20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Theology

Theology Arthur A. Cohen T heology in Judaism is an intellectual discipline with a continuous history but a discontinuous tradition. Despite the unbroken production of works either partly or wholly concerned with the asking of theological questions, the issues they have raised have not always been considered central or even germane to the conduct of Jewish religious life. The classical rabbinic literature is clearly marked by the consideration of theological questions-the nature, person, and manifestation of God, the relation between God and history, evil and freedom, redemption and eschatology -but answers to such questions were not regarded by the tradition as either decisive to the acceptance of God's dominion or useful in the clarification and interpretation of Jewish law and practice. We can reconstruct the assumptions and worldview of the rabbis and thereby devise for them a virtual theology, but we have little reason to believe that we accomplish more by such an exercise than the exposition of their theology as we construe it. The classical tradition either regarded theology as secondary to the elaboration of the halakhah-its assumption and presupposition, so to 972 THEOLOGY speak-or else distinguished its own mode of speculation so radically from the Greek and Hellenistic tradition of which it was aware as to have pass as theology what the Western (Christian) intellectual tradition, more cognizant of its Greek than of its Hebrew roots, might not consider theology at all. Rabbinic theology may well be a unique genre that depends upon a different canon of evidence, even an original logic, surely a different arrangement of speculative priorities than was common among the Greeks and their Christian legatees. It remains an ongoing predicament of historical ipterpretation whether to regard aggadah as the literary form par excellence of classical Jewish theology. Clearly, the aggadah is the authentic mode! of Jewish theologizing, but whether it yields an internally coherent theology is debatable. It may well be the case that the rabbis undertook to deal with theological questions in a manner so inapposite to the discourse made familiar by Christian inquiry that Jewish thinkers are obliged to construe the discipline of theology differently. Clearly, the halakhah is grounded upon assumptions about the nature of the created universe so distinct from Christian parsings of the formulas of dogma that, ab initio, whatever may be termed theology in Judaism must be differentiated from its more familiar Christian manifestation . It may then follow tha~ the Jewish understanding of theology is skewed by a prudent unwillingness to have its method confused with that of Christians, who have, over the centuries, preempted theology. Jews cannot , for that reason, assert-as is so often done with an almost cavalier unsophistication-that theology is not a proper mode of Jewish inquiry. Theology is, after all, a scrutiny of the language and interpretation of the ultimate reality that is God. Heuristic considerations aside, the rabbinic tradition surely concerned itself with the formulation of normative beliefs insofar as these reinforced the obligatory demands of halakhah. Insofar as belief in Providence, reward and punishkent, the coming of the Messiah, and resurrection of the dead constellate 1rabbinic system of hope that confirms and solidifies normative practices and supplies an ultimate justification for obedience and performance of the mi~vot, one may speak of a virtual rabbinic theology. Moreover , it is correct to regard the halakhah as itself the embodiment and expression of theological conviction. The formulation ofJewish beliefs independently of halakhah is in some respects appropriate to their formal nature, namely beliefs that entail no correlative acts (as in those of eschatology ), while in other respects, as for instance in the ordinances governing prayer, theological conviction is collateral to and complementary with the performance of halakhic obligation. THEOLOGY 973 At the very outset, what may be recognized as a consistent characteristic of Jewish religion (and presumably then of any Jewish theology that would elaborate it) is that the relation between the Jew and God is manifested in a complex and interconnected structure of acts, beliefs, gestures, and words. The rabbinic Jew scarcely questioned the provenience, presence, and providence of God; they were the presuppositions out of which classical Judaism lived. It is correct then to argue that for the rabbinic Jew-insofar as the rabbinic Jew conducts life within the settled delineations of Torahthe theological care for clarification and definition of first principles of belief hardly exists. The rabbinic Jew does and hears as the...