Print
PDF FormatThis passage makes several striking points. First, Maimonides is convinced that theological error, as well as virulent anti-Semitism, is alive and well among the adherents of Christianity. Yet he does not look out at this world and pronounce, as did Newman, that he sees “no reflection of its Creator.” Even as Maimonides argues that Christianity unfairly distorted Judaism in an idolatrous way, and even as he reflects upon the Christian persecution from which so many Jews suffered, he depicts a humanity that can improve and learn from God’s teaching. Ultimately, in Maimonides’ view, man is capable of making himself worthy of the messianic era.
Moreover, Maimonides hereexpands on the connection between the messianic redemption and the worthiness of those who will be redeemed. In Laws of Repentance, we were informed of the prophets’ promise that the Jewswould repent. Now, however, Maimonides takes up a more universal theme: The preparation for the messiah involves not only Israel, but also the influence of Jewish teaching on humanity. This may not require that all mankind become righteous in the period prior to the end of days. Nevertheless, Maimonides’ vision insists not only that the redemption of Israel is dependent on the repentance of the Jews, but also that humanity, at least partially, will first have to become worthy. In the messianic era, the world will finally, of its own accord, learn to worship God with “one consent,” with no salvational messiah taking its sins upon himself.
This, then, is the theological essence of Judaism: A belief that man has been blessed with the ability to become deserving of redemption, an ability that man’s sinfulness does not foreclose. Reflecting on this contrast between Maimonides and the New Testament, Haifa University philosophy professor Menachem Kellner noted that Paul, “because of his revolutionary, un-Jewish view of human nature as necessarily falling short of the glory of God, was led to ask the wrong question. The question that Jews must ask is: What must we do in order to make the world messiah-worthy?”41 For Christians, the messiah arrived because man could not conquer his own lust. Judaism, in contrast, has always insisted that the redeemer will not arrive until man has learned to rule himself—and that man has the ability to do so.
VI
In light of the foregoing, one may anticipate the following objection: Does not so positive an attitude toward mankind’s abilities lead inevitably to hubris, to the belief that man can achieve greatness without God’s assistance at all? Has not the modern era been plagued by worldviews such as communism and fascism, ideologies that were based precisely on the belief in man’s ability to recreate the world anew? This question was posed by Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the twentieth century’s most influential American theologians, and one of the most eloquent defenders of the concept of original sin:
The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error… continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, … [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.42
There is, Niebuhr argues, a danger in denying original sin, and in taking a positive attitude toward humanity’s redemptive potential. In other words, the Jewish approach to man can be misused. “I have read enough,” writes columnist John Derbyshire, “to know what a stupendous debt our civilization owes to the Jews. At the same time, there are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted in the most fundamental premises of Judaism, has, it seems to me, done great harm in the modern age.”43
The point is a powerful one, and it therefore bears mentioning that Judaism never asserted that man is inherently good. In fact, God’s observation in Genesis that “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” has never been lost upon Jewish thinkers.44 Moreover, unlike Christianity, Judaism never understood Adam as being inherently good before what Christians term the Fall. Rather, human beings were created with the ability to determine their own fate, an ability undiminished by the events in Eden. The Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkovits puts it rightly:
Judaism disagrees with the Christian interpretation of human nature. Man is, of course, not good, but he is capable of goodness. He is a responsible creature…. From the Jewish point of view, Christianity has not discovered an idea of God which is superior to the one taught by Judaism; rather, it has adopted a radically pessimistic evaluation of human nature as compared with the critical optimism of Judaism concerning all creation.45
It is true that Judaism is fundamentally optimistic regarding humanity’s moral capacity, and that it rejects Christianity’s thoroughly negative assessment of it. But this is, as Berkovits points out, a “critical optimism”: Man must have pride in what he can accomplish, but also humility regarding what he must learn in order to do so.
It is for this reason that Judaism has always stressed the importance of law as the medium through which man may improve himself. The Tora represents, on the one hand, the idea that man is beholden to a divinely decreed morality; he cannot seek to redeem the world in whatever fashion he sees fit. On the other hand, the very idea that man is obligated to a complex of laws such as the Tora is itself indicative of God’s faith in man’s potential. Berkovits writes:
The law is a sign of God’s confidence in man. Man can follow it and the responsibility is his.… If, as a result of original sin, man’s nature is corrupt, if he can do no good by his own strength, then of course the rigor of a code of “Thou Shalt” is meaningless. If, however—as Judaism teaches—man has been equipped by the love of God with the potential for continuous moral and spiritual increase, then the law expresses the idea that God does consider and regard man.46
Judaism stresses man’s inherent capacity, but emphasizes that if he is ever to flourish, he must first pay fealty to a transcendent moral order. Indeed, the very sentence that epitomizes the Jewish approach to redemption—“Israel will be redeemed only if it repents”—reflects both our faith in man and our awareness of the need for man to repent. Before redemption becomes a possibility, man must adhere to a rigorous moral standard. Judaism thus rejects both original sin and utopianism. To those who argue that man cannot save himself from sin, Judaism says stoutly: “Israel will be redeemed only if it repents.” And to those who maintain that man can achieve a redemptive end through any means that he sees fit, Judaism responds stubbornly: “Israel will be redeemed only if it repents.”
VII
We have delineated Jews’ and Christians’ differing approaches to redemption, and how these approaches reflect two unique views of humanity. Yet it is not impertinent to ask: Why is this contrast so important? Why is it necessary to highlight the differences between these two faiths? Some would advise instead that in an age of nihilism and secularism, Jews and Christians ought to focus on what they have in common, rather than on what divides them. Jews and Christians certainly share a commitment to something that so many others today deny: The idea that there is a purpose to history, and that we are participants in a history endowed with meaning. As Richard John Neuhaus has put it: “For both Christians and Jews, past and present participate in what Paul calls ‘the fullness of time’…. Jews disagree with Jews and Christians disagree with Christians over the eschatological scenarios and apocalyptic details by which ‘the fullness of time’ will be achieved, but all are agreed that history is not, in the words of the cynic, just one damn thing after another; history will be fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.”47
The answer is that although the two faiths look at history through a religious lens, it must be stressed that the Jewish and Christian perspectives on man’s role in the unfolding of history could not be more different. This difference has, in fact, prevailed since the emergence of Christianity from Judaism two thousand years ago. As the era of the Second Temple drew to a close, Jews began to grapple with the seeming failure of the prophets to predict the future. After all, the Bible had assured Israel of the advent of a kingdom of God here on earth, in which all of mankind would serve God “with one consent.” Yet humanity had not turned to worship the Almighty; evil was rampant on earth, which for Jews was epitomized by Roman rule over the Holy Land. One Jew, a former Pharisee named Paul, proposed a solution: Humanity had not turned to God on its own because it could not; Israel did not earn redemption because it was not able to do so on its own. Redemption was not something that humanity earned; rather, it required that God take the sins of his servants upon himself.
While most Jews rejected Paul’s theology, it is all too often assumed that they did so solely because they rejected Jesus as the messiah. Such a view ignores the far more profound disagreement between the two faiths, a disagreement which persists to this day. The Jews rejected the Pauline view not merely because it conflicted with their view of the messiah—indeed, Jewish history is filled with disputes over proposed messiahs, disputes that did not necessarily bring about the kind of rupture that separated Jews from Christians. Rather, the Jews rejected Christianity because Pauline theology contradicted everything they believed about the relationship between God and man, and about man’s role in history. Evil, according to the Jews, could not be blamed on a cosmic flaw or original sin, for that would deny man’s moral capacity. The messiah had yet to arrive, Judaism insisted, because man had yet to become worthy of his arrival.
Over several centuries, Paul’s perspective triumphed throughout the civilized world. Meanwhile, the Jews went into exile, reviled by much of humanity as a scourge. Yet despite centuries of persecution, despite witnessing the evil that humanity can commit, Jews never lost faith in the possibility that man would choose the good, and thereby earn redemption. If anyone over the centuries should have adopted Paul’s picture of inherent evil and a belief in original sin, it should have been the Jews; yet their faith in man never waned. The story of Jewish history over the last thousand years is, to no small extent, the story of concentration camp prisoners who, as a part of the Yom Kippur prayers, declared that man is “worthy of standing before God”; of Jewish scholars, persecuted by Gentiles, who nonetheless looked for signs that humanity was improving; and of Jews in the ghettos of Europe who, with faith in themselves and in humanity, sat at their seder on Passover night, and waited expectantly for a knock on their door.
Meir Soloveichik is a Contributing Editor of Azure, and scholar in residence at the Jewish Center in New York.
Notes
1. Harvey Cox, Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian’s Journey Through the Jewish Year (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 124.
2. Cox, Common Prayers, p. 125.
3. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 840.
4. Reinhold Niebuhr, Pious and Secular America (New York: Scribner’s, 1958),p. 101.
5. Deuteronomy 30:1-3.
6. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Repentance 7:5.
7. It is often assumed that this issue—whether the Jewish people must deserve redemption in order to be redeemed—is a subject of great debate among the rabbis of the Mishna. Yet a study of the relevant passage reveals this not to be the case. The passage appears in Sanhedrin 97b:
Rav said: All predestined dates [for redemption] have passed, and the matter [now] depends only on repentance and good deeds. But Samuel maintained: it is sufficient for a mourner to keep his [period of] mourning. This matter is disputed by Tannaim: R. Eliezer said: If Israel repents, they will be redeemed; if not, they will not be redeemed. R. Joshua said to him: If they do not repent, will they not be redeemed? Rather, the Holy One, blessed be he, will set up a king over them, whose decrees shall be as cruel as Haman’s, whereby Israel shall engage in repentance, and he will thus bring them back to the right path.
In other words, both mishnaic opinions, as well as both talmudic opinions, assume that the redemption will not take place before repentance occurs; the debate focuses merely on whether there is a guaranteed date by which the Jews, because of historical circumstance, will be motivated to repent, or if, in Rav’s words, “all predestined dates [for redemption] have passed.”
8. Pinchas H. Peli, On Repentance: The Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Jerusalem: Oroth, 1980), pp. 134-135.
9. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Repentance 7:5.
10. Peli, On Repentance, pp. 135-136.
11. Romans 3:23.
12. Romans 9:16.
13. John 3:16.
14. Romans 5:18.
15. I Timothy 2:5.
16. Acts 4:12; “The Gift of Salvation,” First Things (January 1998), pp. 20-23.
17. Miroslav Volf, “The Lamb of God and the Sin of the World,” in Tikva Frymer-Kensky, et al., eds., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Oxford: Westview, 2000), pp. 317-318.
18. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 64.
19. Titus 3:5.
20. Genesis 38:14-18.
21. Genesis 38:26. It is noteworthy that throughout the book of Genesis, it is Joseph, and not Judah, who seems most suited for leadership. He was, after all, the regent of Egypt, the man who saved the world from certain starvation, and who paved the way for the Exodus. Moreover, unlike Judah, Joseph is a paradigm of sexual restraint, resisting the charms of Potifar’s wife. According to the Talmud, Joseph was saved from sin by his desire to honor his father. Yet it is Judah, and not Joseph, from whom, as Jacob himself declares, “the scepter shall not pass.” Genesis 49:10. Joseph was destined to lead in Egypt, but not in Israel. For a man who is pious, perfect, and pure is one whom we may very much admire, but who can by no means inspire those who are not like him. Only one who is flawed, one who is like the subjects he was chosen to rule, can inspire those he leads to overcome their own flaws. Throughout the medieval period, the Jews spoke of a second messiah, a messianic descendant of Joseph who would attempt to redeem Israel and die trying. For Christians, the death of one perfect, pious man is sufficient to provide redemption for all, but Jews insisted that the death of a “messiah of Joseph” would not redeem Israel; rather, it was a son of Judah that would lead Israel—but only after Israel itself repents, and the world is made worthy of the messianic kingdom.
22. “When Israel was staying at Shittim, the people began to have relations with the women of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. Thus Israel tied itself to the Baal of Peor, and the Eternal’s anger was kindled against Israel…. Those that died by the plague were twenty-four thousand….” Numbers 25:1-3, 9.
23. II Samuel 11:2-4, 27.
24. See I Kings 1.
25. Luke 1:26-35, emphasis added.
26. Frederick G. Holweck, “Immaculate Conception,” The Catholic Encyclopedia,www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm.
27. Genesis Rabba 41:4.
28. For this they found support in a verse in Psalms bearing David’s name, declaring that “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Psalms 51:7.
29. Horayot10b.
30. Luke 18:10-14.
31. Martin Luther, The Sermons of Martin Luther (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1983), vol. iv, p. 366.
32. II Samuel 12:7-13.
33. II Samuel 24:17.
34. Catechism, paragraphs 2665-2667.
35. Genesis Rabba 22:6.
36. Ecclesiastes 3:19.
37. Luther, Sermons, p. 366.
38. Edward T. Oakes, “Original Sin: A Disputation,” First Things (November 1998), pp. 16-24.
39. Zephaniah 3:9.
40. Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of Kings 11:4.
41. Menachem Kellner, “How Ought a Jew View Christian Beliefs About Redemption?” in Frymer-Kensky, Christianity in Jewish Terms, p. 275.
42. Oakes, “Original Sin,” pp. 16-24.
43. John Derbyshire, “The Jews and I,” National Review Online, www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire041001.shtml.
44. Genesis 8:21.
45. Eliezer Berkovits, “Law and Morality in Jewish Tradition,” in Eliezer Berkovits, Essential Essays on Judaism, ed. David Hazony (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2002), pp. 350-351.
46. Eliezer Berkovits, Judaism: Fossil or ferment? (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 61.
47. Richard John Neuhaus, “The Idea of Moral Progress,” First Things (August 1999), pp. 21-27.
