Abstract
In this chapter, Wiener Dow explores the way in which individuals—by sharing in time, and, to a lesser extent, space—form community through deed. The halakha thus weds together two areas of the ineffable, communal existence and theological truth, and this understanding renders intelligible key concepts of the halakha. Kiddush Ha-shem, the sanctification of the divine name, lies at the heart of Jewish law because it places paramount import upon the way in which the external observer views the individual’s act. Maḥloket, disagreement, is central to halakha because it allows for divergent understandings of the divine command. The charge of the halakha as communal religious praxis results from the oscillation between inwardness that characterizes the encounter with the Divine and an uncompromising demand of the intersubjectivity of the deed.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative” in Harvard Law Review, Volume 97 Number 8, 1983–1984; see also Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, edited by Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995). For excellent explorations of how the rabbis did this, see Moshe Simon-Shushan, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford, 2013); Barry Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 21 ff.
- 2.
“A generation is growing up in an atmosphere of mere phrases and catchwords, and a kind of go-as-you-please Judaism is being created out of the breath of empty words. Our cries are nationalism, revival, literature, creation , Hebrew education, Hebrew thought, Hebrew labor. … But where is duty? Whence can it come? On what is it to live? On Aggadah ? … What we need is to have duties imposed on us! … We long for something concrete. Let us learn to demand more action than speech in the business of life, Halacha than Aggadah in the field of literature.” Ḥaim Naḥman Bialik , Halacha and Aggadah from Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays, trans. Leon Simon, (Jerusalem : Ibis Editions, 2000), 86.
- 3.
See Steven M. Cohen, Ron. Miller, Ira M. Sheskin, Berna Torr, “Campworks: The Long-Term Impact of Jewish Overnight Camp,” 2011, sponsored by the Foundation for Jewish Camp (FJC). It can be accessed online at http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/details.cfm?StudyID=566
- 4.
Franz Rosenzweig : His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Philadelphia: JPS, 1953), 246.
- 5.
Mishnah Rosh Hashana 2:9.
- 6.
See Chap. 1, note 14.
- 7.
“The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy, and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity .” Abraham Joshua Heschel , The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 14–15. Emphasis in original.
- 8.
“There are two [types of] transfers on Shabbat which amount to four inside, and two which amount to four outside. How so? The indigent person stands outside and the homeowner is inside: [If] the indigent person reaches his hand inside and puts something into the hand of the homeowner, or takes something from [the hand] and brings it outside, the indigent person is liable and the homeowner is exempt. [If] the homeowner reaches his hand outside and puts [something] into the hand of the poor person, or takes [something] from [the hand] and brings it inside, the homeowner is liable and the indigent person is exempt. [If] the indigent person reached his hand inside and the homeowner takes [something] from it, or puts [something] into it, and [the indigent person] brings it outside, they are both exempt. [If] the homeowner reaches his hand outside and the indigent person takes [something] from it, or puts [something] into it, and [the homeowner] brings it inside, they are both exempt” (Mishna Shabbat 1:1).
- 9.
For a longer exploration of these ideas, see my “Shabbat as Holiness in Spacetime” in Kikar Ha-Ir, Volume 2 (Tel Aviv, forthcoming) [Hebrew ].
- 10.
B.T. Eruvin 13b.
- 11.
B.T. Bava Batra 60b.
- 12.
B.T. Shabbat 88b.
- 13.
B.T. Kiddushin 54a.
- 14.
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, (New York: Knopf, 1999).
- 15.
B.T. Kiddushin 40a.
- 16.
Martin Buber writes: “The men in the Bible are sinners, like ourselves, but there is one sin they do not commit – our arch-sin: They do not dare confine God to a circumscribed space or division of life.” The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher Biemann, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 162.
- 17.
In his 1894 essay “Priest and Prophet,” Ahad Ha-‘Am writes: “There are two ways of doing service in the cause of an idea; and the difference between them is that which in ancient days distinguished the Priest from the Prophet.” The Prophet “[i]s essentially a one-sided man. A certain moral idea fills his whole being. … He can only see the world through the mirror of his idea; he desires nothing, strives for nothing, except to make every phase of the life around him an embodiment of that idea in its perfect form.” By contrast, the Priest “[a]ppears on the scene at a time when Prophecy has already succeeded in hewing out a path for its Idea. … The Priest also fosters the Idea, and desires to perpetuate it; but he is not of the race of giants. He has not the strength to fight continually against necessity and actuality. … Instead of clinging to the narrowness of the Prophet, and demanding of reality what it cannot give, he broadens his outlook, and takes a wider view of the relation between his Idea and the facts of life. Not what ought to be, but what can be is what he seeks.” Ha-‘Am, Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-‘Am, 130–131.
- 18.
B.T. Yoma 86a.
- 19.
Franz Rosenzweig , Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gessamelte Schriften, B.1.2, Briefe und Tagebücher, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984, 789 [German].
- 20.
B.T. Sanhedrin 74b.
- 21.
Immanuel Kant , Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Patton (New York: Harper, 1964), 103–107.
- 22.
B.T. Shabbat 64b, Avodah Zarah 12a.
- 23.
Rosenzweig in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 243. Glatzer translates the phrase “aloneness-together,” but I prefer my own “solitude-of-two,” both in terms of its fidelity to the German and in terms of the reality it manages to convey.
- 24.
Rabbi Mordechai Lainer of Icbiza, Mei HaShiloakh , Part I, Parashat Pinkhas, 44a [Hebrew ]. Ariel Evan Mayse has written a number of excellent articles that explore the contours of Hasidic halakha in which these issues are salient. See Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse, “Hasidic Halakhah: Reappraising the Interface of Spirit and Law,” AJS Review 41.2 (forthcoming, 2017); Ariel Evan Mayse, “Neo-Hasidism and the Theology of Halakhah: The Duties of Intimacy and the Law of the Heart” in A New Hasidism: Branches, ed. Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse (Jewish Publication Society/University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2018), and Ariel Evan Mayse, “The Ever-Changing Path: Visions of Legal Diversity in Hasidic Literature” in Conversations : The Journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals 23 (2015), 84–115.
- 25.
Joseph B. Soloveitchik , “Confrontation,” in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 6 (1962). See also B.T. Berakhot 10b-11a.
- 26.
For an excellent secondary source on the matter, see Avi Sagi, The Open Canon: On the Meaning of Halakhic Discourse, trans. Batya Stein (NY: Continuum, 2007), especially Parts 2, 3, and 4.
- 27.
Numerous rabbinic sources, including B.T. Makot 23b-24a, B.T. Horayot 8a, and Song of Songs Rabba 1:2, suggest that at Sinai the Divine only issued forth the first two commandments, those that in fact contain no command but are merely the Divine’s identifying of the Divine self. Later traditions would have it that the Divine only uttered the first word of the commandments “I,” and Rabbi Menakhem Mendel of Rimanov allegedly teaches that the Divine only uttered the letter א [alef] of אנוכי [anokhi]. See Zeev Harvey, “Mah BeEmet Amar HaRebbi MiRimanov al HaAlef shel ‘Anokhi’ in Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts,” ed. Daniel Abrams, Volume 34 (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2016), 297–314 [Hebrew ].
- 28.
B.T. Yevamot 13b-17a.
- 29.
Psalms 119:126.
- 30.
Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, B.T. Berakhot 63a.
- 31.
B.T. Menaḥot 49a-49b.
- 32.
Nearly all treatments of Franz Rosenzweig’s approach to halakha mention his use of the term “not yet” in the context of donning tefillin and fasting (Rosenzweig , Letter to Rudolf Hallo on March 27, 1922), in Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gessamelte Schriften, B.1.2, 765 [German]. However, as I argue in my book U’ve’Lekhtekha VaDerekh, Rosenzweig’s use of the term “not yet” carries with it deeper philosophical and theological implications. See Rosenzweig , Star of Redemption, 184–185 and my U’ve’Lekhtekha VaDerekh: Teoria shel HaHalakha Al Basis Mishnato Shel Franz Rosenzweig (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2017) [Hebrew ], 83–84, 151–156.
- 33.
For a good overview, see Menachem Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, trans. Bernard Auerbach and Melvin J. Sykes (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994), Chapters 21 and 22. See also Chapter 12.
- 34.
“Rav Yosef taught …: If your poor person, meaning one of your relatives, and one of the poor of your city come to borrow money, your poor person takes precedence. If it is between one of the poor of your city and one of the poor of another city, the one of the poor of your city takes precedence” (B.T. Bava Meḵia 71a). See also Maimonides , Mishneh Torah, The Laws of Gifts to the Poor, Chapter 7 Halakha 7 through Chapter 9 for his discussion of how to prioritize the allocation of tzedaka .
- 35.
Emmanuel Levinas , Totality and Infinity : An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 212–215.
- 36.
Moses Maimonides , The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974), Volume Two, 523ff. (Corresponds to Part III, Chapter 31).
- 37.
Thomas Nagel suggests that “since we are who we are, we can’t get outside of ourselves completely. Whatever we do, we remain subparts of the world with limited access to the real nature of the rest of it and of ourselves. There is no way of telling how much of reality lies beyond the reach of present or future objectivity or any other conceivable form of human understanding” [Thomas Nagel , The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6]. Michael Walzer , expanding on both the possibilities and limits of attempts at objectivity, states: “I do not mean to deny the reality of the experience of stepping back, though I doubt that we can ever step back all the way to nowhere. Even when we look at the world from somewhere else, however, we are still looking at the world. We are looking, in fact, at a particular world; we may see it with special clarity, but we will not discover anything that isn’t already there” [Michael Walzer , Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 7].
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Wiener Dow, L. (2017). Shared Spacetime: Community. In: The Going. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68831-2_3
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