The recent conference on Textualities at Drew made it obvious that people primarily trained in Jewish texts and those trained in philosophy have much to say to one another and much to teach one another. Perhaps because the philosophers invited the text scholars and wanted to hear from them and not lecture to them the philosophers were somewhat quiet about what their actual thoughts about the import of Jewish texts and why and how they should be read in the postmodern period. The conference certainly stimulated in me a great deal of thinking about my presuppositions and desires for scriptural reasoning and I thought that I would share them with you in the hopes of further preparing us for the written "Textual" version of our conference and the furtherance of the fruitful dialogues which were begun at Drew. Many of the "principles" were worked out earlier in conversations with Robert Gibbs, Peter Ochs and Yudit Greenberg and will appear in more dialogic form in our forthcoming book REASONING AFTER REVELATION (Westview Press). However, although I take the liberty of using the pronoun "we" the perspective presented on postmodern Jewish philosophy and textual reasoning is, finally, my own.

PRINCIPLES
Postmodern Jewish philosophers are turning to Jewish texts to ground, enliven, and invigorate Jewish thought at the end of this most eventful of modern centuries which has seen the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the consequences of the political and social emancipation of the Jews.

We turn to Jewish texts to give the universal abstract logos back its home in language, community, body, and spirit. We have become lonely in our library cubby holes and tired of only building and defending abstract, colorless, odorless, disembodied philosophical systems and edifices. We no longer accept the Cartesian certitude about the autonomous thinking self and have set out on a search for ourselves in and through Jewish texts.

We want to do thinking with and for others. We want our thinking to be a form of avodah or service in the twofold Hebrew sense of prayer and work for the community.

We initially took as our goal the Buberian dialogue and the Rosenzweigian notions of speechthinking and then found these best embodied and modeled in talmudic discourse where the rabbis value the process of thinking together above the product, where the subject matter and not the rabbis themselves are central, where rabbis think with and through the concrete and particular issue and problem, and where the rabbis move in and out of and through the personal, social, political and theological dimensions of human experience and in so doing declare that these dimensions are seemlessly interrelated. ( This we take as a model for the interrelatedness of all academic disciplines).

We seek to find ourselves in the middle of a process of dialogic speechthinking , in the middle of discussions of matters that really matter for ourselves, our Jewish communities, other human beings, the tikkun of the world and the shekinah. And we have found the still point of this middle in the space or gap between the pshat (literal) and derash (figurative) meanings of Torah. This gap is critically important to us because it makes room for our interpretations of Jewish texts. This gap means that Torah meaning is not fixed but an endless process and possibility of meaning. This gap in the written torah is, of course, the invitation and warrant for oral torah which give us a place to construct meaning with the text, the tradition, and our community of readers.

In this gap in Torah, like the cleft in the rock into which Moshe was inserted in order to see/not see God, we postmodern Jewish philosophers have inserted ourselves. In this awkward space between a rock and a hard place in the ancient Jewish text which we have taken as our Torah we seek to both refind ourselves as Jews and to catch a glimpse of God. The dimension of teshuvah or return is crucial for us but we insist on returning with our modern clothes, our university training and our pluralistic sensibilities. For Jewish studies this means that though we have seen the limits of purely "scientific" Wissenschaft des Judentums approaches we also know that these approaches are crucial aids to any attempt to understand the dynamics of Jewish texts and interpretation.

We differ from modern Jews in that we no longer expect our salvation and truth to come from the isms and utopian promises of modernity be they nationalism, capitalism, socialism, or scientism. At the same time we are the children of these modern movements and value and cherish the advancements they have brought to our Jewish communities and to the world so that we refuse to turn our backs on them. Thus we are the after-modern or postmodern Jews.

We differ from the generic philosophers of postmodernism in that we recognize and embrace our particular Jewish roots, texts, and communities and are dedicated to the revival of our particular communities. We share postmodern concerns for the power of language, text, discourse, interpretation, difference, gender and the body. We share the directive of contemporary "cultural studies" to break down artificial hierarchies and to move across academic disicplines in an endeavor to disclose underlying structures, tensions and commonalities in a human culture. We are indebted to Jacques Derrida's deconstruction for an important tool to disclose gaps and ruptures in texts and false interpretive totalities but are equally or perhaps more concerned with the need to construct a creative vibrant space for Jewish thought, ritual, and community after modernity. It is, perhaps this constructive task that most separates us from the generic postmoderns and in recognition of this we have recently moved to call ourselves textual or scriptural reasoners.

We take from Levinas the conviction that first philosophy is ethics and have found this reiterated in Jewish texts. This means that the face of the suffering other makes an infinite demand upon us to work for the alleviation of her/his suffering and for justice. Therefore we who were slaves and strangers who are now free constantly must constantly remind ourselves who and what we are ultimately working for.

Scriptural Reasoning is reasoning with Jewish texts for the sake of Jewish community, the world, and the tikkun or repair of the Shekinah. Thus scriptural reasoning has pragmatic communal, ritual, ethical, and theological objectives.

PROGRAM
Given these principles and objectives what then do postmodern Jewish philosophers/scriptural reasoners do? First of all we endeavor to establish the conditions for the possibility of scriptural reasoning. Thus we have expended enormous energy (and here Peter has taken the lead) in setting up an e-mail network and journal and arranging sessions at the AAR and AJS, putting together conferences to get people primarily trained in Jewish texts and those trained more in philosophical disciplines to talk together. This task alone is a worthy one and one which we need to attend further to. If speechthinking and dialogue about torah for the sake of community, world, God is our goal how do we set up conditions and rules that maximize the possibility of attaining our goals? When we meet together, what room and table should be used? Do we need one leader or many? Are small groups or havrutot a crucial element and how do we integrate what goes on in the small groups in the larger? Who can speak? The experts, The "text" scholars? Philosophers? Grad students, Lay people? Who speaks first, last, the women, the men? Given the history of men's role in determining Jewish culture and delimiting women's place in that culture the issue of women's voice is one that we need to be particularly sensitive to preserving. It is crucial as we return to Jewish tradition that we do not return to a marginalization of women and the feminine voice.

I would argue that these issues on process and procedure are far more important than which text we choose to study. Indeed, my primary goal in entering into the project of scriptural reasoning is to get into the middle of speech-thinking where torah as process exists. This is the point at which, as Fishbane suggested, the human dibur becomes the divine dibur. The one principle which I know is necessary to allow this to happen is to make the text the center of discussion and not the individual interpreters of the text.

When the central questions become: what does the text mean and how is your interpretation grounded in the text? then the discourse has a common basis and point upon which and around which dialogue and argument will circle. With the text at center people with differences, who seemingly share no common basis for dialogue, are given a common ground. With the aid of the distance and external medium which the text provides people with different personal preferences and ideological agendas become readers talking to one another about the common subject of the meaning of the text. And in that conversation both difference and commonality is clarified and in special moments new insights and understandings are reached. The essential moment of scriptural reasoning then is a collective hermeneutical event, a shared speech activity, an engagement in an interpretive process rather than the formulation and presentation of a fixed interpretation. This is an event in which the written torah is transformed into oral torah and the truth of torah momentarily disclosed. All of us teachers have witnessed such hermeneutical events in our successful seminar sessions and seen the disclosive, transformative, even healing consequences of such moments for our students and for ourselves. And what is most remarkable about these moments is that each student goes away with a different message unique to them yet coming from a shared collective hermeneutical experience. These precious moments, like Buber's I-Thou encounters, cannot be planned or demanded but come as something of a gift, often when we least expect them.

However if the goal of rich dialogic scriptural reasoning cannot be demanded the conditions to defeat or foster it can be studied and predicted. One could thus say that the preliminary activity of philosophers of scriptural reasoning must be to establish conditions and rules for dialogic speechthinking about texts. This means that we must educate ourselves to and teach and write about the pragmatics, pedagogy, ritual, even liturgy of reading texts together.

The next stage of scriptural reasoning is necessarily an analytic and synthetic philosophic enterprise. Here, we come after the hermeneutical event to collect, organize, and structure the various interpretations which collective text study has engendered. Peter has called this "displaying the logic" of a practice of reading. To do this we begin from the presupposition that interpreting a text is not a matter of getting to the "objective" structure or meaning of the text but (again in Peter's Piercean terms) from the recognition of the triadic relationship which exists between the text, the reader(s) and the community of interpreters in which the readers stand. The latter element in the triad reminds us that meaning is never gained in the abstract but is always meaning for a particular community. It is also important to recognize that hermeneutical acts of collective reading will not produce single but a multiplicity of different often conflicting interpretations and thus the scriptural reasoner will need to assemble these in a non-linear manner. Here we could use the model of commentary displayed in the margins and around the text employed in the Talmud and Mikrot Gedolot or some even more creative non-linear options now available with the use of computers.

In the next stage of Jewish scriptural reasoning I would suggest that our interpretations need to be placed in the context of the history of Jewish exegesis. With this we not only connect ourselves to Jewish tradition but also open deep reservoirs of interpretation and meaning which will supply us with a vast additional series of hermeneutical possibilities we would not find ourselves. (And this stage of scriptural reasoning, as is done in traditional Jewish text study, could be integrated in the original dialogic process of interpreting the text). For the Jewish contextualization of interpretation a philosopher like Maimonides or exegete like Rashi or Ibn Ezra with their vast knowledge of Jewish exegesis and a sense of the boundaries of Jewish thought are invaluable aids. For I would offer that a task of scriptural reasoning is to give us a sense for the place of our interpretations in the tradition.

Are our interpretations poor rehashings of something already discovered or genuinely something new? If new, how profound. If profoundly new do our interpretations transgress the bounds of rabbinic thought or carry this thought forward. Now many postmodern readers will be utterly untroubled by knowing they are transgressing the boundaries of Jewish thought (say with an interpretation which is fatalistic or idolatrous ) yet others may not even realize that their interpretations constitute such transgressions. Thus scriptural reasoners , as I see them, not only have the obligation to establish the conditions for the possibility of rich hermeneutical events and to organize and structure them but also to make normative judgments-- in the terms of the Jewish tradition of exegesis, thought and truth-- about them.

Beyond this the Jewish scriptural reasoner may want to place interpretations in the wider contexts of Greek, Christian and Islamic interpretation. When parallel interpretation are not extant the structure or logic of the interpretation may be compared to that of the other religions. This task of comparative scriptural reasoning is fraught with the difficulties of simplification and reduction in interreligious dialogue but if carefully carried out could bear very significant hermeneutic and philosophic fruits.

The final task of the scriptural reasoner is the ethical task of what Gadamer calls "application," and (to make a very loose equivalence) what the rabbis call Halakhah. Having gained a message, a word of torah how does one act in the world in accordance with it? What is the meaning of the meaning we take away from Torah for our lives. Given the conflict in values between postmodern Jews and pre-modern Jewish texts the decisions regarding what I need to do are most difficult. Certainly one can take an Orthodox or its opposite non-Halakhic view : you need to do it all,/you need to do nothing, but these extreme options are inadequate to most postmodern Jews. At this point the scriptural reasoner , at the very least, needs to provide models for ritual, ethical, and political practice that show the intricate connection between torah message of truth and torah as a ethical infused God-aware way of life. And furthermore we ourselves need to take the responsibility to become models of torah in our own actions. So that the ultimate test of the validity and value of this new movement of postmodern Jewish philosophy and scriptural reasoning must be how we act with each other, in our families and Jewish communities, and in the world.