Ora Wiskind

In Fragile Finitude, Michael Fishbane follows a strong tradition of modern Jewish intellectual theologians who underwent a personal transformation as they sought new spiritual horizons and strove to engage readers. Franz Rosenzweig, a powerful and abiding presence in Fishbane’s life and works, famously decided (at a critical turning-point in his career) to cast off the yoke of academia and, instead, to forge a radically new, dialogic mode of thought and expression, one that was rooted in relation – to life, to people, to the vastness of being, with God.

True dialogue requires a measure of open-endedness, a sense of mutual discovery and reciprocity, a willingness to not-know everything already. Yet, too often the language of academic discourse threatens to lock us, once again, back into the passive role of audience for each other’s monologues.

Amidst these reflections and hesitations, Rosenzweig’s confession comes to my mind: You see, I can no longer write a “book”; everything now turns into a letter, since I need to see the “other”.

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Dear Michael,

In my encounters with your writings over the years, I often sensed that your own voice was submerged (or disguised?) in the elegant, profound textual excursions you crafted. Maybe that was due, in part at least, to the endless wrestle with academia’s critical demands. Now, in any case, at this stage in a rich life of kindness and shared experience, your readings are personal, passionate, and inspiring. Fragile Finitude is moving testimony of your quest for expanded horizons of spiritual awareness while attending, with utmost honesty, to “the divine voice that addresses us at every turn.”

Making my way through your work, I’ve been engaged in an intensive mental dialogue with you. I write here now to share my impressions – speaking from the heart as well as the mind, without all the baggage of scholarly discourse – and to note some of the ways your book resonates with my sensibilities. Your uniquely creative mode of expression, of course, elicits this kind of engaged response. You remember when the prophet Elisha revived that child (2 Kings 4:34) – mouth on his mouth, eyes on his eyes, hands on his hands – and breathed life back into him.

Here (in reverse), while reading, it has felt as if your vitality, your vision, your art has flowed into me. Your wish to bequeath us, your readers, a theological legacy of enduring value is audible on every page. And so it summons a commensurate reply, one that combines the personal, the poetic, and the spiritual.

Physically held in one’s hands, Fragile Finitude is surprisingly lightweight. The dust jacket itself – River Light: Blue Morning, a shadow play of indigo, lavender and dream-green – holds the quiet breath of felt mystery. Truly a worthy garment-levush for these sustained and graceful reflections on the “divine depths that pervade existence.” Those depths, as your readings will teach, must be plumbed slowly, with carefully numbered interludes in the spaces between them. The Table of Contents maps the contemplative rhythms of this book as its author accompanies us with a gentle, sure hand through the Orchard, or PaRDeS – from peshat to drash to remez to sod (four types of traditional Jewish scriptural interpretation, four levels of experience) – until by its end the paths of spiritual labor, into life, have been fully set out.

To create an ethos of reading sacred texts that is powerful enough to change lives, a new language is needed: one that both conveys and enacts meaning. You have, quite brilliantly, engendered such a language. I’d like to touch on some of its most cogent features and their effect in attaining your larger purposes and vision: to “reformulate a Jewish theology for our time,” to arouse ethical awareness, even cultivate a mystical consciousness. But perhaps most of all, simply to share your own “heart of wisdom”, to guide fellow seekers on the journey toward knowing that, truly, “God’s mystery is in this and every place.”

Fragile Finitude is a luminous mosaic of poetic images and rhetorical figures. Many of them are compelling but I will focus here on a single trope – one that seems to me strikingly emblematic of your overall project. In the first pages, you stress the urgency and the challenge of the tasks at hand. “Is ‘theology’ even possible in our time?”; “without stable principles to guide our judgement, we swirl in a sea of uncertainty or cynicism,” suffer an “inrush of confusions,” “a barrage of invasive information,” disjointed moments without wonder, an “infinite congery” of shapeless, senseless elements.

Drawing on the biblical account of Creation (Gen. 1:2), you name that primary existential and philosophical state of disorientation, uncertainty, not-knowing as “tohu-bohu” (often translated as “unformed and void”). Throughout the book, you return to probe its nuanced darkness. This passage first introduces the mode of hermeneutical engagement that might elicit a glimmer of light from the void:

Suddenly what seemed “inchoate” and “unformed” (tohu-bohu) induces “wonder” and “astonishment” (or tohe and bohe). And then, with this radical evocation, the mind is awakened to its epistemic potency and affirms bo-hu – there is “something here” […]

God’s ways (of expression) are manifestly not our ways (of understanding): for what ineffably vibrates in the divine depths is “wholly other” than any or all mortal pronouncements. Hence one must be mindful of the hermeneutical dialectic between tohu (the “all-inchoate potential” of world entities) and tohe (the “sudden sense of wonder”), between bohu (the “ineffable intermixture of things”) and bo-hu (the perception of an “inherent or actual meaning”). The meanings construed thus turn on a hermeneutical axis, ever concordant with our creative capacities.

On this reading, based on midrashic and kabbalistic sources as you note, tohu-bohu refigures as a locus of transformation. Blank, mute emptiness (tohu-bohu) – of the world, of the soul – might be re-heard, in a redemptive moment, as a silent summons to seek out the indwelling presence of the divine – because, paradoxically, He is concealed there (bo-hu), right in the midst of it. Such redemptive moments are spurred by bewilderment, non-understanding (tohe), perplexity; they then come into being through acts of interpretation.

Crucially, though, hearing and heeding the summons depends on one’s spiritual readiness, on a “primordial longing and desire” to be addressed. For this and every “quest is founded on lack and humility,” on “spiritual longing and the confession of need.” Questions thus voice the heart’s desire; they drive on the search.

The next passage, an innovative reading of the biblical injunction to “Remember the manna” (Deut. 8:2-3) models your ars poetica. It performs all of the above: poses questions as it shows their role in arousing and enabling acts of interpretation, all the while revisiting the tohu-bohu motif.

Wandering in the desolations of the spirit, can one hope for wonder? Can we see things afresh, or be startled and say:

“What is this” heavenly gift—man hu? (Exodus 16:15). What is this that spreads over the earth so wondrously, so totally unknown? It is the question itself! […] Questions open the heart; and suddenly the holy spectacle of creation is revealed – before names, before distinctions, and before all grasping knowledge. It is query itself, born in the soul that may open transcendence to the stultified heart, starving for spiritual sustenance. […] Wonder unbinds; it is a hesed—a source of life. “Man hu?” we ask. “What is this?” And suddenly, in attentive wonder, bohu is transfigured. It is bo hu: God’s gracious presence, so vitally embodied in created existence.

These lines manifest the dialogical mode of inquiry that informs your thinking. The “bread of dialogue,” which you model here, masterfully, in palpably lived syntax, really offers the only viable medium to convey the tenuous nature of our being in the world, along with endless awareness of the fragility of existence. And so the many questions (156 in all!) – voiced, each one, with humility and care – that convey your reflections in this book are integrally bound up with your hermeneutical theology. Clearly, then, in a very real sense, a work such as this one can be no more than an essai – an “attempt,” somehow, to communicate the ineffable “wonder of God, ever beckoning.”

Here, finally, the divine question that had so shaken the biblical Job: “Where are you, here and now, before the tasks of the world?” has been readdressed.

Your response, this book, opens the heart to transcendence. Thank you.

Ora

Ora Wiskind is Professor of Jewish Thought and serves as Head of the Graduate Program in Jewish Studies at Michlalah College, Jerusalem. Her research interests include Jewish thought and literary studies, Hasidism, and the interface between scriptural exegesis, culture and hermeneutics