beyond the homiletical: rabbinic theology as discursive and reflective practice

Beyond the Homiletical: Rabbinic Theology as Discursive and Reflective PracticeAuthor(s): Cass FisherSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 90, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 199-236Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649848 .

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Beyond the Homiletical: RabbinicTheology as Discursive andReflective Practice

Cass Fisher / University of South Florida

Theology has a troubled place in Judaism, at least from the perspectiveof modern Jewish studies. In a contribution to the Routledge Companionto the Study of Religion, David Ford thus notes:

The term “theology” is often considered suspect among Jewish thinkers. Thisis partly because theology is sometimes seen as being about the inner life ofGod, which has not usually been a Jewish concern. Partly it has been a reactionof a minority against oppressive and dominant confessional theology: it has notbeen safe for Jews to condone public or university theological talk, since Chris-tians (or others) could use it to seek domination or proselytize. Partly, too,theology has been seen as abstractive, intellectualizing and even dogmatizing (inthe bad sense) instead of practice-oriented discussion about community-specificbehavior. Perhaps the most acceptable term is Jewish religious thought.1

While one could challenge the details of Ford’s account as well as hisview that “religious thought” is a more perspicuous term than “theol-ogy,” what he gets right is the genuine concern about the place oftheology in Judaism, including discomfort with the word “theology”itself. One significant impediment to theology making a larger contri-bution to Jewish studies is the tendency to conceive the fundamentalstratum of rabbinic theology as being principally homiletical. In whatfollows, I will propose a strategy for adopting a more evenhanded ap-proach to rabbinic theology that acknowledges the multiple functionsof the rabbis’ theological discourse and the close relationship between

1 David F. Ford, “Theology,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. JohnHinnells (London: Routledge, 2005), 73. It is noteworthy that the second edition of theEncyclopaedia Judaica, arguably the most important pedagogical tool in Jewish studies, preservesan article on theology by Louis Jacobs from the first edition that shares Ford’s basic sentiments;cf. Louis Jacobs and Ellen Umansky, “Theology,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Ber-enbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 19:694–99.



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theological reflection and religious practice. To help make this case, Iwill undertake a critical reading of Pierre Hadot’s work on spiritualexercises in ancient philosophy, a topic that has received much recentinterest from scholars of Judaism.2 Borrowing an account of the rela-tionship between theory and practice from Hadot, I will go on to ex-plore the theological language of Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, a halakhicmidrash on the book of Exodus.

Before going further, I should address why I believe it is necessaryto retain the term “theology” despite its contentious status in Jewishstudies. Objections to the term “theology” often stem from the factthat theology in other religious contexts, particularly Christianity, ex-hibits systematic and dogmatic features that are typically absent in Jew-ish discourse about God.3 Scholars reason, often implicitly, that if the-ology is a systematic and dogmatic discourse about God, and Jewishdiscourse about God is not systematic or dogmatic, then Judaism doesnot have theology. There are two problems with this position. First, itis plainly evident that at every stage of the tradition Judaism has hadmuch to say about God. A wholesale rejection of the term “theology”conceals that fact and obscures the important contribution of theolog-ical reflection to Jewish religious life. Second, even if it were the case(which it clearly is not) that all Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhisttheology is systematic and dogmatic, what bearing would this have onJewish discourse about God? Why must Jewish modes of reasoningabout the divine conform to the standards of other traditions?4 One

2 Hadot’s writings on spiritual exercises were first collected in Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituelset philosophie antique (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1981), portions of which are reprintedEand translated as Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson and trans. Michael Chase(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Spiritual exercises are a recurring theme throughout Hadot’s work.See Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2002), The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, trans. MichaelChase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision,trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

3 Ismar Schorsch addresses the lack of systematic thinking in Jewish thought with the fol-lowing comment: “The traditional form of Jewish thinking, as shaped in the rabbinic period,tended to be exegetical; commentary became the quintessentially Jewish genre of intellectualexpression. A sacred text called for explication, application, and renewal, and midrash evolvedinto a mode of cognition, an expression of piety, and a vehicle for revitalization. But textuallyoriented thinking is essentially concrete, circumscribed, and episodic. Its very specificity in-duces a minimal level of abstraction and a bewildering absence of systematic analysis.” IsmarSchorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: BrandeisUniversity Press, 1994), 172.

4 Gershom Scholem, in his essay, “Reflections on Modern Jewish Studies,” envisions a newand revitalized Jewish studies that is unencumbered by the apologetic tendencies of Wissen-schaft des Judentums. In fashioning this new discipline, Scholem suggests that one of the prin-cipal challenges will be to better understand the nonsystematic nature of Jewish thought:“Such a discipline will relate seriously to the original forms of creativity in Judaism: exegesis,Halakhah, Midrash, and the profound dialectical problems inherent in these forms, as anti-



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who objects to the idea of Jewish theology might say, “Of course Jewishdiscourse about God does not have to mirror the intellectual and dis-cursive forms of other traditions. Just don’t call that Jewish discourseabout God ‘theology.’” This leads us back to Ford’s suggestion that“Jewish religious thought” or some other term is more fitting than theword “theology.” As is well known, Jewish law or halakhah seeks toshape and guide virtually every facet of Jewish life. The term “Jewishreligious thought” could then refer to a dizzying array of topics, manyof which have little or nothing to do with God. What, then, is a suitableway of picking out Jewish religious thought that deals explicitly withGod? To my mind, the once popular “God-talk” is a nonstarter foraesthetic reasons and because the term seriously undervalues the roleof reason in Jewish discussions of the divine.5 Surely the rabbis weredoing something more than just chatting about God. Perhaps I shouldspeak of “Jewish religious discourse about God” every time I refer toJewish theology. Other than having a syllable for each of the Ten Com-mandments, I see nothing that speaks in favor of this suggestion. Thebest alternative, and the one that I will deploy in this article, is todefine theology in a way that makes it most useful for thinking aboutdiscourse about God within a given tradition. To that end, when Ispeak of theology in what follows, I am referring to reasoned discourseabout God and the divine-human relationship with no further require-ments regarding the systematic or dogmatic features of this discourse.6

systematic categories of religious thought.” Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mys-ticism in Our Time and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 51–71, 67.

5 David Kraemer takes the diametrically opposite view that the term “God talk” is the bestalternative for referring to the rabbis’ views on God. Identifying theology as a strictly “Greek”enterprise, Kraemer argues that “there was simply no precedent for theology in the classicalsense in earlier rabbinic literature.” He goes on to say, “If we want to speak of a rabbinictheology, we can only do so by understanding the term ‘theology,’ according to its etymologicalmeaning, as ‘God talk.’ We must then inquire into the nature of rabbinic ‘God talk,’ askinghow and with what assumptions the rabbis of antiquity speak about God. If this is what wemean by theology, then we may at least begin to discuss the matter, for the rabbis do, bothdirectly and indirectly, speak of God.” David Kraemer, “Concerning the Theological Assump-tions of the Yerushalmi,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, ed. Peter Schafer,3 vols. (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 3:355.

6 With the stipulation that discourse about God and the divine-human relationship showsigns of reasoning in order to qualify as theology, I do not mean to establish an evaluativecriterion. I take it that the most meager principle of charity can admit that the rabbis maketheir claims about God for particular purposes and as efforts to articulate specific conceptionsof God. Why, then, include the role of reason in my definition? By associating the rabbis’discourse about God and the divine-human relationship with reason, I emphasize the factthat their theological reflection contains meaningful content that they sought to convey. JacobNeusner, who on account of his nonreductive approach to rabbinic theology is an importantinterlocutor for my work, takes a much stronger stand on this point. He states: “Among theheirs of Scripture in late antiquity, the sages alone approached Scripture as an exercise inrationality and emerged from Scripture with a world that followed accessible rules and realized




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The above concerns would be easier to address if rabbinic Judaismhad an indigenous term with at least some semantic overlap with theword “theology,” but, of course, it does not. Instead, rabbinic Judaismuses the grab-bag term “aggadah” to refer to all nonhalakhic discourse.While aggadah does include theology, it also consists of ethical mate-rial, stories about the rabbis, elements of folk literature, and muchmore. Complicating matters is the fact that the rabbinic sages and laterthinkers have occasionally attenuated their commitments to aggadah.For instance, two traditions preserved together in Song of Songs Rabbahstate

Rabbi Yitzhak said “In the past the Torah was generally known (haitah ha-torahkelal) and thus people sought to hear a word of mishnah and a word of talmudbut now that the Torah is not generally known people seek to hear a word ofscripture and a word of aggadah.” Rabbi Levi says “In the past a perutah [smallcoin] could be found and thus a person desired to hear a word of mishnah,halakhah and talmud but now since a perutah cannot be found, and especiallysince they are sick from servitude, people seek to hear only words of blessingand comfort.”7

While comments such as these are not repudiations of aggadah, theycontribute to the view that aggadah is a homiletic or edifying form ofdiscourse. To be clear, there is nothing objectionable about the cate-gory of the “homily” in itself. The Jewish tradition has preserved nu-merous collections of homiletic midrashim. While the scholastic natureof these documents raises questions about the Sitz im Leben of the ser-mons that they contain, there is no denying the fact that one mode ofcompiling and preserving midrash was to organize it around the litur-gical readings of the Torah.8

Where the category of the homiletic becomes problematic is whenscholars use it as an overarching description of aggadic discourse oras the defining term of rabbinic theology. Identifying rabbinic theology

a universal logic.” Jacob Neusner, The Theology of the Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 17.

7 Shir Ha-Shirim Rabbah 2:5.8 The question of whether the homiletic midrashim preserve actual rabbinic sermons has

been a topic of debate over the past thirty years. Richard Sarason, who undertook a carefulanalysis of the petih�ah in Leviticus Rabbah, a midrashic form believed to introduce a rabbinicsermon, found that virtually all of the petih�ot were the creation of the text’s editors. He thusargues that “given the state of the evidence and the fact that the bulk of the petih�ot preservedin the midrashic compilations as we have them are editorial constructions, I do not think wecan profitably and reliably say much about rabbinic ‘sermons’ or the original oral exegeses”(564). Richard Sarason, “The Petih� ot in Leviticus Rabba: ‘Oral Homilies’ or RedactionalConstructions?” Journal of Jewish Studies 33, nos. 1–2 (1982): 557–67. For a helpful survey ofthe research on rabbinic preaching, see Gunter Stemberger, “The Derashah in RabbinicTimes,” in Preaching in Judaism and Christianity: Encounters and Developments from Biblical Timesto Modernity, ed. Alexander Deeg et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 7–21.




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as homiletical gives the impression that the rabbis were not genuinelyconcerned about how to understand God and that they fashioned theirtheological assertions to benefit the spiritual needs of the laity. Fur-thermore, the term “homiletic” falsely homogenizes aggadah, a discur-sive form marked by its diversity, and simultaneously undercuts themultiple religious functions of nonhalakhic discourse. Curiously, onecan find a homiletic approach to aggadah and the theological dis-course that it contains in the work of some of the most significantcontributors to the study of rabbinic Judaism. David Weiss Halivnigives a concise formulation of the homiletic approach when he states“Rabbinic theology is not categorical nor easily categorized, and ismore prone to homiletical discourse than to carefully groomed,neatly disciplined speculation. Rabbinic theology is often packagedand shrouded in aggada, within a folkloric context, functioning moreas hortatory and pedagogic than as speculative literature.”9 Halivni’sunderstanding of rabbinic theology, which suppresses its cognitive con-tribution, is consistent with the dominant views on the subject sincethe inception of Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century.Scholars such as Gershom Scholem and Ismar Schorsch have docu-mented how the desire for political emancipation for the Jewish peopleled early Wissenschaft scholars to adopt an apologetic approach to Ju-daism that denuded the tradition of anything but the most rationalcontent.10 A point that has received less scholarly attention is that therationalistic approach to Jewish theology has significantly outlasted itspolitical utility. Political motivations hardly explain Solomon Schech-ter’s assertion that “the Rabbis were a simple, naıve people, filled witha childlike scriptural faith, neither wanting nor bearing much analysisand interpretation.”11 While Schechter’s formulation is quite sharp, it

9 David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991), 89.

10 Scholem, for instance, states: “We need not waste words on the theological emptiness ofthis Science of Judaism, on its barrenness in the religious sense. . . . And this may be readilyunderstood: the historical critique which is the living soul of the Science of Judaism couldonly fulfill its mission through a secular, essentially anti-theological mood” (On the Possibilityof Jewish Mysticism, 65). Speaking to the point that scholars of Judaism saw the presentationof Jewish theology as pivotal to the process of political emancipation for the Jews, Schorschwrites: “The founders of Wissenschaft knew that it had been theological contempt which hadexiled the adherents of Judaism to the periphery of the body politic, and only a radical changein the Christian appreciation of Judaism would eventually secure complete political integra-tion. As Zunz often intoned with controlled vehemence, political status was ultimately aconsequence of the level of intellectual respect for Judaism” (From Text to Context, 182; seealso 195, 267, and 283).

11 Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology: With a New Introduction by Neil Gillman,including the Original Preface of 1909 and the Introduction by Louis Finkelstein (Woodstock, VT:Jewish Lights, 1999), 42.




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is possible to trace a shared concern about the place of theology inrabbinic thought through the work of scholars such as Max Kadushin,Ephraim Urbach, and David Stern.12 I do not believe that there is asimple answer that will explain why the most illustrious scholars ofrabbinic Judaism over the past century have embraced an understand-ing of aggadah that mitigates its theological truth claims. In many casesscholars’ attitudes about Jewish theology simply mirror the distrust oftheological language common to most forms of modern and contem-porary philosophy. This is not surprising, as the first generations ofscholars of Judaism were influenced by German idealism, while morerecent scholars have typically drawn their philosophical resources fromContinental philosophy.13 In both cases a critique of metaphysics and

12 The reasons that each of these thinkers seek to attenuate the force of theological truthclaims are complex and divergent. Kadushin is perhaps the most challenging case, as his workendeavors to map the “rabbinic mind” in toto. From one perspective, Kadushin’s work is aformidable effort to respond to the lack of systematicity in rabbinic thought. As significantas his contribution is in that regard, his project is predicated on the notion that rabbinictheology is nonpropositional, meaning that the rabbis are not, in fact, making truth claimsabout God. He argues that the basic unit of rabbinic thought is the “value concept” that is“connotative” rather than “denotative.” Max Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (New York: Block,1952), vii. While Kadushin is clearly trying to defend the contribution of aggadah to rabbinicreligiosity, his solution leads him to downplay the cognitive status of rabbinic theology. Ag-gadah, he says, is “effortful, if not exactly inferential thought” (viii). Whatever logic there isin rabbinic thought, he associates with halakhah and not aggadah; see Max Kadushin, AConceptual Approach to the Mekilta (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1969), 47. As forUrbach, he reserves the category of the homiletic as a means of dismissing rabbinic claimsabout God that fall outside his rationalistic presentation. In his introduction to The Sages, hesays: “Careful attention must also be given both to the exegetical and homiletical methodsused by the Sages in their Halakhot and Haggadot and to the artistic form that they gave totheir own words. Only the study of these aspects can teach us what weight to attach to adictum, a homily, or a Halakhic discussion as expressing a substantive idea, and what mustbe put down to method, form, and formulation.” Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Conceptsand Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 17. DavidStern wrestles with the question of whether the rabbis believed the theologies that theyproduced. His solution is to posit an “aggadic time and space” that he says is “different notonly from our own time but from that in which the Rabbis themselves lived. For the mostpart, the aggadic time and space would have been coeval with the world of the biblical past—a distant, self-encapsulated past for the Rabbis.” David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient JewishExegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996),93.

13 Returning to David Ford’s account of the marginalization of theology within Jewishthought, I would argue that the forces that have brought about this state of affairs are notnearly as calculated as he suggests. I suspect that the scholars’ own philosophical and theo-logical commitments have been a far more decisive force in minimizing the role of Jewishtheology than has their concern about the dangers of theologizing within the university. WhenWissenschaft scholars presented Judaism on the most rational terms possible, they did sobecause this was the Judaism that they believed in and not simply because they thought itwas politically expedient. On German Jews’ deep engagement with and commitment toGerman culture, including its philosophy, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). On the motivations and commitments ofWissenschaft thinkers, see David N. Myers, “The Ideology of Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in




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ontotheology presents a serious challenge to the idea, let alone thesubstance, of rabbinic theological truth claims.14

In addition to acknowledging the influence of the reigning philos-ophies, a charitable reading of the scholarship on rabbinics must alsoadmit what the term “homiletic” gets right about rabbinic theology.Scholars are likely drawn to the term because it deemphasizes dog-matic and systematic modes of thought while making room for theimportant role of figurative expression in rabbinic theology. Anyonefamiliar with rabbinic literature can appreciate these motivations.Nonetheless, labeling rabbinic theology as homiletical diminishes theimportant theoretical and practical contributions that theology makesto the rabbinic religious life. As a corrective to the homiletic readingof rabbinic theology, in what follows I will argue that theology hasthree primary functions in rabbinic Judaism: (1) theology justifies therabbinic way of life, (2) theology serves formative purposes, and (3)theological reflection is itself a form of religious practice. As I am bor-rowing this model from the work of Pierre Hadot, I will now turn to acritical discussion of his work on ancient philosophy.

i. pierre hadot’s account of theory and practice inancient philosophy

Because it is somewhat counterintuitive that I would appeal to the workof a historian of ancient philosophy in order to better understand Jew-ish theology, I would like to be clear about my intentions in doing so.Much of Hadot’s work advances the claim that ancient philosophy wasnot the theoretical discipline that philosophy has become from themedieval period until the present. Rather, Hadot argues that the prin-cipal goal of ancient philosophy was the transformation of the inner

History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge,1997), 706–20.

14 To be clear, my argument is hermeneutic in character. I am not at present concernedwith adjudicating whether a particular rabbinic theological claim is or is not true. My concernis that by embracing a reductive account of rabbinic theology, scholars derail the hermeneuticencounter with rabbinic literature. I accept Gadamer’s argument that it is fundamental tothe hermeneutic task that an interpreter attempt to confront a text’s claim to truth. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev.ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 297. Following this line of thought, it strikes me as anegregious act of textual violence to suggest that all rabbinic theology fits neatly under therubric of the homily. What authorizes such a reductive reading of rabbinic literature otherthan our own philosophical and theological prejudices? Rather than acknowledging the truthclaims that the rabbis seek to make about God, the homiletic approach to rabbinic theologyneutralizes what is “other” and “strange” in the rabbis’ theological reflection by folding itinto the theologically more palatable category of edifying discourse. In my view, methodo-logical considerations alone should compel scholars to abandon the homiletic account ofrabbinic theology.




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life of the philosophical practitioner, a task that was brought aboutthrough the practice of spiritual exercises. Scholars of Judaism andother religious traditions have found Hadot’s conception of spiritualexercises compelling.15 Within Judaism, for instance, scholars of rab-binics, medieval Jewish philosophy, and modern Jewish thought haveargued that Hadot’s work can shed light on the religious life of thesevery different stages of the Jewish tradition.16 One notable advantageof studying religions via their spiritual exercises is that it helps scholarscircumvent the perennial debates about reductive and nonreductiveapproaches to religion. Analysis of spiritual exercises allows for discus-sion of the social forces that form the practitioner as well as the prac-titioner’s inner life, all the while bracketing the larger questions aboutbelief. It is precisely at this point that Hadot’s critics challenge hiswork. Maria Antonaccio and Wayne Hankey, for example, argue thatHadot adopts an existentialist philosophy that privileges practice andvitiates the contribution of philosophical discourse.17 If Hadot’s criticsare correct that he valorizes the practical at the expense of theoreticaldiscourse, then why appeal to Hadot to recover the place of theologicalreflection in rabbinic Judaism? While I find the arguments of Hadot’scritics persuasive, I am also sympathetic to the many other scholars ofreligion who think that Hadot’s conception of spiritual exercises can

15 Recent discussions of Hadot’s spiritual exercises across the disciplines of religious studiesinclude Aaron Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunziand Augustine (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006); Matthew Kapstein, Rea-son’s Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (Boston: WisdomPublications, 2001), 3–26; Dan Arnold, Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief: Epistemology in SouthAsian Philosophy of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 212–13; WilliamSpohn, “Spirituality and Its Discontents: Practices in Jonathan Edwards’s Charity and its Fruits,”Journal of Religious Ethics 31, no. 2 (2003): 253–76; Ted Preston, “The Stoic Samurai,” AsianPhilosophy 13, no. 1 (2003): 39–52.

16 Michael Satlow, “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Ascet-icism,” Journal of Religion 83, no. 2 (2003): 204–25; Jonathan Schofer, “Spiritual Exercises inRabbinic Culture,” AJS Review 27, no. 2 (2003): 203–26; Josef Stern, “Maimonides’ Demon-strations: Principles and Practice,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 10 (2001): 47–84; HilaryPutnam, “Jewish Philosophy as a Way of Life,” lecture delivered at the University of Chicago,November 12, 2002, and Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). The broad acceptance of Hadot’s work inboth religious studies and Jewish studies is that much more striking when one considersthat agreement on methodology is so rare within a discipline, much less across such dis-parate fields of study.

17 Maria Antonaccio, “Contemporary Forms of Askesis and the Return of Spiritual Exercises,”Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 18 (1998): 69–92; Thomas Flynn, “Philosophy as a Wayof Life: Foucault and Hadot,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 609–22; WayneHankey, “Neoplatonism and Contemporary French Philosophy,” Dionysius 23 (2005): 161–90,and “Philosophy as Way of Life for Christians? Iamblichan and Porphyrian Reflections onReligion, Virtue, and Philosophy in Thomas Aquinas,” Laval theologique et philosophique 59, no.2 (2003): 193–224; Donald Blakely, “The Art of Living: Pierre Hadot’s Rejection of PlotinianMysticism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 43, no. 4 (2003): 407–22.




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make an important contribution to their fields of study. What I arguein my discussion of Hadot is that although a weak account of the re-lationship between theory and practice founded on the separability ofthe two terms dominates his writings, a careful reading of his work candraw out a stronger account that depicts theory and practice as mu-tually informative and interdependent. For the purposes of Jewish the-ology, it makes a significant difference how scholars of Judaism appro-priate Hadot’s work. Hadot’s weak account of theory and practice willleave theology on the margins of Jewish studies, while his stronger ac-count can help rectify the tendency to construe rabbinic theology un-der the problematic rubric of the “homiletical.”

One further set of clarifications is in order before proceeding to mydiscussion of Hadot. In utilizing Hadot’s work on ancient philosophyin order to better understand the place of theology within rabbinicJudaism, I am not making any claims about actual historical contactbetween these two traditions. My sole concern is the relationship be-tween discourse and practice and whether one line of thought on thattopic in Hadot’s writings can help illuminate the interaction betweenrabbinic discourse and practice. My argument is, then, methodologicalrather than historical. Similarly, although Hadot frequently speaksabout the recovery of spiritual exercises for contemporary practice, Iam not concerned in this instance with making a constructive argu-ment that parallels Hadot’s claim.18 Where I follow Hadot and suggestthat theological reflection, like philosophical discourse, is a spiritualexercise, my point is a descriptive one that seeks to capture one func-tion of theological discourse within rabbinic Judaism.

Turning now to Hadot, it is not without good reason that scholarsof Judaism, particularly of the rabbinic period, have found his depic-tion of ancient philosophy compelling. To begin with, Hadot identifiesa significant shift in Hellenistic philosophy in the first century BCE inwhich a scholastic form of textual commentary replaces oral argumen-tation.19 While there is still much debate about the methods of studyand transmission of the earliest layers of rabbinic literature, rabbinic

18 As Hadot’s critics often note, the separation between theory and practice is most evidentin Hadot’s constructive comments. Hadot argues that a contemporary retrieval of spiritualexercises from ancient philosophy requires that the exercises be shorn of their underlyingintellectual commitments. In one discussion of the retrieval of ancient spiritual exercises,Hadot writes of the schools of ancient philosophy that “the models they offer can be actualizedonly if they are reduced to their essence or their most profound significance. They must bedetached from their antiquated cosmological and mythical elements, so that their fundamentalpositions, which the schools themselves considered essential, can be brought out” (What IsAncient Philosophy? 278).

19 Ibid., 150–53.




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Judaism is also a commentarial tradition rooted in exegesis.20 This basicphenomenological similarity between ancient philosophy and rabbinicJudaism is striking. Michael Satlow has gone so far as to say that “Tal-mud torah was essentially a Greco-Roman form of spirituality, expressed. . . in a uniquely Jewish idiom.”21 Hadot’s comments about the placeof the sage in ancient philosophy also contribute to the impressionof a deep structural similarity between ancient philosophy and rab-binic Judaism. According to Hadot, the idea of the sage in ancientphilosophy is as important as the living and embodied sage. He claimsthat the philosophical sage is a “transcendent norm established byreason” through which “each school will express its own vision of theworld, its own style of life, and its idea of the perfect man.”22 Asscholars of rabbinics have increasingly come to appreciate, the storiesof the sages in rabbinic literature function as pedagogical narrativesthat seek to shape values, practices, and beliefs.23 Another feature of

20 On the exegetical dimension of rabbinic Judaism, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth andRabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), The Exegetical Imagination: OnJewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Fishbane,ed., The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1993); Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1990); Steven Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and ItsInterpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany: State University of New York Press,1991); James Kugel, In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1990); David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis inRabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Recent discussions ofthe Mishnah have been particularly concerned with how rabbinic texts were composed andtransmitted. See Judith Haputman, Rereading the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient JewishTexts (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah: TheShaping Influence of Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On oralityin early Judaism more generally, see Martin Jaffe, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Traditionin Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For an ac-count of the social formation of the early rabbinic movement, see Catherine Hezser, The SocialStructure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).

21 Satlow, “Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism,” 224. Shaye Cohen offers a like-mindedassessment of the similarities between ancient Judaism and Hellenism: “The concern for thefate of the individual in both this world and the next, the elaboration of a system of require-ments for the individual to follow (prayer, Torah study, performance of the commandments,etc.) and the creation of new social structures in which the individual figures prominently(school, synagogue, and sect)—all these developments attest to a new ethos in Judaism, anethos closely paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, Hellenistic culture.” Shaye Cohen, Fromthe Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 35. JacobNeusner goes a few steps further: “Had Aristotle read the Written Torah and chosen themedia of law, myth, and exegesis for his discourse, his lectures would have recapitulated theresults set forth by the sages” (Oral Torah, 30).

22 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 57.23 See the following and the references therein: Richard Kalmin, “Rabbinic Portrayals of

Biblical and Post-biblical Heroes,” in The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature, ed. Shaye Cohen(Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 119–41, and The Sage in Jewish Society of LateAntiquity (London: Routledge, 1999); Jonathan Schofer, The Making of a Sage (Madison: Uni-versity of Wisconsin Press, 2005).




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Hadot’s account of ancient philosophy that resonates with rabbinic Ju-daism is the claim that Greco-Roman philosophers sought to maintaina mental state called “prosoche,” which Hadot characterizes as an “at-tention to oneself and vigilance at every instance.” Hadot goes on tolink this state of attentiveness to a consciousness of God when he saysthat “the ‘attentive’ person lives constantly in the presence of God andis constantly remembering God, joyfully consenting to the will of uni-versal reason, and he sees all things with the eyes of God himself. Suchis the philosophical attitude par excellence.”24 Taken together, the prac-tice of textual commentary, the emulation of a sage, and the pursuitof an awareness of God tempt the scholar of Judaism to posit an iso-morphism between ancient philosophy and Judaism. Hadot even pointsout that early Judaism, in the persons of Philo and Josephus, soughtto present itself as a philosophy.25 Despite these tantalizing structuralsimilarities, I must bracket the question of what historical contact ex-isted between Greco-Roman philosophy and contemporary forms ofJudaism.26

What most scholars of religion have gravitated toward in Hadot’swork is his account of spiritual exercises. As Hadot repeatedly remindshis readers, “ancient philosophy was, first and foremost, a way of life.”27

According to Hadot, the principal task of Greco-Roman philosophy wasto train the philosophical practitioner in the “art of living.”28 But whatis so pernicious in life that all of the philosophical schools were com-pelled to address such a fundamentally practical question as how tolive? Hadot argues that there was widespread agreement across thephilosophical schools that “mankind’s principal cause of suffering, dis-order, and unconsciousness were the passions,” which he identifies with“unregulated desires and exaggerated fears.”29 The philosophical an-swer to the passions came in the form of askesis, a term later identifiedwith spiritual self-deprivation, that is, asceticism, but which Hadotthinks is more properly understood in the philosophical context as“inner activities of the thought and the will.”30 Hadot gives significant

24 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 130.25 Ibid., 129.26 For an excellent overview of this topic, see Steve Mason, “Greco-Roman, Jewish, and

Christian Philosophies,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner, new series, vol.4 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990). See also Henry A. Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-RomanPhilosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1973). Catherine Hezser, “Interfaces between Rabbinic Literatureand Graeco-Roman Philosophy,” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, ed. PeterSchafer and Catherine Hezser, 3 vols. (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 2:161–88.

27 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 269.28 Ibid., 272.29 Ibid., 83.30 Ibid., 128.




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consideration as to how best translate askesis and ultimately decideson “spiritual exercises.”31 He argues that the term “spiritual” most fullycaptures the sense of askesis in that philosophical exercises engage“the individual’s entire psychism.” Furthermore, the word “spiritual”corresponds to the fact that by practicing these exercises, “the individ-ual raises himself up to the life of the objective Spirit; that is to say,he re-places himself within the perspective of the Whole.”32

The spiritual exercises that Hadot identifies take a variety of forms.They can be physical, such as in “dietary regimes,” or they can beintellectual or contemplative.33 While no systematic treatise on ancientphilosophical exercises has been preserved, Philo of Alexandria doestransmit two lists of exercises that include intellectual practices like“research,” “attention” (prosoche), and “thorough investigation,” andmore general practices such as “self-mastery” and “therapies of the pas-sions.”34 What unites the different types of exercises is that they are allmeant to bring about a transformation of the self.35 Hadot speaks tothis point when he states

In all philosophical schools, the goal pursued in these exercises is self-reali-zation and improvement. All schools agree that man, before his philosophicalconversion, is in a state of unhappy disquiet. Consumed by worries, torn bypassions, he does not live a genuine life, nor is he truly himself. All schoolsalso agree that man can be delivered from this state. He can accede to genuinelife, improve himself, transform himself, and attain a state of perfection. It isprecisely for this that spiritual exercises are intended. Their goal is a kind ofself-formation, or paideia, which is to teach us to live not in conformity withhuman prejudices and social conventions—for social life is itself a product ofthe passions—but in conformity with the nature of man, which is none otherthan reason.36

The idea of spiritual exercises is, in itself, straightforward: ancient phi-losophers engaged in a variety of practices in order to bring about themoral and intellectual perfection of the practitioner. Hadot’s moreimportant contribution is in the larger claim that philosophy in theGreco-Roman world sought to effectuate such states of perfection inits followers. In arguing this point, Hadot seeks to counteract the view

31 In his deliberations, he considers and rejects other possibilities such as “psychic” exercises,“moral” exercises, “ethical” exercises, “intellectual” exercises, exercises “of thought,” and ex-ercises “of the soul.” Ibid., 81.

32 Ibid., 81.33 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 6.34 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 84.35 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 6.36 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 102.




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that ancient philosophy was nothing more than a theoretical and spec-ulative discourse. This raises the question that if ancient philosophy,as Hadot claims, was a “way of life” that seeks the transformation ofthe self, then what was the place of discourse in Greco-Roman philos-ophy? It is on the relationship between theory and practice that Ha-dot’s work receives its strongest criticism, but it is also at this juncturein his thought, I contend, that his work can make the most significantcontribution to the study of Judaism.

Critics of Hadot’s work, such as Maria Antonaccio, Thomas Flynn,and Wayne Hankey, claim that Hadot severs the relationship betweentheory and practice. Antonaccio and Flynn both blame Hadot’s exis-tential tendencies for his privileging the choice of a way of life overthe theoretical discourse that defines and articulates the philosophicalmode of living.37 Antonaccio’s criticisms are particularly sharp, as sheclaims that Hadot’s philosophy exhibits a form of “voluntarism” thatleads him to neglect the “metaphysical necessity” that would have madethe philosophical way of life compelling in its original context.38 WayneHankey also takes note of Hadot’s privileging practice over theory, buthe suggests that it is a rejection of religion that motivates Hadot’s ar-gument. He sees in Hadot’s writings a shifting preference from Neo-platonism in his early work to the Stoics and Epicureans in his laterwork, which he attributes to Hadot’s “denial of transcendence.”39 Theseparation of theory and practice in Hadot’s thought that these criticsaddress has the potential to become deeply problematic when Ha-dot’s conception of spiritual exercises is applied to the Jewish tradi-tion. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to utilize resources internalto Hadot’s thought in order to strengthen his position on the rela-tionship between theory and practice and, in doing so, to make hiswork more useful within a Jewish context.

Untangling the relationship between theory and practice in Hadot’sanalysis of Greco-Roman philosophy requires that we look back to thepractitioner’s initial decision to follow the philosophical path. For Ha-dot, much hangs on the fact that the practitioner chooses which formof the philosophical life to embrace. As he sees it, philosophical dis-course is contingent upon the prior decision about the philosophical

37 Antonaccio, “Contemporary Forms of Askesis,” 76–78; Flynn, “Philosophy as a Way ofLife,” 617–18.

38 Antonaccio, “Contemporary Forms of Askesis,” 76.39 Hankey, “Philosophy as a Way of Life for Christians?” 196. Hankey makes the additional

observation that the Stoics and Epicureans, which Hadot focuses on in his later work, “tendtoward a more or less total demythologizing of religion” (202).




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life.40 On these terms, the philosophical life is not good because itorients the philosopher toward truth. Rather, the philosophical life isgood because the practitioner finds its way of life and its particularform of self-transformation desirable. That Hadot supports this view,or something akin to it, is borne out by his claim that ancient philos-ophy never saw theory as “an end in itself.” On the contrary, he saysthat theory was “clearly and decidedly put in the service of practice.”41

On Hadot’s reading of ancient philosophy, philosophical theories ei-ther gave cognitive support to spiritual exercises or were themselvesspiritual exercises.42

While the choice of a way life plays a pivotal role in Hadot’s accountof the relationship between theory and practice, he also offers addi-tional arguments that seek to limit the place of theory in the philo-sophical life. Perhaps the most beguiling of Hadot’s arguments is thatphilosophical discourse and the philosophical way of life “appear to besimultaneously incommensurable and inseparable.”43 The incommen-surability of theory and practice touches on a pervasive theme in hiswritings, the limits of language. For Hadot, discourse and practice have“completely heterogeneous natures.” He spells this out by saying, “Theessential part of the philosophical life—the existential choice of a cer-tain way of life, the experience of certain inner states and disposi-tions—wholly escapes expression by philosophical discourse.”44 It is notclear why Hadot thinks that philosophical discourse falters when itcomes to our lived experience. Surely something of our choices and

40 “At least since the time of Socrates, the choice of a way of life has not been located atthe end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On thecontrary, it stands at the beginning, in a complex interrelation with critical reaction to otherexistential attitudes, with global vision of a certain way of living and of seeing the world, andwith voluntary decision itself. Thus, to some extent, this option determines the specific doc-trine and the way this doctrine is taught. Philosophical discourse, then, originates in a choiceof life and an existential option—not vice versa.” The final two sentences do not exhibit thepellucid quality that typically characterizes Hadot’s writing style. Hadot appears to go fromthe claim that philosophical discourse is partly determined by the philosophical way of lifeto the much stronger position that philosophical discourse “originates in” and is contingentupon a prior choice of a philosophical way of life. If the second point stands, philosophicaldiscourse, that is to say reason, loses any sense of autonomy. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?3.

41 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 60.42 “Our claim has been, then, that philosophy in antiquity was a spiritual exercise. As for

philosophical theories: they were either placed explicitly in the service of spiritual practice,as was the case in Stoicism and Epicureanism, or else they were taken as the objects ofintellectual exercises, that is, of a practice of the contemplative life which, in the last analysis,was itself nothing other than a spiritual exercise. It is impossible to understand the philo-sophical theories of antiquity without taking into account this concrete perspective, since thisis what gives them their true meaning” (ibid., 104).

43 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 172.44 Ibid., 173.




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inner states is expressible in language. Be that as it may, Hadot rou-tinely returns to the limits of language to demarcate the boundary oftheory in ancient philosophy. In a discussion of the origins of philos-ophy, Hadot makes an assertion that recurs throughout his work that“in the last analysis, real knowledge is know-how, and true know-howis knowing how to do good.”45 Hadot is not simply stating here a per-sonal proclivity for the practical side of philosophy. Much to the con-trary, the limits he places on language and knowledge have a profoundimpact on how he understands the goals of philosophy. For instance,in a discussion of Socrates, Hadot states that “knowledge is not a seriesof propositions or an abstract theory, but the certainty of choice, de-cision, and initiative.”46 The limits on language and knowledge arethemes that traverse the whole course of the philosophical life for Ha-dot. Just as he privileges the choice of a way of life over discourse atthe outset of the philosophical life, and practical knowledge over prop-ositional knowledge along the way, the culmination of the philosoph-ical life also eschews linguistic formulation. This is most clearly seenin Hadot’s discussions of Neoplatonic philosophy, the pinnacle expe-rience of which is an encounter with the One that overcomes the du-ality inherent in language. As Hadot describes it, “our only access tothis transcendent reality is nondiscursive, unitive experience.”47 Onemight contest that Hadot is here and in the discussion of Socratessimply doing descriptive work. Hadot’s essays on Wittgenstein and hisreferences to Wittgenstein’s work support the view that for Hadot thefinal stage of philosophy, and not just Neoplatonism, is a nondiscursiveexperience.48 With a vision of philosophy that is ideally practical (know-

45 Ibid., 18. Hadot is here drawing on a distinction introduced by Gilbert Ryle between“knowing-how” and “knowing-that.” Ryle’s distinction between these two types of knowledgehas recently been challenged, largely for the reason that knowing how to do somethingtypically requires significant knowledge that certain things are the case. See Paul Snowdon,“Knowing How and Knowing That: A Distinction Reconsidered,” Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety 104 (2004): 1–29, and the references there for recent discussions of the topic.

46 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 33.47 Ibid., 167.48 Hadot’s essays on Wittgenstein have been collected in Pierre Hadot, Wittgenstein et les

limites du langage suivi d’une letter G.E.M. Anscombe et de logique et literature: Reflexions sur lasignification de la forme litteraire chez Wittgenstein par Gottfried Gabriel (Paris: Librarie PhilosophiqueJ. Vrin, 2004). Hadot makes a particularly poignant reference to Wittgenstein in a discussionof Skepticism: “This philosophical discourse leads to epokhe, or the suspension of our adher-ence to dogmatic philosophical discourse, including Skeptical discourse, which, like a pur-gative, evacuates itself along with the humors whose evacuation it provokes. Andre-Jean Voelkerightly compares this attitude to that of Wittgenstein, who, at the end of the Tractatus, rejectsthe propositions of the Tractatus like a ladder which has become useless. Likewise, Wittgensteinopposes philosophy as pathology to philosophy as a cure. What is left after this eliminationof philosophical discourse by philosophical discourse? Only a way of life.” Hadot, What IsAncient Philosophy? 144.




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how), nonpropositional, and nondiscursive,49 it is easy to see why An-tonaccio characterizes Hadot as an “anti-theorist.”50

The tension between theory and practice in Hadot’s work is partic-ularly apparent in his constructive comments in which he defends thepossibility of retrieving the spiritual exercises of ancient philosophy forcontemporary practice. These comments merit our attention, as theyprovide an opportunity for Hadot to set forth his own philosophicalcommitments. In one such comment Hadot states: “I think modernman can practice the spiritual exercises of antiquity, at the same timeseparating them from the philosophical or mythic discourse whichcame along with them. The same spiritual exercise can, in fact, bejustified by extremely diverse philosophical discourses. These later arenothing but clumsy attempts, coming after the fact, to describe andjustify inner experiences whose existential density is not, in the lastanalysis, susceptible of any attempt at theorization or systematiza-tion.”51 Here Hadot reveals how little regard he has for philosophicaldiscourse. Philosophical arguments are essentially interchangeable,and this is so because their only real value is to provide support forspiritual exercises and the experiences these exercises induce. Appar-ently Hadot perceives this task of separating philosophical life andphilosophical discourse as a key feature of his work. Reflecting on hisresearch, he has said, “I have tried to show, among other things, thatphilosophical practice is relatively independent from philosophical dis-course.”52 Given the limits that Hadot places on language and his stateddesire to separate discourse and practice, an uncritical application ofhis thought to Judaism would likely result in the further marginaliza-tion of theology within Jewish studies. After all, if discourse and prac-tice are perfectly separable, then it is possible to study the Jewish re-ligious life independent of any purported theological underpinnings.

While I believe this reading of Hadot is accurate, it does not captureeverything he has to say about philosophy as a theoretical discourse.Although Hadot clearly privileges the incommensurability of discourse

49 Related to Hadot’s concern for the limits of knowledge and language is his frequentreminder that most ancient philosophers saw the acquisition of wisdom as unachievable. Asthe following quote indicates, it is crucial to the philosophical way of life that human perfectionis never completed: “With the possible exception of the Epicurean school, wisdom was con-ceived as an ideal after which one strives without the hope of ever attaining it. Under normalcircumstances, the only state accessible to man is philo-sophia: the love of, or progress toward,wisdom. For this reason, spiritual exercises must be taken up again and again, in an ever-renewed effort.” Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 103.

50 Antonaccio, “Contemporary Forms,” 72.51 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 212.52 Pierre Hadot, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but no philosophers,” trans.

J. Aaron Simmons, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2005): 236 n. 48.




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and way of life, he does provide arguments in support of his claim thatthe two are also inseparable. In one of his more developed formula-tions of this view, Hadot states

We can consider the relationship between philosophical life and philosophicaldiscourse in three different ways, which are closely linked. First, discourse jus-tifies our choice of life and develops all its implications. We could say thatthrough a kind of reciprocal causality, the choice of life determines discourse,and discourse determines our choice of life, as it justifies it theoretically. Sec-ond, in order to live philosophically, we must perform actions on ourselvesand on others; and if philosophical discourse is truly the expression of anexistential option, then from this perspective it is an indispensable means.Finally, philosophical discourse is one of the very forms of the exercise of thephilosophical way of life, as dialogue with others or with oneself.53

Reading Hadot with a hermeneutic of goodwill, it is possible to see thispassage as providing the outlines for a stronger account of the rela-tionship between theory and practice than is typically found in hiswork.54 Building on his comments, the first task of philosophical dis-course is to construct and maintain the cognitive framework that isessential for the integrity of the philosophical way of life. As Hadotpoints out, this is not simply a theoretical concern, as discourse andpractice are mutually informative. The second task of philosophicaldiscourse is to communicate a compelling expression of the philo-sophical life in such a way as to bring about the self-transformation ofthe philosophical practitioner. Hadot clarifies the illocutionary func-tions of philosophical discourse by saying that “discourse always has,directly or indirectly, a function which is formative, educative, psy-chagogic, and therapeutic. It is always intended to produce an effect,

53 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 175.54 One reason that a “hermeneutic of goodwill” is necessary is because this passage is im-

mediately preceded by claims of “incommensurability” (ibid., 174). I was first introduced tothe phrase “hermeneutic of goodwill” by David Tracy. In my use of the phrase, I am thinkingof Gadamer’s claim that the hermeneut should attempt to see how an author’s argumentmight be correct and, failing that, how it might be possible to strengthen the author’s ar-gument. “When we try to understand a text, we do not try to transpose ourselves into theauthor’s mind but, if one wants to use this terminology, we try to transpose ourselves intothe perspective within which he has formed his views. But this simply means that we try tounderstand how what he is saying could be right. If we want to understand, we will try tomake his arguments even stronger” (Truth and Method, 292). This is also similar to MichaelFishbane’s use of a “principle of charity” in his reading of classical Jewish literature (BiblicalMyth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 18). For a critical discussion of the contribution of “good will”to the hermeneutic enterprise, see Josef Simon, “Good Will to Understand and the Will toPower: Remarks on an ‘Impossible Debate,’” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, The Gadamer DerridaEncounter, ed. D. P. Michelfelder and R. E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press,1989), 162–75, cited in Nicholas Davey, Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical Herme-neutics (Albany: State University of New York, 2004), 66.




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to create a habitus within the soul, or to provoke a transformation ofthe self.”55 According to Hadot, character formation in ancient philos-ophy is a complex activity that requires both social interaction andindividual attention and effort. Whereas spiritual exercises are a rela-tively private means by which the practitioner conforms himself or her-self to the beliefs, values, and practices of the philosophical school,discourse is the means by which the school seeks to act upon the prac-titioner from a social perspective. The third function of philosophicaldiscourse bridges this apparent dichotomy. Here Hadot argues thatphilosophical discourse is itself a form of spiritual exercise. From thisperspective, producing philosophical discourse, as well as listening toor studying it, is a way in which the individual seeks to shape his orher beliefs and values. Given Hadot’s stated desire to loosen the con-nection between discourse and practice, it is remarkable that he offersan account in which the two are so thoroughly inextricable. Ratherthan trying to render Hadot’s work self-coherent, perhaps it is betterto simply acknowledge his paradoxical assertion that philosophical dis-course and the philosophical way of life are “incommensurable andinseparable.” In any case, what is most important for Jewish studies isthat deep within Hadot’s work there lies a model for understandingtheory and practice as interdependent features of the philosophicallife. It is this stronger account of the relationship between discourseand the way of life that can help theological reflection find its placein the study of Judaism.

ii. theory and practice in rabbinic theology

As I discussed in the introduction, theology is a marginalized categoryin Jewish studies, and some scholars would even contest its existencein Judaism. One significant hurdle to understanding the place of the-ology in the rabbinic tradition is abandoning the idea that since rab-binic theology does not possess the requisite systematic and dogmaticfeatures to qualify as proper theology, it must therefore be homileti-cal.56 By conceiving rabbinic theology as serving analogous functions

55 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 176.56 Hadot expresses his own caution about the term “systematic” and its application to ancient

philosophy. He states: “It is clear that historians of philosophy must use the greatest cautionto applying the idea of ‘system’ for the comprehension of the philosophical works of antiquityand the Middle Ages. It is not the case that every properly philosophical endeavor is ‘sys-tematic’ in the Kantian or Hegelian sense. For two thousand years, philosophical thoughtutilized a methodology which condemned it to accept incoherences and far-fetched associ-ations, precisely to the extent that it wanted to be systematic. But to study the actual progress




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to the ones Hadot ascribes to philosophical discourse, it is possible toset forth a provisional understanding of rabbinic theology that gives amore complex account of the relationship between theory and practicethan does the homiletical approach.57 In order to focus the discussion,I will transpose the three functions of philosophical discourse (dis-course [1] justifies the way of life, [2] is formative, [3] is a spiritualexercise) into an analysis of the theological language of a single rab-binic text, Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, an early rabbinic commentary onthe book of Exodus.58

of exegetical thought is to begin to realize that thought can function rationally in manydifferent ways, which are not necessarily the same as those of mathematical logic or Hegeliandialectic” (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 76).

57 Given the fact that the status of halakhah is not contested in the same way that aggadah(particularly the theological component within aggadah) is, then why not see halakhah asthe proper theoretical analogue to philosophical discourse? In Hadot’s view, one of theprincipal tasks of philosophical discourse is to justify the philosophical way of life, not just inits particulars but also in its totality. In applying Hadot’s work to Judaism, it is necessary tofind a meta-halakhic discourse that deals not just with the laws of a specific mitzvah but,rather, with the justification of the entire rabbinic way of life. Since such second-order halakhicreflections are few and far between in rabbinic literature, another foundational discourse willhave to take its place. As I intend to show, the discourse that provides a global justificationfor the rabbinic religious life is theological reflection. On meta-halakhah, see Walter Wurz-burger, “Meta-Halakhic Propositions,” The Leo Jung Jubilee Volume: Essays in His Honor on theOccasion of His Seventieth Birthday (New York: Jewish Center, 1962). While it was not his inten-tion, Wurzburger’s essay demonstrates how challenging it is to delineate meta-halakhic prin-ciples. In addition to the difficulty of specifying such principles, it is also important to notethat where there is reflection on the foundations of halakhic reasoning, these discussionsoften include aggadah, for instance, the “oven of Akhnai,” B. Bava Metzia 59a–b. Leib Mos-covitz also speaks to the lack of meta-halakhic analysis in rabbinic literature when he writes,“As important and interesting as the justification or conceptual prehistory of individual con-cepts and principles may be, the rabbinic sources rarely address such issues explicitly.” LeibMoscovitz, Talmudic Reasoning: From Casuistics to Conceptualization (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck,2002), 43. Eugene Borowitz sees theology functioning on similar terms to the ones I amoutlining here: “While the halakhah seeks to define just what constitutes one’s obligation, theaggadah often attempts to supply the theological and historical foundation of Jewish duty; soto speak, a major function of aggadic theology is to explicate Judaism’s metahalakhic foun-dations.” Eugene Borowitz, The Talmud’s Theological Language-Game: A Philosophical DiscourseAnalysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 59.

58 Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael is a halakhic midrash. There is a second halakhic midrash onExodus titled Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon B. Yohai. For a recent discussion of the relationship ofthese two rabbinic texts, see W. David Nelson, “Oral Orthography: Early Rabbinic Oral andWritten Transmission of Parallel Midrashic Tradition in the Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon B. Yohaiand the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael,” AJS Review 29, no. 1 (2005): 1–32. Throughout the remainderof the article, I will often use “Mekhilta” as shorthand for Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael. The word“mekhilta” is a singular noun meaning “rule” or “norm” that in reference to the text has anextended sense, meaning the rules by which the Hebrew Bible is to be interpreted. SaulLieberman suggested that the term “mekhilta” corresponds to the Greek term “kanon,” usedto designate treatises of logic. Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: JewishTheological Seminary of America, 1994), 78, quoted in Judah Goldin, The Song at the Sea:Being a Commentary on a Commentary in Two Parts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971),9. The Mekhilta is associated by name with Rabbi Ishmael on the basis of the medieval practice




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To be sure, not even the most barebones account of Jewish theologywould be satisfied with only identifying the principal functions of theo-logical reflection within Judaism. As I see it, moving forward, the pri-mary task of any account of Jewish theology will be to sketch out a farmore complex understanding of the diverse forms of theological lan-guage within Judaism. It is only by acknowledging the diverse forms ofreason and experience that are the sources of Jewish theological claimsthat scholars will put to rest the view that rabbinic theology can beencapsulated in a single homogenizing category like the homiletic.One can imagine a variety of ways to accentuate the multiple forms ofJewish theological language, such as attending to the different literaryfeatures of theological claims or organizing claims thematically aroundcentral theologoumena. While my present concern regarding thefunctions of rabbinic theology prohibits me from setting forth a de-tailed account of Jewish theology, for the argument that follows it isimportant that I indicate what avenues I believe are most promisingfor that endeavor. Rabbinic theology and Jewish theology more gen-erally have fared poorly when considered only from the theoreticalperspective. On these readings Jewish thought about God lacks thedefining features of other theological traditions. A way around thisimpasse is to accentuate the close relationship between theologicalreflection and religious practice in Judaism. Indeed, my argumentsabout the multiple functions of rabbinic theology are meant to push

of naming rabbinic texts according to the first cited rabbi. Nevertheless, analysis of the textdoes indicate that a “core” of the Mekhilta originated from the school of Rabbi Ishmael. Onthis point, see H. L. Strack and Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash,trans. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 254; and Azzan Yadin, “The Hammerand the Rock: Polysemy and the School of Rabbi Ishmael,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 1(2003): 1–17. While scholars have classified Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael as a halakhic midrash,Jacob Lauterbach estimated that the text is 60 percent aggadah and 40 percent halakhah, inMekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition on the Basis of the Manuscripts and Early Editions withan English Translation, Introduction and Notes (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1949),xix. As is typical with rabbinic literature, dating the Mekhilta is difficult. Ben Zion Wacholderchallenged the view that the Mekhilta is tannaitic in his essay “The Date of the Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael,” Hebrew Union College Annual 39 (1968): 117–44. He argues that although theMekhilta draws on older traditions, the text was in fact written in the eighth century and isof Alexandrian provenance. For Menachem Kahana’s defense of an earlier dating of the text,see “The Critical Editions of the Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael in Light of the Genizah Frag-ments” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 55, no. 4 (1985–86): 489–524. For a helpful summary of thedebate, see Daniel Boyarin, “On the Status of the Tannaitic Midrashim,” Journal of the AmericanOriental Society 112, no. 3 (1992): 455–65. The matter of dating the Mekhilta is essentially mootfor the present study insofar as Wacholder can say the following: “The Mekilta of Ishmael andits variant, the Mekilta of Simeon ben Yohai, may be regarded as works which utilize masterfullythe hermeneutics of the tannaim and amoraim to summarize the talmudic halakhah andaggadah pertaining to the Book of Exodus” (“The Date of the Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael,”144). All that the present study requires is that the Mekhilta genuinely reflect the theologicallanguage of rabbinic Judaism, and on this point there is general agreement among scholars.




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in precisely this direction. Going beyond the functions of Jewish theo-logical language, I would suggest that there is much to be gained bya doxastic approach to Jewish theological language that individuatesclaims according to the belief-forming practices that produce them.59

In a religious context, belief-forming practices are often also what wewould consider religious practices. For instance, different ways of read-ing scripture, rational reflection on God, and the cultivation of reli-gious experience are all types of religious practice within Judaism thatare productive of theological claims. The connection between theolog-ical language and religious practices as belief-forming mechanisms willbecome particularly important with the third function of Jewish the-ology as a form of spiritual exercise.

iii. rabbinic theology as a justifying discourse

Whereas Hadot talks about philosophical discourse justifying the phil-osophical “way of life,” with respect to rabbinic Judaism it is beneficialto use the slightly more specific language that rabbinic theology justi-fies rabbinic thought and practice. That is to say that with their wide-ranging comments on God and the divine-human relationship, the rab-bis seek to uphold their worldview in terms of both its theoreticalconstructs and its daily modes of living. Similar to ancient philosoph-ical discourse, the theological language in the Mekhilta serves a varietyof justificatory functions.60 For present purposes it is important to high-light three distinct ways in which theology articulates and defends Jew-ish thought and practice as the rabbis of the Mekhilta conceive it.61 Onecommon task of theological language in the Mekhilta is that it seeks to

59 I am much indebted to William Alston’s work on religious epistemology for this part ofmy argument, including the terms with which I am formulating my position, such as “doxasticpractices,” “belief-forming practices,” etc. William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology ofReligious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

60 Because the Mekhilta, like other rabbinic texts, is a collection of statements from rabbisliving in different time periods and geographic locations, it would be deceptive to speak of“the” theology of the Mekhilta. Such claims would only be possible on the basis of extensivetextual analysis and considered reflection on the compiling and editing of the text and themanuscript traditions.

61 Jacob Neusner also sees rabbinic theology as serving an important justificatory function.He writes: “To the sages, the principal intellectual task is—in the exact sense of the meaningof the word—to justify the condition of society by reference to conduct therein, both publicand personal. That is, the sages want to explain the sense and meaning, to account for thecoherence with justice of what defies the expectations that strict justice would lead us toanticipate” (Oral Torah, 89). On Neusner’s account, the rabbis’ theology is principally a defenseof God’s justice and a means for discovering “useful knowledge of God’s plans and programfor Israel in the world” (28). The account that I am setting forth sets a larger scope fortheology’s justificatory power.




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read Torah in a manner that affirms the rabbis’ conceptions of divinegreatness or perfection. Whether we wish to use the traditional theo-logical language for these attributes or not, the rabbis of the Mekhiltaare adamant that God possesses maximal power, knowledge, goodness,and justice.62 Taken together, this material in the Mekhilta justifies Godby demonstrating that the God of the Torah remains the supreme be-ing despite the shifting notions of divinity in the Greco-Roman world.A second nexus of justifying language in the Mekhilta centers equallyon practice as well as belief. These claims use theology as a way ofsupporting observance of the mitzvot, frequently through recourse tothe language of reward and punishment. The third stratum of theo-logical justifications in the Mekhilta justifies the political and social con-ditions of the Jews in the aftermath of the destruction of the templeand the Bar Kokhba revolt. I will provide brief examples of each ofthese forms of theological language before going on to consider the-ology as a formative discourse and a spiritual exercise.

While it is clear that the rabbis of the Mekhilta have some conceptionof what we would call “divine perfection,” it would be a mistake toassimilate their concerns to philosophical discussions of the topic. Al-though the rabbis frequently make claims about God’s power, knowl-edge, goodness, and justice in their readings of the book of Exodus,there is little effort to harmonize these assertions. Their position ap-pears to be that whatever is a great-making property, God possesses it.In one respect all of the claims about God’s perfection are hermeneu-tic in character in that they are efforts to read and apply scripture ina new cultural context. Nevertheless, an important distinction can helpto amplify the role of divine perfection in the rabbis’ theological re-flections. While it is often the case that a rabbinic claim about God’sperfection arises as the result of a hermeneutic conflict in which thelanguage of scripture challenges the rabbis’ sense of theological pro-priety, in other instances antecedent conceptions of God’s perfectionappear to motivate the rabbis’ scriptural interpretation. In these cases,a claim about God’s perfection breaks forth with no other theologicalmotivation than to affirm God’s greatness. It is imperative to note thatthe issue here is not about exegesis.63 As I will show, antecedently held

62 Menahem Kister touches upon a related set of theological concerns in his essay “SomeEarly Jewish and Christian Exegetical Problems and the Dynamics of Monotheism,” Journalfor the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 37, no. 4 (2006): 548–93. Inthe essay, Kister explores questions of God’s sovereignty, wisdom, justice, and divine indepen-dence.

63 The religious consciousness of the rabbis is undeniably exegetical in character. See n.20. The distinction between the rabbis’ exegetical and hermeneutical approaches to scriptureis less important in terms of the functions of rabbinic theology than in a discussion of the




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views on God’s perfection find their way into the rabbis’ scripturalcommentary through intense exegetical scrutiny of the Torah. What isgained by distinguishing these elective claims about God’s perfectionfrom more properly hermeneutical assertions is a better appreciationof the rabbis’ desire to affirm God’s greatness and a better understand-ing of the relationship between discourse and practice in rabbinic Ju-daism, in this case, the practices of reflecting on and praising God.

Two brief examples demonstrate how a textual feature of scripturecan provide the exegetical foundation for the rabbis to express theirantecedently held beliefs about God’s perfection. The first text is acommentary on the opening words of Exod. 12:29, which states, “Andin the middle of the night the Lord struck all the first-born of Egypt.”64

tmuh hbt vkhkv ,umjf ′v rnt vf van rnthu rntba hpk rntb vnk vkhkv hmjc hvhuvsuvh hcr uekj urmuh itf kct vkhk ka uhmj kg sungk osu rack rapt hta rnudu

.uekj tuv uh,ubugu uh,uga gsuhv rnut vrh,c ic

[“And in the middle (ba-hatzi) of the night” (Exod. 12:29): Why is this saidsince it is said elsewhere “Moses said ‘Thus spoke the Lord “I will go outaround the middle (ka-hatzot) of the night”’” (Exod. 11:4)? It is impossible forflesh and blood [i.e., a human] to stand precisely (‘al) at midnight but in thiscase its creator divides it. Rabbi Yehudah ben Bathyra says “The one who knowsits hours and its intervals, he divides it.”]65

The first interpretation is anonymous and seeks to resolve the differ-ence in prepositions, “in” and “around” (italicized above), in two pas-

sources of rabbinic theological claims. Following the doxastic approach to Jewish theologicallanguage that I gestured toward above, I would suggest that the rabbis engage in two relatedbut distinct reading practices that produce theological claims. The first practice, exegesis,seeks to make scripture coherent with itself. As I am using the term, exegetical claims aboutGod have their source in efforts to reconcile scriptural contradictions, lacunae, and such.The hermeneutic reading practice endeavors to make scripture meaningful within the con-temporary horizon of the interpreter. The distinction between these two ways of reading isnot absolute, as exegetical problems often generate hermeneutic solutions and hermeneuticinterpretations often begin with real exegetical difficulties. Nonetheless, I believe there isreal utility in distinguishing these ways of reading scripture and the types of theological claimsthat they produce.

64 In the following, I will quote and translate from the Horovitz and Rabin edition of theMekhilta, but I will also provide page numbers to the newly reprinted edition by Jacob Lau-terbach. H. S. Horovitz and I. A. Rabin, eds., Mechilta D’Rabbi Ismael cum variis lectionibus etadnotationibus (1928–31; repr., Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrman, 1960); and Jacob Z. Lau-terbach, ed. and trans., Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition on the Basis of the Manuscriptsand Early Editions with an English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: JewishPublication Society, 1933–36), and Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition Based on theManuscript and Early Editions, with an English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, 2 vols. (Phil-adelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004).

65 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 42; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:67.




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sages that deal with God’s killing the firstborn of Egypt.66 As the anon-ymous tradent and Rabbi Yehudah ben Bathyra argue, God is able togo out precisely at midnight because God created the night and thusknows its inner workings. What is interesting about this passage is thatthe interpretation would not be possible without a preceding notionof God’s greatness and a desire to make God’s perfection known. In-deed, it is this concern for divine perfection that comes to answer thequestion of why scripture varies its language in two references to thesame event. In my view the tradents do not arrive at this solution hap-hazardly. The persistent desire throughout the Mekhilta to assert God’sgreatness strongly suggests that this was a guiding principle for somerabbis in their exegetical engagement with scripture. It is only by pos-iting such an exegetical principle that one can account for the factthat rabbinic ideas of God’s perfection so frequently find their way intothe rabbis’ comments. Reverting to our discussion of Hadot, this textdiscloses how tightly theory and practice are bound together in rab-binic Judaism. Committed to the belief that there can be nothing con-tradictory or superfluous in the divinely authored Torah, the rabbisengage in the religious practice of scriptural commentary. In this case,the practice of scriptural exegesis produces the theoretical claim thatGod as creator possesses maximal knowledge and power. Understand-ing God on these terms serves as a justification for the entire edificeof the rabbinic religious life.67 God’s possession of maximal knowl-edge and power confirms the fact that God is worthy of being sought,obeyed, and worshipped.

A second text will lend support to the view that prior notions aboutGod’s perfection at times motivate scriptural interpretation in the Mekhil-ta. Commenting on the splitting of the Sea of Reeds in Exod. 14:21,the Mekhilta offers the following anonymous interpretation:

ihjhacau ,urucca ohnv ;t rnut v,t ihbnu ugecb okugca ohn kf ,ohnv ugechu

66 B. Berahkot 3b preserves an alternative solution to the exegetical problem in this passage.Rejecting the idea that God would use imprecise language, like the word “around,” thisinterpretation claims that the wording of Exod. 11:4 reflects Moses’s, and not God’s, uncer-tainty about the middle of the night. The passage also contains an assertion of God’s om-niscience: thna hne tehpx tfht hn. On God’s knowledge of time, see Bereshit Rabba, Bereshit,par. 10:9 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 1:85).

67 Because divine perfection is not a rabbinic “value-concept” for Max Kadushin, his readingof the passage emphasizes the theme of redemption in the text rather than God’s perfection:“Not represented by conceptual terms in rabbinic literature, the idea of God’s omnipotenceand of His omniscience are not rabbinic value concepts but auxiliary ideas. Here those ideasare employed in order to make vivid the concept of Ge’ullah as concretized in the redemptionfrom Egypt by God at midnight. The redemption was precisely at midnight. There was noteven a moment of transition between slavery and freedom” (A Conceptual Approach to the Mekilta,129).




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gechu1 itf ohnv ugechu ′ba ugecb ,hcjcau ,hjukmcau xufcau sfcau ,urgncau!ugecb okugca ohnv kfa snkn ohnv ugechu tkt itf ch,f iht ohv

[“and the waters were divided” (Exod. 14:21): All the water that is in the worldwas divided. From whence do you say that also the water that was in cisterns,ditches, caves, and that which was in a jug, a cup, a pouch, and a flask weredivided? As it is said, “and the waters were divided” (Exod. 14:21). “The sea”is not written here but rather “the waters.” This teaches that all the water thatwas in the world was divided.]68

The exegetical concern that motivates this interpretation is the shiftinglanguage from the beginning of the verse where Moses holds his handsout over “the sea” and the end of the verse where it is “the waters”that are divided. Additionally, the word for water in Hebrew is dual innumber, but the anonymous tradent reads it as a plural. While theselinguistic features of the Torah lay the groundwork for the claim thatevery body of water in the world was divided, as with the previous text,a desire to proclaim God’s greatness is key to making the exegeticalconnection. That the Mekhilta in this pericope is deeply concerned withGod’s greatness is evident from a lengthy aggadic narrative that pre-cedes this passage in which the sea refuses Moses’s command and onlydivides when God reveals God’s self beside the sea.69 In both the ag-gadic narrative and in this passage, the rabbis of the Mekhilta assertthat God is the operative force in dividing the sea, and not Moses. Thispassage, however, goes beyond the question of agency and utilizes theshifting language of scripture and its linguistic ambiguities to embel-lish the Torah’s account of the dividing of the Sea of Reeds so as tofurther magnify God’s greatness.70 Scripture is, then, the prism throughwhich the anonymous tradent is able to express his conception of God’sperfection.71 Rabbinic thought and practice are only secure to the extentthat they are authorized by and oriented toward that which is truly ul-

68 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 104; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:153. The text goes on to amplifythe above point by arguing that the splitting of the waters was not just a terrestrial act but,in fact, a cosmic one, as even the upper and lower waters were divided.

69 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 102; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:151. Michael Fishbane discussesthe exegetical and mythic background to this aggadic narrative and the issue of agency, inBiblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 48, 226–28. Daniel Boyarin also analyzes this pericopein Intertextuality, 93–104.

70 Michael Fishbane, in a discussion of rabbinic mythmaking, characterizes this exegeticaltendency in a very helpful way. He writes, “one is still struck by the frequency with which thedivine acts and feelings of Scripture—particularly those of judgment and anger—are eitherintensified or reversed in Midrash. Through such means, the sages invent myths of pathosand consolation for the heirs of Scripture, out of its very language and formulations” (ExegeticalImagination, 97).

71 Hadot notes a similar dynamic in ancient philosophy when he says that “philosophicalproblems were expressed in exegetical terms” (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 73).




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timate, and passages such as these help to support the view that this isthe case.

It can seem that the problems of historical distance and the conflict-ing cultural horizons of the Torah and the contemporary world aredistinctly modern concerns. Close reading of midrashic literature re-veals that the rabbis’ efforts to preserve and transmit the Torah werefraught with similar hermeneutic challenges.72 Often what is at stakeis a conflict between rabbinic conceptions of divine perfection and theplain meaning of scripture. As the Mekhilta is a commentary on thebook of Exodus, one persistent concern throughout the text is thequestion of God’s justice in the punishment of the Egyptians. The Mek-hilta expresses the view that God’s punishment of the Egyptians was mea-sure for measure with respect to the method and extent of their pun-ishment.73 Curiously, the rabbis’ concern that elements of the exodusnarrative impugn God’s justice extends even to the destruction of Phar-aoh’s horses. In the opening verse of the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15,it states “horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exod. 15:1).The Mekhilta transmits the following anonymous comment:

hbc rjt ,mr vnk xuxk rnutu ihsc ishngnu ucfuru xux thcn v′′cev ,ucfuru xuxhrjt ,mr vnk hrmnk rnutu ,′udu ohrmn upsrhu ′ba hjrf kgc hbmhrv hrmn rnut tuvuchfrn ouenv vag vn .′udu vgrp xux tc hf ′ba hjrf kg hbmhrv xuxv rnut tuvu hbc

.ohc vnr ucfuru xux ′ba sjh o,ut isu xuxv kg ostv ,t

[“Horse and its rider” (Exod. 15:1): The Holy One, blessed be he brought thehorse and its rider and stood them in judgment. He said to the horse “Whydid you run after my children?” The horse replied “The Egyptian caused meto run against my will as it is said ‘and the Egyptians chased after’” (Exod. 14:

72 Steven Fraade speaks to this point when he says “If hermeneutics is an interpretive shuttlebetween a scriptural text and a scriptural community situated in a different historical andcultural setting, then hermeneutics cannot exist apart from having one foot planted in thatsetting.” Steven Fraade, “Moses and the Commandments: Can Hermeneutics, History, andRhetoric Be Disentangled?” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel,ed. Hindy Najman and Judith Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 421.

73 That the Egyptians were punished by the precise means which they had sinned, seeHorovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 110; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:161. That God punishes each mem-ber of Pharaoh’s army according to his specific sin, see Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 133;Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:193. For a discussion of God’s measure-for-measure justice in theMekhilta, see Elaine Phillips, “The Tilted Balance: Early Rabbinic Perceptions of God’s Justice,”Bulletin for Biblical Research 14, no. 2 (2004): 228–33. For a discussion of measure for measurein the Targumim, see Michael Maher, “God as Judge in the Targums,” Journal for the Study ofJudaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 29, no. 1 (1998): 49–62. See also Urbach,The Sages, 371–73, 436–61. See Avot de-Rabbi Natan, 33, for a similar discussion of the Egyptiansbeing punished measure for measure (Avot de-Rabbi Natan, A:33 [ed. Schechter, 95]). On therelationship between measure for measure and ancient medicine and magic, see Meir Bar-Ilan, “Between Magic and Religion: Sympathetic Magic in the World of the Sages of theMishnah and Talmud,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 5, no. 3 (2002): 383–99.




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9). And he said to the Egyptian “Why did you run after my children?” And hereplied “The horse caused me to run against my will as it is said ‘for the horsesof Pharaoh entered [with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea]’”(Exod. 15:19). What did God [ha-Makom] do? He saddled the man upon thehorse and he judged them as one as it is said “horse and its rider he has throwninto the sea” (Exod. 15:1).]74

While it is a challenge for the contemporary reader to take scriptureciting horses seriously, this imaginative episode conceals a real theo-logical concern for the commentator: why would God permit the need-less destruction of animals?75 For the commentator, it is inconceivablethat God’s justice, even toward an animal, would be less than perfect,and so he must devise an exegetical solution. Further indications inthe Mekhilta that God’s justice necessarily extends over all of creationcan be seen in the effort to provide an explanation of why the firstbornof cattle were killed in the final plague as well as the claim that Goddoes not withhold the reward of any creature, including a dog.76 Theo-logical assertions such as these are neither abstract speculation normerely edifying discourse. Rather, they are fundamental claims aboutGod and the divine-human relationship that bolster the rabbinic world-view by defending the belief that God rewards proper action and pun-ishes transgression with perfect justice.77 While it is impossible to knowwhat the tradent thought of his own exegetical feat of implicating theEgyptian horses in the transgression of their riders, I believe that acharitable reading requires taking seriously the claim that God pos-sesses perfect justice. The same point holds true for the previous pas-sages and their claims regarding God’s maximal knowledge and power.Seeing these texts as serving a justificatory function and not just ahomiletical one preserves the text’s claim to truth and thus makes for

74 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 125; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:182.75 This reading is in agreement with Judah Goldin’s; see The Song at the Sea, 103. Goldin

points out the similar concern in M. Sanhedrin 7:4 about the biblical injunction to stone abeast with which a human has had sex (Lev. 20:15–16).

76 For a justification for the killing of the firstborn of cattle, see Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta,44; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:69. On the claim that God does not withhold the reward of anycreature, see Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 321; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:466.

77 David Flusser speaks to the centrality of divine justice in Judaism when he says, “InChristianity also the terms ‘just’ and ‘sinner’ rate significantly, and the idea of attendingcompensation has not been eliminated. However, in the structure of Judaism this is locatedat the core: the concept that the just are rewarded and the sinners are meted out their desertconstitutes the testimonial to its veracity. How else would divine justice manifestly rule in theworld?” Further on, he states, “the message of Judaism seemed to be founded on the conceptof a just God who meted out to each and everyone what he deserved for observing ordisobeying the divine commandments.” David Flusser, “A New Sensitivity in Judaism and theChristian Message,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968): 107–27, 108, 120.




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a more authentic hermeneutic engagement with the text.78 Readingthe first two passages in which antecedent notions of God’s greatnessmotivated the scriptural exegesis along with a more hermeneuticallystructured passage reveals the important place of theological reflectionand divine praise in rabbinic practice.79 The rabbis not only createdopportunities to express their notions of God’s greatness but they alsodefended their conceptions of divine perfection, even from the plainmeaning of scripture when necessary. To call this intensive theologicaland exegetical work “homiletical” misses the rabbis’ genuine interest inasserting God’s greatness.

For the rabbis of the Mekhilta to argue that God has maximal poweror knowledge or that God is supremely just is, in the end, an indirectway of justifying the rabbinic way of life. Theological claims such asthese support and strengthen the core beliefs of rabbinic Judaism, butthey do so without signaling to the practitioner that this is their goal.A more direct affirmation of the rabbinic way of life can be seen inthe theological claims that the rabbis of the Mekhilta use to promotereligious observance.80 For instance, it is said in the Mekhilta that Shab-bat possesses a holiness like the world to come81 and that with every

78 I am here following Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory by assuming that preserving the text’sclaim to truth is critical to the hermeneutic enterprise. Along these lines, Gadamer states: “Aperson trying to understand something will not resign himself from the start to relying onhis own accidental fore-meanings, ignoring as consistently and stubbornly as possible theactual meaning of the text until the latter becomes so persistently audible that it breaksthrough what the interpreter imagines it to be. Rather, a person trying to understand a textis prepared for it to tell him something. That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousnessmust be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of sensitivity involvesneither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self, but the fore-grounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices. The importantthing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its othernessand thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings” (Truth and Method, 269).

79 Presumably, Jacob Neusner would not acknowledge this distinction, as he states that “thesages were theologians before they were exegetes, and they were exegetes because they weretheologians” (Oral Torah, 56).

80 Michael Satlow eloquently captures the rhetorical force and the social impact of rabbinicliterature when he states, “If we assume that the rabbis formed small social groups within amuch larger social context, and were distinguished by their textual study and ‘text-centeredness,’then these rabbinic texts may have been the primary means by which the rabbis attemptedto reinforce and reproduce sanctioned cultural norms. That is, a group that gives muchauthority to received texts would most likely attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to embed,and thus perpetuate, its societal strategies within its own literary productions. If we acceptthe premise that the rabbis in late antiquity had limited juridical power, then the only wayby which they could have promoted their values and norms would have been through rhe-torical persuasion. Rabbinic texts, in this context, can be seen as agents of persuasion.” MichaelSatlow, “‘Texts of Terror’: Rabbinic Texts, Speech Acts, and the Control of Mores,” AJS Review21, no. 2 (1996): 273–97, 274.





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commandment God adds holiness to Israel.82 Inasmuch as holiness isthe divine category par excellence for the rabbis, comments such asthese use theology to define the rabbinic religious life and to encour-age others to adopt the rabbis’ practices.83 This desire to affirm theimportance of fulfilling the commandments often finds expression interms of reward and punishment. With respect to reward, one finds inthe Mekhilta that: God rewards the individual as soon as that personmakes the decision to fulfill a commandment;84 by observing one Shab-bat properly it is accounted to the practitioner as if he observed everyShabbat;85 to one who studies two halakhot it is accounted to him as ifhe fulfilled the entire Torah; and so on.86 One particularly rich theolog-ical defense of practice occurs in the commentary immediately preced-ing the Israelites crossing of the Sea of Reeds. There we find the follow-ing comment:

tuv htsf vbntc ,jt vumn uhkg kcenv kf rnut vhnjb ′r ,ktrah hbcu van rhah ztufz ′vc ubh,uct ubhntva vbnt rfaca ubh,uctc ubhmn ifa asev jur uhkg vra,arhah zt rntbu uscg vancu ′vc ubhnthu ′tba vrha urntu asev jur ovhkg v,rau

.ktrah hbcu van

[“Then Moses and the people of Israel sang” (Exod. 15:1): Rabbi Nehemiahsays “Everyone who accepts upon himself one commandment in faith is worthythat the holy spirit will rest upon him. Thus we find with our ancestors, thatin reward for the faith that our ancestors believed in the Lord, they meritedthat the holy spirit dwell upon them and they sang a song. This is as it is said‘and they trusted in the Lord and in Moses his servant’ (Exod. 14:31) then itis said ‘Then Moses and the people of Israel sang’” (Exod. 15:1).]87

This passage, which has been the subject of much scholarly discussion,utilizes a common rabbinic exegetical technique called “semuchin,”

82 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 320; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:465.83 It is, of course, a serious challenge to answer who the audience was of such theologies.

Stuart Miller draws a reasonable balance between the “insular” nature of the early rabbinicmovement and its larger goals: “It was largely the fact that the rabbinic movement extendedbeyond the immediate circles and households of individual sages that enabled it to thrive withincities in the first place and to incorporate elements belonging to the countryside. This ‘net-work’ of rabbinic circles and households explains the success of the movement despite itsseemingly insular nature. Those who maintain that the interests and influence of rabbis ofTalmudic literature were insular are correct, but the inner workings of the larger network allowedthe sages to have a purposeful agenda and a mechanism that permitted growth and expan-sion.” Stuart Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique ‘Erez� Israel: A Philological Inquiry intoLocal Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 461.

84 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 42; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:67.85 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 343; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:497ff.86 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 161; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:235.87 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 114; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:167.




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which draws inferences on the basis of the proximity of adjacentverses.88 In this case, the statement in Exod. 14:31 that the Israelitestrusted in the Lord and Moses is seen as having a causative effect.Trusting in the Lord brings the indwelling of the holy spirit as evi-denced by the ecstatic state of song that begins the next verse, Exod.15:1. Interestingly, this exegetical tradition is first stated anonymouslyimmediately prior to Rabbi Nehemiah’s comment in the Mekhilta.Rabbi Nehemiah extends the tradition by linking faith to the com-mandments. It is not just faith but a faithful fulfilling of a command-ment that causes the holy spirit to dwell upon a person. Here we seethe full circle: practice—in this case, scriptural interpretation—pro-duces a theological claim that itself promotes practice by making thecommandments the vehicle for the divine-human encounter. Surely itis the ultimate justification of rabbinic thought and practice to con-strue the commandments as the means for experiencing God.89

Before turning to theology’s formative function and its status as aspiritual exercise, there is one further feature of theology as a justifyingdiscourse. In the aftermath of the destruction of the temple and theBar Kokhba revolt, defending the rabbinic way of life entailed givingsome explanation as to why the Jewish people had fallen into such anabject state. One response found in the Mekhilta was simply to placethe blame on the people. Along these lines, Rabban Yohanan ben Zak-kai states, “Because you did not serve the Lord your God in love, youshall serve your enemies in hate. Because you did not serve the Lordyour God when sated, you shall serve your enemies in hunger.”90 Whilethis theological position answers why the Jews suffer, rhetorically itlends little support to the rabbinic way of life. A theology that wasbetter suited to advance the rabbinic cause was to see suffering as areligiously efficacious form of divine chastisement.91 The Mekhilta con-tains a lengthy excursus on this topic that starts by showing how nu-merous biblical figures accepted suffering graciously but quickly moveson to claim that suffering was a key element in receiving the Torah,

88 The most extended discussion of the passage is Norman Cohen, “Analysis of an ExegeticTradition in the Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael: The Meaning of ‘Amanah in the Second andThird Centuries,” AJS Review 9 (1984): 1–25. Urbach also discusses the passage and suggeststhat it is an anti-Christian polemic (The Sages, 35, 399).

89 For a similar discussion of how the Mekhilta promotes prayer, see Gerald Blidstein, “Prayer,Rescue and Redemption in the Mekilta,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic,and Roman Period 39 (2008): 68–87, esp. 81–82. Isaac Kalimi discusses the “glorification ofthe practice of circumcision” (74) in the Mekhilta in Early Jewish Exegesis and Theological Con-troversy (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2002), 72–76.

90 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 204; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:291.91 On the relationship between the theologies of reward and punishment and the idea that

suffering is a form of divine chastisement, see Urbach, The Sages, 416–523, esp. 444–48.




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the land of Israel, and in meriting the world to come.92 As can be seenin the following text, suffering by means of divine chastisement wasalso conceived as a replacement for the sacrifices that ceased with thedestruction of the temple.93

uvn ,ubcrec .ihmrn ihruxh lf ,ihmrn ,ubcreva oafa ihruxh ihchcj ,rnut vhnjb ′rtkt sug tku .obug ,t umrh ovu rnut tuv vn ihruxhhc ,uhkg rpfk uk vmrbu ′ut

tuv ifu .;udc ihruxhvu iunnc ,ubcreva ,vn hbpn ,,ubcrev in r,uh ihmrn ihruxhhva.uapb sgc i,h ahtk rat kfu rug sgc rug rnut

[Rabbi Nehemiah says “Beloved are chastisements for just as sacrifices satisfya debt so do chastisements satisfy a debt. Regarding sacrifices what does it say?‘[He will lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering] that it will be ac-cepted for him to atone on his behalf’ (Lev. 1:4). Regarding chastisements whatdoes it say? ‘and they will satisfy the debt of their sins’ (Lev. 26:43). Furthermore,chastisements are more effective at satisfying debts than sacrifices since sacrificesare with money but chastisements are with the body. Thus it says ‘Skin for skinand all that a man possesses he will give for his life’” ( Job 2:4).]94

More than simply justifying the conditions of Jewish life, theologicalaccounts of suffering, such as this one, imbue despair with religiousmeaning. In a profound reversal, the vicissitudes of life are no longerdestructive of the rabbinic worldview; rather, they support it. Thepower of theological justification would appear to be limitless whenexegetical virtuosity and the desire for preservation are combined.

iv. rabbinic theology as a formative discourse

According to Hadot, the second task of philosophical discourse is toform the practitioner. Philosophical discourse, he says, “always in-tended to produce an effect, to create a habitus within the soul, or toprovoke a transformation of the self.”95 In the case of ancient philos-ophy, character formation largely revolved around conquering the pas-

92 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 240; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:346.93 David Kraemer says in a discussion of this passage, “Our own flesh and blood replace

the flesh and blood of the sacrificed animals. Suffering repairs the ruptures that earlier onlysacrifices could mend.” David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 85. See also Yaakov Elman’s review of Kraemer’swork; Yaakov Elman, “How Should a Talmudic Intellectual History Be Written? A Responseto David Kraemer’s Responses,” Jewish Quarterly Review 89, nos. 3–4 (1999): 361–86. Elman alsowrites on suffering in the Mekhilta in “The Suffering of the Righteous in Palestinian andBabylonian Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review 80, nos. 3–4 (1990): 315–39, esp. 317–20. Forother replacements for the sacrificial system, such as fasting, prayer, and Torah study, seeFishbane, Exegetical Imagination, 123–35.

94 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 240; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:346.95 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 176.




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sions and overcoming fear. Jonathan Schofer has analyzed the analo-gous discourse surrounding the evil inclination (yetzer ha-ra) inrabbinic thought.96 While the topic of the evil inclination only surfacesrarely in the Mekhilta, the formative function of theology in the Mek-hilta far exceeds those discussions. It is easy to see why that is the case.Formation, for its part, is an exceedingly amorphous term; one couldargue that much of religious discourse is formative in one way or an-other. Theology, in particular, is a type of discourse that seeks to per-suade and guide the practitioner. It would not be difficult to uncovera formative element in all of the texts that I have analyzed so far.Nonetheless, there are distinct advantages to seeing rabbinic theologyin terms of formative rather than homiletic discourse. Formation is abroader category that can include a variety of discursive forms and thedistinct social settings in which they arise. Surely rabbinic formationoccurs as much in the act of study or the rituals of home life as it doesin the synagogue. Furthermore, given the scholastic nature of the hom-iletic midrashim and the uncertainty that throws on their Sitz im Leben,it would seem wise to be as inclusive as possible with our conceptualterms. Most important, the category of formation suggests that the tra-dition guides the practitioner toward that which it takes to be ultimate,while the term “homiletic” has the connotation that theological claimsmay be edifying or comforting but not necessarily true. As Hadotpoints out with philosophical discourse, theology in the Mekhilta is notjust abstract speculation; rather, it serves a distinctly social purpose byseeking to cultivate particular values, practices, and beliefs in the re-ligious community.97

At times the formative aspect of theology is so subtle in the Mekhiltathat one barely notices its effect. For instance, in Exod. 18:7, whenMoses and his father-in-law Jethro enter a tent, the Mekhilta providesan anonymous gloss to the verse that says the tent was a beit midrash, aterm used for the rabbinic house of study.98 This seemingly insignifi-

96 Jonathan Schofer, “The Redaction of Desire: Structure and Editing of Rabbinic TeachingsConcerning Yes�er (‘Inclination’),” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 12, no. 1 (2003):19–53.

97 The boundary between character formation and social formation is quite fluid. In shapingthe values, practices, and beliefs of rabbinic practitioners, rabbinic literature is utilizing asocial force, the authority of its teaching, to shape society one individual at a time.

98 This tradition arises from the fact that the word “tent” in Exod. 18:7 is definite, whichleads to the question, which tent? The Targumim preserve related traditions. Onkelos simplysays that Moses and Jethro entered into the “tbfank,” which can mean either tent or tab-ernacle. Pseudo-Jonathon has the more elaborate tradition that states that Moses and Jethroentered into “tbpkut ,hc ifank,” that is, “the tent of the house of instruction.” Onkelos alsouses this phrase, “tent of the house of instruction,” in his translation of Exod. 33:7, whichdeals with the name of the tent of meeting. For a discussion of rabbinic texts that interpret




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cant explanation adroitly collapses the distance between the rabbis andMoses. Moses is made to engage in one of the fundamental forms ofrabbinic religiosity, exegesis, and the rabbis in their own scriptural in-terpretation are now emulating Moses and continuing his work. Whilethe comment might not seem theological on the surface, what it sug-gests is that the way to God is through the Torah.99 In other cases thetheological claims in the Mekhilta are quite explicit about the valuesand beliefs they seek to inculcate or the practices they seek to en-courage. For instance, in its discussion of Sinai, we find the following:

cu,fv shdn .stn ubg van ahtvu rntba ,u,ub,ubg ,uk ord hn .kprgv kt adb vanuifua tabu or rnt vf hf ′ba ,.rtc ostv og vbhfa ,uravk upux ,uhbg tuva hn kfa

.′udu una auseu sg

[“and Moses approached the thick cloud [where God was]” (Exod. 20:18):What was the cause of this [distinction] for him? His humility, as it is said“Now the man Moses was very humble” (Num. 12:3). Scripture declares thateveryone who is humble will in the end cause the Shekhinah to dwell with(the) man on the earth, as it is said: “For thus said the high and exalted onewho dwells forever and whose name is holy: [‘I dwell on high in holiness andwith the contrite and the lowly of spirit’]” (Isa. 57:15).]100

Several additional verses follow to drive home the point that Goddwells with the humble, and then the passage goes on to prove theopposite case that a haughty spirit drives the Shekhinah, that is, thedivine presence, from the world. The passage expresses a rich theologywith a highly dynamic view of the divine-human relationship. While itwould be a mistake to dismiss these theological claims as mere edifyingdiscourse, it is crucial to see how theological language seeks to formthe practitioner. Unlike the rabbinic parables that David Stern arguesrefer to an “aggadic time and space” much like a “mythic time,” this

the tent of meeting through both Roman and rabbinic cultural forms, see Amram Tropper,“Roman Contexts in Jewish Texts: On Diatagma and Prostagma in Rabbinic Literature,” JewishQuarterly Review 95, no. 2 (2005): 207–27, esp. 213–16. On the beit midrash as a rabbinichouse of study, see Lee Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (NewYork: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1989), 26–29; and Hezser, The Social Structure of the RabbinicMovement, 195–214.

99 Steven Fraade analyzes a similar theologoumenon in the Mekhilta in which the Israelitesimmediately interpret each divine utterance at Mt. Sinai. Fraade nicely summarizes the rhe-torical effect of both passages when he says, “The interpretive act is not belated but originaryto revelation” (26). By labeling Moses’s tent a beit midrash, the study of Torah is as ancientas the Torah itself. Steven Fraade, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxisand Thematization,” AJS Review 31, no. 1 (2007): 24–26.





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is a theology intended for the here and now; it is meant to be lived.101

Cultivation of particular character traits will cause the divine presenceto dwell on the practitioner, and unchecked negative traits will removethe divine presence. To say that theology has a formative function forthe rabbis perhaps does not go far enough. By having its finger onevery element from belief to practice to character formation, theologyappears to be constitutive of the rabbinic religious life.

v. rabbinic theology as a spiritual exercise

The final function of philosophical discourse according to Hadot isthat it is itself a spiritual exercise. To recall Hadot’s definition, he un-derstands spiritual exercises as “voluntary, personal practices intendedto cause a transformation of the self.”102 If the production and studyof philosophical discourse qualifies as a spiritual exercise for Hadot,what sort of analogue is possible for rabbinic theology? In general,theological reflection is not a discrete enterprise for the rabbis; rather,it surfaces within all of their theoretical and practical endeavors. Goingback to my doxastic approach to Jewish theology, virtually all of themeans by which the rabbis form beliefs, such as their multifaceted andmultipurposed engagement with scripture, their rational reflection onGod, their cultivation of religious experience, even their halakhic rea-soning, can be the source for theological claims. Rabbinic theology asa spiritual exercise, then, consists of the manifold production of theo-logical claims and following that the study of this theological material.103

While rabbinic theological reflection is dispersed across a variety ofreligious belief-forming practices, it is nonetheless possible to identifyand analyze crucial elements of rabbinic theology as a spiritual exer-cise. One form of theological discourse in particular fits the mold ofa spiritual exercise: the praise of God. I have already shown the deepconcern that the rabbis of the Mekhilta have to assert and defend theirconceptions of God’s perfection. As important as the justifying func-tions of theology are for sustaining the rabbinic worldview, reflectingon and articulating God’s perfection is also a fundamental way of ori-

101 Stern, Midrash and Theory, 93. Michael Fishbane eloquently makes this point when hesays “interpretation redefines the theological values of Scripture and orders them as idealsfor life” (Exegetical Imagination, 4).

102 Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? 180.103 One advantage of this approach is that including the study of rabbinic theology as part

of the exercise’s practice preserves the possibility of nonvirtuosos’ participation. Certainly thevast majority of individuals who have studied rabbinic literature and been shaped by itstheology were not capable of the kind of exegetical and hermeneutical feats that comprisethe texts.




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enting the religious practitioner to the divine. For the rabbis of theMekhilta, praising God is the pinnacle of the divine-human relation-ship. In one passage, God and Israel declare each other’s praises,which leads to an antiphonal chorus of scriptural citations in whichthe holy spirit announces Israel’s excellence and the Israelites respondby praising God.104 This back and forth with the holy spirit mirrors theconnection that I have already noted between song and ecstatic ex-perience of the divine. Praise is so central to the rabbis of the Mekhiltathat they suggest that even the infants and embryos of the Israelitesjoined in praising God in the Song of the Sea.105 Similarly, when thenations of the world see the destruction of the Egyptians at the Sea ofReeds, they too join Israel in singing God’s praises.106 One might thinkthat offering divine praise is only appropriate when the divine-humanrelationship is in good order. The theology of suffering as divine chas-tisement suggests otherwise. One passage in the Mekhilta argues thatGod should be praised in good times as well as in bad times since it isdivine chastisements that pardon one’s transgressions.107

Because of the fundamentally exegetical and hermeneutic structureof rabbinic discourse, many of the most important features of rabbinicreligiosity receive their fullest articulation in the context of scripturalcommentary. We can see this dynamic play out with respect to the actof offering divine praise in the commentary on Exod. 14:14 in theMekhilta. Recall that as Pharaoh and his army approached the Israelitesbeside the Sea of Reeds, the Israelites called out in complaint to Mosesthat they should have never left Egypt and that they now feared fortheir lives. Moses responds in Exod. 14:13 and following, “But Mosessaid to the people ‘Do not fear. Stand and see the salvation of the Lordwhich he will do for you today, for you have seen the Egyptians todaybut you will not see them ever again. The Lord will fight for you butyou be silent.’” The Mekhilta transmits the following comments on thispassage:

uhv,af u′′e ofk ojkh ′v ihe,uau ohsnug uhv,af ot ofk ojkh ′v rnut rhtn ′ruhv, o,tu ,urucdu ohxb ofk vagh ouenv ofk ojkh ′v rnut hcr .jca uk ihb,ub

uhv, o,t ovk rnt ,uagk ubhkg vn van ubhcr vank ktrah urnt ihe,uau ihsnugihbgf uka ,unjknva hnk ,rtp,u vkusdu jcau rha ihb,ubu ohnnurnu ohrtpn

rnutu lsucf .rtv kf kg ohvkt ohnav kg vnur rnutu oburdc kt ,unnur rntbavga v,utc inut vbunt eujrn ,umg tkp ,hag hf lna vsut lnnurt v,t hvkt ′v

.vtd vtd hf ′vk vrhat vrha urntu ovhp ktrah uj,p

104 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 126; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:183.105 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 120; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:175.106 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 142; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:207.107 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 239; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 2:344.




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[Rabbi Meir says “‘the Lord will fight for you’ (Exod. 14:14): If when you standand are silent ‘the Lord will fight for you’ how much the more so when yougive him praise.” Rabbi [Judah] says “‘the Lord will fight for you’: God (ha-Makom) will do for you miracles and mighty deeds and you will be standingthere silent? Israel said to Moses ‘Our master what is our obligation (mah‘aleinu) to do?’ He said to them ‘You should be lifting up, glorifying, praising,giving song and praise, greatness, and glory to the one whom wars belong.’This is like what is said ‘praises of God in their throat’ (Psalms 149:6); and itsays ‘Be exalted above the heavens O God, let your glory be upon the entireearth’ (Psalms 57:12); and it says ‘Lord, you are my God. I will exalt you; I willpraise your name for you have done wonderful counsel from long ago in perfectfaithfulness’ (Isa. 25:1). At that moment Israel opened their mouths and said ‘Iwill sing a song to the Lord for he is highly exalted.’” (Exod. 15:1).]108

Rabbi Meir’s comment addresses the power of praise to establish andstrengthen the divine-human relationship. His comment subtly extendsthe relationship between God and the Israelites beyond the biblicaltext to his contemporary audience and suggests that the act of givingpraise can draw one closer to God than those who were brought outof Egypt. Rabbi Judah is less concerned with the power of praise thanthe duty to praise God. For Rabbi Judah, praise of God is such a vitalpart of his religious consciousness that it is inconceivable that the Is-raelites would stand silently while God destroyed Pharaoh’s army ontheir behalf. He is so intent on reading the rabbinic practice of prais-ing God into the text that he reformulates the scriptural narrative.109

Moses no longer says “the Lord will fight for you but you be silent”;rather, his words are made into a question, “the Lord will fight for youand you will silence yourselves?” Showing an alacrity that they do notpossess in the biblical text, Rabbi Judah’s Israelites then beseech Mosesto tell them how they should respond to God’s salvific acts. In languagethat mirrors that of the liturgy, Moses indicates in the strongest pos-sible terms that they should give praise to God. After citing three bib-lical proof texts on the topic of praising God, the narrative continuesand states that, following Moses’s response, the Israelites immediately

108 Horovitz and Rabin, Mechilta, 96; Lauterbach, Mekhilta, 1:143.109 This is not to say that praise was an exclusively rabbinic concern. It is also an important

feature of worship in the Dead Sea Scrolls. On this topic, see Ra’anan Boustan, “Angels inthe Architecture: Temple Art and the Poetics of Praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,”in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, ed. Ra’anan Boustan andAnnette Yoshiko Reed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Elisha Qimron,“Times for Praising God: A Fragment of a Scroll from Qumran (4Q409),” Jewish QuarterlyReview 80, nos. 3–4 (1990): 341–47.




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broke out with the Song of the Sea that begins Exodus 15.110 This is aremarkable reworking of the scriptural narrative that brushes aside theIsraelites’ complaints to Moses earlier in the passage as well as the factthat they only acquire trust in God by witnessing the divine acts ofdeliverance that occur after their exchange with Moses. Clearly, RabbiJudah is rereading scripture to make it conform to the religious con-sciousness and the forms of the religious life that mark his own culturalhorizon. God’s perfections are not just matters of speculative or justi-ficatory concern for the rabbis of the Mekhilta. Rather, like Hadot’sspiritual exercises, asserting God’s perfection is a transformative reli-gious practice that strengthens the divine-human relationship. Theol-ogy, exegesis, and prayer come to serve the same end: conceptualizingand affirming God’s greatness.

A second text from the Mekhilta adopts a more direct approach tothe topic of theology and suggests that the Israelites in their travelsthrough the desert shared the rabbis’ theological interests. In Exodus17:7, another instance in which the Israelites complain to Moses, theMekhilta offers a commentary that transforms the Israelites’ complaintsinto a theological debate.

oaf ohagnv kf iucr tuv ah ot ktrah urnt rnut gauvh hcr ,ktrah hbc chr kgubfrm ubk epxn ot urnt rnut rzghkt hcr ,gsb tk utk otu gsb ubhkg iucr tuva

′v ,t o,uxb kgu ktrah hbc chr kg rntb lfk ubscgb tk utk otu ubscgb.iht ot ubcrec ′v ahv rntk

[“on account of the strife of the Israelites” (Exod.17:7): Rabbi Joshua says “TheIsraelites said ‘If he is the master of all works (or deeds) just as he is the masterover us, then we will acknowledge him but if not then we will not.’” RabbiEliezer says “They said ‘If he supplies to us our needs, then we will serve himbut if not then we will not.’” For this reason it is said “. . . on account of thestrife of the Israelites and on account of their testing the Lord saying ‘Is theLord among us or not?’” (Exod.17:7).]111

Disagreements between Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eliezer are not un-common in the Mekhilta. In this case, however, what they agree uponis more informative than the differences between them. The disputeabout whether God’s power or providence is primary pales next to therabbis’ profound reinterpretation of the biblical text. Both rabbistransform a critical instance of Israelite disobedience prior to the giv-

110 Gerald Blidstein comments on this: “The song of praise was sung by the Israelites, then,not after the splitting of the sea and the drowning of the Egyptians, but before these, an actof faith in the impending salvation!” (“Prayer, Rescue and Redemption,” 84).





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ing of the Torah into a theological disputation about God’s perfec-tions. The result is that the contentious nature of the Israelites’ actionsis removed and instead the Israelites become justified for insisting thatGod truly exhibit the attributes fitting an all-powerful deity.112 I wouldsuggest that the tradents’ willingness to project the practice of theo-logical reflection onto the biblical text is evidence of how importantthat practice was to them. While a full analysis of how theological re-flection functions as spiritual exercise for the rabbis is a topic for adifferent article, this text supports the view that reflection and practicewere fundamentally linked for some rabbis. Here, theology is far morethan homily; it is a precondition of the divine-human relationship.Theological reflection in this text provides the fundamental orienta-tion to the divine that makes all of the other elements of the religiouslife possible.

vi. conclusion

My goal at the outset of this article was to identify and deploy concep-tual resources that would provide a more complex understanding ofrabbinic theology, one that takes account of the close relationship be-tween theological discourse and religious practice. While my appeal toHadot is at first blush counterintuitive, by coaxing a stronger accountof the relationship between theory and practice out of his writings, aframework emerges that can help strengthen the place of theology inthe study of Judaism. Using the Mekhilta as a test case, I have shownthat the rabbis’ theological reflections are more than a feeble counter-part to the systematic and dogmatic theologies of other religioustraditions. Similar to Hadot’s description of the functions of discoursein ancient philosophy, theological reflection in the Mekhilta serves a com-plex array of justificatory functions, it is a vital formative discourse, andit is a spiritual exercise. This approach to rabbinic theology helps throwoff the pejorative and superficial moniker “homiletic” and instead ac-knowledges the important work theology does to construct, support, andtransmit the rabbinic worldview and its forms of religiosity. For too longrabbinic theology has been suspended between halakhah as the real the-oretical discourse of Judaism and the observance of the mitzvot as theproper form of Jewish practice. Exposing the multiple functions of theo-logical language leads to a more nuanced account of the interrelation-

112 Rabbi Joshua’s comment that God must be the master of all works (ohagn) resonateswith the rabbinic term for the act of creation (,hatrc vagn). The implication would thenbe that the Israelites will accept God only on the condition that God is the creator and masterof all.




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ships between theory and practice and a better understanding of theimportance of theological language in the Jewish tradition.

In conclusion, it seems evident that for Jewish theology to thrive asan academic discipline, it will have to abandon the dichotomy betweenhomily and speculation that often characterizes the critical stratum ofrabbinic theology. As I have attempted to show, the way forward is notso painful and is best characterized as a case of “both and” rather thanan “either or.” There are good hermeneutic reasons for allowing rab-binic theology a theoretical or justificatory function alongside its hom-iletical, or what I would prefer, its formative, function. Holding this“both” together is the “and” of theological reflection as a religiouspractice. Rabbinic theology arises out of religious ways of reading,thinking, and experiencing. It is not a theory divorced from practice.On the contrary, rabbinic theology is a discursive and reflective dis-course that arises from religious practices and often points back towardthem. What emerges from this is a view of Jewish theology that is atonce theoretical and practical, social and personal. That is, to my un-derstanding of the Jewish tradition, a happy coincidence of terms withmuch potential to illuminate Jewish thought and practice.



beyond the homiletical: rabbinic theology as discursive and reflective practice

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