The following transcript has been lightly edited, to correct minor infelicities and to improve clarity.

MR. HILLEL FRADKIN: Good afternoon. The title of today’s event consists of two questions: Why Genesis? Why now? Both questions are in Leon Kass’s new and remarkable book entitled The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.

The first question, "Why Genesis," or "What is Genesis about and what is it for," is a very old question—at least a very old Jewish question. It is the question posed at the very outset of the most famous and widely read Jewish commentary on the Bible, written by a man now known as Rashi, in the 11th century in northern France.

Rashi suggested that the Bible might have dispensed with Genesis altogether, even the beginning sections of Exodus, and rather begun with the first law which God commanded to the new nation of Israel, the law prescribing the celebration of Passover. This is the way certain Jewish commentators deal with their holy text. The implication of Rashi’s question is that all one might need to know are the specifics of God’s will for man, as embodied in His commandments. Even in Rashi’s day, this question was an old one. Rashi presented it, not in his own name, but in the name of a certain Rabbi Ishmael, who had posed it a thousand years earlier.

Leon’s book and its close reading of Genesis gives us a new answer to this very old question. However, Leon’s book also raises and addresses a necessarily new question: "Why does Genesis, this old book and its old questions, matter to us today? Why do Americans living in the twenty first century concern themselves with this book?" To which might be added, "Why have Americans been doing so since the founding of this Republic?"

Our speakers today are Leon himself, George Weigel, Alan Jacobs, and Leon Wieseltier, all close readers of the Bible and other ancient texts, whose reading opens up onto the questions which present themselves to us today.

Each of our speakers, beginning with Leon, will speak for about 10 minutes. We will then provide for an exchange among our speakers, and finally open the floor for questions. To make our discussion as seamless as possible, I will introduce all of them now with brief and, of course necessarily inadequate, remarks.

Dr. Leon Kass is presently on leave from the University of Chicago and serves as the Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and also as the Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is doubly a doctor, with an M.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard. His books prior to this include The Hungry Soul; Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, written with his wife, Amy, who is here someplace; and Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge For Bioethics.

Our first discussant will be George Weigel. George is Senior Fellow here at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Director of its Catholic Studies program. He was educated at St. Mary’s Seminary and St. Michael’s College in Toronto. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including Witness to Hope: the Biography of Pope John Paul II and, most recently, The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church.

Alan Jacobs is Professor of English at Wheaton College, and has recently published two books, A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age, and A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics Of Love.

Finally, Leon Wieseltier is the Literary Editor of The New Republic, and has been so for more than 20 years. He studied at Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Universities, and was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard from 1979 to 1982. His most recent book is a book entitled Kaddish, which perhaps holds the prize for the closest reading of the Hebrew text, given the amount of text.

DR. LEON KASS: Thank you very much. Thanks to the assembled for coming out on a rainy afternoon. Thanks especially to former colleagues. And I see at least four or five students who at one time or another were in my classes on Genesis, which classes, in fact, are really responsible for the book. This is a teaching book and, as anybody who would look at it can see, the students are cited more frequently than the learned commentators. Thanks to Hillel and the Ethics and Public Policy Center for arranging this forum, and thanks in advance to the commentators, whose comments I look forward to hearing.

The question, "Why Genesis and Why Now?" is an interesting question. The question is itself instructive. Once upon a time the answer to the first question was, "Well, it’s the first book of the Torah." The answer to "Why now?" is, "It’s Simchas Torah and we have to start reading it all over again."

But, I should confess at the beginning that I’m rather astonished to have written this book since I started my life as a child of the Enlightenment, a believer in the indefinite progress of humankind, with socialist leanings—never went to the synagogue, never celebrated my Bar Mitzvah, and was indifferent to religion.

I practice medicine and some biochemistry and have always done so with a certain moralist’s concern that only later did I discover was parasitic on the Jewish teachings. At one point it occurred to me that modern biotechnology was producing moral problems that threatened us with possibilities of dehumanization. I discovered that there were limitations in the modern scientific view of the world, and I began to search for an alternative. I first looked to the philosophical—the pre-modern philosophical alternatives of Plato and Aristotle, and looking for a more natural science, truer to life as lived, one that might actually offer some kind of guidance for these ethical questions. It’s been rather astonishing, gradually, to discover that I’ve been on a journey from the pole of Athens to the pole of Jerusalem.

Thus, the question "Why Genesis? Why Now?" is a pertinent question for all of us, but especially for myself. I would like to give something of an answer drawn from the introduction of the book. In the time that I have, I want to give an illustration of the spirit of reading.

This book offers a philosophical reading of the book of Genesis, and is addressed to believers and non-believers alike. However, it should be of special interest to thoughtful children of skeptics who, like the author, now have good reason to want to see and to learn firsthand what it is that their parents or grandparents rejected.

Despite our freedom, prosperity and high level of schooling, many of us are often perplexed and at sea in the modern world. Though we are knowledgeable, powerful and privileged with opportunities beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams, we remain psychically, morally, and spiritually adrift. It is with respect to this situation of ours that I invite readers to take up the philosophical reading of Genesis.

By philosophical I mean, in the ancient sense, the activity which is performed by the love and pursuit of wisdom—the search to discover the truth about the world and our place within it, and ultimately to seek thereby some kind of guidance for how we are to live. I would acknowledge straightaway that the Bible is not a philosophical book in any conventional sense. Neither in manner nor in purpose is it manifestly philosophical. On the contrary, one could say that it is anti-philosophical. Philosophy, in its classical sense, begins in wonder and seeks knowledge for its own sake. It looks to nature and seeks by means of unaided reason, following the eyes to the wonders of nature, especially those aloft in the heavens.

In the biblical account, the beginning of wisdom is not wonder but awe, reverence and fear for the Lord. The goal is not knowledge for its own sake, but a righteous and holy life. One proceeds, not by looking to nature through ones eyes, but by hearkening to the revealed Word and the command of God. The wisdom of Jerusalem is not the wisdom of Athens. According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is the fear, awe and reverence of the Lord.

This was problem enough before the coming of modern times, but we now have science, not philosophy, as the most exalted body of knowledge. Science has taken the place of wisdom, yet science is, in a certain fundamental way, anti-wisdom as the ancients understood it. Science denies the possibility of philosophy as traditionally understood both because of the limitations of our reason and because of its account of the nature of things. Modern science seems to be an embarrassment to biblical teachings of the Creation, the divine origin of man, and all kinds of so-called miracles.

The Enlightenment has also proved to be a mixed blessing. We have acquired Promethean powers but with no wisdom to guide us. And indeed, the wisdom that was received has now been challenged and, to some extent, threatened by the very science that brings this power. Therefore, it seems to me the time is right for a re-examination of these rejected or abandoned alternatives, and that means serious examination of the Bible. The question is, "Can a thoughtful person today still affirm the teachings of the Bible in the light of what we now know?" The answer to this question depends in part on what the Bible actually says and what it means. Since the stakes are very high, one should not rely on hearsay but should read it and think about it for oneself. This is the justification and answer to, "Why Genesis and Why Now?"

Once I decided to read this book, I gave over my current preoccupations with the state of the culture and various other matters, and tried to submit myself to the book, attempting to understand what kind of a book it is and how it wants to be read. Needless to say, this is not an easy matter and is much contested.

After much study I’ve come to the conclusion that, contrary to scholars who regard Genesis as a patchwork of writings from various sources, it is a coherent whole—a narrative that conveys a moral, political, spiritual teaching. The first 11 chapters prepare the reader to take seriously the arrival of God’s new way for humankind while the rest of Genesis enables the reader to learn, along with the patriarchs, what this new way might offer and what it might require.

The book of Genesis is not a chronicle and perhaps not even a history. The word "history" is an anachronism that doesn’t occur in the text. It is a nineteenth century scholarly term. The things Genesis includes are ordered and governed by a guiding pedagogical intention. The order is more pedagogical than chronological.

It is certainly true that the meaning of this text and the traditions that have honored it as sacred are unintelligible save in the context of that tradition and its place in the cultural and the spiritual life of various peoples. If this is a book of the sort that I think it is one might suspect that it would carry its persuasive power within itself. If the book is written with a pedagogical intention to lead the reader from where the reader first starts to where the reader ought to go, then one would be tempted to the structure or the rhetorical development and pedagogical structure of the account.

This has implications for the reader of the book, for any reader picking up the book seriously engages in a philosophical quest. The reader might expect to learn more than from the outside, a view of what happened first and what happened next. But in fact, the reader might be prepared for the fact that the most important accomplishment in such an activity takes place in the mind and the heart of the reader.

A wisdom-seeking reader might be led from a view that wisdom begins in wonder about the origins of the universe and the status of the heavenly bodies, yet come to belief that the beginning of wisdom might very well be the fear, awe, reverence of the Lord. That is the true meaning and suggestion of the title of my book. Genesis should not be understood as a book for beginners seeking wisdom, but for the serious possibility that the biblical teaching about the beginning of wisdom is, indeed, the correct one.

In the time remaining, let me just make a suggestion about how this might work. One must read carefully the whole. For when one picks up this book it has no title and no author. It does not announce who is speaking. It begins with things no human being could have been witness to, putting the reader in a state of wonder and perplexity. Gradually, in the first 11 chapters, it takes the reader through an account of the Creation, the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Age of Heroes, the flood, Noah and his sons, the dispersion of peoples, and the story of Babel.

These seemingly historical stories are in fact vehicles for conveying the timeless psychic, social elements and principles—the anthropological beginnings or roots of human life in all their moral ambiguity. The stories cast powerful light, for example, on the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, shame, guilt, anger, and love of the beautiful as well as man’s response to mortality.

The stories cast equally powerful light on the naturally vexed relations between man and woman, brother and brother, father and son, neighbor and neighbor, stranger and stranger, man and God. Adam and Eve are not just the first, but also the paradigmatic man and woman. Cain and Abel are paradigmatic brothers. Babel is the quintessential city. By means of such paradigmatic stories, the beginning of Genesis shows us not so much what happened once upon a time, as what always happens in the absence of instruction.

This is the critical point. By holding up a mirror we readers can discover in ourselves the reasons why human life is so bittersweet and why uninstructed human beings generally get it wrong. Genesis, reflectively read, also provides a powerful pedagogical beginning for the moral and spiritual education of the reader. We are taken through the stage of innocence. We are taken through the age of lawlessness, the age of the universal law attempted to be transmitted universally through natural transmission. We see the universal city.

As a result of what we learn from this early education when God calls Abraham in chapter 12, we are inclined to take a walk with him and to pay attention. We seek to find if some way could be found to address these permanent and destructive tendencies in the human soul and human social relations. We hope, as a result of what we have learned from those first 11 chapters, that there really is an alternative, and we now have been given a stake in that outcome.

I think I should stop with only one more comment. The story of Abraham has multiple adventures which I read as his education. When he goes with the great promise, it is not clear to me whether he goes out of obedience to the Commander, or whether he desires the sevenfold promise that is made to him. In the final test of Abraham, the binding of Isaac, these two alternatives are put to the test. The question is, "What is first in your heart, Abraham, the love of the gifts of the promise, or the awe, fear and reverence for the Commander?" And as everybody knows, the answer is given.

I suggest that this reading is traumatic; the test of Abraham turns out also to be a test of the reader who is, in a way, invited to ask the question, "Does Abraham respond lightly to this call?" And, if we are vicariously participating in this activity, the readers must then test whether this alternative really speaks to their longings and our aspirations. This is a very interesting place to pause and see whether the reflection of the text has actually produced certain changes in us. I leave it to you to ponder that question for yourself.

Thank you.

MR. GEORGE WEIGEL: Shortly before his untimely death several years ago, Father Raymond Brown, perhaps most distinguished of American Catholic biblical scholars, certainly the world’s leading expert on the Gospel of St. John, was asked whether when he died he was looking forward to meeting St. John in heaven, and he said yes. He had, after all, spent 45 years of his life studying the Johannine literature.

But he had to confess, he told the questioner, that he was also terrified by this. And the interlocutor said, "Well, what are you afraid of?" And he said, "Well, you remember that scene in John 21, the miraculous draft of fish?" And the guy said, "Yes. What’s so terrifying about that?" He said, "Well, you remember that the text tells us that there were 153 fish. I have spent 45 years trying to figure out what St. John meant by 153 fish, and what terrifies me is that, when I say to him in heaven, ‘St. John, what did you mean by 153 fish,’ St. John is going to say, I wrote 153 fish because there were 153 fish."

I mention this because it seems to me to illustrate in a poignant way what we might call the uneasy conscience of the historical critical method of approaching the Bible, at least as practiced by biblical exegetes and commentators who are not thoroughgoing historical positivists. This uneasy conscience, it seems to me, has to do with an inarticulate fear of losing the forest of truth in the trees of critical scholarship.

As the historical critical method evolved over the past two centuries from literary criticism to form criticism to redaction criticism to composition criticism to who-knows-what criticism, a lot of important things were learned, and we should welcome and cherish that learning. The whole enterprise, it seems to me, has become unpleasantly analogous in the past generation or two to a dissection. And while we learn anatomy from dissecting dead bodies, we don’t learn humanity from dissecting dead bodies. And that, it seems to me, is the drift of the historical critical method, yet it understands itself to be the only intellectually respectable and viable method of reading the Bible. It reduces the Bible to a dead body, rather than a living witness to truth and wisdom.

To vary the analogy, the historical critical method absolutized is a kind of exegetic Napoleonic code in which the biblical text is guilty until proven innocent. And that assumption of guilt, that assumption that somebody’s trying to put something over on us here, is another obstacle to engaging the Bible as a text that just may have something important to teach us.

That’s why it seems to me that Leon’s project in this book is so important. It is a way of reading the Bible that, in a manifestly, intellectually serious and learned way, restores reverence for the text as disclosing the truth of things; the truths built into us and built into the world. This is the truth. These are the truths that the historical critical method often misses, and that lead to that uneasy conscience of which I spoke a moment ago.

Two hundred-plus years into the hegemony of the historical critical method in the world of biblical scholarship, we know much more about biblical texts, about the culture, society, literary forms, military activity, artifacts, etc., of the biblical age. But, would anyone say 200 years into this hegemony that we know the Bible as well as preceding generations, or that the hegemony of the critics has enlarged the influence of biblical truths in our society? That would be a very hard case to make, it seems to me.

This reverence for the biblical text, as truth-telling and truth-unveiling that Leon displays in his work, reminds me of Chesterton’s definition of tradition as the democracy of the dead. Democracy, Chesterton said tells us not to ignore a good man’s opinion, even if he happens to be our groom. Tradition, he continues, tells us not to ignore a good man’s opinion, even if he happens to be our grandfather, or as Leon’s work suggests, our great-great-great-great-great to the nth degree grandfather in the household of faith. That’s an important learning to have put before us in our culture at this point in history.

One other parallel with Leon’s method of reading Genesis that I’d like to mention briefly here is the reading of the first three chapters of Genesis, given by John Paul II in the first part of his four-part Theology of the Human Body. Here is another philosophically informed encounter with Genesis. It’s from a different, in this case, phenomenological starting point than Leon’s, but a philosophically informed reading of Genesis that, like Leon’s, brings these texts alive through a close literary and philosophical encounter with the text, bracketing, in some sense, the questions of historical critical methodology that have so absorbed the biblical world, the world of biblical scholarship, for the past two centuries, and breaking open the possibility of an encounter with important truths about the human condition in a fresh way.

It is true that the Pope’s reading of the story of Adam and Eve and of love and selfishness is different from Leon’s. This merely suggests that this new way, this new old way, if you will, of encountering Genesis opens up the possibility for future truth-centered inter-religious dialogue.

I mentioned Chesterton and tradition. Tradition is often associated with an aristocratic outlook, and everyone who knows and follows Leon Kass’s work knows that he is a man devoted to democracy. But in this challenging book, he demonstrates how democracy and aristocracy are not antonymous. It seems to me that Leon’s method marries an aristocracy of intellect and insight to a democratic love of conversation and debate from which all true wisdom under grace eventually comes.

That dual commitment, I suggest, is very important for revitalizing biblical studies today. It is very important for our culture, more broadly speaking, and for raising this remarkable challenge, to the hegemony of the dissectors, while doing so in such an intelligent and elegant way. It seems to me that we’re all very much in Leon’s debt.

Thank you.

DR. ALAN JACOBS: It’s good to be here this afternoon. I’m assuming that if you have invited an Evangelical to address this issue, you’re looking for some pietistic Biblicism, and so I will do my best to comply with that request. In these brief comments, I want to make two points, one more argumentative and one more compassionately grateful.

To begin, Dr. Kass claims to be offering, as he said a few moments ago, a philosophical reading of Genesis. And it’s worth taking a moment to ask what that means. In his book he says, to start, that it means reading without presuppositions or intermediaries, but I don’t believe that’s quite right. He certainly does have a presupposition, and he admits it; that wisdom may be found in this text.

He states quite forthrightly that, "To read in the spirit of thoughtful engagement requires suspending disbelief and seeking reasons to trust." And he takes that position in part because of the intermediaries of past generations who have venerated Genesis and found reasons to trust the democracy of the dead that George Weigel just referred to.

So, when he says that he wants to read Genesis without presuppositions or intermediaries, what I believe he really means—and isn’t it wonderful, Dr. Kass, to have someone stand here and tell you what you really mean—what I believe he really means is that his presuppositions are revisable, and that his intermediaries do not possess absolute authority.

He does not come to the text with faith commitments that require him to find wisdom in the text and to obey its commandments insofar as he understands them. I would put it in this way, to say that Dr. Kass is, in this book, a pupil of the text, but not its disciple. He does not recognize it as a priori having an unavoidable claim upon him.

As a pupil, what Dr. Kass seeks from Genesis is guidance. His approach—and again, I’m quoting—"attempts to understand the text in its own terms, yet tries to show how such an understanding may address us in our current situation of moral and spiritual neediness."

But, how can the text be shown to address us, given its temporal, spatial and cultural distance from us? To achieve this goal, Dr. Kass must discover a vocabulary that mediates between the biblical world and ours. He needs bridges, translators, and he finds them in the language of human problems and human self-understanding. Thus, at the outset of his book, he suggests some of the connections. I’m giving three quotations here. "As were the protagonists in the world of Genesis, so are we today troubled by vexing questions of family life." "Contemporary concerns over unbridled technology are anticipated in the story of Babel." "Biblical Egypt should be of special interest for modern Americans."

Or take this more detailed example. Kass prefaces his account of the complex relationships among Noah and his sons by suggesting that the Genesis narrative wishes "to encourage the ambivalent male reader to participate vicariously in the fatherly education of the Hebrew patriarchs," first by showing him precisely why such an education is needed, and then by moving him to care about whether, in fact, it can be obtained.

Professor Kass explores the ways in which Noah acts both wisely and foolishly, and discerns in his sons three fundamental human types: "the tyrannical man, or alternatively, the man who is focused on sex and bodily pleasure; the decent, or noble man, the generous man of refined taste and sensibility; and the pious man, the man who takes his bearings from looking up to the divine."

And Kass suggests that we should consider these types in light of a similar typology offered by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, the life of pleasure, the life of honor, and the life of contemplation. In this way, Kass assimilates the narrative of Genesis to philosophical discourse, finding in that narrative the sort of categorical clarifications that we want philosophy to provide.

To me, as a Christian and a believer in the canonical force of Genesis, this way of approaching the text seems not so much unconvincing as odd. One can read Genesis in such a way. What gets lost in such an approach seems vital to me: the irreducible particularities of narrative, the evident claims of this particular narrative to constitute—and here, I think I may or may not be disagreeing with Dr. Kass—some kind of history, even if it’s not clear just what kind, and above all, the centrality of God’s actions to most of what happens in Genesis.

When Dr. Kass, employing again the language of human problems, writes that the book of Genesis is mainly concerned with this question: "Is it possible to find, institute and preserve a way of life that accords with man’s true standing in the world, and that serves to perfect his godlike possibilities?" I find myself thinking that the absence of the Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob from this description, this summation of Genesis, resembles the lack in a summary of Hamlet of any reference to the Prince of Denmark.

For me, as a member of a religious community formed by a belief in a covenant-making God, the appropriation of the biblical narrative is done by historical, rather than what Dr. Kass would call philosophical, means. Our task, as I understand it, is not to find the conceptual vocabulary that will allow us to build analogical bridges between the biblical text and our experience. Rather, we must understand that we dwell in the same history that the people of Israel relayed in the Pentateuch. Genesis, then, is not analogous to our experience. It is our experience in its historical aspect, or so Christians like me believe.

This is my first point. My second is that, as Dr. Kass said a few moments ago, he didn’t write his commentary primarily for people like me, and that’s a good thing. People like me, who believe that reading the Bible is a matter of life and death, are sometimes—and precisely because of the depth of our commitment—greatly flawed custodians of our sacred texts. Sometimes those texts need to be removed from our presence and carried into quieter rooms of the culture, university seminar rooms for instance. One could even say that, in the best parts of Dr. Kass’s book, we see the ethos of the university seminar room wonderfully exemplified.

Though many professors fail to understand this plight, the seminar room is not the place for a sovereign dismissal of the texts under scrutiny as patriarchal or racist or sexist or complicit in violence or, for that matter, atheistic or blasphemous or immoral. Nor is it a place for the fideism position that the sacred book can be accepted by faith and faith alone. Rather, the seminar room occupies an intellectual demilitarized zone where the text is confronted, wrestled with, puzzled over, where interpretations are offered, perhaps tentatively or provisionally, then debated, revised, withdrawn or removed.

In such an environment, it is vital that such texts not be explored as though understanding them is a matter of life and death. And while people of passionate commitment to faith or unbelief may often be frustrated by such a deliberate lowering of the interpretive stakes—certainly I have often experienced that frustration—environments that encourage this detachment are socially vital.

There need to be discursive spaces in our society; spaces that, when functioning properly, can help to constitute a vibrant and healthy public sphere where matters even of eternal life and death can be considered as though they were not quite that important. Though, as Dr. Kass just said a few moments ago, the wisdom-seeking reader may eventually come to the conclusion that a text such as Genesis makes an ultimate demand.

All this is another way of saying that the Enlightenment project retains great value, even if it is deeply flawed and has never been well realized. Dr. Kass’s struggle with the manifold complexities of Genesis is a lovely example of the humane and thoughtful intellectual exercise that that classic Enlightenment institution, the secular university seminar room, can, at its best, produce.

MR. LEON WIESELTIER: "Why Genesis? Why now?" When I heard those questions, I thought to myself, "Did I come from a place where I never heard those questions ever?" The only relevant questions were, "Why anything else?" and "Why not sooner?"

It is a very sweet thing to discuss in Washington a book that is not of Washington and, as you know, a very rare thing. I want to say a few things in praise of my friend Leon’s book, and then more generally a few things in praise of the kind or the type of book that it is, so that some of the more substantive reasons for my admiration of it will become clear.

It is, to start with, a book about the Bible that is not in the virtue business and not in the certainty business. When I say it is not in the virtue business, I mean that one of the really striking and valuable things about the book is that Leon’s descriptions of the biblical figures there are not only compassionate, they are premised upon their creatureliness and their imperfection. None of the figures in the Bible presented by Leon has are idealized. There is no diminishment of the complexity, the troublesomeness or the outright unattractiveness of some of their behavior.

In this sense, when I read Leon’s account of certain figures, it put me in mind of nothing so much as Pierre Bayle who, as you will recall in his dictionary, got into great trouble at the time because of his portraits of Abraham, Moses, especially David—of the creatureliness of the biblical figures. This is not an idealizing book.

And when I say that it is not in the certainty business, I don’t mean to say that it is not a book of doubt either because, as we know, doubt can be just as dogmatic as the opposite of doubt. It has become, in a way, a kind of modern dogma.

What I mean is that this is a book about thought; about the processes of thought. Frankly, I think Leon exaggerates his disenchantment with reason. His objections to scientific reason are strong and forceful, and one accedes to them. But, there is a reasoning mind at work in every page of this book applied to the pages of Genesis.

I think that there is, for that reason, a kind of unsettled quality about Leon’s book, which it is important not to overlook. I don’t think that George is quite right when he speaks of reverence for the text and disclosing the truth of things. I think this book is much more provisional, much more unsettled, much more caught in the gears of interpretation and speculation than that.

The nice thing about Leon’s talk about wisdom is that, unlike many people who talk about wisdom, he isn’t mesmerized by the word itself. That is to say, there is the love of wisdom, but then there is the very troubling question of what the actual content of wisdom is. And it is not enough merely to invoke wisdom against certain philosophical or anti-philosophical or non-philosophical alternatives. One then has to roll one’s sleeves up and get to the actual business of trying to figure out what on earth the substance of wisdom is, which is not a very easy thing to do. And like the old joke about the Jew who waited at the outskirts of town for the Messiah—when asked why he kept up with his job even though the pay was low, he said it was steady work. The search for wisdom is steady work.

Secondly, one of the things I admire about Leon’s book is that it is not a book about religion. It is a book inside religion. There are very, very few books of this kind. It is not a propagandistic book for religion, and it is not an apologetic book for the book of Genesis, or for the Jewish or any other reading of it. It is not a dogmatic book. It takes place inside the roiling character of the tradition of interpretation.

If you’ve looked into the tradition of interpretation of any scripture in any of the great monotheistic traditions, you know that everything in it does not agree with everything else in it. That is to say one of the reasons that these traditions are such treasures is not because they leave one with a nice, toasty feeling of complacence about having been in the precincts of the truth and acquired the holy. It leaves one actually having to make intellectual decisions about what interpretations one believes is right, and what interpretations one believes are wrong. This is a philosophical attitude.

The most important decision I think that a serious intellectual has to make is not what to believe, but how to believe what one believes. That is to say, true belief can be thoughtless belief and, indeed, we know from the history of religion that it often has been thoughtless belief. And one might even make the argument that, without thoughtless belief, religious traditions would not have survived and come down to us to this very late day despite the pressure and destruction visited upon them.

But, if one believes that belief must be the consequence of thought, then the first question I believe that every serious intellectual must ask is, what will be the subject of one’s thought? That is to say, what will one accept as the stimulus of one’s thought? What is it that one will study?

You know, one of my favorite things in the world is a small story in one of the Pali scriptures in early Buddhism which tells the story of a prince who noticed a dewdrop. And in this dewdrop he found what the text calls "support for contemplation." That is to say, out of this aesthetic experience, out of the study of this dewdrop, he came away not just with an aesthetic experience, but with an experience of intellection. It provoked him to think, to arrive at philosophical conclusions about certain fundamental questions about the nature of the world.

Now, the present sorry condition of American culture, its scandalously unphilosophical character, is owed to the fact that American culture in recent decades has made the wrong choices in choosing what will be its support for contemplation, or what it will choose as its subject for study.

It has chosen technique. That is to say, it has decided in certain precincts that the most important question one can ask about anything is how it works. And so we find ourselves choking on this so-called revival of pragmatism, in which the smartest thing one can say about anything is how it works. Not if it is true or false, not if it is good or bad, not what its value is, but simply this shallow technical explanation of the way things operate.

Or, American culture has become excessively enchanted by history, either in the wake of the great ideological competitions of the twentieth century, or worse actually, as a consequence—or rather, this would be the consequence of that—so as to celebrate the tyranny of politics over most of our lives. The way in which we politicize religion, for a start, which is something that one can stay awake many, many nights worrying about.

Finally, the American culture has become mesmerized by physical reality. We are now living in a frenzy of materialism. Biological materialism and capitalist materialism, genes and money, both of which I think have led American culture away from a truly philosophical attitude and from the really primary philosophical questions.

One of the great services of Leon’s book—and of Leon’s other work, but certainly of this book—is that this book is an example of the right choice, in my humble opinion. That is to say, the support for contemplation that Leon Kass has chosen is a text and, more specifically, this particular text. He has chosen to think about a text whose subject is the character of the universe and the character of human life, and nothing less than that. And, having made that decision, he is already, from the first page of the book, launched into a truly primary activity of a kind that is very, very rare in American life.

Now, if one combines this commitment to thought and this commitment to text, what one comes out with is a commitment to commentary. And here I would just like to conclude with a few words about the way in which this book deserves to restore, to rehabilitate, commentary as a primary activity of serious intellectuals. I hasten to add, I mean commentary with a small "c", thank you very much.

There are many things wrong with post-modernism, but one of the many, many mistakes that it has visited upon American life is the idea that commentary is in some way an abject or belated activity; that there is something secondary or tertiary or worse, even that it is not the primary activity. Anybody who knows the history of commentary knows that it was, for many centuries, and in some ways still is, at least in the books that will really matter, always served as one of the great intellectual opportunities for originality of thought, and indeed, for radicalism of thought.

In the Jewish tradition, certainly, the great works of Jewish philosophy are almost all of them works of scriptural commentary, from Philo through the medieval tradition, most notably through The Guide Of The Perplexed (which is the greatest single book ever written by a Jew), through Hermann Cohen.

The majesty, the depth, the diversity of the incommensurability with itself of this tradition shows the extent to which it is almost incumbent upon a serious philosophical mind to engage in the work of commentary.

Leon is right. The Bible is not a philosophical book. But, the most fundamental stimuli, the most fundamental supports for philosophical contemplation, have always been non-philosophical. And Leon’s book falls squarely and proudly and richly into this tradition.

When I say this—and here I will conclude—I do not mean to say that Leon is asking Jewish questions. He is asking universal questions. Hillel began with that first Rashi and Beresheet in Genesis. Ever since I was a little boy, I have always had a strong allergy to that text of Rashi because it has the effect for me of both trivializing and tribalizing what is the single most sublime and enigmatic sentence in all of literature, "In the beginning," etc., etc.

The minute one reads that sentence, one is already involved in thinking about the nature of the cosmos. One’s mind has been lifted up. And the challenge then becomes to offer stout resistance to all the things in human life, in social life and political life and intellectual life, that encourage one or would seduce one to lower one’s mind, to diminish the scale of one’s intellectual activity.

And because Leon’s book hews to these universal questions, one of the great accomplishments of it is that there is not a page in this very fat book—and I like very fat books—in which his mind is in this way diminished.

Thank you very much.

MR. FRADKIN: I’m going to ask Leon to say a few words in response to comments you just heard, and then ask our other speakers to weigh in back and forth a little bit, and then we’ll go to the audience.

DR. KASS: First of all, let me thank all three of you for the warmth and generosity of your comments. I’ve gotten off rather lightly, and I don’t know why that is.

I think the most serious challenges are raised by Professor Jacobs’s comments, so let me begin there. And let me begin with the last remark. I appreciate the charity that’s implied in that suggestion, but I’m not sure that I would accept the characterization of at least my own seminar room as a place where only less than ultimate matters are under consideration.

It’s true that, if the issue is the fate of one’s immortal soul, we probably don’t get around to that. It would be inappropriate, at least in a secular university, to take that up. But, I take it that if one is really interested philosophically the stakes are matters of life and death, at least as far as it is given to us on this earth to know about.

And so, we proceed civilly. I have to sometimes restrain a number of my students who know before they get into the meaning of a certain passage when they say to me, "That’s very interesting, Mr. Kass, but that’s wrong." And they come from all sides of the religious spectrum where what they’ve been taught about the meaning of the text is sometimes an obstacle to entertaining a discussion. And those reservations are treated respectfully so that people are being held to make their opinions square with what one can find in the text, rather than what one might have learned from authorities.

Second, and this is a minor point, I don’t regard this sense of philosophizing as part of the Enlightenment project. "Enlightenment" is a modern term. The quest for wisdom is an ancient activity. And what is interesting to me about this possibility is that, here is a philosophical wisdom-seeking activity in which the reader opens him or herself to the possibility that that activity could show them the limitations of the philosophical activity. In fact, it might bring philosophical reason to its knees.

And in this sense Leon Wieseltier is right, that the text, which has its suspicions about reason, is addressed to our reason. It proceeds by speaking to the mind as well as to the heart. On the other hand, it perhaps seeks to teach us about the limitations of what one could know on one’s own, and also the importance of subordinating the purely rational to something that is more than rational.

A small little note. This is something that I discovered, thanks to Father Paul Mankowski when I did some teaching of Genesis at the Gregorian a couple of years ago. Father Mankowski, a Professor of Biblical Hebrew sat in on my class.

He pointed out to me that the language in which the Bible is written, namely Hebrew, is in fact only one of the many languages into which the unified language of the human race was fractured as a result of the story of Babel. And one of the implications is that we should not be too complacent about the ease with which we think we understand the text that we are reading, that there’s always something unsettling: the lacunae, the reticence, the absences of the story.

In that very story of Babel are all kinds of linguistic puzzles. While they in a way appeal to the mind, they suggest that the very instrument of the mind and its great glory, speech and reason, are both aids and hindrances. And I think that the text makes one very, very humble about the capacity to really understand. And I think that it’s unlikely that one is ever going to get to the bottom of the meaning of this.

Second, the other question has to do with particularity and universality. I don’t think that when God calls Abraham, that He has given up his universalist aspiration for humankind. Even in the very first remark when He calls Abraham, he suggests that, in Abraham, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

There have been various other alternatives prior to Abraham. There is the condition of simple innocence in the garden and expulsion. Human beings lived with the only kind of knowledge of good and bad that they had, namely the kind that they acquired there. And you see the disastrous consequences of that in the story of Cain and Abel.

You have the emergence of the Age of Heroes. I won’t spoil for you the discovery of how that comes about, but it’s buried in the genealogy in chapter five that goes from Adam to Noah. What you discover there is something very important as to why all of a sudden the Heroic Age emerges. And then you have, after the flood, the giving of a kind of law and the attempt to pass that down. And then you have the entire project for Babel, which would seem to be an attempt to deal with humankind united. God rejects that and, in place of that search for a factitious solidity, breaks up the human race and starts over with one people.

But, it’s not so much that God tried many things and failed. Rather, it seems to me the reader is educated as a result of going through those experiences, that you have it on the highest authority that those alternatives of innocence, anarchy and some kind of universal project are doomed to failure. It wasn’t just an accident. You try that again, it’s going to fail also. What reads as particularistic and some kind of particularistic account still has the same universalistic intention. Here I think I would agree with Leon Wieseltier.

As I used to say about Levy’s Rye Bread, "You don’t need to be Jewish to follow the story of Abraham." Every reader who would start at the beginning has a stake in what happens here. The historical veracity of anything that becomes before Abraham I think is irrelevant to its truth.

I think the real truths in those stories are in the transformation of the souls of the readers.

I’m not sure that there’s a deep difference between what George Weigel calls the truth-telling and truth-unveiling character of this reading, and Leon Wieseltier’s suggestion that I’m less inclined to find here the pearls of the truth, rather than the deepening of certain kinds of permanent questions and some kinds of insights.

I think, George, I’m more inclined to Leon’s interpretation of what I’ve done here. The story changes once the law is given. I think there might be a difference between the Jewish and Christian traditions. The important question to me is not the question of faith, but the question of obedience to the commands. There are two real commandments in Genesis: be fruitful and multiply and the commandment of circumcision under the covenant. There are high commandments which are universal yet there’s not even one moral judgment made in the text by the text.

MR. WEIGEL: I’m very interested in institutions and the ways in which dealing with each institution of culture makes certain kinds of conversations possible while simultaneously disabling other kinds of conversations. The synagogue makes certain kinds of conversations possible. The Christian college or university—and I teach at a Christian college—makes certain kinds of conversations possible, but disables others. And the same is true, I would say, of a university like the University of Chicago.

I truly do not think of the conversations that go on at the University of Chicago or any secular university to be something less than the real thing. That world is the world in which I was educated.

The stakes are, or can be, life or death in those conversations. I wholly accept and admit that. I just mean, by my comment, that the course does not proceed under the shared assumption that the book of Genesis, properly understood, contains the key to the questions of life and death. It remains open.

I think one of the most interesting aspects of the book of Genesis is the relationship between the particularities of the history of Israel and the universal claims and the universal narrative. And I think it’s at least arguable that the overall logic of Genesis is one which moves from the particular to the universal, rather than the other way around, and that encapsulated in the promise that, in the children of Abraham, all the nations of the world will be blessed, is a kind of a move from the particularities of God’s dealing with Israel outwards towards a universality, and that, if that is the case, then perhaps the particularities are what yield the universalities.

DR. KASS: Well, there were universal blessings announced in the first chapter. There is a covenant not only with the whole human race, but also with the animal world. I think the universality with the case of Abraham doesn’t simply acquire a kind of universal interest late in the text. It’s present absolutely from the start. And it seems to me the challenge for people. I can understand it if one wants to say, "Look, here is the story of the history of the world before Abraham." Well, why are these things? Why these and only these things? What’s this funny story of Noah and his sons? Why are there two accounts of the dispersion and multiplication of the nations? Why the two accounts of the so-called creation summaries?

Things have been selected in a certain kind of way. If you see that something happens with the beginning of Abraham, and it’s in a way stark, but it’s also prepared by the genealogy that comes from Shem to Abraham then you would like to ask, "What’s the first part have to do with the second part?" And, "If it’s not simply history, what are we learning?"

In the beginning of the twelfth chapter, God calls Abraham. Abraham’s minding his own business. He hears this voice. "Get thee out of thy father’s house. The land I will show you and make a new nation." Abraham gets up and goes. Not a word. And that’s the most important fact about this story. The most important thing is that God called Abraham. The question is, does Abraham really know who’s calling him? Does Abraham really know what this voice wants? Commentaries and reason for centuries have tried to fill in the space. Well, of course, he was a monotheist. He smashed his father’s idols. That’s a way of trying to give an account as to why he answers this call.

Another possibility is—this is purely speculative—that Abraham suspends his disbelief and decides to take a walk with this voice to find out who’s calling and whether the voice speaks truth. Voices that might deliver on that large promise which answers the certain kinds of deep longings that Abraham has.

My suggestion is that the reader who picks up this book finds himself in a position analogous to Abraham. Voices speaking to the reader out of the text that do not identify themselves, about mysterious things that no living human being now or ever can bear witness to, namely the creation of everything.

And rather than say "prove it," or rather than say, "I believe it," it’s clear the text invites us to suspend our disbelief and take a walk with the text so that, by the time God calls Abraham—who didn’t have the benefit of the first eleven chapters, but didn’t need them—we are in a position like Abraham to be interested in God’s calling Abraham. It’s only thanks to what we’ve learned in those first eleven chapters that we now really care a lot about him and are willing to walk his walk and to have a kind of vicarious stake in what happens to him.

MR. WIESELTIER: It’s important that we not get caught up in the common understandings of universalism. A universalist analysis is, of course, always held and not held by particular individuals or particular groups. There is historical universality and there is a philosophical universality. I would disagree with Alan. It seems to me quite clear that when the book of Genesis ends, we are still reading the story of a clan, a clan that will become a people.

However, at the philosophical level, the greatest single universalist discovery that is ever going to be made has been made—the discovery of the universal monotheism, which is the paradoxical moment to which Leon referred. The son of a particular individual in a particular clan, arrives for the first time at what is truly a universalist analysis of God. There is a single immaterial Creator of the universe who rules it in its entirety.

Leon mentioned the story of the Tower of Babel. That story makes this very strange connection between the sin of perfect human unity and the sin of a human race that exists prior to diversity. They collectively build this tower, which is considered to be a rebellion against God. What had to be established at that point was that, whatever human unity will be like, it will never be anything like divine unity. The unity of God, the unity of the human race, either at the end of days or with the achievement of philosophical consensus about the truth, may come soon in our time.

MR. FRADKIN: Leonn, if you could say a little bit more about the analogy you draw between the stance of Abraham at the beginning of his walk, as you put it, and the stance of the reader, beginning not with Abraham, but beginning with Beresheet.

You say there a condition of the reader at the beginning of Beresheet, which is like or will become like the condition of Abraham when he first hears the call of God. And that seems very persuasive to me, but I thought maybe if you would flesh that out a little bit.

DR. KASS: That’s helpful, and I’m glad I have an opportunity to dispel the presumption implied in the suggestion that we readers are in any way to be compared with Abraham. Abraham is a giant and we are midgets. Insofar as there is the analogy, I think we have to start in two places. Who is Abraham when we first meet him? Abraham’s father had already started the journey toward Canaan and stopped in Haran. Abraham completes, under God’s command, a journey that his father began voluntarily.

Abraham is a rootless, childless, son of a radical, who may, in fact, have seen through the worship of heaven for which Babylon is famous. The Tower of Babel is the antecedent story. The tower is in a way a matter of presumption and pride, but it’s also almost certainly the place the Babylonian priest/astrologers used to measure the heavens. And the Babylonians were the first to measure the motions of the heavenly bodies, at least the numbers. The suggestion is Abraham might have figured something out, that the beginning of wisdom is on the other side of the stars, and that things that move up there are not heavenly bodies. And Abraham hears this voice which promises him a name and a place. One of the reasons, it seems to me, why Abraham might be responsive is, "It’s very impressive that this voice has somehow known what’s in my heart and has offered me what it is I’m longing for."

To the extent to which the reader of this book is not already inside the tradition of the text, and somehow at ease with it, but is, as I’ve suggested, someone who has certain kinds of longings and is unsettled, is looking for something more than the things that our culture offers, whether in terms of technique, or material things, or other matters. The soul was open to certain kinds of other matters, which is the condition of the wisdom-seeking soul in the first place. There is a certain certain sense of lack the book can begin to show you. The lack is there, and not only in the world, but especially the obstacles in your own soul, then we are nurtured to the point that the journey of Abraham can become our own journey, or at least one part of it.

MR. HABIB MALIK: Dr. Kass, picking up on your point about suspending this belief and walking with the text, I’m reminded of what Kierkegaard calls "The teleological suspension of the ethical" in his Fear and Trembling. I say problematic because I agree with Walvoord, who in fact says both the eclipse of God and between man and man, is very dangerous. It all hinges on the authenticity of the voice. And the most remarkable thing to me about Abraham is his embrace of the voice and his going along with the voice.

We all live in a post-Freudian age when everything is delusional, for it actually says it about this particular point. Sartre, who doesn’t take any of these things very seriously—being an atheist—at least admits that if the voice is actually God’s, then everything is fine. I would like you to say something about this "teleological suspension of the ethical" by Kierkegaard.

DR. KASS: Well, I have a reading of that story which is different. Allow me to say that Professor Jacobs has written a review of the book in First Things. Some of the comments here are familiar to me. It’s an extremely serious and generous review. The part of the book he likes especially is the way in which I treat that story, confessing at the outset that it baffles me, and that I think my interpretation of it is still rather shallow.

The test that God produces is, from God’s point of view, a perfectly rational test, and I think Abraham understands its meaning. There is a question put to Abraham. He understands it, and the answer is somehow given. Now, there’s lots else to say about it, but it does, I think, depend in fact on the submission to the voice, notwithstanding the contradiction of the command, to the very promise. And unless one had some kind of hope that either God doesn’t really mean it or there’s going to be resurrection of the dead Isaac then, as one of my students powerfully puts it, Abraham is setting out to prove that God is a liar, when the promise is to be delivered through Isaac.

But, you can’t treat that story separately from everything else that Abraham has learned up to that point, not the least of which is the miraculous birth of Isaac as promised to Abraham when he’s 100 years old. While Abraham may not know exactly who this voice is at the beginning, and he wrestles with this voice, it seems to me that he’s acquired enough evidence to know who is calling.

At the end of the story, he gets some rather good news unexpectedly, for which all of us are very grateful. I suggest that all fathers, whether they know it or not, are in some way sacrificing their sons to some god or other or to no god at all. And that story concentrates the entire experience at one particular moment.

Abraham is there, I think, being asked to display whether he really understood the meaning of the act of circumcision and dedicating his son to the Covenant in the most radical and stark and awesome way. But, I think anybody who’s followed the education of Abraham from the beginning would see that, in a funny kind of way, this makes sense, and I say that nervously.

DR. JACOBS: The reason that I like that part of your book so much is that you don’t make the Kierkegaardian move. Faced with an extraordinary difficult text, you don’t punt to the teleological suspension of the ethical. That strikes me as being the necessary response to a text which is demanding you to engage with it. Simply to fall on your knees before it, as Kierkegaard’s Johannes De Silentio does, is a failure of engagement, it seems to me.

MR. WIESELTIER: Leon, it’s still important when one thinks about the voice that Abraham heard, or when one considers the encounter of Moses with God, so-called face-to-face, this tradition of monotheism, and certainly of Judaism, but more generally of monotheism, was not based solely upon the sentry experience of certain epistemologically privileged individuals.

In other words, we are not asked to believe these things only because Abraham heard X, or Moses saw Y. We are asked to believe these things because Abraham heard X and understood it in the following way. But that the act of philosophical reflection immediately follows the experience of the senses that provoked it, which is why in the case of Jewish laws of prophecy and so on, there are very strict standards for what is acceptable and what isn’t. The possibility of illusion or deception in establishing a philosophical idea upon an experience of the senses is always very gray.

MR. PAUL EGRAP: I have a question about the readership of your book and the readership of the book you are helping them to read. You said a lot about those who come to the Bible in a state of disbelief, seeing something that speaks to them in the Bible, and you’re helping them to see that. Could you say more about what those who are not in that state, who may be readers of the Bible, can get from your reading of it? Or are we to say that you are there to help the outsiders get inside, the insiders don’t need you?

DR. KASS: Well, no, thank you. And this is an opportunity also to address Professor Jacobs, who said that this book isn’t for him, since he says he learns a lot from it, but in the fundamentalist way.

I don’t think the Biblical texts are self-interpreting. In fact, it’s not an accident that there are volumes on volumes of commentary and disagreement. And it seems to me even people inside have a lot to learn from slowing down and pondering all kinds of stories that, looked at closely, don’t say what you think they say.

Here are a few examples. Jacob falls in love with Rachel at the well. Most young men should. I mean, it’s an absolutely wonderful moment. But, if you read closely and for a long time the love of Rachel is a blind alley, and you discover that the love of the beautiful wife is somehow of a piece with the idolatry of Rachel when she takes her father’s idols. A pious attempt to suggest she took them to purify his house and escape doesn’t fit because, if that’s all she was doing, she would have cast them aside as the trash she knew they were. The fact that she holds onto them means that she’s at least hedging her bets as to whose god is God indeed.

In the end, you come to discover that the true wife of the Covenant is Leah and not Rachel. Against your own inclination, you trust your eyes to the love of the beautiful. It’s a painful lesson. I learned it from the Book. A similar story could be made about the story of Joseph, who is described in exactly the same terms as his mother, a beautiful form, and beautiful to look at, absolutely identical description, Joseph or Rachel.

It turns out in here, the Jewish and Christian readings depart because Joseph is seen, I think very often, as the forerunner of Christ, a figure who was unjustly treated and nevertheless magnanimously forgives. It’s a tale of forgiveness and reconciliation. But, as I read the story, Joseph is in Israel a dead end. In fact, the very end of the book is the mummification of Joseph, and he departs as the mummified Prime Minister of Egypt. There is no tribe of Joseph. In place of Joseph, Jacob grasps two of his sons. I mean, we could go a long way through that.

To begin with, as I learned from a student in one class, what kind of shepherd has dreams of sheaves of wheat? The interpretation of that second dream about the sun, the moon and the stars bowing down to him, which Jacob gives as a familial interpretation, your father and your mother and your brothers, is in fact a dream of cosmic subordination to human mastery, exactly the sort of thing that is practiced in Egypt. Joseph winds up where Joseph belongs: he Egyptianizes. Those are things which people inside the tradition could learn, I think, if they slowed down and begin to discriminate amongst various characters.

There’s lots more, but let that be an illustration. I don’t think, finally, this kind of thoughtful reading is at odds with the reverence. On the contrary, it seems to me it would deepen it.

MR. TONY CARNES: I’m with Christianity Today. Your idea of reticence and silence…would you say that it teaches us about where we can’t go beyond, and that it teaches us submission, teaches us dependence and anticipation?

DR. KASS: Those are very nice. I welcome all of those suggestions, and I probably have been, both orally here and in the text, less reticent in some of those reticent places than one should be. Though, to revert to something we talked about before, the text doesn’t say a word about Jacob’s grief for the death of his beloved Rachel. It’s absolutely right. There’s nothing that could be said at that point, and one is supposed to keep silence. There are other places where one wants to somehow observe the silences of the text and respect them.

MR. WIESELTIER: Well, your point is confirmed later when Aaron’s sons are killed in the strange fire. The text says explicitly, "And Aaron was silent," which is to say there was no expression of grief. The mourner is simply struck dumb. The striking thing about your reluctance to anticipate in the way that you describe, is that it makes the book refreshingly un-Rabbinical in its methodology. It is very hard to argue that something called Judaism actually existed to unify all under the aspect of this thing called Judaism. One of the nice things about not reading it in that way is that one sees that there was a time before Judaism. And therefore, one understands how it was that Judaism came to be.

MR. JOSEPH COHEN: You emphasize, I believe, that the Bible can teach us the limits of reason, although we don’t certainly know in advance what those limits are. My question would be, to the extent that we have a sense that the Bible does teach the limits of reason, does that also imply a commitment to a path other than the ability to develop our reason, and does it also imply a sense that we can never understand nature fully? If we can never understand nature fully, the right way of life seems to be simply a cultural choice or the traditional way of life that you happened to grow up in. There seem to be no standards outside of that situation, if you say reason is not able to guide me.

DR. KASS: The first chapter, though it probably doesn’t know Greek philosophy, knows something of its cultural equivalent, which is to say the worship of the heavenly bodies. The first chapter, among other things, is a silent polemic against the view that the sun, the moon and the stars are divine. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth", that they are creatures, that they are not divinities. There’s a certain challenge to the dignity of the highest objects of the natural world to which humankind will look up. I mean, if you forget what you hear here, you know, you worship the sun and the moon and the stars, like all the other peoples of the earth. Nature worship is a permanent human temptation. It comes back in deep ecology. That would be the first point.

If the first chapter demotes the dignity to the highest natural objects, the second chapter calls into question the adequacy of the human instrument that seeks to finds its way, taking its bearings from what is in the natural world, i.e., this tree right in our garden. Those two things could be said to be an anticipatory critique of philosophy as a way of life, maybe not for individuals, but for a whole community.

I would say that, from the very beginning, the Bible has a turn to nature in its sights. And it would even agree with things that we now believe about nature, which is to say the heavens may declare the glory of God. However, they’re dead silent about the righteous and the holy. If you care about the righteous and the holy, astronomy is not for you. There is nothing up there that will whisper in your ear that fratricide and incest are wrong. Later commentators would say one of the troubles with the philosophers on things like incest and fratricide is that they never say never. That means it’s unlikely that you’re going to have a community founded on some kind of truths that philosophy will bring you to.

MR. COHEN: The last part of my question originally was that there seemed to be no inherent guidelines or inherent standards from the Bible.

DR. KASS: This is an opportunity to say that, by showing the limits of reason, one is not teaching here irrationalism. I don’t read this in a teaching of mysticism. What’s quite wonderful, beginning really with the way in which the very, very beginning begins, is certain things about God are mysterious and will remain so, but not everything. The things that are said are, if pondered, unintelligible.

The very first two verses, but particularly the second verse about how the earth was unformed and void, are unintelligible. It leaves in the dark the question of whether there is creation out of nothing or there was something there before. The text just doesn’t say. It is telling me the truth in a certain way. The beginning is mysterious. The beginning is rightly mysterious. The beginning is unimaginable. You can’t imagine that the world was always, and you can’t imagine that there was something that was created out of nothing.

It leaves that kind of conundrum. It wins my trust. It seems to me that, if you’ve gone through the trouble of looking in the mirror, that the early stories of Genesis provide the kind of anthropological account that it provides. Kant and Rousseau went to the same place and did some of the same anthropological work in those places. It provided for them a different kind of basis for a social and moral teaching. But I think the reader of this text, who is educated about human nature and the human social relations as a result of reading this, is going to find a fair amount of the law rational and acceptable. Now the question then is, what are you going to do with certain things in Leviticus; it would be fun to try.

MR. WIESELTIER: I think it’s important to distinguish between the view that something is a philosophical mistake and the view that philosophy is itself a mistake. The worship of nature is a philosophical mistake in the framework that you’ve just described. But philosophy itself is not a mistake. Indeed, it is only by means of philosophy that one can expose the philosophical error of naturalism. I find your book to be exceedingly philosophical in this sense. It is not a counsel to rationalism; it is a kind of defense of hermeneutical reasoning of thought.

MR. LAURENCE BERNS: I would like to return for a moment to the question of nature that was raised earlier. I know from your book that the word "nature" never occurs in the Hebrew Bible. Your reading suggests that we’re being invited to learn about ourselves from thinking about the kinds of human beings that we are, in distinction from the other kinds that populate the world. I’m wondering whether you might have said that somehow nature is implied in the fact that there are kinds, and that we are being invited to study the implications of the difference of kinds.

This is leading to a slightly polemical question. I was really struck by page 44 of your book, where you give the biblical view as being, "Absolutely no moral rules can be deduced from even the fullest understanding of nature."

DR. KASS: Give me one.

MR. BERNS: One should be kind to one’s neighbors.

DR. KASS: In a broad sense, that that would count as an ethical rule if by "ethical" you mean how you should live your life. But, that’s partly why it might very well be that the classical account provides a certain kind of endorsement of the private life of study. But I don’t know that it gets you to questions of righteousness or the ordering of the community.

In a passage that you don’t need instruction on, and which has been long-debated, there is a passage in Aristotle’s Ethics where he says, "Perhaps there are some things that, rather than do them, a man should, in fact, submit to all kinds of other things." Thomas Aquinas treats that, and says, "Of course there are some things that a human being should never do." But, I think the philosopher says, "Perhaps." Not even those things whose very name means badness, like murder, theft and adultery, are ruled out always if prudence might require otherwise. And that means that there are no inflexible moral rules.

MR. BERNS: If you meant inflexible moral rules, I think I would have no argument, but rules of thumb maybe. You could probably figure out rules of thumbs.

DR. KASS: But binding moral obligations? I would doubt it.

END