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© 2016 John D. Brey.

The first chapter of Raphael Patai's, The Jewish Mind, attempts to distinguish just who, or what, is a "Jew." ----Many find the question rather silly since in their minds Jews are either a race, a religion, an ethnicity, or some concatenation of one or all of the above. ----- Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on ones worldview, none of these categories are correct in and of themselves (nor even together). Patai makes that painfully clear by examining every one of the categories, alone, and together, showing that they don’t faithfully describe Jewish identity. . . Left with that rather strange state of affairs Professor Patai moves into the netherworld of the limbo of the lost:

To consider or feel oneself Jewish is certainly a necessary condition of Jewishness, but is it a sufficient condition? [. . . and in too many words Patai says no.] . . . Hence we must add a second necessary condition to the first one: a person must be considered a Jew by others as well in order to be a Jew. The two necessary conditions together amount to a sufficient one. Thus we reach the conclusion that a Jew is a person who considers himself a Jew and is so considered by others. Which of course does not change the fact that to be Jewish is a state of mind, except that now we have recognized that the state, or position, of more than one mind is involved . . . .

Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind, p. 24.

Taken alone, freestanding, the statement above seems absurd. And yet it's not really. It's the only conclusion left by a carefully thought-out examination of the problem of Jewish identity. ----- In his rather brilliant book, A Radical Jew, Rabbi Boyarin comes to the same, or similar, conclusions. ----In many ways he (Rabbi Boyarin) delves deeper into the question of Jewish identity than Professor Patai (p. 241):

. . . Jews do not sense of themselves that their association is confessional, that it is based on common religion, for many people whom both religious and secular Jews call Jewish neither believe nor practice the religion at all. This kind of "racialism" is built into the formal cultural system itself. While you can convert in to Judaism, you cannot convert out, and anyone born of Jewish parents is Jewish, even if she doesn't know it. Jewishness is thus certainly not contiguous with modern notions of race, which have been, furthermore discredited empirically. Nor are Jews marked off biologically, as people are marked for sex; nor finally, can Jews be reliably identified by a set of practices, as for example gay people can. On the other hand, Jewishness is not an affective association of individuals either. Jews in general feel not that Jewishness is something they have freely chosen but rather that it's an essence---an essence often nearly empty of any content other than itself--- which has been inscribed --- sometimes even imposed --- on them by birth.

When a Talmudic scholar claims that Jewish identity is an essence devoid of anything but itself, the statement produces a major problem. You can't meaningfully define an essence by saying it's the essence of what it essentially is. -----Statements like that are tautological. . . . A tautology is true, if necessarily so. But it tells us nothing. The tautological nature of Jewish definitions of their identity seem to segue well with Jewish definitions of God’s identity. A parallel relationship seems to exist between Jewish "monotheism" (a Jewish definition of God's identity)---- and "monomeism" (which defines Jewish identity).

The nature of Jewish identity is nearly identical to Jewish definitions of God's identity. This presents an extremely important concept where a distinction is made between a tautology versus a statement that unveils a real and important essence. This is to say that tautologies, though true, reveal nothing. They merely state that things are as they are, such that Jewish monotheism states merely that God is unknowable in his unknowable essence (a tautology), and states it under the apparent misimpression that in presenting that tautology the essence of God is being revealed to some extent.

Because Jewish identity is so closely related to the Jewish monotheistic ideal (which is a tautology: God is God and not other than God) Jews are often forced into the realization that their own identity, as it relates to the monotheistic ideal, is tautological too. There’s no essence in Jewish identity, as there’s no essence in God's identity, since together, God's Jewish identity, and thus Jewish identity itself, equal nothing but a tautology devoid of revelatory essence.

A meontology is similar to negative theology: defining something not by a meaningful essence, but by the fact that no known essence is able to define it. Jewish monotheism is meontological since it imagines God not as a something that is, but by stating that he’s not in essence like the words, concepts, or things, we would use to define him. This same meontological negativity ends up contaminating an attempt to define Jewish identity, since Jewish identity is so intimately caught up in Jewish monotheistic (tautological) definitions of God. Jews define God by what he is not, such that defining a Jew ends up as a definition not of what a Jew is, but what he is not.

"Mono-me-ism" is of a kind with "Mono-the-ism" except that one defines "me" the me-ontological Jew, while the other defines "The" ---the monotheistic Jewish God.

In his book, A Radical Jew, Rabbi Boyarin’s compares traditional Jewish identity with the Jewish identity opened up to the whole world through the Apostle Paul. The juxtaposition between the two identities reveals that the traditional understanding of Jewish identity is like the traditional Jewish understanding of God. They’re both essences without essence: meontological and tautological.

  

Traditional Jewish monotheism states the truth that in his unknowable essence God's essence is unknowable. But, as Professor Wolfson (Giving Beyond the Gift) begrudgingly acknowledges, this merely produces a tautological understanding of God's unknowable essence, which, while no doubt true, nevertheless leaves everything important about God, i.e., the essence of what can be known about God, untouched.

  

To say God is unknowable means that you can't know God, and if you can't know God, you presumably can't genuinely know there is a God? If you –can-- know there is a God, something in that knowledge seems like it would necessarily, and thus illegitimately, reveal something about the God who is said to be unknowable?

The ensuing chapters will grapple with the extent to which the discernment that the final iconoclastic achievement of monotheism calls for destroying the idol of the very God personified as the deity that must be worshipped without being idolized. As Henri Atlan deftly expressed the paradox, "the ultimate idol is the personal God of theology . . . the only discourse about God that is not idolatrous is necessarily an atheistic discourse. Alternatively, whatever the discourse, the only God who is not an idol is a God who is not a God."

Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift, Preface.

Later in the book Professor Wolfson expresses ideas similar to what's being discussed here. To give God an essence is to make an idol, and yet without an essence, worship is a-theistic. The Jewish monotheist is atheistic without knowing it. Jewish identity is atheistic since any God who exists in a knowable essence is an idol, and absent a knowable essence that God doesn't exist in a way that inspires things like love, and respect . . . unless those things are a sham, a dissonant hoax, self-glorification, self-worship in the name of worshiping a God that, in truth, doesn't exist.

When someone says a Jew gains his identity from the fact that he's Jewish, and he's Jewish because Jewish laws say he is, the same tautological attempt to get away from distinctions based on real difference, meaningful oppositions between two real things, is taking place. It's merely a way to assuage the mind by confusing it with tautological statements that seem to makes sense, when they’re merely true by the nature of the way they're parsed.

This is why there’s such a division between modern Judaism and Christianity. Paul says as explicitly as it can be stated, that Jesus is the "fullness of the Godhead in bodily form." ----- This is the utter and complete antithesis of modern Jewish sensibilities, which claim that God cannot be mediated for, or presented in an essential way . . . for he’s too otherly for that. Anything in that line of reasoning is idolatry for the Jewish mind. Which is why Jews often write G-d, rather than God. Even the word "God" cannot be thought of as a mediator for what cannot be mediated.

Being a tautology doesn't make something false, but rather, true. It makes it true in a particular way. It's necessarily true by the essence of its definition.

  

Ludwig Wittgenstein, said two things inexpressibly important to all this. Firstly, a tautology incorporates the whole and full space of logical discourse, such that it can't separate anything within the space it fills to the brim (it can't really say anything falsifiable), and secondly, for something to be knowable, the knower must somehow be outside of the full space of what it is he knows (the space occupied completely by a tautology).

The profundity of Wittgenstein's two statement is the fact that for a Jew to know what he is in a knowable, logical, way, he would have to be both outside and inside of what he is at the same time. Otherwise, he can feel he is Jewish, and believe he is Jewish, without ever knowing what it is that makes him feel Jewish. This latter state in no way denies his full Jewishness. But merely distinguishes it from something that can be known and given a knowable essence. This makes sense of the similarities between Jewish identity and Jewish statements about God's identity. For even God is subject to Wittgenstein's truism: He can be God without knowing how or why he’s God so long as he inhabits the Jewish conception of his pure otherworldliness. . . But to become the Christian version of God, he would have to sacrifice the godliness that doesn't know what it is, wagering that godliness on what might occur if he sacrifices it in order to come to know it?

Most biographers of Wittgenstein are dumbfounded by Wittgenstein's obsessiveness concerning Otto Weininger. Weininger was taken as an anti-Semitic Jewish mystic of little worth to anyone but Wittgenstein or perhaps the Nazis who made jokes about the fact that he (Weininger) was the only Jew who knew what it was to be Jewish. . . The punch-line of the Nazi joke hinges on the fact that Weininger committed suicide not long after penning his essay on what it is to be a Jew.

Wittgenstein was obsessed with Weininger because he knew what Weininger was getting on about when he said that Christ was the first real Jew because he was willing to sacrifice his Jewishness to know what a Jew is. Wittgenstein, who was Christian, realized the incredible profundity of Weininger's statement since he realized that the first knowledgeable Jew, Christ, not only sacrificed his Jewishness to know what it is, but sacrificed his deity to know what it is (such that both identities are caught up in the singularity of the sacrifice of identity necessary to gain "knowledge" of that identity).

For God to know what he is, per Wittgenstein's interpretation of Weininger, he must both be God and not God. ----Man is not God. Christ is man and God. Jesus is the non-tautological God . . . who was God, sacrificed that self-identity to know what it is to be God (tzimtzum, kenosis), so that he could teach others what it is, so that they might actually be like God: which requires knowing what God is like.

There's a vertiginous element to the foregoing that says a Jew must become a non-Jew to become a Jew who knows what he is. ----The ultimate non-Jew is the Christian, who, truth be known, is the person who sacrificed what the tautological Jew holds dearest, in order to become what a Christian is: a Jew who knows what he is, who knows what circumcision represents, because he ventured out into the dark void of faith wagering his very self-knowledge and existence on the God who he realized had made that self-same wager and won the World-to-come based on his having wagered and won his very deity by becoming humanity.

This dizzying element takes on biblical proportions when Paul claims that every Christian was in Christ before the "casting down" that became the post-original-sin world order. Which is to say, the Christian recognized Christ as God because in some manner that many great Christian theologians have pointed out, every Christian is Christ.

The Christian's relationship to the Jew is destabilized by the fact that the Jew is, as Rabbi Kaplan points out, like Adam prior to the casting down of the world, without realizing what Adam was before the casting down of the world. Adam was a man, indwelt by God, such that when the angels caught wind (so to say) of this concept, they made God know what his desire for self-knowledge would cost him, even as Israel, who until they understand the meaning of circumcision, are more associated with the angels as mediators than the mediation of the God/man, made Christ know the cost of voicing who and what he was.

In Peter's epistles he claims that the angels desire to know what the Christian knows. Peter says they strain to understand what cannot be understood without standing in the void that is being other than what one is essentially, in order to know what that essence is. Angels haven't done that. Even the angel who was the scribe who delivered the Law was merely a scribe, an amanuenses. He didn't know the full meaning of what he wrote down. It was a "decree" a "chok," waiting the arrival of Messiah.

Christians teach that Messiah is the first actual Jew, born of an actual circumspect pregnancy, and that he’s God, such that the angelic and Jewish scribes are given the written Torah, but with aspects not accessible to them until Messiah arrives. According to the Gospels the angels and the Jews misunderstood the difference between the Jew associated with the written word, come, through what the pen-is (in biological production), versus the Jew, the God, who can "speak" the truth (without reading a written version) because he came before what the pen-is, and was, since he was in the adam before the adam acquired what the pen-is that wrote all non-Christians into the world "cast down" from Eden.

Every creature came out of the womb of earth prior to it being tilled until the casting down of the world after the original sin. Then adam had a till (a pen, and what a pen-is in reproductive biology), and had to till for his bread, and for his sons and daughters . . . until his first Son, hidden, until a time predetermined, came out of the womb of the earth without it first being tilled, without it being opened by what the pen-is in the genesis that is the exodus from Eden.

An angel tilled adam's body (Gen. 2:21). And then created flesh in his (the angel's) own likeness, so that Adam could till Eve's body in the manner the angel had just tilled his own.  . . After Jesus' death, the demon who placed his own image on the first adam's body had a demonic Roman soldier remove that image from Jesus' body. ----In his anger to point out that Jesus wasn't worthy of the sign of manhood he himself created ---in his own likeness ---- Samael revealed precisely who Jesus is: the God with self-knowledge of his deity. The only man ever conceived in the image of God as that image existed prior to the casting down of the world associated with Genesis 2:21. Jesus is the only man who knows who and what he is because he wasn't "written" into the fallen world, but spoken into the world before the Fall.

  

As is pointed out by many philosophers and thinkers, to include the likes of Chomsky, the very thing that sets man apart from animals, and all other creatures, is his ability to create labels (words and concepts) which in turn form a secondary world (a matrix of sorts) created by labeling essential "things" such that by manipulating the labels that stand in for real, physical, or tangible things, we can do science, logic, human thought, theology.  We can test things by merely manipulating the labels in order to see what would happen if we moved the real thing.

Wittgenstein said we can do all philosophy merely by studying language since language is a fabricated mirror of reality ---it functions on the same sort of duality, though the matrix formed by words and concepts, and itself becomes (language that is) a polar opposition to the real, tangible, world it mimics and maps out. All human thought functions between the symbolic and the real except a particular brand of modern Jewish thought which collapses the relationship between the real and the symbolic. 

It’s correct to separate Christian thought from Jewish thought since the Christian stays within the dualistic distinction between the real, and the symbolic, whereas, that distinction doesn't even exist for a particular kind of Jew.

The way many Jews explain their identity doesn't function in the normal way humans think. The label "Jewish" for normal human thought, labels some essence, or some essential thing, that's merely being symbolized by the word "Jewish." . . But Jews don't have an essential entity that the word "Jewish" labels. The distinction between label and essential "real" "thing" doesn't exist in a particular kind of Jewish thought.

We don't typically start with a label, or definition, and then try to fill it in with essentials. We start with essentials, and then label it (them); we define them. . . People didn't come up with the word "dog" and then try to find a quadruped that seemed like it would fit the word "dog." ------ It works the other way around. ----Every word or label defines something. And the something that's defined can have numerous nuances. For instance a "dog" can be a "Staffordshire Terrier," or an "American Staffordshire Terrier." . . . But an "American" Staffordshire Terrier is still a Staffordshire Terrier, and a "Staffordshire Terrier" is still a "dog."

The label "Jewish" is not like that. It doesn't label anything. It labels the opposite. It speaks of something that’s not a known entity. It’s the antithesis of a known entity. That's what sets the Jew apart from every other creature under the sun. Every other creature is an it, a that, a they, a this or that. ------- A Jew is a human being who also has a definition that makes him or her utterly unique in the most outrageous and marvelous way: they can't be defined by definitions but rather gain their identity from that marvelous fact.

There are Jews who are tall, who practice Judaism, who have ethnic proclivities in common (and even share genetic traits) and such. But anyone who knows and really cares what they're talking about will tell you candidly that none, not one single quality attributed to Jews, nor all of them together, nor any combination, equals (defines, or labels) what it is to be a Jew.

If a person were able to give the ontological definition and genesis of a meontological entity, in this case Jewish identity, they would need to have access to "special knowledge" that hasn’t existed in the world since the foundation of the world. That’s extremely special knowledge. . . This is the glory of Jewish identity. It links the physical, ontologically knowable (Abraham and Sarah) Jew, to an identity that is unknowable unless the flesh and the spirit, the physical Jew and the metaphysical Jew, are in fact united in one real unity the glory of which transcends the nature of our current (Fallen) physical world, and which, can nevertheless be understood, because of physical Jews in this Fallen world. Sparks -- or perhaps "signs" ---from prelapsarian time are hidden --perhaps etched--- in the physical bodies of fleshly Jews.