Introduction to Erich Unger's A Restatement of Judaism

A brief outline of the intellectual development of the philosopher Erich Unger (born in Berlin in 1887, died in London in 1950) shows the logical progression that led him to the somewhat unusual views expressed in “A Restatement of Judaism.”

His course was set at high school. A snapshot shows four excited teen-agers in their last year at school. They were sure that they would be able to change the world—the Jewish world first and the world in general by extension. One of the friends was to die young from wounds inflicted in the First World War, one was to channel his zeal into medicine. Two of the four, Oskar Goldberg and Erich Unger, took their task very seriously, and, had the world they knew continued as expected, their impact may well have been considerable. Hitler changed all that. Deeply frustrated, Goldberg turned to occult wisdom, and only Unger kept to his vision until his death in 1950.

Although Goldberg taught the three others Talmud, their concern was not really the Oral Law but rather the Pentateuch, the blueprint of the Hebrews with its account of the living impact of the divine on the Children of Israel. If they could only understand the reality of that world, the purpose and function of that revelation, they felt, they would find the solution to the erosion of Judaism in a world of indifference; they would be able to revitalize the original message and perhaps help to bring about the conditions necessary for a renewal of the promise “I shall dwell among them,” ve-shachanti betocham (Exod. 25:8).

Their thinking was systematic. First, the idea of one God. To say that reason, unaided, could arrive at such an idea was not new in philosophy. In the Pentateuch the mystery of God is related to life; the “living God” is the source and sustainer of life. Reason can understand the possibility of a kind of divine reservoir of life, from which life comes and to which it returns.

Goldberg and Unger’s reading of the Book of Genesis showed how a myth can explain the necessary stages in the development of that life. For instance, whereas Adam at first represents all mankind, it is as an individual, after disobeying God’s command, that he becomes mortal (“The existence of an individual is only possible as a limited, finite one and individual life, in contradistinction to the species, is attained at the price of death”). ¹ Reason can further translate the “shame” felt by Adam and Eve: “The feeling of shame in this case betrays remorse, not for having ‘sinned’ against the ‘normal,’ natural order of things, but for having forfeited a good in the highest sphere of human desires and Divine possibilities, the good of deathless existence.” ² Every genuine myth is a rational myth, one where reason recognizes the necessary fitness of the image and the message—not the case in some poetic myths, where images can be exchanged with other ones. Theirs was a new, philosophical way of reading the biblical text of Genesis.

Next, the features that characterize Judaism: its moral values, notably the value of social justice and its ritual. The divine source of life can have no defect on any level. Therefore, the laws that regulate the life of the community and the individual, specif ically the chukim, the laws which apparently have no rationale, must ensure the “fitness” of the people in their relationship with the divine; such laws “always involve physical life processes, those that make the individual ‘fit’ for the body of life of the nation that equates to the Godhead. It is to such ‘fitness’ alone that the Godhead responds.” ³ The main areas of ritual concerned with that fitness are the dietary laws, the laws regulating sex, and the laws concerned with purity and impurity. It is significant that these laws extend from the human organism to the nation’s natural environment: “Thus we have ritual measures that affect the treatment of the nation’s future land and its produce (cf. Lev. 25:22ff and...