Textual Reasoning, Modernity, and the Limits of History.

Textual reasoning offers a not-merely-literary way of reading the Bible, other than history, that would tell us "the truth."

Textual reasoning names both a nascent scholarly movement and the set of practices this movement tries to describe and analyze. [1] In this brief essay I will be arguing that textual reasoning helps us to gain perspective on a misleading view of modernity -- namely, the view that what defines modernity is the triumph of history or the historical perspective. From this triumphant vantage point, history alone is seen as revealing the truth of the past and of the human condition in general. However, textual reasoning facilitates the recognition that this is, in fact, both a one-sided view of modernity, and an overly ideological elevation of history. [2]

The essay begins with a personal anecdote which forcefully illustrates these issues (section one). I then pause to recount the emergence of textual reasoning and to describe its three basic dimensions in some detail (section two). Taking up the focus of this essay once again in section three, I explore textual reasoning's challenge to the absolute status of history, and offer some observations on how making history ultimate in this way engenders an essentialist view of modernity. I propose instead a pluralist conception, where "modernity" becomes the contested institutional space within which irreducibly different things -- like textual reasoning and history -- can productively coexist.

Reading between History and Literature

Several years ago, at one of those pleasant dinners during academic conferences where old friends and colleagues get a chance to reconnect and catch up, I found myself in an unexpected imbroglio over a book which, I later realized, represented a shot fired over the bow by "textual reasoning." The book was Daniel Boyarin's Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Toward the end of an entirely amiable dinner conversation the atmosphere grew strained as I began to summarize for my colleague -- a broadly educated scholar of the Hellenistic period with training in Tanakh and in New Testament -- a challenging new book I had been reading on midrash. I explained that in Intertextuality Boyarin was, among other things, carefully exhibiting the Mekilta's intriguing way of reading gaps, apparent contradictions, and repetitions in the text of the book of Exodus. According to Boyarin, I said, the Mekilta interpreted such passages by actually enacting the latent intertextuality of Tanakh: it read a passage in its own c ontext, compared this passage-in-its-context with an apparently contradictory or repetitious passage in its context, and then proceeded to offer a multiplicity of ways to read the divergences. In this way the Mekilta displayed an expansive network of contextual differences among verses; it revealed a living field of organic, intertextual relationships through which the Biblical text generated an endless harvest of meanings.

My colleague was growing somewhat uncomfortable, but still seemed basically peaceable -- until I mentioned that Boyarin had also compared the fertility of this sort of reading with that supplied by the documentary hypothesis. I explained, with a sense of the growing tension between us, that Boyarin had of course carefully distinguished his way of reading the Mekilta from any sort of dogmatic theology; still, Boyarin maintained that midrash avoided the Higher Criticism's reductive, diachronic reading, which entirely eliminated precisely those fascinating "fault-lines of difference" in the text which had called out to the rabbis so long ago: "interpret me!" Thus midrash, with its synchronic reading and its implied Author, offered a richer reading of the Bible -- hermeneutically richer, richer in irony and insight -- than the documentary hypothesis.

As I finished this last point, my colleague erupted. "What are you talking about?" he asked angrily. "The documentary hypothesis is simply the truth, it describes what actually, what really happened; it is the basis of all serious scholarly work on the Bible. Midrash might be a pleasant diversion, it might be of interest to 'religious types' -- but midrash is hardly an intellectually responsible way to read the Bible, and it has little if any place in the academy, except as an object of study or as an historical curiosity." Silence descended. What to say? We managed to change the subject as we walked back to our hotels, but ever since then our paths do not seem to have crossed again.

I have thought about that dinner a lot. At first, I was certain that my colleague had misunderstood a central point in Boyarin's work, either because I had not presented it clearly or because he had not wanted to grasp it. This central point is that Boyarin situates his ingenious account of what is going on in midrash halfway between two classical extremes: a dogmatic fundamentalism, on the one hand, and a reductive historicism on the other. Boyarin names this new place "semiotic." He describes it as follows.

It follows then that God must be understood as the implied author of the Torah. This is not a theological or dogmatic claim but a semiotic one. That is to say that it does not matter for our purposes here if the inscribing of God as author of the Torah is a product of human work and therefore a fiction or an effect of actual divine authority. If God is the implied author of the Bible, then the gaps, repetitions, contradictions, and heterogeneity of the biblical text must be read, as a central part of the system of meaning production of that text. In midrash the rabbis respond to this invitation and challenge. [3]

Boyarin's semiotic account of midrashic activity parallels the late Hans Frei's attempt to retrieve the "narrative dimension" of Biblical reading, a dimension which Frei positioned, similarly, halfway between reading the Bible as a work of history and reading it as a work of literature. Frei draws our attention to the way readers of the Bible before the eighteenth century found in scripture an ordered progression of interconnected events, in which earlier moments prefigure later moments, while later moments are seen as figures of the earlier. Precritical readers of the Bible tried to fit their own lives into this structured procession within which events unfolded, in part by the figurative reading mentioned, and in part by changing their characters and their hearts to conform with the overall narrative pattern. This stands in marked contrast, Frei tells us, with the reading of the Bible that came to predominate later, in which the question of the historicity of events described in the Bible became paramount ("did x really happen? what is the evidence for its occurrence as described? how credible is that evidence?"), entirely eclipsing the narrative dimension. [4]

Yet now with greater hindsight, I wonder if perhaps my colleague had not, actually, understood something about the long-range implications of Boyarin's work better than I. In the introduction to his book, in discussing the proximity between his work and Derridean deconstruction, Boyarin makes these significant remarks.

Among other contributions, Derrida has demonstrated that the conception of univocity and transparency of meaning is none other than a philosophical possibility -- indeed, a quite problematic possibility, not a logical necessity. I would say that this questioning of the Platonic-Aristotelian (ultimately Enlightenment) understanding of language makes possible a space for a more sympathetic reading of midrash as an interpretive act, because it puts into question all interpretive acts. [5]

Notice the telling parenthetical insertion. Here in fact is the heart of the matter. One need not agree with the inordinately condensed version of the history of philosophy Boyarin suggests in this parenthesis, in order to agree nonetheless with the basic point he advances in it. Boyarin's understanding of midrash incorporates one of several cogent philosophical challenges to prevailing assumptions inherited from the Enlightenment; my colleague's angry rejection may have accurately expressed his refusal to entertain radical questions about these assumptions. [6]

Textual reasoning in Boyarin's hands begins to hint at the possible academic legitimacy of a different way of reading the Bible. Boyarin is pursuing something other than a historical reading of the Bible. However, and here is the crux, this "something other" is absolutely not a literary reading of the Bible. Many of us are accustomed to readings of the Bible which eschew historical considerations in order to read the Bible as literature; we hardly deem it "radical" to depart from the discipline of history to proffer such a reading. Yet Boyarin is, I repeat, not doing this. He is, rather, refusing to read the Bible historically on behalf of some other way of reading the Bible -- in other words, not merely in order to attend to its literary elements. We must be careful here: Boyarin is not claiming that this way of reading justifies an anti-historical attitude, nor that it replaces historical readings of the Bible in an a priori fashion. Yet if Boyarin is not proposing just another "literary" reading of the Bi ble, then what exactly is this "non-historical" way of reading the Bible, whose virtues of richness and fidelity-to-the-text make it both fruitful and intellectually respectable?

Here we arrive at a crucial possibility. It has certainly become commonplace, in our highly suspicious age, to say that historians write history from different perspectives; we have learned to incorporate a tolerance for differently inflected versions of history relatively comfortably into our still abiding sense that the discipline of history manages, generally, to tell us "what really happened" -- i.e., "the truth." However, if I am correct in my reading of Boyarin, and of the project of textual reasoning his work represents, then we are not dealing here with something analogous to disagreements among historians. We are dealing rather with the still unclear possibility that there may be a not-merely-literary way of reading the Bible other than history that would tell us "the truth." This way of reading would also, of course, extend to religious texts in general. One name for this way of reading, and for the contemporary scholarly movement which attempts to characterize and perhaps redeploy it, is textual r easoning.

Characteristics of Textual Reasoning

Before proceeding directly to describe salient characteristics of textual reasoning, a word about its roots may be in order.

What we now call textual reasoning in Jewish studies and Jewish thought arose from the relatively recent confluence of two intellectual currents: a group of original and challenging thinkers located mostly, though not exclusively, in France and Germany, and American scholars researching various aspects of Judaism. [7] This confluence has been growing in Jewish studies and Jewish thought since the late seventies and early eighties. To take one example, in Jewish thought during this period we find the innovative work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose influential ideas subsequently spread to other areas in Jewish studies, as well as to other disciplines in the humanities. [8] To take some other examples, in the late seventies and early eighties the fields of Bible and of rabbinics witnessed the growing employment of models taken from developments in literary theory, semiotics, and hermeneutics. Here we find thinkers who constitute other important sources out of which textual reasoning grew: Rola nd Barthes, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Charles Sanders Peirce, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida and his many disciples. Dynamic, new models drawn from these thinkers appear in many places in scholarship on Bible, and in rabbinics during this period. [9] These new models have also recently gained significance in other areas of Jewish studies, such as kabbalah, Jewish thought, and gender analysis. [10]

With this brief background in place, we can begin to examine three telling characteristics that mark textual reasoning. The first two serve to delineate, protect, and preserve a specific region for scholarly inquiry. The third sets out some of the specific phenomena, within this region, which textual reasoning seeks out and studies.

1. Textual reasoning refuses to view later texts which grow up in response to earlier texts as extraneous or heterogeneous to those earlier texts. This is because textual reasoning rejects the idea that it is possible to determine the one "true" meaning of a text, what it "really" means, outside of attending to how various people standing in various historical and cultural circumstances have interpreted that text. Far from any sort of relativism, this is rather the position that human beings read texts and determine what they mean; since human beings always live in particular conditions which set the questions and shape the interests through which they read texts, any reading of a text is always more or less partial, more or less specific, more or less contextual. If this is relativism, then it must be the claim that human readings of a text are relative to the fact that human beings are not God, but rather finite, limited creatures who cannot see everything from every angle all at once, but who live rather in specific environments and times. For these reasons, then, textual reasoning takes the various genres of traditional commentary to be potentially disclosive of the meaning or meanings of a text, refusing to subordinate such traditional commentary in an a priori fashion to academic or philosophical discourses which attempt to determine the meaning or meanings of a text. [11]

2. Textual reasoning resists academic or philosophical discourses which seek to homogenize, or to reduce, the many diverse features which constitute textuality. There has been a widespread tendency to distinguish between the "informational or cognitive content" of a text (which was deemed valuable) and the "lived textual quality" of a text, things like word choice, metaphors, rhetorical flourishes, and even the spelling and sound of certain words which allow for puns, etc. (all of which was deemed inessential and secondary, at best). However, it has been argued persuasively that it is exactly these "secondary" features -- often referred to as "textuality" -- that in fact enable texts to communicate their informational content; and it is just these constitutive features of textuality that endow texts with multiple meanings. As David Stern points out, in an important article reminiscent of Levinas's general approach to Jewish texts, both the midrash and Jewish tradition more generally view this openness of tex ts to a multiplicity of meanings not so much as a worrisome or vitiating indeterminacy, but rather as a reflection of the infinity of God's creative word. [12] In this sense textual reasoning takes a pluralist stance; it defends the way that traditional readers regard ironies, tensions, metaphors, rhetoric, parabolic discourse, and various narrative strategies as generating a semantic field of possibilities, rather than univocal reference to one theme or idea.

3. Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, scholars in the textual reasoning camp are just beginning to catalog and identify the specific reading practices through which Jewish tradition generates and legitimates its unique multiplicity of meanings. Here we encounter the concrete practices of textual reasoning which the movement known as "textual reasoning" aims to explore. There seem to be at least three closely-related dimensions of such textual reasoning.

[A] The hermeneutic dimension of textual reasoning can be found in the distinctive interpretive techniques and strategies that traditional reading practices employ in order to read texts. Boyarin's aforementioned Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, for example, displays some of these procedures, as does Steven Fraade's From Tradition to Commentary, as do several works by Elliot Wolfson devoted to kabbalistic hermeneutics. [13] Peter Ochs has offered a series of pioneering analyses of these interpretive micro-practices, utilizing primarily the theoretical perspective of Peirce's semiotic pragmatism. In general, the hermeneutic dimension of textual reasoning shows us the actual details of traditional readers reasoning about, in the midst of, and through basic texts.

[B] The socio-historical dimension of textual reasoning refers to those pedagogic paradigms, communal institutions, social practices, and patterns of physically organizing and reproducing texts through which traditional reading practices develop and get transmitted. Even though Jewish tradition shaped (and continues to shape) the activity and experience of reading through unique collective, ceremonial, typographic, oral, and aural structures, these structures remain insufficiently explored. An innovative and suggestive study of some features of the history of Jewish reading practices can be found, inter alia, in a recent article by Martin S. Jaffee. [14] The socio-historical dimension of textual reasoning isolates the special social forms and collective institutions which enable the hermeneutic dimension of textual reasoning to be accomplished, and which mold it.

[C] The hermeneutic and the sociological dimensions of textual reasoning help to engender what one might call the cosmico-experiential dimension of textual reasoning. This dimension refers to the way in which traditional reading practices tend, over time, to locate individuals in ever more textually-shaped, or textually-constituted worlds. The cosmico-experiential dimension of textual reasoning can be seen in the relatively common phenomenon of individuals who come, to some degree, to experience the world in terms of categories, metaphors, and structures drawn from their reading of religious texts. In this sense many people "reason textually" in a large-scale sense: their view of reality has been informed by traditional reading practices and by texts thus read, and so they "reason through" or "reason with reference to" such texts. [15] In general, the individual's capacity to experience any sort of textual cosmos implies that she is forging visceral and psychological connections between certain textual detai ls, and her own personal center of affective gravity. The hermeneutic and the socio-historical dimensions of textual reasoning make possible the cosmico-experiential dimension. Yet this latter dimension also makes the former two possible, for it makes them (in the deepest sense) plausible.

Irreducibly Different Things Coexist

In How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism, Jay Harris brings together a vast amount of information concerning how successive generations understood and interpreted a large class of predominantly talmudic midrashe halakhah. These midrashim, found in both talmuds, seem to supply the reasons or justifications for a large number of postbiblical Jewish practices whose sources are not immediately apparent in the text of the Bible. These midrashe halakhah feature an apparent belief in and pursuit of "omnisignificance": they often take extra words, conjunctions, and even potential puns as divergences from an assumed (and sometimes seemingly arbitrary) norm of absolute concision. The authors of these midrashim regarded such deviations as pregnant with meaning, and ripe for interpretations which might uncover the Biblical roots of postbiblical practices, thereby answering the enduring question about the origins of such practices: "How do we know this?"

These midrashim were seen as everything from creative, resourceful, and playful "uncoverings" of the ramifying levels of meaning inherent in a pasuk, to maddening, misleading, and even fatuous alterations of the peshat of that pasuk. Harris documents the lengthy and vigorous struggle waged over how, exactly, to read these midrashim. Harris orients his discussion toward the modern reception of these formative and controversial midrashe halakhah, and so he works through talmudic, medieval, and early modern views with an eye to explaining the rich background of opinion and argument regarding these midrashim from which thinkers in the modern period drew. More than half the book deals with the nineteenth century, describing in detail the reception of these midrashim by reformers, by early practitioners of Wissens chafts Judentums, and by German and Lithuanian orthodox thinkers. Harris ends this impressive historical overview with some observations about more recent trends in the late twentieth century.

How Do We Know This? represents a unique point of departure for considering textual reasoning and its relationship with modernity. In particular, Harris's careful depiction of nineteenth-century views reveals the overwhelming influence that Enlightenment ideals of progress, and of historical thinking, had on the way Jewish thinkers came to see their own tradition. This is not only true of Reform, and of the science of Judaism -- it is just as true of the German founders of modern orthodoxy, albeit in a different way. (Interestingly, these Enlightenment conceptions seem to have had less impact on Lithuanian thinkers, such as the Gaon and the Netziv.) [16] Yet it must be emphasized that textual reasoning as it has been described above seems to refuse and to outstrip basic dichotomies which undergird the Enlightenment, such as that of antiquity versus modernity, or that of reaction versus progress. Textual reasoning is, in this sense, a break with late eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century understandings of Jewis h tradition. This is certainly not to deny the indebtedness of twentieth-century scholarship to its predecessors; there can be no doubt that proponents of textual reasoning have gained much insight from their scholarly forebears. At the same time, though, textual reasoning opens up possibilities which stand outside of or beyond many of the oppositions which define the worldview created by the Enlightenment. Harris himself, in a brief closing comment on Boyarin's work, puts matters this way.

Daniel Boyarin, for example, has explicitly announced his ongoing "intellectual/cultural project of inserting rabbinic textuality into critical discourse and critical discourse into the scholarship of rabbinic literature." A generation ago, or a century ago, the last thing a Jewish scholar would have been comfortable doing is inserting rabbinic textuality into critical discourse. The former stood at such distance from what was then the latter that Jewish scholars spent their efforts undermining rabbinic textuality so as to provide a culturally respectable foundation for rabbinic religion and culture. Today, the scholarly pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, providing scholars of rabbinics with new vocabularies and theories through which they can understand talmudic exegesis.... I think it is safe to say that the apologetics of the Reform, historical, and Orthodox schools of the nineteenth century and their twentieth-century off-shoots, as well as the attacks of the Reformers and Eastern European rebe ls, will be sublated by the new theoretical discourse. [17]

The time of this "sublation" has arrived. But we are still in need of a thorough description of exactly where this leaves us with respect to the Enlightenment ideals which continue to inform much thinking in the academy.

Textual reasoning breaks with Enlightenment notions most fundamentally when it contests the claim that history -- both the discipline, and the very way of thinking it enshrines -- alone reveal the "bottom line" about a text. Boyarin's semiotic reading of midrash and Frei's narrative reading of scripture both suggest a way of reading which floats free of, which is independent of, the work of historians. It is essential to realize that this is not a negation of history -- it is, rather, the search for an alternative dimension (or level of meaning) that would coexist alongside the dimension of history, without being reducible to it (and without this being "aesthetic," at least as this term is generally taken today). Is this kind of irreducible heterogeneity or pluralism possible?

Textual reasoning has caused a stir because this proposal of irreducible heterogeneity seems to deprive history of its sovereign position. Is not history the final bar before which both religious stories and secular narratives must be brought? Is not exactly this the foundation of the distinctively "modern" world ushered in by the Enlightenment? It is acceptable to object to biases on the part of certain historians; it is acceptable to object to whole schools of historical writing, on the grounds that they are ethnocentric, or blind to gender; it is even acceptable to worry about the possibility that history may be little more than a tool for exercising power and abetting conquest. But is it acceptable to challenge the historical worldview itself, to explore alternatives to looking at reality in a historical way? Modernity itself seems to be founded on this historical worldview, which deprives any group of the power to control the past, and exposes the objective data of earlier times to public scrutiny and s cientific analysis. How could there also be a separate dimension of meaning and analysis which remained inassimilable to the discourse of history and the historian's method? And if there were such, would it not threaten the basis of modern, secular culture? [18]

Yet just this question reveals a misunderstanding of modernity. In this sense, textual reasoning is actually a very good indicator of the "true nature" of modernity, once ideological rhetoric has been stripped away. I say this because "modernity" is probably best taken to be that unique era, in which certain institutions create the possibility of free and sustained disagreement over exactly the very issues textual reasoning raises. That is to say, from the perspective afforded by textual reasoning, modernity stands revealed as open to a great diversity of contents and views. Modernity must not be taken as having any essential ideological content, other perhaps than whatever set of ideas is needed to maintain the institutions which support the unhampered exchange and debate of various positions. [19]

The proponent of textual reasoning, claiming to have discovered something of great value in the reading practices of a tradition, aims to bring those practices to "modern self-awareness." That is, textual reasoning uses scholarship to raise a tradition's way of reading to fully articulate self-consciousness, and it searches among its many post-Enlightenment paradigms for the vocabulary and the conceptualities with which to express this self-consciousness. In this way textual reasoning generates a more or less faithful account of traditional reading practices using the meta-language of the modern academy. It then broadcasts this account in that open space of contention called "modernity."

Those who choose to argue against the value of textual reasoning will, similarly, propound their views in the modern forum. Textual reasoning sees modernity not as some decisive moment of an ideologically directed, utopian progressus toward absolute secularism, but rather as a complex forum for interchange in which all may take part, as long as they are willing to obey certain basic rules. But these rules for exchange do not, themselves, commit interlocutors to a belief that history trumps all other approaches to reality. The question remains open. From the vantage point of textual reasoning, it is this openness that truly marks, and has always marked modernity -- even if religious ideologues denied it at first, and secular ideologues deny it now. [20]

In seeking to articulate parallel dimensions of meaning which have become effaced, textual reasoning combats the desiccating and confining tendencies of certain ideals of modernity. These ideals -- such as that of the absolute autonomy of reason, or the triumph of historical thinking and the utopian epoch it should create -- may have served a valuable polemical purpose during a period of struggle against entrenched authorities opposed to the open and free exchange of opinions. But to maintain this view of reason, or of history now, after these battles have basically been won, transforms the discipline of philosophy, or history, into a corrosive and distorting force which can only harm those continuing communities and traditions which inform, invigorate, and inspire our modern world.

These considerations are illustrated well in Peter Ochs's "Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation in Judaism." [21] Ochs analyzes the various species of textual reasoning found in the recent writing of several significant scholars in Jewish studies: Steven Fraade, David Weiss Halivni, and Michael Fishbane. I cannot do justice here to Ochs's rich translations of the reading strategies of each of these scholars, except perhaps to say that philosophers interested in textual reasoning will find themselves in his debt. What I do want to comment on in closing, though, is Ochs's clear direction of his readers' attention to the wealth of meaning that has all too often been foreclosed by the essentialist interpretation of modernity against which I have been fighting in this essay.

At the end of his article, Ochs allows himself to comment in his own voice on various issues at stake in the preceding analyses. (He uses the term "postcritical" to refer to many of the same themes I have surveyed here.)

The model of postcritical inquiry redescribes reason as a relational, or dialogic, activity, assuming as many specific forms as there are contexts of suffering which call out for understanding -- or which call out for divine love. Reason is the relationality of this love: touching us most intimately in the body of those deep-seated rules of knowledge which enable us, not to know the world -- for such knowing is a transient, everyday activity -- but to repair the errors that regularly arise in our everyday knowledge. As this form of relationality, reasoning is repairing -- an activity without which we cannot live. The tragedy of modern scholarship is that it despairs of its capacity and responsibility to participate in the work of repair. For the postcritical scholars, this is the work of exegesis and interpretation, and they do not despair. [22]

These lines describe very much the same problematic discussed in this essay: the way in which certain conceptions of "modernity" or "modern scholarship" turn out to be one-sided and limiting. Yet with these lines Ochs also brings the perspective of textual reasoning to bear on another of the fundamental stumbling blocks bequeathed to us by defective definitions of modernity. I refer of course to the fact/value split, a painful if seemingly useful divide that Max Weber made the very essence of scholarship.

Ochs's closing lines hold out the possibility that scholarship may participate in the work of repairing the world, instead of merely registering and analyzing its brokenness. He appeals to a conception of scholarship where detachment and distance have given way to engagement, and, even more significantly, where reasoning itself is seen as reconnective. In this Ochs is relying on his previous presentation of Fraade, Weiss Halivni, and Fishbane; in their scholarly study of Jewish texts these men ultimately seek to rejoin, to participate in, the ongoing activity of making and transmitting meaning they find in the rabbinic texts on which they work. Yet they seek to do this as scholars. Ochs's efforts in this essay, as well as in other texts, is to work up the philosophical understanding required to make sense of this subtle quest, without slavishly reiterating the Weberian epistemic status quo, and returning in despair to the iron cage of modernity.

Ochs's work lends support to my attempt here to use textual reasoning as an occasion to begin rethinking the relationship between history and modernity. Certainly much more analysis is needed, for the stakes are high: defenders of older, more rigid understandings of modernity will not be ready to accept the pluralistic conception advanced here (and, in a different way, by Ochs) unless this new conception continues to endow modernity with enough coherence and resilience to resist the forces that, even today, do threaten it. But perhaps this security will be found precisely in an inclusive and even interdependent pluralism, rather than in homogeneity?

JACOB MESKIN currently teaches, and helps to administer a large Jewish adult education program, at Hebrew College. He taught previously at Williams College, Rutgers University, and Princeton University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion, Judaism, Soundings, Modern Judaism, and in several edited volumes. He is finishing a book on the relationship between philosophy and Jewish tradition in Levinas. This essay is scheduled for publication in Textual Reasonings, ed. P. Ochs and S. Hauerwas (Westview/HarperCollins, 2000).

Notes

(1.) I am grateful to Leora Batnitzky, Joel Hecker, and Peter Ochs for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

(2.) It seems obvious that there cannot be any one thing, or single essence, that could possibly serve to define something as complex, multifarious, and perhaps even paradoxical as "modernity." Modernity clearly contains a great many differently charged developments. One of my purposes in this paper is to use textual reasoning to draw attention to attitudes about history which may help to perpetuate this odd belief that modernity is -- or must be -- any one thing. I am indebted to Jeffrey Stout for this pluralist conception of modernity. See his "Modernity without Essence," Soundings 74, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 1991): 525-40. See also the thinkers mentioned at the end of note 20.

(3.) Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 40.

(4.) Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), esp. 1-17. Frei himself offers the following summary on page 16: ..... the realistic or history-like quality of biblical narratives, acknowledged by all, instead of being examined for the bearing it had in its own right on meaning and interpretation was immediately transposed into the quite different issue of whether or not the realistic narrative was historical."

(5.) Boyarin, Intertextuality, x.

(6.) Of course the term "Enlightenment" really names a vast welter of interconnected historical, political sociological, cultural, religious, institutional, linguistic, and psychological phenomena. Moreover, such interrelated systems of phenomena gradually developed, in different ways, in different locations and communities. Knowing this full well, it still seems clear that there is a loose set of allied philosophical positions that originated with various intellectual elites associated with these phenomena. Even though there may be tensions, or different foci of interest, within this loose set of positions, it is hard to deny that there is enough overlap to bring out certain shared points of view. Some of the most basic of these form the focus of this essay -- an emphasis on the "forward motion" of human history in contrast to what came before, and above all an elevation of the historian and of the discipline of history to a nearly absolute position for determining what had really happened and what was real ly happening. I will return to this point in the final section of this paper.

(7.) This of course is not to deny that some scholars of Jewish studies living in other countries (Israel, France) may also have been influenced by the thinkers in question. The great majority of such scholars, however, reside and work in America.

(8.) Edith Wyschogrod, Robert Gibbs, and Richard Cohen among others have devoted scholarly work to Levinas, which helps to bring out his significance for the project of textual reasoning. This is, of course, in no way to minimize the mark Levinas left on the field of continental philosophy, quite apart from his significance for Jewish thought and textual reasoning.

(9.) These new interpretive strategies turned up in Susan Handelman's The Slayers of Moses (1982), and set off an important debate. Somewhat later such new models, or some version of them, will turn up in the work of James Kugel, Edward Greenstein, Michael Fishbane, Daniel Boyarin, Jose Faur, Steven Fraade, and Martin S. Jaffee, to name just a few.

(10.) They play a role, for example, in the far-reaching oeuvre of Elliot Wolfson, in fresh studies of Buber by Laurence Silberstein and by Steven Kepnes, in Susan Handelman's recent study of several important Jewish thinkers, in theoretical work on the "logic of scripture" by Peter Ochs, and in challenging new work on gender by Susan E. Shapiro, among others. Of course many of these scholars have also produced valuable work in areas other than those mentioned; the work indicated here serves only to highlight an evolving trend. Moreover, this list is neither exhaustive nor normative -- the names of many other important scholars could be included.

(11.) This point stems in a general way from Gadamer, My remarks here are based on a longer analysis of Gadamer I presented in "Reappropriating Religious Tradition: A New Account of the Relationship between History and Religious Tradition," (unpublished), a paper given at "Questions of Tradition," Rutgers University, in November 1997.

(12.) David Stern, "Midrash and Indeterminacy," Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 132-61. See also Levinas's "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition," Beyond the Verse, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 129-50; "La Revelation dans la tradition juive," L'au-dela du verset (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1982), 158-81.

(13.) Steven Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991). See especially Elliot Wolf-son, "Beautiful Maiden without Eyes: Peshat and Sod in Zoharic Hermeneutics," in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1993), 155-203. See also works by the scholars named in notes 8 and 9 above.

(14.) See Martin S. Jaffee, "A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 525-50. One can also find attention to issues related to the history of Jewish reading practices in the work of Elliot Wolfson. For a broad overview of the general historical question, see Robert Darnton's "History of Reading," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 140-67. Though not concerned with the history of Jewish reading practices, Roger Chartier's L'ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliotheques en Europe entre XIVe et XVIIIe siecle (Aix-en-Provence: Editions Alinea, 1992) is quite valuable for thinking about this topic.

(15.) Of course there is another side to the cosmico-experiential dimension of textual reasoning: the individual who comes, to some degree, to experience the actual texture or reality of the world itself as being textual. This can take a variety of forms. More "ordinary" instances include individuals whose experiences of reality become shaped by the rhythms, images, and texts of prayer (tefillah). More esoteric examples include individuals for whom the world is experienced as being "made of" letters or sounds, as in Jewish mysticism.

(16.) Jay Harris, How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), 234-44.

(17.) Ibid., 263.

(18.) I am assuming that by this time the reader is fully aware that when I say "non-historical," or "way of understanding reality other than history," I mean to refer to something other than a strictly literary approach. While textual reasoning incorporates literary modalities, it is clearly something other than a literary reading of a text.

(19.) Here as mentioned in note 2, I follow Jeffrey Stout's provocative "Modernity Without Essence."

(20.) There can be no question that the portrait of textual reasoning I am offering here depends on a complicated, and somewhat innovative reinterpretation of the relationships among modernity, secularity, and religious tradition. I cannot present a full defence of this reinterpretation here, except perhaps to indicate some of the thinkers from whom I have drawn, and am drawing, in constructing it: Levinas, de Certeau, Koselleck, Gadamer, and J. Z. Smith. I hope to be able to present a more thorough statement of this line of thought in future work.

(21.) Included in Steven Kepnes, ed., Interpreting Judaism in a PostModern Age (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 55-81.

(22.) Peter Ochs, "postcritical Scriptural Interpretation in Judaism," in Kepnes, Interpreting Judaism, 77.