Paul Mendes-Flohr

Franz Rosenzweig is said to have once quipped that “God gave us the Torah, not ethical monotheism.” This gnomic obiter dictum is not an indictment of an ethical engagement in the world, however. Rather it is to be understood as an affirmation that God’s revealed Torah is the ontological ground for the flourishing of life as a spiritually, intellectually and hence ethically judicious response to the often seemingly intractable perplexities of one’s personal and public life.

The perplexities facing one, as Michael Fishbane notes with eloquent nuance, have been immeasurably compounded with the dawn of modernity. Proclaiming the unimpeachable reign of Man, his autonomy, and all-powerfulness, the modern ethos, as Martin Heidegger forcefully argued, has left one adrift without ontological moorings in a conception of Being that would anchor one’s perception of the ever-unfolding rush of mundane experience in a vision of the Good and ultimate meaning of human destiny.

Bereft of a firm ontological perspective, modernity is haunted, as Hannah Arendt observed, by an irreconcilable structural tension. For the faith in reason that gave birth to the modern world engendered expectations that incremental material and social progress would lead to the amelioration, if not the ultimate perfectibility of the human condition while at the same time producing the painful awareness that material and social progress cannot but fail to address the existential questions that befuddle us.

A miasmatic existential uncertainty thus hovers over the modern person, which the historian Reinhart Koselleck traces back to middle of the 18^th century when vision of the future, even in its most terrestrial, everyday cadence, that hitherto set clear, stable temporal and cultural orientation began to totter. In previous days, one would mount a horse on a journey confident that one would come upon a terrain ahead to be more or less similar to that left behind. Temporal and cultural expectations would change radically with modernity. Now, as one saddles up a horse or boards a plane, one would no longer be certain that the terrain that lay head would be familiar. The loss of stable temporal and cultural orientations would in its wake lead ever-increasingly to anxious uncertainties about core cognitive and axiological principles —and hence the ontological presuppositions that sustained them — that had traditionally guided the human journey. In time, Koselleck maintains, concepts of truth, love and compassion, while drawn from the traditional spiritual lexicon, no longer would bear the same, unequivocal meaning and promise that they had had in the past.  Suffice to cite the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, selected from one of his Duino Elegies:

Nowhere … can the world exist but within
Our life is spent in changing. And ever lessening,
the outer world disappears.  […]

In the center of Not-knowing whither, as if it existed,
and bent the stars from the skies
toward it. I show it you, angel, still there.

Stand, rescued at last, in your gaze, and finally upright.
Columns, pylons, the Sphinx, the upward striving
Of the cathedral, gray from a foreign or dying city.

Fragile Finitude is an affirmative response to Rilke’s appeal to preserve, rescue, and “finally upright,” in our case, the House of Israel—to do so from within.

Restored from within, the House of Israel (beit Yisra’el) is brought back to life as an edifice of the Spirit. Ru’ach ha-Kodesh — the Spirit of the Living God —is manifest, indeed, embodied in the life of the Jew, modulated by the precepts of the Torah, which one is to “meditate upon day and night” (Joshua 1:8). So the Psalmist rejoices: “The teaching of the Lord is his [the righteous person’s] delight, and he studies that teaching (Torah) day and night” (Psalm 1:2). The community that gathered in the caves of Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea held that Torah study is essential to their spiritual life: “In the place in which the Ten [constituting the liturgical congregation] assemble there should not be missing one to interpret the law (Torah) day and night, always relieving each other.” Intrinsic to the spiritual life of the Jew, Torah study elicits, as it were, an ontological consciousness; the liturgical, ritual, and ethical life of the Jew, may thus be said to be mediated by an ontotheology, a theology of Being.

But contrary to post-modern philosophers who dismiss ontotheology as  an existential irrelevance of little more than sententious platitudes, Fishbane maintains that as a continuous spiritual practice,  Torah study  acknowledges one’s “fragile finitude,” ever attentive to one’s Jobian tribulations. In reconstructing the House of Israel from within, Fishbane brings back to life Judaism in its pristine expression as a theological ethos — an ethos that suffuses all aspects of one’s life with Ru’ach ha-Kodesh. 

Identifying the eternal heartbeat of Judaism as the rabbinic tradition of reflective interpretations of sacred texts, which Fishbane elaborates as a “hermeneutical theology,” is a conversational discourse that he urges us to continue. With the finely tuned voice of a poet, he evokes the spiritual interior of that ongoing discourse. As viewed from within traditional rabbinic reading practice, the study of Israel’s sacred texts — the Written and Oral Torah —is hardly a catechistic exercise of regurgitating given doctrines and teachings. Conducted as a dialogue with the texts studied, and the cumulative commentaries thereon, the reader perforce brings — Fishbane would say is encouraged to bring — to the dialogue cognitive, ethical, and existential issues that preoccupy one — and one’s fellow readers, for ideally the dialogue is conducted together with at least one other reader. These questions are addressed, as Fishbane deftly explicates, at the four ascending levels of the hermeneutic tradition of Torah study (PaRDeS), whereby in the quest for enlightenment one is attuned to the numinous experience of the Divine Presence.

As a sacramental rite of sacred attunement — to allude to the title of one’s Fishbane’s previous books —  Torah study addresses one’s questions, bearing as they do the stamp of our “fragile finitude,” from the perspective of  biblical ontology, which beckons us to celebrate life as a divine blessing and to bear the responsibility with God for the created order. Placed in our care, God’s creation establishes, as the philosopher, Charles Taylor avers, “a moral space,” which continuously extends beyond the precincts of one’s immediate concerns to embrace the woes of our neighbors, near and far, and with ever-pressing urgency global epidemics and the looming threat of ecological collapse.

The exigencies of the present hour facing humanity at large are vividly voiced in a recent article by a Muslim brother, Ebrahim Moosa: “The viruses and political bacilli that undoes the body politic, rendering us inert and frozen, are infesting our societies at a rapid speed.” Moosa continues, “what is needed is a new mode of being and existence.” For Fishbane, Torah study —alert to contemporary cognitive, ethical and existential questions — as a mode of being living in the Presence of God secures our faith and spiritual fortitude and resolve to resist a Cassandran paralysis and despair.

Paul R. Mendes-Flohr is a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought. As an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss. He is the editor of a series on German-Jewish literature and Cultural History for the University of Chicago Press, the collected works of Martin Buber in German, and the author of Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale).