JUST FAITH:

 Perhaps the times cry out for a resurrection of the lost literary genre of religious apologia. Strauss, Spinoza and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith (Kodesh Press, 2022) takes up this challenge on behalf of Judaism. Edited by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein, and Gil Student, it is a collection of essays by seventeen thoughtful Orthodox Jews--rabbis, laymen, and academics--addressing what exactly attaches them to their religion and inspires them to continue to believe in it. The answers are necessarily more or less specific to Judaism, but since the questions apply to all religions, all believers are likely to find something instructive in this volume.

The essayists respond to an argument by the political philosopher Leo Strauss defending the respectability of Jewish Orthodoxy. In Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Strauss argued that philosophy or reason (as represented by Spinoza) is unable to decisively refute revelation or orthodoxy, because philosophy and revelation alike begin with unproven assumptions. Hence the choice between Spinoza (or, perhaps, any philosophy) and Jewish Orthodoxy (or, perhaps, any orthodoxy) "is ultimately not theoretical but moral." So, according to Strauss's argument, faith in revelation is respectable because philosophy rests on no more ultimate certainty.

Strauss's argument is intentionally minimalist; its aim is to persuade rationalists to take religion seriously. Yet by grounding philosophy and religion equally in moral choice, the argument threatens to undermine both. Taken in isolation, Strauss's argument itself approaches postmodern relativism. Only Rabbi Mark Gottlieb's essay considers the fuller complexity of Strauss's position, offering careful and original scholarship that partially exonerates the master of flirting with relativism. Gottlieb concludes that Strauss rests his admiration for Judaism on the scholarly "theological-legal" aristocracy it establishes. The other essayists focus on the narrow argument; all agree that orthodoxy so defended is rather defenseless. A single unspoken point of agreement emerges amid the dizzying plurality of views: today it is postmodernism--rather than science or rationalism--that constitutes the greatest obstacle to faith.

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