Britannica defines “Postmodernism” as “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” Given Postmodernism’s general denial of objectivity and occasional expression as a rejection of the very concept of Truth itself, the view is often derided in religious circles. Following last week’s posting on Judaism in conversation with the philosophy of fiction, I received a question about what separates such views from Postmodern ones and how I’d recommend engaging with Postmodernism.
When it comes specifically to Orthodox Judaism’s relationship with Postmodernism, there are three thinkers to discuss; Professor Tamar Ross, Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, and Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (“Rav Shagar”).
I’ve already engaged with Professor Ross’ work directly, so I’ll just briefly summarize her view here. Based heavily in the mystically inclined thought of Rav Kook as well as feminist criticism of the Biblical text, Ross came to the conclusion that
God is not a person or an object that exercises agency on the world from without. Our personalist understanding is not to be belittled; it is a necessary pointer to that which in essence leaves no room for distinction between subject and object, or perceiver and the object of his perception. Hence, revelation is a genuine vision of that reality as grasped by one of its aspects in a particular light. But because that totality is infinite, the potential meaning of revelation is also infinite, varying generation to generation, building on and modifying previous understandings in accordance with the never-ending give and take between its seemingly discrete elements.
God’s revelation, in other words, is too vast and infinite to ever be fully grasped by human beings. God Himself is too transcendent to be objectively understood by any finite mind. With this in mind, Ross concludes that
the meaning and significance of the belief in revelation, divine accommodation, and all religious doctrine making metaphysical claims, is best understood in light of its function in the life of the believer. The “truth” of such beliefs is substantiated not by appeal to external evidence or reinterpretation, but on the basis of their ability to inculcate spiritually meaningful attitudes and values, reinforcing the particular form of life on which such attitudes and values are predicated.
This is the core issue that many Orthodox thinkers have with Postmodernism. Once truth is subjective and only to be evaluated based on its existential consequences, religious observance can potentially move in an infinite number of directions. Rabbi Neil Gillman demonstrated this in the Conservative Movement when he wrote that
God-talk is figurative. We must speak of God, but we are aware, all along, that God is never literally what we think or say God is. That is because God is God and we are human; God transcends human language and understanding… [but] if the terms we use to refer to God are of our own devising, then how do we know that they capture what God “really” is? We can’t step out of our metaphors to compare them to the “real thing,” because if we had a notion of the “real thing,” we wouldn’t need the metaphors in the first place. Even more disturbing, how do we know there is a “real thing” in the first place? Are we not caught in a solipsistic trap? To put it another way, when I advance this position, I am invariably challenged: “Since we create the metaphors, and the metaphors are all we have, do we not create God?” Or, more brutally, “The Bible tells us that God created human beings. But you claim that human beings created God!”
My response is “No, we discover God and create the metaphors.” But this “discovery” is fraught with subjectivity. We do not see God. All we see is the broadest possible canvas, nature, history and the human experience all taken together, what physicists would call a unified field theory. But this “seeing” is highly interpretive. It is a seeing of our minds, not only of our senses. We see what we want to see, what we are prepared to see, what we are educated to see. To use a common metaphor, it is a connecting of the dots of our experience, much like, in our childhood, we connected the numbered dots on a page and then saw a tiger. Except now the dots are not numbered and there are different ways of connecting them. We choose the dots that we seek to connect, and then proceed to connect them. Here again, the term myth continues to work for me. A myth is the connective tissue, the “in-between-ness” which lends coherence and meaning to our experience of the world.
Atheists and believers, Christians and Jews connect the dots of their experience in different ways. They employ different myths. The subjective element in the choice of a myth is thus unavoidable. And with subjectivity comes tension. But it is clear that there is no thoroughly rational, objectively valid, logically unassailable proof of God’s existence; philosophers have been searching for such proofs for centuries without success. The only alternative is to resort to experience and, as we concluded in discussing revelation, to invoke human experience is inevitably to relativize its discoveries.
God, then, may very well exist, but the metaphors that humanity describes Him with are invented. Gillman continues to suggest that for all Jews who accept this, it is impossible not to consider the effect on halakhah (Jewish law). He infamously critiqued the Conservative Movement for claiming to be halakhic when its theology contradictions such a notion:
my critique of the claim that we are a halakhic movement is directed not at how we function but how we identify ourselves. As an identifying mark, the claim is unfalsifiable and disingenuous, it escapes any clear definition, it has failed to engage our laity who either don’t understand it or don’t view it as relating to their own lives, and it is subverted by the culture of our movement, by its ac a demic center, and by its implicit theology. It is a claim, created by and for rabbis and designed primarily to promote our wish to feel authentic.
In its place, I suggested that we embrace the tension and ambiguity which has always been at the heart of our reading of Judaism. If we believe that all of God-talk is metaphorical, if we deny the historicity and the literalness of the Sinai narrative as it appears in Torah, and if we claim that the Jewish religion was essentially the creation of the Jewish people, of groupings of Jews at various critical moments in our history, functioning in response to and within specific cultural contexts which we can describe—a notion that I am convinced most of the ideologues of our movement share—then we must conclude that authority in matters of belief and practice lies within the hands of the committed Jews of every generation. To say this is to relativize all of our ideological commitments, and effectively to consign us to a life of tension—which, I suggest we should embrace and which we will find liberating.
… What distinguishes us then [from Reform and Reconstructionism]? First, we differ in how much of traditional Jewish ritual practice we want to retain, how much we are prepared to abandon or to change, and how we go about changing. In all of these areas, we are more “conservative.” That is more of an emotional stance than a theological one, and it is thoroughly legitimate on its own terms. Feelings are important. Second, we differ in our institutional loyalties. Our loyalty to the institutions of our respective movements, primarily to JTS or to HUC-JIR, is genuine and powerful. Finally, we differ strikingly in our liturgy. No one who has davened in a Reform or in a Conservative synagogue could possibly confuse the two. I have frequently suggested that were you to blindfold me and lead me into five Reform and five Conservative synagogues, I would identify the movement in less than a minute. Whatever my personal theology, I cannot daven in a Reform or Reconstructionist synagogue or from one of their siddurim. None of this is going to change.
Gillman’s view that halacha ought not be given divine weight once theology is moved to the realm of metaphor seems to follow well from postmodern assumptions. Once religious acts serve an instrumental purpose rather than a theological one, they become personal choice as opposed to binding obligation. This was noted as well by prominent Conservative Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who wrote that
Jews who hold idiosyncratic (and, to my mind, sometimes amusing) spheres of halakhic concern, like the congregant who berates the cantor for skipping a stanza of the Geshem prayer for winter rain before leaving for his post-shul round of golf. Jews who perform and aspire to perform mitzvot, but only insofar as such observances do not impinge on their secular commitments— their theater tickets on Saturday afternoons, their children’s club sports on Saturday mornings or, an expectation that they observe the dietary laws of Passover beyond the Seder itself.
In short, their mitzvot are volitional lifestyle choices, not commanded deeds existing within the totality of a halakhic system. And while my observations are those of a Conservative rabbi, I would contend that the difference between Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox Jews is a difference of degree and not of kind. Everyone is picking and choosing mitzvot. No longer a prix-fixe menu, Judaism has become a buffet prepared to serve the individual tastes of the contemporary Jew.
This reality is also acknowledged, albeit to a lesser degree, by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, who “became convinced that the Jewish community had to move beyond its commitments to modernity and its internalization of modern values and assumptions, toward a new synthesis of Judaism and postmodernity. Modern Orthodoxy also had to reformulate itself as “Postmodern” Orthodoxy.” This conviction rested on Greenberg’s trust that postmodern thought contained within it the seeds of Judaism’s most powerful potential expression:
All truths are inescapably articulated and understood in a social and historical context. The wrong conclusion to be drawn from this is a worldview of relativism or nihilism. The right response is to acknowledge the subjectivity, seek to offset and filter it with a hermeneutic of skepticism and with cross-cultural comparisons and insights. What is right about postmodern culture, and what needs to be incorporated into our religious beliefs and systems? The best approach is to recover as many choices from the past and present as possible, so as to fallow for a 360-degree view of the truth and/or the issue.
… To do this, Modern Orthodoxy would have to incorporate the positive moral and intellectual advances of modernity into its Torah heritage. Clearly, this would place a great strain on its capacity to grow and to reformulate the vital center of its tradition. I was convinced that, on balance, democracy, pluralism, humanism, feminism, individualism, self-expression, this-worldliness, affirmation of the body and pleasure, cultural creativity, and variety of expression were moral and spiritual advances that the tradition should incorporate (while also critiquing and modifying them). Furthermore, both science and historical/critical studies had deepened our understanding of reality. The tradition needed to acknowledge these achievements and properly and persuasively reformulate the classic doctrines of revelation, the continuity and eternity of tradition, and the covenant, in a manner credible to people with a new understanding through the postmodern lens. By the light of the classic tradition, Jewry would critique, reshape, and put dialectical limits on postmodern culture - to the betterment of both.
But how is (Post)Modern Orthodoxy to accomplish this while still holding true to the ideas that make it… well, Orthodox? Greenberg argued that this would require accepting the idea of pluralism:
Pluralism holds the continuing authority (and even absolute demands) of one’s own tradition, while acknowledging that there are other, sometimes even contradictory teachings that are also valid. I continue to believe that pluralism is the only acceptable alternative to relativism. The fundamentalist upholding of absolutism requires creating a shelter or forcibly reducing the presence of other religions and cultures. Such a policy is morally flawed and spiritually warped - as can be seen in those countries where fundamentalism rules supreme. The policy is also likely doomed to failure as technology, more and more, interconnects people and their traditions.
How does this look in practice? In a different essay, Greenberg recounts his first retreat with non-Orthodox rabbinic colleagues:
my stereotypes and dismissals of liberal Judaism fell away. I came to see these individuals as truly embodying Tzelem Elokim - dignified, equal and unique people living inspiring religious lives... Any movement that raises people of this quality had to be treated with respect. More than that: I came to see that Conservative and Reform were channels to connect and partner with God. They taught people to live a covenantal life, dedicated to Tikkun Olam. I did not become a Conservative or Reform Jew - because many of my stereotypes/criticisms accurately described people in the movements as well as weaknesses in those approaches. I concluded that my Orthodox movement, with its specific mix of strengths and weaknesses, could, on balance, contribute more to me and to Jewry overall. Nonetheless, by their existence, these liberal exemplars made a strong case that is was worthwhile to work with them to improve their movements - rather than to attack them. With this recognition, my excuses to deny and stand by flaws in my own community fell away.
Darren Kleinberg has called this an attempt by Greenberg to create a “Hybrid Judaism” which has a “rooted group identity while acknowledging that, in a post-ethnic reality, one is attached to and influenced by more than any one single identity group, both within and beyond the Jewish community.” Kleinberg goes onto note that
while Greenberg would certainly prefer that Jews remain rooted in Judaism and the Jewish community, it is also clear that Greenberg’s theology of Hybrid Judaism contains within it the potential for Jews to be influenced by other religious traditions. And, as members of religious communities begin to integrate insights from other denominations and religions, the lines dividing one identity group from another necessarily become more porous.
This would seem, then, to put both Ross and Greenberg in rough agreement with Gillman and Cosgrove - postmodern assumptions necessarily lead to a reality in which personal choice and experiential preference determine one’s Jewish expression more than any metaphysical reality of divine commandedness. Is there any way for contemporary Orthodox Jews to alvage such an ideology?
Rav Shagar draws an important distinction between “Hard Postmodernism” and “Soft Postmodernism.” Hard Postmodernism, the complete rejection of truth and deconstruction of any given subject, is what so often leads to nihilism and the abandonment of values. Soft Postmodernism, on the other hand, does not deny the existence of truth but only it’s objective accessibility. There is no possibility to truly know the truth, but one can strive towards it viatradition. As Rav Shagar writes,
There is no proof of faith, and no certainty of faith to be gained with a proof. In any event, proofs do not impact our existence like a gun pointed at one’s temple; they do not touch upon the believer’s inner life. That is why, when it comes to faith, I prefer to use terms such as “occurrence” and “experience.” God’s presence in my prayers is as tangible to me as the presence of a human interlocuter. That is not a proof but rather an intimate experience. Similarly, I do not assert that the sight of someone standing in front of me is proof of the person’s existence. That would be foolish: After all, I see you.
But try as I might, I cannot refrain entirely from rationalization and apologetics. In fact, as soon as I put things into words, I am ensnared by the same fallacy. The price of language is duality, and, in the context of faith, unreality. Even what I am about to present here constitutes speech about faith; hence, it is a pale simulacrum. Faith does not reside in words, and certainly not in any exposition or essay. The language of faith is the first-person address of prayer. It is not speech about something, but rather activity and occurrence. That is why there will always be a gap between the words and what they aim to represent.
For Rav Shagar, in other words, we can intuit and experience Truth in our lives without objectively accessing it. In Rav Shagar’s own life, he was able to acknowledge that while remaining steadfast on his observance. As he closes that same essay,
Despite all of the above, my faith is Orthodox. I believe in halakha and the halakhic lifestyle. Orthodoxy is a condition for maintaining the Absolute and its representations in our lives, bringing God’s presence, the Shekhina, down into the lower realms, and elevating matter itself. Faith must manifest in one’s day -to-day existence. A genuinely religious life is predicated on a connection with tradition, on a sense of obligation to tradition that, to my mind, is the essence of Orthodoxy.
The goal of religious language and living, then, is to serve as a guiding metaphor that aligns us with the Absolute Truth that we experience deep down without becoming convinced that those metaphors are the be-all-and-end-all. How does this look in practice? Rav Shagar expands on that at length in a different essay:
One cannot ignore the fact that haredi compartmentalization in response to modernity has often been fanned by a fundamentalist and fanatic spirit. Compartmentalization is often accompanied by the delegitimization of all other modes of life - Jewish or otherwise - and presents ultra-Orthodoxy as the only possible truth. It seems as though this trend runs counter to the spirit of traditionalism, which does not require, when embraced as a lifestyle, a comparison to other ideas and traditions. Thus, we return to one aspect of religion’s response to modernity: the doxa of ortho-doxy, the conception of religious truth as rigid and exclusive, formulated without room for change or flexibility. One can claim that such a response to modernity constitutes and internalization of modernity itself, for, in spirit, modernity believed in the existence of an absolute truth. This belief led to a demand for coherence and the resolution of all contradictions in a given language, be it historical, psychological, biological, or religious. Consequently, places where the resolution of contradictions proved impossible became increasingly rigid, even violent. That is the root of the rigidity of haredi Judaism.
I yearn for a different haredism, an authentic haredism that maintains the compartmentalist approach - currently the movement’s only possible approach, to my mind - but is not motivated by the rejection of other cultures of lifestyles or the attempt to identify them with haredism. I pin my hopes on a haredism driven by an acceptance of multiculturalism that enables it to choose itself without rejecting or delegitimizing other cultures, and without becoming rigid. Such a haredism will excel at creating gaps between various forms of reference in a manner that retains the truth of each, and prevents the distortions that arise from attempted syntheses, while rigorously empowering and maintaining the boundaries of its own faith.
I must concede that if it is to have a future, the national religious movement must internalize such haredi outlooks or risk becoming either secular or hardal (fundamentalist haredi Zionist), or these days theology must be founded on alienation and absurdity, among other things. This means that, in the absence of an absolute truth or language, the fabric of reality is permeated by a myriad contradictory and irreconcilable truths. Only a religious outlook that succeeds at positioning itself as a hard, unconditional truth, while remaining open - absurdly - to the existence of other truths that contradict it, will be able to persist without losing its soul to rigid dogmatism or self-deception.
For Rav Shagar, postmodern religious faith provides the ultimate ability for one to confidently enter the world and face any differing opinion. It allows its practitioners to fully buy into their own system as rooted in their fundamental experiences of reality while also being able to enter into genuine conversation with contradictory approaches. Most importantly, it does so by maintaining that halakhah is an objective standard by which we live that is beyond our immediate control. With halacha still related to as the divine will calling us to act in particular ways, it is not in our hands to alter in any given moment. In order to be most successful, though, this approach requires something else: rootedness in the Jewish tradition:
The traditional Jew is rooted in his belonging. Because he both lives within tradition and is borne upon it, he feels no need to update it or justify it to the zeitgeist. His lack of awareness keeps his tradition from ossifying into orthodoxy, a cult of the right deed. Only someone aware of the relationship between changing times and his way of life and native context will attempt either to prevent the familiar from changing along with the times or to formulate synthetic adjustments. Thus, tradition is, first and foremost, belonging. Those who question tradition, who are compelled to justify, defend, or preserve it, no longer belong to it, for it is, by definition, a function of self-identity rather than reflexivity.
I therefore have no intention of arguing that traditionalism can give rise to full commitment to halakha; rather, I maintain that a lifestyle of halakhic commitment bereft of the rootedness of traditionalism is soulless - and the soul, as we know, is the essence. Moreover, the source of halakha’s conservatism is intimacy and rootedness in tradition. The moment it loses its intimacy and rootedness, halakha becomes a lifeless body, and conservatism morphs into religious fundamentalism. Indeed, Rabbi Yehuda Amital long claimed that youth who reject the religious lifestyle generally suffer from a deficiency in kneidlach (matza balls) and noodle kugel, or perhaps the Passover Seder’s aromas and the melodies of the High Holy Days. The point is that they lack the self-contained experience of the ancestral home, which breathes life into the religious existence.
… Of course, the various shades of modernity and Orthodoxy have removed Jews from the more rooted Judaism. Orthodoxy’s insistence on a Jewish lifestyle “by the book,” as a doxa, in order to compartmentalize - inside and out, present and future - has eliminated the unbounded Jewish rootedness from that lifestyle and faith…. Rootedness is never “by the book;” rather, it is embedded in the current of life. The halakhic Jewish lifestyle is the flow of Jewish life - not the study of halakhic tomes. The fullness, which is the soul of the halakhic life, is engendered in this stream, establishing the tribal ethos that shores up out forefathers’ customs and is thus rooted in them. Without this soul, our forefathers’ customs, and the faith enfolded therein, would wither. To put this in the context of Rabbi Amital’s statement above, what many people miss in the religious world is not so much the smell of the food as the connection to that world, the sense of belonging generated by the customs, flavors, smells, and scenes that are all unique to the religious lifestyle. These things make one’s lifestyle cozy and intimate, Shabbat-like, such that one cannot step outside it, just as one cannot truly leave home - one belongs to it, wherever he may be. Thus, what is lacking today is the taste and smell that are themselves the content. The modern era alienated man from this content and severed him from his home, dealing a deathblow to intimacy. It was an era that gave rise to the Orthodoxy that lives by the book but is bereft of its Shabbat-like soul.
For Postmodern Judaism to be successful, then, traditionalism is required. Not reflexive traditionalism, though, but rather lived connection to Jewish traditions and a call to embody them as a sign of where we are from, who we are in the moment, and how to get where we need to be in the future. Accepting who we are and embracing our most fundamental texts and most inspiring traditions, is a tremendous asset in that regard as long as we remember that tradition can belong to us only if we belong also belong to tradition.
I think Post-Modernism suffers from confusing two different concepts of ideal.
There is the pristine ideal, which I would call the Mountaintop Ideal, which defines what we are aiming for. And then there is the Path Ideal, the ideal way of getting there.
For example, Shelomo haMelekh describes the tzadiq as one who could "fall seven times and arise" again to greatness. But he would never say that Judaism's Mountaintop is to stumble along the way.
Similarly, even if we admit the impossibility of a universally knowable truth, that "only" changes the Path we take in life to embrace and embody those ideals. It does mean shifting to other ways of justifying our beliefs. But it doesn't change the fact that the Torah includes propositions that it says are objectively true statements about ethics, morality, metaphysics and theology. The Path Ideal has to deal with the new episemological conclusions. But the ontological Mountaintop remains unchanged.
I would argue that R Shagars postmodernism is in line with Orthodoxys beliefs, while Tamar Ross's is not. It would take an essay to articulate the difference though.
Rav Shagar uses postmodernism as a reason not to justify the belief, as the belief can stand by itself. Ross uses postmodernism to say that while the belief may not be true, we can act as if it is true. Huge difference.