\"Michael Fishbane: An Intellectual Portrait\"

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

VOLUME 14

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

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Michael Fishbane Jewish Hermeneutical Theology Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

LEIDEN ᆕ BOSTON 2015

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Cover Illustration: Courtesy of the University of Chicago. The series The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation.

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-28543-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-28548-4 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-28549-1. Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS The Contributors  .............................................................................................

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Editors’ Introduction to the Series  ............................................................

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Michael Fishbane: An Intellectual Portrait  ..............................................  Sam Berrin Shonkoff

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Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics  ....................  Michael Fishbane

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Midrash and the Nature of Scripture  .........................................................  Michael Fishbane

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Five Stages of Jewish Myth and Mythmaking ..........................................  Michael Fishbane

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The Bible in the Jewish Mystical Tradition  ..............................................  Michael Fishbane

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A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology  .............................................................  Michael Fishbane

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Biblical Hermeneutics and Philosophical Theology ..............................  Michael Fishbane

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Interview with Michael Fishbane  ...............................................................  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

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Select Bibliography  .........................................................................................

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MICHAEL FISHBANE: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT Sam Berrin Shonkoff Michael Fishbane is one of the most prodigious and dynamic forces alive in Jewish scholarship. His articles, books, seminars, and lectures have invigorated the study of Judaism for nearly fifty years now, and his work today is as inspired and energized as ever. To consider his scholarly contributions, one must broaden one’s gaze to behold the entire expanse of Jewish history, for Fishbane has composed seminal works in the areas of Hebrew Bible (and history of the ancient Near East more generally), Midrash, medieval Jewish philosophy and mysticism, Ḥasidism, modern Jewish philosophy, and Hebrew poetry. Furthermore, in recent years Fishbane has turned many heads and hearts with his own constructive theological writings. It is ultimately this latter material that sealed Fishbane’s place in this collection, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers. However, the historical and constructive phases of his career constitute an integrated whole— not only because there are thematic and theological correlations between them, but because they together reflect a lifetime of strivings for truth and meaning that interrogate the very binary of scholarship and spirituality. The unifying theme throughout Fishbane’s corpus of writings is Jewish hermeneutics. He has attuned his readers and students to the fact that Jewish thought throughout history has been exegetical through and through. In his groundbreaking work Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel he demonstrated that this is no less true in the Hebrew Bible itself than in the postbiblical commentary traditions.1 Jewish individuals and communities have characteristically expressed Jewish wisdom vis-à-vis the texts and con-texts of Jewish tradition and history. A person is a palimpsest, always already bearing inscriptions of “texts” (literally and figuratively) from the past in her being, even while exercising faculties of reflection and

1 See Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Cf. Fishbane’s essay “Inner-Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” in Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 3–18. The latter essay also appears in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

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imagination.2 The natural self and the cultural self bleed together, and Jewish theology thus springs from what Fishbane calls the “exegetical imagination”—a confluence of primary sources and primordial intuitions, raw experience and the language of tradition. It is both canonically rooted and richly creative.3 Even the most wildly imaginative myths in Judaism—those of sea monsters and heavenly battles, godly weeping and divine eros—invariably incorporate canonical citations into their literary structures, reworking the old as they express the new.4 In Saussure’s terminology, the speech-acts or parole of Jewish thought arise out of the lingual matrix or langue of Jewish sources.5 And all of this is no more and no less than Jewish theology, which is “not propositional but concrete through and through.”6 The exegetical imagination extends as well beyond verbal expressions into the very concreteness of life. Fishbane embraces Thomas Mann’s concept of “zitathaftes Leben” (textualized life or citational existence) to refer to ways in which thought, behavior, and life-perceptions all arise in rela2 The notion that human consciousness is always already shaped by “texts” of the past is, of course, a foundational insight of philosophical hermeneutics. This pertains to Heidegger’s conception of the “hermeneutic circle,” where every hermeneutical act is conducted within one’s prior hermeneutical situatedness. Heidegger’s student Gadamer later reformulated this principle according to his notion of prejudice (Vorurteil), whereby all understanding involves prejudgments rooted in prior influences, as well as his concept of “historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), which further affirms that the “texts” of the past delineate the horizons of all consciousness. Fishbane himself points to contemporary conceptions of “intertextuality,” citing philosophers such as Julia Kristeva and Jonathan Culler. According to Fishbane’s own summation of this concept, “one may say that we are constituted—even appropriated—by the texts we read. They are our interior Tower of Babel, filling us with the many voices of the many texts that make us who we are.” See Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 126–27. However, it would be reductionist to conclude that Fishbane merely borrows such notions of hermeneutical situatedness from the discourse of philosophical hermeneutics and then applies it to Jewish thought. Indeed, as we shall see, much of Fishbane’s scholarship highlights the extent to which Jewish exegetes themselves throughout the centuries have regarded the textual matrix of Jewish tradition as inseparable from all cognition and creativity, perception and existence. My references to other philosophers here and elsewhere in this introduction are not intended so much to address questions of “influence”—such inquiries are notoriously tricky, and they rarely illuminate the heart of a person’s work—but rather to situate Fishbane’s thought in a broader intellectual context. For readers who take interest in such considerations, most of these comments will appear in footnotes throughout this essay. 3 See Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 4 See Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5 See Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 11–13, 18, 21, 187n. These passages all appear below in Fishbane’s second essay in this volume, “Midrash and the Nature of Scripture.” 6 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 6.

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tion to textual sources. Jewish lives shape Jewish texts, and Jewish texts shape Jewish lives. While this reflects a dimension of all cultures to varying degrees, Fishbane suggests that it is especially salient in the Jewish case. “Among the historical religions, none so much prizes ‘zitathaftes Leben’ as does Judaism,” he writes.7 And inasmuch as Jewish theology is fundamentally exegetical, for Fishbane, even the most embodied enactments of Jewish textuality are indeed constitutive of Jewish “thought.” When Fishbane published his Sacred Attunement in 2008, this represented a pronounced turn from historical theology to constructive theology. However, that work incorporated many themes from Fishbane’s scholarly corpus. In that book, as well as in subsequent essays such as those in this volume, Fishbane attempts to articulate a contemporary Jewish theology that is both concrete and hermeneutical to the core, and thus consonant with the exegetical spirituality he observes in the history of Jewish thought. If one defines the field of “Jewish philosophy” narrowly to include only rationalist attempts to prove metaphysical doctrines or to read Scripture allegorically through the prism of philosophical principles, then Fishbane would not belong. However, such a conclusion would be misguided. To be sure, Fishbane does appreciate the limits of philosophical discourse, and he suggests in his constructive work that heady speculations and abstractions can actually distract us from the concreteness of dialogical life where human-divine encounter takes place. However, one must consider three points: First of all, meditations on the limits of philosophy—and decisions to reorient one’s ways of thinking and living accordingly—are philosophically engaged processes. Second, Fishbane does in fact situate his thinking in relation to a particular school of thought, namely, philosophical hermeneutics.8 Regarding his convictions that, say, thinking is mediated by “traditional” forms of language and culture, intertextuality is a fundamental feature of subjectivity, and articulations of truth are always contextual—if one dismisses such views as anti-philosophical, then one must also dismiss the likes of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Kristeva as anti-philosophical. Third, Fishbane affirms that philosophical theologians such as Philo, Saadia, and Maimonides are no less hermeneutical theologians than the rabbis of Midrash or the mystics of Kabbalah were. All these 7 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 2. 8 See especially Fishbane’s sixth essay in this volume, “Biblical Hermeneutics and Philosophical Theology.” Fishbane writes therein: “For me, philosophical hermeneutics is fundamental, insofar as it seeks to ground our humanity in acts of interpretation at every stage and in every way” 197.

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disparate figures committed themselves to the interpretation of Jewish sources according to particular paradigms and experiences that they deemed to be true, and Fishbane does no less in his own historical and constructive work—and, moreover, he demonstrates how one can appreciate this very hermeneutical process, in all its myriad forms, in philosophical terms. Fishbane’s historical and constructive works are the offspring of dynamic unions between philological prowess and psychological sophistication. His current theological meditations reveal how academic scholars of religion may be in unique positions after all to make crucial contributions to constructive religious thought. He is not only intimately familiar with the texts of Jewish tradition, but he is also acutely aware of contemporary obstacles to the very discourse of theology, from both the dark disillusionments of history and the undeniable deconstructions of philosophy. As we shall see, Fishbane’s hermeneutical theology takes all this into account. It is dynamic enough to reflect the spectrum of exegetical diversity and ritual life in the history of Judaism, and it is humble enough to stand firm amidst the anxieties and uncertainties of our century. Biography and Career Michael Fishbane was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1943. He grew up in a traditional Jewish household in the way that Conservative Judaism was traditional in the 1950s. His maternal grandparents had a significant influence on Fishbane’s early Jewish consciousness. Every day during his high school years he went to his grandfather’s house and learned Rashi’s commentaries on the Torah—and he was not allowed to eat dinner until he could recite the teachings from memory.9 Aside from traditional Torah commentaries, Louis Maltzman would speak to his grandson about Jewish persecution in Russia, his escape to America near the turn of the century, and what it meant to rebuild Jewish life. In Fishbane’s family, the coordinates of Judaism lay largely in relation to images of war and pogroms, survival and preservation.10 His father Philip was wounded on D-Day at Normandy and only rescued from the beach days later—young Michael met him for the 9 Four decades later Fishbane would dedicate a book to his grandfather, acknowledging that he “instilled in me an old-fashioned commitment to exegetical thought.” Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, x. 10 Most of the information transmitted in this biographical sketch comes from my personal conversations with Fishbane, mainly in summer 2014. I will only cite these conversations henceforth in the case of direct quotations.

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first time upon his homecoming—and the traumas of those war years were alluded to repeatedly, with and without words. And no one spoke directly about the Holocaust. Fishbane’s religious identity was rooted concretely in Jewish practices and personalities, yet the strength of his personal attraction to Jewish wisdom and spirituality (without yet having such language) was somewhat mysterious, as visceral attractions tend to be. He recalls being reflective about his Jewishness already in elementary school and laying tefillin every morning in his preteen years. He imagined being a rabbi when he grew up, yet when he interviewed local rabbis for a school project in eighth grade, he found himself utterly uninspired. Only a few of these men mentioned intellectual or spiritual reasons for entering the rabbinate. In Fishbane’s memory, there was a sort of spiritual muteness in that era of American Judaism. There was not yet a developed language for shedding light on the shadows of human interiority or spiritual yearnings. Mainstream American Judaism in the 1950s, as Fishbane experienced it, was whitewashed and sterilized. After the intellectual intoxications of Enlightenment, in the wake of fights for Jewish emancipation and social integration, and following generations of apologetic contortions to appear respectable before Christian gazes, many European and American Jews had suppressed elements of Judaism that smelled irrational, mystical, or otherwise shameful—and it required great suppression to squeeze the vivacity of Jewish thought into cookiecutter essences of ethical monotheism. In Fishbane’s retrospective reflections, he recalls moments when he caught glimpses—however vaguely—of the vital energies pulsing beneath the manicured surfaces of the American Jewish landscape. As a freshman in high school, he sat mesmerized in the front row of an Abraham Joshua Heschel lecture in old Jewish Mattapan. The precise details of the complex lecture—it was on space and time in Judaism, and a philosopher named Kant—were less memorable to the adolescent than the image of Heschel working his way through a mountain of note cards. As Heschel finished with each card, he transferred them one by one to a stack on the other side of the podium, so the second pile gradually grew to the height of the first. Jewish temporality unfurled itself in this speech-act as Heschel waxed philosophical on his theme. Young Fishbane sensed that there was something powerful at stake here—but he had no vocabulary for such intuitions. In a similar way, Fishbane studied evenings at the Hebrew College’s Prozdor, where Eastern European intellectuals and rabbis expounded about “Hebraic” culture and Jewish literature of all periods. Fishbane sensed that these teachers embodied rich religious and intellectual backgrounds, yet there was a meager bridge connecting his world to theirs, and this gap deepened his

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sense of cultural and spiritual isolation. However inchoately at that time, he perceived untapped depths to be explored, and he began to mine voraciously in the Boston Public Library and old bookstores of the city. In this way he discovered the luminous voices of Nietzsche and Tillich, and he mused at how Bialik interwove ancient Hebrew language with imaginative articulations of presence. However, Fishbane generally felt alone in such feasts and fascinations. “There was no one to discuss spiritual questions with,” he reflected recently. “The notion of an interlocutor wasn’t real to me then . . . In a sense, my interlocutors were books that I read for personal dialogue . . . and I think that shaped me even to this point . . . The interior discourse was always the primary one.”11 As an undergraduate, and later as a graduate student at Brandeis University, Fishbane further pursued his interests in Jewish studies and developed a deep fascination with the history of religions more generally. In these years, along with the classics of Western civilization, he became fascinated with Buddhist and Hindu texts, especially the Upanishads. This language gave voice to profound spiritual intuitions and illuminated vistas of a cosmic wholeness beneath perception and thought, breath and heartbeat. This was a private affair, mostly limited to reading rooms and the silent space between reader and text. Although these Eastern works inspired and awakened him in various ways that Jewish texts had not, he could not quite shake his sense that this was not his primary language. In 1962 Fishbane studied abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he plunged into new eye-opening regions of Jewish study. He encountered Kabbalah in a seminar with Gershom Scholem (taught mainly by his assistant Efraim Gottlieb), and Fishbane devoured these strange texts that were as far from Brookline’s Jewish world as one could get. The faculty he studied with in Jerusalem also included the likes of Yehudah Amichai, Shlomo Pines, and Ernst Simon. It was an “astonishing encounter,” Fishbane recalls.12 The scholarly mentalities of his professors in Jerusalem were inspiring, especially their radical openness to all texts and sources as legitimate glimpses into Jewish history. Whereas the rabbis Fishbane knew from his youth tended to present the contents of Judaism through the filters of their own apologetic aims and faddish ideologies, these academic scholars seemed courageously committed to revealing the truth of Judaism, even in its strangest phases and murkiest memories. He would later praise

11 August 7, 2014, conversation with Michael Fishbane. 12 August 7, 2014, conversation with Michael Fishbane.

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his Brandeis teacher Nahum Glatzer (1903–1990), a disciple of Buber and Rosenzweig, as “an example of the ideal that nothing Jewish be alien to us.”13 In this respect, Fishbane sensed that clear-sighted and engaged scholarship had the power to unearth human experience and wisdom from the forgotten—or repressed—depths of personal and collective consciousness. In this vein, Fishbane would later observe in 1975 that scholarly investigation of historical sources involves soundings into the archeology of the imagination. The manifest layer of culture is stripped back and deepened by the uncovering of latent levels of cultural consciousness found in the texts. It is here that the task of learning performs a maieutic role: it becomes a mid-wife for the rebirth and release of long-forgotten or long-repressed memories of the culture. The movement is toward a cultural anamnesis, a cultural remembering . . . [T]he scholar seeks to . . . release repressed layers of culture and response, and to insure the integrity and availability of the past to consciousness. We need merely to recall the monumental work of Gershom Scholem anent the history and forms of Jewish mysticism to appreciate this dialectical process of discovery and recovery. Hereby the task of scholarship becomes a moral task; it seeks to restore to us our fullest memory of ourselves and to renew inner power by unchaining the forces of repression and ignorance . . . Diverse levels of humanity are disclosed; one’s humanitas is understood and expanded through an encounter with humanity in its historical manifold.14

Such potencies and potentials of historical scholarship fueled Fishbane’s early attractions to mythology, a primordial and prerational mode of world-perception and discourse that resided deeply in the “archeology of the imagination” that Fishbane sought to excavate. His fascinations with mythic thinking drew great momentum from Henri Frankfort’s volume Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man,15 as well as Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, particularly the second volume on mythic thought.16 Cassirer affirmed that ancient myth was not simply poetry or symbolism, but a genuine saying of the world—and it 13 “Action and Non-Action in Jewish Spirituality,” Judaism (Summer 1984): 318. 14 Michael Fishbane, “The Teacher and the Hermeneutical Task: A Reinterpretation of Medieval Exegesis,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43, no.4 (December 1975): 717–18. For a later reformulation of these reflections, see the essay by the same title in Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 119. 15 Henri Frankfort, ed., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1960). Fishbane was less interested in William Irwin’s essay therein on ancient Israel than in Thorkild Jacobsen and Frankfort’s essays on mythmaking elsewhere in the Near East. 16 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Volume 2): Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).

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did not originate from “a purely invented or made-up world,” but from “its own mode of reality” and its own distinct logic.17 To learn this logic was, for Fishbane, to penetrate ever deeper into the substrates of human culture.18 Fishbane knew by the end of his undergraduate years that he wanted to pursue graduate work in the history of religion. After considering options to study with Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago and Thorkild Jacobsen at Harvard (Jacobsen was a contributor to the Before Philosophy volume mentioned above), Fishbane ultimately decided to pursue his Ph.D. in biblical studies with Nahum Sarna (1923–2005) at Brandeis. On this academic path, he would reground his Jewish studies in foundational texts, building from the bottom up. He sensed that the commitment to critical study of primary sources was stronger in this program at Brandeis than it was in the more general “history of religions” programs elsewhere, where theoretical frameworks and conceptual typologies of the day often spoke louder than the ancient texts themselves. Indeed, Fishbane wanted to encounter cultural documents in their mysterious alterity—this was and remained his intellectual passion. It is also clear to Fishbane (at least in retrospect) that his attraction to Jewish studies was simply too strong to deny. This was the language of his own cultural self, and this textual tradition was the grounds of his own archeology of consciousness. Fishbane wrote his dissertation on themes of magic and divination in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East—that is, precisely one of the themes, along with mythology itself, that rationalist apologists had sought to purge from the image of Jewish monotheism. Fishbane would later recall that this project was largely deconstructive in nature and not reflective of the culturally formative concerns that would later animate his scholarship. At this stage in Fishbane’s development, his Jewish explorations were still largely internal and monological. Of course, scholarly development and spiritual growth alike are gradual, and they rarely (if ever) happen entirely on one’s own. In the winter of 1965, Fishbane took his friend’s sister Mona DeKoven out on a date. After a local

17 See ibid., 4. Emphasis in the original. 18 Interests in alternate modes of logic were also central to the “Midrash and literature” movement, which erupted in the 1980s and 1990s with investigations of rabbinic Midrash in terms of philosophical hermeneutics and literary theory. Scholars such as Fishbane, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Daniel Boyarin, and David Stern explored ways in which midrashic thought challenges Western “logocentrism” in fundamental ways. See Hartman and Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature, which contains essays by all the authors listed above, among others. Cf. David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

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screening of Doctor Zhivago, he drove her back to her Wellesley College dormitory where she had to return before curfew. “So what do you study?” Mona asked as they made their way down the snow-covered road. “Mythopoeic thought and subsurface culture,” Fishbane responded. Although Mona was highly intelligent and a philosophy major to boot, she of course had no idea what Fishbane was talking about. She challenged him to explain, and as he proceeded to elucidate the intricacies of his investigations, he completely missed the turn-off for Wellesley and ended up bringing Mona home late. In accordance with parietal rules, she was prohibited from going out for a week, and this event deferred their relationship. Beginnings say volumes. This was the first of countless moments in which Mona DeKoven Fishbane would challenge her husband to get out of his head, so to speak, and to communicate his intellectual-spiritual stirrings in ways that could engage other people directly, beyond subjective chambers of inner reflection. From the beginning, then, Mona challenged Fishbane to be more dialogical, both in his speech and in his writing.19 One should refrain from essentializing individuals and their professions, but it is illuminating to consider the fact that Mona is a couple’s therapist by trade, a vocation whose day-to-day practices differ quite remarkably from the monastic tendencies of a scholar-theologian.20 Of course, her impact on Fishbane’s intellectual trajectory went far deeper than matters of phrasing and word choice. Mona has challenged Fishbane in general to be more relational and trusting with people. Without her own optimism and curiosity—and nudging—Fishbane might never have joined, let alone been a founding member and core teacher of Ḥavurat Shalom, an experimental community founded primarily by Arthur Green, who was then a young rabbi fresh out of the Jewish Theological Seminary.21 The ḥavurah (fellowship), which launched in September 1968, would have an indelible impact on Fishbane’s spiritual-scholarly development. Most of the active members and teachers of Ḥavurat Shalom were either trained rabbis, Jewish studies scholars, or both. It was originally founded as a “community seminary,” and although members soon thereafter abandoned

19 See Fishbane’s acknowledgment of Mona in his Sacred Attunement (2008): “again a first reader; again a prod to clarity.” Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 212. 20 That said, Mona is also a scholar in her own right. See Mona DeKoven Fishbane, Loving with the Brain in Mind: Neurobiology and Couple Therapy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). 21 See the forthcoming volume in this series on Arthur Green.

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the vision of an accredited (non-)institution of learning, the community nonetheless remained an effervescent cauldron of study. From the beginning, course-offerings ranged from Hebrew Bible with Fishbane to Ḥasidism with Green, along with New Age spirituality with Zalman Schachter (1924–2014)—and the spirit of study and prayer at Ḥavurat Shalom continued to swell for years. One of the most distinctive (and radical) aspects of Ḥavurat Shalom was its deconstruction of the scholarly-spiritual binary. In its daily gatherings, text study, prayer practices, and personal relationships were all enmeshed in one sacred matrix of spiritual life. Boundaries there between public and private, text and life, interpersonal dynamics and human-divine encounters wore thin. This setting posed rich challenges to Fishbane that opened him up in profound ways to new potencies and possibilities in his vocation as a Jewish scholar. Fishbane, Green, and other founding members of Ḥavurat Shalom selfconsciously envisioned their community as a contemporary project in the spirit of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, founded by Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) in Frankfurt in 1920. However, it is significant that Rosenzweig regarded the Lehrhaus project as antithetical to academic scholarship. Indeed, he abandoned a promising academic career amidst “scholars” in order to write and teach amidst “people.”22 Fishbane and his friends at Ḥavurat Shalom, however, sought to dismantle those dichotomies and develop a new synthesis. They promoted a dialogical hermeneutic wherein the whole intellectual-spiritual reader might approach texts in all their historical, philological, spiritual, and phenomenological dimensions. Fishbane, as an academic scholar, came to identify as “very much a disciple of Franz Rosenzweig” precisely due to his “deep conviction that genuine questions are those that seize us and from which there can be no honest evasion.”23 Such hermeneutical and pedagogical syntheses were of course difficult to implement. By 1969, Fishbane was teaching regularly at both Ḥavurat Shalom and Brandeis, and the dissonance between those contexts was striking to him. He entered the field of Hebrew Bible studies at a time when it was very much still in the spirit of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the “science” of Judaism: historical positivism was a foundational tenet, reconstruction of objective truth was the goal, and source criticism was 22 See Rosenzweig’s letter to his academic mentor Friedrich Meinecke in Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 93–98. 23 See Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 121.

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the way. In many respects, Fishbane shared these ideals, but he started to sense that discourse in his academic sphere at that time was somewhat dogmatic and shortsighted. If the text study at Ḥavurat Shalom risked excessive subjectivization, then the text study at Brandeis risked excessive objectification. While the modus operandi in ḥavurah classes was engaging study with inflated feelings of human-Torah immediacy, Brandeis classes devoted so much attention to the background of the Bible that they drowned out the foreground of the text itself. For Fishbane, this was not exclusively a “spiritual matter” or a “scholarly matter”—it was both. This was a question of how a person can attain the deepest possible understanding of a text. If historical-critical scholars overlook their own personal positions before the text, then subjectivist seekers overlook the historical otherness of the text. Fishbane sought a middle way, which he later described as “a genuine textual life that may hope to balance (if not integrate) a respect for the objective otherness of the text within the subjective involvement of the reader.”24 Fishbane came to realize, along with the values and visions of Ḥavurat Shalom, that the most illuminating hermeneutic—for scholars and seekers alike—is one that is most dialogical. Near the end of his doctoral work, as a twenty-eight-year-old, he wrote: Such a dialogue need never take place at the expense of scholarship and methodological rigor. Rather, it is only after the careful and accurate reconstruction of the materials that a text-dialogue can develop. For in text as in life true meeting takes place only when the integrity of the other is preserved. This idea of immediate text study and the corresponding synthesis

24 Michael Fishbane, “Canonical Text, Covenantal Communities, and the Patterns of Exegetical Culture: Reflections on the Past Century,” in Covenant as Context: Essays in Honour of E. W. Nicholson, ed. A. D. H. Mayes and R. B. Salters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 155. Fishbane also notes that scholars who blunt their emotional and psychological receptors in reading will likely fail to discern even the “plain” or “literal” sense of a text. For example, regarding the episode of Jacob’s nightlong wrestling in Genesis 32, Fishbane jabs at those critical readers who would overlook the personal pathos and spiritual concerns of the text: “It would certainly be limiting to suggest that the ‘literal’ purpose of this text is merely to provide an aetiology for the northern shrine of Penuel, or for the custom of abstaining from the sciatic nerve of animals. It is also apparent that even if we understand the separate facts of this or another text, its total, ‘literal’ meaning is even more complex.” Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 115. For Fishbane, then, there is no such thing as an unmediated, purely objective encounter with a text. All reading is interpretation. Indeed, he indicates that Plato himself already knew this when he taught that written words “seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.” Phaedrus, as quoted in Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 113. Fishbane comments: “After the text has ceased to speak, all that is heard is the voice of the interpreter.” Ibid.

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MICHAEL FISHBANE: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT of the encounter lie at the vital center of why I am and remain in Jewish scholarship, and is my bridge to the wider Jewish community.25

One perceives echoes of Buber’s dialogical hermeneutics in Fishbane’s formulations. Indeed, Fishbane himself notes how Buber similarly “sought to integrate research, reading, and life instruction”26 and exemplified “a more involved notion of scholarship.”27 Buber, too, developed a dialogical approach to Scripture that included both historical-critical clarity and subjective-spiritual receptivity. According to Fishbane, Buber “had no use for programs of so-called objective, historical-philological scholarship, which eclipsed the enduring meaning of the text; nor was he interested in a private subjectivization of the text, which obscured or ignored its concrete, historical otherness. For him, the two approaches were one and inseparable—when properly pursued.”28 Fishbane notes, however, that Buber, in practice, often obscured boundaries between “historical understanding” and “personal transformation” in scholarship.29 Thus, in a sense, Fishbane sought to develop a scholarly methodology that was more Buberian than that of Buber himself.30

25 “Freedom and Belonging,” in The New Jews, ed. A. Mintz and J. Sleeper (New York: Random House, 1971), 218. 26 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 93–94. 27 Ibid., 97. 28 Ibid., 95. 29 See ibid., 90, 95–98. 30 One might also consider Fishbane’s search for a hermeneutical middle ground between historical-philological objectification and inner-spiritual subjectivization vis-à-vis the work of Paul Ricoeur. In his The Symbolism of Evil, first published in English while Fishbane was still a doctoral student at Brandeis, Ricoeur affirmed historical-critical sensibilities and yet declared famously, “Beyond the desert of criticism we wish to be called again.” Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 349. For Ricoeur, a premodern “immediacy of belief” has been irretrievably lost, but “we can, we modern men, aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again.” Ibid., 351 (emphasis in original). Fishbane and Ricoeur both turn to hermeneutics as a contemporary gateway to sacred reading and reading the sacred. They both sense that hermeneutical considerations foster intimate encounters with texts, but not at the expense of intellectual integrity or historical-critical sensibilities. However, there are significant differences between Fishbane and Ricoeur’s approaches, beyond the fact that they read Scripture from different religious traditions. In particular, whereas Ricoeur’s approach proceeds largely through philosophical reflections on the structure and temporality of biblical narrative itself, Fishbane focuses more on the history of biblical interpretation and on the transformations and dialogues that such exegetical processes have produced and transmitted. This difference is plainly evident in a comparison of Ricoeur’s “narrative theology” and Fishbane’s “hermeneutical theology.” See Ricoeur’s essay “Toward a Narrative Theology: Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Difficulties,” in his Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).

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Over time, Fishbane developed a distinctive approach to religious language and study that sought to straddle the dialogical divide. Teaching was a great catalyst for this spiritual-intellectual growth, and his classes at Brandeis became popular for a new generation of scholars. His 1979 book Text and Texture provides glimpses into his early hermeneutical breakthroughs.31 In this work, which appealed to both academic and nonacademic audiences and was pivotal for the “Bible and literature” approach of recent decades, Fishbane demonstrated how modern readers might attune themselves simultaneously to the historical, literary, and theological dimensions of the text, which all interpenetrate in the text’s contextual texture. His exegesis in this work—as well as in his commentary on the Haftarot (prophetic lectionary)32 and in his most recent masterpiece on the Song of Songs33—reveal how truly critical reading requires thoughtful sensitivity to various hermeneutical layers of the text in its multidimensional wholeness. His concurrent commitments to write for both scholarly and religious communities reflect his deep sense that those disparate methods and concerns can speak to one another. For instance, while he maintains that historical considerations can enrich spiritual contemplations, he has also suggested that premodern Jewish hermeneutics might support crucial correctives in modern biblical studies. He asserts, for example, that the fourfold method of Jewish exegesis known by the medieval acronym PaRDeS—peshat (plain sense), remez (allegorical interpretation), derash (intertextual commentary drawing from the entire canon as a seamless whole), and sod (mystical meaning)—may enhance the multifocal gaze that critical study requires: PaRDeS was, itself, a programme or strategy of reading and interpretation in the deepest sense. It allowed a reader to distinguish different levels of meaning in the Bible, but without having to relinquish any one of them. We moderns are faced no less with the need to conceptualize the multiple dynamics of the hermeneutical task, to analyze them severally and together, and to delineate their interpenetration with teaching and learning.34

31 This book was later republished as Michael Fishbane, Biblical Text and Texture: A Literary Reading of Selected Texts (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998). 32 See Michael Fishbane, ed., The JPS Bible Commentary: Haftarot (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002). 33 Michael Fishbane, The JPS Bible Commentary: Song of Songs (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2015). 34 Fishbane, “The Teacher and the Hermeneutical Task,” 711. Cf. Fishbane’s later formulation of this in Garments of Torah, 114.

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With such considerations, Fishbane hopes “to revitalize modern text study with the energies and coherence of sacred learning—wherein simultaneous meanings are concurrent.”35 In the spiritual interstices of this scholarly orientation—and surely in spaces opened up by other life experiences and personal realizations—new religious identities and commitments have emerged. Although Fishbane continues to hold values and viewpoints from his roots in Conservative Judaism and his immersion in Ḥavurat Shalom, as well as from other twists and turns in his spiritual path, Fishbane now finds his religious home in Orthodoxy. This shift was fueled by his ever-deepening faith in traditional Jewish praxis, and his increasing sense that theological sensibilities must be embodied in concrete practices in order to be maximally transformative for the individual and transmissible for the community. One may call Fishbane’s approach to scholarship unconventional, but one can hardly deny that it has been extraordinarily fruitful. He is one of the most productive and praised scholars in the academic study of religion, and he is the preeminent scholar of Jewish hermeneutics. As a professor for twenty years at Brandeis and now twenty-five years (and counting) at the University of Chicago, he has published numerous books and articles that remain landmark contributions to fields in Jewish studies ranging from ancient through modern eras. His Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (1985) and Kiss of God (1994) both won National Jewish Book awards. He has earned many prestigious fellowships, including a Guggenheim, and has twice been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the illustrious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Textual Studies from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture, and an entry on Fishbane appears in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.36 However, these honors and awards only hint at the immense value and richness of Fishbane’s thought. I use the word “thought” here mindfully, for even Fishbane’s hard-core historical scholarship bears repeatedly upon themes and questions with great implications for Jewish philosophy and theology. Without positing ulterior motives or intellectual compromises, we may

35 Fishbane, “The Teacher and the Hermeneutical Task,” 711. Fishbane would later articulate the fourfold hermeneutic differently in his Sacred Attunement (2008), his essays in this volume, and in his commentary on the Song of Songs (2015). 36 Zev Garber, “Fishbane, Michael,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 7, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 59–60.

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observe (now more than ever before) that Fishbane’s groundbreaking historical work nourished foundations for constructive thought. Indeed, it is his very transparent and uncompromising methodologies that opened up such rich theological pathways. Historical Theology In Fishbane’s decades of historical scholarship, which traverses the textscapes of ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish thought, one can discern some theological themes that remain quite consistent. A focus on these, as opposed to a straight summary of Fishbane’s investigations and findings, will be most illuminating for our purposes. I trust that this approach will not only provide helpful vistas into Fishbane’s work, but that it will also elucidate the intellectual grounds on which he develops his own theological constructs. Broadly speaking, the two main themes that we shall discuss pertain to Fishbane’s observations that (1) Jewish theology is exegetical through and through, and (2) Jewish exegetical theology is a revelatory practice in its own right. These two interconnected insights highlight ways in which Fishbane’s scholarship on Jewish hermeneutics challenges widespread assumptions about the nature of theology and monotheism. Many modern Jewish scholars and practitioners alike have questioned whether there is even such a thing as “Jewish theology.” Beyond the fact that there is no indigenous term for theology in the Jewish canon (modern Hebrew speakers simply transliterate the Latin-Christian term theologia), it is also significant that even the classical sources of Judaism present wildly contradictory views of God and do not seem very much concerned with logical or philosophical speculation. Of course, there have been numerous philosophers of God in Jewish history, from Philo to Maimonides to Hermann Cohen, but the Jewish world as a whole has never anointed their doctrines as obligatory pillars of faith.37 Indeed, many have argued that the cornerstones of Jewish religiosity are not common credos, but common laws.38 Thus, David Ford notes in The Routledge Companion to the Study of 37 For example, consider Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith summarized in the medieval liturgical hymns Ani Ma’amin (“I believe”) and Yigdal (“Exalted”), which many Jewish communities recite daily. The highly influential sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria seems to have omitted Yigdal from his prayer book, and authorities ranging from Luria’s student Ḥayyim Vital to the recent Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef have highlighted this precedent. See Ḥayyim Vital, Shemonah Peraqim, Sha’ar ha-Kavanot; cf. Ovadia Yosef, Yabiʿa ’Omer, VI:10. 38 For example, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) claimed: “Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic Law, there is not a single one which says: You shall

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Religion that the “term ‘theology’ is often considered suspect among Jewish thinkers,” in part, because “theology has been seen as abstractive, intellectualizing and even dogmatizing (in the bad sense) instead of practiceoriented discussion about community-specific behavior.”39 Fishbane’s scholarship, however, testifies that such definitions of theology are simply too narrow to detect the distinct textures of Jewish theology, which have traditionally appeared more in the form of interpretive commentary than philosophical treatise. It is my view that Jewish thought and theology arise in the thickness of exegesis and are carried by its forms. The theologians thought with these elements, and the rabbinic editors regularly compiled them into anthologies for religious instruction. Yet it is remarkable how often studies of Jewish belief and behavior ignore or neutralize this fact.40

In this sense, Fishbane stresses, “Jewish exegetical thought is not propositional but concrete through and through.”41 In his landmark work Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (1985), he shows how scriptural exegesis was, in fact, already constitutive of Scripture itself during its centuries of formation. Although this might sound paradoxical, Fishbane demonstrates with calculating methodologies and exacting analyses that the first Jewish exegetes were the biblical scribes and editors themselves. While the canon was still open and in flux, these “sage-scribes”42 generally transmitted believe or not believe. They all say: You shall do or not do. Faith is not commanded.” Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 100 (emphasis in the original). More recent Jewish thinkers such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz and David Weiss Halivni have argued that Jewish nonlegal discourse (aggadah) has had license to be so diverse and discordant precisely because it is simply unable to adulterate the concrete theological foundation of Jewish legal practice (halakhah). 39 David F. Ford, “Theology,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John Hinnells (London: Routledge, 2005), 73. A similar perspective on Jewish theology appears in Louis Jacobs and Ellen Umansky, “Theology,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 19, 694–99. In this entry, Jacobs affirms that while there is such a thing as “Jewish theology,” insofar as Jewish thinkers since antiquity have dealt consistently with theological themes, this is still a somewhat questionable designation. “For historical reasons (the heritage of the Bible with its strong practical emphasis; the influence of the Talmud, in which the ideal of law is paramount; the absence of doctrines such as the Trinity calling for precise definition; the dispersal of Jews in many different communities with varying patterns of thought), the genius of Judaism has been directed more toward the practices of the faith than toward abstract speculation, more to what God would have men do than to what God is. Therefore it has been frequently asserted that Judaism has no theology.” Ibid., 694. 40 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 8. 41 Ibid., 6. 42 Fishbane calls these earliest exegetes “sage-scribes,” as opposed to the rabbinic “sagescholars” of postbiblical exegesis. See his essay “From Scribalism to Rabbinism: Perspectives on the Emergence of Classical Judaism,” in Garments of Torah, 64–78.

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earlier formulations that appeared questionable or problematic in their eyes, but often integrated their own corrective narratives and qualifications into the text, either within those very verses or elsewhere in the biblical corpus.43 Thus, the Bible bears traces of numerous instances where the inherited tradition (traditum) is reworked and transformed through acts of transmission (traditio). Consider, for example, the subversive revision of Psalms 8:5–7 by Job 7:17–18, where the first praises, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you take him into account? . . .  You have established him by the work of your hands, and placed everything under his dominion,” but the later text sneers, “What is man that you raise him up, and that you put your mind on him? You take account of him every morning, and test him continuously.” Clearly, the psalmic affirmations of divine providence and human domination no longer resonated smoothly with the joban author’s experiences and sensibilities. For Fishbane, it is precisely in the “hermeneutical tension” between such clashing religious attitudes that biblical theology is revealed.44 Fishbane was not the first scholar to suggest that later biblical texts serve exegetical roles in relation to earlier biblical writings—indeed, he notes that he first learned the term “inner biblical exegesis” from his teacher Nahum Sarna.45 However, his Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel revolutionized this discourse and provided the first comprehensive investigation into this biblical phenomenon. In effect, Fishbane shows that amidst conflicting “commentaries” in the Hebrew Bible, the multivocal Torah expresses complex modes of theology that are exegetical through and through. In subsequent works, Fishbane highlights the extent to which hermeneutics remains part and parcel of postbiblical Jewish theology. The paradigmatic example, for Fishbane, is the classical form of rabbinic exegesis known as Midrash, which certainly frustrates anyone in search of definitive dogmas or theological proofs. Midrash is first and foremost biblical commentary, and it is precisely this discourse of interpretation that embodies the content of classical Jewish theology. Discussion of the old is the medium for articulation of the new. Just this is the “pivotal paradox: the sages produce Jewish theology as the meaning of Scripture.”46 This does

43 Furthermore, even the earliest biblical sources themselves betray traces of exegesis, as those early traditions often involved revisions of mythic narratives in the ancient Near East. For one illuminating case study of this, see Fishbane’s essay “Israel and the ‘Mothers’ ” in Garments of Torah, 49–63. 44 See Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 285. 45 See ibid., viii. 46 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 5.

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not mean that the scholar’s task is simply to isolate the theological utterances from their hermeneutical contexts and discern ideological patterns therefrom. Indeed, the exegetical nature of rabbinic thought implies precisely that such extrications and distillations are reductionist.47 According to Fishbane, “the new ‘biblical’ teachings are not abstract propositions, but forms of concrete discourse inspired by the shapes of Scripture. Change the citation and you change the exegesis; exchange the exegesis and new theology is the result.”48 Fishbane perceives complex confluences of voices in midrashic teachings, where disparate scriptural citations and (often) disagreeing rabbinic teachings are voices unto themselves, and the resultant hubbub of thick intertextuality constitutes the irreducible texture of rabbinic theology. Classical Jewish thought is dialogical discourse: [M]idrashic composition is at once deceptively naive and highly elliptical. It is the former insofar as the pattern of thought seems to be merely a play of passages, clever correlations, or the need to work through all the phrases of a verse. But on closer inspection one must attend precisely to the concrete implications of a series of interpretations, for they often reflect dialectics or tensions of a complex sort.49

Fishbane observes that these very dialectics and tensions in the midrashic swirl of traditional citation and contemporary reflection are no more and no less than the teachings of rabbinic theology.50 47 Ephraim Urbach commits this very error in his well-known study The Sages: Their Concept and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1987). Urbach draws from his immense knowledge of rabbinic literature to outline the various dimensions of rabbinic thought, but he underappreciates the extent to which rabbinic theology is irreducible in its exegetical and contextual forms. Fishbane assigns all his doctoral students to read this work for their comprehensive exams in rabbinic thought and theology, and he invites them to critique the work with attention to methodological and hermeneutical considerations. Fishbane’s critique of Urbach’s distillations of classical exegetical theology is reminiscent of Pierre Hadot’s critique of such distillations of classical Greek philosophy. For connections between Fishbane and Hadot, see Arnold I. Davidson, “Ethics between Cognition and Volition,” in The Journal of Religion 93, no. 4 (October 2013): 452–60. See also Fishbane’s reference to Hadot in his first essay in this volume, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics,” 70 n. 14. 48 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 1. 49 Ibid., 6. 50 Fishbane’s preference for thick descriptions of Jewish discourse as opposed to extractions of general principles is, in some respects, consonant with Foucault’s preference for the methods of archaeology over those of the history of ideas. In his The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), Foucault writes: “In relation to a history of ideas that attempts to melt contradictions in the semi-nocturnal unity of an overall figure, or which attempts to transmute them into a general abstract, uniform principle of interpretation or explanation, archaeology describes the different spaces of dissension.” Ibid., 152 (emphasis in original). Foucault and Fishbane strive similarly to highlight the ruptures

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Furthermore, Fishbane’s scholarship focuses on how later medieval and modern Jewish thinkers continue to theologize as well in the key of exegesis. To be sure, Jews who looked upon sacred texts and rituals under the influence of Aristotle or Hegel, Neoplatonism-inflected mystical experience or Kantian critiques of reason, produced radically different theologies. However, Fishbane has emphasized ways in which exegesis itself has remained a common denominator in the tosses and turns of historical Jewish theology.51 His extensive work on Jewish mythmaking underscores how even the most daringly imaginative episodes in Jewish thought nonetheless draw hermeneutically from old wells of tradition, at least in their final literary forms.52 Indeed, this interfusion of textuality and creativity is the crux of Fishbane’s notion of the “exegetical imagination.” The Jewish commentator thinks with the natural elements of experience as well as the traditional archives of culture. Fishbane does not suppose that such hermeneutical dynamics are entirely unique to the case of Judaism. Insofar as every human is shaped by countless cultural influences, everyone is a “traditional” being who refracts reality through inherited prisms. In the spirit of twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics, Fishbane senses that there is no such thing as wholly unmediated experience or unconditioned meaning-making.53 “There is thus no purely natural state for humankind in Judaism, or any other religious culture for that matter, since the natural self is transformed from birth into a cultural self—heir through training and tradition to the wisdom and practices of the past.”54 However, Fishbane suggests that Jewish culture presents an exceptional case: “In great textual cultures like Judaism, the process of thought is always exegetical—be it simply the reformulation and breaks in discourses that are traditionally regarded as smooth and unbroken, although they do so with different end goals. For further reflections on Fishbane and Foucault, see below 46–47. 51 To appreciate these longitudinal views on Jewish hermeneutics in Fishbane’s historical scholarship, see especially his Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, Garments of Torah, Exegetical Imagination, and Kiss of God. 52 See especially Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, passim; cf. “Israel and the ‘Mothers,’ ” in Garments of Torah, 49–63; cf. the second through sixth chapters of Exegetical Imagination. 53 See Fishbane’s first essay in this volume, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics,” where he discusses the problem of “an immediate apprehension of existence” (55) in the context of Derrida’s critique of Husserl, and affirms in the spirit of Nietzsche and Rilke that “the world is thus newly revealed in and through the receptive, interpreting self” (58). 54 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 151. As we shall see, this impossibility of unconditioned identity or unmediated perception becomes a foundational idea in Fishbane’s constructive theology.

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of older tradition or the detailed derivation of new scriptural sense.”55 The traditional Jew beholds the textures of existence as filtered through sacred texts (as well as other “texts” of course). Indeed, this is the essence of zitathaftes Leben, textualized existence, wherein “through exegesis, life imitates (and interiorizes) texts.”56 Fishbane declares, “In all, Judaism is a vast intertextual system whose internal life expands and contracts through exegesis. This is the secret of its spirit; and this is the reason that even the love of God in Judaism is an interpreted love.”57 Love and death and joy are not just aspects of one’s natural being, but values to be enacted in idealized ways. The shapes in which one may imagine death and regard it as a goal or value are therefore constructed by the exegetical imagination; in a similar way, the ideals of joy are articulated and transmitted through theological interpretation. Consequently, the world of the text serves as the basis for the textualization of the world—and its meaning.58

In his scholarship, Fishbane highlights and analyzes these hermeneutical dynamics in their implicit and explicit expressions through the history of Jewish thought, and he shows how Jewish theology is verily inseparable from the dialectics of zitathaftes Leben. Nowhere is this striking concreteness of Jewish hermeneutics more evident than in Fishbane’s provocative indications that biblical exegesis does not take place only in verbal forms—and thus neither does Jewish (exegetical) theology. Already in the Bible, Fishbane asserts, there are “two distinct types of exegetical tradition: the one dignified by its verbal origins in Scripture, the other dignified by the religious community which lives by Scripture and whose customs can therefore be faithfully regarded as a form of non-verbal exegesis.”59 He refers to the latter type of exegesis alternatively as “Scriptural living”60 and “exegesis as action.”61 In short, ritual action and “zitathaftes Leben in its full embodied sense”62 are central sites of theological expression. Fishbane emphasizes this corporeal dimension

55 Ibid., 106. 56 Ibid., 8. Cf. ibid., 1; cf. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 2. 57 Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Mystical and Spiritual Death in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 13 (emphasis in original). Cf. Fishbane’s portrayal of Jewish mystical experience in his fourth essay in this volume, “The Bible in the Jewish Mystical Tradition.” 58 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 4. 59 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 3. 60 E.g., ibid., 4. 61 Ibid., 543. 62 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 8.

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of Jewish “thought” in the later chapters of his Exegetical Imagination, where he shifts from “speculative theology to something like a Jewish practical theology.”63 In those essays, Fishbane explains, “the praxes discussed are by and large theological. That is, I have chosen to explore how theological attitudes or thoughts become practical theological actions through forms of meditation or right attitude. This is . . . to emphasize the interior process through which certain exegetical theologies are actualized and embodied.”64 For Fishbane, the porousness of the boundary between mind and body in Jewish hermeneutics underscores the very non-abstract character of Jewish theology.65 Thus, for Fishbane, Jewish theology is first and foremost a process or practice of Jewish theologizing—with all one’s “mind, body, and means.”66 In the bulk of Jewish tradition, love of God is not so much an amor intellectualis as a full-bodied enactment of love. “Amor dei, love of god, is thus not an internal state, but an act of outward devotion; absolute commitment and acknowledgement, through public performance of the true actions, that one is a follower of the will of this covenanting, revealing god.”67 63 Ibid., 7. See the seventh through eleventh chapters of Exegetical Imagination. 64 Ibid., 7. 65 Thus, in his essay “Action and Non-Action in Jewish Spirituality,” Fishbane directs his readers’ attention to the classical rabbinic Mishnah: “Any Torah—that is, any study or religious yearning—which is not accompanied by melakhah, by action, is ultimately worthless” (328). See also Fishbane’s fourth essay in this volume, “The Bible in the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” where he elucidates the medieval kabbalistic notion that “when the words of Scripture are actualized through ritual performance their energy is materialized concretely by the worshipper who enacts theological truths” 126. For an illuminating case study in the embodied expression of theological values, see Fishbane’s observations about nefilat ’appayim (lit., falling on one’s face) practices in Kiss of God, 104–120. Regarding the Ḥasidic sage Dov Ber’s interpretation of nefilat ’appayim, for example, Fishbane comments: “the advantage of the nefilat ’appayim practice lies precisely in its conjunction of the theoretical and actual.” Ibid., 119. Cf. Fishbane’s masterful study of Buber’s concept of “verification” (Bewährung), according to which theological truths cannot be expressed verbally or conceptually, but only through the concrete actions of life itself. Michael Fishbane, “Justification through Living: Martin Buber’s Third Alternative,” in Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, ed. P. Mendes-Flohr (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press and The Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities, 2002), 12–32. Fishbane also discusses related forms of “verification” in Rosenzweig’s thought. See Fishbane, “Speech and Scripture: The Grammatical Thinking and Theology of Franz Rosenzweig,” in Garments of Torah, 108, 110. 66 See Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 180. Fishbane’s subtle reformulation here of Deuteronomy 6:5 (“You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, soul [naphshekha], and means”) in the context of kabbalistic practice says a lot about his understanding of Jewish mystical theology. 67 Fishbane, “Action and Non-Action,” 319. For Fishbane’s most extensive reflections on Jewish formulations of love of God, see Kiss of God and his commentary on the Song of Songs.

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In addition to his investigations into the exegetical nature of Jewish thought, a second (related) major theme in Fishbane’s scholarship pertains to his observations that Jewish exegetical theology is not merely an intellectual exercise about God, but a vehicle of human-divine connection with God. In other words, Jewish exegetical theology is a concrete spiritual practice in its own right, and there is a fine line in the history of Jewish hermeneutics between human interpretation and divine revelation. Indeed, through his studies of inner-biblical exegesis, Fishbane shows that this was already the case in ancient Israel, where it was no secret that God’s Torah was being written down by living scribes—and, evidently, the unfolding biblical theology was consistent with this process. “Within ancient Israel,” Fishbane observes, “as long as the textual corpus remained open, Revelation and Tradition were thickly interwoven and interdependent, and the received Hebrew Bible is itself, therefore, the product of an interpretive tradition.”68 Of course, scribes did strive to conceal their exegetical labor so that the Bible would read as a work of God. However, Fishbane suggests that even this aspect of their process affirms the nuanced blend of revelation and tradition in biblical theology. The strategic subordination of the human exegetical voice to divine revelation in the Hebrew Bible should not . . . be regarded as a case of pious fraud or political manipulation of older sources—though here and there this perspective cannot be excluded. Rather we should recognize the inevitable preeminence of the divine voice in biblical culture and realize that many legal additions, for example, made the law livable; so that an interpreter may well have often believed that his interpretation was the explicit articulation of the received content of the tradition and that individual talent was marked by its very ability to perform this feat.69

In the light of this “paradoxical dimension of scribal exegesis: namely, that the tradition it receives . . . is not necessarily the one it transmits,” Fishbane concludes that “the privileged voice of divine Revelation and the human voice of instruction have become one” in ancient Israel.70 The composition of Scripture thus indicates the revelatory capacities of interpretation.

68 Fishbane, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” Garments of Torah, 18. 69 Ibid., 17–18; cf. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 528–42. 70 Fishbane, “Inner Biblical Exegesis,” Garments of Torah, 7. Cf. “In different ways, then, the older traditum is dependent upon the traditio for its ongoing life. This matter is paradoxical, for while the traditio culturally revitalizes the traditum, and gives new strength to the original revelation, it also potentially undermines it. The reason for this lies in the fact of revelation itself. Where each particular traditum was believed to derive from divine revelation, recognition of its insufficiencies—inherent in the need for the interpretation

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Furthermore, Fishbane shows that later biblical texts, such as Psalm 119 and the books of Ezra, Daniel, and Ezekiel allude directly to what Fishbane calls “exegetical revelation” or “exegetical illumination.”71 Such biblical texts presuppose a new sensibility: one in which Scripture has become the vehicle of new revelations, and exegesis the means of new access to the divine will. Thus, complementing the divine revelation now embodied in a written Torah, the sage seeks from God the grace of an ongoing revelation through the words of Scripture itself—as mediated through exegesis.72

In sum, Fishbane finds that in biblical theology, exegesis is a vehicle of divine revelation that not only produces and “reveals” the Torah in its very composition, but also further “reveals” the Torah through its interpretation. Fishbane’s scholarship on postbiblical Judaism shows how this latter dimension of exegetical theology in particular gains traction in the history of Jewish thought. In classical rabbinic hermeneutics, the revelatory nature of exegesis— and thus of Jewish exegetical theology—becomes far more overt than it was in the Bible. The well-known rabbinic dictum that traces the Oral Torah (i.e., rabbinic interpretations of the Written Torah) back to the original Sinai revelation affirms the divine origins of rabbinic exegesis.73 However, this is only the beginning. For rabbinic religiosity, while the content of exegesis is revealed, it is also the case that the very practice of exegesis is revelatory. Fishbane emphasizes this fact: Thus the textual sanctity of Scripture is signalled by its status not only as the preserved verbal traces of an older divine communication, but—for the Pharisees, at least—as the source of ever-new revelations and guidance through living interpretations of it . . . Interpretation, therefore, partakes of the sanctity of Scripture even as it further reveals it: for the role of of the traditio—decentralizes the mystique of the authority of the revelation.” Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 14. 71 Fishbane uses these phrases in Garments of Torah, 67–69. Cf. Fishbane’s discussion of “revealed exegesis” in Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 539–43. 72 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 67 (emphasis in original). Regarding Fishbane’s detections of exegetical revelation in Psalm 119, see Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 539–42; Garments of Torah, 66–67. Regarding Ezra, see especially Exegetical Imagination, 13 (also appears in Fishbane’s second essay below, 85); Garments of Torah, 66; and Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 245. Regarding Daniel, see Garments of Torah, 67–68. Regarding Ezekiel, see Garments of Torah, 69. Fishbane also refers to traces of exegetical revelation in both Psalm 119 and the book of Daniel in his first and fourth essays in this volume, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics” and “The Bible in the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” respectively. 73 See Mishnah Abot I.1. For Fishbane’s comments on this dictum, see Garments of Torah, 3–4.

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Engagement with the words of the Written Torah is, for the Rabbis, an encounter with God’s own voice. “The written Law is thus an extension of divine speech—and not merely its inscriptional trace,” Fishbane comments. “This identification of God’s utterance and Torah is the hermeneutical core of Judaism.”75 And the hermeneutical core of rabbinic Midrash is just this: “Paradoxically, the divine Word unfolds through human speech. As exegetical act and event, this human speech is Midrash.”76 Who speaks in this hermeneutical discourse, God or human beings? Fishbane demonstrates that rabbinic exegetical theology undermines this very dichotomy of revelation and interpretation. One of the most distinctive aspects of rabbinic hermeneutics is the radical affirmation of biblical intertextuality through interweaving disparate strands of biblical text into intricate hermeneutical textiles, only to then unravel them and reconfigure biblical language into new exegetical utterances. In midrashic theology, this hermeneutical technique, known as “enchainment” (ḥarizah), is the process whereby new formulations of divine speech are vocalized as Oral Torah from the vastness of all verbal possibilities in the Written Torah. “The enchainments thus dramatize the unity of Scripture and reveal it as a rabbinic work,” Fishbane affirms. “Indeed, this is ultimately the great achievement of midrashic exegesis.”77 In this way, every exegetical speech-act (parole) is a formulation out of the divine language (langue) of the Bible. “By activating the langue of Scripture, rabbinic paroles keep the fiery speech of Sinai aflame. What is more: reanimated by human breath, the old words rejoice—and not least because they reveal the ‘laughing face’ of God (Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 12.25).”78 The 74 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 37–38 (emphasis in original). In this context, Fishbane cites the midrashic comment in Eliyahu Zutta, II: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, He only gave it as wheat from which to extract flour, and as flax wherewith to weave a garment through [the hermeneutical principles of deduction called] klal u-phrat, prat u-khlal, and klal u-phrat u-khlal.” 75 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 9 (also appears in the second essay below, 81). In its original context, Fishbane’s statement is in relation to Sifrei Deuteronomy 343, but the perspective applies as well to classical rabbinic thought in general. 76 Ibid., 10 (below, 82). In this context, Fishbane cites Songs Rabbah I.2:2 and Sifrei Deuteronomy 313. 77 Ibid., 20 (below, 93) Emphasis in original. 78 Ibid., 20 (below, 93). Cf. Fishbane’s statement: “Exegetical discourse thus speaks from the fullness of God’s canonical langue, revealing ever new iterations of its truth. Our collections of midrashic paroles bear witness to this messianic project” (ibid., 18; below, 91).

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rabbis, Fishbane notes, celebrate “the Sinaitic sparks that are released from Scripture through human interpretation.”79 In classical Judaism, then, exegetical theology is both the medium of Jewish thought, and an agent of revelatory intimacy between Israel and God in exile. Fishbane also demonstrates how medieval kabbalists revolutionized these notions of exegetical revelation in the literature of the Zohar. Whereas the rabbis regarded the Written Torah as “an extension of divine speech,” the later Jewish mystics regard it as “an aspect of Divinity itself.”80 In zoharic hermeneutics, Scripture is thus the sensible garment of God: What the mystical esotericists did was to descend even further into the hidden mysteries of Scripture to that point where the essence of the Bible and the deus revelatus were One. Hereby, the sacrality of the biblical text actually merged with the sacrality of the Godhead. The Bible was not so much a revelation of the divine will, as a revelation of the divine Being—in all its unfathomable depths.81

In part, this radicalization of exegetical theology stems from differences between the biblical-midrashic and zoharic maps of the cosmos, especially with regard to correlations between the divine and the human dimensions of reality.82 Whereas classical Judaism posited a “theosphere” above and separate from the “biosphere,” Fishbane explains, zoharic consciousness collapsed this duality “so that for the mystic the biosphere is really a modality or an actualization of the all-embracing theosphere.”83 According to the Zohar, “Reality is one, and its truth, howsoever diverse, is also one. God, world, and mankind, and also the Torah, template of all, are correlated. This is the mythic and also the mystic truth of this work (‘as is above, so below’); and the task of study and worship is to attain this deeper consciousness.”84 For the kabbalist, then, the palpable Torah—with its concrete language and mythic imagery—is divine in its plain senses, and also at the same time only a re-fraction of its deeper meaning: “The language of Scripture is nothing less than the condensed earthly form of divine speech which descends throughout all the worlds, and which has many levels of meaning at every station thereof.”85 Exegesis is thus the mystical practice through which the kabbalist encounters the various levels of 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., 19 (below, 91). In this context, Fishbane cites BT Sanhedrin 34a. Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 301. Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 124. See Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 69–80, 309–14. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 313. Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 125.

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Divinity revealed and concealed in the sensible language of Scripture. In Fishbane’s poetic formulation, “the hidden myth of Divine Being is encoded in the words and sentences of Scripture, and it is precisely in the exegetical pyrotechnics applied to these words and sentences that the great mystery is articulated.”86 For the kabbalist, the voluminous narratives and commandments of the Written Torah are, in essence, nothing less than an encodement of the ineffable Name of God, the Tetragrammaton.87 In this way, the Zohar intimates a “deep simultaneity that may exist between textual study and spiritual quest,”88 for “exegesis and mystical search are one here.”89 Fishbane also identifies affirmations of exegetical revelation in modern Jewish thought, especially in Buber’s dialogical hermeneutics. For Buber, the revelatory potency of Scripture is inextricably bound to the dialogicalcum-sensory act of listening. The primordial spokenness of Revelation is accessible precisely in the spokenness (Gesprochenheit) of Scripture.90 Thus, the exegete must be truly ready and receptive as a “hearer-reader (Hörleser).”91 According to Fishbane’s characterization of Buber, “the Bible releases the primal forces of Sinai—of response and commitment—to those who hear in it the voice of divine Instruction.”92 This “voice” is not so much the booming voice of a deity as the very dialogical resonance of concrete encounter. For Buber, the language of Scripture springs from those moments in the history of ancient Israel. The words are neither metaphors 86 Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 303. 87 See Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 125. 88 Ibid., 35. 89 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 102. Cf. Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking: “Scriptural exegesis is thus, itself, a spiritual act, and a way to realize the deep mysteries of God’s own Being” (268). Fishbane concludes his book Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (except for appendices) with an allusion to Zohar II.137a. One who follows this citation sees that the Zohar’s teaching here is that one can speak about the Unspeakable precisely because of the oneness of all reality. In other words, despite the fact that we are unable to attain intellectual knowledge about the most supernal realms, the interpenetration of above and below emboldens us to grasp and speak those spiritual heights nonetheless. Zohar II.137a reads: “Although they are supernal secrecies, never known, their streaming flows and streams below; and because of that flow, we in this world have complete faith, and all inhabitants of the world discuss the mystery of faith of the blessed Holy One regarding those rungs—as if they were revealed, not hidden and concealed. Thus . . . from the beginning of the world to its end, the wise of heart discuss those hidden rungs, although they are unknown.” The Zohar, vol. 5, trans. Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 262–63. 90 On spokenness in Buber’s theological hermeneutics, see Fishbane, “Biblical Dialogue of Martin Buber,” Garments of Torah, 82–85. Cf. Martin Buber, “Biblical Humanism,” in On the Bible, ed. Nahum Glatzer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 212–16. 91 See Fishbane, Text and Texture, 12. 92 Fishbane, “The Biblical Dialogue of Martin Buber,” 83.

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to describe “spiritual” processes nor literal reports of “supernatural” events, but rather the “verbal trace” of unspeakable natural events, which give voice to the Voice of encounters.93 For Buber, Fishbane writes, Scripture is the preserved outcry of the genuine ‘spokenness’ (Gesprochenheit) of the events—as they were first articulated in the ‘spontaneously forming memory’ of their human witnesses, and as they were continuously spoken forth by living tradition until the present literary witness had stabilized. The reader must therefore listen attentively to each speech-form, until the most primal one is intuitively heard, and one ‘hears’ the Voice of the Divine Presence as it addressed the ancient Israelites in history.94

When hearer-readers perceive that dialogical throbbing within Scripture’s spokenness, they hear the voice of God. Fishbane thus sees Buber as a twentieth-century incarnation of the age-old trend in Jewish hermeneutics to unify interpretation and revelation in the vibrancy of exegetical illumination. But there is more. One can also detect ways in which Fishbane himself, in his historical explorations, observes textures of revelation that are not so much explicated in Jewish texts as they are between the lines, so to speak. Fishbane does not only follow the tracks of exegesis in Jewish history, but also the tracks of the imagination. If the former draws from the langue of Jewish sources, the latter draws from an even deeper wellspring of theological possibilities—a source that is even more primary than the langue of Scripture. We may call it the langue of Being. Indeed, the exegetical imagination does not only feed on textual sources; it also draws upon historical happenings, biographical experience, embryonic impulses and inklings, and the very primordial pulsations of Being. All of these dynamics are shaped by cultural forces—but, for Fishbane, their roots descend even deeper than that. At all times, this langue of Being is phenomenologically prior to the Oral Torah, the Written Torah, and every other cultural formation. It presses upon the person and shapes all expressions of the exegetical imagination. Just this, Fishbane suggests, is the primary origin of Scripture, or Miqra, “the ‘calling out’ of God—from beyond the treasure house of human language; from the hidden depths of ruaḥ, of ‘spirit’ or ‘breath,’ which precedes speech and animates all the forms and substances of this world.”95 The langue of concrete Being is the headwaters of

93 See Buber, “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” in On the Bible, 8–9. 94 Fishbane, “Martin Buber’s Moses,” Garments of Torah, 94. 95 Fishbane, Text and Texture, 142.

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revelation—even as its subsurface outpourings are funneled and filtered through cultural channels. Fishbane emphasizes this primordial wellspring most vividly in his work on Jewish mythmaking. He claims that rabbinic myth has a “more primary” as well as a “most characteristic” aspect, which are, respectively, “the movement from natural experience to its mythic dramatization; and then, as a further feature, the mythological reformulation of a received linguistic tradition through exegesis.”96 Although the bulk of Fishbane’s scholarship addresses that secondary, “most characteristic” aspect of mythmaking, one should not underestimate the theological gravity of that “more primary” element in his consciousness. “The sounds and sensations of the natural world have been a primary source of mythic speculations since time immemorial,” Fishbane reflects.97 For what sights have not been described as divine activities, and what sounds not heard as sacred speech? Some mythmakers say that the stars testify to the valor of ancient deities; others claim that the roiling sea plots a revolt against the lord of heaven. And who knows if the blood-red dawn is the sign of birth or death in the hidden heights?98

Fishbane associates this primary source of mythmaking with Herder’s philosophy of language, according to which “the earliest dictionary was thus a sounding pantheon.”99 As Fishbane understands it, “mythology is primary and language its faded echo.”100 Consider, for example, his reflection on psalmic combat myths: A situation of personal or national crisis characterizes the psalms and prophecies in which God’s victory over primordial sea monsters is recalled or invoked. For although the precise historical situation involved cannot always be identified in our sources, they all palpably reflect (or refer to) some concrete occasion of suffering or distress when the lack of divine presence was keenly felt. Indeed, it is just the tangible pathos of a human out96 Michael Fishbane, “‘The Holy One Sits and Roars’: Mythopoesis and the Midrashic Imagination,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, ed. Michael Fishbane (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 61. 97 Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 98. 98 Fishbane, “Five Stages of Jewish Myth and Mythmaking,” Exegetical Imagination, 86 (also appears as the third essay below, 95). 99 As quoted in Fishbane, Midrashic Imagination, 61–62; cf. Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 88 (and see below, 97). Fishbane comments: “In Herder’s view, language itself is a ‘faded mythology’ and not its source; for we first experience the sounds of the ‘stirring godhead’ and only then tell its story” (Midrashic Imagination, 62). Cf. Exegetical Imagination, 23–24. 100 Fishbane, Midrashic Imagination, 61.

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cry that gives these texts their tone of urgency, and marks the mythic acts adduced therein as real and significant events in illo tempore.101

As Buber had suggested that biblical narratives bear the traces of concrete dialogical encounters, Fishbane intuits that mythic imagery emanates from the turbulence of historical moments—even if those originary events become buried beneath layers of cultural reformulation and commentary.102 The primordial langue of Being is inexhaustible, and it continues to shape human construction and creativity well after the “sounding pantheon” is translated into cultural forms. To be sure, it both underlies and informs all hermeneutical engagements with tradition.103 This primary source is implicit, at least, in Fishbane’s work on inner-biblical and postbiblical exegesis—for surely there were always life situations and spiritual intuitions that inspired scribes and sages to revise and reinterpret earlier traditions in particular ways at particular times.104 Thus, enactments of exegetical illu101 Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 37. 102 Fishbane seems to express some of his own sentiments when he notes that, for Rosenzweig, “Scripture is an inscription of human experiences. The classical relationship between text and commentary is thus reversed. Indeed, in Rosenzweig’s understanding, the phrase ‘as it is written’ actually introduces a commentary on life.” Garments of Torah, 107. We may infer similarly with regard to Fishbane’s statement that “Buber endeavored to penetrate behind the literary ‘crystallizations’ of the Hebrew saga to the concrete historical experiences of Israel’s religious origins.” Ibid., 94. 103 In this respect, it is significant that the first and final phases of Fishbane’s “five stages of Jewish myth and mythmaking” (see chapter 6 in Exegetical Imagination, or the third essay below) both involve attunements to the raw, pre-conceptual happenings of Being. The first stage is “the creative representation of existence as divine actions described in human terms” (Exegetical Imagination, 87), to which we have already alluded. The fifth stage, however, is that of modern poetry, which catalyzes “a return through subjectivity to the sights and sounds of existence. This renewed attempt to produce a ‘sounding pantheon’ despite the hobbling inflections of self-consciousness is a kind of second naiveté. It mirrors the first stage of mythmaking suggested at the beginning, but darkly, for it is the modern soul that looks through the new glass.” Ibid., 103. Fishbane focuses on the poet Bialik, who “recovers the mythic texture of things,” creates “a personal mythology of the reborn world,” instills in his readers “a natural eye capable of seeing the divine sights of this world,” and thereby fosters “a renewed sense of the sights and sounds of existence.” Ibid., 103–104. Thus, the first and last stages of Jewish mythmaking, which span from antiquity to modernity, demonstrate that the “primary” aspect of mythmaking never disappears completely from Jewish hermeneutics, although it may surface at certain times more than others. Indeed, all five stages somehow incorporate responsiveness to the present dynamics of world and life. For further reflections on Bialik’s poetry, see Michael Fishbane, “In Sight of Insight: Reflections on a Poem by H. N. Bialik,” in Religion, Fiction, and History: Essays in Memory of Ioan Petru Culianu, vol. 2, ed. Sorin Antohi (Bucharest: Nemira, 2001), 190–97. 104 Cf. Fishbane’s comment in Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel: “How biblical culture maintained its sources of authority when these were not sufficient for new circumstances (as often in law and cult); when divine words had apparently gone unfulfilled as

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mination do not only reveal the texts of tradition, but also the textures of Being—in the same breath. One of the richest aspects of Fishbane’s historical work is his bifocal attentiveness to these “primary” and “secondary” dimensions of hermeneutics. He is drawn to the horizon where primordial intuitions become cultural expressions, as well as the hermeneutical processes whereby cultural expressions are revised according to primordial intuitions. And when the philologist finally gazes at the ink of tradition, the natural and cultural layers tend to bleed together. Indeed, they are as intertwined as the adamic and mosaic aspects of the Jewish person.105 In Fishbane’s own constructive theology, which he formally introduced to the world less than a decade ago, he strives to articulate a spiritual orientation that is consonant with his views on historical Jewish theology. His new formulation must be expansive and dynamic enough to engage the hermeneutical core of Jewish thought, and it must be honest and personal enough to lift one’s eyes in the desert of twenty-first-century doubt and disillusionment. As we shall see, the main theological motifs in Fishbane’s historical scholarship discussed above—namely, Jewish theology as exegetical theology, and Jewish theology as a revelatory practice in its own right— inform the very core of his constructive thought. However, nota bene: this correlation does not suggest that preconceived convictions determined Fishbane’s historical observations (although, in truth, no scholar can avoid this perfectly). Rather, it hints how attentive and uncompromising historical inquiry can nourish the growth of new theological insights. Indeed, Fishbane recognizes that modern historiography can be a rich hermeneutical measure in itself, just as the likes of Hillel, Philo, and Isaac

originally proclaimed (as in various promises and prophecies); or when new moral or spiritual meanings were applied to texts which had long since lost their vitality (or restricted this vitality to specific legal or cultic areas), are matters of the greatest interest” (14). 105 In Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, Fishbane acknowledges the grave methodological challenges in any scholarly attempt to differentiate between the primary and secondary dimensions of a given myth. Although he generally adopts the “supposition of (exegetical) secondariness,” he nonetheless concedes that “one must also presume the ‘priority of exegesis’ as a factor to be reckoned with,” and this blurriness hints at “the hermeneutical circle of rabbinic mythmaking. Where does a pre-existent myth end and its scriptural support begin—such that we could say that a given myth is clearly independent of or primary to any subsequent shaping by or contact with the biblical text? And, conversely, Where does exegetical invention begin and a brand new myth result—such that we could assert that the myth is a hermeneutical event wholly independent of pre-existent themes or traditions that may precondition the choice of proof-texts? So formulated, there is no easy or single answer to this dilemma, not least because of the complex conjunction of Scripture and tradition in the rabbinic imagination.” Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 108.

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Luria had theirs. Contemporary academic interpreters of Jewish sources do not break fundamentally from their ancient and medieval predecessors— it is only the particular philosophical frameworks, hermeneutical metrics, and historical circumstances that differ. Present-day historians, too, engage in the age-old hermeneutical practices of interpreting texts according to what they deem most true. Regarding the study of Jewish exegesis, Fishbane writes, The new voice of the contemporary scholar is no more the voice of the old interpreters than theirs was the primary voice of Hebrew Scripture. Like its predecessors, this new voice is also engaged in prolonging the words of the ancient text—despite the new language and contexts in which it speaks. Scholarly discourse may therefore rightly be seen as a kind of supercommentary, analyzing texts with the ideas and methods of one’s own historical situation, and integrating them into new orders of significance. Accordingly, the ideal may be to approximate an authentic double-voicedness: to speak about the text with an intimacy and understanding achieved through philological persistence, but in a voice that is also shaped by the conceptions and concerns of one’s own time and place. I do not believe that the original interpreters did any less, in their own way.106

For Fishbane, any attempt to decipher theological utterances of the past involves the exegetical imagination—“we must always recognize that historical theology is itself a constructivist enterprise at its core.”107

106 Exegetical Imagination, 5. In this vein, Peter Ochs characterizes Fishbane’s scholarly approach to Scripture as “postcritical” insofar as Fishbane both embraces modern historical-critical sensibilities and regards these as hermeneutical pathways into the spiritual meaning of Torah: “As illustrated in Fishbane’s reading, postcritical interpretation does not abandon modernity. It does not therefore ignore historical-critical reading, not its practice of dis-integrating the scriptural text into its purported elements. Instead, it transforms this reading into patterns for uncovering the garments of Torah.” Peter Ochs, “Returning to Scripture: Trends in Postcritical Interpretation,” Crosscurrents 44, no. 4 (Winter 1994–1995): 448. 107 Fishbane, “Images of God for Life and Thought” (unpublished essay). Cf. Fishbane’s observation that the “new scholarly attention to the constitutive inner-history of canonical texts and cultures” has engendered a sense among many scholars that “the past is not viewed as something that is simply or objectively given, but rather as an exegetical construction achieved by cultural memory for its own purposes.” Fishbane, “Canonical Text, Covenantal Communities, and the Patterns of Exegetical Culture,” 141. Cf. Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, where Fishbane acknowledges that the academic study of myth does not break fundamentally from the very history of mythic exegesis that it studies: “The modern interpreter is a further link in this chain of reception. Indeed, to analyze or reconstruct the myths of Hebrew Scriptures and Judaism is to add a new chapter to the cultural work of enlivening and formulating myth in contemporary terms. Such a process does not ensure the historical or analytical validity of the conclusions drawn in any given case; but it does emphasize the fact that the old myths are also revealed and revived anew

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Still, the theologian and the historian must communicate differently— even when they are the selfsame soul. Theologians worth listening to speak personally, wrestle openly, and think with every chamber of their heart. Fishbane offers us such wholeness. “‘Here I am; this is life as I know it.’ Such a confession clears a space for honest theology.”108 After decades of illuminating study and “endless brooding,” Fishbane was finally—“ready.”109 Constructive Theology Fishbane is acutely aware of modernity’s challenges to theology. In the wake of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, how can one even begin to imagine a theological position that is neither opiate, cowardice, nor illusion? Can a historian of religion, who has studied the rise and fall of countless theological movements over the course of millennia, honestly entertain the possibility of creating a new one that brushes with transcendence? Can a philosophically minded scholar in the twenty-first century after Gadamer, Derrida, and Foucault actually speak about theological Truth without blushing? Just here in this place of uncertainty is where Fishbane begins Sacred Attunement: This work is an attempt to ‘do’ theology in a dark and disorienting time— a time sunk in the mire of modernity. Naïveté is out of the question. The mirror of the world reflects back to us our willful epistemologies, our suspicion of values, and the rank perversities of the human heart. Like Kafka, we prowl aimlessly around the debris of old Sinais, in a wasteland of thought. The tablets of despair are strewn everywhere. Old beginnings do not work; they are a dead end. Is theology even possible in such circumstances? And if possible, can it be done without denying the undeniable?110

Fishbane thus begins with questions—difficult questions—and he refuses to run away. He has clearly known storm clouds of meaninglessness. by the work of scholarship—an intriguing and intricate case of logos in the service of mythos” (27). 108 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 2. 109 See Ibid., 211. Be that as it may, one can certainly catch glimpses of Fishbane’s theological “brooding” in his earlier works. I have indicated this to some degree above in my discussion of the theological concerns in his historical scholarship, and I will indicate it further below in my discussion of Fishbane’s constructive theology, mostly in footnotes. 110 Ibid., ix. Kafka’s image of those who “umschleichen den Berg Sinai” (“prowl round Mount Sinai”) appears elsewhere in Fishbane’s work. See “Canonical Text, Covenantal Communities, and the Patterns of Exegetical Culture,” 153; Garments of Torah, 132. For the original context, cf. Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 44–45.

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Everything, it seems—every system of belief and morality, every paradigm of love and holiness—can be relativized and historicized, deconstructed and dismissed. “There is a howling emptiness all around, which mocks our limited attempts to make order and interpret the world.”111 For the avid intellectual in search of the bare truths of world and life at all costs, this darkness may look like the final answer—it may appear to be the tragic but no less real endpoint of genuine seeking, if only we can face it. For Fishbane, however, this place of emptiness is not the ultimate truth. How could one even speak of ultimate truths in such amorphous shadows where all definitions and determinations quickly evaporate? Postures of vigilant deconstructionism or nihilism, for example, would be too decisive and certain: they either shield one’s eyes from genuine emptiness or otherwise convert it into something—or into nothing, as it were—prematurely. Fishbane strives, rather, to hear and harness foundationlessness itself. He senses that such courageous listening unveils a brokenness, to be sure, but also an opening. These moments are “ruptures” or “caesuras,” for they rend the fabric of everyday reality that seems so seamless and tight-knit in the normalcy of habit and routine consciousness. It is normal to flee from caesuras through dismissal and forgetting, or to fight against them with defensive ideologies and rigid rationalizations. But Fishbane senses that if we can bear to open ourselves to this unsettling indeterminacy, to let go of our illusions of absolute certainty and let ourselves simply see what arises— then we may recover some footing. The primal ground is not in the form of a new abstract truth or heady answer, but in the very concreteness of . . . of that which remains when we let go of insistent narratives and ceaseless sense-making. In the sudden spaciousness of caesura, we may perceive the very pure, pre-interpreted and preprocessed pulsations and sensations of raw Being. At all times, we are surrounded, permeated, and, indeed, constituted by the palpable dynamism and utterly unknown vastness of existence. This is-ness is primordially independent of my will and intentionality. The molecules and energies of worldliness swarm unspeakably into forms of happening and history. Even the cells and vitals of my own body—without which none of this language or observation could even take place—pulsate and process autonomically, beyond my controls of knowledge and foresight. But, see, even here in this wordy description we get lost again in the abstractions of thought—about being, about concreteness— and we lose sight of the very nakedness of that which presses palpably 111 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 173.

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upon perception in every moment. There is no secret more mysterious than the very tangibility of being, which slips away constantly from the clutches of consciousness. The mind cannot imagine a noumenality more sublime than the ever-changing and ever-unspeakable flow of phenomenality itself, if only we can see it on the hither side of lazy dogmas and calcified ideas.112 “We have eyes to see, but our minds are filled with idols,”113 Fishbane laments. But moments of rupture rip everyday veils and reveal the very elusive Site of all there is—“an absolute ‘somethingness,’ pulsing in elemental specificity—for we suddenly sense the raw plenitude of existence; but here too, simultaneously, it seems is a revelation of primordial ‘nothingness,’ . . . for we also sense that the event is in excess of human meaning.”114 Here is the first glow of Fishbane’s theology—just on the horizon of our most basic mindfulness.

112 Fishbane suggests that this is especially the case for “moderns, who find their theological challenges on earth and not in some concealed chamber on high.” Sacred Attunement, 145. In short, he affirms, “The phenomenal world is all that we have.” Sacred Attunement, 13. It is not that Fishbane necessarily denies the ontological possibility of a noumenal transcendence, but he insists that tastes of such heights or depths are accessible only through phenomenality. For further reflections on Fishbane’s ontology, see below note 114. 113 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 2. 114 Ibid., 19. Fishbane’s language here of “somethingness” and “nothingness” bears traces of Rabbi Azriel’s kabbalistic notions of being (yesh) and nothingness (ayin), as well as Rosenzweig’s existential meditations on Naught (Nichts) and Aught (Etwas). See Fishbane’s footnote in Sacred Attunement, 327–28. One should be wary to conclude, however, that Fishbane adopts one or the other of these worldviews as philosophically foolproof. As to whether his ontology (if he indeed “has” one in a strict sense) resembles that of Neoplatonism or any other school of thought, I shall leave that for others to discuss—and I fear that such philosophical labels would eclipse the qualities of perception and attunement that he wishes to foster. Fishbane thinks philosophically, and he offers us a philosophical theology (see his sixth essay in this volume, “Biblical Hermeneutics and Philosophical Theology”), but one must be mindful of how Fishbane does and does not operate philosophically. The following statement is revealing in this regard: “And though we may not follow R. Azriel in his particular mystical ontology of divine emanations, we may nevertheless strain to understand his teaching as a great truth of theology—still pertinent for our lives.” Sacred Attunement, 52. In the spirit of Franz Rosenzweig, Fishbane’s thought springs from dialectical tensions between philosophy and theology—where philosophy addresses conceptual and timeless truths, and theology addresses concrete and temporal revelations. For Fishbane’s most explicit reflections on the relationship between philosophy and theology, see his sixth essay in this volume, “Biblical Hermeneutics and Philosophical Theology.” Cf. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 114–18. Buber’s reflections on the relationship between religion and philosophy (Buber did not use the term “theology” in his own work) also bear on this theme. See “Religion and Philosophy,” in Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1988), 25–46.

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For Fishbane, the most primary response to such moments of beholding is “humility” and “tremors of awe” before the teeming vastness.115 He then goes further to note that these moments of rupture may evoke senses of moral awareness and responsibility, for “we become transparent to ourselves as makers of meaning.”116 We see, if only for an instant, that we are born into a vast and vibrant swirl of sensations and stimuli, and every stitch of conscious existence—every action and utterance, decision and judgment—is an interpretation of this ever-unknown totality, which we determine. “There is no self-evident vastness unmediated by persons and their perceptions.”117 At all times, we are primordially and fundamentally hermeneutical beings. This is our basic nature. “Humans are thrust into the vastness of the world with its apparent givens and formalities. So much is this so, that we may easily forget how much we bear responsibility for the way we construe things and interpret purpose or behavior. Nothing is just there as a matter of fact.”118 This “awakening to the realization that our 115 See Fishbane, “Ethics and Sacred Attunement,” in Journal of Religion 93, no. 4 (October 2013): 422. Cf. Fishbane’s further reflections on hermeneutical humility below in Part I of his first essay in this volume, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics.” 116 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 82. There are some similarities between the primordial awareness to which Fishbane directs his readers’ attention and Heschel’s notion of “wonder” or “radical amazement.” Heschel defines this quality of awareness as “the state of maladjustment to words and notions,” wherein one does not (yet) wrestle with philosophical concepts and scientific conundrums but realizes, rather, “that even the minimum of perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all.” See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 11–17, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 45–53. Heschel and Fishbane sense similarly that the first inklings of Divinity arise in one’s consciousness through glimpses of grounds of being that are ontologically and phenomenologically prior to any cognitive constructions. However, they speak about this state of awareness in quite different ways. Whereas Heschel stresses feelings of “wonder” and “amazement” in relation to the “ineffable,” Fishbane might regard such terms as already too value-laden and theologically charged. For Fishbane, the most primordial awareness elicits “tremors of awe” and a humble sense of hermeneutical responsibility. Whereas Heschel is stirred quite quickly, it seems, to impulses of praise and prayer, Fishbane is more cautious. In God in Search of Man, especially, Heschel intersperses reflections on radical amazement with biblical citations and reference to Jewish liturgical practices. Fishbane, in contrast, is unwilling to make such a quick leap from raw awe to cultural formations. This is most evident in the first chapter of his Sacred Attunement, entitled “Toward Theology,” which proceeds only very gradually to the normative elements in chapter 2, “A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology.” This second chapter appears below as Fishbane’s fifth essay in this volume. 117 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 40. 118 Ibid., 81. Fishbane’s notion of finding oneself “thrust into the vastness of the world” may remind some readers of Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). Fishbane has not engaged explicitly with Heidegger’s thought, although there are some observable correlations between their philosophies. To be sure, some of those correlations

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world of meanings is constructed through ongoing evaluations and interpretations” thus elicits our primordial sense of “moral awareness.”119 Every moment pours forth a distinct flood of phenomena and possibilities—and everything depends on how we respond. All that we say and do is a hermeneutical refraction and reshaping of the otherwise “mute and meaningless” vastness.120 There is thus a silent command of sorts that issues forth from rupture—something like “Remember, Do Something, or Have Sympathy.”121 Something makes a claim on us, commanding our attention.122 These are the rough contours of general theology, for Fishbane. Caesural moments guide the courageous beholder to a “great circumscribing vastness,” a “most primal Depth (beyond the Beyond of all conception),” a “throbbing of divine everlastingness,” which Fishbane associates with God, so to speak.123 And there is a “voice” that makes a moral claim from the depths of this Source. Many activities and stimuli in life may bring about such “attentiveness to the double dimension” of the elemental and the human.124 However, for Fishbane, “theology tries to transform this perception of elementariness into a sustained way of life and thought.”125

are by virtue of the fact that Fishbane is situated in the schools of philosophical hermeneutics and, to some degree, phenomenology, both of which Heidegger shaped indelibly. However, one should not overestimate the influence of Heidegger on Fishbane. One might presume that Fishbane’s critique of Heidegger would resemble his critique of Husserl in his essay “A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology” below. According to Fishbane, Husserl intended to turn “to the things themselves,” but instead “ascended to a formal, transcendent plane of reflection, high above the nitty-gritty of natural life, wherefrom he believed he could have an immediate apprehension of existence as it presented itself to human ego-consciousness.” Fishbane, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics,” below, 55. According to Levinas, Gadamer, Buber, and others (all of whom influenced Fishbane significantly) Heidegger erred similarly insofar as he attempted to turn to the concreteness of being in the world, but ultimately remained excessively abstract and solipsistic in his analytic of Dasein. 119 Fishbane, “Ethics and Sacred Attunement,” 422. 120 See Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 39–40. 121 Ibid., 20. 122 For Fishbane’s account of this emergence of hermeneutical humility and responsibility, see also Part I of his first essay in this volume, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics.” 123 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 129, 34, 109. 124 On “attentiveness to the double dimension,” see ibid., 22. Cf. Fishbane’s reflection on “twofold consciousness: of the fullness, vast and sovereign, and the particular occasion, specific and personal.” Ibid., 123. For Fishbane’s exploration of ways in which paintings, music, and poetry can promote experiences of caesura and rupture, see ibid., 22–32. He stresses, for example, that “the artistic vision helps us to see that we see constructively, and to perceive that the world is always coming into focus in numerous shades and angles.” Ibid., 24. 125 Ibid., 33 (emphasis in original).

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Theology is thus not a discourse of revealed doctrines or metaphysical proofs, but a “spiritual exercise of the highest order” and a “sustained way of life.”126 In a bold subordination of theological discourse to that which it is supposed to accomplish, Fishbane states, “God is a cultivated presence and theology its handmaiden.”127 The goal of theology is thus not so much “knowledge of God” as “God-mindedness.”128 Fishbane calls this a “hermeneutical theology,” for it both springs from and attends to one’s hermeneutical position in the world. However, how does one even begin to develop such a theological orientation? With what language does one turn toward this Wellspring of existence, and how does one begin to formulate, let alone respond to Its claims? It may be tempting, especially for contemporary seekers who sense that “language can never mean what it says or even quite reach its object,”129 to envisage a theology that is purely nonverbal rupture and response. However, Fishbane affirms that while language can verily distract us from concrete reality, it is also our primary medium for engagement with it. “Language is thus both a symbolic form that abstracts us from the ‘brute’ facticity of things, and the means for their ‘spiritual’ appropriation and internalization. It is therefore our most primary rationality, giving our minds their most basic mindfulness.”130 To simply maintain a passive, mystical silence, as it

126 Ibid., xv, 33. 127 Ibid., 40. 128 Fishbane uses this phrase “God-mindedness” in ibid., 198, and elsewhere. For Fishbane’s perspective on what it means to “know God,” see his two interpretations of Proverbs 3:6 (“Know God in all your ways”) in ibid., 111–13. Neither of his interpretations suggests an intellectual knowledge in the strict sense. 129 Ibid., ix. 130 Ibid., 15. Cf. Fishbane’s earlier formulation in Text and Texture: “Man must surely have intuited and experienced very early the magical power of words to create reality and control imagination. What is sayable is knowable. And what can be said can be shared and transmitted. To give verbal shape to experience is to control the understanding of it indefinitely. Language both constructs a universe of meaning and becomes the means whereby that universe is presented to consciousness.” Ibid., 3. One may discern the influence of philosophical hermeneutics here, particularly Gadamer’s insistence that one is “in” the world through being “in” language. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), especially the third chapter of Part III, entitled “Language as Horizon of a Hermeneutical Ontology.” However, Fishbane’s historical scholarship demonstrates ways in which Jewish texts and tradition also affirm the inseparability of language and world. Indeed, the opening chapter of Genesis indicates that the universe was created through speech-acts, and Fishbane points out that the Jewish Palestinian Targums render the opening words of Genesis: “with the word (viz., with speech) the world was created” (see Garments of Torah, 82). For Fishbane’s comments on classical rabbinic notions that the universe is created through language, see Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 102, 242n and Exegetical Imagination, 13–15 (the latter citation also appears below in Fishbane’s

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were—to avoid the problem of theological language altogether—would be to neglect the very gravity of hermeneutical responsibility. The challenge, then, is to develop theological language that sensitizes one to the irreducible facticity that transcends language and which thereby attunes us to the palpable particularities of existence in each moment. “We must be sure that the vessels of language mediate the vastness of possibilities emergent from God’s effectivity, and that they do so with moral sensibility for what may be called into being.”131 Fishbane also insists that it would be misguided to attempt to uproot theology from cultural grounds. After all, we are always already shaped by such forces. No experience of rupture is unmediated, and no response to caesura is unconditioned. To deny this fact is to ignore it. “For we are creatures that ever shape the surrounding vastness into cultural forms and formulations, through our evaluations of its nature and being. Fact and value are always intertwined for us.”132 For Fishbane, this inevitability further expands and defines our sense of moral awareness and hermeneutical responsibility, for it highlights our capacity to choose particular practices, paradigms, texts, and traditions that might cultivate our interpretive faculties in ways we see fit—and, moreover, we are able to revise those very cultural elements through hermeneutical engagement. Thus, the moralcum-theological question for Fishbane is not “Shall I adopt a tradition,” but rather, “Which tradition shall I adopt?” Instead of approaching the world with hermeneutical dispositions shaped by various cultural, biological, and

second essay in this volume). Cf. Fishbane’s comments on related concepts in the philosophies of Buber and Rosenzweig in Garments of Torah, 82 and 100–101. Cf. Fishbane’s references to the “exegetical construction of reality” in Kiss of God, 85 and 126, and Exegetical Imagination, 4; cf. his reference to the “exegetical representation of reality” in Kiss of God, 64–65. See also below in Fishbane’s fourth essay, “The Bible in the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” where Fishbane comments on the traditional notion that the universe was created out of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. 131 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 42. 132 Fishbane, “Ethics and Sacred Attunement,” 422. Cf. below “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics”: “The very idea of a tabula rasa is a figment of selfdeception, erasing the tabulation of our mortal indebtedness to tradition that comprises the deep codes of our human condition. Who could think that we could truly start anew, self-made? Even when we stumble or pause, is not our regeneration variously dependent on inherited matrices, and thus a reinterpretation or sorts? So it seems” (59). As we discussed earlier, Fishbane already affirmed in his historical scholarship that the self is always conditioned by tradition, and there is no wholly unmediated perception of the world. Revelation and interpretation converge in the exegetical imagination, and one cannot distinguish neatly between the “more primary” natural dimension and “most characteristic” cultural dimension of mythmaking. See Fishbane’s third essay below. For a theological affirmation of the person as both natural and cultural at all times, see Sacred Attunement, 163–4.

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biographical forces beyond one’s control, one can alternatively approach the world with hermeneutical dispositions consciously cultivated through intentional practices. “Humans thus have the singular capacity to live thoughtfully and deliberately—in a responsible freedom. Indeed, a great realm of freedom marks their finitude, and they can even substitute one ḥiyyuv [obligation] for another or establish different hierarchies of duty and obligation.”133 According to Fishbane, the optimum cultural forms will be those that engage in hermeneutical acts of construction with both humility and moral awareness: humility, before the fact that all conventions and conclusions will be no more than interpretations of the absolute vastness, and moral awareness, through an attunement to the particularities of phenomena as they appear. In his attunement to the immediacy of caesura, beneath the structures of tradition and culture, Fishbane speaks as a natural being born into the universe. Yet he also of course speaks as a cultural being from within a particular textual universe, and he ultimately articulates the contours of 133 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 194–95. This is the sense in which Fishbane embraces the rabbinic teaching that what is ḥarut (“inscribed”) on the tablets is actually ḥerut (“freedom”). See Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 191–96 and 228n; cf. Mishnah, Abot 6:2. It is noteworthy that Fishbane’s interpretation of the “freedom [ḥerut] on the tablets” differs fundamentally from that of Buber, who exhorts his audience to liberate themselves from the bondage of religion’s heteronomous normativity. As God is unconditioned, Buber insists, so too must humans be unconditioned. See Martin Buber, “Ḥerut: On Youth and Religion,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1967), esp. 82 and 84. Although Fishbane and Buber similarly stress the spiritual imperative to devote careful attention to concrete reality, Fishbane regards halakhic practice as a tool for the ongoing cultivation of such attunement, while Buber regards it as a hindrance. One of the crucial sources of this disagreement lies in their divergent views on mediation. Whereas Fishbane affirms that all apprehensions and perceptions are mediated and conditioned, Buber suggests that dialogical encounters are definitively unmediated and unconditioned. “The relation to the You is unmediated [unmittelbar],” Buber writes. “Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness . . . Before the immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit] of the relation, everything mediate [alles Mittelbare] becomes negligible.” Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 63. For Buber, then, laws inherited from the past of cultural memory cloud one’s vision of the utterly present Other over-against me. As Buber wrote to Franz Rosenzweig: “I cannot admit the law . . . into the realm of my will, if I am to hold myself ready as well for the unmediated word of God directed to a specific hour of life.” See Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955), 111. In contrast, Fishbane believes that elements of cultural mediation are unavoidable, and he regards traditional Jewish praxis as a particular way of life that effectively enhances one’s capacities for hearing and doing mindfully and dialogically in concrete reality. For further reflections on this divergence between Fishbane and Buber vis-à-vis Jewish practice, see Sam Berrin Shonkoff, “The Two Tablets: On Dissolving Ethical-Theological Dualism in Sacred Attunement,” Journal of Religion 93, no. 4 (2013): 445–50.

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hermeneutical theology in terms of Jewish tradition. We have already discussed how Fishbane’s historical scholarship showed ways in which Jewish theology has been exegetical (read: hermeneutical) through and through, and how it has been a spiritual practice in its own right. As we shall see, these elements are present as well in his constructive theology. His thought is thus rooted firmly in the grounds of Jewish sources, even while it is a deeply personal meditation—that is, it is an expression of his own exegetical imagination. Fishbane turns to the Torah as precisely the sort of foundationless foundation that hermeneutical theology demands. He regards it as a microcosm of life itself and as a rich field for the cultivation of God-mindedness. The Torah itself is threefold. First and foremost, the preverbal torah kelulah, “the Torah of All-in-All” whose primordial letters spell out the totality of Being, refers to a depth and wholeness of reality that lies at the ineffable core of Divinity. “Only this Torah truly comes from the mouth of God,” writes Fishbane, affirming his commitment to historical-critical scholarship, but also to his consideration of this field in a theological light. Then there is the torah she-bikhtav (Written Torah), the Hebrew Bible itself, the sacred and imperfect attempt of ancient Israel to refract the torah kelulah into finitude. Finally, there is the torah she-be’al peh (Oral Torah), which includes millennia of Jewish responses—exegetical, emotional, behavioral—to the ink of Scripture. However, the relations among these three forms of Torah are more complex than they may appear. As Fishbane’s historical scholarship demonstrated, and as he continues to highlight in his constructive theology, the phenomenon of inner-biblical interpretation (and all the multivocality that this involves) shows how the Written Torah already gestated the Oral Torah from the beginning.134 Furthermore, the fact that the utterances of both Written Torah and Oral Torah always incorporate human responses to historical circumstance and spiritual intuition—what we referred to earlier in the context of Fishbane’s historical scholarship as the langue of Being— indicates ways in which the torah kelulah always infuses Torah in all its forms.135 The Torah as a whole is thus a “threefold chord,”136 always directing the hearer-readers’ attention to the full tonal range of reality between illimitable vastness and traditional form. For Fishbane, a living Jewish the134 For example, see Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 46–48 and 59–61, 160–62. See also the subsection “Traces of Hermeneutical Theology in Scripture” below in the first essay, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics.” 135 See Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 160–63. 136 Ibid., 60.

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ology lies precisely in the “concordant discord”137 of the multiform Torah, and it “will ever try to maintain this complexity and dynamism.”138 Furthermore, the practice of biblical interpretation itself is fourfold. Fishbane draws from the four traditional modes of Jewish biblical exegesis, which constitute the acronym PaRDeS: peshat (the plain or contextual meaning of the text), remez (symbolic or allegorical interpretation), derash (theological and legal reformulations of scripture, often involving creative uses of intertextuality among all canonical sources), and sod (the “secret” or mystical dimension of scripture, inseparable from one’s own spiritual life). While some classical exegetes have favored one method of interpretation or posited a hierarchy of methods, Fishbane endorses a radically integrated and dynamic approach. “Not bound by the exclusive importance of any one mode of reading and thinking, or by fixed hierarchies of value, we may live with the awareness of a more complex simultaneity of meanings.”139 Insofar as each hermeneutical mode casts a different light on Scripture, PaRDeS perpetually challenges static readings or rigid conclusions. However, they are not only modes of reading the texts of tradition, but also modes of reading the “texts” of life. For how we approach the Written Torah inevitably influences how we approach the torah kelulah, and vice versa.140 Each aspect of PaRDeS attunes us in a distinct way to the vastness of being, always rupturing trances of fixity and returning us to the clear-sightedness of uncertainty. The threefold chord of Torah, the fourfold method of exegesis, and the spontaneous intermingling of all these various modes underscore the dialogical tenor of Fishbane’s theology. In harmony with his historical observations that Jewish exegetical theology has traditionally extended beyond verbal discourses into embodied 137 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 131. 138 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 163. These musical metaphors are apt, as “attunement” is the watchword of Fishbane’s theology. For Fishbane, spiritual receptivity involves perceptions of rich, if not chaotic oneness amidst the many vibrations of existence—without reduction or simplification. This element of oneness is especially apparent in German translations of “attunement” as Einstimmung and Einklang, both of which contain the prefix of unification. See Michael Fishbane, Einstimmung auf das Heilige—Auf der Suche nach der Transzendenz: Eine jüdische Theologie, trans. Manfred Oeming (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2012); Michael Fishbane, “Theologie, Einklang, und spirituelle Praxis,” Evangelische Theologie 72 (2012): 387–97. 139 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 104–5. 140 Cf. Gadamer’s claim that one’s theoretical understanding of a text and one’s concrete applications of that understanding are inseparable processes within a single hermeneutical practice: “Application is neither a subsequent nor merely an occasional part of the phenomenon of understanding, but codetermines it as a whole from the beginning.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 333.

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exegesis and zitathaftes Leben, Fishbane now emphasizes the concreteness of his own constructive thought. “A living theology is ever an embodied theology,” he declares, “one that is enacted every day in the everyday.”141 Hermeneutical theology is an embodied theology, first of all, through its relations to the Written Torah. The traditional Jew “interprets” the Bible’s language of commandment through corporeal performance of biblical imperatives, and in this respect, “halakhah is living Jewish theology in word and deed.”142 Furthermore, Fishbane emphasizes how the very carnality of recitation constitutes a deep dimension of biblical interpretation. This is most evident in his portrayal of the hermeneutics of sod (the “secret” dimension of PaRDeS): One reads scripture in an act of bodily presence. Ideally, one should feel oneself totally engaged in the recitation of the text: there are the attentions of the eye, the hearing of the ear, the speaking of the mouth, the rhythms of the breath, and the full realm of tactile sensations involved in touching the text or sitting before it. Our reading is thus accompanied by a sense of embodiment in a most primary way.143

Sod is the most “mystical” hermeneutic precisely due to its concreteness, for just here is the visible spectrum of God’s torah kelulah, which heady discourse and philosophical ruminations all too often conceal. This guides us, then, to a second way in which Fishbane’s hermeneutical theology is an embodied theology: through its relations to the torah kelulah. Insofar as this immanent vastness is the source and substance of spatiotemporal being, the very vibrations and movements of life become the ink and scroll of hermeneutical theology. Fishbane wants to convey “a theology that is no more and no less than a ‘speaking about God’ out of the thickness of human existence, through the vitalities of one’s breath and

141 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 198. He also refers to his thought as a “performative theology.” Ibid., 44. For more extensive reflections on Fishbane’s “embodied theology,” see Shonkoff, “The Two Tablets,” 438–41. 142 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 115. Fishbane also affirms the traditional ideal of Torah study “for the sake of doing.” See ibid., 149–51. Furthermore, he emphasizes that halakhic activity in general promotes rupture moments repeatedly throughout the day, insofar as it disrupts habitual consciousness: “Daily life is filled with events that largely escape routine attention. It is halakhah that tries to refocus the mind so that one may acknowledge the many occasions of life as they happen.” Ibid., 121. 143 Ibid., 101. Cf. Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 84–85 and Sacred Attunement, 219f., where he refers to Buber and Rosenzweig’s biblical hermeneutics, according to which readers— or “hearer-readers,” as it were—attune themselves to the sensible rhythms and “breath units” of Scripture in its spokenness. See also above, 26.

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body in the course of life, on the way to death.”144 The particular ways in which one refracts the potential energies of existence into kinetic enactments comprise the ultimate expressions of exegetical “thought.” And just here is the site of theological truth: “theology is not merely a type of thinking, but a type of living. For it is in just this way that it is tested and put to the proof.”145 Fishbane’s hermeneutical theology clearly has bold implications for concepts of religious “faith.” To be sure, such implications were already latent in his historical explorations of exegetical Jewish thought, which is “not propositional but concrete through and through,”146 but now Fishbane articulates his own personal meditations on these matters. He suggests that the Hebrew word emunah should not be translated as “faith,” but rather “faithfulness,” for it is not an abstract declaration of belief so much as a firm attentiveness to what is happening. Living with steadfast emunah in the world means, theologically, to stand steadfastly within the world as an expression of God’s ever-happening effectivity . . . Our faithfulness is tested by the character of our responses, and by our capacity to sustain the full brunt of what occurs at any time, without sliding into simplicities or reducing the complexities.147

Emunah is expressed when “one’s entire body and being say, ‘Amen veAmen’ (Yes and Truly)”—not as an intellectual affirmation, but as a hermeneutical posture.148 Obviously, there are times when it is extremely difficult to embody the “amen” of faithfulness, and Fishbane is not one to spout

144 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 32–33. 145 Ibid., xii.; cf. ibid., 214n. Fishbane adds here that this phrase “put to the proof” refers to Buber’s notion of Bewährung. For further discussions of this concept in Buber’s thought, see Fishbane, “Justification through Living”; cf. Garments of Torah, 89–90. Cf. Fishbane’s comment later in Sacred Attunement: “A living theology proves itself in the hearing and the doing of each moment, at all times” (114). 146 Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 6. 147 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 168. See Fishbane’s remarkably similar description of Buber’s concept of emunah in Garments of Torah, 86–90. Buber, according to Fishbane, affirms that “one cannot know . . . God cognitively. But one can be faithful to Him and His sovereign Unity by living steadfastly through the totality of experience as it presents itself.” Garments of Torah, 88 (emphasis in original). 148 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 102. Emunah and amen are etymologically related. Cf. Fishbane’s comments in the context of Rosenzweig’s theology: “The life-affirming word Amen (Truly) is the base for the biblical words emet (truth), emunah (faith) and ye-amen (verify). . . . [I]n the response of ‘Amen’ to life one faithfully affirms its truth. Faith is thus the affirmation of the truth with one’s whole life.” Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 110–11.

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theodicy in the face of grief.149 There are experiences of trauma and tragedy, and there is the gnawing thought at times that life is meaningless. Indeed, Fishbane affirms that emunah is always “locked in battle” with the sense of futility.150 Moreover, there is grave evil in the world—and insofar as Fishbane suggests that evil originates in acts of disregard or turning away, there is a constant tension as well between evil and emunah.151 Faithfulness does not require rational explanations for why there is evil or suffering in the world. It only requires this: “the courage ‘not to run away from what is happening.’”152 A core task of hermeneutical theology is to remain in relation—to people, to life, to the vastness of being in all its complexity. Indeed, for Fishbane, this is no less than standing firm before the revelation of God. We have discussed Fishbane’s historical observations about how Jewish hermeneutics blurs distinctions between interpretation and revelation, and he affirms this sensibility as well in his personal theology.153 However, he also expands upon this principle in Jewish hermeneutics with his own psychologically rich tones and intuitions. Moses is the paradigmatic one who takes a stand before the yawning caesura and faces the “amoral welter of world-being” in its particular form at a particular moment and comes out of this whirlwind with tablets of moral awareness and cultural instruction.154 This Torah is therefore not a comprehensive instruction but a specific shaping of the torah kelulah through the heart and mind of one called Moses (and his disciples), and formulated in the style and idiom of the times. At Sinai, Moses bent his being toward God’s great voice and heard therein the enfolded possibility of life and action. He stood firm in this welter and wonder, and slowly gathered the impulses of the torah kelulah in his heart,

149 Fishbane’s reflections on faithfulness amidst painful experience are not without his own personal trials. It is poignant that in the last months of his work on Sacred Attunement, he suffered the sudden loss of his daughter-in-law, Leah Levitz Fishbane—the wife of his son Eitan, and the mother of his first granddaughter. See his words in Sacred Attunement, 212. See also Eitan’s deeply moving reflections on this loss in Eitan Fishbane, Shadows in Winter: A Memoir of Loss and Love (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 150 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 172–75. 151 For Fishbane’s reflections on the nature of evil, see his “Ethics and Sacred Attunement,” 432–33. 152 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 99–100. Fishbane quotes Rosenzweig here. 153 For example, see Fishbane’s first essay below, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics,” where he outlines “a hermeneutical praxis whereby revelation through Scripture and its study interfuse” (70), and he affirms that “Scripture is only stillborn for those who do not know the midwifery of exegesis” (73). 154 See Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 59. This appears as well below in the fifth essay, “A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology.”

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combining his own wisdom and experience with his recollection of the exodus and a sense of national destiny.155

The Written Torah is thus revealed as an interpretation of the torah kelulah. This scriptural record then continued to undergo “exegetical elaborations or innovations” in subsequent centuries of ancient Israel, according to changing life circumstances and historical insights.156 And the development of Oral Torah—from the classical literature of the sages through the present interpretations of contemporary commentators—is no less informed by the torah kelulah. Divine Scripture and traditional interpretation are thus revealed according to the same basic hermeneutical schemes: Repeatedly, the ‘Shall-Be’ of God has been received by the human heart and shaped into modes of spiritual disclosure: in the most formative times the divine reality and pulse of life found expression in the multiform Written Torah (the torah she-bikhtav); and in subsequent times, these expressions themselves became the basis for ongoing expansions of the emergent Oral Torah (the torah she-be‘al peh). In turn, in the most marvelous ways, the latter also remained responsive to changing life-conditions and values, as manifested in God’s ongoing and multiform world-expression (the torah kelulah).157

Sacred Scripture and traditional interpretation are thus both hermeneutical refractions of God’s torah kelulah. While the torah she-bikhtav may very well be a revelatory “Torah from God,” Fishbane affirms, no such revelation is ever “the absolute Torah of God, the torah kelulah, whose reality throbs around the letters and words of the Torah from Sinai.”158 Fishbane’s personal conception of revelation thus expands upon his scholarly intuitions vis-à-vis the history of Jewish hermeneutics: The parole of Jewish commentary (including the “commentary” of the Written Torah itself!) has always emerged, in part, as interpretive response to the unfiltered vastness of raw reality—what we referred to earlier as the langue of Being—and just this is what Fishbane now designates as the torah kelulah. The dynamics of divine revelation are structurally similar to those of the exegetical imagination. Only now Fishbane strives to speak subjectively from the heart of the matter rather than objectively from scholarly sidelines. 155 Sacred Attunement, 160. Cf. below in “Modern Jewish Theology”: “Moses (and all who spoke in his name) once filtered and sorted this profoundly ‘interfused’ (kelulah) Reality with hermeneutical care, and refined its impulses with spiritual and moral purpose. In such a way, we may suppose, God’s Heavenly Torah (Torah min-Ha-Shamayim, the Torah of God-Shamayim), is revealed through Moses’s Torah at Sinai (Torah mi-Sinai)” (78–79). 156 Fishbane, Sacred Attunement, 160–62. 157 Ibid., 146. 158 Ibid., 62.

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Theological truth is not something that one can profess monologically or possess graspingly, and divine revelation is ever changing, ever incomplete, and ever dialogical. However, Fishbane maintains nonetheless that something is revealed within the hermeneutical hubbub of tradition, no matter how dynamic and unthinkable that something may be. It is helpful here to contrast Fishbane with Foucault. In his attempt to “escape the naïvety of all positivisms,” Foucault insists in The Archaeology of Knowledge that his discourse is merely a discourse about discourses: but it is not trying to find in them a hidden law, a concealed origin that it only remains to free; nor is it trying to establish by itself, taking itself as a starting-point, the general theory of which they would be the concrete models. It is trying to deploy a dispersion that can never be reduced to a single system of differences, a scattering that is not related to absolute axes of reference; it is trying to operate a decentering that leaves no privilege to any centre.159

Foucault, much like Fishbane, is committed to practices of radical decentering, to unearthing the discord in discourses that others might wish to cast as consistent and consonant. However, when Fishbane gestures toward the torah kelulah as the primordial All-in-All underlying diversities of discourse and existence, he diverges sharply from Foucault. To be sure, the divine vastness that Fishbane affirms does not bespeak a new discursive concept or definite image—a “hidden law,” “general theory,” or “single system,” to use Foucault’s phrasings. But it may very well indicate a privileged “centre” of some sort—a Center, however, that is thoroughly dynamic and dialogical, akin perhaps to Buber’s notion of the living Center (Mitte) that pulsates ineffably in the Between of I-You encounter.160 For Foucault, the “word archaeology is not supposed to carry any suggestion of anticipation; it simply indicates a possible line of attack for the analysis of verbal performances,”161 but for Fishbane, “soundings into the archeology of the imagination . . . performs a maieutic role: it becomes a mid-wife for the rebirth and release of long-forgotten or long-repressed memories of the culture.”162 Whereas Foucault distances himself from any constructivist tendencies, Fishbane seeks to nourish cultural foundations, albeit with attunement to foundationlessness. 159 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 205. I focus on this particular text here because it is the book of Foucault that Fishbane integrated into his seminar on “Hermeneutics and Tradition” at the University of Chicago Divinity School in Fall 2012. Thus, I know that Fishbane has studied it carefully and, moreover, as a student in that classroom, I had the opportunity to hear his personal reflections on it. 160 See Buber, I and Thou, Third Part. 161 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 206. 162 Fishbane, “The Teacher and the Hermeneutical Task,” 717–18. See above, 7.

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Foucault proceeds to insist that his “archeological” discourse defies conventions of disciplinary categorization: “If philosophy is memory or a return of the origin, what I am doing cannot, in any way, be regarded as philosophy; and if the history of thought consists in giving life to half-effaced figures, what I am doing is not history either.”163 Accordingly, Foucault would likely dismiss Fishbane’s thought as philosophical insofar as it gropes for intimations or “memory” of an original Ground of discourse, or as historical insofar as it entails “giving life” to hermeneutical subjects. However, let us complicate this assessment even further. Fishbane’s thought is of course not only philosophical and historical, but also theological. Like Foucault, he seeks to break out of idealist-humanist notions of a transcendental ego and sovereign subject. However, in this very pursuit, Fishbane turns to theology in a Rosenzweigian sense. It is precisely theology, Rosenzweig claims, that offers a “bridge from the most subjective to the most objective.”164 In contrast to philosophy, Rosenzweig writes, “theology itself does not see its content as contents, but as event—that is to say not as life [Leben], but as experience [Erlebnis]—the pre-conditions are not conceptual elements, but existing reality.”165 In this regard, the truth of God that Fishbane perceives amidst clashing complexities of text and world is not philosophical content but theological event, “not propositional but concrete through and through.” Wholly Other and utterly present, this unspeakable Truth crowning through caesura is no more and no less than—Revelation. In surveying the expanse of Fishbane’s historical and constructive work, one senses ways in which his thought challenges common conceptions of monotheism. The most conspicuous challenge comes from his studies of monotheistic mythology, which centuries’ worth of rationalist commentators and critics have claimed does not even properly exist.166 However, 163 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 205. 164 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 116. 165 Ibid., 117 166 Fishbane notes that Maimonides was the first major figure to conclude authoritatively that Judaism dispelled mythology, although there are even earlier traces of this in Jewish thought. See Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 7–8. Furthermore, Fishbane points out that many modern historical-critical scholars have made similarly apologetic claims, positing “an essential contrast between polytheism and monotheism, with the former presumed to have a certain set of traits deemed characteristic of myth (concrete, anthropomorphic images of divinities, who personify diverse natural forces in a vast chain of being), and the latter the result of a breakthrough to a more abstract and transcendental religious perception (reflected by a greater purity of literary expression and belief).” Ibid., 4. For example, Yeḥezkel Kaufmann writes, “Biblical religion is in essence non-mythological; the myth is demolished and suppressed, existing only in shredded remnants” (as quoted in ibid., 6 n. 22), and Ephraim Urbach writes, “From the Bible the Sages acquired their supermythological and supernatural conception of God . . . All possibility of representing God by means of any creature upon the earth or the hosts of heaven is completely negated” (as quoted in ibid., 10 n. 41). Cf. Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 209, n. 1.

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there is an additional challenge to conventional notions of monotheism, which is even more important, I think, in our present age of “return to ethnic and small-group absolutisms that again threaten the notion of humanity—again, at the end of a century of unspeakable horrors.”167 Scholars ranging from David Hume to Jan Assmann have argued that monotheism is inherently less pluralistic than polytheism is, for whereas monotheists worship one supreme deity and therefore must regard different theologies as idolatrous, polytheists worship many deities and thus are inevitably more open to religious differences.168 At the very least, Fishbane’s work complicates such conclusions, and the grounds of his refutation are more hermeneutical than historical. He does not deny the immensity of violence (both psychological and physical) that Christians, Muslims, and Jews have inflicted against outsiders, but he perceives a radical openness to disagreement at the very heart of Jewish hermeneutics. In short, he does not articulate a doctrine of monotheism so much as a hermeneutic of monotheism.169 In an essay published in 1989, Fishbane cites Otto Rank and Ernest Becker’s claims that religions are essentially “immortality systems” through which humans seek to deny and transcend death through ideological identifications and persecutions of the Other. However, Fishbane proposes that the Bible itself, with all of its diverse imagery and exegetical contradiction, may yet offer an antidote to such absolutism and antagonism. “For if the Bible is a text rife with competing immortality systems, in and through these very contestations a prophetic voice may be heard.”170 Thus, Fishbane suggests, “the entire text may be regarded as a prophetic eruption in its own right,” the revelation of a radical “vision of ‘concordant discord.’”171 His historical and constructive inquiries into Jewish theology have been academically masterful and spiritually stimulating—but that is not all they are. The upshot of these reflections is to suggest a new type of sacredness sponsored by the Bible: not the sacredness of the raging, exclusive vision, but

167 Fishbane, “Canonical Text, Covenantal Communities, and the Patterns of Exegetical Culture,” 157. 168 See David Hume, Natural History of Religion (1757), especially Section IX; and Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 169 Cf. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Monotheism and its Discontents,” in “Theocracy” and “Nation” in Jewish Thought: Past and Present, ed. Ada Taggar-Cohen (Kyoto: Doshisha University, 2014), 20–24. In this essay, Mendes-Flohr suggests that Buber offers a “phenomenology of monotheism” that challenges critiques such as those waged by Hume and Assmann. 170 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 131. 171 Ibid., 131.

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the sacredness of the chastened, inclusive one. Such a vision would provide an opening to transcendence not by demoting other symbolic models but by seeing in the Bible a model for a plurality of visions of multiform humanity. The sacrality released hereby would not be the competitive sacrality of segregated symbols. Rather, this new Bible-sponsored sacrality would allow the awesome transcendence of the divine reality to chasten our constructions of order and sacrality . . . Just as the Hebrew Bible was the original cultural sponsor of raging differences, so may it now sponsor the eruption of a prophetic voice: critical of the potential dangers of human symbolic systems, and an advocate for their fragility and plurality. So perceived, the Bible relativizes the idols of the human textus for the sake of the divine textus; and it points to that sphere where our death is not transcended symbolically, but is absorbed into the fulness of God.172

The Essays that Follow The selection of essays in this volume provides a unique and unprecedented panorama of Fishbane’s thought. The first essay, “Modern Jewish Theology and Traditional Hermeneutics,” offers a rich introduction to his constructive thought, and it has never before been published in the present form.173 He situates his own theology between the poles of (1) theologies that are “self-assured” and “without evident doubts” about their arguments and convictions, such as those of Maimonides or even the Book of Zohar, and (2) radical affirmations of foundationlessness and uncertainty, whether in the philosophical deconstructions of Derrida or the mystical annihilations of Rabbi Naḥman. Without simplistic dismissals of either of those two extremes, Fishbane presents his hermeneutical theology as an attempt to find fertile ground between despondency and overconfidence—one that involves being a humble “disciple of things” in the spirit of Nietzsche, Rilke, and the variegated vastness of Jewish tradition itself. The exegetical practice of Jewish hermeneutics is a model of attentive and rooted, yet transient and open-ended theological discourse. It is grounded in normative sources, and yet responsive to the unique questions and challenges of the present moment. In this essay, Fishbane discusses inner-biblical exegesis and emphasizes how hermeneutical theology is already present in Scripture itself. Nowhere else does he articulate more explicitly the continuities

172 Ibid., 131–32. 173 An earlier, condensed version was presented as a lecture in Heidelberg, at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in 2009, at a colloquium to mark the publication of Sacred Attunement. That lecture was published as “Theologie, Einklang, und spirituelle Praxis.”

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between his historical observations about the formation of Scripture and his constructive formulations of hermeneutical theology. The next three essays in this volume are exemplary works of Fishbane’s historical scholarship, capturing the hermeneutics of Midrash, myth, and mysticism. However, the content of these essays sheds light nonetheless—however retrospectively—on his constructive thought as well. In the second essay, “Midrash and the Nature of Scripture,” Fishbane offers a penetrating analysis of the hermeneutics of derash—that is, a dimension of the fourfold PaRDeS hermeneutic that he develops in his constructive theology.174 Fishbane describes the dynamics of radical intertextuality in rabbinic exegesis, wherein the whole Written Torah becomes the language (langue) for all subsequent speech-acts (parole) of Oral Torah, no matter how imaginative and innovative those utterances come to be. This linguistic scheme does not stress the normative confines of exegetical tradition as much as it emphasizes the inexhaustible vastness of biblical sources. For Fishbane, a central principle in this regard is the rabbinic concept of ḥarizah (enchainment), according to which every textual stitch of Scripture—every narrative, phrase, and letter, regardless of its original context in the canon—is interconnected fundamentally. In Midrash, the elements of Scripture are constantly integrated, disintegrated, and reintegrated anew in ephemeral bodies of intertextual meaning—and this is no less than the perpetual restoking of Sinaitic speech, the very practice of Jewish theology. Thus, midrashic hermeneutics opens up a seemingly ceaseless stream of possibilities for the revelation of the divine langue, while also delimiting the horizons—and, indeed, the boundaries—of legitimate interpretation. The third essay, “Five Stages of Jewish Myth and Mythmaking,”175 is a sweeping overview of some of Fishbane’s key observations about the history of Jewish hermeneutics. Of course, the very notion that mythmaking recurs throughout the lifespan of Jewish thought is itself a bold rejection of the conventional idea that monotheism dispelled mythology. Indeed, Fishbane affirms that mythic vitalities erupt again and again in the history of Judaism—and not only in marginal sources, but in the most foundational texts. One of his main theses in this essay is that hermeneutics lies consistently at the core of Jewish mythmaking. First of all, biblical scribes, 174 This essay appeared originally as the first chapter of Fishbane’s Exegetical Imagination. 175 This essay appeared originally as the sixth chapter of Fishbane’s Exegetical Imagination.

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rabbinic exegetes, and medieval kabbalists all interpret mythical forms of the past through their formulations of new literary works. Moreover, Fishbane suggests that these sages, no less than prebiblical mythmakers and modern poets, also “interpret” the very sights and sounds of existence as they give human voice to those otherwise mute and indifferent happenings. For Fishbane, interpretation and imagination are always alive and breathing in moments of mythmaking. Fishbane’s fourth essay in this volume, “The Bible in the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” presents the contours of Jewish mystical hermeneutics from the Hebrew Bible through twentieth-century Ḥasidism.176 Aside from the fact that this chapter unearths a rich trove of sources for anyone interested in the history of Jewish mysticism, it is an especially illuminating sample of Fishbane’s corpus insofar as it stresses the intrinsic relation between Jewish spirituality and hermeneutics. In contrast to portrayals of mystical experience as immediate and unconditioned, spontaneous and individualistic, Fishbane characterizes Jewish mysticism in terms of its textual and cultural mediations, and defines it as “fundamentally a tradition of commentary.”177 The religious practice of Torah study both expands and anchors the mystical mind, elevating thought and imagination beyond the bounds of private subjectivity while also rooting them in sources of revelation and tradition. Thus, this essay elucidates Fishbane’s notion of the “exegetical imagination,” as it highlights the interpenetration of commentary and creativity, tradition and vision. After all, Fishbane suggests, even the mystical mind can only perceive so much on its own. Although he does not altogether deny the power and profundity of spiritual illuminations that spring from inward depths, Fishbane echoes kabbalistic cautions against such monological mysticism: “One has to fit the measure of one’s mind to the measures of Scripture, not fit Scripture to one’s natural state of mind.” The final two essays in this volume are works of Fishbane’s constructive theology. The fifth essay, “A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology,” is a selection from Sacred Attunement, and this is likely the formulation of Fishbane’s theology that is most familiar to his readers (as of now). In this section, Fishbane articulates his understanding of the “threefold chord” of Torah— the torah kelulah, the Written Torah, and the Oral Torah—and articulates the dynamics among these various dimensions. In this process, he sheds light on his concept of divine Revelation through a rich meditation on the 176 This essay appeared originally in The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 177 See below, 115.

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image of Moses atop Sinai. Furthermore, Fishbane presents the fourfold hermeneutic of PaRDeS and uses these interpretive modes as instruments of theological reflection. This chapter is required reading for anyone interested in Fishbane’s constructive theology. The last essay in this volume, “Biblical Hermeneutics and Philosophical Theology,” appears here in print for the first time.178 In this chapter, more than any other work published thus far, Fishbane situates his theology in a philosophical context and reflects on the pursuit of this endeavor. “For me,” he writes, “philosophical hermeneutics is fundamental, insofar as it seeks to ground our humanity in acts of interpretation at every stage and in every way.”179 If Gadamer and Ricoeur offer a “general hermeneutic,” Fishbane suggests, then Jewish theology introduces a “regional hermeneutic,” and there can be a fruitful dialogue between them. Fishbane strives to think beyond the old conflict of Athens and Jerusalem, and regards philosophy (qua philosophical hermeneutics) and theology (qua biblical hermeneutics) as mutually enriching and perhaps even mutually dependent endeavors. “Biblical hermeneutics needs philosophy to reach beyond historical theology and its regional assertions of value; and philosophical theology, for its part, also needs biblical hermeneutics, to ground it in historical traditions and the particulars of human inquiry.”180 For example, philosophical concepts such as the “hermeneutic circle” and the “horizons” of understanding may provide crucial points of reflection in Jewish theology, while theological practices such as the hermeneutics of PaRDeS may, in turn, give flesh to abstract philosophical principles. After a series of theoretical considerations, Fishbane then proceeds to clarify—indeed, enact— his philosophical theology through an exquisite reading of the Song of Songs, a biblical source that lies especially close to his heart. All in all, the volume offers an extraordinary glimpse into the thoughtful mind and mindful heart of Michael Fishbane. It will surely be a vital resource for generations to come.

178 A version of this chapter was presented at a conference at Harvard University in 2013, devoted to the Song of Songs and its hermeneutics. 179 See below, 197. 180 See below, 198. Cf. my comments above in note 114 regarding the relationship between philosophy and theology in Fishbane and Rosenzweig.

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