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The Last Rabbi

Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition

Indiana University Press

Hermeneutics of Rabbinic Mourning

Learning mourning may be the achievement of a lifetime.

— Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary

Learning how to mourn may take a lifetime to achieve, as Cavell writes, its challenges emanating from not knowing how to lose. Soloveitchik's sense of loss — both personal and historical — shows itself to be acute, cultivated in his later works to form the underpinnings of his radical conceptions of both ethics and the psyche. In programmatic midrashic statements, Talmudic tradition also figures loss, but does so at the center of its legal hermeneutics.

The "face to face" between the human and the divine in the biblical representation of the encounter between Moses and God in Exodus — "The Lord spoke with Moses face to face" (33:11) — depicts the fullness of presence, an historical manifestation of the Edenic ideal, but one that already anticipates its eventual loss. This book on law — legal hermeneutics and epistemology — begins with midrashic readings of the "face to face," or, in an extension of the generic category to include the Christian midrash of Paul, the philosophical midrash of Spinoza, and Freud's extended set of psychoanalytic and anthropological midrashim on the life and death of Moses. Together, with rabbinic meditations on the death of Moses — an event that marks for the rabbis an end to the privileged encounter of the human with the divine, as well as its loss — they provide meditations on the nature of transmission and truth from out of which the parameters of the rabbinic hermeneutics of mourning emerge.

I begin, however, with the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street and the presentation of its own unlikely midrash of the "face to face" from Exodus, expressing an anxious response to lost presence and an impatience with language as compensation for that loss. The persona created in this 1972 portrayal of Main Street America laments, "Don't wanna talk about Jesus, just wanna see his face." The song thus expresses the desire to dispense with the trappings of language, the excrescence of the material that detract from — and veil — the unmediated truth. That is, in its expression of a craving for the revelation of the divine "face," Exile expresses the desire for the pure presence of an unmediated truth, or what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as the possibility of "penetrating into pure immanence."

This fantasy has been nurtured from the beginnings of early modern philosophy, tapping into a trend of thought that has an ancient theological pedigree as well, what Harold Fisch describes as a "Christian impatience with textuality."

For the author of the second letter to the Corinthians, the veil that Moses puts over his face (Exodus 34:33) is a sign of the Jews' continued entanglement with language — specifically, the old dispensation of the law. As Paul's Christian midrash elaborates:

But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, behold the glory of the Lord. (2 Corinthians, 3:13-18)

As Fisch points out, Paul defines the veil of Moses "as an image of textuality itself," the inability to translate the literalism of the Old Testament into the allegorical truth of the Christian redeemer — the "unveiled face" of the "glory of the Lord." Paul himself, however, "believes that the New Covenant, using great plainness of speech, can evoke actual presence." Against a tradition enmeshed in the carnality and contingency of language, Paul holds out the promise of an exoteric truth without mediation that is available to all — a "freedom" founded on the unmediated perception of the "unveiled face." Paul dismisses the tradition of the "old covenant" on account of its historicity, and indeed, that as a tradition, it depends on language at all. For Paul, those of the prior covenant read and hear, while those of the second — in a purely visual register — simply "behold the Glory of the Lord."

Paul's project, Platonist in its roots, evidences the conviction that theological languages could better accomplish what philosophy had once claimed, eliciting the presence of the divine face. Where the "divided line" in Book 6 of The Republic diminishes the ontological validity of the phenomenal (in relation to the noumenal forms or ideas), the rejection of poetry in Book 10 echoes the allegory of the divided line by placing imagination and poetic representation on the lowest ontological and epistemological levels. As Plato's Socrates claims, the "art of representation is ... a long way removed from truth, and it is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp over anything, and that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance." In Paul's articulation of the "face," the discourses of the law are not merely phenomenal but now fleshly sinful and dead, implicitly taking their place in the lower part of the divided line, the realm of representation. The sight of the "glory of the Lord" enacts in theological terms the accomplishment of the Platonic ideal — rejection of the phenomenal and achievement of an unmediated, nondiscursive realm of truth.

Paul may have translated Plato's philosophical categories into Christian terms; Spinoza, returning to Corinthians and its Old Testament antecedent, appropriates the "face to face" to assert the disciplinary priority of the early modern philosopher. For Spinoza, the philosopher would once again claim precedence, ascending to the highest rung of the disciplinary hierarchy through an unmediated access to truth. In his championing of a new modern philosophy based on what he calls "universally valid axioms" and the study of "Nature," Spinoza turns to Christ as providing a model of the privileged acquisition of knowledge. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza argues explicitly for an unmediated form of truth: "We may quite clearly understand that God can communicate with man without mediation, for he communicates his essence to our minds without employing corporeal means." Communication, in the Spinozan context, is not through the corporeal means of language, rather, immediate — "of the divine ontological essence." Spinoza continues, affirming: "a man who can perceive by pure intuition that which is not contained in the basic principles of our cognition and cannot be deduced therefrom must needs possess a mind whose excellence far surpasses the human mind." For Spinoza, the highest form of cognition is limited to a mind that, in Aristotelian terms, transcends the category of the discursive and understands through "intuition" only. No one, in his view, has attained "such a degree of perfection surpassing all others, except Jesus." To his Jesus, the privileged mediator, Spinoza continues:

God's ordinances leading men to salvation were revealed not by words or by visions, but directly, so that God manifested himself to the Apostles through the mind of Jesus as he once did to Moses through an audible voice. ... Therefore, if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man may do with his fellow (through the medium of their two bodies), then Jesus communed mind to mind.

In asserting that God communicates with man without "mediation," Spinoza argues against forms of knowledge that rely on the intervention of language or images, taking the Pauline attack on the letter of the law and giving it philosophical force. Indeed, for Spinoza, the entirety of the Jewish tradition is compromised because of its self-avowed reliance on forms of mediation — language and images. From his perspective, such mediations, subject to time, place, and circumstance, are transcended for philosophical concepts of universal and eternal validity.

From the perspective of Spinoza's Christianized philosophy, even the prophecy of Moses is compromised because of its reliance on speech — for God speaks to Moses "in an audible voice." Spinoza's exemplary philosopher, Jesus, however, requires no such intervention, as he moves beyond all forms of mediation to a direct apprehension of God. There are neither "words" nor "visions," only the direct contact with the divine. While the Jews celebrate Moses, who spoke "face to face" with God, Spinoza himself heralds the Christian philosopher, who requires no intermediary but rather communes with God "mind to mind." For the Spinoza of the Tractatus, philosophical discourse achieves both truth and certainty, reaching axioms of universal and eternal validity. The Jewish tradition, however, comprised merely of "history and language," leads not to "truth," Spinoza writes, in anthropological terms, only "obedience." In Spinoza's view, the ideal figure of Jesus, replacing Moses in the face to face encounter (as Paul did before him) is not a figure of tradition, and certainly not one of historical transmission. Even when he communicates with the Apostles, it is nondiscursive — an abstraction — rendered through Jesus's mind.

Along with other early modern philosophers, Spinoza set the ground for the emergence of modern conceptions of objectivity, tied to early modern scientific methodologies and assumptions of epistemological neutrality, as argued further in chapter 3. In contrast to the theological culture from which they emerged, such early modern methodologies begin to assert, as Jonathan Lear writes, that "knowledge is available from no perspective at all" (Love, 120). Indeed, the situated nature of both knowledge and interpretation, tied to language and history, are from within Spinoza's early modern philosophical perspective impediments to a truth that is abstractly conceived and objective. Spinoza and his philosophical contemporaries were part of an early modern movement to initiate a split between subject and object (one maintained in an earlier poetic culture), through which the philosopher-scientist claimed objectivity and religious figures, humanists, and poets were relegated to an impoverished realm of subjective contingency. In Spinoza's reading, "the face to face" celebrates an unmediated truth, one that emerges, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, "from nowhere at all." Through his appropriation of Paul, Spinoza transforms a tradition based on transmission into a visual culture of imminence, based on a more literal reading of the Old Testament "face to face."

Focusing on the figure of Moses, Freud elaborates the psychological, historical, and anthropological underpinnings for what Spinoza understands as a Jewish culture grounded on "obedience." The priority of obedience leads to what Freud describes as a psychic phenomenon based on repetition and the necessary avoidance of the divine face. Freud, like the rabbis, focuses on Moses as a historical figure of transmission, but for him, the prophet fails at his task. In Freud's genealogy, the Jews reenact the primal murder of the father in the killing of Moses, and through the repression of its memory, fall prey, as Robert Paul explains Freud, to "a collective obsessional neurosis, namely Judaism itself." In Freudian terms inflected by Spinoza, the neurosis of Judaism is the refusal of an unmediated truth, the avoidance of the face (not only of God, but also Moses), and the subsequent fall into repetition. The inability to remember transforms into repetition, as Robert Paul writes, of "apparently trivial or pointless rules, ordinances, ceremonies, prohibitions and self-accusations." In the Judaism understood to be a religion of repetition, the "Torah" is merely an "instruction manual" to be "recited, copied, taught, studied, and infinitely replicated." Taking themselves out of history, Freud's version of the ancient Hebrews consign themselves, as Hans Loewald, adopting Mircea Eliade, to an "atemporal realm" in which there is "no emphasis on individuality, nor on process with a direction either into the past or into the future, and no emphasis on actively establishing a relationship ... between past and future, which activity would give dignity to the present." In their repressed guilt for the unacknowledged murder of Moses, Freud's Jews give up autonomy, which is itself a function of their abandonment of history. Relegated forever to the realm of Eliade's primitive "premodern," Moses's descendants, for Freud, inhabit a realm outside of history in which the conditions for a tradition — other than as mere repetition — never maintain (Loewald, 99-100). That is, Freud's Jews are distinctive for having lost the capacity to remember and for never achieving a state of "modernity," itself defined through memory, and the futurity and free will that rest upon it. For Freud, it is not a Christianized philosophy that redeems humanity from loss; rather, the endless repetition of the unacknowledged guilt of Judaism is replaced by a Christian memory that saves and, in the process, overcomes the obsessional repetitious neurosis associated with the law.

Freud's figuration of Judaism is linked to his representation of Moses, particularly his death — his slaying, in the story Freud tells, at the hands of the people of Israel. The primal act of the murder of Moses emerges as a cultural, indeed a world-historical, principle through which the psychic configuration of guilt characteristic of Western culture (and especially, for Freud, Western religion) is traced to the original trauma enacted in the repressed rebellion of the people of Israel against their leader, itself a reenactment of the murder of the primal father by the horde. For Freud, the history of the Jews and religion itself begins with that repetition, and a failure of memory. The "shared obsessional neurosis" of guilt begins in the failure of transmission, part of the ambiguous Jewish legacy to the West, with its antecedent and cause in the forgotten murder of Moses. Without the activity of tradition, informed by the psychoanalytic self-consciousness embodied in the process of "working through," the Israelites remain unredeemed from their tragic repetition. As Freud writes, the more one evidences "the compulsion to repeat," the less one experiences "the impulsion to remember" (SE, 1:151). For Freud, religion imagined as obsessional repetition and obedience — and the loss of memory — begins with the murder of Moses.

Without adhering to Freud's narrative of Jewish origins, however, Moses and Monotheism, remains important for its insights into what Richard Bernstein describes as "the meaning of a religious tradition," the nature of religious transmission, or what Freud describes as the ideal possibility of uniting "influences of the present and the past" (SE, 23:207). Paul and Spinoza remove the "face to face" from history, assimilating it to a nonlinguistic conception of the "glory of the Lord," thus rendering tradition obsolete. Freud, however, focuses on Moses as the historical figure who, on account of his murder, shows himself to be a failed figure of transmission. This Freudian account of Moses's murder and its relationship to a tradition understood as repetition allows for an understanding of a different set of representations of Moses's death: those in rabbinic literature, that is, the aggadic figurations or interpretive stories of the Talmud.

In both rabbinic and Freudian narratives, Moses's death figures significantly in the respective conceptions of transmission, particularly of how the people of Israel perpetuate the law (though often despite themselves). In abandoning the genealogical narrative of Moses and Monotheism — Moses's death at the hands of Israel — the current account emphasizes what Lear describes as the volume's most significant insight, "that it is only when one kills off the messenger that the message gets installed." For the rabbis, however, the "killing off" is not the literal event that it is for Freud, one that makes any future based on memory impossible. To understand the rabbinic representation of Moses's death, or more figurative "killing off," I elaborate the insight of Moses and Monotheism that death as well as a certain kind of forgetting — Cavell's mourning — are critical to transmission and the recovery of loss in relation to rabbinic figurations of Moses's death.

The representations of Moses in the Talmud show the rabbis meditating on forgetting death (and even murder) in ways that foreground not so much guilt but rather anxiety in facing the demands of transmission, particularly mourning and the creative remembrance it entails. Further, what I call, in relation to Talmudic tradition, the hermeneutics of mourning does not elicit a singular absolute truth. Embracing loss and language produces a necessary pluralism, one which, read backward, reinforces the emphasis on textuality that Paul and Spinoza aggressively reject. Through the representation of Moses's death, the rabbis elaborate the anxiety of the people of Israel in facing a truth that no longer has its provenance in the privileged prophesy of Moses, and requires embracing a historical tradition based on loss and nurturing multiplicity.

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Excerpted from The Last Rabbi by William Kolbrener. Copyright © 2016 William Kolbrener. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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