After a cataclysm: that defines our moment, claims Alasdair MacIntyre in his classic 1981 work, After Virtue. Yes, now is after a cataclysm: the grinding down – almost total annihilation – of ways of life that offer an orientation to what matters most, and of institutions – think the family, or even more concretely, the family dinner, or less prosaically, how to live with death (and not to flee from it, or try to cover it over): how do we spend time with someone who is mourning the loss of their spouse just moments before? We once knew.
The wrecking ball we call modernity, and the fuel that powers it, capital, MacIntyre declares again and again – and continuing to speak this way well after having ceased to call himself a Marxist – has now reached such a degree of efficacy that we today, or most of us, anyway, don’t remember that things were ever different. We’ve suffered a devastating loss, but don’t even know it.
Does this describe the situation of American Jewry in our day? You might have thought that, in the wake of the publication of After Virtue in the early ’80s, the question would have been asked and answered with passion and acumen, given how dedicated this community has been to memorializing its past and to surviving modernity’s worst ills. An outsider as noteworthy as the Dalai Lama once believed that if you wanted to learn something about how to cope with modern challenges – state sponsored terror, forced migration, assimilation by an alien majority culture – Jewish leaders were the ones to turn to. Would that still be true today?
In fact in Jewish studies, MacIntyre’s text hardly made a ripple, this being the case even though in law, medicine, and other humanities-related fields – not to mention in philosophy herself, MacIntyre’s text has been a watershed. It’s not difficult to guess why. Talk of virtue doesn’t resonate with Jews today. So, when philosophically sophisticated Jews began to discuss MacIntyre’s work in print, they ran headlong into the problem that prompted MacIntyre to write After Virtue in the first place. Not knowing what could possibly count for the summum bonum of Jewish life, many Jews dropped the question altogether, while others became what Abraham Joshua Heschel called religious behaviorists. It should be obvious that virtue-ethics can speak to neither those who have lost all interest in the Jewish tradition, nor to those who have dropped the question of its high purposes, including “behind” its laws and precepts, and yet are content to do them anyway.
What Franz Rosenzweig observed more than half a century before the publication of After Virtue is the crux of the problem: the Jewish community does not know what ends are worth pursuing in its tradition because most no longer seriously study or practice it. Remember, we live after the cataclysm. While it’s true that habit formation and a quest for practical excellence surely characterized the life of the premodern Jewish community, in Alexandria, in Pumbedita, in Seville, and in Vilna, places where practitioners were deeply embedded in a civilization and way of life, and when the ends of that life were so immanent in the bones of most Jews as to be all but taken for granted; nevertheless, the language of virtue and its corollaries won’t evoke recognition today among even the most perceptive observers. No wonder discussions of MacIntyre’s account of the moral life, as edifying as it is when referring to a number of today’s cultural settings, struggling yet alive – think of hospitals, court rooms, and schools, for instance – sound sterile in a Jewish context, the influential work of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks being perhaps the sole exception. For a culture that has ceased vigorous dialogue with its texts about what is required of its members, a virtue ethics simply makes no sense.
How might we, late modern inheritors of a precious tradition, use what readers in other cultural domains, and especially in Catholicism, have learned from MacIntyre as a help in retrieving our cultural inheritance, or at least stemming the tide of its disappearance?
The most perceptive of After Virtue’s readers have understood what follows from MacIntyre’s work: in order to be inducted into a culture successfully – any healthy culture, in MacIntyre’s view – one must have opportunities to apprentice oneself to those who excel at participation in it, learning the skills that would allow one eventually, at least in principle, to take their place. Think of rabbis and their students, to be sure, but it would be a mistake to mine Jewish history in this context only for particularity and religiosity. The Jewish socialist, the Jewish litigator, the Jewish healer – these all, alongside the Talmid Ha-Cham (master of Talmudic studies) –- are recognizable Jewish characters in our dramatic narrative and all will need to be reanimated if the culture is to survive. Their precise nature – whether, for instance, they are secular or religious – is itself a matter for a resurrected tradition and its evolution. As MacIntyre wrote in perhaps the most famous page of his famous book, a tradition is “a historically extended, socially embodied argument” about the nature of itself, its narratives, social roles, and its central concerns.
I should add, to anticipate a trend line in much of modern thought, that this transhistorical ethical process – let’s call it social reproduction – is hardly a matter of “discourse” alone. The aim of Jewish education cannot be comprehended exclusively as the effort to teach a Jewish language, because, though clearly a desideratum of socio-cultural induction, language-acquisition – think congregational prayers, personal benedictions, the “right thing to say” at a wedding or a funeral, and, at a high level of induction, the vocabulary and syntax of the Hebrew language itself – cannot be separated from the bodily practices which co-constitute the civilization at any given moment of social evolution and upon which the language in question always supervenes: standing and bowing at the right time, eating permitted foods and avoiding treyf, and even imitating and cultivating certain emotions – joy at the groom’s Tisch (pre-nuptial celebration) and concern and chastened expectations upon hearing of a pregnancy in the first trimester. One does not congratulate the mom and dad; one wishes them a b’shaah tovah, essentially a hope that the pregnancy will go to term and that, with the mother and baby, all will be well.
I slow the discussion at this juncture to make this point about language in order to introduce a crucial notion belonging, at least broadly speaking, to the Marburg tradition, the figure of the “hermeneutical circle,” an idea pioneered by Hans Georg-Gadamer in his 1960 blockbuster text, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), with roots that go back to Cohen’s 1871 book Kants Theorie des Erfahrung (Kant’s Theory of Experience). and become especially prominent in Heidegger’s widely read Sein und Zeit, (Being and Time.) Gadamer developed the idea of the hermeneutical circle to help solve precisely the misunderstanding MacIntyre’s kind of philosophy might otherwise be heir to. In making MacIntyre a resource, we cannot do without Gadamer’s circle. We need it to explain that, while language-acquisition has a big role to play in stopping the hemorrhaging we are suffering, it is no substitute for participating in the cultural practices of Judaism themselves.
Let me elaborate on this circle metaphor and its philosophical import in order to explain.
In Gadamer’s thought, the circle stands for the round and round that we undergo whenever we are engaged in text-interpretation, or by semantic-extension, interpretation of our world. This is a descriptive claim, not a recommendation. Paradigmatically, it’s what we undergo, for instance, when we try to understand the sentence, “God’s spirit hovered over the deep.” We begin with an idea of what “spirit” means here, but we revise as we do the things people in our culture do to clarify words: use a dictionary, consult other use-cases in the same literature, ask a knowledgable teacher or friend. These are instances of movement between theory and practice. The movement is circular because it constantly returns to the same sentence and the same word, even as the interpretation shifts to accommodate new information and experience.This metaphor is useful, not only in text interpretation, but also in understanding what happens in the course of learning-mechanics in the sensory world. I invite you to think of a speedy-quick merry-go-round, with an array of different horses available, each of which can be grasped in a slightly different way. At some moments in your journey-round, you think about what you are doing and you become aware that to be a good rider of this merry-go-round, you need to hold-on tight. This truly is an adult-merry-go-round, and though you are strapped in, you need to do your part to grip the pole, lest you fall and ruin a perfectly good form of entertainment. At other moments on the journey-round, you clear your head and simply practice gripping, the horse with your legs, at times with your hands, but always with the objective of having a good ride, neither dangerous nor stressful. Maybe you even clear your mind in an effort to relax. You focus on your breath. The important point to understand is that, in learning how to ride the merry-go-round, no priority between theory and practice obtains; there is no right order in which thinking and practicing are properly carried out, and both are essential to your learning.
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The Marburg tradition begins in 1876 with Cohen’s tenure there in a medieval university town in central Germany, a place that first acquired an international reputation as a seat of learning largely because of the philosophical genius of Cohen and the notoriety gained from it in the ensuing years. This was highly unusual in the fledgling German state. Cohen was a Jew with a rabbinical education and an observant background, and the first European Jew in the modern period to hold a chair in philosophy in a German university, a position that could hardly have been more prestigious as the young German state sought to build its Kultur through the good offices of its state university system. Significantly, in 1880, the Jewish community, confronting the Berlin Anti-Semitism controversy and talk of their exclusion from good standing in the new German polity, Cohen stepped forward to use his powerful institutional location to represent and advocate for them. It was in such a moment that Cohen must have also turned his professional attention to the challenge that a German nation state – and by extension any ethno-state – might pose to a viable Jewish future in the Diaspora. Henceforth, the nature of the state, and its role in exciting solidarity among its citizens became central to Cohen’s philosophical work, eventually yielding a system of philosophy that could aptly be described as a program for perpetual peace. It had much to offer readers interested in politics and political theory but that is not our topic for today. What is remarkable about Cohen’s system, emerging in 1902, viewed by him as an exercise in leadership in his profession, pursued amidst growing anti-semitism, is his tenacity as a Jewish educational leader: in so many ways, Cohen’s system represents an effort to push back hard against Judaism’s detractors, and to make its tradition central not only for Jewish- but for German culture as well. Kant himself had urged his readers to associate Judaism with an undignified dependence on others, rather than a stand-tall-and-be-a-man capacity to “think for one’s self.” Cohen’s system is among other things a rejoinder to Kant, a description of the role Judaism could and should play, its law-oriented character intact, in the construction of the best kind of society.
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I recently had the opportunity to convene a week-long intensive workshop on the Marburg tradition, the inaugural instance of an Academy that I hope will continue long into the future. In attendance were a cohort of smart and highly motivated graduate students, two leading rabbis, and two highly accomplished emeriti from departments of religious studies – Jews, Christians, atheists, and “undeclared” – all of whom were interested to learn what the Marburg tradition had to teach interested parties today.
One of the most worthy moments in this Academy came when Rabbi Avi Winokur, emeritus rabbi of the Society Hill Synagogue, confessed that he did not know that Cohen could really in anyway inform his pulpit, since he, Rabbi Winokur, did not understand neo-Kantian philosophy and was in any case a postmodernist. I invited Rabbi Winokur to address the group on this topic, and open up a public dialogue with me, since I represented the view that one did not need to be a connoisseur of philosophy in order to benefit from a study of the Marburg tradition.
Rabbi Winokur said something like this: As a postmodernist, I don’t really expect to be able to develop a coherent, systematic world view. Our grandparents tried that – think of the Marxism of an entire generation of New York Jews, the hard-scrabble atheism of another cohort, and of the thousands of urban immigrants from Europe of Hannah Arendt’s generation with their Freudian convictions, and their psychoanalysis, and what did it all amount to? A self-refuting modernism, it has all fallen apart. None of it is convincing today.
And Rabbi Winokur continued something like this: As a result of the chastening of the revolt against religion of this earlier generation, we today are ready to read Jewish texts that our grandparents would have abhorred, texts filled with God talk, mystery, otherworldly experience, and we take it seriously. We ought to anyway; and why not? All the old barriers to entry into the world of Jewish theological texts have fallen away and become irrelevant – the systems of thought that once barred the way to Jewish religious life now appear as much based on superstition as the tradition they rejected. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…” (Psalm 118:22)
Here’s how Rabbi Winokur proceeded.
Let me give you an example of a text we as modern people would not have been open to before, but have thankfully become available to us as we’ve let some of our condescension toward “pre-modern” wisdom fall away.
Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Kotzk once asked his disciples, “Where does God live?” The disciples were perplexed. “What does the Rebbe mean: Where does God live? Where does God not live? Surely we have been taught that no place is devoid of His presence [leit atar panui mineih, a ubiquitous principle in Hasidic circles in the 19th century, first appearing in the Zohar]? He fills the heavens and the earth [melo chol ha’aretz kevodo, a very familiar phrase for any person participating in Jewish life, Isaiah 6:3, and incorporated into the synagogue’s central prayer.]” The Rebbe replied, “You have not understood. God lives where we let Him in.”
Now, there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye in this deceptively simple tale. The disciples give an answer that bespeaks conspicuous passivity in their religious lives, whereas the Hasid from Kotzk is called to the opposite pole, to responsibility, even supererogation. The disciples are passive in an obvious fashion. Referencing a kind of benign pantheism or panentheism, they take God’s presence in the here and now as a given, a phenomenon in whose realization they need play no role.
Now I am truly grateful for Rabbi Winokur’s intervention in the Academy, as his subsequent confrontation with the letter and spirit of Marburg was educational for us all. Let me say just a word of appreciation about the text Rabbi Winokur brought before engaging its challenge to Hermann Cohen. Rhetorically, for all of its folkloristic qualities, the text is sly and unassumingly subtle in its argument. In order to signify God’s “taken-for-granted” character attitudinally, the Kotzker places phatic phrases in the mouths of his disciples, sentences that signify “all is as it should be.” Theology belongs in prayer books and mystical texts. No one need exert effort to seek out God in the world, nor find their own words for God’s presence. In reply to an unconventional question from their Rebbe, the disciples rely on convention.
The Rebbe will not have it: you can count on neither God, nor traditional society alone. Ayeka – Where are you? God is in search of you. If you want God to “live” in the world, you will need to get involved with God. The fullness of God’s presence in our world depends on you. “God lives where we let Him in.” You and God-in-the-World are co-related.
In a church or a synagogue, the previous paragraph would make for a fine ending to an uplifting sermon. In a classroom infused with the Marburg tradition, however, it is the opening of an ethical debate. In hearing Rabbi Winokur’s teaching at the inaugural Franz Rosenzweig Academy Summer 2025, I took it as an invitation to such. How so and what happened next?
Without so much as an introduction, I declaimed Psalm 73:28 and Cohen’s commentary, and offered some time for it, a kind of rejoinder to the Kotzker, to sink in.
What is at stake in the confrontation between Kotzk and Marburg? Is it more than a semantic dispute? Truly, yes, a good deal more. For Cohen, eros will always tempt man with precisely the achievement the Kotzker titillates us with, an achievement Christianity claims to have won for all time. The Jew cannot be an accomplice to this, claims Cohen, and behind him looms the prodigious shadow of Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed is entirely dedicated to the proposition that contact will forever elude us, and that Jewish spirituality excels in the spaces where silence about the God-human relationship prevails. “To you silence is praise” (Psalm 65:2). But in what sense is remaining silent about one’s traffic with God a form of Geistlichkeit, of spirituality in today’s parlance? In fact, for Cohen this spirit is the very embodiment of the negative commandment, “Do not make idols to replace me,” and signifies, as called for in the first and second imperatives of the Decalogue, essential practical knowledge of God.
| תהילים ע״ג:כ״ח
וַאֲנִ֤י ׀ קִ֥רְבַ֥ת אֱלֹהִ֗ים לִ֫י־ט֥וֹב שַׁתִּ֤י ׀ בַּאדֹנָ֣י יֱהֹוִ֣ה מַחְסִ֑י…׃ {פ}
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Psalms 73:28
As for me, nearness to God is good; |
For a Marburg neo-Kantian, human beings ought to know they cannot make contact with God, and, God-forbid, God never comes “into” a human being. The first virtue of all religious life for Cohen is humility, and a humble person will never conclude that he has come “face to face” or otherwise internalized Ha’shem. In championing the “nearness to God” as my “[highest] good,” Psalm 73 makes us “aware of [erkennen] our correlative status with God [Korrelation],” a reciprocity between Man and God in which they act on each other, as it were, albeit not as equals. Nearness – never union – to God is the goal. The seeker in the Psalm is for Cohen a kind of character in the tale of Zeno, doggedly making progress toward an infinite quantity he’ll never reach. The sentiment expressed in the Kotzker text, that Man is charged with a quest for God, and that the quest is successful when he lets God in, runs hard up against the core of Marburg spirituality.
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The Marburg tradition begins with Cohen’s tenure in the medieval town that bears its name, but its moment really arrives only with the advent of Franz Rosenzweig onto the scene, and accordingly our Academy featured prominently Rosenzweig reception of Cohen, a brilliant essay published as the introduction to Cohen’s three volume Jüdische Schriften and which thankfully recently became available in an excellent English translation. Of the many important insights offered by Rosenzweig in this essay, I can in this space only deal with one, namely, the irony that Cohen is known for resurrecting interest in the philosophy of Kant, a figure for much of the 19th century overshadowed by the gargantuan output and legacy of Hegel; and yet, in at least two conspicuous respects, Cohen is in fact Hegel’s successor, not Kant’s. For it is Hegel whose footsteps Cohen follows when constructing a “system,” Kant having no such pretensions; and it is Hegel that drives Cohen and an entire generation of critically-minded philosophers who came of age in the 1870s amidst cries of “Back to Kant,” to bring narrative – historical, literary, and personal – into philosophical discussion, something which Kant would never have done. In Cohen’s case, the Jewish narrative to be championed in the wake of this new way of narrative-thinking can be pointed to with the utmost specificity: it is the tale of the suffering servant, found in Isaiah 53.
There is hardly a question of whether this narrative could catch fire in today’s Jewish world: after the Holocaust and now, after October 7th, how would one even begin to pick up Cohen’s argument for the virtues of long-suffering, taking “stripes of love” in order to absolve others of their sins, or as a witness to the power of steadfast faith in God? Rosenzweig, who understood so very well Cohen’s significance, as a person and a professional philosopher, extended Cohen’s new narrative-thinking but in a more promising direction. In a series of luminous texts – about philosophy and equally important about the Hebrew Bible – he invited the contemporary German Jewish community to acknowledge its profound ignorance and emptiness, and to rededicate themselves to an inductive process designed to reclaim its patrimony. The diagnosis and destination were similar to Cohen’s, but the method was inverted. Not to know one’s meta-narrative in advance of study and practice, this was the approach Rosenzweig recommended. Yes, we need to discover the rudiments of our Jewish life, wrote Rosenzweig, but any effort by elites to trot them out in advance for the Jew-in-the-Pew (who has long since stopped going to synagogue) will appear catechistic, and will be unconvincing.
What is the way forward? This is what I learned by working through these issues at the first annual Franz Rosenzweig Academy. If you want to understand Rosenzweig’s response to MacIntyre’s incisive diagnosis of our plight, a diagnosis he fundamentally would have agreed with, you need to read, above all, two contributions, both of which bespeak the logic of the hermeneutical circle: “The Secret of Biblical Narrative Form,” where Rosenzweig directly confronts what we all know to be an obstacle to the recovery of Jewish life in the diaspora, an absence of interest in the biblical text. Why would we place the Torah at the center of our lives? Without an answer that can be verified by individuals in practice, we remain unable to begin the inductive process Rosenzweig recommends. Secondly, Bildung und Kein Ende, translated by Nahum Glatzer as “Toward a Renaissance of Jewish Learning.” There is no point worrying about our culture, spirituality, or if you prefer, our Jewish education, if there is no Jewish person inside us still developing throughout the life-cycle. Our “books only exist to transmit that which has been achieved to those who are still developing.” Rosenzweig, fully cognizant of the wisdom of the hermeneutical circle, urges here, “back to the sources” where sources signify not only our language and literature but also our practices: wake to modeh ani/a gratitude prayer, visit a shiva house, build a succah, and by God, learn a little Hebrew. We can begin to face up to the cataclysm we have endured only once we decide to do and to study, to join and to speak, to narrate and to critique, in short, to be someone in particular – a Jewish someone.
“Everything is connected to everything else in these matters. We have had no teachers because we have had no teaching profession; we have no teaching profession because we have had no scholars; and we have no scholars because we have had no learning. [What we are enduring, we are enduring because] teaching and study have both deteriorated. And they have done so because we lack that which gives animation to both scholarship and education – a Jewish life itself.”
Rosenzweig’s “secret” essay has a secret in it worth discovering, but it is only discoverable by a reader who is simultaneously entering into serious Torah study. Rosenzweg’s Bildung essay harbors a secret as well. Our Bildung – an untranslatable word meaning education, culture, mentorship, and self-cultivation all at once – has had no substance because our Jewish lives have had no ends. This is a vicious circle and we might well remain trapped in it, Rosenzweig and MacIntyre admonish. In After Virtue, the latter famously announced, it is time “to retreat into communities of ethical practice because the barbarians are at our door.” The latter day disciples of Rosenzweig – there are a handful – fear the situation is now even worse: we have become the barbarians, and the hour is late.