Torah! Torah! Torah! | Jacob Neusner, The Glory of God is Intelligence: Four Lectures on the Role of Intellect in Judaism

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This is a Festschrift of four lectures given by Jacob Neusner at Brigham Young University in 1977: “The Glory of God is Intelligence: A Theology of Torah-learning in Judaism,” “Cultic Piety and Pharisaism Before 70,” “From Cultic Piety to Torah Piety After 70,” and “The Mishnah as a Focus of Torah Piety.” It also contains a bibliography of Neusner’s major publications.

The importance of this volume resides at two levels. First, Professor Neusner’s introductory lecture sets forth the distinctive idea of Talmud-Tor ah: man serves God through the use of the mind. In his admirable introduction, Kent Brown reminds the reader of the centrality of learning as devotion to God from the earliest period of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although Neusner subtitled the first lecture “A Theology of Torah-learning in Judaism,” its implications extend beyond the confines of one religious community, presenting a striking dialogue between two very different communities which hold human thought and reflection to be of the highest spiritual value. Neusner demonstrates in this first lecture that Judaism’s demands upon the mind for reason, criticism, restraint and the rational exchange of ideas, witnessed on every page of Talmud, are not limited to some closed and remote period of antiquity. Neusner states, “The Jew has been taught to engage realistically in the world’s tasks, to do so with a whole heart, yet without the need or even the power, to regard completion of those tasks as the threshold of a final and completed fulfillment of history. Because of its mode of thinking, Judaism teaches man to take seriously the wide range of worldly problems without expecting that in solving them—provisionally, let alone finally—they might save the world.” 

At a second level, the three following lectures—beginning with the question of when in the history of Judaism did the idea of Torah-learning enter the theological complex of Judaism—serve as a most concise guide, to Neusner’s more extensive and specialized studies over the past fifteen years. Are the Pharisees to be characterized as a sect devoted to the preservation and mastery of Torah traditions before 70 A.D. and the destruction of the temple? Neusner summarizes what can be said of the Pharisees from the historical documents (allusions to the Pharisees in Josephus, controversies between the Pharisees and Jesus from the Gospels and laws and sayings attributed to the Pharisees or stories told of this group by the rabbis from the period after 70 A.D., preserved in the Mishnah, Tosefta and later texts). The Pharisees, in Neusner’s analysis, appear as a group centering upon table-fellowship and as “Jews who believed that the purity laws were to be kept outside of the Temple” Other sectors of the Judaean population organized their lives around the restriction of purity laws to the precincts of the Temple. The Pharisees’ meals appear distinctive from the early Christian community’s specific and intense ritual meal. Neusner states that the pharisaic table fellowship was a “quite ordinary, everyday affair. The various fellowship rules had to be observed in wholly routine daily circumstances, without accompanying rites other than a benediction for the food. The Christians’ myths and rituals rendered table-fellowship into a much heightened spiritual experience: ‘Do this in memory of me.’ ” Neusner concludes that before 70 A.D. Talmud-Torah was not a central idea of Judaism. 

In the third lecture, Neusner indicates the precise manner in which Talmud Torah became one element within the symbolic structure of Judaism, along with the study of Torah, the rabbi and the importance of moral and ethical action, forming a coherent unity in the wake of the Temple’s destruction. This transpired through the amalgamation of the pharisaic ideal of Israel as a nation of priests and the scribal tradition of learning or study as a way of life. Before the events of 70 A.D., the Pharisees had extended the Temple’s sanctity and purity to the ordinary, but it was after that period and when all hopes for the rebuilding of the Temple came to an end with the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 A.D.) that, as Neusner indicates, “the rabbi is the new priest. Study of Torah is the new cult. Deeds of loving-kindness are the new sacrifice.” 

The fourth lecture is the most important for general students of religion. Here, Neusner explores the Mishnah as the single most important document in the religious world-view of Rabbinic Judaism. While he treats the manner in which transcendence is made contemporary in Mishnah and how Mishnah by its very ontological structure facilitates memorization, the most important element of the discussion is the idea of an open canon. In the same way that Neusner’s analysis of the tensions between the Pharisees and the early Christian community overturns a number of scholarly interpretations, his discussion of attaining Torah leads to the conclusion that canon is not really fixed and closed, but that new works are continually added in virtue of what it means to master revelation.

Neusner’s four lectures on Talmud Torah provide both an excellent introduction to the critical study of Judaism in late antiquity and a review of many of the most important points in Neusner’s own work for the more advanced student.

[Ed. Note: See Brief Notices for another opinion.]. 

The Glory of God is Intelligence: Four Lectures on the Role of Intellect in Judaism. By Jacob Neusner. With Introduction by S. Kent Brown. Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978, xxi + 68 pp, $4.95.