Arnold Eisen

I’ve never been a fan of the elegiac approach to religion: mourning a time when faith was allegedly “at the full.” Belief is pronounced impossible by such critics even before it has been attempted, and deemed prima facie inauthentic when it is.

Max Weber struggled for faith over much of his life,  and apparently felt genuine guilt at taking part in the scientific project that in his view had banished religion to the margins of modern life,  but he nonetheless declared in “Science as a Vocation”  that “the arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately” to welcome “the person who cannot bear the fate  of the times like a man.” All such as person must do to secure admittance is “bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice.’”  Even the great historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, who hoped that the Jewish people’s return to sovereignty in the Land of Israel would lead to a revitalization of Jewish faith, did his part to popularize the elegaic approach.

Scholem closed his landmark study of Jewish mysticism with the now-famous story of the Baal Shem Tov who, whenever he faced a difficult task, would go into the forest,  light a fire, and say a prayer — “and what he had set out to perform was done.” His disciple the Maggid of Mezeritch could no longer light the fire, and Hasidim of the next generation did not know the prayer.  Those that came after them could not find the place. All we can do centuries later,  Scholem wrote, is “tell the story of how it was done” and hope that this will be enough.

As a Jew committed to keeping Jewish faith alive in a way that is not content merely to tell stories of the ancestors, I found myself cheering on Michael Fishbane at many points in his ground-breaking theological essay of 2008,  Sacred Attunement.  I cheered again at reading Fragile Finitude.  We too often learn of individuals who opt to give up talk of God and God’s will for human beings altogether rather than sully faith or integrity with the stain of inhumanity.  Fishbane will not resolve their dilemmas, but they may find solace and resolve in his strong moral and theological voice, one that is both careful and compassionate.

Fishbane is aware of the obstacles confronting any “attempt to do theology in a dark and disorienting time – a time sunk in the mire of modernity. Naivete is out of the question.” He gives sustained attention in both volumes to how theology can proceed nonetheless.  The key is to find correlations between meanings stored up in classic texts and practices and realities of everyday life,  once those realities have been re-opened — newly “attuned”— to what he variously calls “infinite possibilities,”  “traces of transcendence,” “infinities” to be “intuited,” “impingements of sight and sound which happen roundabout. A Jewish theologian helps to cultivate awareness of these “impingements” via eyes, ears, and mouth (breath; words) and directs awakened selves to a life engaged by the covenant that was given,  according to the Jewish master-story, the Torah,  at Sinai.

Abraham Joshua Heschel set forth a similar three-step progress to faith in his “philosophy of religion” from 1951,  Man is Not Alone. First open the self to wonder, the sense of the ineffable;   then realize that God is the only satisfactory answer to the questions provoked by wonder; finally, move from awareness that God is present in our world and wants something from human beings,  to a “pattern for living” that answers God’s call. The successor volume from several years later, God in Search of Man, which bears the subtitle, “A Philosophy of Judaism,  turns on the claim that the prophet Moses received revelation at Sinai that has directed  Judaism’s “pattern for living” ever after. “Jewish theology begins at Sinai,” Fishbane writes in Sacred Attunement. “This is its axial moment.” His successor volume goes deeper into how Jews can exercise “the spiritual imperatives of care and consideration” imposed by the “fragility of life.”

Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber are the other “presiding presences” in Fragile Finitude. Like them, Fishbane calls us to greater consciousness of God without entering into the specifics of what a Jew must do or should and should not believe.  Fragile Finitude builds still more creatively than Sacred Attunement upon the classical notion of PARDES, a medieval acronym for four levels or methods of interpretation. Pshat is “the level of ordinary and religious experience.”  Conjunctions between the two aspects of experience are the heart of the matter for Fishbane (and the key to the structure of the book). Drash frames and deepens daily life with “Jewish values and theological significance.” The focus here is on how human beings driven by both good and evil drives, guided by covenant and law, can bring justice and love to the world.  Remez seeks “to inculcate paths of personal [character] development” through a ladder of ascent in spiritual practice based on Scriptural commandments to “remember” key aspects of experience. The fourth and final level, Sod, attempts “to awaken religious consciousness to an ultimate awareness of the absolute dimension of God.” “Sovereign selves” concerned only with individual achievement are subject to implicit but trenchant critique. “A rebirth of soulfulness” on the Sabbath is urged to get beyond “the daily labors of mastery and control.” The virtues of a discipline of meditation are implicitly argued; Hasidic masters are frequently cited; “spiritual consciousness” and “mystical hermeneutics” are put forth as a bridge to the awareness and service of God.

Sacred Attunement makes the striking avowal that theology “has the primary duty of serving God alone – not some particular religious formulation or tradition. This means helping make the world ‘God-real’ or God-actual (in Buber’s terms)…” Fragile Finitude seems to claim more than once that God is somehow a partner in this effort. “God is the omnipresent source of meanings; our human interpretations provide means for their ongoing expression.” That is the point at which Fishbane reaches the limit of what he thinks can be said about the “unsayable.” It is also the point about which I desperately wanted more to be said. We are all too aware of religious leaders who do say a lot more — shout it, in fact — as they act in God’s name,  claiming to serve God dutifully, by excluding, oppressing,  persecuting, and even killing people who worship differently. Alternatively, we hear religious voices that ascribe evils of nature or history— a pandemic, for example;  or a genocide — to divine retribution. Buber himself followed the example of the Biblical prophets in fretting about how hard it is to distinguish true from false prophets, wishing that God had made it easier to do so.

Fishbane does not solve these theological dilemmas for his readers (no one can, I suspect) but his distinctive theological voice — immensely learned yet humbly grounded in the realities of contemporary life— offers assurance that the fragility and finitude that mark the human condition may be the vehicles through which ultimate meaning can be sought, and even found.

Arnold M. Eisen, one of the world’s foremost authorities on American Judaism, is chancellor emeritus of The Jewish Theological Seminary and professor of Jewish Thought. He is the author, among other works, of Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming, and Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community, and co-author of The Jew Within.