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In its classical self-description, the people Israel is a people set apart but also one obliged to serve as a light to the nations. While these apparently contradictory characterizations do not define the mission or religion of the Jewish people, they are, nonetheless, suggestive portraits that raise a compelling question for this volume of essays. The question is: how might contemporary Jews honour this dual role, as a people apart and for the others? One answer is: by contributing, for one, to inter-Abrahamic engagements, including the academic project of Abrahamic studies.
In this chapter, I shall argue that some of the primary methods of scriptural study that distinguish rabbinic Judaism among the Abrahamic traditions (approaches to midrash) could also serve as a significant prototype for one as yet underappreciated dimension of inter-Abrahamic studies (what I will label reparative enquiry). I shall argue, furthermore, that work on inter-Abrahamic logics of reparative enquiry might, in turn, challenge contemporary philosophers both to help refine such logics and to deploy them. I shall suggest, finally, that these two arguments provide warrants for the work of Abrahamic studies in the Academy.
In this chapter, I employ the term ‘Abrahamic’ in a collective, not a distributive sense. That is, I use the term, not in the sense that there is a natural class of traditions called Abrahamic (since I do not believe there is), but in the sense that warranted readings of distinctly Jewish and also Christian and also Muslim traditions of scriptural reading and interpretation can be collected into a set (named ‘Abrahamic studies’) and that warranted and interesting observations can be made about relations among or characteristics of the members of that set. In previous writings on some of the linguistic markers of inter-Abrahamic conflict, I have introduced a distinction between two different contexts of language use: what I dub ‘language in times of peace’, and ‘language in times of conflict, disruption, and radical social change’. In this chapter, I argue that these different contexts lend themselves to two different genres of academic enquiry and that serious errors result when the wrong genre is applied to the wrong context of language use.
Language in times of peace. I have used this phrase metaphorically, to refer to the way everyday communication works when the underlying language system is relatively undisturbed (so that the language itself is ‘at peace’, whether or not it is a time of societal conflict). At such times, the paradigm for language use is dinnertime conversation among close friends or family members. Here, if you ask your table mates to ‘please pass the salt’, they won’t pass you the pepper and they won’t stop to ask what you really mean. In times like this, the order of language use seems to correspond to the order of the world: language is ‘natural language’. Language in times of non-peace. I have used this phrase to refer to the way both everyday and specialized forms of communication work when a society’s language system is undergoing radical change. At such times, the rules of conventional systems of language are no longer reliable. These rules may hold in individual cases of communication, but they may also fail: for example, because events are observed that no longer correspond to the vocabulary or even syntax of a given system of natural language; because traumatized or exiled individuals may forget conventional language conventions; or because language communities may be enslaved or uprooted and absorbed into other communities, so that different vocabularies and rules of syntax are hybridized in various ways. In such settings, a given order of language may no longer correspond to the order of the observed world.
Different enquiries for different times. Writing about strategies for peacebuilding in times of conflict, I have suggested that, in the modern Academy, enquiries framed for ‘times of peace’—times when language conventions are reliable—tend to display comparably ordered languages of analysis. But what enquiries are appropriate to times of ‘non-peace’: when—for example, in Muslim, Jewish, or Christian studies—the texts or societies or peoples being studied communicate by way of languages that are in distress, disrupted, suffering radical change? I have written that enquiries appropriate for conventional language use tend not to be appropriate for contexts of radical distress; enquiries appropriate for such times are themselves capable of continual adjustment in relation to their continually changing subject matter. I label these ‘reparative enquiries’, which I claim are guided by rules of observation, analysis, and repair that operate in close relationship with their subject of study.
Two kinds of enquiry for Abrahamic studies. This marvellous volume of essays offers a fitting context for both testing and expanding this model of ‘two types of enquiry for two contexts of language use’. The essays also suggest a somewhat different analytic vocabulary for testing the model. I shall therefore reintroduce this model in the following terms:
Orders of enquiry in this chapter. In order to conduct the work of this chapter, I shall refer to different ‘orders of enquiry’, drawing on a medieval practice (for example, in Aquinas) of distinguishing ‘first-order judgements’ about what one observes or wants to do from ‘second-order judgements’ about the character of these primary judgements. I shall refer to enquiries that tend to draw first- or second-order judgements as first- or second-order enquiries. Some theologies, for example, offer first-order judgements about what someone should do on this earth; others offer second-order judgements about, for example, ‘prescriptive discourses’. But I shall add a third term, ‘third-order enquiries’, for enquiries that tend to offer judgements about second-order enquiries. For example, I would classify George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine as a third-order enquiry because it reviews and reclassifies Church doctrines as expressions of second, rather than first-order enquiry. In these terms, normal enquiry could include one, two, or three orders, but most scholars of normal enquiry refer only to two. Reparative enquiry is necessarily a third-order enquiry, since it claims to begin with reflections on disruptions in the language systems that enable both first- and second-order enquiries.
Illustrations from this volume: As I read them, most of the essays in this volume practise Abrahamic studies as a genre of normal comparative enquiry: comparing certain features of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traditions or sub-traditions. The essays in this genre succeed because none of the authors tries to stretch the domain of normal enquiry to cover cases of linguistic distress.
A few authors name dimensions of Abrahamic studies that address contexts of conflict among the traditions and of reparative modes of enquiry in response. Silverstein, for example, describes how communities in conflict may summon the name of Abraham as a potentially unifying figure. In the terms I am using, Silverstein is referring to reparative enquiries as they may emerge among the communities themselves: employing the name ‘Abraham’ in a way that is, in fact, non-conventional, since it refers at once to the tradition-specific, conventional Abraham and to the one who might defuse some conflict among these traditions at some time (Silverstein in this volume, pp. 37–43). Silk devotes comparable attention to the performative force of enquiry in both academic and traditional circles of study: for example, in the way that scholars may attend to ‘Abrahamic traditions’ inclusively, in order to ameliorate some perceived conditions of interreligious conflict (Silk in this volume, pp. 80–4).3
Three authors introduce the genre of enquiry to which my chapter belongs: third-order reflection on the methods and presuppositions of a given field of academic science. Examining the history of academic Abrahamic studies, Stroumsa opens the questions I want to ask about both the epistemic assumptions and performative purposes of various practices of comparative Abrahamic studies. Illustrating a good bit of what I mean by ‘reparative enquiry’, Stroumsa uses Kuhnian terms to name the difference between conventions:
We can detect…some paradigm shifts in systems of knowledge and on the reconstruction of central cognitive structures, throughout the trajectory of modern scholarship on religion.…It should be obvious, I repeat, that such fields are never innocent productions of knowledge. They are ultimately related to the construction of the self through the understanding of the other, in particular when they deal directly with religious identities. (Stroumsa in this volume, p. 62)
Surveying medieval approaches to the study of religious multiplicity, Weltecke extends this kind of methodological analysis, constructing a broad typological scheme for classifying and illustrating the various ways that scholars and believers have sought to account for the plurality of religions (Weltecke in this volume, pp. 192–202). I offer a different, but I hope complementary typology of contemporary approaches to Abrahamic studies as cases of either normal or reparative enquiry. This typology frames my central arguments. Ford is a long-term co-worker in the effort to develop Abrahamic models of reparative enquiry. His chapter begins with the assumption that scholars of Abrahamic studies will need to promote both normal and reparative enquiries.4 He then undertakes the kind of work we too rarely perform in the Academy: third-order reflection on the best institutional contexts for nurturing both of these genres of enquiry, side by side (Ford in this volume, pp. 580–95).
(1) There are two different contexts for what, most broadly, may be termed ‘tradition studies’, including Abrahamic studies, as well as other studies of scriptural or religious traditions.
(a) Tradition studies for times when the subject society’s language system is relatively undisturbed.
At such times, the prototype for language use is what I earlier dubbed ‘dinnertime conversation’, where the rules of communication and the criteria for meaning and for truth or falsity are comparable to what Ludwig Wittgenstein set out in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. The first rule is that the order of language corresponds, for all practical purposes, to the order of the world. This ‘at-homeness’ of language in the world warrants a second rule: that claims about the world can be tested, when necessary, by a propositional logic. According to this logic, testable claims are delivered by way of individual judgements that predicate some familiar qualities of some identifiable entities in the worlds of thought or experience. The ‘at-homeness’ of language also warrants a third rule: that to see if a claim is publicly verifiable, one needs to verify only its semantics (the publicly recognizable meaning of its key terms) and not its material elements or its pragmatics (the consequences of its being asserted in a particular time and place). When guided by these rules, tradition studies tend to be composed as types of normal enquiry that generate third-person descriptions of states of affairs within various domains, such as religious documents, redaction and reception histories, ritual practices, and systems of belief. Meaning is assumed to be specific to various systems of natural language, some of them civilization-wide, others specific to local social groups or associations. The fifth rule is ontological: that, since language corresponds reasonably well to the world, authors of normal enquiries can assume, until there is evidence otherwise, that their enquiries display verifiable knowledge of the worlds they are examining. The fifth rule implies a sixth: that, until there is evidence to the contrary, readers may assume that these authors’ knowledge claims provide readers with comparable knowledge of the actual worlds to which those claims refer. In other words, these enquiries provide ‘objective knowledge’: or knowledge whose validity is independent of the conditions and methods of enquiry.
(b) Tradition studies for times of conflict or disruption, when a society’s language system is undergoing radical change.
At such times, the rules of conventional systems of natural language are no longer reliable. These rules may hold in individual cases of communication, but they may also fail: for example, because events are observed that no longer correspond to the semantics of a given system of natural language; because traumatized or exiled individuals may forget conventional semantics or syntax; or because language communities may be uprooted and absorbed into other communities, so that different vocabularies and rules of syntax are hybridized. In such settings, a given order of language may no longer correspond to the order of the observed world; conventional rules of propositional logic may no longer be reliable; semantic rules may appear to vary in each new context for social interaction; realist ontologies and epistemologies that draw clear subject/object distinctions will most likely generate false claims. At such times, scholars can no longer predict if and when they can rely on their skills of discerning rules of meaning within conventional systems of natural language. They can no longer assume that their customary practices of normal enquiry apply equally everywhere.
(2) How is it possible to locate rules of enquiry that apply when the rules of normal enquiry are no longer reliable? As students of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant would readily tell you, the answer to this question cannot come from normal enquiry, but only from an enquiry capable of disclosing, examining, and potentially revising the presuppositions of normal enquiry (what Kant called its transcendental conditions). But who is prepared to conduct such an enquiry? Or, having conducted it, who is capable of getting anyone to listen to the results? The best name and location for this enquiry is philosophy, when identified as a discipline of both analytic and reparative third-order reflection.
(3) There are two contexts for conducting philosophic enquiry.
(a) Philosophy as third-order, normal enquiry, when a society’s language system is relatively undisturbed.
A significant proportion of writings in contemporary analytic philosophy, for example, examine natural language systems as relatively stable sources of evidence about rules of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so on. Such stability warrants efforts by such philosophers to repair errors that arise within the academy when scholars make second-order claims that either misrepresent natural language semantics or flaunt its rules of logic.
(b) Philosophy for times of conflict or disruption, when a society’s language system is undergoing radical change.
At such times, the rules of conventional systems of natural language are no longer reliable, so that philosophers lose their warrant for conducting third-order normal enquiry.5
(4) What models of philosophic enquiry are appropriate for times marked by conflict, disruption, or radical social change? There are two surprisingly complementary models: one derived from quantum physics and one derived from Abrahamic traditions of scriptural interpretation. These are complementary sources, as well, of pragmatism as a practice of philosophic, reparative enquiry.
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim studies are most often prosecuted today as if they were designed only for contexts appropriate to normal enquiry. They tend to examine their objects of study as if each belonged to a coherent language system with respect to which most propositional claims could be measured as clearly true or false. In the face of such contexts, practitioners of these modes of enquiry tend, more often than the academic guilds acknowledge, to understate the vagueness and indeterminacy of their data and observations and to overstate the reliability and generality of their conclusions. Some practitioners may, as an alternative, acknowledge the inadequacy of their data and observations, but attribute this to the unavailability of scientifically verifiable information. On the evidence of both contemporary quantum science and the long history of Abrahamic scriptural studies, I would argue that, in many of these cases, verifiable information is indeed available, but it is visible only to methods of enquiry fashioned specifically for times of radical linguistic change.
(a) Quantum physics as a science of disorderly systems
Quantum physics emerged in the late nineteenth century as a practice of enquiry that would enable scientists to make truth-functional claims about the behaviour of subatomic particles that could not be directly observed. Today, introductory college textbooks in physics often introduce quantum science as the single most general characterization of the field as a whole; and some science writers refer to quantum theory as the most general account of the natural sciences as a whole. For our purposes, the significance of quantum science is not that the behaviour of subatomic particles somehow gives us better insight into the behaviour of scriptural traditions in times of disorder. The significance is that the disciplines of enquiry that made quantum theory possible were available in other forms long before they were applied to the accounts of subatomic behaviour. I have argued elsewhere that these disciplines are visible in rabbinic and some patristic approaches to scriptural interpretation and that these approaches are among the sources of the philosophic discipline Charles Peirce labelled ‘pragmatism’.6
As Warner Heisenberg, one of the founding theorists of quantum science, wrote in the early twentieth century: Charles Peirce’s logic of science somehow anticipated quantum theory forty to fifty years earlier. I mention this because Peirce offered his proto-quantum studies (for example his ‘logic of relatives’, ‘semeiotic’, and system of ‘existential graphs’) to correct errors in the logic of laboratory science that he believed stemmed from his contemporaries’ fixation on a single, mechanical model of the behaviour of the universe. Peirce complained that the natural sciences of his day tended to extend only to fields of enquiry and mathematical frameworks that were appropriate to the study of phenomena that fell within the ken of everyday human experience and language use (and thus within the ken of normal enquiry). Peirce introduced his ‘pragmatic method’ as a means of resolving the interminable debates that arise when enquirers offer equally inadequate, competing accounts of phenomena that fall outside that ken: as, for example, objectivist vs. subjectivist efforts to offer competing, clear, and distinct judgements about behaviours undergoing radical change (Peirce 1878). His method offered logical guidelines and strategies for reformulating one’s tools of measurement when changing conditions render previously reliable tools unreliable. Inheriting the objectivist models of scientific measurement that dominated nineteenth-century philosophy and logic of science, Peirce may first have observed such changing conditions as exceptions to the reach of these objectivist tools (Peirce 1868, 1905), for example, when he found these tools inadequate to the task of mapping geodesic phenomena, or force fields, or human perceptions of continuous sound or melody. He discovered that, rather than falling outside the reach of science, such phenomena could be mapped and measured successfully with other tools: if, for example, he employed statistical and other practices of probabilistic or stochastic mapping and reasoning.
Stated in terms of the Bayesian models popular today (cf. Lipton 2004), Peirce discovered that phenomena that appear chaotic when examined one datum at a time may be mapped as statistically predictable functions or waves or fields when observed macroscopically as sets of enormous numbers of individual events. He discovered, in other words, that objectivist models of science overstate not only the universality of observed laws but also the discreteness of the bits of data that purportedly displayed such laws. As he extended his new field of enquiry, Peirce discovered something more: he could map the laws of normal enquiry as special cases of more general probabilistic functions. He found that it was scientifically more efficient to treat all phenomena as if they were observed in conditions of disorder and change and then to define the data of normal enquiry as the way phenomena appear within certain highly defined conditions of experience or observation. In this way, he made another ‘Copernican turn’, claiming that Newton’s mechanical laws define the laws of the universe only as they appear within the limited frames of measurement that characterize everyday human experience. These frames are not illusory, only limited. Peirce’s conclusion implies that, within the broader frame of statistical models, what normal enquirers consider ‘individual entities’ in the world no longer function as passive objects of enquiry. They are now to be observed as relational aspects and relative functions, waves, or fields.
When referring to phenomena of literature and communication, Peirce restated his statistical logic of relations as what he called a ‘semeiotic’: a non-binary logic of signs and symbols. In the terms of this semeiotic (which scholars of logic and linguistics now distinguish sharply from the binary ‘semiology’ of de Saussure7), claims are not truth-functional when they are presented as ways of predicating certain discrete characteristics of certain individuals in the world (‘X is Y’). They are truth-functional only when they display the context of measurement (or what Peirce called the ‘interpretant’) with respect to which a certain set of possible relations (the predicate of a judgement) is displayed in a certain space-time or event (the subject of a judgement): mapped, for example, as ‘xMy’ or ‘y is observable at x with respect to measurement M’, or ‘x is a sign of y for M’.
I have reviewed all of this material about Peirce, because his semeiotic may function like a quantum logic for scholars in Abrahamic studies (or the humanities more broadly): providing a means of mapping phenomena that remain invisible to the tools of normal enquiry. If, as I argue, Abrahamic studies should include studies of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scriptural traditions in contexts of disruption and radical social change, then Peirce’s semeiotic—or cognate models of statistical measurement—should play some role in Abrahamic studies. To strengthen this claim, I shall add another argument: that Peirce’s semeiotic and proto-quantum logic derive from an Abrahamic scriptural semeiotic.
I refer here to ‘Abrahamic’ in a collective, not distributive sense. That is, I use the term, not in the sense that there is a natural class of traditions called Abrahamic (since I do not believe there is), but in the sense that sources of semeiotic can be located in warranted readings of distinctly Jewish and also Christian and also Muslim traditions of scriptural reading and interpretation. I do not, furthermore, presume that these traditions necessarily generate semeiotic or quantum models of reasoning: the semeiotic model precludes necessaritarian claims. I argue only that, among other ways of reading, there are also logically and rationally warranted ways of reading each of these traditions as displaying semeiotic or quantum-like models of reasoning. I will sample evidence here only from one reading of rabbinic scriptural traditions, with a complementary note about Augustinian directions in scriptural semeiotic. I anticipate that scholars could offer many more comparable readings from each of the three Abrahamic scriptural traditions.
I summarize here an argument I have offered elsewhere in several places: that, for at least one direction in contemporary Jewish studies—‘Textual Reasoning (TR)’—hermeneutical reflection on the classical rabbinic practice of midrash is an effective source of models for conducting Jewish reparative reasoning in contexts of conflict, disruption, and radical change. In the following, I identify a single line of hermeneutical reflection that uncovers what I call five rules for a practice of rabbinic reparative reasoning. Each rule reflects a reading offered by some contemporary rabbinic scholar, but the effort to name and collect these into an ordered series is my own.
Consider for example these prototypical narratives of distress:
The Israelites groaned in their bondage and cried out and their cry for help because of their bondage went up to God. (Exod. 2)
I reared up children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me…The Lord’s anger burns against his people. (Isa. 1).
How solitary sits the city, once so full of people.
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks…
Jerusalem has become unclean (Lam. 1).
Consider how the Bible regularly rereads these narratives, for example:
Why should you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts? (1 Sam. 6: 6)
For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put an iron yoke on the neck of all these nations so that they may serve King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and they shall indeed serve him; I have even given him the wild animals. (Jer. 28: 14)
The Lord continued, ‘I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters.…I will send you.’ Moses said, ‘Who am I that I should go?’…He said, ‘ehyeh ʿimach, I will be with you.’…‘Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ehyeh sent me to you.’ (Exod. 3)
But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, Seed of Abraham my friend—You whom I drew from the ends of the earth…I have put My spirit in him, He shall teach the true way to the nations…Who formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I will redeem you.…You are Mine. (Isa. 41–3)
Ezra opened the scroll in the sight of all the people, for he was above the people; as he opened it, the people stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with hands upraised. Then they bowed their heads.…Jeshua, Bani…and the Levites explained the Teaching to the people, while the people stood in their places. They read from the scroll of the Teaching of God, translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading. (Neh. 8: 4–8)
In these intra-scriptural rereadings of both distress and redemption, one biblical pericope may function in a way that is comparable to a second-order reflection on another pericope: Isa. 1 and Lam. 1, for example, as reading the record of past punishments as sources of prophecy concerning future punishment (Fishbane 1985: 446–9, 458n8); or Isa. 41–3 as rereading past punishments as marks of prefilled punishment and therefore future redemption (Fishbane 1985: 469); or Isa. 29: 25 as rereading Exod. 3: 10 is anticipating a very different time when YHVH will also call Egypt ‘My people’ (Fishbane 1985: 368); or Neh. 8: 4–8 as evidence of the work of intra-biblical reflection itself (‘they read from the scroll,…giving the sense,’ Fishbane 1985: 83). The overall lesson is that intra-biblical commentary already introduces patterns of potentially third-order reflection, through which changing contexts of language use are read as occasions for new rules of meaning.
When Rabbi Joshua looked at the Temple in ruins one day, he burst into tears. ‘Alas for us! The place which atoned for the sins of all the people Israel lies in ruins!’ Then Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: ‘Be not grieved, my son. There is another way of gaining ritual atonement:…through deeds of loving-kindness.’ (Avot de Rabbi Natan 11a, cited in Harlow 1988: 615)
It was decreed for Israel that they study words of Torah in distress, in enslavement, in wandering and in uncertainty, suffering for lack of food. (Midrash Eliayahu Rabbah 21)
All Israel has a place in the world to come, as it is written, ‘Your people shall all be righteous, they shall possess the land forever; there are a shoot of My planting, the work of My hands in whom I shall be glorified’ (Is. 60). Moses received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, the prophets to the members of the Great Assembly…Simeon the Just was one of the last members of the Great Assembly. He used to teach: The world rests on three things: on Torah, on service to God, and on acts of loving kindness. (m Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 1)
[A midrash] must not deprive a scriptural text of its plain sense (‘eyn mikra yotse mide peshuto’: b Shabbat 63a).
Mishnaic reflection, and later Talmudic re-reflection, on the Destruction of the Second Temple constitute the prototype for rabbinic reparative reasoning9. I find it useful to read these reflections as anticipating the following four stages of reparative enquiry: (a) Perceptions of stark contradiction between conventional readings (the ‘plain sense’) of Israel’s covenant according to the biblical text and reports about the empirical realities of Israel’s life in times of destruction and exile: displayed, for example, in Joshua’s words, ‘Alas! The place which atoned for the sins of all the people Israel lies in ruin!’ (b) Radical rereadings of the interpreted meaning of the biblical text (for example, ‘There is another way of gaining ritual atonement:…through deeds of loving-kindness’) so as to reassure a given community of its enduring covenant (for example, ‘Be not grieved’ and ‘All Israel has a place in the world to come’), while at the same time revising its reading habits and reorienting its behaviour (for example, by engaging in atoning ‘deeds of loving-kindness suggested’). (c) Significantly revised practices and institutions of Jewish religious life, including revisions of law and theology and of the structures of authority and learning: all attentive to the new worldly realities (‘Moses received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, the prophets to the members of the Great Assembly…’: the Mishnah signals the emergence of several new practices and institutions: chief among them the rabbinic sages as recipients of Moses’ oral Torah, of much of the work of the scribal priesthood and much more). (d) Procedures for testing and, when necessary, revising these new revisions (for example, the injunction ‘[A midrash] must not deprive a scriptural text of its plain sense,’ suggests that the plain sense remains the arbiter of future scriptural interpretations: interpretations speak to needs of their day; the plain sense speaks eternally).
The sword and the book came down from heaven tied to each other. Said the Almighty, ‘If you keep what is written in this book, you will be spared this sword; if not, you will be consumed by it’. (Midrash Rabbah Deuteronomy 4: 2). We clung to the book, yet were consumed by the sword. (Halivni 1998)
The horrendous Divine abandonment that took place during the years of the Shoah marked the nadir of a long, gradual process that may have already begun with the Golden Calf. To paraphrase a Talmudic saying, ‘If the Tablets were not broken, the Torah would not have been forgotten.’ ‘If they would not have abandoned God by worshipping the Golden Calf, God would not have abandoned us in the years to follow.’ But He did abandon us, and His absence has affected all aspects of Jewish spiritual life, including the way we interpret the Torah. (Halivni 2007: 124)
A Talmudic prodigy as a boy in Sighet, Halivni was brought from town to town to recite Talmud. He was interned at Auschwitz and other camps during the Shoah and suffered the loss of his entire family. After the Shoah, he became an academic Talmudic scholar. I spent some years interviewing him to discern how the immeasurable disruption of his world might have left its mark on his practice of Torah study. I read these two citations as illustrating three of these marks: (a) that he did not abandon the institutions of rabbinic Judaism into which he was socialized (he did not depart, one might say, from the plain sense of his textual tradition); (b) but he focused his scholarly attention on the profound contradictions between the reparative hopes of rabbinic midrash and the reality he captured in the phrases ‘We clung to the book, yet were consumed by the sword’ and ‘He did abandon us’; (c) as a result, he revised his practices of Talmudic enquiry: in my reading, his scholarship moved from normal to reparative enquiry.
I have often used the term tikkun hamikra or ‘repairing Scripture’ to describe the task of those who have accepted some of the conclusions reached by methods of historical criticism as applied to the study of Bible and Talmud. These scholars are cognizant of inconsistencies, repetitions, and irregularities within the text of sacred Scripture. And yet, while accepting the critical approach to Scripture, they still believe in Torat Moshe: the revelation of both the Written and Oral Laws at Mount Sinai. They attribute the corruption of the text to human error, a consequence of the ‘Sins of Israel’, chate’u yisrael (a phrase I adapt from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21a)…
I apply the expression tikkun hamikra to the entire Torah because I consider the need for tikkun to be pervasive. I contend that the Written Torah was ‘maculated’ through a process of forgetfulness and neglect that I call chate’u yisrael and that it is therefore in need of a general restoration in order to ‘reinstate its glory as in the days of old’…
My use of the expression tikkun hamikra is most similar to the Lurianic notion of repairing what was broken in the beginning. In my reading, Scripture needs restoration because its text has suffered maculation since its inception.…As the sages lament, ‘If only the first Tablets had not been broken, then Israel would not have forgotten the Torah’ (‘Eruvin 54a). It remains our obligation to engage actively in the ongoing project of restoring this maculated text, investigating its defects, and making every effort to discover anew the words of the Living God as they were originally revealed at Sinai…
If the text of the Written Torah, Scripture, is marred by maculation, the text of the Talmud is marred by forced interpretation, dochok: the effort to cover over, or rationalize, the maculations of received texts rather than seeking to repair or at least acknowledge them. This defect of the Talmud inhibits our capacity to study torat emet, the Torah as it was given. First of all, the forced interpretations introduce a kind of reasoning that is foreign to the texts they seek to explain. Second, by covering over defects in the received texts, these interpretations prevent us from seeing those defects and, thereby, from taking on, let alone fulfilling, the obligatory work of repairing them. Since we belong, still, to the generations of those whose life in Torah is defined by how we read Talmud, the Talmud’s forced interpretations remain an obstacle to our living lives of Torah. I therefore extend the obligation of tikkun hamikra to the work of restoring the original texts of the Tannaim, the authors of the Mishnah, and restoring the correct reasonings of the Amoraim, the authors of the Gemara. This has been my lifelong work in Mekorot Umasorot.
Mekorot Umasorot (‘Sources and Traditions’), Halivni’s (1968) voluminous, critical commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, is highly respected by contemporary rabbinic scholars because it displays extraordinary erudition in the redaction and reception history of the Talmud. While his personal, theological accounts of why he undertook this critical commentary tend to remain in the margins of contemporary academic interest, I cite them here because I believe they demonstrate two enduring features of the rabbinic scholarly tradition: (a) it maintains both normal and reparative enquiries, each appropriate to its context; (b) even when the times demand it, reparative enquiry will tend to be dismissed or openly rejected by contemporaries who practise normal enquiry. Unless it becomes repressive, this dismissal is not inappropriate, since it protects a scholarly community against errant projects of repair. One proof of appropriate reparative enquiry is its capacity, over time, to convince its opponents.
(4) Jewish philosophy today tends for the most part to promote its work as normal enquiry. Most writings in academic Jewish philosophy examine the writings of previous Jewish philosophers in the manner of Jewish intellectual history. This practice tends to apply, as well, to recent writings on the set of post-Kantian Jewish philosophers who saw their own work as reparative enquiry (Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas). This is unfortunate. While the Academy will continue to be well served by philosophic scholarship that addresses fairly well ordered language systems, contemporary Jewish civilization is animated by sharply disordered systems of language, many in competition one with the other and many undergoing radical change.
Without abandoning its attention to more conventional discourses, Jewish philosophy carries an additional and perhaps greater responsibility in times like these. Because they have direct access to both the reparative hermeneutics of rabbinic Judaism and the logical tools of western philosophy, Jewish philosophers have the capacity to craft potentially powerful instruments of reparative reasoning. I believe that, in times like these, this capacity carries the moral obligation we might associate with lifeboat ethics, except that in this case the philosopher has little to lose by helping. By way of illustration, philosophic reflection on cases of reparative reasoning like Halivni’s will generate models of reasoning that may, when tested on specific occasions of disruption, prove to be of reparative use. Without normal rules of enquiry, what method of modelling should one use? Here, Kuhn’s approach is instructive: new paradigms of science both build on and experimentally revise the older ones. But what guides the experimentation? The secret of reparative enquiry is that certain kinds of guessing—hypothesis making or ‘abduction’—actually work and that reparative traditions like rabbinic Judaism record and transmit long histories of successful and unsuccessful examples and methods of guesswork. Then why add philosophy to the mix? Because philosophy names a discipline for modelling modes of reasoning. What philosophic method is indigenous to rabbinic Judaism? Questions about ‘indigenous authenticity’ often betray efforts to extend patterns of normal enquiry to cover conditions of disruption as well: valorizing ‘what is indigenous’ may mask an effort to protect conventional rules of enquiry from revision.10 The well-remembered Jewish philosophers, from Philo to Levinas, have all devoted portions of their work to reparative enquiry and have all drawn the techniques of modelling from any sources they found useful.
Here are samples of how I might, strictly for illustrative purposes in this chapter, try to model the rules of reparative enquiry I observe in Halivni’s writings. I have previously explored this exercise with the writings of other rabbinic scholars, as well. I shall have succeeded in these exercises if better-qualified readers see that they can do this better:
This section has, I trust, illustrated how Jewish philosophers might frame rules of reparative enquiry that could, per hypothesis, be reshaped and tested for use outside of Jewish studies. Since these rules are derived from practices of rabbinic scriptural interpretation, I trust this section has also illustrated how at least one of the Abrahamic scriptural traditions might generate rules of reparative enquiry. But what evidence do we have of a scripturally based practice of reparative reasoning outside of rabbinic Judaism? In the next section, I close by sampling an argument that I have offered in detail elsewhere (Ochs 2009): that Augustine introduced a scripturally based semiotic model of reparative reasoning that anticipated Charles Peirce’s pragmatic model. This is an important argument, because it illustrates how analogous modes of reparative reasoning can be identified through philosophic readings of both classic rabbinic midrash and patristic scriptural interpretation.11 The argument is important, as well, because it locates a prototype for Peirce’s proto-quantum logic in a genre of Abrahamic scriptural studies. The argument would offer a strong warrant for reading quantum science as complementing a scriptural practice of reparative reasoning.
(bii) An Augustinian Scriptural Semeiotic
The immediate object of Peirce’s critique was what he considered the faulty inductive logic of John Stuart Mill, but Peirce traced Mill’s errors to modern philosophy’s turn to a species of foundationalism Peirce labelled ‘intuitionism’, or ‘Cartesianism’.12 For Peirce readers, including Wittgenstein, ‘foundationalism’ refers to the effort to locate truth claims independent of inherited traditions of practice, on the basis of which one could construct entire systems of belief and practice. Peirce argued that most efforts of this kind are grounded in an ‘intuitionism’: the belief that such truth claims come in the form of self-legitimizing intuitions.13 Peirce’s critique is that the arguments of intuitionism are circular: immune from any criticism, self-legitimizing intuitions constitute mere assertions, not truth claims. Peirce’s mature critique of Cartesianism begins with a claim that anticipates the distinction I introduced earlier between peacetime and non-peacetime contexts of philosophic enquiry. Peirce argued that there are at least two different classes of truth claims: (a) constative claims14 and (b) reparative or contested claims. Constative claims are conventional in that they state a matter of fact with respect to an implicit set of non-contested conventions or rules of meaning: because these rules are assumed, these claims are often presented as if they were self-evident. Emerging when conventions of meaning are subject to disruption and radical change, reparative claims are offered to recommend ways of modifying aspects of these conventions. These claims are sufficiently clear to call a community’s attention to certain disruptions in their conventions of meaning; but they must remain partially unclear, since it is the community’s task now to investigate what has happened to them and decide how best to respond.
Peirce’s critique of Cartesianism is not a critique of any constative claim but a critique of the Cartesian tendency to treat reparative claims as if they were constative claims and, therefore, self-evident. In the terms of this chapter, Cartesianism treats reparative enquiry as if its concerns were already met by a normal enquiry; in the terms of a rabbinic reparative reasoning, it imposes ‘forced meanings’. But what would tempt thinkers like Descartes to misrepresent reparative recommendations as self-evident claims? Without space here to connect the genealogical dots from Descartes to Scholastic and earlier medieval sources, I shall merely report on conclusions I have presented elsewhere: that Augustine is among the founders of a more inclusive ‘Cartesian’ tradition that includes both Descartes-like intuitionists and those, like Augustine and Peirce, whose work displays both the temptations to intuitionism and a means of repairing the temptations.
Augustine worked within a broader Hellenistic/Mediterranean civilization that drew its epistemic rules from several sources, of which the most influential were Hellenic and scriptural models of reasoning and action. But these two models are not easily mediated: individual thinkers who try to mediate them are likely to find themselves drawn instead into an irremediable inner dialectic. That is at least how I read Augustine’s Confessions: the inner story of one who sought, on his own, to tame this dialectic but found himself infected by it instead, leaving him with a ‘restlessness’ that was relieved only when he was shown how Hellenic and scriptural models can find rest in each other’s company. On this reading, Augustine’s ‘place of rest’ would be a practice of reparative reasoning that both demonstrates the Bible’s reasonableness and articulates its ratio.15
In this reading of Augustine, restlessness and rest anticipate the pragmatist’s journey of reparative enquiry. ‘Restlessness’ marks the epistemic dialectic that results when methods of normal enquiry are errantly adopted as methods of reparative enquiry. ‘Rest’ marks the wisdom and inner peace that accompanies a triple discovery: that the source of restlessness is now to be found within and not without (from one perspective, it appears as an inner dialectic between two poles of normal enquiry: ‘objectivism’ and ‘internalism’); that the source of rest now lies within as well (his redeeming word); and that the dialect is not quieted until one receives his word, alone, as its mediator.16 In this reading, ‘receiving his word’ is not a matter of conation alone, but of logos received through a certain discipline of semeiotic as well as of devotional reading (Markus 1972).17
Like all pragmatists in the Cartesian tradition, Augustine’s reparative reasoning arises first as a means of repairing his own inner dialectic. In the movement of his writings, from De doct. to De conf. to De trin., one can therefore trace the gradual resolution of the dialectic from within his reparative reasoning. And that, one might say, is the secret of the thing: the Cartesian dialectic arises only within an unacknowledged early stage of reparative reasoning. The opposing sides, for example objectivism or internalism, are divided, misplaced, and misidentified dimensions of reparative activity. No wonder, then, that for Augustine and all the Cartesian pragmatists to follow, a sign of distress (disruption or conflict) is also a sign that one’s Redeemer lives: the distress has always been a dimension of repair already under way.
By way of conclusion, I shall articulate one as yet unspoken theme of this chapter: ‘Abrahamic studies: how to respond to critics, supporters, and curious onlookers.’ Collected together my responses have been:
1 Utilizing analytical categories coined by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, one might characterize the works of Spinoza and Simon as marking an exegetical shift of ‘paradigm’ followed by a period of ‘normal science’.
2 Nicholas Adams (2006, 2008) coined this term to capture what we both meant by the corrective character of pragmatic reasoning.
3 Also pertinent to this approach are Stoyanov’s study of religious dualisms and Ruthven’s study of fundamentalism.
4 Ford’s writings have for decades explored the reparative dimensions of inter-human, interreligious, and divine–human relations. See, for example, Ford 2007 for detailed studies of responses to ‘the cry’ in Scripture (what I would label scripture’s reparative reasoning), including the cries of Job and the cries of Jesus on the cross. His writings on ‘wisdom’ in interreligious relations and in the university identify the virtues of facing, listening, hearing, caring, and rejoicing that are foundational for reparative work; and they identify the pitfalls of reducing reparative enquiry to the terms of normal enquiry (see also Ford 2006, 2009).
5 I recognize that this claim would be rejected by, for example, some schools of analytic philosophy as well as of phenomenology, who may claim to have access to transcendental disciplines of enquiry (like Kant’s) that are not affected by disruptions in societal or civilizational orders. Such claims appear to me to be foundationalist and not readily defended against the genres of postmodern criticism that, for example, are illustrated in this volume’s chapter by Anidjar.
6 See Ochs 2009 and Markus 1972. Complementary claims have been made about Origen, Clement, and Gregory of Nyssa. I anticipate that complementary claims will be identified, as well, in the early traditions of quranic tafsir and legal interpretation. For intimations, see, inter alia, Ahmed 2012.
7 For a readable introduction, see Sheriff 1989.
8 Fishbane also notes how the ekah (‘alas!’) of Lam. 1 rereads the ekah of Isa. 1: 21.
9 Daniel Weiss observes that my pragmatic typology appears contradictory, since I argue for both the medieval distinction between plain and interpreted sense and David Halivni’s account of early rabbinic exegesis, which differs sharply from the medieval account. My response is that I begin with Halivni’s account of the rabbinic distinction between initial readings mamash (‘akin to what we call plain meaning’: Halivni, 76) and additional readings that disclose ‘applied’ meanings. I extend this mild distinction into an explicit, pragmatic rule that, I believe, captures the primary hermeneutical practice of contemporary ‘textual reasoners’: inspired, at once by classic rabbinic midrash and those medieval hermeneuts who honoured both the textual authority of peshat and the performative guidance, or at times authority, of derash.
10 When examined by way of third-order enquiries, conventional rules (such as those that inform contemporary programmes in any field of Jewish, Muslim, or Christian studies) may display ‘non-indigenous’ origins, where the point of origin was an occasion of reparative enquiry.
11 It would be good in the future to test for analogues in philosophic readings of classic quranic commentary.
12 Since this turn was displayed prototypically, but by no means exclusively, in the works of René Descartes.
13 In his early Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers of 1868–9, Charles Peirce identified Cartesianism with intuitionism, the assumption that there is a ‘cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and therefore so determined by something out of consciousness’ (Peirce 5.213).
14 ‘Constative’ claims are declarative utterances, asserted as either true or false. These are distinguished from claims made through some performance (rather than direct utterance) and from utterances that do not assert any matter of truth-or-falsity. Constative claims, include both ‘common sense or everyday’ claims and ‘specialized or scientific’ claims. Common-sense or everyday claims are made with respect to sub-communities of natural language use. Specialized or scientific claims are offered to sub-communities of enquirers who share an argot constructed not for the sake of furthering specific projects of enquiry that do not replace or substitute for everyday discourses. The truth or falsity of a constative claim is judged with respect to the coherence of the claim with a given set of semantic and illocutionary conventions and the correspondence of the claim with what listeners would expect to perceive or cognize as the object or referent of the claim if it were true.
15 My thanks to Thomas Higgins (Ph.D. University of Virginia 2005) for this insight into the Confessions.
16 Three epistemic tendencies are internal to Augustine’s process of reparative reasoning:
17 On this reading, Stoic logic offered Augustine the most mature expression of Hellenic logical enquiry; De. doct. shows Augustine at work transforming Stoic logic into the triadic semiotic that, alone, can diagram the mediatory movement of intra-scriptural rationality; and De trin. displays Augustine’s semeiotic in its most mature expression.