Performing Israel's Faith: Narrative and Law in Rabbinic Theology

Epilogue - Covenantal Conduct: The Outcome of Performing Israel’s Faith

207 Epilogue Covenantal Conduct The Outcome of Performing Israel’s Faith Law without theology conveyed in lore—exegesis, narrative, topical exposition —yields legalism. It does not fully express Israel’s partnership with God, omitting as it does the theological convictions that animate action. Stated simply: Halakhah without Aggadah—rules without convictions—produces robots, automatons of the law. Theology without law conveyed in rules of normative conduct—Aggadah without Halakhah, beliefs without corresponding behavior—yields not a covenanted community but a radically isolated individual. Theology without social norms does not embody that same partnership, omitting as it does the essential aspect of realizing the covenant in actualities of the workaday world. Covenantal conduct contains imperatives of attitude and belief (“You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might”) and action and behavior (“Love your neighbor as yourself”). We have examined massive testimonies in support of E. P. Sanders’s view of covenantal nomism. He argues against the idea of Judaism as “a petty legalism, according to which one had to earn the mercy of God by minute observance of irrelevant ordinances.” The relationships between the narrative and theology of idolaters and Israel and between the narrative and theology of repentance and atonement have shown the relevance of ordinances in responding to the grace of God set forth in the Torah. The narrative accounts for the idolaters and their standing and task in world history, the law translates the matter into everyday performance of the faith. The narrative of sin and repentance, atonement and forgiveness, defines the context for the text of the Temple rite, faithfully preserved in synagogue liturgy for the Day of Atonement even to this very day. The message at the end—repentance begins in the here and now of seeking the forgiveness of those one has sinned against—provides the Judaic setting for the prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses , as we forgive those that trespass against us.” The characterization of Judaism as a petty legalism conflicts with the law and theology of covenantal conduct set forth in these pages out of the authoritative documents of the Torah, written as mediated by the oral tradition. We are further struck by evidence amassed in chapter 5 of the power of the law in its own framework, not in the framework of narrative, to speak in its own behalf of theological things. The law on its own delivers its message, as Ithamar Gruenwald says, without an accompanying script, which became clear in chapter 5. The systematic exposition of the law of the Seventh Year, of the law of the disposition of the fruit of a tree in the first three years and then the fourth year after it is planted show that the law is anything but petty and irrelevant. Rather, it allows the faithful Israelite to act out God’s design for creation with its climax at the Sabbath. The laws of Shabbat-Erubin underscore the sanctifying power of the Sabbath over time and space. The laws of Passover and of Tabernacles sanctify the households of Israel in the model of the Temple. So too the criminal justice system portrayed in Sanhedrin-Makkot embodies the conviction of God’s passionate love for humanity: his provision for eternal life through the expiation and atonement of sin through death, as through the provisional media of repentance and the Day of Atonement and the rites of atonement. The law is commonly represented as formal and superficial, the theology conveying the spirit, which gives life. But here we have seen that the law directs itself toward the interior of life, the lore, to externals. That paradox should not be missed. When readers examine matters in detail, they see that the Aggadah’s structure and system and those of the Halakhah address a single topic, but from different angles of vision of Israel’s existence, the one, outward-looking and the other, inner-facing. But both engaged by relationships , the one transitive ones and the other intransitive. It is the Aggadah, fully set forth, that affords perspective on the Halakhah—and vice versa. The Halakhah in its way makes exactly the same statement about the same matters that the Aggadah does in its categories and terms. But the Aggadah speaks in large and general terms to the world at large, while the Halakhah uses small and particular rules to speak to the everyday concerns of ordinary Israelites. The Aggadah, accordingly, addresses exteriorities, the Halakhah, interiorities , of Israel in relationship with...