Discourse on Judaism’s relationship to land are politically fraught, and because of this often fall onto one side or the other of a binary opposition: either Judaism is fundamentally diasporic, with text culture taking the place of homeland, or else it is fundamentally Zionist, with the mitzvah of settling the land holding a central place.
This paper seeks to break apart this binary by placing one of the more theologically innovative movements of Jewish thought in the past few decades, namely Textual Reasoning, into dialogue with particular strands of Native American thought about the nature and role of land, place, and the more-than-human relatives of human beings, including plants, animals, and the earth itself, who share lands and places with us.
Textual Reasoning, and its sibling Scriptural Reasoning, developed in the 1990s and 2000s as a postliberal movement of Jewish thought among a group of thinkers offering various pragmatist and postmodern justifications for returns to scripture and rabbinics in the wake of the genocidal destruction of the twentieth century. The origins of Textual Reasoning are in the American Academy of Religion, among scholars of religion in general and Judaism in particular who felt that older ways of reconciling religion and the sciences were in need of philosophical and methodological sharpening. As these scholars acquired Christian and Muslim dialogue partners who perceived analogous needs in their own communities, the Scriptural Reasoning community developed (and still holds its annual meetings at the AAR).
Among the thinkers of Textual Reasoning, I focus in this paper on Peter Ochs, who offers the clearest and sharpest description of the philosophical commitments underlying the approach. He frequently does so in readings of his own teachers and mentors, such as Max Kadushin and David Weiss Halivni, showing how these thinkers display similar characteristics of reasoning in their approaches to renewing tradition in times of crisis.
There are several reasons that a comparison between this body of thought and contemporary Native American philosophy and criticism promises to bear fruit for both Jewish thought and Native thought. First, these intellectuals find themselves in similar positions: in the wake of genocide, having “broken into” academic fields previously closed to them, these scholars seek to apply academic methods of history, sociology, anthropology, et al. to their own traditions. However, they find that they cannot do so in a direct or straightforward way: the methods require correction according to standards derived from tradition, even as they also, simultaneously, aid these scholars in correcting and transforming tradition itself.
The primary Native interlocutors I have chosen for Ochs here are Robert Allen Warrior (Osage), Daniel R. Wildcat (Yuchi-Muscogee), and Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux). These thinkers have produced works that bear formal resemblances to Ochs’s dialogues with Kadushin and Halivni, and they did so during the same time period.
In Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1994), Warrior discusses work by both Deloria and John Joseph Mathews, one of the most important Osage writers of the twentieth century. It is in his discussion of Mathews that I will argue Warrior articulates a “landed reasoning,” in which land—mediated however by Mathews’ text—plays a role analogous to scripture for Ochs. In both cases, crises destroy a traditional way of life, along with the “common sense” understanding appropriate to that way of life. Both scripture and land must then serve a purpose that is different from the one that they played within the now-destroyed “common sense” understanding of the devastated culture—they must now serve as a wellspring for revitalization, enabling a continuity that can neither reject the past nor pretend to have straightforwardly revived it. Warrior’s Mathews, like Ochs’s Halivni, represents a connection to a lost world who also offers a way for his people to move into a new one.
The paper comes full circle with its discussion of Wildcat and Deloria’s Power and Place: Indian Education in America (2001). Power and Place begins with a critique of Western metaphysics and returns repeatedly to the question of fundamental differences between the philosophical assumptions underlying mainstream Western educational forms and those the authors perceive as necessary for Native communities in the twenty-first century. However, among the Western philosophical options, Wildcat has the most favorable things to say about John Dewey, whose version of pragmatism he sees as most congenial to traditional tribal forms of reasoning. This provides a final justification for my comparison of these sources: Ochs, in his discussions of Charles Peirce, identifies Peirce’s pragmatism as rooted in Christian scripture (“You will know them by their fruits,” Matthew 7:16). Scott Pratt, however, in Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (2002), has argued that Native American thought does not just bear logical affinity to pragmatism but actually serves as one of its historical sources. The affinity between the “landed reasoning” of Warrior/Wildcat/Deloria and the “textual reasoning” of Ochs and others, I argue, provides further indirect support for Pratt’s thesis.
Finally, I conclude my paper by offering several initial hopes for what may emerge from this dialogue. I hope that it will be useful to practitioners and scholars of both Jewish thought and Native thought. Since my primary location is in Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, I prefer to let Native thinkers and Indigenous Studies scholars tell me if this is true on their side. On the Jewish thought side, however, I hope to renew attention to the concrete aspects of landedness, which are distinct if not finally fully separable from questions of political sovereignty. Jewish “land” discourse tends to focus either on “rights” to the land of Israel and the moral problems of conquest and occupation, or on the global focus of eco-theology in a moment of environmental crisis. But the Jew who said “you shall know them by their fruits” continued to ask: “do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?” Attention to “landed reasoning” has potential to enhance Textual Reasoning’s reparative power.
This paper places the Textual Reasoning approach to Jewish thought into dialogue with particular strands of Native American thought about the nature and role of land, place, and the more-than-human relatives of human beings, including plants, animals, and the earth itself. Peter Ochs’ dialogues with teachers like Max Kadushin and David Weiss Halivni are shown to share logical patterns with Robert Warrior and Daniel Wildcat’s readings of John Joseph Mathews and Vine Deloria Jr. I argue that the latter demonstrate a “landed reasoning,” rooted in pragmatism in a similar way to Textual Reasoning. Dialogue between the two has the potential to break down unhelpful binaries in discourses about land, peoplehood, and sovereignty.