Provocation: D'var Mahloket

It is as if the multiplicity of persons--and is this not the very meaning of the personal?--were the condition for the plenitude of "absolute truth"; as if each person, by his uniqueness, were the guarantee of the revelation of a unique aspect of truth, and some of its points would never have been revealed if some people had been absent from mankind.... [T]he totality of the true is constituted from the contribution of multiple people; the uniqueness of each act of listening carrying the secret of the text; the voice of the Revelation as inflected, precisely, by each person's ear, would be necessary to the "Whole" of Truth. --Emmanuel Levinas "Two Jews, three opinions." --Jewish saying This piece is about argument. It is about a scholar's commitment to Judaism, and Judaism's commitment to living in dark times, and the connection between darkness and argument. (1) These things easily go together, but their being-togetherness is not easy. Jim Aune wrote about these things in his essay "Justice and Argument in Judaism: A D'var Torah on Shofetim." In revisiting this essay, I find it difficult to move beyond the two epigraphs he chose for this essay. I reprint them here because they have taken on a new meaning for me. I will take the second quote first: "Two Jews, three opinions." I have heard this saying many times and it was meaningful to me as someone who came to Judaism through conversion. My family are evangelical Christians, and argument as a culture was not part of my childhood experience. Debate had a limited place at our tables, worship sites, family spaces, and in the writing that we shared with each other. I began my process of conversion after graduate school, however, when argument and debate had already become a significant part of my life. When my rabbi told me that I would need to prepare a D'var Torah at the conclusion of my study, I found it helpful to remember his earlier lessons about the Jewish tradition of debate, argument, and even disagreement. (2) Judaism has been built upon a history of innumerable debates between rabbis (and everyone else) about the meanings, effects, and ethics of everything from death to whether or not you can tear toilet paper on the Sabbath. I could not get the D'var Torah wrong, in other words, because the goal was not correctness at all. My challenge was to create D'var (a word, a speaking. The telos was to join the Jewish community as a member, which means participating in the joyous and tumultuous event of debate. In the years that followed my conversion, I found myself laughing whenever someone would jokingly mutter "Two Jews, three opinions" after a heated squabble spilled out from a synagogue committee meeting. It took me some time to adjust to my husband's Jewish family and their habits of arguing at the table (and everywhere else) without any negative consequence. As Jim writes in "Justice and Argument in Judaism," when he was asked by a student to explain "the Jewish view of homosexuality," he told the student that there could never be such a thing. "Any given Torah text may thus yield multiple readings," writes Jim. This is a much more eloquent way of saying "Two Jews, three opinions," but the weighty significance of these two insights are the same. The goal of studying Torah is not to conclude any arguments. In fact, concluding argument would mean shutting down Judaism as a living activity. Two Jews, one opinion is not only in conflict with Judaism; it is the work of Judaism to prevent that from happening. Jim's essay excavates an important difference about debate within Christianity and Judaism. He meditates on Paul's proclamation in 2 Corinthians, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." In Judaism, writes Jim, we might very well flip Paul's statement. The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life. "The Jewish approach reads the letter in such as way as to maximize human freedom within the divine command," he writes. …