Arguing With God, Talmudic Discourse, and the Jewish Countermodel: Implications for the Study of Argumentation

God may well slay me; I may have no hope/Yet I will argue my case before God. Job 13:15 (Miles 324) [To love the Torah more than God is] protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred that is unmediated by reason. Emmanuel Levinas (Difficult 144) The relationship between Judaism and the classical tradition, between Athens and Jerusalem, the God of Israel and the God of the Christians, and Continental and Jewish thought has been and remains argumentative. To some, this relationship rests on a fundamental binary in which Judaism and classical thought are conceptualized as antipodes, mutually exclusive antagonists having little or nothing in common. As Hannah Arendt (Origins) and others have documented, Hitler and the Third Reich transformed this binary into a vicious twentieth-century totalitarian movement that led to the Shoah (Holocaust). The two traditions, others hold, share some beliefs and differ on others, with economic, political, religious and cultural contexts influencing the degree to which difference and commonality are stressed (Levinas, Difficult 275; Handelman, Slayers 4). I believe the two traditions are a philosophical pair (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 415-18). They are antinomies: two coherent and relatively reasonable systems of thought that sometimes contradict. My hope is that a juxtaposition of classical and, Jewish understandings of argument and argumentation will contribute to the contemporary theory and practice of reasoned discourse. Ultimately, I aspire to show how a philosophy and pedagogy of argumentation, informed by normative Jewish patterns of reasoning and the Jewish-inflected works of Emmanuel Levinas and Chaim Perelman, can help to cultivate a more pluralistic and civil society in the twenty-first century, one based on disagreement expressed through argument rather than on consensus enforced through rules or secured through schism and polarization. I do not suggest that Judaic thought is intrinsically better or is exclusive in its emphasis on pluralism and civility; doing so would betray the very impulse at the heart of this system of thought. Jews can draw from their tradition doctrines of exclusion and incivility. Witness, for example, how the settlers of the occupied West Bank depict Palestinians as modern day "Amaleks" (ancient enemies of the Jews) with the Hebrew Bible (Rowland and Frank 148). This reasoning deviates significantly from that of normative Judaism, which I feature in this study. For the purposes of contrasting classical and Jewish perspectives on argumentation, I will assume that the two can be distinguished by their respective views on the following philosophical pairs: ontology and speech, the vita contemplativa and vita activa, philosophy and rhetoric, and apodictic logic and argumentative reasoning. Classical, Western, Patristic (Christian), and Enlightenment thought favors the first term over the second in these pairs, often allowing the first term to rule if not obliterate the second (Arendt, Human; Perelman, "Reply"). I follow Chaim Perelman's definition of the classical tradition, with the understanding that there are major exceptions to his generalizations (as there are to my efforts to identify fundamental patterns of Jewish thought): [T]he tradition I called classical assigns but little importance, as far as achieving science and contemplation goes, either to practice or to the historical and situated aspects of knowledge.... This viewpoint is held in common by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by thinkers such as Descartes.... The tradition I call classical includes all those who believe that by means of self evidence, intuitions--either rational or empirical--or supernatural revelation, the human being is capable of acquiring knowledge of immutable and eternal truths, which are the perfect and imperfectible reflexion of an objective reality. …