Externalized Religiosity – To Asher Cohen (Unpublished – 2005)

With God’s help

Is it really about externalization?

A response to Asher Cohen’s article in the latest issue of ‘Akdamot’ (15), ‘The Knitted Kippah and What Lies Behind It’

Introduction

Asher Cohen, in his article in the latest issue of Akdamot, presents the results of a survey he conducted concerning the degree of commitment to commandment observance among religious Jews living in urban communities in central Israel. In my response I will deal only with the theoretical-conceptual introduction to the article (although much could also be said about the results presented and their analysis), since it contains several significant assumptions which, though at first glance they seem reasonable, as we shall see below actually conceal serious flaws and errors with important implications in a number of contexts.

In his principled introduction to the presentation of the survey results, Cohen draws a distinction between criteria of identification, which define the very religious status of a person or a society – for example, the process of conversion or the Jewishness of one’s mother – and criteria of identity, which are used to define, in substantive terms, themselves and their world.

As I shall hint later, this very distinction is presented in the article in a vague manner that obscures several severe theoretical flaws. This is not the place to elaborate on that, but what follows may shed some light on this more general point as well. Let us begin with a brief review of the points in the article that are relevant to our concern.

A summary of the points in the article relevant to our discussion

Cohen goes on to review the criteria of identity prevalent in contemporary religious society, and finds that they differ radically from the criteria of identification. That is to say, there is no correlation between the severity of an offense in Jewish law and its centrality as a component within the totality of religious identity.

To examine this, Cohen proceeds to define two circles of identity: the hard core, which is the collection of critical parameters in defining religious identity, and the outer, more peripheral circle, which contains components that exert less influence on that identity.

The striking example that opens the article is, of course, Yigal Amir. Cohen poses the question sharply: would any of the religious educators (almost all of whom strongly condemn Amir’s deed) present him as a non-religious person? Would someone who stole be presented as non-religious?[1] By contrast, when a person stops wearing a kippah, or turns on a light on the Sabbath, he certainly leaves the category of a ‘religious person.’ These are, according to Cohen, examples of the distinction between identity and identification.

Cohen further argues that a survey of the parameters of Jewish law that constitute Jewish identity in contemporary religious society shows that the fundamental distinction is not between interpersonal commandments and commandments toward God. The proof of this is prayer, for example, which is not considered a dominant parameter in contemporary religious identity discourse.

We shall bring here two lists of laws from the article: the first, laws that are, surprisingly, parameters of the second circle; and the second, laws that, surprisingly, belong to the first circle. These two lists express, from opposite directions, the polarity of the distinction between standing in Jewish law (= an identificatory parameter) and the centrality of the law in question within religious identity discourse.

1. Forbidden sexual relations and bloodshed, two of the three gravest transgressions (idolatry is hardly relevant today, though I would add that there are manifestations of idolatry that also belong to the outer circle), clearly belong to the peripheral circle. Hardly anyone would define a person guilty of sexual immorality or a murderer as non-religious. Add to this fraud, taking bribes, giving bribes, theft, and refraining from prayer.

2. In contrast to all these, keeping kosher, wearing a kippah (as opposed to women’s head-covering), and Sabbath observance (to a certain degree) are parameters that clearly belong to the hard core, even though some of them (such as the kippah) are not especially severe in Jewish law, certainly not on the level of murder and adultery.

As stated, Cohen raises the possibility of basing the criterion on commandments toward God, and explains this on the sociological-historical plane as a response to the need of a religious society to distinguish itself from the surrounding secular society. The latter too has, in recent generations, adopted the universal moral norms embodied in the interpersonal commandments, and therefore identity shifts the center of gravity to commandments toward God. We have already noted that he rejects this distinction on the basis of the example of refraining from prayer, which is certainly no less severe than not wearing a kippah.

To conclude the review, I shall cite his conclusion in his own words (p. 14):

It seems that the most important distinction for clarifying the formation of religious identification discourse (I think it should read: identity discourse) is the distinction between externalized commandments, that is, commandments whose observance is visible to the external, non-religious environment, and the other commandments. דווקא the wearing of a kippah, whose rank from every point of view is lower than Sabbath observance and keeping kosher, clarifies the distinction. The kippah is the most externalized symbol of belonging, because everyone sees it. The kippah constitutes a constant and continuous declaration of belonging to religious society in the face of non-religious society. Hence the great importance attributed to it, and the perception of the personal decision to remove the kippah from one’s head as a critical turning point in the process of leaving religious society.

A collection of some of the flaws in the argument/description proposed in the article

There are several methodological errors in the article, as well as a good number of mistakes in the analysis itself. For lack of space, I shall list only a few of them here:

1. Cohen ignores the fact that there is not a single interpersonal commandment that belongs to the hard core of religious identity. How can this be explained if the distinction between interpersonal commandments and commandments toward God is indeed not important here? True, refraining from prayer is an example in one direction: there exists a commandment toward God that does not belong to the inner circle. But what about the inverse correlation – namely, that no interpersonal commandments are included in the hard core? The necessary conclusion is that, contrary to Cohen’s emphatic conclusion, interpersonal commandments are in fact not included in religious identity discourse. It is indeed true that not all commandments toward God are included in it, but that is a somewhat trivial claim, since it is obvious that there are differences of degree, whether in terms of Jewish law or of identity, within the sphere of commandments toward God. Does anyone expect all commandments to receive the same status, whether legal or identitarian? There is no logic to such an expectation, and therefore there is nothing surprising in this result. If so, the distinction that Cohen rejects – between commandments toward God and commandments toward one’s fellow – remains valid, and empirically it is unassailable (one may, of course, offer a value-based critique of this, but this is not the place).

2. From this one can infer a mistaken methodological assumption in the article, namely, that there must be one criterion that unifies all the legal components of religious identity discourse. As we have seen, the hard core consists of commandments toward God, but not all of them. That is, the criterion of identity includes at least one additional parameter. On what is this methodological assumption based? Why should we rule out a priori the possibility that there are several such criteria? Moreover, how can one determine, on the basis of a single example (prayer, which points in only one direction; see the previous section), the question of the relevance of different types of legal components in religious identity discourse?

3. However, Cohen’s general conclusion already borders on absurdity. Here we are no longer dealing merely with lack of proof, but with an internal contradiction. His conclusion is that the fundamental distinction in identity discourse lies in the difference between externalized commandments and those that are not. To understand the absurdity, let us take murder as an example, and especially the murder of a prime minister. Apparently this is Cohen’s ultimate example of a commandment that is not externalized, since at the very outset he determines that it is irrelevant to religious identity discourse. Can that be? Has any one of us not heard of Yigal Amir? And what about theft, bribery, and fraud?

4. More generally, one may say that harming another person, by definition, is always externalized. Therefore Cohen’s two most basic claims in this part of his article are simply in direct contradiction: on the one hand, he states that the distinction between interpersonal commandments and commandments toward God is not an important criterion in identity discourse. On the other hand, the criterion he proposes is the degree of externalization of the commandments. As everyone understands, interpersonal commandments are the clearest example of externalized commandments. After all, they are usually seen, at the very least, by the other person involved – the one harmed or benefited. By contrast, commandments toward God are generally more concealed, between האדם and his Creator in the privacy of his own four cubits (certainly keeping kosher and the Sabbath – unless we are dealing with public desecration of the Sabbath – and yet these, according to Cohen’s justified claim, are the most important parameters in identity discourse. I am astonished!).

Now, among the commandments discussed in the article, there is one commandment toward God that certainly does stand out externally: communal prayer. Yet, much to one’s disappointment, דווקא it is not part of the hard core (as Cohen himself argues), whereas keeping kosher and the Sabbath, which are far less external, do belong to it. Accordingly, on pp. 14-15 a rather impressive Talmudic-style dialectical exercise is presented that turns the whole picture upside down: Cohen shows, with considerable ingenuity, that keeping kosher and the Sabbath are externalized commandments, whereas prayer in the synagogue (=’a closed communal space,’ in his words) is not.

1. In light of what has been said above, one may say that Cohen himself, in his article, proves unequivocally that the criterion for a commandment’s belonging to the hard core is precisely not the degree of externalization it involves.

2. Let us continue a bit further along this winding path: what are we to say in the face of the obvious fact that, in practice, the degree of externalization really is important in our identity discourse (see the example of the kippah, whose severity is marginal while its belonging to the hard core is obvious)? At first glance, Cohen’s conclusion is correct. True – but not for the reasons he gives, nor in the same way, nor under the same methodological assumptions. In other words, once again we return to the conclusion presented above in section 2: the assumption that there is one dominant parameter in the definition of religious identity discourse is mistaken. The parameter of externalization does indeed play some role in it, but it is far from being the only one, and apparently it is not even the primary one.

3. Another error is the reliance on the plane of sociological explanation. Even when Cohen proposes the distinction between interpersonal commandments and commandments toward God, he places it on the foundations of the need to distinguish oneself from the surrounding non-Jewish or non-religious environment, which is becoming increasingly moral. Yet that same proposal could just as well have been grounded on essential considerations: the demand that a person be truly human does not belong specifically to the religious plane, but to the universal-human plane, and this regardless of the state of the external environment in which he lives. Religious identity, by its very nature, focuses on what distinguishes the religious person – namely, the second tier: the particular ‘religious’ tier. This does not mean that there is no religious obligation to be moral. On the contrary, some of the gravest commandments belong to the first tier. But ever since Aristotle we have known that the definition of any entity should be based on its most distinctive and characteristic parameters, not necessarily on the most severe and important ones. Would anyone propose defining a donkey as a being possessed of life? Life is undoubtedly the most important parameter of a donkey, but it is not unique to it. The same applies to the status of morality in relation to Judaism. Therefore the entire set of phenomena described by Cohen is simply trivial, and the last thing I would say about them is that they are surprising, or unreasonable and unexpected.

Put differently, we could say that interpersonal transgressions do not necessarily testify to rebellion against God; they may also reflect weakness of character and corrupt traits. But transgressions toward God express nothing but sheer rebellion against God. Is this not a reasonable criterion for Jewish identity and identification?[2]

1. In light of what was said in the previous section, another methodological error emerges. A proposal that distinguishes between interpersonal commandments and commandments toward God on a historical basis (distinguishing oneself from a moral, or non-moral, environment) should be tested against historical data. True, I have not conducted a study, but it is quite clear that the criteria of religious identity discourse have not changed greatly even in environments of a different character and in other historical periods. It seems to me that prayer was never a critical component in Jewish-religious identity discourse (in places where there was an alternative Jewish identity. Elsewhere, identity discourse is not relevant, except perhaps vis-a-vis non-Jews). By contrast, keeping kosher and the Sabbath were certainly always regarded as such. And again, the reason is that prayer exists in other religions as well, and therefore it is not unique to Judaism (see section 7).

2. Cohen points to a gap between the legal treatment (which he associates with identification) and the treatment characteristic of identity. Yet, as is well known, even in Jewish law offenses involving Sabbath prohibitions have a unique status that is not connected to their formal legal rank (not every commandment punishable by stoning receives the same legal treatment). For example, one who is an apostate regarding the Sabbath is considered an apostate regarding the entire Torah, and for some legal purposes his status is that of a Gentile. Is this identity discourse or identification discourse? A legal determination, by definition, would seem to belong to identification discourse and not identity discourse. Cohen himself assumes this throughout, saying that the distinction between identification and identity is reflected in the fact that identity parameters belonging to the hard core are not necessarily severe from the standpoint of Jewish law (= identification), and vice versa. According to his view, the distinctions between identification and identity are reflected in deviation from Jewish law, or at least from its scale of values and order of priorities. If so, he agrees that Jewish law is an expression of identification and not of identity. If so, how would Cohen explain the different legal treatment accorded to Sabbath prohibitions as opposed to other prohibitions of the same level of severity?

3. Following the last sentence, let us return briefly to the fundamental distinction between identification discourse and identity discourse. As noted, this distinction can be attacked on several planes. I already addressed one of them in the previous section: Jewish law itself, which is the clearest expression of identification discourse (even according to Cohen), takes a position on questions of identity. As we have seen, even according to Jewish law, the importance of laws is not always measured by their severity.[3] In the same way, the very consideration of distinctiveness from one’s surroundings can be (and indeed is) a parameter of Jewish law, and not merely an external interest or an expression of the psychological need of one religious person or another.[4]

4. This is not the place for a conceptual analysis that would expose the systematic misleading contained in the dichotomous distinction between identification and identity. Briefly, I would say that the ambiguity involved in attaching the adjective ‘essential’ to either identification or identity sharpens the point היטב. What, after all, is essential – identification or identity? Ostensibly, identity is the accidental and changing element, whereas identification is the fixed one (= the legal one, at least the fixed biblical legal framework). On the other hand, identity relates more to content, whereas identification is ostensibly merely formal and not essential. We thus arrive at an apparent absurdity: the formal and eternal is not essential, whereas, conversely, the changing element – sometimes even the mistaken one – is the essential element.

The alternative

In conclusion, I shall offer a brief formulation of an argument opposite to the one presented in the article, as emerges from the discussion thus far (a more detailed justification would require a separate article):

1. I am convinced a priori that there is a correlation between identity and identification. Whatever serves as a critical parameter in identification discourse is grounded in an essential parameter in identity discourse, and vice versa. This assertion applies even to biological belonging, which appears to be the least essential criterion. It is precisely for this reason that some sages established the concept of the ‘unique quality of Israel,’ whatever exactly its meaning may be. The kabbalists went even further and held that non-Jews who convert were apparently rooted, biologically, in the people of Israel. Thus biology too can be a parameter of essence (with full awareness of the grave connotations that accompany such a claim), though perhaps not the exclusive one (see the entry ‘conversion’). In any case, I have not seen – neither in the article nor outside it – an argument supporting the opposite assumption. Therefore this assumption, which is implicit at the base of the analysis of the survey data, cannot automatically be regarded as acceptable.

2. The conclusion is that the laws that constitute a critical component in identity discourse are grounded in identification discourse, and vice versa. The very fact that Cohen does not find a single parameter underlying this identity classification itself indicates that the source lies not in identity but in identification. What do wearing a kippah, Sabbath observance, keeping kosher, and the like have in common? Since there is no other common denominator, the answer must be: all of them express one thing – a religious Jewish mode of being. Is that not identification? The conclusion is that identification is the meaning of identity, and vice versa. There is something common to all the identifying parameters, but it is itself not a parameter of identity but of identification (= ontological). There is no room for a dichotomous distinction between these two planes.[5]

3. In the final analysis, in my opinion (which of course has not been adequately argued here, because of lack of space), the relation between identity discourse and identification discourse is like the relation between semantics and syntax (though it is not always clear which is which). Anyone familiar with the foundations of logic knows that there is a theorem there known as the ‘Soundness and Completeness Theorem.’ This theorem establishes a relation of full correspondence between semantics and syntax, as is fitting for any consistent system that aspires to coherent meaning.

Let us take note!

[1] This is in contrast to the common quip that there is no such thing as a religious thief, since if he is a thief then he is not religious. The very fact that this is a quip (and, in my view, justifiably so; see my article in the same issue of ‘Akdamot,’ p. 161 and the editors’ note there, as well as around note 19 there, and in fact throughout the entire article) is itself revealing.

[2] In this connection I should note what many commentators on Maimonides wrote (see the index volume in the Frankel edition, at the beginning of Hilkhot Mamrim, in the second and third columns on chapter 1, laws 1-2). They argue that according to Maimonides, one who violates rabbinic commandments without a principled rebellion against the sages’ authority (apparently even if he transgressed deliberately, like one who violates Torah commandments out of impulse, who is not considered inadvertent) has not violated the commandment ‘You shall not turn aside’ (Deut. 17:11). But one who transgresses out of a principled refusal to recognize their authority – he, and he alone – violates the biblical prohibition. This is a good example of the argument presented above.

[3] See, for example, my article ‘He Gives the Wicked Evil According to His Wickedness – Is It Really So?’, Alon Shevut – Alumni 9, Iyar-Sivan 5756, p. 145.

[4] Part of the matter is that the collective develops identity through collective discourse, namely Jewish law. The subject of identity is not only the individual Jew but Judaism as a whole, and as such, collective identification discourse is part of identity discourse.

Therefore legal determinations, such as the process of conversion, are not imposed on us from outside, as Cohen writes when he assigns conversion to identification discourse rather than identity. The process of conversion is the result of our discourse with ourselves (according to the Torah, which is also part of us), and therefore it belongs no less to identity as well.

[5] This distinction does have meaning, mainly sociological, but it requires a far more delicate formulation and analysis. The dichotomy is highly misleading in this case.