Academic Research and the Prohibition of Touch
Contents of the Article
Academic Research and the Prohibition on Touching
Just as a scholar of poetry is not himself a poet, so the academic study of Jewish thought is not supposed to express contemporary positions. On the difference between the researcher and the creator, and on the academy’s regrettable decline
A few months ago, a discussion took place in the pages of this supplement about the proper approach to the study of Jewish thought. What sparked the discussion was an article about the dispute in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University between the philological-historical ‘faction,’ which aspires to objective, unbiased research stripped of contemporary significance, and Avinoam Rosenak, who advocates raising current issues and integrating them into the department’s teaching. It was reported that as a result of this struggle, Rosenak, formerly the head of the department, was transferred against his will to another department in the university (the Department of Education).
In these pages, Shalom Rosenberg, Avi Sagi, and Mordechai Rotenberg attacked the philological-historical approach. They argued that it amounts to euthanasia for the field of Jewish thought, since it insists on adhering to texts and context while disconnecting them from the relevant and contemporary questions they raise. I do not know the details of the case, nor the people involved, but I reached the conclusion that this debate skips over the deeper point at issue. That point concerns the very foundations of academic research and the role of academia in general. I would like to offer here an explanation in defense of the attacked camp, דווקא as someone who does not belong to it.
The Criterion of Assessability
A few years after my first book, ‘Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon,’ was published, a well-known figure from Ariel College (as it was then called) called me and told me that they were about to launch a new journal of Jewish thought. He asked me to write an article for the first issue, but added that it should not be like my books. It had to be assessable, because this was an academic journal. I immediately understood what he meant, and told him that I write the way I write, and if that did not suit the journal, they would have to make do with other writers. But people to whom I recounted this did not understand. After all, I too write in technical terminology, sometimes with references to various sources; I deal with philosophy and with analysis of the conceptual plane of things and the meaning of earlier sources. So what exactly is the difference? To explain the difference, we need a few examples, some of them banal.
Would anyone imagine that a poet would write a poem and send it to a journal devoted to the study of poetry? Or that he would be given an academic post in which he would write poems? Of course not. The same is true of a novelist or playwright. Why? Academic research does not write poetry; it studies poetry. Academic scholars do not engage in the thing itself but discuss the thing. The same applies to the study of literature and art generally. Even in psychology, academic research does not engage in therapy but at most in the study of therapeutic methods. No one would think of employing athletes in academic positions, even though there are academic departments that study sport (its history, physiology, various techniques, and so on). Industrialists and businesspeople, too, do not operate within faculties of economics and management. Even lecturers in education are not necessarily good teachers.
One of the main differences between these two kinds of activity is assessability. A poet writes what arises in his heart and is not bound by any rules. By contrast, when a scholar makes some claim about the poet’s poetry, he is supposed to ground his determinations in a way that makes them assessable, so that the reader can determine, as objectively as possible, whether they are correct or not. Of course, this is not mathematics, and clearly there are disputes and different approaches, but the distinction is still important and valid. When you support pluralism, that is your position, and anyone else may hold a different one. That is not assessable. At most, the reader can say that he opposes pluralism, and that too is fine. Therefore such an essay belongs either in a book of philosophy or in an op-ed in a daily newspaper.
But when you argue that Maimonides was a pluralist, the reader can subject your claims to an empirical test against the sources you have brought. He will examine whether you have presented reasonable evidence for your claim or not, and judge it. Therefore this is an assessable claim, and its place is in an academic work.
If we return now to the opening story, my books and essays do not deal with the study of Jewish law or philosophy, but with Jewish law and philosophy themselves. As far as I am concerned, I am a player on the field, not a researcher of what is done there. Therefore that editor was right when he asked me to write the article differently. The meaning of this is that academia deals with knowledge, with its accumulation and analysis. Creation, by contrast, does not deal with knowledge. Knowledge in the academic sense tries to be, as far as possible, objective and unbiased—not dependent on opinions and tendencies. That is the deep meaning of the demand for assessability.
Within this framework, incidentally, quite a few scholars have fashioned bypasses for themselves. A scholar of Jewish thought cannot write an article in praise of pluralism in Judaism. So what does he do? He shows that Maimonides was a pluralist. And in order to support equality for women, he shows that Rashba was a feminist. All this is perfectly fine, so long as the arguments meet the tests of assessability against the sources. The agendas and motivations of the writer are not the concern of the academic reviewer (this is the well-known distinction in the philosophy of science between the context of discovery and the context of justification). The rabbi or thinker, by contrast, is not bound by any of this. He can write an essay or an op-ed (or deliver a talk in a yeshiva) in which he preaches pluralism, or argues against it, in a way that is plainly not assessable.
Between the Philosopher and the Professor
There are fields in the humanities in which this disciplinary distinction is far from clear. Moreover, my sense is that there are groups that are deliberately trying to blur it even further. The difference between a poet and a scholar of poetry, or between a novelist and a scholar of literature, is sharp and clear. But in fields like philosophy, Jewish thought, the study of the Talmud and Jewish law, and the like, it is sometimes hard to put one’s finger on the difference between studying the thing and engaging in the thing itself. An article written by a scholar of Jewish thought appears, at first glance, similar to an essay written by some thinker or creator who deals with Jewish thought. Maimonides, too, tries to understand what lies at the foundation of the sages’ midrashim and other sources, and to draw conclusions from them. So what is the difference between the creator and the scholar in the field of Jewish thought?
Because of this blurring, professors of philosophy are perceived (including by themselves) as philosophers, and therefore scholars of Jewish thought regard themselves as thinkers in Jewish thought in their own right. But to the best of my judgment, this is a mistake. Professors of philosophy are not philosophers, nor do they need to be. They are experts in the study of philosophy. That expertise includes knowledge of methods and trends in the history of philosophy, and the ability to make comparisons and analyses of different schools. This, of course, involves knowledge of philosophy, but there is no reason to expect them to be philosophers.
A philosopher innovates new ideas and new methods in philosophy. He is a creator, exactly like a poet or novelist (with all the differences between them, of course), and is not bound to one method or another. He takes positions and expresses his opinion, with various arguments and sometimes without them. He is by no means required to rely on earlier sources (though he can of course do so), nor does he necessarily use the techniques of analysis and comparison employed by academic scholars. He simply writes his view, and there is no demand for assessability in his case. It is well known that the works of Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche would not be accepted by any self-respecting philosophy journal, and rightly so. Kant was a philosopher, not a scholar of philosophy, and his writings express his own positions rather than concern themselves with the study of philosophy.
I am dealing here mainly with the humanities, but the same is true of the natural sciences. A physicist is mainly occupied with investigating the laws of nature. He does not create the things but studies them and speaks about them (though his research can of course involve creativity). Even in a faculty of engineering one can distinguish between development done in industry and basic research in academia. Unfortunately, there is decline today in those fields as well (because of interests and economic pressures), and that is regrettable. The academic physicist is supposed to study the laws of nature created by the Creator, and the scholar in the humanities is supposed to study what human beings create.
A Decisor Around the Table
Incidentally, in my view this is also the difference between legal decisors and scholars of Jewish law. A decisor does indeed deal with the sources that preceded him, but he does not examine what Maimonides thought; he uses Maimonides in order to derive a legal ruling of his own, one that will be correct for his own time and place. That decisor also does not need the context in which Maimonides’ words were written, unlike the academic scholar, who is committed to the philological-historical method. By contrast, decisors who do cling to precedents and earlier sources (I call this ‘Mishnah Berurah decisors’) are not really decisors in my eyes but scholars of Jewish law. They bring what the decisors wrote. But a true decisor is a creator or a player, not a researcher. He must formulate a legal position on the situation brought before him, and precedents generally serve only as assistance and guidance.
This distinction is directly connected to what I once called ‘first-order ruling’ as opposed to ‘second-order ruling.’ A decisor is supposed to deal with the first order. He is supposed to derive the correct law for his own time and place. He may use his intuition, tradition, and modes of thought that are not formally articulated or conceptualized, whether received from his teachers or developed on his own. But all of this is forbidden to the scholar. He is supposed to describe and analyze what exists, not to play on the field himself.
Let me give an example. I once wrote an article about conversion to Judaism in which I argued that there is no opinion in Jewish law that is willing to dispense with acceptance of the commandments (in the sense of inward acceptance). Afterwards there appeared an angry response by a well-known scholar of Hebrew law, who quoted from a responsum of R. David Zvi Hoffmann (which was already familiar to me). From my perspective, the fact that Rabbi Hoffmann wrote this means nothing. So he wrote it and was wrong. The fact that his book is printed in Rashi script and bound in gold letters does not make it a legal opinion that counts. But that is only from my point of view, as someone who is on the field and arguing with Rabbi Hoffmann around the table of Jewish legal deliberation. The scholar, from his own perspective, was correct. He is not supposed to relate to such matters as a player on the field but as a scholar dealing with objective data. From his perspective, there is such an opinion in the legal field, and therefore he is obliged to cite it and take it into account. This is another example of the difference between a creator who plays on the field itself and a scholar who examines it from the outside in an assessable way. The anger of that respondent stemmed from that very blurring between decisor and scholar. He read my article as though it were a study of conversion surveying the various opinions, and it was not.
It is important to note that this is not a distinction between persons but between disciplines. A person who studies philosophy can of course also engage in philosophy and write essays that take his own positions rather than merely study the teachings of others. But when he does so, he is wearing a different hat. He should not receive academic credit for such essays, nor should he publish them with academic presses. He should publish them himself, or through private institutes for supporting philosophers, just like a philosopher, painter, or poet who is not an academic. He should publish such articles as opinion journalism in the press, or as books with ordinary publishing houses.
There is, however, room here to distinguish between teaching and research. Within the framework of university teaching, there is more room to introduce existential and experiential aspects. After all, the faculty of engineering produces engineers and not only researchers of engineering. The department of Jewish thought, too, is supposed to contribute to the formation of thinkers and not only scholars. There is therefore certainly room to engage students with questions of meaning and the formation of contemporary positions. But all that should not be done within the framework of academic research. Research should be concerned with developing the tools in the most objective sense possible.
Precisely against the background of the sharp distinction I have presented here, it is important for me to note again that beyond agenda-driven motives, the line between these fields is not sharp even in the subject matter itself. In recent generations, quite a few philosophical ideas have arisen, and continue to arise, within academic works (although, in my impression, this is still only a small minority). Sometimes the study of philosophy leads a person to ideas of his own, and he expresses them in the academic article itself. By the same token, there may be a passage from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that could enter an academic journal, but that would be merely incidental. Usually that is not supposed to be the purpose of the academic article, and conversely not the purpose of the philosophical work either.
A Postmodern Interest
As noted, beyond the natural blurring in these fields, it seems to me that various scholars have an interest in this blurring. They are uncomfortable with the distinction between a professor of philosophy and a philosopher. They very much enjoy the mantle of the philosopher (the one with the pipe, who can go on the radio and offer his opinion as an expert on the philosophical and ethical issues of the day), a mantle that in many cases they do not deserve at all. Very few of them merit the title philosopher, and it is a pity that radio broadcasters and other journalists are not always aware of this important distinction.
That interest dovetails with the general blurring that has prevailed in the postmodern age, and academia has not been spared. Today all sorts of strange fields and ‘studies’ enter the university, whose connection to academic research is entirely accidental. Beginning with experiential experimentation in practical Kabbalah, continuing with prediction of the future, most of which is nothing more than worthless modern sorcery that uses impressive technical terminology and the language of numbers and percentages that says absolutely nothing—just like the Oracle of Delphi or one of the charlatan holy men of our own time. It continues with gender studies, most of which is nothing but political ideology in academic garb and nothing more, with historians whose agendas distort their research, and so on and so forth.
Incidentally, many of these ‘scholars’ say this openly, and of course explain, with impeccable taste, that there is no such thing as unbiased research. In their view, everything is political and everything is based on agendas and hegemonies and plots and positions of power and narratives and all the rest of the vague postmodern trash whose function is to create the blessed blurring that prevents any distinction between what is secondary and what is essential, between quality and garbage, between creator and scholar, and between anything and anything else. Usually, those who explain to us that there is no unbiased research are the first to suffer from this very illegitimate tendentiousness, and the postmodern fog serves them as a defensive strategy. In order to conceal the lack of academic value in their work, they accuse the whole world of a defect that is found chiefly in themselves (see, for example, the article by the physicist Alan Sokal that was sent to the postmodern journal Social Text, published at Duke University, and that contained a jumble of quotations from unrelated fields together with pseudo-scientific nonsense; this nonsense was accepted and published there, thereby laying their shame and disgrace bare in public).
Of course, the question of proportion is also important here. A scholar can engage in Jewish thought with academic rigor (philological-historical), and afterward ask his students or readers what all this means for us or for them. But that can only be marginal. A university deals with knowledge, not opinions. It teaches; it does not educate. It researches, accumulates, and analyzes knowledge, and it does not engage—and should not engage—in the formation of opinions and positions, at least not within the framework of academic research. I oppose that academic imperialism that seeks to conquer the realms of action and creation as well, and that in the long run causes the debasement of academic research and a disgraceful confusion between research and creation. This blurring turns research into a handmaiden for advancing agendas and social and political trends, as we have seen quite a bit in our academia in recent years.
There are additional costs to this blurring. Philosophical and intellectual literature that was not produced in academia is ignored (Avi Sagi, in his article, mentions Rabbi Shagar, who is ‘blacklisted’ by the tone-setters in academia), and prize committees for works of nonfiction judge books by academic criteria, so that a book that creates new thought but is not written in academic style will generally not pass. Because of this imperialism, there are almost no serious journals of philosophy in which an article that takes a position can be published.
To avoid any doubt, I am entirely in favor of this separation—provided it is openly acknowledged. Neither side should take over the other, or we will all lose. The results of blurring research and creation harm both research and creation alike. If the scholar is simultaneously also a creator—that is, a player on the field—then both creation and research are damaged.
A few years ago there was a conference at Bar-Ilan University whose title was ‘There Is No Judaism Without Jewish Studies.’ Well, there certainly is. Jewish studies sometimes help illuminate different facets, but one must not confuse Jewish studies with Judaism. These are two fundamentally different things, just as the study of Native American culture is different from that culture itself, and just as the philosophy of mathematics is not mathematics. In both cases, the second does not really need the first.
We thus learn that the academic scholar really does need to kill the field with which he deals—to drain it of the living moisture of its relevance in order to preserve academic distance. One may aptly apply to this Oscar Wilde’s wonderful words (from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, quoted there in Orland’s translation): ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves, by each let this be heard: some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.’
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham is a lecturer at the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies, Bar-Ilan University
Published in the ‘Shabbat’ supplement of Makor Rishon, 5 Shevat 5776, 15.1.2016