Judaism and Enlightenment

In an age of enlightenment, how does a Jew believe? In an age of belief, how does a Jew enlighten? The answer is, “Only with difficulty,” for — as both Ruth Wisse and Ralph Lerner suggest in their outstanding studies — enlightenment and Judaism have always been uneasy partners.

Wisse, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, is a lady with the convictions of her conscience, and The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture reflects her character. She writes with wit, intelligence, and unfailing spiritedness. Wisse is particularly contemptuous of self-forgetting blindness. Her summary judgment of the American contribution to the Jewish canon is a masterpiece of damning with high praise: “American Jewish literature . . . has not yet offered up many positive advertisements for Jewish life or teachings, but some of its most masterful work joins the Jewish canon in supplying the negative evidence of a community that has traduced its values and followed strange gods.”

Wisse has an admirable impatience with pretense and affectation (thus we encounter E. E. Cummings instead of e. e. cummings). She has an altogether praiseworthy distrust of things German. Nothing captures her idiosyncratic charm better than the fact that she describes Cynthia Ozick’s The Cannibal Galaxy, perhaps the best novel by the author with whom Wisse seems most to identify, as an “irritated book,” thereby becoming the only writer ever to employ that expression as a term of praise.

The Modern Jewish Canon is an ambitious book. In it, Wisse aims to prove that there is such a thing as modern Jewish literature: a multilingual body of self-consciously Jewish works. But she aims further to demonstrate that this literature is good. Examining works in all the major languages in which the twentieth-century Jewish experience was recorded — Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, French, Italian, Dutch, and English — Wisse turns primarily to fiction for a comprehensive account of human nature and experience. “Literature,” she maintains, “has always seemed to me the discipline that encompasses all the others. The same novel can be read for pure enjoyment and for the kind of information that otherwise could never be gleaned.”

Few readers can come away from her book without a renewed desire to read the authors she treats: Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, George Eliot (“Daniel Deronda is the imaginative equivalent of the Balfour Declaration”), and Saul Bellow, among others.

Ultimately, Wisse contends, such works invite Jews to self-knowledge: “Modern Jewish literature is the repository of modern Jewish experience. It is the most complete way of knowing the inner life of the Jews.”

But even as she calls her book The Modern Jewish Canon, Wisse is well aware of the tensions compressed in the phrase “modern Jewish.” In her discussion of Cynthia Ozick, for example, Wisse writes: “If modern meant trust in human agency and Jewish meant following the commandments at Sinai, the Jew would have to mark his separation from the rest of society at the point that God’s Sabbath and laws set the boundaries. Ozick’s fiction disproves the liberal assumption that enlightened Jews can embrace secular modernity without forfeiting their moral strength.” Though appreciative of America as “the best diaspora,” Wisse is not sanguine about the prospects it offers for a meaningful Jewish life.

The problem, as Wisse knows, is that the “modern Jewish” literature she seeks to elevate is for the most part closed to the possibility that God exists, that the Jews are His chosen people, and that they were given His Law to follow. What then is the core of Jewish identity in the absence of shared belief?

This is perhaps the question that explains Wisse’s preference for authors who are most alive to — if not exactly open to — the problem of revelation. This especially applies to S. Y. Agnon, whose A Guest for the Night, she asserts, “stands at the center of the modern Jewish canon.” Indeed, it is when she takes up Agnon’s work that Wisse supplies her fullest explanation of what she considers it means to be a modern Jew: “The Jewish way of life is, when all is said and done, less an answer than a means for living with questions, and Agnon’s narrator persuades us by example . . . what advantages accrue to the person who lives his life through its framework.”

As her subtitle indicates, Wisse is fascinated by the problem of language. To what extent is language determinative of national identity? Are there languages that as it were are constitutionally hostile to Judaism? Can the future be anything but bleak for Jewish literature in non-Jewish languages? At the same time that Wisse powerfully makes her case for the existence of a multilingual Jewish canon, she suggests that the future of Jewish literature rests in Jewish languages — without, however, arriving at a clear explanation of the difficulties gentile tongues present Jewish authors.

So, for example, Wisse shows — with restraint and delicacy — how Elie Wiesel “neutered” Night, his novelistic memoir of Auschwitz, when he assisted in its translation from Yiddish to French. Pointing out the ways in which the Yiddish and French versions differ, she blames much of Wiesel’s accommodations to “a Gentile readership” on “the conventions of national discourse.”

Yet it is not clear why the deeply political Wisse attributes so much to the cultural and, especially, the linguistic rather than to the moral and the political. Certainly, she betrays neither reluctance nor incapacity when it comes to translating the passages in question from Yiddish to English. Perhaps the problem is less the product of culture and language than of secular liberalism, a contention to which Wisse’s analysis of American Jewish literature lends considerable support.

At a quick reading, Ralph Lerner’s Maimonides’ Empire of Light would not seem to share Wisse’s concern with contemporary liberalism. But this conclusion would be misleading. Wisse is concerned with modern liberalism’s constitutional aversion to Judaism, while Lerner examines modern liberalism’s antipathy to genuinely philosophic — or Maimonidean — education. Lerner’s study is an ode to the art of teaching.

Maimonides’ Empire of Light consists of two parts. The first, “The Politics of Public Teaching,” contains eight brief essays on the approach of the twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides and two successors, Joseph Albo and Falaquerea, to the relation between philosophy and political life. The second part, “Addresses to the People,” then adds translations of five of the texts to which Lerner refers.

Lerner’s book may be described as an introduction to Maimonides for democrats — as opposed to a democratic introduction, an attempt to turn Maimonides into a modern supporter of democracy. Maimonides comes to sight as a radically aristocratic philosopher who at the same time was a bold innovator on behalf of popular education.

How was it that “so confirmed and openly avowed an elitist” as Maimonides undertook the massive project of enlightening the entire Jewish people — learned and ignorant, old and young, women and children? Addressing some of his works to popular audiences, Lerner informs us, Maimonides effected a break from the “nearly unanimous opinion” of his philosophic predecessors. For a variety of reasons, not least of which was their awareness of the natural basis of intellectual inequality, those philosophers regarded the attempt to “bring some features of [a] philosophic analysis within the ken of each and all,” as, at best, an exercise in futility. What induced Maimonides — who shared their understanding of intellectual inequality — to make the attempt? How did he proceed and what did he hope to accomplish?

Lerner addresses these questions chiefly through a series of commentaries on Maimonidean texts that show the great thinker struggling to free his fellow Jews from particularly harmful delusions to which the Exile had given rise. In an age of belief a persecuted and homeless people were vulnerable to superstitious longings. Maimonides found himself confronted by assorted unhealthy enthusiasms — messianic, resurrectional, and astrological — which he sought to moderate. His artfulness lay in his ability to make a single piece of writing convey different teachings to different classes of readers.

The range of Maimonides’s purposes matches the range of people he addresses. Tempering the excesses of the fanatic is one purpose, but educating the human being who by nature and character is truly fit is the highest as well as the most pious:

Philosophy can reinvigorate or newly awaken a sense of wonder. That sense of wonder, in turn, if properly guided and nourished, can lead to a deeper understanding. Maimonides himself has produced such a guide. For it is his unfailing message to rare individuals of all times and places that the achievement of that level of understanding constitutes true worship of the purest kind.

Lerner is more concerned with the manner of Maimonides’s teaching than the teaching itself. Maimonides’ Empire of Light, as Lerner notes in his preface, is a book about “the way a master teacher addressed the confusions of his distressed and distracted people.” That way is restrained, playful, and indirect. Lerner takes particular delight in calling attention to Maimonides’s pedagogical imitation of God. In place of the just and angry God of the Old Testament, we are presented an urbane and crafty God of “wily graciousness,” who, as it were, “stays His hand” in regard to the announcement of the future resurrection of the dead at the time of Israel’s founding because the slavish people of that time were insufficiently credulous. Only a “gradual, politic” Divine education in miracles could lead to “a generational progress in acceptance if not necessarily in wisdom.” Education by degrees is characteristic of the empire of light.

“In the course of illumining God’s modus operandi, Maimonides draws attention to his own.” Something similar can be said of Lerner’s own relation to Maimonides. Maimonides employed what he illuminated about God to teach his contemporaries. Lerner employs what he learned from Maimonides to teach us to overcome our democratic resistance to Maimonides’s greatness. Indeed, only one aspect of Maimonides’ Empire of Light is un-Maimonidean — its oddly contemporary chapter headings: “Curricular Reform,” “Hard Lessons for Slow Learners,” and “Back to Basics.” Yet as a reminder to reflect on ourselves and our times, those obtrusive intrusions of the contemporary serve a genuinely Maimonidean — and thus timeless — purpose. Like Wisse’s The Modern Jewish Canon, Lerner’s Maimonides’ Empire of Light is a scholarly labor of love.