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Shattered Vessels: Judaisms Encounter with the Postmodern

Session1:(Post)ModernOrthodoxy?
FallBeitMidrashSeries@LSS

jrosenfeld@lss.org
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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/WhenisThePostmodern?

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

on Knowledge [Minneapolis: 1984, trans. Bennington &
Massumi]; Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv

...

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

1983]; afterword, pp. 201-2

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

Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard (ed.),
[Ithaca: 1977]; pp. 140-2

...

II.InthePrismofJudaism

4. Steven Kepnes, Postmodern Interpretation of Judaism:

Deconstructive & Constructive Approaches [in Interpreting

Judaism in a Postmodern Age, ed. Kepnes, New York: 1996];
pp. 1-16

...

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

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...

...

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 is
within 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 The

Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed.
Jack Wertheimer, Cambridge: 1998]; pp. 484-5

9. R. Yuval Sherlo, Religious Zionism: The Rabbinate in a

Postmodern 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/disseminating
Halakha.
6. The growing acceptance of a priori identities in religious
frameworks.
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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