Fishbane's attempt to enact this "honesty" in his constructive theological effort. Jewish theology, Fishbane believes, must be based on Scripture as a living religious voice, expressed and grappled with through the lens of rabbinic tradition (broadly defined), from antiquity to the present. Fishbane offers a multilevel, God-centered religious orientation, based on what he calls a PaRDeS model. PaRDeS is the mystical garden into which the four sages entered according to the foundational story of Jewish mysticism in tractate Ḥagigah of the Babylonian Talmud. The acronym traditionally represents four modes of interpretation of the sacred text: peshat, derash, remez, and sod, which, in Fishbane's rendition, represent four stages or spheres of a committed Jewish hermeneutical existence. Peshat refers to the [End Page 401] universal and plain sense of what it means to be a living and dying human being. Derash represents the movement from an individual to a collective context shared with past, present, and future fellow humans. Derash is a liturgical mode of being, in which a communal language is sacred and meaningful. Remez represents the re-embedding of the personal resonance and meaning of the individual within the living community of faith. Finally, sod denotes the movement from a communal consciousness to a cosmic sense, through the history of the mystical tradition in Judaism.