Arguing with God, Talmudic discourse, and the Jewish countermodel: implications for the study of argumentation.

• Author: Frank, David A.

God may well slay me; I may have no hope/Yet I will argue my case before God.

Job 13:15 (Miles 324)

[To love the Torah more than God is] protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred that is unmediated by reason.

Emmanuel Levinas (Difficult 144)

The relationship between Judaism and the classical tradition, between Athens and Jerusalem, the God of Israel and the God of the Christians, and Continental and Jewish thought has been and remains argumentative. To some, this relationship rests on a fundamental binary in which Judaism and classical thought are conceptualized as antipodes, mutually exclusive antagonists having little or nothing in common. As Hannah Arendt (Origins) and others have documented, Hitler and the Third Reich transformed this binary into a vicious twentieth-century totalitarian movement that led to the Shoah (Holocaust). The two traditions, others hold, share some beliefs and differ on others, with economic, political, religious and cultural contexts influencing the degree to which difference and commonality are stressed (Levinas, Difficult 275; Handelman, Slayers 4). I believe the two traditions are a philosophical pair (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 415-18). They are antinomies: two coherent and relatively reasonable systems of thought that sometimes contradict.

My hope is that a juxtaposition of classical and, Jewish understandings of argument and argumentation will contribute to the contemporary theory and practice of reasoned discourse. Ultimately, I aspire to show how a philosophy and pedagogy of argumentation, informed by normative Jewish patterns of reasoning and the Jewish-inflected works of Emmanuel Levinas and Chaim Perelman, can help to cultivate a more pluralistic and civil society in the twenty-first century, one based on disagreement expressed through argument rather than on consensus enforced through rules or secured through schism and polarization. I do not suggest that Judaic thought is intrinsically better or is exclusive in its emphasis on pluralism and civility; doing so would betray the very impulse at the heart of this system of thought. Jews can draw from their tradition doctrines of exclusion and incivility. Witness, for example, how the settlers of the occupied West Bank depict Palestinians as modern day "Amaleks" (ancient enemies of the Jews) with the Hebrew Bible (Rowland and Frank 148). This reasoning deviates significantly from that of normative Judaism, which I feature in this study.

For the purposes of contrasting classical and Jewish perspectives on argumentation, I will assume that the two can be distinguished by their respective views on the following philosophical pairs: ontology and speech, the vita contemplativa and vita activa, philosophy and rhetoric, and apodictic logic and argumentative reasoning. Classical, Western, Patristic (Christian), and Enlightenment thought favors the first term over the second in these pairs, often allowing the first term to rule if not obliterate the second (Arendt, Human; Perelman, "Reply"). I follow Chaim Perelman's definition of the classical tradition, with the understanding that there are major exceptions to his generalizations (as there are to my efforts to identify fundamental patterns of Jewish thought):

[T]he tradition I called classical assigns but little importance, as far as achieving science and contemplation goes, either to practice or to the historical and situated aspects of knowledge.... This viewpoint is held in common by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by thinkers such as Descartes.... The tradition I call classical includes all those who believe that by means of self evidence, intuitions--either rational or empirical--or supernatural revelation, the human being is capable of acquiring knowledge of immutable and eternal truths, which are the perfect and imperfectible reflexion of an objective reality. ("Reply" 86) In drawing upon the Jewish countermodel to classical thought and on the works of Levinas and Perelman, we may chose to reverse the terms in the key philosophical pairs by favoring speech over ontology, the vila activa over the vita contemplativa, rhetoric over philosophy, and argumentative reasoning over apodictic logic. Unlike the classical tradition, this reversal of terms in Jewish thought does not mean the elimination of or lack of respect for the second term, as philosophical pairs nest opposites in the same system; philosophy and rhetoric can coexist, apodictic logic and argumentation can complement one another.

These philosophical pairs have had significant consequences for the study and practice of argument in western culture. Bruce Kimball's comprehensive history places oratory and public argument, which were clustered under the art of rhetoric, at the center of ancient Greek and Roman education.

This center was under constant attack by philosophers who, by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, gained control of the newly emergent universities and stressed "speculative thought" over public action, logic and mathematics over the more practical disciplines. As a result, "rhetoric ... dropped from sight or was transformed into a highly formal" art (Kimball 207).

In the 1660s Peter Ramus removed logic and reason from the realm of rhetoric, placing it instead in mathematics and sciences, thereby effectively demoting and degrading rhetoric (Ong). Although Ramus's direct responsibility for the demise of rhetoric is questionable (Conley 142-43), rhetoric did not recover fully until the 1950s when Perelman and the other "new rhetoricians" sought to revive nonformal logic and argumentative reason (Hauser). "The struggle between philosophy and rhetoric in Greece ended in philosophy's conquest" writes Susan Handelman; in contrast "The Rabbis ... never suffered this schism ..." (Slayers 11).

To understand how Jewish thought "never suffered this schism" I will consider the birth of argument in the Hebrew Bible, the development of argumentative reason in the Talmud (which interprets the Hebrew Bible) and, finally, two important statements on Jewish thought and argument, cast in response to the Holocaust. Accordingly, I will begin with three founding illustrations of Jewish argument with God in ancient Judaism as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. These arguments, I believe, establish the fundamental metaphysical, theological, axiological, and epistemological assumptions of Hebraic patterns of thought. Then I will reflect on the form and function of Talmudic argument as it struggled to illuminate this Bible in the Diaspora. In conclusion, I yoke the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas and Chaim Perelman, important twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who provide argumentation theorists with a Jewish-influenced outlook on argumentative reason, one that can complement the more humane impulses of classical thought.

This survey, of course, will operate at the surface and must ignore the great complexity of the Jewish and classical traditions. I will use Robert Alter's new translation of the Torah and the Jewish Study Bible to consider the arguments between and involving God, Abraham, and Moses. I will supplement the Jewish Study Bible with translations by Miles and Mitchell for my analysis of argument in Job. I will follow Miles's lead and treat God as an advocate who develops character and argumentative competence over time in the Hebrew Bible. In addition, unlike the arguments in many Western texts, those in the Hebrew Bible are often indeterminate, confused, and can yield a host of reasonable but incompatible interpretations. In the next section, I begin with the genesis of argument in the Jewish tradition and consider as foundational to Jewish thought the arguments made to God by Abraham, Moses, and Job, and God's responses.

ARGUING WITH GOD

The field of argument has yet to penetrate the fields of Jewish studies or philosophy, although one will find some studies that use our scholarship for purposes of taxonomy and argument classification. Laytner's Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition provides a comprehensive overview of the multiple instances of humans and God involved in argumentation. However, Laytner does not draw from our field to conceptualize and explain the Bible's arguing-with-God pattern. His otherwise superb study collapses the arguing-with-God notion into the "law-court pattern" of prayer. This pattern reveals itself in a four-part structure: God is addressed as judge, the facts of the case are presented to God, a request is made to God on the basis of the facts, and God, if persuaded, responds. This pattern, with the key exception of Job's argument with God, does describe an archetypal pattern of argument between God and humans but, in reducing argument to prayer and the law-court pattern, Laytner often misses the deeper meaning of argument in the Hebrew Bible.

The God of the Hebrew Bible is, by nature, argumentative. Humans, made in God's image, also are argumentative and, in that famous description found in Exodus 32, are described by God as "thick-necked." Agonistic speech is the beginning of Jewish theology. Genesis I has God, in the words of Robert Alter's translation, facing "welter and waste" and then speaking the world and humanity into existence (17). Speaking, or davar, is the touchstone notion in the Hebrew Bible, which Handelman defines as speech and thought, word and thing (Slayers 3-4). In this tradition, there is no distinction between symbol and reality: "for the Hebrew mind, the essential reality of the table was the word of God, not any idea of the table as in the Platonic view" (Handelman, Slayers 32). In contrast, the classical tradition dissociates the word from the thing (the map is not the territory) and privileges what Aristotle termed "First Being" (ousia). True knowledge exists in this tradition beyond the symbol, and Being is grasped through a silent speculation that transcends speech and noise. There is no Hebrew word for Being because "[o]ne...