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TO REFUTE GOD HIMSELF

Talmud as Meta-Philosophy

AGATA BIELIK-ROBSON

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

EMILY DICKINSON, Fragment no. 1263

The first real man among the philosophers was also the first to see God face to face—even if only to refute Him.

FRANZ ROSENZWEIG ON NIETZSCHE (Star of Redemption, 25)

There are many ways in which the positioning of Talmud and Philosophy can be understood: as conjunction (perhaps leading to some elusive synthesis), as neutral juxtaposition, or as opposition (and as versus). But I propose something else: a certain reading of Talmud as a meta-philosophical document, which first creates a necessary condition for any reason, be it a philosophical Logos or a rhetorical scriptural reasoning. By referring to the famous lo bashamayim fragment from Bava Metzi‘a 59b—possibly the best-known Talmudic story, frequently quoted by Scholem, Levinas, Taubes, Biale, Boyarin, and many others, and the most exquisite example of the Talmudic tradition of refutation—I want to demonstrate that it delivers a set of transcendental conditions of any rational discussion, before any specific definition of the ratio, including the Western philosophical one.¹ I call this transcendental meta-philosophical position a decentered theism. In opposition to the theocentric “theological absolutism,” which turns the divine infinite vantage point into the “measure of all things,” the rabbinic decentering creates a distance from the overwhelming divine verdicts, which allows the finite minds to develop their own reasoning. The refutative no against the miraculous interventions from above, which automatically trump any argument from below, is here a necessary defense mechanism without which no “finite thinking” could ever emerge.²

RADICAL FINITUDE

The aggadic fragment from Bava Metzi‘a 59b has always been one of the most discussed stories, but it is certainly due to Gershom Scholem’s essay “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” that it became truly famous; more than that, it became almost a synecdoche of the whole Talmud, epitomizing the main tenets of the Jewish wisdom of commentary:

Nothing demonstrates this authority, the authority of commentary over author, more triumphantly than the story of the oven of Akhnai which is told in the Talmud. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos and the sages disputed about whether or not this oven, which had a particular type of construction, was subject to impurity in the sense of the Torah. Finally, against the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, a majority declared it subject to impurification. On this matter the Talmudic account, which represents one of the most famous passages in Jewish literature, then continues:

On that day Rabbi Eliezer brought forward all the arguments in the world, but they were not accepted. He said to them: “If the Halakhah [the proper decision] agrees with me, let this carob tree prove it.” Thereupon the carob tree was uprooted a hundred cubits from its place; some say, four hundred cubits. They replied: “No proof may be brought from a carob tree.” Then he said: “If the Halakhah agrees with me, let this stream of water prove it.” Thereupon the stream of water flowed backwards. They replied: “No proof may be brought from a stream of water.” Then he said: “If the Halakhah agrees with me let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it.” Thereupon the walls of the schoolhouse began to totter. But Rabbi Joshua rebuked them and said: “When scholars are engaged in halakhic dispute, what concern is it of yours?” Thus the walls “did not topple, in honor of Rabbi Joshua, but neither did they return to their upright position, in honor of Rabbi Eliezer; still today they stand inclined.” Then he said: “If the Halakhah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven.” Thereupon a heavenly voice was heard saying: “Why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer? The Halakhah always agrees with him.” But Rabbi Joshua arose and said (Deut. 30:12): “It is not in heaven.” What did he mean by that? Rabbi Jeremiah replied: “The Torah has already been given at Mount Sinai [and is thus no longer in Heaven]. We pay no heed to any heavenly voice, because already at Mount Sinai You wrote in the Torah (Exod. 23:2): ‘One must incline after the majority.’” Rabbi Nathan met the prophet Elijah and asked him: “What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do in that hour?” He replied: “God smiled and said: My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me.”³

According to Scholem, the moral of the story is the unequivocal praise of mediation as a necessary medium through which the divine word becomes apprehensible:

In Judaism, tradition becomes the reflective impulse that intervenes between the absoluteness of the divine word—revelation—and its receiver. Tradition thus raises a question about the possibility of immediacy in man’s relationship to the divine, even though it has been incorporated in revelation. To put it another way: Can the divine word confront us without mediation? And, can it be fulfilled without mediation? Or, given the assumption of the Jewish tradition which we have formulated, does the divine word rather not require just such mediation by tradition in order to be apprehensible and therefore fulfillable? For rabbinic Judaism, the answer is in the affirmative.⁴

This mediation, however, also changes the status of the “divine word”: it is no longer a spoken word but a written one. The rabbinic insistence on the scriptural character of revelation—“already at Mount Sinai You wrote in the Torah”—contains both a defensive and an agonistic element that wards off the absoluteness of God’s message in order to let imperfect human beings enter the game. Without this self-defense, which protects the receiver as an autonomous pole in the asymmetrical relationship between the finite human and the infinite God, the former would simply collapse under the enormous impact of the latter. To insist, therefore, on the scriptural mediation/medium of the revelation is to allow—in Harold Bloom’s words—a certain ratio to be established between otherwise incommensurable dimensions.⁵ This self-defense must take the form of the attack capable of stripping the Infinite of its overwhelming and traumatizing glory (which constitutes the main theme of the book of Job, in which the terrifying divine manifestation thunders “from the whirlwind” to crush the precarious human). Yet this defensive mechanism is not set against God but rather for God’s sake. If God is to reveal himself as God and enter into a relation of the covenant, he has to allow for the “defeat” of his absoluteness: the Christian narrative of kenosis begins here, in the very logic of the divine-human relationship.⁶

The moral of the story, therefore, is to vigorously refute God’s attempt to enter the argument in a way that completely disregards the rules of the game. These rules were established precisely to ward off the repetition of the trauma of revelation but also to allow revelation as such, relieved of its blinding effect. The defeat is thus quite literal: God started the game, but he has been surpassed by his children.⁷ But this also means something deeply un-Greek: that the First, arche, does not possess the highest authority of the veridictive vantage point; that coming late or second, further removed from the origin, does not disqualify or disadvantage the “children” in the rational process of truth-seeking. The further removed from the absolutist perspective that always privileges the arche as “the mystical foundation of authority,” the better; the less overwhelmed by God’s presence or the proximity of origin, the more quickly the Talmudic rationality will develop its own finite thinking in the element of différance/disagreement, which can only benefit from the divine nonpresence.⁸

The divine defeat has a double sense here. It is a necessary condition of God entering and maintaining the covenantal relationship with finite human beings, but it also confirms the written nature of the revelatory gift. Exodus 23:2, quoted by Rabbi Joshua, declares (and this is not a mistake) that God specifically tells people not to side with the majority or follow the crowd on moral judgments “to do evil” (lera‘ot) and “to pervert [justice]” (lehattot). But the wording of the prohibition may suggest that it is not wrong to follow the majority if one does not intend to do evil or pervert justice, in other words, if the person’s motives are pure. This seems to contradict the authorial intention, yet it would be in full harmony with the rabbinic model of inquiry, which looks for the ambiguities of a written text to make it exact—to read a text as it is written and not as what the text wants to say. Thus one may read this passage without heeding the heavenly living voice, which supposedly wants to warn against majority judgments but then states that “one should incline after majority.” So the very argument used in favor of the freedom of the written word against any intervention of the heavenly voice is already an innovative piece of reasoning extracted from the scripture, treated as scripture in the strongest sense of the word; that is, with no attention paid to the spoken intention. What can God do in such a case but smile and admit: nitshuni banai (“My children have triumphed over me”)?⁹ By writing down the Torah and leaving it in its sealed scriptural form, God has made himself—that is, his ongoing participation in the hermeneutic debates of his children—irrelevant. This is the first case of the “death of the author” as the master controlling the interpretation of the text, and the whole Derridean deconstructive method, which consists precisely of ignoring the authorial intentions for the sake of what really remains written, is comprised here in a nutshell.¹⁰ When Truth is written down, it does not say anything. There is thus no rationale for “heeding to the heavenly voice.”¹¹

However, it would be too far-fetched to see in the preceding aggadah the “death of God” as pure and simple, as Slavoj Žižek does when he praises it in his essay “Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox,” a text particularly relevant to the topic of ‘Talmud and Philosophy’ because it draws the Talmudic reasoning into the very center of the formation of Western rationality:

This Jewish legacy—in Lacanese, the passage from the big Other qua the abyss of subjectivity to the big Other qua the impersonal structure of the symbolic Law—found what could be said to be its most radical expression in the Talmud, in the story about the two rabbis who basically tell God to shut up. . . . No wonder this passage from the Talmud was endlessly exploited by anti-Semites as proof of the Jewish obscene-manipulative relationship to God! To cut a long story short, what happens here is already the death of God: once the act of creation is accomplished, God dies, he survives only in the dead letter of the Law, without retaining even the right to intervene into how people interpret his law—no wonder this anecdote recalls the well-known scene from the beginning of Woody Allen’s (another Jew!) Annie Hall, where a couple waiting in line for cinema tickets debate a point about Marshall McLuhan’s theory, and then McLuhan himself appears in the queue, intervening in the debate by brutally siding with the Woody Allen character.¹²

This intervention, as expected, does not win the argument for the Woody Allen character in the eyes of his female opponent. But Žižek is both right and wrong. This is precisely what one should not do: cut the long story short. The defensive practice of keeping God’s living presence at bay is not synonymous with killing God or rendering him completely “inactive”; that is, “as good as dead.”¹³ God is not dead; rather, he is sublated in the original sense of the word kathargein/aufheben, as used by the Pharisee Paul, who was well versed in Judaism’s long dialectical stories, of which Christianity formed for him simply the next chapter, with the Jewish law simultaneously preserved and deactivated. Just as monotheism is a historical religion, so does God’s transcendence have a temporal aspect: he keeps his incontestable status quo, guarding the definite past perfect of the revelation, in which he had given us the Torah. However, because of the enormous “anxiety of influence” on the part of his human believers, he withdraws into virtual absence by leaving them with the freedom to read. Spinoza’s vehement refutation of miracles as the proofs of God’s existence as nothing but “taking refuge in the will of God, i.e., the sanctuary of ignorance”¹⁴ derives directly from this unique tradition of mature and independent rationality—a “dialectical clarity”—which had emerged only on the condition of forbidding God to issue direct instructions.¹⁵

Commenting on the preceding fragment and similar ones in the Talmud, Robert Gibbs devised a formula that perfectly captures the rabbis’ stance, simultaneously pious and agonistic: “disagreeing for God’s sake.”¹⁶ The formula has two meanings. First, disagreement, or “sporting” different opinions, is not a matter of sport. It is not about the egoistic glory of a talented interpreter, boasting of his skills. Second, for God’s sake is not in God’s name: to speak in his stead as an immediate, participatory representative of transcendence within immanence is strictly forbidden.¹⁷ For God’s sake precludes any sacred empowerment of the interpreter, who would claim a privileged position in the hermeneutic community (Eliezer), but it also protects him from a total disempowerment, where it is only the “living God” who possesses the truth. The truth is no longer in heaven. It has been written, laid down in the form of the written word, open and accessible to all properly trained readers.¹⁸ The truth is out there, not in the possession of the unapproachable transcendent deity but in the revealed text of the Torah, which—to paraphrase Saul Kripke’s phrase—constitutes a rigid designator that fixes the reference of the rabbinic commentary without determining its content.¹⁹

The Kripkean rule—the more rigidly fixed the reference/designator, the less determined its description—is fully confirmed by the well-known words of Ben Bag-Bag from Pirqe Avot regarding the Torah: “Turn it and turn it, for all is in it.”²⁰ Truth is given once and for all—but its content is open to an infinite discussion and commentary, which takes the form of the organized hermeneutic disagreement. Truth is one and revealed—but its meaning cannot be determined immediately and finally. Another quote from Pirqe Avot is Rabbi Tarphon’s “You are not required to complete the work, but neither you are free to desist from it,” which can be understood as praising the disagreement stage, which should be treated as autonomous, without the regulative idea of a consensus implied by the completion of the work.²¹ Tarphon also describes the rules of the “dialectical clarity” required by the permanent dissent: his concept of the interpretive work dialectically intertwines invention and convention, the individualistic moment of agon and the communal moment of togetherness; newness and tradition. The sacred work of “disagreeing for God’s sake” is envisaged as an interminable process, without beginning (relegated to the “radical past,”’ which will be discussed shortly) or end (infinitely deferred and delayed, as Derrida suggested in his concept of the différance), passing constantly through all generations of commentators, past, present, and future.

This highly disciplined, positive freedom to comment is best illustrated by yet another passage from Pirqe Avot, in which Rabbi Joshua ben Levi says: “And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tablets. Read not charuth (graven) but cheruth (freedom), for no man is free but he who labors in the Torah.”²² In the Ark of the Covenant, two sets of tablets lie next to each other: the original ones, which were shattered by Moses in his fury over the apostasy of Israel, and the new ones, called “free,” on which the Law was written for the second time. In Es gibt Geheimnis in der Welt (There Is Mystery in the World), Gershom Scholem speculates on the metaphor of the two tablets as the central figure of the relationship between faithfulness, which rigidly fixes the commentator on the Torah, and freedom, which infinitely delays the consensual moment of ultimate understanding of its “descriptive essence”: “Two sides of this conflict—he says—are best expressed by two phrases from the Talmud . . . which for the last two thousand years have remained alive in the Jewish tradition—‘the freedom of the tablets’ and ‘the broken tablets,’ which both lie in the Ark of the Covenant, i.e. within the same sacred sphere of Judaism.”²³

Thus, while the broken tablets symbolize the “Truth in itself”—which can never be reached as such—the graven-free tablets, which replaced the original ones, represent the free act of commentary that is offered by the “freedom of the written word” (harut/herut). This replacement shows the genius of mediation on which the Jewish tradition relies: the lekh lekha rule—“get thee out of here”—applied to the original revelation from which the finite mind has to “move away” to begin to work on its contents. Just as Abraham is told to leave the place of his origin, so are rabbis to distance themselves from the “strong light of the canonical” in order not to be blinded/traumatized/paralyzed by its immediacy.²⁴ The traumatic encounter with the Infinite must be defensively mediated if the finite mind is to survive it at all, for no one can face the Living God and remain alive. So, only in this manner, thanks to the defense mechanism of multilayered mediations, can “tradition be concerned with the realization, the enactment of the divine task which is set in the revelation. It demands application, execution, and decision, and at the same time it is, indeed, ‘true growth and unfolding from within.’ It constitutes a living organism, whose religious authority was asserted with as much emphasis as is at all possible within this system of thought.”²⁵

This extreme assertion of the religious authority of the mediated/displaced origin, found in Bava Metzi‘a 59b, is also expressed in the phrase of Emmanuel Levinas: “to love Torah more than God.”²⁶ This is blasphemy only prima facie. This declaration not only is not blasphemous but also formulates the necessary condition of any rational piety in which reason does not have to abdicate in front of faith.

THE ULTIMATE DISAGREEMENT

But why is the possibility of disagreement (mahloket)—originary, irreconcilable, the potentially endless conversation of finite minds—such a crucial issue? The exclusion of God from the horizontal community of scholars who “incline after majority” and “do not heed to the heavenly voice” is prima facie a shocking act bordering on sacrilege—yet, on the other hand, when interpreted more soberly, it merely states the obvious: that the finite reason, if it wants to evolve at all and create its own tradition of rationality (i.e., secure a “true growth and unfolding from within”), must remove itself from the blinding light of the Absolute and seek refuge in the worldly realm of shadows, where, in the words of Emily Dickinson, you can “tell all the truth, but tell it slant / [because] the success in circuit lies.” The slant and the circuit, which filtrate and diffuse the absolute light, do not prevent the participants of the hermeneutic community from “telling the truth,” yet, at the same time, they incarnate the one truth into a multitude of carnal voices, each encumbered with its own slant/perspective, which turns what for God might be a single timeless utterance into a material plurality of winding narratives.²⁷ And once the one Voice translates into those polivocal stories, there is no turning back to any preestablished harmony: the disagreement emerges as originary.

Sergey Dolgopolski’s What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement begins with the seminal question: “In particular, why does the Talmudic approach to disagreement as a goal in itself seem exotic and esoteric while Western philosophy’s goal of reaching agreement in any discussion, intellectual or political, shapes common parlance?” Why, therefore, not take “the side of disagreement as an end rather than as a means”?²⁸ Indeed, why not? In fact, as I show in the next two sections, the originary dissent has not been as neglected or deemed as “exotic” as Dolgopolski claims. At least since Descartes, Western thinking has turned toward the framework of the finite rationality, which, historically speaking, was embraced for the first time by the Talmudic reasoning.

According to Dolgopolski, Talmud not only defends against the absolutist perspective of one voice/one truth, capable of superseding the democratic plurivocality, but also—most importantly—does not aspire to it, as is the case with philosophy, which inherited the Platonic obsession with the One, even if it was in the negative terms of an unattainable regulative ideal. The Talmudic scriptural reasoning admits only one oneness: there is one rigidly fixed tradition, inaugurated by the matan Torah, but precisely because the Torah was given, it cannot be univocal. The gift necessarily comes with a freedom to appropriate it, which cannot be immobilized and set in stone, as the sages insist when they say: read not “graven” but “free.” The tradition, therefore, is like a sea of voices in which the apprentice must learn to swim in order to leave his own trace.

The phrase sea of voices derives from Harold Bloom, and the Talmudic practice of truth-making is indeed more akin to the Bloomian revisionistic agon of strong poets than to the veridictive procedures of philosophy, which, instructed by Plato, often usurps the divine transcendent vantage point of the ultimate truth. According to Susan Handelmann, the works of Bloom and Derrida, the two paradigmatic “slayers of Moses,” clearly derive from the Talmudic lore based on the complex and ever-growing nexus of refutations, which knows no beginning and no end. While the Talmudic reasoning “slays” the authority of the origin (not only Moses but also God), it also infinitely delays/defers the final “truth-saying” or the verdict that would have ended the game of interpretation. Thus, just as “strong poets” wish to keep tradition/canon going in a creative manner, so it can generate ever-new “ephebes”—the rabbis insist on keeping the body of midrash living and open to “innovations” (hiddushim) against the veridictive absolutist closure, which, for the art of commentary, could only mean death. And just as the Derridean différance is emphatically not the Hegelian antithesis pushing toward the synthetic “end of story,” so, too, is the rabbinic agon an ongoing invitation for new voices and perspectives to appear; it is not a stepping stone leading toward a future consent but a full affirmation of dissent as the ultimate expression of life—always this life, finite, singular, “thrown” into its world, opaque to itself. By drawing on the three thinkers who, despite belonging to Western philosophy, questioned its essentially Platonic setup—Heidegger, with his emphasis on the cognitive finitude as the critique of the post-Cartesian fully self-reflective subject; Derrida, with his promotion of différance, ecriture, and dissemination as the means by which language evolves and displays its potentialities; and Deleuze, with his diverse and polivocal “logics of sense”—Dolgopolski demonstrates the uniqueness of the Talmudic art of reasoning, which completely excludes any imitation of the divine absolutist perspective by making a priori impossible any infinite, identitarian, omniscient, and veridictive stance. For Dolgopolski, who in his analysis relies heavily on Canpanton, the fifteenth-century Sephardic rabbinic thinker, the rabbis who signed with their proper names are not real persons but synecdoches of what the former calls the “radical past”—the past that was not only not present but could never be made so essentially: they stand for “eons,” the bits of the opaque space-time that were drawn into the orations in the form of tacit premises—a Talmudic version of the enthymemes, which “entail an inner element of an oration that is always spatially outside of its immediate language.”²⁹

The radical past, with its uncontrollable tacit premises, is thus the best synonym for the radical finitude that can never be sublated by an infinitist perspective of one truth: the inevitability of enthymemes and the opaque moment of the finite “throwness” that determines the perspective of a given eon and that is preserved in the Talmudic reasoning precisely as such—as impersonal abstract throwness/conditioning, which can never be overcome and which, precisely because of that, becomes an objective ground of disagreement. The commonsense stereotype of the ever-quarreling rabbis must thus be rejected because the disagreement is not taken merely as an expression of personal biases or emotional local colorings, as would be the case with Nietzsche’s notion of perspectivism, which was motivated and fueled by the individual will to power. It is, to use Gibbs’s witty phrase again, a disagreement taken up not for “sport” but for God’s sake!—even if, especially with the exclamation mark, it also suggests a certain dose of the human—all too human—irascibility. Eventually, however, the Nietzschean personal bias is removed from the proper name of the rabbi, which stands here for the best-argued finite position that attempted to eliminate as many enthymemes as possible but that could not refute them all on ontological grounds. Carrying the work of refutation, which would dispel the doubts raised by the radically past tacit premises, is the task of every new adept student of the Talmudic school entering the “chain of the tradition.”

The Talmudic masters disagree if, and only if, there is a cause and this cause can be eliminated neither by correcting a mistake, nor by any voluntary act of agreement. The disagreement between parties comes neither from a logical mistake nor from a conflict of interests, but rather is constituted as a relationship between parties emerging as permanently disagreeing eons (or multiple, finite eternities) that refine and define each other due to the process of their disagreement. The disagreement in question is thoroughly impersonal and thus involuntary: Although it is represented by the personal names of the masters, those names no longer belong to any biographical personalities, but rather designate eternal profiles that could always be manned anytime by anyone capable of understanding the disagreement, or “contemplating” it, to use Canpanton’s term. The personal names of the parties in disagreement are no more than synecdoches for the event of disagreement itself. Again, because any oration is always already a refutation, the point of getting the refutation right consists not in agreeing with it, but rather in disagreeing with it intelligently.³⁰

For this reason, every new intervention into Talmudic reasoning emerges via the refutation—the only point “worth making”—which exposes the limitations of the past orations due to their tacit premises on the grounds of a new set of tacit premises, which will become exposed in its own limitations only by the next refutation, and so on, potentially forming an infinite series of finite eternities.³¹ “The disagreement contemplated in the radical past is no longer an intermediary point on the way to consensus, but rather is the fact of a radical past that, in order to remain so, challenges the student to speculate.”³²

The truth, therefore, emerges only on the basis of a dynamic double negation that can never close on itself. Despite the effort of the “maximized proximity” between the past oration and the present external judgment on the matter, the negation always preserves a gap, and this gap does not allow for any closure of the discussion. Roma locuta, causa finita is precisely the rule that does not apply here. God himself might have favored Rabbi Eliezer’s position; even his opponents might have admitted that “he is the Halakhah,” as if he were a perfect vessel (keli) embodying the ultimate true way, but this is not how things are done within the rabbinic discussion. Eliezer had to be excluded not because he was wrong but because he was “always right.” Unable to play the mirror game of mutual refutations where all finite positions could be right, but also equally wrong, Eliezer aspired to incarnate the truth itself, which would end the game among the equals: the finite minds encumbered by their singular pasts, irremediably imperfect “vessels.” Thus to capture the specificity of the Talmudic procedure of truth-making, Canpanton ventures a concept of the “inverted truth”; that is, a truth that can only be approximated via the refutation of its opposite:

On the occasions when he [Canpanton] himself spoke of truth, he approached it rhetorically, rather than logically: “truth is recognizable only through the inversion of it.” The inversion in question leads not only to what is logically opposite or linguistically different; it primarily leads to what the truth rhetorically refutes. Inversion thus means nothing else but what is refuted. So for Canpanton, finding the refuted element in the truth becomes the high road to recognizing a given truth itself. . . . In Canpanton’s own example, the truth about the proposition “This ring is of true gold,” is not that “this ring is truly gold,” but rather the refutation of the ever-present but always implicit doubt that the ring may have been faked. Without such an implicit doubt, the oration “This ring is of true gold” would refer to a self-evident truth and would not be worth making.³³

Thus only an oration that is not self-evident in itself and that implies a possibility of doubting and refuting is worth being made—and this, Canpanton and Dolgopolski insist, is a necessary condition of truth-making within the Talmudic reasoning. By contrast, Alfred Tarski’s famous definition of truth—“snow is white is true if and only if snow is white” (or “this ring is of true gold is true if and only if this ring is of true gold”)—although logically irrefutable relies on the statement that, in light of Talmudic requirements of innovation, would simply be not worth making. This, then, constitutes the main difference between the philosophical logic, which judges truth according to the criterion of self-evidence and, because of that, privileges tautologies, and the Talmudic reasoning, which implies rhetorical elements of contrariety, novelty, and curiosity, but, unlike the traditional rhetoric, shifts them into the very center of the truth-making procedure:

Kant’s definition of man—“man is a refuse”—thus also defines the student of Talmudic speculation, although not in any humanistic or moral sense, but rather in a rhetorical one: The student of the Talmud is “a refuse,” in that he eliminates doubt, but doubt, in order to be eliminated, must first be found. He refutes an external judgment that, in order to be refuted and thus be further refined, must first be established. Disagreement is the internal element a student must seek in order to establish his external judgment and to refine it further, an element that, as we have seen, logic would fatally miss altogether.³⁴

Having found the decisive difference between the philosophico-logical and Talmudic rational procedures, Dolgopolski concludes: “The ‘inverted truth’ of Canpanton is thus neither logical in the sense of scholastics, nor expressionist in the sense of either Spinoza, Heidegger, or Deleuze. Rather, it is of its own kind. It is Talmudic.”³⁵ But as we shall see in the last section, the rejection of tautology as the model of truth that would simply be “not worth making” and as such would only be a waste of time is what, according to Hans Blumenberg, also characterizes modern science and, more generally, a modern style of thinking. It is, therefore, not an accident that Kant, a Western modern philosopher, defines man as a “refuse.” The refutation of refutation, which never closes the circuit and preserves a gap between the best-argued position and the “truth in itself,” is precisely the manner of the “finite thinking” that has discovered its “provisional” nature and abandoned the previous desire to imitate the Platonic art of infinite contemplation.

THE FATHERLESS WORD

The suggestion that the art of Talmud, although constituting a highly specific game, can form a paradigmatic point of reference for a “finite thinking”; that is, the late-modern Western philosophy finally ready to fully embrace its finitude and all of its materialist implications, yet without falling into the trap of atheism as the Nietzschean dissemination of perspectives, appears in Daniel Boyarin’s Sparks of the Logos. By taking Jean Goux’s Symbolic Economy as a polemical foil, Boyarin demonstrates that once the Father is gone—removed from the game as an unfair player capable of “trumping” all dissenting voices—the Talmudic word becomes “fatherless,” no longer bound by the systemic limitations represented by the Father/Phallus/Logos as the triad governing the post-Platonic rationality, yet simultaneously bound by something else: the fixed reference to the holy text.

Boyarin’s first move to demonstrate the “fatherlessness” of the Talmudic word is to show that the art of Talmud has nothing to do with what Western culture calls interpretation. While interpretation is a metacommentary that aims to reveal the system of meaning behind the text, midrash operates on the same level as the commented text to which it attaches itself on the basis of metonymy or, in Talmudic terminology, mashal, “likeness.” “As the dominant mode of early rabbinic reading, it thus provides a direct contrast with allegoresis. In allegory (interpretation), a story is taken to signify a set of meanings—it is dominated, therefore, by the Jakobsonian sign of metaphor; in midrash, a story is placed beside another story, and connections or analogies between the stories provide mutual illumination of understanding without paraphrase or translation into abstraction. Its dominant sign is, therefore, metonymy.”³⁶

The metonymic rule further suggests that, within the Talmudic realm, the words themselves have no fixed significance: they are “virtual icons,” marked with their material concreteness, which simply cannot be paraphrased by an interpretation attempting to abstract from them a steady meaning. The words, therefore, are material pictograms from which it is impossible to separate the meaning from the sign itself, just as it is impossible for Jews to separate matter and spirit, the finite medium and the infinite message. By paraphrasing Archibald MacLeish, a poet of the school of New Criticism, which strongly emphasized the iconic character of poems as material articulations of language, Boyarin could thus say that “the midrash does not mean, it is,” implying that the words the midrash is made of must be taken in their radical finitude as inseparable entanglements of the imagistic concreteness: they can never assume an abstracted universal form (although Boyarin also finds MacLeish’s formula to be not radical enough). By analogy with the economic processes of exchange, Boyarin claims that while the Western mode of interpretation grounded in allegoresis belongs to the stage of universal exchange based on the abstract medium of money, the Talmudic exegesis still deals with “bartered words,” which also expresses the early-rabbinic resistance toward the global economy of the Roman Empire. Instead of exchanging words for words via the medium of universal abstract meaning, which allows for an exact paraphrasing of the original text, the rabbis exchange words for words on the principle of the material barter, which does not permit the distillation of an ideal value/meaning of any word. The words do not mean; they simply are what they are—and what they can be bartered for in a concrete transaction: “Early rabbinic interpretation, true midrash, barters without money, exchanges signification for signification, or places significations side by side, without positing a realm of abstract meaning.”³⁷

Interpretation is the dominant mode of commentary in a culture within which value is expressed in terms of an abstract, universal, and in itself substance-free standard: the coin. By interpretation I mean virtually all of our methods of formal response to texts by which the text is taken to mean something, by which meaning is extractable from a text and presentable, even if incompletely and not exactly, in paraphrase. Even the most extremely antiparaphrastic of western interpretative methods, for instance the poem-interpretation of the New Critics, still is infinitely more paraphrastic than midrash, which simply refuses to take even the text as verbal icon, preferring almost to read each word, and sometimes each letter, and sometimes the shape of the letter or even its serifs, as a virtual icon in itself. One way to bring this point home would be to insist that even according to those who would argue that “a poem must not mean but be” the poem remains at least partially translatable. With the modes of linguistic operation which are characteristic of early midrash in place, the text is simply untranslatable (something on the order of the untranslatability of Finnegan’s Wake). Too many of the features upon which midrash founds its meanings are simply artefacts of the materiality of the language in its Hebrew concreteness.³⁸

But it also means that the barter—an open horizontal exchange of goods/words whose value is never estimated in abstracto and then eternalized or “set in stone”—cannot have a Master who would arbitrate on the question of value by referring to the “universal equivalent,” because this value does not exist apart from the concrete transactions. If the contrahents in question agree to barter, there is no point in discussing the bartered value any further. This is precisely how Boyarin understands the Bava Metzi‘a fragment in which God himself is dismissed as a spurious arbitrator: “Midrash is the dominant mode of commentary in a signifying economy without the ‘universal equivalent.’ Widely known is the moment in Talmudic legend when God seeks to intervene in midrashic interpretation and is informed that he has no status because the majority of the sages disagree with his interpretation. In commentary, at any rate, for the Rabbis, even the deity is not the measure of all things.”³⁹

The “bartered word” and bartering exegesis indicate that there is no system in terms of a “generalized form of value,” pointing to the privileged status of Father/Phallus/Logos, which consists of holding all symbolic exchanges together in the form of virtual harmony, equivalence, and agreement: the “measure of all things.” The symbolic economy of the midrashic art is different: by rejecting one Logos, which “gathers all” (as the word legein suggests), it is “no philology at all but rather a sort of misology.”⁴⁰ Barter is a local form of exchange not warranted by the system governed by the privileged Master Signifier, constituting the sovereign exception outside the system. The meaning of the bartered word is not guaranteed by any transcendent Logos; it is essentially “fatherless”—even “godless”—and thus open to disagreement, which is originary, precisely the way it is envisaged by Derrida in his coinage of différance as an originary heterogeneity that is not just a negation of agreement or deviation from the virtual ideal represented by the Pater/Phallus/Logos who oversees and reconciles all into a systemic totality.⁴¹ The original disagreement is a very different condition than a merely secondary dissent, always perceived as privatio boni, here understood as privatio consensus; that is, in purely privative and negative terms of “sin,” Fall, “disjointedness,” or Un-Fug.⁴² Radical finitude goes hand in hand with radical materialism and the original condition of dissemination not to be condemned as a deviation from the harmonious ideal of universal consent or a Neoplatonic Fall from the One into the chaos of the multitude.

As Boyarin suggests in the final line of his essay, the “Not-All,” the antisystemic position of late Lacan (as he admits, adopted by him due to the influence of what he saw as the tradition of Jewish materialism⁴³), is indeed the natural metaphysics of the rabbis. As we have seen, Žižek agrees with this and, by drawing Judaism into the universal “passage from the big Other qua the abyss of subjectivity to the big Other qua the impersonal structure of the symbolic Law,” he not only restores the eternal validity of the Jewish religion against the supersessionist claims of his opponent, John Milbank, but—in harmony with Boyarin’s implications—affirms this validity also in meta-philosophical terms: as the necessary condition of rationality exercised by finite minds. Contrary to what Western philosophical tradition appeared to claim—that the paternal function of Logos/Big Other is necessary for the coordination of the symbolic sphere of exchange—the opposite is true: it is only when the sovereign point de capiton becomes loosened that the finite reason is able to move away from the “misty paradox” (which, according to Žižek, is Milbank’s position: the impossible task of thinking in the full presence of the living God or what the latter calls grace) and assert itself within the “impersonal structure of the symbolic Law,” which, at the same time, remains the law. The whole point of the “passage,” therefore, is to avoid the nondialectical dualism of absolutism and relativism: the wrong transition from the providential supervision of Logos, the keeper of the absolute truth, to the nihilistic stance of posttruth as “anything goes” of the ever-changing doxa. The disappearance of the former, as narrated by the Bava Metzi‘a fragment, does not have to lead to the anarchy of dissenting voices substituting truth with mere opinion—or the “return of the sophists” as advocated by Nietzsche, who saw it as a natural consequence of the final and irrevocable death of God. God is silenced but not dead. His authority may be withdrawn, contracted, in the state of tsimtsum, but it does not vanish completely. Instead of atheism, we may rather call it, again, a decentered theism.

In that sense, Talmud may indeed be said to anticipate many of the moves of modern philosophy, especially those concerned with creating a reliable sphere of human rationality. Long before Descartes and his refutation of deus fallax—the “devious God” of the nominalists portrayed by him as a capricious and manipulative demon—the rabbinic community refuted the living presence of God in order to establish a new conversation of humankind that, from this point on, will only take arguments from the equals. In that sense, Talmud is before philosophy as practiced in modernity: a shocking discovery that late-modern philosophical thought, gradually reconciling itself with the “finite thinking,” has made in its Owl of Minerva startled hindsight.⁴⁴

NOT HEEDING TO THE HEAVENLY VOICE: DESCARTES

I aim to prove that Boyarin’s and Žižek’s conjecture is right: once Western philosophy becomes a self-conscious “finite thinking,” it begins to tread in the footsteps of the Talmudic masters and their decentered theism as a meta-philosophical position—starting with Descartes. The juxtaposition of Hans Blumenberg’s seminal reading of Descartes in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age with Bava Metzi‘a 59b reveals an intriguing analogy: an implicit continuation of the lo bashamayim argument in which Descartes decides not to listen to the “trumping” divine voice and, thanks to this decision, creates an autonomous space of reason. In that sense, Descartes, who gains distance from the arbitrary verdicts of the Nominalist deus fallax, thinly disguised as a “fictional” genius malignus, repeats the gesture of the Talmudic rabbis who achieve this distancing and thus a “breathing space” in the paradigmatic and foundational manner: as Blumenberg rightly points out, Descartes refutes the hypothesis of the malicious demon not logically but rhetorically—and yet, it works. In Blumenberg’s view, therefore, modern philosophy is not free from the rhetorical element it constantly tries to exorcise; in fact, it is made possible by the Cartesian cut that gains freedom from the “all-trumping” and thus malignant omnipotence of the Nominalist “devious God,” and, from this time on, becomes deaf “to the heavenly voice.”⁴⁵

It is hardly possible that Hans Blumenberg, despite his deep assimilation with German culture, did not know the “famous legend” that circulated among the milieu of German-Jewish thinkers. Although he does not mention it in his analysis of Descartes, one cannot avoid an impression of deep analogy. Just as God suddenly intervenes in the dispute of the rabbis and procures unwelcome miracles/exceptions that suspend the laws of the universe—the Nominalist God, deus fallax, enters the train of Descartes’s methodical scepticism and subverts the laws of logic, rendering him helpless and unable to proceed. And just as rabbis reject the impossible argument from miracles (impossible because miracles destroy the framework of any rational argumentation), so does Descartes rebel against the “devious God,” disguised as a “malignant genius,” by stubbornly sticking to the last-ditch explanation of logic, which he sees as valid even for an omnipotent deity: “Even if I am deceived, I still exist—ego sum, ego existo!” According to the “theological absolutism”—the formation that grew particularly strong among the Nominalist scholastics, most of all William Ockham—God possesses potentia absoluta, which can create and immediately destroy, establish, and subvert anything and everything, including the laws of logic, which he is not obliged to obey. His only way to proceed is thus via miracles, which have just one justification behind them: quia voluit, “because He wanted it that way.” In this theological game, which speaks the language of miracles and exceptions, God is the card that trumps all.⁴⁶

By holding to the last voice of logic in the face of a genius malignus who is capable of deceiving us into a belief in the infallibility of logic, even if “in themselves” the laws of logic reduce to his arbitrary whim, Descartes does not refute the malign intervention on logical grounds because he admits that they may be nothing but a frail convention. Rather, in a manner analogical to the rabbis, who defend their game against the specter of the divine living presence threatening to destroy it, Descartes simply stops “heeding to the heavenly voice.” He moves away from the vertiginous presence of the divine potentia absoluta and withdraws in the shadow of his own “provisional” finite thinking, which, as he claims, will be groping in the dark, proceeding slowly and with caution, step by step, by slant and circuit, relying on nothing but cautious logic—the same logic that the hypothesis of the malicious demon threatened to destroy and that, in fact, it did destroy as the way to achieve the absolute truth. Just as the “inverted truth” of Canpanton allows only for provisional results that can—and will—be refuted by the future participants of the Talmudic game, the Cartesian “provisional” thinking also never witnesses any truth directly and avails itself only of the method of refutation, from which it originated. The starting point of Descartes’s positive reconstruction of being—a seemingly constative and triumphant cogito, ergo sum—has the structure of the provisional refutation of the refutation, or the “inverted truth”: Even if he deceives me, I still am is a piece of reasoning that only refutes the doubt raised by the hypothetic existence of genius malignus. Can I reasonably doubt my being when there may be an omnipotent spirit capable of deceiving me on all fronts, the laws of logic included? Perhaps I could, but even while doubting or being deceived, I simply cannot doubt myself out of existence: the act of doubting proves the existence of the doubter. But what if I am deceived even about the rationality of this conclusion? This is also possible, but then the whole thinking would simply make no sense at all. We could obviously prostrate ourselves in front of the “misty paradox” and humble our reason, which would be only logical because it is the very logic of this situation that calls for the abolishment of all logic. But is this quietistic paradox—the abdication of reason deduced rationally, as in William Ockham—the only way to end this conundrum? Just as I cannot be doubted out of my existence, I also cannot be thought out of my thinking; once I claimed the tools of reason, which gave me my sceptical method, I will not end by granting to deus fallax the power to still my reasoning. I will go on, even if on “provisional” grounds, always full of doubt, finite and precarious, but—yes—thinking.⁴⁷

This is what Blumenberg calls the moment of “self-assertion”: the not fully logical act of the “provisional” decision to remain in thinking, now consciously opposed to the absolutist perspective that the “finite thought” no longer wants to imitate. More than that, due to the Nominalist crisis, which created the very idea of deus fallax, the finite thought finds any absoluteness apposite and hostile to itself.⁴⁸ For Blumenberg, Descartes is the first thinker to escape the snares of “theological absolutism”: the Nominalist form of theism that followed the theocentric logic to the bitter end and created a “theological monster” who, instead of securing the existence of the world as its reliable creator, turned against his own creation and threatened to annihilate it.⁴⁹ Descartes’s early-modern self-assertive rebellion against deus fallax clarifies again what Bava Metzi‘a 59b explained long ago—that no “finite thinking” is possible in the strictly theocentric environment or, to use Derrida’s idiom, that God must be decentered as le Dieu en retrait; in other words, removed from the systemic center if humans, the other pole of the covenant, are to assert themselves at all:

Under the enormous pressure of the demands made upon it by theology, the human subject begins to consolidate itself, to take on a new overall condition, which possesses, in relation to ambushes set by the hidden absolute will, something like the elementary attribute of the atom, that it cannot be split up or altered. Absolutism reduces whatever is exposed to it, but in the process it brings to light the constants, the no longer touchable kernels [. . . .] The ius primarium, the primeval right to self-assertion, becomes comprehensible long before Descartes and Hobbes as the essence of modern age’s understanding of itself—that is, as the anthropological minimum under the conditions of the theological maximum.⁵⁰

“Long before Descartes and Hobbes”—could indeed refer to the Talmudic “famous legend,” in which the anthropological minimum asserted itself for the first time against the conditions of the theological maximum and, thanks to the self-assertive obstinacy of the rabbis, the theocentric tendency, always incipient in all orthodoxies, became—at least partly—defeated. This decentration, however, does not “kill” God in the Nietzschean manner; it occurs within the theological model, where it creates a “breathing space” of distance and respite (Galgenfrist), which occludes the terrifying face of the Living God and lets creation live—and think—in the conditions of the benign (“smiling”) retreat/tsimtsum. Thus, even if later on Descartes restores God and God’s good name (which excludes being a “deceiver”), this is no longer a theocentric argument: the deistic God of Cartesianism—essential only in the moment of creation but no longer a “necessary hypothesis” in the created realm “within our reach”—becomes relegated to the “radical past,” which removes God from the central living presence but without rendering him “dead.” God is not dead—he is merely, as in the motto taken from Rosenzweig, refuted.

But this is also the moment in which, according to Blumenberg, modern science is born, not out of the spirit of atheism but rather out of this peculiar decentered theism in which the existence of God becomes irrelevant and gives way to human self-assertion. Modern science, then, proceeds very much like the Talmudic reasoning: it gives up on the logical tautology as the eternal model of truth, stating only those hypotheses that are “worth making” from the pragmatic point of view, which it subsequently proves by the refutation of refutation and the procedure of the “inverted truth” (in other words, the principle of falsification according to which only the hypotheses that raise reasonable doubt can be called scientific); combines invention of discoveries with the convention of the received theories, which remain valid temporally, that is, until they are proved otherwise; and, finally, “inclines after the majority” within the community of scholars and its set epistemic paradigm. The fact that it resorts to the rule of the experimentum crucis in the procedure of first raising and then refuting the doubt is a secondary feature. Formally speaking, the Talmudic art of “exaction” and the scientific art of formulating the hypotheses as precisely as possible belong to the same lore of the “finite thinking” that proceeds slowly, provisionally, and with caution. Canpanton and Karl Popper could indeed shake hands.

VOIDING OF CHILD’S HEAVEN: LEVINAS

I once again return to Levinas’s formula: “loving Torah more than God,” which I take to be the best depiction of the rabbinic decentered theism as the necessary condition of the possibility of the “finite thinking”: a meta-philosophical position allowing modern thought to pass “from the abyss of subjectivity to the impersonal structure of the law” or from the desire to imitate the divine omniscience to the horizontal exchange of hypotheses and refutations. In the short text under this title from Difficult Freedom, Levinas discusses the fictional diary published in Israel in the 1960s as Yossel, Son of Yossel Rakover from Tarnopol, Speaks to God, which presented itself as a document “written during the final hours of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance.”⁵¹ The concluding line of the “document,” in which Yosel ben Yosel begins to understand that “the adult’s God is revealed precisely through the void of the child’s heaven [and] this is the moment when God retires from the world and hides His face” indeed reads as an uncanny parallel to the Cartesian Meditations:⁵² “This accounts for the monologue’s closing remark, in which Yossel ben Yossel echoes the whole of the Torah: ‘I love him, but I love even more his Torah. . . . And even if I were deceived by him and became disillusioned, I should nevertheless observe the precepts of the Torah.’ Is this blasphemy? At the very least, it is a protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred that is unmediated by reason.”⁵³

While the God of the infantile heaven can play tricks and perform miracles and thus taunt his childish believers, the “adult’s God,” whose direct voice the mature believer no longer wants to heed, is the giver of the Torah, which contains a self-sufficient “internal evidence of morality.”⁵⁴ For Descartes, the point of certitude lies in the awareness of his own existence, which cannot be doubted away, even if the infinite mind of deus fallax plays tricks with our finite thinking. For Yosel ben Yosel, the certitude is the sacred text, which is the true unwavering divinity, the ultimate rigid designator. Thus even in times of the greatest despair, Yosel ben Yosel does not deplore the condition of the divine “occlusion” (hester panim) because it is precisely the possibility of this living dependence that makes him uneasy. This is not atheism pure and simple, although, as Levinas states: “True monotheism is duty bound to answer the legitimate demands of atheism.”⁵⁵ It is, again, a decentered theism that rejects an emotional relationship with the living God as the paradigm of the religious bond and honors him only as the author of the Torah.⁵⁶

To refute the living God, therefore, defines exactly the Jewish difference that protests against the desire to live in a state of dependence on the living God and be as close to his absolutist perspective as possible, which Levinas finds characteristic of Christianity.⁵⁷ What Rosenzweig attributes somewhat quixotically to Nietzsche—that he had to refute God the moment God became revealed—is rather the defining feature of Judaism as the religion of the absent God, deus absentis (withdrawn, retreated, contracted, concealed, occluded—whatever form this absence takes). But perhaps there is some truth in this seemingly exotic attribution: Nietzsche, as a philosopher (or, rather, as long as he remained a philosopher), could not have thought in the direct contact with the Sacred. Hence the last line of Levinas’s text: “Man can have confidence in an absent God and also be an adult who can judge his own sense of weakness” could just as well have come from the later meditations of Descartes, who has managed to put God at a safe distance and has begun to enjoy his logical procedures, always quietly aware of their provisionality.⁵⁸ Talmud and (modern) Philosophy may thus not be an impossible marriage after all: even if the latter has not learned directly from the former, it eventually discovered the same conditions without which the “finite thinking” could simply not go on.

AGATA BIELIK-ROBSON is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and Professor of Philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her publications include Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy, and Derrida’s Marrano Passover: Exile, Survival, Betrayal and the Metaphysics of Non-Identity.

NOTES

1. On the vastness of the commentaries on Bava Metzi‘a 59b, see Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, 314, where notes 1–4 contain a comprehensive list of the significant mentions of the story in the recent scholarly reception. See also Rubenstein’s midrash on the legend on pp. 34–66, which very subtly points to the literary aspects of the story, usually omitted by those commentators interested mostly in the “Oven of Akhnai” as the best illustration of the Talmudic epistemology.

2. The phrase “finite thinking” derives from Jean-Luc Nancy’s A Finite Thinking, which is mainly concerned with the post-Heideggerian evolution of the late-modern Western philosophy based on Martin Heidegger’s rediscovery of human finitude as the factor determining the cognitive faculties of Dasein. In this essay, I intend to prove that the idea of the “finite thinking” existed within the Talmudic art of reasoning long before it became the explicit theme in Western philosophy, which, in accordance with Hans Blumenberg, I associate not with Heidegger but rather Descartes.

3. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 130–31.

4. Ibid., 132.

5. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 99, 111, 128, 143. On the affinities between the rabbinic model of creating a ratio between the transcendent revelation and the immanent tradition and the Bloomian revisionistic agon creating a ratio between the poetic greatness of the dead precursor and the belated beginner/ephebe, see Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie, 33–74.

6. This argument also figures very strongly in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, in which the divine absolutist glory can only be ascribed to those gods who never enter any relationship with humans; that is, the pagan idols self-sufficient in their immortal “fullness of life,” whereas the Jewish God, being relational, must choose a different idiom of self-expression, which, in Rosenzweig’s openly Christianizing account, is a bat kol, the gentle voice of love: “The world of the gods always remains a world in itself, even when they enclose the whole world; then that world that they enclose is not on its own and with which God would have to enter into a relationship, but something that encloses him. So here God is without a world; or, conversely, if we wanted to characterize this representation as precisely a view of the world, this world of the life of the gods who remain among themselves would be—a world without gods. And with this we would have expressed the essence of what can be designated as a mythological conception of the world” (Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 42 [my emphasis]). The link between God’s “defeat” as described in Bava Metzi‘a and the Christian process of kenosis, which eventually leads to the “death of God,” is also a theme of Slavoj Žižek’s essay “Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox,” which will be discussed shortly.

7. The idea of the divine defeat is an integral moment of Judaic difference conceived most of all as the art of “arguing with God,” which is shared by both scholars and popular commentators. For instance, by claiming that the book of Job is the climax of the Hebrew Bible, in which “Job has won, the Lord has lost,” Jack Miles perceives God’s “biography” as a didactic story in which “arguing with God” allows human participants of the covenant to mature and stand on their feet (Miles, God, 325). David A. Frank expands Miles’s argument beyond the Tanakh and sees it also operative in the Talmud: “With this defeat, God falls silent; this is God’s last argument in the Hebrew Bible. . . . In both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, God admits defeat in argument with humans. The arguing-with-God tradition ends with God’s defeat in Job; God is not given direct authority in the Talmud, according to the Oven of Akhnai story. Argument between humans in the Talmud, absent the direct presence of the divine, and capable of hosting antinomies, does not have an ending point” (Frank, “Arguing with God,” 81–82). According to Amos Rubenstein, the motif of “standing on one’s feet” is what unites the book of Job with Bava Metzi‘a 59b: “Yehoshua ‘stood on his feet’ and argued against the heavenly voice and the Gamaliel ‘stood on his feet’ to plead against the threatening wave” (Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, 39).

8. See Derrida, “The Force of Law and the Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Acts of Religion.

9. According to Rabbi Tsvi Hirsch Chajes, a great sage from Brody, who commented on the Eliezer story in the standard Romm-Vilna edition of the Talmud, the verb nitshuni derives not from nitsahon (victory) but from netsah (eternity), so the phrase nitshuni banai should be read as “my children made me eternal.” Instead of cherishing Hashem as a Living God (who, as Nietzsche rightly claimed, can always die), the rabbis turned him into an eternal Name, signing the one and only holy text.

10. This connection did not escape Daniel Boyarin, who perceives the Talmudic intertextuality as a precursor to Derrida’s invalidation of authorial intentions: “The irony is that the hermeneutic conservative, R. Eliezer, the one who literally has God on his side, was excommunicated and exiled for his insistence that the Author controls the reading of His text” (Boyarin, Intertextuality, 36). See also Handelman, Slayers of Moses, in which she quotes Bava Metzi‘a 59b and then relates it directly to the deconstructive practices of Derrida and Harold Bloom: “The boundaries between text and interpretation are fluid in a way which is difficult for us to imagine for a sacred text, but this fluidity is a central tenet of much contemporary literary theory. The elevation of later commentary to the status of earlier primary text is one of the extraordinary characteristics of rabbinic interpretation, and involves a not so subtle power struggle” (Handelman, Slayers of Moses, 41).

11. There are numerous explanations for how the rule that, in Daniel Boyarin’s words, “the majority of the community which holds cultural hegemony controls interpretation” (Intertextuality, 35) emerged, even though it seems to be such a blatant contradiction of God’s words. Holger Zellentin, for instance, understands it as an element of the “rabbinic parody” or an ironic sense of humor subversive toward any, in Derrida’s words, “mystical authority”: “The passage in Exodus 23:2, of course, condemns precisely such ‘inclination after the majority’ to such an extent that the rabbis take the repetitive insistence as an invitation to derive the opposite lesson from the text” (Zellentin, Rabbinic Parodies, 218). The condemnation that goes too far and insists on repeating itself would thus be a pretext to do precisely what is condemned; that is, to follow the lead of Adam and Eve who were so abundantly instructed not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge that they simply felt invited to do so. This contrarian logic is also reflected in Paul’s critique of the Jewish law as an inverted instruction on how to sin in Romans 7–8: “What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead.” It is precisely this “nevertheless” that would govern the rabbinic ironic logic of inversion.

12. Žižek, “Dialectical Clarity,” 268–69.

13. “Such a Jewish art of endless interpretation of the letter of the Law is thus profoundly materialist, its implication (and maybe even true goal) being (to make sure) that God is (and remains) dead. This is why Christianity could emerge only after and from within Judaism: its central theme of the death of Christ only posits as such, ‘for itself,’ the death of God which, ‘in itself,’ takes place already in Judaism” (Ibid., 269–70). While the first part of the diagnosis, which points to the materialist character of the rabbinic reasoning, is right—the second, inferring from this a pre-Christian figure of the death of God, is far too hasty or is simply supersessionist. The Judaic rule of the “long story not cut short” found its best expression in Hermann Cohen’s theory of subtle heteronomy, or “Sinai in our heart,” which provides a historical perspective of gradual maturation: from the external moment of revelation, planting the seed of the Torah in human life, to the internalization of the teaching, from this time on evolving only within the community of finite minds: “The teaching is not in heaven but in man’s mouth, in his faculty of speech and in his heart, and therefore also in his mind. It did not come to man from without; it originated within him. It is rooted in his spirit which God, the uniquely One, has put into man as the holy spirit, the spirit of holiness” (Cohen, Reason and Hope, 101).

14. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, part 1, appendix, 113. This is perhaps also why Heinrich Heine, while obliquely referring to Spinoza, called modern Jews “the Swiss guard of deism”: a position very close to what I call the decentered theism.

15. Also Peter Schäfer and Holger Zellentin emphasize the antimiracle (but also anti-Christian) thrust of the “Oven of Akhnai” narrative; while the former portrays Rabbi Eliezer as “an alter ego of Jesus” (Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 49), the latter claims that “each of the miracles indeed ironically repeats a particular ‘Christian’ miracle and, most importantly, that using miracles in doctrinal arguments itself is a characteristic of late antique Christianity” (Zellentin, Rabbinic Parodies, 219).

16. In his vigorous apology of disagreement—“for God’s sake!”—Robert Gibbs defends it against the theological monopoly of orthodoxy: “But, and here theology is not innocent, the need for these institutions for dissent and active disagreement, often arose because religion has seemed to insist on consensus, on orthodoxy and uniformity of opinion. Whatever we make of the Mishnah, for many in this room [and I had a pleasure to be there—A. B.-R.], the notion that disagreement is for God’s sake may well seem paradoxical. And yet, for Jewish tradition it is not merely tolerated; it is central” (Gibbs, “Disagree, for God’s Sake!”).

17. This feature of the rabbinic reasoning is strongly emphasized by Jacob Neusner, who sees it as resulting from the passage from the prophetic ventriloquism characteristic of the “Scriptural modes of thought and expression [that] ignored or dismissed views contrary to one’s own, which, often as not, were also represented as God’s,” to the rabbinic argument that engaged in a “logical inquiry [at the foundation of which] lay the philosopher’s insistence that conflicting principles cannot both be right” (Neusner and Chilton, Intellectual Foundations, x–xi). At the same time, however, Neusner, who insists on the philosophical influence shaping the argumentative skills of the rabbis, admits the essential difference: “If then in Plato’s dialogues, a name stands for a viewpoint to be set forth and argued out in the setting of a debate with a contrary viewpoint identified with a name, the Mishnah deserves comparison with those dialogues. And the one really striking difference is that while Plato’s Socrates asks what, exactly, is justice, our sages of blessed memory occupy themselves with conflict over who owns a cloak that two persons claim or how to adjudicate possession of a sliver of land or the carcass of a gored cow” (Ibid., 9). The difference, therefore, consists in the blocking of the sublimatory act of abstraction that would lead to the “heaven of forms”: not only is the Torah no longer in heaven but the whole thinking remains tied to the material earth, where it develops horizontally and creates a complex nexus of concrete cases.

18. The proof that the Talmudic reasoning is as strict as mathematics lies in another story, equally commented on, which describes the conflict between the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai. Here the “voice of the living God” also intervenes, but this time, it does not side with any of the rabbis involved. It says that both are right and, as such, it becomes accepted. This manner of dealing with the presence of the living God is a precise topological inversion of Bava Metzi‘a 59b: the figure correlating one voice with the absence converts into the figure correlating presence with many voices, but their significance is the same. God can enter the rabbinic discussion either as a presence siding with all dissenting voices, but if he wants to side with only one voice, he must remain absent.

19. See Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 48–49: “A designator rigidly designates a certain object if it designates that object wherever the object exists; if, in addition, the object is a necessary existent, the designator can be called strongly rigid . . . proper names are rigid designators.” Following this definition, the Torah as the proper name of the Hebrew scripture would designate rigidly the necessary existent scripture before “purely qualitative descriptions” (Ibid.), which come only later and can never exhaust or replace the rigid designation. But if Kripke’s theory aligns with the Jewish model of referring to the Torah, it might have been influenced by it in the first place. On several striking affinities between Kripke and Maimonides, see Fagenblat, Covenant of Creatures, 125: “A proper name designates an identity without imputing any descriptive essence to it.”

20. Hertz, Pirke Avot, 5:25.

21. Ibid., 2:21.

22. Ibid., 6:2.

23. Scholem, Es gibt Geheimnis in der Welt, 47 (my translation).

24. The phrase, made popular by Harold Bloom, derives from Scholem’s letter to Salman Schocken from 1937 and refers to the work of Franz Kafka as the most accomplished modern heir of the kabbalistic tradition: quoted in Biale, Gershom Scholem, 75.

25. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 131 (my emphasis).

26. I return to this theme in the conclusion.

27. On the claim that Moses heard only one barely audible sound, which the Hebrew alphabet designates as aleph, a beginning of all articulated speech, itself on the verge of silence, see Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 30. On the positive materialist appropriation of the anti-Judaic trope of “carnal Israel,” see Boyarin, “This We Know to Be the Carnal Israel,” in Sparks of the Logos, 24–58.

28. Dolgopolski, What Is Talmud?, 7–8.

29. Ibid., 94.

30. Ibid., 98–99 (my emphasis).

31. Ibid., 103.

32. Ibid., 102.

33. Ibid., 102–3 (my emphasis).

34. Ibid., 94.

35. Ibid., 103.

36. Boyarin, Sparks of the Logos, 157 (my emphasis).

37. Ibid., 145.

38. Ibid., 144.

39. Ibid., 144 (my emphasis).

40. Ibid., 161.

41. See especially, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Derrida, Dissemination.

42. As it is still in the case of Heidegger, whom Derrida criticizes in Specters of Marx, for his unreflected privileging of der Fug as the higher harmony of Being (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 27–32).

43. See Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 99.

44. I must emphasize again that what seems to be Žižek’s major limitation—his insistence on “cutting the story short” and rendering the lesson of the aggadic fragment to the Nietzschean/Althiserian terms of “God is dead”—is precisely what does not allow for the passage he endorses. For, if God were just dead, there would be no justification for the Law to remain a law. Thus, even if God is dead as an author in terms of the authorial authority on what the text “wanted to say” (voluoir-dire, French for “to mean,” which obviously did not escape Derrida’s attention), God cannot be simply dead as the author in terms of the giver of the Torah, fixing it as the eternal source of the legalistic wisdom. Some of his authority, even if it is delegated to the “radical past,” must be dialectically preserved. But Žižek, as is evident in his treatment of the “death of God” motif, is not fully free from the supersessionist bias: in this peculiar competition, the Christians always kill their God better!

45. Contrary to the cliché that insists on pairing Descartes’s name with the absolutist view of truth that privileges logic over rhetoric (“if two men disagree, one of them must be wrong,” which is the fourth rule of The Rules for the Direction of the Mind), Blumenberg reads the Cartesian story as the one akin to the book of Job or the Oven of Akhnai: the defeat of God as the arbitrary Absolute, who then becomes silenced, never to return as the Absolute in Descartes’s thinking, which then assumes a “provisional” character whereby logic becomes a main prop—a kind of logical halakhah as the instruction how to walk—but it is nonetheless a finite thinking, never to assume, imitate, or emulate the absolutist perspective. On Descartes’s alleged triumphant absolutism in contrast to the rabbinic rhetoric, see Frank, “Arguing with God,” 82.

46. As Blumenberg describes: “The God Who places no constraints on Himself, Who cannot be committed to any consequence following from His manifestations, makes time into a dimension of utter uncertainty. This affects not only the identity of the subject, the presence of which at any given moment does not guarantee it any future, but also the persistence of the world, whose radical contingency can transform it, from one moment to the next, from existence into mere appearance, from reality into nothingness” (Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 161–62).

47. See Descartes:

The thought had come to me, that perhaps some God might have endowed me with such a nature that I could be deceived even about those things that appeared supremely obvious. But whenever this preconceived opinion of God’s supreme power occurs to me, I cannot help admitting that, if indeed he wishes to, he can easily bring it about that I should be mistaken, even about matters I think I intuit with the eye of the mind as evidently as possible. On the other hand, whenever I turn my attention to the things themselves that I think I perceive very clearly, I am so thoroughly convinced by them, that I cannot help exclaiming: “Let whoever can, deceive me as much as he likes: still he can never bring it about that I am nothing, as long as I think I am something; or that one day it will be true that I have never existed, when it is true now that I exist; . . . or that other such things should be true in which I recognize an obvious contradiction.”

Descartes, Meditations, 26 (my emphasis).

48. In his “Discourse on the Method,” Descartes talks about the “provisional morality” as the essential part of the search for certainty undertaken by a finite mind: the will must be engaged in the pursuit of rationality, so it can go on, propped by the assertive moral attitude. His “provisional moral code” is thus necessary to foster the “finite thinking”: “I thought I could do no better than to continue with the [occupation] I was engaged in, and to devote my whole life to cultivating my reason and advancing as far as I could in the knowledge of the truth, following the method I had prescribed for myself” (Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 1:124). Similarly, in Meditations, the will is also presented as the indispensable ingredient of the finite reasoning that must assert itself each time by warding off the specter of the “external influence,” and as this power of self-assertion can actually measure up to God: “For although the will is incomparably greater in God than in me . . . nonetheless, when it is considered strictly as it is essentially in itself, it does not seem to be greater in him than in me. This is because . . . it consists purely in this: that we are moved in relation to that which the intellect presents to us as to be affirmed or denied, pursued or avoided, in such a way that we feel we are not being determined in that direction by any external force” (Descartes, Meditations, 41 [my emphasis]). And, as Descartes claims, once will and reason cooperate within the provisional morals/thinking, “all the true goods [are] within my reach.” (Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:125 [my emphasis]). The image of the limited space “within my reach” is opposed to the infinite realm of absolute knowledge, which needs no provisos to know the truth and thus needs no will to maintain itself in the epistemological self-assertion.

49. “That such an idea of the absolute and its transcendence could achieve such a sustained influence on Scholasticism can only be understood as the repression of the humanistic element of the Christian tradition by its theological ‘rigor.’ Only when the indifference of divinity toward man had been thought through to the end was theology’s immanent logic satisfied [. . . .] The world as the pure performance of reified omnipotence, as a demonstration of the unlimited sovereignty of a will to which no question can be addressed—this eradication even of the right to perceive a problem means that, at least for man, the world no longer possessed an accessible order.”

(Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 171).

50. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 196–97 (my emphasis).

51. Levinas, “Loving Torah More Than God,” in Difficult Freedom, 142.

52. Ibid., 143.

53. Ibid., 144 (my emphasis).

54. Ibid. A similar argument is made by Eliezer Berkovits in Not in Heaven, which presents the lo bashamayim principle in terms of the necessary mediation, which only the Jewish law can fulfill.

55. Ibid., 143.

56. The closest to the idea of the “decentered theism” as the differentia specifica of Judaism is Scholem’s term pious atheism, which combines the moment of piety and its Kripkean “rigid designator” in the form of the Torah with the awareness of God’s absence here and now; see Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 283. David Biale’s elaboration of lo bashamayim as creating a tradition of “Jewish secularism” follows Scholem’s intuition that “his secularism is not secular” (Ibid.) and develops “a contrarian argument: that many of the most avowed critics of religion, those we call secularists, could never escape the tradition they overturn” (Biale, Not in the Heavens, 176). The key to this paradox is that one does not have to escape the Jewish tradition in order to overturn it: the refutative agonistic moment of “arguing with God” is so strong that the greatest rebels become the holiest saints, and vice versa.

57. See Frank’s remark, which connects the Bava Metzi‘a aggadah with Levinas’s position: “I believe the deeper reason why the majority rejects the divine voice as proof is the one expressed by Levinas: direct contact with the Sacred without the mediation of reason produces madness”: a madness being precisely what Žižek calls “the abyss of subjectivity” (Frank, “Arguing with God,” 81).

58. Ibid., 145.