Judaism, Jewry, and Jews

The statement “Judaism is a people, not (just) a religion” seems like an important truth, but it is not even logically coherent. “Jewry is a people” is true and coherent, but banal. Here is how to capture both the truth and the importance without losing coherence.

GS on his blog OrthoModerndox posted an entry today with a title well calcluated to attract my interest: “Judaism as a nation, not [just] a religion” (the square brackets are part of the title). In this piece, GS offers some thoughts provoked by his reading The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel by Michael Wyschogrod. “One of his main themes,” he says of Wyschogrod, “is that Judaism is a people / nation rather than [just] a religion” (the square brackets are, again, in the original text). This is a topic on which I have written on this blog before (in “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish” and “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity”), and I’m not sure that there is anything new in what I have to say about it here. But that one sentence raised some thoughts in my mind of which I make an occasion for reviving my own blog. The new year (5771) seems like as good a time as any for doing such a thing.

Now, I don’t doubt that GS, like most bloggers, and in sharp contrast to me, writes quickly, without spending a lot of time recomposing his sentences, as I invariably do. The typing error in his first sentence (“intersting” for “interesting”) is sufficient evidence of that. Nonetheless, I am going to pick on the statement that I quoted from him, for the following reasons.

First, it is a very difficult matter to state the relation among the concepts of Judaism, religion, and peoplehood. One can’t just make an incoherent statement on that point and then say, “Well, you know what I mean.” If you can’t say what you mean, then you can’t assume that your audience knows what you mean, because you have not shown that you know what you mean.

Second, the statement “Judaism is a people,” given the now current meaning of the word “Judaism” (more on that qualification in a moment), is not a coherent one. The predicate term “people” and the subject term “Judaism” do not belong to the same logical category. Of course Judaism is a religion: that is what we have the word “Judaism” for, as contrasted with terms like “Jew,” “Jewry,” and “Jewish people” (as a singular or plural noun). To say “Judaism is a people” is as senseless as saying “Five is a color.”

Now I have to admit one qualification here. I recently learned from the Oxford English Dictionary that the term “Judaism” was at one time used in a sense corresponding to that of judaismus in medieval Latin, namely to mean “Jewry.” Thus, a source from 1884 (the latest example of this usage provided) says: “The revenue of the Judaism, as it was termed, was managed by a separate branch of the exchequer, termed the exchequer of the Jews.”

If GS meant the term in this sense, then his statement is not logically incoherent at all. It was much as if he had written: “Jewry is a people,” “The Jewish people is a people.” But, for one thing, I find it unlikely that he had in mind any such rare and antiquated sense of the word “Judaism.” For another, if he did mean this, then his statement is banal and uninteresting. I prefer to assume that he was trying to say something both true and interesting.

I think that what GS was trying to say can be most exactly expressed thus: “The status of being a Jew is essentially a matter of belonging to the Jewish people rather than one of professing or practicing the Jewish religion.” This, I think, is an interesting statement, and a true one as well (subject, of course, to questions about the meaning of the crucial adverb “essentially”: more on that in a moment).

But the statement contains at least the suggestion of a falsehood. For it suggests that the connection of being a Jew with the Jewish religion is accidental: as if “Judaism” were the name of a religion that just happened to be practiced by a large portion of the Jewish population—as, e.g., Armenian Orthodox Christianity is practiced by a large portion of the world’s Armenians, but is not what defines them as Armenians.

As a matter of history, such a suggestion (concerning the Jewish people) is obviously false. The Jewish people have, through most of their history, defined themselves as the people of the Torah. In some sense, we still are so defined: that is, we are definable as the descendants of the people of the Torah, even if we are not all practitioners or believers of the Torah. Such a definition, whatever exactly it means, clearly depends religious terms.

The slippage between “Jew” and “adherent (by profession or observance) of Judaism” comes about because, according to the Torah that defines the Jewish people collectively, the individual Jew is defined as such by his or her birth. In terms of the category of “religion,” this means that it is a religious practice that defines that status, though it defines it in terms of birth rather than in terms of belief or observance.

So those who consider themselves Jews in something more than a purely ethnic sense but who cannot accept Jewish (or any) religious beliefs have the problem that their self-identification as Jews presupposes a religious practice whose fundamental beliefs they cannot accept. They are—that is, we are—in an inherently uncomfortable position.

This discomfort does not arise merely for those who are, like GS, “Orthoprax,” that is, observant of the ritual practices of Orthodox Judaism while rejecting most of the beliefs that support that practice (such as “TMS,” the doctrine that the whole Torah, oral and written, was given to the Israelites through Moses at Mount Sinai). It arises even for the “three-day-a-year” Jew, whose observances do not extend beyond partaking of a seder at Passover and going to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (something that I have bound myself to do every year by accepting a paid gig in the choir of a Reform temple), as long as he or she does so under some sense, however vague and unformulated, of an obligation other than an immediate social one. It applies to the unbelieving Jew who refrains from eating pork and shellfish for reasons that cannot be attributed to personal distaste or matters of health (false rationalizations notwithstanding). The unbelieving Jew who considers himself or herself under so much as one obligation—one mitzvah—merely because he or she is a Jew has this problem.

The Natural versus the Supernatural

Once you look into the meaning of “supernatural,” it becomes harder to sustain a distinction between “pure” and “mixed” supernatural beliefs. So I give up that distinction. Still, it is the natural rather than the supernatural beliefs that do most to bring religion into conflict with scientific knowledge.

Francisco Zurbarán, The Apotheosis of Thomas Aquinas

In a previous entry (“Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs,” May 20, 2010), I proposed a distinction among three kinds of religious beliefs, which I termed “natural,” “supernatural,” and “mixed,” i.e., beliefs concerning purely natural matters (e.g., that Moses wrote down the words of the Torah in the Sinai desert), beliefs concerning purely supernatural matters (e.g., that God exists), and beliefs concerning matters with both natural and supernatural elements (e.g., that the Torah was dictated to Moses by God). I did not, however, offer any explanation of the terms “natural” and “supernatural,” a deficiency which I would now like to make good.

As a matter of structure and derivation, “supernatural” signifies what is above nature, or what exceeds it. “Above” or “exceeding,” though, in what sense? I will answer this question by a brief excursion into the history of words and concepts. Anyone without the patience for such topics may skip the next section.

* * *

According to the  Oxford English Dictionary, the medieval Latin antecedent of “supernatural,” supernātūrālis, comes from the work of Thomas Aquinas. In a scholarly paper (reference below), Father Andrew Murray analyzes the several contexts in which Thomas uses the term “supernatural”: e.g., the supernatural change of consecrated bread into the body of Christ, the supernatural gift of divine grace, the supernatural good of eternal life, the supernatural knowledge that is prophecy, the supernatural effects that are miracles, and so on. He sums up his findings thus:

What then, does Thomas mean by “supernatural”? The term is used only as an adjective or infrequently as an adverb and then by way of distinction. It means that some power or effect or agent or gift or end or some such is not natural and that it is outside the order of nature on account of direct divine intervention. Thomas is clear, however, that God does not normally intervene in the workings of nature[,] so that the supernatural is not a kind of explanation for things we do not understand. Supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles occur only for the sake of salvation and matters such as the nature of Christ and the sacraments are part of the order of salvation, the free gift of a personal God, who is distinct from the created universe. (5)

So certain things are termed “supernatural” to indicate that they exceed what is possible in nature or by nature alone. Supernatural powers, acts, or occurrences may be deviations from the normal course of nature, as in the case of miracles; or they may be indistinguishable from natural occurrences, as in the case of the Eucharist, in which the body of Christ is indistinguishable from an ordinary wafer. What makes such occurrences supernatural is not that they appear to be contrary to the order of nature, for they may not so appear, i.e., the divine element may be indiscernible to our observation. What matters is that they come from a source superior to nature, namely God.

* * *

The supernatural, then, at least in the original sense of the term, is not necessarily something contrary to nature (though it may be) but rather something belonging to an order superior to nature. It does not merely indicate something that is unexplained or inexplicable in natural terms. Rather, the term implies an order superior to nature, such as a divine order: it does not take its meaning merely from the negation of the word “natural.”

This may be a narrower understanding of the term than is common today. The Wikipedia article “Supernatural” says, at least at the moment of my consulting it, that “the term ‘supernatural’ is often used interchangeably with ‘paranormal’ or ‘preternatural’.” Whatever the sense of the term in popular usage today, Saint Thomas’s sense is more pertinent to the application of the term to religious belief. Religious beliefs are supernatural in the sense with which I am concerned when they pertain to something belonging to an order superior to that of nature, specifically a divine one.

So understood, supernatural religious beliefs are not necessarily in conflict with what we know of nature. In fact, one might argue that purely supernatural beliefs cannot be in conflict with what we know of nature, because they simply do not concern anything in nature. But such a position faces difficulties. Consider, for example, the belief that the natural world is the creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving supreme being—in a word, God. This seems to be a fine example of a purely supernatural belief. But, as philosophers and theologians have recognized for centuries, it is not obvious how this belief is to be squared with the fact that all sorts of evils befall all sentient things, not least of all human beings, including ones of whom it seems inconceivable that they can have done anything to deserve their ill fortune (small children afflicted with terrible and fatal diseases, for instance). Whether or not there is a way to reconcile the existence of God, so conceived, with the existence of evil in the world, there is plainly at least prima facie a conflict between the belief in the former and the recognition of the latter, which suggests that purely supernatural beliefs can in fact conflict with natural facts.

There seem to me to be two possible ways to respond to this difficulty. One would be to restrict the term “purely supernatural belief” to beliefs which have no possible bearing on natural facts. This would preserve the thesis of non-conflict between supernatural beliefs and natural facts, but at the risk of restricting the application of the term “purely supernatural belief” so narrowly as to make it virtually if not actually useless. The other option would be to abandon or modify the threefold scheme that I originally proposed. I am inclined to take the latter way. I will give up the term “purely supernatural belief” and instead simply use the term “supernatural belief” for any belief that has a supernatural element, regardless of whether it also has bearing on natural facts. Instead of a threefold division, then, I offer a merely twofold one comprising natural and supernatural religious beliefs.

I think, though, that I can hold on to my main former contention, namely that natural religious beliefs do more than supernatural ones to bring religious beliefs into conflict with scientific knowledge. What troubles me now is that the thesis seems in danger of collapsing into the virtually trivial assertion that religious belief conflicts with knowledge of nature only when it bears on nature. But I don’t think that it reduces to that. The non-trivial point remains that a large part of religious belief, and specifically a large part of traditional Jewish belief, consists of beliefs about natural fact (by which term I mean to include, as I said before, facts of human history), and that it is these beliefs that bring it into conflict with scientific (including historical) knowledge.

REFERENCE

Andrew Murray, “The Spiritual and the Supernatural according to Thomas Aquinas,” paper delivered at the Biennial Conference in Philosophy, Religion and Culture, “The Supernatural,” Catholic Institute of Sydney, 3–4 October 1998 (PDF file).

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What Beliefs Are Jewish Beliefs?

Certainly some beliefs are Jewish beliefs; only it is difficult to say which ones. If the question is whether a belief is an Orthodox Jewish belief, the question can be easier to settle; but not always.

Rabbi Louis Jacobs (1920–2006)

Shilton HaSechel posted a comment on my previous entry, “Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs,” which has given me occasion to rethink some of what I wrote and to add a few further thoughts. Shilton writes:

After all the denial of Mosaic authorship although dear to many actually is not necessary to Judaism.

I concede the point. I probably ought to have specified “Orthodox Judaism” at certain points in my article, though even then I am not sure if that would have been an adequate qualification, as there may be a diversity of views on the pertinent points even among Orthodox rabbis, let alone Orthodox Jews (not a term capable of sharp definition) in general.

While I continue to hold that there is such a thing as “Jewish beliefs,” or beliefs characteristic of Judaism, it is no easy matter to say what those beliefs are and in exactly what sense they are “Jewish” or “characteristic of Judaism,” without making arbitrary or parochial assumptions. So, for instance, the belief that the Torah was given litteratim to Moses at Mount Sinai is certainly a Jewish belief in some sense: it is propounded in the Talmud; it has been maintained by rabbis for hundreds of years; it is still maintained by (most? many? some?) Orthodox rabbis. But, also obviously, that belief is not held by all, or even by most, Jews, and probably not even by most rabbis.

Continuing with Shilton’s comment:

Even Orthodox Judaism could do away with belief in Biblical history and still continue functioning pretty much the same. All you really need to believe is someway somehow God inspired/directed the holy writings of Judaism so therefore these writing are then themselves holy and contain God’s message.

In theory, perhaps; in practice, I very much doubt it. The “could” that Shilton suggests here is presumably what Rabbi Louis Jacobs assumed when he first published We Have Reason to Believe: Some Aspects of Jewish Theology Examined in the Light of Modern Thought in 1957. In that bracing book, he argued that imputing divine origins to the written and oral Torah is entirely compatible with a scientifically informed understanding of the historical process by which the pertinent texts were formed. And he did this without any fudging of the science à la J. H. Hertz.

The Orthodox establishment of Great Britain had quite different ideas, as Jacobs learned to his discomfiture a few years later when his promised appointment to the principality of Jews’ College (the London Orthodox rabbinical seminary) was thwarted by the intervention of the Chief Rabbi of the UK, Israel Brodie; and again a few years after that, when Brodie vetoed the appointment of Jacobs to a pulpit position at the New West End Synagogue of London. The vindictiveness of the Orthodox establishment toward Jacobs only worsened after he left the Orthodox rabbinate to found the Masorti movement, the British equivalent of Conservative Judaism in the US. In 1995, the present Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, published an article in the Jewish Tribune accusing Jacobs of “intellectual thievery” and, according to an article by Matt Plen, “alleging that Masorti’s claim to represent authentic Judaism was a subterfuge aimed at the destruction of the tradition.” In 2003, Jacobs was denied an aliyah at his granddaughter’s wedding because, as Rabbi Sacks and the head of the London Beth Din, Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, wrote together in a publication, “had Jacobs uttered the words ‘Our God [. . .] who gave us the Torah of truth [. . .]’, he would have made a false statement” (source).

Of course, one could argue that this disgraceful history says more about the parochial rigidity (not to say meanness, mulishness, and sheer stupidity) of the British Orthodox establishment than it says about Orthodox Judaism per se. But when certain positions are maintained by such a prominent Orthodox authority, it is difficult to regard them as deviant or unrepresentative.

Finally, to answer Shilton’s closing question:

Are there any other natural beliefs you have in mind besides Mosaic authorship?

Well, pretty much all of the history in the Bible. I have been reading The Bible Unearthed (bibliographical information in note 2 of my previous entry), and I am continually impressed, first, by how much knowledge has been accumulated by scholars concerning the actual history of the ancient Near East, and second, how little truth it leaves in the accounts of events in the Bible. As Finkelstein and Silberman say at some point, even the histories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which have a far closer relation to historical fact than anything in the Pentateuch, simply are not attempts at history as we understand it, but exercises in ideology in historical form.

Of course, those parts of the Bible have a less intimate relation to Jewish religious practice than have the contents of the Pentateuch. But they do support the important theme of how the Israelites earn divine retribution by repeatedly straying from the worship of the one true God. That is, they attribute the misfortunes of the Israelites to their collective failure to keep their part of their covenant with God. Finkelstein and Silberman’s findings show that even where the “natural” part of this history is concerned—the mere recounting of events, regardless of the theological interpretation that is put upon them—the Bible is untruthful.

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Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs

Religious beliefs contain both natural and supernatural elements. The natural elements do more than the supernatural ones to make systems of religious belief rationally untenable in light of science.

Moses at Sinai: lithograph by F. W. McCleave, 1877

There is a common tendency—at least, it seems to me very widespread—to equate religion with religious belief. Whatever convenience such an equation may have for thinking about Christianity, it makes nonsense of Judaism. To say that someone “practices Judaism” is perfectly intelligible; to say that someone “believes Judaism” is a bizarre combination of words.

Nonetheless, it is plain that there are Jewish beliefs, that is, beliefs characteristic of Judaism, or at least of this or that variety or denomination of Judaism. Some of these beliefs may even be considered to be foundational, in the sense that they provide a rationale for religious observances. The nineteenth-century movement to preserve traditional Jewish observances called itself “Orthodoxy”—“correct belief”—for a reason: it also meant to preserve, or rather to establish, a body of specifically Jewish doctrine or dogma. [1]

But what sorts of beliefs may be counted as religious ones? Consider the following three propositions as examples:

1. The Torah (i.e., the Pentateuch) was written down in the Sinai desert by Moses more than three thousand years ago.
2. The Torah was dictated to Moses by God.
3. God exists.
   

All three of these are, I take it, Jewish religious beliefs. But they are plainly different in their relation to natural fact.

The first proposition does not imply, or at least need not be interpreted as implying, any supernatural element. It concerns a matter of historical, or more broadly natural fact.

The second proposition has both a natural and a supernatural element. The natural element is just what is stated in (1), that the Torah was written down by Moses more than three thousand years ago. The supernatural element is the idea that this writing-down was a taking of divine dictation. (I use the phrase “written down” rather than simply “written” so as not to exclude that idea a priori: to say that the Torah was written by Moses might be understood to imply that he was its author rather than merely, as per (2), its original scribe.)

The third proposition I take to be of purely supernatural significance. Of course, I have not tried to define the terms “natural” and “supernatural,” but rather than take on that difficult task, I will simply take the two terms to be sufficiently well understood for my purposes. My three examples are meant to illustrate the distinction that I propose among three kinds of religious belief: (1) natural beliefs, (2) mixed natural–supernatural beliefs, and (3) purely supernatural beliefs.

The points that I want to make about these three kinds of belief are the following. First, while people tend to identify religious belief with beliefs of the third type, such as the belief that God exists or beliefs about the divine nature, a very large part of religious belief consists of natural elements. In consequence, many religious beliefs are not essentially religious, in the sense that they are such that it is possible for someone to believe them without accepting any religious doctrine that contains it. Someone might, for instance, believe that Moses wrote the Torah in the Sinai desert without believing that God had anything to do with the matter.

Second, natural and supernatural elements are often tightly connected. For instance, though someone might believe that Moses wrote down the Torah but not believe that he did so under divine dictation, no one can believe that God dictated the Torah to Moses without believing that Moses wrote it down. That is a matter of logic. Other connections are a matter of psychology. Thus, while it is possible to believe, say, that a worldwide flood killed all land animals but those on Noah’s ark without believing that God had any hand in it, it is not likely that anyone—any adult of much education at any rate—would ever do so. That is, many natural religious beliefs are held only because of some accompanying supernatural religious belief.

Third, to the extent that a body of religious belief contains natural elements, it is subject to critical examination in the light of science. If it were established that the Torah was written down by Moses in the desert more than three thousand years ago, scientific investigation would be powerless to settle the question whether he was taking divine dictation. But the fact is that no such hypothesis is established, or, in view of the evidence, capable of being established. On the contrary, the findings of archaeological investigation as well as textual analysis render the belief that the Torah was written all at once, hundreds of years before the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, completely untenable. [2]

Fourth, even if the supernatural as such is beyond the reach of scientific criticism, mixed natural–supernatural beliefs are not. If it can be proved that the Torah was written hundreds of years after the time in which even the latest events recounted in it are purported to take place—which it can, unless one understands “prove” to signify a standard of certainty that is never attained in any empirical science—then the idea that Moses wrote it under divine dictation is also thereby refuted.

Fifth and finally—though this is not a point for which I shall be supplying the necessary argument in this entry—Judaism, like Christianity, is thoroughly dependent on natural beliefs and mixed natural–supernatural beliefs that are rationally untenable in the light of known evidence and scientific arguments. Even if purely supernatural beliefs, such as the belief in an almighty and supremely wise and benign creator and ruler of the universe, are given a free pass, specific natural and mixed beliefs are required for supporting a body of specific religious observances; and some of the most important of those beliefs are not rationally tenable.

REFERENCES

[1] On the question of preserving versus establishing, see Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006).

[2] On archaeology, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001). On textual analysis of the Bible, see Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

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Dishonesty in Hertz’s Torah Commentary

Got a Torah passage that says something morally repugnant? No problem: just deny that it means what it says!

As I strive to catch up with the weekly Torah portion after some recent disruptive events, one of the sources that I have been consulting is the Soncino Press Pentateuch and Haftorahs, edited by J. H. Hertz, commonly known as the Hertz chumash. This is a work originally published in the 1930s containing the Hebrew text, an English translation (the Jewish Publication Society’s version of 1917), and a commentary by Rabbi Joseph Hertz, then the Chief Rabbi of Britain. It has been widely used for several decades in synagogues of all denominations, particularly Modern Orthodox ones. Hertz’s commentary seems to rest on the presumption (though Hertz nowhere asserts this, as far as I know) that there is nothing in the Torah that is repugnant to science, reason, or common sense, provided that it is correctly understood. I attribute this premise to Hertz because I do not know how otherwise to make sense of some of the perverted reasonings that I find in his commentary. Here I will discuss just one example.

Consider the following famous passage from Exodus, part of the preamble to the Ten Commandments:

. . . For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me. (Exodus 20:5; Hertz, pp. 295–6)

On the face of it, the passage seems to be saying that God punishes several generations for the sins of their forebears. But Hertz will have none of that. His comment on the phrase “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children” begins with the following bold assertion:

The Torah does not teach here or elsewhere that the sins of the guilty fathers shall be visited upon their innocent children.

It doesn’t? To read the pertinent line of Torah and then Hertz’s comment is like being presented with a brain teaser. How, one wonders, is Hertz going to reconcile such a comment with such a text? Where does the wiggle room lie between “God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me,” which is what the Torah says, and “God visits the sins of the guilty fathers upon their innocent children,” which is the idea that Hertz says is not in the Torah?

The only plausible way out seems to lie in the gap between “third and fourth generation of them that hate Me” and “innocent children.” If the offspring of some iniquitous progenitor “hate God,” then arguably they are not innocent. So in visiting the fathers’ sins upon them, God would not be punishing the innocent. (Of course, this would raise the question of why it should be of any relevance that the sins were committed by the fathers, and how hating God is supposed to make the descendants guilty of the ancestors’ sins: surely all that is relevant to punishing the following generations should be their sins. But let us set that question aside for the moment.)

Hertz does eventually offer an interpretation along these lines in his comment on the phrase “of them that hate Me,” where he writes: “The Rabbis refer these words to the children. The sins of the fathers will be visited upon them, only if they too transgress God’s commandments.” But the passage previously quoted comes from his comment on the preceding phrase, and is supported without reference to the phrase “of them that hate Me.” That comment continues thus:

The soul that sinneth it shall die proclaims the Prophet Ezekiel. And in the administration of justice by the state, the Torah distinctly lays down, ‘The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin’ (Deut. XXIV, 16).

The first thing to note about this is that it is at best a rather indirect argument for Hertz’s initial claim; or in other words, it is of doubtful relevance. The administration of justice by the state is one thing: what is at issue is what God does to the children of sinners. The line quoted from Ezekiel says what God does to sinners, but not what God does or does not do to their children. Perhaps Hertz was expecting the reader to call to mind the rest of the passage from Ezekiel of which he quotes only a fragment:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. (Ezekiel 18:20, King James Version; emphasis added)

This comes from a chapter that begins “The word of the LORD came unto me again, saying” (18:1); so Ezekiel is claiming to speak for God here, and in that capacity is expressly denying that the son “bears the iniquity” of the father—meaning, presumably, that he does not suffer the divinely ordained consequences of the iniquity.

Very well; but so what? Even if we assume that the prophet speaks with divine authority, the Book of Ezekiel must have been written hundreds of years after the Book of Exodus. Whether one regards both texts as the word of God or not, what one has on one’s hands here are two conflicting utterances. In Ezekiel, God says that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father; in Exodus, he says that the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon their children. Even if one could regard one text as simply canceling the other out, one would need an argument for saying that the Ezekiel passage overrules the Exodus one rather than the other way around.

Of course, one consideration that might influence one’s interpretation is the fact that the view expressed in the Ezekiel passage is morally appealing, while the one expressed in the Exodus passage is utterly repugnant. But that cannot possibly be a legitimate basis for taking one passage to represent the teaching of the Torah and the other not to do so (especially as it is the passage from the Torah that expresses the repugnant view). Whether one takes these texts to be the writings of human beings or of God, one cannot regard the passage from Ezekiel as making the passage in Exodus mean the opposite of what it says. The problem of interpreting the passage from Exodus remains.

But Hertz has another move to make. His comment continues:

However, human experience all too plainly teaches the moral interdependence of parents and children. The bad example set by a father frequently corrupts those that come after him. His most dreadful bequest to his children is not a liability to punishment, but a liability to the commission of fresh offences. In every parent, therefore, the love of God, as a restraining power from evil actions, should be reinforced by love for his children; that they should not inherit the tendency to commit, and suffer the consequences of, his transgressions.

Hertz’s claim here is that the children of a wicked father are likely to repeat his sins. If this is supposed to be relevant to the interpretation of the Exodus passage—and if it is not, then one has to wonder why Hertz would take up valuable space in his otherwise compactly written commentary with irrelevancies—then the plain implication is that when God says in Exodus that he “[visits] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” the Torah “does not [thereby] teach . . . that the sins of the guilty fathers shall be visited upon their innocent children,” because the children of sinful fathers are not innocent. They are guilty of the same sins—at least, they are so in many cases. So when God punishes them for their fathers’ sins, he is punishing them for their own sins—in many cases.

And for the other cases? Well, apparently Hertz sees the problem, because he offers yet another way of removing from the passage the morally repellent implication that God punishes innocent children for their forebears’ sins:

Another translation is, ‘remembering the sins of the fathers unto the children’; i.e., God remembers the sins of the fathers when about to punish the children. He distinguishes between the moral responsibility which falls exclusively upon the sinful parents, and the natural consequences and predisposition to sin, inherited by the descendants. He takes into account the evil environment and influence. He therefore tempers justice with mercy; and He does so to the third and fourth generation.

I can say nothing about the cogency of the alternative translation, but as an interpretation, this is patently desperate. Plainly, Hertz is reasoning from what he wants the text not to mean, namely, that God punishes people for the sins of their forebears up to three generations back—or in other words, just what the text says. Perhaps the Hebrew construction used here can be rendered in some contexts as “remember unto” rather than as “visit upon.” But only a will to make the text say something other than its plain meaning can make one read into it in this context the idea that this “remembering unto” may involve seeing that the children are guilty of no sin and therefore refraining from punishing them. If they are innocent, then of what possible relevance can it be that their fathers were guilty? If their forebears’ sins are irrelevant to their guilt—and surely they are—then why should God “remember” those sins “unto” them?

Of course, if the Torah is a document composed by human beings rather than dictated by God, none of these problems arise. But presumably that view is not an option for a Chief Rabbi.

I am still trying to learn what Modern Orthodox Judaism is. My present understanding is that, as far as beliefs are concerned, the word “modern” is supposed to signify an acceptance of the findings of science and other secular forms of inquiry, while the word “orthodox” signifies acceptance of certain traditional rabbinic beliefs, among them the belief that the Torah is of divine authorship. That is the idea, but in practice, as one sees repeatedly in Hertz’s commentary, one cannot have both without some very strange mental contortions. Of course, the notion that some text is of divine authorship is hardly transparent; and I imagine that among rabbis who would call themselves Modern Orthodox there is a great deal of diversity of views about what that means. But I strongly suspect that, in practice, it is always going to dictate the kind of move that we find Hertz making in his commentary: upon finding scriptural passages that mean something repugnant to reason, science, common sense, or common decency, take whatever measures are necessary to impute to them some other meaning.

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