Messianic Politics (iii c):Jonah and Justice

On the matter of distinguishing between law and justice, and partially in response to the questions from Steve and Doug, we can look, in more detail, at Scholem's, “On Jonah and Justice”(1919).

Scholem’s very interesting – perhaps even idiosyncratic – reading of Jonah leads him to some striking conclusions on law and justice. He explains that the seemingly exceptional character of the book of Jonah among the prophetic books – its reluctant prophet, its conspicuous lack of prophecy (a single line, Jonah 3.4) – point to its status as a book not primarily of prophecy, but about prophecy: God teaches the prophet what justice is. Justice, on Scholem’s reading of this divine lesson, is precisely the deferment that I mentioned in the earlier post, but in this case, instead of the deferment between commandment and judgment – which, now that I come back to it, is better said to be a constitutive difference, not a provisional or temporal gap – it is the one between judgment and execution.

Scholem pursues the issue of law and justice in Jonah in terms of the two conflicting ways of interpreting the only properly prophetic speech of the book: "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be [lit. “is being”] overthrown!" (3.4b). Scholem relies upon the literal translation and in this way speaks of Jonah’s interpretation of prophecy as “historiography.” According to the prophecy Ninevah is destroyed – its as though Jonah’s speech is transposed forty days into the future, thus he speaks in the present (participial) tense, as though he were bearing witness to an event under way: Ninevah is being destroyed. (It would be interesting to read Jonah’s “Ninevah is being overthrown” in light of Freud’s take on fantasy in his essay “A Child is Being Beaten” – written, interestingly, in the same year as Scholem’s essay.) Now, according to Jonah, it is simply a matter of history following suit, there is no gap between prophecy and historical fact. For God, on the other hand, prophecy qua prophecy is not historical fact, but warning. The difference between the historiographic and prophetic points of view correspond to the difference between law and justice. As Scholem claims,

Jonah takes the standpoint of the law, and from this side he is indeed in the right; God takes that of justice; God denies the (mythical) law in history. In the act of repentance, the law is overcome and the judgment is not carried out.(On this, compare Psalm 94:14-15, particularly the interconnection of the two verses.) This, and nothing else, is the meaning of justice in the deepest sense: that judgment is allowed, but the execution of it remains something tirely different. The unequivocal connection of the judge's decision to the executive power--a connection that defines the actual order of law--is suspended by the deferment on the part of the executive power. This is what God does with Nineveh. The conclusion of 4:10--he had passed a sentence in order to carry it out, and he did not (yet) do it--is a classic statement of the idea of justice. Where the court pronounces a verdict, justice raises a question. As Daniel says:"In the counsel of the guardians a decree and in the verdict of the holy ones a question"—this is justice (357).

A few of points on this to conclude: (1) justice is not constitutively different from law, but an adjustment of it. Justice, in Scholem’s telling is a disruption of the continuity of law, which is the necessary connection between judgment and execution. Without this connection law is toothless, impotent. Thus, Scholem says, “Justice and the law complement each other and coincide.” Justice relies upon the logic of law – as the continuity between judgment and execution – insofar as it is defined as the disruption of this logic and the breaking of this continuity, as “deferment.” (2) Justice is fundamentally a theological (perhaps, “Jewish”) concept. This is not to say that it harbours no historical or profane exigency –Scholem highlights this exigency when he says that “Justice is the idea of the historical annihilation of divine judgment, and just is that deed which neutralizes divine judgment upon it.” In this way Scholem’s justice, much like Benjamin’s divine violence, is opposed to and resists fate. (3) Justice is associated with the question, law with an answer. The question, as opposed to the verdict, is something like a Benjaminian “unalloyed means.” Subtracted from its relation with an answer, it is a means without and end or a mediality.

The question is an unending cycle; the symbol of this infinitude, in which the possibility of an empirical end is given, is the rhetorical question. This ("Jewish") question can be justly characterized as medial; it knows no answer,which means its answer must in essence be another question; in the innermost basis of Judaism the concept of an answer does not exist (356).

Messianic Politics (iii b): The Commandment

In the last post I left a quote from Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" hanging with one from Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, on the meaning of commandment. I would like to return to this juxtaposition. But here again, I will end by leaving a quotation in suspension, this time from Gershom Scholem's 1919 essay "On Jonah and Justice." It is my hope that the three quotations will eventually circulate with some coherence.
Benjamin:

For the question “May I kill?” meets its irreducible answer in the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment precedes the deed, just as God was “preventing” the deed. But just as it may not be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. And so neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it. Thus it was understood by Judaism, which expressly rejected the condemnation of killing in self-defense. But those thinkers who take the opposed view refer to a more distant theorem, on which they possibly propose to base even the commandment itself. This is the doctrine of the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal or even vegetable life, or limit to human life (298).

Two things seem significant to me: (1) the temporality of the commandment, and (2) the discontinuity between commandment and judgment. The temporality of the commandment is what prevents it from functioning as an a posteri judgment (but, no more does it function as an a priori judgment – contra Kant, such a possibility does not exist). Judgment and command are incommensurable by virtue of their temporal modes. Judgment takes place, by definition, after the deed, good or bad. In contrast Benjamin says of the commandment that it “precedes the deed”. Benjamin does not say explicitly whether the command comes from the present or the past, but it certainly cannot be addressed to the future: it cannot judge a deed already done – for this the substrate of law would be necessary. At this point the Rosenzweig connection comes into view.

Whereas the indicative has all the circumstances behind it that established the objectivity and whose purest form seems to be the past, the commandment is an absolutely pure present for which nothing has prepared it. And not only has nothing prepared it; it is absolutely unpremeditated. The imperative of the commandment makes no forecast for the future; it can imagine only the immediacy of obedience. If it were to think of a future or an “always,” it would be neither a commandment nor an order, but a law. The law counts on periods of time, on a future, on duration. The commandment knows only the moment; it waits for the outcome right within the moment of its growing audible, and when it possesses the spell of the genuine tone of a commandment, it will never be disappointing in this awaiting (191).

With recourse to its grammatical structure, Rosenzweig ties the commandment, as imperative, to the present. In this respect, he offers a more precise temporal indexation than Benjamin, but like Benjamin he identifies the commandment as blind to the future. The commandment – and the commandment of love, the “greatest commandment,” is exemplary here – knows only the present and anticipates only obedience, not consequences. When “Love me!” (or “Do not kill!”) becomes “Love me, or else…” it falls into law. For while the law “counts on periods of time, on a future, on duration…the commandment knows only the moment.” The binding of the commandment to the present marks its fundamental difference from law. In this way the divine violence that Benjamin is speaking of meets its historical limit not by virtue of the illegality of murder, but because of the commandment not to kill. He can still speak of the law-destroying character of divine violence, so it seems, while not lapsing into a kind of anarchism.

The second aspect that I would like to elaborate is the discontinuity that Benjamin names, between commandment and judgment. He says that “no judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment” and further that “neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance.” Judgment, Divine judgment, does take place, but it cannot be seen to follow necessarily from the commandment. It depends upon a double contingency: (human) disobedience and (divine) decision. The only way for this contingency to be overcome, for the semiotic relation between commandment and judgment to be established, is for law to become operative. Law is the guarantee of continuity. But commandment precedes both the deed and law. Furthermore, the very task of the “critique of violence” is to interrogate violence that is subtracted from any law: a pure violence. There is a necessary hiatus or “deferment” between one and the other. Without this deferment the distinction between law and justice is undone.

On the matter of distinguishing between law and justice, we can look behind Benjamin’s Critique to the early essay by Gershom Scholem, “On Jonah and Justice.” But, as I mentioned, I will leave this quotation in suspension for now.

Justice is the idea of the historical annihilation of divine judgment, and just is that deed which neutralizes divine judgment upon it. Justice is the indifference of the Last Judgment; that means, within it unfolds that sphere in which the enactment of the Last Judgment is infinitely deferred. Messianic is that realm which no Last Judgment follows. Therefore the prophets demand justice, in order infinitely to eliminate the Last Judgment. In just actions, the messianic realm is immediately erected (357).