Answer

Dear Rabbi A., greetings.
 
I went through your book, In Human Language, which you sent me. Many thanks for sending the file. I have quite a few comments. I’ll try to write briefly and summarize the main points. Of course this isn’t organized, as befits an email.
 
The book is written clearly and fluently, and I enjoyed reading it very much (it even happened at the speed of light. I finished the whole thing over the course of a few hours just now). At first glance I agreed with most of the points, but all along I felt that I didn’t agree with the melody in the background. In the end I realized that we have several very fundamental disagreements, even though I agree with many of the bottom-line conclusions. I hope my reservations will be received in the right spirit. They are written constructively and out of sympathy for the directions you are trying to advance.
 
Before describing the disagreements, I should note that in my opinion it would have been important and appropriate to devote a section at the beginning of the book to presenting your methodology: to what extent you are committed to sources, and to which sources. For example, it would be important to clarify whether you are trying to prove theses or merely show plausibility (in the end I understood that the latter is correct). There are very few arguments in the book in the sense of true or false, and your conclusions are mainly a result of your own personal and value-based preferences (the book is written in a very personal way, and in my view that weakens it, because the reader gets the impression that you are presenting him with a personal, non-binding position. All he has to say is that it doesn’t seem right to him, and that’s that. If there were arguments, he would have to deal with them and couldn’t brush them aside so easily).
At times you bring a source from Maimonides or Rabbi Kook, which of course you choose as you wish (not because it is truer, but because it fits your values and your views better). More than that, you also interpret the sources in a completely free manner and do not seem committed to their original meaning (your hermeneutics strike me as somewhat deconstructionist). I’m not claiming that this can’t be done, but such an approach requires methodological justification. Beyond that, why do you need the sources and interpretation at all? If in any case you choose your sources according to your preferences, just say directly what you have to say and that’s it. If you hadn’t found a Maimonides who supported your views, would you have abandoned them? I assume not—and rightly so.
It’s important for me to clarify that on this point I not only agree with you, I am even more radical than you: in my view all of this has no status whatsoever in formulating a philosophical outlook. I say what I think, and it really does not matter to me whether someone in the past said it or not. In the realm of thought (as opposed to Jewish law—and even there there is an exaggeration in granting authority), what determines things is what is true, not whether someone said it.
Beyond that, in my opinion there is no such thing as “Jewish thought.” There is correct thought and incorrect thought. What is correct obligates every non-Jew as well and can also come from a non-Jew, and what is incorrect should not interest me even if its source is “Jewish.” Therefore, for me Kant, Dostoevsky, Russell, or Shakespeare have the same status as Maimonides or the Maharal in shaping moral and philosophical positions (except that Kant and Russell, in my opinion, are more rational and speak to me much more). These are all methodological principles that it would have been important to clarify at the beginning of the discussion, especially if one wants to propose revolutions in Jewish thinking. Not for nothing did Maimonides, who made revolutions, devote considerable effort to methodology (the roots, the introductions, the Book of Commandments itself, Guide of the Perplexed, and more). In my trilogy, substantial sections are devoted to methodology and these questions, precisely because of the radical positions I present there.
 
As mentioned, after reading the book it became clear to me that there are several very fundamental points on which I disagree with you. It seems to me that almost all of them can be arranged along one chain, because they are connected. I’ll try to present the main points here (without sufficient processing, but briefly, as is fitting for an email).
Without revelation in its accepted sense, there is no point to the whole thing. I see no obligation whatsoever to keep something just because it is Jewish culture or because someone dreamed it up—even if that dreamer claims it is a divine revelation trickling down to him. Let everyone keep his own hallucinations to himself.
And indeed, in the end you arrive at seeing Judaism as culture. In my view culture is valueless, and I see no importance in it, and certainly do not feel bound to Jewish or Israeli culture. If I happen to like it, fine; and if not, also fine. I have no problem being a halakhically Jewish person with Belgian or Tanzanian culture. Why should I care about one culture or another, even if it is that of my people? Maybe there is sentiment, but you do not build commitment, obligation, or religiosity from sentiment. Sentiment is an emotional matter, not a value-based one.
The component of obligation was very absent for me all along, and I understand from your concluding remarks that you really do not accept it (commitment without obligation). If so, this is not a religious doctrine but a cultural one. See the previous paragraph.
From this it follows that you identify religious values with universal and human values, and here I disagree with you deeply. Not because I do not feel committed to universal values. On the contrary, I am fully committed to them, and sometimes for me they override Jewish law and religious values. But I do not see religion as an instrument for morality and a proper society. You do see it that way (following Maimonides and Rabbi Kook), and from this you draw conclusions about changes that are called for today. In my eyes this is a baseless outlook (on the part of Maimonides and Rabbi Kook), since most of Jewish law contributes nothing at all to a proper society or to a proper human being. The dubious explanations offered by Maimonides in Part III of the Guide of the Perplexed and by Rabbi Kook in his To the Perplexed of the Generation, and elsewhere, are in my opinion ridiculous, with all due respect. To think that Jewish law was created for this is an intellectual joke. How can one explain all the details of Jewish law as instruments for creating a proper society: the prohibition of pork and creeping things, ritual impurity and purity, meat and milk, the detailed laws of mixtures, and so on and so on?
And from this it follows, in my opinion, that what you are offering is not Jewish culture but universal culture. What is Jewish about the values you propose? Is there any enlightened non-Jew who would not accept something from what you say? What non-Jew could not pray in the sense you propose, or keep commandments whose goal is values of justice and the like? At most he would not say all this in Hebrew and would not season his positions with Talmudic passages or texts from medieval authorities and later authorities, but his conclusions would be completely identical to yours.
For example, you look for justice rather than charity, because that is what you believe in (as opposed to me, with no connection to Judaism). But that is a value you advocate as a person, independently of Judaism; afterward and on that basis you dress it up as Judaism. So why do that? Give your reasons why it is good to work for justice rather than charity, and that’s enough. Moreover, by the same token, a capitalist like me will find an anchor in biblical and halakhic sources no less good than yours—indeed, in my view better. So what use is your reliance on sources when they do not obligate your position?
And more generally, it seems that you are not really looking for what the Torah says, but rather dressing it up with what you want to say. By the way, this is not an accusation. In my trilogy I argue that this is what happens structurally in Jewish thought. But precisely because of that, this is not Judaism in my opinion (not because it is false—that can be debated—but because it has nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism. It is your outlook as a person living in our Western humanistic world. So why dress it up in Jewish sources?!). Incidentally, in my trilogy I use your article firsthand about the need to seek a doctrine of social justice in our sources, and I criticize it for resorting to our sources on such a matter, when there is neither need nor value in that (and it is also doomed to fail, because in our sources you can find whatever you want, and that means they have no value. You yourself bring a similar Popperian argument regarding providence as an explanation for what happens in the world. Incidentally, in my opinion providence is not meant to offer an explanation for what happens in the world, and therefore I do not agree with your criticism. As for myself, I do not accept that there is providence in the sense of divine intervention in the world. There may perhaps be passive providence—He watches the world).
Just to clarify my position, I would say that I advocate a dual-aspect approach. I am a Jew and a human being. As a Jew, I am committed to Jewish law, and everything else belongs not to my Judaism but to my humanity (“nothing human is foreign to me”), and I am no less committed to that. This too is explained at length in my trilogy. Therefore I do not seek universal values in Jewish law and am not troubled by contradictions between them. The same applies to democracy and Judaism/Jewish law, or the laws of the state and Jewish law. These are two alien categories (contrary to what you write at the end), and I am committed to both. But not because both are Jewish law—rather because both are binding on me.
I also completely accept the human component in Jewish law (in thought there is only that, as stated), but that does not mean that Jewish law is a human invention, as seems to emerge from your words. The basis was given to us, and on top of it we interpret. Moreover, there is no doubt that interpretations are influenced by the values and norms in the interpreter’s/halakhic decisor’s environment, and that is perfectly fine. A person is shaped by the landscape of his birthplace. So it is also clear that interpretation suffers from many errors, as happens with human beings, but none of this touches halakhic obligation. That does not depend on authenticity (that is, on whether this is in fact what the Holy One, blessed be He, intended when He gave the Torah). This too is a methodological assumption that I clarify in my trilogy.
 
Regarding prayer, it is important to distinguish between its various parts (praise, request, thanksgiving, etc.), each of which requires separate treatment. The main problem lies in the requests, since in the view I accept—that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved in the world and therefore there is no point in asking Him—it is not enough to explain, as you suggested, that this is an expression of my feelings. One cannot ignore the fact that in the wording of the prayer I ask the Holy One, blessed be He, for healing or livelihood. That requires a more concrete explanation. The same is true of praise, since there too there is no point in praising the Holy One, blessed be He, for what He did not do.
 
In conclusion, I must explain why in my view these are very important comments. Precisely because I support most of the revolutions you propose, the methodology you employ may undermine them. A reader inclined toward conservative views will immediately identify this direction with lack of commitment to Jewish law (Judaism as culture, universality in disguise) and reject the ideas out of hand. Precisely for this reason, in my trilogy I show how one can reach your bottom-line conclusions, and even far more radical ones, without giving up the dimension of obligation and obedience to command, which in my view are the essence of religiosity (and not mere religious feeling or moral values, as is common in Christian thought). But this requires difficult methodological and systematic effort (hence the length. I build a systematic picture from the foundations to the top). I have a feeling that perhaps if you read the trilogy, you may agree with a considerable part of what I say and see that it is possible to arrive at conclusions that seem right to you without giving up the fundamental components of religiosity (in its Jewish sense), as, in my understanding, happens in your book.
 

Again, I hope my words will be received in the right spirit. I wrote them constructively, precisely because I identify with your principal directions.