Judaism is not an interpretive religion, but it has dogmatics

Brief musings on the nature of Judaism vis a vis common opinions about it.

To some extent, this post is a continuation of lines of thought I published in Religia titled "Hermeneutics of Transformation or Hermeneutics of Law?" In another sense, it's also an attempt to correct some less successful formulations that appeared in that article. Mainly – this is a short post summarizing a successful chavruta (study session) I had today.

"Judaism is not an interpretive religion" sounds like a provocative statement, but perhaps it's not really, not if we understand what we mean when we talk about interpretation. To understand this, I'll rely briefly on Gadamer again. Modern hermeneutics began as an attempt to shape an interpretive philosophy that would allow us access to texts – the Bible – that have religious importance, but whose meaning has been obscured over time. During this effort, many rules of thumb were tried: let's trace the psychological intention of the author, let's try to harmonize the different statements in the text as much as possible, let's formulate the historical position of the interpreter in relation to the text, and so on. The truly radical move – according to Gadamer – was made when Heidegger understood that every methodological principle reflects certain metaphysical presuppositions about what is and isn't available to the interpreter. In slightly less grandiose words: methodology will always contain within it a certain subordination of the text's meaning. To understand a text, we are required to approach it precisely without methodology.

An interesting way in which Gadamer ultimately explains the difference is through the distinction between philologists and judges. There is, Gadamer admits, an entire sub-discipline in legal literature called "hermeneutics" (interpretation) in which legal scholars deal with the question of how a judge should interpret the law. But two things make legal "interpretation" different from that of the philologist. (1) Legal scholars work and need to work with the assumption that there is no case in reality that is not, in principle, subject to the law. If certain cases are perceived as ones about which the law has nothing to say, it is precisely because of a prior determination by the judge. Another way – the judge cannot resort to the assumption that the law simply has no relevance to the case before him. This is a somewhat broad statement, which I think needs more defense, so we'll skip it for now. (2) The judge judges according to principles. Not as an ideal, but as a practice. Every legal body contains within it "principles" of how judgment within its framework should be carried out. Think, for instance, of the principle of precedent (not relevant to Israel). If there is a certain precedent, the judge works with a rule according to which, regardless of the interpretation he personally might attribute to the law, he must bow to another interpretation, the one reflected in the precedent, if it is available to him. A somewhat more Jewish example: when ruling on halakha, almost every historical decisor has a set of principles that take precedence over the meaning he finds in the Talmudic text: individual versus majority, the law follows the majority; that one should not rely on early midrashim outside the Babylonian Talmud but written around the same time (Ramban); and so on. There is no completely agreed-upon set of principles, but in fact, there isn't one for ordinary legal scholars either.

What the philologist does, on the other hand, is use tools. He may use linguistic tools, literary tools, etc., but the tool is subordinate to the purpose of understanding the text. The philologist is autonomous, at least from the characterization of the occupation and in relation to the judge. He does not come to the text with preconceived principles, but tries, to the best of his ability, to understand the text on its own terms. In other words, while the judge works within a certain historical tradition, he also works within a certain legal tradition that dictates rules for interpretation that take precedence over the application of the law, which is the purpose. The philologist, on the other hand, although subject to the historical tradition in which he works, has no declared, traditional-philological principles that he must give precedence to in extracting the meaning of the text. The philologist's purpose is to understand the text, not to apply it.

This distinction is useful because it shows unambiguously that if we accept that the interpreter's role is to arrive at the meaning of the text, then the legal scholar is not an interpreter, and therefore Judaism is not an interpretive religion. Thus, for example, one can identify very declared principles for the interpretation of most Rishonim, as well as differences in the various study principles in terms of the principles they rely on. The Jewish tradition, in this sense, is not a philological tradition, but a legal tradition.

Things are different with Christianity. Gadamer demonstrates this through various theologians like Fuchs, but I think the example that is more available to most of us is Karl Barth. The idea is that Christianity has a "message" for the world that is expressed in the New Testament. The church is entrusted with proclaiming this message to the world. Dogmatics, in this sense, is a kind of critical science. It is supposed to judge the church's message in light of the scriptures. Like any science, it has a history, things that are more accepted and stable, and things that are less so. In fact, dogmatics is the product of the interpretation of scriptures that has been institutionalized within the church. The church may err, and it is up to dogmatics to try to correct it. Moreover, dogmatics changes over time. There can always be a mistake in interpretation, and the message may need to be reshaped. In this sense, dogmatics is a kind of "philological tradition" par excellence. A tradition that has no parallel in Judaism, because the concept of an idea that Judaism should spread to the world is foreign to its conceptual world. I'm not relying here on Rosenzweig, but on Maimonides:

[...] Even Jesus of Nazareth, who imagined he would be the Messiah and was killed by the court, was already prophesied by Daniel, as it is said: "And the lawless of your people shall exalt themselves to establish a vision, but they shall stumble" (Daniel 11:14). And is there a greater stumbling block than this? For all the prophets spoke of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel and their savior, who would gather their dispersed and strengthen their commandments; while he caused Israel to be destroyed by the sword, their remnant to be scattered and humiliated, the Torah to be altered, and most of the world to be led astray to serve a deity other than the Lord. But the thoughts of the Creator of the world – no human has the power to comprehend them, for our ways are not His ways, and our thoughts are not His thoughts. And all these matters of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the Ishmaelite who arose after him, are only to prepare the way for the King Messiah, and to prepare the entire world to worship the Lord together, as it is said: "For then I will turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord, to serve Him with one consent" (Zephaniah 3:9). How? The world has already become filled with the words of the Messiah, and with the words of the Torah, and with the words of the commandments, and these matters have spread to distant islands and to many nations uncircumcised of heart, and they discuss these matters and the commandments of the Torah. These say: These commandments were true, but have already been nullified in this time and were not meant for all generations. And these say: There are hidden meanings in them and they are not to be understood according to their plain meaning, and the Messiah has already come and revealed their hidden meanings. But when the true King Messiah will arise and succeed and be exalted and lifted up, they will all immediately return and know that their ancestors inherited falsehood, and their prophets and ancestors led them astray. (Laws of Kings, Chapter Eleven, emphasis mine)

To the extent that Judaism has a message – and there is none like Maimonides, who is also exceptional as a halakhic decisor, to promote this view – there is no practical need to distill it, because it is not our job to spread it. Until the coming of the Messiah, the dissemination, albeit distorted, is done precisely by Christianity and Islam. In this sense, Maimonides reflects more than any historical fact the deviation from the path of Judaism in the nineteenth century: Jews did not engage in the distillation of any message, and certainly their engagement with the interpretation of scriptures took on a much less institutionalized character and was less relevant to their day-to-day religious lives. The institutionalized project of the Jews is halakha.

All this is interesting, but it still doesn't mean that Jews don't occasionally engage in the interpretation of scriptures, which after all are the living word of God, and it's hard to imagine a Jew without the Bible, even though several movements in modern times have come quite close to this concept, and some of them still call themselves Jewish today. In a certain sense, it is even true to say about Jews that they have a dogmatics, a message, but it is much more fluid and much less historically institutionalized. It does not function at the level of an institutionalized tradition, but at the level of a historical tradition. To some extent, this is the dogmatics that is expressed not in the declaration of Jewish faith, but in Jewish life as such, which is not, after all, merely legal life.