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Especially since the rise of Christianity and Islam, Jews have concerned themselves with defining the nature and fabric of the Jewish claim of particularism1 in relation to, and as distinct from, the non-Jewish other.2 But not only the non-Jewish other. The other is not only the non-Israelite/Jew but also the other that lives in the midst of the comm munity , inside the Jewishness of the Jew.3 The fear is not only of the non-Jewish other but of the Jewish “other,” the Jew who stands in oppos sition to the operative definition of Judaism. Esther Benbassa and JeanChristoffe Attias argue that otherness is not merely a part of Jewish identity; it stands at the very center of how Judaism views itself: “Biblical thought and rabbinical Judaism have obviously never ceased to secrete this imagined other. The reason is that Judaism has defined itself, to a 4 Numbers Balaam, Moses, and the Prophecy of the “Other”: A Lurianic Vision for the Erasure of Difference inclusion is exclusion —Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion. —Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence Inversion, in other words, must simultaneously be a perversion that is subversive. —Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” 144 From Metaphysics to Midrash large extent, as a ‘counter-religion’. It constructs itself and conceives of itself in confrontation with an external enemy, that is, however, simultan neously a standing internal temptation: idolatry.”4 Sacha Stern puts it more starkly: “The rabbinic image of the non-Jew is xenophobic in the extreme.”5 The other who is Christian, of course, begins as an internal other that becomes external, and Islam views itself to some extent in the trajectory of Judaism or at least Abrahamic and Mosaic prophecy. In Kabbala the other, who is often demonic, is sometimes depicted as internal to the self whose power is generated through interaction with the sacredness of the human soul. Being empowered by the sacred, the demonic is, in some way, always a part of the sacred it opposes.6 In the Bible, the external other, for example, Balaam, is portrayed in the Lurianic imagination as sharing a soul with Moses. And he is viewed as connected to the ¿erev rav (mixed multitude, Exod. 12:39) who also constitute a kind of “internal other” to Israel. Like the ¿erev rav, Balaam is both outside and inside, an external threat and internal temptation. So while the other is, as Boyarin suggests, “different,” she is also the same, a difference that is rooted in sameness, the other that is also always the self. As Jonathan Z. Smith notes, comparison is always the manipulation of difference “to achieve some stated cognitive end.”7 So the question reg garding Balaam and Israel is not only about difference per se but about how that difference reflects sameness (Balaam/Moses) and how that sameness reflects an internal difference (Israelite/convert). W. D. Davis claims that the relationship of Israel to the gentile world may have been the most pressing theological problem of the first century.8 The claim of exclusivity that lies at the center of the Israelite covenant is often in tension with the messianic and eschatological claim endemic to Judaism, especially in the Hebrew Prophets, predicting a utopian future where exclusivist claims (at least conventionally understood) are effaced or at least transformed.9 The extent to which Paul’s ostensible move to univ versalize the covenant founded on his reading of the eschatology of the Hebrew Prophets (with all its caveats) should not be underestimated as exh hibiting an internal tension among Ancient Israelites.10 While modern nity —which brought emancipation and later the promise of religious plur ralism to Jews—certainly presents unique challenges to traditional Jewish claims of covenantal exclusivity, modernity does not create the tension.11 Rather, negotiating exclusivity and universality, being inside and outside, self and other, underlies much of the Ancient Israelite and later Jewish trad dition , beginning in the Bible, and becomes especially prominent among post-rabbinic mystical Judaisms that stress utopian redemption. This is esp pecially true when Jews find themselves in close proximity, geographically or theologically, to the (monotheistic) “other” (Christianity and Islam). I [3.145.191.22] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 01...

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