What is Good and What God Demands is an innovative attempt to describe and classify normative terminology in early rabbinic literature. By focusing on “normativity” in its most general sense, Novick seeks to capture the whole field of “ought,” whatever force it may carry: legal, ethical, or merely the slight force of etiquette. The book's fundamental contention is that rabbinic legal vocabulary is not based solely on the contrast between obligation and prohibition. Rather, it includes additional modes of normativity, including supererogatory and character formation ethics. Whereas previous attempts to downplay the pervasiveness of duty within rabbinic thought tended to divert attention toward non-legal ethical aspects of rabbinic teachings, Novick suggests rabbinic legal thought includes many different levels of normativity.
The book is comprised of three parts, which represent decreasing levels of normativity. Chapters 1 through 4 examine the relationship between the basic categories of duty in rabbinic vocabulary, such as obligation, permission, transgression, and the elusive term mitzvah. Novick's main contention in this section is that among the different rabbinic schools these terms comprise two distinctive normative schemes, which assume different levels of intrusion upon human existence. We will return to this issue below. Chapters 5 through 7 illustrate the nature of passionate participation in the law, as reflected in tannaitic literature. The rabbis acknowledge a human tendency that inclines toward stringency. Figures such as the rabbinic sin-fearer transform obligation into a site of personal excellence. The last section, Chapter 8, discusses rabbinic exemplarity, which adds virtue ethics and the ideal of self-perfection to the rabbis’ legal discourse.
The last chapter completes the three staged move, in analyzing the field of “ought,” from (1) obligation and duty, through (2) prudence and the supererogatory, to the opposite pole of (3) character formation. At the same time, each part of the book offers a very different reading experience. The discourse of exemplarity, presented in the last chapter, supposedly reflects an ethics of self-formation. In Novick's eyes, by introducing such a discourse the rabbis set self-formation as an alternative to the forces of obligation and duty. However, this is hardly convincing. After all, biblical role models, introduced into rabbinic legal discourse, serve first and foremost as examples for the appropriate adherence to the law and not for transformation toward perfection. It is therefore questionable to what degree the Greco-Roman ethical ideal of self-formation is indeed present in rabbinic legal normativity.
In contrast, the comparison of rabbinic terminology to that of Jewish wisdom literature in the second part of the book proves the impact of ethical conceptions on rabbinic legal discourse. In Chapter 6 Novick discusses over-cautionary tendencies, such as those embodied in the figure of the prudent person introduced into rabbinic literature from the wisdom tradition. Here we learn that as this figure, characterized by his measured acts, was transferred into a distinctively legal context, his concerns and anxieties were completely reshaped. His measured prudence was transformed by the rabbis into excessive concern to avoid any possibility of sin. This same phenomenon may be found in Chapter 7, which is concerned with the notion of timely fulfillment. Timeliness is a prized wisdom virtue; however, in rabbinic instructions timely performance is substituted by immediacy. In other words, one must not “leaven” the commandments which are to be fulfilled at once. As Novick suggests, “The norm of immediacy thus arises from the superimposition of wisdom time over deontological time” (171). This and other intriguing insights display how normative categories acquired new meanings as they were transplanted into a distinctively legal system of duty, as crafted by the rabbis. This is clearly of utmost importance for understanding the creation of rabbinic normativity. At the same time, such developments do not occur in a vacuum, and the reader can only regret that Novick does not go beyond development at the linguistic level to examine this process within its broader historical context. As it currently stands, the rabbinic legal construct seems almost arbitrary. This issue resurfaces in some of the core arguments of the first section of the book.
No doubt, the first section should be seen as the heart of the book, as it includes some of the most nuanced and interesting ideas. In the first chapter the author claims that while the school of R. Akiva tends to read biblical phrases as denoting compulsory commandments, the school of R. Ishmael reads them as mere possibilities. In the third chapter we learn that this divergence represents two competing worldviews. According to the school of R. Ishmael, Scripture presupposes and overlaps with the world. In a way it reflects human experience much more than it intrudes upon it. Thus, Scripture may describe factual occurrences without any normative overtones, or it may instruct one how to best manage in the world, employing only very weak normativity. In contrast, the school of R. Akiva contends that Scripture is at odds with the world. It is an external normative system that does not derive from or represent some world order or reality but rather is forcefully imposed on it.
As Chapters 1 and 3 attest, careful analysis of rabbinic vocabulary of obligation and permission proves quite effective in uncovering within tannaitic literature indications for different conceptions of law. It is much harder, however, to substantiate Novick's attempt to systematically reconstruct two contrary rabbinic normative approaches. Such a project would admittedly require the use of a variety of tools and a wider methodology. Unfortunately, the discussion lacks any reference to possible backgrounds—theological, hermeneutical or jurisprudential—for the evolution of these specific rabbinic notions. Do they correspond, for example, to the much-discussed contrast between the Qumran inclination toward realism and rabbinic nominalism? Again, isolated from contemporaneous (Jewish, Roman, or other) conceptions, we are left mainly with a more subtle knowledge of normative vocabulary, woven into two ideal types of the law.
The notion of mitzvah and its supererogatory overtone is examined in Chapters 2 and 4. The author argues in Chapter 2 that the source of this usage lies in the law of process, as it spells out the ideal order of performance. It is only a short way from this point to the association of mitzvah with preferable conduct, in opposition to merely valid actions. Chapter 4 traces the radical transformation of the term mitzvah: from its biblical sense, as a law which one is careful not to transgress (Deut. 26:13), to the rabbinic sense of mitzvah as a rewarding action. Thus Chapters 2 and 4 seek to reconstruct the process through which mitzvah acquired a quasi-supererogatory sense, subsequently losing much of its normative force.
Novick has managed to neatly trace the development of the rabbinic usage of the term mitzvah, leaving the impression that the transformation in meaning was fundamentally an internal process. However, this can hardly explain the revolutionary nature of the rabbinic conception, which can be appreciated only against the backdrop of other contemporary responses to the biblical commandment system. According to M. Makkot (3, 14), God increased the number of mitzvot in order to justify the People of Israel and to ensure them life in the world to come. Evidently, this stands in contrast to Paul's claim that the Law justifies none, and death prevails due to one transgression. This tension between Paul and the Mishnah is indispensible for any attempt to explain the rabbinic motivation for reshaping the concept of mitzvah into a positive term capable of representing divine grace, and is therefore of direct relevance to the book's argument.
Other contemporary systems are relevant as well. Novick presents the notion of mitzvah as a preferable act to be a rabbinic innovation in comparison with the biblical meaning of the term mitzvah. However, this development too, it seems to me, can be appreciated only against the background of specific alternative systems. After all, one of the essential features of rabbinic rulings, which set them apart from the stringent Qumran law, is the constant distinction between proper conduct and the minimal requirement ex post facto. The roots and nature of such normative flexibility, which lie at the heart of rabbinic (and maybe even Pharisaic) normativity, still await further investigation.
What is Good and What God Wants sets the linguistic foundation for any future discussion of rabbinic legal thought. Much is yet to be done in framing the author's important insights into both historical and conceptual contexts. However, students of rabbinics will no doubt benefit from Novick's careful and erudite discussions of the tannaitic sources, no less than from his commendable attentiveness to the subtleties of rabbinic terminology.
