ABSTRACT
The constellation of social and intellectual conditions known as modernity has posed fundamental challenges to the very idea of theological doctrines. It is now no longer just particular claims within traditions that are called into question but the very notion of turning to those traditions at all as sources of truths. Accordingly, many religious figures have contended that “faith” pertains less to matters of abstract knowledge than to moments of embodied knowing. In this vein, a remarkable number of Jewish commentators have highlighted the biblical phrase na‘aseh ve-nishma, literally “we shall do and we shall hear” (Exodus 24:7), to affirm that theological truth is only intelligible through the prism of bodily events: in “doing,” we “hear” or understand divinity. My chapter demonstrates, however, that this interpretation is distinctively modern, emerging in late-eighteenth-century Hasidic mysticism and flowing thereafter into other tributaries of Jewish thought, from Buber, Heschel, and Levinas to the contemporary writings of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Jay Michaelson, and Mara Benjamin. In tracing the exegetical afterlives of na‘aseh ve-nishma, we unveil not only a striking mutation in modern Judaism but also a broader trend in modern religious culture. This chapter illuminates the hermeneutical and phenomenological textures of this turn towards embodied theology.
