Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik: Halakhic Man
Judaism and Philosophy, never natural friends, seemed since the Middle Ages to have suffered an almost total estrangement. There had been, to be sure, Jewish thinkers of distinction in the modern age – men like Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Mordecai Kaplan, Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. But each stood some way from the mainstream of rabbinic tradition, of halakhic and aggadic Judaism. Their works mapped out new forms of Jewish consciousness instead of translating the old forms into a new language. To confront modernity, it appeared, one had to move away from Orthodoxy. To remain Orthodox, one had to resist the confrontation.
We might have concluded that just as there was an age of prophecy, so there was an age of philosophy – in this case that remarkable five-hundred-year flowering between Saadia Gaon’s Emunot VeDeot and Joseph Albo’s Ikkarim. Maimonides had been its Isaiah, Albo its Malachi, and philosophy had then fallen silent. Perhaps the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 was as decisive a watershed for the possibility of philosophy as had been the destruction of the Second Temple for the possibility of prophecy.
If so, we would have been wrong. Postwar American Orthodoxy, by some happy combination of circumstance, discovered that the bat kol of Jewish philosophy could be heard once more. “Modern Orthodoxy” was the label under which were grouped such diverse thinkers as Norman Lamm, Emanuel Rackman and Eliezer Berkovits, Walter Wurzburger and Michael Wyschogrod, and a younger generation which contained the subtle and elegant Aharon Lichtenstein as well as radicals like Irving Greenberg and David Hartman.1A recent anthology of Modern Orthodoxy is Reuven Bulka’s Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, Ktav, New York, 1983.
Here was a group which despite its label had no common programme or stance. It was not a movement or a school of thought. Yet it had a rough-and-ready kind of unity. It had an institutional focus in Yeshiva University. It had a medium of expression in the journal Tradition. And above all it had a prophet: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, known to an entire section of American Jewry as simply “The Rav.”
The last few years have seen a flurry of activity in making Soloveitchik’s work more accessible. Volumes of his hitherto unpublished or uncollected writings have appeared. Lectures have been transcribed and translated.2The major collections are Shiurei Ha Rav (ed. Joseph Epstein), Hamevaser, New York, 1974; Hamesh Derashot, Jerusalem, 1974; Al ha-Teshuvah (edited P. Peli), Jerusalem, 1975, translated as On Repentance – in the thought and oral discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Pinchas Peli, Orot, Jerusalem 1980; Ve-Sod ha-Yahid ve ha-Yahad (ed. P. Peli), Orot, Jerusalem, 1976; Ish ha-Halakhah, Galui ve Nistar, Jerusalem, 1979; Divrei Hagut ve Ha’arakhah, Jerusalem, 1981; see also Reflections of the Rav (adapted by Abraham Besdin), Jerusalem, 1979. Recently a massive two-volume festschrift appeared, occasioned by his eightieth birthday and an impressive tribute to the range and depth of his influence.3Sefer Yovel (edited by S. Israeli, N. Lamm and Y. Raphael), Mossad HaRav Kook/Yeshiva University, Jerusalem, 1984.
English readers will be particularly grateful that this literary harvest now includes a translation of the classic essay Ish-ha-Halakhah,4Halakhic Man, translated by Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1983. which had for many years been the single written expression of Soloveitchik’s philosophy. Published as an article in 1944 in the journal Talpiot, it had lain like a buried treasure: difficult to track down, hard to read, and imposing formidable intellectual demands on the reader. It subsequently appeared, in 1976 and 1979, in two Hebrew volumes of the Rav’s essays, and has now been issued on its own as Halakhic Man in a translation by Lawrence Kaplan, himself a student of the master.
What emerges from the book? What or who is Halakhic man? What is distinctive about the way he approaches the world? And how – surely the key question – has R. Soloveitchik entered into the confrontation with modernity which others before him had declined.
Halakhah and the Search for Authenticity
First, though, a personal reminiscence. I met the Rav in the summer of 1967. I was then a student with one year of philosophy behind me. American Jewry seemed at the time to be populated by theological giants who spoke a language of such richness and creativity that a pilgrimage seemed a necessary part of an education. (It was probably the last such moment. Nowadays, even to meet the best of the Americans, one would have to travel to Israel.)
Commentary magazine had recently taken soundings from most of the leading thinkers and had published the results in a volume entitled The Condition of Jewish Belief. With this book in one hand and a Greyhound bus ticket in the other I set out to meet as many as possible of the figures in its pages. It soon became clear that a major landmark in this densely populated region was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.
Everyone pointed in his direction. For the non-Orthodox perhaps even more than within his own world, he was the object of awe and surprise. Here was a representative of the world of mitnaged yeshivot, a member of a famous halakhic dynasty whose grandfather – R. Chayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk – had been one of the shaping geniuses of the analytical school of talmudic study. Yet this figure from an apparently closed world had studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, written a doctorate on Hermann Cohen, and was steeped in the literature of existentialism. He delivered discourses on the phenomenology of faith illustrating his argument with arcane sections of Jewish law one moment, rapturous quotations from the Song of Songs the next – all in a fluent and highly rhetorical Yiddish!
He was the culturally impossible made real. A Renaissance man who compassed the intellectual world within four cubits of the halakhah. He was a living embodiment of Hamlet’s paradox: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space.” What could he be like in the flesh? After several fruitless attempts to track him down, I eventually encountered him at the beginning of the new year in his Talmud shiur at Yeshiva University. He was a strangely forbidding figure, slight, gaunt, dressed in a conventional business suit, with cold abstracted eyes turned in upon some private vision. It was his custom, he told me, to sit with his students in silence for an hour or two before the class preparing the passage they would study that morning. If I cared to come the next morning, he would sit outside the class and talk to me.
Next morning I was there, and we sat together on a bench in the corridor. Instantly the austerity was gone. In the unique kinship that is lernen, he put his hand on my shoulder and started to sway backwards and forwards expounding his philosophical thesis as if it were a difficult Tosafot. His question was fundamental: What is authentic, autonomous – what is Jewish – about Jewish philosophy?
Judaism, he maintained, had one unique heritage from which every authentic expression must flow and in reference to which every proposition must be validated: the halakhah. A philosophy not rooted in the halakhah would fail to capture what it sought to describe.
For instance, he said – in a reference to A.J. Heschel – it was possible to construct a philosophy of Shabbat as a “sanctuary in time.” This might be a beautiful idea; but it was a misleading one. Shabbat for the halakhah was the thirty-nine avot melakhot (parent-categories of forbidden work) and their derivatives. Any philosophising must begin and end with this point.
A philosophy of the individual, his freedom and grandeur, must take as its starting point some concrete halakhic application. This was to be found in the Laws of Repentance in Maimonides’ Code. He was, he said, expounding just such a philosophy in his lectures on Teshuvah (they have since been transcribed and published by the late Pinhas Peli and constitute the best point of entry into his method and tone of voice).
Although halakhah seemed an inauspicious reservoir of ideas –
it was, on the face of it, no more than a system of concrete laws for particular applications, lacking wider reference to the mysteries of existence – those ideas could be found by patient uncovering of the conceptual world they presupposed. Halakhah was the visible surface of a philosophy: the only philosophy that could lay legitimate claim to being Jewish.
That still seems in retrospect the best summary of his work.5Discussion in the thought of Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik can be found in the following: A. Lichtenstein, “R. Joseph Soloveitchik,” Great Jewish Thinkers, Bnai Brith, New York, 1963, 281–297; Lawrence Kaplan, “The Religious Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Tradition, 14:2 (Fall 1973) 43–64; Jonathan Sacks, “Alienation and Faith,” Tradition, 13:4–14:1 (Spring-Summer 1973), 137–162; Morris Sosevsky, “The Lonely Man of Faith Confronts the Ish Ha-Halakhah,” Tradition, 16:2 (Fall 1976), 73–89; Pinchas Peli, “Repentant Man – A High Level in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Typology of Man,” Tradition, 18:2 (Summer 1980), 135–159; David Hartman, “Soloveitchik’s Response to Modernity” in his Joy and Responsibility, Jerusalem 1978, 198–231; Eugene Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, Behrman House, New York, 1983, 218–242.
Text and Life
But the idea that halakhah is the basis of Jewish philosophising has a double sense. For halakhah might mean either of two things: a process or a product, the process of studying Jewish law or the product of that study, the law itself.
In Rabbi Soloveitchik’s later work – the lectures on Teshuvah, for example – the latter comes into play. A piece of halakhah, a paragraph in Maimonides’ Code perhaps, becomes the starting point for ever widening philosophical meditation. Not always is it a legal text that sets the discourse in motion: in the two major articles he wrote in the 1960s, Confrontation6Tradition, 6:2 (Spring-Summer 1964), 5–29. and The Lonely Man of Faith,7Tradition, 7:2 (Summer 1965), 5–67. the text in question is a biblical one, in both cases the creation of man in the book of Bereishit.
In this vein R. Soloveitchik represents a classic tradition of derashah, wide-ranging exegesis which moves from a text to the complex world behind the text, a style used in the Akedat Yitzhak of Isaac Arama, the Derashot of Rabbenu Nissim of Gerondi, and in the Chassidic work which has frequently influenced R. Soloveitchik, Likutei Torah of R. Shneour Zalman of Liadi.
But in Halakhic Man we are in different territory. Here the subject is halakhah as process – the act, the life, of studying halakhah. We are not invited to reflect on any particular text; rather we are introduced to the kind of person who devotes himself to talmudic study.
Is there, though, just one kind of Talmud student? Clearly not. A point needs to be made here if we are to understand what Halakhic Man is about. It is one thing to ask: What kind of person becomes a talmudist? And quite another to ask: What kind of person does a talmudist become? There are many different motives for studying Talmud; but the process changes the person, as he becomes increasingly involved, enveloped and shaped by the activity. So we can talk of an ideal type – the person in whom this process is complete – and still say something of great relevance. Few readers of Halakhic Man will recognise themselves in its pages, but they will learn something of what they might become.
Ideal and Real Worlds
Who then is the man of halakhah? R. Soloveitchik begins by telling us who he is not. He is neither the man of science (cognitive man) nor is he the conventional man of religion (homo religiosus). The man of science seeks to dispel the mystery of existence by uncovering the laws that govern the universe. The man of religion seeks out the mystery of the universe by reaching to the unfathomable beyond the laws.
Halakhic man is neither, or rather he is something of both; he “reflects two opposing selves.”8Halakhic Man, 3. References are to the English edition. He is not like the empirical scientist trying to understand the laws that operate within things we can observe. Instead he is like the mathematician who constructs models or abstract systems which may or may not correspond to the world. “The essence of the Halakhah, which was received from God, consists in creating an ideal world and cognizing the relationship between that ideal world and our concrete environment.”9Ibid., 19. Some suggestive remarks on this model building characteristic of halakhic thought are contained in Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud, New York, Bantam Books, 1977, 229–240; and in the same author’s “The Imagery Concept in Jewish Thought,” Shefa Quarterly 1 (1979), 56–62.
This view of halakhist as mathematician yields a strange but characteristic vision. When the halakhist witnesses a dazzling sunrise, he is no poet seized by its beauty or uniqueness. He relates it to his ideal system; here is an event which triggers off certain obligations with regard to prayer, tefillin and so on. He encounters a mountain and asks: is this a private domain within the laws of Shabbat? He sees a spring of water and it becomes for him a mikveh-equivalent, satisfying the requirements of a place for immersion and purification.10Halakhic Man, 20–21.
Like the mathematician, theory pleases him more than practice: “the pillar of halakhic thought is not the practical ruling but the determination of the theoretical Halakhah. Therefore, many of the greatest halakhic men avoided and still avoid serving in rabbinical posts.”11Ibid., 24. He would like reality to correspond to his system, but “as long as this desire cannot be implemented, halakhic man does not despair.… He goes his own way.”12Ibid., 29.
In many ways, therefore, he is quite unlike the conventional type of the religious man. He does not long for transcendence and escape from the narrow imperfections of the real world.13Ibid., 30. Nor does he have a morbid fascination with death and the afterlife. The entire halakhic system cherishes life in the here-and-now, and sees death as defiling. The afterlife is a place of religious reward, but “the receiving of a reward is not a religious act; therefore halakhic man prefers the real world to a transcendent existence because here, in this world, man is given the opportunity to create, act, accomplish.”14Ibid., 32.
Torah is law for the human situation: that is why it was given to man, not the ministering angels. When the sages of the Talmud pictured God and the heavenly hosts, they saw them assembled as a yeshivah disputing points of concrete halakhah: laws concerning leprosy, the red heifer, and so on. R. Soloveitchik puts this epigrammatically. In conventional religion “the lower yearns for the higher.” In halakhah, “the higher longs and pines for the lower.”15Ibid., 39.
Certainly halakhic man has a place for eternity. Does he not say, in his blessing over the Torah, “And everlasting life has He planted in our midst”? It is simply that he reverses the usual direction of such feelings. Eternity is not a refuge into which he wants to escape. It is something he wants to incorporate into the world: he “longs to bring transcendence down into this valley of the shadow of death…and transform it into a land of the living.”16Ibid., 40.
This endows Judaism with a special kind of spirituality. First, there is no escape from the problem of suffering. Halakhic man cannot say, beholding injustice, that there is a world beyond this in which all wrongs are righted. “There is nothing so physically and spiritually destructive as diverting one’s attention from this world.”17Ibid., 41. Hence the powerful definition given by R. Chayyim of Brisk of the role of the rabbi: “To redress the grievances of those who are abandoned and alone, to protect the dignity of the poor, and to save the oppressed from the hands of his oppressor.”18Ibid., 91.
Second, halakhah sees holiness always as embodied in the concrete, the finite. When Solomon completed the Temple he stood aghast at the impossibility of the project he had been commanded: “Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house that I have built?” (I Kings 8:27). In Jewish mysticism this unanswered question becomes a cosmic paradox. But halakhic man does not sense the problem. He has an obsession with the precisely quantifiable. Each holy act and object has its exact dimensions. It is here – in the measurable world of the senses – that the religious life becomes objective. “The fundamental tendency of the Halakhah is to translate the qualitative features of religious subjectivity…into firm and established quantities.”19Ibid., 57.
The thrust of Halakhah is against the private and the subjective. Its practitioners do not experience the mystic dread or love of self-abnegation when standing before God; nor do they fear death.
R. Soloveitchik relates of his grandfather, R. Chayyim, that when fear of death seized him he would immerse himself in study of the laws of corpse defilement, and became calm. “The act of objectification triumphs over the subjective terror.20Ibid., 73.
At this stage the anecdotes quoted with admiration may strike the casual reader as unearthly, even callous. Take, for instance, the case of R. Elijah Pruzna whose daughter was on the brink of death. The rabbi, dressed in tallit and tefillin, was engaged in prayer. He came to his daughter’s room, asked the doctor how long she had to live, returned to remove his Rashi’s tefillin and put on those of Rabbenu Tam, so that he could complete the command before being present at her death.21Ibid., 77.
An episode like this is a crux for our understanding of the halakhic personality. Only in a culture which utterly cherished both life and children could it be other than heartless. But because we know that the rabbi was at a juncture of distress no less than Job’s, we stand in awe at the power of a religion which sets him outside of himself and his grief. “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). The wisdom of Kohelet here becomes a total emotional discipline.
Self-Creation
It would be wrong, though, to conclude that the halakhic system aims at effacing personality by a regimen of controlled emotions. Indeed the latter half of Halakhic Man is devoted to showing how far individual creativity is encouraged. This looks like a contradiction; but the picture R. Soloveitchik draws can be summed up this way. Halakhic individuality belongs to the mind, not to the heart. We are unique not in what we feel but in what we think. The halakhic hero is not a man of emotion, but a man of intellect.
The Talmud, in a series of dramatic vignettes, describes how the Almighty willingly yielded His authority to the sages when it came to interpreting Jewish law. “Even the Holy One, blessed be He, has, as it were, handed over His imprimatur, His official seal in Torah matters, to man; it is as if the Creator of the world Himself abides by man’s decision and instruction.”22Ibid., 80.
This endows the halakhist with extraordinary dignity under the eye of heaven. As interpreter of the tradition, he shapes the rules to which even the Almighty conforms. R. Soloveitchik cites with approval the remarkable dictum of R. Chayyim of Volozhin. In Ethics of the Fathers, R. Judah ha-Nasi had said, “Know that which is higher than you (mimkha).”23M. Avot 2:1. R. Chayyim read this as: “Know that what is higher proceeds from you.”24R. Chayyim of Volozhin, Nefesh Ha-Ha-Hayyim, 1:4, note. Man, says R. Soloveitchik, “constructs the worlds which are above him.”25Halakhic Man, 82. He is, with God, co-creator of the ideal world which is Halakhah.
Halakhic man is neither modest nor humble. His most essential character is strength of mind.26Ibid., 79. He is not unemotional, but his feelings are dictated by his thoughts. This is the meaning of that strange passage in Avot which says, “He who walks by the way and studies and breaks off his study and says, ‘How beautiful is this tree,’ is reckoned by Scripture to have committed a mortal sin.”27M. Avot 3:8. This does not mean that we should be indifferent to the beauties of nature, but it means that “cognition should precede rapture.”28Halakhic Man, 85. Accordingly the man of Halakhah loves truth above all things. He cannot be a poet: nor can he be a politician. Truth does not yield to public pressure or expediency. His words may offend, but halakhic man is unmoved.
How then does this individuality arise? For this is no mere rhetoric. It is here that Halakhah takes its stand at the point most opposed to conventional religion. It refuses to value the merging of the individual with the universal. “The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself.”29Ibid., 109. It happens in three stages.
The first is represented by the idea of teshuvah. This should not be confused with repentance. Repentance means atonement, regret, seeking to put things right with the Almighty by mourning the past. Not so teshuvah, which has to do with the active reconstruction of personality. In teshuvah the individual creates for himself a new identity, forges a new future; and in so doing rewrites his own past. Teshuvah is essentially creative. Through it we create ourselves.30Ibid., 110–117.
The second stage belongs to the idea, as set out by Maimonides, of Divine Providence and human choice.31Guide for the Perplexed, III, 17. We belong, all of us, to the species “man.” If we were passive, responding only to our drives and biological instincts, we would be no more than members of a species. We would live and die having experienced pleasure and pain, but having contributed nothing that was uniquely our own. But Judaism confronts us at every moment with a choice: to be active, creative, and thus to be an individual. To the degree that we exercise this choice, we experience Divine Providence as a personal encounter. We create; therefore we meet the Creator.32Halakhic Man, 123–128.
The third and highest stage is that of the prophet. Again R. Soloveitchik follows Maimonides,33M.T. Hilkhot Yesodei Ha-Torah ch. 7; Guide, II, 32. this time in regarding prophecy as a permanent religious possibility and not just a passing moment in the history of Israel. The prophet has so remade his personality, through teshuvah and the constant exercise of choice, that he has made the complete transition from man, the member of a biological species to man, the partner and voice of God.34Halakhic Man, 128-131.
Ideal Teacher
Such, then, is Halakhic man. An intellectual aristocrat who carries a world within his head, a world of which he is co-author with the Almighty. Study is his primary religious act: study understood as a dialectic between the received tradition and individual creativity; study magnified to epic proportions as the crucible in which a new selfhood is forged; study seen as a unique, almost mystical, encounter. God is met through the mind.
R. Soloveitchik has little to say about God and much about man. But his vision of God is recognisably that of the talmudic sages, who saw Him as the Ideal Teacher. He provides his students, the children of Israel, with Torah as the constitution of an ideal world. He listens to their arguments, their discoveries, with acquiescence and delight. He longs to speak with them as intellectual equals. Above all: He leaves them work to do, whether it be in perfecting the universe or adding a new interpretation to a text. Divine grandeur belongs supremely to Divine self-restraint – “Wherever you find God’s greatness there you find His humility.”35Megillah 31a. It is the self-restraint of the teacher who wishes his disciples to grow.
R. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man is an astonishing tour-de-force. Readers will be spell-bound by the flow of erudite reference. In its pages and footnotes they will meet Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Niebuhr, Kant and Hegel, rubbing shoulders with Rashi and Tosafot, Maimonides and Nachmanides, the Gaon of Vilna and the Maggid of Mezeritch. One wonders whether such company has ever before been assembled in a single mind.
As well as being a complex and subtle work it is also a simple one: for it is in essence a homage to his grandfather, R. Chayyim of Brisk, and to the kind of personality he represented. And despite the range of philosophical influence that lies behind it, the key figures in this universe are not Aristotle and Kant, nor yet Maimonides, but two eighteenth-century theoreticians of the halakhah, R. Chayyim of Volozhin (1749–1821) and R. Shneour Zalman of Liadi (1745–1813). Though they stood on opposite sides of the great Mitnaged – Chassid divide, they shared a powerful sense of the mystical quality of talmudic study through which the mind of man encompassed and was encompassed by the Divine will.36See R. Chayyim of Volozhin, Nefesh ha-Hayyim, and R. Shneur Zalman of Liady, Likkutei Amarim (Tanya), especially part 1, ch. 5. For an introduction to the work of R. Chayyim, see Norman Lamm, Scholarship and Piety, in Faith and Doubt, Ktav 1971, 212–246.
Nor was this sentiment new in the eighteenth century. A midrash reports that “Ben Azzai was sitting expounding Torah and fire blazed around him.… He explained: I thread words of Torah onto the Prophets and words of the Prophets onto the Hagiographa, and the words of Torah are as joyful as when they were given at Sinai when they were given in fire.”37Leviticus Rabbah 16:4. “Oh how I love Thy law,” says the Psalmist, “It is my meditation all the day.”38Psalms 119:97. Torah as the object of study, devotion, rhapsody is as old as Torah itself. What then is modern about Halakhic Man? What made a generation feel that R. Soloveitchik had broken the philosophical silence and spoken to his age?
The Divided Self
For there is no mistaking the fact. Despite its classical lineage, Halakhic Man is a distinctively modern work, in three ways a document of its time.
First its religious hero, the archetypal man of halakhah, is a personality riven by conflict. This is, in fact, his singular glory, a cause for celebration: “Out of the contradictions and antimonies there emerges a radiant, holy personality whose soul has been purified in the furnace of struggle and opposition and redeemed in the fires of the torments of spiritual disharmony.”39Halakhic Man, 4.
This theme, a relatively minor one in Halakhic Man, was to become a leitmotif of the Rav. The conflicts are many: between the cognitive and religious sensibilities, between man as member of a species and man of God, between Majestic Man who creates and takes responsibility for the world, and Covenantal Man who is receptive, reflective and searches for communion.40See The Lonely Man of Faith, op. cit. The man of faith is not at peace – not with himself, not with the world. In community he finds loneliness; in intimacy, distance; in speech, silence.
In part we recognise this thinking-in-oppositions as a heritage of the Brisk method of talmudic analysis, translated here into a psychological, existential plane. But it also takes its place in a wider dislocation of the religious personality since the eighteenth century. Not for nothing did Arthur Green call his study of the Chassidic Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, Tormented Master, or Elie Weisel entitle one of his volumes, Four Hasidic Masters and their Struggle against Melancholy. A.J. Heschel’s last book was a study of the Rebbe of Kotzk and his face-to-face encounter with despair.41Arthur Green, Tormented Master, A Life of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, Schocken, New York, 1981; Elie Wiesel, Four Hassidic Masters and their Struggle against Melancholy, Notre Dame Press, 1978; A. J. Heschel, A Passion for Truth, Secker and Warburg, London, 1974. These are the modern heroes of Judaism, men who stood at the edge of the abyss, conscious that beneath the thin surface of our interpreted world is the tohu va vohu of disorder and destruction.42See Heschel, op. cit., 228–229. “Chaos and void lie in wait in the dark alleyways of reality and seek to undermine the absolute being, to profane the lustrous image of creation.”43Halakhic Man, 103. Perhaps R. Soloveitchik’s greatest contribution is to have brought this dark emotional world into the halakhic arena, making him the first non-Chassidic Rebbe. A sense of loneliness permeates his work, whether or not he is talking explicitly about it. There is little in Halakhic Man, where there could have been so much, about the delights of intellectual companionship, chevrutah. This is in strange contrast to talmudic Judaism itself, which has nothing positive to say about isolation. “There is either companionship or death,” said the rabbis;44Ta’anit 23a; see Baba Batra 16b. “A sword is upon those who sit alone and study Torah.”45Berakhot 63b; Ta’anit 7a; Makkot 10a.
Modern halakhic man has friends: but they are people of the mind. He “embraces the entire company of the sages of the masorah.… He walks alongside Maimonides, listens to R. Akiva, senses the presence of Abaye and Rava.”46Halakhic Man, 120. But his peers are of the past; the present offers him little. The people around him are impatient, secular. “When the hour of estrangement strikes, the ordeal of the man of faith begins and he starts his withdrawal from society.… He returns, like Moses of old, to his solitary hiding and to the abode of loneliness.”47The Lonely Man of Faith, 65.
Nothing in the classic literature of rabbinic Judaism dwells in this land of anguish, conflict, isolation, divided self.48Not only in the talmudic literature. Compare the essentially harmonious conception of the ideal personality in Saadia Gaon, Emunot ve Deot Book 10; Judah ha-Levi, Kuzari, II, 50; M.T. Hilkhot Deot ch. 1. Being caught in the grip of powerful and conflicting emotions is a barrier to prophecy: Maimonides, Shemoneh Perakim, ch. 7. When R. Soloveitchik seeks a precedent he finds it in the prophets, or the voice of the lover in the Song of Songs, or in the image of Adam and Eve alone in the universe. His modernity consists in this, that his hero – so often reminiscent of Kierkegaard – lives in a world in which faith is uncommon: an act of choice made against the stream of his culture.49See, for further analysis, J. Sacks, “Alienation and Faith,” op. cit.
Argument and Autobiography
Not only in content do we sense this alienation, but in form as well. R. Soloveitchik’s writings are normally cast in the stylistic and intellectual medium of phenomenology and typology. Here is a kind of personality, he seems to say; let me show you from the inside what his mental world is like. It is a kind of rarified, idealised autobiography – a common enough genre outside of Judaism, but unusual within it. And here lies his second mark of modernity.
Eugene Borowitz has pointed out the shortcoming of this philosophical method: “What remains missing in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s thinking is the way by which searching, critical moderns might come to such faith.” Halakhic Man shows us the inner workings of the rabbinic personality. But why should we want to become such a personality, if not because we were independently persuaded of the truth of its axioms – revelation, covenant, the historicity of Sinai? “Most Jews do not begin with his faith but might be open to argument seeking to demonstrate its reasonableness.”50E. Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, 241. Yet argument of this conventional kind is precisely what is absent from the writings of the Rav. Nowhere does he adopt the stance of “Let me convince you of the truth of my faith.” Instead he invites us to enter his world, leaving it to us to decide – by conviction or commitment – whether we will finally care to share it with him.
Occasionally he touches upon these questions, only to dismiss them out of hand. He tells us that “I have never been seriously troubled by the problem of the biblical doctrine of creation vis-à-vis the scientific story of evolution…I have not been perplexed by the impossibility of fitting the mystery of revelation into the framework of historical empiricism…I have not even been troubled by the theories of biblical criticism which contradict the very foundations upon which the sanctity and integrity of the Scriptures rest.”51The Lonely Man of Faith, 8–9. It is not that he has easy answers, but that he knows that there are no answers, nor could there be. “Covenantal commitment eludes cognitive analysis by the logos and hence does not lend itself completely to the act of cultural translation. There are simply no cognitive categories in which the total commitment of the man of faith could be spelled out.”52Ibid., 60.
This is the post-Kantian heritage, the end of an optimistic friendship between revelation and reason of which many of the medieval Jewish philosophers dreamed. We would be wrong to overdramatise the breakdown. On the one hand Maimonides himself was acutely conscious of the limits of human language in speaking about God; on the other R. Soloveitchik remains committed to the role of intellect in the religious life. What is modern is the feeling which keeps breaking through of the impossibility of communication at the level of faith. We cannot speak to the secularist; we cannot have meaningful dialogue with other faith communities;53Confrontation, op. cit., pp. 18–21. R. Soloveitchik does not in fact rule out the possibility of dialogue but insists that it should be a confrontation which establishes “our otherness as a metaphysical covenantal community.” as soon as we approach the “faith gesture,” conversation falters and lapses into misunderstanding and silence.
The most the modern halakhic Jew can say is: Here I stand. This is my vision. Perhaps that is all he could ever say. But never before were we so conscious of the limits of argument, the privacy of faith.54Privacy as distinct from subjectivity. The key concepts of the halakhic system – revelation, tradition, law, intellect, and mitzvah as objectification-through-action – all militate against religious subjectivity. It is just that the public language of a secular culture is unsympathetic to the aspirations of the man of faith and sees them as “absurd,” “insane,” “mad,” “unpardonable” and “foolish (Lonely Man of Faith, 61–62).
Tragedy and Kaddish
The third mark of the modernity of Halakhic Man is to be found in what it does not say. The kabbalists spoke of a time when the empty spaces between the letters of the Torah would be as lucid as the letters themselves.55A statement attributed to R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. See Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Schocken, New York, 1972, 81–82. R. Soloveitchik’s empty spaces are eloquent.
Ish ha-Halakhah originally appeared in 1944. The date reverberates with tragedy. The world of the Lithuanian yeshivot, to which it is a tribute, was at that moment being reduced to ashes. In retrospect the work is a hesped, a funeral oration; or more precisely a mourner’s kaddish to a shattered universe.
R. Soloveitchik has defined the saying of kaddish as “courageous and heroic mourning” in which grief is transcended and we affirm that “However terrifying the grave is, however nonsensical and absurd everything appears…we declare and profess publicly and solemnly that we are not giving up, that we are not surrendering, that we will carry on the work of our ancestors as if nothing had happened, that we will not be satisfied with less than the full realization of the ultimate goal.”56“A Eulogy for the Talner Rebbe” in Shiurei Ha Rav, op. cit., 20.
Kaddish is a response to death but it does not mention death. Halakhic Man does not mention the events that were occurring as it was being written. But it reads as a response to them, even in – precisely in – its silence.
How so? It is as if, by constructing in the mind the ideal world of the halakhic system, a world peopled with architects – Hillel, Akiva, Rav, Shmuel, Rashi, Maimonides, R. Chayyim of Brisk – who never die, the real world and death itself can be defied. Halakhah in a moment of crisis takes on the role of therapy and consolation. Here are letters of fire that cannot be destroyed by fire. Here is a Torah untouched by Holocaust.
One contemporary scholar has suggested that the formation of the Mishnah in the wake of the destruction of the Temple follows the same psychological course. There were two responses – apocalypse and Gnosticism – which took that historical event to be of cosmic significance. But there was a third, chosen by the rabbis of the Mishnah, which responded to history by retreating from history. The rabbis’ “deepest yearning is not for historical change but for ahistorical stasis.”57Jacob Neusner, Judaism: the Evidence of the Mishnah, University of Chicago Press, 1981, 27. Jerusalem lay in ruins, but survives in the Mishnah as “a city of the mind, a particular place, framed in all due locative dimensions and requisite spatial descriptions, which, in fact, existed nowhere but in the mind, which by nature is utopian.”58Ibid., 47. The resemblance between this and R. Soloveitchik’s characterisation of the halakhic universe is uncanny.
Certainly there were to be both apocalyptic and gnostic responses to the Holocaust amongst the Jewish thinkers of the modern age. In their company R. Soloveitchik emerges as a contemporary Yochanan ben Zakkai, not dwelling on tragedy but concentrating on the quiet task of reconstruction, of reaffirming that which endures, of raising up disciples. In the seclusion of Yavneh not the public drama of Massada, in the “four cubits of the halakhah” not the arena of history, lay the strength to survive.
Philosophy or Midrash?
Where, finally, does Halakhic Man belong in the context of R. Soloveitchik’s work as a whole, in what is now the rich mosaic of his available writings? In that corpus it is the most austerely philosophical of his statements, and in time it may come to be seen as the least influential of his contributions to the development of Orthodoxy. Two other directions already seem more decisive: first his restoration of the crown of pure halakhic study to its original glory, and second his recovery of an authentic voice of twentieth-century midrash, accessible to us in his published lectures – astonishing in their beauty, scope and dramatic intensity.
It may be that, after all, philosophising does not bring out the best in the Jew. To adopt the philosopher’s stance, to stand back and reflect on one’s place in nature and history, cannot be comfortable to a member of Am Yisrael. That place, for us, is never secure. The unknowability of God and the threat of history make any philosophy of Judaism veer between the tragic and the ironic. Halakhic Man is no exception.
Our happiest moments come not in abstraction from life but in application to texts. R. Soloveitchik’s midrash is perceptibly more resilient, less etched with despair, than his purer moments of philosophising. It is as if the parts of Judaism were more than the whole; as if the individual verses were more than the book; as if specific moments came to more than the religious life as a whole. In the detail of Judaism is joy; in the totality is pain.
But that is not to deny the enduring value of the book. A sober analyst of the history of Jewish philosophy may conclude that its practitioners solved no ultimate problems; rather, they allowed certain personality types and mental frameworks to take their place in Judaism. The rationalist feels at home because of Maimonides; the anti-rationalist, because of Judah ha-Levi. R. Soloveitchik, in his philosophical writings, has answered no questions, but he has done what a great Jewish thinker should. He has given a home to the previously unhoused: to the Jew in the modern world who experiences conflict, loneliness and the sharp unease of faith.