Buber and Covenant

Although the Covenant seems to the basis of Jewish existence, Buber does not explain why Jews should be bound by the Covenant (in fact he says that we are not bound by all law- only that which we feel commanded by). Of the Bible he says, “The words are human, but they result from authentic encounters with Gd (pg 156).” Using these arguments his critics say that his system provides no, “useful content to anyone seeking moral guidance (pg 160).”

Although his system does not seem to provide explicit moral guidance, by striving to treat people with the values learned in the I-Thou relationship (accepting them as fully human and treating them with mutuality and responsibility- pg 161), a moral climate can in fact be established (and I reject Borowitz’s argument that that would be inconsistent with Buber’s theory)

Overall, I really like Buber’s system of thought. I am not sure it can exist entirely on its own (I do think we need a more explicit set of morals and rules) I dfo think it can be incorporated into our belief of Gd and relationships. I especially like the analogy of comparing Gd to a best friend or lover- it provides me a great way of trying to interact with Gd- one that does not make me feel as if I have to “explain” things to Gd, but that Gd will implicitly understand my thoughts and needs.

I will end with a suggestion- Read Borowitz’s article first- it will make the passage in Dorff and Newman more understandable. The D&N passage illuminates many of the points Borowitz explains- such as the Thou being a total giving over of self and being unexplainable. Two parts I liked:
1- pg 62, “The Thou meets me. But I step in direct relations with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing…”
2- pg 63- “without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.”

Buber and Evil

Buber’s understanding of evil was deeply affected by the Holocaust. The Holocaust forced Buber to conclude that Gd sometimes “withdraws from humankind (pg155).” [This realization makes me very uncomfortable- as I cannot believe in a Gd that is capable of abandoning us when we need Gd the most.]

Buber and I-Thou vs I-It

So let me begin by saying that Buber has some amazing ideas that can work very well in a Reform setting. He promotes a very personal relationship with Gd. However, he does not see the need to “prove” Gd exists (which I agree with, but some of our more rationalistic congregants may have trouble with)

Buber is interested in the relationships that are able to move past the distant I-It and into the holistic and “real” I-Thou. Buber’s definition of the I-Thou relationship is one in which the whole person is involved- and objectivity is inevitably lost. He describes it as the moments when two friends know what the other is trying to say without it needing to be said. This is the kind of relationship we should all strive to have with Gd as well.

Buber argues that by trying to have an I-It relationship we turn Gd into a thing- which he argues is a form of idolatry (where the image is mental not made of wodd or stone). He also says “apply the wrong way of knowing to people or to Gd and they remain hidden. Reach out to Gd as one does to another person, and the surprising yet obvious fact emerges: Gd may be found everywhere.” (pg 151-152). He argues against trying to have an “experience” but rather to let it happen as it does with love.

Kaplan and Process

In explaining Gd as a Process he sums it up by saying (pg 74), “Since Gd is life, knowledge, goodness, what else can He be but process?” his basic argument is that since each of those elements are by itself a process, the ultimate conclusion is that if Gd is all of these things together than Gd too should be a process. Kaplan also argues that Gd is the process by which we are created, and humans are the process by which Gd is evident in the individual- he stops short of saying that people created Gd, but he does argue that neith have meaning without the other- which I see that as a downfall of his argument (I think Gd can indeed exist without humans)

Kaplan and Civilization

In explaining “Judaism as a Civilization” he says that “Judaism as otherness is thus something far more comprehensive than Jewish religion. (pg 45)” I am not sure I totally understand that and the next piece (Living in two civilizations)- if someone else wants to take a stab at explaining it- go for it.

Kaplan and Reform Judaism

Kaplan’s basic view is that Reform Judaism set out to bridge the gap between modernity and Judaism, and failed and his version is the next attempt. He refers to change coming about though a process of trial- and- error a few times- he simply feels that Reform Judaism was the first attempt and his is one that has learned from RJ’s failings and should therefore supersede it. As he says on pg 151- “It should have reformed the Jew before it attempted to reform Judaism”

In the later passage Kaplan stresses the need for mitzot and our interpretation of the Bible to change and adapt with modernity. He concedes that this is what RJ set out to do,but he argues that RJ tried and failed and now it is time for yet another attempt (which he of course believes will be successful).

After-class thoughts: Baeck

Last class (Jan 23), Dr. Adler presented two models of approaching a religious system: essentialism vs constructivism and claimed that there are mutually exclusive. Liberal Judaism, therefore, being based on the idea that Judaism has always evolved and adapted to external circumstances cannot adopt a essentialist view of Judaism.

Rachel T., on the other hand, seemed to propose a continuum, in which some approaches might be totally essentialist or totally constructivist, but where there is also space for approaches that mix these two elements in different ways/proportions. I especially liked Rachel's perception that the larger the share of constructivisim in any given approach, the smaller the core (i.e. the part identified by the essentialist approach) can be. (Among many others, a good thing of having Rachel in our group is that she can correct me if I did not understand it right.) I liked Rachel's approach and I think Baeck's distinction between Law (created by human beings) and Commandment (given by God, essentially ethical commandments, immutable) was his way of expressing that same understanding.

But this would bring us to the second aspect of Dr. Adler's lecture: if the commandments are ethic-based and universal and they are the essence of Judaism, is there any space for particularism? I think the way Baeck would answer that challenge would be by recurring to the dialectics between Mystery and Commandment. Commandments are universal ethical values, but Mystery reflects the different understanding of the divine and our different approaches to connect with God. Therefore, all the particularistic elements of Judaism would derive from our unique understanding of God. I think the next step connects Mystery not only to Liturgy (where I think the link is more clear) but also to Jewish traditional daily life-style:

In Judaism the attempt has been made to give life its style by causing religion to invade every day and penetrate the whole of everyday. Everything is in a sense divine service and has its mood and its dignity. (M&C, 201)

So, I guess Baeck would somehow justify Jewish particularism, as a specific form of Mystery. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these issues and how Dr. Adler's lecture challenged your previous understanding of Baeck.

Leo Baeck's summary - second installment

Wow!!!!!

I have just finished Leo Baeck's article and I'm still regaining my breath. The article is excellent and, to tell the truth, I don't think Borowitz makes a good job of explaining Baeck's thought. In the article, it becomes clear how central the dialectical relationship between Mystery and Commandment are for his understanding of Judaism. At first, I found the definition of these concepts quite tricky:

• Mystery is the knowledge of what's real in the world, about the real meaning of life, our presence here and the origin of all things;
• Commandment is the knowledge of what is to be realized, the direction we are moving towards, what we need to do in order to get there.

In Baeck's words: "The foundation of life is the mystery; the way of life is the revealed. The one is from God, the other to be achieved by man." (p. 195)

Without using this term, Baeck defines a "Theology of Dialectics":

• Every mystery means and suggests a commandment; every commandment means and suggests a mystery
• Olam ha-bah and Olam ha-zeh exist only in relationship to each other
• "God gives man's life and God demands man's life from him" (p. 198)
• Individuality and commonality between human beings are also expressed in dialectical terms: "Our soul is what is divine in us; it is our mystery and shares the mystery of all souls; and yet it shows also our individual stamp, that which is unique within us, our very self, that which belongs to it alone." (p. 198)
  

There is no space for opposition between mysticism and ethics, according to Baeck the history of Judaism reveals simultaneous concern for these two dimensions, with a higher emphasis to one or the other in different periods of time. Even the players were almost always the same, with the author of the Shulchan Arukh also involved in Jewish mysticism. When the religion gets too close to only one of these poles (mystery/mysticism vs. commandment/ethics), it stops being Judaism and that's what happened to Christianity after Paul - it stopped being concerned with this world and became too focused on the spiritual dimension of religion. On the other hand, the rational-only concept of religion could never be applied to Judaism either, and here there is a clear dispute with Cohen.

The commandments, therefore, are rooted in mystery and need to be understood as the Jewish way of the sacred pervading every aspect of our lives. Another quote (p. 201):

Every partition of life into the profane and the sacred is to be avoided, and the sanctuary dare not possess merely one day beside all the other days. The word "remember" is inscribed above this law: "That you may remember and do all my commandments and be holy unto your God."

The Shabbat, in this context, brings together the physical recess from the everyday sphere and the religious rest, a connection with God, a Messianic experience. It contains simultaneously memory of creation and hope for the future, it "possesses the great contradiction of any end, a perpetual renaissance." (p. 202)

The final paragraph of the article summarizes why the rational component of religion (ethics) had to be joined by a personal-spiritual dimension:

The Law, and quite especially the sabbatical element in it, has educated that capacity in man which is born only of depth of life - the capacity to be different. Without this, life cannot be unique. Whoever experiences mystery and commandment becomes unique among men, different and individual within the world. (...) Whoever experiences both [mystery and commandment], both in unity, lives in the world and yet is different, is different and yet is in the world, lives for other men and with other men and yet within himself, within himself and yet also for other men and hence with them. This is the gift and possession of Judaism. And it may well be its historic task to offer this image of the dissenter, who dissents for humanity's sake...

Woksheet - Leo Baeck

Worksheet on Modern Jewish Thinkers - Leo Baeck

God

Is God an addressable Being (a Thou) or a concept or force?

According to Borowitz, “Baeck's exposition of Judaism remains typically liberal. It says much more about human beings, their ethical sense, and their consciousness of the Divine than it says about who God is and what, if anything, God does.” (p.60) At the same time, though, it tries to bridge the gap between the rational God of Cohen (who thought about God a lot) and the religious experience of devout Jews (who fell God a lot). His definition of Judaism as human ethics (the rational side of God) and religious consciousness (the expression of God’s meta-physical, or spiritual dimensions) tries do address that God is more than what human beings can rationally conceive.

Baeck would say that nothing can be said about the specifics of God’s existence (i.e. if there is a personal God), and that traditional Judaism has never said anything about it either, but “God is (...) understood personally and regarded as personal” (Borowitz, 61).

What is the meaning of revelation?

• “For Baeck, the validity of Judaism did not rest on a unique event at Sinai, but rather on the truth of the central ideas that the Jewish people had maintained over the ages. Baeck maintained this intuitive-historical stance toward the interpretation of Judaism in all his writings.” (Borowitz, 56).If I understand this right, we could see two basic arguments or paradigms for the validity of the Torah: (1) 600.000 men were present at Sinai when the Torah was delivered and it would be impossible to lie mentioning such a huge number of people; therefore, the Torah (both written and oral) are the sacred words of God; or (2) The Jews have believed in this system for thousands of years and if it were false, someone would have found it out and challenges its premises. Baeck followed the second approach. Borowitz doesn’t say it, but I think that if you follow this view, challenging traditional Jewish understanding becomes almost a duty, aimed at strengthening Judaism and its internal consistency.

What is God's relationship to or responsability for suffering?

• "The source of evil is the misuse of human freedom."(Borowitz, 62) People are ultimately responsible for their acts, including repenting and trying to correct our acts (re-establish the connection with God)
• Despite having experienced (and survived) a death camp, the Holocaust did not change his theory of evil

Israel

What does it mean to this thinker to be a Jewish human being?

• Jews have the "mission" of spreading ethical-monotheism around the world, which is not particularly open to the concept. Therefore, "stubborn endurance is a Jewish ethical imperative; for a Jew, to exist is a commandment." (Borowitz, 69)

What is this thinker's position on choseness?

• God is universal and, therefore, cannot be attached only to the Jews. "Baeck does not assert Jewish particularity in terms of Judaism's essential conent, which is universal, but only in the historic actuality of its appropriation and continuing expression. The Jews are 'chosen' because they chose to devote themselves to God." (Borowitz, 66)
  

Leo Baeck - First Draft

When I looked at Dr. Adler’s questions about Leo Baeck, I got the impression that most of them referred to the article, which I had not copied.... so I decided to start “digesting” what I had read by first summarizing it and then by trying to fill in some of the questions of the “Worksheet on Modern Jewish Thinkers” we got on our first class. Please, join me and add / correct this first draft...

Summary of Borowitz (pp. 53-73)

• After Cohen had established the identity between Judaism and ethical religion, Jewish thinkers became increasingly troubled by this concept. If Judaism is only ethical-monotheism, why should Jews keep their Jewishness when other ethical-monotheist religions existed, especially those that were not attacked with the same degree of prejudice that Judaism was? It against this background (and keeping this question always in mind) that we need to understand Baeck’s thought.
  
• Baeck’s thought came as a development of Cohen’s theology (Cohen himself thought of Baeck as his most promising disciple), but Baeck expanded Cohen’s concept of Judaism as a religion based on reason alone, and it incorporated some sort of existential experience, spiritual connection that could not be explained using only rational concepts (this is what Baeck called "religious consciousness"). Borowitz is very clear that Cohen would not have liked Baeck’s new approach if he were alive at the time.
  
• Baeck developed his theology with these two basic premises, human ethics and religious consciousness, in permanent dialectical tension.
  
• “For Baeck, ethics without this mysterious grounding in God is mere moralism” (Borowitz, 59), but the spiritual aspect of religion, if not firmly grounded in ethical behavior, might lead to extreme religious behavior, one that it’s either fanatic or focuses only on the individual-God relationship, ignoring the rest of the world.
• Baeck gave more attention to the way people understood God that to the definition of what God exactly is. He said that people had a concept of a personal God and experienced God personally - on the other hand, he tried to avoid the risk of the anthropomorphism that permeates the belief in a personal God to be taken too seriously. "This destroys God's transcendence, thereby vitiating the authority by which the ethical comes to us as a categorical demand". [ Here I think there is a connection with the point Joel has raised about Cohen (American (Liberal?) Jews taking the concept of autonomy to the extreme where there is no ethical imperative dictated by religion) ] According to Baeck, that paradox was resolved by making the personal (i.e. close) God the same that created the world and acts through world history (i.e. distant).
• A sentence that reminded me of Jocee's sermon last month: "God's anger is a way of expressing our sense that ethics must be uncompromising. Genuine morality always involves a protest against, and resistance to, indecency." (Borowitz, 61) For Baeck, there is a choice to be made between good and evil, and no compromise could be reached regarding that choice; immorality corrupted human dignity and should not be tolerated.
  
• Baeck's understanding of an ethical God prevented, in his view, of attributing any particularistic attributes to God - therefore, he negated the traditional Jewish view of the "elected people". On the other hand, because the Jews were the first to comprehend the religious idea of ethical monotheism, they became God's "ambassadors", responsible for spreading this concept all around the world. In my reading, what Baeck is saying is that the Jews are the "chosen people" not because God chose us, but because we chose God. [In my reading, though, there seems to be also some value judgment on his view that other people are more prone to relapse into paganism than the Jews - see the first lines of Borowitz, p. 69]
  
• In line with his view of the Jewish mission to spread ethical-monotheism, Baeck believed that we should seriously engage in poselytization.
  
• [pages 67-68 of Borowitz dealth with Baeck's polemic against Christianity, but I could not understand it well, I hope someone else did, or that the additional article clarifies this issue]
• For Baeck, the word "commandment" refers only to rules that come directly from God, i.e. ethical commandments. The word "law" refers to rules legislated by the rabbis, and subject to human review. "In any tension between commandment and Jewish law, ethics has priority since it is the essence of Judaism." (Borowitz, 69)
• While Baeck allows changes in the law if there is a conflict with ethics, he prefers to keep traditions unchanged, so not to disrupt the unity of Jewish practice around the world.
• Borowitz evaluation of Baeck: (1) Borowitz seems to be very critical of Baeck's position on Jewish particularism. He asks a question that has personally challenged me for quite some time: "If the essence of Judaism is available in direct, intellectual form, are we not ethically required to spare future generations of Jews the possible suffering in perpetuating our people?" [ While I rationally understand that this question can be a direct result of a Jewish lack of particularity, my intuition tells me that the second component of Baeck's theology (religious consciousness) is what answers the challenge raised by Borowitz. While there is nothing superior on being Jewish, this is who we are, and this is how we feel! Because Judaism is not only reason-based, those of us who decided to remain Jewish despite all the persecutions (Baeck among us!) dit it because rational arguments will not convince us to give up our identity . Baeck understood that our religious experience is not rational only - on the other hand, this might be a bigger challenge for Cohen, for whom reason played a much more preponderant role]
• (2) The second challenge that Borowitz raises to Baeck is that his theology was adequate to a generation that was desperate for integration and to common-grounds with Gentile friends, but it become obsolete to a generation that, having been accepted into the broader society, is in search of its ancestral roots. Before, liberal Jews needed a theology that allowed them to get rid of some of the burdens imposed by religion; now, what is needed is a theology that gives liberal Jews a reason to keep some of the mitzvot [Again, I'd have to disagree with Borowitz - maybe that's because I am always comparing Baeck to Cohen, the only other modern Jewish philosopher we studied so far. Baeck's view of reason and Jewish passion in dialectic relationship certainly allows for the sort of religious revival that we have experienced in the last decades (note that the 1st edition of Borowitz's book is from 83, the 2nd. from 95). Again, in Baeck's view Judaism is not only reason and, even though there might be few rational arguments to keep some of the commandments, people feel that by keeping them more strongly connect to their religious consciousness.]
  

Way to go Rogerio

I think this is a great idea!

The floor is open

What about having our Cyber Sichah through a Blog? I personally think it will make things easier, what do you think? Let's try it for a week at least?
See you here soon,

Rogerio