Tamar Elad-Appelbaum

It is said, in the name of the Baal Shem Tov: that life is like falling down into a dark pit.

This is true for all. Yet, once we fall into that pit, we are handed a ladder, and we can then learn the ways of that ladder, for only with it will we be able to climb up out of the dark pit. The ladder itself is the revelation of the presence of God. Our consent to fall into the pit, and the labor of learning the ladder, in order to climb together with God, is the purpose of life and the essence of faith. Yet, so many of us do not recognize that ladder. We first hold on to it, then slowly put it aside, as if it had no use, walking through our lives within the pit, without the ladder, losing purpose, disconnecting from God, wallowing in darkness, engrossed in a contagious spiritual inflammation of the heart muscle of humanity.

With compassion, care, radical spiritual generosity and accessibility, Professor Michael Fishbane takes us into the pit. For only there, where we are finite, compromised, bodily, needing, vulnerable and fragile, will we be able to learn the ways of the ladder. He takes us even deeper, into the dark, where we are “victims of our achievements…. devastated by a century of wars…. instigated by barbaric mentalities that have harnessed technology into agents of mass deaths…. and the sabotage of nature itself.”  Only in that Jobian place (Fishbane utilizes the drama of biblical Job as a hermeneutical marker in this discussion), acknowledging our private and universal broken dislocated spirit, can a new theological consciousness appear. And with it, a new way of life: one of concern, moral duty, of limit and love.

Only there, can we learn the ways of the ladder, a fourfold perennial method of religious and spiritual development, constructed of a perfect assembling of the multi-faceted Jewish human hermeneutical theology with God at its center: The PaRDeS.  The four levels that formulate the ladder have been historically unreachable to the public, hidden in mystical language, revealed mostly in glimpses throughout Jewish tradition, yet in an act of faith and moral urgency, this book brings the ladder back to public attention, recognizing that Jewish tradition is a public tradition–one that trusts the people, trusts language and speech. Therefore the first mode, Peshat, acknowledges the ordinary, the natural and social realm; the second mode, Drash, invites to the collective communal range of Jewish rabbinic traditions; the third mode, Remez, enters deeper into the realm of the individual soul; and the fourth mode Sod, invites to the cognitive task of a complete mystical consciousness of the Divine, cultivating altogether a God-centered heart.

Fragile Finitude is far more than a book, and there is no easy way to summarize it. It is a language unto itself. It is a full spiritual surgery, opening thoroughly each of the four chambers of the human heart and condition, and resetting the rhythm of our breath and speech with that of God. It is a theological-spiritual procedure, inviting us to fall into the pit, and then – for those who attune their hearts – to climb, step by step, on a ladder of hermeneutic  theology, between “now” and “not-yet,” between the revealed and concealed, placing one stair at a time between the two primordial trees of life and knowledge, in a caesural realm the realm of pausing and acknowledging the sacredness of what is beyond me, the realm of the resurrection of the dead — when we climb up the pit, more fragile, more finite, on a sacred ladder, together, with God.

Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum is co-founder of the Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis, a joint project of the HaMidrasha Educational Center for Israeli Judaism and the Shalom Hartman Institute.