A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz
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“He has created a remembrance of His wonders” (zekher asah le-nifle’otav—Ps. 111:4), a verse they marshal consistently, and somewhat formulaically, in an array of their writings. In their reading, this verse refers to observable phenomena that attest to theological truths about God and His attributes. The Pietists believed that the created world contains “remembrances” (objects and phenomena discernable to the careful observer) which shed light upon God’s “wonders” (namely, theological truths about His nature and attributes). Dan, who was the first to treat this doctrine of “remembrances” in his pioneering work on the German Pietists, understood it in light of his broader sense that the Pietists “do not see nature as a reflection of God’s attributes.” In a series of studies, he has argued that the only remembrances of interest to the Pietists were those that deviated from, and hence undermined the typical workings of the natural order:8 “The Creator has, in his kindness and goodness, implanted within reality wondrous and unnatural things that cannot be comprehended according to the laws of nature, in order to enable His pious followers to comprehend Him, and to learn about the wondrous, supernatural capabilities of the Creator Himself, which similarly cannot be understood according to the laws of nature…. The true nature of God can be discerned, in their view, only from the supernatural, from phenomena that are exceptions to the conventional laws of nature.”9 This sense that the Pietists prized “the supernatural” at the expense of “the natural” has been widely adopted by scholars writing in Dan’s wake, who have agreed that, for the Pietists, “only in the marvelous and the anomalous does one find the Divinity reflected.”10 The claim has been further extended to Ashkenazic culture as a whole by scholars who have contended that “reliance on natural phenomena as a means of comprehending [theological matters] was an uncommon characteristic” in medieval Ashkenaz.11
Now, it is true that discussions of “nature” are conspicuously lacking in Pietistic theological texts—but this is not due to a supposed Ashkenazic antipathy toward the natural world. Rather, it results from the fact that, as far as Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers were concerned, “nature” as such did not exist—at least not lexically. The standard medieval Hebrew term for nature, teva, was a neologism coined in the mid-twelfth century by Samuel Ibn Tibbon in his Perush ha-Milot ha-Zarot (Explanation of Foreign Terms), a philosophical dictionary intended to supplement his Hebrew translations of Judeo-Arabic rationalist texts.12 In earlier Jewish sources, teva was used to denote either the building blocks of which physical objects were composed—the four elements, for instance, or the four humors—or else, relatedly, the “natures,” or specific qualities of things.13 Ibn Tibbon used teva in his translations as a replacement for the Arabic words tab and tabi’a, to denote “nature” as a systematic and unified construct. The German Pietists did not have access to Ibn Tibbon’s translations or dictionary, and so their neglect of “nature” reflects not a principled theological opposition, but simply a lack of conceptual vocabulary. Ashkenazic Jews did have other, related terms at their disposal, such as hokhmat ha-toladot for “science,”14 and of course ma’aseh bereishit, which could mean both the process of creation and the created order as a whole. But whether these semantic terms approximated or differed from the Tibbonite teva in their meanings can only be discerned if Pietistic discussions of the workings of their physical surroundings are analyzed from the ground up.
The fact that the Pietists were exploring God’s “remembrances” at precisely the moment when Jewish (and, as we shall see, also Christian) conceptions of “nature” were being consolidated is of crucial importance. For Pietistic ruminations upon Psalms 111:4 in fact reveal a spectrum of attitudes toward the created world and natural order. On the one hand, the writings of Judah and Eleazar recurrently locate theological profundity specifically in the routine, mundane components of the natural order. In these instances, the Pietists seem to take for granted, and to derive spiritual meaning from, the stability and predictability of the laws of nature. Thus, while the “remembrances” that they see as meaningful do attest to God’s wondrous nature, they are often not themselves wondrous. Indeed, the prosaic quality of these “remembrances” is key to the very workings of the Pietists’ argumentation, revealing not only an awareness of and appreciation for the conventional workings of nature, but a theological dependence upon it. On the other hand, the Pietists not infrequently invoke Psalms 111:4 in their discussions of decidedly non-mundane phenomena—fantastic, extraordinary marvels such as the malevolent potentialities of excrement described above. In these cases, the “remembrances” highlighted are themselves “wondrous,” and would seem to destabilize the consistency that the Pietists at other times prized.
But while these divergent approaches seem contradictory at first glance, they are in fact of a piece with a broader tension in high medieval thought—how to make sense of apparently inexplicable phenomena, and integrate them into the broader natural order. This challenge was increasingly taken up by high medieval Christians and Jews alike—not only by the superstitious “folk” but by influential theologians and natural philosophers, who were both fascinated by and suspicious of the mirabilia that featured prominently in the literary texts, magical treatises, and travel narratives introduced into Europe over the course of the high Middle Ages. These thinkers arrived at diverse solutions to the tension between natural order and disorderly wonders of nature. But on the whole, their discourses of “science” and “nature” were far more capacious than modern, binary distinctions between nature and the supernatural would lead one to believe, and could include and account for the magical and marvelous alongside the mundane.
By analyzing Pietistic discussions of God’s “remembrances” both synchronically and diachronically, this chapter shows that the natural order was indeed a source of theological meaning for the German Pietists. Attention to this dimension of medieval Ashkenazic theology will also allow us to draw linkages between their esoteric works of elite theology and the more popular, outwardly directed genres that conveyed these ideas to a wider audience. Moreover, the very ways in which they conceived of the character and boundaries of the natural order drew upon developments in the Christian setting in which they lived, and with which they were varyingly and substantively engaged.15
“HE HAS CREATED A REMEMBRANCE OF HIS WONDERS”
The German Pietists were hardly the first readers of the Bible interested in identifying the precise “remembrances” and “wonders” alluded to in Psalms 111:4. This verse was the subject of a lengthy tradition of Jewish exegesis long before the Pietists came on the scene. The interpretation most common during the medieval period approached the verse from a historical perspective, identifying God’s “wonders” with His miraculous interventions in human history. The “remembrances” of these events could vary. One approach was to define the remembrances as the practices and rituals that the Jews were commanded to observe as a means of commemorating God’s wondrous deeds. Thus, the mid-twelfth century midrashic compilation Sekhel Tov jointly lists the prohibition of eating an animal’s sciatic nerve (gid ha-nasheh), the commandment of remembering the exodus from Egypt, the prohibition of eating leaven on Passover, and the commandment of dwelling in sukkot on the Feast of Tabernacles as “remembrances” of “wonders” that God performed for the biblical Israelites.16 Passive remembrance is here allied to specific ritual imperatives, since human beings bear the responsibility of maintaining the practices that commemorate God’s miracles and activities. A wide range of biblical exegetes—both predating and postdating the compilation of Sekhel Tov—read the verse similarly. The eleventh-century French exegete Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (Rashi), for instance, explains that the verse refers to “the Sabbath and holidays [which God] established for the Jews, about which it is written ‘and you shall remember (ve-zakharta) that you were in Egypt.’”17 The twelfth-century itinerant Spanish rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and the thirteenth-century rabbi Moses b. Nahman of Barcelona incorporate similar readings into their own biblical commentaries.18 The motif was utilized in other genres as well—a sermon attributed to the fifteenth-century halakhic authority Jacob Molin of Mainz (Maharil), for instance, consists of an expanded, homiletical rendering of Psalms 111:4 that takes the same historical-ritualistic approach.19
A related interpretation of this verse linked God’s