The homily near the beginning of Tractate Avodah Zarah of the Babylonian Talmud, folios 2a–3b, surely must be numbered among the most fascinating rabbinic compositions. A brilliant creation of the rabbinic imagination, the homily depicts the inauguration of the “world to come.” A richly detailed eschatological drama unfolds as God places a Torah scroll in his lap and summons those who busied themselves with Torah to collect their reward. While rabbinic literature teems with static descriptions of the glorious miracles that await the righteous in the next world and parallel illustrations of the painful sufferings the wicked should expect, extended narratives of the initial stages of the process are rare. Not the nature of the world to come, but the test for admission is the subject at hand.

In 1962, J. L. Austin published a set of lectures entitled How to Do Things with Words. In this founding document of speech act theory, Austin argues that language not only can say things, but it can also do things (what he calls the illocutionary force of language). Austins signal example of the illocutionary force of language is the wedding ceremony, in which words properly recited actually create a marriage. Later students of speech act theory have expanded the application of this insight: all language, written or spoken, has an illocutionary force that depends on the context of the speech act. All language not only, or even primarily, says; it also does.

Converts to the faith have often been perceived as somewhat problematic by Judaism; apostates even more so.1 This was especially true in medieval Christian Europe, where the adversarial relationship between Christianity and Judaism made apostasy, particularly apostasy by choice, more than mere defection; it cast aspersions on the rejected religion.

In the introduction to his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides provides us with a rationale for the composition of this work as well as instructions for the targeted reader on how to decipher its elusive and enigmatic style. Such devices as contradiction, diffuse and seemingly discordant treatment of subject matter, and deliberate ruses are employed to accommodate both halakhic legal constraints on the overt teaching of physics and metaphysics and the wide intellectual disparity of his potential readers. The sensitive nature of the topics to be explored demands an unorthodox pedagogy that both illuminates and conceals, allowing entrance to the qualified few while excluding those who cannot cope with the intellectual rigors involved. Rabbinic stricture prohibits revealing anything more of the Account of the Chariot (metaphysics) than chapter headings, and therefore Maimonides cautions, “my purpose is that the truths be glimpsed and then again be concealed so as not to oppose that divine purpose which has concealed from the vulgar among the people those truths requisite for His apprehension.”

Much has been said and written about the unique position regarding toleration that was adopted by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Its uniqueness within Jewish tradition is not open to doubt. The question I would like to explore here is the extent to which his version of toleration is compatible with the toleration that has become part of the modern secular outlook. In order to accomplish this task, I begin by setting up a typology of two basic varieties of toleration, relating one to the skepticism of the relativist who espouses liberal pluralism, and the other to religious systems with absolutist claims for truth. In the second part of the article, a sketch of the history of toleration in Judaism, this typology is confirmed. The third part of the article is a review of R. Kook′s notion of toleration, which seems at first to conform to the type of toleration generally associated with liberalism, but, when translated into practical policy, displays some significant aberrations. The fourth part suggests that these aberrations are not evidence of inconsistencies or anomalies, but rather an indication of the fact that no attitude of toleration, even that of the most liberal pluralist, can completely evade the necessity for intolerance at some point; and that different views regarding the point where toleration should be limited reflect different epistemological positions, each of which is associated with a different societal ideal which serves as the criterion for limiting toleration.

For many years scholars of Judaism were reluctant to employ the analytic tools distilled in anthropology for studying Jewish culture. One reason for this reluctance was that the classical ethnographic field, consisting of a small-scale tribal society with no written tradition, did not appear pertinent to the study of the text-informed “great tradition“ of Judaism. In addition, the notion of comparative research implicit in most anthropological studies appeared dubious to many scholars of Judaism, who were alarmed by the sweeping, methodologically unfounded comparisons evident in the treatment of biblical material by such precursors of modern anthropology as Robertson Smith and Frazer.1 This methodological consideration was augmented by an emotional unwillingness to equate the “primitive’ religious systems of “savage’ societies with concepts and rituals pertaining to the oldest monotheistic religion.