Urges and Commitments: Unconscious Drives in Rav Soloveitchik’s Writings

After about a month off finding an apartment and moving, here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a few years.

Unconscious Drives in Rav Soloveitchik’s Writings

An underrated phenomenon in Rav Soloveitchik’s thought that he appeals to with surprising regularity is what I would call “unconscious drives.” He does not use this language (and has choice words for Freud in an essay in Out of the Whirlwind), but it accurately captures the dynamic I want to lay out here. I touched on this in the discussion of faith in my Tradition essay on R. Soloveitchik (and I’ll return to that topic below), but it’s worth laying out some of the different examples of what I mean.

First, a basic definition. When I say, “unconscious drives,” what I mean is that Rav Soloveitchik depicts individuals or movements (made up of individuals) as acting based on motivations of which they are unaware, and/or which differ from what they would take to be their motivations. To make up a banal example, if you asked a person why they eat pistachio flavored ice cream, they might say it’s because they like the flavor, but it could really be because their sadly-departed parent loved pistachio-flavored ice cream, and eating it gives them a sense of their lost parent’s presence. Psychoanalysis often differentiates between desire and drive as elements of psychic life, but for all purposes we’ll ignore that distinction and just refer to the phenomenon of individuals or movements acting based on motivations of which they are unaware.

As one more introductory note, I should say that this idea might already have some purchase in Judaism in the idea of the yetser hara, the “evil inclination.” This isn’t the place to explore that further, but for Rav Soloveitchik there’s a lot to say on if and how he accepts that idea. The best place to look for something similar to our topic in this post is his essay “Catharsis,” throughout, but particularly the last section, which focuses on “catharsis” in the context of religion.

The Unconscious Quest for God

As a first, and quite explicit, example from Rav Soloveitchik’s writings, let’s look at his 1973 speech, “Majesty and Humility.” The essay lays out two forms of human existence, each associated with one half of the title, and argues for a variety of implications of each, and their combination. For our purposes, we should just note that he sees each form of life as relating to God—and thus also finding God—in very different ways. Majestic man finds God in exploring the cosmos, and Humble man finds God in experiences of suffering and finitude. However, Rav Soloveitchik does not insist that this “quest for God” is a conscious, intentional activity: “Both cosmos-conscious man and origin-conscious man quest for God, although they are not always aware of this quest.” When secular, Enlightenment-era philosophers and explorers were mapping the world and writing philosophical treatises, they likely wouldn’t have called that a quest for God. But Rav Soloveitchik would have.

A similar dynamic appears in Rav Soloveitchik’s “early” work, And From There You Shall Seek (I have thoughts on calling it “early” but that is for another post). In this phenomenological work (meaning it does philosophy/theology by attempting to describe human experience/consciousness), R. Soloveitchik lays out different elements of human consciousness as related to the quest for/relationship with God. He argues that the quest for God is a basic part of human nature, one which takes a variety of forms over the course of human history:

“Seeking God through the external and the internal worlds is not a theological issue of interest only to scholars of religion. It is a fundamental problem that arose at the dawn of human culture. From the time of the Greek philosophers to that of the masters of modern philosophy (not to mention the sages of the theocentric Eastern cultures), the search for God has resounded throughout the intellectual world. It takes different forms in accordance with the historical and cultural peculiarities of each epoch; it conceals and disguises itself in the range of concepts and variegated aspects through which each generation expresses its thoughts and internal struggles, but it never disappears entirely from the horizon of inquiry.” (8–9)

Now the first half of this paragraph might just mean that different cultures have imagined God differently when they have searched for God. Critical for our purposes is the sentence: “it conceals and disguises itself in the range of concepts and variegated aspects through which each generation expresses its thoughts and internal struggles.” The search for God manifests differently in the dynamics and thoughts of each generation in a concealed form. They might not know it, but they are searching for God. This fits well with the rest of the chapter from which the chapter is taken where the quest for God (explicitly framed as such) takes the form of the quest for real reality, for something absolute and non-contingent, by way of sense experience and potentially science, though science is ultimately said to be misleading and unhelpful in this regard.

A similar dynamic, though perhaps different in some important ways, shows up in The Halakhic Mind, where R. Soloveitchik describes the desire to know reality as exactly that: “Every metaphysical quest for reality is driven by the urge for finality and totality which neither scientific microscope nor telescope can reveal” (19). Knowledge is rooted is desire, rather than the other way around.

I should note that this aspect of R. Soloveitchik’s theory of knowing (and the relationship between these two books) is well discussed in Alex Ozar’s JQR article, “Joseph Soloveitchik as a Weimar Intellectual,” though the above quote is accidentally attributed to And From There You Shall Seek rather than The Halakhic Mind (and I disagree with some of Ozar’s conclusions about R. Soloveitchik’s politics). William Kolbrener’s article, “On Abandoning Aristotle: Love in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Philosophy,” is also good on this, if I recall.

Let’s turn now to his interpretation of Zionism, specifically, secular Zionism. Rav Soloveitchik’s famously uses a dichotomy between the covenants of Egypt and Sinai (parallel to his concepts of Fate and Destiny) to at once connect and distinguish between secular and religious Zionism—both secular and religious Zionism are concerned for the Jew’s bodily well-being (Egypt/Fate), but only the religious Zionists are concerned with their spiritual destiny (Sinai). Setting aside questions about the utility of this claim, let’s just note that he has a clear idea of secular Zionism as a movement fully explainable by its own rational-utilitarian motivations.

It’s therefore quite surprising that you can open up The Rav Speaks and find him presenting a very different understanding of secular Zionism’s motivations:

“As stated above, one acquires a share in the Creator of the universe only by building an altar, by “you shall seek . . . when you search with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deut. 4:29). All effect that mode of possession — the observant Jew consciously and the secular Jew unwittingly. We observant Jews believe that every Jew is forever seeking the Creator of the universe, unwillingly or willingly, inadvertently or intentionally. He seeks Him even when he protests that he does not need Him. Of course, fortunate is the Jew who knows Whom he is seeking and toward Whom his soul yearns. I pity those Jews driven by an inner force toward the Creator of the universe, who exert themselves to repress that yearning. This stubborn denial of the Creator of the world, despite man’s instinctive longing toward Him, is the cause of many emotional and spiritual disturbances and confuses the mind and heart. Yet one cannot change the fact that the more the secular Jew proclaims that he has no relationship to sanctity, the more he feels in the innermost recesses of his heart that he has given false testimony about himself.” (21)

Here too we have the quest for God as an unconscious drive, but where before the actions which this drive motivates were exploratory and philosophical, here the discussion is about secular Zionists’ willingness to sacrifice for the Jewish settlement of the land of Israel. This activity, which could be interpreted in mere utilitarian terms, or as a secular-transcendent act of nationalism, is actually a manifestation of an unconscious, perhaps even suppressed, desire for the “God of Israel” (22) (notice the nationalism sneaking in the back door). Their desire for the land is actually a desire for God.

Relatedly, and leaning into the subtle nationalism of the last piece, is the very concluding paragraph of the book of essays/lectures, Halakhic Morality (Maggid Books, 2017):

Every Jew has a capacity for repentance and a desire for sanctity. Quite often, it is subconscious, hidden away in the deep recesses of his personality of which he is not aware. No alienated Jew may be expelled from our society, for we have never given up on a single Jew or considered him completely lost. With patience and tolerance, we may bring him back if we are generous, if we have faith in him. (222)

This is part of a passage with a direct parallel in one of Rav Soloveitchik’s teshuvah speeches, “The Individual and the Community” (On Repentance [Maggid Books, 2017], 39–62, particularly 58–62), which has been discussed by Daniel Hershkovitz in his article on Rav Soloveitchik and German Nationalists, and Gerald/Yaakov Blidstein’s article on the Jewish People in Rav Soloveitchik’s thought (originally published in Tradition, then in Hebrew in a collected Avi Sagi volume, then in Society & Self, a collection of Blidstein’s essays on R. Soloveitchik). In both passages, Rav Soloveitchik argues that a Jew is required to believe in the Jewish People, which means believing that all Jews will someday do teshuvahand live their lives in accordance with Orthodox Jewish law. The quest for God here isn’t manifest as an ostensibly secular practice, rather it is posited as a fact which necessitates acting toward certain Jews as if they believed even if they seem not to do so.

The Lonely Man of Faith and the Drive to Be Fully Human

Armed with these examples, let us turn for our last two examples to one final text: The Lonely Man of Faith. While fairly popular and well-known, I still think this text is wildly underrated. It’s a rich text that, if I were to try to sum it up, is not about a Jew’s individual religious life so much as different conceptions of human nature and the connective tissue binding individuals into (different kinds of) communities.

The basic structure of the book is an exploration of two imagined figures, “Adam the first” and “Adam the second,” loosely based on the first two chapters of Bereshit and essentially parallel to the “majestic” and “humble” archetypes from “Majesty & Humility” we saw above. At the end of chapter I, laying out the basic dynamics of Adam the first, R. Soloveitchik remarks that

“It is God who decreed that the story of Adam the first be the great saga of freedom of man-slave who gradually transforms himself into man-master. While pursuing this goal, driven by an urge which he cannot but obey, Adam the first transcends the limits of the reasonable and probable and ventures into the open spaces of a boundless universe” (Maggid, 2018; 15)

Much as R. Soloveitchik said Majestic man is driven to explore by an unconscious drive to find God, so too Adam the first is driven to explore and dominate by an urge which determines his conduct even beyond his ability to decide or rebel against it.

R. Soloveitchik makes much the same remark a few pages later, this time regarding both Adam the first and Adam the second.

“Both Adams want to be human. Both strive to be themselves, to be what God commanded them to be, namely, man. They certainly could not reach for some other objective since this urge, as I noted, lies, in accordance with God’s scheme of creation, at the root of all human strivings and any rebellious effort on the part of man to substitute something else for this urge would be in distinct opposition to God’s will which is embedded in man’s nature. The incongruity of methods is, therefore, a result not of diverse objectives but of diverse interpretive approaches to the one objective they both pursue.” (19)

The language of “urge” returns here, and the object of this urge is made explicit: to be human. The creator embedded this urge within human nature, and it causes people to act in certain ways. People then explain to themselves why they do what do, but their interpretations may be undermined by the raw fact of the urge. Any instrumental explanation (this is the critique of ch. IX, and perhaps the main critical point that the book makes) necessarily fails to appreciate this simple, brute reality. Any motivation that the Adams might give for their behavior, particularly if it takes the form of “I do X to attain goal Y,” is necessarily false. The only fully honest explanation is “I do X because I feel driven to do X,” and perhaps, “Doing X is part of being human.”

This line of thought reaches its peak in the description of faith in ch. IX, which is worth quoting at length:

“the man of faith is not the compromising type and his covenantal commitment eludes cognitive analysis by the logos and hence does not lend itself completely to the act of cultural translation. There are simply no cognitive categories in which the total commitment of the man of faith could be spelled out. This commitment is rooted not in one dimension, such as the rational one, but in the whole personality of the man of faith. The whole of the human being, the rational as well as the non-rational aspects, is committed to God. Hence, the magnitude of the commitment is beyond the comprehension of the logos and the ethos. The act of faith is aboriginal, exploding with elemental force as an all-consuming and all-pervading eudaemonic-passional experience in which our most secret urges, aspirations, fears, and passions, at times even unsuspected by us, manifest themselves. The commitment of the man of faith is thrown into the mold of the in-depth personality and immediately accepted before the mind is given a chance to investigate the reasonableness of this unqualified commitment. The intellect does not chart the course of the man of faith; its role is an a posteriori one. It attempts, ex post facto, to retrace the footsteps of the man of faith, and even in this modest attempt the intellect is not completely successful. Of course, as long as the path of the man of faith cuts across the territory of the reasonable, the intellect may follow him and identify his footsteps. The very instant, however, the man of faith transcends the frontiers of the reasonable and enters into the realm of the unreasonable, the intellect is left behind and must terminate its search for understanding. The man of faith, animated by his great experience is able to reach the point at which not only his logic of the mind but even his logic of the heart and of the will, everything—even his own “I” awareness—has to give in to an “absurd” commitment. The man of faith is “insanely” committed to and “madly” in love with God.” (79–80)

Faith is defined as a fundamental “commitment” which undermines rationality, intentionality, and the sense of self (tracking this language of “commitment” in R. Soloveitchik’s writings is more fruitful than look for “Faith” or the like, in my experience; for example, see throughout Halakhic Morality). The person of faith can at most interpret and attempt to explain to themselves their fundamental commitments, but they cannot choose those commitments, and the commitments are not necessarily rational. To have faith is to have this unconscious commitment, directed at God specifically, without which the person would be all surface and no depth. “The whole of the human being” is a complex of elements including both the conscious mind and the unconscious commitments which move it.

Reflections

What does all this mean? What does this do for R. Soloveitchik? What does seeing it do for us?

In terms of what this does for R. Soloveitchik, the first thing we should note is that it serves as what he would call “a mattir,” a tool for rendering something permissible (a “permission structure” in the jargon of contemporary discourse). He takes things like the secular quest for knowledge or secular Zionism and renders them religious activities/phenomena by asserting that their underlying motivations are in fact religious. Religious individuals can therefore participate in those activities or collaborate with those movements without that compromising their religiosity.

Second, and something of an inversion of the former point, this theme may indicate that when R. Soloveitchik talks about “the quest for God,” he has something broader in mind than just the normal meaning of that phrase. If sacrificing for the land and attempting to understand “the Absolute” are both forms of searching for God, maybe God is more than just the Jewish deity who commanded the Jewish people to observe the Torah.

The final thing it does for R. Soloveitchik, I suspect, is that it simply reflects his understanding of reality, and his associated critique of modernity. He really thinks that people are driven by unconscious motivations for at least a significant portion of their activities. Moreover, he thinks denying or suppressing this fact is one of the fundamental tendencies of Western Modernity, and that it is of the utmost importance to restrain this tendency. Overconfidence in the totalizing power of rationality makes an idol of the human being—and of a mistaken understanding of the human being at that.

For interpreters of Rav Soloveitchik, it does a few things. One, the recurrence of the theme throughout R. Soloveitchik’s writings (across decades and genres) is itself notable. Second, making this explicit helps interpret the writings. For example, I have encountered pushback against my argument (in my Tradition essay) that Lonely Man of Faith describes faith as something “unconscious,” but given how willing Rav Soloveitchik is to appeal to this form of explanation, there is every reason to read his description of faith in this manner as well.

Similarly, the book as a whole should be interpreted from the perspective of a person who believes in the reality and significance of unconscious drives, which is to say, Adam the second. The Lonely Man of Faith is the sort of book Adam the second would write, not Adam the first. Adam the first thinks human beings can be fully explained as rational consumers. The Lonely Man of Faith knows what the person of faith, Adam the second, knows—what Rav Soloveitchik knows: that human beings are more complicated than that, that they are often driven by commitments that transcend calculations of logic and exchange.

No Exceptions! On Halakhic Man’s Political Theology

(On re-reading it in 2023)

Cognitive Man is a figure of the closed system, while Homo Religiosus is a figure of the exception [see the terminological note below]. This dichotomy is the basic structuring principle of the book, but it is also immediately restrained: Homo Religiosus desires only a limited exception, it is the exception of the law. The system is given of the world, and Homo Religiosus even finds it desirable, but there is a transcendent mystery which conditions it. Freedom initiates the law, and for Homo Religiosus it should be meditated on, even sought out. This is in contrast to the wild and unrestrained free subjectivity of the romantic subject who destroys the world (fn. 4, 64). Hence also the book’s discomfort with and opposition to both death and transcendence, which are ruptures in the closed system.

Halakhic Man, meanwhile, maintains the reality of the exception, but in an even more restrained form: creation and revelation (and the distinction between them is blurred). The exceptional decision, the miraculous moment of divine/judicial intervention did indeed occur, but in the past. The world exists, the law has been revealed, and now it is given for us to work with and apply. The book juxtaposes discussions of creation and revelation—of the relationship ship between God and the world and the relationship between God and the law—with astute political-theological intuitions.

In terms of dogmatic theology, cognitive man is a believer in the eternal cosmos, halakhic man is a deist, and homo religiosus is a traditional creationist who maintains the possibility of miracles. Subjective, violent man is an occasionalist. The affirmation of the will beyond the law is clearly related to existentialism and subjectivism, as per note 64. However, they are corruptive of this basic idea. For halakhic man, the pure will must remain walled-off in the moment before creation. Halakhic man sees the pure law as created and then essentially eternal. He’s not a legal positivist, though the law was at one moment posited. No one is qualified to create law, just God (in the past).

Similarly, the discussion of repentance-providence-prophecy as individuation defy any divine intervention in the world from outside the system, even though that’s exactly the conventional understanding of providence and prophecy. These last few chapters are about his trying to find the exception within the system, fusing the singular and the universal. This establishes halakhic man as both the exceptional figure capable of managing, developing, and imposing the law, without being separate from it.

Halakhic Man as the one who imposes the law and ensures that there are no exceptions to it emerges most clearly in I:XV, the last chapter of the first part of the book. It’s the book’s most explicitly sociopolitical chapter. It contains a refusal of political thinking and a critique of the Protestant private-public divide as taken up by Liberal Judaism.

However, the refusal of political thinking is not a refusal of political intervention! It is an assertion of halakhic categories and law even in the political arena. It’s an ideology of the halakhic state, or perhaps of a millet-style system. Either way, the key claim is that, if halakhic man was in charge of the state, it would not be an exception from halakhah. Halakhah would determine the state just as it determines everything else.

This necessarily runs into the problem of exile, which is a deep contradiction in the book. Is exile an exceptional state, which ought to be ended, perhaps as soon as possible? Or is it simply the nature of reality and Jewish life for halakhic man? The book vacillates on the topic, never affirming exile, but also downplaying the end of exile in numerous ways: It affirms theoretical learning over practical application of halakhah (even public, political halakah like appointing a king), but then also says that realizing halakhah in reality is halakhic man’s dream; it makes almost no mention of the land, and certainly none of Jewish political power; it always centers the individual who keeps halakhah rather than halakhah as a communal or collective way of life; etc. (For more on this, I highly recommend Dr. Yoel Finkelman’s “Religion and Public Life in the Thought of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Jewish Political Studies Review 13, No. 3 [2001].)

Terminological note:

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology opens with the famous line, “Sovereign is the one who decides upon the exception.” Sovereignty, he argued, meant the capacity to decide when the law must be suspended. Consequent upon this is a host of other issues, such as the creation of the state and the law more broadly. The sovereign, he said, is parallel to God—deciding the exception parallels doing a miracle and creating the state/law parallels creation.

One of his main targets in this polemical work was Hans Kelsen Neo-Kantian legal philosopher, who saw law as a closed system. Unsurprisingly, there is much resonance between Kelsen’s theories and the Neo-Kantian figure of Cognitive Man in Rav Soloveitchik’s monograph.

Some other research notes:

Both halakhic man and religious man are norm-oriented in contrast to cognitive man who is theory-oriented. The same split comes along with interest in transcendence. In all other areas, HM is more like CM than HR.

1:15 (final section of 1:12 in the Hebrew)

In addition to being the sociopolitical chapter, it is also the chapter always cited RE halakhic man caring about ethics and the widow, etc, but paying attention to the language makes it clear that ethics is meant to be “actualized” via halakhah, not via ethical action. Hence the example of ensuring that political lists of Jews conforms to halakhic standards and categories. If you trust or assume that halakhah does realize ethics, great; otherwise, less so.

2:1 Halakhic man is the katechon, the lone force holding back chaos (maintaining creation/the law).

2:3 The discussion of time, history, and freedom fits well with the Cold War emphasis on breaking free from historical, deterministic ways of thinking about society and the state. Feels a lot like Hannah Arendt’s political action, her understanding of the miracle as an uncaused action.

“Historical crimes, past aberrations, can, at times, descend upon dry bones like the life-giving dew of resurrection, to which world history so amply testifies.” (117) – what on earth is he talking about here??

Rav Froman’s Theopolitical Reading of Parshat Shekalim

Below is my translation of Rav Menachem Froman’s short derashah for Parshat Shekalim from Ten Li Zeman (Maggid Books, 2017) followed by pics of the original Hebrew

My translation:

Parshat Shekalim (Ex. 30:11–16) is the first of the four torah portions we read as a community during the weeks leading up to the holiday of freedom. The passage contains the commandment for each member of the Children of Israel to donate one half shekel for the purposes of the services in the Tent of Meeting, simultaneous with the people-wide census. The great commentators of the Jewish tradition explain that this was in fact how they did the census. Each member of the Children of Israel gave the same fixed sum—“the rich shall not give more, the poor shall not give less”—making it possible to know how many of them there were based on the amount collected. According to Rashi (and other commentators), the text contains a divine commandment not to count the people in any other fashion. Counting the Children of Israel directly would be a sin against God. In this context, people often mention the census organized by King David in the Hebrew Bible (2 Samuel 24; 1 Chronicles 21) as an example of how this is a huge sin deserving of harsh punishment, for which David repents, “David said to the Lord … ‘I alone am guilty, I alone have done wrong…’” (2 Samuel 24:17).

Jews of later generations also saw a political census as a terrible sin. One of the first times the Jews rebelled against the Romans, they did so in direct response to a census enacted by the Caesar, who had decided to turn Judea into a province of Rome. Being counted by the Caesar meant belonging to his kingdom, meaning that you accepted his sovereignty—and the Jews saw accepting the sovereignty of a human being as necessarily an act of throwing off the yoke of the sovereignty of the King of Kings. My master and teacher Prof. Auerbach (ob”m) noted that this Jewish way of thinking—which sees human sovereignty as “other gods”—took tangible form at a certain point in the development of the institution of Caesar, when the Romans began to view the Caesar as a god. However, Jews viewed serving human beings as a contradiction to serving God even in places where the highest human authority was not viewed as a god.

The Sages’ homiletical reading the first verse of the Shema—“Hear, O’ Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”—says that an enslaved person cannot fulfill the commandment of accepting the yoke of the sovereignty of heaven, because they already have a different master. You can only have one master—and it is not just having a non-Jewish master from a foreign nation that this reading rejects. When the Sages established that a worker can end their employment with his employer whenever they so choose, they based this on the Biblical description of the Jews who left Egypt: “They are my slaves, not slaves of slaves” (b. Bava Metsia 10a). The Jews are the slaves of God, and they are not permitted to become enslaved to someone else. Hence the prohibition against King David counting his people. They do not belong to him.

This fundamental Jewish position finds expression in Samuel’s opposition to the people’s request that he appoint a king for them (1 Samuel 8). Gideon expressed it even earlier when he rejected the people’s proposal that he reign over them: “But Gideon replied, ‘I will not rule over you myself, nor shall my son rule over you; GOD alone shall rule over you’” (Judges 8:23). Even when David established a more nuanced position and created the monarchal dynasty in response to urgent, practical necessity, he still needed to grapple with this nigh-unsolvable problem: How can an authority be established without contradicting the religious obligation to avoid servitude to a human being?

This has ramifications for us as well, here in the State of Israel which is free from foreign authority. Belonging to the state and commitment to it could well contradict our being servants of God. The challenge is to be counted among the citizens of the state, and to still remain a free human being, under God alone.

Hebrew:

Utopianism and Realpolitik in Israel/Palestine/Gaza

Preliminary note: This isn’t a sweeping discussion of Israel/Palestine/Gaza, I’m just making a very specific point. Don’t extrapolate beyond that.

It’s pretty common in political discourse around I/P to attribute a naïve utopianism or idealism to the Left and a gritty realism to the Right (“Peace would be nice but we have to be realistic”). There could be something to this, but it’s also very reductive, and it misses the way the two forms of thinking tend to work together, rather than being totally separate.

Even realists have to have some vision for how they would like the world to look, which then guides them in their pragmatic decisions. If you didn’t have an ideal vision, such as “some form of a Jewish state should/shouldn’t exist in I/P,” then you wouldn’t care one way or the other about I/P. And whether you think “some form of a Jewish state should exist in I/P” or “some form of a Jewish state shouldn’t exist in I/P” will make a big difference when you come to grapple with what you see as “facts on the ground.”

Now I want to complicate the common “Left = Utopian, Right = Realist” picture.

The Right:

There’s definitely a strong realist posture on the Israeli Right. “We have no partner for peace,” etc. This suggests that the ideal is peace with the Palestinians, and only the reality of Palestinian refusal keeps that from happening. For many even realistic figures on the Right (and the Left, for that matter), this is clearly not the case.

There’s also a strong, increasingly mainstream streak of Right-wing Utopianism (AKA “messianism”). Anytime figures on the right talk about resettling Gaza, or about population transfers, this is their utopian vision bleeding into politics itself, and it’s not exactly marginal. The idea that Israel will one day be able to determine what goes one in this strip of land without having to even take into account the Palestinians—or international opinion, for that matter—is a picture of an ideal world.

The Left:

There’s hardly a finer messianic vision than world-wide, perpetual peace. But does that necessarily make any desire for peace a naïve/utopian political vision? There are probably Israeli Leftists who fit that description, but there are plenty for whom peace is primarily a realist vision. It’s not what they would choose in an ideal situation, but it is a way to navigate a reality wherein both Israelis and Palestinians exist and tend to desire national self-determination. They assume that both demographic groups will continue to exist here, and that any vision which is purely one-sided is therefore necessarily utopian.

Many such Israeli leftists prefer negotiations to war for the same reason. If there will always be Palestinians in I/P, then Israel should give them every reason to desire peace with Israel rather than to hate Israel, and you can’t bomb people into liking you. They might even oppose the war in Gaza (entirely, or the scale/length of it), not because they think Israel is wrong in some absolute sense, but because they think the war is making things worse rather than better for Israel. If the goal of “Destroy Hamas” means something other than the dystopian “Kill anyone who could, now or in the future, fight Israel under the banner of Hamas,” then it has to grapple with realistic questions of “How does Israel encourage Palestinians to like it?”

Finally: UNRWA and Humanitarian Pressure

Much has been made in recent months of the interweaving of UNRWA and Hamas, which, I should note, is bad. No question about it.

People on the right have correctly said that they have been saying that UNRWA is a problem for years, and in some cases that is true. But some on the Right have also taken this as an opportunity to say that “UNRWA = Hamas,” and that’s a different claim.

If you think in utopian terms of pure good and bad, you are going to ask “Who should UNRWA work with to accomplish their mission? Who should they avoid?” and perhaps draw conclusions from who they work with about what their mission really is. They say they just want to help Palestinian refugees, but they work with people who want to destroy Israel, so they must be okay with the destruction of Israel, and perhaps even seek it. Maybe that is their true mission.

From a realist perspective, you also have to ask “Who can UNRWA work with in Gaza? Who can they avoid?” The answers to those questions are a lot more murky, in part because evaluating reality is always fraught. But certainly if UNRWA wants to be effective in Gaza, they are going to have to work with the government, which means working with Hamas. Given Hamas’ absolute refusal to make clear distinctions between its fighters and civilians, UNRWA just working with/employing people in Gaza means they’re going to work with/employ Hamas sometimes. This doesn’t make any particular act of “working with” Hamas or employing Hamas fighters okay, but it’s important to recognize the realist pressures involved. The same is true, of course, for the International Red Cross. They will always have to try to navigate being as effective as possible in a terrain controlled by Hamas, including making moral compromises, without violating any moral red lines. They may fail at avoiding this, but that’s different from sharing Hamas’ goals.

The same is true of international humanitarian pressure more broadly. Such pressure often seems to be directed at Israel to the exclusion of Hamas. Many calls for a ceasefire are essentially calls for Israel to stop attacking Hamas, but not for Hamas to stop attacking Israel or release the hostages. Some people will explain that they feel morally implicated in Israel’s actions more than Hamas’s (either as citizens of Israel, or as citizens of countries which support Israel’s actions), and that’s separate point I don’t want to discuss now.

More relevant to what concerns me here: Others say that they pressure Israel because they have a chance of influencing Israel, whereas they have no chance of influencing Hamas. This is a realist claim, not a moral one. Setting aside if it is true or not, they’re saying that they direct pressure against Israel not because they think Israel is in the wrong but because Israel is more susceptible to the pressure. The greater moral good of ending the fighting dictates setting aside smaller-scale moral questions, even if that makes possible potentially strange ideas like “Israel is in the right, but should also stop,” “Hamas is bad and what they’re doing is bad, but we should let it continue,” etc. The realist claim of who humanitarian pressure can or cannot affect immediately moves the conversation into a world of moral shades of grey.

[Notably, it seems obvious to me that this could also incentivize ignoring humanitarian pressure: If the claim is “We pressure X because X might listen; we don’t pressure Y because Y won’t listen,” then it seems like ignoring the pressure might be a good way to make it stop, at least in the future. If that’s actually what happens or not in response to humanitarian pressure is an empirical question for which I don’t have data.]

Against Scientism: What “The Halakhic Mind” is Really Doing

The Halakhic Mind is fairly explicit when it comes to the purpose of the book. It says in the first section that when philosophy and science go together (as he will then say they have done basically throughout all history), religion must either agree (apologetics) or reject (absurdist faith). 

He wants to avoid both horns of the dilemma by saying that the 20th century is a time when philosophy does not automatically accept the scientific picture of the universe, so there’s room for other ontologies such as religious ones. The book is concerned with metaphysics or ontology: not just what could/does exist, but what is the nature of the world and of how we know the world, and how those determine what could/does exist.

Notably, he is critical of apologist both in the first section, and in fn. 58, p. 118, where he says that the quest for proof or evidence in religion is doomed to failure, and people should just work with the framework they have, it would just be more fruitful. 

Despite this, when Modern Orthodox people bring up the book, it’s almost always in an apologetic context. The book is about opening up and critiquing accepted ideas about the nature of reality before studying halakhah to find new ones, but it most often gets used to support existing beliefs about the nature of reality.

The trajectory of the book from the beginning to the end is toward deriving ontology from halakhah. Hence the last line: “Out of the sources of Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.” The question of the book is “What kind of stuff is there?” and relatedly, “What kinds of ways of answering that question are there?” Then one answer is given: Halakhah can tell us about the halakhic kind of stuff (which may not be all of the stuff). Halakhah is a set of rules based on a certain understanding/experience of the world, which we can reconstruct by studying halakhah (and presumably by following it).

This is fundamentally a critique of scientism. He wants us to avoid reducing reality to science. There’s just more going on in the world than what science can talk about. Science is great, it picks up on some aspects of reality and then builds a whole “parallel” world or picture of the world, but that’s not the same as saying science accurately depicts reality. This is also how Rav Soloveitchik starts And From There You Shall Seek, where the critique of scientism opens up space for experiencing reality in other ways which may point to God. It’s also a key theme in Rav Soloveitchik’s dissertation.

Most of the book is Rav Soloveitchik supporting his critique of scientistic ontology by name-dropping different philosophic and scientific schools who share that critique. The logic is something like “They said it too, so that makes it more likely that it’s correct.” And perhaps that’s true, but perhaps that just makes it the zeitgeist. More practically, it makes for a hard time reading the book, because it can be hard to tell when Rav Soloveitchik is simply reporting something someone else said and when he is saying something he personally thinks is correct.

The book also critique some other ways of trying to determine what sorts of things exist, such as by way of intuition. One of his examples of what not to do is early 20th Century race science, which takes bad intuitions and uses them as a basis for determining that there are these things called races which have certain characteristics and which then determine important facts about individuals. Don’t do this.

A topic which comes up in The Halakhic Mind but also in almost every other book by Rav Soloveitchik and in a bunch of essays is the nature of Time. What is it, how does it work, etc. He gives different explanations of time in different places, so he’s not super committed to one thing that time is, but he wants to critique the idea that measurable, objective time is exhaustive of time more broadly. In Halakhic Mind, his positive suggestion for what time is derives from the way halakhah (specifically, the Jewish calendar) structures time and our experience of it.

He doesn’t discuss them in Halakhic Mind but two other key areas where he’s clearly involved in this project is human nature and the nature of holiness. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean for something to be holy? These are questions he can’t stop asking, and which he never wants us to answer based on science alone.

Some more notes from recently rereading the book:

Rav Soloveitchik name checks a bunch of different anti-monisms: ontological, axiological, and epistemological.  It’s a pluralism of pluralisms—pluralism all the way down.

Pragmatism and its resulting pluralism are spoken of in glowing terms (20–21) while Idealism is described as an idolatrous religion (21–21).  His explicit target there is Cassirer, but you have to imagine Cohen is an implicit target too.

A repeated theme throughout the books is not just derision of pure subjectivity but also its impossibility. There is not unmediated knowledge or reflection. If it is ever discussed, it is a heuristic, “reconstructive” concept, not a really existing reality.

The absolute + the naive, two different elements at the beginning, essentially become the same subjective element at the end.

The book is deeply confused as to whether or not it makes any sense to talk about subjectivity in the absence of objectivity. It explicitly asserts that you can’t (~66), but then the whole discussion of reconstruction necessarily assumes that you can! (Rainier Munk’s book is insufficiently critical on this point)

Best recent scholarship on the book is Alex Ozar’s Jewish Quarterly Review article, though I have my disagreements.

Judgments Belong to God

The collection of laws which makes up Shemot 21–23 includes two mentions of Elohim within judicial contexts—not as the giver of laws or enacter of punishment/reward, but as spatially present.

First, when a male slave decides that he wants to stay with his master, Shemot 21:6 says that “his master shall take him before ha’elohim.” Later, in a discussion about if an item left with a watchman for safekeeping disappears, 22:7 tells us that the watchman should come before “ha’elohim” and declare that he is not responsible for the disappearance.

I’ve left “ha’elohim” untranslated because it contains—or perhaps, generates—a crucial ambiguity. To whom does it refer? If we maintain that God in whatever sense transcends space, then what does the Torah mean when it says people should come to/before God?

The simplest answer might be to say that God has a physical body and the people physically come to/before God, in whatever space God is to be found (such as the mishkan/Mikdash). The term “ha’elohim” really only becomes problematic/ambiguous given a disembodied theology—we take God to be spaceless, so the conjunctions don’t make sense.

Shadal (Shmuel David Luzzatto) provides an explanation which hews close to the embodied model, without rejecting divine disembodiment. He says that courts in the ancient near east used to be contain idols alongside the judges, and hence going to court was referred to as “going to/before the gods.” (I’ll note here as well that the commandments from Shemot 21 and 22 use the word “elohim,” which can refer to God or gods in the Torah.) Shadal argues that the Jews borrowed or maintained this theo-judicial terminology while leaving behind the embodied theology it implied—a very Maimonidean move. Hence the courts which had once been the site of Divine judgment became the site of human judgement, but the rhetoric around them remained theological (we’ll come back to this).

The midrash finds a different ambiguity in the term “ha’elohim.” Instead of “God” (or “gods”), the term should here be understood to mean “judges.” Instead of a theological term introduced into a judicial context, the context should be used to reinterpret the word in a manner that makes sense contextually. You can find this interpretation in the Aramaic targumim as well, in line with what Rambam sees as Onkelos’ anti-anthropomorphic tendency. Rambam picks this up in his reading of Bereshit 3:5—when the snake said they would be “like elohim,” it wasn’t lying. They become like political leaders, guided purely by the conventional terms “good” and “bad.”

But should God be removed from judgment? Should the judicial situation be de-theologized? Or does judgement belong to God (Devarim 1:17)?

Devarim 19:16–18 seems to want disambiguation through addition—why not both?

“If someone appears against another party to testify maliciously and gives incriminating yet false testimony, the two parties to the dispute shall appear before YHWH, before the priests or judges in authority at the time, and the judges shall make a thorough investigation.”

Here the parties to the case come not before “ha’elohim” but before “YHWH,” so there can be no question that they are coming before God. However, they are also explicitly coming before human beings (priests and judges) who can perform the tasks of judicial authority. The judicial situation is theologically charged, but it remains a judicial situation.

This sensibility is dramatized in a story which appears on b. Sanhedrin 19, which cites Devarim 19:17:

“The slave of King Yannai killed someone.

Shimon ben Shetah said to the Sages, “Set your eyes upon him and let us judge him.”

They sent a message to him, “Your slave killed someone.” He sent him to them.

They sent to him, “You must come as well. ‘He should be testified against with his owner’ (Exodus 21:29). The Torah stated: The owner of the ox should come and stand over his ox.

He came and sat down.

Shimon ben Shetah said to him, “Yannai! Stand on your feet and let them give testimony regarding you. You stand not before us but before He-Who-Spoke-and-the-World-Came-into-Being, as it says, ‘The two parties to the dispute shall stand…’ (Deuteronomy 19:17).”

Yannai said to him, “I will not act as you say but as your colleagues say.”

He turned to his right, but they looked down to the ground.

He turned to his left, but they looked down to the ground.

Shimon ben Shetah said, “Are you preoccupied with your thoughts? Let the Master of Thoughts come and punish you.”

The angel Gabriel came and struck the sages to the ground and they died.”
(Translation from Jeffery Rubenstein, In the Land of Truth)

This incredible story inflects the human judicial situation with divine dimensions in two ways:

1. The stakes. When the judges fail to uphold their judicial responsibilities, the divine, invoked as “Master of Thoughts” and appearing as the angel Gabriel, comes and strikes them down.
2. The judges themselves. Echoing the ambiguities of our verses from Shemot 21 and 22, the judges themselves make God present, in some sense. Someone in the court might think that they stand merely before judges, but they ought to know that in fact the Creator of the World is present in the moment of judgement.

This might all seem quite foreign to modern sensibilities, but only because most of us don’t find ourselves on trial very often. The judicial situation, the moment when one individual decides another’s fate and shapes the rules of our shared world, is in fact a very divine moment.

Monolatry and Yitro’s Judicial Revolution

Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016) tells the story of two Jesuit missionaries in Japan, searching for their mentor who disappeared while on mission their himself. When one of them finally finds him, he admits to apostasy—he’s given up the mission and spoken heresy. One explanation he gives his mentee was that the Japanese words for “son” and “sun” are identical, so when they thought they were teaching Japanese people to worship the son of God rather than the Sun God, that likely wasn’t really happening. They thought they were saving souls, but really they were just condemning well-meaning pagans to horrible persecution.

A similar sort of confusion takes place when Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro comes to visit the Jewish people in Shemot 18. Yitro comes because “Jethro priest of Midian, Moses’ father-in-law, heard all that God (elohim) had done for Moses and for Israel—His people—how YHWH had brought Israel out from Egypt.” After he arrives, Moshe tells him “everything that YHWH had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel’s sake, all the hardships that had befallen them on the way, and how YHWH had delivered them.” Yitro responds, “Blessed be YHWH who delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh, and who delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that YHWH is greater than all gods (elohim)…” The first section of the chapter then ends as Yitro “brought a burnt offering and sacrifices for God (elohim); and Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to partake of the meal before God (elohim) with Moses’ father-in-law.”

The theology (literally, “god talk”) of this passage is confusing. What is the relationship between the different divine names, YHWH and elohim? And what is the exact meaning of “elohim” in this context? “Elohim” can sometimes be used to mean God, YHWH, but it can also be used to mean “gods,” the pagan deities with which God commands Benei Yisrael not to worship. This is a practical translation problem: When should it be translated as “God” and when as “gods”? In our context, there are three questions to be asked: What does Moshe mean? What does Yitro mean? What is the relationship between their two intents.

As the text narrates, Moshe only refers to God here as YHWH. There’s no ambiguity, he just means God. Yitro, however invokes both YHWH and elohim. Is he just using two different names for God, or does he mean that there is in fact a multiplicity of gods? The answer is made quite clear when he says, “Now I know that YHWH is greater than all gods (elohim).” God, for Yitro, is just one of the gods—if the greatest among them. This sort of theology, when one god is supreme over a multiplicity of gods, is what is often called “henotheism” or “monolatry” as opposed to “monotheism.” Finally, do Yitro and Moshe know that they’re talking past each other—that they’re using the same word with wildly different intents? When they bring sacrifices to elohim and eat before elohim, do they realizes that one does so as a monotheist and the other as a polytheist? Unclear.

The real significance of this emerges in the second half of Shemot 18: Yitro’s Judicial Revolution. Yitro sees Moshe standing alone as the sole authority figure, and proposes a multiplicity of judges, albeit with one supreme above them all. The analogy between theological and political frameworks (the political theological-analogy) is a useful analytical tool with a long history. For our purposes, it can help us see that what Yitro essentially proposes is judicial polytheism. This may help explain why someone from outside is necessary in order to introduce this change: it flies in the face of a monotheistic theology! Yitro introduces a polytheistic structure into the day-to-day administration of the Torah.

The basic reason for this is clear in the text of Shemot: Judicial monotheism wasn’t working. Moshe isn’t God, and the limits of having one person be the sole authority are severe. It’s exhausting to them, and requires working linearly through all issues one at a time in a way that doesn’t work practically. The political-theological analogy breaks down—Moshe isn’t actually God, and pretending otherwise causes problems.

This also points to a deeper conceptual problem with political theology (and see Erik Peterson’s critique of political theology in Monotheism as a Political Problem). Maybe the analogy is false? And making it is bad? In religious language, we call this idolatry, the worship of something other than God as God or as fundamentally similar to God. A polytheistic judiciary may, in this sense, help avoid the risk of idolatry inherent in the consolidation of power. This is what David Flatto argues toward the end of his book, The Crown and the Courts: Separation of Powers in the Early Jewish Imagination. Certainly, this risk is a live concern throughout Tanakh, and is the focus of prophetic critiques of both Jewish and non-Jewish kings.

In Shemot 18, this benefit appears in a subtle element added in Yitro’s presentation. Whereas Moshe had said that the people come to him when they want to inquire of God (making Bakunin’s point that serving God always requires obeying intermediaries), now Yitro is careful to distinguish that when Moshe represents the people and brings their disputes before God. Yitro’s monolatry, rather than making the judiciary analogous to God, makes God a present part of the system, distinct from and superior to any others within it. Moshe, rather than God’s sole representative, becomes God’s functionary. The polytheism angle remains problematic, but I think we can see my their might be something here worth valorizing.

Hayyim Rothman’s “No Masters But God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism”

I read this book over the last month or so. The book gives “portraits” of different “anarcho-Jewish” thinkers, sub-divided into activists, mystics, and pacifists.

“Portrait” is the right term, as the chapters are succinct, and I sometimes wished for more information or analysis. Each 20–30-page chapter has a brief biography followed by thematic sections exploring different aspects of each thinker’s “Anarcho-Judaism,” that being Rothman’s term for their different fusions of Anarchism and Judaism, seeing Judaism as  anarchistic, and Anarchism as Jewish. Each figure did this differently, but all of them wanted to hold the two together, in contrast to figures like Gustav Landauer who consciously left Judaism behind and embraced Anarchism (Rothman’s contrast may be slightly unfair to Landauer in this respect). 

Two of my favorite chapters were the ones on the mystics: Yehuda Ashlag (author of the popular Sulam commentary on the Zohar), about whom I had known a decent amount (such as his communism, though not his anarchism), and Shmuel Alexandrov, who I knew only as someone to whom Rav Kook wrote letters.

Rothman diligently traces the mystical underpinnings of their anarchisms, as well as showing how the Baal HaSulam works with (and against) Schopenhauer, while Alexandrov is working with Schelling. 

I was also particularly partial to the chapter on Avraham Yehuda Heyn, whose single-minded interpretation of all of Judaism in light of the commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”—specifically “kill,” rather than “murder”—was impressive and inspiring. Almost Levinasian, he radically sanctifies the individual, but in doing so arrives not at a modern American libertarianism but at a libertarian socialism.

The conclusion helpfully draws together common themes, such as a near-universal embrace of radical pacifism (based on means-ends correspondence), some form of universalism, and complex (but mostly positive!) relationships with Zionism and Jewish nationalism/peoplehood. 

The whole book is full of interpretive gems, and the introduction has a great “theological context” section laying out some of the traditional Jewish materials with which the subjects were working—such as the anarchistic comments of R. Don Yitzhak Abarbanel! 

The final chapter on R. Aharon Shmuel (whose works were recently published in Hebrew by Blima Books and in English by Ben Yehuda Press) included one of my favorite interpretations, a phenomenal rhetorical distinction:

Critiquing political Zionism, Tameret notes that while Political Zionists dream of returning to the land of the Israelite kings, Jews throughout history dreamed of returning to the land of the prophets. 

On some level, the book suggests, that’s the choice: do we seek to be kings, or do we seek to be prophets?

A Review of Two New Koren Tanakhs: The Magerman Edition and The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Samuel

As part of its ongoing effort to put out quality books making Tanakh more accessible to more Jews, two of Koren’s new product lines are particularly worthy of note: The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel and The Koren Tanakh Maalot: Magerman Edition.

Koren has so far published two volumes of The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel, one on the book of Exodus and one on the book of Samuel. The mission of this series is to situate the text of Tanakh within its immediate geography for the reader. Alongside the Hebrew text and a new English translation, the reader will find a variety of interesting, helpful explanatory notes. These explanations draw on geography, Egyptology, archaeology, Ancient Near Eastern studies, and more.

Thus, for example, when the book of Samuel describes David’s travels throughout the countryside in flight from Shaul, The Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Samuel provides the reader with aerial photos, maps, artistic renderings from throughout history, pictures of relevant archaeological findings, explanations of place names based on other languages, and the like. These notes are clearly-written, accessible, and short enough to be easily digested in a casual learning session.

There are a few slightly longer explanatory “essays” (such as one on lists in Tanakh and the Ancient Near East before the list of David’s warriors in 2 Samuel 23, and one on “God as King” in the middle of 1 Samuel 8 after the people ask Samuel to appoint a king),  but even these don’t extend past one or two pages each.

My only problem with the volume is that it is physically unwieldy. Based on its size and weight, it feels more like a reference volume or a coffee table book. Its high-gloss paper makes for a great reading experience (particularly given the abundance of images the book contains), but makes it heavy and hard to hold for an extended period of time. I look forward to returning to the volume in the future when I have a question about a Land of Israel specific aspect of the text, but I can’t see myself carrying it around and learning from it directly.

In this respect, the new Magerman edition of The Koren Tanakh Maalot presents quite a contrast. The Hebrew-English edition is still quite a handful (unavoidable for a full Tanakh), but it is lighter than some of the Hebrew-only Tanakhs I have used. It is eminently usable, an underrated but important feature for such a volume.

The Magerman edition features Koren’s brand new English translation, which provides the basis for other projects such as the aforementioned The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel series and Koren’s Mikraot HaDorot series, an extensive ongoing project of making the traditional “Rabbinic Bible” full of commentaries available in English. This single-volume Hebrew-English Tanakh lacks traditional commentaries, or the sort of interesting and far ranging explanatory notes found in the The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel, but that is intentional. The translation has footnotes, but only where the translators and editors felt it was necessary to clarify or make accessible some critical point in the Hebrew.

As with any translation (and all the more so a translation of Biblical proportions!), a careful reader will find translations with which they may disagree. Translations always involve making decisions where multiple possibilities or ambiguities in the original cannot be rendered in the translation, and in such situations the translators and editors must simply decide based on their principles and intuitions. The guiding principle of the work was literary readability, and the translators and editors did their jobs well. The new volume is always clear and readable, and I find myself reaching to pull it off the shelf anytime I want to look something up in Tanakh. That may then be followed by looking up commentaries and differing interpretations online if I disagree without they translated something, but the fact that I keep turning to The Koren Tanakh Maalot: The Magerman Edition so frequently shows how successful the translators, editors, and publishers were in creating a great Tanakh reading experience.

Poetry of Loss and Hope: Dr. Yael Ziegler’s Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World

The problem we encounter when reading Eikhah, like so many other canonical texts, is that we are too familiar with it. Texts like Eikhah are built into the routine of our calendar so that by the time we’re old enough to read them, we barely notice they’re even there. They rest unseen, like glasses on the bridge of our nose, rather than smacking up on the face the way they otherwise might.

Any good book on Eikhah will attempt to re-sensitize its readers to the power of Eikha’s language and imagery, and this is exactly what Dr. Yael Ziegler’s Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World sets out to do. Ziegler treats Eikhah first and foremost as poetry—as a collection of five poems, to be precise—meant to capture the experience of destruction, and to grapple with the theological issues this experience raises.

One of poetry’s most salient features is its rich language. Making full use of both traditional and academic commentaries, Ziegler explores the ins and outs of Eikhah’s words, “assum[ing] that Eikha intentionally weaves multiple meaningful interpretations” into a given verse (398). Notably, poetry often puts a variety of meanings in front of its readers, meanings that don’t always create a harmonious whole. Ziegler does not shy away from the different possible meanings a word might bear, preferring to present a thorough picture than one perhaps more streamlined.

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One notable upside of looking at Eikhah as poetry is that he primary concern is the meaning of the words, and only secondarily what that meaning says about God and Torah. By way of example, take Eikhah 2:5, which Ziegler translates as “The Lord was like an enemy, He swallowed Israel.” This is neither the first nor the last time Eikhah refers to God as an “enemy,” but the straightforward, almost abrupt nature of the verse always shocks me: God was like an enemy.

The first time I read this verse provided me with two lasting memories: the moment I read it, and the moment I asked a teacher how it could possibly say what it says. Commentaries and thinkers concerned with religious significance of the verse often leap—as this teacher did—to show how the verse doesn’t really say what it says. They lean into comparative “like”—God was like an enemy, as opposed to actually an enemy. The word “like” suddenly serves to highlight the fundamental dissimilarity between God and “an enemy.”

Ziegler doesn’t take this approach. Instead, she explores what the author of Eikhah was trying to express by referring to God as “like enemy,” noting that the second chapter generally highlights God’s violence toward Israel without attempting to provide justifications for it. Other chapters, such as the first, do focus on God’s justification—on the sinfulness of the people, their deserving punishment. But the second chapter, as well as the fourth, attempt to express a sense of loss and bewilderment that flows not just from physical suffering, but also from a loss of theological footing that comes from suddenly experiencing God “like an enemy.”

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Another important feature of poetry is intertextuality, the way one text cites or is in dialogue with other texts. Throughout Lamentations (both in the body of the text and in helpful charts), Ziegler shows how Eikhah constantly makes reference to or echoes other texts from Tanakh, particularly the punishments listed in Devarim 28 and the promises of hope in the second half of Yeshayahu.

One function of this is to destabilize or “take the edge off” Eikhah’s harsh emotional tenor. Ziegler hardly makes it through commenting on a single verse—and certainly not through a chapter—without referencing visions of a restored Israel from elsewhere in Tanakh. Many of Eikhah’s expressions of grief turn out to simultaneously be references to hope.

Reading this critically, one might say that if words or phrases mean one thing while also referring to its opposite, they might just be overly common expressions rather than “subtle (nearly indiscernible) reference[s]” (185). Reading more constructively, however, we might say that this is an unavoidable part of the richness of Tanakh—or any “broader canon” (211) within which a text finds its place. Biblical Hebrew—and Jewish language more broadly—is simply too rich to be used unequivocally. You cannot express one thing without referencing its opposite, because all of the words available have already been used so often and so variedly.

This point is brought home by a rabbinic text Ziegler quotes in full, twice, once in one of the introductory essays, and once near the very end of her commentary. In Bavli Makkot (24b), Rabbi Akiva sees a fox walking through the Temple Mount (an image drawn from Eikhah 5:18). When he sees this raw desecration, he smiles because—unlike his companions in the story—he cannot see destruction without also seeing redemption. One automatically references the other. In Jewish language, there can be no loss without hope.

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A final feature of poetry worth mentioning is structure, because it is not only an interpretive tool of which Ziegler makes use again and again, it is also a key to her larger argument about the theology of Eikhah. Ziegler notes throughout her commentary how chiasms are fairly common in Eikhah, on both the micro and macro level. Chiasms are literary structures where two halves of a text mirror each other in their thematic or linguistic elements, with some key element lying in the center between the two halves. The largest chiasm in Eikhah, she argues, is the composition and arrangement of the book’s five chapters. Chapters 1 & 5 mirror each other, as do chapters 2 & 4, with chapter three lying in the center.

Moreover, if the book is a chiasm, then what it certainly is not is a linear progression. The book does not simply proceed apace from one theological position or emotional posture toward another, leaving the former behind. Instead, Ziegler argues, the book puts forward a circular, progress-less vision of religious life, with a key element at its center, and with mirrored elements surrounding it on all sides. For Ziegler, Eikha’s theological “center” (Eikhah 3:21–39) contains a “lengthy reflection on God’s essence, ongoing graciousness, and fidelity” (34), demonstrating the importance of “maintain[ing] a deep core of faith in God’s enduring goodness despite the ever-present suffering” (35). This theological heart beats deep within the cracks and crevices of Eikhah’s loss-wracked chapters—hope persists, but it is not given the final word.

If Eikhah had simply ended on a positive note (and the traditional practice of repeating the penultimate verse does move us in that direction), then we might have said that Eikhah is a book about overcoming loss. Instead, Ziegler argues, Eikhah is a book about the persistence of loss and the insufficiency of theology or theodicy for overcoming loss—as well as about the persistence of faith in the presence of loss. If loss and hope are inextricable, they are also not incompatible. The two come together, and neither one rules out the other. Human commitment to divine fidelity doesn’t keep a person from seeing God as “like an enemy,” nor does such an experience necessarily require a person to abandon their own religious fidelity.

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The only downside of the book is that it is, in fact, “too much of a good thing.” For a commentary on one of the smaller books of Tanakh, Lamentations weighs in at a shocking 528 pages, not including the acknowledgments and bibliography. Part of the reason for this is that the book is provides its reader not with thematic or chapter-based essays so much as a line-by-line commentary on the entire book of Eikhah. While she will sometimes group a few verses together for the sake of coherency, Ziegler leaves no word unturned as she lays out the meanings of the text for her readers. Additionally, the book begins and ends with supplementary essays on Eikhah’s historical background, theology and suffering, biblical poetry, parallels between Eikhah and other biblical texts, and the goals of Eikhah Rabbah.

All of this is incredibly valuable, but it makes for an incredibly long book. Any reader who wants to use Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World to help prepare for the communal reading of Eikhah in just under a month might find it difficult to make it through the whole book cover-to-cover by then. My recommendation in that case would be to perhaps read the introductions and summaries accompanying the commentaries on each chapter of Eikhah, as well as some of the supplementary essays, and then diving in to Ziegler’s commentary on specific verses that catch their interest.