The Land of Unlikeness

I recently interviewed for a teaching job and the interviewer asked me what I meant by saying that I respected and imitated the teaching methods of the Rabbis. I was referring specifically to their search for “surface irregularities” and the manner in which their interpretations of these glitches, holes, and repetitions enables a deeply particular creative form. As I’m preparing for teaching this summer, I just read a famous portion from the Talmud in which one rabbi asks for a sign from heaven to prove his point, at which point the sign is given, but then another rabbi jumps up and says, quoting, “It is not in heaven” at which point the Holy One (that is, God) starts laughing, saying, “my children have won over me, my children have won over me!” In no other religious tradition do we see this kind of resolute orthodoxy and textual mastery mixed with the most stubborn sense of the rightness and space of the human spirit. This sense that God must abide by God’s own law, respecting the sanctity of man’s response. But instead of obsessing over the fact that this seems to limit God, we should notice how much freedom and spirit it gives to man. And putting aside the question of how and whether God works on his own, let’s take note of the fact that God has given men and women an astounding responsibility, one to which even nature pays heed (check out Baba Mezia, 59a-59b, Talmud). It was this Jewish spirit (as found in Kabbalah) from which Pico della Mirandola took his inspiration when he penned one of the most optimistic calls to human action and responsibility, in his famous Oration, and in many of his other writings. In my meager researches in Sophia, this is something that immediately came out to me about her, that she was the spirit of human action and necessity–almost, in a way, putting aside the question of what God can do, here we are faced with a divine humanity whose limits have not yet been spanned. The Rabbis saw the formation of the Talmud as man’s response to the Divine Word given on Sinai, and the limits of this response were something that even God seemed to respect. I would argue that Sophia should be conceived in an analogous manner.