The Impossible Position of the Jews | Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 2.1

What does it mean to be one of God’s chosen people, and why does the Jewish covenant carry both honor and an impossible burden?

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal explore “Of the Impossible Position of the Jews,” the opening chapter of Part Two of Abigail’s book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Jerry and Abigail discuss the meaning of the Jewish covenant, why the Jews became a “pilot project” in humanity’s relationship with God, and how the Hebrew Bible introduced a vision of history in which human actions are seen, remembered, and judged. Abigail describes God as the divine witness whose presence gives moral significance to what people do in the real world.

Their conversation also examines the burden of being God’s chosen people, the high expectations placed upon the Jews, Jewish self-criticism, supersessionism, moral responsibility, and the difference between aggression and self-defense.

Ultimately, the discussion reaches beyond Jewish history to ask whether every person is called to live in partnership with God, conscious that our actions matter and that our lives unfold under the “white light of truth.”

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Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically.

Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo

Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Transcript

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:00:15,727 ]What kind of a hand have we been dealt as women today, and how can we best play it? It's a large question that's always lurking in the background, and since the answers aren't obvious, I find women's lives to be immediately suspenseful and interesting. Don't you? Wait a minute. Who am I? I'm Abigail L. Rosenthal. Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and while my advice has always been not to take my advice, I do write a weekly blog I call Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column. And so, dear listener, I invite you to pull up a chair at this virtual cafe table, no matter your gender, age, convictions, or style of life. 

Narrator

[ 00:01:32,787 ]Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions. Part two. Married philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal discuss her newest book Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

Narrator

[ 00:01:48,237 ]In this episode, the focus shifts from personal experience to a broader question about history, faith, and responsibility. As Jerry and Abigail discuss the role of the Jewish people, the conversation explores what it means to live in relation to a God who witnesses human life and how that changes the way one understands action, accountability, and history. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:14,647 ]Well, I've been reading on in Confessions of a Young Philosopher, which I'll show up so everybody knows what we're talking about, and it's available already at Amazon. And we'll be talking today about part two.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:33,277 ]We previously talked about the preface and part one. Part one was the story in Paris. Now part two is rather different. It contains elements of your story. There are four sections and so I'll ask you about each little chapter separately. They're kind of four brief chapters in part two. And the first is more of an essay, a reflection called Of the Impossible Position of the Jews.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:03:02,167 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:03,067 ]And I'll read you a little bit of this because that sounds daunting, doesn't it? “Here are the tales of a people who lived in a grounded way, having at least at the best of times God as co-author of their tales. Jews came into theological history because there has to be something actual to remember. A particular people existing under empirical conditions who from their side consent to their partnership with God. Had they not done so, we would only have one more mode of worship and retreat from the world, not an experiment that enters the world as it is. With their covenant, the Jews had driven a stake deep into the shifting sands of time. They gave the world a reference point in time and space from which to start counting the things that count. Let's start counting the things that count.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:16,587 ]And maybe you can just explain what's, you know, this is the situation of the Jews. We haven't gotten yet to the impossibility that you find inherent in it, but this is more like the necessity of it, right? …

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:04:30,997 ]It's well, it's a way of saying the actual religious or theological implications. The where you stand and when you stand there is not something that requires you to regret an idealized past or to await some sublime or sublimated future.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:07,067 ]It's right here, right now, as they say empirical, that is apprehensible with your five senses and whatever other supports for the cognitive, the knowing operation you've got. And something to be grasped in memory, to be discussed as you might tell a friend what happened to you today or yesterday.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:05:37,567 ]And your life on the ground, your un-idealized actual life, your life as is, is to be lived in the context of a relation to a god who sees you. You know, the way we act a little different if somebody can see us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:11,547 ]Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:12,737 ]Well, we we act a little different than we might if God who sees a lot, if not everything, sees us. So, there we are.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:24,797 ]You often speak as God is the divine witness. And that always sounds to me as if, well, you better be on your best behavior.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:34,417 ]You're visible. 

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:37,177 ]If you want to do, you know, they say in the little town where we had a home and in Maine, if you want to do something you don't want everybody to know about, don't do it in Millbridge.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:52,877 ]Right.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:06:54,507 ]'cause they'll be out on the water, those fishermen, and it'll be all over town by noon, you know, by 10:00 a.m. or earlier.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:03,047 ]So in the same very unsentimental way, if you want to do something you don't want God, the great witness, the unsurpassable witness to know about, don't do it because He will.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:23,227 ]God will know.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:25,077 ]Mhm. And sometimes you talk as if this is connected. In fact, I just didn't read the lines, but once human beings wanted to live historically, you say, wouldn't God feel called upon to help?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:38,857 ]So here you often mention history right in the preface.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:43,947 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:44,477 ]And it surprised me because I'd never thought of my own life this way. You wanted to find your place on the big map of history. Here the Jews are sort of starting history, it sounds like.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:07:55,757 ]You know, the history in the, I guess, biblical sense, which is not furnishing new information, a lot of times people don't want to stay on the timeline where one thing happens after another, and sometimes there's a reason to be found in the chronology of what happened, in the motivational chronology of what happened.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:08:30,197 ]There's a, you know, if you're on trial for… to clear your name from some accusation, people will want to know, the jury will want to know, the judge will want to know who did what when. And so, you know, people want to get above it. They want to get into some Empyrean safe space, aureole with pink rays, where it doesn't matter what happened when.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:10,997 ]And often when you do something you wish you hadn't done, you hope it can be squirreled away so that it doesn't come to light. But the whole purport of Hebrew scripture is it's almost staggering in its concern for the moral truth of things, you might say the spiritual truth if that word weren't a bit squirrely.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:09:49,617 ]So, almost the legal truth, the consequential truth, who started it? Some brush fire, did somebody come to light it? You know, when kids fight and the counselor or the teacher wants to stop them, one of them says in excuse, he or she started it. And often it's very frustrating because the grown-ups don't seem to care who started it as long as you stop it.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:10:29,837 ]But I've always found that very frustrating because, you know, hitting back in self-defense is exculpatory, that exonerates the person who's in the fight. So it is important who started it. It's a difference between aggression and self-defense. And so if you want moral clarity, which is to say narrative clarity, if you want to tell the story the way it unfolded in time and space, it's important who started it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:09,707 ]It seems as if you're saying also that God, to have this empirical history, God needed to make a deal with a people, and needed to work with the people. The people are on the ground, I guess, and the covenant did that. And you say, had it been God's idea exclusively, we can imagine a God who's only a witness, you know, and otherwise quite above the world. Had it been God's idea exclusively, you say, it could not have become truly historical.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:11:49,247 ]Yes. And it's very curious. The Jews, you might think, well, who cares? This is just a sort of thought experiment. This is Abigail's hypothesis.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:12:03,857 ]But no, if you're in this theistic tradition where God and the world are sufficiently separate so that God can see the created world, then the question of who enters into this pilot project relationship, let's see what it's like when God is in a datable interaction with an entire people because especially in those days it was clear nobody's autonomous. Everybody's got parents and a clan and enough of a group to fight off the attackers. So it's got to be a people, might be outstanding characters in the people, but it's got to be big enough to be a people. So if God wants a pilot project

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:13:08,407 ]which will show something of the reality of God's role as witness to our chronological comings and goings, our doings, our responsibilities or shirkings, and then He has to have a people, a chosen people, you know, sue me. And they will.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:41,787 ]And that's what leads directly to your first aspect of the predicament of the Jews. You say, the predicament of the Jews has to do with the question of whether God really chose them.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:54,867 ]Yeah. Did God choose the Jews? Because everyone else gets their hackles up, right?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:01,707 Just furious how out of God goes the saying credited to somebody to choose the Jews. Apparently, people don't necessarily agree with God's choice.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:16,947 ]And the Jews… Why did God choose… God could have chosen a lot of people, I guess. Why did God choose the Jews?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:24,677 ]There's a midrash about this that was cited to me one time when I was in Israel. God...

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:14:37,117 ]tried everyone else first. The Jews were Plan Z. He really didn't want to choose the Jews, but nobody… everybody else had sense enough to say thanks but no. So the zany Jews, the addle-pated Jews, the Jews whose heads are screwed on backwards, said yeah, hey, there's an idea. And you know, the rest is history.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:08,227 ]They seemed to have a rather dramatic experience with God. But then there's a second aspect of the predicament you bring up, which is all the misdeeds, the misdeeds of the Jews would look abysmal because God it was felt all round would have to regard them that way. You know, the chosen people dropped the ball.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:35,647 ]And you say there were Jewish rogues, but the dashing rogue is not a Jewish type. So there is no way to glamorize the misdeeds the way there are of some characters of legend and so forth.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:15:51,457 ]Yeah, we don't have Zorro, you know, the Masked Marvel, Mr. Daring Do.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:16:00,227 ]You want to rob the rich to feed the poor, there's a rabbinic bylaw that says you can't do that. That's not right.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:11,807 ]They're chosen and they let's say believe they're chosen, accept being chosen. That's the meaning of the covenant. And in the biblical account, they accept the covenant.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:25,267 ]Though they slip away from it, that's also part of the biblical account.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:30,367 ]It’s not just glory from then on. I think you point out not only do others say, well, then if they're the chosen people, they should be like perfect or semi-perfect, goody-two-shoes all the time.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:44,787 ]And they're not. And so when they're not, it looks just horrible. Other people had no standard, you know, to live up to. So they can just mess around and maybe even do it in a glamorous fashion. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:59,127 ] But the Jew doesn't have that liberty and I think you point out even in their own minds. It makes them more self-critical because they're aware they're dropping the ball and they're not supposed to. A lot of people seem to just waltz on in life, not realizing they're really kind of doing terrible things. But, what does it matter? You know, but the Jew doesn't have that luxury. The Jew has some standard. There are the laws for example, for openers, the Ten Commandments plus the Jewish specific Jewish laws you have there the actual Jewish position, impossible from beginning to end.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:42,587 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:43,947 ]No way to do it right, you might say. No way to not, it's not a win-win.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:50,357 ]Oh no.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:17:51,917 ]It's… there's an honor to it. You know, it's an honorable responsibility. It's a significant responsibility. It gives life significance whether you wish it had that or not. But it's certainly burdensome. People talk psychoanalytically about Jewish self-hatred.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:18:28,627 ]Well, there are psychological syndromes where you internalize other people's nasty opinions about oneself, about yourself. So that's neurotic, I guess, hard to avoid if there are a lot. There are a lot more other people with nasty opinions than there are people like you. And it's not just a psychological distortion or a side effect of persecution.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:03,337 ]There's also simply the high expectations that you have to have, you should have of yourself because in a way everybody should have high expectations. God is watching, He doesn't watch Jews, but you're still the pilot project. So, maybe everybody or a lot of people who are in this theistic worldview think they've supplanted you, they've superseded you. But there's a lurking, unstated suspicion that maybe that supersession thing didn't quite go through.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:19:56,247 ]Maybe the Jews still are chosen, still have the covenant that they're supposed to have forfeited. Indeed, why would anybody have a theology that says Jews have forfeited the covenant unless it bothered them that Jews have the covenant? So, you know, otherwise what's it to you? What, this funny other people have in the way of good or bad relations with their God? But no, this has got to be the cornerstone of Christian theology.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:20:34,717 ]The Jews are out of it. They're no longer in the picture. As you know, if you care that much to make it a foundation principle in your theology, then it worries you, the covenant. Not in an envious sense, worried about the covenant. As my Israeli informant told me in the Midrash, everybody else had too much sense to get into this covenant in the first place, but Jews didn't have self-protective sense. They sort of said, let me at it. This looks interesting.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:21:14,947 ]And therefore, they are under the white light of truth. They're exposed to assessment by the ultimate witness, and they know it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:21:29,927 ]As you just said, I'm thinking about the impact on me. I'm not Jewish, but, divine witness? And as you just said, God isn't just looking at the Jews. God's looking at Jerry too, and my next door neighbor too, and all of us too. And the covenant, of course, is a covenant between God and the Jews, the covenant proper.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:21:56,247 ]But the Ten Commandments are given for all of us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:22:01,107 ]That there are only the special dietary laws and so forth just for Jews, but the Ten Commandments, I take it, is for all of us. Moreover, the very example of Jews living through empirical time, through history, almost creating the idea of history as a meaningful, not just chronology, but as something with a meaning. Well, maybe and where the, in the covenant, the people of Israel are partners with God. Well, shouldn't we all, in our own way, be sort of partners with God?

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:22:39,607 ]I always feel, if I know somebody who's become anti-Jewish, and I know more than one person of whom that can be told, I always feel, no, don't go off on that dead-end street. Don't envy something that for you is almost a myth rather than a reality. Don't waste your substance that way. Don't spill your seed on the ground, as one of the biblical stories says not to do.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:17,727 ]The covenantal, the relation to God as witness is not foreclosed, not in the least foreclosed by the fact that can't be erased that the Jews are a pilot project, a sort of an object lesson, an empirical evidence, collection of evidences, that God acts like that.

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:23:56,647 ]But the lesson of it is that God acts like that. This is a lesson the Jews are an exemplar, a public testimony to that fact. But it's still a fact.

Narrator

[ 00:24:17,977 ]What emerges is a vision of life lived under observation, where what we do is not abstract, but seen, remembered, and counted. See you next episode or sooner at dearabbie-nonadvice.com. 

Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal

[ 00:24:47,777 ]Thanks so much, dear listener. If this added value to your life, I'd be happy if you subscribed. You can find me at www.abigailrosenthal.com. I've written a book called A Good Look at Evil, and if that's not too scary for you, you can buy it on Amazon. Another book is called Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and that's forthcoming soon with illustrations.