Introduction: People of the Letter

Language has an exceptional status in Judaic cultures. As texts to inscribe, study, interpret and debate; as divine Names, in mystical terms as the very material out of which the world is made: language is itself an object of contemplation and sacral significance, a site of attention and the basis of praxis. As Gershom Scholem writes, it is “the medium in which the spiritual life of man is accomplished or consummated” (MT 15; NG 60). In this embrace of language, Judaism departs from traditional Western philosophy and theology, where language has been largely seen as secondary. At best it is seen as mere instrument, at worst the distortion of ideas which language can never adequately express. As letter, it lacks, or betrays, higher spirit. Yet it is precisely in its engagement with language that Judaism has come into conjunction with important contemporary trends, illuminating both Judaism and contemporary philosophy. Language has emerged as central to the effort to reframe meaning and value in the face of the critique of metaphysics launched by Nietzsche. In challenging traditional notions of unchanging truth, this critique has launched a crisis of meaning, of truth, of ethics. In this study, I argue that Judaic cultures offer a resource for post-metaphysical models of meaning, especially evident in the positive valuation of language in its traditions of argument, text, interpretation, concrete practices and material letters.

A main claim of this study is that certain trends in Judaic traditions, as these are treated in a series of twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and especially Levinas, were never metaphysical in Platonist senses. They do not characteristically posit a higher ontological, intelligible and unchanging realm as the reference for truth and value in this world of time, multiplicity and materiality. This this-worldly orientation is both represented by and modeled through language, not as mere vehicle for metaphysical unitary truths which language at best conveys, at worst distorts; but as human interchange in which meaning unfolds but which remains anchored in a sense of transcendence. Transcendence, however, does not constitute a metaphysical realm, but rather orients meaning and values within the world. The contemporary critique of metaphysics as grounding meaning and value has given questions of language, how it means and works, its role in understanding and interpretive orientations, a new urgency. In this encounter, contemporary philosophy provides new terms for describing Judaic culture, while Judaic culture in turn opens paths of response to contemporary challenges to traditional norms and the very possibilities of meaning.1

The Judaic commitment to language contrasts against long-standing suspicions against language throughout philosophical tradition. Through the ages language has stood second to truth conceived as Idea, which language may convey but never equal or fully represent. Truth is classically defined as unchanging abstract, intelligible and unitary Idea –non-material precisely to ensure unchangingness. But language unfolds in parts and through sequences of time. It therefore can never be adequate to the abstract unitary thought it merely, and at best partially, conveys. But this metaphysical model– metaphysics in the sense of a higher ontological realm – has been challenged by an increasing sense of the reality and power of historical change, of material experience, of multiplicity and diversity in the world, and of the power of language itself. Meaning has come to be seen as situated in contexts, in materiality, in time, through and across difference. Truth is no longer fixed as unchanging essence or immaterial ahistorical abstraction. In the terms of contemporary theory, language is not secondary signifier to a prior signified which it inevitably fails fully to represent. Instead, language is seen to shape meaning, and to be itself shaped by social, cultural, political contexts of history and usage as an unfolding of signifiers in meaningful relationship.

The challenge to traditional definitions of truth as signified has seemed on the one hand to threaten truth and normativity altogether. All that seems to be left are different modes of discontinuity, dissolution of identities, fragmentation into unregulated multiplicity in a radical destabilization of meaning. Language here, seen to be cut off from truth as ontology, is suspected as prison house, disciplinary force, or instrument of power among competing interests and institutions. Language without metaphysics becomes coercive institution. However, the release from metaphysics also opens promise. The abandonment of a higher ontology of abstract truth introduces possibilities of centering meaning within the world of time, change, multiplicity and materiality. It is my argument that major figures of Judaic thought propose models for such positive, generative relocation of value, where language becomes an arena for articulating and directing material meanings. It situates meaning within the world of change, time, multiplicity and materiality, not as a loss of significance but as its very mode of unfolding. The place of language in Judaic cultures offers a model for such a this-worldly orientation of meaning. In this it oddly intersects with some of post-modernism’s critique of metaphysics and insistence on material world. However, in Judaic discourses, especially in and in light of Levinas, this has not meant abandoning transcendence, but redefining it: not as a higher realm but as it orientates this one.

In this study, I therefore examine how the emergence of language as a pivotal contemporary topic illuminates Judaic cultural practices, values, and ethics. Judaic traditions in turn open important angles on contemporary understandings of language as these raise issues of value and meaning. My argument is that the status of language in Judaic cultures and writings serves as both model and conduct of meaning within post-metaphysical critical terms. Language in Judaic cultures has a positive, even sacral value, distinct from the suspicions against language that run from Platonist thought through Western philosophy and theology and into contemporary critique, where without its metaphysical reference language becomes an instrument of coercion. Even forms of negative theology – traditionally a mode of mystical theology which suspects language and seeks to transcend it – in Judaic traditions do not negate language, but embrace it within the terms of its limits, while marking a boundary not to be crossed but guarded as transcendence. Transcendence in this sense marks a limit and indeed interruption within the world of acts and speech. Levinas thus speaks of “a transcendence beyond ontology” which can “unfold” in the “rupture” of traditional metaphysics (EN 63).

This study focuses on contemporary Judaic figures as theorists of language in ways that respond to metaphysical critique and propose new paths of meaning. I begin with Nietzsche, whose critique of metaphysics, I claim, is consistent with Judaic positions in its turn from unchanging unity to meaning in the multiple, temporal world. I particularly address Nietzsche’s theories of language and interpretation, including his rejection of letter/spirit oppositions both in language and in practice. Nietzsche offers a decisive critique of two-world ontologies – what he calls the “double-world order” of Being and Becoming, eternity and time, unchanging unity and differential multiplicity (TA 70).2 He insists on the material, temporal, changing, multiple as the realm of experience and of meaning, although how to construe values is Nietzsche’s most urgent concern.3 Nietzsche, indeed, left unanswered how meaning then could be regulated, an ethical dilemma he does not resolve.

What follows are three chapters focusing on language theory as it illuminates Judaic language practices. I first treat the topic of Judaic hermeneutics: traditions of argument, with the focus on a textuality that sees each unit of language, indeed each letter, as a site of explication and significance. This chapter explores a broad range of discussions on modes of Judaic interpretation, against a long background of exegetical approaches and methods as well as contemporary philosophy. I emphasize how language itself is the site of interpretive value and energy in what I call lettrism: letters of language as the fundamental unit for interpretation and whose inter-relationality governs and generates exegesis. Moshe Idel describes Judaic culture as “bibliocentric,” “linguocentric,” and “textocentric.”4 I would add lettrocentric. Lettrism challenges the histories of exegesis in which letter was a sign of Jewish lack of spirituality. Here, in contrast with its traditional polemic, the letter is not a reduction of meaning, as if from some higher ontological or spiritual truth beyond its materiality. Meaning is instead seen to be generated by and through the concrete inter-relationships of signifiers, in the world and in language. Both are governed by interpretive practices, directed towards texts and also the practices interpreted to arise from study of those texts. Focus moves to interpretation itself, a hermeneutic recognition that experience is inevitably configured through interpretation. In Judaic hermeneutics, the letter remains, as traditionally, both script and material praxis. But these are embraced as the concrete temporal and historical orders of material existence and their meaningful interpretation.