Mis-Taking in Halakhah and Aggadah (Jewish Responses to Kant II)

Abstract

The chapter accounts for how the rabbinic political was constructed and thereby productively lost in Jewish secularizing modernist thought and literature of Franz Kafka, Chaim Bialik, and Walter Benjamin. Modernist notions of logical implication, literary expression, and language are at the center of analysis in this chapter, as it articulates a crisis in the relationships between law and literature in how these thinkers navigate both the human condition and both the Jewish and general law as its part. The chapter further shows how a departure from neo-Kantianism in these thinkers lead to a reconsideration of the role of mistake and failure in human condition, and how their understanding of both mistaking and failing both purports to capture and misses the Talmudic understanding of mistake in terms of self-refutation. The result is a new vision of the otherwise purely logical notion of implication, a vision in which the very being implicit rather than explicit remains fundamental for human condition, and that no explication of the implicit can ever either replace or tame the power of the implicit in human condition.