Radical Rabbis and Other Serendipities

Abstract

Recent attacks on the academy and especially the Humanities are driven in part by a generalized fear and uncertainty inspired by encounters with difference. This essay argues that the importance of the Humanities lies in its very ability to counter this fear by fostering the epistemological humility necessary for a comprehension and celebration of the diversity and complexity of human difference. The author’s academic journey into the field of Jewish Studies is offered as an example of the transformative and enlivening power of an encounter with unfamiliar ideas. These ideas include the Hebrew Bible’s countercultural conception of the divine as a dynamic living presence, and the Talmudic rabbis’ countercultural conception of divine law as likewise dynamic and responsive to the contingent details of human existence. Resisting characterizations of divine law as a universal, immutable, rational truth, Talmudic argumentation proceeds from a posture of epistemological humility. As a form of anti-dogmatic play, it reinforces the edifying element of uncertainty and contingency in divine law and unlocks a world of possibility. The essay concludes that in an age of increasing extremism and dangerous absolutisms of all kinds, we have much to learn from disciplines like Jewish Studies that bring us face to face with countercultural possibilities, and much to learn from the ancient rabbis specifically – their skepticism, their epistemological humility, their refusal to sacrifice the particular to the universal, and their embrace of uncertainty as the vital seedbed of unending possibility.