10 - Modernism and Interpretation

Summary

AS NOTED IN THE EARLIER CHAPTERS of this book, the contribution of the historical school has been to enable us to see the classical sources of Judaism against their background. Anyone who tries to study theology cannot afford to ignore the findings of the historian but must erect his constructions on the results of their findings. He may, of course, feel obliged to take issue with the historians on this or that matter, but must then do so by employing the historical critical method ology, and when he does this he is a historian himself. What a theologian, qua theologian, is doing is asking not what actually happened in the past—that is the job of the historian—but rather how what happened in the past is relevant to belief in the present; or, to put it rather differently, how eternal truths expressed in a particular time can be extrapolated from their time-bound expression, a notoriously difficult task.

In this chapter I want to try to wed the theological approach to the his torical critical one by considering three significant Jewish themes: the purpose of creation, ‘enjoyment of life’, and the doctrine of imitatio dei.

In this very tentative exercise I examine the history of these themes in Jewish thought with a view to showing how precarious is the position of moderns, to be so convinced both that their new ideas are valuable and that the sources anticipate these that they become guilty of anachronism in their interpretations. It is this problem that is the main concern of this chapter, yet since this is, after all, a book on theology, the three themes are also considered on their own merits. In a sense I have been trying to engage in this kind of exercise in the book as a whole. For all that, it might be useful to have a special chapter on how theology can rely on history while pursuing its own line. Since the wider question is discussed, the chapter is entitled ‘Modernism and Inter preta tion’ rather than ‘A Modernist Interpretation’.

The Purpose of Creation

In his famous, stimulating, but admittedly one-sided, essay Ish hahalakhah, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik observes that Rabbi Simhah Zelig, the disciple and colleague of Rabbi Hayim Soloveitchik (Rabbi Joseph's grandfather), told him the following story.