Revelation and the God of Israel (review)

Norbert Samuelson's recent book on revelation forms a companion piece to his earlier volume on creation, Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation (Cambridge, 1994). The author tackles a core conundrum facing the philosophy and practice of Judaism in the modern period, namely, the intelligibility and believability of revelation. By "revelation" what is meant is not just the scriptural account of Moses at Sinai but the very notion of religious experience in general, defined as "a relationship between God and humans in which communication takes place" (p. 11). What is unique to Samuelson's approach, both in this book and in the creation book, is the turn to science and analytic philosophy, areas largely ignored in the field of modern Jewish philosophy. This is an interest, one suspects, that hearkens back to Samuelson's own earlier research in medieval philosophy, which saw no firm divide between natural philosophy and religious metaphysics, between the study of the physical universe and the apprehension of religious truth. In the new book, Samuelson looks respectively to physical cosmology, evolutionary psychology, and Anglo-American philosophy in his discussion of world, "man," and God. One pressing question runs throughout the entire study: to what degree is the God of Israel "believable"? The proposed answer to this question is fundamentally rationalist, nonliteral, and liberal.

The text is broken into two parts. Part 1 is an intellectual history, in the author's words, "a history of God." Starting with the Bible, the survey plots a path toward a nonliteralist conception of revelation. Following a chapter devoted to Hermann Cohen and Martin Buber, the part culminates with Franz Rosenzweig and Samuelson's claim that it is his philosophy that distills the most believable and most Jewish discourse of revelation, namely, an inspired core of revealed "communication" that eludes fixed and determinate content. Part 2 picks up on the reforms necessary to bring Rosenzweig and revelation up to the challenge posed by modern ethics, the life sciences, analytic philosophy, and biblical criticism. This second part is by far the more constructive and creative in the author's attempt to fend off challenges posed to revelation. A combination of Maimonides and Rosenzweig yields a concept of revelation immune to the challenges posed by modern intellectual culture against literalist notions of revelation that ascribe positive (and unbelievable) content to the communication between God and the human person.

In comparison to the more fundamental philosophical exposition regarding believability, the initial survey constitutes the weakest and most superfluous part of Samuelson's study. The readings in Jewish intellectual history cover too much ground too quickly in what is a relatively slim volume. A lot of room is thereby left for critics to quibble. More seriously, the survey is used to force a bad and schematic choice between Rosenzweig and Buber (representing respectively Jewish tradition and secular humanism) in which one is hard pressed to recognize either party. By focusing too much attention upon The Star of Redemption and I and Thou, the author has lost sight of the larger bodies of rich work that mitigate many apparent differences. The readings here pale in light of Samuelson's own more nuanced readings of the two figures in his An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (New York, 1989). And they distract the reader from the main purpose of the exploration, which is philosophical discovery, not hermeneutical exercise.

Samuelson might very well have dropped Maimonides, Rosenzweig, and Buber in order to give greater room to Samuelson. Instead of "reading" them, as if he needed to prove his scholarly credentials, he might have used them more naturally and elegantly, less self-consciously, to make his own independent statement. Revelation, as construed by Samuelson, is believable because of what he perceives to be its minimal core of content, a notion of religious experience that is noncognitive and nonpropositional. The most interesting and boldest part of the argument is the comparison of religious experience to other types of experience. To my mind, Samuelson is the only contemporary Jewish philosopher to...