This is the four essay in a work by Ed Codish, a poet and teacher. It is published by Ariga: Religious Pluralism
Judaism and Commandment
Religious action is commanded action. In this, it
differs from moral
action, immoral action, or any action chosen by the
person acting. Above all, commandment differs from law.
This is why Orthodox Judaism, in its admirable adherence
to Jewish religious law, does not define Judaism.
Religious action, commanded action, also differs from
instinctive or psychologically driven or determined
action in that its source is external to the man or
woman acting. It differs from all other action in that
it is neither chosen nor long resisted. To be aware of a
commandment requires that the commandment be obeyed. The
source of commandment is what we mean by God, who may
command directly or indirectly. All Jews, probably all
people, are responsive to God's commandments to the
extent that they are aware of them as commandments.
My purpose in this essay is to demonstrate the unity of
all Judaisms,
perhaps of all religions, which accept as their base the
concept of commanded action, the concept that we must
perform actions based on commands whose source is
external to ourselves. A simple example: we feed our
hungry children, who command us to feed them. There are
laws (with penalties for disobedience) requiring this;
instinct may be at work; it is a moral thing to do;
there are rewards for feeding our children (they may
feed us in our old age); and someone may, for some
reason other than inability, not feed his children. That
is, law, instinct, morality and other considerations
exist.
But beyond law, instinct, morality, reward and
punishment, or even the possibility of choice, a hungry
child commands me to feed her, and in response to that
command, I do. Religious commandment is of this nature.
The child's command is very like a divine command.
(Wordsworth, among others, knew this.) Divine command is
not, here, the only reason we feed our children. Law,
instinct and the other factors cause us to act. These
other factors, however, restrict our freedom, and so we
resent them. Commandment frees us, so we welcome it.
(I am not here writing about Judaism as a complete
nexus of law,
religion, nationality, folklore, custom, history, race
and language. My concern in this essay is religion
alone, to the extent that it is separable from the other
aspects of Judaism. As in separating the commandment to
feed one's child from other reasons to feed one's child,
that may not be entirely possible. Obviously, someone
who obeys ancient and modern Jewish law, and identifies
himself completely as Jewish, is Jewish - even if, in
the terms of this essay, he is not religious.)
Religious Law
In many ways, commanded action is similar to lawful
action, action taken
according to a legal code. This similarity has led to
major confusion as to the nature of Judaism.
Many,
perhaps most, Orthodox Jews obey the laws of Torah as
legally binding. For them, Judaism is, as Moses
Mendelssohn wrote, (Selections from the Writings,
Viking: New York, 1975, p. 111) "revealed legislation."
But this makes of Judaism one code among many. Law, I
shall try to show, is not commandment. Judaism may
contain a legal code, but it is not that code. In fact,
by total chosen obedience to the legal code of Judaism,
people may miss the concept of commandment, and lead
seemingly fully Jewish lives which are not religious,
which contain nothing of the divine.
Essays on Jewish philosophy traditionally, at this
point, contain a
disclaimer: "This essay is not for the person who
already accepts the yoke of the commandments. Such a
person does not need explanations or apologetics. Only
the puzzled ('perplexed' in Maimonides) need read
further."
This is not that disclaimer. I have met no one
who accepts the yoke of the commandments in the ancient
or medieval sense. Today, to accept without question all
the tenets of a complex system purporting to describe
the reality of the world is to mark oneself a fool, and
not a divine fool.
I am going to write about a
transcendental system of reality, but it must be
testable and open to examination based on experience. To
accept on faith words in a book is neither desirable
nor, for educated people in the twentieth century,
possible. There are people, intellectual in every other
way, who refuse to act as intellectually educated people
in regard to faith, which they claim is more important
to them than anything else. They seem to me to represent
a problem in psychology rather than in philosophy.
Commandment is not law. It is, like law, a
heteronomous construct, but
unlike law, it cannot be internalized in any Kantian
fashion. I am always aware that I am commanded from
outside of myself. But there is no diminution of
freedom. Failure to respond to commandment decreases
freedom. Law is directed to the generality of a
population and accepted, and enforceable, on the grounds
of general acceptance and adherence. Command is directed
to me as me, even if the same command is directed to
many other people. The command may be to treat others as
part of a group to which I belong, but the command is to
me. As I shall explain, it is a plea.
Consider the workings of law in practice, in a
democracy, for that is
where we live. Law has the following elements: It is
legislated, it is published, it is enforced. All are
necessary. In particular, an unenforced law has no real
existence. Thus, if I know there are no police cars on
the highway,
and I know it is altogether safe to exceed the speed
limit, I may speed.
Imagine, in the United States, what would happen to tax
law if there were no IRS. An implicit deal is made
between the legislature and the citizenry. Laws will be
enforced selectively (there are limits to how many
police can be hired and deployed) such that it is not
economical to disobey them. On the other hand, laws may
be changed by popular will as expressed in elections.
The American government has recently made it possible
for states to raise speed limits on interstate highways.
Therefore, no citizen must accept a law unconditionally;
she may accept a law knowing that it is bad and that she
plans to work for its repeal.
An Orthodox rabbi, a friend for whom I have great
respect and whose
knowledge of Jewish law is encyclopedic, argues that
Jewish law operates basically the same way as American
law. The problem, he says, is that we have no longer any
mechanism for changing or adjusting the law.
Were a
Sanhedrin to meet, such difficulties as the status of
women in Orthodoxy would be dealt with. Meanwhile, he
argues, the law must be obeyed as it stands. As far as
law in Jewish history is concerned, he is right. As far
as law and the continuity of Orthodox Judaism is
concerned he is certainly right. I am myself Orthodox in
action for these excellent reasons.
But Orthodox Jewish
law is not real law because it is unenforceable and - in
practice - unchangeable. Instead, it has become, again
in practice, a set of norms, social rather than
religious, defining Orthodoxy, describing but not really
proscribing the behavior of its adherents. The only
persons subject to penalty for disobeying Jewish
religious law are such functionaries as rabbis and
butchers, who are liable to loss of income if
disapproved of by their communities.
A person may be
expelled from the community or shunned by it for gross
and public "illegalities," but such a person has almost
certainly decided that the penalty is economical, one he
is willing to pay.
In religious beliefs there are penalties other than
exclusion,
imprisonment, and fines. The threat of divine punishment
in this world or the next exists in Judaism as in
Christianity and Islam, and is invoked as a means of
enforcing law. Simply, it does not work.
Whatever power
the threat of such punishment had in the past is, for
the vast majority of people, gone. People think of
themselves as good no matter what they do, and are
certain God will understand and forgive. No evidence
exists to show them wrong. The fear of divine
punishment, long sustained by rabbis and preachers,
cannot be invoked without causing whilom believers to
find a more accommodating synagogue or church. The
person observant of the law may comfort herself with the
idea that she will be rewarded ( and her fellows not),
but she knows she cannot be certain of this as she may
be certain of the traffic patrol on the highway. Even
if, logically, reward and punishment at the hands of
heaven provides enforcement of religious law, in
practice, for a large majority of religious people, it
doesn't. In a non-theocratic state, religious edicts
have no force of law, because they are unenforceable in
this world, and enforcement in any next world is
undemonstrable.
So in the normal usage of the word "law," there is no
currently
operative religious law, except for those people (rabbis
and priests, religious school teachers, kosher butchers,
etc.) liable to economic and social punishment.
There are people such as, often, myself, who have so
internalized religious law
that they would be deeply unhappy were they to violate
that law, who would feel that they had violated an
absolute commitment they had made. But such persons are
using "law" as a metaphor for personal choice or
commitment. They mean that religious observance has for
them a force like the force of law.
Commandment
A commandment is always from outside, and cannot be
ignored. It may be
disobeyed, but disobedience is paid for with a failure
to increase freedom. I shall give a few examples, more
complex than the command by one's child to be fed, to
try to untangle this difficult concept. The discussion
is based largely on the work of Emmanuel Levinas,
particularly the section on "Substitution" in Otherwise
than Being or Beyond Essence (Kluwer Academic
Publishers: Dordrect, 1991). Levinas' prose reveals the
timelessness and egoless character of commandment. I
attempt here to mask the reality beyond essence with the
visage of analysis and reason. If I do not write so
well, perhaps I can be more available to people unused
to Levinas' work and methodology.
I walk down a street. Suddenly, without any chance to
prepare a response
or to choose another path, I encounter a beggar who
looks at me and asks for money. I may or may not respond
with money. I will consider my own needs, the social
setting, and whether I feel threatened or not. If other
people are with me, I will consider the effects on them
of my giving or not giving money. I will look beyond the
face of the beggar, and consider whether or not he seems
deserving. I may well consider whether or not my
religion, whatever it is, calls on me to give money in
this situation. However, in that first meeting, in that
immeasurably short time before any of these
considerations occur to me, in what Levinas calls the
"face-to-face," I will experience commandment. My
instant response is to give money.
Many of us try to avoid being commanded. We carefully
look away from the
face of the destitute; above all we avoid eye contact.
If we see the beggar in time, we may even walk as far
from him as our path permits. Should we have time, we
will marshall our excuses, either for not helping him or
for giving him as little as we can, long before we reach
him. If we do decide to help him, we will have
calculated, or at least estimated, costs and benefits. A
dollar to a beggar may make us feel moral, or superior.
It may impress our comrades. If we are more
sophisticated, the dollar (or ten dollars, or a coin)
may be the price of civic peace and security, just as
the government makes welfare payments to the destitute
to avoid crime and unrest and ugly public squalor. If we
are religious, we may experience a duty to fulfill a
religious requirement to help the needy, and to avoid
the guilt of failing to observe a chosen obligation. All
of these decisions, whether we give or do not give, are
outside the experience of commandment.
As Levinas argues (or illustrates, or reminds us of
things which have
not happened), the experience of commandment is outside
of being - that is, outside of ego and self-interest and
consciousness itself. Commandment is directed to an
aspect of self not identified as ego, that part of a
person that thinks, uses language, has a name and
interests. Traditionally, this "other aspect" has
sometimes been called soul, but that word is
problematical because of its use in all sorts of
spiritualistic contexts. Because the commanded self is
antecedent to language, nothing can be said of it
directly. It exists outside of time (the interval
between the response to the beggar and the beginning of
thought cannot be measured with a clock) and therefore
is eternal for all that it is instantly over. The amount
of money or care commanded is also measureless - how can
the egoless self know what will fulfill the commandment?
- and so is infinite. Speechless eternity and infinity
are not characteristics of law.
Commandment does not always originate in the human
face, although that
is most common. Texts, too, command us. A little over
three years ago, my wife and I prepared to plant a
miniature peach tree, a grafted branched tree which had
arrived in the mail. About newly planted fruit trees,
Leviticus 19:23 states: "When you arrive in the land and
have planted all varieties of edible fruit, you must
treat the fruit as orlah [literally, uncircumcised; in
biblical usage, unsuited for use, lacking some act to
make it fit]. For three years they will be orlah, not to
be eaten." As practicing Jews, we were prepared to wait
three years for fruit. (Unlike almost all Jewish
agricultural ordinances, this one is ordained to be
practiced also outside of Israel.) But we felt we were
being somehow quaint or folkloristic in our obedience.
We thought that by publicly accepting the halachic
practice we would be demonstrating to our children the
importance our religion had for us. Still, the thought
of fruit rotting on the limb was annoying, as was the
concept of blind obedience to an incomprehensible text.
Perhaps, we said, there is a way around this edict.
After all, the plain meaning of the text refers to the
land of Israel, and we live in Michigan.
For hours we studied the books dealing with orlah. Then
we studied for
days. The rabbis twisted more than we in searching for
ways around the commandment (as it was becoming). I
shall not even summarize the texts here, except to
mention that every attempt at a solution that occurred
to us had been anticipated. (Fruit grown in a hydroponic
bath may be permissible, because the tree is not
planted. But growing fruit trees hydroponically is
absurd.) One source considers a tree planted in a
container on a ship at sea, and concludes that the edict
of orlah holds even there.
By the third day, we were aware of the source of
commandment the rabbis
heard, the source commanding us to leave the fruit alone
for three years. Here, unlike in the case of the beggar,
commandment was experienced after long, hard work, for
the face of God is distant, and cannot be stared into.
But there was the shadow of a shadow, a sense of hearing
words never spoken as words are normally spoken. Or
rather there was the sense that the rabbis we read had
experienced the trace of commandment, and in the
experience of their experiencing we knew we had to leave
the fruit alone for three years.
Now our relation to the fruit was transformed. There
was freedom in not
eating the orlah. The freedom was freedom from time and
space, which is the freedom resultant on commanded
behavior. There are other kinds of freedom. The simple
freedom of eating whenever and whatever one chooses is
obvious and valuable. All ego freedoms are valuable.
Unfortunately, they sometimes prevent us from
experiencing the egoless freedom of being commanded.
This cannot be explicated more without falling out of
words. The trace (again, Levinas' language) of
commandment is the shadow of the trace of God
commanding. In Judaism, the commandment is given,
conventionally, on Mount Sinai to Moses. The location of
the mountain is unknown, as is the exact time of the
giving. So a commandment given nowhere in no time is
obeyed in Michigan in the 1990s, and is experienced as
closely akin, perhaps identical, to the experience of
being commanded by a beggar. The face of the destitute
is, as Jeremiah the prophet indicated (22:16), like the
face of God. God asks with humility, even as He
commands.
The examples of the baby, the beggar and the tree can
be multiplied and,
I suppose, classified and characterized. My interest
here is in what they have in common as commandment. They
appeal to us, plead with us and command us
simultaneously. They approach us, or are received as
commandment, through an aspect of our selves which is
not ego, which is not engaged in mastering and
controlling the world. In the Jewish tradition, the
appeal is to that aspect of us which receives the
Sabbath. Sabbath, however, is a different essay.
Resistance to Commandment
Many people to whom I have spoken of the contents of
this essay have
told me that they have never experienced commandment.
Some of these people are absolutely observant Jews who
treat all of halacha as personally binding, but binding
as law internalized. Others, less observant of halacha,
have insisted that they can lead fully moral lives on
the basis of self-developed moral codes "administered"
emotionally and logically. That is, they feel good or
bad depending on the extent to which they live up to
their own moral standards. These people also, in their
own ways, are appealing to experience as evidence of the
correctness of what they say. Why, they ask, appeal to
soul, texts, commandment and God as the source of
action?
The person who violates a law she has internalized
feels guilt, or at
least shame. The person who violates his own moral code
is similarly afflicted with negative emotions. Both feel
their freedom diminished, because time must be spent
recuperating, or justifying their actions, or atoning.
But there is satisfaction in such loss of freedom
because the ego has established these penalties, and is
affirmed when the penalties are imposed. The person who
rejects commandment affirms himself even when he fails
to live up to his self-imposed codes. A decision is made
to be more like the self he or she wants to be.
Living up to one's own code (or a code accepted and
internalized) is
morality. Following Levinas, I use "ethics" for
commanded action.
The ego fights relentlessly, from infancy on, for its
own freedom. It
must be free to include as much of creation as possible
within itself. It judges, or accepts, other people in
terms of their usefulness to itself, a usefulness
generally marked by the other's similarity to the self.
This seems obvious enough not to need example. Men and
women desire each other, want to control and incorporate
the other, on the basis of their similarities as sexed
beings. In order to relate to our pets we ascribe human
characteristics to them. The beggar, if helped, will be
helped (once we start to rationalize away from the
discomfort of commandment) because he is a human being
like myself. This last statement will even be cited as
an example of morality.
In its fight for freedom, the ego identifies itself
with that which it
cannot dominate. Thus, we identify ourselves with
groups, such as the state, and apparently subordinate
our freedom to that of the group. In fact, we are
attempting to acquire the power of the group for our own
purposes. This holds even if the group is religious.
Yeats asks about the rape of Leda, "Did she put on his
power with his glory?" Did she, in submitting however
unwillingly to the god, become part of a group with the
god? If so, Yeats implies, the loss of freedom in the
rape is compensated for. This, crudely, is the way
freedom of the ego works. The metaphor is economic. For
this loss, this gain.
Commandment is commandment by the utterly other. There
is no ego
involved, and so nothing to gain. The reward for acting
ethically is freedom from ego, from spatial and temporal
limits, and is meaningless to the ego. The ego,
frightened by what it cannot incorporate or join, aware
that there is no reward it can comprehend and disdainful
of that which threatens it with nothing tangible,
attempts, always successfully, to resist command. Thus,
faced with religious ordinances, the ego works
ceaselessly to derive gain, ego-freedom, from them. The
corrupt clergyman attempts to gain through other
people's obedience; the deeply "religious" person dreams
of bliss (unlimited ego-freedom) in an afterlife; the
politician attempts to assure potential voters that he
is part of the same groups, including religious groups,
as they.
The commanded person enjoys none of these rewards. She
has, at most, a
hint of a trace in no time and spacelessly of the face
of God, or of God (again in Levinas' terminology) saying
a said which, as said, only the ego can know, but which
as saying the soul experiences. It cannot even be
described. ( Greatly to simplify: "saying" is the entire
complex of the need to communicate, including intent,
expression, the pre-verbal cloud of unformed meaning,
all that goes into expression. The "said" is the result
of the communication, the sieved and sifted censured
text which is all that can result. All of the self is
involved in saying; only the ego delivers - and receives
- a "said.") In the most basic of Jewish texts, the
Torah, Moses himself recognizes this impossibility of
transmitting the saying of God. In Deuteronomy 9:10, we
read: " God gave me the two stone tablets written by the
finger of God, [containing] like all the words [or
things] which God spoke to you on the mountain from the
midst of fire on the day of assembly." The word "like"
is simply not translated in any of the standard
translations. It raises too many questions; it permits,
like most saying, too many meanings, too much meaning.
The Ten Words are a said; Moses experienced more than
this. Judaism is, to a major degree, a study of what
Moses heard but did not write down. Every time any
conclusion is reached, it becomes a said, and appeals
entirely to the ego.
The ego's resistance of command and the ego's control
of reason make
conscious acceptance of command difficult. But the ego
is not all of the person. It is sometimes compelled by
the soul, the non-ego, to obedience. Perhaps because the
ego controls reason, people responsive to command are
sometimes accused of "mindless obedience." This is a
terrible confusion of terms. It is the ego-driven
mindlessness of emotional drive to control which is
dangerous, and leads to mass movements of group action -
sometimes, even to religious movements and crusades. The
first commandment of which we become aware in the
face-to-face encounter with the other is always, as
Levinas has shown repeatedly, "Thou shalt not kill."
Encountering Commandment
There are two ways to encounter commandment: the face
of the other, and
engagement with texts. Both lead to God. The face of the
other is always between me and God. (Maurice Blanchot,
in a brief essay on Judaism and Levinas, cites as
exemplar of this the passage in Genesis 18:1-2: "God
appeared to Abraham at Aloneh Mamre when he was sitting
at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. He
raised his eyes and behold, three men approached him..."
We are aware of the presence of God; the conscious mind
sees man.) We never can know what will fulfill the needs
of the other; needs are always there, and so is she. The
saying in that face resolves into saids: "feed me,
clothe me, befriend me, see me. " Instantaneously,
commandment is overtaken by the exigencies of existence,
but it is there, in the timeless time, and something of
it, a trace, carries over into the world of morality and
mortality.
Encounters with others leave us with the awareness of
commandment. But
for all that the commandments others make are unlimited,
they pose the problem of justice. The commandments the
beggar makes of me may interfere with my ability to
respond to the commandments another person makes. The
ego must step in and choose, classify, analyze. The
transcendent and the immanent are not separate realms in
practice. How shall we encounter God and not be unjust?
Interestingly, this is the subtext of Abraham's
encounter with God, for he soon finds himself arguing
for the city of Sodom, asking (18:25), "Shall not...the
judge of all the world act justly?" The interaction of
commandment, justice, and social action is a topic to be
dealt with elsewhere. The liberation theology of the
Catholic Church may offer guidance, as may the communal
organizations of medieval Judaism, and the great stress
on communal responsibility in the Koran.
Commandment is most often encountered, in the Jewish
tradition, in
texts. The texts are, for this purpose, not studied for
paraphrasable content, but for their own sake. This is
called Torah lishma, and is often cited as the highest
of Jewish religious obligations. A comprehensive study
of the concept may be found in Rabbi Norman Lamm's Torah
for Torah's Sake in the Works of Rabbi Hayyim of
Velozhin and His Contemporaries (Ktav: Hoboken, 1989).
Note that Levinas wrote a number of essays on Rabbi
Hayyim's Nefesh HaHayyim.
In Torah lishma, the reader studies with attentiveness
rather than with
concentration. The object is not to discover what the
text says, but rather to hear the voice of God, at
however many removes, saying. The text hides the face of
God. The reader, watching the veils ruffle in the breeze
of his breath reading, may eventually, suddenly, as when
the beggar is encountered, know the hint of the trace
of the divine. It is this property of the texts, not
their content, that makes them sacred. If there is a
valid Jewish mysticism, it is in this text mediated
encounter with God.
There are other reasons for studying the texts, of
course. For many
people they contain accurate saids, and the
paraphrasable content provides excellent rules of
conduct and just social provisions. But the religious
content is all in the attentive openness to commandment.
This led us to our freedom in leaving the peach tree
alone.
One Judaism
I should have liked to name this section "one
religion," but that would
not have been exact. The differences in texts,
traditions, languages and other distinctions exist. I do
insist on one Judaism. In all that relates to the
face-to-face with the other, we are obviously one. Even
in ritual, we are not entirely different. The wholly
secular Jew who is uneasy, somehow, inexplicably, until
his son is circumcised experiences commandment; the
casually Orthodox Jew eating kosher food may or may not,
in that instance, experience commandment. Rigidity of
tradition, such that we accept our guidance from the
"saids" of society and of legal codes may even make it
more difficult for us to experience God. The Maharal of
Prague, in the sixteenth century, famously objected to
Rabbi Joseph Karo's monumental legal code, Shulchan
Aruch, on the grounds that it might make people less
likely to engage in Torah lishma.
For Jews, religion is an openness to commandment.
Everyone so open and,
perforce, responsive, is equally religious. We are not
all equally free, because we differ greatly in our
abilities to become aware of commandment, particularly
text based commandments. To reach such awareness and
freedom, we must be able to read the texts, take time to
be attentive to them, and overcome our egos' resistances
to them.
To the previous essays
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