PILPUL as a Psychological Disorder
David Shasha
PILPUL as a Psychological Disorder
This much Kafka was absolutely sure of: first, that someone must be a fool if he is to help; second, only a fool’s help is real help. The only uncertain thing is whether such help can still do a human being any good. It is more likely to help the angels who could do without help. Thus, as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka’s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity.
Walter Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka”
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look?
Bob Marley, “Redemption Song”
In Orson Welles’ classic 1958 film “Touch of Evil,” the master plays the character of Sheriff Hank Quinlan. Quinlan’s beat is on the US side of the Mexico-Texas border where he has built a reputation for “getting his man.” Unbeknownst to the public, Quinlan has consistently planted evidence over the years to incriminate those who he already believes to be guilty. In each of his cases, as later uncovered in the movie, where an accused perpetrator was convicted with physical evidence, we come to understand that the great crusader for the Law, the man who enforces the rules, is himself guilty of the most heinous violations of the Law he has been sworn to uphold.
Quinlan is a corrupt cop whose intuitions about the guilt of others cannot in the end hide his own degenerate behavior. In order not to be caught in his nefarious web of wrongdoing – all in the name of Justice and the Law – Quinlan is forced to team up with a family of Mexican criminals, the Grandes, and design a frame-up of a Mexican cop named Vargas who is working on the US side of the border in order to nab those same Grandes. Vargas’ crime is that he suspects Quinlan of malfeasance.
“Touch of Evil” is a morality play that reminds us of Franz Kafka’s The Trial and its centerpiece “Before the Law.” Kafka’s story revolves around a faceless bureaucrat named Josef K. who is summoned to a tribunal without being informed of the charge against him. The “trial” leads to madness and corruption all around, serving to perplex Josef K. whose mental anguish is heightened to the point of no return.
The relation between this Kafka-esque state of irrational incoherence with its residual mental instability and the world of corruption under the Law can be seen in the very interstices of the Ashkenazi rabbinical tradition – the very same tradition which caused so much anxiety to young German-speaking Jews like Franz Kafka and his peers.
At the core of the historical Ashkenazi rabbinical tradition is the concept of PILPUL. PILPUL is the means by which the rabbi approaches the Talmudic text and by means of casuistry reformulates the Law to reflect a situational morality.
As Jose Faur has stated in his classic essay “The Legal Thinking of the Tosafot”:
“The pilpul methodology of the Tosafot presupposes that there is no objective Halakha. In the final analysis, law is grounded on the discretionary judgment of the rabbi, and it is formulated through pilpul. The rabbi molds the law to fit the specifics of any situation. The pilpul reflects the specifics of the situation as seen by the rabbi, and projects to the community the pronouncement of the law made in a hallowed text – as interpreted and recast by the rabbi.”
The use of the term PILPUL in the classical Talmudic tradition, the tradition of the actual Babylonian academies, marked the rhetorical process by which a Law known through a process of oral transmission would be connected to a passage in the written text of Scripture. PILPUL was a hermeneutical device that would allow the Sages to make this rhetorical connection, knowing that the authority of the Law was passed down in the oral discussions of the rabbinical academies. The Scriptural prooftext would then act as the title under which a criminal would be charged.
The Ashkenazim were not a part of this organic Talmudic tradition and confused their own local customs with the actual Law as promulgated in the Babylonian schools. The Sephardic rabbinical tradition, emanating from the Babylonian academies and transplanted to places like Cordoba, Lucena, Fez, Cairo, and elsewhere in the Arab-Muslim world, maintained a strict fidelity to the Law as a foundational concept. Under the influence of medieval Aristotelianism the Sephardic rabbis began to engage in legal codification and a rational ethical system.
After the close of the Talmudic era, Sephardic Sages, similar to the work method of Aristotle himself, sought to organize the legal corpus out of the prolix and sprawling Talmudic literature, producing many books and studies that would serve as the basis for a judicial system that would extend throughout the Mediterranean basin for many centuries.
The contrast between the emerging Ashkenazi legal system and that of the Sephardim was predicated on the concern with rational method and practical application. Sephardi legal decisors were more concerned with streamlining the Halakhic process in order to provide practical rulings for their communities. Their Ashkenazi peers were more concerned with the theoretical aspects of the legal process.
A good example of this process is the legal code of Rabbi Isaac Alfasi (the RI”F) which was produced in the 11th century. Alfasi eliminated all extraneous, non-legal matter from the Talmud in order to extract the applied Law from that huge corpus of texts. The Halakhot of Alfasi is the first attempt to provide for the Law an organized construction, free of the PILPUL and endless discussion that is the hallmark of the Talmudic texts. It condensed the Talmud and led to an outpouring of similar works from other rabbis in the Sephardic tradition.
The Halakhic literature of the Sephardim and Ashkenazim is thus divided between Ashkenazi textual analysis and Sephardic codification. These are general truths that can be understood as a manifestation of the way in which each of the groups understood the formal function of the Law.
Understood within this historical context, PILPUL, as Faur clearly states, allows the interpreter to deny the objective Law and supplant it with a ruling based on personal evaluation. This subjective evaluation can be marked by the whim of the rabbi reflecting his own personal opinion free of rational consideration. Conversely, it can also be impacted by outside influences such as money and power that would force the decisor’s hand in favor of those who have the power to control the community. PILPUL maintains a flexible posture in its disregard for objective legal principles.
In either case, it is a system where the Law is undermined in an effort to allow for a more expeditious result based on circumstance rather than objective principle and rational ethics.
Faur has also identified this displacement of the Law in his discussion of the Ashkenazi-trained Spanish Rabbi Moses ben Nahman:
“The most important mind to emerge from Christian Spain, and the champion of the new form of Jewish orthodoxy, was the saintly Rabbi Moses ben Nahman. He was the great advocate of mysticism and one of the most intelligent censors of philosophical speculation. First, he no longer recognized the Law as the sole constitutive of humankind’s relation with God. In his commentary to the Pentateuch he advanced the thesis that one can be ‘depraved within the mandate of the Law.’ Therefore, to ‘be holy’ does not mean only to be punctilious in the observance of the Law as defined by halakha. There is a higher criterion, ‘such as abstention from the pollution that although it was not forbidden by the Law’ is essential, in his mind, to obtain perfection.”
Returning to our discussion of Kafka, we can see that after many centuries of this Ashkenazi Judaism based on PILPUL, the community was left without a clear understanding of what Jewish tradition, the Law, actually was. With the emergence of Jewish emancipation in Europe, many Jews were now free to take their leave of the religious system and its rabbinical hierarchy. The system was beginning to crack and Kafka’s writings serve to mark a new secular era in European Judaism that looked to question the inherited “truth” of its religious tradition.
Embodied in the text of The Trial is a haunting allegory of this religio-juridical process: A young man, minding his own business, is summoned by the court to appear for trial. But, in an uncanny grasp of the psychotic nature of PILPUL, has no idea what Law he is being charged with violating.
As a member of the Ashkenazi Jewish community, Kafka identified this process from the perspective of what the religious community would call a “fallen Jew.” The allegory allows us to perceive the all-powerful Ashkenazi rabbi as an autonomous entity who determined what the Law was to be. Disputes between rabbis led to divisions in the community where each sect would follow their rabbi, rather than following the Law.
Now, as was the case of Hank Quinlan in “Touch of Evil,” rabbis are empowered to enforce the Law. But when the Law is not an objective fact, but something created by the whim of the rabbi – like Quinlan’s rogue behavior, the individual member of the community has no idea how to properly behave.
In existential terms, the problem engendered by PILPUL is that there is no authoritative Law and no opportunity to live by a set of rules that are known to all. One of the Ashkenazi criticisms of Maimonides’ great Code, the Mishneh Torah, was that it provided the Jewish legal edifice in a clear and concise fashion. As most Jews, then as now, could not master the complexities of the Talmud and its related literature, the Mishneh Torah sought to provide a comprehensive guide to Jewish practice.
In his recent biography of Maimonides, Joel Kraemer remarks:
“Critics were disturbed by Maimonides’s effort to impose system upon the traditional multilayered and dynamic fluidity of Talmudic discourse. One hears this criticism even nowadays. Some claim that Maimonides imposed a congealed legal framework onto a dynamic tradition and enforced a homogeneous Talmudic hegemony upon a pluralistic Judaism. In reality, Maimonides created his code of law to remove the Talmud from its hegemonic position and give people time to study other things, especially the sciences.”
It is interesting to note that for all the Ashkenazi complaints regarding Maimonides’ strict “imposition” of the Law in a Sephardic Jewish world that accepted his authority and his intellectual method, this same Sephardic world was consistently more open and tolerant religiously than its Ashkenazi counterpart; a fact that has been the case until recently as Sephardic rabbinical authorities have abandoned the Maimonidean method and adopted the Ashkenazi approach with its PILPUL.
The paradox here is that strictness in formulating the Law leads to a more easy-going relationship to the Law. Where the Law was shown less respect, the behavior of the Jewish community was far more rigid. As the great Sephardi political theorist Daniel J. Elazar has noted, the Sephardic tradition prided itself on its sober classicism, while the Ashkenazi tradition embodied a romantic approach to Jewish tradition.
In the teaching of Rashi and his heirs the Tosafists, the leading rabbinical authorities in the classical Ashkenazi rabbinical tradition, there was a very loose attitude towards the integrity of the written Talmudic text. In the case of Rashi, we have the use of textual emendation – marked by the Aramaic term Hakhi Garsinan – and in the Tosafot we have the Davqa/Lav Davqa methodology.
On the latter point Faur explains:
“The Tosafot, occasionally, prefaced their analysis of the Talmud by declaring that the sense of the text is lav davqa (not exact). The lav davqa methodology revolutionized the study of the Talmud and changed the content of Jewish law. This methodology is grounded on the assumption that the rabbinic texts may be interpreted not in accordance to their usual sense.”
In an extremely canny way, the PILPUL method turned the Law over to the authority of a self-appointed rabbinical hierarchy operating in a way that emphasized religious zeal over rationality. Such a hierarchical system was quite familiar to European Jews whose understanding of religion was closely tied to the neighboring Catholic Church. Over the course of time, this system congealed into an ossified hierarchy that placed religious power solely in the hands of the clerics.
The PILPUL method gave free rein to the rabbinical class and stymied the community from accessing the Law in a free manner. It was a system that served to reconfigure the elegant classicism of a Sephardic approach which contextualized the Law within a larger socio-ethical and political framework that can rightly be called Religious Humanism.
In Ashkenazi tradition the rabbi was always right, regardless of what the actual Law might be. PILPUL would ensure that an objective approach to juridical matters would be overridden by the authoritative status of the rabbi. Rational standards were marked in this tradition as something “un-Jewish.”
This insight allows us to better understand the resistance to Maimonides’ legal method in Ashkenazi rabbinic circles, given Maimonides’ attempt to provide a comprehensive legal code that would be accessible to the average Jew, freeing them from having to master the huge and complex Talmudic corpus. It also allows us to understand the paranoia of Kafka’s parables in their obsession with the Law.
This development in the Jewish tradition has not been without adverse psychological manifestations. The notion of arbitrary extra-legal authority serves to undermine the mental well-being of the individual. On the one hand, Jews know that certain things are prohibited by the Law, and yet the rabbi was – under the aegis of the PILPUL system – free to remake the Law as he saw fit.
This means that theft and adultery can be permitted if the rabbi so desires in spite of what the Law states. It allows children to rise up against their parents if those parents are deemed undesirable by the arbitrary PILPUL value system. Fidelity to the Law is supplanted by fidelity to a clerical hierarchy. The rabbi is always right.
Conversely, it means that an individual who refuses the authority of the rabbi to remake the Law can be – like Kafka’s Josef K. – prosecuted and convicted in an extra-judicial manner without any rational juridical process. The idea is to allow the prerogative of the rabbi to assert his absolute authority over the individual without explanation.
In the Jewish community this has led to the creation of a magical, enchanted universe.
The rabbi is here not an authoritative representative of the Law, but, like Hank Quinlan, is a rogue sheriff who takes the Law into his own hands and imposes his own “justice” on the community.
The rabbi becomes an occult figure whose authority emanates from his magical powers.
In an attempt to deepen Kafka’s approach, the American Jewish filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen in their movie “A Serious Man” have exposed the sham of this Judaism in a dramatic and intensely moralistic fashion. “A Serious Man” is about a simple Jewish man in Minnesota whose wife is cheating on him. He is shocked to learn that she is having an affair with a “respected” member of the Jewish community. The wife brazenly demands a divorce to enable her marriage to the man she is cheating with, a marriage prohibited under Jewish law, which leads to her to cruelly persecute him and destroy his life. His children are fully aware of what is going on and remain oblivious to their father’s pain.
The cheating wife’s PILPUL serves to confirm the psychotic delusions inherent in the process: instead of affirming that adultery is a grievous violation of the Law, the opposite is asserted. The adulterous couple succeeds in publicly inflicting the utmost cruelty and humiliation on an innocent man. PILPUL allows this evil state of affairs to triumph – the innocent man does not stand a chance. In the course of the persecution we see the deployment of an aggressive tactic, a product of the PILPUL, which seeks to blame the victim. The man who is being persecuted is the one held responsible for the degenerative state of affairs.
In excruciating emotional pain and confusion he naively approaches the Synagogue’s rabbis to help solve the dilemma of the adultery, but they are too stupid, ineffectual and morally compromised to do anything about it. PILPUL has hoisted them by their own petard. Like Josef K., the poor schnook is set adrift in the toxic sea of PILPUL and left to rot. He has become, in the words of the Book of Lamentations, “a laughingstock to all people; the butt of their gibes all day long.”
“A Serious Man” is another bracing post-modern Jewish allegory on the ills of PILPUL. The film argues that justice must be paramount, and yet the Jewish institutional leaders, the rabbis charged with enforcing the Law, act as if they are powerless to uphold it when in fact they have chosen to simply leave things as they are. It is much easier not to rock the boat than to fight for truth and integrity.
There is no hope for the Jewish people, goes the argument in the movie, because there is no enforcement of moral rules, injustice has become the rule. Human beings can act any way they like, and those who are being violated have nowhere to turn to get justice. The system, as I have previously argued, is based on an expediency that can be determined by the influence of power and money. Whoever can accrue the most resources can easily get their way in such a corrupted system. All are not equal in the eyes of the keepers of such a system of “justice.”
The classical Jewish tradition is one that is firmly predicated on its fidelity to the Law. The Law is the great equalizer which permits all members of the community to be equal. In Jose Faur’s precious formulation, the Law creates a “Horizontal Society” where no one person is above any other person. All must be equal under the Law. That is the true meaning of justice in the Jewish tradition.
But what we have today is an imposition of the moral relativism and ethical anarchy of PILPUL which serves to establish a “Vertical Society.” It means that a Jew who claims to observe the Law can engage in practices that violate that very Law and not be subject to any punishment. PILPUL allows for this transgressive system which encourages hypocritical actions. The Law is reformulated to reflect the hierarchical structure of the community where rabbis are given free license to do whatever they want and to enforce their judgments in flagrant violation of the Law.
Again, it brings to mind the depredations of a system where the honest individual is powerless to assert their basic human rights under the Law. All they can do is comply, or suffer the consequences. This is the essence of the Kafka-esque.
It is interesting to note that the Egyptian-Jewish writer Edmond Jabes, another modernist icon, less known than Kafka because his is a Sephardi, appropriated a Jewish thematic for his series The Book of Questions and The Book of Resemblances. Jabes, like Kafka, was a secular Jew, but unlike Kafka was heir to the Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism and did not carry in his being the same anxiety regarding Judaism that the Ashkenazi Kafka did. Judaism for Jabes is a positive element and not a negative one as it was for so many Ashkenazi writers and intellectuals.
The Ashkenazi Jewish pathology has broken down our tradition in a way that has been deeply damaging to Jewish identity in our time. It has divided the Jewish people into different and sometimes opposing groups that mark a dangerous splitting of tradition and modernity.
A parallel to this dire situation can be seen in Don Siegel’s classic science fiction 1956 movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” an alien force invades Earth and assuming the form of human beings. Pods are infused into human bodies which have been murdered by these same aliens, and the pods are restored to life inside those bodies. We see the human beings that were once individuals become aliens who are intent on overrunning the planet by destroying a free humanity. We are not sure anymore who is human and who is alien.
In a similar manner, violation of the Law under the PILPUL regime sucks out our humanity and crushes our ethical foundation. For those who choose to live outside the realm of PILPUL and its extra-legal juridical structure, the world is a terrifying place. To preserve the Law under the fearsome tyranny of PILPUL and its endemic violence and brutality is something that tests of the will of the human being and their courage. Under the reign of PILPUL the psychotic becomes normative and the decent person is the one who is marked as aberrant. This is something quite familiar to the reader of Franz Kafka’s writing.
This in essence is the key to understanding how the Jewish world has transformed itself from a community grounded in the covenant of the Law, to a religion that is now predicated upon the very immorality permitted under the PILPUL regime. The persecution of the decent Jew is thus an accepted fact of life in a world where what was once right is now considered wrong, and what was once prohibited is now permitted. It is the mark of a psychotic and perverse world where the wicked prosper and where the decent are destroyed.
David Shasha