Putting God First: Jewish Humanism after Heidegger

by Alick Isaacs

Putting God Jewish Humanism after Heidegger tackles the challenge of maintaining Jewish identity in a world dominated by Western humanism.

It argues that the Holocaust reflects more broadly on contemporary humanism than the Jewish world has ever dared to acknowledge. It advances the view that the establishment of the State of Israel presents a profound historical opportunity to disentangle Jewish thought from elements of the Western humanist tradition that threaten Jewish survival and conceal from view the plausibility of core Jewish ideas and values. The work proposes that a healthy and peaceful relationship between Westernism and a robust Jewish identity can be achieved only by unraveling the two, and it presents a philosophical path for achieving this.

Following a precise analysis of modern and postmodern thought that includes discussions of Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Steiner, Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and others, the centerpiece of the book offers a close reading of the masterwork Being and Time, which Martin Heidegger composed in the period when his thought was gravitating toward his endorsement of Hitler and Nazism. This deep dive into Heidegger’s ontological understanding of how the individual (Dasein) interacts with others in space and time yields a method for articulating the onto-theological meanings of key Jewish concepts such as the Nefesh (psyche), the Neshamah (soul), Tzelem Elohim (human being in God’s image), Am Segulah, (Jewish chosenness), Shabbat, the Land of Israel, and more in texts such as the Tanya, the Sefat Emet, the Nefesh HaChayim, the Kedushat Levi, and in the writings of Rav Kook and the Maharal of Prague. Ultimately the book proposes a disentangled spiritual/political vision for a Jewish state that is characterized by the politics of Tikun Olam.

672 pages, Hardcover

Published May 28, 2023

Reviews

[Kristjan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a struggle for me. To begin with, I am in no way, shape or form a fan of the typically philosophy texts … most of which hurt my head trying to understand the wordy, sesquipedalian attempts to describe such existential basics such as Why is there air? Here my struggle was aggravated by my lack of familiarity with both German and Hebrew, which served to compound the number of words that had no clear meaning or understanding for me. That is a long winded way to say that this text is not very accessible to the average reader … but if you are a glutton for head games, there are some interesting concepts that you still might be able to tease out here.

The book is divided into four (4) parts, each dedicated to some aspect of Jewish life: Segulah (Being Jewish), Galut (Exile), Churban (Destruction) and Tikkun (Rehabilitation) and how they relate to the the humanism of Nazi existentialists Heidegger (I should have down a deeper dive on this guy as existentialism is my least favorite tradition within philosophy in general). The central concept used is Heidegger’s Dasein (Being) and the various ways to interact with this with an apparently focus and the how and why Dasein hides from itself to permit such evils (corruption) as the Holocaust … and why [zionist] Israel provides an opportunity to purge the “Greek” influences of "Survival and System” (Conformity) that were derived from the Age of Enlightenment from their collective spiritual life. In other words, the author wants to rehabilitate God’s role in politics … and more specially, convince western jews that they need to make their own way with Torah and stop relying upon conforming to Western, humanist ideals.

That is not to say that you won’t find gems within … I especially enjoyed the treatment of Haidt and his moral framework … which I believe I understood okay (more or less). The problem for me is the my near total lack of comprehension with respect to the connecting text between them and how all of this relates to “putting God first.” To use Issacs own words to describe the issue: "Meaning derives not from what the words stand for but from the ways in which we use them.” … When after re-reading several sentences that use a considerable number of terms with which I am unfamiliar enough to miss how they related to each other, I still don’t know what he is trying to say … but I think I can still get the overall gist …

Part I: Segulah
Chapter 1: Tikkun Olam from the Perspective of Segulah
Chapter 2: Sparks of Segulah
Chapter 3: The Psychology of the Rational Self

Part II: Galut
Chapter 4: Structures of Concealment
Chapter 5: Deconstruction and De-con-struction
Chapter 6: Deconstruction as Galut
Chapter 7: The Genealogy of Deconstruction as Galut
Chapter 8: De-con-struction and the Edge of Galut

Part III: Churban
Chapter 9: Heidegger’s Nazism and the Methodology of Chruban
Chapter 10: Concern and the Ontological Meaning of Faith
Chapter 11: The Spaciality of Dasein
Chapter 12: Hiding in Society
Chapter 13: Attunement and the Exilic Absorption of Being in the “They”
Chapter 14: The Temporal Analysis of Dasein

Part IV: Tikkun
Chapter 15: Negating Heidegger from the Perspective of Segulah
Chapter 16: Being-toward-Netzach
Chapter 17: The Space/Time on Inner Torah and the Gateways to Netzach
Chapter 18: The Architecture of Segulah

Some of the other points that really got my attention are:

First, contrary to the principles of post-Enlightenment moral philosophy, Haidt’s psychological analysis calls into question the idea that rational thought can and even should dominate human choices. Second, despite the incredible achievements and benefits of modern science, Kahneman’s research forces us to rethink the basic assumption that rational thought can provide the means for making a moral distinction between truth and untruth.

Even if there is no evidence to corroborate the claim, the self-generative power of the rumor itself is enough to substantiate it. It becomes so because everybody says so. The “everybody that says so” is what Heidegger refers to as the non-being of the they-self. It is this non-being that maintains its everydayness through idle talk. Idle talk is how everyday Dasein discloses itself in the there and keeps itself sufficiently busy to distract itself from the ennui that would necessarily set in were life any less turbulent.

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

#PuttingGodFirst #LibraryThing

[Liron · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the deepest visions for the future of world Jewry brought about through the careful study and and revelation of the ontological meaning of Heidegger and the Holocaust. It is an ideal book for a person who grew up in the material/analytic Western philosophical tradition seeking to understand Judaism in terms of its own philosophical foundation, what Alick calls onto-theological. It is not for the faint of heart. The book is sometimes quite dense, especially for those unfamiliar with ontological language but it is worth it to push through those parts and to take your time with it. The book covers a lot of ground. It starts with revealing the cracks in modern thought by reviewing post-modern criticism. It then goes on to essentially teach you Heidegger's Being and Time. Finally, it explains fundamental Jewish concepts in terms of Heidegger's ontological language and shows how Jewish ontology can be understood as the negation of Heidegger's ontology. Finally, the pieces are put together to provide a profound ontological analysis of the contemporary world accounting (for example) for the political polarization between left and right in terms of Dasein's being and to provide a vision for the state for the State of Israel which would enable the peaceful coexistence of religious Judaism within the secular political apparatus.

Some notable quotes to give a taste of the book.
“scientific experimentation and verification established the capacity of human thought to interact reliably or stably with the world outside of human consciousness. It made it possible to focus on the objects of the world and to know about them without obsessing over the ontological being of the knowing subject… Truth no longer corresponded directly to the content of either inner intuition or revelation”

“one of the central arguments of this book…that the Jewish world has misjudged modernity, rests on the idea that Dasein’s ability to go into hiding poses a primary threat to the well-being of the world”

“What we mean by Tikkun after Churban is the potential of bringing spiritual collectivism into the open by connecting the negation of Nazism by Zionism to the negation of Heidegger’s ontology to the onto-theological phenomenology of inner Torah”

“Essentially, BT is an exploration of the Nefesh and its capacity to constrict the depths of its ownmost being to the confines [of] its own being-in-the-world.”