The Commentator

A couple of semesters ago, I took a class entitled Philosophy of Talmudic Perspectives and Values.  Though the Talmud is not part of formal Western philosophy, the class examined to what extent it is possible to gain philosophic insights from Gemara texts.  The question raised was one of methodology.  How can we, if at all, validly extract or abstract from a whirlwind of legal contemplation and legend-like agadeta substantial, conceptual approaches to the major questions of meaning in our lives?  This puzzle resonated with me, and still does almost every time I open a Gemara. 

The Bible may be the Holy Book, but the Talmud is our book.  Halakha is the guide and the footprint of the Jewish people.  By balancing self-governing rules of interpretation and precedence with organic growth and adaptation, the halakhic system has guided Judaism through space and time.  The core of this remarkable achievement is the Talmud.  The Talmud provides the personality of our whole legal system and by extension our national identity.  It is the culmination of everything that came before it; everything that comes after is commentary. 

It is no wonder then that the Talmud, with its metaphysical descriptions, ethical anecdotes, and intriguing logic is prized as a hashkafic, as well as halakhic, source.  From Rambam to the Rav, the Talmud’s presence inhabits the great works of Jewish thought.  Still, the interplay between Gemara and hashkafa is far rockier than the interplay between Gemara and halakha.  Our methodology for studying Gemara as a segue into halakha is well established and systematic.  The same cannot be said for hashkafa.  Jewish philosophy may continuously cross-reference the Talmud, but this often means citing specific, often difficult to understand, out-of-context passages to support already well-articulated ideas.  Organized talmudic study for its own sake is rarely done with a philosophic end in mind. For this reason, the average reader has no resources other than trust or cynicism to rely on when contemplating which came first: the chicken or the egg, or, in this case, the interpretation or the conclusion? 

And so, I find myself asking the original question even more emphatically: is it possible to develop a method of talmudic study through which the text’s own hashkafic voice can emerge?  The inaccessibility of the Talmud in this area is daunting, and I think in modern times made even more challenging by, ironically enough, the study of philosophy itself.  Thus far, I have been using the terms hashkafa and Jewish philosophy interchangeably.  This is a misnomer.  Philosophy is the discipline invented by the Greeks to further man’s search for truth, not to mention the Truth, through his natural cognitive resources, specifically his ability to think rationally.  Hashkafa is the Jew’s attempt to articulate a world-view; a broad picture of existence both physically and meta-physically derived from the wisdom of Torah.  Both emerge from the natural need to understand the world and our place in it, but philosophy is about what man envisions; hashkafa about God’s vision. 

It is very difficult, however, to totally separate philosophy from hashkafa, as the latter also requires a great deal of man’s rational input to draw conclusions.  When faced with a difficult passage of Gemara, there is a thin line between uncovering the hashkafa, and philosophizing a good enough fit.  Furthermore, it seems impossible to be fully aware of how much our outlook is formed by the philosophic traditions which mold the society we live in.  Any system of thought establishes axioms, rules of conduct, and poles against which new material can be measured.  The Talmud seems neither ignorant nor uninterested in the aspects of life we normally associate with philosophic questioning.  However, its method for broaching such subjects, its framework for understanding them and its very language for expressing them is radically different from the philosophic approaches we have come to take for granted.  This intellectual mismatch has me concerned; will any methodical approach to revealing talmudic hashkafa quickly slip into fancy analytic and literary acrobatics in order to read philosophy into the Talmud?  This may further personal intellectual pursuits, but cannot seriously contribute to a substantial understanding of the text. 

The twentieth century French philosopher Emanuel Levinas suggests a solution which uses philosophy to solve this very problem which philosophy created.  His approach can be found in Nine Talmudic Readings, a collection of transcribed lectures originally delivered by Levinas at the annual Talmudic Colloquia of Jewish Intellectuals in Paris between the years 1963 and 1975.  The essays all share the same format: Levinas quotes a section of Gemara, then analyses it piece by piece in light of political, social and, of course, philosophic themes of his day.  It is this format that makes Nine Talmudic Readings rather distinct.  Levinas is not cross-referencing Gemara in a philosophic discussion; The Gemara is presented as the foundation of the discussion.  Sensitive to the vast divide between the texts before his eyes, the thoughts in his head, and his strong desire to reconcile them, he admits to strong philosophic influences on his writing and considers his work a translation from “Hebrew” to “Greek”.ⁱ 

Many will argue that Levinas’s Gemara study is all smoke and mirrors; that Nine Talmudic Readings is exactly the type of mismatch feared.  Levinas was first and foremost a Philosopher in the secular tradition.  Furthermore, the Colloquias were intellectual, not religious, gatherings.  The very decision to translate from Hebrew to Greek implies greater familiarity and comfort with the second language over the first.  It is very easy to be skeptical of Levinas’s efforts and argue that his outlook is integrally biased towards philosophy; the Talmud never really had a chance.  It is possible to still benefit from Levinas’s conclusions while arguing that the method he uses to reach these conclusions has little, almost nothing, to do with learning Gemara.  Perhaps the best proof of this position is that the Nine Talmudic Readings uncovers a remarkable correspondence between the deeper lessons of the Talmud and the body of work of Emmanuel Levinas. 

If Levinas had described his work as talmudic interpretation, rather than translation, I too would be convinced that the Talmud was merely his token cultural frill of choice in primarily philosophic exercises.  His careful choice of the word “translation,” though, garners greater consideration.  Interpretation implies a one step process of clarifying what is already there in the same language.  When one is seeped in a certain way of thinking, this way of thinking is always what is already there.  Translating, on the other hand, is a two-step process.  It requires a) deciphering the meaning of a foreign text and b) determining which words from the language one is translating into best capture this meaning.  Both languages are active partners in transmitting meaning.  In the process of comparison the limits and lengths of both languages become illuminated.  Annette Aronowicz, in her translator’s introduction to Nine Talmudic Readings, describes Levinas’s translation as “simultaneously an attempt at letting the Jewish texts shed light on the problems facing us today and an attempt at letting modern problems shed light on the texts.”ⁱⁱ This methodology suggests that philosophy can be made into a chavrusa, literally an ezer knegdo, to Gemara and that this will result in “violence done to words to tear from them the secret that time and conventions have covered over.”ⁱⁱⁱ  We are forced to challenge preconceived assumptions about Gemara and philosophy, but through a method of talmudic learning. 

To demonstrate how this method works, and also how it does not, I’d like to bring an example from the Levinas’s essay “Temptation of Temptation.”^iv  Levinas’s text is a slew of agadeta about Mattan Torah which he considers in light of a philosophic problem with which he often struggled. He felt modern society suffered from “the temptation of temptation”^v – an idealization of knowledge that encourages even knowledge of sin.  On the other hand, Levinas sees no benefit in the common philosophic alternative—child-like innocence—which is only able to offer protection through ignorance.  He was in search of a third approach, one that would allow for wisdom but not at the expense of morality.  The problem of the temptation of temptation is a real problem for Levinas, one that must be confronted whenever the transmission of knowledge assumes a prominent role in society.  Since Mattan Torah is the ultimate occurrence of this, the events of Mattan Torah must either overcome, or be tarnished, by the temptation of temptation.  Through the agadeta discussed, Levinas demonstrates how the Jews accepted the Torah neither for the sake of knowledge nor through ignorant-innocence, but from “an original fidelity to an indissoluble alliance”^vi - basically, responsibility^vii.  Levinas deciphers, to the best of his ability, what the Talmud is conveying about the occurrences at Mattan Torah. Simultaneously, he considers the philosophic possibilities for receiving knowledge.  He compares and contrasts the Talmud and the philosophy until they correspond.  Hence: translation. 

But has this method really solved the problem of reading philosophy into Gemara?  The conclusion drawn about Mattan Torah just so happens to correspond with Levinas’s own philosophic answer!  It is impossible not to smile at this symmetry.  Giving Levinas the benefit of the doubt and assuming his intention was truly to clarify the Gemara, this symmetry demonstrates a degree of faith.  Mattan Torah - God’s revelation to man and man’s acceptance of God’s word – is an event we strongly need to believe was not conducted haphazardly.  If, previously, Levinas rationally concluded that responsibility is the moral mode through which ideas should be transmitted, then of course he is going to trust that Mattan Torah was conducted in this most moral way and will read the Gemara accordingly.  We can still say his intention was to elucidate a piece of Talmud as much as share a philosophic idea, but the conclusions are pre-drawn.  If translating only observes the text, but does not interrogate it, we are right back where we started.  We need to understand how translating can move beyond transposing ideas from one disciple to the next, before we can even start to overcome the danger of reading pre-formulated conceptions into text. 

To do this, consider the hypothetical (if not historical) possibility that Levinas did not consider his final answer before studying the relevant Gemara.  Suppose he had applied his method knowing only philosophic possibilities that were bothersome to him,  in this case the idealization of knowledge or innocence.  What would have happened?  The translation would have failed—there would have been no philosophic concept for Mattan Torah, no appropriate word in the Greek dictionary that corresponded to the Hebrew.  When one language lacks a word, you borrow from a language that does not lack it.  In other words, the final satisfactory answer would have been born from the Gemara.   

Translating Hebrew into Greek can contribute to forming a systematic method for studying Talmud towards a hashkafic end, but only as an initial step.  It disturbs the rhythm of common talmudic learning allowing the text to push past its accepted, but ultimately artificial, limit.  Greek moves us beyond Hebrew, as Levinas might have said.  If, however, translating into Greek only produces more Greek, we have hardly progressed.  Our real goal is reached by discovering where the translation fails.  To get beyond Hebrew and beyond Greek, to get to what Levinas might have called a Hebrew beyond Hebrew, would be to discover a mode of thought other than the philosophic and/or talmudic one we habitually know.  I don’t know what it would be, but I’m immensely curious to find out.

Tikva Hecht is a staff writer for Kol Hamevaser

 ⁱ Aronowicz, Annette.  Introduction.  Nine Talmudic Readings.  By Emmanuel Levinas.  Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1994.  p.  ix

ⁱⁱ ibid.

ⁱⁱⁱ ibid. p. 47

^iv ibid.  p. 30-50

^v ibid. p. 34

^vi ibid. p. 49

^vii My brief summary of “Temptation of Temptation” serves the purpose of this paper, but hardly does justice to Levinas’s ideas.  I highly recommend reading Nine Talmudic Readings to fully grasp his concepts. 

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