Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The author meticulously traces the belief in resurrection backward from its undoubted attestations in rabbinic literature and in the Book of Daniel, showing where the belief stands in continuity with earlier Israelite culture and where it departs from that culture. Focusing on the biblical roots of resurrection, Levenson challenges the notion that it was a foreign import into Judaism, and in the process he develops a neglected continuity between Judaism and Christianity. His book will shake the thinking of scholars and lay readers alike, revising the way we understand the history of Jewish ideas about life, death, and the destiny of the Jewish people.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300135152 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 597 KB |
About the Author
Jon D. Levenson is Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies, Harvard University. Among his previous books is The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, published by Yale University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel
THE ULTIMATE VICTORY OF THE GOD OF LIFEBy JON D. LEVENSON
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2006 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11735-6
Chapter One
The Modern Jewish Preference for Immortality
We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community.
We reassert the doctrine of Judaism, that the soul of man is immortal, grounding this belief on the divine nature of the human spirit. -Pittsburgh Platform (Reform Judaism), 1885
That classical Judaism firmly believed in the resurrection of the dead-indeed, insisted upon it as a defining tenet of the community-today comes as a shock to most Jews and Christians alike. The reasons are not hard to find. The American Heritage Dictionary gives as the first meaning of "resurrection" (lowercase) "a rising from the dead or returning to life" but soon defines "Resurrection" (uppercase) as "the rising again of Christ on the third day after the Crucifixion." The latter meaning, which has historically stood at the very center of the Church's proclamation of its gospel, has deeply colored the perception of resurrection (lowercase) throughout Christendom. As a result, Christians often hold the opinion that the absence in Judaism of a belief in the Resurrectionof Jesus indicates the absence of all notions of resurrection in Judaism. Given the structure of classical Christian doctrine, this misperception is hardly surprising. For therein the Resurrection of Jesus is the basis for all human hope to be raised from the dead and to have life eternal. It is interesting, however, that this misperception, bolstered by the ostensible absence of any notion of resurrection in the Torah, is not unwelcome among modern Jews. Consider the Jews who are eager to differentiate their tradition from its major rival among the world religions but are also uninformed about their own religion. For them, it is enormously useful to present Judaism as this-worldly and uninterested in, or even positively skeptical about, the return from death and the World-to-Come. Indeed, well-informed expositors of the Jewish tradition have felt compelled so to present it themselves.
Abba Hillel Silver, a learned Reform rabbi in the mid-twentieth century and one of the most important figures in American Judaism in his time, is a case in point. In his influential volume Where Judaism Differed: An Inquiry into the Distinctiveness of Judaism, Silver presents the resurrection of the dead as a late and degraded development in Jewish thought, a borrowing from foreign sources "to which the Jews added nothing original." The real cause of it is, in fact, nothing more than "the inability of [ancient Jewish] leaders further to withstand popular pressure." In this case, the difference and distinctiveness that is the subject of the book not only involves a contrast with the other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions from which he thinks Judaism assimilated the ideas in question. It is also very much a difference from Christianity, for which "the doctrine of resurrection ... is the chief cornerstone of the entire edifice of its faith." Silver's implication is clear: when Jews believe in resurrection, they lose their distinctiveness and assimilate to the dominant mode of religiousness of antiquity and modernity alike-a mode in sharp contrast to the univocal this-worldliness of authentic Judaism.
What this misses, however, is that in modern Western culture, the cognitive pressure on Jews and Christians alike militates against the classical Jewish and Christian doctrines of resurrection. The emphasis on the ultimacy of this world and on ethical striving that pervades Silver's theology is itself thus a reflection of assimilation-assimilation to the naturalism and scientism of the times. By revising the Jewish tradition in the direction that Silver takes, one can claim to be a good Jew while at the same time adhering to a modern materialist sense of human existence and destiny of the sort that dismisses resurrection as an embarrassing relic of the childhood of humanity, a groundless fantasy. Christianity, by way of contrast, founded on the proclamation of Jesus' Resurrection, thus appears not only as incompatible with modern thought but as a deviation from the teaching of the Scriptures that Jews and Christians hold in common to boot. The true, mature, and genuinely biblical religion had no such idea. In the context of Jewish-Christian disputation, the denial of resurrection can therefore be a potent weapon in the armamentarium of the Jewish disputants. It provides them with an element of religious justification for their own continued existence in the face of the extraordinarily powerful pressures to assimilate to the Christian host culture: the Christians, vulnerable to a crude superstition about a god-man who came back from the dead, have perverted the Hebrew Bible by introducing something altogether foreign into it. In contrast, the Jews, by adhering to their Bible's belief in the naturalness of death, are the true and exclusive heirs to the Scriptures and, what is more, exemplars of a position altogether in line with modern scientific thinking. By excluding the resurrection of the dead from Judaism, modern Jews can appear to the world and, more important, to themselves as simultaneously adhering to a way of thinking that is as old and particular as the Hebrew Bible and as new and universal as modern science.
Substantial as the inducement to redefine Judaism without its historical commitment to resurrection has been, the obstacle to doing so that the traditional prayer book poses has been at least as formidable. A highly liturgical religion, whose forms of worship are regulated by religious law, rabbinic Judaism early on gave the doctrine of resurrection a central place in its daily worship. Consider the second benediction in the prayer known variously as the Amidah ("The Standing Prayer"), the Tefilla ("The Prayer," par excellence), or the Shemoneh Esreh ("The Eighteen Benedictions"):
You are mighty forever, my Lord. You are the one who revives the dead, powerful to save.
(You make the wind blow and the rain fall.)
He sustains the living with kindness and revives the dead with great mercy, supports the falling, heals the sick, releases captives, and keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust.
Who is like You, Lord of power? And who can compare to You, O King who brings about death and restores life and makes salvation sprout?
Faithful You are to revive the dead. Blessed are You, O Lord, who revive the dead.
According to rabbinic law, this ancient prayer is to be said three times each weekday, four times on Sabbaths, New Moons, and Festivals, and five times on the Day of Atonement. There is never a day-never a morning, never an afternoon, never an evening-without it. The prayer is thus as authoritative an epitome of rabbinic theology as one can find, and its second benediction endorses the idea of resurrection repeatedly and emphatically: "revives the dead" (four times), "keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust," "brings about death and restores life." Known as Gevurot ("Power"), the benediction sees in God's revival of the dead the outstanding and incomparable instance of his insuperable might. The other affirmations of his assistance to those in need-his support of the falling, his healing of the sick, and his release of prisoners-are enclosed within an envelope-like structure that begins and ends with an address to the God of Israel as the one who resurrects.
When precisely the resurrection takes place the benediction does not specify. The mention of God's power "to save" and especially the phrase "makes salvation sprout" (masmîah yesu'a) suggests that the miraculous revival forms part of an eschatological scenario. Later on, following long-standing biblical precedent, the fifteenth benediction of the same prayer will use the language of "sprouting" (semah/tasmîah) to refer to the expected messianic king, "the Branch of David"-an unmistakable allusion to the end-time restoration of the people Israel after their long degradation. We cannot say for sure, however, whether Gevurot asserts that God's assistance to the falling, ailing, and imprisoned is a constant and reliable reality in the present order of things. Surely its authors, like the authors of the scriptural texts from which they draw their language, knew that some who fall do not rise, illnesses are often progressively debilitating and ultimately fatal, and many who are incarcerated will never leave prison alive. The likelihood, therefore, is that the atemporal language of the benediction (which speaks in participles rather than finite verbs) affirms that God's deliverance may occasionally be witnessed in the present dispensation but will become fully manifest and unassailable only at or after the messianic consummation. What it affirms, in other words, is not that we can rely upon God to prevent our falling, illness, imprisonment, and death but that he has the power to reverse these painful conditions and will eventually prove faithful to his promise to do so. That he has indeed made a promise to the dead and can be trusted to keep it becomes evident from the two instances of the root 'amen in the benediction. The first, reflecting the language of the eschatological resurrection predicted in Dan 12:1-3 (a text to which we shall devote much attention), speaks of God's "faith with those who sleep in the dust." What is new here, over against the scriptural base, is the affirmation of God's faithfulness ('emûnato). Here, the pronominal suffix is not objective but subjective. It refers not to the believer's faith in God but to God's faithfulness to raise to life those who, as Dan 12:2 puts it, "sleep in the dust of the earth." The same idea appears in the penultimate affirmation that "Faithful [ne'eman] You are to revive the dead." Here again, the persons praying are only indirectly affirming their own faith that the omnipotent Deity will perform an act of resurrection. That which they directly affirm is God's fidelity or faithfulness to do so. God can be trusted to keep faith even with the dead.
In sum, Gevurot, the second benediction of the Amidah, affirms simultaneously the cold, hard, unavoidable reality of death and the unshakable trust that God will revive the dead in the eschatological future. It thus stands among the multitude of texts in the Hebrew Bible (whose language it continually adopts) that maintain that although bad things do indeed happen to good people, they are not the last word. The last word, rather, is a good thing, in this case God's miraculous intervention into history to grant the dead of all generations new life as he finally secures his triumph over evil and suffering and establishes on earth the kingdom over which he already reigns in the higher realm.
In this view of things, death does not lose its reality or its grimness, only its finality. Its continued existence constitutes a standing reproach to the God who "keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust" and yet allows them to do so, having (to all appearances) quite forgotten his promise to revive them. In this way, death must be seen as an opponent of the living God whose faithfulness to his promises will not be perspicuous until death is vanquished and eliminated. Yet the theology that underlies Gevurot is far from dualistic. For the same God who is "powerful to save" and "faithful to revive the dead" is also the "king who brings about death," in other words, death's own author, the One who gives life but also withdraws it. Whatever overtones of ancient myth may still be heard behind this text-myth that, as we shall see, is very much alive in some biblical materials-death is not a force independent of the divine king and outside his control before the final victory is won. Death, no less than life, is part of God's plan, but it is-or can be made into-only one stage of the plan, and not the last. The gracious king who gives and withdraws life will give it again.
Gevurot leaves open a question that readily occurs to us. What is the fate of the dead before they are resurrected? The identification of them as "those who sleep in the dust" tempts us to say that they are not really dead at all but only asleep, enfolded in God's protective grace until they are at last revived. The temptation is best resisted. For neither in the Hebrew Bible nor in rabbinic literature is sleep generally seen as such a benign state. It is more than occasionally associated with death, as it is here, just as waking up is associated (in both literatures) with resurrection. And "dust," not a pleasant place to sleep under the best of circumstances, recalls the Lord's sentence upon Adam that he shall:
... return to the ground- For from it you were taken. For dust you are, And to dust you shall return. (Gen 3:19)
But neither should we say that the Gevurot benediction relegates the dead to oblivion until the day of their restoration into life. For they do still exist at least in the mind of the God who faithfully remembers his promises to them and will bring about their redemption. Nor should Gevurot be taken to imply that the dead lack souls that survive the demise of their bodies. As James Barr has argued, the dichotomy between the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul, though still common in the scholarly literature, is overdone and bears reexamination. A firm belief in the resurrection of the dead does not at all entail a disbelief in the immortality of some aspect of the person or in the notion that the departed righteous even now enjoy a blissful communion with God. The point, rather, is that, whatever notions of the soul circulated in ancient Judaism (and there were several), in the Amidah God was not thought to have fulfilled his promises until the whole person returned, body included. Like death, a disembodied existence was deemed to be other than the last word, for the person is not "the ghost in the machine" (that is, the body) but rather a psychophysical unity. Even the familiar language of "body and soul," with its implicitly dualistic associations, cannot do full justice to the Jewish view under discussion.
As the very term Gevurot ("power") implies, the resurrection of the dead in this benediction serves as a definitive manifestation of God's might. By reviving those who have gone the way of all flesh, God shows his power to be greater even than the power of nature (itself his own creation). Like creation, resurrection is a preeminently supernatural act, a miraculous reversal of the course of nature. Through it, God thus transforms death, nature's last word, into a prelude to his own new act of creation, the re-creation of human beings in a form that is bodily yet immune to the vulnerabilities and ravages of biological life. So conceived, resurrection thus recapitulates but also transcends the creation of humanity. The miracle of the end-time restores the miracle of the beginning.
It is this inextricable association of resurrection with supernatural intervention that sticks most persistently in the craw of many modern Jews and Christians. As Milton Steinberg puts it, "Jewish modernists accept less [than the traditional idea of resurrection]" and "abandon the doctrine of the Resurrection of the body, at least in any literal sense," though they do "retain faith in the deathlessness of man's spirit not only in its naturalistic connotations but also in its beyond-this-life significance as well." What remains to be explored is the character of this nonliteral doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Obviously, a body that has been revived from true death (and not merely some near-death experience) and raised into eternal life is not literally the body human beings inhabit in the current order of things. Rather, resurrection is one key element in a whole panorama of redemptive and re-creative events that characterize the rabbinic vision of the end of history. These events derive from the visions of the biblical prophets and apocalyptic seers, visions communicated, as they must be, in mythopoetic language. Seen this way, the resurrection of the dead belongs with the other elements of Jewish eschatological expectation, such as the liberation of the Jews from subjugation to Gentile rule, the ingathering of the exile to the Land of Israel, the enthronement of the God of Israel, the reconstruction of Jerusalem as God's dwelling, and the coming of the messianic king. All of these are requested and envisioned in the Amidah, and all are to some degree continuous with ordinary life but also wondrously, scandalously discontinuous with it. Once we have recognized this dimension of discontinuity, we become more chary of speaking of a "literal" doctrine of the resurrection of the body-whether in affirmation or in negation. For to literalize is to prosaize, and to prosaize a mythopoetic vision is to traduce it.
The history of the translation of Gevurot in non-Orthodox prayer books demonstrates that Steinberg's "Jewish modernists" object to more about resurrection than simply the literalism with which some may hold it. His reference to their "faith in the deathlessness of man's spirit ... also in its beyond-this-life significance" is the key to understanding the transformation that Gevurot undergoes when the resurrection of the dead, even in a nonliteral sense, is no longer deemed credible. Eschatology, in a word, collapses into creation, God's supernatural act turns into humanity's God-given nature, memory takes the place of redemption, and the resurrection of the dead is quietly but eventfully redefined as the immortality of the individual soul.
To those who subscribe to this transformation, the wording of the Gevurot benediction of the Amidah is, of course, a major challenge. Neil Gillman identifies "three possible [Jewish] strategies for handling a liturgy that no longer reflects your theology: replace the Hebrew with a more palatable alternative; keep the Hebrew text and shade the translation to accommodate your new interpretation of the doctrine; or provide options which allow the worshipper to choose a text that reflects his or her particular belief." Gillman points out that the great scholar and early exponent of Reform Judaism Abraham Geiger (1810-74) explicitly wrote that the concepts of afterlife appropriate to modern Jews "should not be expressed in terms which suggest a future revival, a resurrection of the body; rather they must stress the immortality of the human soul"-a view widely held in his time. In consequence, Geiger's own German translation of the close of Gevurot rendered it as "der Leben spendet hier und dort," literally, "who bestows life here and there"-"a vaguely-worded promise of eternal life," as Gillman puts it, and hardly an affirmation of resurrection.
Later Reform prayer books have tended to follow the lead of another important figure in early Reform Judaism, David Einhorn (1809-79), who served the movement first in Germany and then in the United States. Advocating the "replac[ement of] the doctrine of resurrection with 'the idea of a purely spiritual immortality,'" Einhorn closed his Hebrew version of Gevurot not with the classical expression "[You] who revive the dead" but with another traditional liturgical affirmation phrase, the benediction one recites after being called to the Torah, "Who has planted immortal life within us." This both removes the scandal of resurrection and transfers the focus of immortality from Torah to something ostensibly more universal, creation itself. This upholds God's miraculous power-for what could be more miraculous than "immortal life"?-but it relegates the miracle safely to the primordial past and removes any expectation that something analogous to it will occur in the eschatological future.
The best-known and longest-lasting Reform prayer book, The Union Prayerbook (1895), pursues several strategies to affirm the continued existence of the dead while sidestepping the rabbinic expectation that they will be miraculously revived. "Only the body has died and has been laid in the dust," reads one prayer. "The spirit lives in the shelter of God's love and mercy." Here immortality of the soul is affirmed along with the implication that the body will stay in the dust. "Our loved ones continue," the prayer goes on,
also, in the remembrance of those to whom they were precious. Their deeds of lovingkindness, the true and beautiful words they spoke are treasured up as incentives to conduct by which the living honor the dead.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel by JON D. LEVENSON Copyright © 2006 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.