Hebrew School, Philosophy

Jewish teachers of today cannot, by and large, rely on a religious family culture, nor on an authoritative Jewish community….It is commonly said that education is a reflection of its society. Contemporary Jewish education has the task of creating the very society of which it should be the reflection. Not only must it interpret the received texts, it needs to reinterpret the very conditions of its role, assess the new situation and invent unprecedented methods for meeting it. A repetitive application of traditional approaches will not suffice. There is no substitute for philosophy in this context -- a rethinking of the bases of Jewish life and learning in our times.

- Israel Scheffler, Teachers of My Youth: An American Jewish Experience

Poetic Acts

Poetic acts are acts with potentially limitless reference. Interpretations of poetic acts are legitimated by the recognition of some thoroughgoing mapping between the act and its scene, on the one hand, and some other domain. Poetic acts refer to whatever it is that they map onto in these other domains, or whatever those things refer to. The legitimation of an interpretation is both epistemic and ontic. That is, we learn of these interpretations just as they come into existence – by grasping them mentally. An interpretation can become legitimate, even though the domain might not have had a configuration appropriate for the interpretation at the time of the act; as the world changes, as our concepts and knowledge change, so do the possible interpretations of poetic acts. The reference of a poetic act is potentially limitless because there is no (obvious) limit to the mappings that might be grasped by human minds, or the domains into which these mappings might be projected.

I think that the aesthetic evaluation of poetic acts is, in large part, a matter of aesthetically evaluating their referents, with extra weight given to more detailed mappings and mappings with greater salience. If we take a sports game, religious ritual, or dance performance to be a poetic act, then, whatever the other aesthetic characteristics of the game or performance, it seems that it grows more beautiful the more beautiful its referents, or more profound the more profound its referents, or more tasteless the more tasteless its referents. One explanation of what is sometimes unsettling (to me) about competitive sports when I have war or human conflict on my mind is that there is such a clear analogy between the sport and these domains.

There is something more to say about the attractiveness of poetic acts and the attractiveness of the religious life. Stay tuned.

Bingo

It would be one thing to self-consciously explore/explicate the “uncrystallized” theological ideas that are so integral to Jewish religious life, bringing to bear one’s favored philosophical outlook. One could appeal to aid from the neo-Kantians, or Wittgenstein, or Levinas, or for that matter Aristotle. One would then need to face a crucial question: how much and in what ways one’s favored way of thinking maps on to that of the Rabbis. It’s quite another to claim, as is the thrust of much medieval philosophical theology, that Biblical and Rabbinic theological ideas are captured, virtually without remainder, by some favored philosophical explication.

Howard Wettstein, "Against Theology"

Jewish Hereticism, Take 1

This was inspired by a recent, very interesting, very reasonable sermon given by Tom Gardner.

There is a sort of intrinsic (if, so to speak, defeasible) beauty in persistence in the face of adversity. An otherwise ugly fruit that stays firmly to a tree after a hurricane is beautiful. If people ridicule a silly hat again and again, the hat (or the wearing of the hat) takes on a certain beautiful quality. The persistence of the Rwandan genocide in the face of mounting public condemnation was not beautiful, but only because a genocide is not the sort of thing that can be beautiful.

Jewish practice has weathered more than a little ridicule and persecution, both from without and within. I think what is not despicable in it grows more and more beautiful in the face of this ridicule and persecution. The greater the adversity, the greater the beauty of its persistence in the face of the adversity. But what greater adversity can a religious practice face than rejection of the belief that has always provided the basic rationale for the practice? And then: what greater beauty (of this certain sort) can a religious practice take on than that furnished by persistence in the absence of belief? Only if there is something more powerfully ugly or despicable in the religious practice without the religious belief would the practice be ugly even then. But what could be more powerfully ugly or despicable even about our seemingly most innocuous religious practices? Not a rhetorical question.

Praying What You Don't Believe

Is it wrong to pray (or, if you like, act as if praying) what you don’t believe? For the sake of brevity and relevance to my own practice, I’ll restrict my attention to participation in a public worship service. If to say a certain sentence in prayer is (inter alia) to assert the sentence or its propositional content, then praying what you don’t believe seems to entail either lying, bullshitting, or some form of public self-misrepresentation. (It might only entail lying or bullshitting if we take the alleged assertive force of a prayer to be directed to the people around us, on the plausible principle that, simply by asserting a proposition one doesn’t believe, one can only lie or bullshit to other creatures.) I take it that lying or bullshitting (to your fellows in temple or church) through prayer is wrong. And even if we don’t lie or bullshit by praying what we don’t believe, it is still wrong to publicly misrepresent ourselves in the way I have in mind, that is, by knowingly inviting other people to believe something untrue about ourselves (namely, that we believe what we are saying). So if prayer entails assertion of the content of the prayer, then it is wrong to pray what you don’t believe. And if prayer is taken by the community in which one prays to involve assertion of a certain content, then even if one does not take oneself to be asserting this, one is still knowingly inviting other people to adopt false (and, I take it, important) beliefs. So prayer of what one doesn’t believe is wrong even if one is merely taken to assert the content of the prayer.

I like public prayer, but I do not believe a great deal of the propositional content of most prayer services, so this is an unsettling conclusion for me. Perhaps it should also be an unsettling conclusion for Pascal, who famously recommended that one make one’s way to faith by (at first faithlessly) performing rituals such as public prayer. Now, perhaps Pascal should be unsettled - I, for one, think faith (understood as firm belief in the conscious absence of any known epistemic reasons) in religious propositions (if any there be) is wrong. But I don’t want to be unsettled. Public prayer feels good, it connects me to a kind and serious community, it renews my appreciation for what I do believe in the prayer service, and, I think, it probably causes me to act, on average, a little bit better. It would be a shame if it were wrong for me to pray in spite of all this. I also imagine that there are a number of others like me, especially in liberal religious movements like Reform Judaism.

Happily, I believe that it need not be wrong to pray what one does not believe. It is not clear to me that saying a prayer involves the assertion of its content (if it has any); it’s hard to say exactly how one might go about finding out whether that is the case. But even if prayer, as it stands right now, involves assertion of the prayer’s content at least some of the time, it seems that it is in the power of church- and temple-goers to change this. This follows from the widely adopted view that some sort of convention is needed to give an utterance (in a context) its illocutionary force. It is in the power of the relevant linguistic community to renounce the convention according to which prayer is assertoric. It is always within the power of human beings to give up any one of their conventions; this is, I take it, a conceptual truth. Of course, there is some question in what linguistic community the convention of the assertive force of (my own) prayer resides. The members of my temple? Temple- and church-goers everywhere? Every competent English speaker? There is also the question how one changes a linguistic convention of this type. My intuition, though, is that if everyone I regularly pray with agrees that I am not asserting the content of my prayers when I utter them, I couldn’t possibly be asserting their content when I pray with them and them alone. We can take “agrees that I am not asserting the content of my prayers” in a sense suggested by William Alston in Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning; if everyone I regularly pray with is not entitled to subject me to some form of censure if (the content of) my prayers turn out to be false, they agree that I am not asserting their content. Perhaps we should also add that everyone must not be entitled to censure me if I even contradict the content of my prayers in another, assertoric context - say, by publicly declaring atheism or agnosticism (assuming these declarations have assertoric content). So, intuitively, my answers to the two questions I just posed are (1) that the linguistic community governing the illocutionary force of prayer is the part of a congregation that prays together regularly, and (2) that we convince this linguistic community not to warrant censure of non-believing participants in public prayer. Given the size of most prayer groups - in Reform Judaism, at least - this second aim, if not already achieved, can be achieved without difficulty.

Still, there remains the question whether we somehow defang prayer by stripping it of assertive force. I think we needn’t, but that’s a topic for another post.