1. The question of Jewish identity is, of course, context dependent. Three of Wittgenstein's grandparents were Jews who converted to Christianity, which made the Wittgenstein family Jewish under the Nuremburg Laws. See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 385–400.

2. This list is meant to illustrate the wide range of Jewish philosophers and theologians who draw on Wittgenstein's philosophy and is, by no means, an exhaustive tally. Altmann, Alexander, “The God of Religion, the God of Metaphysics and Wittgenstein's ‘Language-Games,’” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 39 (1987): 289–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bar-Elli, Gilead, “’Emunah ve-’oraḥ ḥayyim—bein Leibowitz le-Wittgenstein,” ‘Iyyun 42 (1993): 493–508Google Scholar; Eugene B. Borowitz, The Talmud's Theological Language-Game: A Philosophical Discourse Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Paul Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows: Religion and the Space of Reasons after Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig and Diamond,” in Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 139–59; Moshe Halbertal, “ʻAl ma’aminim ve-’emunah,” in ʻAl ha-’emunah: ʻIyyunim be-musag ha-’emunah u-ve-toldotav be-masoret ha-yehudit, ed. Moshe Halbertal, David Kurzweil, and Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005), 11–38; Lemberger, Dorit, “Tefisat ha-datiyut shel Wittgenstein: Bein ‘te’ologiyah ke-dikduk’ le-‘nekudat mabat datit,’” ‘Iyyun 52 (2003): 399–424Google Scholar; Yuval Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012); Mittleman, Alan, “Asking the Wrong Question,” First Things 189 (January 2009): 15–17Google Scholar; Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004); Avi Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, trans. Batya Stein (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009); Verbin, Nehama, “Uncertainty and Religious Belief,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 51 (2002): 1–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howard Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). To put the current interest in Wittgenstein into perspective, consider Kenneth Seeskin's assessment of Wittgenstein's role in Jewish thought from 1990: “As for Wittgenstein, he was not born a Jew, was not raised as a Jew and has had very little impact on Jewish thought. In fact, Wittgenstein's impact is substantially less than that of Kant, even though Kant had no Jewish ancestry and some pretty unflattering things to say about Judaism as a religion.” Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 2.

3. The idea that belief plays a minimal role in Judaism is so pervasive it has recently appeared in two articles in the New York Times. In the first article, “Judaism is Alive and Well, Just Evolving,” (October 27, 2013), J. J. Goldberg states that “in most understandings of Judaism, belief is far less important than action, participation and belonging.” The second article is a conversation between Gary Gutting and the philosopher Howard Wettstein, whose thought I will discuss in the next section of the article. Gary Gutting, “Is Belief a Jewish Notion?” New York Times, March 30, 2014. Recent discussions of “social Orthodoxy”—Orthodox practice motivated by social bonds rather than religious belief—make clear that the noncognitive approach to Judaism is not just a liberal phenomenon. See Lefkowitz, Jay, “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy: A Personal Account,” Commentary 137, no. 4 (2014): 37–42Google Scholar. For a philosophical argument that mitigates the role of belief in Orthodox Judaism see Lebens, Samuel, “The Epistemology of Religiosity: An Orthodox Jewish Perspective,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 74 (2013): 315–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Cass Fisher, Contemplative Nation: A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

5. Fergus Kerr, “The Reception of Wittgenstein's Philosophy by Theologians,” in Phillips and von der Ruhr, Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy, 269. Kerr does acknowledge Wittgenstein's influence on the postliberal theology of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. This is a significant point for contemporary Jewish thought in that many Jewish philosophers and theologians have responded positively to postliberal theology. See for instance Tamar Ross, “Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age,” in Faith: Jewish Perspectives, ed. Avi Sagi and Dov Schwartz (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 188–240; Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Hashkes, Hannah, “’Emunah datit be-ra’ei ha-te’ologiyah ha-post-liberalit,” Identities: Journal of Jewish Culture and Identity 2 (2012), 121–50Google Scholar; Steven Kepnes, The Future of Jewish Theology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “Approaches to God in Judaism: Narrative, Philosophy, Theurgy, and the Challenge of Imperfection,” in Pensare Dio a Gerusalemme, ed. Angela Ales Bello (Vatican City: Lateran University Press, 2000), 11–24; Peter Ochs, Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). For an excellent account of Wittgenstein's influence on postliberal theology see John Allan Knight, Liberalism versus Postliberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth-Century Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Coming back to Fergus Kerr, Tim Labron shares Kerr's opinion that Wittgenstein has had little impact on theology. Tim Labron, Wittgenstein and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 3. For a more positive assessment of Wittgenstein's influence on Christian theology see Ashford, Bruce R., “Wittgenstein's Theologians? A Survey of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Impact on Theology,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 2 (2007): 357–75Google Scholar.

6. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Are Religious Believers Committed to the Existence of God?” in Practices of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 350.

7. Gareth Moore, “Wittgenstein's English Parson: Some Reflections on the Reception of Wittgenstein in the Philosophy of Religion,” in Phillips and von der Ruhr, Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy, 210. Earl Fronda responds to Moore's claim and goes further: “But, to put this clam in perspective, this case in the philosophy of religion is probably representative of the case in philosophy as a whole: as suggested by one other commentator, mainstream Anglophone philosophy has become practically anti-Wittgensteinian.” Earl Stanley B. Fronda, Wittgenstein's (Misunderstood) Religious Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 188 n.1. Fronda is citing P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 272.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977).

9. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 22.

10. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 21.

11. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 20.

12. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 35.

13. Nevo, Isaac, “Religious Belief and Jewish Identity in Wittgenstein's Philosophy,” Philosophy Research Archives 13 (1987–88): 225–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Otto Weininger's influence on Wittgenstein see Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, ed. David G. Stern and Béla Szabados (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

14. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 79; Ranjit Chatterjee, Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Suchoff, David, “Family Resemblances: Ludwig Wittgenstein as a Jewish Philosopher,” Bamidbar 2, no. 1 (2012): 75–92Google Scholar; David Stern, “Was Wittgenstein a Jew?” in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. James C. Klagge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 237–72.

15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1969). Anat Biletzki puts the matter this way: “There is great fascination in unearthing what it is exactly that Wittgenstein said and thought about religion, mostly because his—not gargantuan—mention of the practices and beliefs of religion is relatively sparse and appears to be inscrutably vague.” Biletzki, “The ‘Language and World’ of Religion,” in Language and World: Signs, Minds and Actions, part 2, ed. Volker Munz, Klaus Puhl, and Joseph Wang (Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, 2010), 147. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, Practices of Belief, 162ff. For a discussion of the mystical element within Wittgenstein's thought see Verbin, Nehama, “Wittgenstein and Maimonides on God and the Limits of Language,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3, no. 2 (2011): 323–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. In the preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein states that he wrote the work to remedy the inaccurate depiction of his thought in lecture notes and unpublished manuscripts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), x. Regarding the notes on Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief, Paul Franks characterizes them as “cryptic, fragmented, and sometimes plainly inaccurate.” Paul Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows,” 139.

17. Israel Abrahams, Jacob Haberman, and Charles Manekin, “Belief,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2^nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 3:290–94.

18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,” collected in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 118–55. For an account of the role religion played in Wittgenstein's earlier writings see Lemberger, “Tefisat ha-datiyut,” 399–424.

19. Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,” 121.

20. Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,” 139.

21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 53.

22. Hilary Putnam says on this point: “In short—and perhaps this is the only thing that is absolutely clear about these lectures—Wittgenstein believes that the religious man and the atheist talk past one another.” Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 143.

23. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations, 54.

24. Wittgenstein brings this idea to full expression in his final work, On Certainty, where he writes: “And now if I were to say ‘It is my unshakeable conviction that etc.,’ this means in the present case too that I have not consciously arrived at the conviction by following a particular line of thought, but that it is anchored in all my questions and answers, so anchored that I cannot touch it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), §103:16. I will cite from On Certainty by giving paragraph number and then page number. As I will note further on, scholars continue to debate whether religious beliefs should be included among the “hinge” propositions that Wittgenstein discusses in On Certainty. The following comment appears to indicate, for better or worse, that Wittgenstein did think religious beliefs functioned similarly: “Isn't this altogether like the way one can instruct a child to believe in a God, or that none exists, and it will accordingly be able to produce apparently telling grounds for the one or the other?” Ibid., §107:16.

25. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations, 56.

26. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations, 58ff.

27. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 29.

28. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 53.

29. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 33.

30. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 73.

31. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §141:21.

32. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §105:16. Nathan Rotenstreich gives a particularly helpful explication of this part of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Rotenstreich, Nathan, “Between Persuasion and Deeds,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 (1976): 492–94Google Scholar.

33. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §142:21.

34. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §341:44.

35. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §343:44. Nehama Verbin criticizes the application of these Wittgensteinian ideas to religion. She argues persuasively that extending these ideas to religion conceals the central role of doubt in the religious life. Verbin, Nehama K., “Uncertainty and Religious Belief,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 51 (2002): 1–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Claudia Welz also argues for a more dynamic conception of faith that is propelled by doubt. Claudia Welz, “Vertrauen und/oder Gewissheit? Kontroverstheologische und religions-philosophische Fragen im Anschluss an Luther, Kierkegaard und Wittgenstein,” in Gottvertrauen: die ökumenische Diskussion um die Fiducia, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Simon Peng-Keller (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 2012): 345–80.

36. Hilary Putnam, among many other Jewish Wittgensteinians, finds Wittgenstein's account of belief and the role that he gives to trust compelling. In a discussion of relativism, Putnam writes: “The thing to say to the relativist is that some things are true and some things are warranted and some things are reasonable, but of course we can only say so if we have an appropriate language. And we do have the language and we can and do say so, even though that language does not itself rest on any metaphysical guarantee like Reason. What does it rest on? Wittgenstein gives a shockingly simple answer: trust…. Our language game rests not on proof or on Reason but trust.” Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 177.

37. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §354:46.

38. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §279:36. As William Alston points out, Wittgenstein's emphasis on the social nature of our belief acquisition is an important complement to externalist epistemologies that hold the antifoundationalist position that we have no alternative but to rely on our standard belief-forming practices. William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 149–65.

39. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §235:31.

40. Alexander Altmann also endorses this account of religious language and belief. In an essay on Wittgenstein (“The God of Religion, the God of Metaphysics and Wittgenstein's ‘Language-Games,’” 294), Altmann says the following about the idea of the “all-seeing eye of God”: “The personal relevance is what counts here, not the theoretical assertion implied in the image.” There is a large body of literature that rejects the expressivist account of religious language. This is a point that philosophers of religion and critics of religion agree on. For instance, Simon Blackburn writes,

William Alston makes a similar point but for very different reasons:

Van Harvey makes the insightful comment that “[t]here is no power in a religious critique in which the believers do not recognize themselves in the criticism.” Van Harvey, “Contemplative Philosophy and Doing Justice to Religion,” in Phillips and Von der Ruhr, Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy, 191.

41. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 161ff.

42. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 163.

43. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §23:10; §43:18; §138–9:46; §432:108; XI:187.

44. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 168.

45. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, IX:161.

46. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §23:10. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §65:10.

47. I am not sure how we are going to solve the sociological question of what religious practitioners think about their prayers, but my theological and philosophical intuitions are on the side of people like William Alston, Graham Oppy, and Nick Trakakis. William Alston says on this point “I can just report that my sense of the matter is that I and most of the believers I know definitely do not regard their affirmations of religious belief to consist solely, or even most basically, in expressions of attitudes and sentiments toward the natural world and human life.” Alston, “Taking the Curse off Language-Games,” 31. In a discussion of D. Z. Phillips's thought, Oppy and Trakakis write: “While we can happily acknowledge that there are many different things that are done by way of the making of religious utterances, we reject the suggestion that no religious utterances have, in part, the function of making assertions, or stating (purported) facts. Moreover, we think that it is equally clear that a very large amount of religious utterance, religious assertion, and religious belief does involve commitment to a ‘metaphysically real’ God —the vast majority of religious believers do, in fact, suppose that their religious beliefs answer to an independent and transcendent reality.” Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, “Religious Language Games,” in Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, ed. Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 129. For the alternative view that Jewish liturgy is a corrective to our propositional encounter with reality see Peter Ochs, “Morning Prayer and Redemptive Thinking,” in Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption, ed. Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 59–87.

48. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 219.

49. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 43.

50. As I have argued elsewhere, Christian theology has faced the same philosophical challenges as Jewish theology. That fact makes the divergent Jewish and Christian responses to Wittgenstein even more striking. See Fisher, Contemplative Nation, 224.

51. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 219.

52. Another scholar who refuses to concede the cognitive element within the religious life is Joshua Golding. Golding writes: “I can readily agree that religion is not only about belief, and perhaps even that it is not mostly about belief, but rather about practicing a way of life. Still, it is certainly the case that many religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do on the face of things make numerous and quite profound assertions about reality. These religions are not only ways of life. Rather, they are ways of life that make claims about their own significance, by making assertions about reality. Part of the religious life involves believing, or knowing, certain truths, and living in accord with those truths. Hence, for these religions at least, philosophy is relevant to genuine religious life.” Joshua Golding, “A Contemporary Jewish Perspective on Philosophy of Religion,” in Contemporary Practice and Method in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Cheetham and Rolfe King (London: Continuum, 2008), 53.

William Alston expresses a similar view in “Taking the Curse off Language-Games,” 26. Interestingly, Tamar Ross, whom I include among the Jewish Wittgensteinians, also seeks to buttress the place of belief in Judaism but she does so in a manner that avoids Golding's realism: “… we would do well to rid ourselves once and for all of the misnomer of Orthopraxy, often invoked in a pejorative sense in order to dismiss halakhically conformist behavior that is not grounded on acceptance of dogma in its literal sense. Any behavior externally conforming to that which is historically and sociologically identified with traditional halakhic practice indicates some form of belief or justification, thought it may not tally with the naïve objectivism of strict correspondence theory.” Ross, “Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age,” 218 n. 52.

53. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience.

54. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life.

55. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 4.

56. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 24. For a critique of this view see Fisher, Cass, “Beyond the Homiletical: Rabbinic Theology as Discursive and Reflective Practice,” Journal of Religion 90, no. 2 (2010): 199–236CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fisher, Contemplative Nation, 1–20, 37, passim.

57. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 108.

58. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 116.

59. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 111.

60. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 117 n. 32.

61. Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology: With a New Introduction by Neil Gillman, including the Original Preface of 1909 and the Introduction by Louis Finkelstein (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999), 42. David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 89.

62. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 212.

63. Nathan Rotenstreich makes the following comment about the role of practice in Wittgenstein's thought: “… the theoretical grounding of certainty is haunted by regression or progression; thus it is counter-productive or self-defeating. Wittgenstein attempts to point to a realm where there is a stoppage of the infinite and indefinite process, and he finds that this is the orbit of the deed (die Tat), though again it is far from unequivocally shown what precisely is meant by the shift to that orbit.” Rotenstreich, “Between Persuasion and Deeds,” 495.

64. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 214.

65. “To ‘read off’ a belief from the imagery is thus to abstract a piece of the imagery, to kidnap it in a way, to absorb it into a different genre. It is to use the image in a new way.” Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 89.

66. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 213.

67. Howard Wettstein, The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

68. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 119.

69. For the alternative position that a deep logic underlies rabbinic theology, giving it systematic coherence see Neusner, Jacob, “Rabbinic Theology: A System,” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 15 (2012): 165–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hashkes, Hannah, “God in Rabbinic Tradition: Human Reasoning and Divine Authority,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 44, no. 2 (2013): 254–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ibid., Rabbinic Discourse as a System of Knowledge (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

70. For a similar view but expressed from a postliberal perspective see Ross, “Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age,” 210.

71. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 9 and also 152.

72. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 174.

73. Wettstein, Significance of Religious Experience, 152.

74. Flusser, David, “A New Sensitivity in Judaism and the Christian Message,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968), 107–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wettstein's objection to doctrinal accounts of Jewish belief is also an effort to distinguish Judaism from Christianity. As he sees it, the conflation of religion and philosophy that he seeks to remedy begins with Christianity. Given that fact, the opening words of Flusser's essay are quite poignant: “The Judeo-Christian dialogue—be it conducted in the fashion of ordinary human contact or within the discipline of strict scholarly procedure—suffers often from a disturbing pattern: the two partners not only emphasize the elements and features common to both of them, but find themselves confronted in polarity. This emphasis of polarity may prove convenient for the colloquists. Each can assume a polite vantage ground overlooking the position of the opposite religion, yet feel quite content in the assured knowledge of one's own religion because it now bears none of the qualities which distinguish the polar opposite.” Flusser, “A New Sensitivity,” 107.

75. Arthur Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927). Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

76. For a critique of Wittgenstein-inspired accounts of religious language and belief that places prayer at the center of the argument see Henderson, Edward, “Theistic Reductionism and the Practice of Worship,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10, no. 1 (1979): 25–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. In a presentation of early Judaism that in general gives a rather diminished role to belief, Shaye Cohen says: “That God is the omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe, exalted above all his creatures, ruling in majestic splendor, and ultimately beyond human ken, is a common motif in the literature of the Second Temple and rabbinic periods.” Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2^nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 77. On the topic of divine perfection in rabbinic theology see Cass Fisher, “Reading for Divine Perfection: Theological Reflection and Religious Practice in the Exodus Commentary of Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael,” in Retelling the Bible: Literary, Historical, and Social Contexts, ed. Lucie Doležalová and Tamás Visi (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), 139–57. Fisher, Contemplative Nation, 125–39.

78. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 60.

79. Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 188. For an alternative reading of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on the role of metaphysics in religion see Kai Nielsen, “Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians on Religion,” in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert L. Arrington and Mark Addis (New York: Routledge, 2001), 148ff.

80. Cf. Haapranta, Leila and Koskinen, Heikki J., “Trust and Religious Belief,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 86 (2009): 267Google Scholar.

81. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations, 71. For attempts to reconstruct this passage of the lecture see Cora Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief: The Gulfs between Us,” in Phillips and von der Ruhr, Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy, 99–137 and Paul Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows,” 139–59.

82. Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 1. For a collection of Putnam's more recent work on Wittgenstein outside the religious context see Hilary Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

83. Putnam, like many of Wittgenstein's interpreters, stresses that Wittgenstein did not offer a theory of religion: “… Wittgenstein did not, in the end, offer a single ‘model.’ Rather he tried to get his students to see how, for homo religiosus, the meaning of his or her words is not exhausted by criteria in a public language, but is deeply interwoven with the sort of person the particular religious individual has chosen to be and with pictures that are the foundation of that individual's life.” Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 5.

84. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 6.

85. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 18.

86. Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, trans. Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

87. On the common theme in Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein of philosophy as an illness see Rotenstreich, Nathan, “Common Sense and Theological Experience on the Basis of Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 5, no. 4 (1967): 358CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 7.

89. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 26.

90. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) collected in Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). There are two English translations of the work: Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970); Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

91. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 38.

92. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 106.

93. Franz Rosenzweig, “Das neue Denken,” Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, Der Mensch und sein Werk, vol. 3 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 139–161. There are two translations of “The New Thinking”: Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig's “The New Thinking,” ed. and trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999). Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hacktett, 2000). I quote in this essay from the translation by Franks and Morgan.

94. Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 114ff.

95. Fisher, Cass “Divine Perfections at the Center of the Star: Reassessing Rosenzweig's Theological Language,” Modern Judaism 31, no. 2 (2011): 188–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fisher, “Speaking Metaphysically of a Metaphysical God: Rosenzweig, Schelling and the Metaphysical Divide,” in German-Jewish Thought between Religion and Politics: Festschrift in Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Martina Urban and Christian Wiese (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 151–66.

96. Franz Rosenzweig, Die “Gritli”-Briefe: Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Inken Rühle and Reinhold Mayer (Tübingen: Bilam Verlag, 2002), 729.

97. The profound gap between Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein is particularly evident in the following admission by Wittgenstein: “The symbolisms of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive.” Norman Malcom, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. Peter Winch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 11. On Rosenzweig as a systematic philosopher see Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

98. Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, 103.

99. Regarding this issue, Jerome Gellman asks the pointed question: “So, why shouldn't a religious metaphysician possess the same prerogative as Wettstein? Suppose she is convinced of the importance of making good philosophical, metaphysical sense of God to herself, in an age of rampant secularism and naturalism. If she writes a book about her metaphysical approach to her Judaism, it is difficult to see how she would be doing anything intrinsically different from what our author [Wettstein] does with his naturalism and his Judaism. It then seems arbitrary to ban metaphysics the way Wettstein does.” Gellman, review of The Significance of Religious Experience, by Howard Wettstein, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 22, 2013.

100. Alan Mittleman, “Asking the Wrong Question,” First Things 189 (January 2009): 17.

101. Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah, 194.

102. Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah, 195. Ross addresses the role of Wittgenstein in her thought in a series of conversations on the leading blog for Jewish theology, Alan Brill's “The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: Notes on Jewish Theology and Spirituality,” available at www.kavvanah.wordpress.com. She also discusses Wittgenstein's contribution to her thought in an essay titled “Orthodoxy and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism” published at www.thetorah.com.

103. Avi Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, 132. “Faith is not contingent on any outside factor. It is the primary foundation, not grounded on truth claims, through which the believer perceives the world. Faith, then, is not the sum of truth claims about the world; rather, in the terminology of post-Wittgensteinian philosophy, faith is the believer's absolute disposition toward the world, which shapes an entire ‘form of life,’” ibid., 112.

104. Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,” 119.

105. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 73.

106. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 53, 56, 62.

107. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 85.

108. Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit, 134.

109. Moshe Halbertal, “ʻAl ma’aminim ve-’emunah,” 12ff.

110. Alexander Altmann describes in Wittgensteinian terms the process by which religious beliefs fall into desuetude: “There is never a single issue of faith versus non-faith. Belief in God is never a merely abstract affirmation of a Supreme Being. Invariably, it entails faith in the truth of a coherent series of beliefs, strung together by a concrete image of God. Without the total Gestalt, that image fades away. A living faith in God draws its nourishment from the system of beliefs in its entirety. This is why religion is enfeebled and decays once that larger consciousness is seriously impaired.” Altmann, “The God of Religion, the God of Metaphysics and Wittgenstein's ‘Language-Games,’” 292.

111. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 64.

112. Arthur Green makes the similar point that “[t]he traditions of Israel are filled with speech-acts of a trans-verb sort. These are epitomized by the sounding of the shofar, described by some sources as a wordless cry that reaches to those places (in the heavens? within the self? in the Self?) where words cannot penetrate. The same may be said of all the sacred and mysterious silent acts of worship: the binding of tefillin, the waving of the lulav, the eating of matzot. All of these belong to the silent heart of the Jewish theological vocabulary.” Green, “What is Jewish Theology?” in Problems in Contemporary Jewish Theology, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1991), 6. For an excellent discussion of gesture and reference in the context of Jewish ritual see Josef Stern, “Gesture,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Macmillan, 1987).

113. For criticisms of Hadot's account of the relationship between theory and practice see Antonaccio, Maria, “Contemporary Forms of Askesis and the Return of Spiritual Exercises,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 18 (1998): 69–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flynn, Thomas, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 609–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hankey, Wayne, “Neoplatonism and Contemporary French Philosophy,” Dionysius 23 (2005): 161–90Google Scholar.

114. Rotenstreich, Nathan, “On Wittgenstein's View of Philosophy,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 2 (1955): 187–219, 193Google Scholar. Rotenstreich reiterates this view of Wittgenstein's philosophy in a later essay where he writes that “Wittgenstein basically takes a view which tends to refrain from employing reflection.” Rotenstreich, “Between Persuasion and Deeds,” 488.

115. Fisher, Contemplative Nation, 93–100.

116. It is imperative to understand that the matters under discussion are not just the concerns of religious and intellectual elites. Classical Jewish literature, including the siddur, the haggadah, rabbinic literature, Jewish philosophy, and mysticism, utilizes literary techniques and ritual actions to cultivate theological reflection in the religious practitioner. From that perspective, the intellectual gap between the laity and the religious virtuoso is narrowed, or at least ideally that is so. See Cass Fisher, “Jewish Philosophy: Living Language at Its Limits,” in Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Aaron Hughes and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 81–100.

117. Earl Stanley B. Fronda, Wittgenstein's (Misunderstood) Religious Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 38–43, 69–70.

118. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §7:4; cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper, 1960), 17.

119. Nicholas Lash argues that religious traditions are far too large to be considered a language-game and that what Wittgenstein meant to pick out with the term is what Lash calls “micro-practices.” Lash, “How Large is a ‘Language-Game’?” Theology 87, no. 715 (1984): 19–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120. For justification see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §486:116 and for certainty see ibid., XI:191.

121. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §144:21.

122. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §559:73.

123. For an application of Wittgenstein's concept of the “language-game” in a halakhic context see Michael Berger, Rabbinic Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133–41.

124. Eugene B. Borowitz, The Talmud's Theological Language-Game: A Philosophical Discourse Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

125. Borowitz, Talmud's Theological Language-Game, 3.

126. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §204:28.

127. Borowitz, Talmud's Theological Language-Game, 54.

128. A few pages further on in the book, Borowitz says that “a major function of aggadic theology is to explicate Judaism's metahalakhic foundations.” Borowitz, Talmud's Theological Language-Game, 59. I think Borowitz is correct to argue that Aggadah plays a critical role in sustaining the halakhic world view and practice of rabbinic Judaism.

129. Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations, 8.

130. Cora Diamond addresses this point with much acuity:

131. Arthur Green (“What is Jewish Theology?,” 6) argues the opposite position that prayer comes before theology. “Prayer is a primary religious activity, a moment of opening the heart either to be filled with God's presence or to cry out at divine absence. Theology comes later, the mind's attempt to articulate and understand something that the heart already knows.” I am more inclined to see experience and cognition as mutually informative.

132. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2^nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1996), 295. Benjamin Sommer makes a similar point regarding biblical theology: “We may have the right to react to what is in scripture; we may have the right to disagree with it; but we have no right to ignore it.” Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125. On the important contribution that philosophical hermeneutics can make to the study of Jewish theology see Fisher, Contemplative Nation, 21–64.

133. For a helpful discussion of Wittgenstein's notion of “use” in a Jewish context see Paul Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows,” 139–59.

134. Scholars continue to push for a more integrated account of the relationship between Halakhah and Aggadah. See Barry Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

135. Altmann speaks to this point when he says: “What belief in God does not, intrinsically, imply is naïve credulity and fideism. The fact that genuine faith often issues in theologies in conflict with each other even in a single religion should give pause to reflection. It clearly testifies to the operation of the critical faculty within the confines of faith. Remarkably enough, it is the great heretics that keep the flame of faith burning.” Altmann, “The God of Religion,” 292.

136. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §124:42.

137. Coliva, Annalisa, “Was Wittgenstein an Epistemic Relativist?” Philosophical Investigations 33, no. 1 (2010): 1–23Google Scholar; Kai Nielsen, “Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians on Religion,” 163ff. Ross, Jacob Joshua, “Rationality and Common Sense,” Philosophy 53, no. 205 (1978): 379–381CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Plant, Bob, “Religion, Relativism, and Wittgenstein's Naturalism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19, no. 2 (2011): 177–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Avi Sagi defends the alternative view that “Truth claims about the world, about God, and about crucial events such as the Sinai theophany, are religiously irrelevant. In other words, religion is a value system that neither relies upon nor reflects metaphysical assumptions or factual data that could be translated into truth claims.” Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, 27. Sagi argues that the renunciation of religious truth claims is what makes religious pluralism possible. While I share his commitment to religious pluralism, in my view his pluralism comes at far too high a price.

138. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §336:43.

139. Alston, Perceiving God, 164. Borowitz, Talmud's Theological Language-Game, 185.

140. Borowitz oddly seems to believe that Aggadah has no limits, as can be seen in the following rhetorical question: “Given that the aggadah is the voice in which authoritative teachings about Judaism are to be communicated and that rabbinic Judaism is a religion proudly conscious of its difference from other faiths, how can it have an official discourse that houses a near lack of discrimination in content, and in its form, so paltry an interest in noncontradiction?” Borowitz, Talmud's Theological Language-Game, 111. For a discussion of Wittgenstein and interpretive norms see Samuel Fleischacker, Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 387.

141. Fisher, Contemplative Nation, 54–64, 93–100.

142. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §66:27.