Summary
Moses Mendelssohn’s term, as read by A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, for Jewish divine legislation practised as ritual: public, collective and rule-bound, it connects action with contemplation and makes each performance at once a singular historical event and a repetition that transforms what it repeats (A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, PDF p.24-25, p.60-61).
Details
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What was revealed, on Mendelssohn’s account, was not truth but legislation: Judaism is constituted as “divine legislation” — “laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life” (J, 97, quoted PDF p.59) — revealed only to those present, so its truths are historical and depend on others’ testimony (PDF p.59).
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Mendelssohn, quoted by Tucker: “The written as well as the unwritten laws have directly, as prescriptions for actions and rules of life, public and private felicity as their ultimate aim. But they are also, in large part to be regarded as a kind of script, and they have significance and meaning as ceremonial laws. They guide the inquiring intelligence to divine truths, partly to eternal and partly to historical truths upon which the religion of this people was founded. The ceremonial law was the bond which was to connect action with contemplation, life with theory” (J, 128, quoted PDF p.61).
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Its iterative quality — practices meaningful both as repetitions of past actions and as transformations impelled by shifting historical contexts and populations — is read by Tucker as an early model of Seyla Benhabib’s “jurisgenerative politics”, in which repeated iteration of rights transforms them and extends them to previously excluded groups (PDF p.25).
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In Jewish republicanism, ceremonial law sustains the tension between heterogeneity of perspectives and the unity democratic process is supposed to produce, framing the making, implementation and following of law as one structure of ritual practice (PDF p.23).
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Within ritual’s structure, the absolute distinction between historical and eternal truths comes undone, and ceremonial law is Mendelssohn’s superior instrument against idolatry: against the Pauline charge of “dead letters”, Jewish ritual is “a living mode of writing”, a figuralism registering the irreducibility of truth to any particular moment of legibility, while the Christian claim to an eternal, unchanging truth is itself a literalism (PDF p.62).
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Ceremonial law is both predicated upon a community and constitutive of a public: it distributes roles according to differing historical location and is restructured by each new performance, folding in new members while transmuting the existing public and its terms of mutual engagement (PDF p.63).
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Its process — provisional, iterative, revisable — is what Tucker reads as republicanism’s process in parliament’s coalition politics (PDF p.69), and its shifting, jurisgenerative alliances and meanings describe the practice of politics in the tradition’s closing application to Israel (PDF p.73).
Related pages
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, Moses Mendelssohn, Jewish republicanism