James Kugel and Me on How to Read the Bible

OMT gets dissed as a bush-league post-modernist Miltonist by noted author James Kugel - who responds to my review of his How to Read the Bible. Read his comments on my review below or here, but first an abstract of my review - which can be read in full in number 100.1 of the journal JQR. The review is available through JSTOR, or you can send a request for an offprint to me.

Here's the abstract of my review:

In How to Read the Bible, James Kugel employs the many resources at his disposal - among them archaeology, anthropology and linguistic - to reveal a Bible, at once thought unified, to be rather “contradictory and incoherent.” The story which takes center stage in the book is the contrast between the reading habits of “ancient interpreters” and “modern scholars,” – and of how “people went from one way of reading the Bible” to “reading it in another.”

The heroes of Kugel’s account, modern scholars, he explains, “understand the Bible afresh”; reading it “scientifically” and “without any presuppositions,” they embark upon a “cold, objective search for the truth about the text.” They write about the text’s “real meaning,” its “original meaning,” or the Bible at “face value.” Ancient interpreters “had a stake in what the text would end up saying,” while modern biblical scholars oblige by telling us what “really happened”; where “Biblical texts really come from”; and what these texts “really mean.”

Claiming allegiance to both sets of traditions, Kugel fashions himself as the one who delivers “reality” - that is, “the real Bible,” summoned by his own “unbiased interpretation.” For Kugel, there are two Bibles: the real biblical texts and the “Interpreted Bible”: they “make up side by side, two completely different books.” Modern biblical scholars are said to deliver the former; traditionalists, liberal theologians and literary critics offer instead the debris of “human dogmas” and “interpretations.” Kugel ends up delivering what Thomas Nagel calls a “voice from nowhere” – the ostensible perspective of objectivity and so-called unbiased interpretation. How to Read the Bible thus fulfills the dream of the nineteenth century, in having finally revealed what von Ranke calls “Wie es eigentlich gewesen,” the world—in Kugel’s case, the Bible—as it really was.

Kugel’s hypothetical “unInterpreted Bible” is also a fantasy – the fantasy of modern biblical scholars. Not just from a post-modernist sensibility (which Kugel rightfully dismisses), but, from a perspective which ranges from Aristotle to Kuhn, from Milton to Wittgenstein, that understands that perceptions are never innocent of assumptions, and traditions of interpretation are always the vehicles for encountering texts. The mostly etiological (that is causal) interpretations of Kugel’s modern scholars may be elegant, clever and ordered, but such interpretations leave the Bible as simplistic, even simpleminded. Kugel claims that the ancient interpreters ignore the “plain sense” of Scripture and supply the “final and definitive interpretation,” but it’s really the explanations he advocates that provide final and definitive interpretations of the biblical text. In Kugel’s reading, it is predictably the heroic modern biblical scholar, from his (ostensibly) Archimedean vantage point, who provides the causal link that renders everything coherent and final.

Foregoing the objectivity which turns the Bible into a sloppy collection of unrelated fragments may not mean, as Kugel says of traditional interpreters ‘crouching’ in front of the Biblical text, but rather trying to occupy the traditions of those ancient interpreters which allow us to attend to a work that transcends our (sometimes overly narrow scholarly) expectations of what texts should be.

Here's Kugel:

William Kolbrener’s “How to Read How to Read the Bible” presents a pretty good summary of some of my ideas, but he certainly errs in saying (p. 188) that while I “gesture to the role of assumptions in interpretation (p. 135), the mantra of ‘the real Bible,’ repeated throughout How to Read the Bible, betrays a faith in a somehow unmediated text.” I gesture? It is the role of assumptions in interpretation that is the true mantra of my book, chanted in every chapter. But if he is implying that I am not sufficiently interested in the interpretive assumptions of modern biblical scholars, I should point out that the Bible is a rather different from Paradise Lost, to which Kolbrener compares it. Much of the Hebrew Bible was written twenty centuries or more before Milton, in a society and literary environment very different from our own, and in a language still imperfectly understood. What is more, many biblical texts purport to recount historical events, and almost all of them presume a knowledge of specific historical and cultural details proper to biblical times. All these things have been immeasurably illuminated by the last six or seven generations of scholars working in various fields connected to the Bible. What I find lacking in Kolbrener’s article is any appreciation of this circumstance or, indeed, any real acquaintance with modern scholarship apart from the things that I have to say about it – and sometimes not even with those. He doesn’t seem to think that archaeological evidence, Assyriology, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern history, and comparative Semitics need to play any decisive role in our attempt to understand the meaning of biblical texts. But it is precisely these things that must mediate any serious, critical engagement with the Bible today.

Kolbrener apparently believes that they can be dismissed with a postmodernist wave of the hand: they’re all just one possible way of reading. This may fly with Milton scholars, but I don’t think biblical studies are quite there yet. In short: I would like to be kinder, but I’m afraid this is one game he shouldn’t have suited up for.

Oedipus in a Kippa

At the beginning of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex, a chorus of elder priests surrounds the oracle at Delphi. They mourn the terrible plagues that have befallen their city, Thebes, lamenting that the gods have abandoned them. Oedipus, who had already saved the city once, and is lauded by the elders as ‘chief of men’ appears, commanding the devout priests: ‘don’t pray to the gods; pray to me. I will grant your prayers!’ Jocasta, his wife (and, as we know too well, his mother), is distraught, skeptical, mocking the oracles of the gods and their supposed involvement in human affairs - ‘come off it Oedipus!’ Oedipus by contrast proclaims his knowledge of divine will, and his ability to enact it: ‘I am Apollo’s champion!’ I know what the gods want; and I will be the one to perform their will!

Imagine an Israeli production of Oedipus - with the chorus as ultraorthodox, the skeptical and secular Jocasta (in a pants suit), and Oedipus wearing a knit kippa. In Sophocles terrifying vision, you can’t know - even when the gods seem to be talking to you, revealing their will. This is what the psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear, calls ‘the other Oedipus complex’: the belief in the certainty of your knowledge, that you always already know – not only the present, but the future as well. The chorus, who always proclaim their lack of knowledge and powerlessness, are part of a traditional culture that both Oedipus and Jocasta want to push aside. In the end, they are vindicated, but only in the catastrophic defeat of Thebes. The gods do prevail, but not in the way anyone had imagined. Perhaps this is what Aristotle means when he writes of Oedipus’s tragic flaw: he is a victim of his certainty – his belief in his knowledge of the gods, and that he is the one to bring about their will.

The modern public sphere in Israel is filled with versions of the knowing Oedipus –ultraorthodox, national religious, and even secular – all proclaiming their programs for redemption - as they scramble to define the public sphere, and bring the Jewish people to their ‘promised end.’ Even with the shock of the Lebanon War and Gaza, the national religious version of Oedipus still claims to know the divine will, and to be able to enact it – the inheritance of the Six Day War when Israel really did seem to be the divine hand. But the natural religious are not the only ones with their messianic agenda. The secular have their own vision of the public sphere with its own end, if not any more the Zionist state, then at least a state informed by the progressive and liberating forces of enlightenment. And the ultraorthodox – whose skepticism still makes them demur from some of these grandiose visions – have betrayed those skeptical principles by mixing politics and religion as they attempt to fashion the public sphere in their own image. All of these are maximalist, strong and exclusionary visions, betraying another Oedipal fantasy: ' I must rule!'

Perhaps it’s time to forgo this other Oedipus complex, and strive for a public culture stripped of the competing extremist dreams that currently define our lives. Of course, it’s a proposal in which everyone loses something, but may be one, in the end, where everyone wins. Ultraorthodox skepticism about the state means acknowledging Israel as a modern nation state – where one has obligations as well as rights. The national religious give up on their vision of the immediate realization of the divine promise of redemption. While the secular forgo their sometimes exclusionary and intolerant vision of progressive enlightenment. By comparison to the dreams of redemption, the benefits are admittedly more minimal: national religious gain a more inclusive sense of community – of secular and even ultraorthodox – who see themselves as fulfilling a more modest version of the zionist dream (note small case z). The secular gain a public sphere based on principles of genuine inclusion and a universalism generally open to difference. The ultraorthodox gain membership into a State that has divested itself of its messianic aspirations, and the possibility for economic mobility which such membership entails.

What we all gain is a non-coercive public space – for self-reflection and conversation, which in the process may lead us to realize that we have more in common then we had thought. The elders in Sophocles’ play are devoted citizens of Thebes; while Jocasta – the seeming skeptic – sneaks away to pray to the gods. So we might discover that the ultraorthodox – think of the nachal charedi – value the State and citizenship; and as a Haaretz poll recently shows, God’s promise to Abraham has a deep pull on Israel’s secular. When not pursuing the strident vision of exclusive visions, we may find ourselves open to those aspirations which we have secretly harbored, making it easier to identify with those we thought to have despised.

The immature dreams - fantasies perhaps - are discarded, but an admittedly more minimalist and inclusive set of possibilities emerges. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam writes, ‘enough isn't everything, but enough is enough.’ Maybe it's time we all begin to settle with enough.

Open Minded Torah Goes Retro

From Papyrus to Script; from Script to Print; from Print to Electronic.

Despite this normal course of progress, OMT will be reversing the trend: Open Minded Torah will be published (as a book!) by Continuum in 2011!

Watch here for further developments and updates, and a new look to OMT!

Jerusalem Hanuka Event: Hod Hanuka at Barbur

Fanatics in Israel

After a considerable hiatus, OMT weighs in on 'Who are Israel's ultraorthodox Jews?'

Imagine an extra-terrestrial – or someone from Oslo or maybe Kansas City – who googles ‘ultra-orthodox’ and happens upon Avirama Golan’s ‘Who are Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews?’ What would he find? Golan starts by expressing dismay – ‘woe unto us,’ she laments – at the differences of the skullcap-wearers who continue to ‘divide and subdivide.’ True, Golan admits, one can’t generalize – but in this taxonomy, the ultra-orthodox largely consist of lunatic preachers, arsonists, vandals, fanatic messianists and missionaries, murderers, and impoverished psychotics; the few lawyers and the staff at the Glatt Kosher restaurant in Petach Tikvah come as afterthoughts, negligible exceptions.

Golan may be convincing – to the outsider – as she dons the mask of rationality, speaking for the ‘distress’ of the ‘moderate’ Israeli majority. In the name of analyzing the secular-religious divide, she blames the now-defunct Shinui for dubbing the ultra-orthodox ‘parasites’; yet herself implies a comparison between the ‘ultra-orthodox’ and dividing, multiplying and mutating cells. Admitting that ‘it’s impossible to define the word “Haredi,”’ she goes on to provide the dizzying list of ultra-orthodox proclivities, and concludes by condemning the government for having ‘abandoned its citizens to extremist.’ That this kind of supposedly enlightened form of anti-semitism has many parallels and precedents – among Jews, as well as non-Jews (the Nazis were experts at taxonomies of Jewish ‘perversities’) – does not make it any less venomous and misleading. No, Norway, it is not like this! But typical as it may be, Golan’s portrait of the world she calls ultra-orthodox, may show her, with much in common with the extremists she condemns.

In Israel, extremist right and left exist in dangerous co-dependency: both sustain a divisive vision of the world which allows for the perpetuation of their parallel one-sided hatreds. Like the camera-man who visits Kiykar Shabbat in Jerusalem on the Independence Day and the thuggish delinquents who happily accommodate with vulgar displays of disrespect, Israel has turned into a predictable play of hatred – and it’s the rest of us who lose out. Most Israelis don’t identify with the fanatical displays of religious zealotry, nor with Golan’s thinly veiled anti-semitism and close-mindedness. Yet while the rest of us strive for a culture which accommodates our sense of complexity – and the richness and diversity of our shared tradition – it’s the divisive rhetoric of fanatics on left and right which prevails. But there is a growing sense among Israelis that the sociological categories and languages of enmity that sustain fanatics of every color have run their course, and that we need new ways of talking, thinking, and acting – reflecting the diversity of life and culture outside of newspaper headlines and billboards in Mea Shearim.

John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet and sometimes Hebraist, writes, ‘no man is an island.’ Donne does not merely assert that individuals are connected, but that his own individuality is dependent upon others: ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’ With Donne in mind, perhaps it is time to assert more strongly what many of us already know, but what left and right-wing extremists continue to deny – that we don’t fit into their categories; and are connected, depending upon each other for our various identities. To deny that connectedness, to disenfranchise through sociological dissection and divisiveness diminishes. As Donne writes: ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.’

Kinnos Confessios: A Tisha B'Av story

Openminded meditations spurred on by a visit to Yad V'shem on the Ninth of Av.

Turning Hatred into a Mitzvah: Thoughts for the Nine Days

OMT conquers yet another one of the new technologies.