A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought (review)

94 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought, edited by Daniel H. Frank. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 270 pp. $59.50. This volume assembles revised versions of the papers delivered at the eleventh and twelfth conferences of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy held in 1990 and 1991. The first ofthese conferences focused on the issue of chosenness in Judaism, and the second on theories of ritual in Jewish philosophical thought. Whatever pragmatic considerations dictated the publication of these two discussions in one volume, the editor adds that this twinning is justified because it is precisely Jewish ritual that concretizes the sense ofJewish set-apartedness. Part 1 of the volume on chosenness includes papers by David Novak, Menachem Kellner, and Ze'ev Levy, together with Norbert Samuelson's response to Kellner's paper and Kellner's reply. Part 2, on ritual, includes papers by Len H. Goodman, Moshe Sokol, Joshua Golding, and Samuelson. As befits the setting and the standing of the contributors, this volume is a significant contribution to the ongoing inquiry into these central issues in Jewish thought. The discussion throughout is rich and substantive. Footnotes and references are appended to each paper, and the Index will help the more casual reader to locate specific issues for more intensive consideration. The editor's Introduction summarizes the thrust of each of the papers and highlights common themes and issues. The discussion of chosenness focuses, not unexpectedly, on the tension between this classical doctrine and the more egalitarian/democratic temper of our age. Novak directs his efforts to preserving the doctrine as philosophically significant and even justifiable without allowing it to slide into chauvinism or ethnic superiority. Kellner does the same thing using Maimonides' writings, in which he finds a distinction between the Jewish community as ethnic group and faith community. Samuelson's response disagrees with Kellner's reading of Maimonides. Finally, Ze'ev Levy reviews various formulations of the doctrine and concludes that it is fundamentally indefensible and at odds with the contemporary ideal of universal equality. The papers on ritual are directed to unearthing a philosophical justification for those practices which apparently lack rational or interpersonal content. Len Goodman, however, would disagree with this formulation ; he insists that all laws have a ritual dimension, for they all refer us back to the values for which they stand. Sokol goes part of the way with Goodman in that he views ritual as a metaphorical language which aims at restructuring the performer's experience of God, the Jewish people, and humanity. Book Reviews 95 Golding sees Jewish ritual as the way in which Jews experience their "rootedness" or belonging in the Jewish people. Finally, Samuelson offers three models of Jewish worship or love of God, the biblical view that worship is obedience to God, the medieval view that it consists of the pursuit of philosophical truth, and the more modern view that it consists of the struggle for the sociaVpolitical good. Samuelson views these three models as theologically incompatible. For this reader, the discussions in the second half of the volume carry particular interest. This is not meant in any way to disparage the discussion of chosenness. It is rather to note that though in the past few decades the field of ritual studies has become central to the study of the phenomenology of religion, it is only gradually making its way into the study ofJewish religion. Though the approach here is identified as more "philosophical" than phenomenological, that distinction tends to blur almost throughout. Each of the four papers in this part of the volume merits close study. Goodman's paper is by far the longest (close to 100 pages with notes and references) and the richest in the book as a whole. His point of departure is a close rereading of Saadiah's well-known distinction between rational and ritual laws which, he insists, has been misunderstood. Goodman subjects Marvin Fox's discussion of Saadiah to a searching critique, moves on to a discussion of the rabbinic view on the rationality of the commandments and of Jewish legal positivism, to Maimonides' development of Saadiah's...