The Argumentative Jew
To the women and men of Kesher Israel
The most common understanding of
disagreement, in the private sphere and the public one, is that it
represents a failure. A single understanding, a shared understanding, is
preferred to a multiplicity of understandings, which is rejected as an
epistemologically fallen condition. We begin with many, but we aspire to
one: The grip of the holistic fantasy is profound. Disagreement is a
kind of fragmentation, but we wish to be made whole. The many factors
that are responsible for intellectual disharmony—rhetorical, conceptual,
psychological, cultural, political—are regarded pejoratively as
impediments that need to be refuted or discarded, as obstacles in the
way of a higher arrangement. That higher arrangement is consensus. Who
does not prefer consensus to conflict? Is quarrelsomeness not a vice?
Surely a quarrel is a kind of conflict, a state of affairs in need of
correction. A quarrel demands resolution and reconciliation. To see
things differently is to surrender to difference, whereas sameness or
similarity of perspective brings us closer and even unites us. The dream
of intellectual concord is also a dream of social concord. The
abolition of disagreement, when it is not coerced, is a promise of union
and peace.
Recently I came upon a fine example of this consensualist mentality.
In 1943, not long before she starved herself to death in England in
solidarity with the people of occupied France, Simone Weil wrote a short
essay called “On the Abolition of All Political Parties.” It was
published posthumously in 1950, and it has recently appeared in an
English translation by my late friend Simon Leys. Weil begins her essay
with an endorsement of Rousseau and proceeds to develop her own
alarmingly Rousseauist vision of perfect society-wide agreement.
“Rousseau took as his starting point two premises,” she writes. “First,
reason perceives and chooses what is just and innocently useful, whereas
every crime is motivated by passion. Second, reason is identical in all
men, whereas their passions most often differ. From this it follows
that if, on a common issue, everyone thinks alone and then expresses his
opinion, and if afterwards all these opinions are collected and
compared, most probably they will coincide inasmuch as they are just and
reasonable, whereas they will differ inasmuch as they are unjust or
mistaken. It is only this type of reasoning that allows one to conclude
that a universal consensus may point at the truth. Truth is one.” Weil
describes these assumptions as the basis of “our republican ideal.”
There exists, of course, another republican ideal, which recognizes the
inevitability, and even the nobility, of “faction” and chooses
compromise and respect over conformity and massified certitude. Reading
Weil, one yearns for Madison. Weil’s remarks also nicely illustrate the
way in which a horror of disagreement may culminate in a philosophical
monism. It is hard to stay away from metaphysics when one’s subject is
truth.
But there exists another school of thought about these questions. It
may be found in ancient and early modern India, as Amartya Sen showed in
his great essay “The Argumentative Indian,” but its most sophisticated
and most robust home is in Judaism, from its beginnings in ancient
rabbinical literature all the way to the present day. The Jewish
tradition—the tradition of the argumentative Jew—is a long and great
challenge to the consensualist mentality. It repudiates, sometimes in
theory, always in practice, the cult of unanimity. It displays an almost
erotic relationship to controversy. (Like all erotic relationships,
this one sometimes devolves into decadence, which in the early modern
centuries was known as pilpul.) In the Jewish tradition,
disagreement is not only real, it is also ideal—at least in the
unredeemed world, which is the only world we know. In its millennia of
disputations, even mistaken opinions are not without legitimacy.
Minority opinions are not obsolete opinions: They are preserved
alongside majority opinions because their reasoning may one day be
useful again. Arguments that are adjudicated practically remain alive
theoretically. Indeed, both sides of a particular argument may be “the
words of the living God.”
The full text of the talmudic passage is this: “Rabbi Aba said in the
name of Samuel: For three years the house of Shammai and the house of
Hillel disagreed. The former declared: the law should be made according
to us, and the latter declared, the law should be made according to us.
Then a heavenly voice proclaimed: These opinions and those opinions are
the words of the living God, and the law is according to the house of
Hillel.” The passage seems to shut down the very debates that it has
just sacralized—except that the establishment of the law does not
dissolve the legal discussion. The argument survives the decision, which
is made among the elders according to majority rule, so that the
community may function. But the argument was never itself purely
functional. It was, instead, intrinsically valuable. (A practical spirit
motivated also the medieval and early modern enterprise of legal
codification, but insofar as the codes represented a suspension of the
work of analysis, a claim to intellectual closure, they were ferociously
opposed.)
This same epic quarrel between the house of Hillel and the house of
Shammai is described in a mishnah as “a quarrel for the sake of heaven
[which therefore] will endure.” The endurance of a quarrel: What sort of
aspiration is this? It is the aspiration of a mentality that is
genuinely rigorous and genuinely pluralistic. The tradition of
commentary on that mishnah is a kind of history of Jewish views on
intellectual inquiry—from the Levant in the 15th century, for example,
there is Ovadiah Bertinoro’s remark that “only by means of debate will
truth be established,” an uncanny anticipation of Milton and Mill, and
from Hungary in the 19th century there is the gloss by Rabbi Moses
Schick, who himself had a role in a community-wide schism, that
“sometimes it is our duty to make a quarrel . . . For the sake of truth
we are not only permitted to make a quarrel, we are obligated to make a
quarrel.”
And argument is emphatically man-made. In the talmudic passage cited
here, we witness a moment of high religious drama: the abdication of the
divine from the human quest for truth. The heavenly voice announces the
permanent validity of both sides of an argument and leaves the labor of
clarification in our hands. The sacralization of disagreement in
Judaism is accompanied by the renunciation of any heavenly role in the
attempt to verify legal and philosophical propositions. There is even a
midrash that imagines God himself sowing the Torah with perplexities, by
imbuing each of his edicts with “49 reasons to rule ‘pure’ and 49
reasons to rule ‘impure.” We are not given the answers. We must find
them. At least intellectually, this God has absconded.
“It is not in the heavens”: The scriptural phrase became a recurring
refrain. Disputation is an entirely immanent activity. This is an
extraordinary expression of confidence in reason and in the mortals who
engage in reason. In this practice of earthly self-
reliance, thought is preferred to epiphany, and revelation is a thing of the past. (There are a few works of medieval Jewish jurisprudence that claim to derive their rulings in one way or another “from the heavens,” but a close inspection of their conclusions shows that their claim to a transcendent origin of human opinion is a theological and literary conceit.) Since the end of prophecy and divination, ideas and practices must be validated by principles and by reasoning from principles. Certain problems, to be sure, will not find their solutions, as the ancient rabbis said, until the arrival of Elijah, that is, until the advent of the messiah; but that is really a mythological way of saying that those problems are, to borrow the old phrase of a British philosopher, essentially contested. We are to learn to live with disagreement and not to think less of it because it cannot be miraculously consummated.
reliance, thought is preferred to epiphany, and revelation is a thing of the past. (There are a few works of medieval Jewish jurisprudence that claim to derive their rulings in one way or another “from the heavens,” but a close inspection of their conclusions shows that their claim to a transcendent origin of human opinion is a theological and literary conceit.) Since the end of prophecy and divination, ideas and practices must be validated by principles and by reasoning from principles. Certain problems, to be sure, will not find their solutions, as the ancient rabbis said, until the arrival of Elijah, that is, until the advent of the messiah; but that is really a mythological way of saying that those problems are, to borrow the old phrase of a British philosopher, essentially contested. We are to learn to live with disagreement and not to think less of it because it cannot be miraculously consummated.
Learning to live with disagreement, moreover, is a way of learning to live with each other. Etymologically, the term machloket refers to separation and division, but the culture of machloket
is not in itself separatist and divisive. This is in part because all
the parties to any particular disagreement share certain metaphysical
and historical assumptions about the foundations of their identity. But
beyond those general axioms, the really remarkable feature of the Jewish
tradition of machloket is that it is itself a basis for
community. The community of contention, the contentious community, is
not as paradoxical as it may seem. The parties to a disagreement are
members of the disagreement; they belong to the group that wrestles
together with the same perplexity, and they wrestle together for the
sake of the larger community to which they all belong, the community
that needs to know how Jews should behave and live. A quarrel is
evidence of coexistence. The rabbinical tradition is full of rival
authorities and rival schools—it owes a lot of its excitement to those
grand and even bitter altercations—but the rivalries play themselves out
within the unified framework of the shared search. There is dissent
without dissension, and yet things change. Intellectual discord, if it
is practiced with methodological integrity, is compatible with social
peace.
The absence of the God’s-eye view of an issue, and the consequent
recognition of the limitations of all individual perspectives, has a
humbling effect. A universe of controversy is a universe of tolerance. Machloket
is not schism, and the difference is crucial. Though disagreement may
lead to sectarianism, most disagreement in the history of this
ever-thinking people has been contained, and has been brilliantly
developed, on this side of sectarianism. I do not mean to exaggerate the
loveliness of the system: There has been heresy and there has been
heterodoxy, and Jews have persecuted other Jews for their opinions.
Intellectual integrity is always a risk to community, because some minds
may think themselves, rightly or wrongly, beyond the limits. But the
tradition of Jewish debate, especially legal debate, is striking for how
rich it remains within the limits. Whether or not heresy and heterodoxy
are forms of heroism, it is important to acknowledge that fidelity, and
the internal growth of a tradition inside its carefully examined
boundaries, may also be heroic.
Thus described, the Jewish model of quarrelsome unity may be hard to
grasp. Can a religious way of life really endure such a high degree of
inconclusiveness? Or put differently, can pluralism comport with
absolutes? The conventional answer, in our time, is that it cannot, and
so it must be something else. It must be perspectivism, or pragmatism,
or relativism. The contemporary discussion of these questions by Jewish
commentators has been rather slavishly dominated by the anti-rationalist
clichés of contemporary philosophy. My own view is that any attempt to
relieve the argumentative tradition of its rationality; or to seek a
release from its dissonance, by denying either its commitment to truth
or its commitment to many-mindedness; or to reduce rational argument to
the emotional expression of an individual or a group—all this represents
both a misunderstanding of the achievement of the Jewish style of
controversy and an impoverishment of it. Reason is often depicted as
repressive and orthodox, but it is in fact open-ended and infinitely
patient, which is why thinkers in our times are still arguing with
thinkers in ancient times and building upon their work. The enterprise
of argumentation is ancient but not antiquated.
Truth may be one, as Weil said—but even so, what is it? We live in
the arduous interim between the belief in truth and the discovery of
truth. It is never too late for a rational objection or a logical
advance. The contemporary anxiety about reason is misplaced: Emotion is
private and opaque, but reason is public and lucid. This is proven on
every serious Jewish bookshelf. Judaism evolved and progressed and
flourished as an alliance of the heart and the head. The heart alone
would not have sufficed, certainly not for a tradition whose essential
act is the act of interpretation.
