The Society of Scriptural Reasoning:
The Rules of Scriptural Reasoning[7]
Peter
Ochs
University of Virginia
pwo3v@virginia.edu
Introduction
Dear SSR Colleagues,
Shalom. After four years of shared scriptural
interpretation at our annual gatherings, we decided
this year to stop what we do, for a moment, and
reflect on how we are doing what we do. "Naaseh
v'nishmah", the angels say when God commands: "we
do first, and then we seek understanding." So, the
Rabbinic sages in b. Talmud Shabbat describe the
precedence of action over reflection in what we might
call one functional epistemology of scriptural
reasoning. There is no measure, ratio, logos, or rule
of merely human reasoning adequate to encompass or
predict the rule of practice and thinking that will
be displayed in divine speech. So we wait, like the
angels, receiving the speech, imitating it through
our actions and, only then, come to ask ourselves,
"What is it we are doing after all? What rules of
life have been engendered in us?"
"Why ask at all?" we might inquire. We ask because
we are not angels, being at the same time smarter and
more sinful. Out of our sinfulness, imperfection, and
error the "imaginings of our hearts being bad from
our very youth" (Genesis 8.21) comes both our
inability to enact precisely what God has asked and
our need for intelligence, as a means of getting out
of the trouble we perpetually put ourselves in.
Intelligence, or what Michael Wyschogrod calls our
"quality of brightness," is the capacity to reflect
on our actions and discern in them traces of the
divine will. These traces serve as a mirror in whose
reflection we may criticize our actions that have not
been in accordance with God s word. After critical
reflection, they also function as a guide that may
direct our actions in greater fidelity to that word
in the future. Unless God were to exhaust himself
with continual criticism and re-revelation on our
behalf, we have no choice but to appeal to our
intelligence to help perform God's work. While there
is no choice in the matter, this is still another
source of "tsores" (trouble) for us. In fact,
the SSR appears to have arisen specifically in
response to the great failing of Intelligence in the
modern world. The shared sense of this Society is
that the dominant paradigms of reason both in the
university and in our seminaries are deeply flawed.
We believe that these paradigms have tempted not only
the academy, but also an alarmingly significant part
of our religious communities, to reverse the terms of
the angels' pledge: we will understand things first
on our own terms and only then see how the words of
the Creator, Revealer, and Redeemer apply. This type
of Copernican revolution, while rightly elevating our
limited potential for good, ultimately leads to
something bad: a vicious dialectic of totalitarian
versus nihilistic reasoning. In other words, the
modern practice of Intelligence transforms the
activity of reflection into the object of reflection.
Reflection, however, is not itself an object.
Aristotle's reflecting-on-reflection god may think
otherwise, but that is the point: either we are not
gods or Aristotle's god is not God. When we identify
the rule of our actions with the activity of
reflecting on reflection, we inherit a world of our
own making: totality or nothing.
Members of the SSR tend to view the disasters of
Western society in the twentieth century as
consequences of this awful dialectic. While
acknowledging and moving within and beyond modern
thought, the purpose of SR is to recover the practice
of listening for the speech of God that both preceded
and still provides the terms for modern thinking. The
goal is, as much as is possible and appropriate, to
reenact traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
practices of scriptural reading and interpretation in
order to reconstitute modern Intelligence as a
practice of reflecting on the rules of scriptural
reasoning. The assumption is that modern Intelligence
began this way, but soon forgot its point of origin.
This means that modern projects of reasoning are not
to be abandoned, any more than we would abandon
naughty or misguided children. Our goal, rather, is
to rediscover the parent in the child: to remind the
child of its roots and pedigree and the parent of its
child. This intends to remind the parent that its own
failings have sent the child off wandering, that it
is responsible to bring the child back, and that the
child can be returned in ways that redeem the parent
and child alike. This "compassionate postmodernism"
is an effort to redeem the intellectual disciplines
of modernity as instruments of divine speech, rather
than casting them off, seemingly inconsequentially.
Practitioners of SR acknowledge, therefore, that they
are instruments of modern Intelligence, as well as
exponents of the scriptural reasoning that can redeem
that Intelligence.
I have just introduced our project for this issue,
which is to reflect on how we have heretofore
practiced SR. Simultaneously, I have introduced my
description of and proposal for this reflection.
This, finally, is the purpose of this essay-letter:
to provide one detailed example of how we could
reflect on the "rules" of scriptural reasoning and
thereby spur comparable reflections by protest,
agreement, excitement, or disagreement.
What follows is not an attempt to speak for
anyone, but rather an attempt to illustrate one of
several ways we might go about reflecting on the
rules of scriptural reasoning. This approach is
strictly my own, drawing on a contemporary Jewish
philosophic approach to our shared endeavor and my
long-time work on Charles Peirce's semiotics. Our
shared approaches, of course, will draw on Christian,
Muslim, and Jewish sources; I trust that Peirce's
semiotic is only one of several technologies that
could help us simplify and clarify our rules of
inquiry. In response to my essay-letter, it is hoped
that this will not become a single revised document
for general SSR use, rather, that it will stimulate
your own versions or partial versions of rules for
SR. It is also hoped that through the oddity of some
shared brain, some part of the following informs part
of your own rules for SSR, even while responses
critique or praise any of my specific
claims. 1. Reflection
The point of my introduction was to suggest that,
on the one hand, rational reflection must follow, not
precede the reading of scripture and, on the other
hand, such reflection is also necessary to SSR. The
way to handle these two hands is to claim that, in
general, rational reflection is an attribute of the
life of God's word in our midst, but that the form of
reflection is specific to a given context. In the
immediate context of this essay-letter, reflection
appears to precede the hearing of God's word. This is
because this is a monologic statement spoken to
members of several different scriptural traditions
and is offered as a reflection on scriptural readings
that have been enacted in the last four years. We
have read together and now reflection arises.
"Naaseh v'nishmah." 2. The
Specific Context of Reflection
This exercise is itself one act of reasoning; it
should therefore display the particularity of its
context. It was suggested in the introduction that
our immediate context is the need, periodically, to
hold a mirror up to our actions, to attempt to
clarify the rules of our action, and then to use
those rules as temporary measures against which our
efforts at reasoning out the consequences of God's
speech in scripture are tested. After this year's
interruption, we resume the textual enactment until
the time comes to look in the mirror once again,
hopefully to see new and surprising rules
emerge. 3. Deeper Context
What I have previously termed "Rabbinic
pragmatism" in the applied context of contemporary
Jewish philosophy, I now term "scriptural pragmatism"
in the context of the overlapping interests of
Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the SSR.[8] The
deeper context is to describe our entire effort,
including its scriptural reasoning, as stimulated by
the interruption of what we could call our
overlapping salvation histories in the modern West.
As distinct religionists, we have come together in
the SSR not because things are so good that we can
now lie down together in peace, like three lambs, or
three lions. Rather, it is because things are so bad
that, for the moment, our differences are less
interesting than our need to share resources in
confronting overlapping crises. While I do not want
to over-generalize by suggesting that our crises are
identical, shared crises appear to have emerged.
For Jews today, I suggest that we refer to the
crisis in this way: as our living in the shadow of
Destruction. The shadow is, of course, cast by the
Shoah and refers not only to literal deaths, but also
to the spiritual-religious malaise that encumbers the
people of Israel since and that makes us however
understandably unable to find our way out of the
shadow. It would be hyperbolic to call the condition
of Judaism in modernity another Destruction. It might
be better to call it the loss of our center, the loss
of that third something with respect to which our
religious heart would not be divided into two
naturally exclusive poles. The one pole is
represented by Jewish secular universalism; a pole,
mind you, of the religion of Israel, not simply of
what has fallen outside of it. The other pole is
represented by anti-secular ultra-orthodoxy; a
designation which does not mean the "Jewish religion"
or "authentic Rabbinic Judaism," as if Talmudic
Judaism did not have a third, or mediating capacity
to integrate what has become mere "secular
universalism" into the whole of Judaism.
The entire activity of scriptural reasoning marks
a great interruption in the ongoing activity of
modern religious inquiry in the West, including the
sub-inquiries of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
communities. As an interruption, scriptural reasoning
as a whole is a mode of reflection: a mode of
reasoning on something already performed. As we will
see, the unique character of this reflection is that,
while operating within the disciplines of the
Academy, SR embodies reflexivity in its practice of
communal textual reading. 4. The
Interrupted Dialectic of Modernity
SR interrupts a dialectical pattern of inquiry
that encourages the mutual exclusion of two poles of
modern religious reasoning. One pole is secular
modernism: the tendency to reason by reducing all
subjects of study according to certain simple
conceptual patterns or models of reasoning. This pole
may also be labeled secular universalism. While this
is the pole of modern academic reasoning in general,
it is also engendered as a specific mode of classical
liberal religious thought, which tends simply to
apply a priori forms of a secular ethical
universalism to various scriptural traditions. The
second pole is anti-modern Jewish orthodoxy. It
simply will not do to allow such orthodoxy to
arrogate unto itself the definition of "traditional
religion." A religious orthodoxy that defines itself
by negating the leading aspects of secular
universalism endorses the dichotomous logic that
underlies that universalism. Such a reactionary
orthodoxy gradually redistributes the terms of
classical scriptural religion according to this
"dichotomizing logic." There are many ways to
identify the leading features of this modern
dialectic, a few of which will be summarized here. I
have just exhibited one way, which is to identify a
"dichotomizing logic" as an aspect of modernity. This
could also be called a "logic of contrariety." Any
claim of purportedly secular or religious logic can
be termed modernist it if can be reduced to the
following formal terms: that some property A is
asserted, of which a logical contrary is property B,
such that the sum of A and B constitutes all the
properties of interest in a given universe of
discourse. An example is the claim that secular
universalism is true and therefore the claims of
religion are false. This means that the only
alternatives are either a secular universalist one or
a religious one which assumes to be non-secular or
non-universalist. The logic of contrariety should be
distinguished from the "logic of contradiction" : the
relationship of A to B, when B is not A and A plus B
does not constitute an entire universe of
possibilities, but is adequately represented only as
the series A, B, C . . .
As discussed below, the SR way of repairing a
logic of contraries is not simply to negate them as
if the new logic were a contrary of the contraries.
Its goal, rather, is to transform logical contraries
into logical contradictories: this is to transform
polar opposites into dialogical pairs—, but not to
replace them with some purported union of the two.
Any term C that would adequately replace A and B
would in fact reassert a logical contrary of one or
the other. This is, in fact, the logic of the
Hegelian dialectic, which continually reiterates the
logic of contrariety by replacing any terms A versus
C with the term AB versus C. Hegel's effort to
mediate contrariety should be exposed for what it is:
a reassertion of the logic of modernity in a more
subtle form. While Kant does not succeed in redeeming
the modern logic of contrariety, he recognizes it and
does not seek to cover it up. He seeks a third
something, which could be termed the hypothesis of a
desire for mediation, but simply fails to realize or
locate it. One central mark of the accuracy of Kant's
observation is his recognition of the Antinomies,
which are marked by the polar opposites of modern
logic. One mark of the inadequacy of Kant's efforts
at mediation is his attempt to replace the Antinomies
with the assertion of a single explanation, rather
than with the assertion of the Antinomies into its
dialogical pairs.
It is important to note that modern secular
universalism and reactionary orthodoxy go hand in
hand, as two parts of a single syndrome. The
dialectical logic that underlies their difference
appears in different forms in modern society
generally and in the modern Academy particularly: the
oppositions between traditional belief and
secularism, between "objectivist" and "subjectivist"
approaches of academic inquiry, or between the poles
of various ideological battles in academe liberal vs.
conservative, radical feminist vs. neo-classical,
historicist vs. structuralist, or in George
Lindbeck's terms, experientialism vs.
propositionalism. From the Scholastics on,
theological and religious discourses display a
comparable dialectic when complements are made
contraries: for example, the body and spirit, grace
and law, community and individual, and even God's
spoken versus God's created word. 5.
Worse Than Dialectic: The Unrepaired Suffering That
Underlies It
SR's complaint about the modern dialectic is not
primarily an intellectual one: as if scriptural
reasoners had a better theory of how to reason as
opposed to the modern "theory" of dialectics. The
only thoroughly convincing mark of the inadequacy of
modernity is not merely a logical one by what a
priori criterion is one logic deemed errant and the
other not? The most reliable criterion is, rather, a
practical one: the observation that specific kinds of
communal suffering are neither attended to nor
repaired by the academic and religious inquiries that
should repair them.
This proposal offers a pragmatic ground for SR.
Its first element is the pragmatic maxim: that any
modern assertion that claims truth for itself can be
judged only with respect to its success or failure in
resolving the problem or suffering that originally
gave rise to it. This is not to suggest that all
belief and all reasoning arise literally out of a
response to problem solving or suffering. It is,
rather, to claim that reasonings or beliefs that do
not purport to rise out of such a response cannot
claim any truth-value. This does not mean that they
are false, only that they are to be evaluated by some
other criterion than truth versus falsity. Among the
possible criteria, for example, are coherence,
beauty, strength, expressiveness, and so forth. But
for such assertions to claim truth, they would need
to claim some form of infinite regress. If, however,
an assertion purports to be a response to a problem
or a suffering, then the truth or falsity of the
assertion can be evaluated in respect to the success
of the assertion in contributing to the resolution of
that problem or the repair of that suffering.
Truth is one of the dominant criteria by which
modern reasoning seeks to evaluate itself. This fact,
however, is a mere symptom of the reason for this
assertion. Modern reasoning either secular or
religious denies that its verity is only sustained as
a response to the suffering or problematic situation
that underlies its inquiry. Its failure to
acknowledge this context, however, and its tendency
to mask its beginning, is a sign of modern
reasoning's incapacity to resolve its original
problem. Modern reasoning's tendency to objectify the
reference of its truth claims is a mark of its
tendency for self-deception, or more innocently, to
self-delusion or confusion about its purpose and
telos. Confusion about truth is not only a
malady of the objectivist modern scholar; the form of
late Continental modernism that calls itself radical
postmodernism signals its own confusions about truth
when it seeks to invalidate modernity's efforts to
locate truth, as if modernity is simply wrong and
postmodernity has it "right." The problem is not that
truth claims are impossible in academic inquiry; it
is, rather, that they are made more indirectly than
we realize.
A similar malady underlies reactionary efforts by
contemporary critics of postmodernism: from religious
neo-Orthodox critics to neo-liberal apologists for
the religion of humanism. The contemporary
religionists' cry that "they are taking away our
belief in truth" is in particular for Christians and
Jews who should know better a mark of a similar
dialectical confusion. Truth is recovered in Jesus'
parabolic tradition, or in Midrashic tradition, but
certainly not through rude attempts to reassert a
religious axiology by restating varieties of the Ten
Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount as
propositional creeds. The pragmatic rule of SR is to
locate the truths of modernity in the success or
failure of our capacity to read the reasonings of
modernity themselves as symptoms of the specific
conditions that underlie them and therefore as
signals to locate and repair these conditions. The
pragmatic reasoning of SR is redemptive reasoning. It
is not merely a theory about the providence of modern
inquiries, but also a directive to respond to these
inquiries in a salutary way. SR is a
re-categorization of both the modern academy and the
anti-modern orthodoxies that arose as indirect
disclosures of the antecedent suffering of modernity,
rather than as assertions of practice or objective
truth. In this way, the assertions of modernity are
reincorporated into SR's redemptive
reasoning. 6. How Does SR Practice Its
Redemptions?
The second level of SR's pragmatism is to disclose
the rules of "Redemptive Reasoning" which lead from
the interruption of modern reasoning to its repair.
Hope and hypothesis are the origins of this
redemptive inquiry. There is no movement from
failure, problem, destruction, or interruption
without hope or hypothesis. The transformation of
failure into new life must begin with new
possibility, and, as a human form of inquiry, new
possibility arises only by a supposition, or
hypothesis. In theological discourse, this is to
speak of revelation, holy spirit, a spirit of God, or
divine encounter, and at the same time of a
resurrection of the dead tichiyat hametim. As
logicians of SR, we will have to disclose the
relationship between hypothesis formation and all
these theological terms.
There are several parallel ways to uncover the
logic of Redemptive Reasoning: A. Through the language of "the
resurrection of the dead"
"Baruch ata . . . ham'chaye hametim".
Blessed are you . . . who gives life to the dead.
This is a pivotal blessing in the daily standing
prayer, or amidah, of the Rabbinic tradition[9] and
is also emblematic of a pivotal step in the
transformation of biblical Judaism to Rabbinic
Judaism, which is itself also the resurrection of
Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple.
With the Destruction, the basis for literally
fulfilling the words of Torah was gone; the central
preoccupation of the books of Moses being the
construction of the Temple and the ordering of a
priesthood for Temple service. Temple service was the
means through which Israel's sins were expiated and
Israel was brought near its God. But if there were no
Temple and Jews of the late first, early second
century under Roman rule seemed to anticipate a much
longer period of waiting than did the Israelites
after the first century then either Israel would be
trapped in spiritual exile without means of calling
on its Redeemer, or the Jews would be without their
religion. The period of Israel's second Destruction,
therefore, also became the period of victory for the
Pharisaic/Rabbinic reinterpretation of what it means
to be a Jew and what it means to be part of the
Covenant of Israel against Sadducean and other
opposing interpretations. Against the protectors of
the established Temple priesthood, the emergent
Rabbinic Judaism argued that there was not only this
world (olam hazeh), but also the world to come
(olam haba). For them, there was a
resurrection of the dead (tichiyat hametim),
which we may take to refer not only to the rebirth of
the individual human in the next world, but also to
the rebirth of other entities of Israel, including
the people Israel itself and its covenant with God.
This meant that there was not merely a written Torah
(torah she b'chtav), but also an Oral Torah
(torah she b'al peh); not only the explicitly
written Torah scroll, but also the living embodiment
and interpretation of it in the words and deeds of
the Rabbinic community in each generation.
As David Weiss Halivni argues,[10]
the Talmud attributes to Ezra the prototypical work
of disclosing what would become the tradition of the
Oral Torah. This was the work of rescuing the Torah
from the fires of Destruction and the Sins of Israel
(chate'u yisrael) which typifies the
unreliable process of transmitting and
re-transcribing the Torah throughout the period of
Israel's troubled monarchy. With direct divine
inspiration, which we may link to the later notion of
ruach elohim, the spirit of God, ruach
hakodesh, a holy spirit, Ezra so says this story
of the Talmud corrected some of the received text of
the written Torah, but left much of its correction to
an oral rereading of the troubled text. This
rereading is what the Rabbis refer to in Avot
1 as the transmission of the (oral) Torah from Moses,
through the Prophets, to the line of succession of
what would become the Rabbinic sages. Viewed this
way, the Oral Torah is the resurrection of the
written Torah; Rabbinic Judaism is the resurrection
of the biblical Judaism whose merely literal law died
in the Second Destruction; and the Judaisms that
follow each of our destructions are resurrections of
the Judaism that lives on in new forms; and,
following the Destruction of the Jews in this
century, a new Judaism is also reborn. Each of these
new Judaisms retain the written "law" of the previous
ones, but infuses them with new meaning, new
practices, new interpretations, new life, new wine in
old skins. In sum, SR will be both a resurrection of
previous scriptural religions and a means of
articulating the rule of resurrection as a rule for
reading scripture today. It will also be a rule for
rereading the interrupted traditions of the modern
religion whose death gives rise to the tragedy and
new hope that animates scriptural reasoning: that is
the deaths of both the radically modernist and
anti-modernist poles of modern Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam.
"Resurrection of the dead" is a useful trope for
the emergence of SR out of the modernist dialectic.
It is, first of all, an important alternative to the
more extreme anti-modern tropes that attribute to
either side of the modern dialectic simple error. If
modernity is simply wrong, it could be merely
rethought correctly. Or, on religious terms, if
modernity is wrong and hence sinful, then it could be
skirted and replaced with some neo-orthodox appeal to
"the true tradition." To speak of resurrection,
however, is to acknowledge modernity as having been a
life and thus it is appropriate to mourn its passing,
no matter how troubled a life it was; a religious
postmodernity should be sad, not triumphant. To speak
of resurrection, furthermore, is to acknowledge that
the life of the modern dialectic has come to its end.
The "death" of an ideological structure is not like
one of mere flesh; it refers to the death of the
interpretive fecundity of a certain ideological
scheme. For the modern dialectic to outlive its life
that is, to attempt to vivify it beyond its lifetime
is, at least, to encumber present day life. At most,
it is to bring death, in this case literal death: the
ideological superstructure that outlives its time, to
borrow Marxian terminology, imposes irrelevant and
disadvantageous rules of interpretation on a material
world. Since such a superstructure no longer mends
the wounds of that world, it brings death. In this
sense, to allow the dialectic of modernity to outlive
its time is to fail to serve the needs of those who
live. The trope of "resurrection," finally, enables
us to look with hope to the thought structures that
go beyond modernity. These postmodern structures will
bring life once again, which means they will protect
the life that is here. The trope allows us to
introduce scriptural reasoning in a constative rather
than imperative, exclamatory, or polemical voice. We
are not arguing that modernity ought to fail or have
failed; we are simply bringing attention to its
failure. As mourners must finally acknowledge that
their loved one has died, so we are bringing
acknowledgement that modernity has died. In doing so,
the mood that accompanies the emergence of scriptural
reasoning is the sad acknowledgment of fact. It is
mourning, but not mourning without
hope. B. Through the language of Hope
The active voice of scriptural reasoning emerges
under the banner of hope. The dialectic of modernity
has died; while we are not necessarily pleased with
its passing, we have hope that a new life will arise.
Hope includes the vision and expectation of renewed
life. With this vision SR moves past its constative
voice and practice of sad acknowledgment as it turns
to envision possibility and to share the energy and
excitement that new possibility brings. Hope is a
word to express that excitement. SSR is a
revitalization movement, the anthropologists might
say. C. Through the language of
Re-creation and Revelation
These tropes are also useful in articulating the
theological prototypes for the emergence of SR. We
read in the Rabbis daily morning prayer, "Hu
m'chadesh b'khol yom maaseh b'reshit." "God
renews each day the order of creation." The story of
creation is a story not only of cosmic beginnings,
but also of the form in which every world may
re-begin. The story of creation is a story of
resurrection and hope. Resurrection, because from
each day and each world that dies, new life may be
recreated. To speak of Resurrection is thus to speak
of recreation; SR therefore emerges out of the
dialectic of modernity as the expression of a new,
creative activity. When speaking of the recreation of
an idea structure, rather than of material life, we
also speak of revelation, or, in the more
appropriately Rabbinic term, gilluy shekhina:
"a revealing of the divine presence." One may begin
to see a coherence among the use of the following
chain of tropes: a world to come, which is the
product of resurrection; the Oral Torah, in which the
written Torah lives its resurrected life; recreation,
which is the way in which this second life is
created; and, finally, the "revealing of the divine
presence" in which to be distinguished from some
aboriginal divine voice God speaks again and there is
new life. In short, if SR is to emerge as new life
out of the dialectic of modernity, then SR must be an
expression of not just any new creativity, but
renewed creativity per se; and that includes a
renewed disclosure of the divine presence. God alone
creates. We must not say this lightly, but we must
say it: if SR is to guide us out of this century of
destruction and out of the moribund structures of
modernity, then SR must be infused with a divine
spirit. If it is not, then this will not be an
activity of new life. If we are not even prepared to
acknowledge that our work must be made in relation to
God, then we cannot hope to bring about a new life
that would follow modernity. We might be more modest,
but we wouldn't be about SR. To speak of divine
presence, however, may be to speak all the more
humbly; it means we can only be led in our work
ultimately by listening alone: by listening to the
voice of our Creator speaking through the words of
scripture which we have received through the past
traditions that have interpreted them, through the
sufferings that have engendered the end of modernity,
and through, finally, the hope that must move us if
we are to move at all. D. Through the
language of Listening, Hearing, Waiting
A dimension of SR's re-creative activity is simply
one of listening to a voice that is greater than ours
and of which our words are never adequate vehicles.
"Hear, O Israel Hashem is our god Hashem alone."
Hashem is our god, we may add, only when we hear. To
hear is ultimately to read, and to read, ultimately,
is to read scripture. At the beginning of all our
re-creative activity is the reading of
scripture. E. Through the language of
Hypothesis Formation
This reading of scripture is within an activity of
redemptively responding to the destructions of our
age and the inadequacies of merely modern answers to
this destruction. The redemptive activity of reading
is more than just reception. It is to receive the
words of scripture as directives to us: that we
should heal the burdens of modernity and that we
should heal them in certain ways. The first step in
moving from hearing such a directive to enacting it
is to envision the problem to which we respond and to
envision how we are about to respond to it. All such
envisionings are to be tested and retested against
both our reading and our observation of the world
around us. But before all this testing, the first
step is envisioning. A philosophic concept to use for
envisioning is "hypothesis formation." Here, once
again, I borrow from Charles Peirce's work, in
particular his study of "abduction," or the
proto-logic of hypothesis formation. Before entering
the philosophic analysis, I will once again reiterate
the theological link: that the scriptural reasoner's
hypothesis making is the literal means through which
the re-creative activities engendered by hope
begin.
There are two general insights of Peirce's that
make a general contribution to the theory of SR. The
first is that the activity of hypothesis formation,
while unpredictable, is proto-logical, which means
that it can be mapped as a kind of reasoning with a
syllogistic formulation and other formal attributes.
For example, Peirce argues that we should recognize
three kinds of syllogisms and not two. In addition to
deduction and induction, we must include
"retroduction," or abduction. Deduction is typified
by the syllogism that all men are mortal, Socrates is
a man, therefore Socrates is moral. Induction: this
person is mortal and a human, that person is, . . .
therefore we conclude that all humans may be mortal.
And finally the model for Abduction: if all men are
mortal and Socrates is mortal, then probabilistically
Socrates may be human. In so many words, abduction is
an induction from qualities or predicates. Say we
know that squirrels climb trees and eats nuts. Now, I
see a little creature climbing a tree and eating a
nut; perhaps it is therefore a squirrel. Peirce
claims that precisely this kind of reading in a
pre-rational form is implicit in each of our
perceptual judgments. Flooded with stimuli, our
selective pre-conscious capacity is to judge
according to hypotheses made from pre-critical
inferences we could characterize as following: an
recognizable object could display the stimuli A, B,
C, D, this one displays the stimuli A, B, C; perhaps
this one is a X, this a box, or a tree. Finally,
Peirce suggests that all scientific reasoning makes
use of a formal stage of abduction in addition to
induction and deduction, so that we do not directly
enter nature to discover within it its universal
laws; instead, we come to it with certain assumptions
on the basis of which we make certain hypotheses
which can then be tested inductively. A surprising
fact is encountered; we hypothesize that, given
something else we know to be the case, then this may
be the case as well with this fact.
Say, then, that we are faced with a certain failed
explanatory system called the dialectical logic of
modernity. How would we go about replacing it? Now,
if we were not aided by a logic of abduction, we
might go about the job in two consistently modernist
and unsatisfactory ways. The first would be to
suppose that, since modern reasoning had failed, we
would have to, following the caricature of Descartes,
create some new system ex nihilo. Either we
would do that inductively, somehow observing
potentially universal truths in the world around us;
or, deductively, we might begin with some dogma and
deduce from it how to proceed. Perhaps, for example,
we could begin with scripture. Taking the inductive
route, we might suppose that, if we read scripture
carefully enough, the verses themselves would suggest
to us certain universal truths on the basis of which
we could then construct a new system of religious
knowledge. Or, deductively, we might read each verse
itself in some way as a rule and read from it
directions on how we should proceed.
Our abductive approach would be different. It
would be to suggest that, if we begin with scriptural
reading, we always already, faulty or not, bring to
our reading some prior working relation to the text,
including prior assumptions about what scripture
means. Let's say for example that we come with the
very general idea that scripture commands behavior.
Say we then come to a series of narrative texts like
the story of Abraham. While we do not see any
explicit rules of behavior dictated by these verses,
we are led by our assumption to look again and see
how the verses could command. We might conclude that
the individuals in these stories are taken to be
models or counter-models of behavior for us. In any
event, we come to the text always already related to
it and offering hypotheses about its meaning from out
of this relationship. For this reason, the text
cannot display its meaning directly nor command
directly.
The concrete question for SSR is, what relation do
we, as a Society of readers, already bring to the
text of scripture? I am assuming that, acknowledging
both the failure and death of a modernist paradigm of
inquiry, we come to the text of scripture as the face
of our Redeemer: that is, the one who will repair
this modernist paradigm. Our "cries" from the
"bondage" of modernity go up to God, and if God hears
our cries, we re-receive scripture as our Moses. But
this is, in part, too strong an image, unless we
recognize our kinship to Moses' Egypt, as well as our
exile in it. Our scripture must be one that has gone
down to Mizrayim with us. The modernism we
decry must be our own, and the hypothesis we offer
about how to repair it is a statement about the
redemptive relation between scripture and modernity.
But this would mean that, as modernists, we were and
are not merely modernists, but at once modernists and
those who remain in relation to a scriptural
tradition. In sum, the abductive rule of SR would be
this: to uncover (and, if you will, celebrate) the
rules of non-modernist reasoning that are already
with us and use those as assumptions (that is, in
terms of our earlier syllogism using them as first
premises or universals) to look at the world we are
trying to transform and, on the basis of those
assumptions, offer hypotheses about how we might
transform it.
The last sentence introduces Peirce's second
useful insight about abduction: in order for
abduction to work, we have to imagine that we are not
stimulated into our project simply by the failures of
our modernist reasoning. We must assume, instead,
that all of our failed reasonings are of a type, call
it B, where "B-reasonings" are all visible, fallible,
discrete, and in this case have actually failed.
However, we must also assume that these visible
B-reasonings point to the existence of a collection
of unseen, infallible, and vague (or non-discrete)
principles: call these "A-reasonings." We must assume
that it is the unseen guidance of these A-reasonings
that led us to conclude that our B-reasonings have
failed, that they are unreliable, and finally, that
we still have reason to hope. In this theory, the
hope that we describe can be attributed to the living
vitality of these already present A-reasonings. These
A-reasonings are already "present," but not in a way
of which we are conscious until we encounter failed
B-reasonings. To introduce some scriptural language,
immediately, into Peirce's theory: it is as if the
B-reasonings, like the Israelites' cries out of their
bondage in Egypt, rise up to God as soon as they
appear. God appears only in response to their cries,
just as we become aware of A-reasonings only when the
B's have failed: and the God whose name is "I am with
you in suffering" (ehyeh imach b'tsarah) takes
heed of our plight and comes down, only then sending
Moses the Redeemer who would now disclose the
A-reasonings with which we would go about repairing
our B-reasonings. In this little scripture-like
story, we in the SSR play the role of Moses, at least
for our own salvations. For Peirce, the A-reasonings
played the role of the Scotch Common Sense-Realists'
rules of common sense, provided we imagine these
rules were summoned only in times of crisis, when the
rules of everyday life seemed no longer to work. For
that matter, Peirce added that he was only a critical
common-sensist, meaning that he could also imagine
times when the rules of common sense themselves were
in jeopardy. We may say that, when the rules of
common sense fail, modernists become modernists:
radical skeptics thinking that there is nothing left
to save us, or dogmatists thinking that now is the
time to assert dogmatically whatever assumptions we
have.
According to the theory of abduction, a crisis of
common sense would, instead, be a time when our
ultimate A-reasonings are called into action.
Philosophers may call these the rules of "logic."
Calling into question the various dogmatic logics of
modernity, postmodernists are in the habit of calling
any logic a dogmatic logic. What should we do? We
might take a lead from Peirce, who offers several
logics of his own for times of crisis in our common
sense: he calls these a variety of names, such as a
logic of vagueness, a logic of relations, a pragmatic
logic, or semiotics (the logic of sign
interpretations). Is Peirce a modernist when he
offers these logics? Or in more Rortian fashion, does
Peirce mean by "logic" simply the logical use to
which we could put our socio-socially contingent
rules of thumbs to work? In Peirce, Pragmatism, and
the Logic of Scripture, I argue that Peirce's logics,
all of them what we could call redemptive or
reparative logics, derive ultimately from what I call
the logic of scripture. All of these are derived from
his implicit use of traditions of scriptural
reasoning, and I therefore suggest that comparable
logics could be derived from our explicit use of
scriptural reasoning. This means that these ultimate
logics, the sources of A-reasoning when common sense
fails, are our most profound abductions about how to
think about the world on the basis of our deepest
understanding of scripture's directives. To derive
our logic from scripture is to abstract from it the
form of a logical rule, that is, a rule for
reasoning: the instructional or directive force of
our SR flows out of our inherited and corrected
traditions of SR. But let me stay, for the moment,
with A's and B's. According to the theory of
abduction, the very experience of the crisis that has
brought us together will stimulate in us the capacity
to bring to consciousness the rules of A-reasonings
in this case the logic of scripture that will enable
us to make concrete hypotheses about how to repair
the modernist world that we all co-inhabit, animated
as it is with all the failed B-reasonings of
modernity.
I am assuming, in other words, that scripture is
the specific source of A-reasonings that arise in
response to the acknowledged failing of modernity. In
its failings, modernity is a sign of the need for
scripture's redemptions; in this sense, modernity
belongs already to the activity of a scriptural
inquiry. To articulate that inquiry is to disclose a
scriptural reasoning. Scripture does not, therefore,
stand over-against modernity as a ready-formed
measure (or sword!). Modernity belongs within the
life of scripture, as its own burden, the way
Israel-in-bondage belongs within scripture, as
scripture's bondage to Israel's own suffering. SR is
a way of reading scripture, at once within and across
the boundaries of our Muslim, Jewish, and Christian
communities of reading, so that our reading redeems
the failings of modernity. Redeeming, and not
replacing modernity, this reading of scripture will
become a reasoning, just as modernity is a reasoning,
but a transformed reasoning. Of
the language of a Community of Inquiry
What keeps the effort to disclose A-reasonings
from becoming another form of Cartesianism: an
attempt to disclose once and for all the foundations
of our thinking? An appeal to A-reasonings, after
all, is a kind of appeal to foundations. Our answer
is that the A-reasonings always remain vague, that
they are never fully articulated but are only
disclosed to the degree to which they are called into
play, that they are disclosed only for some
particular project of repair, that that project is
undertaken by some historically particular community
of inquirers, and that the efforts to disclose
reasoning themselves are a communal effort. Any
individual effort to disclose A-reasonings in clear
and distinct propositions is a dogmatic project in
the Cartesian sense. The goal of SSR, however, is to
promote communal efforts at redemptive inquiry. For
Peirce, this means that the logic of A-reasonings is
a logic of relations.
I will clarify this point here only briefly. When
we referred previously to deductive, inductive, and
abductive reasoning, and made use of a good
old-fashioned syllogistic form to clarify them, we
were appealing to a form of logic adjusted to Western
individuated reasoning. I myself could conduct an
abductive inference, or so it seems. A single
abductive inference, however, is not an abductive
inquiry, let alone the redemptive inquiry of which
abductive inquiry is a part. Even an abductive
inquiry is to engage a community of inquirers in the
activity of disclosing to one another their
overlapping assumptions and then to generate and test
specific hypotheses, as applied to the resolution of
specific problems. The syllogistic model clarifies
only individual contributions to a much more complex
process. Another, still only partial, way to map that
process is a logic of relations. This is, for
example, to conceive of the entire collection of a
community's assumptions as a set of relative
predicates: a set of possible rational relations that
could be a set of specific judgments about the
world.
Let's say, for example, that these are a few of
our common assumptions: that moments of suffering are
signs of the failure of some practice that are also
the signs of possibly new ways of repairing those
practices; that all observable objects in the world
are, among other things, potential vehicles of our
redemption (potentially healing instruments); that,
seen in this way, all observable objects in this
world are potential signs of the creative work of our
Creator/Redeemer; that we have received, refined, and
tested elaborate traditions that guide us in bringing
the objects of the world to our aid in this way; that
what we now see to be failed practices may once have
functioned as specific engines of repair or
redemption; that each of them may also be
re-remembered, therefore, as instruments of specific
projects of repair and therefore, as particular acts
of healing; that we may define an "angel" as any
direct expression of God's healing activity; that
angels therefore come and go you might say; and so
on. We could restate all of these assumptions as a
specific form of relation into which the failed
practices of modernity could be reintegrated. Take,
for example, the relation "can be an instrument of
God's healing." Let the sign "iH" represent this
relationship. "Cartesianism" can be symbolized by
"C". Then, "CiH" represents the application to
Cartesianism of this particular healing relationship:
this signifies that "iH" has been predicated of
Cartesianism, or, in different terms, that we have
made the specific judgment that the Cartesian
activities of abstraction need not simply be
abandoned but can be themselves brought into a richer
order of relations. Descartes' project, for example,
tells us both about the inadequacies of scholastic
religion as well as about the more-than-Cartesian
ways that need to be repaired.
If all of our shared assumptions are described as
potential predicates of this kind, and all of our
failed practices are described as the individual
occasions in which these assumptions may be
predicated as instruments of healing, then we may
describe the work of SR as making specific judgments,
each of which applies such predicates to such
subjects, and all of which collectively represent the
transformation of modern reasoning into scriptural
reasoning or perhaps I misstated and we should call
this a transformation of modern reasoning, by way of
scriptural reasoning, a redeemed modernity.
There are several reasons why the logic of
relations, as expressed this way, is not the work of
mere individuals. First, we may say that it is the
failure of our inherited practices that brings us to
seek aid from one another; by ourselves we may be
defined more by the failures we inherit than by their
solutions. Second, many of us may be able to disclose
assumptions that serve others' problems; many others
of us may disclose problems for which others'
assumptions are a source of repair, and overall we
may find that the bits and pieces of our individual
disclosures contribute to a recognizable project only
when they are pieced together into a sizable
collectivity. Third, and this is Peirce's strongest
suggestion, the very thought that our individual
reasoning may be interesting in itself is often a
symptom of the modernism we are seeking to repair.
The individuation of reason is itself a prime mark of
modernity; it therefore plays a role in what we might
call the logic of repairing the relations of that
individual subject that needs to be brought into a
healing relationship. This means, in fact, that the
community of inquiry represents the most general form
of healing predication: to begin the work of SR is to
predicate community of each individuated reasoner.
This is to mark each of us qua individual reasoners
as mere subjects in search of predication (to cite
Pirandello!) rather than as vehicles of redemption.
Our Redeemer is not one of us, but must include all
of us!
To enter into SR, therefore, is first to enter
into some SSR. Our triadic community of redemptive
inquiry inhabits three very broad and complex
traditions of redemptive inquiry. Our religions tell
stories of the many communities of redemptive inquiry
that have peopled our salvation histories. Abraham's
family was one, the people Israel was one, the
Rabbinic communities were one, the Kabbalistic
communities were one, the various American-Jewish
denominations have each sought to be one, and so on
then of course the Church, the Muslim nation, and so
on. In fact, one way to describe our religions from
the perspective of SSR is as traditions or
communities of redemptive inquiry, each of which was
always already a vehicle of redemption, never merely
its subject. We all come from destructions, you might
say, or interruptions in the natural order of things.
Our religious communal lives are always ways of
coming together to disclose redemptive A-reasonings
that repair troubled B-reasonings. We are always
therefore part of historically particular
communities, because each act of redemption is a
contingent one: contingent on the specific
characteristics of the troubled practices we have
come to repair. We first emerge, therefore, as
specific sorts of Rabbinic Jews, or Sunni-Muslims, or
Lutheran Christians, and so on. Our particularity is
not a source of wonderment. Neither, however, is our
potential for generalizing. While our specific
projects are fully contingent, our efforts to reach
into A-reasonings are always efforts to reach beyond
our particularity. This does not mean that we are
somehow "seeking universality"; appeals to the
universal are a mark of the modern dialectic. We are
simply reaching for something that will liberate us
from the contingencies of this particular suffering
or failure. The A-reasonings we seek comprehend, at
least, how to generate both this particular and now
failed practice and the practice that would succeed
it. It is sufficiently general that it may have the
potential to guide other practices as well. Its
generality is not something we can determine a
priori, except to know that it will or will not
presently come to our aid. God answers when we call,
and our calls are never universal because our
problems are not.
If we therefore emerge as particular communities
of Jews or Muslims or Christians throughout history,
what would bring us together now in the SSR as an
overlapping community of inquiry? I believe that our
answer can be quite direct. We come together now for
the same reason the university was, or should have
been, originally formed: not as a substitute for our
participating in our various specific communities of
faith, but as a means of sharing resources for the
redemptive inquiries of which we are in particular
need. But, for the moment, at least until we have
discussed this together even more, let me not
generalize even that far. Let me speak, instead, to
the specific overlapping issue that might bring us
together right now. It is that we all participate
already in the university as a common resource of
profound importance to us, but that we also all
suffer in it as well. Not only that, but we also
identify something specific to the university as a
source of failings not only in our academic work, but
also in the contemporary lives of our religious
communities. The university is source, advocate, and
victim of the dialectic of modernist inquiry. But we
are not only its victims. We come together now
because we realize that, in our overlapping resources
for reading scripture, we share sources for redeeming
the university's modern dialectic. From its
inception, the university has emerged directly from
Christian and Muslim sources, and indirectly from
Jewish ones. If we return to these traditions as
sources of the A-reasonings that would guide the
repair of the university's modernism, it is merely a
return to the university's own resources. The West is
as scripturally based as it is Hellenic or
Greco-Roman; our concern is not to undo the
Greco-Roman influence, only to redress the imbalance
in modernity between Athens and Jerusalem. It is to
restore scripture's role in the intellectual-cultural
dialogue between philosophy and scriptural tradition
that should form the fabric of the university's life.
If our goal seems radical, it is only because the
modern university has increasingly forgotten its
origins. We come together as Christians, Muslims, and
Jews to repair the practices of academic inquiry by
adopting A-reasonings that emerge out of scriptural
reasoning as means of redemptively repairing the
errors and failings in academic practice. The
correlative and overlapping religiosities that inform
our dialogue are appropriate to the university and
are not a threat to it, as are the various logics we
appeal to: the logic of relations, the model of a
community of inquiry, the pragmatic and redemptive
character of our logic of inquiry and our appeal to
the abductive imagination as a significant part of
our rationality.
So where is our scriptural reading? Although
already too long for our use, perhaps, my comments
have not yet turned to their detailed implication for
how we conduct our specific textual readings. Leaving
details for another occasion, I will close by simply
hinting at some of the implications. The hints will
come in the form of a few unsynthesized headlines
pointing to various directions in our
work. i.
Textual reasoning:
elsewhere Stephen Kepnes, Robert Gibbs and I have
suggested two distinguishing sub-features of our
work.[11]"Textual
Reasoning" refers to the ways in which contemporary
Jewish thinkers may draw on the Rabbis' Oral Torah
for resources for their community's A-reasonings.
Here the Oral Torah refers to the community-specific
ways in which the Jewish community discloses,
refines, and transforms if necessary its own rules
for reading its scriptures. By analogy, we might
imagine communities of textual reasoning in each of
the three religions or their sub-denominations. In
each case, textual reasoning means reasoning from the
oral traditions through which each community makes
its scripture into a source of redemptive or
corrective A-reasonings. "Scriptural Reasoning"
refers to the ways contemporary Jews, Muslims, and
Christians join together to disclose the overlapping
A-reasonings with respect to which they will reread
their several scriptures as rules for repairing the
modern academy. ii. Depth Historiography:
In his book, Revelation Restored, David
Weiss Halivni offers two different levels of
historiographic study of talmudic and pre-talmudic
Judaism. One level is plain sense historiography: an
effort to reconstruct the socio-, cultural, and
hermeneutical environment out of which certain texts
arose. This type of reconstruction is based on the
best-collected evidence available from a variety of
different textual sources. The community of academic
historians, in a broad sense, shares and tests
explanatory hypotheses about what kinds of opinions
and what ways of living could conceivably be
consistent with various textual evidence. Reading the
documents of Ezra and Nehemiah in this way, for
example, we can reconstruct with considerable
scholarly agreement a broad picture of Israel after
the second Destruction. We can surmise that Nehemiah
was sent to govern the environment politically, and
that Ezra, a scribal priest, played a significant
role both in exile and back in Israel in overseeing
the re-authorization of the written Torah as the law
of the land and the institutions of re-teaching the
Israelites of their Mosaic, prophetic and related
traditions.
In useful semiotic terms, we can use the following
template for describing different types of text
reading. Define any text, including all the words in
it, as a symbol made of a collection of signs. This
symbol has some meaning or refers to some object for
its readers. We have three basic semiotic terms: the
sign, the object, and the condition with the respect
to which the reader will take the object to have its
meaning. Peirce calls this condition an
"interpretant." We could also call it a context of
interpretation, a community or a tradition of
interpretation. Let us call a symbol a kind of sign
which delivers its meaning adequately if, and only
if, the particular readership intended by a text
receives the text to have a given range of meanings.
To receive meanings, furthermore, is to act in a
certain way intended by the sign. Minimally, this
means to offer oneself as recipient of an appropriate
original meaning. In these vague terms, we may define
plain sense historiography as a practice of reading a
textual sign as not merely having an intended meaning
for its reader, but also having a historical sense.
This is an indirect meaning disclosed only to a
community of specialized interpreters for whom the
sign is not only a symbol for the intended readers,
but is also a sign for these specialized readers and
a symptomatic, indexical, or ostensive sign to its
specialized analysts of the condition. This means
that historiographic interpretation operates
separately from what the sign declares itself to be
about for its reader. It is a form of sleuthing that
itself can operate in different ways. In the case of
plain sense historiography, the sleuth is a
straight-forward reader: the text signifies directly
to the analyst some discrete information about a
portion of the collection of historical facts which
would, if collected totally, give us the kind of
picture we would have about the world out of which
the text came that would be comparable to the
complete picture we have about the world in which we
live and write.
Plain sense historiography has two deficiencies.
For one, it is not about what the sign says it is
about. Historians are aware of this problem, however;
like psychoanalysts with their patients, they are
aware that texts deliver much more than one kind of
information and even for the sake of the text itself,
the information may need to be decoded by analysts.
But even for the sake of the analyst, historiography
misses a set of things. First of all, the historical
evidences that can be gleaned from any text are
always incomplete. You cannot, for example, tell from
the books of Ezra and Nehemiah very much about the
way Jerusalem appeared, how the streets were
designed, and most importantly, what Ezra was really
doing with the Torah. This kind of deficiency
historians merely acknowledge as a deficiency of
their trade and, as a sign, the work is always yet to
be done through the long uninterrupted run of
historiography. We can, they would say, simply
approximate the truth little by little.
The second limitation, however, is that there are
certain regions of truth about which plain sense
historiography is particularly quiet. Call these
pragmatic truths: truths about a particular range of
social problems that authors and redactors were
hoping to resolve through the way they were
presenting their texts. Here we enter the domain
which led the German hermeneuts to distinguish
between Naturs- and
Geisteswissenschaften and to complain that
historiography built only on the Naturs-model
could only tell us so much. Hermeneutical historians
have tried to fill in the missing areas by projecting
onto the textual evidences thicker assumptions about
what the author or redactor could have meant. Here,
however, we have gone past plain sense history into
hermeneutical historiography. There remains, however,
a problem with this kind of historiography as well.
What if a given text has brought its author and
reader to the limits of what humans can conceive?
What if it even brought them beyond those limits to
encounter what we call the Divine speech? The good
old plain sense historiographers may have the
appropriate humility here: saying, look, as we said,
we can only go just so far in our knowledge of
antecedent texts, the rest is up to the future.
Hermeneuts, on the other hand, tend to be more
pretentious in this regard, assuming that whatever
was in the text then could be received now. Even that
assumption requires deducing the limits of textual
disclosure to the range of human imagination we now
possess.
But how do we press beyond hermeneutical
historiography and why should we? Halivni offers a
second level of historiography that he calls
"transcendent historiography," or what I call "depth
historiography" in the Introduction to his book. I
restate his claim this way (these are not his words,
but in several discussions he has consented to this
interpretation). The depth historiographer is fully
respectful of the discipline of plain sense
historiography, even defending it against
hermeneutical historiography, which is replaced with
depth historiography. When reaching the point at
which evidence pales and the community of
historiographers claim to be humbly agnostic, depth
historiographers then ask this question: Okay, as
scientists, let us say, we have done our work, but as
scholars of a different sort is there more yet to do?
We study and teach within our own social context, for
our own specific reasons, some that are more urgent
than others. When we invest time and energy and
social capital examining certain texts more than
others, and certain textual issues more than others,
this should not simply be for personal/professional
advancement, but because our efforts have social use,
or are communally urgent. It may very well be that
the urgency that presses us beyond plain sense study
also bears some crucial relationship to what we have
labeled the pragmatic dimensions of the text in its
own historical context. For, by those pragmatic
dimensions, we referred to how the redactor/author's
original work was offered in response to the pressing
problems of the day. Perhaps the pragmatic concerns
of the present day scholar may belong to the same
category of textual productivity as the pragmatic
concerns we imagine may underlie antecedent texts. As
I have suggested throughout this letter-essay,
pragmatic inquiry can be described as an effort to
disclose the otherwise unseen A-reasonings that could
guide our repair of failed practices the very
concerns that led us to our text writing activity in
the first place. We have suggested, furthermore, that
the pursuit of A-reasonings is ultimately the pursuit
of an encounter with the Divine, who would disclose
to us those deeper rules of our own world, knowledge
of which may help us redeem that world from its
failings. If pragmatic inquiry, then, brings us
beyond the limits of human knowledge, we might
imagine the same to be true of the ancient authors'
pragmatic inquiry. This may be one basis for
suggesting that ancient authors' references to God
may bear some identifiable relationship to our
references to God, and if deep speaks unto deep, we
may read about the ancient author in order to help us
disclose our own A-reasonings; and we may at the same
time entertain our own A-reasonings as hypotheses
about the kinds of disclosed reasonings that may be
operative behind the ancient text as well.
Following a depth historiographic rationale,
somewhat like this one, Halivni offers the following
hypothetical reconstruction of Ezra's activity.
Taking up the Talmud's own depth historiographic
speculations, he suggests that Ezra received a
maculate or corrupted text of the written Torah,
corrupted that is by the sins of Israel during the
period of the Monarchy. Under divine inspiration, he
repaired some of the text, left editorial marks on
other aspects that bear correction, and also invested
his deepest corrections in what the Rabbi's later
call the oral tradition. In the chain of succession
from Moses to the Rabbis, in other words, Ezra
contributed his own divinely inspired edition of the
oral Torah and, along with his community of scribal
priests, disclosed a dimension of Israel's
A-reasonings appropriate to meeting the crises of the
day. In offering this reconstruction, Halivni is not
offering an expanded plain sense claim; he is not
therefore competing with or going beyond the evidence
of standard historians and many scholars seem to be
misunderstanding him on these terms. He is offering
something in addition to the conventional plain sense
history. What he offers contradicts no established
plain sense claim, but merely answers the question:
what else do we need to do with our scholarship on
this text at this particular junction in history? His
answer about Ezra has everything to do with the
questions we suffer now in this particular time of
Jewish renewal. His answer is plausible for the Ezra
texts, but necessary for us: the message is that we
too received a blemished Torah, that is a blemished
oral Torah; which we too received from out of the
fires of Destruction, and we too, in order for Israel
to be renewed, must encounter God again and learn
from that encounter what needs to be repaired in our
received traditions so that our Jewish life can
continue. Only through an activity like this would
we, as interpreting scholars, be able to entertain a
depth of reading that was worthy of Ezras' redactors
depth of writing.
This is one illustration of an exercise in SR. In
a previous essay,[12] I
offered other illustrations of how Moshe Greenberg's,
Hans Frei's, and Michael Fishbane's textual
scholarship displays this second dimension of
historiography. Here I call it depth historiography,
there I follow Greenberg's lead and call it "holistic
reading" or "postmodern Jewish text reading." Elliot
Wolfson's already massive corpus of the text readings
of kabbalah is also a showcase for another kind of
depth historiography. He reads to the limits of
today's conventional plain sense historiography and
then reconstructs beyond them in the way that speaks
both to the texts and to the contemporary setting of
textual reasoning. His work is a model in this
regard.
In terms again of our semiotic model, depth
historiography actually brings into dialogue two
modes of text reading. It begins with analytic
historiography, reading the text as symptom of
undisclosed information about the environment at the
time; and at the same time it also reads the text in
terms of the contemporary context of communal
reading; this means it has read the text in its own
terms as symbol of the kind of interpretive activity
in which its readers should also engage. Thirdly,
however, the depth historiographer also notes
complementary kinds of failure in each of these
readings. The communal reading fails because it, at
once, appears both unable to account fully for the
meaning of the sign in its own textual context and to
derive from a reading a clear understanding of the
A-reasonings that would guide the contemporary crisis
that underlies the reading. Both the text and the
contemporary community of reading, one might say, are
troubled by each other; their relationship is
clouded. On the other side, the scholar has traced
his or her scholarly community's plain sense
historiography to the limits of its evidence. The
hypothesis that leads depth historiography then comes
to mind as follows: what if the historians have yet
to disclose the very dimension of this text, which
once it was made clear, would also clear up the
cloudy relationship between the text and its
community of religious readers? The depth
historiographer then uncovers, from a variety of
supplementary sources, or should we say from some
sort of elimination, a single, hypothetical reading
which could at once fill in the pragmatic reading
that is missing in the plain sense historiography and
clarify the text to its contemporary religious
readers and disclose to them the A-reasonings of
which they are in need.
In these terms, SR is also a kind of
depth-historiography.
Peter Ochs
University of Virginia
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