Jewish Death in Jewish Time: The Ontological Shift Required to Understand Torah Judaism’s Indigenous Approach to Historical Trauma and Historical Memory

Abstract

Scholars regularly make the mistake of applying critical analysis to religious traditions without a sensibility that they are often describing one ontology through the lens of another. Just as cultural anthropology attempts to understand indigenous traditions by respecting their unique worldview and minimizing the foreign a priori of the ethnographer, critical scholars of religion need to be mindful of this unconscious bias when studying religious communities from ‘outside’. The traditional Jewish experience of death, mourning and historical trauma is a case in point. As such, this essay considers the indigenous ontological a priori of Torah Judaism as contrasted with the a priori of ‘Enlightenment’ as understood by Foucault. It then applies this hermeneutic to ‘Jewish death in Jewish time’.