Writings

Recovering the God of History:
Scriptural Life after Death in Judaism and Christianity*

Peter Ochs
University of Virginia

for Jews & Christians, People of God, A Theological Conference of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, Augsburg College, June 2001

Where is God in our lives after the horrors of the Holocaust—or of what we prefer to call the Shoah (Hebrew for "total destruction")? Today, few Jewish thinkers seem prepared to talk again of our relation to a God of history. Of those who do speak of God, most refer only to a God of ethics or of creation: a God of principles, rather than one who is personally engaged in our social and political histories. For most who do speak of God, it seems too frightening to speak anymore of a God of history: the one whose covenant with Israel (our name for "the people Israel") renders God an inseparable partner to Israel's salvation history. It seems too frightening, because such a God would also have been God during the Shoah, and, in trying to comprehend that fact, we might have to undo the scriptural and rabbinic grounds of our faith.¹ Redescribing the God of Israel as a God outside of history is therefore a strategy for retaining faith when the alternatives seem too terrible to comprehend.

Only Job's sorry comforters would be unsympathetic to those who adopt this strategy. It honors the creature's own God-given instinct of self-preservation—preserving psychic health in the face of potentially traumatic reflections on what may appear to be divine violence or indifference, let alone divine emptiness. But our sympathy must have a time-limit. In the long run, the strategy would prove to be as damaging to the Jewish people as a whole as it may, in the short run, have been protective of one generation's psychic health. In the long run, the strategy replaces Biblically grounded theology with a form of instrumental reasoning that serves the needs of a particular time of mourning, but that cannot prepare the people Israel for renewed life after mourning, which is nothing less than a life after death.

Belief in resurrection is a central doctrine of the rabbinic Judaism that has guided Israel since the destruction of the Second Temple. This is a Judaism that renewed its life after the death of Israel's biblical institutions -- Temple, priesthood and a national cult in the land of Israel—and that has the theological resources to renew itself after Israel's partial death in our own time. Removing God from history would, however, remove God from the economy of resurrection: condemning Jews to a life without rebirth, not only of the body, but also of the soul, and not only of individuals, but also of the people Israel as a whole. The soul of the people Israel is its faith. In a manner of speaking, this faith did die in the Shoah. Without a God of history, who is with us in our death, however horrible, as well as in our life, I fear there is no way for our faith to be brought back to life. And, if it is not brought back to life, then I fear there is no new life for Israel, for I cannot identify the entity "Israel" without referring to the God in covenant with whom we are Israel.

If there were no renewal for Israel, I cannot imagine how there could be renewed life for the Church. This is because I do not know what Christianity means without Israel, whose life demonstrates the faithfulness of the God of Israel and, thus, of the God whom the Church knows in Jesus Christ. My fears on behalf of the Jewish people therefore lead me to have fears on behalf of Christianity as well. My Christian colleagues in this symposium have already taught me about the centrality of Israel to the life of the Church; I trust they will therefore share my concerns about Israel's health, for their sakes as well as mine. I do not yet know what they will say about what I am calling "the renewal of the Church." If they teach that the Church is not renewed periodically—even in times like these, after modernity and after the Shoa—then they may still affirm the arguments I offer in this essay about Israel in particular. If they do think of the Church as experiencing periodic renewal, then they may also find analogues in Christian salvation history for at least some of my suggestions about the place of renewal and rebirth in Jewish salvation history.

Reading Scripture (again) is to Read Scripture in History

I have three relatively simple syllogisms to offer about why and how the Jewish people should rediscover the God of history. The first syllogism offers a general guideline: (a) We Jews know the God of Israel only by way of our reading of Scripture (specifically, TaNaKh, or the canonical book of Torah, Prophets [nevi'im) and Writings [khetuvim]); (b) We read Scripture as Scripture only when we read it from out of our immediate communal and historical context, which means as the words of Torah whose meanings are guides to our immediate lives; (c) We therefore know the God of Israel only as the God we know through our efforts to find in Torah a guide to living, today, in our immediate communal and historical context.

Combining this guideline (as major premise) with a certain observation about modern Judaism (as minor premise), the second syllogism offers a basis for understanding this generation's loss of the God of history: (a) We Jews know the God of Israel as the God of history through the way we study Scripture from out of our immediate communal and historical context; (b) But long before the Shoa, modern Jews fell out of the habit of reading Scripture, this way, as Scripture (or Torah). They read Scripture, instead, as a record of what they considered "past events" and "traditional beliefs," and neither past events nor traditional beliefs contained any precedents for knowing God from out of the context of Shoa, as total destruction; (c) After the Shoa, the theologians of modern Judaism were therefore unprepared to consider the God of Israel the God of this history of Israel. They therefore tended either to speak of Israel independently of God, or to speak of God independently of Israel in history.

The third syllogism displays the lesson that follows from the first two, and by now this should be obvious: (a) In fact, Jews do not yet know the identity of the God who was God during the Shoa, because they have not yet studied Scripture from out of the context of that terrible time. (On the whole, they have, instead, applied to that context their records of previous times of study.); (b) In order to encounter the God of Israel once again after the Shoah, Jewish theologians must study Scripture, anew, from out of the context of Shoah and of the life of Israel after Shoah. Most of us who write Jewish theology today did not live through the Shoah and cannot therefore rely on our own Torah study alone as the source of our acquaintance with the God who was the God of Israel during the Shoah and is our God today. Most scholars of Torah who lived through and survived the Shoah have not written theological works; (c) In order to write Jewish theology today, those of us who did not live through the Shoah must therefore re-examine Scripture through the witness of Torah scholars who survived the Shoah, who studied Torah during and after the Shoah, and who have left us some evidence of their theological reflections. I believe we must regard this evidence as our evidence of the Torah's own witness to the Shoah and, thus, of the Torah's witness to the identity of God during the Shoah.

To review, the formal argument that shapes this essay is that we know the God of Israel only by studying Scripture; that Scripture is studied as Scripture, or Torah, only when it is studied from out of the immediate historical context of the life (and death) of Israel; that the God we know in Scripture is therefore always the God of Israel's history; that, to renew Judaism today, we must renew the people Israel's relation to the God of history—which means its relation to the God who was God during as well as after the Shoah; that, to renew Judaism, Israel must therefore resume its rabbinic practice of studying Scripture as Torah by studying the witness of Torah itself to the Shoah; and that this witness is available to us only in the theological reflections of Torah scholars who studied Torah during and after the Shoah. Few of these scholars survived the Shoah, even fewer have written theological reflections, and even fewer are still with us today. I believe that our capacity to renew Judaism depends, in part, on our success in locating these scholars and examining their words as witnesses to the identity of our God.

This formal argument defines two tasks: recovering Judaism's practice of reading Scripture as Torah and re-encountering the God of Israel's history in that reading. This essay introduces the first task: how to read Scripture again. The second task remains the subject of a much longer project.²

Rereading Torah Through the Witness of David Weiss Halivni

I could not offer more than the preceding, formal argument, if I had not encountered the talmudist and Auschwitz survivor David Weiss Halivni and discovered, in his corpus of writings, an illustrative witness to the life of Torah during and after the Shoah and, thus, to the identity of Israel's God. Guided by that formal argument, I have concluded that, whatever else I think and believe, my studies of Jewish theological renewal must have their basis in a witness like his. But what if other witnesses differ from his? And what if other students of Halivni's read his witness differently than I do? I read his witness as a reading of Scripture, which means that I regard my own reading of Halivni as a commentary on a reading of Scripture. As I will suggest during this essay, to study Scripture as Torah is to study its words as possessing a depth that cannot be plumbed by any single reading.³ I expect Halivni's witness to belong only to a particular context of reading; all the more so, I expect my commentary to reflect only one sub-reading. But, to the degree that these readings remain true to Torah, they should retain enough of the depth of Torah that their own words both clarify what they should clarify and also signal the depth that remains to be clarified by others in other settings. In the words of the rabbinic sages, "one word issues as many meanings"⁴ but also "deep speaks to deep," ⁵ which suggests that the deep also speaks directly to a level of our comprehension that itself remains deep, or irreducible to clear and distinct propositions.

This essay's study of how to read Scripture again after Shoah begins with Halivni's reflections on what it meant to study Torah during and after the Shoah. The reflections are cited from his Holocaust memoir, The Book and the Sword, but my commentary draws on his broader corpus of writings, from his on-going magnum opus, Mekorot u'Mesorot ("Sources and Traditions," in Hebrew)⁶ to his English-language theological and hermeneutical writings, most recently Revelation Restored. ⁷, ⁸ My commentary addresses two questions: as exemplified in Halivni's work, how is it possible to study Torah in and after a time of death? And what patterns of Torah-study may guide us in the renewal of Judaism after death? To explore the latter question, I adopt Halivni's way of reading Torah as a model for re-reading a brief series of Scriptural texts. My commentaries on these texts address two questions once again: how is it possible, in light of the Shoah, to study these texts as Torah? And what patterns of Torah-study are recommended by these texts, as we re-read them in this light? Our answers to these questions complete this brief study, suggesting how it is possible to renew the study of Scripture after Shoah, and therefore after a time of Israel's destruction and death. I then return to the question of Christianity, asking what Christian theologians would learn from the example of Israel's renewal through Torah study.

Rereading Scripture After Modernity

Before we begin, one more word is in order about why Israel needs to learn how to read Scripture once again. The Shoah did not itself break Israel's habit of reading Scripture as Torah. Israel appears to have lost its habit, instead, because most of those who may have known how to read perished in the Shoah, and most of those who remained had already learned from both modern and anti-modern Judaism how not to read.

The modern period of Jewish civilization has been marked by an increasing division between communal religious life on the one hand, and academic study of Scripture, on the other. Gradually, the late medieval and the modern academy segregated what it considered the scientific study of Scripture from what we might today call the "performative" dimensions of Scripture, or the ways that scriptural texts present themselves as commanding behavior. Academically trained theologians gradually followed suit, qualifying the performative dimensions of Scripture as strictly "confessional" or "subjective" and therefore outside the bounds of extra-denominational, formal study and criticism. At the same time, Jewish and Christian congregations not guided by such academics tended to pursue a contrary path: excluding academic, or academic-like, scholarship as vehicles of formational scriptural study. The result is a crisis in the modern study of Scripture: where congregations tended increasingly to read Scripture naively, as a mirror of their own theological presuppositions; and academics tended increasingly to read Scripture without heart, which means independently of its consequences for congregational or communal life. Independently of such consequences, Scriptural texts and commentaries appear only as records of past events and beliefs.

In these terms, modern Judaism—and I trust my colleagues would say the same of modern Christianity—tends to replace the drama, or happy tension, implicit in classical Scriptural study with an unhappy dialectic, or battle, between what appear to be opposing forces of scientific criticism and uncritical communalism. The alternative to this dialectic is not some Biblical monism, but the drama of scriptural reading that is evident in the classical rabbbinic literature (or, for Christians, early Church and patristic literature) and that I trust we will see replayed in Halivni's work. This reading is both faithful and critical at once: addressing the historical realities of the day from out of a tradition of scriptural reading that will yield specific meanings and commands only as it meets the challenge of speaking directly to those realities.

How To Read Scripture Again In A Time After Destruction

Scriptural reading begins again not with the text of Scripture itself, but with the context out of which it was written. To learn how to read Scripture again as Scripture, the first lesson is, ironically that modern Jews must learn again how to read themselves. To redefine their lives through the text of Scripture, they need first to re-read the concrete details of their own history as part of the story of Scripture. Our own reading of Scripture begins, therefore, with a reading of The Book and the Sword, Halivni's prototypical reflection on a Jewish "life of learning in the shadow of destruction."

The purpose of this memoir is to define myself spiritually in the light of the Holocaust. . . . My spiritual self is learning ... as a highly stimulating pursuit permeated with divinity. Therefore I do not dwell too much on cruelties. I merely hint at them. The only cruelty that asserts itself again and again... is the gassing, ...which still overwhelms my imagination.⁹

Halivni writes of his childhood, spent as a child prodigy in Talmud study in a Hungarian town of Sighet; of his teenage years, spent in slave labor camps, in Ebensee and Auschwitz; and of his adult years as a scholar of Talmud. His decision finally to write this book, so many years after the events, indicates his finally being prepared both to become a public witness to the events and, I believe, to ask, prayerfully, for the theological significance of the dreadful epoch in which he shared. The warrant and direction for my writing this essay comes only from their being such a witness. In Halivni's study of Talmud during the years of Shoah—and in his oral teaching in the labor camps—I understand the Torah itself to have been present, literally, as a witness to the Shoah. In the way he studied Talmud after the Shoah, I understand the Torah to have displayed one illustration of its response to the Shoah. I say these things literally, because I am speaking of the historically situated reading of Scripture to be the presence of Scripture, as Torah, in the salvation history of Israel and, thus, to be the means through which God makes His presence known in this history. For the overleaf of his memoir, Halivni composed a contemporary midrash that indicates, before any other words of recollection and reflection, how Scripture both continues and transforms itself through his witness.

The sword and the book came down from heaven tied to each other. Said the Almighty, "If you keep what is written in this book, you will be spared this sword; if not, you will be consumed by it" (Midrash Rabbah Deuteronomy 4:2). We clung to the book, yet were consumed by the sword. ¹⁰

Halivni's text has many levels of significance. At the center of the text is a verse from the classical rabbinic midrash, or interpretation, that comments on the Biblical book Deuteronomy, in this case, commenting on a text from Isaiah that is read as commentary on Deuteronomy: "If you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword" (Isaiah 1:19). But, before and after the rabbinic verse, Halivni has composed his own commentary: an ironic and tragic commentary on the rabbinic reading of Isaiah. "Follow this book," say the Rabbis, "and you will live." "We did," says Halivni, "and we died." Halivni's textual performance is very brief in words, but profound in significance. The significance can only partly be located in the relationship between his own sentence and the plain sense of the rabbinic sentence. In its plain sense, Isaiah has offered a bit of Deuteronomic theodicy: you are rewarded for following God and punished for disobeying. The rabbinic midrash appears to raise the stakes of Isaiah's claim but without, in this instance, subverting the theodicy. The book will save you or it will condemn you. But Halivni's text subverts the plain sense of both the Biblical and rabbinic texts in the same manner as most rabbinic midrash subverts the plain sense of the scriptural text it is commenting on.

A more typical example of this phenomenon is the rabbinic commentary that is often placed at the head of the texts from Pirke Avot ("Ethics of the Fathers") that appear in the daily prayer book, or siddur:

All Israel have a portion in the world-to-come, as it is written, "your people shall all be righteous, they shall possess the land forever; they are a shoot of My planting, the work of My hands in whom I shall be glorified" (Isaiah 60:21). Mishnah Sanhedrin X:1

One must imagine that the historical setting of this midrash from Mishnah Sanhedrin is a rabbinic reflection on the site of the destroyed temple in Jerusalem, some time in the early second century. Imagine how a rabbinic sage would read the passage from Isaiah while gazing on the site of that ruin. He would have to read the plain sense of the scriptural text as counter-factual evidence either that the people Israel is no longer Isaiah's people Israel, or that God's promise is not fulfilled, or perhaps something even worse. The historical facts run counter to the plain sense. In one brief sentence, the rabbinic midrash restores a meaningful relationship between the word of God and the people of God in history by both subverting the plain sense and reaffirming a "deeper" sense of the Scripture: a discovery that the time of the promise is in "the world-to-come," not in this world of destruction. It is in the world-to-come that Israel will possess the land forever and will fulfill their portion as the shoot of God's planting. The "world-to-come" is not an explicit phrase in the Bible. By re-reading various Biblical tropes as types of the world-to-come, the rabbis uncover a dimension of the divine word that is addressed specifically to the historical context of Israel's life after destruction (in this case, the Destruction of the Temple). The disclosure of this dimension of Scripture heals what would otherwise be a rupture in Israel's relation to God. It heals by uncovering a word (the world-to-come) that coheres with the other words of Scripture but that appears at this time as the "new word" that both repairs apparent contradictions in the scriptural tradition and offers Israel a way to act meaningfully, once again, in a world that would otherwise have lost touch with the scriptural source of meaning.

We see, in this way, how the rabbis read Scripture as Torah. They read it, first, out of the anxiety of a moment in history that would seem to interrupt history as they know it. They turn to Scripture as a source of guidance in such moments but then discover in it words that seem, on one level, to undermine their faith in the very source of this guidance. But they read on because the plain sense is not all there is to Scripture; their traditional memory of what certain verses have meant in the past does not exhaust all there is to learn from those verses. This unhappy moment of encountering Scripture as counter-factual witness to the events of the day is therefore not extraneous to Scripture; it serves as the reader's entrée into Scripture's deeper dimensions. Moved, by suffering, to seek these dimensions, the reader becomes agent of the renewal of scriptural meaning (chidush) through which Scripture becomes the agent of God's renewing the community of Israel after moments of historical crisis and destruction. That Scripture is the word of God that renews Israel is therefore an axiom of the classical practice of reading Scripture, as is the understanding that this renewal does not mean "adding on to revelation" but only drawing out of the words of revelation meanings that were previously hidden but that have now found their time for disclosure. To read Scripture is therefore to renew Scripture as well as to renew the life of the community of readers.

Returning to Halivni's own practice of rabbinic midrash, readers may now see how Halivni's text re-enacts the rabbis' innovative practice of reading, rather than simply citing it. As is evident in this case, to re-enact the rabbis' practice of reading may mean to subvert the plain sense of previous instances of it: honoring one's ancient teachers, one might say, by appearing to disagree with them. In this case, the historical reality of the Shoah contradicts the plain sense of the rabbinic midrash in Sanhedrin. The Jews appear to have been punished rather than rewarded for their fidelity to the book. In a more recent publication, Halivni traces out the ultimate implication of his reading: the Deuteronomic theodicy can in no way apply to Israel's suffering in the Shoah, since Israel's death in the Shoah contradicts the terms of divine reward and punishment as set out in the Biblical Covenant.¹¹ I cannot take the time here to discuss the theodicy Halivni offers in its place, providing a new-old vision of the God of Israel's history without which I believe Israel cannot renew its history. But this vision of God is inseparable from the method of scriptural reading that engenders it, so that our study of Halivni's scriptural method should itself provide us with a sufficient glimpse of the force of his new vision.

This glimpse is best captured through Halivni's phrase "we clung to the book." For Halivni's reader, there is already more to say than that "we clung... yet were consumed," since the memoir is itself testimony to its author's still clinging to the word even after "we were consumed." The word is resurrected—and his word is alive-- even though "we died." In classical rabbinic midrash, the Biblical text stands, counter-factually, over-against the present historical reality of destruction: the word promises, the reality condemns, and the midrash restores the promise by disclosing a word behind the word. In Halivni's midrash, the historical reality of destruction contradicts the rabbis' promise, and the promise is not restored. What is restored can only be described as a promise behind the promise, and this is the life of scriptural reading itself: the word spoken, the word contradicted, the word re-read, the re-reading contradicted, the re-reading re-read.... Since it is Israel who re-reads, this is also the life of Israel, who clings to the book, who dies, and who is resurrected clinging to the book.

Since the rabbinic model of Torah reading includes the subversion and recovery of the meaning of Torah, Halivni's clinging to the rabbinic practice engenders the possibility of his practicing a reading that subverts rabbinic Judaism itself—in its plain-sense -while at the same time renewing it. If so, this briefest illustration of Halivni's reading would illustrate the following lessons of "reading Scripture again after destruction":

Lesson 1: Scripture is present to us only through the practice of reading Scripture as Scripture. In this sense, Scripture is itself the narrative of salvation history, because it is history that is disclosed through the heart-mind-and soul of a member of the people Israel who has suffered this history and has narrated it through his or her own reading of Scripture. In other words, Scripture becomes salvation history when we read Scripture as both a witness to the sufferings of our present day community and as yet an undisclosed response to that suffering.

Lesson 2: Salvation history continues in post-Biblical times, because the reading of Scripture as Scripture remains Israel's access to God throughout history, and because this reading always renews Scripture. To renew Scripture means to both restate the words of Scripture and also to re-enact the generative process of Scriptures disclosing the revealed word of God. In other words, post-Biblical salvation history is history disclosed through the scriptural reading of a member of the people Israel who has suffered and has narrated it. There is, therefore, an analogy between Scripture and the writings of each witness to salvation history, which writings both imitate Scripture and renew or interpret it.

Lesson 3: To study Scripture as Torah is to engage in study as an activity of prayer—specifically, the kind of prayer that appeals to God in responding to ultimate crisis of the day. In other words, to pray for help is to re-read the plain sense of Scripture in the face of a historical reality that appears to contradict those words. To achieve an innovative, or Midrashic, reading of Scripture as Torah is to have received an answer to one's prayers: to have received a transforming vision of the God who appears to condemn Israel in history is now the God who may again redeem Israel in history (even if, as Halivni's words will suggest, Israel's work must itself contribute to this redemption). There is, therefore, no reading of Scripture as Scripture without suffering, nor without the expectation that there is one who will redeem us from this suffering.

There are several corollaries of Lesson 3:

Lesson 3a: The redeemer to whom we pray must also be the One who created this world in which we suffer and the One whose revealed word is disclosed through our reading of Scripture. (For only a God who created our world could also redeem the suffering we experience in it.)

Lesson 3b: There must be some relationship that binds the Creator-Revealer-Redeemer to those who read Scripture in this prayerful way, otherwise there would be no warrant for this prayerful study. In the language of rabbinic Judaism, this relationship bears several names, among them: Creation (that binds creature to Creator), Torah (that binds Israel to the Revealer), and Covenant (that binds Israel to the Redeemer God of history).

Lesson 4: Yet the Shoah exceeds the conditions of suffering that prompt prayerful study in the tradition of rabbinic Judaism.

I cannot derive this last lesson as an inference from any text or experience or principle but must derive it only from what I learn from Halivni's witness and other witnesses like him. "We clung to the book, yet died by the sword." What the Torah promised is contradicted by experience, and what the rabbis learned from this contradiction is now contradicted by Halivni's experience. The implication must be that his experience confounds the logic of prayerfully studying Torah, for he has experienced the absence of God's redeeming presence and has no clear reason to anticipate God's redemption in the future. Perhaps this is why he wrote his memoir so many years later. But he did write it and wrote it prayerfully. That is his contradiction, but his writing may wrest a new form of prayerful study from this contradiction. He named his memoir The Book and the Sword after an image of his own making, composed in the manner of rabbinic commentary on Scripture, but through an inversion of the rabbis' own reading of Scripture. As reader of his composition, I am led to suspect that contradiction is inherent in his exegetical and theological method. And I take the time to derive lessons from his method, because, once having perceived these lessons in his salvation history, I find reason to read them into analogous histories that bear witness to each of the horrible destructions in Israel's history. These extend from his witness back through the history of Israel's sufferings in Europe, through the prototypical rabbinic witness to the Destruction of the Second Temple, to the prototypical biblical witness to the Destruction of the First Temple. And, in each case, I can, in light of his work, now re-read the Jewish literatures that follow each of these disasters as comparably contradictory: ironically prayerful monuments to God's absence as Redeemer. These contradictions seem somehow to mark the path of Jewish salvation history and, while I can in no way understand this path, I -also ironically—cannot imagine our recovering Jewish religious life after the Shoah through any other path.

Not insightfully, therefore, but with anguish, learning only from what I have been shown, I therefore turn to derive a few more lessons from Halivni's witness.

Lesson 5: To study Torah prayerfully, but after a major destruction of the people Israel, is to anticipate redemption but in a way that contradicts what explicit Jewish tradition would lead one to expect.

Recognizing this contradiction entails two corollaries:

Lesson 5a: Study after destruction requires drawing a distinction between the plain-sense of Torah (peshat) and the interpreted sense (derash) that is disclosed through the present study itself. The peshat may stand counter-factually over-against the reality of our historical condition; the derash redeems (affirming that, despite what appears to be the case, God nevertheless redeems and that witnesses like Halivni are therefore not wrong).

The plain sense, you see, appears to be contradicted by present day experience. Therefore, classical rabbinic study distinguished between the plain sense of Torah as Scripture -with its contradictions—and the rabbinic derash that offers a means of resolving the contradictions in its time of witness. Subsequent study, at least study after the Shoah, may also draw a distinction between the plain sense of rabbinic derash and the study that now re-interprets derash as well.

Lesson 5b: One must account for the role of the interpreter and the interpreter's community in re-reading the plain sense brought forward by the tradition. Redemption despite destruction is not achieved through additional revelations to individuals, nor by simply returning to previous readings, nor by jettisoning the past.

There is no doubt that both the classical rabbinic sages and Halivni's community of interpretation brought something to the study of Torah that contributed to the new sense of Torah that emerged through their interpretations. But it is as yet not at all clear what they brought and how it relates to the process of prayerful study. We will see, later, that modern scholarship—and the anti-modern reactions against it- both founder in their efforts to follow this corollary. Some interpreters founder by imagining that, in such times of great change, their individual, new readings are authorized by some direct revelation from God. In imagining this, they ignore the uncertain presence of God's redeeming hand in times of terrible destruction and overlook the significance of what they themselves bring to their studies after destruction. Other interpreters founder by imagining that their study requires no innovation, but is fully guided and warranted by the plain sense of previous traditions of study. These interpreters ignore the aporias and uncertainties that belong to the conditions of prayerful study after destruction. A third and final group of interpreters founder by imagining that their new readings are determined solely by autonomous reasoning, fully independent of prior traditions or of divine presence. These, I am afraid, ignore most of what we have already said about the prayerful character of this study and of its place in the traditions of Scriptural study.

Let us turn, then, to three prototypical sets of texts in the Jewish tradition of prayerful study to see what we have so far only intimated: that, both despite and in light of its innovations, Halivni's witness both imitates and re-interprets prior Jewish witnesses to salvation history.

Texts of Distress

At a quicker pace, I would like first to overview all of the distressful aspects of these histories of destruction:

1. Mitzrayim: Bondage in Egypt

The Israelites groaned in their bondage and cried out and their cry for help because of their bondage went up to God. (Ex 2).

We may say that this is Israel's witness to its primordial event of loss: marked by exile, enslavement, and the dissolution of the patriarchal/matriarchal, Abrahamite religion.

2. Chorban: First Destruction

I reared up children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. . . . The Lord's anger burns against his people. (Is. 1)

How solitary sits the city, once so full of people.
Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks . . . .
Jerusalem has become unclean. (Lam.1)

Here is witness to Israel's paradigmatic destruction: the burning of Israel's Temple,the end of its monarchical theo-polity and political independence, the exile of its priests and intellectuals to Babylonian captivity.

3. Chorban: Second Destruction

An image dominates even more than a text: the Burnt Temple (70-71ce); Jerusalem razed and salted (135ce). But texts abound:

When Rabbi Joshua looked at the Temple in ruins one day, he burst into tears. "Alas for us! The place which atoned for the sins of all the people Israel lies in ruins!" (from Avot de Rabbi Natan 11a, in Machzor for Yom Kippur, J. Harlow).

It was decreed for Israel that they study words of Torah in distress, in enslavement, in wandering and in uncertainty, suffering for lack of food. (Midrash Eliayahu Rabbah)

These late midrashim present themselves as witnesses to the destruction that marks the emergence of our Judaism, which is rabbinic Judaism. The Biblical promises are broken, so it seems. "Because of our sins, we are exiled from the land." Galut. The end of direct Biblical jurisdiction over Israel's life.¹²

Scriptural Reading as a Witness to Destruction

The plain-sense meanings of this first set of scriptural texts offer textual evidence for our first five lessons about scriptural reading. Each scriptural text gives witness to a period of Israel's terrible suffering, disclosed by way of Israel's heart-mind-and-soul rather than only its physical—or journalistic-eyes. Each witness is therefore also a form of prayer, since it refers the suffering to Israel's relation with God and elicits the reader's concern about the past and future character of this relation. The overall sequence of these texts both within and beyond the corpus of the TaNaKh suggests several new lessons:

Lesson 6: Israel's salvation history-including its Scriptural record -- narrates destructions of its entire theo-political order and not merely of its population.

Placed in a sequence, we read narratives of the end of Israel's patriarchal/matriarchal order, of its monarchical order, and of its priestly order.

Lesson 7: Israel's salvation history narrates a spiral of destructions: that is, both a cycle of destruction and some progressive change in the character of these destructions as Israel witnesses them. They are characterized by progressive changes of explanation, moving from the amoral (Egypt), through the moral (First Chorban), to account of both "sin" and mere "fate" (Second Chorban).

In the Exodus account, Israel suffered without apparent sin. It prays (cries) for help, and God hears and sends a redeemer. In prophetic accounts of the first Chorban, Israel suffers for its sins, but also suffers beyond measure. As very briefly sampled here, late rabbinic accounts of the second Chorban both imitate features of the prophetic accounts of Israel's sins and also add a new voice: Israel seems fated to its suffering as if there were no apparent reason for it. The second Chorban appears to challenge Israel's relation with God in unforeseen ways.

Lesson 8: As witness to its terrible destructions, Israel's scriptural readings therefore appear to mark the termini of identifiable epochs in Israel's relation with God as that relation is embodied in all of its theo-political, theo-societal, and theological institutions.

We thereby arrive at what might appear to us as an awe-ful response to our prayerful inquiry into the meaning of this past century of destruction. While this is apparently our worst experience of suffering, periods of destruction like this are not unprecedented in Israel's salvation history, and there is -God help us!—no scriptural warrant for our assuming this sad cycle of history has ended. There is scriptural warrant, however, for our reading the epoch of Shoah as the terminus of a particular epoch of Judaism: what we might call the epoch of modern Judaism. Let us consider the implications of this possibility.

The End of Jewish Modernity

If the bodies of the people Israel were destroyed in the Shoah, Israel's religion had already been sent into spiritual exile two hundred years earlier: not destroyed, but separated into the dialectical poles of Jewish modernism and ultra-Orthodox anti-modernism. These poles define present-day Judaism, as well. This is why, if we remain within the dialectic of modern Judaism, there is no hope for rebirth and thus no means of ending our traumatic period of mourning for the Shoah.

The nonorthodox Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz, narrates such a history of Judaism as it goes into and out of modernity:

After more than a millennium of ostracism and persecution, European Jews were astounded when the French Revolution signaled a turn to political equality in Europe, including even Jews . . . Emancipation revolutionized Jewish spirituality, for whenever Jews were permitted to modernize, they did so avidly, and uncomplainingly accepted its accompanying secularization.

The startling effects of this fundamental shift of cultural context cannot be overemphasized. Freedom from segregated existence brought on a transition from a life oriented by revelation, tradition, and a sense of the holy to one in which religion became privatized if not irrelevant or obsolete. This ...meant that, as the realm of religiously neutral activity expanded, the twin questions of Jewish identity and continuity became increasingly troublesome. Jews began to ask, "What does it mean to be a Jew today? Why should one undertake its special responsibilities?"¹³

By what criteria would modern Jews now choose which aspects of their Jewishness to retain and which to discard? According to Borowitz, modern Jews chose criteria offered by Western, enlightenment sources rather than traditional, rabbinic sources: sharply separating private and public spheres; relegating religion to the private sphere; and adopting, for the public sphere, the rules of scientific reason, modern statehood, individual rights, and universal ethics.¹⁴ For Borowitz, however, this "Jewish modernism" also contained the seeds of its own self-negation, since it represented a particular form of social assimilation that could not over time adequately serve the people Israel's covenantal norms of community and traditional religious law:

As the twentieth century waned, doubts about modernity's beneficence arose throughout Western civilization. People were profoundly disturbed by the deterioration of the quality of life... The Enlightenment, the intellectual credo of modernity, had promised that replacing tradition with rational skepticism, hierarchy with democracy, and custom with freedom would bring messianic benefit -- and certainly it hasn't.

On a much deeper level, this loss of confidence in Enlightenment values has come from the collapse of its philosophical foundations. All the certainties about mind and self and human nature that once powered the bold move into greater freedom now seem dubious.¹⁵

There is no simple alternative, however, since the dominant theologies that supported pious practice in the modern era emerged as reactions against Jewish rationalism rather than as transformatory responses to it. I do not mean that pious practices are reactionary—they share, rather, in the timeless dimensions of Torah as a way of life; I am referring, instead, to the reactionary forms of orthodox argumentation that were developed to defend such practices against secular critics. Examples include popular Hasidism, as well as the varieties of esoteric kabbalism that lie behind it; Neo-Orthodoxy, when it appears only as a means for traditionally religious Jews to make use of the socio-economic vehicles of life inside of modern civilization; and the expanding varieties of contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy, combined in Israel with political or ethnic nationalism. These orthodoxies tended to replace Jewish religious tradition with the idea of it: that is, they tended to replace the humanly unpredictable evolution of traditional Jewish life and law with artificially constructed systems of communal and hermeneutical order.

There is therefore reason for us conclude, sadly, that there is no way for Jews to move beyond the dialectic of modernity without allowing its inner logic to die. From this perspective, a salvation history of Israel's death in the Shoah may indeed mark the terminus of the epoch of modern Judaism. To acknowledge the fact of Israel's physical death in the Shoah is to acknowledge the incapacity of modern Western civilization to prevent this death. If so, this is to recognize that, unredeemed, the modern West—which includes modern western Judaism and Christianity -- offers no home for us; it is a place of death.

The salvation history of our day therefore reiterates the narratives of Israel's previous destructions, marking the end of a moment of our collective life. There is also a significantly new feature in our history, however, which you may have sensed already. In all of Israel's previous narratives of destruction, Israel suffered alone, facing by itself the end of one epoch of its civilization. This time, however, the end of modern Judaism may very well parallel the end of modern Christianity as well. This is, at least, the lesson I learn from an expanding circle of powerful Christian theologians who work at the centers of their respective church communities, but who are also at the center of a potentially transformative movement of post-liberal theology. Let us turn next to consider their significance of their work for our studies of both scriptural reasoning and religious renewal today.

But the end of Modern Judaism is also the end of Modern Christianity

The dominant voices in the circle of post-liberal Christian theologians are in fact included in this symposium: George Lindbeck and Robert Jenson are two of its most established and influential voices in theology, Kendall Soulen one of the strong new voices in scriptural theology—and I trust Richard Neuhaus, Carl Braaten and also Robert Wilken and David Burrell would not mind being included in the circle as well. (And it may be noteworthy that this movement is led by Lutherans, in the United States and Germany. Most of the other strong contributors are Catholics [with Lutheran ties], Anglicans [in the United Kingdom] and Methodists. And Karl Barth is the theologian cited most often by all them.) Together, and along with a supporting cast of students and colleagues throughout the United States and Europe, these theologians have shown the people Israel that it is not alone, neither in facing an end to one of its epoch, nor in drawing on its Scriptural sources as resources for possible religious renewal. I am not suggesting that Judaism and Christian are united or unified in this transformative moment in Israel's salvation history. But I am appealing now to the beliefs that drew both David Novak and me to the projects of Dabru Emet and Christianity in Jewish Terms¹⁶: that, in an historically unprecedented way, this circle of Christian theologians has helped lead the Church to a qualitatively new epoch in its relations with the people Israel; that this movement renews in radical ways Christianity's commitment to its sources in Israel's covenant, history, and Scripture; that this Christian renewal signals the potential terminus of the modern epoch of Christianity, including both its liberal and its reactionary, anti-liberal aspects; and that a post-liberal Christianity is partner to the Judaism that is emerging now after destruction. This means partner in renouncing and seeking to repair and redeem the moribund civilization of the secular, modern West and, therefore, partner in the scriptural reasoning that may serve as an instrument of this redemptive work.

From the perspective of my reading of Judaism after Shoah, I read the works of my Christian colleagues in this symposium as witnesses to the renewal of Christianity after Shoah and after modernity. This leads me to derive from their writings a series of six lessons in "Christian Scriptural Reading" that parallel the eight lessons I have offered about Jewish Scriptural Reading. I do not, in fact, presume that my Christian colleagues would assent to my drawing these lessons from their work. I frame these lessons only as my way of sharing an appreciative Jewish reading of their Christian teachings and of inviting their responses to these questions: Would they find it meaningful to speak of their work, as I have, as contributing to a "renewal of Christianity?" It is controversial enough to read Jewish salvation history, as I have done, as a story of the cycles of Judaism's death and resurrection; would it be more—or less—controversial to speak analogously of the cycles of Christianity's renewal?

Some Jewish Lessons about Christian Scriptural Reading After Modernity

Lesson C-1: Christian Scriptural Reading After Modernity is, for one, a critique of the dualistic and dichotomous character of modern Christianity. Modern Christianity fails in its efforts to correct and redeem the imperfections of premodern Christianity, because its efforts perpetually divide into mutually exclusive alternatives. One locates the sources of correction in received traditions (unchallenged by critical inquiry); the other locates them in the self-validating claims of certain individual critics. The latter alternative is sub-divided again, between the self-validating claims of Biblical literalists and of autonomous reasoners (or conceptualists). ¹⁷

In his book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Hans Frei, of blessed memory, introduced a highly influential genealogy that traced this dualism, in particular, to the work of 18th century Lockians and neologians.¹⁸ Following their lead, most modern Christian thinkers became what he called "mediating theologians," who sought to mediate the two poles of received and revealed knowledge, but always in favor of the revealed. Advocates of revealed (or what some call foundational) knowledge divided, in turn, into advocates of the literal sense of scripture and of autonomous reason. Lindbeck contributed to and extended this genealogy, and his book, The Nature of Doctrine, is perhaps the most well known manifesto of scriptural reading as a form of Christian theology.¹⁹ Jenson's recent, two volume Systematic Theology also joins in this genealogical critique and extends it into a project of what we might call trinitarian scriptural reading.²⁰

According to both Lindbeck and Jenson, the mediating theologians' inner divisions generated modern Christianity's sterile and destructive battles between the religion of liberal academia and fundamentalist or literalist orthodoxies. Jenson argues, in Volume 1 of the Systematic Theology, that modern theologians have failed in their efforts to unify a divided Church and that this division threatens the life of the Church itself. Divided among themselves, furthermore, the modern theologians tend to be dominated by advocates of autonomous reason over scriptural tradition, grace over law and ultimately, the epistemologies of the academy over those of the church denominations. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck argues that academic Christian theologians are themselves divided between "propositionalist" and "experiential-expressivist" tendencies. One group argues that the doctrines that govern Christian lives can be disclosed in clear and distinct statements that are either true or false. The other group argues that what God wants of us is disclosed, ultimately, to the individual heart, and enters into public discourse only probatively, hypothetically, and relative to the contexts of interpretation. Modern Christianity has failed to locate any successful method for mediating between these two models, or, all the more so for repairing the divisions of Christian church and Christian academy.

Lesson C-2: Christian Scriptural Reading does not simply reject the various poles of modern theology, but it redeems them by drawing them back into relation by way of the divine word that, alone, is their mediating ground. This is the word of Scripture: of the Old Testament, of the Gospel narrative that interprets its meaning for the Church, and of the chain of subsequent literatures that interpret this meaning, specifically, for subsequent communities of the Church: from the Pauline letters to the Patristic commentaries and on to the contemporary commentaries and theologies that re-generate Christian scriptural reading. Academic scholarship, including historical-critical studies, has a proper-and necessary—place among this chain of interpretive literatures; it is simply not privileged over other modes of scholarship.

In Jenson's words, the error of the mediating theologians was to think that their own reasonings could unify the divisions of the Church. For Jenson and Lindbeck and all other post-liberal Christian scholars, God alone is mediator, in the presence of Jesus Christ as disclosed through the texts and interpretations of the Gospel narrative. ²¹

Lesson C-3: Christian Scriptural Reading therefore renews/resurrects the premodern tradition of Christian scriptural theology, but in a way that both encompasses and transforms the practices of the modern Christian academy and modern Christian congregational life.

As resources for their theological work, these Christian scriptural readers draw, at once, on historical-critical studies of the Bible and of Christian salvation history; on their participation in community-specific practices of Christian life; and on tradition-specific and academic disciplines of reasoning. No one of these resources dominates the other, because the Word that guides this reading belongs irreducibly to the triune life of God. Trusting in this Word, Lindbeck can therefore say that historical-critical scholarship protects the Church against denominational mis-readings of the Gospel, without betraying what he considers his own Christian orthodoxy. And Soulen—as well as Jenson and Lindbeck—can, with comparable assurance, offer far-reaching ethical, hermeneutical, and source-critical arguments against supercessionist exegeses.

Lesson C-4: As both a means and a consequence of renewing/resurrecting Christianity's primordial traditions of scriptural theology, Christian Scriptural Reading renews/resurrects Christianity's identity with the people Israel, and fosters a new relationship of the Church to contemporary Judaism.

As evidence, I would cite the contents of this symposium as a whole. Here are some sample citations from Lindbeck:

One need not be a theologian or even a Christian believer to suspect that the Christian communities which have the greatest chance of survival and success will in the long-run be those which understand themselves as Israel in continuity with the catholic tradition and in commitment to ecumenical unity. ²²

The roles of the two Torahs and of rabbinic commentaries in Judaism ²³ are not without value for resolving church-dividing Christian differences over the inter-relationships of the two Testaments and of church tradition. ²⁴

Lesson C-5 which is also Lesson 10 (for Judaism): Thus, finally, Christian Scriptural Reading suggests that, like Jewish salvation history, Christian salvation history can also include cycles of renewal. Since these mark certain ends of history, but not final ends, we might label them "meantime-endtimes," that is, times that qualitatively end one epoch of Christian salvation history and initiate a subsequent one. Like Judaism, Christianity might experience this time after modernity and after Shoah as a time of renewal, change, and revival. This lesson about Christian Scriptural Reasoning may, therefore, contribute a new lesson to Jewish Scriptural Reading: that Judaism as well as Christianity experiences meantime-endtimes in its salvation history. In the present day, moreover, we may say that both Jews and Christians are entering one of these meantime endtimes, characterized this time by parallel and inter-related forms of scriptural reading, which redeem the failings of their modern epochs by re-engaging modern scriptural reading with its premodern sources.

This may be the most challenging claim of this essay. It suggests that popular distinctions between Jewish and Christian eschatologies should be modified. In popular Jewish understanding, Christianity looks to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as fulfilling Jewish eschatology: that we are now in the endtime for which Jews prayed, but that this endtime is temporally thick, extending from the time of Christ's resurrection to the time of a second and final coming. This meantime, the time of the church, would be an eschatologically homogeneous time, a time of bringing the world to realize what the Apostles have already beheld. In popular Christian understanding, Judaism looks to the long run of future history as the time of bringing humanity from this world of sin and suffering to the time of messianic fulfillment. This time, the time of Israel's history, would also be eschatologically homogeneous, a time during which the world comes to know the God who created the world and spoke the Torah. The typical conclusion is that Christianity believes it lives in the endtime; Judaism does not.

Lesson C-5, which would apply to Jewish as well as Christian scriptural reading, revises these popular beliefs without necessarily contradicting them. According to this Lesson, both Judaism and Christianity participate in temporally extended meantimes that are not eschatologically homogeneous. These meantimes are, instead, marked by "meantime endtimes," or disruptive moments when the people Israel, within its salvation history, and the Church, within its, may suffer the end of a given epoch of history and also the beginning of another epoch. As noted in Lesson 2, such disruptions are marked by and recorded in the writings of witnesses to salvation history. These writings imitate Scripture itself as the narrative of salvation history, and, according to patterns disclosed within the texts of Scripture, they interpret Scripture within the contexts of their own histories. Thus, both scriptural documents and the written witnesses that interpret them mark what Arthur Cohen called the "caesura of history," the meantime endtimes of salvation history. For both Jews and Christians, the present day may therefore mark a moment of transition: from a time of death to a time that revives each religion, each into an unexpected and new epoch of religious life. Unique, perhaps, in the salvation histories of Judaism and Christianity, these revivals may be taking place together, which means at least in parallel ways and possibly in inter-related ways. Each religion's revival may display parallel and possibly inter-related forms of scriptural reading, while applied to different scriptural traditions and with differences of detail and theme. From this perspective, the previous or modern epoch seems to be characterized, in particular, by the disruption of premodern patterns of scriptural reading. If so, then the revival of scriptural reading might itself be one significant feature of the epoch to follow modernity.

Will Christian theologians accept these claims? One of Jenson's essays, "Toward a Christian Theology of Judaism," ²⁵ may provide a Christian prooftext of at least one aspect of Lesson C-5: that Christians and Jews may live in parallel meantimes. Jenson writes,

In general, the two (Judaisms), the one the Judaism of the rabbis, and the other the church, were born and made their way through history in a kind of lock step and in theological and structural mutual mirroring.²⁶

This means, he says, that the time of the church is neither the final endtime nor independent of the end time:

The time of the church is after all not a piece of the kingdom, we do not now enjoy the final vision of God. Yet neither is the time of the church simply a continuation of this world's history. The time of the church is a time within the advent of the Christ to fulfill Israel's history. ... Until the last judgment and our own resurrection, the Christ has not yet come in the way that consummates Israel's mission. ... God institutes the church by not letting Jesus' resurrection be itself the End, by appointing the famous "delay of the parousia." ²⁷

The church is, in this view, a detour that mirrors the detour that is rabbinic Judaism: in Jenson's words, "Christianity should interpret continuing Judaism as another such detour occupying the same time as the church, paired with the one that is the church for reasons which may even be in some part knowable."²⁸ I believe this leaves out only one feature of Lesson C-5. Jenson does not say explicitly that, during this meantime, both Christianity and Judaism may enter non-final endtimes. I infer, however, that the practices of all the postliberal Christian scriptural readers warrant such a claim, at least for the present day. Lindbeck, Jenson, Soulen, and also Wilken, and I believe Braaten and Neuhaus—and I could add Stanley Hauerwas and Bruce Marshall, and Daniel Hardy and David Ford over in the UK—all promote a Christianity that is freed from the dualisms and divisions of modern Christianity as well as from modern and premodern anti-Judaism and supercessionism. Is this not to acknowledge epochs within Christian salvation and meantime ends and meantime beginnings?

If the God of history is to reenter Jewish theology and renew Jewish life after Shoah, then, I believe, Jews need first to understand this time after Shoah and after modernity as a non-final endtime, through which one cycle of Judaism has died and another must be born. I say "must be born," because Jews cannot be passive vessels of any rebirth, but only active participants. A rebirth of Judaism is found only in the renewal of Jewish scriptural reading. Effort, will, and works are not sufficient for this renewal, but they are necessary elements: the work of reading and study, of contributing to the communal practice that makes such study possible, of attending prayerfully to our historical condition, and of awaiting the word through which this condition may be redeemed. A symposium like this makes us sense that, this time, the Jews may not be alone in their waiting.

Epilogue: Texts of Resurrection and Revival

The scriptural texts that initiated our study of scriptural reading were texts of distress that served as prototypes for the people Israel's latest and most horrifying encounter with destruction. By now, however, our study has led to the expectation that such an encounter could also be followed by an epoch of religious revival. Are there scriptural prototypes for such a revival, as well? Let us conclude this study by revisiting the same three sets of texts and observing how, within them, distress and death is replaced by revival and resurrection.

1. Mitzrayim

The Lord continued, "I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters." . . . "I have come down to rescue them. . . . I will send you." Moses said, "Who am I that I should go?". . . He said, ehyeh imach, "I will be with you." . . . "Thus shall you say to the Israelites, 'ehyeh sent me to you'" (Ex 3).

The patriarchal/matriarchal religion of Abraham died in Egypt, but it was reborn as the Mosaic religion of the God whose Name is with Israel in its suffering, and whose word unites the people of Israel under the legislative force of Torah.

2. Chorban: First Destruction

But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, Seed of Abraham my friend—You whom I drew from the ends of the earth. . . . To whom I said: You are My servant. . . Fear not, for I am with you. . .
This is My servant, whom I uphold, My chosen one, in whom I delight. I have put My spirit in him, He shall teach the true way to the nations.. . .
Who formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I will redeem you. ... You are Mine. (Is. 41-43)

Ezra opened the scroll in the sight of all the people, for he was above the people; as he opened it, the people stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with hands upraised. Then they bowed their heads. . . . Jeshua, Bani. . . and the Levites explained the Teaching to the people, while the people stood in their places. They read from the scroll of the Teaching of God, translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading. (Neh: 8:4-8).

The religion of monarchy and prophet died in the First Destruction. In the very place of exile, however, in Babylon, the religion of Israel was reborn as the religion of second Isaiah, Ezekiel and Ezra: a religion of scribal priests who would redact and re-teach the Torah as well as maintain it, and whose re-teaching would gradually become the legislative voice of Torah within the Second Commonwealth.

3. Chorban: Second Destruction

All Israel has a place in the world to come, as it is written, "Your people shall all be righteous, they shall possess the land forever; there are a shoot of My planting, the work of My hands in whom I shall be glorified" (Is. 60).
Moses received Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, the prophets to the members of the Great Assembly. . . .

Simeon the Just was one of the last members of the Great Assembly. He used to teach: The world rests on three things: on Torah, on service to God, and on acts of lovingkindness. (Pirke Avot 1)

Hillel taught: Do not separate yourself from the community. . . Rabbi Tarfon used to teach: You are not obligated to finish the task, neither are you free to neglect it. (Pirke Avot 2)

The religion of Biblical Israel died in the Second Destruction: the religion of Temple service, defined by the literal word of the written Torah and lived by Israel only on its holy soil. The religion of rabbinic Judaism was born in its place: a religion that inherited the Torah teachings of the scribal priests and the central beliefs of their Pharisaic defenders. These are belief in the resurrection of the dead, in life in the world to come (olam haba) as well as in this world, and belief that the Torah that God gave Moses on Sinai displays two and not only one dimension of meaning: the peshat or plain-sense meaning of the Written Torah (torah she b'chtav) and its interpreted and performative meaning, or derash, collected in the Oral Torah (torah she b'al peh).²⁹

NOTES:

* My thanks to Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten for the opportunity to write this essay and to Robert Wilken for encouragement, advice and comment. George Lindbeck and Kendall Soulen offered detailed comments on an earlier version of this essay and I made serious revisions at least in the direction of their comments, from changing the paper's title to making significant additions to the introductory pages and elsewhere. On the basis of Prof. Lindbeck's and other colleagues suggestions, I have also revised the clarifying glosses I offer for each of this essay's "Lessons in Scriptural Reasoning." This assistance from my Christian colleagues reaffirms the closing theme of this essay: that the renewal of Jewish scriptural reading today is inter-related with the renewal of Christian scriptural reasoning.

¹ I will not take time in this essay to review the various theodicies composed by Jewish thinkers after the Shoah: including atheistic responses (such as Richard Rubenstein's), efforts to refer only to the consummate evil of Israel's enemies (such as Eliezer Berkovitz' and Emil Fackenheim's), and efforts to bypass the question, to some degree, by speaking of God's absence from 1939-45 (such as Martin Buber's reference to el mistater, the God who, in Isaiah's words, "hid His face"). Buber's effort is perhaps the most noble of these, but David Halivni has recently composed the most telling response. He writes that el mistater remained a feature of the Deuteronomic theodicy of sin and punishment, since God hid His face in response to Israel's sin, and Buber certainly did not mean to blame the Shoah on the sins of Israel! While I adopt Halivni's witness to the Shoah as the foundation for this essay, I do not take the time here to articulate his entire theodicy. The latter is presented in David Halivni, "Prayer in the Shoah," trans. from the Hebrew by P. Ochs, Judaism 199 Vol. 50 No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 268-291. Before Halivni's work, the most helpful theodicy was offered by Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust," in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV, 1977), 7-55, 441-446.

² The "witness" for this more extensive project is presented in David Halivni, "Prayer in the Shoah."I am at work now on book-length commentary on Halivni's understanding of the identity of God after the Shoah ("Judaism after Shoah: Reflections on the Witness of David Weiss Halivni").

³ For one, Torah speaks to each different historical context in ways that cannot be anticipated but which make themselves known only in that context. For two, the word that Torah offers to each context is also refracted, again, to each particular community in that time, and that means to each collection of different individuals whose interrelations embody that community.

⁴ Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 34a: "Just as a hammer produces many sparks [when it strikes a rock,] so too a single word issues as many meanings."

⁵ "Where deep calls to deep" (Ps. 42:8), which the medieval commentator Rashi reads as "trouble calls to its fellow," which I read as a suggestion that, in the depth of the Psalmist's troubled heart comes his capacity to hear the depth of meaning of a troubled word of Scripture, read in a troubled time, when "like a hind crying for water, my soul cries for You, O God" (Ps. 42:1).

⁶ Sources and Traditions, A Source Critical Commentary on the Talmud (Hebrew), Tel Aviv 1968; Jerusalem 1975, 1982, and continuing.

⁷ Revelation Restored, Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1997). For a more scholarly version of the latter, see "Reflections on Classical Jewish Hermeneutics," Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, Vol. LXII (1995): pp. 21-127.

⁸ For those who may not know his work, let me introduce Halivni in some more detail. Lucius Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization at Columbia University and former head of the Talmud Department of the Jewish Theological Seminary, he is recognized as one of the post-war generation's greatest Talmudic scholars. Until the past decade, when he began to write his theological and methodological studies in English, he was widely known only among Hebrew readers of Mekorot uMesorot- a technical, wondrous play of hypothetical reconstructions of the Talmud text's history of redaction. His recent writings in English have explained how it is possible for one to apply the scientific tools of textual and historical analysis to the Talmudic literature, while, at the same time, respecting the sanctity of that literature as the source of traditional religious practice.

The center of Halivni's overall work concerns the bond between academic rabbinic scholarship and rabbinic practice: a link that he fears is often missing today in both the academy (lest "religious interests" lead scholars to lose "scientific or critical objectivity") and the traditional or yeshivah worlds (lest "scientific interests" lead pious Jews to lose the "purity of Torah"). He observes that academic scholarship that is not connected to rabbinic practice tends to lose contact with the overall purposes of Jewish textual study, as well as with the guidelines for responding to textual questions for which there are no clear-cut, "scientific" answers. He adds, on the other hand, that when yeshivah learning avoids using the tools of critical scholarship, it fails to imitate the talmud torah of the Mishnaic and Talmudic sages, who made use of the powerful interpretive tools of their age to help them discern the subtler meanings of the Torah texts. In this context, one could say that the overall goal of Halivni's work has been tikkun torah as his way of "mending the broken bond" that links Torah study and Torah life. Consistent with this goal, he has devoted his energies to practical, communal work as well as to scholarship. He is cofounder and rector of a rabbinical seminary -the Institute of Traditional Judaism in Teaneck, New Jersey—and he has become Rav of a Shabbat minyan in the Upper Westside of Manhattan (with a growing congregation of observant Jews, many of them students and young professionals). This practical side of Halivni's work is worth noting, because his study of Torah reflects theological judgments that cannot simply be deduced through some formal method of inquiry. His judgments are made by a whole person: grounded, to be sure, in a life of text study, but offered just as intently for the sake of upholding living communities of Jews. To form such judgments, moreover, he has had to reflect on a lifetime of experiences, including those that bring memories of unimaginable suffering.

Halivni spent his childhood in the Jewish community of Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. He was famous for his Talmudic erudition even as a child, and even before his rabbinic ordination at the age of fifteen. But Hungarian Jewry had already begun to suffer the effects of Nazism several years before this, and, later that year, in 1944, he was deported, first to a ghetto, then to Auschwitz, later to the forced labor camp of Wolfsberg, in Gross-Rosen, then to the death camp of Ebensee. His family perished in Auschwitz, and he writes that, of his grandfather's sixty-five children and grandchildren, only five survived the camps. Inside the camps, he continued to teach Mishnah from memory, but, as he recounts in his memoirs, the environment was no longer one in which he could open his mind to new levels of learning Torah [From Peter Ochs, "Preface to David Halivni's Prayer in the Shoah," in Judaism 199 Vol. 50 No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 259-267].

⁹ David Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,, 1996), p. 166.

¹⁰ David Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword, overleaf.

¹¹ David Halivni, "Prayer in the Shoah," trans. from the Hebrew by P. Ochs, Judaism 199 Vol. 50 No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 268-291.

¹² If we were to add the next stage of the salvation history, it could be illustrated by this reading:

4. Galut in Muslim Afro-Asia and Christian Europe, with its refrain of pogrom, forced conversions, and displacements:
Sorest in memory are sufferings in Christian Europe: the massacres of the Crusades, the Expulsion from Spain, the Chmielnicki pogroms of 18the century Poland, the pogroms of 19th-early twentieth century Russia and the then the Soviet Union.

¹³ Eugene Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 3-4.

¹⁴ Eugene Borowitz, Exploring Jewish Ethics (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1990), 26ff.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Dabru Emet ("Speak the Truth," from Zechariah) is the name of a "Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity" that four of us printed in September, 2000 as a New York Times full page ad, signed by one hundred Jewish religious leaders. The statement said that it was time for Jews to take Christianity seriously as a theological dialogue partner. We also published a scholarly book, with thirty Jewish and Christian contributors, that explored the theological background to our statement in greater depth: Christianity in Jewish Terms, eds. T. Frymer-Kensky , D. Novak, P. Ochs, D. Sandmel, M. Signer, (Boulder , Co: Westview Press/Perseus for the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies: Sept, 2000).

¹⁷ As I read them, each of the latter two would subdivide again, in Lindbeck's terms, into "propositionalist and expressivist" varieties of literalists and of conceptualists.

¹⁸ Has Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974).

¹⁹ Among many other sources, see also George Lindbeck, "The Story-Shaped Church: Critical Exegesis and Theological Interpretation," in Garrett Green, ed., Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987): [pp. 161-178]. P. 161. And George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984).

²⁰ Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol.1, The Triune God and Vol. 2 The Works of God (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 and 1999).

²¹ Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol.1: p. viii.

²² George Lindbeck, "The Church as Israel: An Experiment in Ecumenical Ecclesiology," unpub. ms. p.9.

²³ In a note, Lindbeck cites the example of David Halivni's reading of rabbinic Judaism in Revelation Restored.

²⁴ George Lindbeck, "What of the Future? A Christian Response," in Christianity in Jewish Terms: p. 365.

²⁵ Robert Jenson, "Toward a Christian Theology of Israel," Pro Ecclesia IX #1: pp. 43-59.

²⁶ Ibid, p. 50.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 48-9.

²⁸ Ibid., 50

²⁹ If, once again, we were to add the next stage of salvation history, the redemptive texts would be illustrated in this way:

4. Galut in Muslim Afro-asia and Christian Europe, with its refrain of pogrom, forced conversions, and displacements.
God both creates and destroys; indeed, he destroys by creating and he creates by destroying. . . .Consider the comment attributed to R. Abbahu on the verse, " There was evening and there was morning, the first day" (Gen 1) "From here [we learn that] the Holy One, blssed be He, created worlds and destroyed them, until He created these. He said: These give me pleasure, but those did not give me pleasure" (Genesis Rabbah 3)." . .

"According to a bold idea expressed in the Zohar and further developerd in the Lurianic material of the sixteenth century, the first act of divine creativity involves the elimination of the forces of impurity from the Godhead. This act of catharsis of evil is related to the attribute of judgment or divine limitation, which is referred to in the Lurianic kabbalah by the technical term tsimtsum (withdrawal). . . . From this perspective, we can speak of divine suffering at the very core of existence. If God did not sufffer his own death as the infinite, there would be no eixstence outside of the infinite God." (Elliot Wolfson, "Listening to Speak," in S. Kepnes et al, Reasoning after Revelation, Westview, 1998).