How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism by Martin Shuster

Abstract

Reviewed by: How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism by Martin Shuster Kenneth Seeskin Martin Shuster. How to Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2021. 241 pp. Anyone who sets out to write a philosophy of Judaism faces two problems. The first is that essentialist theories which try to identify a small set of commitments with which to characterize all of Jewish existence have fallen into disfavor. The second is that one must balance reliance on classical Jewish sources with appeal to arguments designed to reach a nonsectarian audience. Put too much emphasis on the first, and you will be criticized for being parochial. Put too much on the second, and you will be criticized for not having enough Jewish content. Martin Shuster tries to avoid these pitfalls by beginning with Emmanuel Levinas's observation that Judaism is best understood as a kind of anachronism. By anachronism, Shuster takes Levinas to mean that there is a fundamental dissonance, friction, or conflict between the self and the world. As Levinas says in Difficult Freedom, the distinguishing feature of Jewish existence is its ability to stand apart from history and be its judge. Or, as Shuster says, it is a moral imperative not to feel at home in a world where violence, oppression, or genocide rule the day. Yet, as Shuster hastens to add, the self cannot be completely divorced from the world since the whole question of what counts as a world must be investigated. It is not just a huge collection of things but rather a consideration of how things emerge for us in the first place. To explicate this sense of emergence, Shuster turns to phenomenology as practiced by Husserl and Heidegger. [End Page 456] It will be objected that Levinas's understanding of anachronism is not just a way of characterizing Jewish existence but a critical feature of the human condition in general. As Shuster points out, such a view of the self's relation to the world is a legitimate way of understanding what it means for a person to be free. What, then, is specifically Jewish about this inquiry? Shuster answers by referring to Levinas's quip that we are all "a little bit Jewish." On the issue of essentialism, Shuster admits that what he is offering is a "sort of" essentialism in that it stresses the form rather than the specific content of Judaism. This means that rather than going into Jewish history or liturgy in detail, Shuster rests his case on the alienation we feel toward the world. The best way to understand Shuster's project is to look at the first two chapters. In chapter 1, he takes up Maimonides's understanding of how we are situated in the world and concludes that for him, our primary orientation is that of awe and wonder. Recall that while Moses was not allowed to see the face of God in Exodus 33, he was permitted to see God's back, which Maimonides takes to be everything God created and which the Torah describes as "very good" (tov me'od). This is followed in chapter 2 by a discussion of Theodor Adorno, whose primary orientation is moral outrage. Although the world that God created may invite wonder, the horrors that people inflict on each other invite disgust. Taken together, these approaches tell us how to distance oneself from the world in order to take a reflective stance on it. The next two chapters take us into important themes in Continental philosophy. Chapter 3 deals with the philosophy of history as seen in a comparison between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Chapter 4 takes up the philosophy of language, with a comparison between Levinas and Stanley Cavell. The virtues of this book are not hard to spot. Levinas's insight about the distance from the world runs through a great deal of Jewish history. Abraham was not at home in his father's house, nor was Moses at home in Egypt. Although Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were in their native land, they were profoundly dissatisfied with what they saw. With the destruction of the Second Temple and two millennia...