lss fall beit midrash - shattered vessels #1

8/10/2019 LSS Fall Beit Midrash - Shattered Vessels #1

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Shattered Vessels: Judaisms Encounter with the Postmodern

Session 1: (Post)Modern Orthodoxy?Fall Beit Midrash Series @LSS

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a. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain: 1917

b. Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: Plate

43 of The Caprices (Los Caprichos), 1799

I. What/Who/Where/When is The Postmodern?

1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report

on Knowledge [Minneapolis: 1984, trans. Bennington &

Massumi]; Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv

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2. Terry Eagleton,Literary Theory: An Introduction [Oxford:

1983]; afterword, pp. 201-2

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3. Michel Foucault,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:

Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard (ed.),

[Ithaca: 1977]; pp. 140-2

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II. In the Prism of Judaism

4.Steven Kepnes,Postmodern Interpretation of Judaism:

Deconstructive & Constructive Approaches [inInterpreting

Judaism in a Postmodern Age, ed. Kepnes, New York: 1996];

pp. 1-16

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5. R. Shagar, Tablets and Broken Tablets: Jewish Thought in

the Age of Postmodernism(Yediot: 2013); p. 431, 433

Postmodernism doesnt have a solid definition, and many quills have been broken trying to

define it. Many postmodernists themselves are opposed to attempts to define their

weltanschauung. For the purpose of our inquiry, we can at least say that postmodernism is

the stance that claims there is no single truth, because that which we call truth is actually a

cultural-social construct, man-made. We can also describe postmodernism as a radical

thrust towards freedom - the freedom of man to determine himself and his values.

...Many educators, most educators, utterly negate and repudiate this notion of

postmodernism completely however, in my eyes there is something much more radical

amiss.

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I feel that postmodernism, deconstructivism are a sort of shattering of the vessels, although

this breakdown potentially grants us a far-reaching, vast freedom, and in the religious sense

- a freedom to believe, even sans proofs and such.

...perhaps postmodernism can turn out to be our Yetsiat Mitsrayim, in the most radical sense

of the term.

In this postmodern world is buried, in my opinion, an option for a very elevated and

advanced belief. What excites me is not the notion that God is some special, enormous entity,

but rather the notion that God is not this thing; God is the essence of purity, the essence of

freedom, the infinite; as Maimonides wrote - he exists, although is not in existence

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6. R. Shagar,Shattered Vessels(Yeshivat Siah Yitzhak, Efrata:

2004); p. 20 n.7, 25

and then comes the day of death, those whom he supported are also gone, and nothing

remains, together with this we still believe that there is some everlasting worth to our

actions. Similar to postmodernists, R. Nahman intimately knew that the final questions, the

metaphysical questions, are beyond the purview of language. However, contra the

postmodernists who concluded that the questions are ultimately meaningless - nonsense R.

Nahman opens new vistas for possibilities of deep faith...

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In this manner we can now read the following words of R. Kook: why does deconstruction

occur? Because divinity gives according to its [unlimited] power, and the receiver is limited,

therefore the good bestowed is limited and unable to receive all the good bestowed lest they

burst and shatter. And therefore the receiver strives all it can to return to its root place in

which it can receive in an unlimited sense to join the creator on the level of wholeness

...the shattering creates the possibility for rebuilding reality anew.

The logic behind the transition between postmodernism to mysticism is simple, it is actually

a small epistemological shift from a pluralistic point of view, with word games in which no

truth is discerned to a point of view of unio mystica that declares that all is truth and all iswithin God, and that no venue is free from God.

7. R. Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, Olat ReAYaH; vol. 1, p. 330

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8. Ivan G. Marcus,Postmodern or Neo-Medieval Times? [in TheUses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed.

Jack Wertheimer, Cambridge: 1998]; pp. 484-5

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9. R. Yuval Sherlo,Religious Zionism: The Rabbinate in aPostmodern Age [Lecture delivered on 1 April, 2014 at

Bar-Ilan University]We can therefore isolate ten key characteristics of the Rabbinate and its

relationship with the nation in a postmodern age:1. Forming partnerships in the public sphere - the Rabbi is not the

sole religious authority.2. The recognition that there are options in Halakha.

3. Dialogical Psak.4. Rabbis operating outside rabbinic frameworks as Rabbis.

5. The usage of technology in forming/deciding/disseminatingHalakha.

6. The growing acceptance of a priori identities in religiousframeworks.

7. New-Age.8. The Rabbi is not the only transmitter of Torah knowledge, advice,

or Torah perspective.

9. Straightness and neo-conservatism with regard to Halakha.10. Egalitarianism.

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