Historical Heresies and Modern Jewish Identity

In The Heretical Imperative, Peter Berger argued that modernity, characterized as it is by a plurality of choices, necessarily embraces heresy, for heresy, as he defines it (going back to hereisis in Greek) means "to choose." In the Hellenistic oikumene, the word most commonly referred to a "faction" or "party," from which, in the letters of Paul, for example, ¹ it eventually developed the pejorative meaning of factionalism or sectarian disagreement. With the gradual emergence of an "orthodox" Church, heresy came to mean dissent from dogma, and, indeed, orthodoxy constructed itself precisely by naming and categorizing heresies. Berger contrasts the world of "tradition" with modernity in the following terms: "For premodern man, heresy is a possibility--usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative." ²

Berger's equation of secularism with heresy is a singularly interesting attempt to describe the dialectic of modernization in religious terms. Yet it seems to me to fail, at least in the Jewish case, one that Berger himself quotes repeatedly. Jewish tradition does not conform to his definition of tradition, the static character of which probably applies to no historical tradition. Consequently, the relationship of modern Jews to heresy is not quite the diametric opposite of tradition. Rabbinic culture, which represents tradition for Berger, certainly developed a concept of heresy and even a lexicon of terms (min, kofer, epikoros) by which to label the heretic. But the process of marking the boundaries turns out to have been much more difficult and complex than Berger's polarities would admit. Rabbinic culture constructed the category of heresy by a process of simultaneously naming and erasing the heretic. Thus, the Hebrew name for Jesus, Yeshu, was understood traditionally as an acronym meaning "may his name be blotted out." But even as traditional authorities sought to erase the heretic by naming him, the very process ensured a kind of recuperation. Jesus himself, for example, appears in a discussion of capital punishment as a case from which one might learn the law (the rabbis have no difficulty here in taking full ownership for his execution!). ³

Elisha ben Abuya, perhaps the most famous heretic in the Talmud and a figure, like Jesus, to whom we shall return, is renamed, in one tradition, as Aher or "Other." But this renaming also hardly succeeds in "blotting him out." Far from it. Elisha is declared a heretic and "rabbinized" at one and the same time. Interestingly enough, it is a prostitute who, in the Babylonian account, names him Aher: "He went and found a prostitute and asked for her. She said to him: Are you not Elisha ben Abuya? When he tore a radish (or turnip) out of the ground on the Shabbat and gave it to her, she said: 'He is another [aher hu].'"⁴ We need not detain ourselves with the possible (Freudian?) meaning of the tubular vegetable that Elisha plucks on the Sabbath. More significant is that it is a woman who first recognizes and names his "otherness," his transformation from a rabbi into a heretic. Yet the way in which the editors of the Babylonian Talmud compiled the Aher stories immediately reverses the process. Aher engages his disciple Rabbi Meir in a series of typically rabbinic exegetical exchanges that would seem to suggest the possibility of his repentance, except that Elisha says he heard from behind the pargod (the "veil" that separates heaven from earth) that only for him was repentance denied. Following Elisha's death, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Johanan vow that, upon their own deaths, Elisha will be punished and forgiven. Then, another female figure is introduced, this time Aher's daughter, who asks Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi to support her. Judah rejects her when he learns her identity, but she replies: "remember his Torah and not his deeds," whereupon "a fire...