The modern philosophical critique of revealed religion in general and traditional Judaism in particular has been primarily normative, as opposed to epistemological, in nature. Take Spinoza, for example. While he contrasted theology and philosophy in epistemological terms - inasmuch as theology, in his view, does not possess any truth-value as opposed to philosophy, whose goal is the truth - his primary contrast between the two was normative - inasmuch as he claimed that theology leads only to obedience to God, as opposed to philosophy which gives rise to the love of God. As for the Mosaic Law, for Spinoza it possessed only a purely political significance and lacked any broader moral or spiritual, much less any intellectual value.

Kant adopted Spinoza’s critique of Judaism, and in a similar vein argued that “Strictly speaking Judaism is not religion at all” but “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.” Of course, for both Spinoza and Kant, denying any value to Jewish law was tantamount to denying any value to Judaism in toto. By contrast, modern Jewish thinkers who sought to find the significance and value of Judaism as residing in something other than the study and observance of the Law could agree with the view of Jewish law taken by Spinoza and Kant, without believing that they had thereby rejected Judaism as a whole.

We raise a question that is anything but self-evident. As an initial step, both sides of the “and” in our title must first be scrutinized. On one side, two main misunderstandings have to be removed concerning Messianism. The notion can be taken in a purely metaphorical sense; hence, for example, Marxism can be considered a messianic phenomenon inasmuch as it includes an utopian view of the best society. But, even while each one of the numerous forms of messianism incorporates utopian elements, every utopia is not by itself messianic. Alternatively, there is the risk of obsessing over the diverse contents of the very words - “messianism,” “messiah,” or “messianic” - in order to bring forth the underlying idea. At issue is a combination of discontent vis-à-vis the current world and a preoccupation in favour of a future inspired by the Jewish conception of redemption.

On the other side of the “and” is the existence of a “Jewish philosophy,” which can be neither presupposed nor simply proven. The field of our inquiry is the encounter between philosophy as such and Jewish tradition, two more or less conflicting discourses about the truth, each one expressed through a particular language belonging to a specific history. Before explaining how this encounter with respect to Messianism does exist and what it means, we must ask when, where, and why it has been possible.

The thought of Franz Rosenzweig is arguably the twentieth century’s most enduring monument to Jewish philosophy. Yet its deeper meaning continues to elude comprehension. No doubt this is chiefly due to the difficulty of Rosenzweig’s major work, The Star of Redemption (1921). Composed in the heat of inspiration, it overflows with effulgent metaphor and sometimes extravagant claims to religious insight. More challenging still, it presumes the reader’s intimate knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, along with much of the German intellectual tradition, not to mention a basic familiarity with both Hellenistic thought and Scholasticism. In style as well as substance it is a book that forbids immediate understanding.

A more helpful place to begin is Rosenzweig’s 1925 essay, “The New Thinking: A Few Supplementary Remarks to the Star.” The essay represents Rosenzweig’s contribution to a spate of philosophical manifestos that appeared in the era of intellectual ferment during the shortlived Weimar Republic (Germany’s first experiment with democracy, lasting from 1919 to 1933). And it signals his conscious participation in a trend then called “the resurrection of metaphysics.” Specifically, it announces in programmatic fashion the various themes already familiar to a new generation tutored in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson: the primacy of poetic language, the bankruptcy of rationalist and idealist philosophy, the constitutive-existential function of temporality, the linguistic, spoken, and always intersubjective grounding of human meaning, the paradigmatic import of religious revelation, and, perhaps most of all, the turn from theoretical knowledge to “life” itself as the chief field of hermeneutic inquiry.

INTRODUCTION: FEMINISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

The interactions between feminism and philosophy, and feminism and Judaism, have undergone serious development in recent decades. Starting with the former, many feminists have argued that Western philosophy has systematically excluded women. More specifically, feminists have argued that what Western male philosophers have presented as “essentially human” is in fact rooted in the male experience and does not reflect women’s experiences; that because the (male) ideals of reason were formed completely without female input, the Western philosophical tradition is thus biased; and that many philosophical works, written by men, contain numerous misogynist statements. In a similar vein, feminist theologians have maintained that Western religious traditions have systematically excluded women’s voices; that religious institutions have been predominantly male-oriented and reflect male concerns and priorities; and that many canonical religious texts, written almost exclusively by men, contain misogynist statements.

That feminist philosophers and theologians have risen to the challenges raised by an androcentric philosophical and theological canon has been well-documented. Jewish feminists as well, influenced by their feminist peers, have begun to level significant attacks against what they see as a Judaism entrenched in patriarchal institutionalism. This patriarchy is perhaps best expressed by Judith Plaskow in her seminal work Standing Again at Sinai: “Underlying specific halakhot … is an assumption of women’s Otherness far more basic than the laws in which it finds expression …men – and not women with them – define Jewish humanity. Men are the actors in religious and communal life because they are the normative Jews.

The crux of the doctrine of autonomy is easy to state: “Man,” as Kant tells us in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, “must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to become.” Simply put, God can command us to obey certain laws and threaten us with punishment if we refuse; but only we bear responsibility for what we do. In the words of Ezekiel (18:20): “the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own.” Though God bids us to turn from wickedness and sanctify ourselves, sanctification cannot be vicarious: it makes sense only if it comes from within.

What kind of being is able to do this? The answer is a moral agent, something that can take responsibility for its actions and change direction when it decides that its actions are not what they should be. Although it is easy for us to take moral agency for granted, it is worth recalling that at one point it was a revolutionary idea. The first formulation of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:5) claims that God will punish children for the iniquity of their parents. Ezekiel’s point is that this cannot be right: each person must answer for her own actions. To understand the doctrine of autonomy is to recognize, with Hermann Cohen, that it is nothing more than an extension of Ezekiel’s insight. Once a person becomes responsible for herself, she becomes master of herself. She cannot inherit someone else’s sin, and if she commits a sin of her own, only she has the power to atone for it.

What is Martin Buber’s legacy to Jewish thought? Buber was certainly one of the most prolific and influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings covered a vast array of disciplines, including several areas of philosophy, mystical traditions from around the world and Hasidism, as well as biblical scholarship, hermeneutics and translation. Above all, he was a visionary thinker, who sought to overcome the ’sickness of the age' by engaging in authentic relationships with others and teaching his students and readers to do the same.

In assessing Buber’s legacy to Jewish thought, I will outline the parallels between the development of his approach to hermeneutics and his changing view of the ideal way of relating to others, particularly other human beings and God. I will look in some detail at I and Thou, Buber’s masterpiece of dialogical philosophy, and explore the extent to which his mature philosophy of dialogue is challenged by the Shoah.

EARLY WRITINGS

Buber was born in 1878 in Vienna. Following the separation of his parents when he was three years old, he was raised until the age of fourteen by his paternal grandparents in Galicia. As a child growing up on his grandfather’s estate in Poland, Buber participated in a traditionally observant Jewish life and was also exposed to the Hasidic way of life of some of his Jewish neighbours in Poland. Buber’s grandfather, Solomon, was a prominent scholar in the Haskalah – Jewish enlightenment movement – whose critical editions of Midrash are still highly regarded.

“Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson.” With this terse epigram, Rabbi Meir Kahane contemptuously brushed off an American television interviewer who betrayed more than a little skepticism, back in the 1980s, about Kahane’s calls for the revocation of Israeli Arabs' citizenship. As odious and indefensible as Kahane’s racist politics were, one has to acknowledge at least the partial validity of his argument. Prior to the Enlightenment, Judaism evinced no recognition of the equal political rights of all men, regardless of their creed or national origin. During the two centuries prior to the advent of Kahane, however, Jewish thinkers of various stripes made strenuous efforts to align themselves with the spirit of modern times. They reinterpreted their religious tradition in the light of the liberal political teachings that had brought them out of the ghetto and had otherwise been so beneficial to themselves as well as others. In the United States, in particular, they succeeded so well at this task that most Jewish viewers of that interview with Kahane must have been shocked and outraged by what sounded to them like a heretical statement.

Nevertheless, however much one might wish to believe that Kahane was an isolated representative of a retrograde attitude, one has to admit that he is far from the only spokesman for traditional Judaism who has in recent years sought to drive a wedge between his religion and modern liberal ideas. The Israeli religious right is well stocked with such figures, and their views have been echoed - albeit rather weakly - in the Diaspora as well. In response to their critiques of liberalism, other traditional Jewish thinkers have grappled with the tension between their heritage and currently regnant political ideologies.

LEVINAS' ITINERARY

Emmanuel Levinas was born on January 12, 1906, in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, known as “Kovno ” to both Poles and Jews. In 1923, at the age of sixteen, Levinas left Kovno to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg in France. During the 1928-29 academic year, he studied in Freiburg under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In 1930, he moved to Paris; married Raisa Levy, who as a child lived on the same block in Kovno as Levinas; became a French citizen; found employment at the École Normale Israelite Orientale; published academic articles on Husserlian phenomenology, his Strasbourg thesis, the prize-winning book The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930), and short pieces in Jewish journals on Jewish topics; and otherwise entered into the vibrant intellectual life of Paris. Conscripted into the French army in 1939, Levinas spent the war years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. After the war, he became Director of the École Normale Israelite Orientale, and in 1947 published his first two original philosophical books: Time and the Other2 and Existence and Existents. After the war, Levinas also began his Talmudic studies under the hidden Talmudic master known only as “Monsieur Shoshoni” or “Professor Shoshoni,” who was also at the same time teaching Elie Wiesel, amongst others.

The turn to language in twentieth-century philosophy is well known. Despite the profound methodological differences and ultimate philosophical disagreements between them, many if not most Anglo-American and Continental-European philosophers continue to emphasize philosophical reason’s intimate relation to, if not dependence on, language. But there is of course an enormous difference between the more minimalist thesis that reason is expressed in language and the more maximalist statement that reason depends on language. This difference goes to the heart of the question of what “philosophy” actually is and does. Can and should philosophy stand above our particular language games and articulate some deeper truth behind the cultural and historical contexts in which all human life is embedded? And what are the scientific, ethical, and indeed the theological implications of how we might answer this question?

While suggesting that these questions are philosophically and historically tied to modern philosophical discussions about the relations between reason and revelation, this chapter explores twentieth-century Jewish philosophical approaches to language. For a number of Jewish philosophers, the turn to language is a turn away from the historically implicit Christian assumptions of much of Western philosophy. As many have observed, the linguistic turn brought philosophy much closer to some of the central concerns of the Jewish historical tradition, and Jewish thinkers were quick to pursue their work in this new area of overlap. To appreciate these Jewish philosophical arguments, and their similarities to and differences from each other as well as to twentieth-century philosophies of language generally, this chapter has been laid out in four parts. Part I describes briefly how the linguistic turn in philosophy redefines the notions of both “philosophy” and “revelation.”

The need to account for the appearance of evil in a world assumed to be ruled by goodness and justice provoked Jewish religious and philosophical reflection long before the Holocaust. The 'problem' of evil, pointed most sharply in the phenomenon of human suffering and loss, figured in the very origins of Jewish philosophy (as in Saadya’s commentary on Job [c. 935 c.e.]), and Genesis itself provided an earlier view of the knowledge of good and evil in its synthesis of cosmology and genealogy - the entry into human nature of moral conscience, which ensured that man would then make his own way across the grain of historical contingency and face divine judgment for his actions. That second nature would then impel the Biblical narrative and subsequent Jewish ethical reflection.

Motivation for philosophical and religious reflections on evil is ample in Jewish thought. On the one hand, the world was found 'good' at each stage of the Biblical creation, and except for scattered moments of mystical enthusiasm, subsequent Jewish commentary never disputed that judgment. On the other hand, a profusion of evidence attests to individual and group suffering in people who appear to deserve that condition no more (often much less) than contemporaries who fare better - often, much better. At least from the time of Rabbinic Judaism, in any event, the issue thus stated would recur in Jewish theological and philosophical discussion: how to reconcile misfortune, suffering or persecution – and exile – with the goodness of creation and the authority of an all-powerful and beneficent creator.

Introduction

Browsing the Ancient Drama shelves of the average library, one could be forgiven for concluding that tragedy and comedy were by far the most frequent and important theatrical activities throughout antiquity, with just the occasional cameo appearance by the satyr play. But, from the protodramatic padded 'komasts' of sixth-century BC Greece to the exquisite musical dance theatre beloved of the Romans up to and beyond the sixth century AD, comedy and tragedy were surrounded on all sides by an extended family of other theatrical forms. If we ignore these lost traditions - festive mockeries, mythological burlesques, satires, farces, comical tragedies, history plays and dance dramas - we deny ourselves rich sources of knowledge and understanding about the array of theatrical activities in these ancient societies, as well as the nature and significance of their more famous cousins.

Alongside these more or less 'theatrical' traditions were a host of other performance activities by musicians, maskers, magicians, dancers, jugglers, poetry performers, exhibition speakers, tightrope walkers (in all shapes and sizes), sword-swallowers, storytellers, engineers, acrobats, escapologists, performing animals and others. Paratheatrical performances like these were to be found in the most unexpected places: at funerals, processions, dinner parties, in schools, on the streets, in front of temples, in the marketplace, in the countryside, at horse-races, at athletic and gladiatorial contests as well as on the stage itself; performance was a particularly flexible form of currency in the unceasing transactions of cultural change.

This chapter will investigate what happens to ancient drama in performance as opera, radio, television and film. Understanding the media is like learning a new dramatic language. Drama is as old as man if we believe Aristotle and associate it with the mimetic instinct. One might say the first act of communication for all of us - the infant's first cry as it greets the world - is a form of drama.

Drama was used to propitiate the gods and amuse viewers. Flourishing in both Greek and Roman theatres, and later on elaborate stages, opera married music to text as it revived mythical themes. Modern media transformed drama further. George Eastman first manufactured transparent celluloid film in 1889, and Auguste and Louis Lumière showed the first motion picture using film projection in 1895. Guglielmo Marconi first sent radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901. Television can be traced to John Logie Baird in 1926. Whereas the modern media are just about a hundred years old, drama has been staged in front of live audiences for thousands of years.

To illustrate the transformation that takes place when classical drama is reproduced in modern media, I will take as an example Oedipus plays and the varieties of treatments they have received from those media. For ease of comparison, I shall discuss only those plays, but the discussion applies to almost all Greek and Roman drama because of the media used for performance.

Oedipus is a singularly fitting choice since, throughout the centuries, his myth has served as a Rorschach for philosophical and psychological theories from Freud to Nietzsche to Lévi-Strauss. This parable of a man who unwittingly commits the vilest crimes - murdering his father, marrying his mother, and engendering children with her - also describes a man who will not give up, and is certainly a memorial to man's capacity for survival.

The critical context

The institution of slavery in the United States was a site of unimaginable physical, emotional, and spiritual cruelty, justified by greed and racism, and sanctioned by religion, philosophy, and the law. Written into the nation's founding documents, its very existence betrayed the contradictions at the heart of national identity and consciousness. It is thus little wonder that it has compelled a rich, challenging, and demanding body of cultural products, from sorrow songs and work songs, to the antebellum narratives written by individuals who had emerged from a system that denied them literacy, to an extraordinary genre of retrospective literature about slavery that exploded in the last decades of the twentieth century and shows no signs of abating.

According to conventional wisdom, the term “neo-slave narratives” originated with Bernard W. Bell's 1987 study The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Bell described “neo-slave narratives” as “residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom,” although over time that definition has expanded to include a more diverse set of texts than Bell's initial description could have anticipated. This genre, which includes some of the most compelling fiction produced in the last fifty years, has evolved to include texts set during the period of slavery as well as those set afterwards, at any time from the era of Reconstruction until the present. They approach the institution of slavery from a myriad perspectives and embrace a variety of styles of writing: from realist novels grounded in historical research to speculative fiction, postmodern experiments, satire, and works that combine these diverse modes.

Is the slave narrative a subspecies or subgenre of autobiography? That is one of the large questions posed by John Sekora in his seminal “Black Message/ White Envelope,” a study of the crucial role that white abolitionists played in publishing, and indeed helping to shape, the antebellum slave narrative. Arguing that the slave narrative usually presents an account of a life “mandated by persons other than the subject,” and that the “black message” of the slave narrative therefore inevitably comes “sealed within a white envelope,” Sekora regards slave narratives as the products of a racist cultural process in which “white sponsors compel a black author to approve, to authorize, white institutional power.” That process, he says, necessitates the relative silencing of the black voice. Moreover, because the slave narrative, according to Sekora, emphasizes not the “individualized Afro-American life, but rather the concrete detail of lives spent under slavery,” he insists that it cannot do what autobiography typically does: creatively work with language and narrative to portray an individual self. Given his skepticism about black narrators' participatory role in the texts that just about always bear their names, Sekora's response to his rhetorically posed question about the status of the slave narrative as autobiography comes as no surprise: “the separately published [slave] narratives are thus not a subspecies of autobiography.”