The World Repaired, Remade
An Interview With Jon D. Levenson.
In his most recent book, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (Yale University Press), Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at HDS, explores conceptions of resurrection in rabbinic thought, tracing their development back to the Hebrew Bible and even further, into Canaanite religion. Levenson argues that, rather than having been imported from other ancient cultures or emerged in response to an immediate crisis posed by the death of the Maccabean martyrs, the resurrection of the dead was not altogether an innovation, but rather an ongoing and vital theme developed from an older biblical religion. This book calls our attention to facets of scripture that have been instrumental in the construction and maintenance of the vision of resurrection and to the ways in which those texts have contributed to issues pertaining to eschatology within Judaism. Sharon Goldman (MTS '05) spoke with Levenson about the book, which has just won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.
Why The Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel now?
I've long been fascinated by the idea of the resurrection of the dead and with
the fact that many Jews think that there is no such idea in Judaism. When I was
in graduate school, I was studying the idea of the Divine Warrior and the
rejuvenation of nature that attends the Divine Warrior's victory, and it
occurred to me that this really is the source of the belief in the resurrection
of the dead. The thought occurred to me while I was in a seminar on Second
Isaiah given by Frank Moore Cross (now Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other
Oriental Languages Emeritus), my doctoral adviser, in 1971. Thirty-five years
later, I finally published a book on the idea that popped into my head that day.
Could you say more about the Divine Warrior?
The Divine Warrior is a name applied to a mythico-ritual complex in which evil
poses a very formidable and terrifying challenge to God. Nonetheless, God
finally marches out to do combat and wins a stupendous victory, with the result
that nature then luxuriates, rejuvenates, and undergoes a restoration of
fertility. The notion of the victorious Divine Warrior really permeates the
Hebrew Bible and has strong ancient Near Eastern connections. The underlying
ethical idea is one with which some people won't be happy, namely, that good is
not self-enforcing. Good often requires the application of force in order to
triumph—so powerful is the challenge evil poses. Here, the force is that of the
God of Israel, but, in my judgment, it would not be wrong to hear in this the
implication that people, too, at times need to use force in order to prevent the
triumph of evil.
At the beginning of the book, you make the distinction between
resurrection as a vision versus resurrection as a doctrine of ancient Israelite
thought, with your endorsement clearly directed toward the former. Could you
elaborate a bit on this distinction?
I don't mean to disparage doctrine. Today, no religion with any
self-consciousness can long endure and maintain its identity without attention
to questions of belief. But the resurrection of the dead begins not with creeds,
but with visions by apocalyptic seers. I don't think you can divorce the
doctrine from those underlying literary forms. Simply to say "I believe there
will be a resurrection of the dead at the end of time" creates only a
propositional, cognitive statement, and that can make us lose a sense of its
rooting in the verbal particularity of the literature. To put it differently, I
don't think you can speak about a religious idea in a scriptural culture as if
it floats free of its specific literary forms and contexts, including
performative contexts. One problem with talking about the resurrection of the
dead as a doctrine is that it can give the misimpression that there is no
continuity with earlier forms of religion in Israel. One point of the book is to
say that there is a great deal of continuity with earlier forms. That's not to
say that the idea is in no sense an innovation, but it's not just an innovation.
It's not the radical break that people often think it is.
You highlight a trend among Jews themselves that avers that Judaism is
about "this world" rather than about any "World-to-Come" and often translates
into a focus on ethical action. You say that the problem with the latter belief
or view is that it severs practice from theology. Can you say a little bit more
about why you see this as problematic? Why do you see it as a "severance" as
opposed to an alternate theology, one that generates constructive action for
that matter?
I don't judge the success of a theology strictly by its practical consequences.
I think there have to be both a larger intellectual framework and fidelity to
the traditional sources. Because the traditional sources have for so long
incorporated the resurrection of the dead as a central belief, any Jewish
theology that does not seriously and attentively reckon with resurrection will
fail to open itself up to the richness of the sources and allow something else
to fill that vacuum. Many modern Jews are so eager to be progressive that
elements of the tradition that speak of a supernatural God and supernatural
events are highly embarrassing to them. (I don't like this language of "natural"
and "supernatural," but it's the best we have, I guess.) I'm not clear as to why
a supernatural event at the beginning of time or during the course of history is
less embarrassing than a supernatural event that is eschatological, that is,
having to do with the end of history. Why should creation or exodus not offend
the naturalistic mind when resurrection does? In my view, the very idea of
revelation implies some element of special disclosure by God, something other
than what one has figured out on one's own. And there is only so much of what
one finds in the Torah that I think Jews can figure out on their own. If one
affirms the Torah religiously, rather than only describing it historically, one
has to reckon with the idea of revelation. But if you want Judaism to look
progressive, scientific, and naturalistic, then the resurrection of the dead
will have to be jettisoned. So when people say that Judaism focuses on ethics
rather than on the World-to-Come, they make a false dichotomy, although one that
can be very useful for modern apologetics. The attempt to set the two worlds,
"this world" and "the World-to-Come" in rabbinic terminology, against each
other, to choose one as opposed to the other really strikes me as inauthentic
and foreign to the way the Jewish tradition thinks about these things.
It's quite difficult for many of us now to think of resurrection in
anything other than in allegorical terms, as an allegory of hope or spiritual
renewal. Don't you agree?
But hope for what? I think the author of 2 Kings 4, which talks about Elisha's
resurrection of the Shunammite boy, expressed hope in the form of a conviction
that the powers of the miracle-working prophet, the "man of God," are so great
that even death yields to them. I don't think the narrative is intended as a
figure for some other conviction, more palatable to modern naturalism. In
Ezekiel's vision of the valley of the dry bones, yes, it's a figure; it's a
vision of the restoration of the people of Israel to their land. What people
usually say about Ezekiel 37 is that it's a vision, it's metaphorical, it means
national restoration, and it doesn't mean the restoration of the dead. It
certainly is visionary and metaphorical and speaks of national
restoration, but one of my main points in the book is that the distinction
between national restoration and the resurrection of the dead is again overdrawn
and false to the Jewish sources. I think the older Israelite view, and certainly
the view that dominates in the Torah, is what I call familial resurrection. One
can't discuss Jewish eschatology without reference to the people of Israel
collectively. Familial resurrection is the term I use to refer to the situation
when the people of Israel seem to have no future because of maladies such as
infertility or the loss of children, yet nonetheless experience miraculous
fertility and the birth of new children or the amazing return of the old ones.
So, yes, resurrection has to do with hope, but the hope centers on national
restoration, the restoration of a flesh-andblood people, and this serves in
context as the functional equivalent of the resurrection of the dead. I'm saying
that pattern of infertility, childlessness, and the loss of children overcome is
the functional equivalent of the resurrection of the dead. I'm not saying it is
resurrection.
You argue that the Israelites saw death more as a continuum than as an
abrupt severance with life, and that death was in effect seen as a privation of
health rather than the opposite of life or its abrupt ending. If ancient
conceptions of resurrection are predicated on this paradigm of continuum, how
can we, living in a scientific age with a sharper, narrower definition of death,
find any meaningful relevance here?
By a continuum, what I mean is that the ancient Israelites usually thought of
death as the most severe of diseases. Therefore, to say that death is
irreversible is to say that there are diseases that God cannot cure. The hymnic
affirmation that God cures, that he is the healer, deeply affects the way they
see death. In the thinking that underlies these hymns, death is not beyond God's
control. Of course, a miracle is by definition an exception; it's never the
norm. The Shunammite woman's child whom Elisha resurrects or the resurrections
that Elijah performs in the parallel text, 1 Kings 17, or that Ezekiel envisions
in the valley of the dry bones, are all presented as miraculous in the sense
that they are literally contrary to anything nature would know; of that the
narrators are keenly aware. That's what makes these putative events noteworthy,
in their mind. They are acts of God. None of these passages presents these
events as the normal course of things. Likewise, the resurrection of the dead at
the end of history (which was the normative expectation of the Talmudic rabbis)
is presented as anything but the ordinary course of things. For the rabbis, it
was the greatest testimony to God's power and an integral part of their vision
of redemption, of the world repaired and remade. When we say that death is
final, those authors would perhaps reply that this reveals the limitation of a
worldview predicated on our deterministic and mechanistic understanding of the
normal course of things; they did not see that normal course of things as
absolute and inviolable. All this is by way of saying that in a strictly
naturalistic conception of a universe, it's awfully hard to see what you can do
with the resurrection of the dead. If you're committed to a totally naturalistic
universe without a personal creator God, an active God who actually does things,
then the best you can do with the resurrection of the dead is to say that it's a
symbol of hope, but a hope that ends at the grave.
You've explained that the resurrection of the dead, as adumbrated in the
Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and later picked up by the early rabbis, resists two
temptations, one being a literal notion of a restoration to one's temporal body,
and the other being the notion of immortality of the soul. Could you qualify
these distinctions?
Immortality means your body dies but the real you doesn't die, the real you
keeps on existing. The resurrection of the dead, on the other hand, is an event.
It is a divine intervention in the course of things at one moment in time. It's
general, public, and universal in the sense that God is doing this all at once.
It also consummates history. The rhetoric of the immortality of the soul uses
language that doesn't imply a consummation of history or providential
intervention into it. Rather, the language implies that the real you is not your
body anyhow; you are trapped in a clay casing that will fall off, and the real
you, which is incorporeal, will emerge to exist for all eternity. The
resurrection of the dead implies that death is very real, and the real you
certainly is harmed by, even destroyed by, death. The classic doctrine of
resurrection is very much involved with the notion of embodiment and with the
notion that death is genuinely a defeat, something to mourn for, while the
language of the immortality of the soul does not find death quite so disruptive.
In the vision of the resurrection of the dead, the self that comes back is an
embodied self, but it is not just a body, and it is not just a soul. It's
something else that's not really well understood if you are dichotomizing the
body and the soul, as philosophers from antiquity on (including Jewish
philosophers) have so often done. But I have to add that the two ideas,
immortality and resurrection, aren't mutually exclusive. They coexist peacefully
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to rabbinic thought, God tends
one's soul until it is restored, until the whole person is restored in totality,
re-embodied, at the resurrection of the dead.
What about the idea of reincarnation (gilgul) mentioned in the
Zohar? What about the conception of the transmigration of the soul in the
thought of the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-century qabbalist)?
I don't deny that these ideas exist and even attained prominence in medieval
mysticism, but what the classical rabbinic tradition insists on in the Mishnah
and in the traditional siddur (prayer book) is that the resurrection of the dead
is an event. It's not that people possess innately an imperishable soul that
lasts forever. Rather, the resurrection is the reversal of death, and the person
resurrected comes back as himself or herself, not as somebody else, as if their
body had nothing to do with who they were.
The Mishnah makes the resurrection of the dead a defining doctrine of Rabbinic Judaism. I don't know of anything comparable with regard to the notions of reincarnation or transmigration. The Mishnah even claims that Jews who don't believe in it will not have a part in it—a nice example of the principle of "measure for measure." Some versions even say that one has to accept that the idea of resurrection is found in the Torah itself! I've always been bothered by the fact that we historical-critical scholars don't think that there's any mention of resurrection of the dead in the Torah, but the rabbis, who were not exactly careless in their scrutiny of the text, generally believed that resurrection is indeed there. That suggests two different hermeneutical paradigms, and to me what's interesting is the question of how we can establish communication between these ostensibly incommensurable systems. To facilitate that communication and make it productive and intellectually defensible has been a concern of my teaching and research for a long time. So, I suppose Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel is the latest installment in what for me is a familiar story.
I also worry that in the current cultural environment, grouping resurrection with reincarnation, transmigration, and the like will give the misimpression that resurrection is primarily about personal survival and answers the self-interested question "Will I have life after death?" In the Jewish context, resurrection is primarily about the power of God and his fidelity to his promises to the Jewish people, a very different thing and something that pop spirituality isn't so eager to affirm. It has nothing to do with esotericism or the paranormal. Something analogous could be said about the Christian expectation of a general resurrection of the dead.
One of the points that you stress in your book is that, while a full-blown
account of resurrection does not explicitly arise in the Hebrew Scriptures until
relatively late, i.e., the book of Daniel, this idea neither emerged out of the
blue nor was imported from foreign sources. Rather, you argue that earlier books
of the Tanakh set the stage for this more direct description by motifs, which
suggest resurrection, by speaking of healing infertility, for example, or
slaking drought and famine. How is it that you have come to attribute those
equations to the ancient Israelite imagination?
The ancient Israelite attitude toward death was more complex than people usually
think. Most scholars think that their view was very matter-of-fact: death was
inevitable, natural, decreed by God, and thus unproblematic. I think it is more
productive to analyze the biblical texts in terms of a tension between a
ubiquitous promise of life and the equally ubiquitous fact of death. People die,
but God promises life. Dealing with forces of death seemed to call God's promise
of life, particularly to the Jewish nation, into doubt. The forces of evil,
chaos, and death were thought of as very powerful. Therefore, the death or
disappearance of children served as a rough functional equivalent of death,
while miraculous fertility, the birth of new children, or the restoration of
lost children were the functional equivalents of resurrection. I'm not saying
that these events were the same thing as the resurrection of the dead as the
rabbis (and their Pharisaic antecedents) later conceived it. They were not
general or eschatological, but they do become integral to eschatology in texts
like Second and Third Isaiah, where it is promised that the lost children will
return, that new ones will be born, that barren women will give birth, and that
the widow who personifies the people Israel will be remarried—even to the same
husband!
My earlier book Creation and the Persistence of Evil deals with this tension between the continued reality of chaos, evil, and even death, and the Divine Warrior who is liturgically acclaimed as superior to all those things. There is strong continuity between that volume and this new one. Three of my books—Creation and the Persistence of Evil, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, and now Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel—are actually the same book written about different material, or at least so it seems to me, if not to anybody else. I've tried to explicate the same spiritual vision in all of them. Chaos and evil (really, the same thing) were thought to be in league with and leading to death. This is a worldview that sees these forces arrayed against God and God's wishes, as extremely powerful and able to triumph for a long time. This, then, rightly raises the question of whether God will ever triumph over them. The texts I discuss envision just such a triumph. Many modern people find eschatology problematic because they can't imagine a definitive end to evil and a transformation and recreation of the realities as they stand now. Nothing in science suggests that this is what we're headed for. Science does not provide a happy view of ultimate destiny. These biblical affirmations are based, instead, on promises that don't have any unassailable empirical evidence. Faith is not a meaningful category without the idea of promise and the possibility of doubt that inevitably comes along with it: the promise-maker may not prove to be a promise-keeper after all.
You've mentioned that the Sadduccees, a prevalent sect during the late
Second Temple Period, were among those who rejected the view of resurrection
portrayed in the book of Daniel. If these equations, or functional equivalents
as you call them, had been so embedded within the Jewish psyche, what was found
to be objectionable theologically and/or politically?
I don't argue that there was any logical necessity behind the appearance of an
eschatological belief in the resurrection of the dead. All I argue is that the
belief has certain continuities with the older mode of thinking and that it does
shed light on the older material, and vice versa. But there are certainly
elements of discontinuity. I'm not arguing that all careful, sensitive readers
of the Hebrew Bible would inevitably come to expect an eschatological
resurrection of the dead. Many Jews believed in it, and many didn't. If there
hadn't been Jews who didn't believe in it, the Mishnah wouldn't have had to
declare their position unacceptable.
Do you think anything else was at stake, politically, socially, or
theologically, in their rejection of the tenet of resurrection?
Theologically, I think the older model that saw God's justice vindicated or
realized with descendents, a postmortem vindication that does not involve the
resurrection, remained alive. For example, I think that what Job wants is
vindication. He wants a restoration, to be sure, but he primarily wants a
vindication of himself. He wants his name cleared. It was very widely believed
that you can have your good name cleared even after you're dead. Also very much
alive was the contention that not all deaths were equal. In the Hebrew Bible, we
have to reckon with the notion of an unfortunate death, the death of those who
go to Sheol, the miserable underworld, and a fortunate death that didn't have
that destination, in my view (many disagree). Sheol wasn't understood solely in
moral terms; it wasn't viewed as a punishment only; it wasn't hell. One might go
to Sheol if one passed away brokenhearted, young, because of an act of violence,
or without proper burial.
You stress at various points in your book that the Israelite understanding
of resurrection is predicated on a very different understanding of selfhood from
that to which we are accustomed in the modern world, one which was understood in
more familial terms. Given this obvious disconnect, do you see any way that we
moderns can forge any pragmatic relationship with the teachings of these texts?
I think it's still very much the case in Judaism even up to this day that you
can't separate the Jew from the Jewish people. You can't separate Judaism from
the Jews. In other words, peoplehood is critical to understanding what the Jews
are all about, just as many Christians would argue that you can't have an
individualistic or socially atomistic conception of Christian identity because
the church is the mystical body of Christ, the people of God. I doubt that the
abstract conception of the individual as deracinated and separated from any
group is so successful or that it will last until the end of time. You can see
in many forms of culture some awareness of the continuing reality of nation. For
several decades in this country, one has regularly heard people, especially
minority groups, saying that they have to be understood in terms of the history
of their people. All of that is quite at odds with the classical liberal view
that all that counts is the individual, and don't you dare judge or assess me
according to some sort of group. The claim that individuals are totally unique
and atomized is shallow and belies human experience, even the experience of the
people who make those claims.
You begin your book by exploring some of the ways that modern movements in
Judaism have put their own spin on the translations of the classical liturgy
when appropriating passages in their prayer books.
Yes, they either translate the Hebrew so as to play down or to eliminate the
resurrection of the dead, or they substitute new Hebrew words.
If some of these translations have distorted some of the core thinking of
our theological tradition, what do you then see as a plausible inroad for modern
Jews, particularly those of us who do not accept the notion of God as an active,
transcendent agent who cares about and interferes with human affairs?
That's a big question. It presupposes a prior question: Does liturgy challenge
the worshiper, or does it just express what the worshiper already thinks? My
view is that one of the core functions of Jewish liturgy is to educate Jews
about, and to call them back to, the central affirmations and practices of the
tradition. In a certain way, liturgy is at least as much revelation to
the worshiper as it is self-expression by the worshiper. It's certainly
the case that the classical liturgy challenges modern Jews to affirm something
that the dominant trends of Western thought for the last three or four hundred
years have not encouraged. There is a well-known statement in the Talmud to the
effect that by doing a mitzvah (a commandment) not for its own sake,
which is the lower level of observance, one may come to do it for its own sake,
which is the higher level. I think liturgy is one of the mothers of faith: by
saying it, especially in community, one comes to believe it. It has a formative
dimension; it is not simply expressive. This is different from the more
rationalistic view that cognition and assent must precede worship. What I am
saying runs counter to the idea that when we say something we don't believe,
even in this specialized liturgical context, we are simply being dishonest.
You write that in rabbinic thought, the final destination of the righteous
is the World-to- Come. So, what would that World-to-Come look like?
First of all, it's a misconception to conflate notions of the World-to-Come with
the resurrection of the dead, and it's difficult to define either of them with
any precision. The rabbinic notion of the World-to- Come envisions a mode of
existence that has elements of continuity and elements of discontinuity with
this world, with this life. Therefore, any effort to envision the World-to-Come
necessarily entails mythopoetic language, while attempts to account for this
mode of being rationalistically and empirically come across as silly, in my
view. We have to remember that these ideas are inseparable from a vision of the
redemption and utter transformation of the world. When mythopoetic or liturgical
language is flattened into propositional or empirical affirmations, something
crucial is lost in the translation. There has to be a critical interplay, a kind
of dialectical interaction, between these two modes of discourse.
Could you say more about the rabbinic conception?
One famous Talmudic text describes the World-to-Come as the righteous sitting
with crowns on their heads enjoying the radiance of God's immanent presence in a
mode of existence that is free of the need for any food, beverage, sex, etc.
Haven't been there, haven't done that.
Is it incorporeal, or is it just not visible?
I can't answer that. I only know about these texts! The rabbis firmly believed
that God is involved with the soul, that God protects the soul between the time
of death and the resurrection, that he takes it from people when they die and
will restore it to them in the World-to-Come and even beforehand when they go to
sleep, and, if they're lucky, wake up again. So, there's a sense that a
disembodied existence is deficient. The rhetoric of the immortality of the soul
can't do justice to that perception of deficiency. But then again, to say that
people come back in a body that doesn't age or become diseased or die, surely
this really doesn't describe a body as we understand it, either. It describes
something like a body, but more than a body. It's a body that doesn't eat,
drink, or have sexual relations, but enjoys the radiance of the divine presence.
So, on the one hand, there is freedom from bodily needs and, on the other hand,
an embodied self is what comes back. Clearly, the issue is not meant to be
understood in terms of a neat, convenient dichotomy of body and self or of body
and soul, and rationalistic, pragmatic questions are not very productive here.
What impact do you hope this book will have within your own field as well
as within related fields of study, e.g., Near Eastern studies, theology, the
study of religion?
I hope that it will dispel widespread views that I am convinced are inaccurate,
for example, that the resurrection of the dead is a radical invention of the
second century bce, or that it was
simply borrowed from elsewhere and fits awkwardly with the biblical tradition.
Certainly, there are affinities with Ugaritic and other Canaanite cultures
(which is not where most scholars think it comes from), but it doesn't do
justice to the cultural dynamics simply to term it a borrowing. There is also a
common belief among Jews that it's a Christian thing. One reason that it's
useful for many modern Jews to say that Judaism doesn't have, and never had, a
belief in the resurrection of the dead is that it enables them to differentiate
Judaism from Christianity. Because Christianity is so focused on the
resurrection of Jesus as the conclusive evidence of a more general resurrection
to come, one can make Judaism out to be more scientific than Christianity by
claiming, inaccurately, that Judaism has no notion of resurrection. There's a
stereotype that Judaism is more "this-worldly," naturalistic, and ethical,
whereas Christianity is "otherworldly" and superstitious. If you say that, then
you make Judaism out to be more modern and progressive than Christianity, more
allied with science, and therefore truer and more valuable in a secular cultural
climate. I hope that this book can have some role in shaking these old
apologetics and uninformed polemics. The literature is more sophisticated than
these simple-minded schemata can handle, but I must say, I am continually
astonished at how tenacious and long-lived they are.
The sources you draw from, the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah, are directed
to a Jewish audience. What about non-Jews?
Where do non-Jews lie in the scheme of things? It's fair to say that the
rabbinic tradition generally affirms there is a place in the World-to-Come for
the righteous gentile. There's no assumption in these affirmations that one has
to be Jewish to have a portion of the World-to-Come. But, again, systematizing
nonsystematic materials is perilous.
Any ideas as to where your next project might take you?
I am currently finishing up an adaptation of my book, co-authored with Kevin Madigan (Professor of the
History of Christianity at HDS), which focuses on the Jewish-Christian
connections of the expectation of resurrection. After that, I hope to work on a
comparison and contrast of the appropriation of Abraham into Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. I want to do an unsentimental analysis of the
frequently expressed claim that Abraham is the common father of these three
traditions and thus ought to serve as a model of reconciliation among them.
