Jewish Theology Unbound

333 Pages·2018·8.97 MB·English

by  James A. Diamond

Title Pages
Jewish Theology Unbound
James A. Diamond
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001
Title Pages
James A. Diamond
(p.i) Jewish Theology Unbound (p.ii)
(p.iii) Jewish Theology Unbound
(p.iv)
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research,
scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade
mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© James A. Diamond 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in
Page 1 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Title Pages
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as
expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the
scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University
Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958595
ISBN 978–0–19–880569–4
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith
and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the
materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Access brought to you by:
Page 2 of 2
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Dedication
Jewish Theology Unbound
James A. Diamond
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001
Dedication
James A. Diamond
(p.v) Dedicated to the collective spirit of the Oyneg Shabbes group:
“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the
ground.”
(David Graber, age 19, August 3, 1942, Warsaw Ghetto)
(p.vi)
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Acknowledgments
Jewish Theology Unbound
James A. Diamond
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001
(p.vii) Acknowledgments
James A. Diamond
This is a very different book from others I have published previously and one
that I envision will appeal to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. My
research has always meant much more to me than simply enhancing my
scholarly credentials. That does not mean that I conduct such research with any
less academic rigor, but only that the issues I examine and the thinkers I study
are also existentially critical to me as a human being and as a Jew. Hopefully,
then, this book will speak in turn to all who are invested both academically and
existentially in matters of philosophy, ethics, and theology.
I approach the topics in this book, including the nature of the examined life,
love, death, martyrdom, suffering, relationship with God, the Shoah, and Jewish
homeland, via what is labeled in academic circles as constructive theology. As I
looked over the near-finished product I realized that what I had constructed
began with the centrality of questioning in Jewish theology and ended where all
questioning breaks down. Construction led to deconstruction. Yet, in a time after
the world’s most profound philosopher could also be a Nazi, a time when faith
could no longer be placed in philosophical clarity, one thing became absolutely
clear to me. It is that the spirit which animated the Oyneg Shabbes group in the
Warsaw Ghetto to persevere in thinking, creating, writing, and recording,
despite unfathomable physical and emotional deprivation, is the guarantor of
Jewish, and indeed human, survival. That spirit is resurrected every time a
novelist writes a short story for which he is condemned to a gulag, when a poem
is composed knowing of the torture and forced labor that will ensue, and when
diaries are kept by those awaiting execution for the capital crime of independent
thought. I therefore dedicate this book to that collective spirit whose legacy of
some 35,000 pages will forever commemorate it.
Page 1 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Acknowledgments
Spirit, of course, cannot endure without embodied life. History has taught us of
the particular existential precariousness related to Jews as a people. In its short
life, the State of Israel has proven itself to be an essential guarantor of Jewish
existence in all its dimensions. This book therefore extends beyond its initial
ending in darkness to a vibrant Jewish future secured by a homeland that is, in
the words of my late teacher Emil Fackenheim, so “astonishing that the more it
is explained the deeper the astonishment becomes.” May our astonishment
become ever deeper until history consummates in a world united by knowledge
that fills it “like the waters that flow to the seas.”
Earlier versions and parts of some chapters originated in previous publications
and I thank the publishers for permission to incorporate them into this book:
Shalem Press, “Love’s Human Bondage: A Biblical Warning,” Azure: Ideas for
(p.viii) the Jewish Nation 44 (Spring 2011), 41–60; “Constructing a Jewish
Philosophy of Being Toward Death,” in Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First
Century: Personal Reflections, ed. Aaron Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), 61–80; “The First Debate over Religious Martyrdom,”
Jewish Review of Books 4/2 (2013), 37–9; —“The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe:
Diverting God’s Gaze from a Utopian End to an Anguished Now” Modern
Judaism 30:3 (2010) pp. 299–330 (Oxford University Press).
Thanks to Adina Gerver for her expert editorial skills and Karen Raith at Oxford
University Press for her professional shepherding of the manuscript toward
publication. It is an honor to be included in the prestigious Oxford catalog of
scholarly works. Special thanks are due to the Templeton Foundation and the
Herzl Institute for choosing me as a Herzl Institute/Templeton Foundation
Fellow, and for their gracious support of my research as part of the Jewish
Philosophical Theology project. It is a rare privilege to have been a member of
the group of esteemed scholars who were my colleagues in the project, including
Josh Amaru, James Arcadi, Craig Bartholomew, Melis Erdur, Lenn Goodman,
Berel Dov Lerner, Alex Sztuden, Shmuel Trigano, Shira Weiss, Jacob L. Wright,
and Joshua Weinstein. I am particularly indebted to Alan Mittleman for his
invaluable suggestions throughout.
Engaging conversations over the years with Kenneth Seeskin, Menachem
Kellner, Aaron Hughes, John Efron, Shaul Magid, Steven Kepnes, Gershon
Greenberg, Kenneth Green, David Novak, Albert Friedberg, James Kugel, Irwin
Diamond, and David Diamond left their mark. I thank them for those as well as
their friendship. I want to particularly express my deep appreciation to Yoram
Hazony for the opportunities to conduct our ongoing dialogue in Israel, whose
very air breathes wisdom, and for inspiring me to pursue the kinds of inquiry
and thinking that ultimately crystallized in the pages that follow. This book
would never have materialized without his constant prodding, encouragement,
and confidence in my work.
Page 2 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Acknowledgments
Finally, if, as argued in this book, God’s sacred and ineffable name gives way for
the sake of love and relationship, then divinity shines in the names of Florence,
Shimon, Yonah, and Nina.
Access brought to you by:
Page 3 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Introduction
Jewish Theology Unbound
James A. Diamond
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198805694
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805694.001.0001
Introduction
Plotting and Subplotting Jewish Philosophical Theology
James A. Diamond
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805694.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
The Introduction provides an outline and summary of the separate chapters in
the book and the overarching goals of the book. The first is to shatter the
stereotype of Judaism as a religion of law absent of any theology. The second is
to actually forge a Jewish philosophical theological discourse that spans a
continuum of Jewish texts, thinkers, and exegetes from the Bible, to the classical
rabbis, to the medieval commentators (parshanim), to Hasidism, to modern
secular philosophy. All the issues in the book are explored from a decidedly
Jewish stance, both existentially and intellectually. That entails both bringing
God into the quest and reading my own particular religious tradition’s
foundational scriptures as they examine life from their various perspectives.
There is a particular subplot that courses its way through all the chapters. It is
the promotion of freedom—in both acts and thought—encouraged by the Jewish
God.
Keywords:   freedom, Judaism, autobiography, chapter summary, philosophical theology
In this book, I examine a series of issues central to the enduring human quest for
the “examined life.” The unexamined life is so anathema to the human condition
that Plato famously condemned it as “not worth living.”1 These issues include
love, death, freedom, evil, and the nature of the questions that spur us to
contemplate them. Despite the universal stake in these questions for all of
humanity, I ask them from a decidedly Jewish stance, both existentially and
intellectually. That entails both bringing God into the quest and reading my own
Page 1 of 11
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Introduction
particular religious tradition’s foundational scriptures as they examine life from
their various perspectives. While the Hebrew Bible and its subsequent rabbinic,
legal, theological, philosophical, and mystical interpretations contribute
substantively to the examination conducted in this book, they are not my only
concern.
This book’s secondary goal is to banish a stereotype and cliché about Judaism
that caricatures it as a religion of law and obedience, devoid of faith and
theology. That caricature, though slowly being whittled away, persists to this day.
Ironically, one of the most prominent advocates of this view is Yeshayahu
Liebowitz, a renowned Jewish thinker of the twentieth century, whose philosophy
denuded Judaism of virtually every single aspect one would traditionally
consider theological. He basically reduces all such theological discourse to the
brute act of obedience to divine will, which, in Judaism’s case, is halakhic
conduct.2
(p.2) The cliché dates back to the apostle Paul’s declaration, “Christ hath
redeemed us from the curse of the law.”3 It may very well be the case that Paul
has been misinterpreted.4 However, the Church has perpetuated this
misconception since its early binary presentation of Judaism as austerely
legalistic, opposed to its own spirituality, faith, and love.5 What I hope will
emerge from this book, taken as a whole, is not just a theoretical repudiation of
this calumny but a concrete demonstration, through close readings of canonical
Jewish texts, of a robust, philosophically informed, practical Jewish theology,
which both complements and underpins its legal framework.
Autobiographical Sketch
Brief autobiographical revelations from my own personal intellectual trajectory
offers some insight into how and why I wrote this book, which seems to be so at
odds with all my previous scholarly studies. There was a certain beauty, charm,
and comfort to the intellectual naivety that suffused the Orthodox familial,
educational, and social milieu of my formative years. The Jewish foundational
texts of Bible, Talmud, midrash, biblical commentaries, liturgy, and responsa all
“evolved,” although that is certainly not the term that would have been used,
within a hermetically sealed world that immunized itself from any “outside”
influences, be they historical, cultural, or intellectual. There was no sense of
linear time or “periods” such as ancient, medieval, and modern, since all these
texts were timeless, floating, and protective, recalling the primordial “wind of
God” over the pre-eternal waters that preceded creation.
Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1903–93), himself a scion of a lineage considered
royalty in the rabbinic yeshivah world of the last two centuries, offers one of the
most poignant descriptions of this pristine rabbinic mindset. He lovingly
recollects what he had absorbed from both his father, Moshe (1879–1941), and
grandfather Ḥayyim of Brisk (1853–1918), the founder of the modern, yet (p.3)
Page 2 of 11
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Introduction
ahistorical, analytic approach to rabbinic texts known as the “Brisker method.”
What Joseph Dov felt as an “ever-present historical psychological reality in the
depths of my soul” translated into a perpetual engagement with his
predecessors elevating mere study to experiential encounter:
When I prepare to learn, I find myself suddenly and immediately in the
company of the sages of the tradition. The relationship between us is
personal. The Rambam [Maimonides, 1137–1205] is at my right, Rabbenu
Tam [a French Tosafist, 1100–71] is at my left, Rashi [the most prominent
biblical and talmudic exegete, 1040–1105] leads the discussion, Rabbenu
Tam casts doubt, Rambam codifies, and Ra’avad [Abraham ben David of
Posquières, 1125–98] critiques. They are all sitting around the table with
me in close quarters. They look at me with affection, engage me in logic
and argument, encouraging and strengthening me like a parent…Those
that transmitted the Torah and those that received it convene in one
historical gathering.6
Transmission and reception are the warp and woof of the Torah continuum, with
each receiver becoming a transmitter in turn, and each engaged in dialogue that
traverses all historical, cultural, and social boundaries. Though, as a critical
scholar of Jewish Studies I can no longer subscribe in toto to such an approach
to Jewish texts, there is something here worth preserving when we in the
scholarly world conduct our own research.
What was once conceived of, during the incipient period of my thinking Jewishly
in the world of the yeshivah, as a monolithic continuum of voices engaging each
other on common ground in “one historical gathering,” later graduated to the
critical perspective of the academy. As a result, Judaism for me could have gone
the way of the self-declared “decent burial” prepared for it by the scholarship of
the early founders of Jewish Wissenschaft. However, I was fortunate enough to
have been introduced to the broader world of philosophy at the University of
Toronto by Emil Fackenheim, one of the world’s most eminent Hegel scholars,
who also became the most profound thinker to struggle philosophically and
theologically with the Holocaust.
Fackenheim’s work can be considered in a sense an act of resistance. First, it
pushed back against Jewish Wissenschaft’s own initial impulse to surrender to
Hegel’s relegation of Judaism to mere anachronism. Second, it was a frontal
assault on Kant’s recommendation for Judaism’s euthanasia, by broadening the
philosophical horizon enough to bridge the divide between Jewish thought and
philosophy. Despite its simple veneer, his consideration of midrashic discourse as
a profound medium of sophisticated theology opened the door to a central focus
of my own scholarship and contemplation of what precisely constitutes a Jewish
way of doing philosophy. In this book, I intend on taking (p.4) Fackenheim’s
Page 3 of 11
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020
Introduction
assertion about midrash very seriously: “for all its deceptively simple story form,
[it] is profound and sophisticated theology.”7
In doing so, there is a need to retrieve some of the yeshivah naivety of my youth
as it relates to a unified midrashic ingenuity spanning different historical periods
and cutting across what have become separate “disciplines” within the academic
field of Jewish Studies. Whether halakhist/lawyer, philosopher, biblical exegete,
or mystic, the canonical thinkers I consider instrumental to the future of Jewish
thought share a common language and mode of midrashic thinking unique to
their rabbinic antecedents. The boundaries between what are often regarded in
Jewish Studies as the rigid disciplines of law, rabbinics, philosophy, and
mysticism are more permeable than they appear. This connective midrashic
thread weaves them all into an intertextual discourse that can be authentically
defined as “Jewish.” The literary forms that can best accommodate its
fragmentary and contradictory expression are parable, story, and metaphor,
which, Fackenheim claims, become normative for the contemporary Jewish
theologian. Midrash, he protests, is a mode of Jewish thought largely ignored by
philosophy. The combination of a Christian bias that equates Judaism with the
Old Testament and a supersessionism that replaces the Old with the New
Testament, leads to all kinds of distorted conceptions of Judaism.
The Subplot: Freedom from God
For the purposes of guiding the reader through this book, I have chosen one
particular subplot that courses its way through all the chapters. It is the
promotion of freedom—in both acts and thought—encouraged by the Jewish
God.8 I speak of the God encountered by the biblical patriarchs, by the Israelites,
and then by their descendants, Jews, through word and text since God’s
originating revelatory appearances recorded in the Hebrew Bible. In this also
lies a repudiation of a major corollary of that contrapuntal dualism between
Christian and Pharisaic theology that views the latter as a religion of ritual and
normative enslavement fuelled by technical casuistry, and the (p.5) former as
one of freedom in faith.9 For example, a standard text for many years on
Christian theology and its contrast to Judaism by a leading twentieth-century
New Testament scholar asserted Christianity’s superiority over Judaism, since
“personal freedom, resting on moral conviction, takes the place of all the mass of
casuistic soul fettering commandments.”10
No less an intellectual giant than Georg Wilhelm Hegel granted this same
distorted view philosophical sophistication and legitimation. He considered
Judaism to be shot through with a “thoroughgoing passivity” informed by a
master/slave relationship between God and the Jewish people and secured by
legalisms in whose “firm bond there is no freedom.”11 Immanuel Kant, another
formidable philosopher, identified Jewish law with the coercion of heteronomy he
opposed, going as far as to explicitly adopt the Pauline antinomy between the
bondage of Jewish law and the freedom of grace.12 Not only does this reflect a
Page 4 of 11
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. 
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 20 August 2020