Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition

AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 273 AJS Review 28:2 (2004), 273–297 “CHISELED FROM ALL SIDES”: HERMENEUTICS AND DISPUTE IN THE RABBINIC TRADITION by William Kolbrener* Among contemporary literary theorists—and in the humanities in general— theological approaches toward interpretation have been dismissed in favor of hermeneutic models committed to the contingency, partiality, and historicity of all interpretative practice. Against the grain of this tendency, which tends to dismiss all vestiges of theology from postmodern habits of reading and interpretation, critics like Daniel Boyarin and David Stern, have, over the past decades, attempted to recover the distinctly Jewish modes and discourses of reading and interpretation. In the process, they have, as Boyarin himself underlines, introduced a specifically Jewish mode of reading—that of midrash—into the literary theoretical canon.1 Such a task was beset by obstacles from the outset: not only the pervasive prejudices among scholars (“religious conviction,” Stanley Fish quotes Mill approvingly, requires “narrow-mindedness”), but also the scholarly refusal to recognize an autonomous set of Jewish hermeneutic and epistemological paradigms.2 “The liberal term ‘Judaeo-Christian,’ as Boyarin has remarked, “marks a suppression of that which is distinctly Jewish.” It “means ‘Christian,’” Boyarin continues, and by not acknowledging as much, the term renders the “suppression of Jewish discourses even more complete.” In retrospect, the rehabilitation of midrash throughout the eighties can be seen to parallel the New Historicist moment in literary studies, which similarly entailed the archaeology of suppressed discourses and knowledges.3 *The research for this project has been generously supported by the Israel Science Foundation. I would also like to acknowledge the guidance and assistance of Rachmiel Daykin, Menachem Fisch, Susan Handelman, Michael Kramer, and Jeffrey Perl. 1. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), xi; David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1. 2. Stanley Fish, “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along,” First Things 60 (February 1996): 23. 3. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, xi. Other important works on midrash and literature include Steven Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany: State University of New York, 1991); Susan Handelman, Slay- 273 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 274 William Kolbrener For Geoffrey Hartman, whose Midrash and Literature (with Sanford Budick) marked the formal entry of midrash into literary studies, the suppression of rabbinic discourses remains embedded in a very specific history, of which his own work becomes a belated part: My motives in studying Midrash are not pure. I am a raider of the lost ark looking for treasure. It is not for the sake of heaven I study but to bring back voices and types of interpretations of which that ark is as full as Noah’s was with beasts. I cannot forget how these writings were slandered, and how public ignorance abetted such slander in the Nazi era. As a “raider of the lost ark,” Hartman seeks to penetrate beneath the surface of “ignorance” and “prejudice” and, in this “age of restitutions,” to participate in the rescue of Jewish exegesis from Nazi “slander.” Against the attribution of “a crass and stubborn literalism” to Jewish tradition, Hartman celebrates the “interpretive bounty of a text” for which midrash becomes a symbol. The promise of this “interpretive bounty” has brought midrash (and its close cousin, aggadah) into the precincts of literary criticism. Though the “Nazi era” and the “impact of the hurban” are never far from Hartman’s mind, he also calls attention to the “shift in˙ contemporary intellectual life from identity—philosophies to theories of difference based on an appreciation of the intertextual character of writing.”4 Midrash becomes, for Hartman, both an example and symbol for this kind of writing, made possible—after Auschwitz—because of its avoidance of conceptual monovocality and its embrace of “difference.” Indeed, with its obvious concern for “polyphony” and “intertextuality,” midrash gained currency with a generation of literary critics schooled on the Derridean différance. In Hartman and Budick’s introduction to their 1986 volume, they find connections between midrash and the notion of literature, which, by the mid-eighties, had reached its ascendancy: What we are concerned with throughout this volume is a variety of “open” modes of interpretation, a life in literature or in scripture that is experienced as in the shuttle space between the text. Abiding in the same intermediary space is a whole universe of allusive textuality . . . which lately goes by the name intertextuality.5 The Derridean echoes are unmistakable, as the authors continue, celebrating midrash’s production of “a continuum of intertextual supplements,” which are ofers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York, 1983); Geoffrey Hartman, “Midrash as Literature,” Journal of Religion 74 (1994): 338 – 355; Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, ed. Midrash and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996). 4. Hartman, “Midrash as Literature,” Journal of Religion 74 (1994): 338, 342. 5. Hartman and Budick, Midrash and Literature, xi. 274 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 275 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition fered “in a spirit of highly serious play.”6 Hartman would further elaborate the connection between midrash and the Derridean moment in his 1994 piece, when he pronounced (if perhaps a bit belatedly), “Ask not what deconstruction may do for Midrash, ask what Midrash may do for deconstruction.”7 Though not as a battle cry, Betty Roitman, in Midrash and Literature, pursues a similar argument when she asserts “the mobility and indeterminacy of midrash . . . explains its attractiveness to present-day theoreticians who understand midrash in a way that feeds their faith in an infinite unfolding of textual signification.” Myrna Solotorevsky echoes: “The concept of the inherent polysemy of the literary text which nullifies the possibility of a univocal interpretation is one of the arch principles of midrash.” The “infinite unfolding of textual signification” and the “inherent polysemy of the literary text,” for both Roitman and Solotorevsky, demonstrate the perceived conjunction between midrashic methodology and literary theory in the eighties.8 To assimilate rabbinic thought to a poststructuralist epistemology of difference, however, has raised its own problems, even—or perhaps especially—for those scholars who have expressed the greatest affinity to midrashic literary method.9 For while midrash may be celebrated, halakhah, that is, Jewish law, is either ignored or condemned as midrash’s inferior handmaid.10 What constitutes this so-called inferiority is what Roitman, for example, calls, Jewish law’s supposition of a “standard of truth”—both in the “metaphysical and logical sense”—of the terms.11 The invocation, however, of an ostensibly metaphysical—or even Platonically informed—realm of Jewish law (halakhah), against the polysemy of midrash, unnecessarily bifurcates rabbinic thought. Indeed, the assertion that 6. See also in this light Susan Handelman, “‘Everything is in It’: Rabbinic Interpretation and Modern Literary Theory,” Judaism 35 (1986): 429 – 440, and her “Fragments of the Rock: Contemporary Literary Theory and the Study of Rabbinic Texts—A Response to David Stern,” Prooftexts 5 (1985): 75–95, where she argues that “midrash takes delight in precisely those aspects of language to which poststructuralist criticism has alerted us,” rendering the text “a field of play.” 7. Hartman, “Midrash as Literature,” 354. 8. Betty Roitman, “Sacred Language and Open Text” in Hartman and Budick, Midrash and Literature, 159; Myrna Solotorevsky, “The Model of Midrash and Borges’s Interpretative Tales and Essays” in Hartman and Budick, Midrash and Literature, 255. 9. For the problems of employing poststructuralist theory as a lens for understanding the rabbis, see David Stern’s review of Susan Handelman’s Slayers, “Moses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 4 (1984): 193 –213, as well as the subsequent exchange of letters in Prooftexts 5 (1985): 75 –103. 10. David Stern has remarked, (“Literary Criticism or Literary Homilies?: Susan Handelman and the Contemporary Study of Midrash,” Prooftexts 5 [1985]), that in “historical fact,” midrash “has been the neglected stepchild of rabbinic literature, ignored and subordinated to the more practical serious rigors of halakhah” (97). In contemporary literary circles, however, this hierarchy has been reversed. 11. Roitman, “Sacred Language,” 159; see also Edith Wyschograd, “Trends in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy,” Soundings 76 (1994), who writes that since “law is governed by an arche outside of itself,” rabbinic legal exegesis is “Platonic” (159). See in the Soundings volume José Faur, “The Limits of Readerly Collusion in Rabbinic Tradition,” which contrasts the interpretive freedom of midrash with the limitations imposed by the Law (153–161). 275 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 276 William Kolbrener midrash is “dialogic” and halakhah “absolutist” is to get both of them wrong. Such categorizations are informed by western—indeed ultimately Platonic—categories, which make relativism and absolutism the only possible options. That the theoretical starting-point for recent considerations of rabbinic hermeneutics has been French poststructuralist thought has helped sustain the impression that midrashic method does, in fact, provide a precedent for a postmodernist epistemological relativism. The starting point, however, for this study is different: not in French poststructuralism but, rather, in the empirical and hermeneutic traditions of Britain and Germany, respectively. To attempt an understanding of rabbinic interpretation and a notion of interpretative disagreement that skirts between the poles of relativism and absolute truth, I turn towards the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer and to Quentin Skinner’s method of intentionalist action. On the surface, Skinner and Gadamer may seem like an unlikely—if not an impossible—pairing. Skinner’s meticulous focus upon intention would seem to be irreconcilable with the Gadamerian insistence upon hermeneutic contexts or “interpretive horizons,” as he calls them, in which readings of texts are engendered, if not produced. Put simply, Gadamerian hermeneutics would seem to lead to an interpretive relativism (and has been attacked for engendering anarchy in interpretation), while Skinnerian intentionalism would seem to be founded upon a hopeless idealism about recovering the intentions that are meant to inform a text.12 Rendering Gadamer schematically (as has been inevitably the case in contemporary representations of his method) would have him celebrating the paradigms, models, or subjective frameworks that produce the interpretation of texts; whereas Skinner would be seen to emphasize the objectively identifiable intentions that underlie the writing of a text. Such simplifications may have an heuristic function, but in their simplicity they turn Skinner and Gadamer into antagonists when in fact there are many— and I will argue, significant—points of agreement. Such agreement, put simply, begins in their common acknowledgement of the failure of a theory of interpretation that depends uniquely upon either subjective paradigms or objective intentions. To be sure, interpretive models that presuppose such a dichotomy will necessarily produce the options of either a subjective relativism leading to anarchy or, by contrast, an objective absolutism turning into a kind of essentialism. A recent scholarly symposium on counter-transference attempted to show the problems inherent in maintaining rigid distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity in psychoanalysis.13 Articulating the hermeneutics of the rabbinic discourse of the Talmud demands a similar attempt, for neither subjective approaches, which celebrate the “polyphony” of a Jewish tradition, nor objective approaches, which lament the essentializing narrowness of a Jewish legal theology, will do justice to 12. For the attack on Gadamerian “anarchy” in interpretation, see E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1967), 231; for attacks upon Skinnerian intentionalism, see the essays collected in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp articles by Keith Graham and John Keane, which both invoke the name of Gadamer; see also John Hall, “Illiberal Liberalism,” British Journal of Sociology 31 (1980): 297–299. 13. For the beginning of the symposium, see Anton O. Kris and Steven H. Cooper, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A History and Introduction,” Common Knowledge 4 (1995): 174–196. 276 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 277 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition conceptions of rabbinic interpretation.14 Independently, neither the simplified version of Gadamer nor Skinner can provide an adequate model for approaching the hermeneutics of the Jewish Oral Law. From the bridge between Gadamerian hermeneutics and Skinnerian intentionalism, however, and from their common acknowledgement of the reciprocal relationship between subject and object, there emerges a methodology capable of doing some justice to the hermeneutic principles that underlie Talmudic discourse. From this point of view, rabbinic hermeneutics will reveal itself to entail an accommodation of difference unlike the one implicit in most versions of poststructuralist argument. The rabbinic accommodation of difference, while entertaining an unfathomable complexity, necessitates what Daniel Boyarin has called “pilpul” (or what he understands as the dialectical “logic of commentary”).15 In another register, it entails a version of Adorno’s fractured “totality,” which maintains itself, entailing the possibility of the relationship between particulars, even in their “diffuse, divergent, and contradictory condition.”16 That is to say, the rabbinic conception of difference does not engender the consequences of postmodern relativism—rhetorical and political models of conversations based upon incommensurability and animus or what Alasdair MacIntyre simply calls “shrillness.”17 Rather, rabbinic models of difference allow for a conception of dispute which courts neither the extreme of unmediated difference (and relativism) nor authoritarian univocality (and absolute truth). As a consequence, an accommodation of difference emerges unlike those available within the conceptual categories of the West. BETWEEN ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND RELATIVISM To suggest the commensurability of Gadamerian hermeneutics with Skinnerian intentionalism, however, raises problems—primarily from Skinner’s own attacks upon Gadamer, dating back to the mid-eighties. In his introduction to the Return of Grand Theory, Skinner laments that “Gadamer has cast doubt on whether we can ever hope to reach the traditional goal of interpretation, that of grasping an alien action, utterance or text ‘objectively’ in its own terms.” Because Gadamer had undermined the possibility of rendering the intentions of a text “objectively,” Skinner warned that it would be just a “short step to the anarchistic conclusion that we ought not to think of interpretation as a method of attaining truths at all.”18 Here Skinner himself invokes the dichotomy described above, arguing explicitly for ob14. See R. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (London: Seth Press, 1986), which sought the reconciliation of the opposing methodologies of the Newtonian scientist and nineteenth-century humanist in the figure of the quantum scientist. See also William Kolbrener, “Towards a Genuine Jewish Philosophy: Halakhic Mind’s New Philosophy of Religion,” Tradition 1996 (30): 21– 43. 15. Daniel Boyarin, “Pilpul: The Logic of Commentary,” Dor le-dor 3 (1986): 1–25. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lerhardt, eds. Gretal Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984), 13 –14. 17. Alasdir MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 8. 18. Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7. 277 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 278 William Kolbrener jectivity in interpretation against the subjective—indeed, anarchic—excesses of Gadamerian hermeneutics. Skinner’s own method—emerging from the twin strands of Austinian language philosophy and the historical traditions of Collingwood and Butterfield— always emphasizes the importance of reconstructing authorial intentions. Before, however, his methodological protest against the avatars of the “Grand Theory,” Skinner had other interpretive models in his sights—particularly those of the New Criticism.19 Writing in 1972 against Wimsatt’s new critical rejection of intention, Skinner fashioned a method that would shift emphasis “off the idea of the text as an autonomous object” and toward an understanding of the text that would take into account what he would call “intentionalist action.”20 Skinner, rejecting New Critical principles, would turn to the “idea of the text as an object linked to its creator, and thus on to the discussion of what its creator may have been doing in creating it.” Skinner would thus emphasize not only intention, but also Austin’s “central insight” about the performative nature of language, distilled in the Wittgensteinian insight that, as Skinner quotes him, “words are also deeds.” This is to say, Skinner’s intentionalism entails a focus not on the text in itself, but, rather, on what he terms, following Austin, the “particular force with which a given utterance . . . may have been issued on a particular occasion.” Skinner thus invokes discursive contexts—or Wittgensteinian “language games”—as a means for reconstructing the intentions of particular texts, or, as Skinner following Austin would have them, texts as performative utterances. Although acknowledging that it is impossible “to step into the shoes of past agents,” and “still less into their minds,” Skinner nonetheless holds out the hope of the recovery of the “intentions with which their utterances were issued, and hence what they meant by them.”21 Against this hope, Skinner’s critics have regularly invoked Gadamer. John Keane, for example, rejects Skinner’s “dusty antiquarianism” and his “old-fashioned positivism.” Since language is always situated and interpreters always bear the unavoidable mark of Gadamerian “prejudice,” Keane argues, interpretations are not discovered, but produced as a function of present concerns. There are, in any event, “no selfless researchers,” as Skinner is meant to presuppose, who are “detached from their object.” Similarly, Nancy Streuver, citing David Hull, finds Skinner’s “preoccupation with anachronism” a “fussy minor therapy,” rejecting both his interpretive model and what she sees as his relegation of past texts to the “status of antiques.” “Presentism,” that is, the taking into account of the interpretive schemes, paradigms, and prejudices wielded by the contemporary subject encountering a text, is a “necessary element in good historiography.”22 Here again, 19. See also Skinner’s “A Reply to My Critics” in Tully, Meaning in Context, esp 276 –281. 20. See Skinner’s “Motives, intentions, and the interpretation of texts” in Tully, Meaning and Context, 68 –78, and esp 70 –72 and 233– 34. 21. Tully, Meaning and Context, 260, 279. Skinner’s critique of Wimsatt may seem, at this point, both dated and irrelevant. For his confrontation with a triumvirate of more contemporary figures (Barth, Foucault, and Derrida), see 272–281. 22. Nancy S. Streuver, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), x. 278 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 279 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition authorial intention is rejected as a chimera, with textual meanings understood as the result of the Gadamerian productive act of interpretation. Notwithstanding the conflict emerging between the avatars of Skinnerian and Gadamerian camps, there is a case to be made, nonetheless, for methodological affinities between the two thinkers. To be sure, a full reconciliation of Skinnerian intentionalism and Gadamerian hermeneutics would be impossible: their own agendas are very much informed by the particular contexts—historical and philosophical respectively—in which they were nourished. Yet notwithstanding the explicit attack of the Grand Theory volume, Skinner has shown himself to be moving in the direction of some kind of a rapprochement with Gadamerian hermeneutics. Skinner, it should be noted, almost always refrains in his more recent work from a head-on attack on Gadamer, more usually arguing against those who invoke Gadamer’s name.23 Indeed, in the 1988 Meaning and Context volume, Skinner, citing Kuhn, acknowledges that “whenever we report our beliefs, we inevitably employ some classificatory scheme” with the result that none of these different schemes can “ever be uncontentiously employed to report undisputable facts.” This is not to deny, however, Skinner continues, “that there are undisputable facts to be reported.”24 Different conceptual schemes, however, Skinner himself acknowledges, will come to reveal different aspects of the world.25 Skinner is even more explicit about the reciprocal relationship between subjective and objective constraints in interpretation when he claims, in the same volume, that historians “inevitably approach the past in the light of contemporary paradigms and presuppositions, the influence of which may easily serve to mislead us at every turn.” Yet he continues, “I have also conceded that the enterprise of recovering the kinds of intentions in which I am interested requires a level of historical awareness and sheer erudition that few of us can aspire to reach.” Skinner’s insistence upon the role of “contemporary paradigms and presuppositions” may have been implicit in his earlier work; the acknowledgement of that role in the response to his critics shows Skinner demonstrating an awareness—indeed, incorporating— the Gadamerian critique into his own methodology. Of course, even the acknowledgement here is balanced by the everpresent Skinnerian emphasis on the importance of erudition and the knowledge of discourses: very simply, to know what Hobbes, or Locke, or Milton might have been doing, one has to know, Skinner admonishes, a very great deal. (Certainly Skinner would be right to point to the way the invocation of new critical method in the sixties, as well as Gadamerian hermeneutics in the eighties, may not have been felicitous for the actual job of writing histo23. For a notable exception, see Tully, Meaning and Context, 338, n. 172. 24. Tully, Meaning and Context, 257. For an earlier acknowledgment of the influence of Kuhn on the Cambridge School, see J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3, 61. 25. Skinner’s recent Vision of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also asserts an affinity with Gadamer: Gadamer’s arguments, writes Skinner, embody “a salutary reminder about the need to be aware of our inevitable tendency towards prejudgment and the fitting of evidence into pre-existing patterns of interpretation and explanation” (15). 279 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 280 William Kolbrener ry).26 Notwithstanding the acknowledgment of the role for subjective elements in interpretation, Skinner’s emphasis remains on the recovery of authorial intentions. Gadamer’s hermeneutic model, by contrast, would seem to rule out any possibility of an interpretive model based upon objective coordinates and founded upon intention. Indeed, in his attempt to undercut the claims of a nineteenth-century “objectivist” epistemology, Gadamer associates the notion that “we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age” with what he calls the “naive assumption” of an earlier positivist historicism. The “important thing” to recognize, for Gadamer, is that “temporal distance” provides the “positive and productive condition enabling understanding.” For Gadamer, there are no unhistorical, that is, unsituated, interpretations. The “hermeneutical situation,” irreducibly historical, is not only constitutive of the text, but also constitutive of “what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation.” But what follows from Gadamer’s analysis of the constitutive act of understanding and from the appreciation of the “finitude of our historical existence” is the particularly disturbing consequence to which Skinner himself had pointed: “that there is something absurd about the whole idea of a unique correct interpretation.”27 Gadamer’s assertion that the inescapable historicity of interpretation renders “absurd” the very notion of “correct interpretation” would seem to leave him open to the very claims of anarchistic interpretation which Skinner had leveled at him, and to make their reconciliation, on any level, impossible. Yet, just as Skinner’s apparently objectivist emphasis on intention is qualified by his concession to the more subjectivist realm of “paradigms” and “presuppositions,” so Gadamer’s apparently subjectivist emphasis on the constitutive aspect of the hermeneutic situation is qualified by his acknowledgement of the demands exerted by the object of interpretation. Gadamer thus qualifies his argument about the absurdity of a “unique correct interpretation,” by asserting that interpretation does not simply emerge as a function of the “mere subjective variety of conceptions” of the interpreter, but of the “work’s own possibilities of being.” Here, significantly, the “subjective variety of conceptions” is limited by the “variety” of “aspects” located by Gadamer in the work itself. Further, Gadamer warns, seeming almost to migrate into the Skinnerian position, if “one regards the variations possible in the presentation as free and arbitrary,” then “one fails to appreciate the obligatoriness” of the object under interpretation.28 All “subjective variations,” Gadamer continues are “subject to the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation.” Although Gadamer’s insistence on right representation acknowledges the impossibility of attaining unmediated access to the text (or what Skinner calls more prosaically “stepping into the author’s shoes”), he does, however, maintain a belief in the “true meaning of the object.” As an interpreter of texts, Gadamer argues, one should “be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert 26. Tully, Meaning and Context, 257, 281. 27. Hans George Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroads, 1993), 297, 300, 120. 28. For Hirsch’s extended critique of Truth and Method, see “Appendix II” in Validity in Interpretation, 245 –264. 280 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 281 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition its own truth against one’s own fore-meaning.” That is, Gadamer’s much-vaunted “methodologically conscious understanding” only makes prejudices “conscious,” so “as to check them and thus acquire right understandings from the things themselves.” Notwithstanding the primary role of the interpreter and his prejudices, Gadamer’s explicit goal is that we may be “able to open ourselves to the superior claim the text makes.”29 Gadamer’s language—inherited from the traditions of German philosophy—certainly entails different commitments and emphases than Skinner’s own empirical intentionalism. Yet both thinkers gesture towards the very extreme that their own thought is alleged to oppose, if not render impossible. What Gadamer and Skinner both seem to recognize, and what gets lost in the polemical attacks put forward by some of their followers, is that even the hermeneutist Gadamer turns to the constraints imposed by the object itself, while the intentionalist Skinner acknowledges the power of the paradigms and schemes that interpreters employ. Away from the scene of polemical appropriation and debate, there emerges some common ground about the nature of the interpretive enterprise based on both subject and objective frames of reference. From them emerges a hermeneutic, removed from the binary between the relative and the absolute, suitable for encountering the hermeneutic universe of the Talmud. For once the polemical debate shifts away from the obsessive invocation of subjectivity on the one hand (and the anarchy it is meant to entail), and objectivity on the other (and the naive idealism it is said to presuppose), an opening emerges for an articulation of rabbinic hermeneutics.30 THE TEMPTATION OF TRANSCENDENCE “Philosophy,” Wittgenstein wrote, “ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.”31 In many ways, classical rabbinic meditations on questions of hermeneutics, epistemology, and even metaphysics are written in poetic—certainly nonphilosophical—form. In the Talmud, as Adin Steinsaltz has remarked, “there is a deliberate evasion of abstract thinking based on abstract concepts.”32 The midrashic or aggadic—that is, the narrative—treatment of philosophical problems serves as a way of avoiding, if not resisting, the abstract concepts of philosophy. In rabbinic discourses, metadiscussions upon the nature of interpretation are almost always rendered through midrash. Only the language of explanatory commentary, we shall see, requires the use of a language of dualism, which the narrative registers of midrash and aggadah manage themselves to avoid. One such talmudic narrative involves the legal dispute between two rabbis; 29. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 118, 298, 269; emphasis added. 30. Alan Sokal’s attack upon the humanities that emerged from the Social Text controversy hinged largely upon his attribution of a simplistic notion of “subjectivism” to all avatars of humanist method against the ostensible objectivity of the sciences. One might argue that neither model, by itself, is appropriate either for the humanities or the sciences. 31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1980), 24e. 32. Handelman, Slayers, 61. 281 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 282 William Kolbrener as the often-cited story goes (B. Bava Meziga 59b), in the midst of the dispute, a ˙ voice—a bat kol—went out from the heavens, proclaiming that the law was to be determined in accord with one of the disputants.33 Within the context of the narrative, the heavenly voice is itself rejected (along with a number of supernatural events which had proceeded), with Rabbi Yehoshua citing a verse from the Torah as a means of supporting the rejection of the divine intercession. In a commentary of the Gaonic period, Nissim ben Jacob ben Nissim Ibn Shahin (Rabbenu Nissim) explains that: the intention of the “bat kol” [the voice from heaven] was only to test the Sages [to see] if they would or would not abandon the tradition in their hands and the teaching in their mouths. And this is what Rabbi Yehoshua said, “it [the Torah] is not in heaven”—meaning, the Torah of God is perfect, and has already been given to us at Sinai (M. Berakhot 19b). The episode, as Rabbenu Nissim explains, not only thematizes the post-Sinaitic priority of human interpretation over divine command, but also enacts the temptation of transcendence—that is, the temptation of aspiring towards a grasp of the absolute. Rabbi Yehoshua’s citation of a verse from the Torah not only provides the relevant proof text, but also enacts a process of interpretation that is already outside of the scope of further divine intervention. The narrative—in Rabbenu Nissim’s understanding—rejects the appeal to the absolute, asserting, after the moment at Sinai, the priority of interpretation. The rejection of divine intervention and the concomitant embrace of interpretation entails, correspondingly, a rejection of the possibility of what Gadamer calls “a unique correct interpretation.” The emphasis on multiplicity in interpretation is manifested in a series of midrashic narratives related in tractate Temurah (15a–16a). Centering around the death of Moses, in these midrashic accounts, the relationship between the loss of access to the absolute and the emergence of interpretive multiplicity is elaborated: “Rav Yehudah said in the name of Shmuel: Three thousand laws were forgotten during the period of mourning for Moses . . . .” The death of Moses, and the loss of his privileged access to God, entails a loss of the law as well. The narrative, however, continues: “After the death of Moses, if those [rabbis] who pronounced [ritually] unclean were in the majority, they declared the object impure, and if those who pronounced [ritually] pure were in the majority, they declared it clean.” Lacking the clarity of insight available to the prophet Moses, the interpretive processes of the rabbis (after the prophetic mo33. For the most salient discussions of the episode, see Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, 34. Menachem Fisch, however, takes exception to a Boyarin’s reading, which, Fisch claims, goes to “the point of interpretive anarchy” (Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997], 85). For other treatments of this narrative, see Michael Rosensweig, “Elu Va-Elu Divre Elokim Hayim: Halakhic Pluralism and Theories of Controversy,” Tradition 26 (1992): 4 –23; Eli Turkel, “The ˙Nature and Limitations of Rabbinic Authority,” Tradition 27 (1993): 80 – 99; Shalom Carmy, “Pluralism and the Category of the Ethical,” Tradition 30 (1996): 145 –163; and Avi Sagi, “‘Both are the Words of the Living God’: A Typological Analysis of Halakhic Pluralism,” HUCA 65 (1994): 105–136. 282 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 283 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition ment) are governed by the apparently democratic principle whereby the legal decision is determined by a majority. Importantly, whereas for Moses, the law would have been transparent (and the object either pure or impure), for the rabbis, it becomes a subject for debate. Such dispute, however, is itself sanctioned by the divine, as the heavenly voice affirms, after a three-year-long dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, “these and these are the words of the Living God” (B. ‘Eruvin 13b). Against the ideal world figured in the prophetic experience that has passed, the rabbis themselves inhabit a realm governed by loss, disagreement, and multiplicity.34 Yet, as a later legal commentator explains in the introduction to his collection, Kezot ha-hoshen, the status of Torah is not compromised through its ˙ immersion ˙ in dispute and multiplicity, and in fact only emerges through the processes of interpretation, “the Torah was not given to ministering angels; it was given to man with a human mind. He gave us the Torah,” the Kezot continues, “in ˙ conformity to the ability of the human mind to decide, in accordance with the conclusions of the human mind.” In what from a Western philosophical perspective would amount to the overturning of the hierarchies represented in Plato’s “divided line,” in which the contingent is dismissed in favor of the ideal of transcendence, the Kez ot affirms, “Let the truth emerge from the earth; the truth be as the sages decide˙ with the human mind.”35 Yet the very allusion to Plato (even in the suggested reversal of his model) does not do justice to rabbinic conceptions of interpretation. For the legal principle, “these and these are the words of the Living God,” which the preceding accounts exemplify, cannot be usefully compared to simple western versions of relativism. Although it may be true, as Ramban wrote in his introduction to the Talmud, Milhemet ha-shem, that “there are no absolute proofs in disagreements” in ˙ this is not to reject the notion of truth or validity in interpretation althe Talmud, 36 together. For the principle “these and these,” which licenses the validity (if not, to risk a term, the truth) of different perspectives, is affirmed not only on what we might call subjectivist grounds, but objectivist ones as well: opposing rabbinic interpretations all represent concrete embodiments of the Torah. Of course, such a principle, when seen philosophically, runs right into the Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction: the subject of the dispute between le34. For more on the principles of loss and mourning in rabbinic hermeneutics, see William Kolbrener, “Hermeneutics of Mourning: Multiplicity and Authority in Jewish Law,” College Literature 30, 4 (2003): 114 –139. 35. The “divided line” in Book VI of The Republic had diminished the ontological validity of the phenomenal (in relation to the noumenal forms or ideas); the rejection of poetry in Book X echoes the allegory of the divided line by placing imagination and poetic representation on both the lowest ontological and epistemological levels. As Plato’s Socrates claims, the “art of representation is . . . a long way removed from truth, and it is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp over anything, and that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance” (Plato, Republic, ed. Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee [London: Penguin, 1987], 364). Aryeh Lev Yosef Ha Cohen, Kezot ha- hoshen ( Jerusa˙ ˙ lem, 1972), 3. 36. Ramban, Introduction to Milhemet in tractate M. Berakhot (preceding the commentary of ˙ R. Alfasi). 283 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 284 William Kolbrener gal adversaries revolved, more often than not, upon questions of permitted and prohibited behavior—questions which would hardly seem to allow for disagreement, let alone outright contradiction. Which is to say, how can the separate determinations that an act is “permitted” on the one hand or “forbidden” on the other both represent the truth. How can they both be the “words of the Living God”? So ask the Bahalei ha-tosafot and Ritba (R. Yom Tov ibn Asevilli), who would elaborate their question (perhaps instigated by an awareness of the Aristotelian categories of scholastic philosophy): The rabbis of France asked how is it possible that they are both the words of the living God, [when] this one [says it is] prohibited and this one [says it is] permitted? And they answered: when Moses went up to the Above to receive the Torah, it was shown to him on every matter forty-nine ways to prohibit, and forty-nine ways to permit. And [Moses] asked the Holy One Blessed-beHe about this, and He said that this will be passed to the Sages of Israel of every generation, and it will be decided according to them.37 Ritba understands that a multiplicity of different legal perspectives were themselves already implicit in the original revelation to Moses at Sinai. Thus the appearance of various opinions—even on the same matter—does not compromise the objectivist criteria of the Torah. The judgments that emerge in particular situations, though contradictory, are nonetheless both “the words of the living God.” The Torah itself, and the experience of Sinai, according to Ritba, is the guarantor of truth in multiplicity. While Ritba emphasizes such a multiplicity grounded in the experience at Sinai itself, later commentators would turn towards the role of the interpreter. Indeed the principle articulated in tractate Niddah (20b)—“a judge can only decide by what appears to his eyes”—provides a Talmudic precedent for this subjectivist criterion. Seeming to transform this principle into a broader interpretive principle, Maharshal (R. Solomon ben Yehiel writes, in apparent disagreement with Ritba, that differences between the sages emerged not because of the multiplicity inherent in revelation, but, rather, because each of the sages “perceived the Torah from his own perspective in accordance with his intellectual capacity as well as the stature and unique character of his particular soul.”38 From the perspective of Maharshal, difference of perception—purely subjective criteria—constitutes an integral part of the Sinaitic revelation. Maharshal’s principles certainly do not compromise his commitment to Law (as his commentary on the Shulhan GArukh ˙ avows), which attests to the necessity of an objective component underlying an interpretive approach that emphasizes the subjective. Ritba and Maharshal, therefore, are not so much disagreeing as they are providing different perspectives on the principle “these and these are the words of the Living God” (their dispute would, in fact, come under the aegis of the very principle they are coming to explain). Indeed, Ritba himself hints at the corollary in37. Yom-Tov ben Avraham Ishbilli, H idushei ha-Ritba Gal ha-shas (Jerusalem, 1974), 3:107. ˙ Bava Kama. 38. Introduction to Yam Shel Shlomo, 284 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 285 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition terpretation of Maharshal when he asserts that, in addition to the explanation that he had already offered, and “according to the ways of truth” (in all likelihood a reference to the Zohar), there is yet another “hidden explanation of the matter.” For certainly Ritba himself would have to provide some account—touching upon subjectivist criteria—which would explain the emergence of the different perspectives in different historical periods. The commentaries of Ritba and Maharshal are already, in their response to the question of Tosefot, inflected (though not explicitly) with binary philosophical categories: Ritba emphasizing objectivity, Maharshal subjectivity. Though even here the distinctions do not emerge out of a desire for mutual exclusion, but only as a matter of emphasis. In the event, no such philosophical distinctions are present in the midrashic narratives themselves, which meditate on problems of interpretation without eliciting these distinctions that are, in fact, a function of commentary. That the divine and human, and hence subjective and objective, are mutually implicated receives further explicit articulation in the account in tractate Gittin centering on another rabbinic disagreement. After describing the dispute between R. Avitar and R. Yochanan (on the correct interpretation of an episode in Judges), the gemara (6b) provides an account of R. Avitar’s encounter with Elijah the Prophet, “R. Avitar went and found Elijah the Prophet and asked, ‘What is the Holy One Blessed-be-He doing now?’ The Prophet answered: ‘He is busy with the dispute between R. Yonatan and R. Avitar,’ and he is saying the following, ‘So says my son Yonatan, so says my son Avitar.’” The midrash demonstrates both divine assent to the notion of multiplicity in interpretation, and to the way in which the divine and human remain entangled. The precise nature of this dynamic, however, remains here ambivalent, and is again only fully brought out in the writings of later commentators. The twentieth-century commentary of R. Chaim Friedlander in Siftei hayim explains by comparing the two talmudic disputants to Moses at the ˙ the revelation at Sinai: time of Thus when R. Avitar and R. Yonatan studied Torah, this was the Torah which was given at Sinai, and just as on Mount Sinai, the Holy One placed the words of Torah in the mouth of Moses, so at the time of their studying, they did not say their own words, but the Words of the Living God.39 By referring back to the Sinaitic moment, Siftei hayim emphasizes the precedence ˙ of the divine and grounds the differences in opinions between R. Yonatan and R. Avitar in the original experience of revelation (much like Ritba had done in his account of “these and these”). Nefesh ha-hayim, the work of R. Hayim of Volozhin, ˙ in which not objective, ˙ but, rather, subprovides the complementary explanation jective, variables seem to be most prominent, “Because of the fact that R. Yonatan and R. Avitar were studying Torah, so the Holy One repeated their words in their entirety.”40 In this perhaps more striking rendering, interpretation itself seems to take 39. R. Chaim Friedlander, Siftei hayim (Benai Brak, 1996), MoGadim, v. iii, 171. ˙ ayimayim (Jerusalem, 1989), 217. 40. R. Chaim Volozhin, Nefesh ha-h ˙ 285 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 286 William Kolbrener precedence, with God authorizing interpretive multiplicity as he repeats and therefore validates the dispute only after the fact. In the version of the Nefesh ha-hayim, unlike that of Siftei hayim, emphasis is placed not upon God and Sinai, but˙ upon the present reality in˙which dispute is engendered. Focusing on one of the accounts of the narrative (which equally accommodates both renderings) might lead to a simplified version of a rabbinic interpretive model—as being determined uniquely by either subjective or objective constraints.41 But again, the two commentaries presuppose one another: following the pattern of Ritba and Maharshal before them, the later commentaries, in my reading, come to extrapolate the opposing emphases implicit in the midrashic narrative, which are themselves both “words of the Living God.” Rabbinic interpretation is simultaneously linked to Sinai and the authority that it accords and to a creative present in which new meanings are produced. Later renderings of the narrative, which in some sense are already responding, if only implicitly, to the Aristotelian demands of noncontradiction, provide necessarily simplified accounts of the nonphilosophical registers of midrash, or what we might call, following Wittgenstein, rabbinic “poetry.” In such poetry, the divinely sanctioned multiplicity of “these and these” emerges between the extremes of what we call in our impoverished philosophical languages the twin poles of the subjective and the objective. Between these poles emerges both a notion of truth, as well as a conception of disagreement, which defy Western critical conceptions. To explore these notions—and the attitudes upon which they are presupposed and which they engender—we turn now to the languages of halakhah, seen from a perspective informed by both Gadamerian hermeneutics and Skinnerian intentionalism. DISAGREEMENT, DITCHES, AND INTERPRETIVE CHARITY Any discussion of rabbinic meditations on interpretation must turn to a discussion of rabbinic interpretation in action. Indeed, by looking at a particular example of rabbinic disagreement, we can see the way in which the more general hermeneutic principles discussed above lead to a very particular rabbinic attitude towards the nature and conduct of disputes. That Torah is only manifested through inter41. Menachem Fisch, though not relying upon the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, nonetheless bifurcates talmudic thought into what he calls “traditionalist” and “antitraditionalist” voices. For Fisch, the antitraditionalist voice, according to his reading “camouflaged” in the Babylonian Talmud, emphasizes “critical appraisal” and “skepticism” (roughly corresponding to what I have been referring to as subjective tendencies) rather than the traditionalist “unquestioned reception” of “inherited teachings” (corresponding to the objective tendencies in the heuristic of this study; Fisch, Rabbis, xix–xx). Fisch’s bifurcation of what seems to him contradictory, and therefore necessarily independent, approaches within the Talmud may derive from his Popperian biases and his more general inclinations as an analytical philosopher not to entertain contradiction. My own sympathies—informed by the sense that Talmudic discourses refuse the dichotomies of Western philosophy—lie more with Menachem Fisch’s late father, Harold Fisch, who sees not contradiction between opposing voices, but, rather, paradox as a means of Talmudic argument and expression (see Harold Fisch, Be-seter Gelyon: paradoks u-setirah bi-mekorot ha-yahadut [Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2001], especially chap. 10, 124 –133). A full response, however, to Menachem Fisch’s complex and sometimes provocative arguments goes well beyond the scope of the current essay. 286 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 287 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition pretation (through what we might call subjective elaborations of an objective truth) will, by necessity, entail the application of what Moshe Halbertal calls, following Willard Quine, the “principle of charity.” Such a principle, as Halbertal explains, entails adopting a stance such that “a speaker’s words will make sense and the sentence that he utters can have meaning.” This principle has a special place in rabbinic hermeneutics, not only in the context, as Halbertal is concerned to show, of the interpretation of the canonical texts of the written Torah, but in the realm of disputes within the context of the Oral Law itself.42 For in as much as the Torah can only be revealed through interpretation, and such interpretation necessarily entails multiplicity, the persistent attribution of incoherence or falsehood to one’s opponents (the rejection of difference) amounts to a rejection of the Torah itself. To be sure, the Talmud itself provides, among other things, a vast collection of disputes. These disputes remain unresolved in the sense that, in most cases, disagreement persists; yet nonetheless supreme hermeneutic effort is exerted to maintain the coherence of the competing perspectives in such disputes. Not only does this entail a practical acknowledgment of the necessity for multiplicity in the realm of the Law itself, but it also demands a constant application of the Quinean law of charity. For to reject one’s opponent out of hand—that is, to assume the incoherence of one’s interlocutor—entails, again, a rejection of the processes that make up Torah. To reject a subjectivity—which is genuinely engaged with Torah (that is, engaged in learning Torah for its own sake, or li-shema)—is to reject Torah itself.43 Thus, to see halakhic discourse as celebrating either an unbounded polysemy (as has been claimed of midrash), or, on the other hand, a Platonic standard of absolute truth, is to fail to see the distinctive conception of rabbinic disagreement, and rabbinic truth. In this reading, rabbinic interpretation always begins with an extreme version of the Skinnerian model, which is to say that rabbinic interpreters exert an extraordinary effort in understanding the intentions of the texts that precede them. In the case of the Talmud itself, this entails the efforts of Amoraim (200 to 600 CE) to understand the utterances of their predecessors, the Tannaim (200 BCE to 200 CE). Briefly, the utterances of the Tannaim (“those who teach”) form the basis of the Oral Law or Mishnah which, once a strictly oral tradition, was codified by R. Yehudah Ha-Nasi at the end of the tannaitic period. The tannaitic utterances of the Mishnah provide the basis for all later articulations of the law, and are authoritative for all future generations. Amoraim (literally “those who say”) derive legal principles and concepts from the earlier tannaitic sources (never, however, contesting the authority of those sources); indeed, the articulation of such principles almost always depends upon both acknowledgment and incorporation of those earlier texts.44 42. Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 27 and ff. The principle is codified, in a mishnah in Pirkei Avot, not only in relationship to texts, but as a more general behavioral practice. The mishnah enjoins to “Judge every person in the direction of their benefit”—that is, to attribute both coherence and goodness to their actions in the absence of unavoidably compelling evidence to the contrary. 43. For more on the principle of Torah li-shema, see Volozhin, Nefesh ha-hayim, 235. ˙ Strack and Gün44. For a detailed scholarly introduction to the subject, see Hermann Leberecht ter Stembeger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Edinburgh: T&T Clark International, 1991). 287 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 288 William Kolbrener That is to say that Amoraim, who build their own diverse systems of halakhah in what has come to be known as the gemara (that is, “learning” or Talmud), inevitably debate the meaning of tannaitic sources as they argue for the authority of their own halakhic principles and interpretive systems. Any amoraic statement that is contradicted by a preceding tannaitic statement is, by definition, subject to rejection. Yet, amoraic statements that, on the surface, may seem to be contradicted by earlier tannaitic utterances are in point of fact almost never rejected.45 Talmudic invocations of alternative conceptual and interpretive schemes become the means by which the apparently incoherent utterance becomes coherent and understandable. This entails the application of something resembling the “principle of charity,” and will lead us, as we shall see, on a path from the Skinnerian emphasis on intention to the Gadamerian emphasis on interpretive horizons. Such a path can only be traced, however, through turning our attention to a brief account of the intricacies of a particular rabbinic dispute. Granting rabbinic legal argument such attention is not for the sake of finding explicit metadiscussions on the nature of interpretation. Unlike midrash, the legal discussions of the Talmud do not openly meditate on the nature of interpretation; but in the very forms and attitudes of legal argument emerge more clearly the nature and demands of rabbinic dispute. The first mishnah in the second chapter of tractate Bava batra (17a) deals with the limitations imposed upon a landowner’s use of his own property because of damage that may be incurred to a neighbor’s property. The mishnah begins with the precautions that a property owner must take, including the requirement that when digging a ditch, he must distance it from the wall of his neighbor’s ditch by a distance, in the gemara’s measurement, of three arms-breadths. As mentioned, the mishnah’s proclamations are non-negotiable for future generations; what remains, however, is the extrapolation of principles from the mishnah itself into other contexts and cases. The gemara takes up the case of one who wants to dig a ditch near the boundary of his own property: can he do so if his neighbor has not yet dug on his own property? On this question, the mishnah does not offer any explicit ruling. Thus, for the Amoraim, the question becomes a matter of dispute—that is, does the Torah permit someone to initiate digging on the edge of his property or not? That is, does one have to take into account the possible future actions of a neighbor when digging on one’s own property? In the ensuing debate between Amoraim, Abaye rules that one may place the ditch near the boundary, while Rava, by contrast, rules that one may not, and should distance his ditch appropriately. Both of these Amoraim, however, must claim that their ruling is in consonance with the intention of the author of the mishnah. The gemara goes on to test these amoraic utterances to show their adherence to this tannaitic antecedent of the mishnah, as well as all the other tannaitic sources that reflect on the issue. In fact, in this case, this mishnah itself would seem to accommodate both the perspectives of Rava and Abaye; the questions on their respective perspectives emerge most strongly from other tannaitic sources.46 45. There are exceptions, however, in which refutations involve final rejections of certain Talmudic opinions; see for example, B. ‘Eruvin 16b. 46. In the continuation of the gemara, however, Abaye’s ruling is questioned from the language of the mishnah itself. 288 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 289 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition Our understanding of the amoraic discussion is complicated by the fact that the dispute itself exists in two versions in the gemara (the significance of which will be discussed later). We shall only focus upon the second of these two versions, and the way in which, in this context, the gemara itself struggles to justify the positions adopted by Rava and Abaye against the possible attacks from other tannaitic texts. In this, the second account of the disagreement between Rava and Abaye, the two Amoraim are said to agree in the case of land where it is not customary to dig ditches. This is to say, even Rava will agree with Abaye, in this set of cases, that one can approach the very boundary of one’s property and dig. Even before the gemara’s account of the disagreement begins, the point of dispute is narrowed to a very particular set of cases. Indeed, rabbinic methodology almost always maximizes areas of agreement. In this instance, the gemara constructs the amoraic argument in such a manner as to show that the only place where the Amoraim disagree is on land where people are accustomed to dig ditches (in the other version, the dispute concerns land where people do not habitually dig). Here Rava— against the more lenient ruling of Abaye—will insist upon the distancing of the ditch from the boundary to safeguard against the possible damaging of neighboring property, especially since it is customary to dig on such property. The gemara proceeds by citing early tannaitic sources as a means of interrogating, if not openly questioning, the positions of Rava and Abaye. As part of the process, the gemara invokes a mishnah—and a tannaitic dispute between the Sages and R. Yose—which would seem to render incoherent both the positions of Rava and Abaye. For the earlier dispute between the Sages and R. Yose (rendered in full in the same tractate, 25b), though not on the question of the digging of ditches, implies principles about damages that explicitly contradict the rulings of the later disputants. To Abaye’s claim that it is permissible to dig near a boundary, the gemara brings the opinion of the Sages, who argue that one must distance a tree twentyfive cubits from the ditch of a neighbor lest its roots damage the ditch. (R. Yose, by contrast, whose position will be elaborated more fully below, articulates the seemingly more lenient position that licenses property owners to use their land as they see fit.) Here begins the Skinnerian analysis of tannaitic intentions, as the gemara invokes the utterance of the Sages as a means of rendering Abaye’s position incoherent: how can Abaye maintain the permissibility of digging near a boundary when we see that the Sages articulated a principle which offers protection against actions taken on adjoining properties? That is to say, from the perspective of the questioner in the gemara (likely sharing or, at least adopting, the assumptions of Rava, and coming on behalf of his perspective), the intention of the Sages was surely and clearly to prevent activity that would cause damage to adjoining property.47 Abaye, whose own utterance, by definition, needs to be consistent with the “language-game” in which the Sages participate, seems instead to have articulated a position that openly contradicts their position. Yet, rather than reject Abaye’s opinion as ridiculous, non-normative, or in47. It should be noted, that although the gemara presents a whole series of explicit attacks against both Rava and Abaye, the specific language of the gemara here renders the questions only implicitly. 289 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 290 William Kolbrener coherent, the gemara goes on to elaborate a context in which Abaye makes sense. Against the previous attack of the gemara brought implicitly in Rava’s name, the defenders of Abaye (here the anonymous gemara) goes on to elicit what Abaye would maintain are the real intentions of the Sages in their argument with R. Yose, and thus to refine our sense of Abaye’s intentions—in his argument with Rava— as well. The Sages, Abaye would argue, did not intend to limit all forms of potentially damaging activity; their intentions were, in fact, much more specific. The questioner, the defenders of Abaye would argue, did not understand the precise nature of the Sages’ conversation with their interlocutor, and thus failed to understand their true intentions. While it is true that the Sages had required the distancing of the tree, they had only made such a demand in a case where there had been a preexistent ditch. In the present case, however, of the amoraic discussion of the question of digging on boundaries, there is no ditch in the neighboring property, and therefore Abaye’s ruling is not only correct, but in accordance with the very opinion which was meant to contradict him (as well as what we shall discover to be the apparently more libertarian opinion of R. Yose). Having re-elaborated the parameters of the Sages dispute with R. Yose, Abaye’s opinion emerges as coherent—consistent with the views of all the relevant tannaitic antecedents. The defense of Abaye represents a characteristic set of Talmudic moves. As is well known, expressions such as “Rather say” [i.e., “this is what the text really means”], “This is what is meant,” and “With what are we really dealing?” abound throughout the gemara, as the intentions of tannaitic texts are reevaluated and reformulated in the process of defending the integrity and coherence of later amoraic statements. If, as Wittgenstein puts it, the “sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs,” 48 then the tannaitic “sign” gets its significance first from the language to which it belongs, that of the Mishnah. This “language,” however, initially defined in terms of a synchronic relationship, itself is explained, refined, and recreated in the different languages of individual Amoraim. In our discussion, at the point of the attack leveled against Abaye, with its assumptions about the nature of the intentions of the Sages, Abaye’s perspective seems hopeless. The shift of perspective, however, which entails a reconsideration of the intentions behind the utterance of the Sages, reveals the coherence—if not the actual complexity—of Abaye’s utterance, as the Sages utterance is reconfigured within the context of Abaye’s perspective. Rather than reject Abaye’s utterance as incoherent, the gemara elicits the intentions of the antecedent tannaitic text (the Sages restrict the placement of a hazard only where the object liable to be damaged is already present) by re-elaborating the real context for their utterance. The result of this reframing of contexts is to show how the Sages themselves would not argue against, but, in fact, would countenance Abaye’s legal ruling. In the continuation of the gemara, it is Rava’s position that comes under attack: While Rava had ruled that one who wants to dig a ditch must distance from a property boundary, R. Yose had argued, against the Sages, that “just as this one digs within his own property, so this one plants within his own property.” Here the 48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 5. 290 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 291 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition question, informed now by the perspective of Abaye, sees the intentions of R. Yose quite clearly: one is not required to distance potential harmful agents from a boundary (there is no prohibition against planting a tree even where it is liable to damage the pit of one’s neighbor). It is, in fact, incumbent upon the threatened party to protect his property. Again, from the perspective elaborated in the question, just as we saw in the case of Abaye, the very integrity of Rava’s statement seems to be contradicted by the preexistent utterance of R. Yose. Rava might, we would speculate, accede to the question and fall back on to the opinion of the Sages (whose emphasis on precautionary distancing would seem to provide an obvious support for his position). But the gemara does not even attempt this as a last resort: for the working assumption of the gemara is that the opinions of the Amoraim should be accommodated with all previous tannaitic statements, and that some context be constructed which would allow for the coherence of Rava’s statement, according to not only the perspective of the Sages, but even from the perspective of R. Yose as well. This is not only to maximize agreement (such that Rava will have to be consistent with both the Sages and R. Yose) but to resist interpretive frameworks which would bifurcate the tradition (and the Torah itself ) with R. Yose and Abaye on one side and the Sages and Rava on the other (with the both sides remaining opaque—if not incoherent—to one another). Although there may be disagreement registered in the words of the Tannaim, the later interpretive efforts of Amoraim are meant to maximize the points of agreement with all precedent tannaitic texts. In the event, in defense of Rava, the gemara once again shifts conceptual perspectives and finds a new way of understanding the intentions behind the statement of R. Yose; R. Yose, the gemara argues, intended only a limited application of his less interventionist principle. Rava’s ruling, this new perspective reveals, is actually in accord with R. Yose, who would have distinguished between the case of planting a tree where the potentially damaging roots are not yet in existence, and the present case, where the digging of a ditch weakens the surrounding land, rendering it unsuitable for further ditches. That is, according to R. Yose, one need not anticipate future damages, but one must, of course, guard against the damaging consequences of present actions. Under the pressure of the question of the gemara, not only R. Yose’s intentions come more clearly into focus, but also, as a direct consequence, Rava’s own. Whereas at the beginning of the discussion, Rava’s statement, like that of Abaye, seemed to have merited outright rejection, by the end of the discussion, his statement seems not only coherent, but importantly in accord with all tannaitic predecessors—even with the opinion of R. Yose, which on the surface seemed to directly contradict Rava’s position. In both cases, the shift in the analysis of the intentions of antecedent texts is motivated by the need to mount an appropriate defense for the position under attack. These defenses, importantly, can only be justified in the gemara through elaborating discursive contexts responsive to the actual language—that is intention—of the texts themselves. Neither the defense of Rava nor that of Abaye would have been successful had the words of the Tannaim been unable to accommodate the interpretations that the gemara proposes. The process, briefly considered here, of the reconciliation of the utterances of Amoraim against the attacks implicit in tannaitic texts was informed by a Skinnerian conception of intention—elaborated through the construction of contexts. Yet, 291 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 292 William Kolbrener the process also necessarily entails a rejection of a simplified version of Skinner’s methodology. To be sure, the gemara constantly operates according to Skinnerian criteria in trying to draw out the parameters of tannaitic (and even amoraic) disputes— like the one we have examined between R. Yose and the Sages (as well as that of Abaye and Rava themselves). Only an intentional analysis—and the attempted recovery of the discursive context for their argument—would adequately reveal what the Sages intended in their ruling, and what R. Yose’s was doing in his response to their statement. Yet, even in our simplified rendition of a small section of the gemara, we have seen the way in which the discursive contexts of the argument between R. Yose and the Sages undergo transformation, as do, inevitably, the intentions that inform their utterances. For, at this point in our simple analysis of the text, we have identified two versions of the dispute between R. Yose and the Sages; their argument takes on a different aspect as the gemara moves from the perspective that informed the question against Abaye to the one that informed the answer offered in his defense (or, more simply, from the perspective of Rava to Abaye). The shifting of perspectives—informed by the everpresent rabbinic invocation of the principle of charity— demands a move from a simple and monovocal view of intention to one where the intentions of individual agents transmute and multiply. That is to say, what could be termed a kind of Skinnerian attention to intention and language games may indeed be an indispensable means for understanding rabbinic disputes—provided that such attention also accommodates the proliferation of frameworks and contexts that always attends rabbinic interpretation. The frames provided by different interpretive contexts for the very same discussion provide, in our reading of the gemara, two versions of the intentions of both the Sages and R. Yosef. This is both to affirm the Gadamerian notion that interpretation is the means by which “the work explicates itself . . . in the variety of its aspects,” as well as, of course, Skinner’s concession that the existence of different classificatory schemes compromises the very notion of “undisputable facts.” Which is to say, the constant demand for the shifting of perspectives in gemara requires not only a single analysis of a discursive context or language game, but also the analysis of that language game from many different perspectives. What, for example, R. Yose was doing with his response to the Sages will depend on the perspective one has: Abaye’s or Rava’s. Further, it is not only the versions of the dispute between R. Yose and the Sages that multiply, but also in our discussion, the versions of the dispute between Abaye and Rava themselves as the gemara, as mentioned, reports two separate accounts of their argument. In the account we have passed over (wherein the dispute concerns land where people do not habitually dig), the context of Rava’s disagreement with Abaye (and the intentions that inform their statements) will be completely different, as will, undoubtedly, the arguments of R. Yose and the Sages, whose opinions their arguments must continue to accommodate. What Gadamer refers to as interpretive horizons (and also as the meanings engendered) only continue to multiply as the arguments of the gemara itself are constructed, in later generations, in the works of medieval exegetes. All of these commentaries, however, only claim their authority through eliciting the intentions of the texts they explain: the multiplicity of interpretive horizons reveals the fecundity of the words of the Tannaim, which lend themselves to so many diverse—sometimes even contradictory—ex- 292 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 293 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition planations that are, nonetheless, all granted the status of Torah. Which is to say, the words of the Sages and R. Yose, by the lights of both Rava and Abaye, are the “words of the Living God.” To reject the perspective of either one is not merely to reject a single opinion, but to put an end to the everproliferating truths of Torah. There is then no distinction between Torah and the individuals who disseminate it, provided—and this is a large proviso—as Nefesh ha- hayim insists, that those who are engaged with Torah do so for its own sake and not˙ for self-aggrandizement.49 Subjective constraints, as Gadamer constantly emphasizes, are indispensable to the production of Torah; but they are only productive in so far that they remain faithful, in the Skinnerian sense, to the intentions that inform the texts themselves. “FROM EVERY SIDE” In tractate Nedarim (38a), the gemara explains that while Torah was given to all of Israel, originally, pilpul—what Boyarin calls the “logic of commentary,” or simply, dialectic—was given first to Moses, and then bestowed by him onto further generations. Pilpul, as the early modern commentator, R. Bezalel Ashkenazi ˙ . . . like a perexplains, entails understanding a matter “incisively and with insight son who is exacting in his halakhah and chisels it from every side to clarify it.”50 Talmudic dialectic, often referred to pejoratively as “hair-splitting” or “logic-chopping,” similarly requires seeing an issue from all possible perspectives—chiseling it from all sides. Pilpul, that indispensable part of the interpretive processes of the Talmud, requires the dialectical awareness of the multiple hermeneutic perspectives that reveal the intentions of antecedent texts in their fullness. Pilpul, then, is a kind of antidote for the monovocal thinking which seeks to embrace one side of a dispute at the expense of another, without, however, entailing a rejection of the notion of truth altogether. To be sure, Jewish behavioral life is governed by legal decisions which establish normative communal behavior in no uncertain terms, but the realm of study is characterized by the need for a cognitive openness which appreciates—indeed, demands—the truth of Torah in its many-faceted diversity.51 To put it in other very different terms, the study of Torah entails training the mind to see the famous picture of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as both a rabbit and a duck (Figure 1). From this point of view, the study of Torah becomes an exercise in attempting to inhabit perspectives that may not, at first, seem accessible. As Bernard Williams writes in the Wittgensteinian framework, mental efforts may allow “those who had one picture . . . to see the point . . . of another picture, and also perhaps . . . to understand why those who had it, did so.”52 Limud 49. As the Nefesh ha-hayim puts it, “At every moment that a person is working and cleaving to the words of the Torah in the˙appropriate fashion, the Words rejoice as if they were given from Sinai” (225). In philosophical terms, only when subject and object merge is true Torah produced. 50. Betzalel Ashkenazi, Shita Mekubzet, tractate Nedarim (Jerusalem, 1997), 154. ˙ 51. For further discussions of the “openness” of Talmudic dialectic, see Ouaknin, Burnt Book, 159 –163, and David Kraemer, The Mind of The Talmud: an intellectual history of the Bavli (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 99 –138. 52. Bernard Williams, “Wittgenstein and Idealism” in Understanding Wittgenstein, ed. George Vesey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 87. 293 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 294 William Kolbrener Figure 1. Torah—the study of Torah—thus presupposes an interpretive charity which strives to elicit the coherence of differing perspectives, and in fact, as much as possible, to inhabit these differing perspectives. Such a process of study, in fact, mirrors the amoraic consideration of earlier tannaitic texts; just as the gemara attempts to reconcile amoraic statements with all preexistent tannaitic statements, so the study of Torah remains a process which attempts to come to terms with (and elicit the coherence of) all previous utterances in the tradition. For Amoraim (like those, perhaps, confronted in the Wittgensteinian case with the picture of the “duck/rabbit”), though wielding different interpretive paradigms, are simply eliciting aspects implicit in the work itself. (It should be added, however, that “these and these” is also an exclusive principle: “these and these,” but not those. That is to say that some interpretations simply did not fall under the validating aegis of the divine precept. Though this may also be consistent with the principles implicit in the Wittgensteinian analysis of the “duck/rabbit”: we only need imagine our response to someone who, looking at the picture, claimed to see, for example, a pig.) Seeing the Torah in its multiplicity provides an antidote to the attitude embodied in the Biblical figure of Korah, who as Rashi explains (following Targum Onkelos), “separated himself from the˙ rest of the community in order to maintain dispute” (Numbers 16.1). Korah, becomes the paradigm in the tradition for a kind ˙ of dispute, not pursued for the “sake of Heaven,” but based instead upon the pursuit of self-interest and self-aggrandizement (M. Avot 5.17). Countering this model stand the arguments of both Hillel and Shammai, which, pursued for “the sake of Heaven,” are of “lasting worth.” Such disputes are of lasting worth not because they are resolved, but precisely because they remain unresolved. As Maharal of Prague explains in his commentary on this mishnah (5.17), the disputes of Hillel and Shammai were actually “beloved by God,” for both participants sought to elaborate the truths implicit in Torah: their own conceptual models, though leading to contradictory interpretations, would bring out truths implicit in the Torah itself.53 The acknowledgment of the possibility of truth-claims occupying a space between relativism and absolutism and unconstrained by simplistic models of interpretation tied to either subjective or objective coordinates (in this account, associated with the extremes of Gadamerian and Skinnerian perspectives respectively) does not lead, in the Talmud, to the end of disputes. It does, however, lead to the end of animus and the spirit of rejectionism that informs disputes modeled after the separatism of Korah. Against Korah, Beit Hillel themselves be˙ ˙ 294 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 295 Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition come the figures for a principle not of a mere (liberal) toleration of difference, but of interpretive empathy, as well. For, as the midrash goes, in their dispute with Beit Shammai, they merited “to have the law established according to their view” because, as the gemara explains, they, “were easy and forbearing, and they would study their own rulings and those of Beit Shammai, and would even mention the actions of Beit Shammai before their own” (B. ‘Eruvin 13b). Beit Hillel thus becomes a model for an interpretive charity that explicitly embraces, understands, and rehearses the perspective of their adversaries—even in their rejection of it. For although Beit Shammai, to Beit Hillel, represents an adversary, their arguments, also pursued for the sake of Heaven, and thus also “beloved by God,” need not be merely tolerated and respected, but also understood. For from the utterances which emerge from both Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, not despite of, but rather because of their subjective limitations, emerges the objective truth of Torah, the words of the Living God. William Kolbrener Bar Ilan University Ramat Gan, Israel 53. Yehudah Loew, Derech ha-h ayim (Tel Aviv: Yad Morechai, 1975), 604. ˙ 295 AJS 04 015 273-296 12/3/04 7:44 AM Page 296