Rabbi Halivni on Revelation: A Phenomenological Perspective

The following is a paper given by Rabbi Novak at a conference in memory of Rav Halivni at NYU on June 3, 2024.

I.

It is a great honour to speak today at this conference in memory of our revered and beloved teacher and master, ha-Gaon ha-Rav David Halivni zt”l. I was privileged to have known Rav Halivni for a little more than 60 years, and to have been in touch with him regularly for most of that time (first meeting him in 1958 when he had just become “Dr. Weiss”). There was no conversation with Rav Halivni, no matter how casual, from which I didn’t coming away  enlightened, often inspired. And my experience is by no means unique. These conversations were his own torah she-be`al peh. They always come to mind when reading his writings, his torah she-bi-khtav, especially his theological writings dealing with the ideas embedded within the texts he knew so well.

Now in Rav Halivni’s view, torah she-b`al peh provides the true context for torah she-bi-khtav.  So, what he told me about his life– and to others here and not here today — helps all of us better understand and appreciate his theology, which is as carefully thought-out as is his rigorous textual scholarship. In fact, it could be said that his theology is the result of what might be called his “existential crisis.”

Of course, Rav Halivni’s greatest existential crisis (as “Dovid Weiss, the illui from Sighet”) was how to survive in body, mind, and faith the Hell of Auschwitz and the Death March away from Auschwitz before the Soviet army could liberate the prisoners in January 1945. Though by no means as grave, there was nevertheless a lesser existential crisis to be sure, one more intellectual than physical, but which his mind and his faith continually struggled with. That struggle began after his physical survival, upon his arrival in the United States in 1947, when in his thirst for more worldly knowledge, his Jewish faith in the divine revelation of the Torah was  “confronted by the science of textual criticism.”[1] That is the textual criticism of the Bible, especially the textual criticism of the Pentateuch based on the “Documentary Hypothesis.”

This struggle is the leitmotif of Rav Halivni’s theological writing. Indeed, he took upon himself the task of being a constructive Jewish theologian very seriously. This was a task for which his extensive and intensive textual scholarship provided the raw materials. As he put it, “Statements of theological nuance found in rabbinic literature can be amplified to generate a contemporary brand of traditional Jewish theology.”[2] In my last conversation with Rav Halivni, he was still struggling with the fundamental question of how to correlate “genuine faith” (emunah tserufah) and “intellectual integrity” (yosher ha-da`at). This, by the way, became the motto Rav Halivni himself chose for the organization he, the late Dr. Saul Shapiro, and I founded in 1983: The Union for Traditional Judaism. His struggle, then, was more than academic.

 

II.

It seems to me there are five basic approaches one can take to handle the conflict between faith in scriptural revelation and critical biblical scholarship.

One, the simplest approach is the outright rejection of critical biblical scholarship on dogmatic grounds, i.e., it is heresy (apiqorsut), totally incompatible with the faith assumption that the Torah, as it is now in the possession of the faithful community, is the immaculate record of God’s revelation of the Torah. Those who advocate this position are most often called “fundamentalists,” though this is the position taken by a Jewish thinker as philosophically sophisticated as Joseph Soloveitchik.

Two, it has often been said in modern times that the literary analysis of the Bible forces one to conclude that the Bible is the creation of human authors instead of God. Thus the acceptance of what seems to be an indisputable fact leads to the denial of revelation. This led  Spinoza in the 17^th century to leave Judaism altogether; and it led to Mordecai Kaplan in the 20^th century to try to radically reconstruct Judaism. Conversely, Rav Halivni definitely chose to neither leave Judaism nor reconstruct it, neither in thought nor in deed.

Three, there are those who have simply bifurcated the conflict between faith and critical biblical scholarship by talking critically in an academic context while talking and acting traditionally in a religious context. This was the approach of most of Rav Halivni’s teachers and colleagues, especially regarding the Pentateuch, in the years he was a student and then a professor in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. In fact, to avoid this conflict, until fairly recently, Chumash was only taught in the Seminary with the traditional commentary of Rashi. This avoidance of the conflict was initiated by Zechariah Frankel in the first Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau in the 1850’s who, by the way, shocked the Orthodox of his day with his views on the historical development of Mishnah and Yerushalmi and Halakhah in general.

Four, there are those who are convinced they can argue for their belief in the immaculate, divinely revealed text of the Pentateuch by employing the methods of the Bible critics against the heretical conclusions of the critics. This was the approach taken by the important Hungarian-German halakhist David Zvi Hoffmann (d. 1921), followed more popularly by the late Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Joseph Hertz (d. 1946). However, by entering the domain of critical biblical scholarship, these traditionalists had to play the game by the rules made by the critics; and the critics could easily show that their truly “critical” interpretations of biblical texts are far more convincing than those of the traditionalists.

Five, there have been very few traditionally oriented Jewish scholars who have attempted to integrate the assumptions of the Bible critics with the traditional faith assumption of the divine revelation of the Torah (torah min ha-shamayim). But this has required constructing a critical, selective approach to both the assumptions of the Bible critics and the assumptions of the tradition about the text of the Pentateuch. This was Rav Halivni’s approach, involving his truly critical mind combined with his spectacular grasp of the entire rabbinic corpus, ancient, mediaeval, and modern. Let us see how he worked it out.

 

III.

The majority of rabbinic texts assume that the Torah given to Moses was simply repeated by Ezra. But there is a minority opinion in the Talmud that Ezra did more than repeat what came to him intact. Rather, as Rav Halivni extrapolated from the pertinent rabbinic texts, what came to Ezra was not an intact text, but what Ezra found in several fragmentary texts.[3] Ezra then creatively edited the several fragments into a unified text which could probably be accepted to be the original Torah given by God to Israel through Moses, even though the text at hand appears prima facie to be a composite work. These various fragments became components of the now redacted or “restored” text. So far this is consistent with the “scientific” view that the Pentateuch is (and always has been) a composite document. Nevertheless, the Bible critics go further, speculating when and by whom these different fragments were composed. In their view, all the fragments of the Torah were composed by humans, not by God.

While accepting the empirical findings of the Bible critics, Rav Halivni could not accept their speculative conclusions. He insisted that “no one critical theory of the Pentateuch’s origins has been proven. Almost all the data are disputed among the various factions of scientific scholars.”[4] He then cites as a precedent for his critical approach to biblical criticism Maimonides’ distinction between Aristotle’s scientific findings, most of which he regards to have been proven, and Aristotle’s unproven metaphysical conclusion of the eternity of the universe.[5] (I remember discussing this analogy with Rav Halivni several times in lengthy conversations.)

Although Maimonides admits that the Torah can be interpreted in a way consistent with Aristotle’s cosmology (and even more consistent with Plato’s cosmology), yet he opts for the traditional Jewish (and subsequently Christian and Muslim) view of creation-in-time. As such, God alone is eternal, and thus God transcends the temporal/finite universe God creates apart from Godself.

Now the traditional theory of creatio ex nihilo can no more be proved than can the competing theory of the eternity of the universe be proved. The latter, though, entails the assumption that the eternal order of the universe cannot be changed even by God as God is totally contained or immanent therein. Moreover, we humans like even God are wholly determined to act in ways for which we are not responsible because we could not have acted otherwise. In this metaphysical scheme, there are not, nor could there be, any miracles. Finally, and most importantly, divine commandments (mitsvot) would be futile as nobody could choose to do them or not do them.[6] Therefore, accepting the eternalist cosmology of the philosophers would undermine the foundations of Maimonides’ faith community (kenneset yisrael), the community to which he owed his primary, perpetual loyalty.

Analogous to Maimonides’ acceptance of creatio ex nihilo, Rav Halivni writes about his own acceptance of torah min ha-shamayim: “Critical approaches that eradicate the notion of divine revelation destroy the Law in its principle . . . I am unwilling to disturb the foundation of Judaism.”[7] Let me add that it was his faith in the foundation of Judaism that enabled his spirit to survive in Auschwitz and thereafter. Moreover, while forever bearing the deep wounds inflicted upon him in that Hell, his faith in the foundation of Judaism enabled Rav Halivni to not only survive but to flourish thereafter. All of us are certainly the beneficiaries of Rav Halivni’s spiritual and intellectual flourishing.

Accepting and imitating Maimonides’ existential choice to affirm the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, Rav Halivni opts for the traditional dogma of the divine revelation of the Torah. In fact, he once told me that if he accepted the Documentary Hypothesis, he would thereby place himself outside the traditional Jewish world that he survived Auschwitz to be active and proactive therein. By imitating Maimonides’ precedent, he was able to remain faithful to traditional Judaism with intellectual integrity.

 

IV.

Rav Halivni’s main thesis in Revelation Restored is that the giving of the Torah through Moses is essentially different from the reception of the Torah by Ezra.

In a famous rabbinic text there is one opinion there that the Torah was forced upon the people Israel by God.[8] One opinion there approves that the people accepted the Torah nonetheless by what could be called a “leap of faith.” But another opinion there is that even if the people accepted the Torah willingly, their choice was impulsive (peziza) not deliberate. Indeed, how could it be anything but impulsive since the people Israel had no experience of the Torah and its commandments which alone would have provided them with the basis for any deliberate choice? No wonder, as Rav Halivni emphasizes in his citing the text, that the people in the time before the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE were extremely neglectful of the Torah, even often engaging in its cardinal sin of idolatry (avodat elilim).[9]

Nevertheless, Ezra was able to do what Moses couldn’t do, namely, restore the Torah to the Jewish people who are now willing and able to accept it judiciously. Their willingness to accept the Torah that Ezra restored for them was a deliberate choice based on their experience of its content as the product of God’s wisdom and beneficence. As it is stated there, only during the Babylonian Exile could it be said that the people qiyyamu mah she-qibblu kvar, i.e., “they upheld [freely and deliberately] what they had previously accepted [under duress or capriciously].” Remember the subtitle of Rav Halivni’s first theological treatise, The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law.  There he wrote: “Jews cannot live by apodictic laws alone, sooner or later they demand justification for their laws.”[10]  That justification came later with Ezra rather than sooner with Moses.

Being able to accept the Torah freely and judiciously from Ezra’s “maculate” – i.e., imperfect or incomplete – restored version, the Jewish people could now intelligently appropriate the Torah. This appropriation, for the more thoughtful Jews, had to be more than passive acceptance because the text does not interpret itself nor apply itself. Rav Halivni shows that this intelligent appropriation has been done in two different ways.

On the one hand, thoughtful Jewish interpreters could look for the prior causes of the text they now had in hand. Since the text in hand appears to be multiple, exegetes would look for multiple prior causes. But this would conflict with the dogma of the Torah’s origin as being “given from the One Shepherd” (nittnu me-ro`eh ehad).[11] In fact, most modern Bible critics (no matter how traditional their personal religious origins might be) have concluded from their intellectual acceptance of the multiple origins of the Torah that they have to abjure the traditional dogma of the Torah’s unitary origin (however religiously observant they might remain in practice.)

On the other hand, thoughtful Jewish interpreters could approach the text of the Ezra-restored-Torah phenomenologically, which is different from the search for chronologically prior causes. Let me explain.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (d. 1961) put it this way in the preface to his most important book on phenomenology: “It [phenomenology] is a philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ [déjà là] . . . It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is [telle qu’elle est] without taking account of its psychological origin [genèse] and the causal explanations [italics mine] which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide.”[12] It can be argued that Rav Halivni, albeit the “scientist” and “historian” he surely was in his incomparable textual scholarship, nevertheless in his theological thought he was more a phenomenological philosopher. That is because, in his profound view, the Jewish people accepted the Torah Ezra had restored for them not by looking retrospectively – i.e., back toward the past for where or how it began — but rather looking prospectively, i.e., forward from their present experience of the Torah by trying to explicate its meaning. That will carry it forth into the future. Without that prospective exegetical approach, the Torah would quickly become an antiquarian museum piece.[13]

The question, though, is whether the desired meaning is to be taken from the text, or whether it is to be brought to the text, i.e., constructed or constituted for the text. That depends on how the text is experienced. Were the text experienced as immaculate, i.e., perfect a priori, then one could say that the task of the exegete is to discover what the text has always meant. However, as Rav Halivni constantly reiterates, the text is maculate. That is especially evident in the contradictions the text contains. As Plato pointed out, our understanding is “called [parakalounta] to enquire” when our experience of the data now before us [for Jews, the words of the Torah] “digress in opposite directions [eis enantian].”[14]

The task of the exegetes is more than passive repetition or paraphrase of what has been received. Rather, it is much more proactive, constructing what the text ought to mean. The contradictions cannot be ignored or simply accepted without question, as if questioning them, let alone trying to resolve them, challenges the authority of the Written Torah.  Indeed, for the sake of the total integrity of the Torah, the contradictions themselves call for their resolution.[15] But that is not done by selecting which strands of the text one agrees with while dispensing with those strands one does not agree with, for that would destroy the Torah’s authority by subjecting it to a standard higher than itself.[16] In fact, speaking in a contemporary context, Rav Halivni argues against those who “tolerate changes in religious law,” justifying their views by the idea of “continuous revelation,” which “Classical rabbinic knows not [there]of.”[17] The Torah is accepted wholly intact, “already there” (déjà là) in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. Hence all interpretation is a posteriori.

Now the contradictions are of two kinds.

One, there are the internal contradictions within the text itself. They are generally resolved by using he famous exegetical principle of Rabbi Ishmael: “When two passages contradict each other, the contradiction is settled by invoking a third passage [what logicians call a tertium quid] that mediates the contradiction by having the third passage assign to the two seemingly contradicting passages different meanings.”[18] The third passage in Rav Halivni’s words “finds a compromise [pesharah]” between the first and the second contradictory positions.[19]

Two, there are external contradictions between the text and what the people are actually practicing. Here the exegesis was bolder. Rav Halivni designates the actual  contradictory praxis as stemming from “corrective and expository traditions that superseded and even contravened the written word in practice were received by the people . . .[as if] these instructions emanated from the Holy Scriptures themselves . . . from the deeper levels of the text itself.”[20] These traditions constitute the “ever expanding network of oral tradition,” which then retrojects its interpretations back into the biblical text. Yet a maculate Torah is the present reality, calling for active, sometimes radical interpretation and application. As Rav Halivni puts it: “The text itself requires adjunct explanation . . . In spite of textual maculations, coherent law is introduced.”[21] The immaculate Torah – when all the contradictions both internal and external will be overcome — is more an ideal than a prior reality. It is an eschatological desideratum, not the longing for a lost, primordial, immaculate paradise.

 

V.

Rav Halivni has done much for us in both his textual scholarship and in his constructive theological endeavors. Even when we agree with him, though, he seems to require us not to merely accept his conclusions as “apodictic” [a favourite word of his], but rather to develop them further. That is the task Rav Halivni has bequeathed to us, which is tentative, i.e., until Elijah comes, telling him and us where our various interpretations of God’s Torah are correct and where they are incorrect.

[1] Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 2.

[2] Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 90. The only comparable work of contemporary rabbinic theology is by my late revered teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah min ha-shamayim be’aspaqlariah shel ha-dorot, 2 vols. (London: Soncino, 1962).

[3] The main texts he drew upon are bSanhedrin 22a; Bamidbar Rabbah, 3.13.

[4] Revelation Restored, p. 6.

[5] Guide of the Perplexed, 2.25.

[6] See Mishneh Torah: Hilkhot Teshuvah, chap. 5.

[7] Revelation Restored, p. 6. See Peshat and Derash, p. 150.

[8] bShabbat 88a.

[9] bNedarim 22b.

[10] Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 68.

[11] Kohelet 12:11 as invoked on bHagigah 3b.

[12] Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 1.

[13] See bKiddushin 66a.

[14] Republic, 523C.

[15] See, e.g., bBaba Kama 41a.

[16] See bBerakhot 19b-20a re Prov. 21:30.

[17] Revelation Restored, p.88.

[18] Sifra, chap. 1.

[19] Meqorot u-Mesorot: bShabbat 39a, p. 11.

[20] Revelation Restored, p. 49.

[21] Revelation Restored, p. 27.