Joseph B. Soloveitchik: Conflict and Creation
“What can a man of faith like myself, living by a doctrine which has no technical potential, by a law which cannot be tested in the laboratory, steadfast in his loyalty to an eschatological vision whose fulfillment cannot be predicted with any degree of probability, let alone certainty…what can such a man say to a functional utilitarian society which is saeculum-oriented and whose practical reasons of the mind have long ago supplanted the sensitive reasons of the heart?”
With these words, taken from the introduction to “The Lonely Man of Faith,”1Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition 7:2 (Summer 1965), 8. Soloveitchik’s other key works include “Confrontation,” Tradition 6:2 (Summer 1964), 5–28; “The Community,” “Majesty and Humility,” “Catharsis,” “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah,” “A Tribute to the Rebbitzen of Talne,” Tradition 17:2 (Spring 1978), 7–83; Be-Sod ha-Yachad veha-Yachid (ed. P. Peli), Jerusalem: Orot, 1976; Ish ha-Halakhah – Galui ve-Nistar, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1979; Divrei Hagut ve-Haarakhah, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1981; Halakhic Man (translated by Lawrence Kaplan), Jewish Publication Society, 1983; The Halakhic Mind, Seth Press, 1986. Summaries or reconstructions of Soloveitchik’s public lectures include: Joseph Epstein (ed.), Shiurei ha-Rav, New York: Hamevaser, 1974; David Telsner (ed.), Chamesh Derashot, Jerusalem: Orot, 1974, translated as Five Addresses, Jerusalem: Tal Orot Institute, 1983; P. Peli (ed.), Al ha-Teshuvah, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1974, translated as On Repentance, Jerusalem: Orot, 1980; Abraham R. Besdin (ed.), Reflections of the Rav, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1979.
For studies of Soloveitchik’s thought see: Eugene Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, New York: Behrman House, 1983, 218–242; Elliot Dorff, “Halakhic Man: A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 6:1 (February 1986), 91–98; David Hartman, Joy and Responsibility, Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Posner, 1978, 198–231; The Breakdown of Tradition and the Quest for Renewal, Montreal: The Gate Press, 1980; A Living Covenant, New York: Free Press, 1985; Lawrence Kaplan, “The Religious Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Tradition 14:2 (Fall 1973), 43–64; “Degamim shel ha-Adam ha-Dati ha-Idiali be-Hagut ha-Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik,” Mechkerei Yerushalayim be-Machshevet Yisrael, 4:3–4 (1985), 327–339; Aharon Lichtenstein, “R. Joseph Soloveitchik” in Simon Noveck (ed.), Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, B’nai B’rith, 1963, 281–297; Pinchas Peli, “Repentant Man – A High level in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Typology of Man,” Tradition 18:2 (Summer 1980), 135–159; Aviezer Ravitzky, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge: Between Maimonidean and neo-Kantian Philosophy,” Modern Judaism 6:2 (May 1986), 157–188; Jonathan Sacks, “Alienation and Faith,” Tradition 13:4–14:1 (Spring-Summer 1973), 137–162; “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik: Halakhic Man,” L’Eylah 19 (Spring 5745), 36–42; David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2:3 (October 1982), 227–272; Morris Sosevsky, “The Lonely Man of Faith Confronts the Ish Ha-Halakhah.” Tradition 16:2 (Fall 1976), 73–89; and the essays by Zvi Kaplan, Walter Wurzburger, Zvi Zohar, A. Strikowski, M. Rosenak and A. Shauli-Bick in Sefer ha-Yovel…haRav Yosef Dov ha-Levi Soloveitchik, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook/Yeshiva University, 1984, vol. 1. we find ourselves for the first time in Orthodox thought in the full pathos of the modern situation. While Hirsch energetically believed that the Orthodox Jew could participate in the secular enterprise, and Kook that tradition would eventually absorb it, Soloveitchik sensed that modern consciousness, with its rationality, pragmatism and scientific method had systematically marginalised religious sensibility. “Modernity” was not something external to the believer – non-Jewish society and culture for Hirsch, Jewish rebels against tradition for Kook – with which he might negotiate a relationship. It was something within, part of the air he breathed, the language he spoke. It had invaded his personality, and therefore it was within the personality of the believer that the battle had to be fought, or if not fought, then brought to consciousness.
The implications are dramatic. In the very next paragraph Soloveitchik writes that he has never been troubled by the conflicts between the biblical doctrine of creation and the theory of evolution, between the biblical concept of man and modern psychology, between revelation and empiricist philosophy, or between the belief in “Torah from heaven” and biblical criticism.2“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 8–9. Almost the entire range of issues that had perplexed Jews since their encounter with enlightenment is dismissed in a few sentences and never returned to. Soloveitchik does not tell us how he resolves the conflicts, but we can hazard guess. Judaism and the scientific mind operate on different cognitive presuppositions. They are parallel but alternative realities which do not intersect. What he has told us is that the issue is not the critical one. At an external, intellectual level the man of faith can navigate the currents of modernity. But what if modernity enters the holy of holies by which he means not the home or the synagogue or the academy, but the very soul of the believer? This unerring instinct for the heart of the dilemma makes Soloveitchik the most focussed and relentless of modern Jewish thinkers.
BRISK AND BERLIN
Not by accident. To a unique degree. Soloveitchik (1903– ) is master of two worlds, those of contemporary philosophy, theology and science on the one hand, and talmudic dialectic on the other. As halakhist, he is heir to one of the greatest of Eastern European dynasties. His great-grandfather, R. Joseph Baer Soloveitchik (1820–1892), was for a while joint head of the great yeshivah of Volozhyn with Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin. His grandfather, R. Chaim Soloveitchik (“The Brisker,” 1853–1918),3On Chaim Soloveitchik, see S. Y. Zevin, Ishim v-Shittot, Jerusalem: Bet Hillel, 39–86. was a legendary figure whose analytic method revolutionised talmudic study in the East.4In “How is Your Beloved Better than Another?” [Hebrew], Be-Sod ha-Yachad veha-Yachid, 212–235, Soloveitchik argues that R. Chaim revolutionised the study of Talmud in the same way as did Galileo and Newton the pattern of scientific thought. His father, R. Mosheh Soloveitchik, was head of the Talmud faculty at Yeshiva University, a position in which his son succeeded him in 1941. This provenance, together with the formidable degree to which he inherited and acquired the family traits – vast erudition coupled with incisive analytical acumen – would have guaranteed him a prominence as the natural leader of American Orthodoxy, a position which he has occupied since his early days at Yeshiva University.5As honorary president of the Religious Zionists of America since 1946, and chairman of the Halakhah Commission of the Rabbinical Council of America since 1952. See Louis Bernstein, “The Rav and the Rabbinical Council of America” [Hebrew], Sefer ha-Yovel…haRav Yosef Dov ha-Levi Soloveitchik, vol. 1, 18–29.
That role, however, was both deepened and made more resonant by his prodigious acquaintance with secular culture, ancient and modern. Within the first few pages of his first published work, Halakhic Man,6Originally published as Ish ha-Halakhah, Galui ve-Nistar in Talpiot 1:3–4, New York, 1944. we encounter Heraclitus, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Rudolf Otto, Tertullian, Eduard Spranger, Ferdinand Lasalle, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Bergson, Nietzsche, Spengler and Heidegger. In The Halakhic Mind,7The Halakhic Mind, published in 1986, was originally written in 1944: author’s note at beginning of book. written at about the same time, we meet a seemingly endless intellectual pantheon: Mach, Avenarius, James, Pierce, Schiller, Vaihinger, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, Husserl, Santayana et al. The exposure to secular philosophy came relatively late, when after a traditional education Soloveitchik entered the University of Berlin at the age of twenty-two. In 1931 he completed his doctorate on Hermann Cohen’s epistemology and metaphysics, and married Tonya Lewit, who had herself completed a doctorate at the University of Jena. It was to her that he dedicated “The Lonely Man of Faith,” and her illness and death (in 1967) evoked a profound emotional crisis whose effect on his work is occasionally hinted at8It is referred to directly in “Majesty and Humility,” 33. The frightening example in “The Community,” 11 seems to be drawn from personal experience, despite the reference to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich. Much of Soloveitchik’s work is related to death – his several published hespedim, the lectures On Repentance delivered on the yahrzeit of his father, and so on. Elsewhere he writes this into the phenomenology of the halakhic personality: “Halakhic man is afraid of death; the dread of dissolution seizes hold of him” (Halakhic Man, 36). He conquers it through the distancing effect of halakhic study itself: “When halakhic man fears death, his sole weapon wherewith to fight this terrible dread is the eternal law of the Halakhah. The act of objectification triumphs over the subjective tenor of death” (ibid., 73). The process of theologising, as he practises it, is explicitly given a cathartic function by Soloveitchik: “All I want is to follow the advice given by Elihu the son of Berachal of old who said, ‘I will speak that I may find relief’; for there is a redemptive quality for an agitated mind in the spoken word and a tormented soul finds peace in confessing,” “The Lonely Man of Faith,” 6. and often sensed.
Family relationships figure, to an uncanny degree, in his writings. Halakhic Man is prefaced by the quotation, “At that moment the image of his father came to him and appeared before him in the window.”9Sotah 36b. The reference could not be more pointed. It is to the talmudic aggadah which describes the moment of Joseph’s temptation, left alone in the house with the wife of Potiphar. Joseph, so the passage implies, might not have resisted had not the image of his father appeared before him, saying: “Joseph, your brothers will have their names inscribed on the stones of the ephod and yours among them. Is it your wish to have your name expunged from among theirs and be called an associate of harlots?” The image of the son of the patriarchs, left alone with the strange woman of secularity,10The metaphor of strange woman = secular philosophy is used by Maimonides in his letter to R. Jonathan ha-Cohen of Lunel: “She [the Torah] is my loving hind, the bride of my youth, whose love has ravished me since I was a young man. Many strange and foreign women have nevertheless become rival wives to her: Moabites, Edomites, Sidonites, Hittites. The Lord, may he be blessed, knows that I took these other women in the first instance only in order to serve as perfumers, cooks and bakers (I Samuel 8:13) for her [the Torah], and to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she is exceeding fair to behold.” Teshuvot ha-Rambam, ed. J. Blau, 1961, vol. 3, 57. caught between the desire for knowledge and the memory of his father’s stern commanding voice,11“Father’s tradition is an intellectual-moral one. That is why it is identified with mussar, which is the Biblical term for discipline.” “A Tribute to the Rebbitzen of Talne,” 76. is a powerful characterisation both of the conflict between tradition and modernity and of Soloveitchik’s own existential situation.
From the biographical information we possess it appears that his entry into the worlds of literature, philosophy and the university were at the prompting of his mother,12Lichtenstein, 283; Samuel Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy, Part II,” Modern Judaism 2:2 (May 1982), 193. from whom he seems to have inherited a taste for literature and a romantic temperament which “looks for the image of God not in the mathematical formula or the natural relational law, but in every beam of light, in every bud and blossom, in the morning breeze and the stillness of a starlit evening.”13“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 17. This dichotomy between what he learned from his father (“how to comprehend, how to analyze, how to conceptualise, how to classify”) and from his mother (“that there is a flavour, a scent and warmth to mitzvot14“A Tribute to the Rebbitzen of Talne,” 76–77.) assumes massive significance in his writings once transposed to epic, archetypal forms. Over against halakhic man, one might almost say, there is aggadic woman.
Again, there is a haunting description in one of his essays of a personality type, whom he calls Ish Rosh Chodesh (“the man of the new moon”) and who is typified by the biblical Joseph and by Soloveitchik’s own father, who hides a warm and expansive emotionalism under an exterior which is hard, cold and intellectual.” The more holy and intimate the emotion, the more it must be hidden within.”15BeSod ha-Yachad veha-Yachid, 312. The unspoken words which even the closest relationship cannot disclose, the paradoxical limits of communication in which “the word brings out not only what is common in two existences but the singularity and uniqueness of each existence as well,”16“Confrontation,” 14. these too figure heavily in his work. His most frequently used image, awesome in its starkness, is that of Adam and Eve, alone with God in the cosmos, seeking solace as husband and wife and discovering an uncommunicable residue of private experience, an ontological loneliness.
FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHY TO THEOLOGY
These autobiographical traces in his work are not accidental but constitutive.17These are explored in David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2:3 (October 1982), 227–272. Soloveitchik writes not of the world or of God but of the human experience of both. Nor does he write normatively and impersonally, prescribing, as it were, from outside. Instead he writes from within, drawing on his own personal experience and on his observation of the great figures of halakhic scholarship he knew from his father’s house. The means by which he translates this from autobiography to theology is typology, by constructing ideal types or pure forms of existence which are never entirely represented by real people but which nonetheless provide an organising, interpretive scheme through which we may analyse our inner world.18See Halakhic Man, note 1, 139. These types are themselves presented phenomenologically, as modes of experiencing. Indeed at the beginning of “The Lonely Man of Faith” Soloveitchik eschews theology in the conventional sense. What he has to say “has been derived not from philosophical dialectics, abstract speculations, or detached impersonal reflections, but from actual situations and experiences with which I have been confronted.”19“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 5.
The individual does not encounter these types as simple, static alternatives. Sometimes they are ordered hierarchically, so that the human-spiritual progression is from one to another.20“Confrontation” and the major essay Uvikashtem mi-sham, in Ish ha-Halakhah – Galui ve-Nistar, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1979, 115–236, are organised hierarchically and chart a spiritual progression. In his most famous essays, however, they are counterposed dialectically, such that the man of faith or halakhah oscillates ceaselessly between them. His first published words were: “Halakhic man reflects two opposing selves,”21Halakhic Man, 3. and much of his work is shot through with the language of conflict and struggle, antithesis and anguish. At one point Soloveitchik makes clear the difference between this kind of dialectic and its more usual philosophical sense: “Judaic dialectic, unlike the Hegelian, is irreconcilable and hence interminable. Judaism accepted a dialectic, consisting only of thesis and antithesis. The third Hegelian stage, that of reconciliation, is missing. The conflict is final, almost absolute.”22“Majesty and Humility,” 25. In short, there is no synthesis. The inner world of Soloveitchik could not be more distant from that of Hirsch’s ideal co-existence or Kook’s integrative harmony.
How is this emotional landscape, unusual to say the least in the geography of the Jewish personality, to be mapped on to the given world of Jewish law and belief? Here Soloveitchik’s genius, and his family tradition, are at their most creative. The analytic method of R. Chaim of Brisk often involved postulating conceptual dichotomies to explain otherwise intractable disagreements. Two conflicting interpretations of a text would be rendered mutually intelligible by ascribing each to an alternative conceptuality. Thus, two different interpretations of a law might be explained in terms of one view predicating the law of the object involved (cheftza), the other seeing it as relating to the agent (gavra). By thus drawing out the conceptual presuppositions of the halakhah, apparently unrelated arguments could be seen as instances of an overall pattern of disagreement.23See Zevin, op. cit. As a hermeneutic tool, it was a powerful method of extracting universal themes from a literature which had hitherto seemed utterly concrete and case-specific, and Soloveitchik was to draw out its metaphysical implications in Halakhic Man, a work wholly devoted to this type of study and the personality it generated.
But his most creative contribution lay not in the description of the method, but in its application, which Soloveitchik extended not only to the halakhic literature, but also to rabbinic midrash and to the biblical text. This allowed him to discover his “types” – usually in binary opposition – in the classic texts, whether drawn from biblical narrative or seemingly arcane halakhic discussions. Thus, as we shall shortly see, two apparently conflicting biblical accounts of the creation of man are transformed by this method into two conceptualities, two men, two “ideal types” and two phenomenologies, the “majestic” and the “covenantal.” With this brilliant extension of the Brisk method Soloveitchik solved the problem of relating his singular and highly contemporary existentialism to the canonical texts of Jewish tradition, and in the process created a new and powerful form of midrash, or exegetical method. Perhaps it is the case that every new form of Jewish philosophy is or involves a new method of textual interpretation.24See Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken Books, 1972, 282–303; “Religious Authority and Mysticism,” On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, New York: Schocken Books, 1972, 5–31; Simon Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation,” Studies in Jewish Thought, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974, 45–80. Certainly this is what gives Soloveitchik’s thought its particular power: its ability to move from highly individualised experiences to ideal types, and then to discover those types in biblical narrative, rabbinic homily and halakhic detail.
Does this method create or discover? Does it read its concepts into or out of the text? This is one of the central questions to be asked, and Soloveitchik asks it. But – and once again Soloveitchik’s biography is crucial – what might have been otherwise marginalised as a subjective or eccentric reading of the sources in this case held an unavoidable fascination. For here was the scion of one of the most distinguished family traditions of Lithuanian piety and scholarship, encountering and mastering the Western intellectual tradition, and wrestling with it in explicit, even confessional,25“A tormented soul finds peace in confessing,” “The Lonely Man of Faith,” 6. This semi-autobiographical, semi-confessional stance breaks forth from time to time in Soloveitchik’s work and gives it its peculiarly dramatic force. Form here mirrors content, for the lonely struggles of the life of faith, seen as essentially isolated and non-communal, are what have replaced the communal faith experience in the modern world. Soloveitchik in no way negates the centrality of the community, and he often stresses the function of halakhah in objectifying inner experience and rescuing it from subjectivity, romanticism and chaos. But the individual has to struggle towards them. It would be difficult to conceive of Soloveitchik’s style of writing, or his vantage point, prior to the twentieth century. On the general issue of modern selfhood, see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1978. public discourse. The drama was palpable. Without so choosing, he became the emblematic figure of a generation. In a sense, he had been cast as an archetype, and his choice of themes and method turned destiny into philosophy.
THE TWO ADAMS
The essay in which these themes come most strongly to the fore is “The Lonely Man of Faith.” Soloveitchik begins with an admission that immediately singles out both his approach and situation. “My interpretive gesture is completely subjective and lays no claim to representing a definitive Halakhic philosophy. If my audience will feel that these interpretations are also relevant to their perceptions and emotions, I shall feel amply rewarded. However, I shall not feel hurt if my thoughts will find no response in the hearts of my listeners.”26“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 10.
This is no mere diffidence but an expression characteristic of the man of faith in the modern world. He no longer speaks the shared language of society. He can no longer “prove” or justify his stance by the standards invoked by a secular world: scientific demonstration or practical utility. How then is he to communicate? Simply by speaking out of his inner situation and hoping to find an echoing response in his audience. The man of faith is lonely. How does this loneliness arise?
With a brilliant exegetical stroke, Soloveitchik discovers an inner division in the religious personality mirrored in the two accounts given of the creation of man in the opening chapters of Genesis. In the first chapter Adam is made “in the image of God.” He is commanded to “fill the earth and subdue it.” He is created simultaneously with woman. And the name of God used throughout is E-lohim. In the second chapter, almost antithetically, he is made “from the dust of the earth.” He is commanded to “serve and protect” the garden. He is created alone, and only subsequently does woman appear. And the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter personal name of God, appears.
The reason for the discrepancies between the two accounts is simple: they describe two different Adams, two ideal types. Adam of the first chapter is man in the aspect of creative and conquering being. As a creature endowed with intelligence and creativity he is “the image of God.” His characteristic is dignity, which resides in his ability to control and dominate the environment. “Only when man rises to the heights of freedom of action and creativity of mind does he begin to implement the mandate of dignified responsibility entrusted to him by his Maker.”27Ibid., 14. He is a maker of things, and thus becomes the author of the norms within which creativity takes place, scientific, technological, ethical and aesthetic. Soloveitchik calls him majestic man.
Adam of the second chapter explores the universe not as a scientist, seeking knowledge and control, but instead as one tantalised by its mystery and elusiveness. “He encounters the universe in all its colourfulness, splendour, and grandeur, and studies it with the naivete, awe and admiration of the child who seeks the unusual and wonderful in every ordinary thing and event.” He seeks not dignity, but redemption, a state in which the individual “intuits his existence as worthwhile, legitimate and adequate, anchored in something stable and unchangeable.”28Ibid., 24. Dignity is achieved through control over the external world. Redemption comes through control over oneself, through the willingness to be confronted, even defeated, by another being. The second Adam begins with an awareness of his insignificance in the universe (“dust of the earth”) and with a profound sense of loneliness. He seeks communication and communion. Soloveitchik calls him covenantal man.
The difference between the two types can be seen in the kind of communities and relationships they create. Majestic man forms a “natural” community to undertake joint enterprises and promote shared interests. Individuals need to work together to control their environment. But the relationships within such communities are collaborative and functional, side-by-side rather than face-to-face. The second Adam seeks community for another reason, to break out of his loneliness and find “existential companionship.” He seeks what Soloveitchik calls the “covenantal faith community.” He finds it in speech, the gesture of communication. Thus God is met not in the majesty of the cosmos, in which He is simultaneously ever-present and unapproachably remote, but in the word of the covenant. The word has two forms: prophecy, in which God speaks to man, and prayer, in which man speaks to God. Both prayer and prophecy link human beings to one another as well as to God, for both are objectified in the form of a communal-ethical imperative. The prophet receives a message for the community. The man or prayer speaks on behalf of the community and its normative needs. While majestic man forms a community of interests, covenantal man forms a community of commitments. Thus majestic man encounters God as E-lohim, the source of the cosmos, and woman simply as a co-creature. Covenantal man meets God as the Tetragrammaton, the God of face-to-face relationship,29Ibid., 33. Soloveitchik here follows Judah Halevi’s understanding of the distinction between the two names: Kuzari 4:1–16. See Jonathan Sacks, “Buber’s Jewishness and Buber’s Judaism,” European Judaism 12:2 (Winter 1978), 14–19. and finds woman only after sensing his own loneliness and after the overpowering sleep of despair.
Why the two Adams? Evidently because both are inescapably part of the human condition: “In every one of us abide the two personae – the creative majestic Adam the first, and the submissive, humble Adam the second.”30“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 54. Both modes of existence are willed and sanctioned by God. He commands man to build, construct, plan and create. He endorses both majestic man and the communities he fashions. At the same time He “also requires of man to forget his functional and bold approach, to stand in humility and dread before the mysterium magnum surrounding him.”31Ibid., 50. To reject either would be “tantamount to an act of disapproval of the divine scheme of creation.”32Ibid., 54. But therein lies the ceaseless dialectic of the life of faith. In either community, the majestic or the covenantal, man might have found repose, since each poses a problem and provides the solution for it, the one through joint activity, the other through redemptive relationship. But man is commanded to move from one to the other, from prayer to conquest and back again. He is thus fully at home in neither. Hence the loneliness of the man of faith.
“RELIGION” AND “SCIENCE”
At this point in the argument it is worthwhile drawing out the implications thus far. First, Soloveitchik has affirmed the “secular” enterprise in a more thoroughgoing way even than Hirsch or Kook. The characteristic achievements of post-medieval civilisation – scientific method, technological mastery, aesthetic creativity – are unreservedly welcomed as part of the life of faith itself. They are the fulfilment of the mandate to Adam the first, to have dominion over his environment. And they enhance human dignity as the image of God: “Only the man who builds hospitals, discovers therapeutic techniques and saves lives is blessed with dignity. Man of the 17th and 18th centuries who needed several days to travel from Boston to New York was less dignified than modern man who attempts to conquer space,33There appears to be an implicit criticism here of the stance adopted by A. J. Heschel (1907–1972), who had argued in The Sabbath that Judaism was a religion of time aiming at time’s sanctification whereas technical civilization represents man’s conquest of space. Halakhic Man, too, with its comparison between the halakhist and the modern theoretical mathematician, is set in counterpoint to Heschel’s romantic-nostalgic portrayal of Eastern European Jewry in The Earth is the Lord’s (The Earth is the Lord’s/The Sabbath, Meridian Books 1963). A detailed contrast between the two men, both leading theologians of the twentieth century, both heirs of famous dynasties (Heschel was a descendant of several outstanding Chassidic leaders: the Maggid of Mezeritch, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev and Abraham Joshua Heschel – after whom he was named – the Apter Rav), both deeply immersed in the Western philosophical tradition, might yield some fascinating results. The schools that they represent – for Soloveitchik, Lithuanian talmudism, for Heschel, Chassidism – were directly opposed in the nineteenth century, and some of the classic dichotomies persist in their work. Both in Germany, where he worked with Martin Buber in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, and in America, where he taught at the Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, Heschel belonged outside the institutional framework of Orthodoxy, and his involvement with the civil rights movement and interfaith dialogue were outside American Orthodoxy’s central concerns. But the contrast between the two men lies along a different axis than a simple Orthodox/non-Orthodox rift. boards a plane at the New York Airport at midnight and takes several hours later a leisurely walk along the streets of London.”34“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 14.
In this analysis there is no room for a religious-nostalgic longing for the naivete, innocence and wholeness of a pre-technological age. Nor is there even the hint of a possibility of a conflict between religion and science, either at the cognitive level, where they occupy separate domains, or at the functional level, where each possesses its own integrity. More significantly, Soloveitchik rules out even the possibility of a psychological-spiritual critique of the aspirations of enlightenment man. The charge that had been levelled against religion – often specifically against Judaism – since Spinoza was that it had been an instrument of oppression, inducing an attitude of servile submissiveness in its followers.35See Don Cupitt, Crisis of Moral Authority, SCM Press, 1985, 106–121; David Hartman, A Living Covenant, 1–108. This was the leitmotif running through the Marxist critique of religion as sanctifying the social hierarchy, Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s view of Judaism as “slave morality,” and Freud’s perception of faith as a neurotic craving for authority.
Against this, Soloveitchik fully ratifies the human pursuit of “majesty” so long as it is kept in balance by the dialectical realisation that man, too, is dependent and but a handful of dust.36“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 48–53. This is an important line of thought, for it appropriates and gives a positive interpretation to the insight of Hegel, Max Weber and more recently Peter Berger,37For a modern examination of Weber’s thought in relation to Judaism see Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism, Polity Press, 1984. Peter Berger’s analysis is contained in The Sacred Canopy, New York: Doubleday, 1967, especially pages 105–125. that Judaism was from the outset a victory of rationality and “secularisation” over paganism – a “disenchantment” of the world – relative to which Christianity was, in Berger’s words, a “retrogressive step.”38The Sacred Canopy, 121.
However, and this is Soloveitchik’s second point, there is a conflict, one made all the more poignant by the fact that it is not external – the man of faith on one side, the man of science on the other – but wholly contained within the life of faith. In some respects, as he argued powerfully elsewhere,39In Halakhic Man. the authentic figure of Jewish spirituality is more like the man of science than like the conventional homo religiosus. Nevertheless, the conflict is endless,40Soloveitchik does not always speak as if there were no end to the conflict. Thus, “out of the contradictions and antimonies there emerges a radiant, holy personality whose soul has been purified in the furnace of struggle and opposition.… This spiritual fusion that characterises halakhic man is distinguished by its consummate splendor, for did not the split touch the very depths, the innermost core, of his being?” (Halakhic Man, 4). This question is discussed by Lawrence Kaplan, “Degamim shel ha-Adam ha-Dati ha-Idiali be-Hagut ha-Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik,” and Aviezer Ravitsky, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge.” inescapable and internal. Faith moves man like a pendulum between action and passivity, assertion and submission, cognition and rapture, victory and defeat. The man of majesty cannot live wholly within a world he controls and dominates without becoming demonic and overreaching himself, like the builders of the Tower of Babel.41“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 57, 63. See also Robert Gordis, Judaic Ethics for a Lawless World, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1986, 1–58. The man of redemption cannot live wholly within the community of prayer and find peace in escape from the world: “I hardly believe that any responsible man of faith, who is verily interested in the destiny of his community and wants to see it thriving and vibrant, would recommend now the philosophy of contemptus saeculi.”42“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 54, footnote. The war of cultures – “religion” and “science” – has been turned from a static antagonism to a dynamic oscillation within the soul of the believer.
But at this point we face a question, and come to the next and culminating point of the argument. Soloveitchik has taken the dilemma of modernity and identified it in the roots of human existence, in the very opening chapters of the Bible. As such, it is a problem of antiquity too, of humanity per se. What then did he mean by announcing at the outset of the essay that the “contemporary man of faith lives through a particularly difficult and agonising crisis”?43Ibid., 8. His answer is that in premodern times the dialectic of faith was “a wholesome and integrating experience.”44Ibid., 55. But the balance has been disturbed. The pendulum no longer swings freely. Majestic man has ousted covenantal man.
THE MAN OF FAITH AND MODERN RELIGION
The dilemma of modernity is that majestic man has achieved unparalleled success in his attempts to explain and control nature. He has been intoxicated into hubris, the overreaching sin of seeing the creative, assertive side of his being as the entire reality of man. He has expelled covenantal man from his inner psyche, seeing passivity, submissiveness and ontic incompleteness as out of keeping with the stance of victory over a hostile environment. “By rejecting Adam the second, contemporary man, eo ipso, dismisses the covenantal faith community as something superfluous and obsolete.”45Ibid., 56.
The argument might at this point have turned into a conventional attack on the pretensions of Nietzscheian triumphalism. But once again Soloveitchik demonstrates his genius for getting to the uncomfortable heart of the problem. For he does not proceed to set up a new dichotomy between religious and secular, belief and unbelief. His target is not “vulgar and illiterate atheism”46Ibid. at all, but something closer to home: the phenomenon of modern religion itself. Just as he had earlier argued that Judaism extends into the secular, scientific domain, now he argues that the secular has subtly entered into the religious domain and appropriated and distorted its institutions and teachings.
Who is the contemporary man of religion? Certainly not the homo religiosus of whom he had spoken in Halakhic Man, who seeks “cognition for the sake of grasping the eternal riddle, revealing for the sake of concealing, comprehending for the sake of laying bare the incomprehensible in all its glorious mystery and terror.”47Halakhic Man, 12. Instead he is a man of the world, a pragmatist engaged in the pursuit of success, who is nevertheless a member of an organised religion and a supporter of its causes. He creates religious communities, but these are not covenantal faith communities, but instead communities of interest and practical action.
Soloveitchik’s insight is that secular man does not exclude religion from his universe. He needs an ethical Absolute to give his norms permanence and stability. There are times when he needs the therapeutic power of the act of faith. There are times too when he needs to turn from the mechanical world to the experience of beauty and the sublime. Even the scientific mind occasionally “yearns for its Creator and rebels against the concrete reality that so entirely surrounds it.”48Ibid., 14. Thus far, “the message of faith, if translated into cultural categories, fits into the axiologico-philosophical frame of reference of the creative cultural consciousness and is pertinent even to secular man.”49“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 59.
However, the translation is only partially successful. It is true that the classic texts of Judaism occasionally speak in pragmatic terms: obedience to the commands lead to worldly happiness and a pleasant life. But there is another, disturbing, irreducible voice in which faith speaks: “There are simply no cognitive categories in which the total commitment of the man of faith could be spelled out.… The act of faith is aboriginal, exploding with elemental force as an all-consuming and all-pervading eudaemonic-passional experience.”50Ibid., 60. It resists every attempt to reduce it to cognitive or functional terms. And it directly challenges those terms in their aspiration to represent the whole of reality.
Soloveitchik’s critique of contemporary secularised religion is devastating:
Notwithstanding the fact that Western man is in a nostalgic mood, he is determined not to accept the dialectical burden of humanity.… He, of course, comes to a place of worship. He attends lectures on religion and appreciates the ceremonial, yet he is searching not for a faith in all its singularity and otherness, but for religious culture.… He is desirous of an aesthetic experience rather than a covenantal one, of a social ethos rather than a divine imperative. In a word, he wants to find in faith that which he cannot find in his laboratory, or in the privacy of his luxurious home.… If he gives of himself to God, he expects reciprocity. He also reaches a covenant with God but this covenant is a mercantile one.… Therefore, modern man puts up demands that faith adapt itself to the mood and temper of modern times. He does not discriminate between translated religion formulated in cultural categories…and the pure faith commitment which is as unchangeable as eternity itself.51Ibid., 63–64.
This note has sounded through Soloveitchik’s writings from the beginning. He finds the same phenomenon in modern religion’s claim to represent tranquillity and peace of mind as against the chaos of the secular world;52Halakhic Man, 139–143. in the desire for men and women to pray together, which he sees as turning prayer from loneliness to a desire for security and comfort;53R. Besdin, Reflections of the Rav, 81. in the demand that halakhah be “meaningful” or that it be submitted to historical or intellectual categories;54Ibid., 139–149; “Majesty and Humility,” “Catharsis”; The Halakhic Mind, 85–99. and in the belief that there can be genuinely theological interfaith dialogue, implying that one faith can be translated into the language of another.55“Confrontation”; Reflections of the Rav, 169–177.
These are all symptoms of the appropriation of faith by majestic man. Against them the man of faith must protest that they capture only half of the religious message. But here is the tragedy. For the other half is precisely that which cannot be translated into terms that modern man would understand. It is, to him, a “foreign” language. What then can the man of faith do? “When the hour of estrangement strikes, the ordeal of the man of faith begins and he starts his withdrawal from society.… He experiences not only ontological loneliness but also social isolation.”56“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 65. The closing pages of “The Lonely Man of Faith” end on a defiant but elegiac note, with evocations of the prophetic figures – Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah – who endured social loneliness but could not contain the word of faith that burned like fire in their hearts. “Is modern man of faith entitled to a more privileged position and a less exacting and sacrificial role?”57Ibid., 67. Could there be a more tragic analysis of faith and modernity than this?
THE SECULARISATION OF FAITH
As we noted earlier, Soloveitchik embodied to a remarkable degree – in his biographical and personal prominence, in his unsurpassed mastery of both secular and halakhic scholarship the existential drama of the meeting of two worlds. In him, the Lithuanian yeshivah met contemporary secular thought. No figure, certainly not Hirsch or Kook, had so known modernity face-to-face. Perhaps it was the sheer familiarity with non-Jewish scholarship which he displayed, perhaps the affirmative tone of the first half of “The Lonely Man of Faith,” or perhaps the memory of the more confident earlier essay, Halakhic Man, that encouraged his readers to believe that Soloveitchik spoke for a “modern” Orthodoxy. The impression was mistaken. “The Lonely Man of Faith” is an expression that falls little short of despair.
Its final prescription precisely echoes a point made several times by Maimonides, namely that there are times when the man of faith must withdraw from the world. “If (virtuous men) saw that due to the corruption of the people of the city they would be corrupted through contact with them and through seeing their deeds, and that social intercourse with them would bring about the corruption of their own moral habits, then they withdrew to desolate places where there are no evil men.”58Maimonides, Shemoneh Perakim, ch. 4. The translation is taken from Raymond L. Weiss and Charles Butterworth (eds.), Ethical Writings of Maimonides, New York: Dover, 1975, 69–70. The rule is codified in Hilkhot De’ot 6:1, and given practical expression at the end of The Epistle on Martyrdom (translated in A. Halkin and D. Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985, 31–34). Maimonides’ analysis of the religious personality is directly relevant. He portrayed two alternative ideals, the chakham and the chassid, the sage and the saint.59Hilkhot De’ot ch. 1; Shemoneh Perakim chs. 3–4; see also Guide for the Perplexed, III: 53. The sage, whose personality is marked by moderation, is the normative figure of Jewish tradition. The concept of the sage as ideal is directly related to the social character of Judaism, and to the ideal of halakhah as the legislation which creates a society. The saint, by contrast, is not the Jew as social being, but a figure in search of personal piety, engaged in a struggle with his personality.60This emerges clearly from Shemoneh Perakim ch. 4.
Two circumstances, both abnormal, turn the saintly ideal from an option to a norm: the process of repentance,61Hilkhot De’ot 2:1–2; Hilkhot Teshuvah 2:4. The social character of the halakhah is set out in Guide II, 39–40; the law’s disregard for the individual per se, in Guide III, 34. The argument of this and the preceding paragraph needs further elaboration, since it takes issue with the analysis of Aharon Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” in Menachem Kellner (ed.), Contemporary Jewish Ethics, New York: Sanhedrin, 1978, 102–123. Lichtenstein’s analysis, though remarkably suggestive, rests to my mind on a quite unwarranted assertion of discrepancy between Hilkhot De’ot and Shemoneh Perakim. and the breakdown of society. When the sage finds his religious life systematically undermined by all available social encounters, he has no alternative but to retreat into temporary seclusion and into the behavioural patterns of sainthood. This is precisely the pattern of Soloveitchik’s man of faith who might, like Maimonides’ sage, have found the balancing of opposites a “wholesome and integrating experience,” but instead, like Maimonides’ saint, he must turn to “his solitary hiding and to the abode of loneliness.”62“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 65. The two analyses concur that this is an aberration imposed by outside circumstance, not a timeless ideal. Modernity has forced faith into exile.
It is clear that Soloveitchik had pessimism thrust upon him. His earliest work bears an altogether different tone. The Halakhic Mind, written in 1944, begins with the sentence: “It would be difficult to distinguish any epoch in the history of philosophy more amenable to the mediating homo religiosus than that of today.”63The Halakhic Mind, 3. His argument, from which he has not retracted, is that modern developments in science and philosophy opened up a space for an altogether more fruitful presentation of religion, specifically halakhic Judaism, than prevailed in the premodern era where the only possibilities were scholasticism, agnosticism and mysticism. With considerable prescience, Soloveitchik sensed a new era of epistemological pluralism64Ibid., 19–81. For a modern secular exposition of a similar position, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. in which the halakhic universe could be set forth as a complete self-sufficient world, objective, quantified, neither dethroned by science nor driven to romantic subjectivism. “Out of the sources of Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.”65The Halakhic Mind, 102.
It was not secular knowledge, encountered in the University of Berlin, that caused Soloveitchik such searing distress, but secular man, encountered in suburban-Jewish America. “The Lonely Man of Faith” is in essence a critique – before the term was coined – of “civil religion.”66“The Lonely Man of Faith” was published in 1965. The term “civil religion” is usually attributed to Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (Winter 1967), 1–21. Recent sociological studies of both American and Israeli Judaism67Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State, University of California Press, 1983; Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews, Indiana University Press, 1986. have identified a powerful return to Jewish values and symbols, but subtly transposed into a language devoid of transcendence. “For the civil religion, Judaism is very much a matter of concern; God is not.”68Woocher, 91. Particularly in America, the new mood is associated with philanthropy and activism, and exactly mirrors the portrait of the religion of majestic man which Soloveitchik had so sharply diagnosed. His suspicion that the secular would enter and possess the sanctuary has been vindicated by subsequent events.69Liebman, Don-Yehiyah and Woocher all attribute the rise of the new civil religion to the processes set in motion by the 1967 Six Day War. It is made doubly poignant by the fact that his own thought has been appropriated by younger thinkers and used to legitimate highly secular readings of Judaism.70See Irving Greenberg, The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History, National Jewish Resource Center, 1981; Towards a Principled Pluralism, New York: CLAL, 1986; David Hartman, A Living Covenant, op. cit. Both Greenberg and Hartman take up the “modernist” statements within Soloveitchik’s work, while ignoring or taking issue with, his anti-modernist dialectic.
Soloveitchik’s drama, then, is a heroic-tragic one. The man of faith can certainly engage with modern society and its modes of thought, provided that he has the courage for a double encounter with a dual identity.71This is the argument of “Confrontation” and “A Stranger and a Resident: (Reflections of the Rav, 169–177). As majestic man he is part of the secular-human enterprise. As covenantal man he is heir to a faith tradition that cannot be translated into contemporary language, and to a set of emotional responses – defeat, helplessness, the heroism of failure – that are no longer common currency. He may be in, but not of, the modern world. Most Jews, he admits, are not prepared for this inner dialectic, and hence the tradition is no longer the religion of most Jews. A synthesis is possible between the two identities, but not within society as presently constituted. Orthodoxy and modernity are both friends and strangers to one another. In this uncomfortable paradox, the man of faith must live.