The Philosophy of the Talmud (review)

Abstract

New York: Routledge, 2002. 240 pp. $85.00. After demise of modern paradigms of rationality, can we still speak of rationality of our religion? If so, where is its rationality to be found? Many philosophers of religion today offer either of two contrary answers: either no, because we cannot speak of rationality in any general sense at all, or no, because religion is extra- or sub-rational. According to a romantically orthodox position, Judaism is an extra-rational religion, because our sages deliver a divine message whose authority and meaning cannot be gainsaid by any recognizable standard of rationality. According to a skeptically postmodern position, Judaism is sub-rational, because it is constituted by political, economic, and psycho-social phenomena that cannot be reduced to any sets of rational principles. In The Philosophy of Talmud, Hyam Maccoby introduces an answer that is far more promising than any of these: that, while we may recognize no humanly constructed, universal rationality, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrashic collections display indigenous patterns of rationality. This is a rationality that emerges from out of rabbinic argumentation itself, rather than as judged by criteria imported from classical Greece, 19(th) century Germany, or other, contrasting sources of rational practice. These various rationalities are not merely self-enclosed, however; rabbinic thinking can import patterns of rationality learned from Greece, and vice-versa. Maccoby therefore calls his study of rabbinic rationality the philosophy of Talmud: it is philosophy, way Greek thinking is philosophy, except that its logic and conditions of truth and falsity may differ from those of Greek philosophy. One of Great Britain's most active author/editors in rabbinic thought, Maccoby writes many books, and he tends, in each one, to offer only one facet of a larger project. The same is true of this book. Here, he collects classes of rabbinic sugyot that illustrate various patterns of rabbinic rationality. Learning these patterns, a student of Talmud should be prepared to debate major philosophic issues of our day from out of a distinctly rabbinic perspective. Within limits of this book, however, Maccoby does not also illustrate what such a student's philosophic approach would look like in any significant detail. For most part, moreover, he does not attempt to justify his manner of collecting those classes of sugyot within terms of recent Talmudic scholarship. These are not oversights of Maccoby's, however; he has simply chosen to offer just this much within this book, inviting readers to wait for next book to see how his Talmudic readings engage philosophic debates of day. Within these limits, we should be encouraged by what Maccoby has begun. In Michael Wyschogrod's felicitous words (in The Body of Faith, 1996), we should no longer locate rationality in artificial coherence of vast systems of thought but locate it, instead, in brightness that graces those of our everyday judgments that hit mark, or that enhance virtues we associate, in rabbinic terms, with light of Torah. …