INTRODUCTION

SERGEY DOLGOPOLSKI AND JAMES ADAM REDFIELD

This book is about Talmud and philosophy, not “Talmud” or “philosophy.” Its critical contribution is to uncover and interrogate the work of this innocuous copula /and/ in order to determine whether it serves as a conjunction, disjunction, continuity, or other form of relationship between the terms. Before beginning a discussion on this /and/, we offer an articulation of our title’s other orienting terms: philosophy and Talmud. Our presentation subsequently falls into two parts. The first is an “Attunement to the Theme of Talmud /and/ Philosophy” written by Sergey Dolgopolski that was sent to the contributors at the outset of our work together. Following this Attunement, we provide an introduction and chapter-by-chapter discussion of authors’ responses to our common theme.

What is “philosophy” as expressed in our title? Rather than a body of texts (by writers who are identified as “philosophers” on one hand, or, on the other, the Talmud, two late ancient Jewish corpora by that title), we define the relationship of Philosophy and Talmud as one of traditions. More precisely, to quote Gérard Granel, we define Philosophy as well as Talmud as a “tradition of tradition”: an inherited perception of what the tradition is. Practitioners accept this perception as given, even though they relate to one another’s practices of the tradition in various ways, for example, as exemplars or antagonists, thereby constituting differences within a continuity. By inviting the two traditions of tradition into conversation, the volume opens up a mutual renegotiation of their boundaries.

Philosophy, as such a “tradition of tradition,” is defined by many of its practitioners as unfolding from the pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece; moving forward to the Platonisms and Aristotelianisms of late antiquity and Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Middle Ages; to the humanism and romanticism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; and, finally, to the modern and postmodern eras—the focus of this volume’s practitioners of philosophy when this tradition of tradition radically questioned its own scope and limits—emblematically in Feuerbach and Marx in the nineteenth century, and Heidegger and Levinas in the twentieth.

Talmud refers to a “tradition of tradition” that originates in but is not confined to late antiquity, nor is it limited to the medieval era when its literary product (the Talmuds of Jerusalem and Babylonia, which we designate consistently by the definite article) gradually gained hegemony as a normative text in Jewish life. This tradition of tradition—Talmud, as opposed to the Talmud—unfolds from rabbinic schools of rhetoric in late ancient Palestine and Babylonia to the medieval rabbinic interpretation and appropriation of the archives of these schools through practices of collection, transmission, editing, commentary, systematization, and jurisprudence; to the early modern period, when the Talmud remained a symbol for postbiblical Judaism even as Christian and humanist thinkers deepened their engagement with Talmud as a mode of thought; to the modern and postmodern eras, when Talmud was reabsorbed into the dominant currents of Western society, religion, and politics, even as it retained its symbolic role as an expression of what is most distinctive in Jewish thought. In short, as this volume shows, to be a practitioner of both philosophy and Talmud is to constantly renegotiate the boundaries of one’s tradition and redefine one’s tradition for itself.

ATTUNEMENT TO THE THEME OF TALMUD /AND/ PHILOSOPHY

The main intrigue in the theme of “Talmud and Philosophy” concerns this little word and, and we’ll address that intrigue shortly. But there is another, more general intrigue at work here. The Talmud is what differentiates the Jewish tradition of reading the Bible from other traditions—from Islamic and Christian traditions. The Christians have the church fathers; the Islamic traditions have sunna and hadith, the oral traditions of interpretations of their Scripture, Koran; and rabbinic communities or, in modern terms, Jewish communities, have Talmud. Talmud is the general name for two large corpora. One is called the Palestinian Talmud, or Jerusalem Talmud. Ironically, it was never written in Jerusalem because the city was not available to rabbis at the time of its composition ending approximately in the fourth century CE. This “Jerusalem” or “Palestinian” Talmud was then taken to Babylonia or further developed into the Babylonian Talmud, although the question of relationships between the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud is a difficult one. At any rate, there is a Talmud that is referred to as the Babylonian Talmud, and a version of it, a reification of it—and the term reification is very important in this account—is a set of typographically produced volumes of the Babylonian Talmud with its text filled with medieval commentaries, the object of very diligent study in rabbinic communities for almost a thousand years beginning from the Middle Ages. Currently, people outside of Jewish circles also have access to it. As a result, the readership of the Talmud is historically the largest it has ever been because of the availability of versions in English, modern Hebrew, German, and other renditions or translations.

And yet, we are only now beginning to understand what it is that has been studied for all those years in traditional settings and more recently in academic settings. We have taken the object of that study for granted and asked only about how to study it. We have also been asking questions concerning only the historical development and how to interpret the text. But the question of what this text is in the first place, what Talmud signifies, and what it represents is only now coming to the attention of researchers.

Let me therefore begin with a very preliminary history—we are not even sure we ought to say history but perhaps an approximation by way of a story—of the receptions or conceptions of what this text is, even if people never asked this question concerning what this text is but took what it is for granted. That said, they took it for granted in a variety of ways, and we will now map out this variety.

It all has to do with the relationship between philosophy and its traditional others. If we think and try to reconstruct the Talmudic text (i.e., if we try to reconstruct what the communities producing the Talmud looked like in late antiquity in Babylonia and Palestine), then the first approximation of this picture would be something along the following lines:

Rabbinic leaders in Babylonia, where they had relative administrative autonomy, needed training schools, which at that time were schools of rhetoric. Not only rabbinic leaders but also judges, community leaders, officers, officials, and so on were trained here. Rhetoric was understood not in the sense of the art of speaking nicely but rather as a school of thinking, a school of argumentation, a school of seeking justice, and a school of general education. The way rabbis trained at these institutions was exceptional. There are classical elements of rhetorical training, which, according to Ciceronian tradition, amount to the following:

1. delivery: how you present your speech

2. invention: the new point that you make in the speech

3. memory: techniques that an expert in rhetoric would need to deliver the speech because, at the time, there were no PowerPoint presentations or even paper records. The true expert was supposed to speak without any notes. In classical rhetorical schools, memory was thus a technique used to prepare for that type of oral delivery: memory for things and words, creating a palace of memory by associating what needs to be said and in which order with certain places. The elements of invention, memory, and delivery are followed by the remaining two elements:

4. refutation: an argument refuting the argument of another party, an important part of rhetorical training.

5. example.

These five elements were separated from each other as five different techniques. But in rabbinic academies, they were not separate. These schools of rhetoric did something that to the best of my knowledge had never been done before: they used refutation—the art of proving to the other speaker and the audience that this opposing point of view is wrong—as an instrument for remembering, a vehicle of memory. They also used refutation as an instrument for invention and to build character, to deliver or create a personality that therefore (in principle) became interpersonal rather than either an individual or collective (e.g., a chorus.) For one to say something, one had to be already refuting someone else; otherwise, there was no point in talking. If what one had to say was obvious or called for no objections, then one was better off keeping silent. And everyone understood that. One should only open one’s mouth if there was a point that was worth refuting.

There is an example of this in biblical Hebrew, which is not related to the texts discussed here, but it still provides a useful illustration. In biblical Hebrew, there is no word for yes, only for no. The biblical כן means so rather than yes because if your response is yes, you just do it; you comply with what you were told to do, and there is no need to actually say anything. No, by contrast, is a very important word. It conveys that you are not going to comply.

Refutation came to serve all the elements that the other rhetorical schools considered to be separate. The result was not a book but a skill and also a curriculum—an “archive,” either oral or recorded, as modern scholars would call it. These are archives of the curricular activities of the rabbis in the academies of Sura, Nehardea, Pumbedita, and other places in Babylonia. The archives circulated in different forms, the earliest of which is responsa, which were the answers by geonim, or leaders of communities, sent as epistles to remote locations. Thus, the first embodiment of the Talmud was not a book or ink on paper but these rabbinic academies and a skill they taught: the skill of memorizing and using refutation to probe the memory for its validity.

The first and most characteristic figure in such a rhetorical school or academy, insofar as can be reconstructed from the arguments in the Talmud, is a tanna, who is simply a memorizer. The tanna mechanically remembers what is called the Mishnah, the instruction for rabbinic courts, which was composed in around 220 CE (Mishnah), followed in around 250 CE by the Tosefta (a collection of formulations parallel to those in the Mishnah and thus excluded from it). The tanna was also charged with remembering and reciting other apocryphal texts of the authorities who are mentioned in the Mishnah and Tosefta. These were not general instructions for teaching the law; rather, they were directions for how to rule or, more precisely, how to decide. The matter concerned decision rather than the application of a rule to a case. It was about cases and situations where no kind of rule could readily apply. That approach entailed the following: if there were rules (or rules could be produced), then there was nothing to decide. One could just apply the rules. But the issues discussed in the Mishnah (at least according to the way the Mishnah is approached in the Talmudic text, what in the printed editions of the Talmud is called Gemara, the “study” or “completion” of the Mishnah) were things that could not be sorted out by common sense or logic, or even by applying rules to a case. When there was an uncertainty as to which way to go (I gladly borrow this term from Chaya Halberstam, a term to which I owe a lot), that was when the Mishnah or rabbinic instruction was necessary. When there was certainty, there was no need for either. This text of the Gemara was scrutinized in rabbinic academies of later periods in Babylonia to ensure that the nature of these uncertainties would be remembered. If one wanted to understand anything in the Mishnah, one had to understand which uncertainties this Mishnah refuted or removed.

This attitude toward uncertainty led to a completely different protocol of a relationship to, or way of thinking about, the world than what we are used to. Speaking in very broad terms, philosophy stands in sharp contrast to this attitude. Philosophers, broadly speaking, have a variety of conceptions of truth. One of the simpler, more widely known, and most strongly criticized of such conceptions is called “correspondence theory.” When a statement is made about something that corresponds to something in reality, it is true; if it does not correspond to something in reality, it is false. Without denying this idea of truth or this truth protocol, rabbinic academies developed a counterpart to it, a completely different idea of truth: claims are only true if they refute something, that is, if there is an uncertainty and there is something to be refuted given that uncertainty. Otherwise, claims have no point. There is no reason to tell someone that a ring is gold simply because it is—what is the point of saying so? But if there is an uncertainty about it (e.g., in a jewelry store in the fifteenth century), the salesperson could say to the customer, a groom-to-be, “Well, this is gold,” thereby refuting or dispelling certain doubts that the groom-to-be might be having about buying this ring for his bride. Refutation becomes the criterion for truth. I can assert that a claim is true if I can determine what the claim is refuting. Things can be understood in their truth only if we understand what they come to refute.

How this conception of truth as refutation relates to other schools of rhetoric or philosophy—the key answer to this question, which has no final answer—is latent in the key word of the title. This key word is not Talmud. It is not philosophy. It is /and/.

In considering the ends of that word /and/, several scenarios become possible, one of which is philosophical. As already mentioned, Talmud was produced in the context of rhetorical schools. As was also briefly mentioned, rhetoric has an unstable position in the scope of traditional philosophy. According to Platonism, one of the leading traditions of philosophical thinking, rhetoric has no place in philosophy. It is the outcast, the outsider; it is the place of sophistry where people use arguments to make points about their private interests. Rhetoric is the way of trickery; it is the arch-other of what philosophy is. There is no truth to rhetoric whatsoever. The other, competing tradition is Aristotelian, which says that rhetoric does not belong to the core or center of philosophy, to its canon, but it does belong to philosophical knowledge, to its organon. So, then, we have two approaches: one that completely excludes rhetoric, and the other that lets rhetoric into the margins of philosophy—as a scandalous necessity—but not in the center.

Going back to the beginning of this introduction, where we explored a preliminary definition of the terms Talmud and Philosophy as parallel “traditions of tradition,” let us reconsider the historically dominant paradigms for how this relationship between Talmud /and/ Philosophy has been understood. We might begin in the Middle Ages because that was the period in which people started talking about an object, a reification, which ultimately became “the” Talmud in the form of printed volumes. The first well-known person to start thinking about the Talmud as a reified object—in particular, as an object of philosophical negation—was Moses Maimonides. In the introduction to his Mishneh Torah, he expressed the idea of stripping the late ancient archives of rabbinic academies of their rhetorical form of refutations and counterrefutations because he thought this rhetorical form was extraneous to the “law,” which Maimonides posits the Talmud contains and on which, in his view, the Talmud is centered. Very schematically, Maimonides’s response is: Let’s extract the law from the extraneous form of refutations and counterrefutations it had in late antiquity and present everything systematically—nicely, cleanly, “philosophically”—so that one mind (rather than two, let alone more minds) would be enough to establish what the law is. In rabbinic academies, no thinking is possible without at least four, but generally many more minds—one I disagree with, one about whom I disagree with another, and yet another one with whom the previous one disagrees. So there are at least four minds and sometimes many more. Against that complex multitude, Maimonides proposes to have one mind, one thinker, and one person. He aims to strip the Talmud of its rhetorical form and present everything systematically. That is what Mishneh Torah does.

In addition to losing the “extraneous” rhetorical form of the Talmud, there was another price the Talmudic tradition paid for the would-be-systematization: the partition of the Talmud into “legal” and “narrative” forms, or into halakhah and aggadah, respectively. Maimonides wrote another book, The Guide for the Perplexed, in which he addressed what remains of the Talmud when the law is systematically extracted from it. What remains is the second, poetic component in the Talmud: the individual sayings, interpretations, and deeds of certain rabbis. In the Guide, he addressed narratives that personal rabbis produced, or narratives attributed to personal rabbis in the Talmud, under the general rubric of aggadah—in the sense of poetic productions, a “figure of speech,” melitsah—as opposed to what for him is the law, or halakhah. So he introduced the separation that we still suffer from today: the separation between the aggadah, or narrative—the part of the Talmud that is, as it were, added and “poetic,” wherein, Maimonides would say, every rabbi acts and teaches in accordance with his own inspiration—and halakhah, the legal part, where everything is universal, and truly the law. This separation between aggadah and halakha continued to be a significant concern to both traditional and academic scholars of the Talmud. Yet we have to understand its source: a philosophical interest in distilling the law from the rhetoric.

Of course, the rhetoric cannot be completely stripped from the law—or, rather, the law cannot be extracted from the rhetoric. But to appreciate Maimonides’s impulse to do such a thing, we should recall the political context of the history of receptions of the Talmud that he inherited. Central to this context was the Karaite political crisis. The Karaites were communities that separated themselves from rabbinic communities on grounds prepared by Islamic culture, where the art of grammar flourished (nurtured, as it was in many ways, by Jewish interpreters). The art of grammar reinforced a Stoic idea that one could have access to the meaning of a text if one understood the grammatical structures of the text. For example, the Karaites thought they could take the pronouncement at the beginning of the book of Genesis (“On the seventh day God rested”) to mean vaguely “some time on the Sabbath” so that the Sabbath could start at noon, which is, after all, still “on the seventh day.” Rabbinic communities were starting the Sabbath on Friday night, a very practical difference that had political implications. Rabbinic authorities needed to counter the argument of the Karaites who told the rabbis that they were just inventors and that others could legitimately read the actual chapters of the Bible grammatically and come up with practical interpretations, which the Karaites claimed were more straightforward as well as more correct than what the rabbis were coming up with. The rabbis’ response to this argument was the Iggeret [Epistle] of Rav Sherira Gaon and an earlier book called Seder [Order] of Tannaim and Amoraim. These books outlined the continuity of authority through generations of rabbis in the Talmud to show that it was in keeping with, and the heir of, Moses’s teaching. A common practice of the time was to create fantastical genealogies and topologies of certain things, and this was done with rabbinic tradition. (Its fantastical nature is best exemplified by the fact that, at the same time, a fantastical map of Roman administration had been created. People did not like horizontal connections; they wanted something vertical, so they produced a map of a Roman administration that never existed.)

These two books, the Epistle and the Order, fueled and reflected a growing hunger for genealogy within the rabbinic world. This yielded a genealogy of Tannaim and Amoraim (the latter meaning “speakers” who issue dicta or commentary on traditions of Tannaim, or “reciters” of the Mishnah), which showed that rabbis do have a tradition beginning from Moses and proceeding through each generation of scholars named in the Talmud. In this genealogy, names were given and relationships were established, so by the Middle Ages, there was a continuous authority of tradition. Therefore, the Sabbath must start on Friday night, not Saturday noon. That was the first step in transforming the Talmud into a reified object: first as a genealogy, then as an object of rejection or philosophical “reform” by Maimonides. A little later, by at least the thirteenth century, a single book was produced, which tried to include the entirety of the Talmud. At the time, the idea was to collect everything in one volume and give the book as a bar mitzvah gift. There is a version of this book in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. It is not really everything, but it is an attempt at everything; the manuscript contains almost all of the Talmud. The scribe took half a year to produce the volume of the whole Talmud in very quick handwriting, probably realizing that it would not be read easily; it was a bar mitzvah gift for a boy who might continue the tradition of learning. The book itself was not the core; the core was memory. People were still memorizing things, and these writings were simply aids to memory. Yet the book did emerge: the codex of the Talmud.

Since then, the struggle over the relationship between Talmud and philosophy and over the /and/ continued. Maimonides said, or was understood to have said, that we do not need the Talmud, to which there were several important responses. The first was that the poetic/aggadic element of the Talmud remains important in mystical terms and has its own rationality, albeit not a philosophical one. Kabbalah was, in a sense, the result of that response to Maimonides. The other response was so-called Talmudic rationalism, which came from the schools of Aristotelian rhetoric, whereby rhetoric and the art of interpretation are very precise. According to this view, the Talmud is therefore rational and precise, not in the logical sense of precision but in the rhetorical and hermeneutical sense. The fifteenth-century book Darkhei Hatalmud by Rabbi Isaac Canpanton, which I was privileged to write about in the footsteps of Daniel Boyarin and Hayim Dimitrovski, was an important source in which this attitude to the rationality of the Talmud as Talmud (an intellectual discipline, a tradition of thinking, not a reified object of thought) took shape. Not entirely unlike Maimonides, Canpanton and others of his school were openly Aristotelian, so it is not quite appropriate to speak of “Talmud and Philosophy.” Their philosophy was Aristotelian or post-Aristotelian, and there were schools of rhetoric and philosophy—or, in the case of Kabbalah and respective Kabbalistic interpretations of the materials in the Talmud, there were Neoplatonic schools.

In that context, glossing the phrase “Talmud and Philosophy” as a simple and direct conjunction is inappropriate even though, institutionally, it was that and it still is today. For Canpanton—or, more broadly, for Talmudic rationalists—the Talmud was rational, but in a rhetorical sense, not a philosophical one. As a rhetorical object, the Talmud was the book privileged for rational contemplation (iyyun, to use Canpanton’s term) or an ideal physical object as a printed book. Regardless, the readers of this book were Aristotelians. Within this Talmudic Aristotelianism, Talmud and Philosophy could not be two separate but conjoined entities. Institutionally, of course, there was a moment of partition; Talmud was practiced in Rabbinic institutions, such as Houses of Study where the Talmud was studied, whereas philosophy developed in scholastic academies and later in universities. Yet intellectually, Talmud and philosophy remained under the specter of Aristotelian traditions, leaving no room for and as a conjunction (unless the word is glossed as an internal and, between philosophy and rhetoric, within philosophy—a gloss that is also problematic).

This is why, by way of contrast, the moment of institutional separation between Talmud and philosophy goes back to the point from which I began: philosophical rejection or marginalization of rhetoric, which both sides—the philosophers and the Talmudists—have blindly and tacitly accepted. The result is two separate traditions, Talmud and (i.e., or) Philosophy—two schools or institutions of study that do not readily communicate. The time came to institutionalize what intellectually remains a continuum. That is why these traditions need to be studied as a continuum, including fissures that such a continuum might or even must entail.

This is not to say that there is no divide between Talmud and philosophy or that Talmud can or should be subsumed into philosophy. Rather, I offer the possibility that the Talmud represents an intellectual discipline of its own, with this moment of refutation as a vehicle of memory at its center—a discipline that offers ways of thinking about being and interpersonality. (I would not say intersubjectivity because both subjectivity and intersubjectivity are too philosophical.) Interpersonality here refers to ways of thinking in which one is not immersed in one’s solitary thinking. Thinking is a collective enterprise, calling for thinking together without ever thinking as one, in the end.

I conclude this attunement with a quote from Franz Rosenzweig, who was also sensitive to the dangers of the little word and. He writes in the Star of Redemption:

The And is not the secret companion of the particular word, but of the sequence of words. It is the keystone that completes the vault of the cellar, above which is erected the edifice of logos, of reason in language.

[Das Und ist nicht der geheime Begleiter des einzelnen Worts, sondern des Wortzusammenhangs. Es ist der Schlußstein des Kellergewölbes, über welchem das Gebäude des Logos, der Sprachvernunft, errichtet ist.]

This edifice of logos, of “reason in language” is precisely what has been developed and criticized by philosophical tradition in its self-understanding: whether in conjunction with, or in disjunction from, Talmud. Philosophy, the “edifice of logos” (again, including critique thereof), is now the dominant intellectual paradigm in our society and our thinking about everything from informational technology to Talmud. I hope we will encompass possible continuities as well, starting by suspending the edifice of the /and/ in its disjunctive and, in particular, conjunctive and controlling powers, and that we will start looking into the walls and the ground, into the opening and, perhaps, the darkness behind it that lifting the veil of the /and/ can create.

***

It is no secret that introductions are written after the body of the book is already there. The same open secret holds for the balance of our introduction, where we reflect on essays written in response to the Attunement. The essays were written by scholars of both rabbinic texts and philosophical works, moving beyond partitions that the history of the word /and/ has imposed on our thought by way of trainings and institutions. The collaborative nature of our project anticipates that the book’s readers are or will be similarly open to thinking beyond their various disciplines and backgrounds.

Moving beyond the /and/ has assumed different shapes and brought forth new questions. One focus of these questions is the stable axis of a relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, onto which the relationship between Talmud and philosophy has also been predominately projected; if not entirely incorrectly, then far too reductively.

Three major configurations fall along that axis: excluding rhetoric as a mimetic art from philosophy, in Platonisms; allowing rhetoric as a marginal discipline into the organon but not the canon of philosophy, in Aristotelianisms; or placing rhetoric at the center, where it underlies any philosophical argument, in the modern philosophy of language. Talmud, in turn, has been aligned with these three major views of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. Talmud has been excluded from philosophy (Maimonides); included into philosophy in Talmudic rationalism (Canpanton); and privileged as the most advanced version of philosophical thinking, whether the best version of Enlightened reason (Luzzatto) or a “religion of reason from the sources of Judaism” (Cohen) on par with other philosophical religions of reason. An alternative fourth view has Talmud figuring as “ethics” in the sense of first philosophy, one at which other philosophies were envisioned as having yet to arrive (according to one interpretation of Levinas). Despite these oppositions among the three traditional philosophical positions (not to mention the fourth), locating the Talmud and its tradition, vis-à-vis philosophy, was invariably defined by a stable axis of relationship that philosophy had also posited between itself and its traditional other: rhetoric. In short, in the relationship of Talmud /and/ philosophy, the word /and/ has historically been glossed in four ways: as a disjunction (excluding Talmud from philosophy), as a conjunction (including Talmud into philosophy), as an origin (making Talmud the center, or telos, of philosophy), and as a horizon (figuring Talmud as the beginning of a philosophy yet to come). Regardless, because of its profound and often unconscious association with the traditional positioning of philosophy in relation to rhetoric, Talmud itself—as its own “tradition of tradition” and discipline of thought—has been obscured from view.

Authors responded to the attunement by resisting this reductive projection of Talmud onto the axis of relationships between philosophy and rhetoric, landing in various positions as they probed its stability and shook its very conceptual pillars. The essays study and chart strategies for moving beyond and above the axis, beyond and above the ends that the /and/ of philosophy /and/ Talmud has traditionally established, as if they were taken for granted. As a result, this book maps alternative possibilities for defusing the role of /and/ or lifting it up to view, without, however, sealing the gap between Talmud /and/ philosophy.

These modes of lifting up /and/ vary from essay to essay. Each author looks into the abyss behind the gap from a new angle. Each refuses to convert this abyss into a perspectival landscape, to reduce it to the vanishing point of a privileged perspective. With that critical impulse, the contributions are complementary and can be configured as orthogonal lines of flight from the traditional axis of relationships among Talmud, philosophy, and rhetoric. They reveal original ways of working with, rather than closing, the gap between Talmud /and/ philosophy that was traditionally configured as disjunction, conjunction, origin, or horizon.

The gap can open possibilities for a meta-view: one that Agata Bielik-Robson explores by probing a Talmudic discussion as a meta-space, irreducible to a single linear axis of relationship, where philosophy newly problematizes its own sense of tradition. Beyond a term that has been elided by reduction to rhetoric, she uses Talmud to assess and take philosophy’s measure from the outside. Instead of simply inverting the traditional axis of relationship by making the Talmud dominant over philosophy, she interrupts the powers of the copula /and/, reframing its architectonics by reflecting on the Talmudic tradition of thought as a vantage point for reflecting on the tradition of philosophical thinking. She asks how philosophy would look if such a philosophy were born from the spirit of the Talmud and refused to cut the umbilical cord of its bond to the Talmud. This is not a Levinasian project of positing the Talmud as already a philosophy, one to which another philosophy will arrive. It is a much more open project of reflecting on and practically conceiving a new philosophy from the spirit of the Talmud. Others (e.g., de Man) have made a similar turn toward rhetoric of metaphor and metonymy by insisting that philosophy (e.g., Locke or Kant) had never parted from such rhetoric. Yet Bielik-Robson goes even further to suspend any sense of hierarchy or static architecture, any need for a stable genetic relationship around the /and/ to pose, instead, a truly open and fundamental question: How can philosophy rethink its dominance of rhetoric if a philosopher asks a Talmudic question about philosophy itself?

For Elad Lapidot, the gap rescales Talmud as a discipline of thought in rabbinic tradition. Lapidot interprets the “tradition of tradition” of Talmud on a still broader scale: as a task, a perspective, and the possibility of another beginning for human engagement with the world. For Lapidot, this rescaled vision of the tradition (lowercase “talmud”) translates a discipline of rabbinic thought toward a horizon of human thought perse, in and beyond the scope of Heidegger’s “other thinking,” as a departure from Greek-Aristotelian-Christian-Jewish-Muslim traditions where Western philosophy has seen its past and future. Lapidot reconfigures the question of /and/ by articulating the ongoing task of moving from “the Talmud,” as an archive of late ancient texts posited and interpreted since the Middle Ages, to this book’s “Talmud,” as an intellectual discipline of disagreement and memory, to his “talmud,” as the always-open task of arriving at an intrinsically evolving “tradition of tradition.” As his ongoing task, one that deals with the problem of the political or literary as a way for humans to engage the world and community, rethinking “talmud” means a perpetual questioning of the operations of the /and/ between Talmud and philosophy. Instead of settling on his rescaled “talmud” as “philosophy’s other,” let alone “philosophy’s better,” Lapidot invites us to rethink this “tradition of tradition” as an open call to constantly rethink and challenge the operations of the /and/.

The gap between Talmud /and/ philosophy exposes an abyss of forgetting within human memory, as Sergey Dolgopolski argues on the powers of citing the past in the Palestinian Talmud. The chapter focuses on forgetting and memory (in this order) and the role that citing from the body of work collected in the Palestinian Talmud can play in how we understand forgetting and remembering the past in both late ancient and modern contexts. The result is to set up a comparative framework for the Palestinian tradition of Talmud and the tradition of philosophy surrounding the question of forgetting and memory. To do so, Dolgopolski places a fragment from the Palestinian Talmud back into that longue durée of the history of forgetting as the default human condition. This history is a reversal. Memory and truth, the derivatives of forgetting, become the default while forgetting recedes to their would-be inverse. In the context of this reversal, partitions between the traditions of Talmud and philosophy emerge in a new perspective; one facet of which this essay sets out to explore.

Dolgopolski focuses on the rabbinic schools of rhetoric in Roman Palestine and their place in that longue durée. The rabbis cite and thereby remember the for-them-not-yet-fully-established procedural laws and obligations (ius, halakah) of Israel toward God; they do this so as not to forget their laws governing their obligations to God, thereby making the case for God not to forget God’s promises-to-have-become-“obligations” to them. Thus the crucial question of the chapter is how to appreciate the role of citing the past (and in particular of the law of the past) as the rabbis and philosophers engage with, and struggle against, the powers of forgetting. Dolgopolski’s exposition of that longue durée offers a new problematization of how the Palestinian Talmud is positioned vis-à-vis forgetting, an abyss that philosophy also faces repeatedly.

Lifting up the /and/ without sealing the resulting gap leads James Adam Redfield, a scholar of rabbinic anthropologies, to reimagine this gap’s possible relationship to Kant’s philosophical anthropology. Rabbinic thought transpires in his argument as a version of anthropology that is commensurable in scope, but irreducible to, Kant’s philosophical-anthropological answer to the question “Who is human?” in the framework of Kant’s defense of Enlightenment as a religion of reason. Rather than focusing on one gap, Redfield studies two in his novel “analogical” critique: the gap between anthropology and morality in a precritical Kant (as distinct from his three Critiques) and the gap between anthropology and morality in rabbinic literature. Redfield’s essay shows how the tension between the precritical and critical Kant can illuminate the scope of relationships between anthropology and morality in rabbinic texts. His argument operates in the space between Kant’s philosophy and rabbinic literature and is only sustainable as long as that difference does not collapse: rabbis are not to be reduced to an avatar of Kant or vice versa. In this, Redfield departs from the prevalent reception of both the rabbis (along the lines of the modern halakhah) and Kant—by those who read his anthropology in light of his Critiques alone and, therefore, tend not to accord his anthropology any significant purchase on his overall system. Just as Kant’s “precritical” account of morality in his anthropology bears on his overall thought precisely because he takes a very different approach to morality in his later, critical works, so, too, Redfield argues, can we situate a selective (and by no means paradigmatic) rabbinic moral anthropology (derekh erets) within rabbinic thought precisely through the conceptual tensions and discontinuities between anthropology and morality. That juxtaposition does not conflate this rabbinic moral anthropology with Kant’s precritical one; rather, it opens up a space between rabbinic thought on moral norms and human nature on one hand and a philosophical tradition of thinking through the same relationships on the other. Redfield’s juxtaposition performs a critical interrogation of the /and/ in both traditions of tradition.

Yonatan Brafman places the modern discussion of rabbinic procedural law (halakhah) directly into the gap: a gap now reconceived as a no-one’s-land, where we can no longer differentiate between pragmatic analysis of the law as such and halakhic analysis of the law. This gap arises because both the pragmatic and the halakhic analysis take up the law as the challenge for thought, one that is fully met neither by rabbinic codifications of divine law nor by the philosophy of a human-made (positive) law. For Brafman, this challenge initiates a self-reflective discussion on the nature of law and is thus congruent, in its modes of thought and analysis, with self-reflective discussions of law in analytic traditions of philosophy. While distinctly different in vocabulary, and variously imbued with the apparatus of Christian legal thinking, the analytical discussions of both rabbinic law and modern law meet in this gap between philosophy and Talmud. Together, they depart or break, as Brafman argues, from the reification of the Talmud, in the form of authoritative codes of law that unfolded from the Middle Ages to modernity.

A scholar of rabbinic thought, Lynn Kaye shows how images lurk behind the gap that neither form a copula with concepts nor support any sense of separation between concept and image. If such a separation has defined philosophy’s self-differentiation from rhetoric, Kaye’s rereading of rabbinic texts opens a different vista on rhetoric. By reconceiving dynamics between thought and image in rabbinic discourse, at right angles to Kant’s understanding of their relationship, Kaye manages to articulate yet another irreducible gap behind the /and/ without sealing it shut. Kaye asks the reader to inhabit the space of thinking of a rabbinic discussion, where, unlike in philosophy, the question is not how to relate concepts to images or vice versa but rather what it means to develop a rigorous mode of thought in images from the start—and before the sheer distinction between concepts and images is assumed. Such thinking in images includes images in the sense of the personae of those who do such thinking in interaction with one another. Appropriately, Kaye’s exposition includes images that she creates to develop her argument.

As an interpreter of the late ancient rabbis, Alexander Weisberg frames the gap as one between late ancient and modern thought on “language,” “reality,” and human-world ontologies. In reclaiming the rabbinic tradition in late antiquity as escaping the axis of relationships between these terms, Weisberg places that tradition in a heuristic schema marked, on its other end, by Benjamin’s view of reality and language. Thus his reading of rabbinic texts interrogates the modernist philosophy of language. The asynchronicity of his analysis invites a fresh mode of encounter among traditions and across epistemes, negotiating their intellectual conjunctions and disjunctions rather than resolving or reassessing their historical relationships. The chapter discusses a plant-animal connection as one way to think about the relationships between philosophy and Talmud. Weisberg applies Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language to illustrate that relationship in an innovative way.

A scholar of rabbinic and classical thought, Sophia Avants threatens to reconfigure the hitherto dominant view of the relationship between the traditions of philosophy and rhetoric by reclaiming the Mishnah as the work of building a community around a third space: a constructive form of the gap. Avants reframes relationships between philosophy and rhetoric to allow the rhetoric of the Mishnah to interrupt philosophy’s control of its partition from the ars rhetorica. Avants uses her act of interruption, that is, her violation of the rigid disjunction between philosophy and rhetoric, as a way to resituate the Mishnah—precisely in that third space between philosophy and philosophical figures for rhetoric and its tradition. Avants takes up the question of the Platonic and Aristotelian treatment of mimesis and the rhetorical syllogism, in contradistinction from rabbinic practices of the rhetorical syllogism or enthymeme, as one way to build a community. In this Mishnaic third space, rhetorical arguments clash, creating a space for discussion—rather than aiming at a community that is driven to agreement through public persuasion. Avants reframes the late ancient composition of the Mishnah as creating a space and community of this “in-between”: reducible to neither philosophy’s nor rhetoric’s standard accounts of their own traditions. In contrast with Emmanuel Levinas’s readings and translations of Talmudic discussions into the language of Greek philosophy, as an ethics of responsibility and forgiveness in a logocentric community, Avants pursues a different route. She explores the relationships between rhetoric as part of a philosophical canon and rhetoric as a formative principle in the Mishnah. Her analysis reveals a new sense of community in the Mishnah; predicated, as it is, on a reinterpretation of the enthymeme as a “rhetorical syllogism” of a life in indeterminacy, departing from a dominant philosophical view of the enthymeme as a “reduced logical syllogism.” The contrast between the two syllogistics, a philosophy’s ideal of logic in life versus the Mishnah’s reality of rhetoric in life, translates into two distinct senses of community. One community is based on the default of logical certainty; the other is grounded on the programmatic uncertainty of a rhetorical syllogism.

Karma Ben-Johanan, a critical historian of relationships between Christianity and rabbinic literature, describes a genealogy of the emergence of the Talmud on the horizon of the Christian intellectual world. Sensitive to the theology of Christian supersessionism, which encountered the Talmud as “unexpected” evidence of the intellectual life of supposedly spiritless and even mindless Jews, Ben-Johanan pointedly signals the current danger of reverse supersessionism, a flip of the historical axis whereby a rediscovered talmud (see Lapidot, above) or Talmud (in our sense, above) strives for dominance with philosophy or a theological space dominated by Christianity. To avoid this danger, Ben-Johanan asks how lifting up the /and/, reopening the gap of Talmud /and/ philosophy today, could instead yield a “stubbornly unsupersessionist” version of supersessionism: this time, one of t/Talmud over philosophy, without simply reversing the old philosophy-rhetoric hierarchy. This leads her to critique the challenge of avoiding a power hierarchy between Talmud and philosophy and to her historical review of the obstacles to any unsupersessionist dialogue between the two, however “stubbornly” she, and we, would like.

Collectively, this volume invites a sustained rethinking of the tradition of the two traditions, that of Talmud and that of philosophy. The chapters commit to neither a common third category nor a common beginning from which to trace the emergence of the two traditions. Together, the contributions lay bare the very instability and complexity of the otherwise all-too-quiet and all-too-powerful effects of the /and/ on the tradition, in or against the sway of which a philosopher or a Talmudist always thinks.

How might this book be read? To whom is it addressed? Broadly, the book contributes to rethinking where the various areas of Jewish studies stand in relation to the humanities at large. As philosophy grounds the theoretical apparatus for many disciplines, developing the bridge between philosophy and the study of the Talmud can allow other disciplines to grasp their own connections with counterparts in Jewish studies. In that sense, the book invites new readerships across the humanities and beyond the partitions. More broadly still, the book addresses readerships interested in comparative perspectives on rabbinic tradition, philosophy, history, literature, and other areas beyond the humanities within the liberal arts university, as well as other readers who think and read across the traditions.

As each chapter responds to the initial Attunement to the theme, each in its own way, after reading this introduction and before reading the afterword, the chapters can be read in any order according to the interests of the reader.