New Article: Fake Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox “Post-Modernism” and the Impossibility of Midrash
David Shasha
Fake Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox “Post-Modernism” and the Impossibility of Midrash
I have exposed the fraud of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox Post-Modernism many times:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/shagar/davidshasha/AqRJ1zh9brs/n52tlLnwAwAJ
Central to the current discussion is the promotion of Rav SHAGAR whose post-Kookian Zionist readings of Jewish tradition have now become ubiquitous in the discussion:
As has become usual, we will notice that the frame of reference in this fraudulent discussion of Jewish Post-Modernism is strictly Ashkenazi and strictly Yeshiva University Orthodoxy under the iron hand Da’as Torah of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and his son-in-law and disciple Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein.
We have encountered Lichtenstein and his Da’as Torah authoritarianism before:
Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy has firmly rejected the Religious Humanism of Maimonides, as we can see in my discussion of Samson Raphael Hirsch:
Rav SHAGAR’s thought emanates from this Da’as Torah context and his Religious Zionism is quite antithetical to the Liberal political values of the Post-Modern, from Derrida to Foucault.
But worse that this is the complete avoidance of the pioneering scholarship of Susan Handelman and Jose Faur, figures who sought to link Rabbinical interpretation to the new Literary Theory.
I have discussed the intellectual-religious implications of this scholarship in my article attacking academic Judaic Studies “How German Is It?”:
This deceptive Modern Orthodox thinking pours old wine into new bottles in a way that pretends to be representing Judaism in a way that comports with the open hermeneutics of Deconstruction and Post-Modernism.
It is in the end the same old Ashkenazi PILPUL and political reactionary values of Religious Zionism and its extreme Messianism.
It is by no means an authentic presentation of a Jewish Post-Modernism that reflects Liberal socio-political values.
As we have also repeatedly seen, Rabbi Marc Angel is a devoted advocate of this Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox system:
As an example of his fierce loyalty to the YU weltanschauung and his ignorance of Sephardic culture, we have the following brief post on Midrash and Literalism:
https://www.jewishideas.org/three-year-old-bride-thoughts-parashat-hayyei-sarah
Here is how Rabbi Angel characterizes the matter:
No parent or teacher should insist that a child or student must believe that Rivka was three "because Hazal say so." Hazal also said she was fourteen! Midrashic statements are often made to convey a lesson, not to record historical fact. We should not compel people to accept the literal veracity of the midrash that has a three year old Rivka marrying a forty year old Yitzhak. To accept such a statement is not only religiously unnecessary, but morally repugnant.
Angel’s statement on Midrash fully confirms the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox approach, as it ignores the philosophical values of Literary Theory that we have learned from Post-Modernism.
I have discussed these issues in my recent article on Tablet magazine’s Adam Kirsch and his attacks on the Talmud:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/midrash/davidshasha/fDOa6iBH0eU/Bfw5DQ30BQAJ
Kirsch’s ill-advised and ill-informed attacks on the classical rabbinical literary-philosophical heritage is closely connected to the ongoing academic attempt to undermine the historical-conceptual integrity of the Talmudic tradition.
I have presented examples of this in a number of SHU posts.
There is of course Robert Alter and his vicious attack on Jose Faur and Jewish Post-Modernism as an anachronism and romantic projection:
In that article on Anti-Jewish values at Berkeley, I also made reference to the deeply offensive scholarship of Daniel Boyarin which is closer to “Jews for Jesus” than it is to traditional Judaism.
The new attacks on the Talmud stem from the tendentious assertions of scholars like Jacob Neusner and David Weiss-Halivni that I have addressed in the following post:
The current scholarship on the rabbinic tradition strongly denies the organic connection between the Pharisees and Talmudic Sages, as it seeks to mark the rabbinical literature as belated in relation to the Christian Scriptures and Jewish Apocalyptic and non-canonical Pseudepigrapha. These latter sources are viewed as more “accurate” sources of ancient Judaism than the Talmud!
It is a full-on assault on traditional Jewish identity and the primacy of the Oral Law.
My Huffington Post article on Midrash is a vigorous defense of the classical rabbinic tradition and its innovative literary-philosophical values.
Here once again is the complete article for those who might not have read it:
While the Halakhah, Jewish civil and ritual law, is the stern discipline of Jewish life, the Aggadic Midrash is its fountain of creativity. The word Midrash comes from the Hebrew root D-R-SH meaning “to inquire” or “to seek.” The word Aggadah comes from the Hebrew root N-G-D meaning “to tell” or “to narrate.” Midrash is the mechanism that permits Jews to generate new and multiple meanings from the Sacred Scriptures.
The tradition of Midrash as interpretation can be found in the strikingly odd tale of Ezra the Scribe in Nehemiah 8:8, where Ezra stood before a gathering of the people and presented to them the text of the Law, “translating it and giving the sense so they understood the reading.” Ezra — the “Bookman” — transformed Judaism into a text-centered religion which promoted study and critical investigation of its traditions.
In the period of the classical Sages, Midrash became a discipline unto itself, and many collections of Rabbinical Midrashim, most prominently the canonical Midrash Rabbah, were generated and later collected into books.
In her classic 1981 study of Rabbinic interpretation in the context of contemporary thought, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, Susan Handelman contrasts Midrashic hermeneutics to the Greek philosophical tradition:
The infinity of meaning and plurality of interpretation are as much as the cardinal virtues, even divine imperatives, for Rabbinic thought as they are the cardinal sins for Greek thought. The movement of Rabbinic interpretation is not from one opposing sphere to another, from the sensible to the nonsensible, but rather from “sense to sense,” a movement into the text, not out of it.
Rabbinic Midrash begins with the text of Scripture in order to spin out infinities of new meaning through the agency of stories, interpretations, and exegetical acts. While the ethical aims of both the Greeks and Jews sought an ideality, the methods that the two groups used were quite different.
The great scholar Max Kadushin, in his seminal 1952 work The Rabbinic Mind, sees the Midrashic method of narrative expansion that he views in “organic” terms:
The organismic principle of integration is an all-embracing principle, taking in all the value-concepts in the complex and relating every concept to every other concept in an identical manner. Within this general, all-inclusive type of integration or relationship, however, there is room also for additional forms of integration having to do not with the complex as a whole but with numerous specific concepts.
Kadushin illuminates for us the ethical elements that drive Rabbinic thinking, elements that emerge from a kaleidoscopic reading of Scripture.
In Medieval times Rabbinic sermons centered around the rhetorical aspect called Melitzah. Melitzah is the Hebrew term signifying rhetorical ornamentation and poetical values. The expert Derashah was one in which, as Jose Faur has written in an article on Rabbi Joseph Dana and Jewish oratory, the eloquence and erudition of the rabbi were central:
In our hands has been preserved a unique and quite singular art whose entire substance has been refined from a definitively Jewish source: the derasha or the “rabbinical oratorical art.” It would be germane to mention here that the Tanakh functioned within the Sephardic rabbinical tradition as a fully formed model of “rhetoric.” In this tradition, “rhetoric” is not considered an ornamental setting devoid of substance, but a Jewish aesthetic that shapes “truth/beauty” into a single unity: a truth that is inimitably beautiful is inimitably true, and the reverse [...]. From the aesthetic standpoint, the accomplished Darshan is no less an artist than the poet, painter or composer.
The art of Derashah thus comprises the scholarly-intellectual, the ethical, the exegetical, the aesthetic, and the poetical. Its aim is to expound Scripture by means of narrative expansion, thus allowing the Darshan, the one making the Derashah, to formulate new and often innovative ideas that can encapsulate cultural, historical, scientific, and philosophical values that are seen as “emerging” from the ancient Biblical texts.
As the scholar James Kugel states so eloquently in his landmark 1983 article “Two Introductions to Midrash”:
Here then is the crucial factor in the mentality of all early exegesis: for when what then happened in Scripture happens again and again, unfolds over and over, it is because the Bible is not “the past” at all. For it to be the past, its sense of time would necessarily need to be continuous with our own, and we would have to live amid a series of similarly God-dominated events, so that the whole flow of time from Abraham to now could make for one simple, consequential, story. Once this is no longer the case, biblical time becomes “other,” a world wholly apart from ours, yet one which is constantly intersecting our own.
In the end, Midrash is a means to affirm the sanctity of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture, yet it permits us to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the text in order to evolve as mature human beings. The Biblical text thus takes on a dual aspect: the ancient stories are told and retold while our current concerns are addressed.
The Midrashic method contrasts with static historicism, known alternatively as “originalism” or as “fundamentalism,” in its ability to adopt multiple perspectives and a pluralistic stance towards meaning in our lives. Rather than assume that the truth is a singular, univocal idea, the attitude found in the Platonic philosophy and adopted by Western civilization, Jewish tradition leaves room for multiple truths and a seemingly infinite chain of meaning that is exemplified in the use of the Midrashic method.
Angel’s discussion shows us the current reality of Modern Orthodoxy and the feeble way it approaches the Midrashic tradition; giving the lie to all of this Post-Modernism business.
We have seen in the work of Susan Handelman and Jose Faur a profound integration of traditional Jewish philosophical values with the tenets of Post-Modern hermeneutics.
Midrash is not only about Orthodox Literalism, but is a profoundly important existential strategy that allows us to make Scripture live in the present, as we continue to process new developments in civilization and struggle to understand how the past relates to the present.
Jewish Post-Modernism is not simply a negation of Ultra-Orthodox values, but is a way of reading texts that provides a depth of knowledge that is closely tied to humanistic concerns and our struggle to understand reality.
But when we look closely at what has been going on in Modern Orthodox Jewish circles we see a very different approach that continues to support authoritarian Zionist Da’as Torah and the illiberalism of the Ashkenazi tradition. It is all about the internal schisms that exist within Orthodoxy itself and how that conflicted Orthodoxy deals with the other Jewish denominations.
Let us not make the mistake of seeing the new Ashkenazi initiative as a real way of bringing Judaism and Post-Modernism together. It is just more slight-of-hand from those who desperately want to be seen as hip and current, when in point of fact they remain reactionary and impervious to new ideas.
David Shasha