Abstract
Michael Fishbane’s book, Fragile Finitude, is a sequel of sorts to the author’s Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008. The title of the longest chapter of the earlier book, “A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology,” is the subtitle of the book under review. Like that chapter, Fragile Finitude structures its exposition of Jewish theology around four “senses” of scripture in the Jewish tradition, or four ways of reading scripture: peshat (the “plain” sense); derash (“inquiry,” i.e., classical rabbinic interpretation from late antiquity); remez (“hint,” or medieval exegesis centered on perfection of the self, especially in an allegorical and/or philosophical vein); and sod (“secret,” that is, mystical or kabbalistic interpretation). The same fourfold approach frames F.’s magnificent commentary on the Song of Songs for the JPS Bible Commentary series, published in 2015.
There is an important shift in emphasis from the chapter in Sacred Attunement to Fragile Finitude. The former focuses on the ethics, and by extension the theologies, of reading. F. is interested there in the ways in which each mode of reading is rooted in, and thus enables a reader to cultivate a certain understanding of and relation to, the world, and thus also God. The chapter includes careful description of what each exegetical method looks like. The very end of the chapter, abstracting from such description, offers an interpretation of the four exegetical methods as ciphers for distinctive and complementary theological postures. Fragile Finitude can be understood as a revision and expansion of this conclusion, and the reader who would wish to learn more about the reading methods themselves, and the ways in which they implicitly inform F.’s treatment of them in the current book, would do well to begin with the chapter in Sacred Attunement.
In Fragile Finitude, the mode of peshat is bound up with attentiveness to the presence of God as it pierces, caesura-like, the “fugue state” of mundane reality. Derash processes this attentiveness through conventional structures: language, theological categories, ritual, and law. The shift from peshat to derash thus involves a movement from the individual to the community. Remez returns us to the individual, not, as with peshat, in a phenomenological mode, as the locus of experience, but in a classical philosophical mode, as a site for self-cultivation. The fourth sense, sod, offering “the most expansive vistas of theological meaning and significance” (131), dissolves the self by exposing the underlying unity of all things in God. The tradition of the four senses of scripture implicitly orders them as a progression toward ever greater insight, and as the last quotation suggests, F. preserves this implication.
Even as the book leaves aside detailed exposition of the traditional reading practices, it remains intensely committed to the significance of hermeneutics, or scriptural interpretation, and Fragile Finitude is replete with strong readings of scripture, some from the tradition, especially from Hasidic sources, and some of the author’s own. The extended reflection (106–20) on the “remembrances”—verses from the Pentateuch that enjoin commemoration, collected together in a liturgy that some recite after the daily morning prayer—stands out as a tour de force that rewards rereading.
And yet there is a curious indeterminacy in this reflection, and in other penetrating readings that enrich the book. One might take or leave many of them, because the essential commitments of F.’s hermeneutic theology are relatively abstract and formal: to scripture; to reading; to attentiveness; to being in the world, with others and with God. The theology is architectonic, as in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, but it produces only a loose blueprint. F. does not want to insist on a particular way of constructing a life with God from these plans: how to furnish the rooms, how to allocate one’s time among them, and so forth. His own predilection, expressed in his readings of scripture, appears to lie with the modes of exegesis and of being that are centered on the individual, as such and in relation to the world in the widest sense; the book seems least animated when it takes up the theology of life in a community (one element of the second exegetical mode, derash). F. does not, however, insist on such a preference; his house has many rooms.
But the demotion of community is bound up with one very substantial exclusionary move: The book’s theology does not have room for many of what we may call scripture’s metaphysical claims, most importantly the claim that Israel is God’s people. For F., “it must never be forgotten that theology itself, as a ‘discourse about God,’ has the primary duty of serving God alone—not some particular religious formulation or tradition” (Sacred Attunement, 39). Even a specifically Jewish theology, in F.’s view, cannot incorporate, in any literal sense, the traditional notion of Jewish chosenness, or the idea that the Torah or the land of Israel has unique significance. But one who wishes to hold on to such notions will nevertheless find much of value in this learned and often beautiful book.