Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [100]
12. T. B. Berakhot 31b; Gittin 60a.
13. See Heschel's discussion in Torah min ha-Shamayim, vol. 2, pp. 71ff., 360ff.
14. T. Y. Peah 2:6; Va-Yiqra Rabbah 22:1.
15. This is an essential theme of Hayyim Nahman Bialik's classic essay “Halakhah and Aggadah,” still very worth reading. An English version may be found in Bialik's Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000).
16. Heschel, Torah, vol. 2, pp. 75ff. and sources quoted there.
17. Such poems belong to the category of Azharot, poetic renditions of the commandments, once recited on the festival of Shavu'ot. See Encyclopedia Judaica s.v. Azharot.
18. T. B. Makkot 24a. The verse quoted is Ex. 20:19, immediately following the text of the ten commandments. The view that Israel said this after the first two commandments were spoken, effectively interrupting God's revelation, is that of R. Joshua ben Levi. See the discussion in Mendel Kasher's Torah Shelemah, Yitro 452.
19. The latter phrase is of course my addition to the traditional formulation, but I see no alternative to it. If the prophet is truly a partner in the articulation of God's word and not merely a passive mouthpiece, the limitations of his own person and the times in which he lived must be reflected in the text as it emerged from his mouth or pen. Heschel is not quite willing to state this openly in either The Prophets or Torah min ha-Shamayim, but I believe it is clearly implied in his approach. I see full admission of it as vital to the self-understanding of a contemporary heterodox Judaism. Indeed, it might be the point of division between Heschel's attempt (thus far unsuccessful, as history has shown) to create an expanded notion of Jewish orthodoxy (the lowercase o is intentional) and my own clearly heterodox adaptation of his approach.
20. See Rosenzweig's letter to Martin Buber, June 3, 1925, published in the appendix to Rosenzweig's On Jewish Learning (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), pp. 117f., as well as the discussion by Rivka Horwitz in my collection Jewish Spirituality, vol. 2 (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 360ff.
21. Quoted by his disciple R. Naftali of Ropszyce in his Zera’ Qodesh, Shavu'ot (Jerusalem, 1971), vol. 2, fol. 40 b-c.
22. Scholem, “The Meaning of Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 30. Scholem was much interested in the question I am discussing here, going back to early conversations with his friend Walter Benjamin.
23. T. B. ‘Eruvin 13a.
24. Atiqa (or keter) is identified with the divine name ehyeh, elements of the tetragrammaton headed by an aleph.
25. Liqqutey MoHaRaN 1:65, based on T. B. Menahot 29b.
26. This phrase is carried over into Hasidism from the language of medieval Jewish philosophy. Its best-known source is Judah Halevi's Kuzari 5:20.
27. This is the meaning I derive from R. Nahman's tale “The King and the Sage,” or “The King's Portrait,” with which I open my book Seek My Face (Woodstock VT: Jewish Lights, 2003) p. xiii.
28. Bereshit Rabbah 19:9.
29. Benjamin D. Sommer comes to a similar conclusion based on his reading of the same aleph passage in the Zera’ Qodesh. See his “Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Religion 79 (1999): 422-451. His view (and implicitly mine as well) is critiqued by Jerome Gellman in “Wellhausen and the Hasidim,” Modern Judaism 26 (May 2006): 193-207. That there is an unspoken Orthodox/heterodox polemic behind this conversation should not be surprising.
30. To say it more fully, I reject the notion that commandment requires heteronomy. The argument of all the post-Kantian moralists who defend Judaism (from Hermann Cohen to Yeshayahu Leibowitz) assumes a somewhat simplistic and naive notion of the self and indeed of the distinction between “self” and “Other.” I am claiming a notion of commandedness based on our recognition precisely that we are of the One, that we are part of something