Abstract
POSTMODERN JEWISH REASONING(S). How does that sound to you? On May 22, about eighteen of us joined host Eugene Borowitz for a delightful conference at Hebrew Union College (NYC) on postmodern Jewish philosophy and text reading. In-between sessions on Sifre Devarim and Mishnah Eduyot, we reflected on what to call what we were doing (a practice we have indulged in only too often in this journal). Philosophers, rabbis, text scholars, literary folk, we gathered around selections from these texts, read first in chevrutot, then in the context of background readings on modern and postmodern pedagogy broadly considered: modes of transmitting knowledge, that is, and thus of receiving and interpreting foundational texts. Then we asked what we had been doing _ what patterns of behavior were displayed? Many kinds of pattern, to be sure, but, if we had to label the whole collection of them, we tended to agree that “philosophy” was too determinate a term, even with the “postmodern Jewish” modifier. “Reasoning(s)” won the hour (the day is too much to ask): a mark that there were identifiable patterns of discursive behavior here, even if no one pattern was privileged, nor any single way of describing the patterns. Some of us would have been happy with “Reasoning” (singular, but non-imperious since as vaguely known as the divine word), others more suspicious of any master(s),would have preferred something like “reasonings….” But we all tended to acknowledge our being engaged by a process that headed somewhere and by a dialogue, at once, with one another, with these texts, and with successive traditions of reading them that now begin to include our various “postmodern Jewish” discourses.
The text scholars among us may not be perturbed if “philosophy” per se has less of a hold on us, but it’s an unsettling thought for students of Maimonides and Rosenzweig among us who are accustomed to serving their Talmud with two lumps of Aristotle or Kant. In THE BODY OF FAITH (Harper, 1983), Michael Wyschogrod offers what may prove to be mediating words:
It is difficult to avoid asking why the Bible does not focus on reason as [humanity’s] distinguishing characteristic.... The Bible does not know of [the dissociation of matter and mind].. and speaks of [human beings] as being created in the image or likeness of God without expecting that this will be taken automatically to refer to the nonvisual likeness of an endowment, such as reason. In addition, the whole framework of definition is foreign to the biblical mind, especially when applied to the being around whom creation revolves . . .
And yet, reason plays a very important role in the Bible. It is best, at this point, to stop talking about reason and to begin talking about intelligence. Reason is a philosophical construct with definite theoretical implications. Intelligence is a working endowment rather than a theory and can be active in the absence of a philosophical theory about the rationality of the universe and the structure of mind that enables it to grasp the rationality inherent in the world. Intelligence is a quality of brightness that enables all normal human beings to some extent and some to an extraordinary extent to grasp relations and implications in complex situations. There are various forms of intelligence, and an individual can excel in one and not in another....
Recommended Citation
"Old Series: Volume 4, Number 2 (June 1995)." Journal of Textual Reasoning Old Series: Vol. 4 (1995): 42-81. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jtr/vol0/iss4/2