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book reviews
books on Judaismreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
books on Judaismreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Why learn about Judaism? Religions are a way for humans to convince ourselves that our fellow humans are something other than evil wild animals. Christianity focuses on salvation, which makes it more evangelistic, while Judaism focuses on preserving its own cultural traditions and rituals. That may be why Spinoza, who speculated about the nature of God—practically an everyday thing in Christianity—was treated as a heretic. The weakness of the ‘tradition’ model, especially one that imagines a caring deity, is that it has more difficulty explaining why he allows terrible crimes to happen. This is the problem of theodicy, which several of the essays in this book discuss.
The subjects of this collection of essays are Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Salomon Maimon, Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, Emil Fackenheim, and Joseph Soloveitchik. Most are described as neo-Kantians, the idea being that the Jewish tradition feels a strong affinity for Kant's universalist humanist idealism.
To a non-religious person, the most interesting religious philosophers are those who hypothesized what their deity must be like. Baruch Spinoza (discussed here) imagined the human mind as a tiny finite part of the Creator's infinite mind. For his trouble he got excommunicated from Judaism in 1656 in “the harshest writ of cherem ever issued,” as one author put it.
The only other one who's mentioned, Joseph Soloveitchik, believed that religion should borrow its methodology from mathematical physics. According to Lawrence Kaplan, Soloveitchik's idea was that God implanted the desire for eternity in the Torah by encoding or ‘contracting’ himself in the Talmudic concepts and laws (called the Halakhic texts). The scholar must use hiddush, a creative interpretation of the legal part of the Talmud, to decode the text into a coherent system with the aim of comprehending spatio-temporal reality. In so doing, he can supposedly reveal the divine presence into the material world.
This divine presence, according to Kaplan, is more like the Old Testament God—fearsome and judgmental—as he is envisioned in Judaism. As with Spinoza's deity, he is also “opaque, obscure and incomprehensible.”
Most of the others, including Hermann Cohen, who advocated merging Judaism into the general culture and moving the Shabbat to Sunday, and Franz Rosenzweig, who said religion must be reconceived as life in a community, treated religion more as a set of rituals and social traditions. The mystical side of Judaism is barely discussed and seems to be a fringe movement: one contributor says Salomon Maimon tried to insult Spinoza by calling his ideas Kabbalistic but only succeeded in making him more respectable.
The authors clearly took great pains to describe their subjects accurately. The chapter on Leo Strauss, for instance, compares favorably to other sources which accuse Strauss, who died in 1973, of somehow causing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Another chapter debunks the pernicious myth, promoted by one online encyclopedia, that Kant was antisemitic. It would be strange indeed that Jewish scholars would hold Kant in such high regard if he was.
Basic information about Judaism isn't included; for instance, many people don't realize that Judaism has 613 commandments (mitzvot) instead of just ten. Most of the contributors do a good job of describing their subjects' views without imposing their modern-day value judgments on them.
jan 13 2025. updated jan 14 2025