**7. A mereology of divine law: the Palestinian קיום" kiyum" (a suspended testimony/testament to the law as a whole)**

The masters and students of rhetoric in Palestinian Rabbinical schools did not consider polemical contexts extraneous to the results of polemics. This general stance of any school of rhetoric found a particular configuration in a mereology of the Divine law the Palestinian rabbinical schools of rhetoric displayed in their extant archives, known today as the Palestinian Talmud or Jerusalem Talmud.20 What pertains to the context of this essay is that the Palestinian's schools developed a mereology of the past as mereology of the divine law. Looking at their mereology sheds a new light on the mereology of *existentia* versus *essentia* in Victorinus, of mens as the memory of the present in Augustin, and of the earth as the whole which is not a body, in Husserl.

<sup>19</sup> Heidegger's criticism of *existentia* as *Vorhandenheit*, and his proposed compensation for that criticism in Heidegger's own notion of *Existenz* can be seen as a reconfiguration of the tension already induced and set in place in the process of transition from *huparxis* to *existentia*. In a sense, Heidegger drives closer to Philo, as for the both the who is sharply distinct from the what. For Philo, *huparxis* has to do with the G-d of Septuagint, the G-d under *whose* arche the world is subsisting. For Heidegger, if the Latin *existentia* translates *huparxis*, then the who gets lost in translation and huparxis becomes a what, a pure what before any definitions, before essence, to be sure, but a *what*. To compensate for that loss in translation Heidegger retranslates *existentia* as *Vorhandenheit*, the mere being there of a what *before* any definition or meaning, while coining the *Existenz* to introduce the *Who*, human or divine without difference: the Who, who is not *before* definitions or before *essential*, but rather fundamentally *without* definitions or essence. To wit: "Existentials and categories are the two fundamental possibilities of the characteristics of being. The being which corresponds to them requires different ways of primary interrogation. Beings are a *who* (existence) or else a *what* (objective presence in the broadest sense). It is only in terms of the clarified horizon of the question of being that we can treat the connection between the two modes of characteristics of being" (in Joan Stambaugh translation; ["Existenzialien und Kategorien sind die beiden Grundmöglichkeiten von Seinscharakteren. Das ihnen entsprechende Seiende fordert eine je verschiedene Weise des primären Befragens: Seiendes ist ein Wer (Existenz) oder ein Was (Vorhandenheit im weitesten Sinne)." (*Being and Time*: 45)].

<sup>20</sup> The display comes alive, if one reads these archives against the grain of their reception and interpretation in the subsequent tradition, dominated as it has been by medieval reception and interpretation of the Iranian rabbinic rhetorical schools under the name of the Babylonian Talmud.

The Palestinian schools concern with a necessity and impossibility to testify for the divine law of the past. Such testifying, testimony or testament come in two forms: as an exemplary act (*ma'aseh*, deed) or as a procedural rule (*halakhah*) spelling out a contractual obligation.21 The both must arrive by way of a *recollection*; more specifically in a recitation of respectively an exemplary act or of a rule of procedural obligation (between Israel, G-d and the nations of the world). The necessity is to recall/cite/testify the divine law that comes from the past;<sup>22</sup> for otherwise how can one comply to one's obligation? The impossibility is in the very nature of a recollection and citation: To recall and to cite are to make the past present. That in turn makes the past lost as such, that is to say as past, behind the present of the law cast by its citing. In yet other words, by becoming present (in a testimony of recollection or recitation) the law of the past loses its character and its power of the past.

The conflict of the impossibility and necessity to recall the law of the past is a version of mereology. The past is a whole that has no parts (in this case no fully specified laws/rules of procedure); and the recitations stemming from that past are (to use Husserl's language) separations from the law of the past (just as the planets and other bodies were separations from the bodiless earth.) The paradoxy is that the characters in the Palestinian rabbinical schools of rhetoric in reciting the law make it present and thereby loosen or weaken its power, the power of the law of the past. This is why the characters in the Palestinian Talmud are often concerned with "what are we to testify to" or "what are we to establish" as the divine law (lit "what are we making stand" [*ma anu mekaymin*]). The characters express such concerns by juxtaposing the recollections and recitations with one another, thereby showing how unstable the grounds of such testifying and establishing are. The resulting tension is that the characters must and cannot testify to the laws of procedure (*halakha*) without making this very testifying and testament suspended between the impossible and the necessary.<sup>23</sup>

What does that mean by way of differing versions of mereologies considered heretofore? The Palestinian schools display a mereology of the past, which celebrates uncertainty of one's standing between the impossible and the necessary, rather than committing to the would be false certainty about parts and parcels of the law of the obligation. Whereas this law comes from the past as a whole with no parts thereto, citing and detailing this law threatens its very power. Standing between Scilla of necessity and Haribdah of impossibility, the Rabbis, however, do not refuse to testify. They instead suspend testimony, thereby humiliating their own power of citation. They thereby suspend both the impossibility and the possibility to testify to the Law.

<sup>21</sup> Such a contractual obligation can pertain to the procedural law of obligation between the descendants of the Biblical Israel (Jacob) and the G-d of the Bible, or within the community of Israel's descendants, between the members of that community and the others.

<sup>22</sup> In question is reciting of the law of obligation in counter-distinction from the law already given in the Scripture. The Scripture itself, if considered a divine revelation or coming directly from G-d would not be problematic in this respect. The only problematic part would be in reading and interpreting it, but that belongs to the other aspect of the activity in the rhetorical schools, that of exegesis and eisegesis of Scripture as distinct from formulating the procedural law of obligation which is supposedly coming from the past, which means is not present in the same way in which Scripture is.

<sup>23</sup> This conflict of impossibility and necessity finds an expression in including several parallel and thus competing versions of the same procedural law in the Mishnah, as well and even more so in the Palestinian Talmud.

*Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104595*

By comparison with Augustine memory of the present, the rabbis and students in the schools prefer the memory of the mereological past of the law over the recollection of the law in the present. That also means they prefer the memory of the law of the past to a recollection of that law in the form of definitive rules. Yet, facing the necessity of such recollection, they suspend such recollection/ citation by committing to no final formulation of the law but only to a provisionally accepted number of recollections/citations. A community living by mutual obligations with G-d lives in suspension of any given recollection about the past of these obligations. Back to Augustine, instead of certainty of the memory of the present, this community lives by the uncertainty of the memory of the past. That celebrates a programmatic uncertainty as an authentic condition versus any certainty that Augustine offers in his "memory of the present." *Huparxis*, or subsisting under the *arche* of existing G-d means remembering G-d there where G-d cannot be recalled.

What that means, however, is that the mereologies of the bodiless whole without parts in Husserl and Augustine alike find a contrasting parallel in the rabbinic Palestinian mereology of the divine law. If the former strive for a certainty in the foundations of human life in a such a bodiless whole without parts, the Palestinian rabbis in their continuation of Philo's mereology of *huparxis* display a contrasting standing, that of a human in suspension of her position *vis a vis* the whole without parts.

### **8. Beyond the environment: a conclusion**

To conclude, Husserl's mereology of the bodiless earth induces reservations about approaching the earth as environment. In its either localist or globalist versions, the notion of environment not only reduces the earth to a body, but also either begins with or stays within the anthropo- and geo-centric element. Husserl gestures toward a way to overcome such centrism: to approach earth as more than a body, that is, as not a body. His mereology of the bodiless earth, however, is as promising as it is also limited by his commitment (shared with Augustin) to finding a *certain* bodiless whole, a whole which can give certainty, in his case that of "one earth and one humanity". A contrasting sense of programmatic uncertainty in the rabbinic memory of the past, rather than the recollection of the past, and the version of mereology that such past as past is proposing yields a structure to apply in thinking not only about law but also about earth as such a bodiless whole, to which one is better off to relate with a well-structured uncertainty than with being certain about what can or cannot be.

Then what? Ascribing science the sole or even predominant responsibility for creating and resolving the "environmental crisis" needs a radical rethinking in view of the competing mereologies outlined above. For, they collectively put both earth and humanity back into consideration, while letting the Copernican science do what it does best, to work with the bodies. That also means keeping Copernican science apart from what is not a body, that is to say from the humanity and the earth.

The above analysis affords a conclusion that environmentalist thinking needs a sustained critique of its over-commitment to science, including the scientific view of wholes as organisms. Beyond and in addition to organicist holism of the bodies, a mereology of bodiless wholes without parts, in the competing versions thereof outlined above, needs to be brought forth and to claim its role in the understanding of what we do not understand when we lock ourselves into thinking about nature in terms of "environmental crisis" today.
