Aspects of Rabbinic Theology

Solomon Schechter

Description

The classic statement of the ideas that form the Jewish people’s religious consciousness, by one of the Jewish scholars of our century. Solomon Schechter’s creative thought, compelling writing style and warm personality give this book lasting influence.

Sujets

• Jewish
• Philosophie et théologie
• Jews
• Israel
• God
• Theology
• Judaism
• Religion
• Jew

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580237772
• Langue: English

Extrait

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To
LOUIS MARSHALL, ESQUIRE
JEW AND AMERICAN
CONTENTS
Publisher’s note: In the process of preparing this book for electronic publication, some of the formatting in the footnotes has been lost. This may result in some confusion as to which numbers are volume, chapter, or verse in each source. Generally the first number given is a chapter number, followed by a space and the verse number or numbers. We hope readers will still be able to make use of these references, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
Introduction by Neil Gillman
Introduction by Louis Finkelstein
Preface

I. Introductory
II. God and the World
III. God and Israel
IV. Election of Israel
V. The Kingdom of God (Invisible)
VI. The Visible Kingdom (Universal)
VII. The Kingdom of God (National)
VIII. The Law
IX. The Law As Personified in the Literature
X. The Torah in its Aspect of Law (Mizwoth)
XI. The Joy of the Law
XII. The Zachuth of the Fathers. Imputed Righteousness and Imputed Sin
XIII. The Law of Holiness and the Law of Goodness
XIV. Sin As Rebellion
XV. The Evil Yezer: The Source of Rebellion
XVI. Man s Victory by the Grace of God, Over the Evil Yezer Created by God
XVII. Forgiveness and Reconciliation With God
XVIII. Repentance: Means of Reconciliation
Additions and Corrections
List of Abbreviations and Books Not Quoted With Full Title
Index
Copyright
Also Available
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INTRODUCTION
N ORMAN B ENTWICH , in his biography of Solomon Schechter, quotes from an 1888 letter to Schechter by Claude Montefiore. Montefiore was then the leader of Liberal Judaism in England and it was he who had brought Schechter from Berlin to serve as his private tutor in Cambridge. In his letter, Montefiore urges Schechter to devote himself to what Montefiore calls popular writing. I cannot bear the idea of your devoting yourself to texts. You must train yourself to write, and you must write not only for the learned world. Not bibliography but theology, not antiquity but history, not archeology but religion, these are your themes. The peculiar texture of your mind is not revealed by editing a Hebrew classic; speak out you can [ sic ], because you have no one to fear and no one to hurt. You have theological capacity. No other Jewish scholar that I know has it, and that is why I grieve when you have to work at manuscripts.
Schechter must have agreed for in 1896 and 1908, he published the first two volumes of his collected Studies in Judaism (the third was published in 1924, nine years after his death). Aspects of Rabbinic Theology was published in 1909.
This set of distinctions between bibliography and theology, antiquity and history, archeology and religion, in short between writing for a learned audience and a popular one, provides a fascinating perspective on what was available in print for the Jewishly concerned, English speaking public at the turn of the century.
We today are used to frequenting Judaica bookshops overflowing with books in English on every conceivable issue in Jewish life. That was not always the case. In fact, when this writer was in the process of rediscovering his Jewish roots in the early 1950s, there was precious little material of a non-scholarly (or even of a scholarly) nature available in English. I recall asking for a book with a traditionalist approach to Jewish religion and being handed an 1898 English translation of Samson Raphael Hirsch s Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel , a volume that had originally been published in German in 1836. The Jewish Encyclopedia was published between 1901 and 1906. Kaplan s Judaism as a Civilization , arguably the first comprehensive approach to being Jewish in modern America, was published in 1934, the first English translation of I and Thou , in 1937. Jacob Agus Modern Philosophies of Judaism , the book that first introduced the English speaking public to the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, appeared in 1941.
In rabbinic literature, the first English translation of portions of the Babylonian Talmud appeared in M.L. Rodkinson s abridged version between 1896 and 1903. The Soncino edition appeared between 1935 and 1952. Claude Montefiore s A Rabbinic Anthology , edited together with Herbert Loewe, was published in 1938. George Foot Moore s 3-volume Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim , among the very first books that I acquired, was published in 1950.
But in 1896, Schechter s first volume of Studies exposed the reader to essays on Hasidism, Elijah the Gaon of Vilna, the thought of the 19th century Galician Jewish historiographer Nachman Krochmal, on theological issues such as the place of dogma and the doctrine of Divine retribution in Judaism, among others. The second series included monographs on the Genizah, parallels between the Talmud and the Gospels, Jewish mysticism and the diary of Gluckel of Hameln.
These essays had been written during Schechter s stay in Cambridge from 1890-1902. (That was the year he left England for New York to assume the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which position he held until his death in 1915.) There is no questioning the scholarly authority that underlies these essays. Schechter s ability to do first-rate textual scholarship in the Science of Judaism mold had been solidly established by the publication, in 1887, of his critical edition of Avot de Rabbi Natan , a Talmudic tractate that serves as a supplement to Mishnah Avot , more commonly known to us as the Ethics of the Fathers . Schechter compared the available manuscripts, established an accurate text which he proceeded to annotate, and added an extended introduction explaining the origin of the tractate, its relation to other texts of the period and the character of its sources.
Just a year before this, in 1896, Schechter had come across the first of the finds which led him to unearth the Cairo Genizah, the long-hidden treasure-trove of manuscripts and fragments covering twelve centuries of post-biblical Jewish life and thought, which illuminate one of the darker periods in Jewish history and on which scholars, to this very day, continue to work.
But what distinguishes Schechter s writing in the Studies is his unique ability to take relatively abstruse or esoteric material and make it available to the lay reader without a hint of condescension. Instead of speaking down, he raises the reader to his level and acknowledges his intelligence and his seriousness of purpose. The approach exudes confidence in the reader s mind and concern. Schechter s scholarship is well concealed by the elegance of the writing, the bits of whimsy and humor scattered throughout, the consistent concern with relating the scholarly issues to universal human interests and the sheer accessibility of the presentation as a whole.
What is taking place here is indeed popular Jewish education- popular, not in the sense of commonplace or fashionable, but rather as distinguished from elitist or highbrow. It was in fact Schechter s attempt to mold the thinking of what he called Catholic Israel, that consensual, living body of caring, learning and committed Jews which, Schechter argued, had always served and would continue to serve as the ultimate authority for determining the shape of Judaism in every generation. The enterprise as a whole reflects Schechter s sense of responsibility for creating and educating that consensus.
It should also be noted that Schechter s concern for addressing this audience of Jews was shared consistently by his successors as Chancellor/President of the Jewish Theological Seminary and, by virtue of that position, chief spokespersons for Conservative Judaism: Cyrus Adler, Louis Finkelstein, and Gerson Cohen, and, yibadel lehayim , the current incumbent, Ismar Schorsch. Each of these men-with the possible exception of Cyrus Adler who is remembered primarily as the master institution builder in American Jewish life-had established scholarly reputations before coming to power at the Seminary, and each wrote, and in Ismar Schorsch s case continues to write, extensively for the thinking, lay Jewish public.
Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (originally published in 1909 as Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology -the title seems to have been changed for the 1961 Schocken edition of the book) is thoroughly within the genre of Schechter s Studies in Judaism . The scholarly underpinnings of the material emerge in the extensive footnotes which include references from the entire corpus of classical Jewish sources and which unabashedly use Hebrew terms when indicated. The range of Schechter s knowledge and his mastery of the traditional sources revealed in these pages is nothing short of overwhelming. Yet the book can be read throughout without even a glance at the footnotes, the writing is clear, precise and even elegant, and the material eminently accessible.
If there was one area of Jewish literary creativity that remained closed to the non-Hebrew speaking public, both Jewish and Christian, it was pre-eminently the literature of the talmudic and post-talmudic rabbis. Part of the problem is its language, an admixture of Hebrew and Aramaic. Another is the quality