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Creating space for the integrity of the other - An educational challenge for Jews and Christians
David Hartman
Lecture delivered at the colloquium of the International Council of Christians and Jews held at Heppenheim, West Germany, 28-30 June 1981.
In my talk this morning I will discuss stages in the life of worship, as seen in the educational philosophy of Maimonides. I believe his perception may have important implications for our search to find room for the other, or to create space for the integrity of the other. My thought on the matter grows out of Maimonides, and since it is in Heppenheim that we are meeting, it will as well mirror certain elements of Martin Buber's thinking. Maimonides sees history from revelation to redemption as the movement from the tyranny of subjectivity — from the framework in which man sees the world and God out of his own hungers and fears — towards the stage in which reality can be perceived and understood in terms of its own intrinsic worth. This movement from yir'ah (fear) to ahavah (love), from subjectivity to the full awareness of truth is the movement towards redemption. Truth to Maimonides is not just a cognitive experience, but rather the ability to hear and respond to that which is other than myself in terms of its own intrinsic worth. The discovery of -intrinsicness", the discovery of transcendence is the movement towards redemption. The movement from the narcissistic egostructure to full objectivity is the movement from yit'ah (fear) to ahavah (love). I will try to show how this movement from revelation to redemption both in terms of the thrust of history and the development of worship, has something concrete to offer in our quest for mutual understanding.
In the Guide of the Perplexed, Part 3, Chapter 32, Maimonides offers three stages in the life of worship. For a religious philosopher, the growth of history is ultimately a growth in worship. You measure the development in history according to the degree in which forces within man are liberated to greater religious intensity. And therefore revelation, or the process towards redemption, is not the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven in a theocentric framework, but rather, from Maimonides' and the halakhic perspective, redemption is an anthropocentric framework: it always must be seen in changes in the human condition. Theological change must equally lead to a psychological change. And therefore, for Maimonides, Messianism is not just the establishment of the objective Kingdom of Heaven, but it is a transformation in the psychic capacities of man. When man feels greater powers to love, he is moving in the direction of redemption. And therefore let vs see how God leads man in that perspective. In other words, the initial claim is: redemption is not a theocentric but an anthropocentric category.
Revelation - God's Response to Us
Revelation is — as Paul van Buren noticed in his important book, Discerning the Way, in contrast to Buber — not the self-disclosure of God, but the response of God to fragile man. Revelation is not God revealing Himself, but God in his ability to listen to man. God reveals Himself when he responds and listens. And therefore, the first stage of revelation in the life of worship, for Maimonides, was the sacrificial cult. Central in Maimonides' notion of the sacrificial cult — and here he disagrees with the mystics, such as Nachmanides — is that the sacrifices were part of the pagan world, and the Israelites in Egypt were pagans, and when God wanted to bring pagan man to His worship, Ile did not reject paganism, but absorbed paganism within the framework of the temple. The first movement of revelation, or the first movement towards redemption, is God's listening to the concrete framework of man, seeing what type of world he is in, dealing with that which is real to him, and then asking: How do I absorb this subjective passion, this subjective truth (in the Kierkegaardian sense: truth is subjectivity), this experiential intensity and direct it towards the worship of God. Maimonides possibly understood that in paganism there is subjective integrity.
Prayer - Our Response to God
Maimonides' understanding of revelation has the following stages: the first stage is God saying: I accept man, I accept his concrete world, I accept that which he identifies with. But what do I do with the sacrifices? I restrict them, I have only the priests being able to offer them. I only allow them to be brought to Me in a specific place. In other words, I accept the concrete. I cannot say that the concrete — the fears of man and what man is about — is ugly, pagan. I cannot say: that since I am and love the Truth, I have to blind myself to the pagan, and say: paganism is false, let us now begin on the true Way. The choice, as Maimonides understood God, was either for God to say: I will give Israel a pure form — and all the theological journals will write how wonderful are the biblical forms of worship and I will have made it in all theological circles — or to say: I will begin where man is at, and be able to compromise, be able to use that which is real to human beings, so that not I should he known in the world, but man should be brought to God. And therefore revelation is God listening to man and really revealing His love for what the human condition is about. God accepts experiential integrity above formal truth. He is not a Platonist. He does not move in Platonic forms. Purity is that which is honest to the human being. And therefore revelation begins where man is at. So there is both this accepting mode and yet the limiting mode. I accept, but yet I build into the acceptance a way in which man can grow beyond it. And therefore the second stage in the life of worship is prayer.
What is essential here in the educational understanding of revelation in Maimonides is that revelation works only if the word of revelation contains the word of man. The Word of God cannot reach man if man is not a constitutive creator of the very content of revelation. The Word of God can reach man, because the Word of God is in response to man and contains what man is about. Only the word of the teacher that grows from the listening to the student can shape the student. If the word of the teacher grows only out of his own creativity, he cannot reach his students. Anyone who is a teacher knows that the most important lesson is the first one: the most important lesson is the intense listening to who is before you. William James told his students: prepare your lessons thoroughly and then throw away the notes. The ability of a teacher to listen — that is the hardest thing. Even for people who give sermons is the question: How do you listen to your congregation? How do your very words contain their reality? Only if it contains their reality can your word in some way meet them and enter into their souls. Man recognizes the truth that he helped shape. Therefore revelation is not the pure word of God, but it is the word of God that has grown out of the divine listening to the human condition. This, for Maimonides, is implied in the "korbanot', the sacrificial cult 1.
The second stage in this process of the divine listening, of the divine awareness of having to be sensitive to the concrete situation of man, is the movement towards petitional prayer, language. Ritual cult moves to language. Language prayer can be in any place. You don't have to have the priest pray for you. This shows, to Maimonides, that this second state in the process of growth in worship — petitional prayer —is closer to the redemptive structure. The essence of rabbinic prayer — Soloveitchik saw this as well — is petitional: bakkashah. When the Talmud speaks about prayer, it does not refer to the Shama, but to the Amidah, the silent eighteen or nineteen blessings: that is the classical definition of Tefillah: the standing silently before God in petition. The three blessings of praise at the beginning and the three blessings of thanksgiving at the end are only pro forma. You don't come before a king by starting with "please...", but in proper respectful manners you say: 'Magnificent king, glorious king," etc., and before you leave you offer thanksgiving. But the guts, the heart of the experience is petitional.
What is petitional prayer? Petitional prayer is God accepting man's move to Him out of a situation of crisis. It is the importance of having God share my pain, my hunger, the pain of the unredeemed world. Petitional prayer means God who participates with man, feels the pain of living in unredemptiveness: "Immo anokIn be-tzarah" ("I will be with him in trouble", Psalm 91:95). God shares in the crisis situation. And the essential dimension of petitional prayer is that man in a world of brutality and hate believes he can still stand before God. For Maimonides, petitional prayer communicates that, in a world of violence, it makes sense still to say that he who saves one life saves an entire world. It is very important to realize that the Aristotelean tradition had generalized providence. It was absurd for Aristotle to say that God cares for a single individual. Therefore the problem of divine providence is not just reward and punishment, but the essential notion of "basbgachah pratit" is that a single human life is sacred. It means that you cannot quantify human life. Divine providence means that you do not evaluate the movement of history numerically, that God creates a whole world for one human being. Petitional prayer keeps alive the scandal of the sacredness of one single life, or in prophetic terms, the significance of the remnant. Divine providence is the anti-Hegelian notion that history is not necessarily on the side of success. Divine providence symbolises the notion that God doesn't mind working with failures. I'd love to see the development of a theology of failure. Petitional prayer's goal is to retain the irreducible worth and significance of one human life in a world of massive indifference. Therefore, petitional prayer moves man towards redemption, because it enables him to move out to God, out of the situation of his crisis.
Silent Adoration: The Ultimate in Prayer
The third stage of worship is not petitional, it is not that of unredeemed man, of crisis man. It is the stage of what Maimonides calls "adoring silence'. Silence before God! Not the beggar, the hungry beggar, here comes before God saying: God, my stomach hurts. Hear my cry! No! The ultimate prayer is the person saying: God, can I just be in your presence? The joy of being in the Presence. It is the triumph of objectivity; it is the world of objectivity, where I don't bring God into my world. I am able to fully feel His reality. This is the triumph of love, the triumph of Messianism. Mymovement towards God doesn't grow out of my own crisis, but it grows out of His own plenitude, His own richness, His own infinite beauty. And therefore the ultimate in prayer is the silent adoration.
These three stages of worship have fundamental importance in our attempt to build a theory of education which creates a framework for the integrity of the other. What we learn from the Maimonidean schema, as articulated above, is that there cannot be a movement towards redemption or towards love if you only speak the language of love. The great danger of religion is that it develops a conceptual purity which creates the deception that, since I can speak that way, I am that way. I am disturbed when I hear religious people talk with such love, humility etc. What is going on in this community of love-making? They talk so humbly and so lovingly, and there is a profound danger that if we talk the language that God is Love, we think we are that! And we fail religiously if we do not understand the jungle in which man finds himself. Religious educators must face the essential question: Do we offer the world verbal purity or experiential truth? Do we begin where the world is at, or do we offer them some sort of noble vocabulary which can be uttered in pious prayer but has nothing to do with what man is really about? This is a fundamental choice that one must make. If one thinks within the framework of Maimonides, one has to be able to communicate in the midst of the jungle. To use a Talmudic phrase: "dibb'rah Torah keneged yetzer hail': the Torah speaks in relationship to the yetzer ha-ra of man. How do you translate yetzer ha-ra? It is the passionate libido, narcissistic egocentricity, in other words: a difficult person. Now, you have in some way to deal with this, and therefore, in contrast to Buber who loves the eagle-winged speech in the Bible of God saying: will bring thee on eagle's wings", I love the section of the Bible where God gives manna to the Jews in the desert and each day has to tell them: 'Please, trust me", and they put away the manna in the "freezer because they don't trust Him. The manna story is the symbol of the divine teacher who fails, rather than the lovely teacher who carries you on eagle's wings.
I love the Law, I have meditated on it for the last twenty five years. There is the law on the captive woman, a strange biblical law. We wish it wasn't there. It offends our sermons, it doesn't fit in with our talk of nobility and humility. The law asks: what do you do when you are a soldier in battle? You capture a woman, and the big question in the Talmud is: Are you permitted to have intercourse with her in battle, or do you have to wait, and first take her home and then have intercourse with her? There is a whole Talmudic discussion on this point. What do you do after you raped her, or didn't rape her. Or are you not supposed to rape her? How do you deal with her when she comes to your house, but doesn't want to stay with you? How do you send her away? People say: What kind of a law is this? This is a law of the soldier! Does our spiritual message follow the soldier when he is in battle, or do we wait for him to come to the comfortable pew on Sabbath? What we see in the biblical framework is that God is prepared to accompany man in that jungle. Religion educates only if it is aware of this in man and relates to this world that we live in. I offered this example of the captive woman, because only a tradition that is prepared to get Its hands dirty can really raise man out of that filth. This is the essential framework. We have been preaching love for two thousand years, and there is still violence. We have to rethink what we are doing.
Creating Space for the Other
I would offer three models, three fundamental frameworks of the human condition which must be taken into account, if we are to create space for integrity of the other.
The first framework to which religious thought has to address itself, is what I call the founding and sustaining experience of the human personality. It is the experience of the human being emerging out of the gift of love from parents as a vulnerable, fragile human being, who needs to be sustained by others. This is the first stage towards the beginning of the creation of space. I become an other, but in my otherness I am utterly dependent, because man is the being who is, only because others are. Man is that being who lives constantly in a framework of interdependence. How this experience of dependence is developed, will define the self-understanding of man in terms of his own personal dignity. Does that founding, sustaining, nurturing experience create a sense of dignity of the person? Or does the very fact of dependence create humilitation and shame? If that experience is an abusing experience, then all language of dignity and love is hollow. The beginning seeds of the ability to love grow from the way man appropriates his initial dependence experience. Here I take into account both the familial structures of a society and its economic framework. One cannot speak of dignity if the sustaining framework abuses one's sense of worth. Here there is the tension between the fear experience and the love experience. Can those who sustain a person, enable the person to become other? Or does the sustaining become a key for manipulation? Is hunger used as a way to create control? (We can call it also absorption: the mystical experience). Or can hunger be used in a very gentle way in order tocreate a distancing, using Buber's term? Can there be the experience of distancing, although man is an utterly dependent being? Are dependence and intrinsic dignity mutually contradictory experiences? The first fundamental challenge to all sustainers, be it in the economic structure of a society, be it in the family framework, is how do we work out that experience of the nurturing and dependent framework?
The Experience of Distancing
The parental sustaining stage must merge into the second, higher stage in the development of the integrity of the other: the learning experience. The parent must make place for the school. And in the school we have the same framework. There is dependence, not in terms of ontological dependence (To be, I need others), but: I need you in order to learn, to make contact with culture, to make contact with history. I need you so that the world opens up for me. In that stage of dependence, does the learning experience equally as well create the distancing? Do we enable the child to develop his own imagination and intellectual wings? Only to the degree to which the critical faculty emerges can we move towards the development of total otherness, Distancing is not just an economic question. It is equally as well an intellectual and imaginative question. To the degree to which the mind is not free, man has not fully achieved distancing. To the degree to which the critical faculty of man does not operate, to that degree is he absorbed by the frameworks of authority and there is no room. Room is not only an economic question. Not only if you are financially independent are you "other'. To the degree to which you can critically evaluate — and even disagree with — that which you have received and you could imaginatively put on new frameworks for the understanding of the tradition, to that degree as well have you achieved a sense of distancing. The illusion of the modern world is that distancing is an economic process and is not related to the whole cognitive development of man. Therefore, religion has to address itself to the drama in the classroom, to the way in which people relate to information. It has to address itself to the way teachers manipulate students and abuse them because of their dependence. Unless we address all potential abuse situations, we cannot take part in a process leading towards redemption. Just as in Maimonides there are stages in prayer, I am suggesting stages in a process which moves from oneness in the embryo to an economic dependence which does not absorb the person and make him ashamed, but allows for his hunger: a process of self-dignity and self-worth in some personal sense, self-worth as economic man, the self-worth of a child in a family who is not embarrased to need parents. If we are embarrassed to need, then we live with the illusion of individual self-sufficiency and we destroy the human condition in the deepest sense. The fear of having children today in the modern world grows from the illusion that the individual alone could be whole. Or, in a deeper sense, the fear of the child is the fear to expose my vulnerability, because anyone who has a child knows he is not perfect. And if there is anything which is redemptive, it is living with children. When modern man seeks the illusion of perfection, he seeks building families without children. In a sense, therefore, the fear of dependence, the fear of having to receive from others, makes it impossible to create room for a genuine sense of otherness.
Sense of Distance and Otherness
The third stage in the creation of the dignity of the other is the movement from the cognitive to the erotic, the sensual, the sexual, the passionate love between man and woman. Here, the fulness of otherness begins to emerge. In the sexual interdependence, the sexual hunger, the same dialectic works itself out. What happens in sexual hunger? Can it merge with love? The religious insistence was that sexuality and marriage should be intimately connected and sexuality should not he separated from the total human experience. What we arc really saying in the religious tradition is that interdependence with regard to the sexual urge can be integrated with full distancing and otherness, that the erotic, the sensual can realize itself within a framework of mutuality and freedom, and that sexuality does not have to be a tool of manipulation, but it can be a tool of affirming the other in his full personal dignity. Can there he distance and yet sensual passion? Can there be a relationship of distance, although there is the drive towards control which grows out of the total libido? When the tradition merges both, it is really saying that, in the framework of hunger, man can liberate himself towards the sense of distance and otherness. There can be space within the intimacy of love. There can be distance and yet intimacy. The highest challenge is to enter into an authentic relationship in which people live totally naked whith each other, and yet fed a distance which guards their personal integrity. This final stage is really the redemptive model.
The founding, the cognitive and the intimate are really three stages in the religious life. God as Father and Creator is the founding experience of the religious life, in which man, in order to be, needs the sustaining framework. From creation, we move to God as the Teacher, which is revelation. God is called in the tradition: homelammed Torah le-ammo Israel, (whoteaches Torah to his people Israel). The full dignity of the teaching experience emerges when the Talmudic tradition develops with its critical distance and the freeing from literalism. Fundamentalism is when the student has not yet found his own distance. Interpretative freedom is where the student meets his teacher in a sense of personal dignity. The exegetical, imaginative freedom of the Midrash, the intellectual boldness of the Talmud is an experience in which the presence of the self-limiting experience, the creating room for the other, emerges fully within the Talmudic tradition. To the degree to which I can laugh at my teacher and be critical of him, to that degree has the teacher created space for the student to emerge in his own dignity. This is what I would call the relationship of God the Teacher in the Talmudic period to the Biblical God as Creator! As a father of my children, I remember when I had to take my child to grade one. What a trauma was that! The greatest pain is when the child comes home and says: 'Daddy, but the teacher says...". At that moment, since I was a teacher myself, I said: Your Teacher!? That man? You call that a teacher? You know who I am? Should I show you all the books in my library? The one who teaches you in Grade 2, you are going to pit against your father? I could have done that, and I did with my first child. That is why the first child receives a double inheritance, because we learn to become fathers on the first child. Therefore the Bible compensates him with a double inheritance at the end. In a deep sense, when the parent can say: "Yes, I understand, your teacher says...", there is a reflection of the Eft So/ which must contract itself in the process of Tzimtzum: The "infinite", the 'omnipotent" Father knows that it all must go through the mystical experience of Tzimtzum, the self-contraction, in order for the child to emerge with new people who will influence him. Always in new stages we are contracting ourselves in order to make room for new elements of growth. The third theological experience is God the Lover, which is the Messianic world. It is the world of Hosea, of the Song of Songs: It is: ani le-dodi we-dodi li (I am to my beloved as my beloved is to me). It is the passionate yearning to be in each other's presence. And in that passionate yearning, man has to fully overcome the terror of the founding dependence and the cognitive dependence, and merge in the full, independent spirit of living with the other. Marriage implies an ability to transcend the incestuous: al-ken ya'azov ish et aviv we-et immo we-davak bedsbto: (Man must /cave the house of his father and mother and cling to his wife and become one flesh). To the degree to which I can overcome the terrors of interdependence, can I become a lover. In the deepest sense religious education has to aim towards that love experience, but it cannot do this, if it is not prepared to first deal with the initial terrors of the human situation.
If we do not show how man can work with his terror, we can never speak of an ethos of love.
From Love of Neighbour to Love of the Stranger
Hermann Cohen spoke of the two commandments of the Bible: Love thy neighbour, and: Love the stranger. I see them really as one commandment, operating in two stages. Love of the neighbour is the first stage where you believe that you really know the person whom you love. It is your next-door neighbour. He is someone who is close to me. I have known him all my life. The first stage of love, the first stage of Jews and Christians finding each other, is the love of "re'a" (neighbour): We really like each other, we share a common tradition; there is the Judaeo-Christian tradition. We have the same prophets, the same metaphors, the same biblical roots. Look, how simlar we are! Why have we been strange brothers to each other? Abraham is our same father, we know of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man! — We have been preaching the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man for so long, and we have failed! It is time we started asking what has gone wrong. The first excitement is: after two thousand years I discovered my next-door neighbour. In our religious educational systems we can talk about the similarities between Judaism and Christianity. But the deeper dimension of love, the greatest gift that occurs in love, is that after having loved a woman for years intensely, after thirty-five years of living together in intimacy, one says one day: You know, I really don't know you. You're a mystery. I thought I knew you. Suddenly you are shocked into an awakening: that what you thought you had and possessed, turns into an independent mystery. Your neighbour turns into the stranger. The "we-abavta le-re'akha kamokha" ("you shall love your neighbour as yourself") turns into "we-ahavta et hager" ("you shall love the stranger"). The re'a, the neighbour, becomes the ger, the other mysterious person. The end of knowledge is that you do not know. This is true in Maimonides as well.
From love we come into silent prayer. What is silent prayer. I thought I knew God, and suddenly I realized that I have to give up theology and just stand in silence. Scholars wonder to what degree is negative theology essential in Maimonides. In the "Guide of the Perplexed", part I, chapter 50 to 60, the whole function of negative theology is the leading quality of religious language. I know that I don't know. I keep on in one way aporoaching God and in getting there, it is always the via negativa. The via negativa means that God the Re'a, the neighbour, the lover, always becomes ultimately God the Ger, the Stranger, the Other one. We know we love when we are not frightened not to possess the one we love.
We walk together in Jewish-Christian struggle. I will welcome that moment when I look at a Christian whom I dearly love, and he will look at me, and we will recognise that, through our love, we have become strangers to each other; that our love is not: We are the same. But our love will lead to a sense of radical otherness. I cannot be absorbed within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I dislike that terminology. It is only the beginning of neighbour love. I love to hear the passion of the Christian tradition, the passion of the Islamic tradition, the passion of other religious traditions, and I will walk forward with the passion of Hillel and Abaya and Maimonides and Soloveitchik. I will be other. And the question is, when I walk as the stranger, will you be able to still say: "Him I love"?
Rabbi Dr. David Hartman, an Israeli originally from Canada, is a lecturer in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and School of Education of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also the Director of the Shalom Hartman Institute for Tudaic Studies, rehov Rahel Immenu, Jerusalem.
1. Many people were upset with Maimonides, the greatest halakhist, because they thought he undermined the purity of the notion of revelation. By the way, it is important for people to know that when we speak of Moses in the Jewish tradition, we are referring to Moses Maimonides. Those who want to understand the living faith they must know that Moses, the Founder, is the respectful head, but the one who really shaped the nuts and bolts of the tradition, is Moses Maimonides. If anyone wants to know Judaism, he has to know Maimonides and his Mishne Torah, he has to know the Halakhah and this master of the Halakhah.
