Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

3. Ethical Monotheism and Jewish Thought

3 Ethical Monotheism and Jewish Thought Should a person tell you there is wisdom among the nations, believe it. . . . But if he tells you there is Torah among the nations, do not believe it.—Eichah Rabbah 2:9:13 From what was said about the movement of return in the previous chapter , it should be clear that, if teshuvah is a return from exile, then exile is not just a geographical category. In addition to the geographical exile, there is an exile of the soul and of thought. Just as a Jew might wander in an alien land, so might a Jew be lost in an alien thinking. Such, indeed, is the exile of Hashem, so that the ultimate purpose of teshuvah is to draw God Himself out of exile, as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has maintained.1 And most alien to Jewish thought—the orb that most radically eclipses the light of the holy—is the ego, as the Chasidic master Yechiel Mikhal of Zlotchov has taught.2 Lost in the lie of our “egoism,” of our aniyut, as it is called in Hebrew, we cry out in the “lamentation” or the aniyah of our exile. In this condition, we never live but only hope to live. In this condition, we fail to realize that it is better to want what you have than to have what you want. In this condition, we merely want. Situating the ego at the center of being robs a human being of the capacity for joy, for the ego would always have more. Yet it is beggared by its abundance. And so, in our not so quiet desperation, we ask: Where do we go from here—anah? 63 The philosophical exile that confronts the Jewish soul is an ancient one. The Talmud relates, for instance, that the apostate Elisha ben Avuya used to secretly study Greek philosophy before he abandoned Torah (see Chagigah 14b, 15b). To be sure, in the epigraph to the last chapter we have a talmudic text that expresses a concern over the adverse eªects of Greek wisdom on the Jewish soul. That concern follows Jewish thinkers into the Middle Ages, when Bachya ibn Paquda complained that great “was the destruction of their own understanding. . . . [E]ach of them thought that his evil was the good way, and his erring path the right direction . This view they turned into a statute and moral principle. . . . What had been strange in their world became known to them, while the right way was strange to them” (Bachya ibn Paquda, Chovot Halevavot 9:2). Bachya’s point will strike a chord in anyone familiar with the modern Jewish flirtation with ontological thought. Leo Baeck, for example, wrote, “At one time it [Judaism] believed that biblical wisdom was contained in Greek philosophy and Greek truth in the Holy Scriptures. It was a naïve belief.”3 Why naïve? Because, says Baeck, “what Greek philosophers lacked above all was that idea of ethical command,”4 delivered from on high, and not merely deduced from reason.5 Why naïve? Because Greek speculative philosophy—and its modern ontological outgrowth—could never deliver on its promises of truth, meaning, and morality. If the Holocaust has not demonstrated that, it has not demonstrated anything. Like the serpent of old, speculative philosophy appeals to what is “pleasing to the eye” (Genesis 3:6)—and to the I—from Philo, who attempted to “correct” the Scriptures by changing the voice of God to a vision of God,6 to Edmund Husserl, who declared that “if phenomena have no nature, they still have an essence, which can be grasped and determined in an immediate seeing.”7 Not only was the Jewish enthrallment with speculative thought naïve, it was destructive. One of Baeck’s students, Emil Fackenheim, recognizes as much when he registers this complaint over the Jewish product of German Idealism, namely, liberal Judaism (despite his a‹liation with that movement). In liberal Judaism, he says, Jewish prayer, once between a “subjective” self and an “objective” God, is viewed as the self ’s disport with its own feelings, conducive to aesthetic 64 Ethical Monotheism and Jewish Thought or therapeutic benefit. Halakhah, once a way walked before God, is reduced to “custom and ceremony,” performed for the sake of warm emotions within or wholesome relations without. Judaism, once a covenant involving a singling-out God and a singled...