Michael Fishbane

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the kindness of my colleagues in devoting time and thought to my book, Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology.

This work continues my efforts to construct a contemporary theological voice, informed and based in the many levels of Jewish tradition, but also alert to the need to rethink and represent this material in light of the considerable challenges of modernity.  I began this ‘constructive’ task with Sacred Attunement in 2008, and have written this work to deepen and develop thoughts presented there.  As I believe that theology is a living practice, embedded in lived experience, this was an unexpected but perhaps inevitable development.  It reflects my attempt to continue to gain personal clarity with regard to the tasks of a theologically informed life, and to do so with integrity as I age and continue thinking.  If there is a major or a noticeable difference between the first book and this one, it is my attempt to move to a more comprehensive and integrated statement about what I mean by an alert or attuned theological consciousness (in particular, to be attentive to the present moment while being simultaneously attuned to eternity) and the role of study as a liturgical practice that opens up and provides vectors for diverse states of religious life and thinking.

In Sacred Attunement I attempted the use and modern application of the traditional four-fold Jewish exegetical practice known by the acronym PaRDeS, to accentuate and demonstrate how these modes of reading and interpretation cultivate different levels of theological living.  The level of Peshat (P) refers to the plain or contextual sense of meaning; that of Derash (D) to the rabbinic types of normative explication of Scripture; the level of Remez (R) denotes the allegorical or philosophical levels of interpretation; and that of Sod (S) marks the mystical sphere of significance.  The key development in Fragile Finitude is to use these levels to pose a multi-levelled theological orientation, grounded in universal, earthly life and personal experience (P), supplemented by the communal religious life and values of rabbinic Judaism (D), guided by personal practices of spiritual and moral development (R), and extending to a more cosmic consciousness (S).  At all levels, I reinterpret the sources of Judaism, as a mental and lived practice; and see all four levels as simultaneous and inter-dynamic – given that the modern person lives at multiple levels (sometimes simultaneously; and sometimes in sequences and with notable priorities).

There is close attention at each level to finding a language for a contemporary theology alert to the fact that hermeneutics (or interpretation) is at the core of our lives at every moment.  This, indeed, is the so-called linguistic and hermeneutical turn in contemporary philosophical thought; and it underpins my theological project from start to finish.  But if interpretation or explanation is the act in response to the mystery of life and being, it requires the most uncompromising attentiveness to the call or voice of life and being, everywhere and always.  Thus my theology is, at the deepest level, a theology of call and response, of attentiveness and responsibility.  This is the core of what it means to be alert and alive in a religious sense – and the levels of interpretation, informed by numerous Jewish sources, try to give this an informed Jewish character.  In this respect, issues of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption are fundamental; but, as the reader of the book will hopefully feel and realize, this theological triad is deeply entwined, in numerous ways.  Thus, for example, hearing the infinitely voiced call of creation, and heeding its revelation to consciousness, is already an incipient moment of redemption.  The traditional texts help deepen my brooding on this and other subjects.

I have written this theology to find, again, my own theological voice, as one deeply embedded in tradition and open to contemporary thought – and to do so without apology, as a necessary and honest stand within tradition, as it again, stands within the complexities of its age.  But I have also written it for others, to show what may be possible in our time, and how one can revitalize the sacred and authoritative texts (from the Bible to modern poetry) with integrity and with spiritual courage.  Each reader will have to take up that task in their own way, and in their own life-setting.  My work is thus, itself, a text to be built on in diverse ways.  The historian will perceive the challenge and solutions in one way (from a reflective point of view); the engaged practitioner in yet another (with an eye and ear to public application, perhaps); and the spiritual seeker will respond to this book in distinctly personal ways (one that may inform their quest and lived truth).

It is with the preceding considerations in mind that I now respond, in turn, to the remarks of my colleagues.  Each has written from the strength of their theological perspectives and life, and their comments have stimulated the desire for dialogue.  My ensuing comments are gestures toward this end.

I note, initially, the reflections of Paul Mendes-Flohr, a historian of Jewish thought and theology.  He has chosen to place my work within the wide arc of modernity and its attempts at personal authenticity and integrity – given both the ruptures that beset our traditional lives and predilections in contemporary times.  In this context, he notes and addresses my efforts to ground my theology in text study – and my exploration of its possibilities from within (in his telling phrase).  This concern to revitalize Jewish and human thought through a new engagement with traditional Jewish sources is, of course not new, and has been vitally preceded by two thinkers he knows well: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. So to Mendes-Flohr I pose the query of how he sees my work as extending and vitalizing for our time (and in a new way) the labors of these major thinkers, and how he assesses my attempt to find new ontological grounding – not only in Scripture, but also in and through its multileveled modes of lived interpretation. This also bears on the crucial issue of life-changing import of lived interpretation (something that Buber learned from Dilthey, and that Rosenzweig stressed by his transformative notion of speech-thinking, learned from Rosenstock-Huessy).

The issues of a lived dialogue with a text and its multiple dimensions deepen the ontological issue, especially for the modern person.  I share the need to harness the spiritual and liturgical power of that mode of study for modern theology (much as the two afore-named persons tried to do in the Jewish Lehrhaus in Frankfurt in the 1920s); but the new conditions of our time, and the challenge of being open to multiple dimensions of reality, mean that new integrations with tradition are necessary, not least the regarding the centrality of Scripture – a matter which is at the heart of my book.  Mendes-Flohr no doubt had many of these topics in mind, as he composed his response; I would enjoy hearing his ruminations on the issues that remain, and whether he thinks that I succeeded in dealing with the challenges of modernity, which he knows so well – and in what measure.  I have tried to offer a voice from within to those without, who at best only harvest broken tablets.  So, as a starter for dialogue, I now ask: is my approach a tikkun or guide towards such an intellectual ‘repair’?

The second reader in this academic tradition, Arnold Eisen, has also taken up the issue of modernity in broad terms and sets my work within certain sociological sights and the challenge to compose a living theology – not mourn an irretrievable traditionalism.  I note that he has variously referred to formulations found in my first theological book – even as I have refocused that presentation in the second, and sought to set the theological task on a new conceptual and spiritual footing: one that deals with finitude and the possibilities of tradition and religious life in modernity.  Since he has, himself, written works related to the topics of revelation and obligation, his thoughts on my present treatment of these subjects would be of much interest.  It would also, I believe, help answer what he asks of me; namely, to provide a further consideration of the ‘unknowability of God’, and how we may or should respond to it.  Indeed, throughout my book I address the ‘mystery of God’ from the perspective of human finitude and the longing for sense and meaning; and from this vector I have reread the sources of the Jewish tradition to show how this dimension can translate into a life of ongoing spiritual attentiveness to the tasks of ethical care and responsibility.  This issue is posed at the outset in my rereading of the book of Job, and it is taken up in each of the succeeding four parts of Fragile Finitude. In my own way, but following in the theological tradition of Heschel, whom Eisen cites approvingly, I have set forth a way of responding to the givens of existence in terms of an omnipresent revelatory call of Divinity: to hear and to do what comes repeatedly to hand and heart.

The richness of the rabbinic tradition provides moral resources for a re-conception of human attentiveness amid the mystery and wonder of existence – not to mention resources for resistance to the challenges of perversity and evil.  This consideration is at the heart of the multiple (four-fold) layers of my hermeneutical engagement with the Jewish literary sources. Since Eisen has written elsewhere regarding the notion of (what he terms) ‘commandedness,’ and as an opportunity for dialogue, I would now ask him: did my book meet the test?  And how and in what ways does it meet the theological challenges we are embedded in, and the spiritual yearnings of the modern Jew to whom he has devoted considerable sociological and cultural attention?

There are many ways that one can live an engaged theological life in the broader community – beset by uncertainly, moral challenge, and theological wonder.  Eisen served for many years as the chancellor of a major seminary – but not as a practicing rabbi.  This presents other demands.  An engaged religious person, like Tamar Elad Appelbaum – who has devoted her considerable energies to helping her congregants in Israel find a theologically inflected spiritual and moral voice – is precisely another type to whom my book is addressed.  For just as I have tried to translate the sources of Judaism into a new and compelling life idiom, the socially engaged religious leader must do the same, albeit in more fraught circumstances.  In this setting, the challenge is whether my textual approach, or one adapted to or by it, can have an effect on those seeking a new spiritual-moral compass.  Can my theological presentation, grounded in the energy and content of Jewish tradition, have a programmatic impact on those seeking a new Jewish voice in our difficult times?  I am deeply moved by Tamar Elad Appelbaum’s personal response to my work.  Indeed, she expresses in her direct and attuned way that one must have trust in the resources of the tradition and trust in the people one leads.  Her metaphor of the ladder captures the painful step-wise manner of an ascent; and the great need to pause, evaluate, and spiritually integrate the content – also in personal and socially active ways.  She has zeroed in on the lived relationship between my work and the spiritual quest.  As I have stressed, my book is but one personal exemplification of the task.  Others will have to do this in their own way and in their own life setting.  Just this is the intercultural dialogue that will be so vitally enriching and is so much anticipated.

The response (a letter) of Ora Wiskind is for me a most remarkable integration of deep intellectual and spiritual attunement, formulated in the most personal way – but nevertheless keyed to the conceptual challenges of writing and reading a work of theology.  In the same spirit of that direct address, I say in response: You have profoundly sensed the need to bring one’s spiritual voice to the surface through the longing and ardor of patient responses to the mysteries of text and living.  Writing theology therefore becomes testimony and dialogue, and example of a life lived with a certain quest at its core, a certain hope at its center, and enough humility to keep the silences swirling around the hesitant formulations.  Your own wisdom has allowed you to sense my core motifs and themes, and to recognize that even this inner pivot must move in response to new occasions, and thus produce variations ‘on the way’.  Sharing theology as dialogue is precisely what turns living into a liturgical act, a voicing of understanding and explanation in and through the quiet wonder of ‘what is there’.  Lived mystery is at the center, and it proliferates with an attuned consciousness – one that begins anew at each moment of being called to see and hear, and to ponder meaning as a spiritual aura that radiates from this perception, and slowly made personal through reading and our words.

This is what we may sense of the living God, whose voice speaks here and everywhere, and most lovingly in and through the traditional texts we caress by our voiced interpretations.  This was the profound wisdom already enunciated by our rabbinic sages to the opening words of the Song of Songs, where the kisses of Your mouth is the teaching breathed into us by the living God, day by day – each teaching only one of the infinite teachings of an infinite mystery.  This all-inspiring love from God is stronger than death; it is a heavenly gift in our fragile finitude.

Michael Fishbane is the Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.