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  • The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought by Mara Benjamin
  • Benjamin Pollock (bio)
Mara Benjamin Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought by Mara Benjamin Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 182 pp.

One of the fundamental insights of twentieth-century Jewish thought is that we become the selves we are through our relationships to others. Whether they conceive such relations in terms of love, mutual recognition, responsibility or dialogue, Jewish thinkers like Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas share the view that the kind of self one becomes is wrapped up with the kinds of relations one has to others; and they share the conviction that divine revelation either grounds or finds its true expression in interpersonal relations. Taking this insight as its starting point, Mara Benjamin's The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought offers a profound reflection on the experience of maternal obligation. Like her first book, Franz Rosenzweig's Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Obligated Self is steeped in scriptural and rabbinic sources as well as in modern Jewish philosophical thought. The book's thoughtful reappropriation of traditional Jewish resources in light of maternal experience promises to enrich contemporary Jewish feminist theology in important ways.

The basic claim of The Obligated Self is that when I become a parent, I suddenly find myself subject to an obligation to another person—my newborn baby—and my obligation to this intimate stranger is experienced in a way that is imperative, embodied and particularized. I find my own self bound up with this other through a new, inescapable "ought." Unlike interpersonal relations between equals, my relation to my baby is asymmetrical in the extreme. As such, the features of the maternal self that Benjamin foregrounds most resemble the kind of infinite responsibility to the other found in Levinas's account of the ethical relation. But, Benjamin argues, while "most influential Jewish thinkers conceived of the intersubjective encounter … in decidedly abstract terms" (p. 13), the maternal relation is concrete and particular: it is the law of this baby that has a claim on me, this baby for whom I feel obligated to care, this baby who seeks out my face. Maternal obligation is carried out through concrete, embodied actions, from nursing and burping and holding [End Page 188] to cleaning and wiping. Moreover, the specificity of maternal duty highlights the dialectic of agency and obligation inherent to the parent–child relationship. Even when I intend or expect to have a baby, I do not freely choose to obligate myself to this baby; rather, the obligation emerges out of my unique relation to her.

The Obligated Self shows how attending carefully to contours of maternal obligation can illuminate our understanding of human subjectivity, and it also shows how fruitful maternal subjectivity is for thinking theologically. Benjamin argues that the mother–child relationship is a far more helpful model than that of reciprocal relations for thinking about the divine–human relationship. She explores the asymmetry of the divine–human relation in both directions, showing not only how maternal experience can give us insight into the divine perspective in God's relation to human beings, but also how the sense of obligation to God wrapped up in Jewish religious service can be understood on the model of a mother's care for her baby.

Benjamin avoids simplistic binaries in articulating a feminist theology on the maternal model. She does not, for example, call for an understanding of the divine as loving, caring and nurturing full stop, to counter traditional depictions of God as all-powerful and vengeful. Indeed, she is remarkably adept at reflecting on—and thereby helping readers reflect on—those myriad painful, awkward and complicated aspects of parenting, both human and divine, whether these be related to parental anger, the special form of the erotic involved in parent–child relations, or the need to restrain parental power. Benjamin advocates a nuanced account of the maternal that grasps these oft-unwanted aspects of parenting—again, both human and divine—as part and parcel of parental love and obligation themselves.

Benjamin's approach is phenomenological, broadly speaking, and her willingness to share personal...

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