The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought by Mara H. Benjamin (review)

In her own words, the singular driving claim of Mara Benjamin's The Obligated Self is that "the ultimate theological significance of a maternal intervention into modern and contemporary Jewish thought lies in the new knowledge of the ineffable that emerges through the daily, quotidian work of caring for one's child." (122) In other words, in question form: what might be revealed about the divine through an inquiry into the everyday, mundane tasks of motherhood—a phenomena regularly ignored in the history of theology and philosophy despite its being one of the most universal traits of all human experience?

To answer this question, Benjamin draws from a vast array of sources but is particularly informed by centuries of Jewish Scriptures, rabbinical commentaries, and philosophical texts. Regarding the latter, Benjamin draws from the accounts of intersubjectivity developed by Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and especially Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed, the chapter titles themselves nearly read like a glossary of key Levinasian terms: obligation, love, teaching, the other, the Third, the neighbor. But while Benjamin's deep regard for these scholars is evident, her employment of these terms hardly reflects a mere regurgitation of her predecessors' ideas. Rather, she reconceptualizes them in fresh, creative ways, sometimes even subversively. Most glaringly she takes to task "these philosophers [who] were interested in the substructure of intersubjectivity, which remained abstract and removed from ordinary social life." Despite the brilliance of their analyses of the self–other relation she notes that in their works, "everyday social interactions, along with gender, race and most other factors that affect social life, were relegated to the level of superficiality." (121)

In contrast, Benjamin's analyses stay close to the phenomena of the mother–child bond, deriving philosophical and theological conclusions through a close attunement to the real particularities, idiosyncrasies, and even frustrations that make up the day-to-day experience of parenting. This philosophical framework, which privileges human experience as the site of the manifestation of the divine, finds support in Buber and Levinas to be sure (123), but Benjamin reaches further. In the introduction, for example, she cites the Mishnah from the first chapter of the Babylonian Talmud, which describes the third watch of the night as a time when "the child sucks from the breast of his mother" (Berakhot 3a), as ample evidence that "ritual time"—the daily, weekly, and annual practices that make up one's religious calendar and commitments—"is itself derivative. It takes on its meaning from domestic life: we humans reckon ritual time in terms of ordinary daily activity in which humans naturally engage." (xxi) Our encounter with the divine emerges out of the humdrum of our daily routines as embodied beings changing diapers, washing dishes, or admonishing children.

Benjamin's approach to the Jewish intellectual tradition is marked by what she describes as "two disorienting, mutually opposing orientations toward Jewish texts." (xx) On the one hand, she is critical of the Jewish tradition that, due to its centuries of condoning patriarchal norms, often treats women as second-class citizens in the community and both minimizes and renders invisible the everyday physical tasks of child-rearing. On the other hand, she maintains that Jewish sacred texts may be put to the service of a rich reading of the parent-child relation, for "the rabbis … intuited that the primal heart of Torah and mitzvot could only be truly known through the relationships of care and obligation we experience daily." (xx) As a result, the book regularly oscillates between, on the one hand, utilizing twenty-first-century constructs from feminist thought, psychology, and philosophy to critique and reimagine the Jewish tradition and its understanding of the divine, and on the other, presenting Jewish scriptural, rabbinical, and philosophical texts as treasure troves for uniquely examining and illuminating the parent–child bond and its theological significance. To this, she writes, "For me, neither the critical nor the...