20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Individuality

Individuality Peter Ochs T he concept of individuality refers to an event and a movement rather than to some enduring thing in the world. For Israel's sages, God alone endures, while the things of this world pass away, acquiring individuality only as instruments of God's purposes . Only idol-worshipers place their trust in mere things. For those not sharing the perspective of Israel's sages, however, concern to overcome worldly idolatries may also breed disrespect for our worldly limitations. Impatient with the things of this world, they try to possess eternity through their ideas of God or of another world. In place of eternity, however, they are left only with themselves, individual collections of ideas, desires, and fancies, cut off from this world and from the God who created it. The meaning and value of individuality depends on its source: creator or creature. For biblical and rabbinic Judaism, the creator is the source of individuality : God is pure subjectivity, creating this world and then acting on it, through his spoken word (dibbur). The spoken word is the source of purposes in the world, in relation to which this world is a collection of possible agents. When God speaks, he deSignates certain objects in the world as 484 INDIVIDUALITY agents of his purposes, making possible agents actual ones. Individuality is the quality of having been designated as such an agent. Something in the world becomes an individual as the effect of having been selected by God. A bush is an individual bush when God appears by way of it. A human being is an individual human being when God calls that being out of the world in which it normally operates, as, for example, God called to Abraham, "Lekh Lekha!" ("Go forth!") (Gen. 12:1). For classical Judaism, individuality is a passing thing. Something is individual only while serving a purpose. Once the purpose is fulfilled, or aborted, the individuality evaporates, or is remembered not as an individuality but as an exemplary instrument of action. When he "went forth," Abraham was an individual; when he is remembered as Abraham avinu (our father), he is a model for the selection of other individuals. The power of memory makes human beings both remarkable and troublesome instruments of God's purposes. For the most part, these purposes are implanted in the human soul as preconscious rules of behavior, products of biology and of childhood socialization. Acting in the world, humans select individual instruments of these purposes, like Adam naming the animals he might rule over. Remembering which individuals were more helpful agents than others, humans may enact their purposes most efficiently. In memory, however, individuals lose their evanescent character, becoming ideas or images of pOSSible rather than actual individuals. With sufficient memory, humans may collect small worlds of such ideas, worlds that may interest them more than the one God created. Mistaking ideas for individuals , humans may try to enact their purposes in idea only, leaving the created world unchanged and their purposes unfulfilled. This is the source of what the rabbis call Adam's evil inclination: love of his private world, which breeds inattention to the created one. For many modern Jews, Adam's evil inclination is a source of respite from a world they have grown to mistrust. Israel's suffering in Europe has made the created world appear an unsatisfactory arena for enacting God's purposes. In its place, they choose worlds of their own making, suggesting that the creature and not the creator is the source of individuality. For the secular disciples of the Enlightenment and the emancipation, the creature is an individual human being, made individual as agent of its own purposes. This human being is subjectivity and individual in one. Self-governing and thus self-individuating, it rules over a private world of speculation, fancy, and satisfaction. For the extreme orthodox, the creature is an individual community within the people Israel. This community first acquired its individuality through a history of shared suffering, understood as a shared expe- INDIVIDUALITY 485 rience of God's justice and mercy. It now preserves its separateness through an act of will. Replacing history with memory, the community now lives through shared ideas about its past, rather than through shared experiences of its present. Mistrusting the one created world that we all share, modern individualists , secular or orthodox, place their trust in private worlds of ideas, or ideologies . Withdrawn...