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PARTISAN REVIEW
good, or is the good good
because
God loves it? The Platonic answer,
embraced by Weil, is that God loves the good
because
it is good.
Wyschogrod, by contrast, chooses the other path: "Oewish ethics] .. .is
not the ethics of the Euthyphro of Plato." To do otherwise, for
Wyschogrod, would be to place the good above God. Weil is not alone
in rejecting this line. Eric D'Arcy, in '''Worthy of Worship': A Catholic
Contribution," places himself firmly on the side of Weil: "God forbids
certain kinds of action because they are wrong, not vice versa ."
Yet Wyschogrod, too, does not stand alone. He is joined by no less a
figure than Wittgenstein, who was, like Weil (and, indeed, myself),
"three-fourths Jewish." Unlike Weil, however, he described himself as
"one hundred per cent Hebraic," as opposed to "Greek," and main–
tained that it is his position here that "is the deeper one:
Good is what
God orders.
For this cuts off the path to any and every explanation
'why' it is good, while the [other] conception [i.e., Plato's] is precisely
the superficial, the rationalistic one."
Weil is not alone, however, in finding the texts Wyschogrod adduces
troubling. The question of how to read "troubling texts " in the Hebrew
Bible is of course a major issue in Jewish Biblical scholarship itself.
Thus, Shaul Magid in "What is 'Troubling' About Troubling Texts?"
discusses three hermeneutic approaches to the teaching of "troubling"
texts from the Hebrew Bible-"troubling" either because they offend
our ethical sensibilities, contradict themselves, or contradict fundamen–
tal passages elsewhere in the Bible. The approaches he outlines are: "de–
Judaizing the text [i.e., arguing that it is so offensive it cannot be
authentically Jewish]; allegorizing the text; and reading the text against
itself. "
James Carroll, too, in
Constantine's Sword,
suggests "reading the
text against itself" in the case of "troubling" passages in the Gospels of
the New Testament. He also points to "'troubling texts' that imbue the
Jewish Scriptures with blood, from those slaughtered firstborn male
children in Egypt to the Canaanites driven from Palestine." Unlike Weil,
however, he places less emphasis on these than on troubling passages in
the New Testament, and he protests "the inherently supersessionist ter–
minology of 'Old' and 'New' [Testaments]."
Weil's concerns, then, about troubling texts in the Hebrew Bible can–
not be dismissed out of hand as a mere symptom of prejudice. Yet the
question remains: is it permitted to Weil, a Jew by birth, to resign from
"the club from which one does not resign," to reject her membership as
one of the "chosen" and choose instead to follow Plato and the Christ–
ian Gospels? I conclude not with an answer to this question but with a
