General Discussion: The Tip of the Dreidel

 
rabbi david ingber is doing great work .. way to go !

regarding the notion of renewing religion .. or as rabbi zalman calls it "updating the software of the tradition" .. ken's point says it well

"to think that spirit gave a revelation two thousand years ago and then stopped speaking is just a little goofy"

I love the Jewish people, it seems their ability to persevere in the face of adversity throughout the history of the West has indeed made them a people with singular creative flair and ingenuity... In addition to the Old Testament prophets, just a few of the innovative individuals that the Jewish race has given us include: Jesus, Maimonides, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Husserl, Levi-Strauss, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and Jacques Derrida... which makes me wonder that maybe Hilter was 100% wrong: it is the Jews who are the master race...

Anyway, I want to focus here on the connection between Judaism and the work of Jacques Derrida, arguably the most dangerous thinker in post-modernity – in order to show that Derrida is probably a more integrally orientated writer than many people realize. For my taste Derrida is a modern day Jewish prophet, for he exposes a certain "coefficient of uncertainty" in all of on our favorite texts and institutions, which causes all of us, democrats and republicans, religious and secular, the reasonable and the faithful, considerable discomfort.

For instance, Derrida showed the mythic-membership amber v-meme (pre-modernity) that what is considered to be time-honored “Tradition” was really a historically contingent construction that was a far more complex and polyvalent mix, a more penetrating study of which would turn up a lot more than family values and proof that God was on your side.

He showed the orange v-meme (modernity) that Enlightenment “Reason” was also to a great extent an historical construction, a more honest account of which would have to include a lot more about faith, un-decidability and context.

And he showed the green v-meme (post-modernity) that the destabilizing agency in his work is not a reckless relativism or nihilism but rather an affirmation, a love of what in later years he would call the “un-deconstructible.” For Derrida, the un-deconstructible is both a “singularity” as well as a pure and unconditional affirmation—“viens, oui, oui” (come, yes, yes)— an affirmation of something un-imaginable and inconceivable by our current standards of imagining and conceiving.

So Derrida is post-post-modern (or integral with a hermeneutic of humility) and deconstruction is a lot like what Jews would call the “critique of idols.” Deconstruction is satisfied with nothing because it is waiting for the Messiah, which Derrida translated into the philosophical figure of the “to come” (à venir), the very figure of the future, of hope and expectation... a singularity that simply cannot be foreseen or anticipated, as in the Technium of another recent installment on Integral Life...

Echoing the founding distinction between Judaism and Christianity, Derrida's foremost North American interpreter, John Caputo, notes that: "The coming of the Messiah, the messianic coming, is not to be confounded with his actual presence in recorded history, with occurring in ordinary time, with actually showing up in space and time, which would ruin everything... The Messiah is a very special promise, namely, a promise that would be broken were it to be kept, whose possibility is sustained by its impossibility."

In upholding a thoroughly evolutionary openness to the future, deconstruction’s relentless exposure of the contingency of our beliefs and practices—on democracy, for example—is made in the name of a promise that is astir in them, for example, of a democracy “to come” -  for which every currently existing democracy is a but a faint predecessor state...

And in a similar vein to Nagarjuna’s (Mahayana Buddhist philosopher) dialectical demolition of reason, Derrida also visits upon us the unsettling news of the radical instability of the categories to which we have such ready recourse, which thereby opens the conditions of possibility for a mystical apprehension of un-qualifiable Emptiness (i.e. Consciousness without an object), a realization that confesses our lack of categories with fixed meanings that can be employed to make things make sense. So as a post-post-modern mystic Derrida exposes us to the “secret” that there is no Big Capitalized Secret to which we have been wired up - by scientific reason, religious revelation, or by political ideology. That is not nihilism but a quasi-mystical confession, the beginning of self-knowledge, the onset of wisdom and compassion...

From a different angle, another key to grasping the relationship between deconstruction and Judaism lies in the Jewish mystical view that “reality is a text” and that the world’s most basic elements are the twenty-two letters of the holy tongue, which are in turn comprised of the four letters (YHVH) of the divine name. It is this reliance of Jewish mysticism on texts and hermeneutics that has led some to suggest that Derrida may well have been influenced by the Kabbalah in his formulation that “there is nothing outside the text” as the Book has remained the main metaphor for reality in Derrida’s work, even as it survived Derrida’s attempt to get rid of the mythic God of traditional religion...  

Derrida, then, is in the tradition of the Jewish prophets and the “wandering” Jew who lives for a messianic, redemptive promise, the sole meaning of which is that it is always “yet to come”... In this sense, Derrida has grasped the paradoxical implication of the conventional Jewish messianic belief: the messiah rests on the idea that the messiah cannot come. That is, the possibility of the messiah’s coming is predicated on the impossibility of the messiah’s arrival...

For if the messiah shows up so that we can make everything turn on the 'metaphysics of presence' with a clear-cut distinction between the saint and the heretic, the messiah and the false prophet, the divine and the demonic, then - as soon as you think you have a handle on this distinction - that is the end of ones passion for the impossible, the end of faith, hope and love... Just like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Issac (which is either insanity or the absolute paradox of faith), when we obey the unconditional claim of God on our lives we must give up any ethical justification (Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension), any rational grounds, and any merely human calculation... For just as the absolute religious experience is made possible by this “asymmetrical obedience to an absurd order” (Derrida) - or a space that is otherwise to everything that goes by the name of religion, philosophy and revelation, when you are sure you have the Real one, you can be sure that you’re lost in the wilderness, and so maybe it is better that the Secret remains secret after all - for who can we trust to administer it, interpret it, protect it?? In other words, if the Secret were given, the cure would quickly turn to poison... which probably explains why whenever Jews have thought the Messiah's arrival to be imminent - the results have usually been catastrophic...

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"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

 Formidable text, Corey.  Very well put. 

Yes, this conversation helps clarify some misunderstandings that occured in a recent discussion. God as a "four letter word" (YHVH), God as "Being itself", "The One who was, is, and shall be" is a concept I can work with. 

To lighten up the topic a bit, I found this funny animated dreidel song. Enjoy!