Abstract

Sam Lebens’ The Principles of Judaism is an extraordinary book in its rigor and richness. It is a sophisticated examination of three central propositions, which Lebens maintains, are the fundamental doctrines that “can make sense of continued commitment to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.” (Lebens, 273). He presents and discusses the following three propositions: 1) The universe is the creation of one God; 2) The Torah is a divine system of laws and wisdom, revealed by the creator of the universe; and, 3) The creator exercises provi-dential care over his creation, manifest in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, reward and punishment for human action, and in the promise of ultimate salvation. (Lebens, 3).Lebens presents the principles as they were variously explicated and de-fended in key Jewish texts written by the most influential Jewish thinkers; he then turns to search for “the most plausible rendering of this set of prin-ciples...” (Lebens, 274). After so doing, he specifies those doctrinal compo-nents among them, which he deems necessary “for making sense of commit-ment to Judaism” (Lebens, 275), identifying a “commitment to Judaism” with being “faithful to the tenets of Judaism” in the sense of having faith in them:To the extent that these principles are necessary for making sense of commitment to Judaism, I argue that you cannot be considered faithful to the tenets of Judaism without holding an attitude of faith toward some element of each of the three principles... (Lebens 275).The distance between Lebens’ philosophical and religious outlook and pre-suppositions, as they show themselves in his Principles of Judaism, and my own is great. I shall start with a critique of Lebens’ reduction of Judaism to so-called Orthodox Judaism, and argue that Lebens has no justification for characterizing the principles that he identifies, as the “principles of Judaism” without qualification. I shall then turn to argue that there are grounds for questioning whether the principles that Lebens identifies can be understood as the principles that so-called “Orthodox Jews”, too, have faith in. It is, how-ever, clear that the utterances that Lebens discusses do play a central role within the life of committed Jews. I shall end by proposing that we adopt the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical method for making perspicuous their meaning and their different roles.