Research

Dissertation

My dissertation, “The Law is Not in Heaven”: Covenant and Authority in Jewish Political Thought, recovers resources for a constitutively circulating, agonistic, non-sovereign conception of authority from Jewish sources. Deriving from Hebrew Bible and extending through rabbinics and early-modern, modern, and contemporary philosophy, I focus on the covenant as a site of both communal-social formation and dissent, between God, the rabbis, the priests, the prophets, the civic leaders, the people, or any participant to the covenant.

My dissertation title references a story in the Talmud, in which a debate over Jewish law (halaḥa) morphs into a contestation over legitimate forms of proof and evidence. Despite multiple demonstrations “from Heaven” on Rabbi Eliezer’s behalf, Rabbi Yehoshua intercedes and reminds, “לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא” “it is not in Heaven” (Deut. 30:12), thereby settling the argument. This declaration, “[the law] is not in Heaven” is a manifestation of how authority moves between the participants in the law (Bava Metzia 59b). God may have handed down the law to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, but by the time of the Gemara, the rabbis claim authority/authorship by interpretation over the law. Despite the law’s earthly domain, it does not lose its sacrality; one follows the law because it is the practice of the covenant, a divine-human partnership.

This Jewish conception of authority, which I call “covenantal authority” challenges the received understanding of authority in Euro-American political thought, which also takes Hebrew Bible (in Christian context) as the source for authority and the model of sovereignty in the emergent state in the early-modern era. Interpreting covenant as a binding agreement that not only requires but demands obedience from the participants to the sovereign, evacuates the dissenting and democratic potential of covenant and transforms it into the social contract model. In this model, authority is hierarchical, coming from the sovereign on high, with the expectation of strict of obedience.

The relationship between dissent and social contract leads me to a critique of liberalism and conscience-focused politics, which privilege the sovereign authority of the individual. By reconstituting covenantal authority, I show how rereading sources that have been used for command-obedience authority in their Jewish context reveals not only the democratic potential in covenant, but that a democratic politics that is fundamentally dissenting and circulating is possible.

My dissertation unfolds as follows:

Chapter 1: The Many Moseses of Hobbes’s Leviathan: Sovereignty, Authority, and Covenant

            Much of our understanding of unitary, sovereign authority can be traced, or is in reference to Hobbes’s articulation in Leviathan (1651). By focusing on how Hobbes theorizes from Hebrew Bible to demonstrate the political, historical, and religious validity of the leviathan sovereign, I show that Hobbes’s choice to ‘personate’ the sovereign as Moses illustrates the uncontrollability of authority (against Hobbes’s own arguments) and how Hobbes’s arguments about obedience come from creative translations of Hebrew Bible at the moment of covenant at Sinai. Such ‘creative’ translations permit Hobbes not only to rewrite Moses (and thus, Bible) in the image of his leviathan, but also indicate that there are other interpretations possible for those same verses.

Chapter 2: The ‘Democratic’ Biblical Kingship: Spinoza and the Authority of Interpretation

            Unlike his Enlightenment peers, Baruch Spinoza reads the narrative from Exodus to the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE) as an unstable, shifting landscape of sovereignty. Very likely a product of his proximity to the text due his great knowledge of Hebrew and the rabbinic tradition of interpretation (despite his deep-seeded criticism of it), Spinoza is attentive to the nuances of the transitions between different kinds of relationships to authority, even if he ultimately argues for a sovereign state that is not too different from that of Hobbes. I take Spinoza’s critique of the biblical kingship’s (I Samuel-II Kings) struggles to consolidate sovereignty as an opportunity to explore that institution not as a failure of sovereignty, but as a demonstration of covenantal authority. The democratic resources in the biblical kingship exemplify the deeply-engrained and widespread account of covenantal authority in the Hebrew Bible, that are then picked up and elaborated upon in rabbinics, and the furthered discussed and theorized in Jewish philosophy (which includes Spinoza).

Chapter 3: Arendt after Jerusalem: Conscience, Civil Disobedience, and Jewish Critique

            Covenant does not domesticate dissent, but fosters it to such an an extent as to always be on the verge of dissolution of community. Looking at cases in both Arendt and Walzer’s writings on conscience, I will explore the relationship between their critiques of conscientious objection, their theorizations of civil disobedience, the under/untheorized reference to covenant throughout, in their discussion of the mutuality that makes promises and action in common possible. I think with the conceptual constellation of thinking, conscience, and responsibility in Arendt’s work from Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) as part of the framework of the “Civil Disobedience” essay in Crises of the Republic (1972). To animate how Arendt conceives of civil disobedience as related to covenant, I introduce the idea of a non-biblical mode of Jewish critique in Arendt’s work, and how other uses of a biblical mode of Jewish critique can foster interpretations of Hebrew Bible as the basis for the early-modern (and contemporary) understanding of social contract.

Chapter 4: Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophet of Covenantal Authority

            Heschel is firmly embedded in covenantal thinking: from his approach to authority, to the interplay of texts across time and space, and to community as an origin of religion and politics. Heschel’s unique positioning as an activist, rabbi, and prolific writer make his contributions to Jewish understandings of authority, dissent, and covenant invaluable. Writing from his closeness to the texts, his relationship to God and religious community, his prophetic understanding of moral necessity, and his experiences defying the law on earth, Heschel embodies both the hermeneutics of the Jewish canonical tradition and the actions of a person bound by covenantal authority. As such, working with Heschel is not just a culmination of the arguments in the previous chapters, but it is also an exploration of how covenantal authority demands a deep responsibility from each covenanter.

Research agenda

I work in Jewish political thought at multiple registers: to make accessible Jewish sources as works of political theory; to unassimilate Jewish thought from the Christian hegemony of much of the tradition of political theory; to articulate how the theological is political, and how the political is often theological; and to question the kind of authority we typically associate with religion as religious as such. I am particularly interested in political theory of and from the Hebrew Bible, receptions of Hebrew Bible in the early-modern era, and twentieth century encounters with religious ideas against political and political theoretical understandings of authority.

My next project will engage the “religious freedom versus civil rights” antagonism that characterizes much of contemporary American politics. By bringing covenantal authority into this space, to think about holding difference in a space of constitutive dissent, I will bring themes from my dissertation research into questions of law, identity, and negotiations between varying forms of authority to offer new insight into this seemingly entrenched area. In thinking with and through religion, political theory can provide a way to address cases where religion comes up against other civil rights with a nuanced, context-informed balance in lieu of zero-sum competition.

My research agenda extends to post-colonial theory (primarily Francophone), religion, race, and gender in political thought, and questions of memory and responsibility.

Other Projects  

“Weaving Politics”

Taking the paradigm of weaving from Plato’s dialog, The Statesman, as an invitation to explore how the craft was actually practiced in Ancient Athens, we argue that women’s work can be a model for a democratic politics. Further, that weaving as practiced by ancient Athenian women runs counter to the xenos’s diaretic method, such that to weave includes a kind of dividing that makes space for more creation.

Co-authored with Jill Frank for forthcoming Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, edited by Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen

“Contested Memory, Contested Space: Jewish and Algerian Memory in the Parisian Cityscape”

The political-historical events of modern France are inscribed in the streets and buildings of its capital city. With lieux de mémoire evoking its bonapartist (Arc de Triomphe), republican (Pantheon), revolutionary (Place de la Bastille), monarchist (Palais du Louvre), Gaullist (Palais des Invalides) and other political pasts as part of its dramatic skyline and experience of the flâneur. As such, one might expect that the cityscape would carry traces of the legacies of two of France’s most significant minorities, Jews and Algerians. Why these two groups? Curiously but not coincidentally, major moments in Jewish or Algerian liberation or oppression align with transformative political events: Jewish emancipation and the Revolution of 1789, Algerian colonization and the July Monarchy of 1830, the Loi Crémieux, giving Jewish Algerians French citizenship, and the Paris Commune, the fall of France in 1940 and the subsequent removal of French citizenship of Algerian Jews, the Algerian War of Independence and the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

This paper explores the fraught history of lieux de mémoire for French Jews and for Algerian colonial subjects in the metropole, and how contestations over monuments and memorials manifests a social, cultural, and political struggle to reckon with the violence of the past.

Banner photo: From left to right, John Lewis, an unidentified nun, Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Bunche, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth marching in Selma, AL in 1965. Associated Press.