The Two Kinds of Judaism of Jewish History and Theology

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, January 8, 2007

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote that there are "Two Kinds of Tradition," by which he meant the Tradition of covenantal law and the Tradition of inherited, intuited, heartfelt personal belief, life style, praxis patterns passed on from the sacred memory of the revered past, and communal shared identity. The real divide in Judaism is not between the observant and non-observant, the believers and the skeptics, or the intensely and selectively committed; Judaism's ultimate divide deals with the "epistemology of religion," or the very nature of Jewish religious meaning. It is the divide of the devoted, the passion of the pious, and different versions of the Judaism of the Jews who are most concerned about their Ultimate Concerns. Most Jews' Judaism is actually the second kind of Tradition, and not the first. This second kind of Tradition is the Judaism that the sociologist finds in community and is subsequently reported in non-canonical books. Very few Jews, Orthodox or liberal, determine their behavior by examining sacred tomes or by engaging in speculative contemplation. Most religious Jews mimic the behavior of the Jews whom they respect, without referencing Judaism's sacred library.

Because no person is like another, the Torah canon records both forms of religion. In the Torah, the second form of religion is found in Leviticus and Numbers, which deal with priestly matters. Priests are human beings, selected from the Aaronide clan of the Levitical tribe, to serve the Lord in the holy precinct, where the Lord resides on earth. This is the religion of experiencing the divine, of leaving time reality and merging with eternity. It is the heartfelt yearning to join with the Divine infinite, eternal Creator of all. "Those who cleave to the Lord God live indeed today." If Leviticus and Numbers speak of the Divine realm on earth, with priests dressing and acting as though they are angels, removing themselves from the dead and thereby affirming a life that does not end, caring for others as does God, and bringing reconcillation, peace, and perfection into this imperfect world, Deuteronomy provides the means by which God resides in the hearts, souls, and minds of the living community. If the Aaronide priests represent reality of the world to come, which a world enchanted with holiness and infested with spirit modeled after the eternity to come, the Deuteronomy in which the speaker is not God but Moses our Teacher, is about bringing heaven down to earth, of fixing this world on the template of the Divine. By fixing this world, we prepare ourselves for the eternality of the next world. In my view. Deuteronomy, the book of the Written Torah spoken by Moses and is therefore also oral Torah put into writing, represents the Divine ideal for this real, flawed, and unfinished world; the enchanted world of the priestly metaphor is commanded by God, binding in this world, but serves not as an ideal of sanctity but as a moral conditioning program the observance of which sanctifies Israel.

Both priests and rabbis teach Torah. In Biblical Israel, the priests taught Torah as an oracle. With time, less sacred but more effective teachers were found in rabbis, who are not necessarily born into the Levitical tribe. [Some rabbis, like this author, are also Levites.] We are in principle all to be religious, a kingdom of priests and an entirely sacred nation. Not only clergy in Israel are "religious." Sanctification is both available and obligatory for all Israel. After all, Moses taught "Torah was commanded to [all of] us, as an inheritance for the [ethnic] congregation of Jacob."

In the presence of the priest, who intuits the actual intent of the mind of God, the Israelite who is in the priestly precinct and the presence of the Lord must submit to God and to the divine vicar, the priest. In this world, reality is enchanted and the individual cowers before the Eternal. People, places, and things contain real holiness, and holiness is part of nature and not just a consequence of obeying God. The down side of this form of Judaism is that it is given to abuse. Pharaoh was able, at least in his dream, to walk on water, and presented himself as the god Horus incarnate. Christianity argued that God became human and, as one of the Christian hero's mighty acts, was the walking on water. If a human becomes god, God forbid, then one would do well to obey and not question, to honor by deferential gesture, and to know one's lowly, submissive place in the infinitely just divine order that orders human beings to be slaves before the real hero, the real man, [women did not have access to this kind of religion in Israelite antiquity], the great one who parses with piety and insight the intention of God. After all, like Balaam, "he [and he alone] knows the opinion of the most High." This religious structure is given to corruption. Institutions have a habit of feeding itself before it feeds others, it preaches that the spirit of God overrides the wisdom of humans. But God's wisdom is recorded in Torah, and not the spirit that this or that person claims to possess.

In Deuteronomy, Moses does not appear as a prophet bringing God's word from heaven, but as a teacher of God's word on earth. This Moses is mortal, is he accountable to public benchmarks of propriety, and unlike angels or prophets, this greatest and most modest of men is a model of right precisely because he is neither priest nor angel. In Moses' Torah, the priest are human beings and not angels. Only God is holy. There is no place holy because it is enchanted. It is heresy to believe that this or that person is so holy that she or he is worthy of unconditional deference. The only books that are holy are given in public to all Israel and are not secret troves given to a privileged, priestly, pious, or political elite. The Tradition, or masorah, is given to all Israel or it is given to no one at all. God's law contains no secrets to be divined by divines, and God's mind must be parsed through the words of Torah, and not with the gifted charisma of the self-appointed.

In rabbinic times, there were three competing "Judaisms," to use Rabbi Jacob Neusner's insightful observation. A "Judaism" is a religion of Jews that makes a theological statement regarding what its religion actually is. Hebrew Christianity and the Qumranides [the Judaism of the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls] lived "priestly" religion." Qumranides believed that time never changed, but that its Teacher of Righteousness, who insists on what his intuition, inspired of and by God, tells him what the Torah update of the moment ought to be. Its canon is "open" in that there are additions and editions that reflect God's new Torah for new times. While Scripture is read literally, its "oral" ideal Torah is that only the changes of its elite, inspired by God, reflect God's "Torah opinion."

In the first Christian century, there were many competing Christianities with competing, conflicting, and ultimately irreconcilable Christologies. The Christianity that emerged victorious with Nicea, is that religion that saw the Christian hero as "the salvation, way, and life" with no one, with no deed, idea, or belief, of coming to God the father without loyalty, submission, and fealty to those who claimed that they and they alone are His rightful replacements, or vicars. In this religion, there is no law. This is the first religion in the history of the world for which rite is replaced with dogma and ethics show that one may be saved by faith and not deed alone and one cannot make God happy by any means others than social and political loyalty to God's present representatives, or priests.

According to Rabbi Neusner, the Judaism that impacted all subsequent Judaisms, was the Judaism of the sacred library of the Oral and Written [Dual] Torah canon. In this world, as distinct from the world construction of the Priests but like the religion of Moses the teacher/speaker in Deuteronomy, nature is not enchanted, it is not spooked, and possesses holiness only insofar as Israel sanctifies nature by obeying God's publicly recorded and taught commandments. One defers to truth, and not to person; the Torah learned person is an autonomous moral agent, like Moses. The simple Jews is commanded to respect the scholar but not to submit blindly to any being but God. And becoming a Torah scholar is, in principle, not the privilege of a political elite but the legacy of the entire nation. By replacing the priest, the holy person, with the rabbi, the learned leader, who teaches the holy book to all Israel, the Divine ideal resides amongst the people Israel that becomes sanctified by observing the commandments, which alone afford eternality to its adherents.

These two Judaisms remain in conflict in the Middle Ages and in our time as well. Moses b. Maimon, or Maimonides, and Moses b. Nahman, Nahmanides, are the exemplars of these two ancient Judaisms in medieval times. Acutely aware that these two Judaisms are not congruent, R. Joseph Soloveitchik affirmed, according to his devoted disciple, Rabbi Menachem Genack, that he is ultimately a Nahmanidean.

For Maimonides, there is a contract between God and Israel that was first sealed at Sinai. To make God happy, Israel must obey the contract and its norms. Maimonides wrote commentary to make these rules understandable [Commentary to the Mishnah], a compendium [a systematized collection of what he thought the covenant rules actually are], a list of the commandments, or Rules of Obligation, prefaced by interpretative rules which show how one knows that a rule of Torah is indeed so [a Rule of Recognition], and a book of mysticism called the "Guidepost for the Confused," usually rendered "Guide to the Perplexed", whereby the inner logic of the publicaly revealed Hebrew Scripture is made more accessible the theologically astute students. In the tradition of the rabbinic understanding of Deuteronomy, Maimonides called his compendium "Mishneh Torah," a restated, recycled, re-articulated but theologically constant expression of Torah for his time.

Nahmanidean Judaism maintained that feeling and intuition, when done by the great sage, can and does parse the mind of God. It is necessary but not sufficient to obey Torah law. The guidance for the theologically perplexed comes not from one who addresses and is therefore corrupted by Aristotle; true religion is determined not by Moses our teacher alone, and certainly not from the errant teaching of Maimonides, but by the intuitive mystical Platonists who, by dint of their piety, are afforded insight into the mind of God. These people are holy people, and as a consequence deserve the deference that is the authentic expression of respect. Their intuitions, concepts, definitions, policies, and leadership are, if not absolutely infallible, nevertheless normative and obligatory to any and every Jew. While in principle, great people make mistakes, as evidenced by tractate Horayot and as recorded in Maimonides' treatment of error [Shegagot] contemporary Jewry is too debated to reference the canon. We may not rule according to the Talmud and we certainly, at least to this view, may not rule according to Maimonides. In order that our rulings reflect the rule of God, the Godly, pious, holy people who are endowed with the "Holy Spirit," Torah opinion, and authentic intuition have a right to cite with providential insight, God's eternal world. While much of the Torah was given to all Israel, the hidden, secret, authentic word of God is given to the real teachers of Torah, the carriers of "Tradition," whose bodies are on earth but whose hearts and souls are informed from Heaven.

In some Orthodox circles, text trumps in Torah. Following the medieval mystic and jurist, Maran Joseph Caro, any act that is not explicitly forbidden is implicitly permitted. Torah is about freedom. In other Orthodox circles, Torah is about subservience to God and to God's spokespeople. We suffer from moral vertigo. Modernity is so mind-contaminated that Israel cannot be trusted to think about Torah, but should defer to those who know better. Better the intuition of the saintly rabbi than the secular bias of the modern Orthodox virtual secularist. The Torah, given from heaven and for Moses, not in Heaven, returns to Heaven and is controlled by Heavenly people alone. Inasmuch as the Torah contains both perspectives, of a Heavenly and Earthly Torah, and Judaism is blessed with mystics, rationalists, rationalists who are touched with mysticism and mystics who apply rational thinking, this debate which has endured since Sinai will likely endure until Elijah and the Messiah' great Sanhedrin will resolve the issue. And since arguments undertaken for the sake of Heaven are destined to endure, Israel, which engages in this argument because it is engaged, passionate, and sincere, is also destined to endure.

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