Jewish thought has passed through a crisis, one of the most serious in its history. The story we have told has been of a religious tradition in a state of fragmentation. Despite the fact that we have spoken of “modern Jewish thought” as if it were a single entity, we have found little common ground among the various contemporary approaches to the Holocaust and the State of Israel, the diaspora and Jewish peoplehood, halakhah and the authority of Judaism’s sacred texts.
To be sure, modern Jewish thinkers have something in common. They have reflected on the same set of subjects in the light of Judaism’s classic themes: exile and redemption, covenant and peoplehood, revelation and interpretation. Perhaps, then, the current diversity of Jewish thought is no more than a continuation of the longstanding “argument for the sake of Heaven” which has historically characterised Judaism in its philosophical moments. If so, the disagreements between Jews today are not unique. They echo those between Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael, Maimonides and Nachmanides, and the eighteenth-century Chassidim and their opponents. On this interpretation, Judaism has always been constituted by debate and dialogue rather than by dogma. Its unity is not to be found in a list of propositions agreed by all. Rather, it is to be found in a shared set of themes to which the various philosophies of Judaism are the multifaceted and open-ended commentaries.
There is some truth in this approach, but not enough. There is no precedent for the depth of disagreement that currently characterises Jewish thought. To be sure, there were profound intellectual disputes in the past. But they took place within clearly defined boundaries. Premodern Jewish commentators and philosophers shared a cluster of commitments that made them recognisably participants in the same tradition, adherents of a single faith, speakers of a common language. That cannot be said today. It would not have occurred to any Jewish thinker prior to the nineteenth century that there could be Jewish faith without belief in the divine revelation of Torah, or that there could be Jewish identity that was not religious identity, or that there could be Jewish peoplehood in the absence of the unifying bond of halakhah. Even the events which more than any other have shaped modern Jewish consciousness – the Holocaust and the State of Israel – have given rise to a bewildering variety of interpretations. For some they have confirmed religious faith. But for others they have refuted it.
For some time, Jewish thought has been in a state of disarray to find an adequate parallel for which we would have to travel back to the second Temple period, some 2,000 years ago. The question is why. Some modern thinkers – most notably Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg – have argued that the cause lies in the Holocaust. Its disclosure of radical evil shattered all previous paradigms of faith. Its unredeemed tragedy “ruptured” the covenant. Religious belief, once engraved on tablets of stone, has been broken. Today’s Jews and their conflicting beliefs are the fragments that remain.
It is a powerful image but, I believe, a wholly mistaken analysis. The fissures that mark modern Jewish thought have their origins in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. They preceded the Holocaust and were not produced by it. If anything, the Holocaust and the State of Israel have given rise to a renewed search for tradition, a search which has led to a tentative re-engagement on the part of non-Orthodox thinkers with the concepts of revelation, halakhah and the meaning of Israel as a covenantal people. But the ghosts of the nineteenth century still haunt the Jewish imagination, and they have not yet been exorcised.
In the first chapter we explored the social background to the crisis of the nineteenth century. In this last chapter we must confront its intellectual dimension. More than Jews were dislocated by the massive changes which swept across Europe. So too was Judaism. Let us now attempt to say why. To do so we must take one stage further the argument of the previous chapter about the connection between revelation and language. And we must consider them both in the context of the idea that modern thought, Jewish and non-Jewish, has found more problematic than any other: the concept of a chosen people.
Genesis and pluralism
One of the most striking facts about the Hebrew Bible is that though it focuses almost exclusively on the history of Israel, it does not begin with it. Instead it opens with two prototypes of humanity as a whole: Adam and Noah. One might call them natural and civilised man respectively. Each signifies a universal religious order, both of which fail. Natural man reaches his nemesis in the generation of the Flood, when the world is filled with violence. Civilised man is guilty of the opposite failing, hubris or overreaching ambition, symbolised by the tower of Babel. The story of Babel, set as it is immediately prior to the choice of Abraham, is crucial to an understanding of Judaism. In it, mankind is depicted as “one people with one language.” Harmony reigns. But humanity sets itself the project of ousting God. The city and its tower designed “to reach to heaven” represent a man-made universe to rival creation. The tower of Babel is a perennial metaphor for all secular utopias, from Plato’s Republic to the Communist Manifesto and the Third Reich.
The divine response is to divide humanity into a multiplicity of languages, peoples and cultures. To be sure there is the promise, implicit in Genesis, explicit in the prophets, that one day mankind will be restored to its original harmony. But not yet: not until a metaphysical “end of days.” In the meantime and for all historical time, human civilisation is irreducibly plural. Cultures are distinct and cannot be translated into one another. There is to be one great symbol of this fact: Abraham and his family, later to become the children of Israel, eventually to become the Jews. They will be marked by their non-universality. They will be holy, meaning separate, distinct, “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.” They will have no natural basis of continuity. Instead, their survival and history will be peculiarly tied to the terms of their divine covenant. They will be “God’s witnesses” in their victories and defeats, their land and their exiles. They will be the exceptions to every universal rule. “You shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord your God am holy, and I have set you apart from other peoples to be Mine.”
Judaism embodies a unique paradox that has distinguished it from polytheism on the one hand and the great universal monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, on the other. Its God is universal: the creator of the universe, author and sovereign of all human life. But its covenant is particular: one people set among the nations, whose vocation is not to convert the world to its cause, but to be true to itself and to God. That juxtaposition of universality and particularity was to cause a tension between Israel and others, and within Israel itself, that has lasted to this day.
Had Israel believed in a tribal god – one nation among others, with one god among others – there would have been no tension. The nation and its god would have risen or fallen together. But because Israel’s God is God of the universe, there are times when He stands apart from His people and calls them to account for their sins. Through Amos He says “You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities.” Through Malachi He declares, “From where the sun rises to where it sets, My name is honoured among the nations…but you profane it.” When the first Temple is destroyed, Jeremiah explains that this is not the defeat of a nation and its god, but a defeat of a nation by its God. God is not for His people right or wrong. Israel’s relationship with God is continually dependent on its fidelity to the covenant.
Had Israel been a universal faith, again its existence would have been simpler. The world would have been divided into believers and infidels, the saved and the unredeemed. Against this, the Torah insists that God is the God of all humanity, not only of the saved elect. Such is the burden of the book of Jonah. Such, more fundamentally, is the message of exile and exodus. Man is called on not only to love his neighbour, the one who is like himself. He is called on to love the stranger, the one who is not like himself. Israel knows this from the core of its being, for it, more than any other people, has suffered the experience of being strangers in a land not its own. A Mishnah comments on the verse, “Let us make mankind in Our image, after Our own likeness,” that when we make many coins from the same mint they are all alike. But when God makes many people in the same image, they are all different. Meaning: we are called on to recognise God’s image in those who are not in our image.
Israel thus testifies in its very being to the oneness of God and to the plurality of man. It furnishes a protest against tribalism on the one hand, and universal solutions to the human situation on the other. For neither does justice to the human “other,” the “stranger” who is nonetheless in the image of God. Tribalism denies rights to the outsider; universalism grants rights if and only if the outsider converts. Tribalism turns the concept of a chosen people into that of a master race. Universalism turns what may be the absolute truth of a single culture into the measure of all humanity. The opening chapters of Genesis describe the recurring outcomes of such visions: violence on the one hand, hubris on the other. Against this, Abraham is to become the father of a single family whose children are to be taught “to keep the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just,” and through whom “all the peoples of the earth will be blessed.” He prays and goes to war on behalf of his neighbours, the people of Sodom. But he dwells alone, a “stranger and sojourner” among the nations.
There can be little doubt that, historically, Israel has paid a high price for its religious destiny. Refusing to assimilate with its neighbouring tribes and nations or to convert to one or other universalist faith, it has experienced the full force of hatred of the “stranger” in the form of persecutions, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms and attempted genocide. Granted a glimpse of the future of his children, Abraham was overcome by a “deep dark dread.” Nonetheless, with or against its will, Israel has repeatedly born witness to Genesis’s statement of the human situation: that it is the stranger no less than the brother who bears within him the image of God, and a world that cannot live with strangers is a world not yet redeemed.
The biblical juxtaposition of the tower of Babel and the choice of Abraham signals, I believe, one of the great theological truths: that in an unredeemed world there are no final solutions, no universal utopias. The tower, eternal symbol of a world of “one people with one language,” is destined to remain unbuilt, however much blood is shed in its name. To be sure, Judaism stakes its faith on belief in a messianic age when the harmony with which creation began will once again return. But equally it stakes its faith on the belief that the messianic age is not yet. The world is redeemable but not yet redeemed. Until then humanity is divided into a multiplicity of languages under the sovereignty of one God.
Implicit in Judaism is a deep analogy between faith and language. A language is spoken by a people; there is no such thing as a private language or a universal language. We are born into a linguistic community; we do not choose to be born to English- as against French-speaking parents, and yet that fact has the greatest significance in shaping our sensibilities. By speaking any natural language we are participants in the history of a civilisation: its nuances of meaning and association were shaped by the past and yet persist into the present. And to speak a language is to internalise its rules of grammar and semantics; without these rules we cannot express ourselves articulately.
Applying these ideas to Judaism: faith is neither private nor universal. It is a phenomenon, in the first instance, of a particular people. Just as we can be born into a linguistic community so we can be born into a faith community and its obligations. By speaking the language of faith we are in constant dialogue with the past: this is what we described in the previous chapter as the midrashic view of revelation and tradition. And faith has rules, its own grammatical structure – in the case of Judaism, the halakhah – without which there can be no religious expression. It was just these aspects of Judaism which, as we shall see, were uniquely difficult to translate into modern Western thought.
Faith, after Babel, is covenantal, and one covenant does not exclude another. Isaac and Jacob are chosen, but Ishmael and Esau are also blessed. God rescues Israel from Egypt, but – He asks through Amos – did He not also bring the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir? Is the God of Israel not also the God of the Ethiopians? There can be truth which is absolute and yet particular. There can be covenants which bind a people without negating the other covenants of other peoples. Because there are many faiths but only one God, we are called on to love the stranger who is unlike ourselves no less than the brother or neighbour who is like ourselves. To be sure there is a covenant which is universal – for Judaism, the covenant with Noah – which sets the minimum threshold for different peoples to live together in justice and peace. But beyond this lies the intrinsic plurality of human meanings and the distinct integrity of different faith communities. To this truth Judaism, with its code of difference, is an eternal witness.
Enlightenment and universality
Against this, one of the great beliefs of the Enlightenment was that there exists in the realm of human meanings some universal truth or at least some detached perspective (what Thomas Nagel calls “the view from nowhere”) from which all claims to truth can be universally judged. It was, after all, universality that marked the two outstanding models of Enlightenment knowledge: science (based on observation) and mathematical logic (based on reason). The kind of truth which promised progress was truth which held under all circumstances and which could therefore be tested without reference to factors which varied from one culture to another, such as authority, tradition or revelation. Such truth was “scientific.” And since science had yielded such spectacular results in explaining natural phenomena, there was every reason to suppose that it would do likewise in explaining human phenomena as well.
In ethics, for example, from the eighteenth century onward we find attempts to ground the norms of human behaviour in reason (Kant), emotion (Hume), social contract (Hobbes, Rousseau), the consequences of action (Bentham, Mill), the structure of history (Hegel), human will (Nietzsche) and existential decision (Sartre). Not all of these were rationalist approaches, but what they have in common is that their subject matter is man-as-such, not particular human beings set in specific traditions, each with its own integrity. There is a vast chasm separating those like Kant and Mill who believed that there are universal principles of ethics, and those like Nietzsche and Sartre who argued that there is nothing beyond individual decision and will. But despite this, they share the same fundamental either/or: either there is ethical truth, in which case it applies to all men equally, or there are only the private decisions of individuals, in which case there is no objective ethical truth. Ethical principle is universal or it is private: such is the axiom of the Enlightenment’s heirs.
This seemingly self-evident proposition had one fateful consequence. It excluded Judaism. For, as we have seen, Judaism was and is predicated on the conviction that there can be truth which is absolute and yet particular. Behind the Judaic belief in revelation, halakhah and the religious interpretation of history is the idea that God enacted a covenant with a particular people, thus endowing it with a unique sanctity and destiny. That truth might be covenantal, revealed, particular to those who witnessed that revelation and agreed to be bound by its terms; that it might therefore be opaque to the universalist disciplines of science and logic; that the structures of human meaning might be true without being universal: these were the principles on which Judaism depended and which the Enlightenment systematically denied.
In the previous chapter we considered one example at length: the concept of Torah min ha-shamayim. What was ultimately at stake between the Judaic concept of revelation and biblical scholarship from Spinoza onwards was the issue of the universality or particularity of meaning. What made critical scholarship appear “scientific” is that it seemed to involve no faith commitments. The meanings it sought were those that could be uncovered by methods that could be used by anyone: philology, archaeology, comparative history and so on. Recently, as the shortcomings of these methods became clear, there has been a move in some circles toward “reader response” approaches in which the meaning of the text is invented by the reader: roughly analogous to the transition, in ethics, from Kant to Nietzsche. Again the same dichotomy has held sway: either meanings are universal or they are private. Against this, Judaism insists that meanings are like languages, neither universal nor private but the property of a particular community extended through time. Since religious truth is absolute but not universal, it cannot be arrived at through (universal) reason but only through (particular) revelation. And since revelation is to be applied to the concrete human situation it must contain within itself the rules of its own interpretation, namely an oral as well as a written law. These ideas made no sense to Enlightenment thought with its implicit assumption that either (religious) truth is universal or it is not truth but subjective decision.
The intellectual crisis through which Judaism has passed and from which it is only slowly recovering is, I believe, this. Cultures can collide. Not all modes of thought are compatible with one another. In their encounter with Enlightenment, Jews met a culture into which Judaism could not be translated. Two systems of thought, each opaque to the other, met in headlong confrontation. One – Judaism – broke into fragments as soon as the attempt was made to transpose it into the language of the other. The history of the modern Jewish mind has been the record of the attempt to hold together two conceptual systems which fundamentally exclude one another. Jewish philosophy has burned brightly these past two centuries, more so than at any time since the days of Maimonides. But it has not been the light of the bush Moses saw in the desert, which burned and was not consumed. Instead it has been the light of a meteor as it enters an atmosphere and begins to disintegrate. Because the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment still exerts its power, it is important to spell out some of the ways in which Jewish faith takes issue with its fundamental assumptions.
Religious knowledge
The history of modern philosophy begins with the moment in the early seventeenth century when Descartes raised the question. What can I know with absolute certainty? What can I not doubt? Descartes’s famous answer – “I think, therefore I am” – is less important than his objective, to ground knowledge on the foundation of certainty. For three centuries thereafter, philosophy was to be driven by the quest for demonstrable knowledge whose two paradigms were science and logic.
The consequences for religious faith were immense. To be sure, Descartes himself still retained God at the centre of his system. But this could not last for long. It soon became evident that if everything was open to doubt, so too was religious faith. Immanuel Kant established that existence – even God’s existence – could never be the subject of logical proof. Darwin’s theory of evolution suggested that there were other ways of explaining the apparent order of the universe than by purposeful creation: the operation of chance and necessity might produce the same result. Within a century, Kant and Darwin had overthrown the two most powerful theological “proofs” of the Middle Ages: the ontological argument and the argument from design. Neither reason nor observation led inescapably to God; and these were, it seemed, the only reliable sources of knowledge. Theology suffered a blow from which it has not yet recovered. At worst, the positivists concluded, statements about God were unverifiable and therefore meaningless. At best, they were private expressions which lacked objective reference. Faith became, as H. L. Mencken put it, “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
Judaism was not unaffected by this revolution. Medieval Jewish philosophy, most notably in the case of Maimonides, had offered metaphysical “proofs” that now bear the mark of their time. But what is fundamental and in retrospect deeply significant is that philosophy as such was always a marginal Jewish undertaking. In the first century it was undertaken by Philo of Alexandria, but not by the rabbinic sages. In the twelfth century it was subjected to a fine critique by Judah Halevi. The philosophical work of Maimonides has remained controversial for eight centuries despite his unquestioned pre-eminence as a halakhist. In the modern period Samson Raphael Hirsch, Samuel David Luzzatto, Abraham Kook, Joseph Soloveitchik and Michael Wyschogrod all expressed sharp reservations about Maimonides’s Aristotelianism. Judaism has consistently had an uneasy relationship with philosophy. Why so?
At the core of Judaism is faith in God not as a concept but as a person. This is an idea impossible to translate into philosophical categories, ancient or modern. For if God is the Platonic, timeless source of all being, how can He be involved in the shifting contingencies of the human situation? How can He be moved by human pain or prayer? How can He be present at some times, and at others “hide His face”? How can He have a will expressible in finite commands? How, above all, can God love – not in the abstract, but in a way significant to human beings as individuals. How can God love not just man-as-such, but particular persons and peoples in their uniqueness and individuality? That God does love, care, command and choose is Judaism’s most monumental claim. For Judaism God is more than the cause of causes or necessary being, concepts explorable by science or metaphysics. God is a person, for only if God is a person does the universe hold objective meaning for human beings as persons.
For Judaism, the search for religious certainty through science or metaphysics is not merely fallacious but ultimately pagan. To suppose that God is scientifically provable is to identify God with what is observable, and this for Judaism is idolatry. To suppose that His existence can be logically demonstrated is to make God the subject of necessity – that which could not be otherwise – and this too is a denial of Judaism’s ultimate beliefs. Nor is this twentieth-century apologetics. It is a consistent theme of the Bible itself. God cannot be represented, imaged or conceptualised. He is “I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be.” Even Moses, greatest of the prophets, is granted a glimpse only of God’s “back” for “man may not see Me and live.”
The idea that God might serve as an explanatory hypothesis is sharply parodied in the book of Exodus. The Egyptian magicians, unable to reproduce the plague of lice, declare, “This is the finger of God.” God here becomes a quasi-scientific hypothesis. Such, so the Bible suggests, is how He appears to a pagan culture. Even Maimonides, who more than anyone else in the history of Judaism saw science and metaphysics as routes to the love and fear of God, explicitly reversed the conventional relationship between philosophy and faith. We philosophise, he wrote, because we are commanded. The first command, for Maimonides, is to know that God exists; therefore we must pursue knowledge, for all truth leads to God. But the command precedes the pursuit. “Hearing” and “obeying” precede philosophical “knowing.” Philosophy for Maimonides is not what it was for Plato or Aristotle: an independent discipline with its own self-sufficient justification. It is a religious duty, a means to an end. Even Maimonides’s conclusion is stunningly minimalist. Philosophy can tell us only what God is not, not what God is.
Because God is a person, we can know God only as we know persons: through relationship. The key categories of Judaism are all relational: hearing, obeying, covenant and command. None designate God in Himself. All speak of God in His relationship with man. God, as Martin Buber put it, is a being who can be experienced only as a Thou, never as an It. This, Judah Halevi wrote eight centuries earlier, is the difference between the God of Abraham and the god of Aristotle. God cannot be known, comprehended or compassed through magic or myth, philosophy or science. At most, argued Halevi, one can through such means arrive at knowledge of that aspect of God that the Bible describes by the word Elohim, meaning the cause of causes or the force of forces. But one cannot thereby arrive at knowledge of God as a person, the bearer of a proper name, God as He acts in history and reveals His will for the human situation, the God who loves and evokes love. Such knowledge arises only through revelation, “hearing” and prophecy. Greece, says Halevi, had philosophers. Israel had prophets.
As a result, the word “faith” in Judaism does not signify a mode of knowledge or belief. It is, above all, a form of moral commitment. To have faith is to trust that God will honour His word, and to be loyal in honouring the word given by man. The Bible sets out in the sharpest possible way the contrast between cognitive certainty yielded by logic or the senses, and moral certainty that the word, once given, will not be retracted. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are promised as many children as the stars of the sky, the dust of the earth and the sand of the seashore. But each must live with the childlessness of their wives. They are promised the land of Israel, but must endure as strangers and exiles. Moses is charged with bringing the Israelites to the promised land but must die on the far side of the Jordan. The prophets have faith in divine justice but must live in a world where evil reigns, the righteous suffer and power is the hands of the oppressor. Faith is the ability to live with moral certainty in the face of cognitive uncertainty. To have faith is to have the courage to resist the two great spiritual temptations of wishful thinking on the one hand and nihilism on the other: the illusion that the world is at it should be, or despair that the world – this world – can ever be as it should. It is to have trust in the promise and loyalty to the covenant. It is to believe that the word spoken will come to pass, but not without trust and effort on the part of man.
Halakhah and autonomy
This was not an idea that made sense in terms of the post-Cartesian philosophy of knowledge. But of yet greater consequence for Judaism was the philosophy of ethics. Here the seminal figure was Immanuel Kant. For it was he who shaped the modern conception of ethics to the extent that, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes, for many “who have never heard of philosophy, let alone of Kant, morality is roughly what Kant said it was.” But Kant was a devastating critic of Judaism. He saw it as an antiquated system of law and ritual which was opposed to religion and ethics as he understood it. It was a criticism that could not be ignored, for many Jews had the same admiration for Kant that Maimonides had for Aristotle. Much of modern Jewish thought is, explicitly or implicitly, an attempted reconciliation between Kantianism and Judaism. Therein lies its tragic failure, for it too cannot be done.
Kant’s most revolutionary idea was that of autonomy. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he argues that all previous efforts to discover the “principle of morality” have been mistaken. Morality was seen as a set of laws external to the agent, and the question therefore arose: Why should one be moral? But any answer to this question is self-defeating. For if one has a reason to obey the law – hope of reward or fear of punishment – then one’s action is not moral but pragmatic, a matter not of principle but of self-interest. The fallacy lay in seeing morality as externally imposed (heteronomous) law. Instead it is imposed by the agent himself. Morality is necessarily autonomous. In so far as we are moral, we are each legislators of our own morality. It is this principle which more than any other lies behind liberal arguments on homosexuality, abortion and euthanasia, namely that we have an inalienable right to determine what we will do with our bodies and lives. More specifically, it rules out absolutely a central concept of Judaism, that there can be a revealed morality in the form of commandments and the halakhah. Judaism was, for Kant, a prime example of an externally legislated and thus heteronomous and impure moral system.
Judaism rejects the Kantian argument because it sees morality, like language, as an essentially shared enterprise, a phenomenon not of individuals but of communities and societies. It cannot be reduced to private moralities made by autonomous decisions. Judaism’s central virtues – justice, compassion, righteousness and the pursuit of peace – are concerned with collective rather than individual beatitude. A society of autonomous moralities would resemble the state of affairs described at the end of the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel: everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That is a description not of moral law but of moral chaos.
Indeed in the absence of divine law, it is likely that a civilisation will arrive at the condition of humanity before the Flood: corrupt and full of violence. Eichmann, chief executor of Hitler’s Final Solution, stated at his trial with unmistakable sincerity that he had been guided throughout his life by Kant’s moral precepts. Judaism views law as the essential vehicle of righteousness; but it cannot be mere human law. During the Third Reich the greatest German philosopher of his time, Martin Heidegger, declared that “The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and law.” Against this Judaism insists that human law is always subject to divine law, and that since God desires righteousness, law is His single most important revelation to man. It is divine law which binds commoner and king, which bids the rich to attend the cry of the poor and the powerful to heed the needs of the powerless; a law which must sometimes be enforced, for not all men are moral but morality binds us all.
To be sure, the rabbis valued autonomy in the sense of moral action as an end in itself. One might perform a command “not for its own sake,” but the ideal was to do so “for its own sake.” Maimonides defined the proper service of God as being “impelled by no external motive, neither by the fear of calamity nor by the desire to obtain benefit.” It is instead to “do what is truly right because it is truly right.” In one remarkable passage the Talmud suggests that when God gave Israel the commandments, He suspended Mount Sinai over their heads and warned that if they did not accept the covenant, they would die. On this Rabbi Acha bar Yaakov commented, “This constitutes a strong objection to the Torah.” The heteronomous character of revelation threatened to undermine its binding force. Nonetheless, continues the Talmud, the Israelites later accepted it in the days of Esther and Ahasuerus.
What Judaism rejects is the simple either/or of heteronomy or autonomy. Instead it sees moral development, both for a nation and for individuals, as a gradual transition from one to the other, from externally to internally imposed law. So seriously, indeed, did Judaism regard the requirement of autonomy that it held that a Jew is duty-bound to study Torah all the days of his life, until its imperatives became part of his personal vision and character.
So Judaism was sensitive to the claim later raised by Kant and included it within its system of values. But this does not imply that Judaism is compatible with Kantian moral philosophy. It is not. For while both systems recognise the claim of autonomy they assign different priorities to it. Kant takes it to be determinative of morality. Judaism does not. Instead it insists on the primacy of divinely revealed command over morality as self-legislation. It believes that like language, moral behaviour has objective rules (in the case of Jews, the halakhah) which are progressively internalised by the individual in his course of moral education. Neither Torah as revealed command nor halakhah is translatable into the terms of Kantian ethics. Kant himself was in no doubt about this. Here was one conflict between Judaism and modern ethical thought.
Universality and covenant
But there was another. For Kant added a further stipulation to his definition of morality. A moral judgement must be universal in scope. We must, says Kant, “be able to will that a maxim of our action should become a universal law.” This was the rational requirement of moral consistency. I may, for example, be tempted to break a promise. But I cannot consistently will that all people should break their promises, for if so, no one would trust anyone else’s undertakings and the institution of promising would collapse. Thus stated, the doctrine has self-evident logic. But it rules out most of Judaism’s commands. For many of them relate specifically to Jews. Judaism is not a universal faith. It is the religion of a particular people. Its commands do not apply to everyone. Seen from a Kantian perspective, therefore, they fail the test of morality.
As with autonomy, the rabbis had long before accepted the thesis of universalisibility. To the rules which applied to man as such, they gave the name of the “seven Noachide commands.” Indeed, according to the eleventh-century sage Rav Nissim Gaon “all commands which are dependent on reason and human understanding have been obligatory for all humanity since the day man was created on earth.” It is possible that Judaism might recognise a distinction on Kantian lines, between commands that are “moral” and thus universal, and those which are, in Saadia Gaon’s term, “traditional” (i.e. dependent on revelation), for which no complete rational explanation could be given and which were binding only on Jews. Moses Mendelssohn seems to have argued along these lines, distinguishing between “revealed legislation” which applied to Jews and “universal propositions of reason” which applied to humanity as such.
A more convincing account of Judaism, however, is that it takes a quite different view of morality. Morality is rational, but reason is not the source of moral obligation. That lies in covenant, the agreement on the part of humanity to be bound by certain laws. There can be a hierarchy of covenants, not all of which are universal. The covenant between God and Noah creates duties towards all mankind as “the image of God.” The covenant between God and Israel imposes further duties, between Jews and God and between Jews and one another as members of a community sharing bonds of collective responsibility. Morality, then, is grounded in formally binding relationships, some of which are universal, but not all.
Kant’s theory is only one, and not necessarily the most plausible, account of the moral life. For it fails to explain why certain duties which we regard as moral are not universal but highly specific. Michael Wyschogrod provides us with one case which merits reflection.
In the devastating 1976 earthquake in Communist China there was a report of an incident in which a father insisted on rescuing a local Communist officer rather than his child, whose moans he heard but ignored in order to save the official, whose social value he placed above that of his son. By the time he returned to the wreckage in which his son was buried, he found him dead. The Chinese Communist press pointed to this incident as an example of proper Communist behaviour.
Here was an act that was justified on Kantian and, as it happens, utilitarian grounds. The father made no distinction between persons in favour of his son, and he acted to secure the most beneficial consequences for society as a whole. Nonetheless one might legitimately feel that the father was deficient in some important moral sense.
Judaism suggests a different account of morality, according to which the sense of obligation is born in primary relationships – within the family, for example – and gradually extended to the community as a whole and beyond that, to those who lie outside the community. On this view, it is perfectly intelligible that members of a covenantal community might owe special duties to one another. The moral crux, however, would be how the community treats the outsider, the one who is a “stranger,” not a “brother.” The Torah itself consistently emphasises the duties to love and not oppress the stranger “because you were yourselves strangers in the land of Egypt.” Rabbinic law extended the obligation of charity and compassion to non-Jews, regardless of race or faith, on the grounds of “the ways of peace.” Judaism, then, is not an abstract moral system grounded in reason, but rather a revealed moral tradition grounded in covenantal relationships and the historic experience of powerlessness and suffering. Its universality grows out of its particularity. This was not a view that recommended itself to Kant. But it is difficult to see how Kantian theory can give a satisfactory account of actual moral traditions and communities.
