Cantor's Corner by Eric Schulmiller

About six years ago, when I was still in graduate school studying to become a cantor, I had the opportunity to hear Jacques Derrida deliver a lecture at NYU. I was a big fan of his ideas – long before I was associated with the Reconstructionist movement, the Deconstructionists held a special appeal for me. I arrived early to the auditorium, and was near the front of the line of eager students waiting to sit at the feet of the master. It was at this point, after about an hour of waiting, that I noticed a detail on the flyer for the lecture that I had missed on first inspection: the lecture was sponsored by the NYU French club. I asked a few of my fellow devotees, and was told that, yes, Derrida was delivering his lecture entirely in French. Although I was very disappointed (I speak next to no French), I decided that I would atone for my Deconstructionist sin of failing to give the text (the flyer) a close reading by attending the lecture anyway. After all, if one of the primary ideas that Derrida originated was that language was always, at some root level, ambiguous and therefore open to limitless interpretation, I should be able to get something out of his lecture, even if my French was limited to ordering a cappuccino in a Montreal cafe.

As it turned out, I was able to understand quite a bit of Derrida’s lecture that day. No, I wasn’t channeling Charles de Gaulle. As I listened from the front row of the auditorium, it became clear, from Derrida’s frequent use of Hebrew terms such as Elohim, Akeda, Yitzchak and Moriah that he was actually delivering a lecture about the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac! There was certainly no better example in the Torah of a text with multiple interpretations, and the implications of each interpretation for the reader were monumental, indeed.

As I sit at my desk, writing this article less than a week after the passing of this brilliant philosopher, I find that his contributions to the study of language and philosophy (or even in opposition to it) belie Derrida’s Jewish heritage. Born into a petit bourgeois Jewish family in Algeria in 1930, Derrida experienced anti-Semitism at the hands of the Nazis, and later the French themselves, whose quota system caused him to be expelled from school at a young age. By his early twenties, however, Derrida had gained admission to the most prestigious halls of learning in France, and from there began a fifty year career of writings that would challenge the very foundations of Western philosophy, science, and literature.

What was most crucial about Derrida’s writing was his insistence that every text had multiple meanings, and to deny the fundamental ambiguity of language (the space of uncertainty between polar opposites that he called, "difference") was to deny the richness of our own experience that transcended pure logic and concrete description. This methodology of a dialogical relationship to text, a sense of play with language, and the understanding that the world could not so easily be broken down into binary units of knowledge hearkened back both to the core assertion of Jewish faith (God is ONE – all encompassing, indivisible), and shares as well as the Talmudic rabbis’ sense of awe at the overwhelming richness of language, even as they both acknowledge its inherent inadequacy. In the end, I think that Derrida has a lot to offer us as well. After all, before we can reconstruct Judaism we must first deconstruct it - challenging the basic assumptions that underlie our Jewish traditions, and seeing how we can breath new life into the interrelated structures of practice, history and identity whose main vitality lies not in some fundamental truth that these traditions point to, but in the limitless possibilities for meaning that we gain in our relationship to them.