The Way I See It: Jewish thought has a place in modern secular education

The Way I See It: Jewish thought has a place in modern secular education

BY GREGORY KAPLAN
The Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies

On Feb. 21 the Department of Religious Studies hosted the 2008 Rockwell Foundation Lecture Series. The topic of the symposium, “Rethinking Leo Strauss: Judaism, Politics and Philosophy,” is relevant to a course I am presently teaching about ethics in Judaism and provoked in me some thoughts.

GREGORY KAPLAN

The symposium was aimed at salvaging the good name of a 20th-century German-Jewish political philosopher, Leo Strauss, who is known as a father of neoconservatism. As the neocons have been blamed or credited for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Strauss’ reputation has sustained abuse. 

Our symposium featured presentations and discussions by two scholars who have each published important new books on the topic. Steven B. Smith, the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Leora Batnitzky, professor of religion at Princeton University, challenged the audience to take another look at Strauss. 

It made me think about how Strauss and the study of Judaism might apply to many disciplines within modern secular undergraduate university education. 

Religion and politics

Certainly one of the most pressing questions today is how to confront terroristic behaviors fueled by the sentences of ancient tradition. Not surprisingly, the Jews and Judaism, arguably both victim and source of such terror, offer perspective on what Strauss called our ”theological-political predicament.” 

Strauss’ inspiration for that phrase came from Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza, who posed such questions as: What problems do the contradictions between public goods and private rights disclose or instigate? What could lead to the terrorized and terrorizing demand for certainty that we now terrifyingly call ”security”? Is the commitment to survival any less illusory than salvation?  In raising these questions, Spinoza remains our contemporary.

Even today the organization and dissolution of human societies demonstrate how the Jews and Judaism are caught in the middle of their material survival and its spiritual aspirations (see, for instance, Zionism). Indeed, Jewish thought has persistently occupied a fragile position in between reason and revelation, what Strauss called a tension between Athens and Jerusalem. Jewish thought admits that Torah and prophets rely on trust and discipline, whereas Homer and Plato advance curiosity and inquiry. And the postsecular condition we inhabit returns us to the problem in Jewish thought of differentiating the Jews as a type of ethnic people and Judaism as a mode of religious participation. 

Short of containing a particularistic religious hierarchy to the private sphere, but assuming it to have a public role, how could it resist forcing itself violently upon a universal claim to equality that any hierarchical scale of values would deem indifferent, even immoral?  Here the social sciences will encounter familiar issues treated distinctively in Jewish thought.

Philosophy and linguistics

I have come to learn how critical it is to read closely and carefully texts that are not only critical for the Jews as a traditional people but also critical of Judaism as a religious aspiration.

Students often ask me what Judaism teaches, but I have no easy answer. When asked to explain Judaism on one foot, a first-century rabbi famously proclaimed, ”That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow: That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary; now, go and study.” 

However, Jewish study of religious texts requires some degree of membership in a community of readers. That raises the fair question of whether children of a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother, as well as adherents of new religious movements called ”Jews for Jesus” are Jewish. The question ”Who is (not) a Jew?” is a philosophical-cultural one involving questions of personal identity, language and history. 

Jewish philosophy does not evade the facts but wonders how they relate to values, assuming that facts and values are not strictly identical.

Moreover, since a text and its interpretive possibilities lie at the core of Judaism, linguistic research is a central feature of Jewish thought. A history of thought that obtains a continuous line of transmission from at least the second century to the 21st century cannot be appreciated without the ability to read foreign and sometimes inactive languages. By the same token, reading these languages takes on a human value only when something valuable is lost in misreading them. 

But the assessment of such value is made not by the finer parsing of a word but by the more comprehensive understanding of the world, and this requires also critically questioning whether a living, breathing Jew can or should live up to the standards of a tradition which aspires to more than the Jew’s survival. In Jewish thought, therefore, the many facets of the humanities — from aesthetic appreciation to empirical analysis to critical reflection on values — productively converge.

Law and technology

The new frontier of Jewish thought does not appear at the crossroads of theology and science, as it often does for Christian thought. The creationist-evolutionist debate is not a lively one in Judaism, because the difference for Jews between the alternatives is relatively inconsequential.

Already in the 12th century, Moses Maimonides had suggested that belief in the creation of the world by God (as opposed to Aristotle’s arguments for the eternity of matter) only makes a difference to the Jew because it supports the justice of the commandments issued by that God at Mount Sinai, and not because it has theoretical (or scientific) advantages. 

By and large, Jewish thought rests far less on propositions and coherent theories than on guidelines and effective practices. Indeed, the honing of legal judgment in the Jewish tradition often parallels the honing of technical procedures in Greek physician Galen’s medical trials, Francis Bacon’s experiments and cutting-edge digital computations. History shows that Jews have influenced technology and that technology has influenced Judaism. 

Yet Jewish thought also probes how the technical activities of Jews resemble and differ from the lawful actions in Judaism. What does Jewish thought tell us about gene therapy, data mining or robotics? 

Rice’s own professor, Baruch Brody, has made a superior case for why medical ethics follow the cased-based reasoning familiar to anyone who has read the rabbinic literature of the Talmud. Or, ask Professor Moshe Vardi how the invention of a technical device allows his religiously observant father to travel to the synagogue on Shabbat, in a seeming violation of halakha, or Jewish ritual law. If engineering wishes to garner more public support and guidance in crafting its priorities, then it may profitably take a look at Jewish thought.

There are places, too, I know, where science, music, architecture and business meet in Jewish thought. However, I leave that thought to your imagination and also to further conversations I hope we may have across our university’s open campus.

–“The Way I See It” is a special guest column written by faculty, staff and students at the invitation of the Rice News.