13 - Revelation

Summary

As most students of modern Jewish philosophy can attest, modern Jewish philosophers wasted little ink writing philosophical expositions of the biblical category of revelation. Moses Mendelssohn may have given an argument for toleration that did not deny revelation at Sinai, but Jerusalem mentions Sinatic revelation only in two paragraphs. Hermann Cohen, of course, defined revelation as the creation of man in reason. Revelation has rarely been an element of the modern Jewish philosophical tradition. Within this context, Benedict de Spinoza's philosophy has often been viewed as a catalyst of modernity's conscious move toward a secularized rejection of revelation, whereas Franz Rosenzweig's work has been widely acknowledged as a reaction against modernity's dismissal of the biblical account. The purpose of this chapter is to showcase the character of Rosenzweig's return to revelation but to focus specifically upon the role of desire in his view, so that Spinoza's analysis of biblical Israel in his Theological-Political Treatise serves as a foundation of this retrieval of revelation rather than a dismissal of it. In bold distinction from the rationalist trajectory characteristic of much Jewish philosophy from Saadia Gaon up to and including Moses Maimonides, at the heart of Spinoza's retrieval of the biblical account of carnal Israel is his analysis of the relationship between Jewish law and communal desire. Nonetheless, this chapter will argue that Spinoza's emphasis upon the role of communal need within a lawful society licenses a parochialism or self-interest that inevitably conflicts with wider culture.