Michael Wyschogrod, Dean of Orthodox Jewish Theologians, Dies at 87
David P. Goldman
Tablet, Dec. 18, 2020The Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod died Dec. 17 at the age of 87, after a long illness. He was old enough to have stood with his father across the street from Berlin’s main synagogue as it burned on Kristallnacht, when the Brownshirts unrolled a Torah scroll in the street and charged passersby the equivalent of a dime to trample the length of it. Wyschogrod escaped Germany with his family early in 1939 just as the gates were closing, obtaining an American visa thanks to an uncle in Atlanta whose employer knew a U.S. senator. He was a brand plucked out of the fire. And he was, perhaps, our last living link to the engagement of yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews with continental philosophy.Educated at the Yiddish-speaking Orthodox day school Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, Wyschogrod attended City College and then earned a Columbia doctorate with a dissertation on Kierkegaard and Heidegger. At the same time he attended Rav Joseph Soloveitchik’s Talmud class at Yeshiva University. He admonished observant Jews to master Western philosophy, the better to comprehend their own tradition, but he proposed a uniquely Jewish solution to the 20th-century crisis in Western philosophy. His influence was enormous; Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once told me that Wyschogrod was the closest thing we have to a systematic theology of Judaism. But it was not as great as he hoped it would be in the community he averred would be the ultimate judge of his work, namely Torah-obedient Jews. That has changed in the last several years, and Wyschogrod’s numerous writings will guide Jewish scholars for years to come.His favorite Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, pictured the “Knight of Faith” who is so secure in his relationship to God that his daily life becomes a continual source of joy. Wyschogrod was a knight of Kierkegaard’s order. In his wife, the distinguished philosopher Prof. Edith Wyschogrod, he found a lifelong soulmate as well as an intellectual peer. When Edith was offered a position at Rice University in Houston, Wyschogrod moved from the CUNY system to the University of Houston and was delighted to teach undergraduates who knew the Bible by heart. They had two children and five grandchildren.
Michael Wyschogrod looked at the world with irony but without a trace of rancor. Shortly before his final illness, he took his grandchildren to Berlin to see where he spent his boyhood. Recalling Kristallnacht, he noted that the Berliners did not seem at all happy with the Nazis’ rampage. He joked about German anti-Semitism, formed close ties with German colleagues, and saw his major work published in German.
His doctoral dissertation became the first English-language work on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose Nazi party membership (and refusal to apologize for it) remains a scandal in the philosophical world. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Please wait for the article to appear – Ed.]
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God’s First Love: The Theology of Michael Wysogrod
Meir Y. Soloveichik
First Things, November 2009
Paradox attends the influence of Michael Wyschogrod, perhaps the most original Jewish theologian of the past half-century. An unapologetic defender of Israel’s particularity and God’s special love for the Jewish people, he has often found a warmer reception among Christian thinkers than among traditional Jewish ones. Twenty years ago, the appearance of his book The Body of Faith transformed the way many leading Christian theologians understand Judaism. Perhaps this is not surprising” for, over his long career, this American thinker, born in Germany in 1928, has proved extraordinarily willing to draw on Christian theologians: Karl Barth, for instance, whom Wyschogrod deploys in his efforts to free Judaism from dependence on such extraneous philosophical influences as Aristotle and Kant. For that matter, in his emphasis on the uniqueness of Jewish revelation, Wyschogrod has found surprising commonalities with Christians.
As an Orthodox Jew, Wyschogrod insists that his work rises and falls with the ability of traditional Jews to be moved by it: “Ultimately it is the Torah-obedient Jewish community that judges a work of Jewish thought,” he wrote in his 1989 masterwork, The Body of Faith. At the same time, it is precisely the Orthodox community that has failed to appreciate his work, perhaps because of his criticisms of Maimonides, one of the most beloved thinkers in Jewish history.
Maimonides, Wyschogrod insists, introduced extraneous influences into Judaism, partly in an attempt to reconcile Jewish religion with Aristotelian philosophy. Wyschogrod argues that Judaism concerns not a philosophical doctrine but rather God’s unique and preferential love for the flesh-and-blood descendants of Abraham. The election of the Jewish people is the result of God’s falling in love with Abraham and founding a family with him. And, out of passionate love for Abraham, God continues to dwell among the Jewish people. Maimonides, in Wyschogrod’s account, deviated from the biblical view to accommodate Aristotle’s philosophy.
Along the way, Maimonides also attempted to banish all anthropomorphism from Judaism. An entire tradition of Jewish rationalism has followed Maimonides in this and has applied it to the concept of Israel’s election. Thus many German Jewish thinkers, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox, see Israel’s election as symbolic of God’s equal love for all of humanity” for surely a good God would not violate Kant’s categorical imperative. The result is the loss of any reason for the election of Israel, a foundational idea of Judaism. The biblical insistence on God’s indwelling in the living Jewish people, Wyschogrod observes, requires us to believe that God is present in the physical people of Israel. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Michael Wyschogrod, Zt”l
Rod Dreher
The American Conservative, Dec. 18, 2018
He was old enough to have stood with his father across the street from Berlin’s main synagogue as it burned on Kristallnacht, when the Brownshirts unrolled a Torah scroll in the street and charged passersby the equivalent of a dime to trample the length of it. Wyschogrod escaped Germany with his family early in 1939 just as the gates were closing, obtaining an American visa thanks to an uncle in Atlanta whose employer knew a U.S. senator. He was a brand plucked out of the fire. And he was, perhaps, our last living link to the engagement of yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews with continental philosophy.
Educated at the Yiddish-speaking Orthodox day school Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, Wyschogrod attended City College and then earned a Columbia doctorate with a dissertation on Kierkegaard and Heidegger. At the same time, he attended Rav Joseph Soloveitchik’s Talmud class at Yeshiva University. He admonished observant Jews to master Western philosophy the better to comprehend their own tradition, but he proposed a uniquely Jewish solution to the 20th-century crisis in Western philosophy. His influence was enormous; Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once told me that Wyschogrod was the closest thing we have to a systematic theology of Judaism. But it was not as great as he hoped it would be in the community he averred would be the ultimate judge of his work, namely Torah-obedient Jews. That has changed in the last several years, and Wyschogrod’s numerous writings will guide Jewish scholars for years to come.
His favorite Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, pictured the “Knight of Faith” who is so secure in his relationship to God that his daily life becomes a continual source of joy. Wyschogrod was a knight of Kierkegaard’s order.
First Things published a lovely essay in 2009 on Wyschogrod’s thought. The author is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who explains that Wyschogrod, though an Orthodox Jew, found a more respectful hearing among many Christians than among his own people, in large part because he challenged the work of Moses Maimonides, the medieval rabbinical giant who was more or less the Thomas Aquinas of the Jews. Excerpt:
And through the centuries, the Jewish people were sustained not by a belief in Maimonides’ God of the philosophers but by what the Midrash calls the “Divine Presence in Exile,” the God who dwells among his persecuted people, making their travails his travails and their suffering his suffering.
Because the Jewish community was so devastated by the Holocaust, there is a tremendous temptation to give it a prominent role in one’s theology. For traditional theologians, especially the Orthodox, there are dangers in this. Giving the Holocaust pronounced theological prominence can lead Jewish thinkers to dilute or relativize Judaism’s theological foundation. More, it allows the Jewish experience of anti-Semitism in the past to influence unduly theological attitudes toward Christians today. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Michael Wyschogrod and the Challenge of God’s Scandalous Love
Leora Batnitzky
Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2016
Michael Wyschogrod, perhaps the boldest Jewish theologian of 20th-century America, died at the age of 87 this past December. More than any other 20th-century Jewish theologian, Wyschogrod went against the grain of the dominant trends of modern Jewish thought that emphasized Judaism’s rationality and fundamental confluence with ethical universalism. In doing so, he also rejected the entire tradition of Jewish philosophical rationalism, running from Maimonides to his own teacher Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Much like his older contemporary Martin Buber, though for different reasons, Wyschogrod has, at least so far, had his profoundest influence not on Jews but on Christians. Whereas liberal Protestants found in Buber an important and moving account of Christian grace, post-liberal Protestant theologians have found in Wyschogrod a deep articulation of the idea of incarnation and its relevance for rethinking Christianity’s claim to have superseded Judaism. The respective Christian receptions of Buber and Wyschogrod may also reveal what many, though certainly not all, Jews have found less appealing about the two theologians: Buber’s well-known rejection of the authority of Jewish law and Wyschogrod’s almost exclusive focus on the Bible as opposed to rabbinic literature. Yet while Buber self-consciously rejected not just Jewish observance but also traditional Judaism as it came to be practiced in the modern world, Wyschogrod understood himself as a traditional Jew. This apparent disconnect is part of what makes Wyschogrod’s thought so interesting and challenging for our present moment.
Born in Berlin, Wyschogrod escaped Nazi Germany as a young boy in 1939 and immigrated to the United States. He studied at City College, Yeshiva University, and Columbia and went on to a long career as a professor of philosophy, first in the City University of New York system and then at the University of Houston. From the beginning of his intellectual life, Wyschogrod never shied away from intellectual controversy. In 1954, he published the first book-length study of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in English, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence. In a 2010 essay published in First Things, he continued to insist on Heidegger’s philosophical greatness, despite the fact that, as he put it, Heidegger was “a committed Nazi and a liar.” Strikingly, Wyschogrod contended that aspects of Heidegger’s thought could be saved because, despite a traditional Catholic upbringing in which the Bible was not central, Heidegger was “a thinker whose spiritual life was largely determined by Hölderlin and Rilke [and therefore] could not break with the religious power of the Hebrew Bible.” Despite Wyschogrod’s own philosophical training and acumen, it was an engagement with what he regarded as the anti-philosophical essence of the Hebrew Bible that stands at the center of his Jewish thought. … [To read the entire article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
A Theological Difference: An Exchange between David Hazony and Readers on his January 2005 Review of Michael Wyschogrod’s Book, “Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and…, Commentary, Apr. 2005 — To the Editor: In his review of my book, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, David Hazony concludes that it “presents a skewed and deeply misleading understanding of the Jewish tradition” and that “the ‘promise’ of its title does not just remain unfulfilled but is very nearly betrayed” [Books in Review, January]. Mr. Hazony is wrong and uninformed in every criticism he hurls.
Jewish-Christian Dialogue from the Underside: Markus Barth’s Correspondence with Michael Wyschogrod (1962–84) and Emil Fackenheim (1965–80)*: Mark Lindsay, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Summer 2018 –– In the nearly fifty years since the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) died, one of the most contested aspects of his legacy has been how to interpret his theology of biblical and post- biblical Israel, particularly in relation to the church.
Heidegger’s Tragedy: Michael Wyschogrod, First Things, April 2010 — If Martin Heidegger is an unimportant philosopher, then the fact that he was a Nazi is no special catastrophe.
Michael Wyschogrod and God’s First Love: Kendall Soulen, Religion Online, July 27, 2004 –-I first read Michael Wyschogrod when I was in graduate school. The experience was electrifying. As I sat in the library finishing his essay “Israel, the Church, and Election,” I remember being overcome by an almost physical sense of discovery, as though I had bumped into a hitherto invisible rock.
WATCH: Michael Wyschogrod: Flight From Germany: YouTube, Sept. 15, 2014 –– My father, Michael Wyschogrod, Jewish philosopher and theologian, was born in Berlin on September 28, 1928. In 1939, at the age of 10, he fled Germany with his parents and brother. In November 2011, he traveled to Berlin and Budapest with me, my husband, and our three children.
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