Old-Fashioned Truth, Telic Truth, and Interreligious Understanding

This chapter presents an approach to religious truth and to telic truth while explaining how this strategy functions in interreligious understanding. It then turns to defend the face of three widely held objections to the author's position: the expressionist objection, the nativity objection, and the postmodernist objection. The chapter offers a philosophical analysis of religious truth and own defence of a correspondence-based understanding of truth. It states that the falsity of a core belief of another religion means that to that belief there corresponds no objective, independent state of affairs, hence, a correspondence view of religious truth. The chapter explores the meaning of religious truth within the framework of a broader philosophical discussion that is not particular to Judaism. Judaism provides the specific instance for statements of broader context and appeal. Finally, it elaborates a detailed and careful presentation of Jewish belief in a very rough and schematic way.

History and Truth in Religion

This chapter is a philosophically oriented exploration of truth which tackles a specific challenge to the truth within Judaism, but that challenge potentially applies to other traditions as well. It engages with the more theoretical question of what we mean when we speak of truth in a religious context. Judaism is a textual tradition that appeals to historical reality. It is thus highly historical. What happens when factual certitude falters and we lose the safe moorings of faith in the plain sense of historical accounts that provide the basis for the religious life? Stanislaw Krajewski's efforts are an attempt to salvage or uphold a notion of truth in textual and historical matters, despite various uncertainties that we are confronted with. It also addresses the ultimate challenge of truth: identifying or pointing to the immutable element in religion — that which transcends the processes of change and growth that characterize everything, religion included. The chapter tackles the challenges that history poses to religious truth on multiple levels.

The Cognitive Value of Religious Truth Statements

This chapter tackles the problem of religious truth in a broader theological context, and not simply with reference to one of the prevailing challenges, typically the challenge of the reliability of tradition or the confrontation with science. It makes us aware of the surprising anti-realist position of Rav Kook, wherein he is willing to consider various truth statements as not capturing truth fully and completely. The chapter explores Rav Kook's position against the history of non-realism in Jewish tradition, but more significantly against the broader orientations of postmodern philosophy. In seeking to distinguish Rav Kook from postmodern thinkers, the chapter allows us to appreciate the fine balancing act between the theoretical flexibility that allows him to adopt an instrumentalist view of truth statements and the relativism that characterizes postmodern philosophy. Rav Kook, then, offers an intriguing balance between non-realist understandings on the one hand and an ontological grounding of his spiritual life on the other, largely by virtue of his mystical experience and panentheistic world-view. This balance opens up promising avenues in a contemporary educational context, wherein one seeks to integrate willingness to adopt a view that does not rely on heavy ontological claims for grounding truth with religious fervour and devotion.

Da’at

This chapter presents the teachings of a Hasidic teacher, Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl. The chapter focuses attention on the notion of da'at, knowledge or consciousness, as it appears in Rabbi Menahem Nahum's classic Me'or einayim. The chapter considers it the ultimate goal of the mystical life. Focusing on da'at provides a particular approach to the issue of religious truth. In the chapter, religious truth is viewed from the subjective and cognitive dimension, in terms of human consciousness and its ability to enter the reality of God. It explores the relationship between this cognitive and the conscious dimension of approach to God and the more objective dimensions of religion in relation to the notion of truth. The chapter offers a turn to the subjective, the experiential, and the conscious as a means of safeguarding the foundations of truth, grounded in God, and the quest for da'at. One might almost discern a parallel between the appeal to da'at on metaphysical, cognitive, and mystical grounds and Krajewski's appeal to a kernel of historical truth in tradition. However, da'at is more than a kernel. In fact, da'at is the essence, the goal, and what counts most in the spiritual quest. Getting to the heart of things, therefore, allows us to rebalance perspective and to affirm that which matters most in religion, its ultimate truth, despite the weakening of the historical and other foundations of the religious system.

The Scope of Religious Truth

This introductory chapter explores the experience of the Sephardim, one of the two major branches of the Jewish people, in several major centres of urban civilization. It seeks to understand who they are and how their visit in certain cities left its impression upon them and distinguished them from other parts of the Jewish people. This chapter also recognizes that being 'Sephardi' means to be related in some fashion to Spain. Yet most bearers of that designation today never had any contact with Spain, nor did many of their ancestors. The chapter examines seven cities through which to explore the shaping of Sephardi identity. It also includes the descendants of Jews who lived in the Iberian peninsula before the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and of Jews who received the refugees from Iberia afterwards.

The Cosmic Eye and Its Pupil

This chapter approaches the question of truth not from the starting point of theoretical considerations but rather from specific textual contexts. It studies rabbinic sources in detail and brings them into dialogue with broader philosophical concerns that pertain to a universal and particular truth. A perfect God must necessarily be the God of all people, and as such, it is inconceivable that human well-being would be dependent on a particular divine revelation. The chapter walks us through a range of rabbinic options. The fuller theoretical articulation of these concerns is found in the works of Moses Mendelssohn and Franz Rosenzweig, and the chapter discovers them also at the heart of midrashic thinking. Reflecting on God's perfection leads one to recognize God's universality, the potential to know God in ways that transcend the particularity of Judaism. The chapter opens us up to the presence of a universal dimension that derives from God's being and his creative act and relationship to all, beyond the particularity of his relationship with Israel. Notions of particular and universal truth are thus refracted or approached through the affirmation of God's perfection.

Religious Truth

The last chapter surveys the range of issues and positions, and assesses the diversity of the contexts of and approaches to truth. It started from Jerome Yehuda Gellman's affirmation of the validity of truth claims to R. Nathan's renouncing the possibility of the common person attaining truth in a cognitive way, leading one to cultivate instead faith and humility, and to Rav Kook's willingness to forgo realist understandings of truth statements. The chapter discusses the range points to the richness of the subject matter and to the multiple approaches to it, which in turn rely on diverse definitions and understandings. It recognizes that under the rubric of 'truth', different people refer to different issues and aspects of religious and spiritual life. Truth serves as a kind of overarching concept by means of which these diverse issues can be brought under one conceptual framework. The conclusion examines the different discussions, whether philosophical or textual, which allow us to develop an in-depth understanding of what truth means. Ultimately, it highlights thought strands in the chapters that enrich our understanding of truth and that are relevant to appreciating the author's view of how truth plays out in the interaction.

The Truth Beyond and Beyond Truth

The chapter tackles the notion of truth within Hasidic literature. It examines various aspects of the system of Breslav Hasidism, and juxtaposes two stages in Breslav theology: the thought of its founder, R. Nahman, and that of his disciple, R. Nathan. For R. Nahman, truth is to be understood as a state of being in fullness, rather than as an affirmation of specific doctrines and faith tenets. Not all can attain truth, here conceived as the higher state of being in union with the One, the Good, and the True. Truth is a state of being with moral and existential expressions. Truth is rising to God himself. R. Nahman's disciple takes the argument a step further. For him, truth in this world is impossible. We cannot attain truth; hence, we must cultivate faith. For both teachers, the approach to truth ultimately points to a way of being. For R. Nahman it is the way of being in God that constitutes truth, as it is attained by the few, the great masters. For his disciple, R. Nathan, renouncing truth in the cognitive sense leads to a way of being that prefers other values. Ultimately truth, in the sense of true opinions over which one would fight and argue, is more of a vice than a virtue. It is faith we must seek, not truth.