Copyright (c) 1994 Postmodern Jewish Philosophy
Bitnetwork.
All rights reserved.

Office of Jewish Studies, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940
Peter Ochs, Editor
Roger Badham, Assistant Editor
Pat Glucksman, System Manager
Email Address: POCHS@DREW.DREW.ED
Telephone: (201) 408-3222

NETWORK MEMBERS:
“V5345E@TEMPLEVM.BITNET” Sid Axxinn, Temple U.
“YFPY0060@VM1.YORKU.CA” David Bakan, Willowdale, Ontario
“LBARTH@MIZAR>USC>EDU” Lewis Barth, HUC-LA
“BATNTZKY@PHOENIX.PRINCETON.EDU” Lenora Batnitsky, Princeton U
“BAUER917@RAVEN.CSRV.UIDAHO.EDU” Dustin Bauer, U. Idaho
“NB2@EVANSVILLE.EDU” Edward A. Beach, U. of Evansville
“KRAUT@BCVMS.BITNET” Avi Bernstein, Stanford Univ
“RELBT551@EMORYU1.CC.EMORY.EDU” Timothy Beul, Emory University
“PYRAP@CSV.WARWICK.AC.UK” Andrew E. Benjamin, U. of Warwick
“KPB@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU” Kalman Bland, Duke U.
“BRIDGES@APOLLO.MONTCLAIR.EDU” Tom Bridges, Montclair Cllg
“MSMARCO@PLUTO.CC.HUJI.AC.IL” Marc Bregman, Hebrew Un Cllg (Jersl)
“BRESDAN@UKANVAX” Daniel Breslauer, U. of Kansas
“DHB2@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU” Don Breslauer, U. of Michigan
“BOROWITZ@NYUACF.BITNET” Eugene Borowitz, HUC/JIR, New York
“TLKAMI@UTA.FI” Aviva Bower, Finland
“BOYARIN@GARNET.BERKELEY.EDU” Daniel Boyarin, UC Berkeley
“BOYARIN@CSSC.NEWSCHOOL.EDU” Jonathan Boyarin, The New School
“BELIAKB@CGS.EDU”
“CARR@EMX.CC.UTEXAS.EDU” Steve Carr, U. of Texas
“CHARME@ELBERETH.RUTGERS.EDU” Stuart Charme, Rutgers U.
“JHCHAJES@MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU” JH Chajes, Yale U.
“ACOHEN@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU” Aryeh Cohen, Brandeis
“75320.2253@COMPUSERV.COM” Phil Cohen, Brandeis
“BDICKEY@UA1VM” Richard Cohen, U. of Alabama
“PHILIPC@STJOHNS.AUCKLAND.AC.NZ” Philip Culbertson, St. Johns,
Auckland
“B6933873@MAIL.WSU.EDU” Gilad Ehven
“TESKENA@EIS.CALSTATE.EDU” Tamara Eskenazi, Heb Un Cllg (LA)
“EFELD@DELPHI.COM” Rabbi Edward Feld, NYC
“HARVEY.FORMAN@TIGERTEAM.ORG” Harvey Forman, Tigerteam
“FRASTED@YALEVM.BITNET” Steven Fraade, Yale U.
“HEIM@VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA” Barbara Galli, McGill U.
“MGARBER@DHVX20.CSUDH.EDU” Marilyn Garber, Cal State
“ALEVINE1@CC.SWARTHMORE.EDU” Jay Geller, Rutgers U.
“RBGIBBS@PHOENIX.PRINCETON.EDU” Robert Gibbs, Princeton U.
“MIGOTTSEGEN@JTSA.EDU” Michael Gottsegen, CLAL
“WMSG@MACMAIL.CC.ROCHESTER.EDU” William S. Green, SUNY Buffalo
“YGREEN@ROLLINS.BITNET” Yudit Greenberg, Rollins Cllg
“HAASXXPJ@VUCTRVAX.BITNET” Peter Haas, Vanderbilt U.
“SUSAN_A_HANDELMAN@UMAIL.UMD.EDU” Susan Handelman, U. of Maryland
“FSH4R@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU” Scott Hennesy, U of Va.
“JAFFEE@WASHINGTON.EDU” Martin Jaffee, U. of Washington
“KAGAN@LEMOYNE.BITNET” Michael A. Kagan, Le Moyne Cllg
“MKATZ@EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU” Marilyn Katz, Wesleyan
“MSSTEVEN@PLUTO.MSCC.HUJI.AC.IL” Steve Kepnes, Colgate U.
“KNOBEL@MERLE.ACNS.NWU.EDU” Peter Knobel, Beth Emet, Evanston, IL
“LANCE@FREELANCE.COM” Lance Fletcher, Free Lance Academy, NJ
“GALABOVITZ@JTSA.EDU” Rabbi Gail Labovitz, JTS
“RHH1902@HAIFAUBVM” Ze’ey Levy, U. of Haifa
“KRLINDBECK@THEO.JTSA.EDU” Kris Lindbeck, Jewish Theol. Sem.
“LUSTHAUS@MACALSTR.EDU” Dan Lusthaus, Macalester Cllg
“MSJUDDMA@PLUTO.MSCC.HUJI.AC.IL” Judd Maltin, Slacker U.
“JNATHANS@LRC.MED.UWO.CA” Jay Nathanson, U. of Western Ontario
“MENDES@HUM.HUJI.AC.IL” Paul Mendes-Flohr, Hebrew U.
“JACOB.E.MESKIN@WILLIAMS.EDU” Jacob Meskin, Williams College
“KLEYZEMER@AOL.COM” Marty Morgenbesser
“FOLIVE@CC.FC.UL.PT” Immanuel Duarte de Oliveira, Lisbon Portugal
“HEIM@VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA” Michael Oppenheim, Concordia U.
“POCHS@DREW.DREW.EDU” Peter Ochs, Drew U.
“PLANINCZ@MCMAIL.CIS.MCMASTER.CA” Zdravko Planinc, McMaster
“JPONET@MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU” James Ponet, Yale U.
“HILLEL@UMAXC.WEEG.UIOWA.EDU” Jeff Portman, U. of Iowa
“USERGF0J@UMICHUM.BITNET” Sara Rappe, U. of Michigan
“JLRIDLEY@NETCOM.COM” Jimmy Ridley
“V5118E@TEMPLEVM.BITNET” Norbert Samuelson, Temple U.
“DANIELS@PHOENIX.PRINCETON.EDU” Daniel Schwartz, Princeton U.
“MMSBC@CUNYVM.BITNET” Mel Scult, Brooklyn Cllg
“DASEIDENBERG@JTSA.EDU” David Seidenberg, JTS
“LJS2@LEHIGH.EDU” Larry Silberstein, Lehigh U.
“RSILAK@CCLU.LV” Regnars Silakalns, Lativa U.
“JSMNTMPL@TEMPLEVM” Julius Simon, Temple U.
“MICHAEL.A.SIGNER.1@ND.EDU” Michael Signer, Norte Dame
“MSRAJEK@PRAIRIENET.ORG” Martin Srajek
“6500OS@UCSBUXA.UCSB.EDU” Oren Stier, UC Santa Barbara
“73122.1413@COMPUSERVE.COM” Rabbi Ira Stone, Tmpl Zion-Beth Israel
“TEMES@HUSC.HARVARD.EDU” Peter Temes, Harvard U.
“LTHOMAS@SUVM.BITNET” Laurence Thomas, Syracuse U.
“PERICLES@TEMPLEVM.BITNET” Dan Thompkins, Temple U.
“GURFEL@UMBC” Alan Udoff, Baltimore Hebrew U.
“VDLINGPL@ALPHA.UNISA.AC.ZA” Gerhard van der Linde, U. Of South
Africa
“WALLERSTEIN@AESOP.RUTGERS.EDU” Bernard Wallerstein
“WEINBERT@SERVAX.FIU.EDU” Theodore Weinberger, Florida Int. U.
“STEDITH@RUF.RICE.EDU” Edith Wyschorgrad, Rice U.
“BERNIE@VM2.YOURKU.CA” Bernie Zelechow, York U.
“STEVENS397@AOL.COM” Steven Schwartz
“B6933873@MAIL.WSU.EDU”
“RABBISTEVE@AOL.COM” Steven L. Jacobs, Tmpl. B’Nai Shalom
“HSHAPIRO@LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU” Harvey Shapiro, Hebrew College
“MZANK@BU.EDU” Michael Zank, Boston U
“GERDA@BGUMAIL.BGU.AC.IL” Gerda Elata
“0007001642@mcimail.com” Michael Paley, Wexner Fdn.
“KRINSKY@STUDENTS.WISC.EDU”
“NLEVENE@FAS.HARVARD.EDU”
“BMESCH@LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU”
“SMAGID@RUF.RICE.EDU”
“RUBIN@ROUTLEDGE.COM”
“MCARASIK@LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU”
“CHARLOT@U.WASHINGTON.EDU”

FORWARD
Dear Network Members,

We are eager to see you, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 9:30-11:00 am in
the Forum Room of the COPLEY PLAZA in Boston. The event is the
great Academy of Jewish Philosophy review of Robert Gibbs’ book,
CORRELATIONS IN ROSENZWEIG AND LEVINAS. With reviewers Almut
Bruckstein, Martin Srajek, and Michael Zank; with a response from
Mr. Gibbs; chairperson Peter Ochs; and convened by Norbert
Samuelson.

Rosenzweig and Levinas (along with Buber and Cohen) are the
principle parents of the founding members of this Network, and
Gibbs’ book brings them into close dialogue with each other, with
their peers in late modern/early postmodern thought, and with us.
This is therefore a very important book and a very important
occasion, for both the Academy and the Postmodern Jewish
Philosophy Network. All are welcome. So please come!

For a warmup, to get you ready, we enclose a preliminary
review of Gibbs’ book, by Martin Srajek (he’ll be offering
different words at the Boston event). In a future issue, we’ll
review the Boston Gibbs event as a whole.

Aryeh Botwinick also announces: Sunday night, 9:15pm, in
Robert Gibbs very own room at the Copley, Aryeh B. is hosting a
Talmud and Postmodernism study session for Network members and
others. Please review Aryeh’s contribution to our Network Vol. 3.2
(on “Overdetermination”) – but this session will be on new textual
material. (If you need details ahead of time, please call Aryeh at
215-473-4502.)

Meanwhile, for a warmdown, we complete this special issue with
a reprint of a longer version of a remarkable paper Nobert
Samuelson delivered at the AAR conference in Chicago. While the
paper is not about postmodern thought, its importance for a number
of us who were there lies in its success in overviewing the stages
of Jewish philosophy that lead up to the one we presume to think we
occupy! We hope that someday some member of this Network will
send us an epilogue on postmodern Jewish philosophy worthy of the
rest of Norbert’s paper.

Before we say l’hitraot, here is a reminiscence and
announcement about the Talmud Study Session we held at the Octber
1994 AAR Conference in Chicago.

REMINISCENCE: It was a delightful session: about two hours of
study l’shma, led by Aryeh Cohen’s reading of Gittin, with a mix of
scholars from a variety of disciplines attending to the texts,
lifting off proto-theoretical observations, and in the process
setting a foundation for the kind of close-text reading and
eclectic theorizing we would like to continue in the future. The
theoretical part of this work has just begun. Our very warm thanks
to Aryeh C. for leading us so insightfully, to R. Gibbs for helping
organize the session (along with P. Ochs), and the following
additional contributors-to-the-conversation (in the order of the
signup sheet we sent around): Alan Krinsky, Nancy Levene, Gail
Labovitz, Oona Ajzenstat, Barry Mesch, Shaul Magid, Steven Kepnes,
Rick Sarason, Steven Fine, Michael Signer, Andrew Rubin, Aaron
Mackler, Jonathan Seidel, Michael Carasik, Charlotte Fonrobert,
Larry Silbertstein, Leila Bronner.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Peter Ochs is putting together part of an issue
of SH’MA about the performances of reading that are beginning to
emerge in our Network, with the Aryeh Cohen session as one
illustration. Most of the content of the issue will be excerpts
from responses to Cohen’s papers including responses in Volume 3 of
our Network, and responses presented in the AAR discussion.
HERE IS WHERE THE ANNOUNCEMENT COMES IN: PETER NEEDS SOME OF THE
RESPONSES OFFERED AT THE SESSION TO BE FLESHED OUT A LITTLE MORE.
AND HE NEEDS IT FAAAAST — for a Dec. 30 copy deadline. WOULD THE
AFOREMENTIONED CONTRIBUTORS PLEASE CONSIDER SENDING PETER (c/o the
Network) WRITTEN VERSIONS OF THEIR ORAL COMMENTS ON ARYEH’S PAPER
OR ON OUR DISCUSSION? BETWEEN ONE TO THREE PAGES TOPS (to be
edited down in conversation with you– please send your phone
numbers along with the email or express mail text). THE ISSUES
RAISED BUT NOT FLESHED OUT INCLUDED FEMINIST RESPONSES TO
TALMUD-READING, STRUCTURALIST RESPONSES, CONCERNS ABOUT LATENT
STRUCTURALIST TENDENCIES, THEORY VS PERFORMATIVE READING, CRITICAL
THEORY AND TALMUDIC READING.

By the way, one of the foci of the SH’MA discussion will be
the performative dimension of “postmodern” reading: on ways the
reading shapes relations among readers and among the methods they
bring to the text, as well as on the way community formation shapes
any reading; here, the concern is not only on what is observed in,
or lifted up from the text, but also on what forms of human
interaction are gathered around the text and on what forms of
dialogue emerge among text and readers. COMMENTS ARE WELCOME ON
THESE ASPECTS OF OUR STUDY.

Copyright notice: Individual authors whose words appear in the
Description, Response, or Essay sections of this Bitnetwork retain
all rights for hard copy redistribution or electronic
retransmission of their words outside the Network. For words not
authored by individual contributors, rights are retained by the
editor of this Bitnetwork.

Subscription: The BITNETWORK is sent free of charge to electronic
mail addrresses. For present or back issues, send requests to:
pochs@drew.drew.edu.
Harcopies cost $5/issue; $12 per volume (3 issues). Send requests
and payment to Jewish Studies Program/BIT c/o Peter Ochs, Drew
University, Madison, NJ
07940.

Submissions: Electronic mail to: pochs@drew.drew.edu. Disks (Mac
or IBM) to: Peter Ochs, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940.

THE REVIEW
A review of Robert Gibbs, CORRELATIONS IN ROSENZWEIG AND
LEVINAS, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). by Martin
Srajek, Illinois Wesleyan University

This book is a long missing link in many respects. First, it
connects some of the most important Jewish neo-Kantian philosophers
(Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen) with the thought of one of the
foremost Jewish philosophers of our time: Emmanuel Levinas. The
influence of Jewish neo-Kantian thought on the project of Western
philosophy since the middle of the last century has still not been
fully acknowledged. It can be seen in thinkers that range as far as
Marx, Cassirer, Husserl, and Kaplan. Gibbs, although his book is
not a study of neo-Kantianism, deserves credit for having done his
part to establish this lineage. It, secondly, focuses on the ethics
contained in the thought of Rosenzweig and Levinas; and though that
has been done quite extensively for Levinas already, never had
somebody tried to do it in conjunction with the thought of
Rossenzweig. This oftenimes led to a certain distortion, for the
thought of Levinas, though ethical, never really seemed to look
quite Jewish.

Third, the book attempts the interpretative work that needs to be
done from a methodologically angle that is new and innovative; it
seeks to open up the thought of Rosenzweig and Levinas through its
juxtaposition with speech-act theory and social theory. Fourth,
Gibbs brings to light the central importance that both thinkers
have in that in them not only their own thought comes to fruition
but also the thought of many other seminal thinkers, such as Hegel,
Kant, Schelling, Cohen, Marx, Marcel, Troeltsch and many others.
Gibbs succeeds in showing that both Rosenzweig and Levinas stand at
the intersection of multiple intellectual currents which enable
them to construct an equally multiple philosophico-ethical image of
the world. Fifth, Gibbs ends the book with a summary of those
elements in his text which implicitly move the reader towards a
better understanding of the scope and direction of a Jewish
philosophy at the turn of the millenium. Perhaps the most
significant and, at the same, most controversial, point in this
epilogual summary is that Gibbs challenges the reader with the
thought that from within the boundaries of postmodern Jewish
thought comes a call for a messianic type of universalism; a
universalism which means that “someday we all will agree and
worship the same God.” This universalism stands in stark contrast
with the universalism so critically targeted by postmodernity.
Whereas traditional philosophical universalism attempts to forged
the details and particularities of reality into one coherent
systematic picture, thereby distorting the details, messianic
universalism, presents itself as a universalism of particulars. Its
message is no one will be excluded. It is a universalism that
announces the end of marginal existences and promises full
partipcipation in the community for everybody.

I will begin with a description and summary of the book. For
reasons of space, I will not be able to focus on all the details of
the book. Gibbs does indeed draw together the thought of a fairly
eclectic numbr of thinkers only some of which will I have the space
to mention in this summary. For those who are interested in the
details of the book I recommend reading it. Some of the most
obvious audiences for the book are modern Jewish philosophers,
Rosenzweig and Levinas scholars, postmodern philosophers and
religion scholars, those with an interest in philosophical renewal
of Judaism from within its own boundaries,. and many others. The
book is divided into an introduction, ten chapters, and an
epilogue. The first six chapter are devoted to the work of Franz
Rosenzweig. Chapters seven through ten deal with the work of
Emmanuel Levinas.

SYNPOSIS OF THE BOOK
Gibbs’ intent in this book is to bring to light the function
of Judaism as the other of traditional philosophy. According to him
this function as the other can be formulated in two interrelated
ways: 1. Judaism’s radical focus on ethics rather than on
epistemology; and 2. Judaism’s relentless struggle with the
question of God’s transcendence. Given this description, Gibbs
expects that “this Judaism can again reorient philosophy.” However,
Gibbs points out that the relationship between philosophy and
Judaism as its other is not that of a simple antagonism or
opposition but rather that of correlation. This, it seems, is a
correlationship that Gibbs presupposes as existing already, his
book, in other words will not bring about this relationship but
rather describe it as it shows itself in the work of Rosenzweig and
Levinas. This will happen by way of an approach that will
bring out the Jewishness of Levinas as a philosopher and the
postmodernism of the Jewish philosopher Rosenzweig. Gibbs’ leaves
somewhat unanswered the question as to how one would have to define
the terms “Jewish” and “postmodern.” However, instead of defining
these somewhat ambiguous terms, it is his suggestion that both
thinkers can be read as social theorists who, through a multiple
interpretative pattern of logic, speech,theological speech, and
time and eternity, redefine theologically the notions of society
and community. The implication of this approach is that it meets
both the criteria for a definition of Judaism as philosophy’s other
as well as the criteria for a definition of postmodernism as
philosophy’s other. This patterned reading, in Gibbs’
understanding, will bring out some parallels in Rosenzweig’s and
Levinas’ thinking, and it will direct us towards an understanding
of the locus of “community” in the thought of both thinkers. Gibbs
is suggesting, in other words, that the thematic locus of Judaism
and, in addition, the thematic focus of postmodernism as well can
be found in the complex questions that relate to the community and
tosocial theory.

In chapter I, Gibbs introduces us to the basic connections
that exist between Rosenzweig and Levinas. Both are dealing with
the question of the boundary between philosophy and theology and
both are, furthermore moving towards theology. Rosenzweig does so
by applying his theory of speech to philosophy, Levinas can do so
by pointing to theology as philosophy’s other. Yet, both thinkers
claim that they are still operating within the realm of philosophy.
It is important to understand that Gibbs is precisely not
suggesting that there are correlations between Levinas and
Rosenzweig, but that their relationship might be best understood
through the term “adaptation.” This formulation leaves it open
whether the adaptation takes place with respect to each other which
would only work from the perspective of Levinas or whether is an
adaptation with respect to an issue on which they are both working.

Chapter II is the actual beginning of the book. Gibbs begins
by outlining the stakes of Rosenzweig’s logic by highlighting his
critique of philosophy as an all-embracing, all-knowing science.
Gibbs points out that Rosenzweig’s reliance on death as the
category that explodes Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge is
misunderstood if understood in existentialist terms. Rather, it
should be read as an epistemological limit with which the
particular subject approaches philosophy. This does not erase
philosophy from the scene but it questions its validity as a
discourse descriptve of human beings. Gibbs underlines
dRosenzweig’s insight that, by focusing on death, i.e., nothing,
Rosenzweig suggests a beginning which, he hopes, can only end in
life (something). The gap between philosophy and the individual,
however, requires theological discourse for its explication.

This discourse can be entertained only by free agents. Gibbs
therefore emphasizes that, for Rosenzweig, the problem of
philosophy did not end with its wrong beginning but lay,
furthermore, with the absence of freedom from it. This insight,
Gibbs points out, Rosenzweig derived from his reception of the
philosophy of Schelling. Like Schelling, he wants to show that
the way from the nothingness of the beginning to the somethingness
of the worlis marked by the human capacity for freedom. For
Schelling, this capacity functions by understanding human actions
as an extrovertive force through which previously introvertedly
existing content materializes. Two consequences of this type of
thinking are that 1. in counterdistinction to Hegel, Rosenzweig
thinks of human actions and thought not as “vernichten” but as
“schaffen” and 2. humans are free because the time of their actions
is chosen by them alone.
Gibbs shows how Rosenzweig, despite his attraction to
Schelling’s conception of freedom, moves away from the latter.
Schelling’s system is based on a type of speculation about
beginnings which are alien to Rosenzweig. Although it is
Schelling’s merit to have understood that the flaw of Hegel’s
system lay with the fact that he begins his system of philosophy
with being rather than with nothing, Gibbs underlines that
Schelling’s theosophist theory of an intial mystical chaos was a
turn-off for Rosenzweig. Rather than through an act of mystical
emanation as in Schelling, Rosenzweig gains his intial elements
through his adaptation of Cohen’s infinitesimal method.

Gibbs can show elegantly how Cohen’s thought parallels
Schelling’s logic of introversion and extroversion by way of a
logic of nothing and something. The presupposition of a pure
nothing avoids the messiness of an intial mystical chaos and allow
us to think the beginning in solely logical terms. Gibbs is careful
to point out further that Rosenzweig’s adaptation of Cohen ends up
being somewhat of a distortion of the latter’s thought. For Cohen
the logical categorie of nothing and something led directly to the
reality/actuality of the world itself, while for Rosenzweig they
can only lead to the three logical elements of that world (God,
man, world). Philosophy, in Gibbs’ words, is thus not so much
a tool that helps to assimilate the world into thought, but rather
it is a means throught which we understand the limits of philosophy
itself with respect to the world. This is a marvelous chapter, not
only for its thought on Rosenzweig but especially also for its
detailed analysis of one of the most difficult issues in the
thought of Hermann Cohen.

Chapters III and IV introduce us to a further investigation of
Gibbs’ notion that it is theological discourse that will close the
gap between philosophy and the individual. (Chapter IV focuses on
the theological qualities of that discourse.) Gibbs shows that the
philosophy of Rosenzweig contains in it a theory of speech. The
chapter focuses on Austin’s theory of speech and his assertion that
ultimately all constative utterances can also be read as
performatives. It furthermore draws on the linguistic theory of
Rosenzweig’s cousin, Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey, which includes the
discovery of the soul and the categories of speech and grammar. It
ends by showing that Rosenzweig, not unlike Austin, understands
language through its performative rather than through its
constative quality. As language and grammar for Rosenstock-Hussey
became the key to an understanding of the soul, Rosenzweig now uses
language, in particular the three moods of the indicative, the
imperative and the cohortative, to make understandable, i.e.,
audible the concepts of creation, revelation and redemption.

Chapter IV brings into focus how the words of speech can have
actual theological, i.e., eternal, meaning. Rosenzweig’s prime
example is prophetic speech. Prophetic speech has meaning which is
supplied by Rosenzweig’s logic and which finds theological
application in that it explicates the relationship between the
three elements God, man and world which Rosenzweig had gained
through his logic. Theological meaning is distinct from regular
meaning in that it will not let itself be temporalized or
historically contextualized. Theological meaning in that sense is
eternal. Gibbs demonstrates how Rosenzweig develops a theory of
speech that moves from logic to the speech of prophecy. He shows
that Rosenzweig believed that through his logic he had found an
experientially inaccessible foundation which turns into an eternal
matrix out of which prophecy can arise. The theological
significance of speech for Rosenzweig is further highlighted by
Gibbs’ focus on the written word. Although the written word in and
of itself is not speech, it causes speech as interpretation, i.e.,
as a midrashic communal event. Speech as interpretation thus
advances to being the connecting link between God and the
community. Gibbs argues that Rosenzweig thought that his
speech-theory was in agreement with the work of Cohen who, he
thought, in his Religion of Reason, had moved beyond the frame of
a pure logic towards the inclusion of theological speech. Gibbs
hesitates to confirm Rosenzweig’s reading of Cohen but indicates
that Cohen’s treatment of the Day of Atonement does indeed suggest
that Cohen might have been in the process of reevaluating speech
theologically.

A further element in Rosenzweig’s social theory is introduced
in Chapter V. Gibbs refers to it as the “deformalization of time.”
He shows that Rosenzweig, in order to let eternity enter in to the
regular time of the community, focuses on the absolute sameness of
the temporal units the Jewish religions calendar. The sameness, of
the units, Gibbs suggests, lets the encounter with eternity happen
not as something that is unending or that is at the end alone.
Eternity, experienced in this way, is a social experience (through
the ritual celebration of the Jewish Holy Year) and it can happen
at any point in the present. Gibbs concludes, that Rosenzweig’s
analysis of time and the community, though historical at times, is
not motivated by the expectations of a historian but by those of a
theologian.

Chapter VI explores further in what ways the community that
has now formed through religious speech and the celebration of a
cyclical ritual can ensure its own eternity. Gibbs does that by an
exploration of the concepts of politics and aesthetics in
Rosenzweig’s work. He points out that Judaism has chosen the
political way, but it has chosen it while simultaneously
abdicating the medium of violence (Gewalt) through which politics
usually emerges. Judaism tries to go its way “gewaltlos.”
Christianity on the other hand, through a stronger focus on the
aesthetic, has created a new theological art as its own expression.

Chapter VII marks the beginning of the second part of the book
that deals with Emmanuel Levinas. Gibbs begins by introducing
another distinction (for Rosenzweig it had been that of philosophy
and theology): that between Greek and Hebrew thinking. He points
out that Levinas thinks of the Greek/Hebrew relationship as
translation and asks, if this understanding is adequate for both
sides. Gibbs conceives of the relationship between Greek and Hebrew
thought as three Greek features that ask for a Hebrew response. The
features are: politics and power through univeralism, knowing, and
language. The Hebrew responses to these three are: universal
particularism, Torah and wisdom. Gibbs believes that Levinas’
notion of Greek thought is that of a necessary heuristic tool for
the introduction of Hebrew thought to a wider community. Levinas’
readings of the Talmud are a good example of this understanding.
Levinas here proposes an aggadic philosophical reading which
responds to the universal intent of all Hebrew thought.

Chapter VIII looks at Levinas’ attempt to bring forth the
other as an ethical criterion for philosophy. Gibbs points out that
at the beginning is for Levinas the realization of phenomenolgy’s
inability to be a philosophy that could recognize the other.
Levinas, on the other hand, is interested in the encounter with the
other as the moment of ethical responsibility. Gibbs shows how
Levinas defines responsibility as the impossibility of
experiencing the other for whom instead we need to substitute the
notion of the “trace,” i.e., that of a sign of the other. Gibbs
works this chapter out with a Cohennian framework. He points to
some of the parallels between Cohen and Levinas, especially with
respect to the asymmetrical character of the relatiohship with the
other. At the same time Gibbs rejects the understanding that
Levinas’ work could be likened to that of Martin Buber.

Chapter IX is the longest chapter in the whole book. It is a
quasi-synoptic reading of the texts of Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and
Gibbs and contains the main claim that between the thought of
Levinas and Marcel there exist similiarites in as far as the
connections between thinking the other and thinking God are
concerned. However, while Marcel emphasizes the freedom as part of
the human condition, Levinas emphasizes responsibility or a form of
heteronomy that is absolutely determined by the other. Both
thinkers reject the notion of autonomy as outside the scope of the
ethical. Gibbs ends this chapter by asking a crucial question. How
Jewish is the idea of substitution that is developed in Levinas and
that can be found in the writings of Marcel as well. He offers an
interesting reading of the idea of substitution through incarnation
in Christianity not as God substituting Godself for us but as the
sign that we are socially incarnate for each other, that, in other
words, expiation has to take place horizontally and not vertically.

Chapter X attempts to move Levinas more into the sphere of the
social away from the merely epistemological sphere marked by the
question of how one can conceive of the other. Gibbs proposes that
one can read Marx and Levinas as mutual commentary on the question
of liberation that takes place within society. This is an
interesting approach, for despite the common theme of liberation
which can be conceded easily, it is not easy to see how the ideal
epistemological direction of Levinas could be seen to match the
historical materialism of Marx. Gibbs shows that Levinas’ thought
moves beyond the diadic responsibility that I have for the one
other in front of me and emphasizes instead that responsibility,
qua responsibility for the other, becomes a responsibility for the
many others in the world. Furthermore, he emphasizes that the
responsibility for the other which I understand through the command
coming from the face of the other goes beyond rationality and
reason and thus might be read as coming close to the material other
in the thought of Marx.

The book ends with an epilogue that picks up on the theme from
the beginning–the relationship between Jewish thought and
traditional philosophy by introducing seven categories of specific
criteria for a Jewish Philosophy. The categories are: 1.
universality of accessbility; Gibbs understands this to mean telos
of a “messianic universalism” which implies that “someday we we all
will agree and worship the true God;” 2. the primacy of ethics;
Gibbs understands this to shift our focus to ethical praxis rather
than onto logical thought. 3. Sociality not Individuality; this
categorie emphasizes the social genesis of both practice and
thought. 4. Prophecy and Messianic Politics; prophecy as social
criticism linked to a messianic vision of the well-fare of all. 5.
Resurrection and the Material World; the vision of messianism might
entail the genesis of a new body, i.e., a new understanding of the
notion of materiality, which will keep us from violating the
material/physical rights of the other. 6. The Suspension of the
State; the state as the possessor of “Gewalt” will be replaced by
a state which serves only the goals of “social responsibility.”
Gibbs acknowledges that this state will not be a nation-state
any longer. 7. Halakhah and Social Institutions; in this last
category Gibbs iterates the paradox of the type of social thought
that he is envisioning. It is supposed to be one that provides us
with social forms, while at the same time being non-compulsory or
non-coercive.

COMMENTS

Gibbs’ book contains an interesting thesis. Not only does it
tackle the task of bringing the thought of two of the most complex
thinkers of our century together, but it also claims that the
thought of these thinkers has significance far beyond the century
of their appearance back into the past as well as into the future.
The thesis that Judaism has something to contribute to philosophy
cannot be read as a statement about the Judaism of this century
only, but must be read as something that is part and parcel of what
Judaism is and always has been. We are talking to some extent about
the essence of Judaism. Gibbs’ merit is to show how both Rosenzweig
and Levinas in their own unique ways pick up part of this essence
and confront with it the claims of traditional philosophy. Gibbs
further deserves applause for bringing to Judaism the ideas of
speech-act theory and of social theory, both of which have been
used in other fields to challenge the essentialism of traditional
philosophy. One of the most avid protagonists of this latter
movement is the German sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas.
Habermas not only understood the critical value that social theory
could ultimately have for a reevaluation of philosophy, but also
understood earlier than many others the contribution that Jewish
Philospohy could make to traditional philosophy. Habermas
recognizes in the essay “Der Deutsche Idealismus der judischen
Philosophen” “wie produktiv sich aus der Erfahrung der judischen
Tradition zentrale Motive der wesentlich protestantisch bestimmten
Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus erschliessen lassen” (“how
productively one can deduce from the experience of the Jewish
tradition central motives of the essentially protestant philosophy
of German idealism”). He can talk about the fertile consanguinity
(“fruchtbare Verwandtschaft”) between the Jews and German
philosophy. “Der deutsche Idealismus der Juden produziert das
Ferment einer kritischen Utopie” (“The German idealism of the Jews
producd the ferment of a critical utopia). But to say that Gibbs
does what Habermas does would be neglecting that he indeed finds in
Judaism the seeds for what Habermas later came to claim his own
theory, viz, that of a power-free social discourse and a social
theory. In contrast to Habermas, however, the discourse of the
Rosenzweigian/Levinasian type is not power-free. Rather, in it
power comes absolutely from one source: the other. Gibbs adds to
that the insight into an element missing in the approach of
Rosenzweig and possibly also in Levinas. For the other as the
source of power is matched by the question of the self for the
other. Habermas, in other words, emphasizes power-balance and
reciprocity, Gibbs, along with Rosenzweig and Levinas advocates
non-reciprocity.

The questions about the book derive more from the details that
it comprehends than from the book itself. I want to touch, here,
only on a few of those.

ROSENZWEIG AND PHILOSOPHY: Despite Rosenzweig’s avowed opposition
to the philosophy of Hegel, he does not seem determined enough to
move away from the idea of the system altogether. There is, first
of all, the threefold divsion, only too reminescent of Hegel’s
tripartite Encyclopedia.

What are the systematic dissimilarities between the latter’s
encyclopedic approach and the work of Roscnzweig. It seems that the
crucial moment in both thinkers is that they employ the method of
negation and double-negation in order to watch the progress of
their systems. Both, not only Hegel, it would seem, should end up
with the problem of a bad infinity. Eternity can only be reached
by way of a forced inclusion. In Hegel’s case this inclusion is
that of the philosopher himself, for he is the only thing left
outside of the system. In Rosenzweig’s case it is the inclusion of
death itself which is sublated into the system by way of focusing
on the birth of others. How can Rosenzweig move beyond the damaging
universalism of Hegel’s system, if his own philosophy, like that of
Hegel begins with logic once again?

Rosenzweig’s problematic relationship with traditional
philosophy is also evident from his reception of Schelling. It
seems that Rosenzweig’s “yes-no-and” structure as the prelinguistic
foundation of human existence diminishes the freedom of the
individual decision. His rejection of Schelling’s mysticism and the
concomitant substitution of Cohen’s differential calculus as well
as the concept of prelinguistic foundations take the sharpness out
Schelling’s approach and liken it more to Hegel then the former
would have liked. Schelling’s freedom–the “that” of my free
decision–emerges from a mystical chaos not from a pre-structured
universe.

ROSENZWEIG AND SOCIOLOGY: How committed is Rosenzweig to sociology
as an empirically founded science? It is hard to fend off the
impression that Rosenzweig’s empiricism is only his hand-maid for
pointing towards certains forms to which both Judaism and
Christianity seem to adhere. Did Rosenzweig attempt to contain
Judaism in such social forms? If the answer is “yes” in how far is
that genuine to Judaism? How can such formalism prevent Jewish
philosophy from falling into the same trap(s) into which
traditional philosophy has fallen repeatedly?

LEVINAS AND PHILOSOPHY: Levinas, more than he might want to admit,
is indebted to phenomenology and its methods. What he is doing, in
other words, is epistemology. In what ways can it be said that he
has moved away from doing just that and closer towards an approach
in which real communities become an issue? Despite the inclusion of
the “third” into his philosophy, one cannot help but think that,
still, all he is doing is epistemology.

It seems difficult to see, also, how Levinas’ approach can be
sustained in comparison with Marx given the latter’s prioritizing
of material reality. When Levinas looks into the face of the other,
he sees God; when Marx sees the other he sees poverty. Different
from the socialism of Hermann Cohen, there really is no reception
of Marxian thought in the philosophy of Levinas. That is not to say
that they might not have similar concerns. But their approaches
seem fundamentally different from each other. We have to ask in
other words, what the material ramifications of a theory like that
of Levinas might be.

POSTMODERNISM AND RELIGION: Gibbs mentions the postmodernists’
disavowel of religion. Here some more explaining might help. In
what ways does he see this disavowal take place? Is there a
religious moment in postmodernism? What is it? What is the
religious postmodern moment in the philosophies of Rosenzweig and
Levinas?

A CASE STUDY IN JEWISH ETHICS —
THREE JEWISH STRATEGIES FOR SOLVING THEODICY

Norbert M. Samuelson, Temple University
Prima facie the answer to the question, “Can there be a Jewish
ethics” is — of course, why not? There are two parts to this
answer — “of course”, and “why not?”. The “of course” part is
that Jewish thought and life are filled with both prescribing moral
behavior and thinking about moral issues, so much so that the
judgment that there are Jewish ethics is as apparent to common
sense as the judgment that there is a physical world. The
“why not” part says that anyone who doubts that there are, either
is ignorant, an anti-semite, or a philosopher, and these three
categories are not mutually exclusive.

The “why not” reply question has two possible philosophic
answers, neither of which strikes me as terribly interesting.
First, no obligation can be called “moral” whose import is not
universal; Jewish ethics are imperatives that arise from a
particular entity (the deity of Abraham) making demands on another
particular entity (the Jewish people); consequently, obligations in
Judaism are not universal, and hence are not moral obligations.
Second, the reasons that Jewish thinkers give to explain moral
obligations in Judaism are the same reasons that all philosophers
give for all moral obligations; ethics are about the reasons for
imperatives and not about the imperatives themselves; hence, while
some Jewish moral obligations may be distinctively Jewish, there
are no distinctive Jewish ethics. Together, these two replies say
that particular moral imperatives and/or moral arguments cannot
admit distinctions between individuals and/or subgroups of
collections of individuals within the human species; the Jewish
people are a subgroup; Jewish ethics apply specifically to the
Jewish people; hence, there are no Jewish ethics. Or, to say the
same thing in different words, either Jewish ethics are not
distinctively Jewish or they are not ethics.

There are two reasons why the question does not strike me as
terribly interesting. First, it is not obvious why ethics to be
ethics must have a universal domain. It seems to be perfectly
reasonable, in fact common-sensical, that some individual or
individuals in one time-space setting may have very different, but
none-the-less absolute, moral obligations than the same individual
or individuals in another time-space setting or other individuals
in the same time-space setting. Second, there is no single thing
that can be called “Jewish ethics”. Rather, this is a general
term that ranges over a variety of very different positions Jews
have taken on moral and ethical questions from a variety of
significantly different philosophical standpoints, and this
diversity in no way disqualifies Jewish ethics from being both
Jewish and ethics.

However, the question entails another question which to me is
interesting, viz., is there anything in Jewish ethics that is
philosophically interesting in the sense that it suggests a fresh
approach to doing ethics that is different from what we already
find in other sources of Western civilization besides Judaism?
Here, my answer is that there is at least one, and it is on that
one that I want to focus, through example, in this paper. In this
case I want to look at three different Jewish approaches to solving
the so-called problem of theodicy. In all three cases the
solutions are significantly different from the ones commonly
recognized in our Christian biased heritage of philosophical
ethics.

The so-called problem of theodicy (1) involves positing three
propositions which appear to be mutually incoherent. They are: (A)
God is perfectly good. (B) God is perfectly powerful. And (C)
there is evil. Any two of these three may be asserted without
contradiction, but one of the three must be denied. God may be (B)
perfectly powerful and (A) good if (-C) there is no evil.
Conversely, there can be (C) evil if (-B) God has limited power
and/or (-A) is not good. In general, the problem is resolved
by denying any combination of the three propositions (2). Of
course which of these options is chosen depends on what theologians
mean when they say “God”, “good”, “evil”, “power”, and how the
adverb “perfectly” modifies these affirmations. Throughout the
course of the history of Jewish thought every possible move has
been made to varying degrees, and several of them have been made in
radically different ways. I will limit myself here to only three
of what I consider to be the most interesting examples.

1. God is neither perfectly good nor powerful — The View of
Genesis in the Torah

Whatever were the views of the different authors who wrote the
different parts of the Pentateuch, a fairly consistent picture of
the universe emerges from the text that the Jewish people inherited
from its priestly editors in the sixth century B.C.E. That picture
contains one fairly specific version of the problem of theodicy and
poses a clear solution to it. (3) The problem focuses on a fairly
specific event, viz. the destruction of the first Temple and the
exile of the people of Judea to Babylonia. According to this view
God created the universe for a single primary purpose — to provide
the space and time for sacrifices to be offered to Him. The
successful fulfillment of these acts constitutes the end by which
all actions are judged to be good or bad.

In this context moral values are applied both ontically and
socially. Ontically the term “good” is associated with separation
and order. At first the universe exists as a single, homogeneous
whole that is judged to be chaos. Gradually God introduces a set of
distinctions, all of which are understood to overcome chaos and are
called “good.” (4) The progression of separations function at two
levels simultaneously, one involving the space of the universe and
the other involving the occupants of that space. Light is
separated from dark, sky from earth, dry land from the seas on the
surface of the earth, the land of Israel from other lands, and
eventually (5) Mt. Zion from other locals within the land of
Israel, the space of the Temple from Mt. Zion, and the space of the
Holy of Holies from the Temple mount. At the same time, the
inhabitants of sphere of the earth are separated from the
inhabitants of the sky, humanity from other living creatures on and
in the sphere of the earth, the nations that descend from Abraham
from the other nations that descend from Noah, Israel from the
other families of Abraham, the Levites from other Israelites and
eventually the Cohanim from the other Levites. The concluding ontic
goods — a separate priest class who performs its defining function
in a separate space — are themselves not mentioned in the
Pentateuchal narrative. But their existence is always present
throughout the narrative as the end towards which the biblical
story points beyond itself. They are the paradigmatic references
for the term “holy” (KADOSH), a term that functions within the
narrative for what is of ultimate value. They are holy because
they are separate, but they are separate because of the key role
they play in making actual the purpose for which the universe was
created — viz., the literal “service” of God.(6) Socially the
term “good” is associated with obeying God’s commandments. The
differentiated regions of space are commanded to generate living
occupants without limit, while the light inhabitants are ordered to
rule their celestial region and the human inhabitants are commanded
to govern their terrestrial region. The nations of humanity are
given a set of laws beyond procreation to govern their society,
while Israel, in the middle book of the five book (7), is given an
extensive law code to create a nation whose central purpose is to
carry out the sacrificial laws described within the very heart of
that middle book. Israel is constituted to be a nation whose
primary task is to prepare meals where the holy people in their
holy space dine with the holy God of the universe three times per
day on weekdays and four times per day on the holy Sabbath. During
the week there is labor as well as feast, but on the Sabbath there
is only feast. More precisely, it is a day of continuous feast,
for both God and humanity.

It is this day that provides the Torah’s primary vision of the
end of days. Sabbath is the goal towards which all of creation
points. It is the paradigm by which all good and evil are to be
judged. It is this cosmic schema that is the context of the
biblical version of the problem of theodicy. There exists evil,
viz., the Temple has been destroyed, so that the priests cannot
perform the tasks for which Israel exists, for which the universe
was created. Evil exists because Israel failed to obey God’s
commandments. Hence, the God of the Pentateuch is not perfectly
powerful, for there is service that he needs that he cannot perform
himself. Clearly he is more powerful than anything else in the
universe. He and he alone, after all, is the force that can either
create or destroy it. But that power has limits. Similarly, but
less obviously, he is not perfectly good. He performs acts of which
he must repent, i.e., acts that fail to bring about his desired
ends, not the least of which is the creation of humanity. Certainly
from this respect — viz., the human — he is not perfect. For
humanity exists within the universe for God; neither God nor the
universe exist for the sake of humanity. Clearly he is better than
anything else in the universe. He and he alone, after all, define
what is good and what is bad. But that goodness, like his power,
has limits.(8)

2. While God is perfectly good and powerful, there really is no
evil– The Views of Maimonides and Gersonides in Classical Rabbinic
Philosophy

The solution to the pentateuchal problem of theodicy provided
the framework for the development of the second Jewish polity under
the policies of Ezra and Nehemiah. The new Judah became a state
that remained faithful to its Toraitic constitution, viz., to serve
God no matter what the human price. With the rise of Hellenism that
price became enormous. Because Judah refused to reconstitute
itself into an acceptable political model within the hellenistic
world, it became the poorest of nations within the empire, and
because it believed that its deity was the ultimate power in the
universe, it fought three disastrous wars against the pagan Romans.

Judah’s failure to win those wars constituted a second, major
occasion for the redefinition of theodicy with in the perspective
of Jewish thought.

Scripture taught that the first Temple had been destroyed
because Israel had failed to keep God’s commandments. But the
second Temple was destroyed precisely because the nation did obey
God’s law. Clearly, if God is the creator of the physical world,
the universe should now come to an end, and, if it does not, then
its continued survival must be for some other reasons than
continual communal dining by a small portion of humanity with the
creator God of the universe. In other words, it cannot be true that
the destruction of the second Temple is really evil. Rather, it
must serve some as yet unrecognized divine good. Furthermore, if
even the destruction of the Temple is not really evil, then all the
lesser evils from a human perspective must not really be evil. But
what could that purpose be and why does it remain hidden from even
the chosen people of God’s humanity?

The second Moses — viz., Moses Maimonides — provides a
second myth in his Guide of the Perplexed (9), to solve the second
paradigm fact of evil. Again, the first paradigm was the
destruction of the first Temple, whose cosmic solution was
presented in the name of the first Moses as the myth of creation.
The second paradigm is the destruction of the second Temple, whose
cosmic solution is hinted at by Moses Maimonides in his myth of
the Sabians.(10)

Maimonides reports the following story: The universe as God
created it was perfect, as was everything within it. More
precisely, everything was created to be perfectly what it was
supposed to be. That does not mean that anything created was
absolutely perfect. If everything were absolutely perfect, then
everything would have been God, and there would not have been a
world other than God.(11) Rather, the universe as a whole was
perfectly a universe, and everything within it was perfectly what
it had been created to be, including Adam, the first man. That
Adam was perfectly a man entails that he was no less, but also no
more, than a human male. With respect to knowledge, he knew
perfectly everything that a human could know, but he knew nothing
that was beyond human knowledge. In general that meant that he
understood everything that he perceived through his senses and he
had the mental ability to make valid logical inferences from that
experience, but he had no views on any subject the knowledge of
which was beyond the limits of experience. The topics of such
trans-empirical based knowledge fall under the general heading of
metaphysics. It includes cosmology, cosmogony, and theology.
Angels are capable of such knowledge, but not human beings. At
best people can have opinions, but they have no basis to know
whether or not those opinions are in fact true. And Adam, being
a perfect human, knew only what he knew he could know, viz.,
physics, and did not even think about what he could not know, viz.,
metaphysics.

However, humanity also had the ability to extend its powers
beyond its original nature. Its first extension was to develop
agriculture. By nature what grows are a mixture of plants, some of
which are fit for human consumption and others of which are not.
By the simplest act of farming, viz. weeding out what they could
not eat, to leave more room for what he could, the first humans
made nature (from a human perspective) better, and by so doing made
it unnatural. From this beginning developed a nation of farmers,
known as the Sabians (12), who extended all of their abilities
beyond the confines of the human species into the power domain of
the angels. However, in so improving themselves, they introduced
into the world error and sin. In other words, by improving the
universe for humanity they in fact made it less perfect in itself
than it had been. The problem was that while the original human
was perfectly human, the improved human was imperfectly angelic.
While humans limited their thought to what human could know, they
reasoned without error, but when they improved themselves to reason
about what only the angels and God could know, they reasoned badly,
i.e., they made mistakes that had dire consequences for both
humanity and the universe.

The Sabians drew an analogy between their farms and the
universe. Their land lacked human order and value until they, the
farmers, imposed structure upon it, transforming it from a
wasteland into farms. Similarly, the universe as a whole exhibits
order and value. Hence, by analogy, just as they had imposed
structure on one segment of the space of the universe, so there
must be an entity, who, like a farmer, imposed divine order and
value on what had originally been the disordered, valueless space
of the universe. That entity is the Creator of the Universe, the
only being worthy of worship as a deity. But who would that God be?

The question was right. The order of the universe does suggest
that it exists by intention and not by accident, and the existence
of an intelligent product does suggest an intelligent producer.
But, again, this is a question for divine entities to ponder, not
for mere humans, who, in consequence of their limitations, gave
false answers. They looked about them for what they could find to
be the most excellent entities within the realm of their experience
to worship as deity. Rightly their attention focused on the
celestial beings — the sun, the moon, and the constellations, who
they proclaimed to be their gods. Their reasoning was correct as
far as it could go. What is most excellent is most worthy of
worship, and of all that they could experience the living entities
of the sky are most excellent. But they are not the creator; they
are merely creatures. The true creator lay beyond anything that
could be given within the domain of human experience. Hence, the
first humans progressed from having no religion, like animals, to
worshipping deity, like angels. But the religion they formed was
profane. Having transcended the appropriate agnosticism of their
origin where they knew nothing about deities, they became
idolators, who worshipped false gods, the gravest form of sin, for
the universe had been created to serve its creator, not creatures.

The human decline from human perfection in its advance beyond
primordial human nature had equally dire consequences in ethics.
Originally human beings did not think about what is right and what
is wrong. They behaved naturally, without reflection. However, as
they developed their ability to manipulate nature, they came to
realize that humans need not always act in accord with their
nature, that in fact they could deliberate and make choices
that were counter-intuitive. They then began to think about what
they ought and ought not to do, and in so doing, because of their
limitations as human beings, they made bad decisions, often
disastrous, decisions that eventually led to the corruption of the
generation of Noah, corruption so profound that it threatened the
survival of the universe as a whole. In consequence, God was
forced to destroy humanity through a universal flood and to begin
his universe a new. But this second beginning differed from the
first.

Recognizing that humanity could not remain for ever within the
confines of human nature, God provided a political model for
humanity to develop a kind of society in which it could know the
difference between metaphysical truth and error as well as moral
right and wrong. That model is the Torah that God revealed to
Moses at Sinai.

Torah is here understood to be a national constitution that
has universal consequences. Through obedience to its law, Israel
could in time develop into a kingdom of angels, who, armed with
celestial wisdom, could lead the rest of humanity to an end of days
when all human beings would become divine.

So much for what Maimonides explicitly states in the text of
the Guide. Of course the problem is that Israel, being very human,
cannot understand adequately what the Torah says, including the
reasons for its social legislation. Hence, Israel, like all of
humanity, always has the option, through ignorance, to choose to
disobey. To the extent that Israel disobeys, it prevents the
coming the end of days; to the extent that Israel obeys, it hastens
that coming. Maimonides believed that progress toward the
messianic ideal of an end of days was more likely than decline
towards the Noaitic flood limit of an end to the universe, and that
the destruction of the second Jewish commonwealth itself
contributed to that positive evolution. Furthermore, he believed
that to whatever extent Israel obeyed God’s law, it improved its
moral and conceptual talents, and to the extent that Israel so
improved, the possibility of even greater obedience to Toraitic law
improved.
Increasingly Israel, and eventually the rest of humanity,
would understand God’s purpose in creation, and through that
understanding the apparent evils that occur in the world would
become intelligible and, in consequence, avoidable. But progress
would be slow, slower than even Maimonides himself anticipated.

It is against the background of the myth of the Sabians that
we should understand what explicitly Maimonides says about
theodicy. From an absolute perspective, God is perfectly good and
powerful and there really is no evil. To be sure from this
perspective the created universe is not perfect. But it could not
be and still be the world. It is, as Leibniz would later say, the
best of all possible worlds. In other words, while the universe is
not perfect, because it cannot be better than it is, its
imperfection does not constitute real evil. In fact, the only evil
is human ignorance, a defect that the Torah was created to
overcome.

How ignorant are we? Prima facie Maimonides suggests that it
is absolute. The distance between what we know of God and the
universe as it is in itself is infinite, and, because it is
infinite, it is unbridgeable. But this surface reading of
Maimonides’ words cannot be correct, for if it were, then, no
matter how our wisdom improves, we would be no closer to the
messianic ideal, and, if there can be no progress, then the
legislation of the Torah would have no practical value. On one
hand, it is clear that for Maimonides the actual world is
infinitely remote from the divine ideal, but, on the other hand, it
must be possible to progress towards it. The reconciliation of
these apparent opposites is found in Maimonides’ negative
theology.(13)

The critical datum underlying Maimonides’, and all subsequent
Jewish philosophic, analysis of God-talk is that God and God alone
is the creator while everything else is a creature. Hence, there
is a fundamental difference between God and everything else, a
difference so extreme that no positive human language can literally
be applied to God. A general term can be predicated of any number
of subjects in the same way (i.e., with the same meaning) only if
in the relevant respects these subjects belong to the same species.

Where a single general term is predicated of two or more subjects
from different species, the meaning of the subsequent sentences is
radically differen (e.g., “The boy is big” and “Government is
big”). In such cases, the meaning of the stated general term is
equivocal. In what way equivocal and how the different uses are
related depends on the way the relevant subject species differ.
Whatever these ways are, it is most extreme in the case where a
single term is predicated of both God and anything else, for here
there cannot even be a common genus, let alone a common species.

In subsequent centuries, Maimonides was understood to have
been defending the claim that the difference is so radical that any
attribution of anything to God is, from a human perspective,
unintelligible. As an alternative, Gersonides offered a less
extreme, theologically more acceptable, account of the difference
in meaning between predication of God and anything else.(14)
Basing himself on the way that Aristotle in his Metaphysics applied
the term “OUSIA” to a substance and any other kind of subject,
Gersonides judged divine attributes to be PROS HEN equivocal, i.e.,
to apply primarily to God and secondarily to anything else so that
the secondary usages are dependent on the primary usage in the
following two ways: (a) The meaning of the predicate term when
applied to something other than God contains a reference to its
primary divine meaning, so that the truth of the secondary meaning
is logically entailed by the truth of the primary meaning, and (b)
the fact described in the sentence that contains the secondary
predication is causally dependent on the state described in the
sentence that contains the primary predication. For example, to
say that certain persons are good states something about how those
people are related to God, viz., that what it means to say that
they are good involves a statement about how they are related to
God’s goodness, and that God is the ultimate cause of their
goodness. In brief, statements about the Creator express ideals
which, as such, are related to comparable statements about all and
any creatures of God.

How the two classic Jewish interpretations of divine
attributes, viz. those of Maimonides and Gersonides, are different
is not obvious.(15) On final analysis Maimonides may have intended
something like what Gersonides subsequently spelled out. In fact,
given the way that Maimonides’ theory of divine attributes was
interpreted by Hermann Cohen’s disciples, there is little
difference.(16) For both Jewish philosophers divine attributes
express ideals that are related, as a primary and a final cause,
to what is actual. All divine attributes express God.(17) But the
actual in principle never is God.(18) The term “Creator” expresses
God’s relationship to the world as its first cause. He is the
source from which the universe unfolds. And the term “Redeemer”
expresses God’s relationship to the world as its final cause. He
is the telos towards which it moves. The perceived universe of
time and space persists between these two transcendent poles of
origin and end.

3. While God is perfectly good, he is not perfectly powerful– The
Views of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber & Franz Rosenzweig in Modern
Jewish Philosophy.

On Cohen’s understanding of Maimonides (and through
Maimonides, of authentic Judaism), divine attributes are to be
understood as moral ideals.(19) In general, given any simple,
affirmative predicate, P, what it means to say that God is P is
that God is not Q, where Q is the complement of P. Hence, to say
that God is good means that He is not bad, that He is powerful
means that He is not weak, etc. The problem is, however, that to
be able to predicate any P of God would render God-talk
unintelligible, but why can we not say God is Q, which correctly
means that literally God is not P, since no attribute literally
understood can be predicated of God? Maimonides’ answer is that we
may predicate of God only those attributes that the Torah affirms
of Him, and the reason why Scripture says what it says is because
the affirmed attributes are all human excellences. In other words,
all statements about God are in reality disguised moral
imperatives, where a statement of the narrative form, “God is
P” means the commandment, “Strive to become P”. What links the
declaration to the imperative is the principle of holiness, viz.,
“You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2). In
other words, the content of theological statements about God are
entirely ethical, and the religion of the people of Israel who
proclaim them is a political program to redeem the world. This
Cohenian reading of Maimonides’ theology has informed all
subsequent Jewish theology.

From this perspective, the problem of theodicy dissolves.(20)
As a moral ideal God is perfectly good. More accurately He is
“the” good. But as an ideal He has power only to guide. The
actual work of the transformation of the universe into something
good is the obligation of human beings. They and they alone, in all
of their imperfection, have the power to realize moral values in
lived life. The nature of the world as God created it has order
and structure, but that order is morally neutral. On this
understanding of the biblically based faith of Israel, what Genesis
means when it says that God calls His creation “good” is that He
has produced one kind of creature, the human, whose task is to
create good, i.e., to transform what are ontically only things into
something socially of value. In other words, God creates the
human, but it is the human who creates value.

Cohenian Judaism posits two ways to view reality —
narratively as it is viewed in natural science and history as
something that is, and imperatively as it is viewed in religion and
ethics as something that is not what it ought to be. The former
way views the world in terms of objects subject to physical laws.
The latter way views it in terms of personal relationships subject
to moral rules. From the former perspective, there is no evil.
There are only facts and fictions that are either intelligible or
unintelligible.

From the latter perspective there are only occasions that
create moral obligations which may or may not be obeyed. Buber
called the former the I-It relationship and the latter the I-Thou.
Within his language God is “I-Eternal Thou”, by which he meant that
God functions perfectly as the paradigm for human moral obligation.

Rosenzweig formed a picture of the reality where life is lived
between these two perspectives. The former is the fore-world
(Vorwelt) of things that he calls “elemens”. The latter is the
over-world (berwelt) of ideals that he calls “structure” (Gestalt).

Lived life in the world is an infinite set of movements from
distinct nothings of things toward individual somethings of value.
Infinitely remote at both ends of the flow of human and physical
history is God, as an element at the creation the world, and as
truth at its redemption. As such, God is not of the world, even
though He is what makes it intelligible. He is never actual, but
He is ultimately, ideally, all that really-truly is. There is a
deep divide between what is actual and what is true that human
beings in the world bridge through God. To be sure there are
important differences between the Jewish philosophies of Cohen,
Buber and Rosenzweig. But they do not differ in the general
guidelines that they inherited from Maimonides’ expression of
biblical theology.

Consequently, they share in common, albeit in different
languages, the same reconciliation of the problem of theodicy.
Only God is good, only what eists in the world has power, and only
humanity has the power to make good a world that inherently is not.

Concluding Remarks

Our story of the history of what Jewish philosophy has to say
about theodicy is now concluded. It is worth noting that the two
main classical Jewish accounts of theodicy arose in response to
specific events, viz. the destruction of the first Temple for the
editors of the Torah and the destruction of the second Temple for
the rabbinic philosophers. In contrast the modern Jewish
philosophers presupposed no such paradigmatic event for their
speculation. If there is one, it would have happened after
they wrote their major works. It would have been the Holocaust.
Several contemporary Jewish theologians believe that this event
requires a rethinking of Jewish theology no less radical than the
changes required by the destruction of the second Temple. The most
notable of these thinkers is Emil Fackenheim.(21) He argues that
the Holocaust is so demonic and so distinct that it nullifies the
truth value of all previous philosophy, includeing Jewish
philosophy, impossible. Personally, I do not share this radical
judgement. While the Holocaust was a great disaster for both the
Jewish people and for the world, it does not merit a conceptual
status that is qualitatively beyond the destruction of the first
two Temples. Nor does it raise anything conceptually new beyond
what the above accounts of theodicy, all other factors being equal,
can handle.

None of this is intended to minimalize either the great evil
of the Holocaust or its critical importance for contemporary Jewish
history and life. It is only to say that in itself the Holocaust
raises no special perspetive for solving, or at least attempting to
solve, the problem of theodicy.

In conclusion, there are a number of features of the above
description of Jewish philosophic accounts of theodicy that I would
like to highlight. First, the problem of evil is seen in terms of
collectives rather than individuals. For Rosenzweig, as for the
editors of the Torah, moral issues range primarily over nations and
only secondarily over their citizens. In general, in marked
contrast to most modern thought, individuals exist as parts of
collectives; collectives are not mere mental groupings of
individuals. Second, judgments of individual events as good or bad
are based on teleology. No event in itself has moral value. The
universe is either viewed ontologically from a scientific
perspective, in which case moral judgments are inappropriate, or
from a political perspective, in which case events are judged from
the perspective of a revealed vision of both the origin (creation)
and the end (redemption) of the universe. Third, neither standard
of judgment, creation or redemption, are, ever were, or ever will
be anything actual in the perceptible world of time and space.
Rather, they are always ideals that function perpetually for
humanity to know that what is is not good and can always become
better. It is in this sense that all of the solutions to the
problem of theodicy turn on positing myths. Here the term “myth”
functions in much the same way that Plato used it in the Timaeus
(22), viz., as a picture or story or model that is inherently
something more than opinion but less than knowledge, that as such
is somewhat, but not entirely, intelligible.

NOTES

1 The following is a development beyond an earlier piece I wrote
on theodicy from a Jewish perspective entitled “Solutions to
Theodicy out of the Sources of Judaism,” Religious Education 84,
1 (Winter, 1989) 55-67. An earlier version of this present paper
was written for the Studies in Jewish Theology series that Dan
Cohen-Sherbok edits for Edwin Mellon.

2 viz. (1) -A B C, (2) -A -B C, (3) A B -C, (4) A -B C, (5) -A B
-C, (6) -A-B -C, and (7) A -B -C.

3 What follows in this section are conclusions based on what I
believe to be a reasonably rigorous literary analysis of the Hebrew
text, particularly the first chapter of Genesis, in my The First
Seven Days: A Philosophical Commentary on the Creation of Genesis,
Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993. Other books particularly
relevant to this interpretation are the following:
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, New York, Basic Books,
1981; Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis,
translated into English by Israel Abrahams, Jerusalem, Magnes,
1961-1964; Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture: Close Readings of
Selected Biblical Texts, New York, Schocken, 1979; Yehezkiel
Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the
Babylonian Exile, translated into English by Moshe Greenberg,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960; Jon D. Levenson,
Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine
Omnipotence, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1988; Jon D. Levenson,
Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible, San Francisco,
Harper and Row, 1987; Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary:
Genesis, translation and commentary by Nahum M. Sarna.
Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1989.

4 The terms explicitly employed in the biblical narrative are
“good” (TOV) and “chaos” (TOHU VAVOHU), which are understood to be
opposites, which entails that “order” (SEDER) is associated with
good while “evil” (RAT) is associated with chaos, even though these
latter terms are not explicitly used in this way in the biblical
text. However, the association of these sets of terms will be
made explicit in subsequent (medieval) rabbinic, philosophic
commentaries on the biblical text.

5 I.e., beyond the time line of the Pentateuchal narrative, which
concludes as Israel begins to take possession of its land and
create a nation, a nation whose destruction concludes the
narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is this concluding event
that is the problem that biblical theodicy addresses.

6 The Hebrew term is “AVODAH”, whose concrete referent is the
sacrificial activity of the Temple cult. It is the detailed
description of this literal divine service that occupies the
central (and therefore most important) place within this literary
composition by the exiled Babylonian priests who edited the Torah.

7 Viz., in Leviticus. On the judgment that the editors of the
Pentateuch followed a onion-like, as opposed to a linear, structure
in constructing the Torah, so that what is most important is set in
the middle of otherwise parallel texts in the extreme, see Jacob
Milgrom’s commentary on the Book of Numbers, The JPS Torah
Commentary: Numbers, Philadelphia/ New York, The Jewish
Publication Society, 1990, especially pp. xvi-xxix of the
Introduction.

8 How close Maimonides believed himself and his generation to be
to the messianic age is a subject of scholarly debate. There have
been several articles on this question in recent years, but none of
them are decisive. Here and in what follows I accept the view of
Steven Schwarzschild that the Messianic Age functioned for
Maimonides as an asymptote, i.e., as an ideal limit intended to
provide humanity with a model for moral judgments that can
in actuality be approached but never realized. Cf. Schwarzschild,
Steven S. “Moral Radicalism and ‘Middlingness’ in the Ethics of
Maimonides,” Studies in Medieval Culture 11 (1977) 65-94, reprinted
in Menachem Kellner, ed., The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings
of Steven Schwarzschild. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1990, pp. 137-160.

9 Moses Ibn Maimon (Maimonides). DALALAH ALCHA-IDIN (The Guide of
the Perplexed) [MOREH NEVUKHIM]. Translated into Hebrew by Judah
Ibn Tibbon. Wilna, I. Funk, 1904. Translated into Hebrew by Joseph
Bahir David Kapach. Jerusalem, MUSAD HA-RAV KOOK, 1972.
Translated into French by Solomon Munk. Paris, A. Franck,
1856-1866. Translated into English by Shlomo Pines. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1963. Henceforth referred to
as “Guide.”

10 In the Guide Book III, chapter 29.

11 This explanation of why everything was not absolutely perfect
is not explicitly stated by Maimonides in the passage in question.
However, it is implied. My explicit statement is a summary of what
Maimonides’ predecessor, Abraham Ibn Daud, said in his The Exalted
Faith, Book 2, Basic Principle 6, Chapter 2, 203b16-204b16 of the
Mich 57 manuscript in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library of
Solomon Ibn Labi’s Hebrew translation from the original
Judeo-Arabic. Cf. Abraham Ben David Ha-Levi (Ibn Daud), The
Exalted Faith (HA- EMUNAH HA-RAMAH), edited by Norbert M. Samuelson
and Gershon Weiss; translated into English by Norbert M. Samuelson.
Cranbury, N.J., Associated University Presses, 1986; pp. 242,
246-247, 251.

12 Who the Sabians of Maimonides’ myth/story might be is a topic
of scholarly debate. My personal guess is that they are the
Chaldeans.

13 The secondary literature on Maimonides’ theory of divine
attributes is vast. While it is never perfectly clear what
Maimonides in fact believed he was saying about any topic that is
critical to his philosophy, some positions seem more coherent with
the totality of his writings than others. In this article I accept
the general guideline of Hermann Cohen and his disciples who
understand Maimonides’ negative theology to mean that divine
attributes state moral, asymptotic ideals. Even confined to the
Cohenian interpretation of divine attributes, the relevant
bibliography would be too large to present in this article.
Instead, I will limit my references to Zevi Diesendruck, “The
Philosophy of Maimonides.” Central Conference of American Rabbis
Yearbook LXV (1935): pp. 355-368, and the following three articles
by me (the last of which bearing most directly on the
interpretation presented here): “On Knowing God: Maimonides,
Gersonides and the Philosophy of Religion,” Judaism
(Winter, 1969) pp. 64-77. “The Role of Politics in the Torah
According to Maimonides, Spinoza and Buber,” Community and Culture:
Essays in Jewish Studies, edited by Nahum M. Waldman,
Philadelphia, Gratz College Seth Press, 1987, pp. 193-208. “Divine
Attributes as Moral Ideals in Maimonides’ Theology,” The Thought
of Maimonides: Philosophical and Legal Studies, edited by Ira
Robinson, Lawrence Kaplan and Julien Bauer, Studies in the
History of Philosophy, Volume 17, Lewiston/ Queenston/Lampeter,
Edwin Mellon Press, 1991, pp. 69-76.

14 In Levi Ben Gershon (Gersonides), MILCHAMOT ADONAI (The Wars
of the Lord) III-IV, Riva di Trento, s.n., 1560 and Leipzig, K.B.
Lark, 1866, translated into German by B. Kellerman, Die Kampfe
Gott’s von Lewi Ben Gerson, Berlin, Mayer and Muller, 1914. Book
III is translated into English by Norbert M. Samuelson, Gersonides
on God’s Knowledge, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1977. Book IV is translated into English by J. David
Bleich, Providence in the Philosophy of Gersonides, New York,
Yeshiva University Press, 1973. Books III and IV are translated
into French by Charles Touati, Les Guerres du Seigneur, Livres 3 et
4 , Paris, Mouton, 1968. Also see Charles Touati, La Pense
Philosophique et Theologique de Gersonides, Paris, Minuit, 1973,
and the following works by me: “On Knowing God: Maimonides,
Gersonides and the Philosophy of Religion,” Judaism (Winter,
1969) pp. 64-77. “Gersonides’ Account of God’s Knowledge of
Particulars,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (Octber, 1972)
pp. 399-416. “The Tenth Principle–Omniscience–Gersonides,
Milhamot Ha-Shem , Third Treatise, chapters 1, 3-6,” With Perfect
Faith: The Foundations of Jewish Belief, J. David Bleiech (ed.).
New York, Ktav, 1983. pp. 440-466.

15 This is a topic that should be, but has not as yet been,
adequately discussed by contemporary students of medieval Jewish
philosophy.

16 One other Jewish philosopher worthy of mention in this context
with Maimonides and Gersonides is Baruch Spinoza. He has been
omitted here from consideration only because of space limitations
in this volume and because his influence on subsequent Jewish
thought was mostly negative. Like his intellectual Jewish
teachers, Maimonides and Gersonides, Spinoza affirms a God
who is perfectly good and powerful and denies the reality of evil.
However, his interpretation of these three claims stands in
intentional and explicit opposition to their religious Jewish
solutions of the problem of theodicy. What he objects to is their
judgment that the world is good. Rather, Spinoza constructs a
model for understanding where reality is morally neutral. The
issue is not theodicy. It is science. And the source of the
disagreement is how Spinoza interpreted what it meant for the
Creator of the Universe to be perfect. The tradition of classical
Jewish philosophy had argued that the universe and everything in it
are perfectly what they are, which entails that they are not
absolutely perfect. Spinoza understood this judgment to mean
that everything is the way it is because it must be that way. An
absolutely perfect God must always do what is absolutely perfect,
and since there is nothing else that can influence or modify what
an absolutely perfect agent does, this universe is a necessary one,
i.e., the only one that is logically and causally possible. Hence,
there are no genuine options in the universe, and, without options,
it makes no sense to say that what happens in the universe happens
for a purpose. God does what He does not to bring something about;
God does what He does simply because He is God. This position also
is a solution to the problem of theodicy. Like Maimonides Spinoza
claims that what appears to be evil only appears so because of the
inadequacy of human knowledge. However, Spinoza’s solution
— viz., to posit a non-moral universe JPPJ stands outside the
dominant tradition of Jewish religious thought which, as we shall
see, makes ethics primary over ontology. Spinoza had enormous
influence on the subsequent, so-called “modern” attitudes of
educated Western civilization. In this and many other respects
Spinoza’s philosophy was paradigmatic for the subsequent
development of modern science, particularly in the humanities.
However, his influence in Jewish thought was, rightly or wrongly,
primarily negative. Spinoza’s ontologically primary, morally
neutral, algebraic picture of the universe stands in marked
contrast to the ethically primary, calculus-process picture of the
universe that Cohen and his disciples in modern Jewish philosophy
developed.

17 For both Maimonides and Gersonides this is a consequence of
God’s radical unity. No attribute can express part of God, because
God can have no parts. Similarly, no attribute can express
something that merely is true of God, because then God could be
other than He is, which, if that were possible, would entail that
God could be influenced by something other than His own nature,
which would entail that God is not perfectly powerful.
Consequently, every divine attribute is God.

18 Cohen will say that to affirm anything actual as good would
constitute idolatry, which is a consequence of both the radical
separation between God as Creator and the world as His creation,
and the radical separation in principle between the is and the
ought.

19 The following works by Cohen are relevant to this discussion:
Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Method , Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp,
1968. Judische Schriften, edited by Franz Rosenzweig, Berlin, 1924,
and Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen der Judentums, Frankfurt
a.M., 1929, translated into English by Simon Kaplan, Religion of
Reason, New York, Ungar, 1972. Also relevant are the following
secondary works: J. Klatzkin, Hermann Cohen, Berlin, 1921. William
Kluback, Hermann Cohen: The Challenge of a Religion of Reason,
Chico, Scholars Press, 1984, and J. Melber, Hermann Cohen’s
Philosophy of Judaism, New York, Jonathan David, 1968.

20 The following application of the philosophies of Martin Buber
and Franz Rosenzweig to theodicy are based on my discussion of
these three philosophers in chapters 10-11 of my An Introduction to
Modern Jewish Philosophy, Albany, State University of New York
Press, 1989. The “Recommended Readings” listed at the end of each
chapter are the works upon which my interpretation is based. My
reading of Buber is based primarily on his Ich und Du (Heidelberg,
Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1977, translated into English by Walter
Kaufmann, I and Thou, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), as
my reading of Rosenzweig is based primarily on his Der Stern der
Erlsung (Rosenzweig, Franz, Der Stern der Erlsung, Frankfurt a.
M., J. Kaufmann, 1921, translated into English by William W. Hallo,
The Star of Redemption , Boston, Beacon Press, 1971, translated
into Hebrew by Yehoshua Amir, KOKHAV HA-GEULAH, Jerusalem,
Bialik Institute, 1970). The interested reader can find a more
detailed expression of my understanding of these works in the
following essays: “Rosenzweig’s Concept of (Jewish) Ethics,”
Joodse Filosofie Tussen Rede En Traditie: Feestbundelter ere van
de tachtigste verjaardag van Prof. dr H. J. Herring, edited by
Reinier Munk, Amsterdam, Kok Kampen, 1993, pp. 207-220.
“The Concept of ‘Nichts’ in Rosenzweig’s ‘Star of Redemption’,” Der
Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Band II, Das neue Denken
und seine Dimensionen, edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik,
Freiburg, Verlag Karl Alber, 1988, pp. 643-656. “The Role of
Politics in the Torah According to Maimonides, Spinoza and Buber,”
Community and Culture: Essays in Jewish Studies, edited by Nahum M.
Waldman, Philadelphia, Gratz College Seth Press, 1987, pp. 193-208.
“Halevi and Rosenzweig on Miracles,” Approaches to Judaism in
Medieval Times, edited by David R. Blumenthal, Brown Judaic Studies
#54, Chico, CA, Scholars Press, 1984, pp. 157-172. “Ibn Daud and
Franz Rosenzweig on Other Religions: A Contrast Between Medieval
and Modern Jewish Philosophy,” Poceedings of the Eighth World
Congress of Jewish Studies, Division C: Talmud and Midrash,
Philosophy and Mysticism, Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, Jerusalem,
1982, pp. 75-80.

21 One should read all of his writings to see the development of
his most original and insightful analysis. However, clearly his
most mature, and conclusive, work is To Mend the World:
Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, New York, Schocken, 1982.

22 52b. There Plato invokes mythology, which he calls “bastard
reasoning” (LOGISMU TINI NOTHU), as the appropriate way to talk
about space (CHORA). See Richard Dakre Archer-Hind, The Timaeus of
Plato, New York, Arno Press, 1973, and Francis MacDonald Cornford,
Plato’s Cosmology. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966 (first
published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1937).