Wednesday, July 21, 2010

On Language as Such and the Practice of Religious Forms...and other Benjaminian Musings

Although I haven't blogged in a while (since my fiery college years), reading "The Orthoprax Rabbi's Blog" has moved me to again reformulate some of my thinking and responses to some of the pressing issues raised by those most learned and yet disillusioned by their Judaism. By way of modern critical theory, hasidism, and some Eastern philosophy, I posted the following reply to his most recent post:

Anthropologically speaking, all of language is mythical–that is, emerging from humanity. Every modern thinker would admit that language itself is flawed, arbitrary, and the translation of other languages along a long chain of linguistic history. To claim a “pure” or essentialist language, a language that is intact and purely signifies uninterruptedly for the last 6,000 years, a language given by God to man, a language holier than any Other, is both highly ignorant and racist.

Further, we live within the myths of life cycles, social institutions, and political fields. These are our modes of thinking–or at least until we re-mythologize them. We might say that the history of western civilization is that of thinkers who have done one of two things: they have either offered a more profound language for imagining humanity’s project, or they have exposed the richness of humanity’s own myth-making project.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote: “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”. This analogy, though simple, speaks to the core of human imagining and constellating; the trouble is that we forget that what we see is only a constellation, an arbitrary relationality. Such is the power of human reading, and such is the failure in forgetfulness of that reading.

The solution, then, especially to an individual embedded in an Orthodox culture and language: celebrate the language as myth, not as “truth”. Celebrate the possibility for re-imagining these mythical forms and tenets: God, Torah, Mitzvah, Man, etc. Arthur Green (the man behind the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College) has done some great work in recently publishing what is one of the most important works of Jewish theology for the 21st Century, “Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition”, in which he does exactly what he claims in his title (interestingly emerging with a radically hasidic and Spinozan account of Judaism).

Also, keep in mind that the ancients would not have understood such a distinction between fiction and non-fiction, or between truth/myth or history/myth; this are mostly modern and post-enlightenment distinctions. In fact, Daniel Boyarin at UC Berkeley has done some interesting theoretical work in this area, particularly when examining pre-Christian midrashic literature as uninfluenced by the linguistic norms introduced by Christianity and therefore unaffected by Platonic hierarchies of thought above speech. The implications for thinking of the Judaism of our ancient forefathers, the tribes of Israel, as radically different than ours–not only in terms of Torah Sh’beal Peh, Sectarianism, etc–but in terms of how they imagined the function of their religion as more of a practice than a belief (of course, see Menachem Kellner’s important work on this as well) is tremendous.

Thus, to be an atheist, or agnostic--as the Orthoprax Rabbi finds himself, but still a practicing Jew, may very well be in line with ancient Jewish practice as praxis, and perhaps even the radical direction in which we are headed today--a direction that will challenge Judaism's religious forms by emptying them of signification, allowing for a relevant re-constellating.

In fact, let us pray for and anticipate a Judaism in which the mythical forms, the mitzvot and torah, are emptied once again of their overdetermined and usually fundamentalist weight. In fact, R. Nachman of Breslov famously wrote “the highest kavanah is to have no kavanah at all”. Aware of the danger of conformism, we must move beyond the stagnant waters of signification in which we find ourselves, all the while preserving our traditional forms.

I end with the following challenge offered by one of the greatest Jewish (re)thinkers of the 20th Century: “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” (Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; Also in his Arcades Project, “Convolute N”)

1 comment:

  1. nice comment, but I find it easier in theory to do than in practice, at least for me. Once you give up being frum after a certain age it's hard to return. I guess it may work if you actually like the culture and you never left in the first place

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