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  "publishedAt": "2002-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "Rashkover - The Semiotics of Embodiment - JCRT 3.3 \n\nThe Semiotics of Embodiment: Radical Orthodoxy and Jewish-Christian Relations\n\nRandi Rashkover  \nYork College of Pennsylvania\n\n  \n\nOne of the greatest thorns in the side of Jewish-Christian relations has been contending with and overcoming Christianity's charge that Jews and Judaism remain bound by the flesh in contrast to Christians who, through Christ's resurrection, are elevated into the life of the spirit. This charge, of course, goes all the way back to Paul. In recent years, Christian theologians have begun reconsidering the doctrine of the incarnation. This issue has captured the attention of two schools of Christian theology; narrative theology and radical orthodoxy. Currently however, only narrative theologians have analyzed how a reevaluation of the body of Christ can advance Jewish-Christian relations. In this paper, I will argue that despite its best intentions, this narrative approach remains supercessionistic. Conversely, despite its failure to attend to the implications of its incarnational theology for Jewish-Christian relations, radical orthodoxy's appreciation of the semiotic character of Jesus' corporeality better links Jesus to the rabbinic tradition's semiotic practices and thereby opens up possibilities for Jews and Christians to study sacred texts together. In what follows I will compare radical orthodoxy's incarnational theology with a portrait of Jewish semiotic life in order to highlight the eucharistic character of rabbinic hermeneutics and the rabbinic character of Christian hermeneutics. Furthermore I will discuss the role of desire within their parallel scriptural practices and articulate how these practices can provide a basis for an ethical and just society.\n\nNarrative Theology and the Eucharist\n\nRadical Orthodoxy and the body of Jesus\n\nRe-viewing Desire\n\nThe Donating Community\n\nJesus' Semiotic Body and Rabbinic Hermeneutics\n\nThe Torah and the Nearness of the Divine Word\n\n     > Rabbi Joshua b. Levi said: When Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels spoke before the Holy One, blessed be He, 'Sovereign of the universe! What business has one born of woman among us?' He answered them, 'He has come to receive the Torah.' They said to Him, 'That secret treasure . . . Thous desirest to give to flesh and blood! . . . The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, 'Return them an answer.' . . . He \\[then\\] spoke before Him, 'Sovereign of the universe! The Torah which Thou givest me, what is written therein? I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt (Exod. 20:2). 'Said he to them \\[the angels\\], 'Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharoah?, etc. Again what is written therein? Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy (Exod. 20:8). Do you then perform work that you need to rest?, etc. Again, what is written therein? Honor thy father and thy mother (Exod. 20:12). Do you have any fathers and mothers? . . . Straight away they conceded to Him.\" \n\n     Responding to the story Joseph Soloveitchik says, \"God does not wish to hand over His Torah to the ministering angels. . . he handed over His Torah to Moses, who brought it down to the earth and caused it to dwell among human beings . . .\" Elliot Wolfson has done much to highlight the incarnational themes within the mystical tradition and speaks of \"the textualization of God ' that is, God's becoming concretely manifest in the form of the Torah.\"\n\n     > By going back to the Hebrew text from the translations . . . \\[one discovers\\] the strange or mysterious ambiguity or polysemy authorized by the Hebrew syntax . . . words coexist rather than immediately being coordinated or subordinated with and to one another . . . returning to the Hebrew text . . . makes it more difficult than one thinks to decide on the ultimate intention of a verse . . . there is no one verse, not one word of the Old Testament - . . . .read by way of revelation that does not half-open to an entire world . . . .\n\n     Moreover, this plurivocal character acts as an invitation, a mandate, if you will for readers to participate in the creativity of the Torah. The Torah's plurivocity translates into its interpretability and as Levinas says, \"this invitation to seek and decipher, to Midrash, already constitutes the reader's participation in the Revelation, in Scripture. The reader, in his own fashion, is a scribe.\" Rabbinic hermeneutics is eucharistic and through it \"we get a first indication of what we might call the 'status' of the Revelation: its coming from elsewhere, from outside, and simultaneously dwelling in the person who receives it.\"\n\nThe Semiotics of Torah and Desire\n\n     > Scriptural Reasoning therefore emerges out of the dialectic of modernity as the expression of a new, creative activity. . . . One may begin to see a coherence among the use of the following chain of tropes: a world to come, which is the product of resurrection; the Oral Torah, in which the written Torah lives its resurrected life; recreation, which is the way in which this second life is created; and, finally the \"revealing of the divine presence,\" which -- to be distinguished from some aboriginal divine voice ' God speaks again and there is new life. . . . \\[B\\]y listening to the voice of our Creator speaking through the words of scripture we have received through the past traditions that have interpreted them, through the sufferings that have engendered the end of modernity, and through finally the hope that must move us if we are at all to move.\n\nSemiotics of Embodiment and Jewish-Christian Relations\n\n  \n\nNotes\n\n  \n\n> Randi Rashkover received her doctorate from the University of Virginia and is an assistant professor of religious studies at York College of Pennsylvania.\n\n  \n\n> \n\n  *\n\n ' 2002 Randi Rashkover. All rights reserved.  \nUpdated 07/28/21.   \nhttp://jcrt.org/archives/03.3/rashkover/\n\n---\n\n Paul frequently associates Jewish law with a life of the flesh in contrast to the life of faith and the Spirit. See Paul's letter to Galatians, \"Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? . . (Galatians 3:3-4).\n\n Scott Bader Saye, _Church and Israel After Christendom_ (Westview, 1999), p. 142.\n\n Graham Ward, \"The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,\" in _Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology_, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (Routledge, 1999).\n\n\n Ibid., p. 165.\n\n\n Ibid., p.164\n\n Ibid., p.167.\n\n\n Robert Gibbs frequently employs this term when describing the practical events that take place in written and oral discourse. See Robert Gibbs, _Why Ethics: Signs of Responsibilities_ (Princeton University Press, 2000).\n\n\n \"Displaced Body,\" p. 167.\n\n\n Ibid., p. 170.\n\n\n Ibid., 172.\n\n\n Ibid., p. 173.\n\n\n Ibid., p. 166.\n\n\n Ibid.\n\n Ibid., p. 167.\n\n\n Ibid.\n\n\n Ibid., p. 169.\n\n Ibid., p. 174.\n\n\n Ibid.\n\n\n Ibid., 163.\n\n\n Ibid., p. 175.\n\n\n Susan Handelman is perhaps, best known for this charge. See her, Slayers of Moses, _The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory_ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).\n\n\n See my \"Exegesis, Redemption and the Maculate Torah,\" in _Textual Reasonings_, ed. Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene (SCM Press, 2002) and my \"Re-Admitting Philosophy into Contemporary Jewish Thought: An Encounter between Jewish Feminism and Exegetical Jewish Thought,\" in _On Being Human: Women in Jewish Philosophy_, ed. Hava Tirosh Samuelson (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).\n\n\n _Shabbat_ 88b-89a.\n\n\n Joseph Soloveitchik, _Halakhic Man_ (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), p. 33.\n\n Elliot Wolfson, \"Listening to Speak: A Response to Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy,\" in Stephen Kepnes, Peter Ochs and Robert Gibbs, ed. _Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy_ (Westview Press, 1998), p. 99.\n\n\n M. 'Avot iii, 14.\n\n\n Gen. Rabba i, 1.\n\n Ephraim Urbach, _The Sages_ (Harvard University Press, 1979).\n\n\n Emanuel Levinas, \"Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,\" in _Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader_, ed. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (Oxford University Press, 1999), 166.\n\n\n Ibid., 167.\n\n\n Ibid.\n\n See my \"Re-Admitting Philosophy into Contemporary Jewish Thought: An Encounter between Jewish Feminism and Exegetical Jewish Thought,\" in _On Being Human: Women in Jewish Philosophy_, ed. Hava Tirosh Samuelson (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).\n\n\n Randi Rashkover, \"Exegesis, Redemption and the Maculate Torah.\"\n\n\n In my dissertation, \"Rosenzweig, Barth and the Theology of Election,\" (University of Virginia, 2000) I discuss the ramifications of Ward's neglect of a doctrine of command and election in the context of my own effort to assess the theological significance of divine command in Jewish and Christian covenantal life.\n\n\n Robert Gibbs, \"Why Textual Reasoning?,\" _The Journal of Textual Reasoning: Rereading Judaism After Modernity_, volume 1.1., Spring 2002.\n\n\n See David Weiss Halivni, _Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses_ (Westview Press, 1997).\n\n\n Gillian Rose often launched this critique of contemporary Jewish thought. See Gillian Rose, _The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society_, (Blackwell,1992). Nonetheless, Rose could not consider a number of thinkers whose work, written after her death, focuses on the relationship between desire and ethics e.g., David Novak, Miriam Peskowitz, Rachel Adler, et. al.\n\n\n Peter Ochs, \"Rules of Scriptural Reasoning,\" _National Society of Scriptural Reasoning_, 1999.",
  "title": "The Semiotics of Embodiment: Radical Orthodoxy and Jewish-Christian Relations"
}