The Future of Jewish Theology E-Book

Steven Kepnes

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Manifestos
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 485

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This engaging argument for the future of Jewish theology, written by a renowned Jewish scholar, provides a rounded introduction to the faith, its history, and its place in the modern world. * Explores foundational Jewish structures and concepts through the discussion and interpretation of Jewish texts * Argues that we must acknowledge holiness as a ritual and ethical reality in order to heal the rift between different forms of Jewish practice and theology * Covers historical context as well as the relations between Judaism, Israel and the wider world today * Speaks to both Jews and non-Jews and demonstrates through textual readings how Jews, Christians, and Muslims can understand and share their theological riches

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 You Shall Be Holy

Holiness Theology

The Experience of the Holy

Holier Than Thou

Prophetic Holiness and Ethics

Chapter Outlines

Theoretical Addendum: Jewish Theology as a Language-Game

Notes on Names

Part One

2 Holy Blessings, Torah, People

Jewish Theology as an Embodied Theology

The Life of Blessings

Gratitude As the Beginning of the Holy Life

The Blessing as Worship

Blessings as the Sanctification of life

The Torah As Fulcrum of Jewish Theology

From Art to Torah

The Need for Interpretation: A Covenant of Meaning

Jews as a People

In Sum: God, Torah, Israel

3 Holy Shabbat

How to Hallow Shabbat

Halakhah: The Guide to Making Holy Shabbat

Shabbat as Liturgical Performance

The Action Theology of Shabbat

The Shacharit Morning Service: The Reading of the Torah

The Shabbat Meal

The Afternoon Service: Turning to Redemption

Returning to Exile

Havdalah: Service of Separation

4 Holy Food and Holy Sacrifices

Part One

Part Two: Holiness and the Holy One in the Sanctuary

5 The Ethics of Holiness

Divine Command as Social System

Rabbinic Exegesis as Social Ethics

Appendix: Leviticus 19

6 Prophetic Holiness

Isaiah: The Prophet as Public Theologian

Against Beauty

Against Happiness

Conclusion

Part Two

7 Ethical Monotheism

Ethical Monotheism

Understanding Ethical Monotheism

Modern Ethical Monotheism

Monotheistic Ethics

The New Law of Ethical Monotheism: The Jewish Obligation to the Other

Biblical Warrants for a Jewish Obligation to the Other

Ethical Monotheism: Legacies and Limitations

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

8 Textual Reasoning

Understanding the Language of Torah

Torah as Analogic Language

Contemporary Philosophies of Language

Metaphor and Theology

The Holy Text and Its Interpretation

From Interpretation to Talmud Torah

Holy Argument

Jewish Textual Reasoning

Textual Reasoning In Four Stages

An Example of Textual Reasoning: God’s Holy Name

9 Liturgical Reasoning

The Siddur or Prayer Book as Common Theology

Bringing the Distant God Close

Conclusion

10 Scriptural Reasoning

The Imperative of Interfaith Dialogue Today

Scriptural Reasoning

I: Reading Hagar, Ishmael, and Esau into the Family of Israel

II: The Future of Scriptural Reasoning

11 High Holiness

The Limits of the Cultural-Linguistic Model

High Holiness

Moral Purity

Repentance

Yom Kippur – The Blessing of the Name of the Kingdom

The Avodah Service

Index

Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kepnes, Steven, 1952–The future of Jewish theology / Steven Kepnes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65961-8 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-65960-1 (pbk.) 1. Judaism–Doctrines. 2. Judaism–21st century. I. Title. BM602.K47 2013296.3–dc23

2012030739

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: © Kristine Slipson / istockphotoCover design by Nicki Averill Design

For Pochs

“FOR GREAT IN YOUR MIDST IS THE HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL”

(ISAIAH 12:6)

Preface

When Moses is trying to convince God to remain with the people after the sin of the Golden Calf, he tells God that He must remain with the people and lead them “so that we may be distinguished, Your people and I, from every people on the face of the earth” (Ex 33:16). Here, Moses offers a theological interpretation of Jewish identity. It is the Jewish relationship to God that ­distinguishes them as Jews. In the contemporary world, after the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel and the secularization of the Jewish community, Jews are more apt to describe their identity in ethnic terms, or historical terms, or in Israel, in ­nationalistic terms. The theological definition of Jewish identity has become less central to Jews in today’s world. Yet, Jews still do read the Bible, go to synagogues, recite prayers to God, and, like all humans, ponder the eternal questions: Where do I come from? Why am I here? And, where am I going? The question of God and the life of the spirit still intrigues Jews today. Even with the radical challenges to faith that the modern world has brought, theological questions remain and theological answers retain their relevance. Therefore, this book is written with a sense of the continuing spiritual power of Jewish theology within our largely secular age and for a highly secularized people.

Yet having been distanced from God and “Jewish God talk” for most their lives, it is not easy for today’s Jews to gain access to the God of Moses. For Jewish God talk is bound up not only with Moses and the Jewish people, but also with the Hebrew Bible, and the practice of rituals as well. This means that entrance into Jewish theology requires learning a kind of theological language and doing certain ritual practices. This book is written, however, to provide access to the language and practices of Jewish theology for religious and secular readers alike. To provide this access, I employ the ­biblical and rabbinic theological category of “the holy.” Holiness or qedushah is a certain quality or attitude that Judaism associates with God and that pervades the relationship between God and the people Israel in the Bible. Holiness is a complex reality in which God and humans meet and to which humans react with a combination of fear and longing, repulsion and attraction. For, as God tells Moses, humans, “cannot see me and live” (Ex 33:20).

What makes things even more complex, however, is that even though the people Israel is warned against direct contact with the Holy God, they are also told by that same God that they, ­themselves, must be holy! Thus, God says in Leviticus: “You shall be holy for I, the LORD, Your God, am holy (Lev 19:2). So Jewish theology not only has to help Jews to understand what it means that God is holy but, also, it must explain how it is that Jews themselves, can be holy. Since the command is a matter of “being,” it is not only a matter of thought but of the body and soul, thought and action. Put another way, being holy is a matter of how Jews live. Therefore, this is a book about Jewish life and about the particularly Jewish “way to live” so that holiness is brought into life.

Since it is Jewish life about which holiness is concerned, this book focuses on the most basic aspects of life including food and eating, and what Judaism calls “Kashrut.” The fact that Jewish ­theology has, in its agenda, the subject of food, suggests that Jewish theology is equally about how one thinks about God as it is about such everyday aspects of life as what one eats. In other words, Jewish theology is about the mind and the body. In addition to food, a Jewish theology of holiness also considers how Jews act in the world, specifically how they act in relation to others, to other Jews of course, but also, and very importantly, how they relate to non-Jews. Thus, in the same chapter in Leviticus where Jews are told to “be holy,” they are instructed to “love your fellow as yourself,” (Lev 19:18) and to “love the stranger as yourself” (Lev 19: 34). Therefore, a Jewish theology of holiness must also be about ethics, and this, then, is a book which is preoccupied with ethical matters.

However, the book is not only concerned with how Jews act but it is also concerned with how Jews cease to act, that is, how Jews rest. The first mention of holiness in the Torah connects it to rest, to God’s rest after He created the world. “And he blessed the seventh day and declared it holy” (Gen 2:3). This means that this is a book about Shabbat rest and how it is the central Jewish festival of holiness. Beyond Shabbat, however, there are many other Jewish rituals and liturgies and texts that are concerned with holiness, and these too are discussed in this book.

By now it should be clear that holiness in Jewish theology is a complex reality. One may say that holiness is both a ritual and an ethical matter. The book suggests, however, that contemporary Judaism has erred by separating these two aspects from one another – with the more traditional forms of Judaism focusing mainly on ritual matters and the more liberal movements focusing mainly on ethics. Thus, the book suggests that the future of Jewish theology will be best served if these two aspects, the ritual and the ethical, are brought back together as we find them in their classical biblical formulation in Leviticus, chapter 19.

I would also like to make clear that this is a book about the “Future of Jewish Theology” which means it is neither about the “future of Judaism” nor “the future of the Jews.” Although these are related matters, I largely focus on topics of Jewish philosophy, ethics, and, of course, God. The reader will find that my approach is “interpretive” or “exegetical.” In other words, throughout the book, I attempt to present my Jewish theology through an ­interpretation of Jewish texts, rituals, and liturgies rather than through a discussion of concepts or ideas alone. In taking this exegetical (or “hermeneutical approach”), I believe that I am following in the footsteps of biblical and rabbinic thought. The book is meant to be creative and hypothetical rather than predicative. In more technical language, it is more a book of “constructive theology” than it is an attempt to say what actually will be the case in the “future” of Jewish theology. Unless otherwise noted, I use the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh.

Reference

Tanakh: a new translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the traditional Hebrew text. (1985). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.

Acknowledgments

This book was largely written during a two-year sabbatical in Jerusalem, 2009–2011, which was supported by my beloved Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. It is rare that a university allows a scholar a two-year leave, and for this leave I cannot thank Colgate and the members of the Religion Department enough. While in Jerusalem, Hebrew Union College supplied me with a place to sit, research, and write. For that, I wish to thank Michael Marmur, Vice-President for Academic Affairs at HUC, and Batya Kaplan and Adina Feldstern of the HUC library.

In Jerusalem, I was fortunate to form a “Textual Reasoning” (see chapter eight) study group on the topic of“Holiness,” with Hannah Hashkes, Rachel Adelman, Hanoch Ben Pazi, Jonathan Price, Rabbi Isaac Lifshitz, and Miriam Feldman Kaye. I also greatly benefitted from conversations with Moshe Halbertal, George Savran, Menachem Hirshman and Adam Afterman. My close friend, Walter Herzberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was an enormous help to me in leading me through texts of rabbinic ­exegesis on the Bible. I would also like to thank David Frankel of Machon Schechter in Jerusalem for guiding me toward traditional Jewish texts. Hannan Shlechinger was important to my research for chapter five. I also wish to thank Vanessa Ochs and Moshe Gresser for comments on chapter four. My long-term study partner, Henry Abramovitch, shared his insights throughout my writing process. Special thanks are due to Jonathan Price and Naomi Schacter, who nourished me, my wife, and family both physically and spiritually throughout our two years in Jerusalem. In chapter three, I discuss the holy joy of the Shabbat meal. There is no better example than Naomi and Jonathan’s Shabbat dinner table.

Back home in America, I was extremely fortunate to have a rare group of theologically curious academics from the departments of Physics, Chemistry, Education, and History at Syracuse University with whom I have studied and prayed for many years at Congregation Beth Sholom Chevra Shas in Dewitt, New York. This group includes Joan Burstyn, Dennis Gilbride, Peter Saulson, and Gershon Vinchow. Members of this group read this manuscript and provided honest responses and invaluable editorial advice for which I am immensely thankful. I would also like to thank Carl Rosenzweig for his comments. Sincere thanks are also due to my long-time friends, the Catholic Theologians David Tracy and Brian Mahan, who specifically encouraged the liturgical direction which this book has taken.

This book has a sibling that is already in print,The Future of Christian Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). I am immensely ­grateful to David Ford, its author, both for identifying me as an appropriate author for the companion book and for his encouragement and critical comments as the book was being written. I await with great anticipation the other companion book,The Future of Muslim Theology, which our friend Aref Nayed is set to write. Rebecca Harkin and Ian Critchley ofWiley-Blackwell have simply been a joy to work with and I also wish to extend my thanks to both of them.

Throughout the process of writing and living my Jewish life, no one has helped me more than my loving wife, Arlene Kanter, and I wish to thank her along with my two children, Rachel and Ari. Finally, this book is dedicated to my dear colleague, confidant, teacher, and friend, Peter Ochs, with whom I have traveled from the beginning of my theological journey.

Parts of chapter ten appeared as “Hagar and Esau: From Others to Sisters and Brothers,” in Peter Ochs and Stacey Johnson (eds.), Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 40–56.

1

You Shall Be Holy

“You Shall Be Holy. For I, The LORD, Your God, Am Holy” (Leviticus 19:2)

Here, in the words of Leviticus 19:2, is the manifesto of this book. Here is the prescription for the future of Jewish theology. These words are uttered to the entire community, kol adat, of the people Israel; and they make an audacious claim upon them – to be holy. The audacity of this charge is not muted or dulled many, many centuries after they were uttered. The charge is audacious because it assumes that not only individual Jews, but every single Jew, and the community as a whole, can be holy. As we will see, this is not as easy task, but God assumes that it can be accomplished by the natural human being through human will and actions. And there is even a sense that it is the unique destiny of the people Israel to be holy. This is explicitly stated in Exodus: “You Shall be a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation (Ex 19:6).” Making the charge to be holy, the manifesto of the book on Jewish theology is, then, reasserting an ancient doctrine, an old biblical charge, that might appear both arcane and foreign to contemporary sensibilities. However, I have become convinced that the notion of holiness or “qedushah” that we have in the Torah and interpreted in rabbinic exegesis, ­liturgy, and philosophy, holds the key to a revival of Jewish theology in the contemporary age.

Still, the notion of holiness as we have it both in the Torah and in rabbinic literature is not an easy one to grasp. The people is charged to be holy, but they very well might ask, what is holiness? It is certainly not, as philosophy demands, a “clear and distinct” idea. And it is also not a naturally occurring human experience. Rather, holiness appears as a dynamic quality that can inhabit a person, time, or place, for a moment and then be gone. Holiness is associated with God and with God’s power and transcendence from the physical and worldly realm, yet it is also a term that is used to speak of God’s presence on earth. Holiness is definitely a spiritual phenomenon, but it is equally a moral one. In the book of Leviticus we see that the holy is both a matter of ritual action and interpersonal ethics. Leviticus begins with all the ritual prescriptions for the sacrificial cult, but it also includes the well-known commandment in Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”