Moses Mendelssohn! A name I haven’t heard in ages! But it’s true, I had students in "Approaches" read Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, which I used to anchor an argument about the meaning and value of ritual in religion. What my erstwhile TA remembered was Mendelssohn's observation that you can’t make yourself believe something, something I reprised for this class (without its subtle polemic against Christianity) as a basic but largely unacknowledged fact about human beings. (The only thing more absurd is the idea that you choose your beliefs.) Any tradition that demands belief can’t but make intolerant hypocrites of its devotees.
That’s why, Mendelssohn wrote, ritual is so important, especially ritual whose meaning is never fixed or final. It offers us a way to be religious without pretending. We came back to this after a wide-ranging discussion of how the Book of Job interrupts pious certainties, enjoining us to revere good questions over bad answers. Mendelssohn doesn't (I dimly recall) have anything to say about Job but thee views resonate deeply with the sense I've been inviting students to make of it. I told my guest (and the class) that my course is called “Performing the problem of suffering” because this is a problem we could never satisfactorily answer. Instead of throwing up our hands, we are invited by texts like the Book of Job us to study and interpret and reinterpret, tell and retell... and so abide with those questions we can neither answer nor leave off asking. Perhaps my whole approach owes to Mendelssohn!
