Shabbat

By Charles Vernoff

In this book, Charles Vernoff argues that what makes Judaism distinctive is that it departs from all the characteristics typifying "path philosophy" spiritualities, such as Christianity and Islam. Judaism is not established through philosophical analysis, nor does it seek to persuade via abstract concepts. Rather, its radical and unassailable uniqueness comes from the fact that it purports to reveal divine transcendence as such, not mediated by anything else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ellipsis Imprints
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005537562

Book preview

Shabbat

by Charles Vernoff

Published by Ellipsis Imprints at Smashwords

Text Copyright © 2021 Rena Panush

All Rights Reserved

ELLIPSIS IMPRINTS

Durham, England

Twitter: @EllipsisImprint

Book Design by Ellipsis Imprints

Smashwords Edition

Cover photo by Marleen de Kramer. Cover design by Sara L. Uckelman.

This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

Also by Charles Vernoff

For the Children of Abraham: Scripture's Wisdom

Shabbat

by Charles Vernoff

Foreword

Before they invented writing, what happened to the thoughts that pass through a mind in the course of a life? Mostly what happens to the life, whatever that is. This book you are holding is a rare product of a rare mind that would be lost. It came into my hands when I was trying to find my own way—spiritually, personally, philosophically—in my 40s and it gave me some guidance and some light. When I met Chuck Vernoff, its author, we became friends. A couple of years later, when he was in hospice suffering from an incurable lung disease, he asked me to be his literary executor. I said yes and that’s why you are holding this book. Had any of those things not happened, I think it might have had the fate of the thought and life of the man or woman before writing.

Charles Vernoff was a gifted writer, teacher and professor who taught religion for decades. But this book is not primarily a contribution to scholarship. It is a work of religious thought. Drawing on the work of Potter, Vernoff talks about religion being a path philosophy rather than a map. This book invites you to walk across a path.

And although it uses ancient categories and concepts, it is a new path, because Vernoff’s was a truly original mind. Just to give you an idea, towards the end of his life, Chuck became captivated with the notion of the spiritual geography of the United States. He thought each region—the East, the Heartland, and the West Coast—had its own specific conception of freedom. For the East, it was freedom as liberation from their oppressors in Europe; for the mid-West, freedom was a self-constituting community; for us on the Coast, it was transcendence of the human condition. Chuck mistrusted any plan to transcend at the same time as he was drawn to it, in the same way that he was ambivalent about the strictures of orthodoxy at the same time as he was drawn to them.

Chuck was ambivalent about himself and afraid to take himself seriously. Part of him would be embarrassed that you are reading him at all—in dark moments he referred to his thought as his schuss or drivel. Far be it from me to call him wrong about anything but in that he was. These thoughts are a deep honest wrestling with questions such as What is originality? How can we commit while at the same time be aware of our own limitations as thinkers? What is religion? Who or what is God?

Daniel Pinkwater, the sage and children’s book author of such classics as The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, was Chuck’s childhood friend. He recalls Chuck loved me because I had once caused him to laugh so hard he squirted peach juice out his nose. He regarded this as one of his finest moments. I was told by one who was present, that he was laughing at the moment of his death.

I don’t recall discussing his scholarly work, his beliefs, or even his personal life very much. We had something better to do with our time together. I don’t actually remember the peach juice incident, but if he said it happened, it happened.

A tradition recounted to me says that when we read the works of a departed sage, his lips in his grave move along with our reading. I like to think Charles Vernoff’s lips are moving as you read this.

Maybe laughing.

Maybe singing.

Eric Linus Kaplan, June 2021

Prologue: In Search of the Judaic Path

Of all spiritual paths, the path of Judaism is probably the most hidden and elusive. Other paths, whether of the East or of the West, are usually well presented in what Indian thought might call path philosophy, a form of self-characterization deeply embedded within a mainstream religious tradition. Such a philosophy implicitly addresses the disinterested but open-minded outsider. It describes the spiritual goal of the path in a more or less clear, universally intelligible and intuitively appealing way—cosmic consciousness, release from desire, attunement with the flow of reality, divine love, and so forth. It presents an elegant and logical argument for the truth and worthwhileness of that goal. And, above all, it shows how the spiritual methods used to advance on this path may reasonably be supposed to lead toward the goal. A path philosophy, in other words, provides a rational and effective promotion for its spiritual approach.