Interim Judaism: Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis

2. Revelation, Language, and the Search for Transcendence

2 REVELATION, LANGUAGE, AND THE SEARCH FOR TR ANSCENDENCE Revelation and Access to the Transcendent: The Problem Today In recent decades, in America and throughout the world, there has been a resurgence of religious sensibility. This process includes a return to ritual practice, a widespread interest in religious texts, and a surge of religious activity in politics. The latter has not been only an American phenomenon, marked by the growth of the Christian right and of religious and quasi-religious issues as central political chess pieces; it has also manifested itself powerfully in places such as Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Israel. 1 Among the paradigmatic scholarly symbols of this intense interaction between the religious and the political, for example, is Clifford Geertz’s famous essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock¤ght.” 2 One of the most important features of this interest and activity concerning religion, however, is that it is not primarily about religious ideas or religious beliefs in any clear sense. Rather, it is about that aspect of religion we call “sensibility.” It is about basic attitudes, feelings, and the ethos of religious life and all that it involves. In Western culture, certainly in America, this revival of the religious sensibility does, however, have an intellectual dimension. It registers in some serious questions that at one time were dealt with in a totally secular fashion but now, as for most of the history of Western thought and culture, have regained a religious cast. One 46 such question, for example, is about moral and political purposes. Can reason serve adequately to ground our values? Or can nature? Is it possible for us to go about our moral and political business without acknowledging some transcendent ground? This is the theme of an interesting book by Fergus Kerr entitled Immortal Longings, in which Kerr, a Dominican philosopher at Blackfriars in Edinburgh, considers how a number of twentieth-century intellectuals—including Martha Nussbaum, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, Iris Murdoch , Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor—have dealt with this very question. 3 For Jewish life in America, this religious revival began in the late sixties and early seventies. It was stimulated by the growth of black nationalism in the civil rights movement and, after the Six Day War, by the way in which black leadership and the new left turned on Israel, thereby alienating and isolating many Jewish intellectuals and other Jews. One result was a Jewish shift to a politics of identity and to a search for new content for the sense of Jewish solidarity. 4 This was the period of the emphasis on worship and the intimacy of small groups of the chavurah movement, which eventually even in®uenced synagogue life, of the ®ourishing of Jewish folk-rock liturgy, and of a return to ritual in Reform Judaism. It also was at the leading edge of a very selective Jewish politics with regard to Israel and a slow but sure effort to mitigate the importance of the memory of the Holocaust and to decenter the Holocaust in Jewish identity, one that has had to accommodate to a boom in Holocaust publications and even to the ritual incorporation of the Holocaust memory in liturgy. 5 This renewal movement occurred simultaneously with and interacted with the rise of Jewish feminism; it also blossomed, in the eighties and nineties, into the movement called “Jewish spirituality ,” a Jewish version of the new age and metaphysics rage that has been very much a part of pop culture for the past decades. For a number of reasons, these trends raise a serious problem for Jewish thought and self-understanding. Many of these developments focus on religious experience and religious ritual practice. These trends invariably point to God, the divine, and especially to Revelation, Language, and Transcendence 47 questions about our access to transcendence or our experience of God. Since the trends ¤rst emerged as part of an effort to reinvigorate Jewish worship and celebrations, to bring a sense of elevation, personal ful¤llment, and joy to Jewish prayer, they have also drawn into their orbit a widespread interest in the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism and with it mystical terminology, mythological storytelling , and mystical-style meditative practices. In traditional Jewish terminology, the conglomerate raises questions about divine revelation and about the relation between God’s presence and human experience . I should point out, as a caveat, that while these recent trends in Jewish life should...