” target=”_blank”>Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism.
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Dear Professor Weiss,
Your book explores what you refer to as “confrontation” or “Jewish protest theology” – the age-old history of Judaism's arguments and confrontations with God.
For my first introductory question, I'd like to begin with the basics: How do you define confrontation, what would you like your readers to learn about the phenomenon, and why have there been no systematic studies of the history of this theme in Judaism?
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Dear Shmuel,
Despite its centrality in contemporary liberal Judaism, no academic book has comprehensively analyzed the ancient roots of the Jewish tradition of protesting God. While two Jewish theologians, Anson Laytner and David Blumenthal, have composed important and influential constructive works on the arguing-with-God expression, and other scholars have treated the motif as it emerged in Hasidic thought and the post-Holocaust theology of Elie Wiesel, little has been done to trace the origins of this distinctive feature of Judaism. In fact, Ephraim Urbach, Arthur Marmorstein, and Max Kadushin, the leading scholars of ancient Jewish theology of the past generation, ignore altogether the theme of protest. Consequently, the tradition of arguing with God is often assumed in contemporary literature without understanding and appreciating its roots and history in the most canonical of Jewish works: Midrash and Talmud. (70 CE -800 CE).
My recent book, Pious Irreverence, examines how the rabbis of late antiquity produce moral critiques of God. The rabbis, however, do not challenge God directly, but indirectly by placing critiques of God into the mouths of various biblical heroes when they retell the biblical story. Through this literary method, the rabbis can express their own struggles, ambivalences, and discomforts with the biblical God who, at times, acts capriciously, arbitrarily, and without due mercy. Although from a scholarly perspective the critiques are designated as “rabbinic” creations, the rabbis, of course, do not admit this. This act of protest ventriloquism provides a literary safe space or shelter for the rabbis to generate their own critiques of God with impunity as they present themselves not as originators of the confrontation but only as their transmitters. The sages thereby remove themselves from the picture, placing sole responsibility for the challenge onto a biblical character. This act of ventriloquism does not solve the moral problem, but it does provide a cathartic outlet for the sages to work through their own theological and moral anxieties with a problematic scriptural God.
Building on the prior works of Laytner and Blumenthal, Pious Irreverence analyzes the Jewish protest expression from a variety of perspectives, including the comparative, conceptual, historical, and theological.
Adopting a comparative lens, the book traces and explains — for the first time in modern scholarship — the emergence of anti-protest traditions in both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. I argue that rabbinic and early Christian anti-protestors adopted different ways to explain how heroic biblical protestors such as Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job launched their critiques of God with seeming impunity.
From a conceptual perspective, the book uncovers the midrashic rationales behind both the rabbinic anti-protest tradition and the pro-protest position. It asks, why should protesting God be deemed a sinful act, or how can it be logically defended?
Third, using a historical lens, the book isolates the emergence of pro-protest Jewish traditions in the third century, and offers explanations as to why a similar pro-protest position never surfaces in early Christianity. The book also demonstrates how the six and seventh-century rabbinic Midrashim called “Tanhuma-Yelammedenu” radicalize earlier pro-protest traditions, and then offers historical, cultural, and literary reasons to account for this intensification.
Fourth and most controversially, Pious Irreverence highlights the theological implications of these late rabbinic texts. I argue that many of these rabbinic protests — particularly in Tanhuma-Yelammedenu literature–rely on the theological premise that God is not morally perfect and, thus, God’s goodness does not necessarily need to be defended in the face of biblical accounts of unethical divine action.
The bold notion that God is fallible and not morally-perfect — and therefore protesting God might be legitimate — surfaces in amoraic literature (fifth century CE), and appears most starkly in post-amoraic rabbinic literature (sixth-seventh century CE). In these latter texts, we read of biblical heroes teaching or counseling God to adopt a more ethical approach to governing the world. Strikingly, God accedes to these moral critiques, declaring that the contentious encounter has caused Him to adopt a new moral position. In these midrashim, God’s apparent capitulation is transformative and substantial, expressing an essential change in God’s moral compass. They reflect an ongoing and fundamental change in God’s attitude toward His governance of the world, rather than a one-time concessional act of divine mercy as we have in the Hebrew Bible or earlier rabbinic texts.
The scholarly neglect of the protest material in the rabbinic period is due in part to the unsystematic and fragmentary nature of its earliest expressions in the foundational texts of Judaism—the works of Midrash and Talmud—which were produced by rabbis in Hebrew and Aramaic more than fifteen hundred years ago. More importantly, this lacuna should also be attributed to the field’s biases. While there are an abundance of scholarly works treating non-theological rabbinic sub-fields– such as history, law, literature and biblical interpretation — rabbinic theology has been a neglected area. In fact, the last scholarly original English book on the rabbinic conception of God appeared in 1988 (Jacob Neusner’s Incarnation of God). This reality, of course, begs the question: why have scholars of the Talmud and Midrash shied away from investigating theological matters? Part of the answer relates to an old problem – the “embarrassing” depictions of God found in these sacred texts. The divine in the rabbinic documents is not presented as a transcendent, omnipotent or omniscient being, but a complicated, embodied, and fallible deity who evinces greater continuities with the capricious gods of Greco-Roman mythology than the incorporeal, unchanging Christian God of Augustine, Maimonides or Aquinas.
Rather than defend these odd and “embarrassing” anthropomorphic depictions of God as genuine expressions of the rabbinic imagination, the standard traditional Jewish response — from Moses Maimonides and on — was to neutralize the problem by adopting various strategies of containment. These apologetic maneuvers included de-canonizing or devaluing the non-legal sections of the Talmud and Midrash; seeing these strange divine images as mere “poetic conceits” for the uneducated masses; or embarking on various forms of allegorical reinterpretation that expose the deeper “spiritual kernel” of the rabbinic depiction.
In the 1990s and 2000s, however, revisionist scholars such as Michael Fishbane and Moshe Idel sought to break Maimonides’ philosophical hold on rabbinic theology. They stressed the discontinuities between early rabbinic and later philosophical thought. The unapologetic works of Fishbane and Idel have ignited a renewed interest in the rabbinic God. “Scandalous” anthropomorphic texts – including much of the rabbinic protest material — that had been ignored and downplayed are now being read on their own terms. Building on Fishbane and Idel’s recent revisionism, Pious Irreverence reads rabbinic reflections concerning God with a literalist hermeneutic and with utmost seriousness.
