Autonomy and Judaism: The Individual and Community in Jewish Philosophical Thought

The Individual and the Community in the Normative Traditions of Judaism

The Individual and the Community in the Normative Traditions of Judaism Lenn E. Goodman 1. Introduction In 1980 the Knesset of Israel severed the last formal ties between Israeli and British law and instructed judges who could find no grounds for a decision in statute, case law or analogy to form their decisions "in the light of the principles of freedom, justice, equity and peace of Israel's heritage." A large body of British precedent and principle had already been taken up as statute during the years 1922-1980, when British Mandatory law was the system of normative recourse in default of more direct legislative instruction. But now, when the historic step was taken of severing the connection to the colonial past, the Knesset was careful to specify that recourse to the traditional canon should be to its humane and justice preserving principles .1 No parochial traditionalism was to be erected on the basis of this law, which reestablished a formal, governmental status for the ancient legal canon. Rather the intention was to reopen the Israeli legislative /juridical process to a source of inspiration from which it had been too long cut off and to reenliven in a modern context the most universal human values that find articulation in the context of Judaic Law. What are those values and how are they to be disentangled from the particularities which body them forth concretely in specific epochs? How are the timeless principles to be teased out of their historic settings and reintegrated into new contexts, where the social circumstances may vary widely from those of the original formulations? This question is the fundamental constitutional question for all societies which hope culturally to preserve and juridically to build upon 70 Lenn E. Goodman the legal achievements of the past without the mortmain of accepting norms determinatively because they express the values of the past. The question has been asked repeatedly throughout Jewish history . Indeed, the fact that it has been addressed so often and in such widely different social and historical contexts provides us with a material basis for addressing it ourselves. For it is characteristic of religions based on the concept of a transcendently revealed scriptural document as constitutional foundation-thus of Judaism, Christianity and Islam-that they regard that document not as a fixed archaeological record but as a timeless, ever new touchstone of inspiration, whose very ambiguities are the keys of new and always relevant meanings. Fundamentalist or revivalist movements of reform are characteristic of the monotheistic scriptural communities precisely because the mere positivity of a doctrine, a document, a practice, can never be accepted as an adequate expression of the profundity of meaning in symbols whose function as signifiers is to point beyond particularity, towards a Source of absolute and transcendent perfection . New effort is constantly required to reopen what are construed as the true and original intentions of the revelation and its law. But the locus of those intentions is only fictively and projectively discovered in the past. The actual locus is in a realm of normative virtuality which the individual aspirant or community strives for, atavistically or creatively, by radical departures from the normative center of gravity in pursuit of particular themes (thus generating heresy), or by closely reasoned steps of argument or almost imperceptible shifts of emphasis which work from intuitive sensitivity to the continuity of those themes, generating evolution. The process is always selective and interpretive. Its practical outcomes may be inspired or misguided , thoughtless or inspiring. In the case of Judaism we find an immense variety of form and content in the historically variegated efforts to articulate the fundamental norms, but three underlying, related and interactive, idioms-the Mosaic, the prophetic, and the rabbinic. Strictly historical studies of the emergence of each of these forms from its antecedents and alternatives, while widely undertaken, rarely address the questions we have asked. Often such studies degenerate into an historic noting of differences, suggesting that the values and themes of an epoch or text have been understood once its mode of discourse has been analyzed and its idiom and terms of reference labeled-"Wisdom Literature," "Priestly Document," "Elohist Tract," and so forth. While such historical analysis can be valuable, it is of limited use for The Individual and the Community 71 our more philosophic and interpretive purpose. When the end product of historical stratification is no more than a series of strata, or the...