From Phenomenology to Existentialism : The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Volume 2 [1 ed.] 9789004243347, 9789004243330

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From Phenomenology to Existentialism

Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy Edited by

Elliot R. Wolfson (New York University) Christian Wiese (University of Frankfurt) Hartwig Wiedebach (University of Zurich)

VOLUME 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sjjt

From Phenomenology to Existentialism The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Volume 2 By

Dov Schwartz Translated by

Batya Stein

Leiden  • boston 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwartz, Dov.   [Haguto ha-filosofit shel ha-Rav Solovaits’ik. English]   From phenomenology to existentialism : the philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik / by Dov Schwartz ; translated by Batya Stein.    volumes cm. — (Supplements to The journal of Jewish thought and philosophy, 1873–9008 ; volume 19)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-24333-0 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-24334-7 (v. 2 : e-book) 1.  Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov—Teachings.  2.  Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov. Ish ha-halakhah, galui ve-nistar.  3.  Jewish philosophy.  4.  Jewish law—Philosophy. I.  Stein, Batya, translator. II. Title.   BM755.S6144S3813 2013   181’.06—dc23 

2012033610

ISSN  1873-9008 ISBN 978-90-04-24333-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24334-7 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

In memory of Isidore Friedman, z”l Disciple of Rav Soloveitchik, lover of Torah, man of deeds

Contents Preface 

....................................................................................

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Part One

Consciousness Chapter One

Reason and Ιts Limitations  ..................................

1

Chapter Two

The Concept of Revelation in And from There You Shall Seek  .............................................

35

Chapter Three. Consciousness of the Deity (1): Mercy and Justice  . .............................................................

65

Chapter Four

Consciousness of the Deity (2): Tzimtzum  .......

89

Chapter Five

Consciousness of the Deity (3): Cognition  ....... 115

Chapter Six

The Conscious Mechanism of Conjunction (1): Intellect and Matter  ....................................... 151

Chapter Seven The Conscious Mechanism of Conjunction (2): Prophecy and Tradition  ................................ 169 Part two

existence Chapter Eight The Negation of Metaphysics: “Kol Dodi Dofek” and the Zionist Homilies  ....... 193 Chapter Nine

Finitude and Suffering: Out of the Whirlwind  ............................................ 227

viii Chapter Ten

contents Between Subject and Object: Essays on Family Relationships  ........................ 291

Chapter Eleven Dialogue and Faith: The Lonely Man of Faith  .................................... 319 Epilogue  . .............................................................................................. Bibliography  ........................................................................................ Subject Index  ....................................................................................... Names Index  .......................................................................................

365 377 391 413

PREFACE The unique standing that Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s teachings enjoy in Jewish thought in general and in twentieth-century thought in particular is a result of several factors: (1) Method and Style. In some of his writings, R. Soloveitchik resorted to methods of discourse uncommon in Orthodox Jewish thought. And From There You Shall Seek is a phenomenological discussion of Jewish religion. The Lonely Man of Faith is an autobiographicalexistentialist text. Halakhic Man is mostly devoted to the categories of epistemic idealism developed by Torah scholars and, in this case, as in the previous one, he resorts to character description (typological writing). All three forms of writing reflect a uniquely innovative direction in modern Jewish thought. (2) Halakhah. In all his discussions, regardless of method or style, R. Soloveitchik takes as his starting point that the uniqueness of Jewish religion lies in Halakhah. Even when R. Soloveitchik is swept into a broad description of the religious experience as resting on emotional, mental, and existential elements, he always stresses that this description follows from Halakhah or fits within it. R. Soloveitchik’s work can be defined as an “Orthodox philosophy of Halakhah.” His philosophy may greatly exceed these parameters, but it clearly rests on this definition. (3) The Rejection of Metaphysics. R. Soloveitchik’s various works share a tendency to depart from the traditional course of Jewish philosophy, which had been interested in supernal worlds and spiritual entities and had made statements about them and about their attitude to history. R. Soloveitchik is indifferent to the study of the spiritual spheres per se, and directs his conceptual energies to entirely different realms. A distinction can be drawn between various periods in his work in this regard, as will be shown below. (4) Dialectics. A prominent characteristic recurring in both the phenomenological and existentialist writings of R. Soloveitchik is the fluctuation between opposite poles. R. Soloveitchik relies on religious phenomenological literature, particularly on the thought of Rudolf Otto, Max Scheler, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr,

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preface to base religious consciousness on opposites. He goes further, however, and creates a unique Jewish consciousness built up as a series of polarities and contradictions. This characterization of consciousness is so essential that R. Soloveitchik emphasizes that the early stages in the course of halakhic man are also marked by contradictions, although he is ultimately released from them.

In the previous volume,1 my focus was mainly on “halakhic man,” a term that R. Soloveitchik uses to portray the Lithuanian Jewish scholar. My claim there was that the approach he develops in this work contradicts those he offers in other contemporary writings—And From There You Shall Seek and The Halakhic Mind. This confrontation, as I showed, fits in with the claim that Halakhic Man, rather than conveying R. Soloveitchik’s figure and his views, is a memorial tribute to R. Hayyim of Brisk and his disciples. In this volume, my discussion centers on R. Soloveitchik’s personal and systematic thought rather than on the description of a figure he does not fully identify with, such as halakhic man. I begin with an analysis of And From There You Shall Seek as an instance of R. Soloveitchik’s “early” philosophical work. I then trace the conceptual changes in the “middle” period of R. Soloveitchik’ thought in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly his lectures on psychology, his homilies on the conjugal relationship, and the essays “Kol Dodi Dofek” and The Lonely Man of Faith. Since The Lonely Man of Faith is the mature expression of R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist thought, the “middle” period will be confined to the years 1955–1965. In this volume too, my starting point is hermeneutical-analytical, concentrating on the analysis of reflective texts attesting to the course of R. Soloveitchik’s ideas. From Halakhic Man to and From There You Shall Seek And From There You Shall Seek describes at length a dialectic scheme of associations between God and human beings from the perspective of religious consciousness. In this work, R. Soloveitchik discusses the general religious experience and the very notion of Halakhah as the

1   Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007).



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dominant factor shaping this experience in Judaism. And From There You Shall Seek was written around 1944, but R. Soloveitchik published it only in 1978. An analysis of this text shows that R. Soloveitchik apparently made some additions over the years, although leaving it essentially unchanged. In any event, no original or updated manuscript is available, allowing us to trace additions or modifications. Although many admit that And From There You Shall Seek is one of the most important, if not the most essential and representative of R. Soloveitchik’s works, over the many years since its publication it has been relegated to the sidelines and has never been the subject of a large-scale study.2 My intention here is to discuss at length both the method and the main ideas in And From There You Shall Seek. Consider the distinctions between Halakhic Man and And From There You Shall Seek: (1) Halakhic Man reflects the figures of R. Soloveitchik’s grandfather, father, and uncle, whereas And From There You Shall Seek represents R. Soloveitchik himself. (2) Halakhic Man represents a one dimensional figure, exclusively concerned with talmudic scholarship and Torah hiddush (innovation) and focused on a cognitive-scientific perspective. And From There You Shall Seek presents a multifaceted figure merging scholarship (as a purely epistemological experience) with a diversified religious experience expressed in several areas and in many mental and conscious characteristics (certainty, mysticism, dependence, and so forth). (3) Halakhic Man is, in covert ways, highly critical of mysticism, whereas And From There You Shall Seek views mystical teachings as a positive and authentic expression of the believer’s experience. (4) Halakhic Man is shaped by the exclusivity of scientific cognition, that is, by the order and rules of the mathematical natural sciences. And From There You Shall Seek is based on a phenomenological

  The only short study devoted to this subject mistakenly claims that it endorses an existentialist approach. See Michael S. Berger, “U-vikasthem Mi-sham: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Response to Martin Buber’s Religious Existentialism,” Modern Judaism 18 (1998): 93–118. None of R. Soloveitchik’s central writings in the 1940s adopts existentialist views. R. Soloveitchik’s writing is clearly phenomenological and only occasionally does he refer to an existentialist source, which does not attest to a change in his overall direction. 2

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preface approach, which relies on the priority of the Lebenswelt over the theoretical world of the sciences.3

Halakhic Man is a study of the Brisk scholarly type. Its terminology draws on Hermann Cohen’s epistemic idealism, although R. Soloveitchik tried to give the impression that his approach was phenomenological. And From There You Shall Seek is a classic study in the phenomenology of religion. The scholarly type of Halakhic Man absolutely negates the existence of a “religion” beyond halakhic cognition, whereas the religious type of And From There You Shall Seek affirms the existence of a transcendent religious consciousness, of which halakhic cognition is only one component. Like Halakhic Man, who is indifferent to existence outside cognition, And From There You Shall Seek is also uninterested in the world outside consciousness. The bracketing of the (sensorial-qualitative) world is common to epistemic idealism and to phenomenology, but religious consciousness is filled by a series of “transcendent” cognitions, beside halakhic thought. The main influence on Halakhic Man, therefore, are the philosophical writings of Hermann Cohen, whereas the main influence on And From There You Shall Seek are phenomenologists of religion. Methodological and Conceptual Inquiry In the mid-1950s, R. Soloveitchik changed the focus of his thought, shifting his concentration from the pure study of religious consciousness to the characteristics of concrete religious existence. In other words, R. Soloveitchik shifted from the phenomenology of religion as the sole motif, a line that had characterized the first stage of his thought, to existentialism. From then on, R. Soloveitchik was to be troubled by such issues as authentic vs. inauthentic religious existence, the possibility of communication and dialogue with the other, the community’s influence on concrete life, and so forth. At times, R. Soloveitchik hints that religious life is not exhausted by any particular method or by one or another trend of thought. What cannot be ignored is that the central axis of R. Soloveitchik’s thought shows, to

  As in the formulation of Paul S. MacDonald, ed. The Existentialist Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 29. 3



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some extent, a displacement from an exclusive focus on phenomenology to the introduction of existentialism. Let me emphasize that I do not adopt philosophical terms such as phenomenology and existentialism in order to restrict R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy to rigorous historical borders or in an attempt to place him in a defined category. Confining him in this fashion would miss the point. The distinction between Husserl’s phenomenology and existentialism is a fine one, as is well known.4 The criteria I adopt are valid for R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy and follow from it. Existentialism, phenomenology, essentialism, and so forth are defined here only in regard to R. Soloveitchik’s thought. Hence, I use these historical theories because they are convenient criteria for focusing and expressing interest. The philosophical approaches are an artificial tool meant to point out the development and the dynamism of R. Soloveitchik’s teachings. My view, as noted, is that R. Soloveitchik fluctuates between his attraction to metaphysical consciousness and his negation of it, between a focus on concrete human distress and an inquiry into the search of the divine-human relationship reaching for infinite love and communion. More precisely, between distress and suffering as stable and permanent existential characteristics and their disappearance at the highest stage of consciousness following communion with God. The purpose of the philosophical terminology, therefore, is merely to point out trends and areas of interest. The concern of phenomenology is an essentialist discussion inclined to metaphysics, whereas existentialism reflects disappointment with this inclination and a turn to suffering as the stable fact of life. My concern now is to clarify the difference between phenomenology and existentialism in R. Soloveitchik’s thought and in its definitions. (1) Reason and Explanation. R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy seeks to outline the structure of religious consciousness. Its approach is essentialist, that is, it isolates essential components within the religious phenomenon. Phenomenology is the tool that R. Soloveitchik uses to expose subjective consciousness, investing his effort into showing its link to concrete activity. Among the components of subjective consciousness we find metaphysical consciousness,

4   On the blurring of borders in Heidegger’s approach, see, for instance, Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995), 160–164.

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that is, the consciousness searching for the abstract study of the divinity and for the causality and reason of divine action. By contrast, the starting point of R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist philosophy is the absolute rejection of the causal, metaphysical element.5 The pole of scientific control over nature, which survives in R. Soloveitchik’s dialectic, does not deal with reasons and causality either. This pole continues to rely on Hermann Cohen’s theory and on the conventionalist approach in the philosophy of science, both of which reject metaphysics. In his exclusively phenomenological period, then, R. Soloveitchik continues his inquiry into the abstract consciousness of God and even presents various models of the divinity, whereas his existentialist discussions negate metaphysics altogether, even as an element of consciousness. More precisely, metaphysics no longer interests him. At times, metaphysics is rejected altogether, and at times it denotes a way of relating to the world, but metaphysical consciousness as such ceases to be an object of discussion as it is in his phenomenological writings. In his phenomenological thinking, R. Soloveitchik emphasizes consciousness striving for the transcendent and speaks at length of the self-transcendence of consciousness; by contrast, in his existentialist philosophy, R. Soloveitchik focuses mainly on the concrete situation of existence. Concern shifts from the transcendent dimension (in consciousness) to the personal concrete one. (2) Distress. R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological philosophy inquires mainly into the human-divine relationship. This relationship has several aspects, such as love and fear, communion and distance. This philosophy views this relationship as an entirely “normal” and even typical phenomenon for the religious person. At first, the dialectic exposed at both the objective and subjective levels involves no problem at all and, moreover, it is ultimately resolved when the duality becomes a unity. By contrast, in existentialist philosophy, the starting point is distress and anguish. Just being human lays us open to pain, suffering, shock, anxiety, finitude,   Some scholars have claimed that Kierkegaard, as an existentialist thinker, expanded the concept of the subjective as endowing meaning by including the moral realm within it (responsibility, attachment, choice, and so forth) See Roger Poole, Towards Deep Subjectivity (London: A. Lane, 1972), 97. R. Soloveitchik’s approach points to a different understanding. He holds that existentialism means changing the concept of subjective by emptying it of any metaphysical references (even if only as an expression of consciousness). 5



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and so forth. From here on, R. Soloveitchik’s writings discuss reactions to the concrete situation. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik accepts the basic assumption of existentialist-religious philosophy, stating “there is no human solution to the human problem.”6 R. Soloveitchik holds that the human situation is insoluble—it has no possibility of entirely overcoming the problem. In his view, however, Halakhah, and only Halakhah, enables human beings to confront distress. Specifically: observing Halakhah enables human beings to live with distress in a conscious, dignified, and purposeful way. (3) Alienation. The signs of distress enable us to draw more precise distinctions between the various periods in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological thought assumes an a priori association between the individual and nature. This association assumes various forms—creation is at times revealed to us and at times eludes us. But when nature becomes unintelligible and meaningless to us, the rift is deep because of the bond that had preceded the mutual dialectical relationship. By contrast, existentialist thought often begins with alienation and loneliness. Alienation is a fundamental state of estrangement, and is not preceded by sympathetic relations of closeness and distance. Alienation is a fact, a given, the starting point. The attempts to overcome alienation and loneliness are different, but do not relieve the primary givenness. (4) The “Other.” This issue follows directly from the previous one. In R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological philosophy, the problem of the other is not considered an area deserving independent discussion. This philosophy does address the place of society in the person’s consciousness, but the “other” and the other’s attitude to the “self ” does not play a significant role in individual consciousness and is not constitutive of it.7 By contrast, R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist philosophy places the problem of the other at its very center. The starting point of his existentialist philosophy   John Macquarrie, Studies in Christian Existentialism: Lectures and Essays (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965), 8. 7  Indeed, Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy often resorts to intersubjectivity and to the options it provides for knowledge of the “other” (see, for instance, Descartes, Fifth Meditation). But R. Soloveitchik hardly ever uses these analyses, and the problem of the other grows for him from the situation of dialogue and the possibilities of communication. 6

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is the impotence in communicating with the other, be it another person or even God. Contact and dialogue are pivotal issues in R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist thought. More exactly: the existentialist dialogue is not the very act of addressing the other. Phenomenological thought also deals with God and humans addressing one another in revelation. Existentialist philosophy, however, assumes that communication is a daunting and almost impossible undertaking. A subject cannot possibly know another since, by definition, they are not amenable to transformation. Intersubjective communication is thus R. Soloveitchik’s concern in his existentialist philosophy, as is the issue of community—the regulation of interexistential relationships between various subjects in one communal framework follows from the problem of the other. (5) Releasing the Dialectic. The givenness of opposites and, as R. Soloveitchik recurrently defined it, the “situation of the absurd,” is both a conscious and an existential characteristic of human existence. In the phenomenological writings, however, we often find a unification of opposites. Both in And From There You Shall Seek and in “Reflections on the Amidah,”8 unification is the highest stage of consciousness. As I attempt to show below, this stage is not free of antitheses either, but the unification feature is certainly essential in the articulation of the highest stage of consciousness. By contrast, in existentialist philosophy, the antithesis almost invariably remains in place. R. Soloveitchik focuses on the exposure of the opposites and on the way of living with them, but no unified stage is to be found. (6) The aim of the philosophy. R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological philosophy is driven by two motives: (a) Curiosity and the quest for knowledge. The philosopher senses both an intellectual and an experiential need to attain knowledge of religious consciousness and to expose its essentialist components. (b) Religious perfection. Knowledge of religious consciousness paves the way to communion by relying on knowledge of its highest stages of development. 8   “Reflections on the Amidah” is the English translation of “Ra‘ayonot al ha-Tefilah” in Ish ha-Halakhah: Galui ve-Nistar (Jerusalem: WZO, 1979). The English version was published as ch. 10 of Worship of the Heart: Essays on Jewish Prayer, ed. Shalom Carmy (Hoboken, NJ: Toras Horav Foundation, 2003), 144.



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By contrast, the aim of R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist philosophy is above all therapeutic: the starting point of R. Soloveitchik, as noted, is his problematic situation and his unique subjective existence and, in other words, the sense that his plight and his problems are not understood. Hence, the articulation of problematic existential situations is a therapeutic attempt to be extricated from loneliness and from the impossibility of communication with the other. We will thereby clarify two phenomena: (a) R. Soloveitchik often resorts to personal writing in his existentialist philosophy. (b) Almost invariably, this philosophy takes suffering as a given starting point. The writer suffers. Halakhah, as noted, is the axis of discussion and the linchpin of R. Soloveitchik’s thought. The purpose and the role of Halakhah are determined according to the philosophical approach. In the phenomenological trend, Halakhah records and regulates the subjective inclinations of consciousness, whereas in the existentialist trend, Halakhah confers meaning on existential situations (suffering, communication with the other, and so forth). Dialectics and Method [?] It merits further emphasis that the terminology and the style of R. Soloveitchik changed in the mid-1950s in the sense that they expanded. R. Soloveitchik, then, continues to resort to the terminology of epistemic idealism and to the phenomenology of religion at the background of his discussion, and to argue that he abandoned the phenomenological method altogether would be mistaken. Indeed, the opposite is true: R. Soloveitchik went on developing his phenomenological philosophy and inquiring into the structure of religious consciousness (including the metaphysical bent) as if attracted to it against his will. The central concern of his teachings, however, crystallized around the problems raised by existentialist-religious philosophy. Specifically: the image of R. Soloveitchik as a “Jewish existentialist,” as many define him, emerged only in the mid-1950s. The change is prominently evident in the homily “Kol Dodi Dofek” and in various essays on psychology, marriage, and family life that were published

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after R. Soloveitchik’s death and assumed systematic form in The Lonely Man of Faith. In his references to the Holocaust and to the establishment of the State of Israel in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” he already resorts mainly to the terminological tools of existentialist philosophy. Furthermore, the change in R. Soloveitchik’s teachings is above all methodological. Its course proceeds from the study of religious consciousness (phenomenology) to an attempt to contend with concrete existence (existentialism) while continuing his examination of the structure of religious consciousness or, more precisely, to fluctuate between the two. Of him too, it may be said “Not only had one to begin from what was present to consciousness but from what was present to man [in reality or concreteness].”9 R. Soloveitchik evades making a final choice and attempts to shift back and forth from the study of consciousness to the exposure of the foundations of existence. My starting assumption here is that these shifts in R. Soloveitchik’s thought develop in the mid-1950s. A decade previously, phenomenology had definitely been the dominant approach in his writings. A double dialectic unfolds before the reader: (1) Fluctuation between a sweeping negation of metaphysics and its adoption as an authentic expression of essentialist consciousness; (2) Fluctuation between the study of religious consciousness and the awareness of depth structures in concrete existence. Once again, therefore, absurd and dialectics play a constitutive role in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. The discussion so far shows that I am not looking for a clear-cut and unequivocal method in R. Soloveitchik’s writings. Unquestionably, various trends and constitutive principles are at play. For instance, in And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik holds that the fluctuation is amenable to settlement and unification, whereas in most of his writings of the 1955–1965 decade, he rejects a unified reconciliation of this kind. The absurd is also a constitutive principle during various periods of R. Soloveitchik’s thought, but to conclude from these trends and principles a distinctive and cohesive method would be irresponsible. The quest for a philosophical method was hardly ever a serious concern for R. Soloveitchik. Generally, his writings are conceptual references to particular issues in specific contexts,10 or therapeutic formulations  9   James F. Sheridan, Sartre: The Radical Conversion (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1969), 64. 10   For instance, Halakhic Man as a response to the destruction of European yeshivot; eulogies such as “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod,” which are context-bound; essays such as



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of existential problems. Moreover, the intentionality principle was also crucial to his thought because of his personality. This principle claims that thought and knowledge do not deal with general and vague assumptions but relate always to the object. R. Soloveitchik’s thought is also invariably context-bound (place, time, actual-existential problems, and so forth). This book is meant to trace directions and changes in R. Soloveitchik’s thought within the context of the cultural climate that inspired him and within which he formulated his philosophy. The conceptual trends are the object of my study. For this reason too, I have refrained from general statements on R. Soloveitchik’s thought and focused on a detailed analysis of books, essays, and specific articles. Every chapter or series of chapters in the current book is devoted to the analysis of a specific work rather than to specific manifestations of general ideas. In this sense, this volume continues the previous one, which was devoted to an analysis of Halakhic Man in light of R. Soloveitchik’s earlier writings, and points to trends that concerned R. Soloveitchik from And From There You Shall Seek up to The Lonely Man of Faith. Thanks are again due to several colleagues who contributed directly and indirectly to the course of my analysis in this book, among them Prof. Gideon Freudenthal and Prof. Avi Sagi. Batya Stein has long been a true partner to my intellectual endeavor, and her superb translation constitutes an essential contribution to this work. I deeply appreciate the productive cooperation between us.

those in Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Suffering, Mourning and the Human Condition, ed. David Shatz, Joel B. Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler (New York: Toras HaRav Foundation, 2003), discussed in ch. 9 below, which he offered in various mental health settings. On the absence of a systematic theology in R. Soloveitchik’s thought, see Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 159.

Part One

Consciousness

CHAPTER ONE

REASON AND ITS LIMITATIONS And From There You Shall Seek is a comprehensive description of various stages of religious consciousness and of the tensions associated with its development. The present book offers a broad picture of R. Soloveitchik’s views and attitudes in the mid-1940s, an endeavor that requires tracing the course of different ideas in And From There You Shall Seek. Of particular importance is to understand R. Soloveitchik’s methodological starting point, that is, the religious-phenomenological study of consciousness that is my concern in the first seven chapters of this book. My special focus in the current discussion of the first chapters of And From There You Shall Seek will be on the approach to faith. At times, R. Soloveitchik’s view of faith plays a key role in his writings, but at times it does not, as evident from another contemporary text, Halakhic Man. In And From There You Shall Seek, faith is a constitutive element of the discussion from the start. Several aspects in the development of R. Soloveitchik’s view of faith, from And From There You Shall Seek up to The Lonely Man of Faith, are described in Chapter Eleven below. In the present chapter, as noted, I focus on the first three chapters of And From There You Shall Seek. Faith first appears as a constitutive element of consciousness in the third chapter and is defined on the basis of the first two, which trace the web of associations linking human beings and God from a universal perspective. These chapters are not necessarily restricted to the special stance of Judaism on faith, and offer a religious-phenomenological analysis of the human-divine relationship in general. The first chapter of And From There You Shall Seek, a poetic depiction of the fluctuations in the lovers’ union in Song of Songs, deals with the unfulfilled relationship between God and human beings. The second chapter opens up the discussion from the perspective of the human search for God. The third chapter begins by linking the universal discussion to Halakhah and, in this sense, is a kind of transition. At this point, R. Soloveitchik turns to a discussion of faith. Henceforth, he discusses the same set of associations from the perspective of Judaism,

2

chapter one

that is, revelation and Halakhah. The discussion below considers faith from a universal perspective. The Anthropological-Conscious Digression Chapter One of And From There You Shall Seek, as noted, describes the connection between God and human beings. The closest link (the lover’s knock at the beloved’s door) turns into the greatest distance (the beloved does not open and the lover slips away); closeness exposes distance in a pattern that will recur. Through the poetic depiction, the reader first becomes acquainted with dialectical religious consciousness, and the discussion below will dwell on the subtleties and nuances of this description. In Chapter Two, entitled “The Yearning Heart,” R. Soloveitchik points out various realms where human beings seek God. R. Soloveitchik approaches the search for God as an expression of selftranscendence, a key term borrowed from phenomenological-religious literature that is essential to the understanding of his philosophical course. A brief survey of the meanings that have been pinned on this term in the literature indicates that Max Scheler defines “selftranscendence” as the ability of individuals to turn themselves and their surrounding world into an object of knowledge.1 Reinhold Niebuhr endorsed Scheler’s approach and defined the term as the capability of consciousness to stand outside itself and observe its limits, its contents, and its modes of development. In his view, transcendence bears on the ability of the self to determine not only its possibilities but also their meaning and purpose.2 “Consciousness,” he writes, “is a capacity for surveying the world and determining action from a governing center. Self-consciousness represents a further degree of transcendence, in which the self makes itself its own object in such a way that the ego is finally always subject and not object.”3 Niebuhr 1   Max Scheler defines man as man in his capability for self-transcendence. See Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 46–47. R. Soloveitchik quotes Scheler and Reinhold Niebuhr in his mid-1940s writings. See David Barzilai, Homo Dialogicus: Martin Buber’s Contribution to Philosophy (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 105–125. 2   Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 163. 3  Ibid., 13–14. See also ibid., 361.



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emphasizes self-transcendence as going beyond the limitations of time and history toward eternity.4 Paul Tillich links the definition of faith to “ecstatic” capability, which for him means transcending the human rational dimension, but without shattering it and destroying it.5 According to these thinkers, we can transcend our biological, temporal, and rational existence. Abraham Joshua Heschel calls this “the grand premise of religion.”6 The common denominator of all the various meanings of this term is its perception as supra-rational, that is, as transcending the limitations of reason but not as anti-rational, in the sense of contradicting reason. R. Soloveitchik is less interested in the nature of transcendence and more in its (transcendent) direction and in its contribution to the exposure of religious consciousness. Rather than on the definition, then, which was a significant concern to phenomenologists of religion, R. Soloveitchik focuses on its final cause. In his view, the aim is to expose traces of the (transcendent) element beyond consciousness, that is, of the divine presence. This aim is reflected in the confrontation with four separate “realms” (rashuyot) and leads to four kinds of action (7–8):7 (1) Nature and its laws (the “cosmic drama”) and, consequently, the examination of the scientific consciousness that exposes the mathematical-physical order. (2) The paths of the soul and its aptitudes (“the depths of his spiritual existence”—tehomot ha-havaya ha-ruhanit) and, consequently, the exposure of the freedom-commitment dialectic and the discovery of the inner and complex dimensions of the soul and of religious cognition through introspection. (3) The rational-subjective and ideal concept of the Deity (“the system of a priori concepts”) and, consequently, the examination of the intellectual activity that exposes the pre-experiential concepts.

4  Ibid., vol. 2, 74–75. See also Harold B. Kuhn, “The Problem of Human SelfTranscendence in the Dialectical Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 40 (1947): 47–68. 5   See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 57; idem, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 6–7. 6   Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1955), 33. 7   Henceforth, all page references are to And From There You Shall Seek, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav and Toras HoRav Foundation, 2007).

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(4) The conscious experience in realms beyond consciousness (“transcendental ‘experience’”) and, consequently, the examination of the ecstatic, mystical, and spiritual experiences of divine revelation.8 In determining the “realms,” R. Soloveitchik presents separate disciplines and also a process. As shown below, consciousness begins with a scientific approach, then proceeds to the sense of God in the soul and in subjective cognition, and concludes with the evidence of experience. At the unified stage of consciousness, all four realms come together, but at the early stages, the realms are dialectic poles between which we move. Immediately following the description of the various realms, R. Soloveitchik discusses the nature of the “search for God.” On close scrutiny, this discussion emerges as basically negative. R. Soloveitchik seeks to prevent a common mistake that has characterized centuries of Jewish philosophy: There is no hidden corner of the natural or spiritual world which man’s consciousness, pining for its divine beloved, does not peer into and scrutinize. Human consciousness carefully investigates the buds of transcendence that appear every so often in the spiritual desert.9 This search is not the romantic yearning of fugitives from the monotonous secularism of the everyday. Rather, it is rooted in the general cultural consciousness. Flesh-and-blood man longs to escape from the straits of the limited, bounded, and contingent world and go out into the limitless, independent wide-open spaces.10 This search is an act of self-transcendence, which is truly the essence of man’s cultural ascent. The question of whether the Deity’s connection with the world is transcendent or immanent is irrelevant. Man sometimes attempts to find God within reality, and sometimes beyond it. It all depends on the viewpoint of the individual who searches. There are many facets to man’s awareness of God, which is replete11 with the absolute and the eternal,

 8   These experiences are widely reported in mystical literature. R. Soloveitchik included biblical prophetic revelation in religious facticity. These characterizations of consciousness appear in And From There You Shall Seek, 7.  9  In the Hebrew original “be-eretz ziyyah ve-zalmavet” (a land of deserts and pits), according to Jeremiah 2:7. 10  In the Hebrew original, this sentence is patterned on Psalms 118:5: “Out of my distress (min ha-metsar) I called upon the Lord: the Lord answered me with liberation” (merhav yah). 11  In the Hebrew original “assumat,” to denote storing. The use of this term, which appears in the prayer of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, is unusual in



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yet reverberates within a contingent, temporal creature. It listens for the occasional notes of the old-new song that bursts forth from without as well as from within reality, attesting to a wondrous supermundane being that, in the Kabbalists’ phrase, “fills and surrounds all the worlds”12 . . . The mystical masters justly taught that the Deity separates itself from the existent, which is imprinted with the stamp of creation and chained by the constraints of objective cosmic necessity, yet at the same time dwells within it as one “who dwells with them in their impurity” (Lev. 16:16). The Shekhinah imbues both object and subject, yet also transcends them. God created the world, and His primordial will exists within it. Malkhut (Kingship) is the name the Kabbalists gave to the Shekhinah hidden within the lawfulness of nature and spirit, but God dwells beyond the limits of reality in infinite eternity. (8)

This passage articulates the essence of R. Soloveitchik’s view on the mutual relations between man and God—he excludes theology from the discussion and makes self-transcendence a matter of consciousness rather than ontology. A far-ranging controversy has surrounded the question of whether God is outside the cosmic and worldly reality or rather an inner presence in the world. R. Soloveitchik does not even bother to formulate a dialectical or paradoxical view on this question.13 The nature of the divine essence—“transcendent or immanent”—is of no interest to him, or even meaningless. In the first chapter of And From There You Shall Seek (“Overt Halakhah and Covert Love”), based on Song of Songs, R. Soloveitchik describes the lovers’ mutual and unfulfilled pursuit. Here, the motives of man who fails to answer God’s knock are open and clearly formulated: “laziness and fear combine to paralyze her [the beloved’s] will and bind her legs”14 (3). modern Hebrew. It indicates that God’s consciousness includes the (search) for the absolute and the eternal. 12   See, for instance, Zohar (Raya Mehemna), 3 (Pinhas), 225a. The divine presence in nature (“the mystery of nature”) is perceived in phenomenological literature as a constitutive element of religious consciousness. See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 93–94. 13   See, for instance, John McConnachie, The Barthian Theology and the Man of To-day (London: Harper and Brothers, 1933), 224. Cf. Eliezer Goldman, “Overt and Covert in the Teachings of R. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present, ed. Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 230. In line with this trend, Aryei Fishman offers a sociological interpretation of the immanent and transcendent trends in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. In Fishman’s view, these trends shape distinct social types, and he relates to The Lonely Man of Faith. See Aryei Fishman, Judaism and Collective Life: Self and Community in the Religious Kibbutz (London: Routledge, 2002). 14  In the Hebrew original “asru et ragleha ba-rehatim,” after Song of Songs 7:6.

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Human existence, in its weakness, precludes a response to the lover’s knocking, whereas the lover’s dialectical behavior is never explained. R. Soloveitchik does not address the lover’s motives. The lover’s behavior is beyond the aesthetic and substantive realm of the discussion and, if you wish, is not even interesting. “This sort of game” (4) is significant and useful only from the perspective of the beloved and of the daughters of Jerusalem, that is, from the human side. Metaphysics per se, as a concern with the Supreme Entity, with the Cause of Causes, becomes irrelevant. The sole focus of interest is human religious consciousness and its objects, thereby revealing: (1) The phenomenological method in use throughout And From There You Shall Seek. (2) The distinctive anthropological digression: human consciousness is the heart of the discussion. These issues are discussed at length below.15 R. Soloveitchik also painstakingly characterized the metaphysical realm concerning an issue that has occupied kabbalists for many long years: the divine presence. At the end of the passage, he even explicitly presents the widely accepted compromise formula: there is a divine dimension present in the world and there is such a dimension beyond the world (“fills and surrounds all the worlds”). The balance between these two dimensions has concerned many mystics and thinkers. R. Soloveitchik, however, differs from philosophers and kabbalists in essential ways: they discussed ontological and epistemological questions. Thinkers were interested in the divine reality and in the way we perceive its various dimensions.16 By contrast, R. Soloveitchik deals with the search for God as a constitutive element of human existence 15   See below, ch. 4. See also David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2 (1982): 262–263. Sokol deals also with the phenomenological characteristics of And From There You Shall Seek in the context of his theory that every significant work of R. Soloveitchik addresses a different problem. See Moshe Sokol, “Ger ve-Toshav Anokhi”: Modernity and Traditionalism in the Life and Thought of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” Tradition 29, 1 (1994): 32–47. On the anthropological turn in R. Soloveitchik’s thought, see Pinchas Peli, “Introduction,” in On Repentance: The Thought and Oral Discourses of R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1996), 11–13. 16   Some have presented the transcendent as an ontological dimension (“for His part”) and the immanent as a result of human cognition (“for our part”), whereas others have claimed that, “for His part,” God is present in the world, whereas human cognition, “for our part,” apprehends God as separate. This issue has been discussed in the literature at great length. See, for instance, Yosef Ben-Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 87 ff.; Norman Lamm, Torah Lishma: In the Works of R. Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1989), 81 ff.



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in general, and of religious consciousness in particular.17 In his view, the achievement of the mystics’ compromise—whereby the Holy One, blessed be He, fills and surrounds all the worlds, present and hidden— is not necessarily in the realm of content. Rather, its achievement is the final removal of the problem from the philosophical agenda as an ontological and epistemological problem. Henceforth, what is interesting is the human aspect or, more precisely, the conscious-human situation. R. Soloveitchik did have reservations about formulations of radical immanence (pantheism), as evident in his presentation of Plotinus and Spinoza as “but a single step away from atheism” (koferim ba-ikar) (24). And yet, he dismisses longstanding metaphysical discussions of theology. From now on, the concern of the mind is not “God” but “seeking God” (8); at the core is the human creature seeking God in the concrete reality and in the cultural existence, not the rational search per se. R. Soloveitchik thereby adheres to the conceptual approach outlined by Niebuhr and Tillich that influenced the theological discourse in the United States: the starting point of theology is the analysis of the human situation.18 In the coming chapters, we will find that religious consciousness develops various models of the Deity according to its various stages. At times, the Deity assumes immanent form, and at times, it is distinctively transcendent. Henceforth, the object of R. Soloveitchik’s study is no longer God but “God,”19 that is, the God or the divine aspect revealed in the observation of consciousness. The study, then, hinges on the explication of the Deity as a constitutive transcendent component of consciousness.

17  In this sense, he follows such approaches as that of Rudolf Otto, who viewed holiness as an a priori component of human existence. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). See also Avi Sagi, “R. Soloveitchik: Jewish Thought Faces Modernity” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of Rav J. B. Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO, 1997), 464. 18   See, for instance, Alexander J. McKelway, The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich: A Review and Analysis (New York: Dell, 1964), 45. 19   See Steven William Laycock, “God as the Ideal: The All-of-Monads and the AllConsciousness,” in Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Daniel Guerriere (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 250.

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chapter one The Impotence of Reason

Making the search for God a fundamental component of the anthropological model presents human beings as religious by definition. In presenting religion as a defining or essential characteristic of the human situation, R. Soloveitchik follows Friedrich Schleiermacher and phenomenologists of religion such as Rudolf Otto. According to Schleiermacher, dependence on the absolute, which cannot be defined or described, is a vital component of man: “In the relations of man to this world, there are certain openings into the Infinite.”20 Several Schleiermacher scholars, including Tillich, clarify that dependence on the absolute is not just an emotion, but includes an epistemological and conscious dimension as well.21 On this basis, R. Soloveitchik concludes that the search for God is also reflected in distinctively rational human action.22 In R. Soloveitchik view, classic rationalism is represented by neo-Kantianism in general and by radical epistemic idealism in particular (the Marburg school), and he never abandoned this assumption throughout his philosophical pursuit: Science indeed admits that it cannot explain a spatiotemporal phenomenon by a transcendental idea, for it cannot transcend its own limits and escape the circle of categorical assumptions corresponding to critical scientific experience, which is limited to the domain of finite perception and thought. Science does, however, admit to the presence of an irrational element in any world-view, and does not deny the right of others to investigate it. Were one to ask, “What is the irrationality hovering over the pure scientific conception?” the answer would be that it is the realm of the qualitative and sensory. (9)

To explain these matters, we need to clarify R. Soloveitchik’s sources. Kant explains cognition as a combination of two factors: the senses, meaning the impressions of the qualitative domain, and reason, which organizes impressions according to a system of categories and forms

20   That is, to the Deity. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 130. See, for example, Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives and Unbounded Categories (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 118. 21   See, for instance, John Macquarrie, Studies in Christian Existentialism: Lectures and Essays (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965), 31–32. 22   Michael S. Berger, “ ‘U-vikashtem Mi-sham’”: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Response to Martin Buber’s Religious Existentialism,” Modern Judaism 18 (1998), 95.



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of sensibility (space and time). Hermann Cohen and his Marburg disciples sought to dispense with the duality of cognition and established it on one factor only. R. Soloveitchik clarified in his dissertation that, according to Hermann Cohen, reason not only organizes its objects but also creates them. According to reason, there is no “datum”: reason relies on the pure, synthetic, a priori statements that make up experience, that is, the order and rules of the mathematical natural sciences (“the fact(s) of science”).23 The role of epistemology is to locate the principles of pure thought disclosed through the sciences.24 Cohen, then, uses the various sciences (mechanics, optics, and so forth) to show that reason proceeds from theories and their subsequent laws to the creation of elementary scientific objects, to the “origin” (Ursprung). These sciences rest on mathematics, which supplies the technique for creating objects in cognition through infinite size, minimized to infinity (the infinitesimal). The principle of origin enables the minimization of quantity to infinity, that is, extra-epistemological elements can be minimized until they disappear, leaving only the pure quality from which cognition creates the scientific object. Thought creates scientific objects from itself and within itself. Cohen argues that the foundations and the products of cognitive thought (Denken der Erkenntnis) stem from the thought of origin. Only as a creation of origin can thought attain clear and absolute methodical regularity, because if reason does succeed in establishing being—all being—at its point of origin, such being could have no other cause than that assumed by reason. All pure 23   Reinier Munk, The Rationale of Halakhic Man: Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Conception of Jewish Thought (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1996), 21. On the concept of experience in Kant and Cohen, see Nathan Rotenstreich, Experience and its Systematization: Studies in Kant (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965). The term that Cohen adopted is “das Factum der Wissenschaft,” that is, “the fact of science.” According to Cohen, the objects that thought creates are constituted on their theoretical and mathematical scientific expression rather than on the sensorial-external phenomenon. Ernst Cassirer writes: “[According to Cohen], Kant introduced neither a new metaphysics nor a new psychology; what he offered was something quite different—a new theory of experience . . . A theory of experience is what in modern terminology we call a general ‘axiomatic’ of experience. Such a doctrine must be built up on independent logical principles. To discover and establish these principles, first and foremost the principles of mathematics and mathematical physics, was the real aim of Kant.” Ernst Cassirer, “Hermann Cohen (1842–1918),” Social Research 10 (1943), 223. 24   Josef Solowiejczyk, Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1932), 92 (henceforth Das reine Denken). In Cohen’s formulation: “The task of logic is to lead science to awareness of its ways.” Hermann Cohen, System der Philosophie, Bd 1, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, dritte auflage (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer Verlag, 1922), 589.

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cognitions must, in one way or another, be cognitions of origin, and only then are they pure cognitions of independent value.25 In his dissertation, which is devoted entirely to Cohen’s epistemology, R. Soloveitchik reserves a special discussion to the standing of the senses in particular and to the sensorial-qualitative world in general. He poses a question: given that the natural sciences rely on the senses, who can guarantee that the sensorial experience will surrender entirely to the rational-idealistic order? R. Soloveitchik argues that Marburgian idealism did neutralize sensorial experience but is not entirely free from it. The question about the standing of the senses is an “aporia in Cohen’s method.”26 In what way? The issue of real-sensorial experience hinges on the actual adaptation of the senses and of the qualities they absorb to general laws or to order. Some intensive size, some remnant of the senses and of the qualities that does not respond to rational lawfulness (categories, forms of sensibility, and so forth) is invariably present. This intensive size, the sensation (Empfindung),27 guarantees the existence of an external-qualitative world of objects. How else can we distinguish between the representation and external reality?! Perhaps we do not see the objects at all but only remember them?! The senses, then, separate the spirit’s creations from the external-objective world. At the same time, however, they are also a hindrance to reason: the senses are a non-rational remnant, which reason fails to analyze and order. Cohen’s well-known answer on the experience issue is: the senses raise the problem, and reason provides the solution.28 The senses turn into a kind of stimulation of reason requiring, as it were, an explanation and a scientific answer, and reason does indeed provide such an explanation through the autonomous building of science and its objects. We therefore learn that Hermann Cohen’s essential interest was to dispense with sensation, which attests to the existence of an extracognitive qualitative world. According to R. Soloveitchik, Cohen failed

25  Ibid., 36. See Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, translated by John Denton (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 85–86. 26   Das reine Denken, 94. 27   For psychological and physiological interpretations of sensation in Kant’s thought, see, for instance Lorne Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 123. 28   Das reine Denken, 199. See Samuel Hugo Bergman, “The Ursprung Principle in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy” (in Hebrew), in Thinkers and Believers (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1959), 140.



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to do so. In the passage from And From There You Shall Seek cited above, R. Soloveitchik explains this fact as an expression of the “religious” component in man. The “realm of the qualitative and sensory” is “the irrationality hovering over the pure scientific conception” (9). Seeking God, striving for the absolute and the transcendent, precludes the final success of the idealistic epistemological approach that predicates the whole of being on the act of thought. In this critique, R. Soloveitchik’s approach is close to that of Samuel Hugo Bergman. As is also evident from some of his previous writings, R. Soloveitchik was familiar with several of Bergman’s philosophical views and Bergman’s thought had clearly left an impression on him. Bergman writes: The philosopher-idealist looks down contemptuously from the height of his intellectual constructs at the “given” concreteness represented by sensation, but concreteness exacts its revenge: he remains trapped in the net of his intellectual construct and cannot break through to reality. As long as we are within the realm of discursive, inferred knowledge, we are pushed from one point to another, without rest to our thought . . . We cannot penetrate reality through reflection, through proofs. Proof is a tool unable to grasp reality.29

The search for God, then, is expressed in all human ways, including “the pinnacle of the system of pure concepts of the understanding” (7). Let me stress again: R. Soloveitchik does not mean to give marks to Cohen’s neo-Kantian approach, though he does occasionally criticize it. His intention is to examine what is beyond Cohen’s philosophical structure.30 Soloveitchik seeks to trace the element of “seeking God” as it is reflected in the figure of the philosopher searching for the absolute system underlying the sciences. The philosophical-scientific method, then, is a tool for understanding the thinker’s consciousness, not 29   Samuel Hugo Bergman, “Philosophy and Religion” (in Hebrew), in Thinkers and Believers (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1959), 14. In this work, Bergman supports dualism: the source of thought is the mind, whereas the source of concrete reality is faith. See also idem, “The Loneliness of the Subject in Critique of Pure Reason” (in Hebrew), in The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1980), 163–167. See also Meir Munitz, Unity of Opposites: A Comparison between Rabbi A. Kook and Prof. S. H. Bergman (in Hebrew) (M.A. Thesis: Bar-Ilan University, 2002), 30–34. 30  To critical idealist thinkers, this approach was obviously meaningless. The search for the structure beyond Cohen’s self-contained philosophical-scientific approach is also an important element in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig. See Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 50.

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vice-versa. R. Soloveitchik thus launches on his philosophical course with a professional-technical interpretation of Hermann Cohen’s teachings, and then uses his general philosophical knowledge to shape the cognition of halakhic man. Now we understand that the assertiveness pole of religious consciousness in And From There You Shall Seek is also shaped by epistemological idealism. The anthropological digression is manifest in the inability of idealistic philosophy to provide “true” insights not only about reality (sensation), that is, about the traces of the hidden Deity, but also about the nature of scientific theory. According to R. Soloveitchik, science offers no access to extra-cognitive reality either. He then claims: Modern physics, which has given such great prominence to the symbolic character of scientific constructions, knows that it cannot provide satisfactory explanations for one who aspires to penetrate the innerness and essence of being. In the qualitative reality as we experience it, there is no relativity, there is no quantitative reciprocity, nor are there mathematical equations. The world—as perceived by sensuality involving the process of stimulus and feeling, which fills our consciousness, enchants us with its variety of tones and colors, encompasses us completely,31 oppresses us with all the burden of its otherness, and amazes us with its size and its force—remains unexplained by science. (9)

In The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik presents several differences between physics (which represents the mathematical natural sciences) and the humanities.32 One of these differences is the approach adopted by physicists and philosophers of science such as Henri Poincaré, Pierre Dohm, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Arthur Eddington. This approach is associated with the conventionalist school in the philosophy of science, and views physics as a science of pure mathematical constructs and symbols correlated with the datum. According to 31  In the original Hebrew, “koter otanu sehor sehor,” according to TB Shabbat 13a; TB Pesahim 40b; TB Yevamot 46a, and more. 32   This distinction deepened in the wake of the controversy between the epistemological approach (Kuno Fischer, Hermann Lutze, and Hermann Cohen) and the historical-anthropological approach (Wilhelm Dilthey, Adolf von Harnack, and Moritz Lazarus), which enjoyed wide resonance at the end of the nineteenth century. See Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914, trans. Noah Jonathan Jacobs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 182–191. R. Soloveitchik’s training with Marburg school scholars certainly contributed to his awareness of the distinctions between the natural sciences and the humanities, a standard tenet among neo-Kantians. See, for instance, Ted Benton, Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 105.



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this school, scientific theories are empirically balanced so that none is “truer” than the other. “Knowledge of reality entails the construction of some ideal order coordinated with the qualitative cosmic process which retains its anonymity and mystery.”33 Scientists know that there is no one absolute (“true”) access to actual reality and, therefore, they are not interested in “truth” but in the “thriftier” or “more convenient” approach. By contrast, the humanities refrain from duplicating reality by creating parallel ideal constructs. The humanist “is determined to capture the natural sensible reality in its full uniqueness.”34 We now arrive at the same conclusion we had reached concerning Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism, this time from the perspective of the conventionalist philosophy of science: researchers in the mathematical natural sciences “duplicate” reality and deal with quantitative models that parallel the qualitative world. From R. Soloveitchik’s perspective, scientists have not cracked the secret of concrete reality. “But the mind [of scientific man], caught in a metaphysical storm, will not be satisfied by abstract constructions or the matching of sequences35 . . . The cry bursting from the soul longing for infinity breaks through all modern philosophical thought, rebelling against the formal cognition of creative reason as a response to the soul’s greatest question” (11). When scientists renounce the study of the qualitative world, they implicitly recognize an extra-epistemological, qualitative dimension as a realm inaccessible to the scientific method. They thereby point to the conscious component that is constitutive of the search for God. R. Soloveitchik presents here a critical version of the philosophy of science from the perspective of religious phenomenology. In the phenomenological tradition, the essence that is not scientific and is reached through an eidetic process relying on the objects

33   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 32 (henceforth The Halakhic Mind). A concise and representative formulation appears in Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (New York: Dover, 1952), xxvi. See also Francis J. Collingwood, “Duhem’s Interpretation of Aristotle on Mathematics in Science,” in Nature and Scientific Method, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 76. In his dissertation, R. Soloveitchik presents Cohen’s idealistic approach, whereby the world of abstractions and ideal constructs of the mathematical natural sciences is the real-objective world since, as science evolves, so does thought (Das reine Denken, 77). 34   The Halakhic Mind, 35. 35   That is, the sequence of ideal scientific models and “the sequence of concrete phenomena” (11).

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and qualities of the concrete world precedes the scientific-mathematical essence that is acquired through an ideal process.36 R. Soloveitchik thus turns to the eidetic analysis of religious-Jewish consciousness, postulating the shortcomings of scientific thought and the helplessness of the idealist philosophy relying directly upon it. The power of these realms lies in their emphasis on the need to seek the mystery and the drive behind the qualitative world. In general, And From There You Shall Seek endorses the resolute statement of Jacques Maritain: “As the superior science, theology judges philosophy in the same sense that philosophy judges the sciences.”37 From Certainty to Certainty through Reason The development of scientific and philosophical thought contributed, ex post facto, to the emphasis on the anthropological-conscious component in the search for God. The first contribution is negative, the second—positive. Both contributions hinge on the rational proofs of God’s existence in philosophical tradition. R. Soloveitchik formulates the first contribution as follows: Kant’s teaching, despite all the difficulties it has encountered, has not been undetermined. Reason does not photograph the “given”38 but adapts it to its own needs. It sculpts the “given” with the chisel39 of categorical concepts so as to prepare it for scientific understanding. If reason is not accepting or passive; if, on the contrary, it is active, creative and original; if its achievement is not, as realists have believed since the time of Aristotle, to describe the “given” as it is, but to create constructions and ideal symbols—and the fathers of modern physics agree with Kant that this is the case—then, as mentioned above, reason cannot govern an absolute, non-contingent realm, a realm which cannot be symbolized by the free creations of contingent understanding. (14)

36   See, for example, the analysis in Emmanuel Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris, Vrin, 1963), 173–174. 37   Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. E. I. Watkin (London: Sheed and Ward, 1959), 94. 38   This turn of phrase, “photographing the given,” apparently originates in the Hebrew writings of Samuel Hugo Bergman, some of which influenced R. Soloveitchik. 39   See Exodus 32:4 (Rashi ad locum: “A tool used by jewelers, who etch and engrave with it in gold”).



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R. Soloveitchik had already pointed out the first extra-rational element that Kantians and neo-Kantians had been forced to acknowledge, namely, sensation and the qualitative world. He now adds the other element—the absolute. This realm too, which for R. Soloveitchik is extra-epistemological, reflects the shortcomings of science and reason,40 and science thus provides a great service in exposing its limits. The strength of modern philosophy lies precisely in its power to reduce reason to its true size. In R. Soloveitchik’s view, the power of reason is particularly evident in Kant’s refutation of traditional proofs of God’s existence. Bergman and R. Soloveitchik’s outlooks appear to merge in this endeavor.41 Medieval scholastics labored to formulate proofs of God’s existence and ascribed great importance to them. Maimonides, for instance, presented the proofs of God’s existence at the very core of Guide of the Perplexed (II:1).42 The Kantian outlook, however, “dares to deny the logical, objective validity of these proofs, which were based on categorial assumptions, such as that of substance or causality” (11). Modern philosophy thereby deliberately excludes any scientific concern with the presence of God. R. Soloveitchik demands praise for this acknowledgement of the limitations inherent in science and reason. By placing these limitations, “the Deity is not subject to the intellect of His creatures, and the experience of God, infinity, and eternity is not confined to the particular extent of the finite, temporal mind” (14). The question then becomes: if the contribution of reason and science lies in the actual determination of their boundaries, do they have any positive value? In other words, do reason and science help to point out the paths needed for knowledge of God? Here we come to the second contribution of scientific and philosophical thought. We come to know the Deity through the experience of certainty or, in R. Soloveitchik’s terms, through an “immediate experience” of God as “the most certain of all certainties, the truest of truths” (12). Experience is not antithetical to reason. Quite the contrary, it is based on thought in

  See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), 3–4. 41   Bergman, “Philosophy and Religion,” 11. 42   See, for example, Harry Austryn Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–1977), 561–582. R. Soloveitchik describes the types of proofs in And From There You Shall Seek, note 3, 157–158. 40

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general and on proofs of God’s existence in particular.43 The proofs of God’s existence are not perceived as a rigorous discursive move, but as arguments that reveal the realms and the ways wherein man seeks the Deity. The cosmological proof, for example, paves the way for the experience of the divine presence in the cosmos. The proof from the soul directs the person living through the experience to seek the Deity in the recesses of the soul, and so forth. The proofs of God’s existence are “hints” or “indicators” to paths in the search for God (14). In a way, R. Soloveitchik was influenced by the “theology of crisis” circle (Karl Barth, Emile Brunner, and their group), whose members had more or less renounced all rational proofs of God’s existence and presence and placed their trust fully on divine grace and revelation. Some of them, such as Barth, claimed that religion has a “logic” of its own that is not co-extensive with rational logic. Contrary to them, however, R. Soloveitchik does not entirely deny the achievements of reason evident in these proofs. He thereby follows Scheler, who argues that traditional proofs resonate with echoes of dimensions beyond the formal laws of logic, the causality principle, and the facts of experience in an inductive sense. Despite Kant’s refutations, claims Scheler, the proofs attain “their legitimacy and profundity of meaning (tiefen Sinn), insofar as they refer to attributes of God.”44 The importance of science and philosophy, then, is not confined to the actual setting of reason’s limits, but extends to the channeling of the religious experience. Implicitly, his claim is that science also has a restrictive and critical role: religious experience might lead us in directions that are not positive, and science and philosophy are the mechanisms that prevent this decline. R. Soloveitchik ends as follows: God is revealed to man through these very aspirations and yearnings. Why does man know no rest? Why does he seek that which he shall never find? It can only be that God draws man to Him. Man is tired and weary,45 dissatisfied with his life and his achievements; he is confused and lost in the paths of existence and cannot attain what he wants most . . . In man’s yearning and frustration, God is revealed. The

  R. Soloveitchik is highly critical of the religious subjectivity that dissociates from the rational dimension in the long note at the opening of Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 139–143. See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 1. 44   Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper, 1960), 278. 45  In the Hebrew original “aiyef ve-yage‘a,” according to Deuteronomy 25:18. 43



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ontological46 consciousness, which is all yearning and upward striving, becomes identified with the transcendental consciousness. The world is nothing but the glory emanating from the Infinite [En-Sof ]. Eyes thirsty for the richness of being,47 and hungry for the abundance of the creation, see God; the soul, seized by vision and agitated by beauty, travels through existence, following the footsteps of the lover who is hiding in the crannies48 of the symbolic mind.49 (15)

R. Soloveitchik outlines here the three-stages of the consciousness of revelation, and indeed the process of its evolvement: (1) Greatness. The various proofs of God’s existence represent the pinnacle of human knowledge. Both in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, these proofs were considered the summit of rational scholarship. As such, they bring consciousness to a situation of self-affirmation. The “theologian” thought he had “found” the Deity through rational action. (2) Abasement. The collapse of these proofs following the endeavor of critical philosophy since Kant’s days leads to the fall, meaning to a sense of failure and frustration.50 The Deity slips away and disappears, and the theologian remains at a low point.51

46   Obviously, the term ontological does not fit Kant’s transcendental idealism or Cohen’s epistemological idealism. R. Soloveitchik, however, preferred to use this term. 47  In the Hebrew original “ateret ha-havayah” (Jeremiah 33:6), pointing to the myriad diversity of reality. 48  In the Hebrew original, “binkik ha-sel‘a.” See Jeremiah 13:4. 49   Referring to scientific cognition. See below. 50  In note 6, R. Soloveitchik alludes briefly to the cultural climate created by existentialist-secular approaches that are oblivious to the “absolute and the eternal” and remain frustrated by a dead-end dialectic. Given the exclusion of the divine presence from the dialectical structure of the personality and its existence, these oscillations cannot be resolved. Furthermore, this turns into an unintelligible and meaningless plight, and the result is distinctly pessimistic: “Atheists wander along the paths of an absurd existence. They are lost in their absurd, cruel agony and madness” (159). R. Soloveitchik is referring here to Camus (and to some extent to Sartre as well). See, for instance, Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002), 145–157. Given that The Myth of Sisyphus was published in 1942 and translated into English in 1955, this line and even the entire note could be a later addition. 51   Self-affirmation and humility are classic characteristics of the religious experience, as noted by scholars from various fields. See, for example, Greta Hort, Sense and Thought: A Study in Mysticism (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1936), 151–152; R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism—Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 86–88; Erich Neumann,

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(3) Revelation. At this low point, revelation occurs. Channeling the proofs to the experiential realm leads to the divine presence. Revelation gives meaning to the fluctuations experienced by the believer that were described in the two previous chapters.52 God, then, is revealed when human beings despair of the achievements of science and of philosophy as the supreme and exclusive authority. Precisely at the least expected moment, the moment of crisis, abasement, and despondency that follows the failure to find God through the uniquely human quality of reason, God reveals himself. This is R. Soloveitchik’s explanation of prophecy in several places: God is revealed at the depths of distress.53 The “symbolic mind,” the ideal mathematical-physical structures created by science according to the conventionalist tradition in the philosophy of science, no longer meet the needs of the quest for God. Man therefore seeks what is beyond the formal-quantitative symbols, and human consciousness becomes a “transcendental consciousness.” The lover hides in the qualitativeconcrete world, and also beyond cognition (“the absolute”). To sum up: the way to the religious experience can be described as involving four stages: (1)  An initial (naïve, intuitive) certainty of the divine presence54 ↓ (2)  Scientific demonstrations (proofs of God’s existence) ↓ (3)  The collapse of the demonstrations following Kant and Cohen ↓ (4)  An absolute certainty, whose course is determined according to the demonstrations

“Mystical Man,” in The Mystic Vision: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 395–411. 52   The model of revelation as a solution to the conflict between philosophy and theology and as personal redemption is typical of Tillich’s approach, and R. Soloveitchik may also have been influenced by it. See McKelway, The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich, 94–95. 53   See, for example, And From There You Shall Seek, 35. 54   R. Soloveitchik does not relate explicitly to this stage, but the childish-naïve experience may plausibly be assumed to precede the stage of discursive scientific inferences.



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Maimonides As a General Homo Religiosus Maimonides is presented as one who attained experience and certainty based on scientific philosophical knowledge (that is, moved from stage [2] to stage [4]). In the second chapter of And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik does not relate to Maimonides as a Jewish thinker and a halakhic authority, but as a paragon of the classic “homo religiosus.”55 He cites from the first three laws that open the Mishneh Torah and comments on Maimonides’ formulation: “The basic principle of all basic principles and the pillar of all sciences is to know that there is a First Existent . . .” (12): This knowledge is not based on logical inference, but is, rather, immediate: the knowledge of reality as divine reality, the awareness of the creation as something separated from the bosom of the Infinite. Even though Maimonides did not desist from presenting indirect demonstrations of the existence of God, and even though he believed that proofs of this sort exhaust our knowledge of the First Existent, the essence of his view is nevertheless that this knowledge is based on the immediate ontological cognition that there is no reality but God. (158, note 4)

Since R. Soloveitchik is interested in Maimonides as the paradigmatic homo religiosus and not necessarily as a thinker, in his analysis of Maimonides’ spiritual development he discusses first the Guide of the Perplexed and then the Mishneh Torah. Let us consider this statement in detail: in the Guide of the Perplexed (II:1), Maimonides deals at length with a series of scientific proofs (“indirect demonstrations”) of God’s existence, relying on the physics and the cosmology of the Peripatetics (Aristotle’s disciples). By contrast, Maimonides’ rulings at the opening of the Mishneh Torah are a result of direct intuitive cognition. The discursive achievement—the proofs of God’s existence—is relegated to the margins of consciousness after exposing the experience of ontological dependence on God. The intuitive certainty of the divine presence now replaces rational inference, and R. Soloveitchik interprets Maimonides’ words ad locum precisely in these terms: “All existing things, whether celestial, terrestrial, or belonging to an intermediate class, exist only though His true existence.” Reality is

55  To some extent, this is how Maimonides is presented in Aviezer Ravitzky, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge: Between Maimonides and Neo-Kantian Philosophy,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986): 157–188.

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absolutely dependent on God.56 Maimonides’ appearance in a discussion about the course from experience to certainty presents his intuitive approach as emerging after his discursive way. As it were, when the proofs of the existence of God in the Guide of the Perplexed collapsed, they directed Maimonides to the Mishneh Torah. Implicitly, the opening of the halakhic work is presented as an expression of Maimonides’ (intuitive-experiential) grown, mature outlook. The Critique of Neo-Kantianism The long text of note 7 (159–161) returns to the question of the senses and of qualia as an expression of the impotence of science and philosophy. Ostensibly, this is a repetition. Between the lines, however, R. Soloveitchik ties the collapse of the proofs of God’s existence to the inability of neo-Kantian epistemological idealism (in the teachings of Hermann Cohen) and of the conventionalist approach in the philosophy of science to explain the senses, which attest to a qualitative, extra-epistemological domain.57 He writes: It is true that the senses ask and the mind answers, but the answer is not relevant to the question. The senses demand a solution to the riddle of real, vital, flowing qualia,58 while the mind responds with an ideal, quantitative construction that is dumb to reality and closed off to purposefulness. The senses hint at a world full of motion, change and form, swept along in a mighty, many-colored stream, while pure reason creates abstract, formal objects, bereft of vitality and tumult, whose existence is rooted not in their essence and independence, but in their mutual interrelations. Mathematical physics regards the sensible world as an eternal enigma.

56   R. Soloveitchik refers to the apprehension of God as necessarily existent, of which he says: “This theory is one of the most wonderful and profound thoughts that our great teacher put at the center of his world” (159, note 4). See, for instance, Alexander Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 108–127. 57   As noted, these two views appear interchangeably in R. Soloveitchik’s writings. The distinction between them, however, is worth noting: conventionalism rejects the concept of truth in reference to the scientific proposition, whereas Hermann Cohen and the Marburg school ascribe truth to science. The two approaches, however, share the view that scientific representations (“symbols”) do not reflect qualitative-concrete reality. 58  In the Hebrew original, “ekhutiyut kolahat.”



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I will now recapitulate my preceding remarks. Instead of explaining the system of qualia from within its own unique self, science creates a new, ideal symbolic system parallel to it. It flees from qualia that flow from one unknown to another, creating a new world fettered in mutual relations and functional dependencies. Even though science then returns to the qualitative and measures its ideal new theories against the standard of sense perception because the free symbols have to conform to the vital qualitative cues, nevertheless there remains the mystery of the variegated sights and sounds that excite everything and smile at everything. The logos does not consort with [this mystery]. It does not penetrate the shell of the nonrational senses, and does not form a unity of cognition with it. (160)

Hermann Cohen, as noted, tried to make sensation superfluous by presenting reason as a creative activity. R. Soloveitchik clarified in his doctoral dissertation that Cohen had failed in this attempt. Sensation plays a dual role in Cohen’s outlook: (1) Question and Problem. The senses are a “hint” (Hinweis, Anspielung) to the task imposed on reason.59 The senses are a kind of stimulus, a problem and a demand from reason (Denken) to establish its foundations. Contrary to Cohen, Paul Natorp maintains that the problem raised by sensation determines the direction of the reasoning process, whereas Cohen holds that reason operates independently from the senses.60 The role of sensation is to present a problem to reason, which deals with it by creating the scientific objects from it and within it (“objectification”). In R. Soloveitchik’s formulation, “the senses ask and the mind answers.” (2) Consciousness.61 Cohen presents the creative process of reason in two stages. The first is the “naïve” stage, when reason creates the scientific objects according to moves called “judgments.” The second stage is the “critical” stage, where consciousness (Bewußtsein) appears. At the consciousness stage, cognition engages in a

59   Das reine Denken, 95–96. R. Soloveitchik argues there that the distinction between a task and a “hint” of a task is not as clear-cut as Cohen suggests. See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 77–78. 60   Das reine Denken, 50. 61   The term consciousness is adopted here in its denotation in Hermann Cohen’s thesis, that is, as the critical stage of cognition, as opposed to its usual denotation in the phenomenology of religion, that is, as an emotional, spiritual, and intellectual subjective whole.

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chapter one penetrating clarification of whether its ideal creations do indeed fit the concrete, extra-conscious world (“sharp critique”). Cohen determined that, at the critical stage “we find the fact (Tatsache), which contradicts the non-subjective character of thought.”62 At the consciousness stage, reason turns to the facts of the concrete world and examines itself.63 Or, in R. Soloveitchik’s formulation in the above passage: “Science then returns to the qualitative . . . the free symbols have to conform to the vital qualitative cues.”

R. Soloveitchik uses the term “cue” to link the two systems he considers in his parallel discussion in the second chapter of And From There You Shall Seek. In one, proofs of God’s existence “hint”64 at the suitable paths to the experience of certainty (in the phenomenological terminology adopted by R. Soloveitchik). In the other, sensation “hints” at objective scientific lawfulness (in Cohen’s terminology). The following diagram clarifies the dual use of “hint”:

Proofs of the existence of God (objective)

   ↓



Sensation (subjective)    ↓

Hint Hint Experience Ideal world (subjective) of scientific objects (objective)

62   Das reine Denken, 55. The essential problem that R. Soloveitchik raises is that the very making of consciousness the critical agent of reason hinders the unity of cognition. 63  Ibid., 56. R. Soloveitchik emphasizes that consciousness is characterized by two types of relationships: the relationship of consciousness to the “self,” that is, selfconsciousness, and the relationship of consciousness to objects in the outside world (Außenwelt). Pure consciousness, according to Cohen, is consciousness of the second type, which emerges through the correspondence between reason and the concrete, extra-conscious world. 64   “A demonstration now means the experience of the creature yearning for the Creator. There are hints in the world that turn man’s mind toward Heaven. Even Kant admitted this when he defined the three concepts—God, man, and the world—as regulative ideas” (And From There You Shall Seek, 14).



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The link between these two approaches is the model of religious subjectivity based on rational and factual-practical objectivity. A system based on only one element, be it objective or subjective, is bound to fail (as clarified in The Halakhic Mind and in the long note at the opening of Halakhic Man).65 The religious subjective experience must be directed by a rational, objective, and practical element anchored in normative and practical action since, otherwise, it is potentially disastrous. R. Soloveitchik thereby follows a model of conceptual-rational religiosity that is not exhausted by rationalism. Another element is thus present in religion, beyond though not opposed to rationalism. This model of religious consciousness features, for instance, in Otto’s phenomenological-religious approach, and would eventually appear as well in, for example, Robert Olson’s view of existentialist-religious philosophy.66 At the same time, R. Soloveitchik sought to clarify that scientific-idealist thought had failed in its attempt to blur the senses (the “subjective-qualitative” order in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology in the note) and dispense with them. The qualitative domain that becomes known through the senses is the source of the great riddle, and in its diverse and richly varied manifestations (sounds, smells, colors, and so forth) we find traces of the divine presence. Ontological Pluralism R. Soloveitchik claims in The Halakhic Mind that, contrary to the tension that had prevailed between religion and science in the Middle  In R. Soloveitchik’s early writings, the term objective appears in two contexts, one rational and the other practical, referring to a context of action. The first context usually appears in R. Soloveitchik’s early writings. The second context, however, which crystallized in The Halakhic Mind, is found in R. Soloveitchik’s writings from other periods as well. R. Soloveitchik is highly critical of a religiosity lacking an objective dimension: in some of the sources, he attacks non-rational religiosity, and in others—religiosity without observance. The first context is the valid one here. See below, 292–294. 66   On the distinction between a rational and a non-rational Deity and on the preference of a model that is based on (though not exhausted by) rationalism, see ch. 1 in Otto, The Idea of the Holy; Yosef Ben-Shlomo, “The Rational and the Irrational in Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion” (in Hebrew), in The Rational and the Irrational, ed. Marcelo Dascal and Adi Parush (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1975), 78–87. See also Robert G. Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover, 1962), 98. 65

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Ages, the modern homo religiosus is not in competition with the scientific view. The centuries-old confrontation is replaced by epistemological pluralism: for R. Soloveitchik, cognition is not the exclusive purview of scientists. Homo religiosus is a “cognitive type, desiring both to understand and interpret.”67 Homo religiosus, argues R. Soloveitchik, struggles for his right to independent cognition of reality. In And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik makes what appears to be a stronger claim, and argues for ontological pluralism. In his view, there are two approaches to existence (“ontological experience”): (1) as scientific experience, which is relative, limited and contingent, producing an ideal-functional correlative that corresponds to unexplained, alien being; (2) as transcendental experience—experience of the absolute infinite within the temporal, bounded and contingent; encounter with the Creator within the creation as its origin and end. The first type of experience is formulated in symbolic mathematical equations, and the second in continuous yearning and wondrous immediate experience, which burst forth from the depths of human experience and sweep the individual to mysterious faraway realms. There is religious facticity just as there is scientific facticity. There is religious reality just as there is scientific reality. (15–16)

The first approach is identical to a combination of Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism and the conventionalist approach in the philosophy of science, which were discussed at length above. The second reflects the philosophy and phenomenology of religion that extends from Schleiermacher (the sense of “createdness” and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, “encounter with the Creator within the creation”) and up to Otto, Scheler and van der Leeuw (“the numinous moments” such as the sublime and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, “the depths,” “the mystery,” and so forth). These two aspects characterize, respectively, the figures of cognitive man and homo religiosus in Halakhic Man, a work he wrote around 1944–1945, at a time he was beginning to conceptualize And From There You Shall Seek. Whereas cognitive man is not tolerant of the ontological view of homo religiosus,68 the latter’s characteristic feature is ontological pluralism. Homo religiosus 67   The Halakhic Mind, 40. On epistemological pluralism in this work, see Lawrence Kaplan, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Philosophy of Halakhah,” The Jewish Law Annual 7 (1987), 144; Jonathan Sacks, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik’s Early Epistemology: A Review of The Halakhic Mind,” Tradition 23, 3 (1988), 78–81; Munk, The Rationale of Halakhic Man, 53–54. 68   Referring to a neo-Kantian philosopher who endorses epistemological idealism.



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is willing to accept the epistemological-idealist approach, while also acknowledging transcendental existence. R. Soloveitchik’s work shows that the distinction between the two approaches is fundamentally epistemological, so that the sharper formulations by comparison with The Halakhic Mind are only a matter of terminology. “Ontological pluralism” is not a plurality of entities but a plurality of approaches toward the entity, that is, of kinds of cognition. “Ontological experience” is merely ”epistemological experience.” Cognitive man observes reality and his cognition amounts to a system of mathematical-physical symbols, whereas homo religiosus comes to know the same reality through the mystery, that is, through the experience of the transcendent presence. Both the idealist-epistemological and the conventionalist outlooks on the one hand, and the phenomenological approach to religion on the other, relate to “facts” and to “reality” through symbols and essences. The distinction between cognition and religious consciousness, then, is not ontological. Phenomenology is generally more “tolerant” of the concrete reality it brackets, whereas epistemological idealism largely strives to negate it; ontology, however, does not allow an essential distinction between them.69 Homo religiosus is characterized by both “philosophical” and experiential cognition. We find, then, that cognitive man, the philosopher of science, is not ready to recognize extra-cognitive factors. By contrast, homo religiosus, who relies on idealism as a rationalist approach and acknowledges mathematical-physical symbols, recognizes the existence of an element that transcends cognition. This mysterious and sublime element is perceived in his consciousness as another type of being.70 “Ontological” (actually, epistemological) pluralism, then, reflects a process that leads to the experience. The “scientific experience, which is relative, limited and contingent” (15), reflects the first, rational approach. When homo religiosus despairs of the implications of this outlook (which includes Kant and Cohen as well as Poincaré) for religion and for the quest for God, as in the collapse of the proofs of God’s 69   The term ontological, to which R. Soloveitchik repeatedly resorts in regard to the philosophy of Kant and his followers is, as noted, problematic. Kant denied the existence of ontology and this, in Kant’s view, is a genuine Copernican revolution. A well-known hermeneutical controversy regarding Kant hinges on whether the three Critiques are a preface to a positive philosophy or exhaust his theory. Clearly, however, being divorced from cognition is meaningless after Kant. 70   This approach is based on Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation. For an extensive discussion, see Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 198–199.

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existence, he seeks other epistemological paths. This epistemological search leads him to the experience of the transcendent, that is, the divine extra-cognitive factor. “The cultural consciousness peers into an opaque disjunctive realm which is not its own, and chases after the reflection of the God who oversees everything from the crannies71 of relative being; it falls in love with the appearance of the handsome lover and follows Him” (17). This sentence concludes the second chapter of And From There You Shall Seek, “The Yearning Heart,” and the reader learns that the search for the reality beyond represents the summit of the quest for God. The second approach, then, is the transcendent one. Despite R. Soloveitchik’s declaration about the ontological difference, the actual distinction is between a cognition that denies supra-cognitive elements and one that affirms them. Tension and Process The third chapter of And From There You Shall Seek, “The Disappointed Heart,” is devoted to the dimension of failure and humility in the quest for God. In this chapter, Halakhah appears for the first time as an element that locates itself within the general framework of the religious experience, and even controls it and directs it.72 “Judaism,” writes R. Soloveitchik, “knows well the tensions and hesitations involved in the wearying search for God, as well as the joy and ecstasy of the search” (19). The lesson from the analysis so far is, above all, that the search for God is an ongoing, never-ending process. The quest for God becomes an independent value, an end in itself. The association between individuals and their God is one of process, and R. Soloveitchik indicates that this is a process involving tension. The collapse of the proofs of God’s existence and the transition to experience create, as noted, a flow and ebb dynamic. One seeking the Deity oscillates between two systems of polarities:

 In the Hebrew original “mashgiah min ha-harakhim.” See Song of Songs 2:9.   For initial remarks on the problematic status of Halakhah in And From There You Shall Seek, see Kaplan, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Philosophy of Halakhah,” 176–179. 71 72



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(A) Facts and Interpretation Pole (1): A search for the divine presence places man before an “opaque” nature that does not allow reason to penetrate. Pole (2): The individual searching for God offers a vibrant and multifaceted interpretation of the qualitative world. (B) Feelings and Situations Pole (1): Searching for God is a wearying process because the dialectic is never-ending,73 as the images from Song of Songs explain so well. Pole (2): The very search for God is a source of joy and pleasure. The experience and the words of the prophets on the one hand, and the prayer rituals on the other, attest to the tension accompanying the quest for God. The prophets called upon us to uncover “the glory of the Creator’s majesty, which hovers over mute creation”74 (19), as an expression of the first kind of tension. As for the prayer rituals, R. Soloveitchik mentions the plea for divine revelation “on the nights preceding the High Holy Days [selihot]” (20). In the prayer for forgiveness on the days of judgment and mercy, afflicted by suffering and anxiety, the supplicant asks for divine revelation, which is the pinnacle of hopes: A whispered plea bursts forth and rises with the morning star that appears on the eastern horizon: “Present Yourself to us when we seek You, as it is written,” “And from there you shall seek the Lord your God, and you will find Him if only you seek Him with all your heart and all your soul” [Deut. 4:29].75 Master of the universe, behold, we search for

 In the final chapters of And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik attempts to present a structure of consciousness that resolves the contradictions and ends the dialectic. As shown below, however, he clearly holds that, even at the later and unified stages of consciousness, differences persist in latent ways. Several years after the writing of And From There You Shall Seek, Erich Fromm pointed to this dialectic as a psychological element in the love of God. See Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), 72–80. 74  In the Hebrew original, toladah, meaning nature. (Toladah in this denotation appears mainly in the writings of R. Abraham Ibn Ezra. See, for instance, the long exegesis on Exodus 23:25). It is interesting that R. Soloveitchik specifically chose the words of King David as an expression of prophecy: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Psalms 19:2); “O Lord, how manifold are thy works!” (Psalms 104:24). 75   See Shlomo Goldsmith, ed., Selihot (Poland) (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1965), 11. 73

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chapter one and seek You with all our being, we long for You, with every beat of our hearts,76 we run after You. (20)

These poetic words are an expression of the second type of tension. The Status of Halakhah: Dynamism and Assertiveness Henceforth, Halakhah enters the picture, though not yet as the sole factor in the discussion. Its involvement is intended to offer a response to the religious experience in general and, more precisely, to pinpoint the difference between the universal religious experience and the uniqueness of the halakhic religious experience. Halakhah is presented as adapted to, reflecting, and encouraging the conscious tension. R. Soloveitchik writes as follows about the pole of vibrant and dynamic interpretation (first tension) and about the pole of assertiveness and pleasure (second tension): The Halakhah approves of this confrontation between God and man within the world. We are commanded by the Halakhah to utter a benediction over every cosmic phenomenon: over the afterglow of the fiery sunset and the purple of the sunrise trickling along the mountaintops; over the rising moon sprinkling its pale light; over the stars in their courses77 and the comets leaping from clear space. . . . In short, we utter a benediction over everything man encounters that demonstrates the power of creation. What is a benediction—whether birkat ha-nehenin, a blessing over something we imbibe, or birkat re’iyah, a blessing over something we behold—if not praise and thanksgiving to God for the nature of the world, a nature that changes, in the instant that the benediction is uttered, into a supernatural, miraculous universe, if not the redemption of nature from its muteness, deprivation, and solitude; if not the identification of the cosmic dynamics with the primordial will of the Creator, which is hidden and acts from within its hiding place on organic and inorganic matter, on animal, vegetable, and mineral! (20–21)

The feeling of createdness, together with the feeling of the divine presence, make the observation of nature a spiritually uplifting experience. The quest for the dynamic divine presence within existence is encouraged and acknowledged through the benediction.78 Already in   See Jeremiah 4:19.   See Judges 5:20. 78   See also And From There You Shall Seek, 71–72. For the theological meaning of the benediction in R. Soloveitchik’s writings see, for example, Marvin Fox, “The Unity and Structure of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Thought,” Tradition 24, 2 (1989), 54. 76 77



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Halakhic Man, homo religiosus is described as seeking the miraculous dimension of scientific order, contrary to the Brisk scholar (that is, the ideal halakhic man),79 who does not acknowledge this dimension. The cognition of halakhic man, as noted, parallels cognition according to Cohen’s epistemological idealism: halakhic man confronts a system of Torah laws as the philosopher confronts scientific Newtonian order and regularity. Both seek to trace the pure foundations of halakhic and scientific laws, and both create halakhic and scientific objects in cognition—halakhic man relies on “hillukim” and the philosopher on rational judgments. Hence, both the Brisk scholar—halakhic man—and the philosopher, endeavor to dispense with the sensorial-qualitative world. The difference intensifies here: the concrete-qualitative world functions as a stimulus for the scholar, raising the problem that leads to the creation of halakhic-ideal models in his cognition, whereas homo religiosus as described here immerses into the real world. He seeks the divine presence in the examination of the miraculous and concealed dimension of creation, not within ideal halakhic (“objective” in Cohen’s terminology) order but, indeed, within concrete reality itself. Homo religiosus considers that Halakhah directs us to immerse into the concrete world and to seek God’s traces within it. The Status of Halakhah: Opaqueness and Humility As Halakhah encourages and reflects the dynamism and anthropomorphism of creation and the sense of assertiveness, it also records suffering in the process of searching for the elusive Deity and confronting opaque nature. R. Soloveitchik places the harmonious and dialectic views of Halakhah beside one another:80 “The Halakhah knows of the 79   Note that R. Soloveitchik uses the term “Halakhah” in two different denotations. In Halakhic Man, Halakhah refers only to the learning style developed in the Lithuanian yeshivot and particularly in the Brisk dynasty (lomdus). This term reflects the methodological process whereby Torah scholars analyze a range of theoretical halakhic laws (as formulated in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, for example), quantitatively reduce them to infinity (since Halakhah is based on “quantities and measures”) and, from the pure quality that remained, recast them as ideal legal constructs (“hillukim”). By contrast, in And From There You Shall Seek, the term “Halakhah” serves in its common denotation, that is, as the list of concrete commands that constitute Jewish law. I will refer to the former denotation as ideal, and to the latter as concrete. 80   Cf. Gili Zivan, “Religious Experience According to Rav Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of Rav J. B. Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO, 1996), 227.

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Shekhinah revealed, but also of the Shekhinah removed” (22). And yet, R. Soloveitchik argues that a full clarification of the second pole of tensions (B1, B2) requires a new term, faith. Furthermore, faith distinguishes Judaism from other religions: At a time when theologians believed in man’s ability to find God within creation, Judaism was not sure of this. According to the Jewish view, man cannot be redeemed from his pollution and contamination, or find his happiness and purpose, by coming close to God through creation alone. Another sort of approach is necessary—an approach through an act of faith. Yearning for God through [contemplating created] reality does not turn into faith. There is experience; but faith is lacking, and Judaism stresses that man needs faith. The distance that separates man from his Creator is infinite; the road from the temporal to the eternal and from the tangible to the transcendent winds through limitless expanses, and man with his limited mind cannot reach his destination. There is an unrealized hint, an unfulfilled aspiration. (22–23)

This passage requires us to clarify: what is the need for faith, and what is true faith? A suitable answer to these questions requires us to chart R. Soloveitchik’s critique of scientific rationalism in general, and of rational religiosity, which is exclusively based on the authority of reason, in particular. His critique centers on the pretension to apprehend the Deity from within the world, and is built on two stages: 1) A Critique of Negative Theology. R. Soloveitchik’s fundamental assumption is the impossibility of describing God. Reason and human language are incapable of describing God per se, and can only negate the attributes that characterize reality as we know it: “The theologian in this context cannot comprehend the essence of the absolute and eternal except through the use of negative attributes” (23). The only conclusion of rational inquiry is the negation of attributes, since such an inquiry is based on an abstraction. Rational religiosity amounts to such a negation. The common denominator of Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hermann Cohen is a reversal of direction: instead of searching for the Deity in the personal, dynamic, and vibrant reality, they sought God in ideal abstractions. Abstraction leads to a negation of the attributes and, in fact, to a voiding of the concept of God. The rational theory of the attributes, then, does not help us to comprehend God. 2) A Critique of Rationalism. Two different rational outlooks (or “cosmic,” as R. Soloveitchik refers to them) are targeted for criticism: the



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conventionalist approach to the philosophy of science, and positivism. The philosopher of science maintains that the pure mathematical constructs of the scientist sum up the human view about “the secret of creation” (25). The positivist holds that qualia and the observed phenomena explain themselves and do not shape universal and metaphysical laws. Both err in their search for the absolute within the given natural-cosmic reality. In other words: both ignore the transcendent factor, though only its addition will provide a full explanation of cosmic order. “Seeking God only within existence is a daring and risky adventure, which sometimes meets up with threatened failure” (25).81 I now return to the distinction regarding faith that R. Soloveitchik draws between Judaism and other religions (“theologians”) according to his view in the passage cited above. Other religions maintain that we can become aware of the divine presence by apprehending nature and the universe. This approach leads to paradox and to failure. The paradox is rooted in the approach that negates the attributes. Rational religious thought has unequivocally ruled that the Deity is inapprehensible; theologians in other religions argue that the Deity is apprehensible from within nature, but also that it cannot be apprehended at all. The paradox leads to failure and to the illusion that creation attests to the Creator. By contrast, the fundamental and unquestionable assumption of Judaism is the inability to apprehend God. Given that apprehending God is impossible, and given the dubious effectiveness of observing nature and the universe, Judaism drew two conclusions: (1) What is interesting is not reaching the goal—apprehending God— but the process. Judaism deals with the search for God as an endless process, which does not include apprehending the infinite. (2) The impossibility of relying on cosmological observation in the search for God compels reliance on faith. Without faith, the search for God becomes a meaningless activity. Furthermore: scientific observation assumes its meaning in light of faith.

81   R. Soloveitchik assumes that heresy follows from hubris: “Man’s pride and impudence drive him to deify himself as the solution to the mystery” (25).

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R. Soloveitchik argues passionately that, against the pole of nature’s opaqueness and the suffering accompanying this process, Judaism places faith.82 Faith As a Process To recapitulate: faith is perceived as a reaction to “religious” distress, that is, to the wavering between the inability to apprehend God on the one hand and the quest for the divine presence on the other, and also as the presentation of the associations between individuals and their God as a process that cannot be fully realized. According to R. Soloveitchik, faith provides the process of seeking God with its motivation since, otherwise, why would we seek the inapprehensible?! Indeed, faith is itself the choice of a way that is a process without an attainable goal. In a way, faith functions as a therapeutic factor, which enables us to cope in healthy, mature, and responsible fashion with permanent tension. R. Soloveitchik clings here to Søren Kierkegaard’s position, stating that faith reflects the dialectical situation. Kierkegaard set up two models: one harmonious, whereby faith resolves the dialectic, and the other disharmonious, whereby faith perpetuates the rupture with God.83 In his initial presentation, R. Soloveitchik tends to view faith in Judaism according to the disharmonious model: faith records the insoluble tension, and shows how to live with it. Living a life of faith, therefore, implies internalizing the various aspects of the tension: contemplation of the “cosmic drama” (7) grants a sense of the divine presence, but its attainments are questionable. Cohen’s “a priori concepts” provide an adequate explanation of creative cognition, where infinity fulfills an important role (according to R. Soloveitchik, this implies “peering” into the transcendent Deity, although such a view obviously contradicts the spirit of epistemological idealism). Nevertheless, the 82   On R. Soloveitchik’s view of faith see, for instance, Arieh Strikowski, “The Message of Faith in His Thought” (in Hebrew), in Jubilee Volume: In Honor of Morenu Hagaon R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Shaul Israeli, Norman Lamm and Yitzhak Raphael (Jerusalem and New York: Mosad Harav Kook and Yeshiva University, 1984), 89–104; Schubert Spero, “Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and Belief in God,” Modern Judaism 19 (1999), 1–20. 83   See Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 86–88.



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concrete-qualitative world remains opaque, closed, and impenetrable to cognition.84 Even the “the sense of absolute dependence” that R. Soloveitchik, in the wake of Schleiermacher, views as reflecting religious facticity, shatters in the face of the absolute negation of the attributes. Faith reflects both the recognition of the tension as such and the very choice of a tense life. The believer prefers process to result. Like Buber, R. Soloveitchik too holds that faith does not provide a solution to existential tension,85 but helps to live with it. Hence R. Soloveitchik’s distinction between Judaism and other religions. Whereas other religions do not need faith because they maintain that the Deity is cosmically apprehensible, Judaism requires faith because it casts doubt on this possibility. Other religions hold that the tension can be resolved (the harmonious model ), whereas Judaism knows it has no absolute solution, and faith is therefore necessary. In Kierkegaard’s terminology, other religions do not need faith as salvation from despair, since they maintain that God is indeed revealed in the contemplation of nature. Finally, whereas other religions claim that apprehending the divine presence is a goal, Judaism maintains that this is an infinite process. Faith, then, is the key to the Jewish position. R. Soloveitchik addresses the indirect connection between original sin and faith (26–27). Kierkegaard argues that faith is the antithesis of original sin.86 By contrast, R. Soloveitchik claims between the lines that original sin is what causes the need for faith. “If not for sin, man would be able to reveal the Creator in the creation without any disappointment “(26). R. Soloveitchik uses kabbalistic symbols (emanation, infinity, splendor, and so forth) in order to present the Shekhinah’s removal from the world after Adam’s sin (26). These symbols concretize the hidden divine presence and a life of searching for God as an ongoing, ceaseless process. The sin caused the tension, and faith helps to give meaning to this tension and even to live with it. R. Soloveitchik then draws the inevitable conclusion: in the messianic era, faith no longer

84   Heschel also points to the oscillation between exposure and opaqueness in nature, but discusses it in the context of the possibility of communication between elements separated by an abysmal gap. See Heschel, God in Search of Man, 172–173. 85   See Barzilai, Homo Dialogicus, 263. 86   Louis K. Dupre, Kierkegaard as Theologian: The Dialectic of Christian Existence (New York: Sheed And Ward, 1963), 130–132.

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has a role.87 In the future, the divine presence will be revealed. Until then, however, we need faith to contend with the suffering attendant on the search for the hidden God and with the knocking on nature’s locked doors. Except for this discussion on the definition and status of faith that opens And From There You Shall Seek, the book makes no further mention of faith’s universal aspect. Henceforth, R. Soloveitchik resorts several times to the expressions “revelational faith” (emunah giluyyit) and “revelational faith experience” as resulting from heteronomous and arbitrary divine revelation and as a source of Halakhah. These expressions are antithetical to the “natural-ontological experience,” which is a product of human initiative.88

87   See Dov Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads: A Theological Profile of Religious Zionism, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 193–210. 88   See, for instance, And From There You Shall Seek, 42.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CONCEPT OF REVELATION IN AND FROM THERE YOU SHALL SEEK The previous chapter showed that, in And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik presents a religious-phenomenological analysis of the human connection to the Deity, explicitly pointing to Judaism as a distinct form of religious consciousness. Formally, the contents of Halakhic Man and the method of And From There You Shall Seek are similar in their negation of, or rather indifference to, metaphysics. Halakhic cognition is described in Halakhic Man on the basis of Hermann Cohen’s epistemic idealism, which denies the existence of any transcendent realms beyond cognition, except for a vague qualitative reality. Halakhic man is entirely indifferent to metaphysics and dismisses its expressions from his cognition. As noted, the model of halakhic man in And From There You Shall Seek reflects the assertiveness and self-affirmation of religious consciousness. The humility aspect is described in the religious phenomenological literature as the confrontation with the “mysterium tremendum” (Rudolf Otto) and the “absolute other” (Karl Barth, Reynold Niebuhr, and so forth). In other words, R. Soloveitchik used Hermann Cohen’s model of epistemic idealism to mark the pole of self-affirmation,1 whereas the approach of Rudolf Otto, Max Scheler, and other phenomenologists of religion sustains the pole of humility and crisis.2 And From There You Shall Seek focuses on the phenomenological approach typical of the Jewish homo religiosus. This work, indifferent to metaphysical truths, is not concerned with the divine and cosmic 1   German idealism formulated an inclusive pattern of thought, which pretends to present a comprehensive philosophical system that contends with a broad range of problems and provides a consistent explanation of all conceptual and historical phenomena. This pattern certainly affected twentieth-century Jewish thought. See, for instance, Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 93–115. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik harnessed epistemological idealism to the description of the pole representing the height of human achievement. 2   See above, 23–25. See also Rainier Munk, The Rationale of Halakhic Man: Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Conception of Jewish Thought (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1996), 116.

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reality found beyond religious consciousness. Its starting point is an essentialist contemplation of the religious consciousness that emerges from objective activity (Halakhah) and from subjective feelings and experiences. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik would join Scheler’s religious-phenomenological statement whereby “the God of religious consciousness ‘is’ and lives exclusively in the religious act, not in metaphysical thinking (metaphysischen Denken) extraneous to religion.”3 Although he would have had strong reservations at that time about a radical view limiting God’s presence to religious consciousness, R. Soloveitchik would have added that the appearance of the Deity in other, extra-conscious realms is simply uninteresting. The only concern of And From There You Shall Seek is consciousness itself. R. Soloveitchik relied on different and even opposite conceptual views (such as, for instance, both Maimonides and R. Isaac Luria [Ha-Ari]) and he did not fear contradictions since his sole concern was the conscious-religious structure that constituted them. Metaphysical reality and truths are marginalized and become unimportant. The phenomenological study of Jewish religious consciousness replaces for him the classic discussions of Jewish thought throughout its history. Nevertheless, And From There You Shall Seek does not make a clear statement about the status of metaphysics per se. R. Soloveitchik did not express views about metaphysical truths, but simply showed a systematic and consistent lack of interest in them. By contrast, in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” he was already expressing his well-argued view that the concern with metaphysics is sterile and superfluous.4 In its negation of, or disinterest in, metaphysics, Halakhic Man is close to And From There You Shall Seek. My concern in the present chapter is the phenomenological perception of prophecy and revelation in And From There You Shall Seek, and the clarification of the relationship between natural and revelational consciousness. The gist of this approach appears in Chapters Four and Five of And From There You Shall Seek—“The Surprised Heart” and “The Yearning Yet Fearful Heart”—and is then sustained 3   Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper, 1960), 134. 4   This view, as noted, characterizes R. Soloveitchik at various periods of his thought. The distinction between the various periods is the following: in And From There You Shall Seek, metaphysics is perceived as an important element of consciousness, meaning that R. Soloveitchik shows interest in the metaphysical impulse of religious consciousness. At a later period, however, metaphysics is negated from a conscious perspective as well.



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throughout. His discussion of revelation, as noted, exposes all aspects of the phenomenological method that he applies in the book to the study of religious consciousness. A Structural and a “Rational” Model of Revelation The order of the discussion at the opening of And From There You Shall Seek attests to R. Soloveitchik’s model of revelation. Chapter Two, “The Yearning Heart,” presents the search for the Deity as the height of intellectual achievement. At the summit of the scientific process, through the creative unfolding of cognition according to scientific, mathematical, and physical laws, homo religiosus looks for the Deity’s traces in Creation. The chapter ends by recognizing the cognitive-scientific impossibility of penetrating qualitative reality, when R. Soloveitchik relies directly on the structure of cognition outlined by Hermann Cohen. According to R. Soloveitchik, this structure “avoids” confronting the extra-cognitive qualitative realm. The height of scientific cognition, then, is also an admittance of its failure: reality is not bound by cognitive laws. Chapter Three, “The Disappointed Heart,” describes the conscious state of failure and suffering. Reality is perceived as the vanishing traces of the Deity, which human consciousness cannot capture: “the beloved has turned and gone.”5 Chapter Four describes the revelation that follows the stage of suffering. The structure of the discussion at the beginning of And From There You Shall Seek, then, presents a phenomenological model of revelation involving a three-staged process, as we found above:6 (1)  Assertiveness and self-affirmation following scientific achievements. (2)  Humility and pain following the failure to cognize reality. (3)  Revelation, which takes place at the humility stage.7

5   The crisis pole is described as the failure to discover the presence of the Deity in the material world. Pascal described the desperate search for signs of the divine presence in the universe that would lead man to faith, and the first researchers of existentialist philosophy presented this approach as an anticipation of existentialism. See William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 98. 6   See above, 14–17. 7   See Michael S. Berger, “U-vikashtem Mi-sham”: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Response to Martin Buber’s Religious Existentialism,” Modern Judaism 18 (1998), 96.

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This model is reflected in the opening words of Chapter Four: “All sapient men [anshei ha-da‘at] search for God, but when the seekers reach the ultimate boundary of reality they become alarmed and retreat . . . . and here God reveals Himself above nature, from beyond the world bounded by time and space“(29).8 We therefore learn that R. Soloveitchik presents a distinct and coherent pattern of revelation. This pattern is also evident at the opening of The Halakhic Mind: “From time immemorial, whenever the identity of the individual and the community was shattered, man encountered God (e.g., the Paradisiacal man after his fall; Moses after the episode of the golden calf). Religious experience is born in crisis.”9 Dependence prevails between the state of despair and the divine revelation.10 Revelation takes on a teleological and distinct dimension, given its direct address to the one standing at the edge of the abyss. The end of revelation could be to rescue such a person, or an expression and application of God’s love (divine goodness), or both. For consistence and coherence, then, revelation is bound by a structured and “rational” model. Furthermore: the figure of God that emerges from such a view of revelation is both moral and rational. However sublime, absolute, and transcendent, God turns to human creatures and is aware of their limited and problematic circumstances.11 R. Soloveitchik, then, sought to create the impression that God’s “behavior” is bound by rules of some kind. Later, however, he proceeded to upset this scheme.

 8   Revelation implies the failure of Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology, which does not acknowledge the concrete existence of a transcendent entity, that is, of (nonsensorial ) existence beyond cognition. The third stage, then, builds upon the collapse of the first. This is obviously not an ontological statement, but a view that rejects the option of establishing religious consciousness solely on the philosophical-critical model.  9   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 3. 10   R. Soloveitchik claimed that the crisis exposes the absurd and dialectical structure of religious consciousness, but drawing skeptical agnostic conclusions from the fact of the crisis is a mistake. For his critique of Karl Barth’s “theology of crisis,” see ibid., 129. 11   For a defense of this view of the Deity see, for instance, Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948).



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Disorder And From There You Shall Seek opens with a reference to Song of Songs—the lover searches for the beloved. The lover’s considerations in the “dialectical game” remain unexplained. R. Soloveitchik is not interested in them. We do not know why the lover fails to respond, despite his love for the beloved. Ostensibly, the structured and teleological description of revelation presented above is part of an attempt to grasp the image of God per se and to disclose rationality, coherence, and purpose in the divine actions. The first section of Chapter Four, however, reverses this trend. Revelation emerges as a chaotic event, unbound by any kind of pattern. It does not appear at the height of scientific cognition, when the scientist grasps “the mystery of creation,” nor does it take place when the homo religiosus prays to the Holy One, blessed be He, in the depth of his sorrow. Revelation, then, implies a collapse of the theological standards familiar to us from religious thought. We come to understand that the rational-purposeful mode of God is only one pole of revelational consciousness, and that R. Soloveitchik’s true concern is the structure of consciousness, not the extra-conscious entity. Let us consider now the chaotic description of consciousness: God reveals Himself to His creation above and beyond nature, bringing prophecies to human beings. This is the new Torah that was given at Sinai to slaves who had become free, and who then gave it to the rest of the world. God reveals Himself to man in the desert: “He found him in a desert region, in an empty howling waste. He engirded him, watched over him, guarded him like the apple of His eye” (Deut. 32:10). Not in a settled,12 flourishing land but on the plains of a great and terrible desert— a wasteland in the shadow of death—does God appear from among the holy myriads.13 At a time when it seems as if man has ceased searching for God in the desolate wasteland, and has given up on everything, God reveals Himself to man. This revelation is not a reply to man’s questions and doubts, visions and longings. The sight of God14 is not a response to human yearning. God arrives suddenly when He thinks of revealing Himself.15 Man  In the Hebrew original “eretz noshavet,” according to Exodus 16:35.  In the Hebrew original “mi-revavot kodesh,” according to Deuteronomy 33:2. 14  In the Hebrew original “mar’ot ha-Elohim,” according to Ezekiel 1:1; 8:3; 40:2. 15   According to BT Menahot 29b. The story of R. Akiva’s cruel death, hinted at in R. Soloveitchik’s style, highlights the arbitrary element of Divine Providence. 12 13

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chapter two does not and cannot know when or why. God surprises man, who is not expecting salvation16 and is not mad with longing or burdened with the mystery of creation. The Deity encounters flesh-and-blood individuals who are satisfied with the manifest and the superficial, who confine themselves within the pale, yellowing, desolate husk of existence.17 When the tempest is under control, when the desire to search is ended, when the heart is dulled and the soul frozen, and the entire universe is dying in a deep nightmarish sleep,18 then God emerges from His isolation and secrecy and reveals Himself to man. The exposure of the Hidden One to a world of chaos because that is His will—this is the revelation of the Shekhinah. (29–30)

The ending of this passage indicates that revelation is a direct result of the divine will. R. Soloveitchik presents the divine will, probably under Maimonidean influence, as purposeless and to some extent arbitrary.19 The fact that revelation is not bound by any order thus emerges at two levels: (1) The time. Revelation is unexpected, that is, it cannot be predicted (“Man does not . . . know when or why”). (2) The content: revelation is unrelated to the human situation or to human needs (“this revelation is not a reply to man’s questions . . .”). A contrast between R. Soloveitchik’s model of revelation and that of Maimonides reveals them to be radical opposites. According to Maimonides, revelation is bound by laws,20 and is the result of consistent   See BT Shabbat 31a.  In the Hebrew original “toladah,” referring to nature. 18  In the Hebrew original, “siyutei marmota,” according to Genesis Rabbah 17, 21. 19   See, for instance, Dov Schwartz, Contradiction and Concealment in Medieval Jewish Thought (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002), 97–101; idem, Central Problems of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 46–50. 20   A cautious reader will notice the concealed dialogue with Maimonides. Presenting Maimonides as the ideal figure for the restoration of religious consciousness is natural (see also below). Although Maimonides appears to have supported the capability to withhold prophecy from those deserving it, many traditional commentators claimed that Maimonides did not uphold this view. See, for instance, the commentaries of Efodi and Shem-Tov ad locum. Modern scholarship continued this interpretation. Maimonides represents here the natural theology that developed in the Middle Ages. In his description of the arbitrary pole of revelation, R. Soloveitchik may have been influenced by “crisis theology” philosophers (Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and their colleagues), who had reservations about rationalism in religion. On such influences during a later period, after And From There You Shall Seek, see Alan Brill, “Elements of Dialectic Theology in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s View of Torah Study,” in Study and 16 17



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preparation. Maimonides strongly opposed the idea that God reveals himself to the simple man, and held that revelation without preparation is tantamount to the prophecy of “an ass or a frog.”21 According to R. Soloveitchik, preparation plays no role in revelation. Whereas Maimonides demanded ethical-religious perfection from the prophet, R. Soloveitchik held that “God revealed Himself to Adam when he had sunk into the deep mire22 of the original sin” (30). Furthermore: according to Maimonides, the content of prophecy suits the intellectual and political needs of the prophet, whereas R. Soloveitchik maintains that revelation is entirely detached from political and religious needs. According to this description, revelation exposes God to the believer’s consciousness as the “absolute other” and, in the familiar terminology of Rudolf Otto, as the “mysterium tremendum.” Otto describes the “non-rational” dimension of the Deity: ”Not the most concentrated attention can elucidate the object to which this state of mind refers, bringing it out of the impenetrable obscurity of feeling into the domain of the conceptual understanding.”23 Scheler added and clarified the experience of crisis following the encounter with the “absolute other.” He claimed that, if indeed an entity exists that is the supreme being and the absolute good, then any possible human culture is pushed into the margins of existence and revealed as loose and unstable.24 Heschel states: “Vain would be any attempt to reconstruct the hidden circumstances under which a word of God alarmed a prophet’s soul.”25 The discrepancy between the phenomenon of revelation (or “the feeling of revelation”) and the ways humans react, that is, the mapping and framing of the phenomenon within the rational and ethical categories characteristic of human knowledge, present an unbridgeable gap between the revealed God and man. Laws and structure reflect the human ability to confront the experience of the other, and they

Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2006), 265–296. See also 349–357 below. 21   Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), II:32, 362. 22  In the Hebrew original, “bi-yven metsulah,” according to Psalms 69:3. 23   Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 59. 24   Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 317. 25   Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1955), 188.

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collapse and tumble when confronted with the absolute otherness of God. Like Tillich, R. Soloveitchik too described revelation while preserving the full otherness of God, which poses a threat to the independence of human existence.26 The consciousness of revelation is thus complex and oscillates between two poles. On the one hand, revelation is bound by the structured model, and on the other, it is not part of any law or regularity. On the one hand, the three-staged model states a rule whereby revelation emerges at times the pole of humility dominates, and on the other, revelation is not bound by time or causality. On the one hand, revelation supports us and encourages us when we are at the humility pole, and on the other, it is indifferent to our needs and even threatens our existence. From a human perspective, the following formulation can be offered: on the one hand, revelation presents individuals as subjects, capable of controlling and analyzing the conditions of their existence, and on the other as objects, lacking any control over their lives. Needless to say, the style that resembles existential categories is used only for illustration, and its role is to emphasize the poles between which the religious experience fluctuates; in truth, R. Soloveitchik sought to preserve the dialectical dimension of consciousness as described by phenomenologists of religion.27 Between Judaism and Other Approaches Let us now turn to the second section of Chapter Four. In And From There You Shall Seek, as noted, R. Soloveitchik draws a distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish views of faith.28 The complex consciousness of revelation again enables R. Soloveitchik to draw a distinction between Judaism and other perspectives. The distinction is easier, however, when he endorses the structural rather than the chaotic perception of prophecy. R. Soloveitchik writes:

  See, for instance, Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Scribner, 1948), 89. R. Soloveitchik hinted at an approach of this kind in the phrase “ontological negation” (31). 27   See Eliezer Goldman, “Overt and Covert in the Teachings of R. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present, ed. Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 232. 28   See above, 29–30. 26



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This is Judaism’s view. God reveals Himself to man when he is in the grip of a fate cruel as vultures,29 bereft of hope or vision. The encounter with God to forestall the expulsion of man from God’s inheritance,30 the Creator revealing Himself to the creature who is suspended over the abyss31—this is the secret of the revelation of the Shekhinah. . . . The approach of the non-Jewish [kelali] homo religiosus, by contrast, is strewn with roses32 and adorned with grace. It finds what it wants in the image of Logos [reason] and the figure of Nous [intellect], in pure form, in ideas gloriously displayed, in the inherent harmony of the world’s regulation and so forth. From the lawful, the regulated, the good, and the beautiful, the non-Jewish homo religiosus ascends to the absolute, the perfect, and the One. But his thought is perplexed and confused when it encounters impermanence, disorder, evil, negativity, privation, and formlessness. Therefore the later Greek philosophers33 concluded that matter is the source of all the evil and chaos in the world, and they believed—Heaven forbid—that matter is outside God’s domain. (31)34

Revelation has a distinct purpose: God’s revelation is meant “to forestall the expulsion of man.” Revelation is a redeeming event. “The revelation of the Shekhinah” is intended to save the lost. Prima facie, this is a long-standing theological motif, a constitutive element of Jewish and Christian thought: revelation follows from God’s love for humanity. “The lover seeks His beloved, His beautiful one.35 The Creator seeks the creature, the spiritual personality” (29). R. Soloveitchik, however, sought to draw a distinction between the Jewish and the non-Jewish homi religiosi. He chose to focus on the sources the non-Jewish man of faith uses—a broad range of Greek philosophy extending from Plato to late Neoplatonism. Plato viewed the material world as a pale reflection of the world of ideas; Aristotle saw matter as the foundation of the contingent, and Plotinus presented it as non-existent. Evil is a consequence of, and is identified with, the material dimension. Greek philosophy, therefore, created several models for isolating evil (matter) and presenting it as a partial and unstable reality. Philosophers-scientists, in its view, deal with the permanent  In the original Hebrew, “ka-yeanim” [like ostriches], according to Lamentations

29

4:3.

 In the original Hebrew, “be-nahalat Elohim,” according to Samuel I, 26:19.  In the original Hebrew, “ha-taluy ‘al blimah,” according to Job 26:7. 32   According to Song of Songs 7:3. 33   Meaning the neo-Platonic trend (Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and so forth). Previously, the viewpoints of Plato and Aristotle were mentioned. 34   The translation was slightly modified in this quotation. 35   According to Song of Songs 2:10, 13. 30 31

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and eternal elements of existence and exclude contingent elements from their realm of concern or view it as minor and corrupt. Greek philosophy is presented as expressing the non-Jewish homo religiosus, but R. Soloveitchik certainly did not hold that a model that isolates evil is exclusive to Greek philosophy. Indeed, he held that Greek philosophy was apparently the basis for the Christian split between flesh and spirit. The isolation of evil is a pattern typical of the Christian model, and Greek philosophy is perceived as the source and the foundation of Christian theology. Between the lines, R. Soloveitchik sets up a distinction between the Jewish and non-Jewish homi religiosi: Judaism postulates that revelation occurs within raw, crude matter, where human degradation is exposed, whereas the Christian model of isolation assumes that the Deity is revealed mostly to spiritual people.36 And here the full extent of the problem becomes evident. R. Soloveitchik did not conceal his sources, and modern Protestant thinkers feature prominently among them, and precisely these thinkers describe the divine love and redemption that is also manifest in the debased material state?! This is the issue that R. Soloveitchik seems to focus upon later: Authentic Jewish thought, rooted in faith in the absolute creation ex nihilo, introduced a mutual relationship between God and man. First, man searches for God through reason, ordered and illuminated by the splendor of the great, magnificent creation. . . . From this experience of the divine there bursts forth,37 as stated above, a formula for benedictions that expresses thanksgiving and praise for a proper existence in a fine, lawful world. These benedictions refer to the magnificent, stable cosmic process. Man must be grateful to the Creator for His continuous creation, directed by the primordial will of necessity . . . Halakhic thought wonders about evil not from a metaphysical standpoint, but from a moral-halakhic perspective. It does not ask why or from what cause, but for what purpose. It is interested not in the causal

36   According to the purposeful model, divine revelation occurs at times of crisis. And yet, here too, when R. Soloveitchik highlights the purposefulness and contents of revelation, the latent chaotic element is still preserved. “Even when harsh judgment [midat ha-din] is meted out, and man cannot understand its nature or its essence, God is being revealed. Even out of negativity and obscurity the True Judge comes forth” (32). Revelation is not exclusively limited to times of humility and may also occur during times of self-affirmation, although the model stresses its happening at times of decline. 37   And From There You Shall Seek, 19–22.



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aspect, but in the teleological element of evil. Its question is a halakhic one: What should man do when confronted by evil, so that he may live and flourish?38 How can we turn evil into a creative force? How can evil be used to enhance the rule of the good? The Jew first accepts the judgment and then fights the evil, conquers it, and elevates it to the level of the good. The reply to evil is repentance. Out of his suffering, man raises himself up and returns to God: “When you are in distress because all these things have befallen you, in the end of days, you shall return to the Lord your God and obey Him” (Deut. 4:30). Suffering obliges man to repent. The response to “distress” is the act of repentance. (31–33)

Jewish thought enjoys a dual advantage: (1)  Scope (polar states) (2)  Regulation (Halakhah) Specifically, the advantage of the Jewish man of faith is in the closer association between humans and God at all levels. The search for God is manifest at stages of self-affirmation, when the individual experiences the divine presence in Creation (cosmic experience), but also at stages of humility, when the person struggles to return to God. Alternatively, we could say that Jewish consciousness is essentially dialectical. The consciousness of the Jewish man of faith does not ignore the fundamental split in the believer’s consciousness, which includes the ebb and flow between self-affirmation and humility. Judaism is not oblivious to the material situation, to evil, to humility and fall. One important element of Jewish-religious consciousness that perpetuates the association with God but is unavailable to the non-Jewish man of faith is Halakhah. Specifically: Halakhah neither provides answers to the causes of suffering nor does it solve the problem of suffering. Halakhah provides guidance and educates to live a life of suffering. It gives meaning to suffering by presenting it as purposeful. This principle accompanies R. Soloveitchik’s thought throughout, in all its references.39 During assertive periods, the halakhic element is

  That is, grow and multiply. See, for instance, Psalms 92:13; Job 8:7.   See below, 205–207. The distinction between the various periods in the thought of R. Soloveitchik is that, in And From There You Shall Seek, the meaning that Halakhah assigns to suffering pertains to consciousness. Suffering (as well as self-affirmation) leads to the “experience of God,” that is, to conjunction and reciprocity and, more precisely, to a consciousness of closeness to God. By contrast, in later writings, the meaning that Halakhah assigns to suffering is practical rather than touching on 38 39

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manifest in laws related to benedictions, and at times of humility, in the commandment of repentance. Of the Jewish man of faith, he says: “In everything he sees the glory of the Shekhinah; over everything he utters a benediction” (21). The benediction conveys the search for the divine presence through legal and ritual tools. And repentance, which also takes place in the context of the divine law, gives meaning to suffering. Halakhah implies a legal institutionalization of dialectic life. It is precisely here that we see Judaism’s advantage over the consciousness of the non-Jewish man of faith: Halakhah is an institutionalizing and recording element. The reflection of patterns of experience in the halakhic way of life precludes the blurring of the various states of consciousness, and states of diffidence are revealed as particularly meaningful in religious terms. Halakhah is the factor that prevents the possibility of isolating or ignoring evil. The inclusion of repentance within the legal framework of the divine command places situations of depression and suffering within the realm of religious consciousness. The divine presence at times of humility is ensured by endowing it with halakhic character. Halakhic Man deals with repentance as, first and foremost, an ab initio activity; the creativity that fuses eternity and the past within the present is planned and deliberate. By contrast, in And From There You Shall Seek, repentance does not lose its reason as a reaction to the situation of suffering and depression caused by sin.40 Quite the contrary, repentance institutionalizes and regulates the divine revelation out of humility. The dialectic of religious consciousness is therefore twofold: on the one hand, the ebb and flow between self-affirmation and humility, and on the other, a recurrent oscillation between a structured and a chaotic divine revelation. Halakhah is what gives form to the arbitrariness of revelation and enables proper understanding of the fluctuations of religious consciousness. In this discussion, R. Soloveitchik ignored the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity in revelation, which theological literature discusses at great length,41 and established revelation consciousness, and summed up in dialogue, solidarity, communality, and the moral life. For further discussion of these issues, see below, from ch. 8 onward. 40   See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, chapter 12. Cf. Yosef Ben-Shlomo, “The Rational and the Irrational in Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion” (in Hebrew), in The Rational and the Irrational, ed. Marcelo Dascal and Adi Parush (Beer Sheva: BenGurion University Press, 1975), 82–83. 41   See, for instance, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 2, The Doctrine of God, trans. G. W. Bromiley (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 17–18.



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exclusively on the objective pole. In sum, only Halakhah enables a sane and balanced plumbing into the depths of religious consciousness, of which religions that are not based on the divine law miss essential aspects. The Process of Consciousness Consolidation In the first section of Chapter Four (pp. 29–31), R. Soloveitchik emphasizes the chaotic structure of the consciousness of revelation, and in the second (pp. 31–33)—its patterned “rational” configuration. In the third section (pp. 33–34), R. Soloveitchik returns to emphasize the chaotic dimension of revelation: God’s revelation at times of crisis, from the depths42 of despair and distress,43 is a basic principle of Judaism. Sometimes God does not reveal Himself to the contented soul;44 He reveals Himself to the mute soul, battered by weariness and exertion. Sometimes God reveals Himself to one who grieves for the ruin of His Temple and the destruction of its altars, while avoiding one who dedicates His Temple and stands at the side of his offering; sometimes He does not reveal Himself to the rational individual, but to one who is confused about life, who is bankrupt and has lost track of his world.45 From time to time, man’s salvation comes out of distress. Even the choicest members of the Jewish people first encountered their Lord at a time of raging fear, helplessness, and distraction, when they were not anticipating such an encounter but were thoroughly surprised by it . . . Judaism has firmly established the halakhic principle46 that even when man confronts an unchangeable evil decree coming from God, when his rejected prayers are thrown back in his face, he must see God and conjoin with Him in spite of the tragic reality that weighs him down.47 God reveals Himself through suffering and tragedy, when the individual or the community are in trouble and distress. (33–34)

 In the Hebrew original, “mi-ma‘amakim,” according to Psalms 130:1.  In the Hebrew original, “min ha-meitsar,” according to Psalms 118:5. 44   According to Avot 4:1, 6:6; Avot-de Rabbi Nathan, Version A, ch. 23; Version B, ch. 33; BT Tamid 32a, and others. 45   See Kallah Rabbati 2:7. 46   According to BT Bava Bathra 7b, and see BT Shabbat 60b. 47  In the Hebrew original, “rovets tahtav,” according to Exodus 23:5. 42 43

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Revelation, then, is not bound by rules, as evident in the implicit and explicit reference to its association with prayer. On the one hand, the encounter with God is associated with prayer,48 but on the other, prayers do not result in divine revelation (“his rejected prayers thrown back in his face”). Clearly, then, revelation is not part of a teleological or causal scheme: prayer does not lead to revelation. Since prayer expresses the supplicant’s needs, revelation is not an answer to the supplicant’s predicament. Revelation does not solve human problems or, in another formulation, neither prayer nor revelation change the divine decree. R. Soloveitchik described two parallel systems that do not meet, each one with rules (or a rules-breaking set) of its own: the divine decree, which is equivalent to unchanging fate, and revelation. Let us now return to the structure of the discussion, which presents revelation as chaotic at the start, as structured and intentional in its midst, and as chaotic at its end, a zigzag pattern not fully explained by the fact that religious consciousness is dialectical. More plausibly, R. Soloveitchik sought to reflect the consolidation of the revelation process as follows: at the first stage, revelation occurs as a traumatic event, wherein the absolute “other” breaks into consciousness without any preparation or subordination to any laws. The second stage is one of recovery: consciousness succeeds in framing the traumatic event and even imbue it with a sense of purpose, such as the commandment of repentance or the divine love for those who have lost their path. At the third stage, however, the patterned structure is shattered, and the genuine nature of revelation emerges: in truth, revelation does not pretend to solve problems. Quite the contrary: revelation highlights the unchanging divine decree and its informative dimension (the divine command) has no connection to the situation of the person experiencing it. The process of the development of consciousness is hinted at in R. Soloveitchik’s reference to the two divine attributes of intellect and will, and this is how the process is described in the fourth section of Chapter Four:

48  In the Hebrew original, the root used to describe the encounter of the “choicest members of the Jewish people” with God (pag‘u be-ribonam) is the same used in various sources in association with prayer (ein pegi‘ah ela tefilah). See BT Brakhot 26b; BT Ta‘anit 7b–8a; BT Sotah 14a; PT Berakhot 4:1, 7b, and so forth.



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When God reveals Himself to man, He does so not in order to realize an intellectual, scientific goal—to tell him about the cosmic drama—but to command him and to give him the responsibility for keeping laws and statutes, positive and negative commandments. The God of Sinai is the God of the Will, the Inscrutable One who commands us to follow a unique way of life without explaining why or for what purpose. The God of Creation is the God of the Hidden Intellect who created everything in His wisdom without satisfying our curiosity and without explaining His acts—the creation. The All-Knowing and the All-willing are two of God’s attributes. When man seeks God, he is seeking an intellect that is beyond him. He wants this intellect to take note of him and to enlighten him about the universe,49 about the essence and fate of man, but instead of finding the Hidden Intellect, he encounters the Inscrutable Will. This Will reveals itself to man, and instead of telling him the secrets of creation, it demands unlimited discipline and absolute submission. (35)

In Jewish religious and scholastic thought, a tension prevails between these two divine attributes. Divine thought reflects God’s rationality and his activity, which unfolds according to set and rational laws, whereas the divine will reflects the arbitrary aspect of the Deity, as noted. “The Hidden Intellect encourages the creature and comforts him in his affliction. The Inscrutable Will conquers and subdues him” (35). R. Soloveitchik presents Creation as a result of the divine intellect, although the tradition of religious thought usually ascribes the act of creation to the will, and its result—the ordered cosmos—to the intellect.50 R. Soloveitchik, then, apparently attempted to point to the conscious process discussed above, and convey it through the divine attributes. In the first stage, religious consciousness confronts the chaotic act of revelation and explains it as an outburst of the arbitrary divine will. In the second stage, the stage of recovery, consciousness strives to present revelation as flowing from a divine intellect based on order and rationality. In the third stage, consciousness realizes the failure of the second stage—“instead of finding the Hidden Intellect” consciousness encounters the “Inscrutable Will.” The search for a rational structure of revelation is exposed as an illusion. What had been thought of as a result of the divine intellect emerges as a result of the arbitrary divine will—a distinctly tragic move.

 In the Hebrew original, “tevel u-melo’ah,” according to Psalms 50:12, 89:12.   See Aviezer Ravitzky, Studies in the History of Jewish Thought (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Keter, 1991), 219; Schwartz, Contradiction and Concealment, 97–101. 49 50

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chapter two Against the Maimonidean Approach

The anti-Maimonidean tone implicit in R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological approach toward prophecy was noted above. Maimonides’ intellectual efforts to define and structure prophecy are a strong manifestation of the second stage in the development of consciousness, a stage that is ultimately exposed as an illusion. Jewish religious consciousness approaches Maimonides as one of the summits in the rational explanation of revelation; this approach, however, is doomed to shatter against the dominant chaotic model.51 No wonder, then, that Chapter Four ends with an anti-Maimonidean model, that is, with the chaotic feature of revelation that empties it of any rational order: In this realm, prophecy appears as the discourse of the Creator to the created without any attachment between God and man. The discourse does not remove God’s absolute separateness; God reveals Himself to man and commands him,52 but the divine withdrawal is not abrogated. God appears beyond existence. On the contrary, the awareness of the abyss between God and man is heightened, and man is aware of his inability to cleave to God. The only link between them is the revelational discourse, and it too, as mentioned, is one-way: God speaking to man to give him commandments. (36)

R. Soloveitchik rules out a correlative structure for prophecy: no correlation is possible between God and man, and any dialogical aspect is absolutely negated. R. Soloveitchik adopted Moses’ revelation, where the divine commandment (Halakhah) was given, as a paradigm of revelation. Obviously, Maimonides strongly opposed the notion of taking Moses as the archetypal prophet, and indeed argued that the similarity between Moses’ prophecy and others is only external and superficial. Essentially, these are two different phenomena.53 In this sense, 51   We will find below that, at its highest stage, consciousness becomes unified, and the chaotic moment is revealed as structured and intentional. Nevertheless, the fluctuation between the various moments does not disappear, even at the unified stage. See chs. 6 and 7 below. 52  In the original Hebrew, “va-yetsav alav.” The expression appears in Scripture in the context of one person ordering another (for instance, Genesis 12:20), and compare Job 36:32. 53   See, for instance, Alvin Reines, “Maimonides’ Concept of Mosaic Prophecy,” HUCA 40 (1969): 325–361; Menachem Kellner, “Maimonides and Gersonides on Mosaic Prophecy,” Speculum 52, 1 (1977): 62–79; David Blumenthal, “Maimonides’



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R. Soloveitchik appears to support Judah Halevi, who presented the characteristics of Moses’ prophecy as paradigmatic features of prophecy in general. But R. Soloveitchik’s view is incompatible with that of Judah Halevi, since Halevi indeed held that prophecy, despite its irrational basis, can be framed and bound by rules. In Halevi’s view, rigorous adherence to the commandments at a time all can be observed and in association with a particular place (the Land of Israel ) necessarily leads to the inspiration of prophecy. Halevi’s terms of prophetic lawfulness are unintelligible against the rational Aristotelian model of the Middle Ages, but can be explained according to a model of experiential lawfulness.54 This does not apply to R. Soloveitchik’s approach in And From There You Shall Seek, which in the end rules out prophetic lawfulness in any form. R. Soloveitchik’s choice of the commanding revelation model follows from his inclination to present prophecy as a phenomenon of chaos. He therefore ends Chapter Four of And From There You Shall Seek with a characterization of revelation as the presence of “an awesome transcendent power,” in which “an obscure dimness55 covers everything, and out of the dimness the Infinite reveals itself ” (36). The terminology hints at Otto, in its characterization of the consciousness of holiness in the presence of the “mysterium tremendum,” as discussed above. Henceforth, revelation reflects the receptive aspect of religious consciousness. Revelation denotes a passive and traumatic stance vis-à-vis the transcendent reality, which precludes any human hold on the divine world that could have been a source of security. This discussion shapes the “revelational consciousness” that, beside the “natural consciousness,” determines the central poles in the fluctuation of the man of faith.

Intellectualist Mysticism and the Superiority of the Prophecy of Moses,” Studies in Medieval Culture 10 (1977): 51–67; Jacob Levinger, Maimonides as Philosopher and Codifier (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1990), 29–38; Yaakov Blidstein, “On the Institutionalization of Prophecy in Maimonidean Halakhah”(in Hebrew), Daat 43 (1999), 30–31. 54   See Dov Schwartz, Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Thought, trans. David Louvish and Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005), ch. 1. 55  In the Hebrew original, “afelah seturah.”

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chapter two Prophecy As Consciousness

Prophetic consciousness, then, unfolds in contrast to the Maimonideanrational approach. At the opening of Chapter Five of And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik writes: God’s revelation to man, which occurred at Mount Sinai and on other occasions to privileged individuals who were chosen by Providence to be His prophets, became for posterity a perpetual experience, a unique awareness. In all generations, man lives and feels this revelation the way he lives and feels a natural longing for God. We are commanded about this in the portion Va-Ethanan (Deut. 4:9–10): “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, lest you forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your heart as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children: The day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb . . .” We are warned not to forget two things: (1) the laws and statutes that God commanded us at Horeb; (2) the experience of divine revelation, of standing before God with all the fear and trembling that accompany man’s confrontation with the Infinite. We are commanded to sense the revelation in all its awe and grandeur as if we had just now returned to our tents56 from our encounter with God at Sinai, as if we had just witnessed the thunder and lightning57 and felt a very great dread.58 (39–40)

The description of the consciousness of prophecy also resonates with echoes of Halevi’s outlook, stating that the masses participate in the phenomenon of prophecy. The Sinai theophany described in the passage above is not a one-time phenomenon but a model of revelation. The prophets are indeed selected few, but “he who converses with a prophet experiences spiritualization,”59 that is, he becomes a partner to the prophetic experience and differs from ordinary people. What is the nature of this consciousness?

 In the Hebrew original, “ish le-ohalo,” according to Judges 20:8.  In the Hebrew original, “et ha-kolot ve-et ha-lapidim,” according to Exodus 20:15. 58  In the Hebrew original, “ve-haradnu haradah gedolah me’od,” according to Exodus 19:16, 18. See also Genesis 27:33; Daniel 10:17. 59   Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Schocken, 1964), 1:103. Halevi seems to have intended magic influence. The prophets were isolated individuals but shared their experience with their surroundings, thus creating the basis for the modern term “prophetic consciousness.” See Schwartz, Studies in Astral Magic, ch. 1. 56 57



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The fluctuation between “rationality” and arbitrariness that characterize prophetic consciousness was noted above. The two components of prophetic consciousness that R. Soloveitchik discusses in this passage reflect this fluctuation from another direction: on the one hand, prophecy is a receptive phenomenon. The person who experiences revelation is commanded by “laws and statutes” and is in the status of a recipient. On the other hand, prophecy leaves room for the human side as a partner in the shaping of the revelational event. The person who experiences revelation stands before God and, accordingly, revelation is “man’s confrontation with the Infinite.” True, this is not a partnership or a dialogue between equals, since no comparison is possible, but man still stands before his God. The traumatic situation of anxiety and fear does not blur the prophet’s self-affirmation. Although the dialectic is clearly preserved, the most prominent feature of prophetic consciousness is arbitrariness and receptiveness. In describing the advanced stage of the formation of consciousness, R. Soloveitchik will claim a release of tension, and arbitrariness will then be revealed as rational regularity. Arbitrariness is so prominent, however, that it is also present in the advanced and unified stages of consciousness. This issue is discussed below.60 A Dialectical Consciousness Scheler objected to Schleiermacher’s approach that the universe is the only source for evoking religious intuition and feeling. Scheler argued that religious consciousness has its own unique and independent realm, whose acts and objects are essentially different from the cosmological dimension. Religious consciousness, therefore, develops its own ways of knowledge, which differ from extra-religious epistemological ways.61

  See below, chs. 6 and 7. And see above, p. 50, note 51.   See Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 285. This statement derives from Sheler’s general approach, whereby the intuitive perception of reality is not monolithic and is contingent on perspective. See William A. Sadler, Existence and Love: A New Approach in Existential Phenomenology (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 51; Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), 42–43. 60 61

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This view, already incipient in Otto’s thought,62 was the core of The Halakhic Mind.63 In And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik presents religious consciousness according to Otto’s and Scheler’s view as a dual consciousness: 1. Natural consciousness, in which man initiates the search for God. The object of this consciousness is the universe. Man stands before “a universe64 impressed with the Creator’s stamp” (40). In conquering it and subjecting it to scientific law, man seeks traces of the Deity. The instrument that natural consciousness uses is rational thought. 2. Revelational consciousness, in which God is the initiator. The prophetic consciousness of historical tradition becomes the revelational consciousness whose object is the “realm of the eternal and the absolute,” and the “awesome, incomprehensible” (40) that Otto called “numinous.” Two emotional and mental reactions characterize revelational consciousness: 1. Fear. Revelational consciousness leaves no room for rationality, and is therefore accompanied by a sense of impotence and fear. This feeling appears at the start of an unexpected and arbitrary revelation. Fear discloses the existential anxiety that derives from the situation of finitude, given infinity and the sense of “a very great dread.”65   See Ben-Shlomo, “The Rational and the Irrational,” 85.   See, for instance, Jonathan Sacks, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik’s Early Epistemology: A Review of The Halakhic Mind,” Tradition 23, 3 (1988): 75–87; Munk, The Rationale of Halakhic Man, 52–68. I discuss this issue at length in my Religion or Halakhah. 64  In the Hebrew original, toladah, referring to nature. See p. 27 above, note 74. 65   See Berger, “U-vikashtem Mi-sham”: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Response.” The presentation of anxiety in philosophical-existential terms does not blur the phenomenological character of the discussion. R. Soloveitchik’s “existential” philosophy, discussed below, argues that anxiety does not relate to a specific object, be it God or another entity. Anxiety is not a reaction to an external factor but a characteristic of our finite existence. By contrast, in the current discussion, anxiety is a response to the threatening, infinite God. To recapitulate: R. Soloveitchik does not deal here and in And From There You Shall Seek as a whole with an actual-existential situation, but with the essentialist consciousness that underlies it. Berger’s claim (ibid., 99) about the existentialist character of And From There You Shall Seek, is therefore questionable. 62 63



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2. Frustration. This feeling appears as soon as man understands he will never attain communion with the Deity. “Man’s spirit . . . reaches only the shadow of the Almighty,66 the image of His image; she will never rest in God’s bosom and cling to her lover” (40). What are the direct phenomenological sources of the dual consciousness approach? Scheler distinguished “natural revelation” (natürlicher Offenbarung), which denotes the divine presence revealed in reality’s natural dimension, from “positive revelation” (positiver Offenbarung), which denotes revelation through language (“word”) and human beings.67 R. Soloveitchik internalized such an approach and adapted it to Judaism by identifying positive revelation with the commandment or with Halakhah. R. Soloveitchik conveys both types of consciousness in a dialectical formulation: “Man seeks God and is also a captive of God” (41).68 In Maimonides’ approach, for instance, natural and revelational consciousness are in a causal interrelation. After acquiring knowledge about the natural order and concluding from it the existence and attributes of God, human beings merit the prophetic emanation.69 The dialectic characteristic of And From There You Shall Seek (ibid, 100) that, as shown below, is still present at the ostensibly harmonious stages as well, is not existential but found only in consciousness. Its description is widespread in the writings of phenomenologists of religion such as Rudolf Otto and Max Scheler. R. Soloveitchik was certainly familiar with Kierkegaard’s early writings, whose traces are evident in his view of repentance, but R. Soloveitchik’s concern is consciousness, not existence. Throughout And From There You Shall Seek, he hints at and even proclaims his indifference to concreteness in theological and historical affairs, together with a deep concern with essentialism. From the “middle” period, that is, from the mid-1950s, R. Soloveitchik’s writings clearly show marks of Kierkegaard, who is integrated into the corpus of non-religious existentialist philosophy. See below, chs. 8–11. 66  In the Hebrew original, “be-tsel Shadai,” according to Psalms 91:1. 67   Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 161. 68   R. Soloveitchik hints here to revelation as conveying the human dependence on God. Dependence is the first foundation of general revelation according to Niebuhr. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 131. 69   R. Soloveitchik emphasizes that “all the Jewish sages agree that a religious person must begin with the divine revelation, because it is impossible to strive to know God without faith and tradition” (162, note 10). He applies this view to Maimonides as well, though he does admit: “Our forefather Abraham recognized his Creator out of his own capacity before He revealed Himself to him” (163, note 10). In truth, R. Soloveitchik’s intended to argue that philosophers did not renounce revelation as an essential component of religious consciousness or, in other words, that we cannot understand the structure of religious consciousness without the revelation component. The primacy of revelation stems from a non-Maimonidean cause, that is, from

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Even in the structured model of prophecy that R. Soloveitchik suggested, revelation appears after man has reached the peak of scientific knowledge but is defeated by the “impervious” qualitative world. In the subordination of prophecy to order and teleology, the structured model of R. Soloveitchik is close to the rational Maimonidean model, although Maimonides would have denied the “imperviousness” of nature. When the “chaotic” model of prophecy becomes dominant in And From There You Shall Seek,70 the natural and revelational types of consciousness do not relate to one another in causal but in dialectical terms, so that we recurrently fluctuate between them. Natural Consciousness The following discussion traces the course of R. Soloveitchik’s detailed presentation of the characteristics of natural and revelational consciousness. Two descriptions appear in Chapter Five, in Sections B (41–43) and C (43–45) of And From There You Shall Seek. In the first description, natural consciousness is characterized by creativity and freedom, whereas revelational consciousness is characterized by coerced receptivity. In the second description, natural consciousness is characterized by dynamism and development,71 whereas revelational consciousness is characterized by firm stability. Despite the different characteristics pointed out in each of these descriptions, they can be considered similar. Although the second description does not seem to add much to the first, between the lines we can distinguish two models of dialectical consciousness, as shown below. In the first description, R. Soloveitchik expanded mainly on the question of natural consciousness, which will be discussed first. The

the fact that R. Soloveitchik links revelation as such to the giving of laws and statutes, whereas Maimonides determinedly argued that only Moses’ prophecy (or temporary edicts in other prophecies) involve legal contents. 70   As hinted in the epigraph to ch. 5: “ ‘But,’ He said, ‘you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live” (Exodus 33:20). This verse underscores the frustration that accompanies revelational consciousness, which precludes communion. By contrast, the title of the chapter, “The Yearning Yet Fearful Heart,” reflects both the longing and the recoil. 71  In the Hebrew original, R. Soloveitchik refers to development as “hishtalshelut,” a term firmly established in medieval Hebrew.



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“natural” pole, the pole of flow and self-affirmation of consciousness, was identified above with the approach of Hermann Cohen and the conventionalist school in the philosophy of science that was the basis for the figure of halakhic man in the eponymous text. The cognition based on the laws of mathematical-physical science reflects the summit of human philosophical attainments. Here, however, R. Soloveitchik seeks to point out the differences between Hermann Cohen’s approach and the pole of flow in religious consciousness, that is, between epistemic idealism and natural consciousness. In his view, the “religious experience” is a cognitive and moral as well as an aesthetic experience; it elevates its subject to the height of ontological consciousness, irrespective of the various theories regarding the origin of religious activity.72 This state of mind is woven within the creative spirit and intertwined with all its threads and fibers. From this viewpoint, religious consciousness is manifested as the consciousness of absolute freedom. Man seeks God out of a thirst for the freedom of life, a desire to expand and deepen the universe. The search for God means liberation from the burden of tyrannical nature weighing heavily upon him, release from the blind forces besetting man’s life. Weary73 from the travail of dull life, man flees to the region of complete liberty and conjoins with God. Man desires peace of mind and seeks to wipe the tears of sorrow from his face. Out of the totality of spiritual experience that flows from the inner uniqueness and independence of the creative spirit that rises ever higher,74 the religious experience is revealed. When the person who longs for God arrives at the border of the absolute and the eternal, he does not feel any compulsive force. On the contrary, he voluntarily soars into the heavens and seeks the traces of the One who dwells there.75 The creature needs the refuge of charity, mercy, total salvation and the redemption of existence. The more he breaks through the curtain76 dividing him from his God, the more his freedom will grow and the more intensely will his joy in existence pour forth. (41–42)

72   R. Soloveitchik refers here to the term “Akt,” which has no proper equivalent in Hebrew, implying that the religious experience draws on various mental, cognitive, moral, or aesthetic acts. 73  In the Hebrew original, “ ‘aiyef ve-yage‘a,” according to Deuteronomy 25:18. 74  In the Hebrew original “ha-ruah ha-yotser ha-‘olah m‘ala m‘ala,” according to Ecclesiastes 3:21. 75  In the Hebrew original, “shokhen aravot,” according to Psalms 68:5. 76   According to Maimonides, Eight Chapters, ch. 7. For Maimonides, the term meant a moral or intellectual flaw.

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Natural consciousness rests on two terms, freedom and creativity, that will later be joined together in a unique compound: “creative freedom” (42). Let us begin with the term freedom. In Halakhic Man, freedom was defined in its Kantian denotation.77 Halakhic man is free because he is not bound by any external rules of behavior and activity, only by the principles determined by his cognition. Indeed, revelation is the source of these rules, but halakhic man minimizes the quantities and measures of halakhic objects ad infinitum and, through the scholarly method, re-creates them in his cognition. Henceforth, the true legal deed [shetar], for instance, is a deed whose definitions have been constructed and re-determined with the help of hillukim. For halakhic man, therefore, freedom is the necessary subordination to the cognitive system and the negation of any extra-cognitive one. By contrast, natural consciousness defines freedom entirely differently and, in some ways, antithetically. Natural religious consciousness is characterized by freedom because it can break through the borders of scientific cognition. Freedom is the conscious exit to the heteronomous. As homo religiosus succeeds in disclosing cosmic lawfulness, he also finds the traces of the Deity beyond it. He is not afraid to seek the transcendent dimensions beyond cognition, contrary to halakhic man, who denies these dimensions and negates their very existence. Freedom, therefore, is a constitutive component of religious consciousness.78 Now for the term creativity. In Halakhic Man, the term appears in two areas: (1) The creation of halakhic objects within cognition. (2) The adaptation of the objects to the qualitative world in the sense of consciousness (Bewußtsein). In any event, creativity is meaningless in the “supra-epistemological” realm (of metaphysical beings),79 since halakhic man does not recognize this realm’s existence. It makes no difference whether cognition turns to itself or to the sensorial reality, chaotic and inferior to it. By contrast, the meaning of the term in And From There You Shall Seek is different. “Religious experience, in this context, is the outbreak of the wondrous force [Gevurah] of the spontaneous metaphysical spirit in all its colorful variety and

77   See, for instance, H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 209–211. 78   For an important analysis of freedom, see John Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewook Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963). 79   As in Scheler’s formulation, stating that consciousness includes a correlative realm of absolute entities and values (Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 268).



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raging activity—a partnership in the act of creation” (42). The creativity of natural consciousness is not exhausted by the explanations of philosophical theories, such as Cohen’s epistemic idealism, and by scientific conventionalism. Henceforth, natural consciousness creates metaphysical worlds. R. Soloveitchik apparently intended an activity parallel to theurgic action, which kabbalists considered creative, a sort of participation in Creation and even in the building of the divine worlds. The insemination of the sefirot leads to the divine emanation. R. Soloveitchik obviously describes conscious activity rather than real creativity or theurgy. According to this description of the consciousness of freedom, the scientist who discloses the natural order does so out of distinctly metaphysical motivations. Scientists understand that the conscious-religious component (“the religious act is an essential endowment of the human mind and soul”)80 imbues their action with a purpose: the exposure of the Deity within existence. The laws of nature are merely an introduction to the metaphysical worlds. Here too, creative activity is not only different from the activity of halakhic man but, in certain senses, even antithetical to it. Creativity relates directly to the realms beyond cognition. Again, R. Soloveitchik, as noted, is not interested in the ontological aspect of the transcendent being. His discussion focuses on the structure of the consciousness that takes the transcendent into account and behaves accordingly. The transcendent is studied only insofar as it is a conscious component. At the beginning of And From There You Shall Seek, the search for God in the mathematical-physical order merged with the neo-Kantian models, whereas now it is clear that Hermann Cohen’s approach is only a formal explanation. This approach clarifies the methods of the scientist and the philosopher, but not the motivations or the consequences of their actions. In truth, “only the combination of scientific reason with the heart that searches and yearns for the living God can allow man to progress” (44). Mastery of the universe is anchored in a search for the deus absconditus. The yearning of the scientist to manipulate nature is, a priori, inseparable from the “yearning for God.” Gradually, R. Soloveitchik draws away from the neo-Kantianism that had been such a stable component of Halakhic Man and devotes himself entirely to the study of religious consciousness. The neo-Kantian

80  Ibid., 267. On the approach stating that the religious component (“religious act”) of consciousness is inevitable, see ibid.

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framework becomes a methodical tool, bereft of the philosophical trends of epistemic idealism. Ernst Cassirer’s thought truly represents the approach of And From There You Shall Seek. Were it not for Cassirer, the match between the neo-Kantian model and the mythical religious-epistemological model of the structure of consciousness would not have been possible.81 But Cassirer’s theory does not provide all the tools required for the understanding of religious consciousness either. For that purpose, we must understand the religious experience as an independent realm, which relates to the phenomenological thought of Otto and Scheler. R. Soloveitchik therefore created a complex philosophical structure, resting both on Cohen and Cassirer on the one hand, and on Otto and Scheler on the other. More precisely: rather than an actual merging, his approach involves a choice of motifs that bring closer the different world views of idealism and phenomenology. Revelational Consciousness In light of the remarkable freedom and creativity that characterize natural consciousness, revelational consciousness emerges as the extreme opposite and, in fact, as a curb on creative freedom. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, offers a model diametrically opposed to the Maimonidean one, which assumed a causal connection between natural and revelational consciousness. According to R. Soloveitchik: “The fundamental principle is that revelational consciousness is not a continuation of cultural consciousness and does not identify with it” (43). There is no continuity between the two types of consciousness, but fluctuations. Following is a comparison between the first and the second description of revelational consciousness. Both together present the difference between them:

  On the creation of the objects and the various cognitions in Cassirer’s thought see, for instance, W. H. Werkmeister, “Cassirer’s Advance beyond Neo-Kantianism,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Shilpp (Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 770–772; Gideon Freudenthal, “The Missing Core of Cassirer’s Philosophy: Homo Faber in Thin Air,” in Symbolic Forms and Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 203–226. 81



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Description (1): “The revelational faith experience, unlike the natural ontological experience, is [entirely] unrelated to the spirit of the free,82 creative human being and does not involve the aspirations of cultural creation in all its varied developments” (42) Description (2): “The awareness of a compulsory covenant, submission and acceptance of the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. One who lives the vision of the revelation of the Shekhinah stands beyond the authority of the cultured creative mind [lit. soul, nefesh] that is subject to change and alteration . . . Development and revealed faith are antithetical concepts.83 (44)

The difference is more modulated in the second description. Whereas the first speaks of a total disjunction between natural and revelational consciousness (“entirely unrelated”), in the second, R. Soloveitchik softens the dissociation between them. Consider his view carefully in the following passage: Description (1): “[Revelational consciousness] is the consciousness of the revelation of the Shekhinah, the imposition of authority on the powerless creature. It is the consciousness of necessity and subjugation; it is an absolute awareness of the revealed duty that preempts man’s will. It is distinct from the awareness of natural moral duties, which is rooted in the general consciousness that yearns for total freedom. In the field of revelational experience, man accepts the yoke of the commandments against his will and subordinates his pride and self-love to God.” (43)

82  In note 10, R. Soloveitchik admitted that the characterization of revelational consciousness as the absolute denial of freedom is not clear-cut: “The individual who is compelled by the revelation to perform specific acts can attain the consciousness of freedom by identifying with the command and transforming the compulsion into a constitution of freedom that is nurtured by God’s hidden uniqueness” (168–169). In a certain conscious-revelational dimension, the Kantian view of freedom discussed above enables the characterization of compliance with the compelled law as an act of freedom. This dimension contributes to the cognition of the dialectical tangle of religious revelational consciousness. The dialectic, then, is not exhausted by the fluctuation between natural and revelational consciousness, but each one of these types of consciousness separately is based on fluctuations. And yet, the dominant characteristic of revelational consciousness is still the denial of freedom in the sense of a release from boundaries and borders or, in other words, the negation of the breakthrough to the transcendent. R. Soloveitchik exposed the Kantian dimension of freedom as one of the dimensions of the revelational consciousness because he resorted to medieval rationalist sources, and particularly to R. Bahya (third state, in R. Soloveitchik’s classification there), which defined the highest stage of religious life as a fusion of command and “voluntary” rational cognition. 83   “Antithetical concepts” is a rendition of shnei hafakhim be-nose ehad, a recurring formulation in medieval discussions on the impossible (nimna‘ot). See, for instance, The Guide of the Perplexed I:75; II:13.

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chapter two Description (2): “ ‘Faith’84 means an act that is explainable, not through the stream of natural consciousness, but through the revelation of the Shekhinah to man and man’s joining an eternal world that is entirely [long85 and entirely] stable, persistent, and without transformation or novelty . . . Culture flows on, continually taking on new forms, sweeping up natural religion in its eddies; revelational faith overcomes the transitory, jealously guarding its eternal persistence. It is entirely given over to transcendental necessity and is expressed in an eternal formulation. It is all lingering, repose, and quiet. The wonder of repose, within a world full of motion and alteration, is found in the revelational experience.” (44–45)

R. Soloveitchik offers two models of contrast between natural and revelational consciousness: (1)  Absolute, irreconcilable contrast. (2)  Complementary contrast, which appears in two modes: (a) Hierarchical complementarity. Revelation is “beyond” creative activity, a stage that leads to another. (b) Integrative complementarity. Revelation is the stable element in the changes and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terms, the “stillness” underlying motion and development The first model emphasizes and highlights the negative aspects of revelation. As opposed to the exaltation of natural consciousness, revelational consciousness negates freedom and subdues it. Natural consciousness creates whereas revelational consciousness negates. The fluctuation between natural and revelational consciousness is therefore traumatic, and causes an inner spiritual rift. The second model discloses the positive aspects of revelational consciousness. Although this consciousness is a “compulsory covenant, submission and acceptance of the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven,” it is nevertheless an agreement that has the status of a covenant between the individual assuming the yoke despite awareness of the opposition between the 84   R. Soloveitchik refers here to “revelational faith” in particular. On faith in general, see ch. 1 above and ch. 11 below. 85   According to PT Hagigah 2:1, 77b; BT Kiddushin 39b; BT Hulin 142a. Cf. R. Soloveitchik’s critique in the long note at the beginning of Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 140, where he disparages the perception of religion as “still waters” and as a “magical, still, and quiet island.” The homo religiosus described in And From There You Shall Seek, unlike the Brisk scholar, does not fear this perception of religion.



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acceptance of authority and free natural consciousness. The agreement unwittingly draws natural and revelational consciousness closer. Hence, the second model emphasizes the stillness, the repose, and the eternity that characterize divine revelation. Although this consciousness is antithetical to natural consciousness, R. Soloveitchik nevertheless chose the second model to hint at the parallels between them: both point to an island of stability within a tempestuous sea of events and developments. Natural consciousness too, relying on the development of science, was ultimately meant to discover the stable divine presence in the world. “As science progresses, so does man’s knowledge of God as His Creator, as the One who endows man with reason” (43–44). Both natural and revelational consciousness provide weary, tired man haven and serenity. We find, then, that despite the contrast between the two types of consciousness, they are not entirely contradictory and, in any event, the fluctuation between them need not be traumatic as in the first model. Why did R. Soloveitchik present two models of fluctuation between natural and revelational consciousness, one of radical difference and another milder and containing a complementary element? And From There You Shall Seek, as noted, attempts not only to describe the various dimensions of religious consciousness but also to trace its development and consolidation. The first model of fluctuation denotes the initial experience, when the individual lives through the arbitrary manifestation after the inspiration and the free spirit that characterize natural consciousness. As such, the initial experience is extreme and unbalanced. The transition from the first to the second model denotes the process of balancing consciousness. Ultimately, the believer finds equilibrium, although fluctuations are constant. At that point, the experience is characterized by the balance offered by the second model. Summary This chapter focused on the fluctuations in R. Soloveitchik’s teachings between various sources dealing with the shaping of the consciousness of revelation and its attitude toward natural consciousness. At times, the weight of epistemological idealism prevails to the point of becoming a distinct pole, and at times, it is reduced to merely a formal framework indicating the ways that consciousness acts. At times, the explanation of the structure of consciousness oscillates between the

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idealistic and the religious-phenomenological models, and at times, the structure of consciousness rests solely on the religious-phenomenological model. But these fluctuations, however important to the study of the history of ideas in Jewish philosophy, are symptoms of R. Soloveitchik’s recurrent attempts to find a suitable way of describing religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik sought to ensure authentic expression even to experiences denoting radical and unbalanced religiosity, whether reflected in the natural side (control and initiative in the style of epistemic idealism) or in the revelational one (arbitrariness and receptiveness). Dialectical consciousness has aspects of shock and imbalance, and these aspects are no less alluring and seductive than the balanced dimensions of the consciousness of opposites. Perhaps the fluctuations also shift between the unbalanced and balanced models of experiencing opposites. At the same time, new light is shed on the status of Halakhah. R. Soloveitchik’s message in And From There You Shall Seek is that Halakhah justifies a unique phenomenological discussion in Judaism. Halakhah serves, on the one hand, as a stable element in the turbulent flow of religious consciousness, thereby functioning as a balancing factor. On the other, the extent of the divine command’s arbitrariness and, even more so, the dissociation between the state and problems of man and prophet on the one hand and the divine decision of revelation on the other present Halakhah as a focus of upheaval. Halakhah fits in well with the absurd. At times, Halakhah is what shatters the solidity of natural consciousness. We cannot separate its character and content from the arbitrary and coercive circumstances in which it was given. The perception of Halakhah, then, also oscillates between conscious balance and a lack of equilibrium. Explicitly and implicitly using an intricate set of opposites from different perspectives, R. Soloveitchik tried to express the uniqueness of Judaism. The result is a complex and extreme fluctuation between balanced and radical opposites. The description of the fluctuation is only beginning. As And From There You Shall Seek proceeds, it becomes increasingly complex and intricate, and this will be my concern in the chapters that follow.

CHAPTER THREE

CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DEITY (1): MERCY AND JUSTICE The initial steps in the consolidation of Jewish religious consciousness according to And From There You Shall Seek can now be presented at length, tracing the processes unfolding within it. At various points, the advantage of Jewish over non-Jewish religious consciousness will also be highlighted. The structure of consciousness includes several layers,1 of varying degrees of depth: (1)  Objective layer This is the most external layer, and includes two strata: (a)  Religious Imperative: Practical Halakhah, which sustains, records, expresses, and balances the depth layers. (b)  Actions and events: on the one hand scientific research, whose foundations are expounded according to epistemic idealism and according to the conventionalist approach in the philosophy of science, and on the other hand arbitrary revelation.2 These two strata are objective expressions of religious consciousness. Two additional, “subjective” layers, within which religious consciousness crystallizes its image of the Deity, are reconstructed from the objective one. The second layer, which includes mental-conscious reactions to actions and events that are the polar opposite, has two strata: (2)  Subjective layer (A) (a)  Natural religious consciousness vs. revelational religious consciousness. The events and actions of objective consciousness reflect the opposite, subjective dispositions of consciousness. As this stratum develops, consciousness creates a particular 1  In R. Soloveitchik’s terminology (And From There You Shall Seek, 61), the stages of consciousness are called “layers.” The layers denote static stages of consciousness as well as others that develop and turn into stages of higher quality. 2   This layer was discussed in ch. 1 above (scientific research) and in ch. 2 (revelation).

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chapter three pattern of the Deity, which is the “external” model of the consciousness of the Deity (attributes or midot).3 (b)  Transmutations of the dispositions into one another (love into fear and fear into love). This stratum expresses the unifying and cathartic dimension that underlies the contrary, polarized types of consciousness. The model of the Deity that develops at this stage, the “inner” model, is related to the concept of tzimtzum [contraction].

The third and final layer of consciousness is essentially different from the two previous ones. This foundational layer is the height of divine worship for the perfect individual: (3)  Subjective layer (B) The unity layer of consciousness. At this stage, opposites are dismissed and disappear. The third layer of Jewish religious consciousness will be discussed at length in the following chapters. The current chapter continues the discussion of the second layer, but this time focusing on a conception of the Deity derived from conscious opposites as formulated in And From There You Shall Seek. Different layers of consciousness, as noted, result in different conceptions of the Deity. Adhering to his phenomenological approach, R. Soloveitchik examines the conception of the Deity in religious consciousness from several perspectives, according to their respective sources: talmudic-midrashic literature (mercy and justice), kabbalistic literature (tzimtzum) and rationalistic medieval literature (the union of the Knower, the knowing and the known). I begin with a discussion of the divine attributes. (1)  A Deity of Attributes Religious consciousness fluctuates between self-affirmation and humility, and its consciousness of the Deity develops accordingly. On the one hand, God is the source of mercy. The consciousness of a

3   This layer was discussed in ch. 2, and its consciousness of the Deity is my concern in the current chapter.



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­ erciful God rests on divine goodness. It presents divine acts as ratiom nal and teleological. On the other hand, God is the absolute “other.” This consciousness rests on God’s arbitrary will, and God’s actions are interpreted accordingly. The discussion of the attributes of justice and mercy is defined as a dimension of the “experience of God” (47). Sources for the attributes of justice (din) and mercy (rahamim) as characteristics of God’s action, and generally of his essence, are found mainly in Midrash literature. The starting point in the search for the conception of the Deity are ancient authoritative sources, that is, talmudic-midrashic literature.4 R. Soloveitchik will present the elements of consciousness that shape the figure of God as a source of both mercy and justice as the theological expression of, respectively, natural and revelational consciousness. The figure of the merciful and angry God emerges in his thought as a response to various emotional states (withdrawal and fear as opposed to attraction and love). The description that prevails in religious phenomenological literature— instinctive fear of the “mysterium tremendum” together with attraction to it—is at the root of the dialectical perception of the divine attributes in religious consciousness. Mercy and justice reflect the Deity’s external stratum emerging from the rejection and attraction. In the second stratum, these feelings are sublimated as fear and love, and their theological expression will be entirely different (contraction [tzimtzum] and expansion). This stage is discussed in Chapter Four below. The focus here will be on the first stratum of the development of subjective religious consciousness in general, and subjective Jewish consciousness in particular. The Merciful and Gracious God How does the model of the merciful God develop in the first subjective layer of natural religious consciousness? R. Soloveitchik answers this question directly: God is a merciful deity, in whose bosom man finds absolute good and happiness. Man’s aspiration for God is essentially the yearning of the 4   On the attributes of justice and mercy in tannaitic and amoraic literature see, for instance, Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 448–461; Yehuda Liebes, “De Natura Dei: On the Development of the Jewish Myth” in Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism, trans. Batya Stein (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 1–64.

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chapter three lonely individual, bereft of peace of mind or joy, for happiness and repose.5 The individual—storm-tossed, sunk in the depths of secular life, with little purpose or meaning, full of denial and panic—runs to God as to a safe refuge, to quiet and repose, where he will be liberated from his mute suffering. Death stalks him, nihility hunts him;6 the creation, out of an indifference that is sometimes clothed in the guise of terrifying hatred, shows him a taunting visage, mocks his heart’s desires, derides his lofty hopes and frustrates his initiatives. In the universe, grief exceeds joy, disappointment dominates over fulfillment, opacity overcomes illumination and understanding. Man wishes to triumph over death, to turn senseless fate into a spiritual destiny with a clear direction, and to achieve both a joyful temporal existence7 and eternal life. He yearns for God so as to take shelter under His wings and repose in His shadow,8 where he will find what His heart desires.9 (47–48)

The model of the merciful God takes shape out of a pessimistic starting point that, to some extent, is based on a conception of fate. Suffering, frustration, opaque nature, and secularism are the given. This is an assumption invariably present in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. Ascribing to the model of the Deity developing in religious consciousness the attribute of mercy plays a teleological role (“spiritual destiny”), that is, this model enables the individual to overcome suffering. The confrontation with suffering is accomplished in the following ways: I. In the hermeneutical-theological realm: (a)  Causality. The sufferer acknowledges that it is Divine Providence that deliberately causes the suffering. (b)  Teleology. The sufferer believes that God causes the suffering in order to draw the person closer (“a love for the reward” [48]). II. In the experiential-action realm (c)  Transcendence. Since God is “found” in the spiritual sphere, the sufferer experiences “self-transcendence” so as to focus on this lofty realm and disregard the material-earthly sphere.10  In the Hebrew original “shalvat hashket,” according to Ezekiel 16:49.  In the Hebrew original “tsodeh,” according to I Samuel 24:11.  7   See PT Berakhot 7:1, 11a; BT Berakhot 48b; BT Avodah Zarah 27b, and others.  8  In the Hebrew original “yitlonan,” according to Psalms 91:1.  9  In the Hebrew original “tevakesh nafsho,” according to Ecclesiastes 7:28. 10   Resonating in this approach, we discern echoes of Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s radical interpretation of Maimonides’ view of Divine Providence, whereby the perfect man overcomes evil by ignoring it. Evil does indeed exist but does not affect him, since his attention is entirely focused on the intellectual dimension. See, for instance, Aviezer  5  6



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These ways were meant to help sufferers bear their burden. Causality and teleology endow suffering with spiritual meaning. The meaning is not to guide the sufferer to a specific activity, as R. Soloveitchik would later argue in “Kol Dodi Dofek.”11 Rather, its concern is a system of philosophical and theological explanations that interpret Divine Providence according to the demand of religious consciousness. Experientially, the sufferer engages in ecstatic mental action—drawing away from material existence and coming closer to the divine-celestial world: “Man runs toward the transitory life, hayyei sha‘ah, and finds eternal life, hayyei olam” (48). Once again, the consciousness of the merciful God provides shelter and solace from the hardships of time and of the world; religion serves as a safe refuge from the storms of life. Consciousness reacts to the model of the merciful God by turning to God. A Jealous and Vengeful God Consider now the angry, judging God. The model of the Deity reflected in the attribute of justice is defined in the terminology of Rudolf Otto, that is, this is the model that follows from the mysterium tremendum (50). The divine model of justice rests also on the theology of crisis. After the outbreak of the First World War, many theologians abandoned the liberal and humanistic conception of religion that had crystallized in the nineteenth century. This reaction appears in the philosophy of Karl Barth, for instance, with the adoption of Calvin’s conception of the Deity. Henceforth, God is described in eternal and transcendent dimensions, which human beings will never succeed in understanding. God is perceived as a stern judge, who will never be satisfied with any moral or intellectual human achievements.12 But Barth also drew a distinction between the Torah, which is entirely directed to the material and sinful human being and includes many prohibitions and restrictions, and the Song of Songs, which describes the relationship between human beings and God in the positive dimension of Ravitzky, “Samuel Ibn Tibbon and the Esoteric Character of the Guide of the Perplexed” AJS Review, 6 (1981): 88–123; Dov Schwartz, Central Problems of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 141–143. 11   See below, 207. 12   See, for instance, the description in John Herman Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 568–569.

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love and Eros.13 R. Soloveitchik fully equated the model of justice with the revealed transcendent God. Revelation, as noted, is arbitrary, and forces finite, insignificant man to confront his inability to grasp divine infinite wisdom. The justice model thus expresses existential situations of anxiety, terror, and impotence. R. Soloveitchik presents the model of the revealed angry God together with the emotional-conscious traumatic reaction that generates this model, and deliberately weaves into his description, implicitly and explicitly, motifs from the High Holidays prayers: God appears to man as the King of judgment, awesome and terrifying14 . . . In this situation, when man encounters the attribute of justice, a terrible fear overtakes him. He despairs and attempts to flee. He thinks, as did Adam, that his existence depends on fleeing from the King of judgment,15 not on running toward Him. Man thinks that his existence depends on extending his fear of God, rather than extending his love for Him, for who can be found righteous before His tribunal?16 This fear, which causes anxiety-filled retreat, is a fear of total annihilation. When God is the prosecutor, how can man appear before Him as the defendant? The helpless defendant has no right to stand before the mighty17 and powerful18 prosecutor, who is respected and feared by all who surround Him.19 The feeling of fear of God, like the yearning for Him, belongs to the natural realm, and is rooted in instinctive reaction of living creatures20 to outbursts of power—to eliminate the treat that endangers their existence. (49)

This is a significant passage for understanding the course of ideas and the elaboration of sources in And From There You Shall Seek. The model of the vengeful, judging God is the theological foundation of

13   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, Part I, trans. Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), 315. 14  In the original “nor’a ve-aiyom,” according to Habakkuk 1:7. This compound appears in prayers and piyyutim, and R. Soloveitchik probably intended the prayer “u-Netane Tokef.” See, for instance, the piyyut “ha-mavdil bein kodesh le-hol” (Vitri prayer book #205, and others). 15  In the Hebrew original “melekh ha- mishpat,” according to Psalms 99:4. R. Soloveitchik intended here the ending of the judgment blessing in the amidah prayer of the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah [Ten Days of Repentance]. 16  In the Hebrew original “mi yitzdak lefanav ba-din,” according to Psalms 143:2. 17  In the Hebrew original “sagi koah,” according to Job 37:23. 18  In the Hebrew original “rav onim,” according to Isaiah 40:26. 19  In the Hebrew original “ve-nora ‘al kol sevivotav,” according to Psalms 89:8. 20   R. Soloveitchik relies on the ancient and medieval concept of soul, whereby the human soul comprises an intellectual and an animated realm.



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fear, and R. Soloveitchik describes the state of fear here as a religious state with specific characteristics. On the one hand, fear is described in a religious-phenomenological style, that is, as a special religious feeling different from natural anxiety. On the other, it is rooted in natural fear. Let us begin with the unique religious reaction. The religious feeling is not transformative because it cannot possibly be defined and exhausted through the usual psychological, sociological, or anthropological characteristics. Religion did not come into the world as a result of natural fear or from some general sense of eternal mystery. A sense of awesomeness is not a natural fear, but rather the first spark of the shudder that befalls a soul through the sense of mystery, while presented in its raw form.21 Otto then adds: “Though the numinous emotion in its completest development shows a world of difference from the mere ‘daemonic dread,’ yet not even at the highest level does it belie its pedigree or kindred.”22 R. Soloveitchik emphasized that this religious feeling is the sequel to the human stance when confronting the absolute, mysterious “other.” The “numinous shudder,” in Otto’s terminology, cannot be transferred to other realms and remains exclusively within the purview of religion. The model of the angry, judging God in this passage is a conscious development concretized vis-à-vis the psychological state of fear on the one hand, and the existential state of anxiety and angst on the other. Stylistically, R. Soloveitchik at times adopts terms from existentialist thought. Anxiety and angst differ from fear in that they reflect an existential state rather than a response to an external factor. Angst plays a significant role in Heidegger’s Being and Time. At the time that And From There You Shall Seek was taking shape, Sartre published Being and Nothingness, a text where angst (angoisse) plays a crucial role in the definition of existence and in the attitude to the other.23 A definition of anxiety as a concept resulting from an unbridgeable gap between finitude and infinity and between temporality and eternity is already present in Kierkegaard’s philosophy.24 A person standing 21   Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), ch. 4. For Otto’s discussion on fear and terror in the “mysterium tremendum,” see ibid., 12–19. 22  Ibid., 17. 23   See, for instance, Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre, Literature, and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 76. 24   Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London, Routledge and Paul, 1982), 164.

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before God experiences both fear of the outside and existential anxiety and terror. Fear of the outside, the fear of God, turns into angst when man experiences his “total annihilation.” A limited, final man facing an eternal, omnipotent God senses existential anxiety, “for who can be found righteous before His tribunal?!” Anxiety, then, does not follow from human existence per se, but from the threatening, obliterating existence of the perfect, eternal God. The conscious reaction of anxiety means self-withdrawal and acceptance of God’s word and of his commandments out of a sense of futility and nothingness. The feeling of anxiety is “instinctive,” and can be transferred to the psychological and existential plane. It is at this point that the justice model and the mercy model have a common denominator: we accept the states of suffering and anxiety as given and seek spiritual meaning in them. We understand that we are “thrown” into them, and that only transcendent consciousness—the consciousness of God—will avail us rescue from them. Facing states of suffering and anxiety, religious consciousness simultaneously develops two antithetical reactions: a movement toward God (mercy) and a flight from God (justice). The former reaction follows from natural consciousness, and the latter from revelational consciousness. Justice and mercy, therefore, are different reactions to the same factor. Situations of suffering and anxiety lead natural consciousness to develop the concepts of mercy and justice. Both models, the merciful God and the judging angry God, are at the foundation of natural religion. “This vital natural instinct finds its expression in man’s running toward God” (48); “The feeling of fear of God, like the yearning for Him, belongs to the natural realm” (49). The longing for and the flight from God are both presented as “instinctive” reactions of consciousness,25 and also as characteristics of religious feeling. R. Soloveitchik evidently wavered between his tendency to see suffering and anxiety as natural feelings and as states that are not only typical of religious consciousness on the one hand, and a conception of religious consciousness as unique and non-transferable on the other. And indeed, the impression warranted by R. Soloveitchik’s descriptions is that he took as his starting point that the flight from suffering 25   The term “instinctive” appears to denote a quasi-impulsive reaction that precedes religious feeling, but one could definitely claim that religious feeling is also “instinctive.”



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is natural (“instinctive”), as is the flight from God. For R. Soloveitchik, then, religious consciousness is built from vital-concrete feelings and states, which psychology, sociology, and philosophy ceaselessly seek to define and describe. Nevertheless, R. Soloveitchik continued to waver between this widespread approach and the unique conception of religion as a realm that turns entirely to the “absolute other” and resists any transformation. The Model of Justice: Repentance Chapter Seven of And From There You Shall Seek, entitled “The Heart that Runs and Flees,” addresses the halakhic expression of the tension between the natural and the revelational experiences. The first section of the chapter is actually a defense of the need for revelational consciousness, and particularly of the need for the halakhic-concrete commandment that follows from it (51–54). In its course, R. Soloveitchik attacked views that challenge the value of the divine commandment derived from revelational consciousness, and particularly Christianity. The chapter begins by considering the role of Halakhah, as a divine commandment, in the implantation of both natural and revelational consciousness. “Halakhah has always dealt with real human existence” (52). The divine models (mercy and justice) issue directly from the human consciousness that, as noted, evolves out of the conscious and existential states of suffering and anxiety. Halakhah is adapted to the two divine models but, nevertheless, the discussion at the opening of Chapter Seven of And From There You Shall Seek focuses mostly on an analysis and on halakhic examples of the justice model, and only then discusses the mercy model.26 The apologetic interest at the opening of the chapter clarifies the initial focusing on the model of the arbitrary God, that is, on the attribute of justice. R. Soloveitchik writes: Whatever distresses man obligates him to repent. All the commandments regarding fast days, such as blowing the trumpets and crying out in prayer, constitute the details of one central commandment: repentance out of the distress that the attribute of justice has brought down upon man. Once more, the fear bursts forth out of the depths of man’s natural existence and vitality, from deep desires that aspire to real ­physical 26   R. Soloveitchik explicitly states: “Pragmatically, fearing God precedes loving Him” (55), and that is the order of his discussion.

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chapter three existence. This voiceless fear brings man to a miraculous ascension to the level of the individual possessed of spirit and vision. As R. Solomon Ibn Gabirol wrote in Keter Malkhut27 (sec. 38): “If You seek my sins, I will run away from You toward You, and I will hide from Your anger in Your shade.” (53)

The formulation and style in this passage remind us of R. Soloveitchik’s conception of repentance in Halakhic Man and its connection to prophecy. Repentance was presented there as: (1) A re-creation of the personality in light of innovations in the study of Torah. (2) Leading to prophecy.28 Ostensibly, the characteristics of repentance in this passage are similar. Despite this formal similarity, however, repentance in And From There You Shall Seek assumes an entirely different and even contradictory meaning. The model of the angry God revealed as arbitrary presents humans as passive and withdrawing. Faced with erratic revelation, we withdraw, becoming merely a repository for the divine commandment that comes from the outside. Whereas natural consciousness presents the creative human dimension, revelational consciousness exposes the receptive human facet. Repentance therefore expresses passivity, and prophecy—the acceptance of the divine word. Dominating the phenomenological analysis of the motives for repentance are anxiety and distress.29 By contrast, in Halakhic Man, repentance marks the height of self-creativity. Causally, naturally, and rationally, repentance leads to prophecy. Furthermore: prophecy in Halakhic Man is not passive receptivity. Quite the contrary, halakhic man is a partner to Moses’ prophecy. He does not confront a meaningless commandment incongruent with his mental state. With his scholarship and cognition, halakhic man joins Moses in a newrenewed building of the halakhic system. The homo religiosus of And From There You Shall Seek accepts the commandment in silence and in a state of anxiety. Angst leads him to take shelter under the wings of the Shekhinah, that is, to repent; anxiety brings with it the restriction

27   Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Keter Malkhut, ed. Israel Zeidmann (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1950), 87. 28   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), ch. 12. 29   For a phenomenological analysis of the essence of repentance based on the suspicion and fear factor see, for instance, Solomon Schimmel, Wounds Not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 141–181.



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and contraction of the self, and the resulting personality gap is filled with the divine revelation. Style and Sources In the description of the model of the Deity that consciousness develops, R. Soloveitchik’s thought grows increasingly closer to the phenomenological conception of religious consciousness. God’s figure is shaped entirely according to the conscious poles. R. Soloveitchik presented two models of the pole antithetical to arbitrary revelation and to the alienated God that initiates it. The concern of natural consciousness is: (1) Seeking the Deity through science. (2) Seeking the divine good. In the former case, the divine presence is revealed in scientific thought, and in the latter, as a solace and a source of optimism for the suffering person. Whereas the former model is influenced by the philosophy of epistemic idealism, the second shows the imprint of religious phenomenological literature. Revelational consciousness is rooted mostly in the religious phenomenological literature that described God as “the complete other,” and emphasized the tension between the rational and moral God as opposed to the transcendent arbitrary God. The tension between religious and revelational consciousness is described at length in the religious-phenomenological literature. Evelyn Underhill, for instance, described the prophets’ consciousness of the Deity as follows: “God is revealed to His prophet as the Wholly Other, the Object of man’s awestruck adoration, and also as the Wholly Good, setting a standard of holiness and convicting man of sin.”30 Underhill clarified that the biblical stories present God as transcendent and as the “Eternal One,” and at the same time as a source of the moral law and as the foundation of spiritual life, that is, as immanent. R. Soloveitchik began by emphasizing scientific-rational thought out of an integration of different cultural worlds that played an important role in his spiritual biography. The development of the basic description of religious consciousness in And From There You Shall Seek, however, leads to classic phenomenological sources. These sources highlight the human confrontation with the strange and the

30   Evelyn Underhill, Worship (New York: Harper, 1957), 197. First edition published in 1936.

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wondrous at the expense of the initial integration of scientific cognition and unique religious cognition. Henceforth, the religious experience is pivoted on the pole of anxiety, dread, and withdrawal vis-à-vis the arbitrary revelation of the “absolute other.” (2)  The Polemic against Christianity The discussion of the theological stratum assuming shape at the very foundation of religious consciousness led R. Soloveitchik to the challenge that he had confronted during most of his life: the dispute with Christianity. “The religion of love” relied largely on natural consciousness, which rests on the model of the merciful God, and disregarded the revelational consciousness whose product is the halakhic commandment. This polemic occupied R. Soloveitchik in Chapter Seven of And From There You Shall Seek, both explicitly and implicitly. My discussion will attempt to trace the basis of this polemic and its connection to the divine models of religious consciousness. The Foundations of the Critique: The Holocaust The current chapter began with a description of the structure of religious consciousness as it unfolds in And From There You Shall Seek. When the dialectic structure of this consciousness is contrasted with the same structure in The Halakhic Mind, a work written in the same year, the following picture emerges: Dimensions of Religious Consciousness

Objective dimension

The Halakhic Mind

And From There You Shall Seek

(1) Religious action (Halakhah)

(1) Religious action (Halakhah): Objective recording of the conscious tensions. (2) Acts and events: Tension between scientific research and revelation. Science: Tension between opaque and ­transparent nature. Revelation: Tension between a causal and a ­chaotic model.

(2) Norms



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Table (cont.) Dimensions of Religious Consciousness

Subjective dimension

The Halakhic Mind

And From There You Shall Seek

(3) Feelings, conscious states31

(3) Consciousness of the Deity: (a) Tension (external stratum). Mental-conscious expression: tension between natural and revelational consciousness. Parallel divine model: Tension between the divine attributes (justice and mercy). (4) Consciousness of the Deity: (b) Refining the tension (deep stratum).32 Mental-conscious expression: love and fear (transformation). Parallel divine model: kabbalistic terms (contraction and expansion).

The two structures are very similar, and the differences concern mainly perspectives and details. One important difference, however, is that And From There You Shall Seek emphasizes the dialectic scope of religious consciousness. Whereas in The Halakhic Mind fluctuations express mainly the subjective dimension of religious consciousness, in And From There You Shall Seek the dialectical character extends to all is elements—from objective Halakhah, which perpetuates and regulates the polar fluctuations, and up to the various modes that consciousness relies upon to grasp the Deity.31 32 In And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik presents the model he had developed in The Halakhic Mind in terms of style and terminology as well: Religious commands (secular moral norms are insufficient) that break out with elemental force are the foundation of objective religious reality; those who deny them make religion a fraud. There is no need for apologetics, rooted in an inferiority complex, to defend the concept of

31   Such as standing before God in a relationship of covenant, correlation, love and fear, and so forth. These elements of the subjective dimension are discussed in detail mainly in religious-phenomenological literature. 32   This type of consciousness is discussed in Chapter Four below.

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chapter three the law in the Halakhah. All the statements by Saul of Tarsus [Paul] about the law as the cause of sin are nothing but hevel u-re‘ut ruah, vanity and vexation of spirit [Eccl. 1:14].33 A rational philosophical religion devoid of revelational trials and commands is liable to publicly violate34 its own sanctities, under the influence of a secular social morality that has become defiled and corrupt. Religiosity lacking the objective-­revelational element that obligates man to perform particular actions cannot conquer the beast in man. Subjective faith, lacking commands and laws, faith of the sort that Saul of Tarsus spoke about—even if it dresses itself up as the love of God and man—cannot stand fast if it contains no explicit commands to do good deeds, to fulfill specific commandments not always approved by rationality and culture. The terrible Holocaust of World War II proves this. All those who speak of love stood silent and did not protest. Many of them even took part in the extermination of millions of human beings. (54–55)

We learn from this passage that the four-layer model formulated hitherto in And From There You Shall Seek rests, both substantially and terminologically, on the model developed in The Halakhic Mind that assumes an objective and a subjective dimension in religious consciousness. The divine command issued through revelation reflects the objective layer of consciousness. Natural consciousness and revelational consciousness represent the top layer of consciousness’ subjective dimension. Relying on these models, R. Soloveitchik strongly condemned Christianity through his allusion to the Holocaust. He reiterated his view that a subjectivism oblivious to the objective foundation is potentially disastrous. Christianity is a model of emotionalsubjective religion (“religion of love”) that rejected the divine command (“objective” religious action) through the Paulist principle of rejecting the commandments.35 What remains to be clarified is why the critique of Christian subjectivism that could have appeared before—let us say in Chapter Four of And From There You Shall Seek, where the model of the revealing, commanding God is first presented—is only formulated in Chapter Seven. R. Soloveitchik chose to criticize the rejection of objective 33   On the Paulist world view, see, for instance, E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 475–497. 34  In the Hebrew original “lim‘ol ma‘al,” according to Numbers 5:6; Ezekiel 14:13; II Chronicles 36:14. 35   On a moral critique of Christianity, see Daniel Statman, “Aspects of R. Soloveitchik’s Moral Approach” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO and Yaakov Herzog Center, 1996), 258–259.



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r­ eligiosity after discussing the models of the Deity developed by religious consciousness. Only out of the subjective, mature, and clear dimensions of consciousness, from the very core of the experience of the Deity and through the building of the relevant divine models (attributes), can we understand the meaning of the decline subsequent to the denial of revelational consciousness. The rejection of objective religiosity distorts the conception of the Deity. The experience of the distorted Deity, as the subjective layer of consciousness, results in a theology of destruction and extermination. This is the true meaning of R. Soloveitchik’s statement about modern man as one who “tries to subordinate his God to his own everyday needs and the fulfillment of his gross lusts” (54). The behavior of Christianity, of its institutions, and of many of its faithful during the Holocaust is an expression of the distorted foundation of a religious consciousness that rejects its objective dimensions. The two main ideological elements of the Holocaust according to R. Soloveitchik’s thought in the 1940s can now be introduced: (1) Phenomenological, biologistic, and vitalistic thought (Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, and others), which had abandoned rationalism, was the driving motivation behind the theology of the Third Reich.36 (2) Christianity, which had abandoned the religious action that follows from the divine commandment, brought about lack of restraint and tacit complicity. Christian theology supplied quasi-religious backing for horrific deeds (subjectivism). In a sense, one could claim that the two ideological causes of the Holocaust are present in Christian theology: (1) Unbalanced love. According to R. Soloveitchik, the Christian view on God’s or on the Messiah’s unconditional love (agape) merged with the conception of Eros in Greek culture. This fusion created

36   According to the extensive note at the beginning of Halakhic Man, it is worth pointing out that several years after R. Soloveitchik wrote And From There You Shall Seek and Halakhic Man, Menahem Dorman targeted Samuel Hugo Bergman for a sharp critique for having missed the connection between phenomenology, existentialism, and Nazism. See his introduction to A. Reuveni’s Hebrew translation of George Lukaş, Existentialism or Marxism (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1951), 7–8.

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religious thought in Western culture, which “has never understood fear in all its terrible essence” (55). “Christian love is unconditioned and unlimited.”37 The imbalance between boundless love and fear in Christian theology exposes an essentially irrational facet in it. (2) Rejection of the objective dimension. According to R. Soloveitchik, Christianity denied “the experience of revelation” (55) in its objective content, that is, the divine command. The fact that “Satan has taken control over the realm of Western religiosity” (55), then, follows from Christianity no less than from phenomenological, biologistic, and vitalistic philosophy. R. Soloveitchik attached the adjective “objective” both to the rationalist dimension of philosophizing and to the concrete divine command. Their common denominator is the limitation of human freedom and its moderation; without such limitation and tempering, a person becomes a wild beast. R. Soloveitchik emphasized in this chapter that the consciousness molding a merciful God lacking a dimension of justice—meaning a Deity unrevealed to humanity that imposes commands and demands commitment—is a distorted consciousness. The conception of a God of love bereft of authority and making no normative, unequivocal statements ultimately leads to the loss of one’s humanity. Such a consciousness of absolute love is also oblivious to the fear of God. Hence, “love for the spiritual and the higher realms” without knowledge of “fear in all its terrible essence” leads to apostasy and “brought chaos to the world” (55). R. Soloveitchik associated the lack of borders and restraint (the abolition of the commandments) with the absence of an angry, judging model of God in Christianity. In sum: a balanced “experience of God” rests also on fear and on the attribute of justice. The Attribute of Mercy: The Denial of Asceticism The discussion in Chapter Seven has so far focused mostly on the model of justice and on the might of the arbitrary divine command, that is, on revelational consciousness. The divine command reflects a “revelational consciousness” for the following reasons:

  See, e.g. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 2, 1, p. 278.

37



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(1)  The Commandments As Consciousness. R. Soloveitchik had already noted at the opening of this chapter that Halakhah restrains man “with the awareness [consciousness] of reward and punishment” (52). Halakhah is presented as a legal system that creates consciousness. (2) Revelation As the Antithesis of Rationalism. R. Soloveitchik characterized revelation as the absolute lack of any connection between the human state (human aptitudes, preparations, needs, and requests) and the contents of revelation. The reasons for the commandments, in the classic sense of Jewish thought, lose their meaning because Halakhah is an autonomous system that is not explained out of other realms. The arbitrariness of the commandments is typical of this stage of consciousness but circumstances change at the highest stage of consciousness, a topic is discussed in Chapter Seven below. The concern of Halakhah, then, is to create an autonomous religious consciousness irreducible to other conscious dimensions; Halakhah is not transformative. From the perspective of human rationality, therefore, the revealed divine commandment is arbitrary in the sense that it cannot be understood or placed in context. The discussion, as noted, focused on the commanding dimension, since this is where R. Soloveitchik found Jewish religious consciousness (Halakhah). To be complete, however, consciousness must also include natural consciousness, which is dual: (1) The Search for God. Natural consciousness expresses the experiential-ecstatic awakening of the individual to strive for a transcendent God. (2) Reciprocity. Natural consciousness stresses the experience of a divine presence related to the human situation. The merciful God encourages, comforts, and supports his servant, the servant of God. Natural consciousness rests on an encounter of wills—the divine and the human: On the other hand, God wants man, as a natural creature with a natural consciousness, to worship Him. Man must worship his Creator not only out of the feeling of absolute decree and coercion, not only out of sadness and dread, but also out of spontaneous, variegated desire and aspiration, which gladdens the heart. (55)

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The discussion of natural consciousness deals mainly with the denial of suffering and the extreme asceticism dictated by radical revelational consciousness. Consider R. Soloveitchik’s pronouncements in this regard: When man becomes addicted to an ascetic existence, ignoring the necessity to improve and settle the world38 and to tend to physical and psychological needs in the real world, his religiosity is mediocre. God commanded man to take part in historical social processes and in the development of science and technology to benefit humanity. Anyone who withdraws from the real world is acting in opposition to the Creator’s command, “Fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28) . . .  As mentioned, man is divided in two. This was the primordial will of the Creator. Man needs both types of consciousness, both types of experience. If all of a person’s consciousness and experience is natural, inner, rooted in his personality, then he is like a secular individual who stands outside the authority of religion. On the other hand, if he lacks natural consciousness and experience, and does not entwine his revelational experience within his comprehensive spiritual experience, then he is liable to abandon practical action and the real world. Unless there is a mutual relationship between the two types of consciousness and experience, the religious ideal cannot be realized. (56–57)

If one becomes addicted to revelational consciousness and disengages from natural life, “his religiosity is mediocre.” Extremism leads us to miss out the natural religious experience, and the religious consciousness of the ascetic is therefore lacking. The absence of the natural experience mars the perfection and balance of consciousness and, consequently, “the religious ideal cannot be realized.” Note, however, that the two types of consciousness or experience are not equal in value. A religiosity that relies on natural consciousness is not really religiosity. R. Soloveitchik vigorously rejected exclusive reliance on the natural religious experience, and stated it “is like” secularism. By contrast, a religiosity that relies exclusively on revelational consciousness is “mediocre” since it slides into asceticism, but it is certainly included in the category of religious experience. The symmetry between the two types of consciousness shatters: the exclusivity of the natural religious experience leads to secularism, whereas the exclusivity of the revelational experience is unbalanced but still part of the religious realm.

38  In the Hebrew original “tevel u-meloah,” according to Psalms 50:12; 89:12. See, for instance, Genesis Rabba 4:6; 13:13.



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The meanings embedded in this passage according to R. Soloveitchik appear to be derived from the polemic with Christianity as a religion that rejected the yoke of the revelational command.39 In sum: the model of a merciful God without a dimension of justice ultimately leads to secularism and to the loss of one’s humanity. Out of an exaggerated emphasis of the command as an essential component of religious consciousness, R. Soloveitchik clarified between the lines that the natural religious consciousness Christianity had relied upon is not dismissed from religious life. Rather, R. Soloveitchik used phenomenological Christian sources to describe natural religiosity. In his view, a description of religious consciousness that ignores the natural­experiential layer is partial and lacking. But no symmetry is assumed: the foundation of Jewish religious consciousness is the divine revelation, and natural experience merges with it. Despite this fusion, however, natural and revelational consciousness do not have equal weight, and this assumption explains why the discussion in Chapter Seven focuses mainly on the revelational model. The centrality of the justice model is grounds for a polemic with Christianity, which entirely disregards this paradigm. (3)  Elitism Despite the clear advantage of the Jewish structure of religious consciousness over the Christian one, the extreme dialectical character of consciousness that R. Soloveitchik intimates in And From There You Shall Seek still precludes a one-dimensional distinction. When addressing esotericism and exotericism, my discussion showed40 that the intricate structure of consciousness does not enable its break-up

39   R. Soloveitchik’s description of Christianity is somewhat tendentious. R. Soloveitchik did not deal with the following claim, which derives from his assertions: (1) Christianity is a religion resting solely on natural consciousness. (2) Asceticism derives from revelational rather than from natural consciousness. Therefore (3) Asceticism is not characteristic of Christianity. And yet, asceticism is associated with Christianity and it is as such that it became a constitutive element of Western culture. See, for instance, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 40   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Halakhic Man: Religion or Halakhah (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2008), 374–378.

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for the purpose of conducting an exclusively rational, psychological, or sociological analysis. The Experience and the Rule R. Soloveitchik had so far created the impression that Christianity endorses solely the model of natural religiosity and that extreme ascetics adopt the model of revelational religiosity, also exclusively. Judaism merged the two models. In the two discussions that conclude Chapter Seven, R. Soloveitchik added another characteristic: natural religiosity is esoteric, whereas revelational religiosity is accessible to all. The natural religious experience rests on a search for God through knowledge of the epistemic foundations and conditions that enable science. R. Soloveitchik emphasized: “Scientific thought itself, despite all the virtues and achievements of modern democratic education, remains within the realm of the esoteric. The masses see nothing but its technological conquests” (57). A religious experience based on applied science is not really an experience. Natural religiosity (“intellectual religious experience” [57]) is founded on a deep knowledge of the philosophy of science. The philosophical discussions of Kant and Cohen about the possibility and the conditions of science are unintelligible to the masses, and many contemporary scholars never address Cohen’s neo-Kantian model. Natural religiosity, therefore, cannot become a collective experience. Hence, integrating a natural religiosity of this kind with exoteric (revelational) religion is also impossible for the wide public. Does this denote the advantage of the Jewish religious model?! But according to Judaism, the ordinary person has no access to the subjective experiential model either, since one of its components, natural consciousness, is not generally available. Hinted at in R. Soloveitchik’s discussion, then, is a problem that he avoids confronting. The ordinary person experiences only the revelational dimension: The God who reveals Himself beyond the creation and outside the realm of cognition equates the great and the small,41 the philosopher and the obtuse one,42 the scientist and the ignoramus, the delicate and the ­insensitive. All of them stand awestruck by the Wondrous Presence,

  From the piyyut “Kol ha-Ma’aminim,” from the High Holidays.   See Pesahim 42a.

41 42



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stunned by the apocalyptic vision, silently waiting to know what God will say. (57)

The advantage of Jewish consciousness lies in the correct blend of natural and revelational religiosity. But only the elites can experience this blend, since natural religiosity in the sense of discovering the traces of God through knowledge of scientific methodology is open only to the superior man. Opposing Christianity, then, with its radical emphasis on the natural religious pole, are the Jewish masses, for whom only the radical pole of revelation exists.43 The middle way of a balanced religious experience characterizes only the perfect and elitist intellectuals. In Halakhic Man, R. Soloveitchik sought to present an isolated type, enclosed in his own halakhic-theoretical world, which he juxtaposes to the open consciousness structure of And From There You Shall Seek. Nevertheless, R. Soloveitchik is ultimately swept into another kind of elitism. As far as elitist detachment from the masses is concerned, And From There You Shall Seek does not balance Halakhic Man but presents a parallel model. Both aspects of this problematic bothered R. Soloveitchik: (1) The Discussion. Christian extremism is contrasted with Jewish extremism concerning the masses, casting doubt on the polemical advantage. (2) The Experience. Substantively, the dialectical religious experience becomes the privilege of individuals and, as such, it is not a characteristic of Judaism as a whole. R. Soloveitchik resolves the loss of his advantage in the polemic with Christianity by resorting to the traditional utilitarian solution: although failing to grant a balanced experience, the masses’ adoption of the revelational model does grant the chosen status of God’s servant and of eternal life. “Man’s right to individuation and to communion with Eternity is clearly not given only to the elite,44 but to the entire community” (58). As for the inability of the masses to have a dialectical experience, R. Soloveitchik solved this problem almost semantically:

43   According to R. Soloveitchik, this clarifies the consecration of asceticism in folk beliefs. 44  In the Hebrew original, benei-aliyah. See Eruvin 71; Sukkah 45b; Sanhedrin 97b. The translation was slightly modified in this quotation.

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the experience of revelation is an experience of “holiness.” R. Soloveitchik presented the revelational experience, which lacks a natural religious dimension, as a general “stereotypical experience” (59). Indeed, this experience does not satisfy the needs of outstanding individuals, but is still “external, exoteric holiness” (59). The experience of revelation is still an experience although it is missing the rich dimension of depth and dialectics. R. Soloveitchik would certainly add that the exclusive imposition of the natural experience exposes the beast in man, whereas the exclusivity of the revelational experience limits and tempers man. Elitism and Halakhists Did these solutions satisfy R. Soloveitchik? Certainly not. Indeed, he exacerbated the problem by expanding it to the realm of Torah ­scholarship: The fulfillment of Halakhah through the continuing activity of performing commandments is given to everyone—it is exoteric from beginning to end. Fulfilling the Halakhah through deep, comprehensive study of the Torah and through bold striving toward the crucible of the universe,45 is given to the elite. In the latter realm, the Vilna Gaon cannot be compared with the Vilna shoemaker or water carrier. Individuals do raise themselves above [the rest of] the Lord’s congregation.46 One lives with the community in the basic performance of the commandments, the basis of religious existence, yet he concurrently communes with his Creator . . . [in the Gate of “Dedicating Our Actions to God,”47] in the enclosed realm of his lonely personality which separates itself from the community.48 (59–60)

A balanced religious experience had so far been confined to intellectuals who control scientific methodology on the one hand, and subordinate themselves to the arbitrary authority of revelation on the other. Now, the balanced experience is within the purview of scholars, the 45   See Hagigah 13a. This formulation recurs, for instance in Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundation of the Torah 2:12. 46  In the Hebrew original “mitnas’im ‘al kehal Adonai,” according to Numbers 16:3. 47   This is Gate (Chapter) Five in Bahya Ibn Pakuda, Duties of the Heart. This model of worship is also found in the description of “those who have apprehended the true realities” at the end of The Guide of the Perplexed. 48  In the Hebrew original “poreshet min ha-tsibbur,” according to Avot 2:4; both versions of Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, and so forth.



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society of learners involved in the “deep, comprehensive study of the Torah.” R. Soloveitchik thus adopts the characteristics of the scholar as he described them in Halakhic Man. The true Torah scholar is also the true scientist.49 The proof is in the implicit allusion to the bitter confrontation between Korah and his followers and Moses (“individuals raise themselves above the Lord’s congregation—why do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?”). The allusion is to the tension that unfolded between the scholars and the masses, the rabbis, the Hasidim and their leaders, and so forth. Although the external experience of revelation is common to the entire public, the dialectical religious experience that fits the structure of the balanced religious experience is available only to the perfect individual. The elitist layer is the layer of halakhic scholars. Clearly, then, only he who merges scholarly excellence and the experience of revelation reaches a full religious experience. (4)  Summary When discussing the structure of Jewish religious consciousness, R. Soloveitchik’s aim was purportedly descriptive. This goal is prominently evident in the exposure of the first subjective stage of consciousness and in the unfolding of the parallel model of the Deity. This descriptive goal, however, does not disguise R. Soloveitchik’s apologetic interest, namely, highlighting the advantage of Jewish religious consciousness over that of the non-Jewish homo religiosus. The advantage of Jewish religious consciousness culminates in two characteristics partially or entirely absent from other Western religions: (1) A revelational consciousness, which results in a detailed law (Halakhah). (2) A balanced dialectic, that is, a correct integration of natural and revelational consciousness. To reiterate: the flaw that follows from the exclusivity of revelational consciousness is extreme asceticism. The flaws that follow from the exclusivity of natural consciousness are: (1) The lack of a set of   See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 8.

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l­imitations and balances; in its extreme form, this flaw leads to the loss of one’s humanity. (2) Its limitation to a restricted circle (elitism and esotericism). The advantage of a Jewish religious consciousness over Christianity in particular is therefore twofold: (1) At the individual level: Balance and restraint of the dialectical experience, which are not possible without revelation and without the model of a Deity of justice. (2) At the collective level: The devaluation of asceticism, but not the loss of humanity. The perfect balance of the dialectic experience appears among halakhic scholars, whose cognition combines the scientific and the halakhic. Contrary to Halakhic Man, however, halakhic cognition here is not exclusive. The revelation experience determines cognition and consciousness as such, and is not part of halakhic cognition. Furthermore: whereas the model of the Deity in Halakhic Man is monolithic, the scholar in And From There You Shall Seek is granted both a model of mercy and a model of justice. The advantage of Judaism is thus easily discernible in the unique structure of its consciousness, which includes movement between diverse cognitions.

Chapter FOUR

CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DEITY (2): TZIMTZUM My analysis now addresses the depth structure of subjective and dialectical religious consciousness, tracing the processes of its development and consolidation. This is the second subjective stage of consciousness, which is actually the third layer of the conscious structure and includes the objective stage. In the description of the depth structure of subjective consciousness and of the conscious processes that create it, R. Soloveitchik goes beyond the Midrash literature that presented the divine attributes of mercy and justice. Here, R. Soloveitchik resorts to the basic terminology of Lurianic Kabbalah. Kabbalah reflects the conception of the Deity that develops at the depth stage of subjective consciousness and, as shown below, the divine model supports the ­processes that evolve within consciousness and grants them “ontological” and metaphysical support.1 Hence, my discussion of the fourth and deep layer of subjective religious consciousness will be preceded by a review of the place of Kabbalah in And From There You Shall Seek. Catharsis Like the external dimension of subjective consciousness, the depth dimension of consciousness is also described as dual: on the one hand, spiritual-emotional activity (fear and attraction in the external layer, awe and love in the internal one), and on the other, the conception of the Deity that crystallizes in consciousness following this activity (justice and mercy in the external layer, tzimtzum and expansion in the internal one). R. Soloveitchik opens Chapter Eight of And From There You Shall Seek, entitled “The Comforted Heart,” as follows:

1   At times, R. Soloveitchik uses kabbalistic terms metaphorically since, as already noted, his focus is on consciousness, that is, on the phenomenological examination of the conception of the Deity and not on the Deity’s ontological dimension.

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chapter four Judaism says that the dichotomy between the quest for God and the revelation of God is only the surface layer in the consciousness of God. When we delve deeper into the complexities of this consciousness, we find an entirely different layer. Both approach and flight are raised in spiritual grandeur and ascend from the depths of nature to the heights of ontological and metaphysical conception. The utilitarian desire for reward and fear of punishment are transformed into love and awe, transcendent mysterious experiences. (61)

Regarding spiritual activity, the diametrically opposed attraction and recoil in the subjective-external layer become love and awe in the deep subjective layer. R. Soloveitchik adopted here the phenomenological model of Rudolf Otto, which deals with the transposition of feelings from other realms to the religious realm.2 For Otto, antithetical feelings of recoil and attraction typical of the connection to the sublime in the aesthetic realm may transmute or awaken the “harmony of opposites” in the religious realm. Aesthetic feeling turns into religious feeling. R. Soloveitchik emphasizes that the desire for reward and the fear of punishment—common to religious consciousness but also to psychological, moral, and aesthetic consciousness—are respectively transformed into love and awe, to be found only in religious consciousness. The “desire for reward and fear of punishment,” therefore, is not comparable to “love and awe,” because the “numinous” realm, to use Otto’s terms to refer to a realm that is exclusively religious, is entirely different from the aesthetic or from any other realm. At the same time, the figure of God that rises out of natural-instinctive feeling is entirely different from the figure of God that rises out of religious feeling.3 R. Soloveitchik assumes that the God of “transcendental mystery” that

  See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 41–42. 3   As noted in the previous chapter, R. Soloveitchik wavered in his description of the mercy-justice dialectic between setting fear and attraction in the existential realm, following existentialist thinkers, and setting them in a unique religious realm, following phenomenologists of religion. Here, R. Soloveitchik presents the “numinous” in Otto’s terms, as characterizing the deep layer of subjective consciousness. Existential descriptions are “relegated” to the subjective-external layer of religious consciousness and become “superficial” feelings and situations. The existential style, therefore, emerges as merely a poetic formulation of feelings specific to religious consciousness. Seemingly, the sole aim of this complicated description is to attest to the infinite dialectic aspects of religious consciousness according to R. Soloveitchik. What he attempts is to present the fundamental structure of religious consciousness as a contrasting mosaic, wherein each component is subject to dialectical fluctuations. For a discussion of the depth structure of subjective consciousness, see below. 2

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evolves in consciousness can be substantively described through the kabbalistic conception of the Deity. Kabbalah in R. Soloveitchik’s Early Writings The connection of R. Soloveitchik’s thought to Kabbalah and to mysticism has already been discussed in the literature, and I have also written on this question.4 My concern in this chapter is the meaning of Kabbalah and mysticism in general in And From There You Shall Seek and, in particular, the notion of tzimtzum [withdrawal] in this work. I begin with a brief discussion of R. Soloveitchik’s general attitude to mysticism, Kabbalah, and Hasidism in his early writings. Two works address these teachings at length: (1) Halakhic Man: the halakhic man of the eponymous work is the “pure” type of the Brisk scholar. Recall that this type represents R. Hayyim Soloveitchik and his sons, R. Moshe and R. Yitzhak Zeev in particular. According to R. Soloveitchik’s perception, a true halakhic man absolutely rejects all varieties of mysticism. The apparent closeness to Habad Hasidism that R. Soloveitchik displays in Halakhic Man was actually intended to emphasize the negative aspects of Hasidism. Between the lines of Halakhic Man is a strong opposition to Jewish mysticism and a perception of it as fraught with danger. (2) And From There You Shall Seek: This work offers a phenomenological description of the religious experience that fluctuates between opposite poles. In And From There You Shall Seek, Kabbalah is not perceived as a doctrine dealing with the ontological dimension of being but as a characteristic of the homo religiosus and as a conscious expression of the fundamental tensions that affect him. At every stage of its evolvement, as noted, religious consciousness develops appropriate models of the Deity, and the model that suits the second subjective stage is the theosophical one of Lurianic Kabbalah. Kabbalah is ­therefore perceived as an authentic expression of religious   See Rivka Horwitz, “R. Soloveitchik’s Attitude toward the Religious Experience and toward Mysticism” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO, 1996), 45–74; Lawrence Kaplan, “Kabbalistic Motifs in Rav Soloveitchik’s Thought: Meaningful or Ornamental?” (in Hebrew), in ibid., 75–93; Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein, (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), ch. 7. 4

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c­ onsciousness.5 In this work, Kabbalah’s status is in no way inferior to that of halakhic man’s knowledge, and both these realms together reveal the structure of religious consciousness. How are Kabbalah and its symbolic system integrated in And From There You Shall Seek? Before dealing with the role of kabbalistic notions such as tzimtzum and expansion in this work, I address the general standing of Kabbalah and mysticism within it, an issue that requires reconsideration of their integration in the study of religious consciousness. The Religious-Phenomenological Method and Kabbalah Fundamentally, as noted, And From There You Shall Seek is a phenomenological discussion of the being and standing of the Jewish and non-Jewish homo religiosus. This discussion seeks to trace the rules of consciousness through the experience of objects. In Scheler’s definition, however, this is not the experience of “contingent facts” (zufälligen Tatsachen), meaning sensorial-real experience, but an experience of essences (intuition).6 Reality itself is uninteresting; the appearance of a real object in consciousness is what evokes the interest of the phenomenologist. Not the study of the world but the study of the conscious experience of the world is the phenomenologist’s concern.7 R. Soloveitchik explicitly writes: “The question of whether the Deity’s connection with the world is transcendent or immanent is irrelevant. Man sometimes attempts to find God within reality, and sometimes beyond it” (8).8 In other words, arguments in And From There You

5   The presentation of Kabbalah as an authentic expression of the religious conscious experience does not tone down R. Soloveitchik’s critical view of mysticism as a whole. See, for instance, William Kolbrener, “No ‘Elsewhere’: Fish, Soloveitchik, and the Unavoidability of Interpretation,” Literature and Theology 10 (1966), 180. 6   Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper, 1960), 201. 7   See, for instance, Fernando Molina, Existentialism as Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), 37; Roger Poole, Towards Deep Subjectivity (New York, Harper and Row, 1972), ch. 4. See also “Introduction,” in Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Daniel Guerriére (Albany, SUNY Press, 1990), 1–15. 8   This approach appeared in Jewish thought about ten years prior to And From There You Shall Seek, in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s work on prophecy. See Fritz A. Rothschild, “Varieties of Heschelian Thought,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought, ed. John C. Merkle (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 97–99.



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Shall Seek have no ontological extra-conscious standing because this is not an issue that concerns R. Soloveitchik in this work.9 These claims are cited only in order to expose the modes of observation and action of the human-religious consciousness that thinks them and abides by it in its actions. R. Soloveitchik’s concern is the way in which Jewish religious consciousness constitutes the various models of the Deity. The ontological postulates denote an essentialist standing, that is, objects and events that consciousness constitutes and perceives. R. Soloveitchik sought the “eidetic reduction” of the phenomena that constitute Jewish thought and the discussion of their essence. In other words, he tried to marginalize reality and focus on the conceptual dimension. He could not, however, present a pure phenomenological analysis of Judaism. A basic phenomenological demand is rooted in what Husserl called epoché (restraint)—the suspension of the positive or negative judgment of extra-conscious reality.10 Judaism precludes such a suspension, since the extra-conscious activity, meaning the authoritative system of commandments, is a primary and necessary extra-­conscious assumption. In R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, the “objective” system of Judaism is a fact that precedes phenomenological research.11 R. Soloveitchik was himself aware of this problematic and did address it, as shown below. In And From There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik is not interested in the opposite orientations of Kabbalah and rational philosophy. The historical appearance of these approaches and the (at times contradictory) truth value of their statements do not interest him, nor do their mutual attitudes. He only focuses his discussion on the ways these approaches expose the religious consciousness of those who think

 9   Obviously, R. Soloveitchik would definitely reject Feuerbach’s view that God is constituted entirely by human consciousness. The plausible assumption is that he adopted the quasi-Kantian and problematic phenomenological model, whereby God is constituted by consciousness but exists outside it, in a parallel to the “thing in itself.” See Steven W. Laycock, “God as the Ideal: The All-of-Monads and the All­Consciousness,” in Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Daniel Guerriére (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 251–252. 10   Scholars have considered at length the connection between epoché and Cartesian doubt and the differences between them. See, for instance, J. N. Mohanty, “The Development of Husserl’s Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 67–68. 11   See Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2008), 24–27.

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them. Hence, the contradictions between these doctrines and others, which are recurrently mentioned in And From There You Shall Seek, do not bother R. Soloveitchik. His concern are questions such as: What does The Guide of the Perplexed attest about Maimonides as a man with a paradigmatic religious consciousness? What does the doctrine of tzimtzum reveal about the experiential-religious consciousness of R. Isaac Luria? In other words, what general religious-conscious component of R. Luria’s consciousness is reflected in the specific doctrine of tzimtzum? Furthermore, how do Maimonidean teachings and Lurianic Kabbalah reflect (dialectical or complementary) relationships of the same consciousness? It is clear to R. Soloveitchik that the teachings of each thinker emphasize a different component of consciousness, or that they have a different intuitive grasp of the same religious component. And From There You Shall Seek, then, was written according to a religious-phenomenological method that is not concerned with real (that is, extra-conscious) empirical questions but with distinctively essential questions. According to R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological method, the various discussions between trends of thought are merely different expressions of the same religious consciousness. In this sense, he followed such approaches as that of Karl Barth, who held that theology deals only with fragments of ideas and formulations from various “angles,” all related to the same subject.12 As phenomenologists do, R. Soloveitchik did not evaluate the ideas and objects of Jewish religious consciousness, nor did he judge them by the criteria of logical and scientific rationalism. Rather, he “observed” them and described them. According to the various approaches and relying on Halakhah as a primary constitutive principle, he sought to reconstruct this ­consciousness. This understanding of R. Soloveitchik’s approach helps to resolve many of the contradictions of And From There You Shall Seek. The reading of Halakhic Man, a work pervaded by incongruities and contradictions, allows us to suggest various explanations of this mode of writing. As I claimed in Religion or Halakhah, the most adequate explanation of this writing style is the socio-political one. According to this explanation, R. Soloveitchik sought to draw the Brisk dynasty closer to modern man, particularly at a time the dimensions of the

12   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, Part I, trans. Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), 293.

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Holocaust were already becoming known. He did this with two aims in mind: the first—to set up a memorial to the Brisk yeshiva and to the other Lithuanian yeshivot that were destroyed. His second aim was to prepare the ground for the restoration of yeshivot in the United States, a task that Orthodox Judaism took upon itself. R. Soloveitchik, therefore, played down the more extreme aspects characteristic of halakhic man.13 By contrast, the most consistent explanation of the contrasting approaches that appear in And From There You Shall Seek is the methodological one. Phenomenology approaches religious consciousness from several perspectives. In this sense, both the anti-philosophical outlook of Yehuda Halevi and the philosophical approach of Maimonides reveal the structure of consciousness, even though in many realms they are mutually antithetical. These opposites and contradictions persist in informative and historical realms but not necessarily within the structure of consciousness. One conscious element may be expressed in two contradictory modes. This is the phenomenological foundation of mysticism in general and of Kabbalah in particular in And From There You Shall Seek. R. Soloveitchik bracketed the empirical world, including metaphysical truths, and focused on their place and meaning within consciousness. In The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik formulated a demand for a phenomenological study of religion and laid the foundation for a comprehensive study of this type. At the same time, he was critical of Husserl’s phenomenology, which was largely oblivious to the objective-practical layer of consciousness. This type of critique, this time against Christianity, recurs in And From There You Shall Seek.14 As noted, R. Soloveitchik holds that a phenomenological study of Judaism must take Halakhah into account as a concrete and objective activity that the essentialist analysis neither can nor should ignore. In a sense, R. Soloveitchik’s critique parallels that of Heidegger, who held that a phenomenological analysis of existence must focus above all on day-to-day life. According to Heidegger, ordinary existence cannot be bracketed.15 R. Soloveitchik argued that no phenomenological analysis is possible without examining concrete halakhic activity. And From   Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 1.   See above, 76–83. 15   See Dorothea Frede, “The Question of Being: Heidegger’s Project,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 54. 13 14

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There You Shall Seek preserves such a framework; Halakhah is the stable element that fits the phenomenological description of consciousness, and also records it, balances it, and anchors it in the concrete world. In this sense, And From There You Shall Seek is compatible with The Halakhic Mind. And yet, metaphysical reality is bracketed: the divine entity and spiritual worlds are judged insofar as they reflect conscious components. This clarification is particularly important in the context of a discussion about the presence of mysticism and Kabbalah in phenomenological analysis since these teachings have, for centuries, preserved metaphysical arguments about the activity within the Deity. The Status of Kabbalah in And From There You Shall Seek Religious consciousness is described in And From There You Shall Seek as a consciousness of oppositions. Three axes of contrasts play a crucial role: (1) Revelational vs. natural.16 (2) Rational vs. mysticalkabbalistic. (3) Subjective vs. objective.17 The status of Kabbalah is dictated by the second pair. R. Soloveitchik holds that the rational pole of consciousness comes to the fore, as mentioned, in two classic philosophical models: (1)  The approach of Hermann Cohen and the Marburg school. (2)  The conventionalist school in the philosophy of science. The common denominator of these two approaches is that both claim that the symbols in use in science do not describe actual-qualitative reality. In The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik found support for this

16   On this pair see, for instance, Yuval Cherlow, And They Shall Become One in Thy Hand: From Dialectic to Harmony in the Teachings of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik (in Hebrew) (Alon Shevut: Tevunot, 2000), 42–51. 17   This model emerges clearly in The Halakhic Mind. See Rainier Munk, The Rationale of Halakhic Man: Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Conception of Jewish Thought (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1996), 63; Eliezer Goldman, “Religion and Halakhah in the Teaching of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), Daat 42 (1999): 126–127; Dov Schwartz, “Concrete Models of Homo Religiosus in R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik Early Thought” (in Hebrew), in Jewish Culture in the Eye of the Storm: A Jubilee Book in Honor of Yosef Ahituv, ed. Avi Sagi and Nahem Ilan (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002), 484–507; idem, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 3.

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view in modern physics, and particularly in quantum mechanics.18 The rational model serves And From There You Shall Seek for the following purposes: (1) To express the limitations of reason in penetrating actual reality, and therefore— (2) The limitations of reason in the quest for the divine presence at the foundation of reality. (3) To represent “Brisk” halakhic scholarship. “Brisk” scholarship, according to R. Soloveitchik’s description, is also a pole in the fluctuation of religious consciousness. For the Brisk halakhic man, scholarship is everything, but And From There You Shall Seek presents an open religious consciousness with different coexisting nuances. Scholarship is therefore one nuance in the consciousness of homo religiosus and, as already noted, R. Soloveitchik had gradually drawn away from the presentation of the rational idealistic pole as an independent world view. The rational pole is a priori driven by the quest for God. Contrary to the rationalist pole, R. Soloveitchik set the mysticalkabbalistic one. Let us return now to the description of the dialectic at the beginning of And From There You Shall Seek (Chapter Two). Just as we seek God through “the system of a priori concepts” (7) that also includes the halakhic cognition resting upon it, so do we search for God through “the ecstasy of the mystical masters” (8). This search conveys involvement in the experience, the “transcendent” in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology.19 Mysticism and Kabbalah, then, are an expression of the experiential involvement that characterizes dialectical religious consciousness. No wonder that R. Soloveitchik referred to the ecstatic aspect as a representation of mysticism, since this aspect is an immediate and faithful expression of the kabbalistic view, not only as abstract theoretical doctrine but also as consciousness and as a way of life. In And From There You Shall Seek, Kabbalah is perceived as one way   See, for instance, William Kolbrener, “Towards a Genuine Jewish Philosophy: Halakhic Mind’s New Philosophy of Religion,” Tradition 30, 3 (1996), 27–29; Norbert M. Samuelson, Revelation and the God of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 131. 19   The mark of Otto’s The Idea of the Holy is strongly evident in the treatment of this question in And From There You Shall Seek. On “experiences of the holy” as an expression of consciousness, see The Idea of the Holy, 143. 18

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of experiencing what is beyond (“transcendental ‘experience’ ” [7]). Moreover, it is also the “sense of absolute dependence; the frustrated yearnings pulsating in man’s spirit; the intuition of a supra-sensible realm” (7–8). In his study of Paul Tillich, Robert Scharlemann drew a distinction between phenomenological and ontological approaches. When describing the experience of “holiness,” the former discuss a specific symbolic object and the experience related to it, whereas the latter deal with all that indeed exists concretely and with the experience related to it.20 Clearly, then, the starting point of R. Soloveitchik’s attitude toward Kabbalah is distinctly phenomenological. Kabbalah is merely the symbolic expression of a conscious-religious component and is discussed as such. R. Soloveitchik is not interested in the ontological-cosmic expressions of mysticism. Kabbalah and Experience Kabbalah attests to a distinct structure of religious consciousness. Contrary to Halakhic Man, which between the lines de-legitimizes Jewish mysticism, And From There You Shall Seek presents mysticism as one of the authentic expressions of Jewish religious consciousness, as shown below, and develops its attitude to it accordingly. The nature of the divine essence, then, becomes uninteresting and even meaningless. The symbols of Kabbalah appear in the following passage: The mystical masters justly taught that the Deity separates itself from the existent, which is imprinted with the stamp of creation and chained by the constraints of objective cosmic necessity, yet at the same time dwells within it as one “who dwells with them in their impurity” (Lev. 16:16). The Shekhinah imbues both object and subject, yet also transcends them. God created the world, and His primordial will exists within it. Malkhut (Kingship) is the name the Kabbalists gave to the Shekhinah hidden within the lawfulness of nature and spirit, but God dwells beyond the limits of reality in infinite eternity. (8)

Evidently, then, the sefirotic tree, from the highest sefirot (“will” denotes Keter, Hokhmah and Binah in several early kabbalistic ­writings)

20   Robert P. Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 60.



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and down to the lowest (Malkhut), reflects a characterization of both objective and subjective existence. Kabbalah functions as a tool for the expression of the fundamental tension that describes religious existence. On the one hand, homo religiosus seeks traces of the Deity in cosmic existence as such, as a divine presence (sefirot); on the other, these traces elude him because God is revealed as transcendent being (Ein-Sof=the Infinite). As R. Soloveitchik noted in a previous comment on precisely the same problem—the standing of the Deity visà-vis the world (transcendence vs. immanence)—“the viewpoint of the individual who searches” (8) is significant beyond the ontological dimension. Clearly, kabbalistic contents assume meaning insofar as they reflect the components of religious consciousness and the religious and experiential needs of the believer.21 In this spirit, R. Soloveitchik opens Chapter Eight of And From There You Shall Seek. His interest in theology focuses on the believer’s consciousness: The antinomy of the attributes of justice and mercy appears in a new guise. On the one hand, God is the Creator of the universe and the cause of all that exists. Man’s primary knowledge is the recognition of the First Existent as that which keeps everything else in existence. Man must know that “the basic principle of all basic principles . . . is to know that there is a First Existent who brought every existing thing into being. All existing things, whether celestial, terrestrial, or belonging to an intermediate class, exist only through His true existence” (Maimonides, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 1:1). True existence is the existence of God. Creation is the issuing forth of something from the bosom of the Infinite. The experience of a separate world that exists aside from God, by itself and in itself, is impossible . . .  It is a bold aspiration to rise from nothingness to the God who bears and carries everything, includes everything, and grants being to everything. “Knowing Himself, He knows everything, for everything is attached to Him, in His being” (Maimonides, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:10).

21   Avi Schweitzer (Sagi), “The Loneliness of the Man of Faith in the Philosophy of Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), Daat 2–3 (1978–1979), 251–255; Dov Schwartz, “The Development of the Concept of Faith in the Philosophy of R. Joseph Dov R. Soloveitchik: From And From There You Shall Seek to The Lonely Man of Faith” (in Hebrew), in On Faith: Studies in the Concept of Faith and its History in Jewish Tradition, ed. Moshe Halbertal, David Kurzweil and Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005).

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chapter four On the other hand, the God who conceals Himself under a protective canopy negates everything: [He is] beyond obscurity,22 separate, elevated and exalted, denying any open or hidden reality that claims the right of independent existence and turning into chaos23 those words that proudly declare, “We exist.” (61–62)

The opening of the chapter places the discussion in the correct light: R. Soloveitchik does not deal with cosmological or kabbalistic contents as such, but with “the consciousness of God” or with the “experience of God” (61). His elaboration and development of these notions are only meant to expose the “depths” of man’s consciousness of the divine. The refined dialectical consciousness described here is discussed at the opening of And From There You Shall Seek, where R. Soloveitchik presents this experience at two levels:24 (1) The attitude of consciousness to objects and events and their interpretation: the seeker of God wishes to enter the concrete world and find the inner divine presence within, but nature is revealed as opaque and impenetrable. (2) The emotional-existential situation: the process of the quest for God is tormenting because it is endless, yet the very existence of this process is pleasurable. R. Soloveitchik relates here to the first tension, which is a cosmic expression of the second, and even expands and modulates this dimension. On the one hand, the concrete, created world has a distinct existence. The divine emanation pervades, as it were, the parallel earthly existence (inner divine presence). On the other hand, God’s absolute and full existence precludes any other parallel existence (a-cosmism). Here too, R. Soloveitchik hints at neo-Platonic and theosophical terminology: the appearance of being is the “issuing forth of something” from the Infinite; the human quest for the divine presence is an attempt to rise from “nothingness,” in R. Soloveitchik’s terms (usually Keter), to God (in this case, Infinity).25 R. Soloveitchik resorts to general 22  In the original Hebrew, stima de-khol stimin, a recurring expression in The Zohar. See for instance, Introduction to The Zohar, 2a; Zohar I on Genesis 45a, 49a; Zohar on Lekh Lekha, 85b. 23   See Zohar I, 89a; Song of Songs Rabbah 1:6, s. v. dimitikh, and so forth. 24   See above, 26–28. 25   The exact meaning of the terms is not essential when describing religious experience. See Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 51–55.



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kabbalistic symbols without rigorous precision or adherence to specific sources. Clearly, then, the kabbalistic symbol serves R. Soloveitchik for a phenomenological description of religious consciousness, including its tensions. To claim that a new chapter in the perception of Kabbalah opens up in Jewish Orthodoxy would not be mistaken. R. Soloveitchik’s approach moves far beyond the allegorical view of mysticism, which reflects a centuries-old hermeneutical tradition. This allegorical view presents processes unfolding within the Deity as human impressions, although these processes do not necessarily take place in reality. Nevertheless, supporters of this outlook approach kabbalistic symbolism as a description of Divine Providence and of its mark in the world and in the soul. From their perspective too, kabbalistic contents involve a distinctive, albeit indirect, statement about the Deity. By contrast, R. Soloveitchik saw this symbolism as a description of the dispositions of religious consciousness according to religious-phenomenological tradition. He does not pretend to see in these symbols any positive statement about the Deity. What we have here, then, is a critical and essential anthropological shift of the kabbalistic contents. This shift is often evident in R. Soloveitchik’s conception of tzimtzum. And Again: Tzimtzum The conscious tension was found to entail a cosmic dimension—the existence of a world beside God on one side, and its annihilation on the other. The resolution of this tension lies in the conceptions of tzimtzum and of the breaking (shevirah). R. Soloveitchik presents this kabbalistic doctrine as follows: A separate universe that exists in contradistinction to God is based on a mysterious act of withdrawal (tzimtzum) of the true, one, and only Being, on the Creator distancing Himself from His creation. In the presence and infinite expansion of the Creator there is no place for a creature to exist, since the infinite swallows up and annihilates the finite. This is a mathematical equation, because Infinity+Finitude=Infinity, for what can be added to infinity? Man’s aspiration to achieve complete being, which is fulfilled by coming as close as possible to the source of being, to the Infinite, leads man to eradicate his finite being by cleaving to the Infinite. (63) The Kabbalah has revealed to us the secret of the breaking of the vessels and the story of the seven “kings” (from Hesed, lovingkindness, to Malkhut, kingdom) who ruled and “died” because they were unable “to

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chapter four tolerate the light that spread within them from sefirah to sefirah” (Etz Hayyim of R. Hayyim Vital, Sha‘ar ha-Kelalim).26 Covering the lights streaming from the Infinite makes it possible for worlds to exist. The divine separateness protects being. The tension of love turns into the tension of awe and anxiety. Running toward Him is transformed27 into recoil from Him. (64)

Tzimtzum, then, presents the Deity as the pole of hiding (ontologicalcosmic), which is reflected in the pole of awe and fear (at the personality level). The departure of the Infinite in the process of tzimtzum turns God into what Otto called the “wholly other,” which transcends cognition and is alien to its rational foundations.28 At the same time, tzimtzum presents the Deity as the pole of discovering worlds down to the most “earthly” level where the breaking took place, and thus also as a pole of mercy and lovingkindness (at the level of the personality). God’s mercy enables the existence of the worlds. In sum: tzimtzum is the origin of the expansion of the worlds. The distinction between And From There You Shall Seek and Halakhic Man is immediately evident in their sources for the notion of tzimtzum. The tzimtzum conception in Halakhic Man is based on Habad sources.29 The cosmogonic realistic meaning, therefore, is not the basis for discussion in Halakhic Man or, at least, does not play an essential role in this work. By contrast, in the present description, R. Soloveitchik relied above all on R. Hayyim Vital, although he did not refrain from mentioning the views of R. Schneur Zalman of Liady.30 In this passage, tzimtzum implies the actual withdrawal of the Infinite “into itself ” so that the worlds might be created: “God ‘constricted’ His glory in order to create the world, leaving an open, empty ‘space [makom] in the middle’—that is, the act of creation is composed of separation and advance. God separated Himself from the world when He had the idea of creating it” (172, note 12). The study of religious consciousness that concerns And From There You Shall Seek includes also the cosmogonic and cosmological aspect of tzimtzum, and one   Chapter 1, 5b.   The meaning of this term is described below in this chapter. 28   See Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 25. 29   See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 180–182. I intend to show elsewhere that Habad Hasidism also shows a distinction between the first (actual) tzimtzum and the other (metaphorical) ones, but R. Soloveitchik does not appear to have insisted on a meticulous distinction. 30   Note 12, 172–175. On the terms below see, for instance, Isaiah Tishbi, The Doctrine of Evil and the Kelippah in Lurianic Kabbalism (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984). 26 27



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could even claim that it views the allegorical dimension as marginal. Specifically, the controversy that erupted between R. Yosef Irgas and R. Emmanuel Hai Riki on the allegorical or concrete nature of tzimtzum lacks any essential value in R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenology. What is the source of the distinction between the view of tzimtzum in Halakhic Man and the parallel view in And From There You Shall Seek? In Halakhic Man, R. Soloveitchik discusses tzimtzum from a Habad perspective, since a dialogue between a “classic” kabbalist and a Brisk scholar is not possible, and a dialogue between an adherent of Hasidism who is not a Habad follower and a halakhic man is definitely out of the question. The languages and the meanings that these two types use are diametrically different. By contrast, the intellectual Habad approach to Kabbalah in general, and the value that this Hasidic group ascribes to Torah study, do enable it some connection, even if not an essential one, to the world of scholarship. According to the Habad interpretation, tzimtzum is not the actual constriction of the primordial divine light but only its covering.31 This interpretation inclines to an allegorical view of tzimtzum. By contrast, And From There You Shall Seek deals with a diversified religious consciousness, in all its expressions and dimensions. The discussion of tzimtzum, therefore, involves both a cosmogonic-mythical sense and an allegorical sense, as different dimensions of religious consciousness. The ontological and process implications of tzimtzum do not as such interest the author of And From There You Shall Seek. R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological inquiry into the paths of religious consciousness “brackets” these implications and discusses consciousness as such. Tzimtzum in Halakhic Man also describes a number of processes in cognition (according to “Brisk” authorities) and in existence (according to Habad). In And From There You Shall Seek, however, tzimtzum reflects a fundamental tension in religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik therefore emphasizes the contrary aspects ensuing from tzimtzum—the threatening hidden Deity as well as the God of mercy that enables closeness and the existence of the worlds. Through the phenomenological approach, R. Soloveitchik was able to find similarities between Maimonides and R. Isaac Luria. Both adopted the model of conjunction with and recoil from God as a 31   Y. Jacobson, “The Doctrine of Creation in the Thought of R. Schenour Zalman of Lyadi” (in Hebrew), Eshel Beer-Shevah: Studies in Jewish Thought, 1 (1976): 307–339; Yehoshua Glassman, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (MA Thesis: Bar-Ilan University, 2007). Yet see above, note 31.

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reflection of cosmic integration and separation. Such a model appears in Maimonides in the microcosm conception (the human being as a “small world”).32 In R. Luria, it appears as the theory of tzimtzum and expansion (172–175, note 12). A view of human beings as a microcosm brings them closer to the Deity embodied in the universe (love and yearning), whereas recognition of the infinite divine wisdom within the universe causes fear, recoil, and retreat. According to R. Luria, tzimtzum (the source of the Or Makif [surrounding light]) leads to a consciousness of awe, whereas the divine presence in the worlds after their creation (Or Penimi [inner light])—and even before, in the process of breaking the vessels—leads to a consciousness of love. Both the Maimonidean and the kabbalistic outlooks preserve the character of the “numinous,” in Otto’s terms, as a “mysterium tremendum” that “at the same time exercises a supreme ‘fascination.’ ”33 The parallel between the Maimonidean and the Lurianic views is evident in the following table: Maimonides Conceptual Basis Microcosm

R. Isaac Luria Tzimtzum

Closeness Pole (Cosmic)

The microcosm (man) feels close to the macrocosm

Distance Pole (Cosmic)

Recognition of divine wisdom Surrounding light as reflected in the macrocosm (“surrounds the world”)

Distance and Closeness Poles (Conscious)

Love and awe Union and separation

Inner light (“fills the world”)

Love and awe Union and separation

Union and Conjunction Tzimtzum conveys a tension of distance and closeness at the cosmic level. This tension, when translated into subjective feelings and sensa-

32   Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed I:72. See also Alexander Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 1–40. 33   Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 41.



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tions, emerges as love and awe. Yet, there is an additional conscious link in this tension, a cosmic link intimated in the above passage: union and fusion vs. separation and isolation. The world is annihilated when faced with the all-embracing and all-penetrating Deity, yet the Deity “departs” and lets the world live. R. Soloveitchik distinguished between the two conscious links in the terms “instinctive consciousness” (love and awe) and “ontological consciousness” (assimilation and separation): The creation’s cleaving to the Creator involves the abrogation of the self as well as of the world’s independence. It is a submerging of the finite in the infinite. The world exists when it folds up inside itself. It loses its existence when it breaks out of its circle (and moves) toward God. The fear of the annihilation of being is interwoven with the yearning for the elevation of being, a yearning that is fulfilled by coming closer to God. The spirit that longs for its divine lover wraps itself34 in the grandeur of His might.35 It turns, fades, and disappears into the terrible Infinity that fills everything and surrounds everything, that causes everything and outlasts everything.36 (63)

Phenomenologists of religion, like Niebuhr and Tillich,37 characterized mystic union as the “destruction of the self.”38 “[Mystics] aspired to overcome the variety and uniqueness of man’s personality, recommending the negation of people’s variegated mental and physical existence for the sake of attaining pure, simple unity with no objective content” (87). R. Soloveitchik too, like the philosophers noted above, tries to draw a distinction between mysticism’s blurring of the self and a balanced course that merges love and awe (67). This matter is considered at greater length below, in the analysis of R. Soloveitchik’s discussion of the conjunction ideal.39 34  In the original Hebrew mit‘alefet, meaning covered according to Abraham Ibn Ezra’s exegesis; others read it also as suggesting an embellishment). See Song of Songs 5:14. It could also mean fainting (according to Yonah 4:8). 35  In the original Hebrew, be-hadar ge’on uzo, from the amidah prayer for Rosh Hashanah, according to Isaiah 2:19, 21. See also Hekhalot 8:1, 9:5 (according to Batei Midrashot). 36   See Genesis 2:13; Genesis Rabbah 69:5. 37   Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 83. See, for instance, Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Noonday Press, 1955). 38   Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 112. R. Soloveitchik pointed to this work as the source for several of his ideas. 39   See below, ch. 7.

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The phenomenology of religion offers several models of union.40 For instance, the model that blurs the separation of subject and object implies that, at the time of union, the subject loses its objective dimension and communion is complete; following it, it goes back to be an object. Another model presents awareness of the objective model at the time of the union and is closer to the conjunction idea that Gershom Scholem considered the ideal summit of kabbalistic literature.41 R. Soloveitchik deals with the cosmic dimension of conjunction, which serves as a basis for the complex consciousness of simultaneous love and awe. He adopts a synthetic model of consciousness, which preserves the subject-object tension during conjunction as well: the consciousness of full and absolute union merges with the theistic consciousness of preservation of the object. Transformation and Ontology The divine models of tzimtzum and expansion enable R. Soloveitchik to describe in accurate terms the spiritual-conscious expression of the depth layer. At the surface stage of subjective consciousness, a tension emerges between fear and attraction. This tension, as noted, shaped the divine model of mercy and justice. The dialectic is distinct, and its poles are evident. By contrast, at the depth stage of subjective consciousness, love and awe appear. Is this “only” a refinement of fear and attraction, an elevation and purification of instinctive feelings, or is this perhaps a new conscious reality? In other words: is this a cathartic move of the dialectic, or does perhaps an entirely new type of dialectic appear? Consider some of R. Soloveitchik’s claims cited above: The Kabbalah has revealed to us the secret of the breaking of the vessels and the story of the seven “kings” (from Hesed, lovingkindness, to Malkhut, kingdom) who ruled and “died” because they were unable “to tolerate the light that spread within them from sphere to sphere.”42 . . . Covering the lights streaming from the Infinite makes it possible for worlds to exist. The divine separateness protects being. The tension of love

40   See, for instance, Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 154–159. 41   Moshe Idel conveys his opposition to this view at length in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), chs. 3 and 4. 42   R. Hayyim Vital, Etz Hayyim, Sha‘ar ha-Kelalim (Warsaw, 1890), ch. 1, 5b.



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turns into the tension of awe and anxiety. Running toward Him is transformed into recoil from Him. Love stands up here to its fullest height and is freed from the instinctual longings of man, a living creature who is concerned about its reward. It takes the form of the eternal love of the creature for its Creator, of being for its source. Even the recoil is delivered from the straits of the instinctual fear of a hunted animal and becomes an expanse of spiritual awe filled with unrealizable longing and desire. This love is rooted not in man’s instinctual but his ontological consciousness. The spirit fears God because it is impossible for it to exist in his presence. It loves God and runs after him because it is impossible for it to exist without Him, outside of Him. (64–65)

Clearly, then, whereas feelings in the subjective-surface layer of consciousness are discrete—recoil and attraction—in the subjective-depth layer they bind together (or, in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, from an “instinctive consciousness” into an “ontological consciousness”). Although love and awe can be defined and characterized separately as fear and longing, in consciousness they are transformed into one another. In the depth layer of consciousness, awe is transformed into love and love into awe. How? Because the ontological dimension of consciousness of the Deity enters the picture. The lover understands that the object of his love must be covered, since its exposure would result in the annihilation of being. The lover values the great sacrifice of the object of love. This insight, although the product of a cover leading to anxiety, intensifies the love. Hence, awe is indeed love: love turns into awe, which intensifies the love. And vice-versa: awe relies on the “ontological” fact of the distance from God—tzimtzum, expansion, and emanation in the empty space. Paradoxically, this very fact leads to an intensified yearning for the distancing God (“unrealizable longing and desire”). Awe, then, turns into love. The “inner light” and the “surrounding light” fuse with one another. In the deep subjective layer, feelings meld and turn into one consciousness. R. Soloveitchik presented another type of dialectic: in the deep subjective layer of consciousness, the dialectic is not a fluctuation between two discrete poles. In this layer, dialectic means a transformation of the poles, that is, they transmute into one another. Love becomes awe and awe becomes love. The unified dimension of the dialectic differs now from the fluctuations between mercy and justice, and between attraction and recoil. The dialectic of the deep-subjective layer is in the middle, between correlation and unification. On the one hand, it is correlative; despite the transformation of love into awe and awe into love, the presence and identity of these feelings remain untouched.

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They do not disappear even in their mutual transformations. On the other hand, the experience of melding feelings prevails in subjective consciousness; love is awe, and vice-versa. This complex description of consciousness can also be presented as a mid-position between conjunction and union. In a certain sense, this is the expression of a Hegelian dialectic that assumes a mutual transformation of the poles up to a synthesis. In a complex way, R. Soloveitchik internalized Otto’s principle of transformation in the two stages of development of subjective consciousness: (1) Transformation of layers. Recoil and attraction transform into awe and love (from the subjective-external layer to the subjectiveinternal one): love of reward transmutes into pure love;43 “external” awe and love transmute into “inner” love and awe.44 R. Soloveitchik engages in a lengthy attempt (65–66) to clarify that transformation does not blur the instinctual-material layer. Primeval fear does transform into awe and sensorial longing for love, but without ignoring the “animal” dimension in human beings. Between the lines, R. Soloveitchik continues the polemic with Christianity. The concrete, instinctive, and material dimension is present in consciousness, although consciousness has risen to transcendent heights. The material dimension cannot be ignored or shattered, as Christianity had sought to do, but only refined. “The spirit cannot fly up to the heavens if the animal in man is sunk in the mud” (65); “It is impossible for this awe to develop, however, it if is not preceded by fear” (176, note 13). (2) Transformation of opposites. Awe is transformed into love and love into awe. Emotional dispositions meld together, that is, contrasts

43   R. Soloveitchik illustrated this principle through Maimonides’ view (177–178, note 14). His presentation of Maimonides’ argument suggests that, at the first stage, man sees the world to come as a heteronomous reward he receives from God for his righteousness. At the second stage, he discerns that the world to come is a state derived from his state in material life. The intellect that developed in material life survives after death through a distinctly natural process. The world to come is entirely autonomous. See Dov Schwartz, Messianism in Medieval Jewish Thought (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1997; second revised edition, 2005), 72–74. The desire for reward, then, develops into intellectual knowledge as unconditional love. 44   R. Soloveitchik resorts to the distinction of R. Isaiah (Halevi Ish-) Horowitz between external awe and love as opposed to inner awe and love (177, note 14), and seeks its source in early Midrash. On the complexity of this approach see Jacob Elbaum, Repentance and Self-Flagellation in the Writings of the Sages of Germany and Poland 1348–1648 (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 206–209.

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turn into acceptance and inner unity. This unity is a unity of opposites that become transformed into one another. “Fear and love are mutually contradictory, but awe and love do not negate each other. On the contrary, they are entwined with each other.” Awe “is a love fierce as death,45 that sometimes takes the form of silent suffering” (67).46 Finally, note that the “ontological” dimension of the consciousness involving a union of feelings and their transformation emerges not only in mysticism but also in the epistemic Aristotelian-Maimonidean conception of the union of knowledge, knower, and known discussed below.47 From the current phenomenological discussion, it is already clear that Maimonidean rationalism and Lurianic Kabbalah are discussed in parallel as different dimensions of the quest for conjunction and union. Halakhic Records The ontological models, then, expose the complex and dialectical structure of religious consciousness that, through this description, emerges as a process. Although consciousness does not, at this stage, deliver itself entirely to full union, conscious transformations suggest a borderline association with union and fusion. On the margins, R. Soloveitchik does intimate that “love-desire” (177, note 14)—meaning total devotion and complete absorption within the Deity—are the hidden longing of the servant of God. And yet, although And From There You Shall Seek tends to point to a transformation whereby awe does unite with love, awe does not entirely disappear. R. Soloveitchik’s efforts to formulate the dialectic of conscious transformation are also evident at the end of Chapter Nine. This chapter is entirely devoted to the halakhic documentation of the special dialectic. R. Soloveitchik relies on several examples:

 In the original Hebrew azah ka-mavet, according to Song of Songs 8:6.   The claim “there is no love where there is fear, or fear where there is love, except with relation to God Himself ” (Sifrei, Deut. 32; and see Midrash Tannaim on Deuteronomy), which R. Soloveitchik cites in note 14, points to the fusion of poles or to the metamorphosis of emotional reactions in the divine sphere. In other words, the depth structure of subjective consciousness is discernible already in ancient Midrash. Nevertheless, the power of Lurianic Kabbalah enabled R. Soloveitchik to apply this unification to religious consciousness in general, and not only to the Deity. 47   See below, 131–141. 45 46

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(1) Maimonides’ commandments to love and stand in awe (Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:1–2; 70–71).48 (2) The linguistic pattern of blessings, which begin in second-person (“Blessed are Thou . . .”) and shift to third person (“His word”) (71). (3) The Kedushah (Sanctification prayer), which shifts from “His presence fills all the earth!” (Isaiah 6:3) to “Blessed is the Presence of the Lord, from His place!” (Ezekiel 3:12) (72) The first, “Maimonidean,” example reflects the emotional poles (love and awe), whereas in the last two examples, R. Soloveitchik explicitly points to two “ontological” poles: an immanent vs. a transcendent God. R. Soloveitchik, then, moves in his halakhic examples from emotional experiential consciousness to consciousness of the Deity, or to divine models that crystallize in the wake of feelings. The wording of the Kedushah, which is anchored in early mystical literature,49 is apparently the link to the kabbalistic “ontological” dimension. R. Soloveitchik again tied Maimonidean conceptions to mysticism, as two different sources for the phenomenological study of religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik aims to remind the reader that sinking into the deep subjective dimension of consciousness has no detrimental effect on the conscious sequence. Objective elements, that is, practical Halakhah, are no more than a reflection of the various subjective dimensions. Halakhah records both the emotional and the divine dimensions, that is, the divine models that develop in consciousness. At the end of his discussion of these halakhic examples, he writes: The love fierce as death joins the great awe. The force drawing the person toward the wondrous supernatural joins the force pushing the person back to the circumscribed system of nature; the cleaving of ecstatic desire permeates the withdrawal of awe, and an animating joy bursts froth from the silent agony of insignificance. The man of God, who is

  See Howard Kreisel, Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 225–266. 49   See I. Gruenwald, “The Song of the Angels, the ‘Qedushah’ and the Composition of the ‘Hekhalot’ Literature” (in Hebrew), in Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period: Abraham Schalit Memorial Volume, ed. A. Oppenheimer, U. Rappaport, M. Stern (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 1981), 459–481; Meir Bar-Ilan, The Mysteries of Jewish Prayer and Hekhalot (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1987). 48



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halakhic man,50 turns to and fro in his dialectic consciousness and discourse, caught fast in a thicket of opposites, without the possibility of escape or refuge. “The reward is in proportion to the suffering” (Avot 5:27); the worship of the heart is in accordance with the laceration of the heart.51 (73)

R. Soloveitchik fluctuates between fusion and unification as opposed to correlation, where feelings preserve their independent existence despite their transformation (love and awe). “Desire” transforms into “awe” and “joy bursts forth from the silent agony,” but the separation and the distinction between the feelings remains. The wavering between the absolute unity of feelings and their correlation is supported by the “ontological” model of the Deity: “God’s coming closer to the world and, at the same time, separating Himself from it, and there is no distinguishing one from the other” (72). If we were to judge R. Soloveitchik’s style by strict rational criteria, we would find that his statements are mutually incompatible and lacking consistency, suggesting a desperate attempt to describe contradictory moods that are not amenable to descriptive constructs. Many phenomenologists of religion, such as Rudolf Otto and Evelyn Underhill, were largely successful in describing religious-dialectical consciousness. From another direction, the various dimensions and degrees that Kierkegaard pointed out in the dialectic (paradoxes and “absolute paradoxes”)52 also left a mark in R. Soloveitchik’s writing, although his concern in And From There You Shall Seek is essentialist rather than concrete-existentialist. The message of And From There You Shall Seek, however, is precisely that. The radical dialectical character of consciousness according to R. Soloveitchik is complex and extremely nuanced: opposition within opposition and contradiction within contradiction. There is no stage in consciousness—from the

50   Halakhic man refers here to one in whose religious consciousness, the objective dimension is based on the divine halakhic command. This meaning of the term is entirely different from the meaning of the term in R. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983). R. Soloveitchik uses almost the same formulation in Halakhic Man (3–4) because halakhic man in the Brisk sense began his course according to the consciousness described in And From There You Shall Seek. At a later stage, he develops an entirely different, one-dimensional consciousness. See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 27. 51   BT Ta‘anit 2a; Mekhilta de-Rashbi 23, 25. The translation was slightly modified in this quotation. 52   See Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London, Routledge and Paul, 1982), 108– 109.

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objective and up to the subjective layers—without oppositions, fluctuations, and active processes. The writing style, therefore, is also dialectical, and wavers from one statement to another. A consistent description of such a consciousness is impossible. In its very recording and perpetuation of these oppositions, Halakhah institutionalizes complex dialectical consciousness. The uniqueness of Judaism, then, is not exhausted in the radicalization of the dialectic. The strong concrete-objective dimension of religious-Jewish consciousness (namely, Halakhah) is what makes this turbulent consciousness unique and, paradoxically, grants it stability. Jewish Mysticism and the Homo Religiosus: And From There You Shall Seek and The Halakhic Mind In this chapter, I dealt with the ontological basis that Kabbalah offers the description of religious consciousness. Implicit in R. Soloveitchik’s discussion in Halakhic Man is a strong criticism of mysticism, including both Kabbalah and Hasidism. Due to its deep respect for scholarship, Habad plays an important role in these discussions as the interlocutor of the Brisk scholars. In And From There You Shall Seek, mysticism is an authentic and dynamic expression of religious-Jewish consciousness. This generalized consciousness is not confined to a specific interpretation and, therefore, R. Soloveitchik need not resort to Habad Hasidism as a special partner to the dialogue. In The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik claims that the modern homo religiosus,53 who calls for the independence of religious cognition and its separation from other cognitions, is not “the naïve believer who, when confronted with reality, turns to mysticism and non-rationality.”54 Mysticism is perceived as the diametrical opposite of cognitive-rational cognition and the epistemological act, and homo religiosus is unwilling to renounce the various options of religious cognition. In his view, faith does not require the abandonment of “critical reasoning.” Although R. Soloveitchik makes the analysis of the consciousness of homo religiosus explicitly contingent on recourse to Jewish mysticism as well,

53   This term is borrowed from Scheler who defined him, inter alia, as “the man who has God in his heart and God in his action” (Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 127). 54   The Halakhic Mind, 44.

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he does emphasize that “objectification reaches its highest expression in the Halakhah”55 and not necessarily in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. The strong criticism of Kabbalah implicit in Halakhic Man may also have left a mark on R. Soloveitchik in The Halakhic Mind. In any event, R. Soloveitchik does apply himself in And From There You Shall Seek to the reconstruction56 of subjective religious consciousness and relies on the set of sources noted, including kabbalistic and Hasidic ones. Clearly, then, R. Soloveitchik sees Jewish mysticism as a legitimate expression of Jewish religion. Contrary to R. Soloveitchik’s attitude to medieval Jewish philosophy in The Halakhic Mind, which was mixed and complex, his attitude to mysticism in And from There You Shall Seek (at this stage) remains solid.57 Summary Mysticism, Kabbalah, and Hasidism are a crucial axis in the description of the consciousness of homo religiosus in And From There You Shall Seek. Mysticism plays an important role in determining the relationship of closeness and rejection between God and man. R. Soloveitchik, however, is not as yet caught into the mystification of Judaism.58 An important distinction prevails between And From There You Shall Seek and Halakhic Man: the Brisk halakhic cognition of halakhic man rejects mysticism or ignores it; by contrast, the consciousness of homo religiosus views practical Halakhah (as opposed to the “theoretical” Halakhah that reflects the Brisk method of study) as the qualification, regulation, and channeling of mystical-kabbalistic contents. This is the

 Ibid., 85.   “Active participation in the work of reconstructing the content of revelation is the goal of Judaism” (And From There You Shall Seek, 149). On the conception of reconstruction, see Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 47–49, 62–71; Daniel Rynhold, Two Models of Jewish Philosophy: Justifying One’s Practices (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 48–100. 57  In The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik criticizes medieval Jewish philosophy as highly influenced by foreign sources (The Halakhic Mind, 100). By contrast, in And From There You Shall Seek, he refers to this philosophy as “the holy philosophy of the medieval Jewish sages” (180, note 15). 58   See, for instance, the description of the messianic vision: “The people of Israel do not pray for the world to be annihilated, as the mystics do, but for it to be repaired” (And From There You Shall Seek, 105). 55 56

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cognition that is described at length in And From There You Shall Seek. According to R. Soloveitchik, mysticism enables the understanding of the complex dialectic structure of subjective religious-Jewish consciousness. He presents two types of dialectical approaches. On the one hand, consciousness is dialectical in the sense of oscillating between two poles, when the divine (or “ontological” in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology) model that suits this kind of oscillation is that of the attributes (mercy and justice). On the other hand, consciousness is dialectical in the transformative sense of the transmutation of feelings (love into awe and awe into love). The divine model that consciousness develops in support of the transformative movement is the kabbalistic model (tzimtzum and expansion). Nevertheless, when we follow the descriptions of the divine model and the religious-subjective consciousness that underlies it, we find that dialectics in the sense of fluctuation is still present in the transformative event as well. The transformation of feelings does not lessen the fluctuation between them. By way of conclusion, a brief description of the dominant philosophical trend in R. Soloveitchik’s works from the 1940s and until the mid-1950s is in place. In And From There You Shall Seek, as emphasized above, the phenomenological method does not deal with the extra-conscious concrete dimension of philosophical and kabbalistic theories. Rather, its concern is to note the contribution of these theories to the exposure of the structure of religious consciousness and the various expressions of its components. R. Soloveitchik, however, does not propose in his early thought a clear statement about the structure of the philosophical or kabbalistic world and, instead, the religiousphenomenological approach becomes his sole interest.

CHAPTER FIVE

CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DEITY (3): COGNITION And from There You Shall Seek traces the development of religiousJewish consciousness. Poetically, and in great detail, R. Soloveitchik has so far presented the first two layers of consciousness: the objective layer, including facts, historical events (revelation), norms, and practical commands, and the subjective layer, which begins with dialectical fluctuations between natural and revelational consciousness and between the models of the God of justice and the God of mercy, and ends in the transformation of consciousness according to the tzimtzum model. From Chapter Ten and until the end of And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik deals with the third, deepest, and most fundamental layer of consciousness, which is the second subjective layer.1 The “objective” parallel of this stage, that is, the ethos and the commandments that reflect it, is the imitation of and conjunction with God. At the summit of conjunction, prophecy also appears, and prophecy too is perceived as an extra-conscious commandment. The central and essential characteristic of the third stage is the absence of dialectical fluctuations. Ostensibly, this stage is one of fusion and unification. In this layer, consciousness develops a new and homogeneous image of the Deity, which relies entirely on cognitive modes and on the identification between contemplative and practicalethical cognition. R. Soloveitchik used Maimonidean epistemology, meaning the knowledge-knower-known formulation, to consolidate the model of the Deity at the third stage. The various interpretations that R. Soloveitchik offers for this model, based on both epistemic idealist and phenomenological traditions, help to clarify the union between God and man, who meet through knowledge of the world and its rules. In this discussion, R. Soloveitchik often reflects the flux of religious consciousness between the panentheistic outlook, which assumes a divine presence concretely involved in the world, and the

1

  See below, 123–124.

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theistic outlook, which supports a view of God as an external cause without any presence or inner drive in the concrete world. (1)  Imitation and Communion: A Phenomenological-Conceptual Discussion R. Soloveitchik describes the shift from imitation (imitatio Dei) to conjunction, as noted, as a shift from the dialectical to the unified dimension of consciousness. At the imitatio Dei stage, consciousness balances the various opposites (love and awe), whereas at the conjunction stage, it dispenses with opposites and becomes homogeneous (only love). On closer scrutiny, the structure of consciousness will obviously present a far more complex picture. Between the lines, contradictions and antitheses appear also at the unified stage of consciousness, and R. Soloveitchik himself was not entirely convinced, as it were, of the existence of a “pure” unified layer. Nevertheless, the model shifting from dialectics to union and harmony is the one he relies upon until the end of And from There You Shall Seek. Imitatio Dei The notion of imitatio Dei, “be thou like Him,”2 is perceived as a halakhic principle recording the tension between natural and revelational consciousness. R. Soloveitchik particularly emphasized the contrast between the freedom typical of natural consciousness and the coercion and necessity typical of revelational consciousness. The principle of imitatio Dei as perpetuating the conscious tension is described at length in the following passage: Between the two poles of aspiration for full moral freedom—which bursts forth and rises up3 from man’s yearning for God—and human 2   See, for example, Sifrei on Deuteronomy, 49; Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael 15:2; TB Shabbat 133b. Aristides’ testimony confirms that this is a normative principle. See Arthur Marmorstein, Studies in Jewish Theology: The Arthur Marmorstein Memorial Volume, ed. J. Rabinowitz and M. S. Lew (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 113. On imitatio Dei as a meta-halakhic principle see Shalom Rosenberg, “And Walk in His Ways” (in Hebrew), in Israeli Philosophy, ed. Moshe Halamish and Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv: Papyrus, 1983), 72–91. 3  In the Hebrew original, ha-boka‘at ve-‘olah, according to M. Ohalot 6:6; 7:1, and more.



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subjugation and surrender to the divine decree, a decree that is imposed on man willy-nilly when he tries to escape from God, we find the desire to imitate God as a solution to the contradiction between moral freedom and subjugation.4 The principle of imitatio Dei gives expression, on the one hand, to the terrible despair of the helpless man who is unable to realize his ideal— conjunction with God—which will grant him total and absolute freedom. A note of tzidduk ha-din, justification of the divine decree, is present in the idea of imitating God. Man surrenders himself to the blind, impervious fate that separates him from fulfilling his only hope of attaining his freedom through communion with God, saying, “Even though I cannot attain conjunction with Him, I may be able to imitate Him.” The act of imitation contains a confession of failure5 in his arrogant attempt to achieve total conjunction with God; if he were able to do so, there would be no need to imitate Him. Yet, on the other hand, man makes use of the idea of imitatio Dei in order to allow a supernatural decree to be grasped as a free intellectual experience and clothe it in the glory and majesty6 of spontaneous human freedom. In this situation, the unexplained revelational decree is blended with creative normative consciousness, turning into purpose-filled moral commandments.7 It seems to the man of God that the revelational command, which was imposed on him by coercion, was actually born in total freedom, out of the continual aspiration for ascent—from the darkness of natural opaque reality to the level of intelligible reality. If it is impossible for man to join with God and thus to become a partner in the act of creation, he can at least imitate Him by emulating His deeds, which symbolize total freedom. (75–76)

Imitatio Dei exposes the dual dialectical processes of consciousness (shifts and transmutation), implying conscious fluctuations. On the one hand, imitation expresses a negative aspect—the separation from God—since one in communion with God has no need for imitation. On the other, imitation enables acceptance of the arbitrary divine command as rational. It bears emphasis that R. Soloveitchik is not referring to reasons for the commandments in the sense that many 4   R. Soloveitchik used the term moral both in the sense of a set of rules (an “ethical code”) and in the sense of behavior, action, and ethos. Thus, for instance, the divine attributes are “moral acts—attributes that require man to adapt his actions to them” (187, note 16). R. Soloveitchik further clarified that ethical behavior has a purposive dimension. “Moral subjugation” reflects the Kantian view of morality as subordination to the rational command. 5   See, for instance, Tosefta Bava Bathra 10:1; TB Gittin 40b, 64a; TB Kiddushin 65b, and so forth. 6  In the Hebrew original, lehalbishah hod ve-hadar, according to Psalms 104:1. 7   See note 4 above.

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Jewish scholars had assigned to this term, that is, rational and normative argumentation. He is not supporting Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, or Samson Raphael Hirsch. In his view, imitatio Dei reverses the situation from arbitrariness to rationality and voluntary acceptance. Revelation is an arbitrary event regarding time, place, and contents, and the one who experiences it is passive. By contrast, imitatio Dei can be explained as halakhic autonomy. We come to resemble God, so to speak, as free creators, as partners to the origin of law. R. Soloveitchik used autonomous Kantian ethics to convey the advantage of imitation, and observance of the commandments henceforth denotes freedom and creativity. Again, we see the difference between And from There You Shall Seek and Halakhic Man, whose consciousness too is a consciousness of freedom from which the commandment is derived. Halakhic man feels as a creator of worlds because the commandment follows from his consciousness, just as mathematical developments derive from axioms and basic propositions. This ideal type creates the fundamental structures of halakhic thought, and the various commandments follow from and are detailed out of these structures. In the act of re-creating the halakhic structures, halakhic man is a partner to divine cognition. The freedom of halakhic man is genuine “Kantian” freedom.8 The homo religiosus of And from There You Shall Seek strives with all his 8   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), ch. 8. To “the man of God” it “seems” that he is free, and he “begins to dream of wondrous freedom, as if he were God’s partner in legislating rules and formulating decrees and commandments” (76). Although this style is also used in Halakhic Man, R. Soloveitchik painstakingly clarifies there that the dialectic does not affect halakhic man: “Halakhic man does not experience any consciousness of compulsion accompanying the norm. Rather, it seems to him as though he discovered the norm in his innermost self, as though it was not just a commandment that had been imposed upon him, but an existential law of his very being. Halakhic man does not struggle with his evil impulses, nor does he clash with the tempter who seeks to deprive him of his senses. Halakhic men are not subject to the whispered proffer of desire, and they need not exert themselves to resist its pull. Halakhic man is firmly embedded in this world and does not suffer from the pangs of the dualism of the spiritual and the corporeal, of the soul which ascends on high and the body which descends below. We do not have here a person who strains against the chains of the ethical and the reign of the norm and accepts them against his will. Rather, we have a blending of the obligation with self-consciousness, a merging of the norm with the id, and a union of an outside command with the inner will and conscience of man.” Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: JPS, 1983), 64–65. In truth, the religious consciousness of And from There You Shall Seek does not succeed in fully deriving the law from consciousness, and the heteronomous element is constantly present in it.



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might to attain the freedom of halakhic man, that is, to identify absolutely with divine law and thereby remove any “remnants” of arbitrariness and irrationality from it. But he fails at it. The negative pole, the absence of conjunction, turns autonomy into a freedom that is merely apparent: this, after all, is an imitation of God rather than communion with the Deity. R. Soloveitchik described the movement to create the law as an attempt to gain release from obscure and opaque determinism to the sphere of freedom; from creature to creator of worlds. But freedom is revealed as a dream and a fantasy. Where halakhic man succeeded, homo religiosus was defeated. Halakhic man reached boundless freedom, a genuine partnership in the creativity of theoretical Halakhah; homo religiosus is not a full partner to this creativity. He wavers between a sense of freedom and a loss of this sense. In addition, imitatio Dei exposes the transformation of feelings within religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik’s dialectical description indicates that the meaning of imitation as a loss of the ability to reach conjunction with God becomes the meaning of freedom. Abysmal despair and the sense of hopelessness turn into transcendence, liberation, and partnership in God’s deeds. On the one hand, imitatio Dei preserves the conscious fluctuations, as noted above and, on the other, it creates conscious unity through the transformation. “[The idea of imitatio Dei] reconciles the two contradictory positions:9 divine decree with free individual creativity, the yoke of compulsion with spontaneity, reverence for the revelational command with the glorious vision of absolutely free will, the revelational experience and the experience of freedom” (76–77).10 A Dual Dialectic Imitatio Dei is a product of the dialectic of feelings (“absolute surrender” and “the exaltation of the free spirit” [77])—the movement toward communion with the Deity coupled with its failure result in imitation. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, viewed religious consciousness as radically dialectical and complex. His notion of imitation reflects  In the Hebrew original, “shnei ketuvim ha-makhishim zeh et zeh.”   The dialectic between determinism and freedom of options appears, for instance, in Pascal’s thought, which significantly influenced the development of the religiousphenomenological approaches that dealt with these matters. See, for instance, Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 111–114.  9 10

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this proposition: imitation is a product of dialectics, as R. Soloveitchik explicitly emphasized, but imitation is also essentially dialectical, as intimated in R. Soloveitchik’s discussion. Imitation is a concrete and positive act, widely addressed in Halakhah, but also a negative and imaginary act, “intended to compensate for the failure of his [man’s] aspiration to join together” (78). Imitation is ab initio an independent value, but also a kind of compromise between antithetical feelings. Nevertheless, R. Soloveitchik claimed it is also a “solution to the contradiction,” obviously suggesting that the solution to the dialectic is itself based on an unsolved tension. R. Soloveitchik added to and illustrated the complicated dialectical structure of consciousness in his long discussion on the names of God (180–186, note 15). The initial tension appears in the contrast between the Tetragrammaton, which denies reality given divine fullness (Ein-Sof  ), and the divine names and attributes denoting God’s ways in reality. The Tetragrammaton implies a rejection of any association between the Deity and existence outside it, whereas the other names are based on the existence of a world that is connected to the Deity. The Tetragrammaton reflects “total separateness, absolute aloneness, a separateness that is greatly admired and inspires awe in all that surrounds it,”11 (183, note 15), whereas the concern of the other divine names is “the coming into being of the other and the continuation of its existence through its dependence on God” (184, note 15). Hence, the Tetragrammaton also conceals a tension within religious consciousness between the negation and the affirmation of this name’s connection to the world. The initial tendency of medieval Jewish thought (whose faithful representatives for R. Soloveitchik are Judah Halevi and Maimonides)12 is to present the Tetragrammaton as an essential attribute,13 which reflects 11  In the original Hebrew, nora’ah al kol svivoteha, according to Psalms 89:8; but see Leviticus Rabbah 29:4. 12   “Maimonides and R. Judah Halevi held that this Name denotes God’s essence” (185, note 15). A plausible assumption is that R. Soloveitchik was influenced by classic scholars in Jewish thought, for whom R. Judah Halevi and Maimonides represented the fundamental directions of Jewish philosophy. See, for instance, Warren Zev Harvey, “Hebraism and Western Philosophy in H. A. Wolfson’s Theory of History” (in Hebrew), Daʿat 4 (1980), 103–106. 13   Most medieval thinkers presented the attribute of essence as a negative attribute, which does not add any information about the object. Very few supported the informative nature of essence attributes. See, for instance, Harry Austryn Wolfson, “Crescas and the Problem of Divine Attributes,” Jewish Quarterly Review 7 (1916): 1–44,



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distance and a chasm between God and the world. Another tendency, which appears in kabbalistic literature, associates this name with a connection to extra-divine reality. On the one hand, the Tetragrammaton “denotes total separateness . . . the negation of relations, the abrogation of freedom” (183, note 15), and on the other, this name “is set aside for God’s cloaking Himself in the emanations through His acts” (185, note 15).14 Kabbalistic- theosophical tension now shifts to another level of reality: an undefined Infinite vs. divine names in general. The following diagram presents the dual dialectic of consciousness:15 Divine Names Tetragrammaton (concealed)15

Names and attributes (revealed)

Judah Halevi and Maimonides (concealed) Kabbalah (revealed) Ein-Sof (concealed)

Divine names=sefirot (revealed)

R. Soloveitchik relies on Maimonides both for his discussion on the divine names and on the imitation ethos. The phenomenological method, however, enables R. Soloveitchik to “expose” kabbalistic inclinations in Maimonides or, more precisely, inclinations based on approaches assuming an inner divine presence in existence. “Excelling in particular in this endeavor was Maimonides, the halakhic man,” writes R. Soloveitchik,” who applied his powerful spirit16 to the issue of divine names and cast

175–221; Julius Guttman, Religion and Knowledge: Essays and Lectures (in Hebrew), trans. Shaul Esh, ed. S. H. Bergman and N. Rotenstreich (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), 184–191; Eliezer Schweid, Feeling and Speculation (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Massada, 1970), 149–171; Moshe Idel, “Divine Attributes and Sefirot in Jewish Theology” (in Hebrew), in Studies in Jewish Thought, ed. Sarah O. Heller Willensky, Moshe Idel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989), 98–100 ff.; Zeev Harvey, “Bewilderments in the Theory of Attributes of Hasdai Crescas” (in Hebrew), Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 8 (1997): 133–144; Dov Schwartz, Contradiction and Concealment in Medieval Jewish Thought (in Hebrew) (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press), 183–196. 14   See, for instance, Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 51–53; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 53–55. 15  I refer to the negation of the connection between God and the world “concealed” and to its affirmation as “revealed.” 16  In the original Hebrew, “asher henif be-iyam ruho,” according to Isaiah 11:15.

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bright light upon them.17 In the view of our great teacher, the Tetragrammaton . . . always appears, according to the Halakhah, as a name denoting God’s essence” (180, note 15). And he immediately adds, relying on “Jewish religious consciousness” that the Tetragrammaton cuts out a window18 to the awesome mystery [mysterium tremendum] of the destruction of being via its approach to its source. The simple, sole, unique Infinite, which includes all and negates all, encompasses everything and fills everything (“there is no place that is free of Him”),19 is revealed in these four arcane letters. (180, note 15).

In his discussion in this long note in Chapter Ten, R. Soloveitchik leaps from Maimonides to citations from The Zohar and to the writings of Luria’s disciples and back. Indirectly, one could see such a reading as a mystification of Maimonides’ writings dating back centuries,20 and also as a regular feature of phenomenological discourse: religious consciousness does indeed oscillate between revealed and hidden and between rationality and mysticism. Maimonides’ consciousness is perceived as including within it all the diverse and fundamental components of religious consciousness and this is the secret of its greatness. Between Conjunction and Union The highest, and in truth the deepest, stage of religious consciousness is conjunction, which follows imitation. Ostensibly, conjunction is plainly described: the dialectic typical of the objective and subjective stages of consciousness collapses and disappears, to be replaced by pure and one-dimensional love. In other words, conjunction replaces imitation. Nothing could be simpler. My claim, however, is that R. Soloveitchik views this stage too as pervaded by intimations of a radical dialectic. This dialectic is exposed in the relationship between the imitation of the Deity as opposed to union and fusion with it.21 The possibility of making the structure of Jewish religious consciousness complete according to And from There You Shall Seek is suggested below.  In the original Hebrew, or bahir, according to Job 37:21.  In the original Hebrew, koreʿa halon, according to Jeremiah 22:14. 19   Tikkune Zohar, tikkun 57, 91b; tikkun 70, 122b. 20   See, for instance, Moshe Idel, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” in Studies in Maimonides, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 31–79. 21   On unio mystica in Jewish tradition, see Idel, Kabbalah, 59–73. 17 18



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22 23 24

Stages of Religious Consciousness22

Structural Breakdown

(1) Objective Dimension

(A) Religious Action (Halakhah): Objective recording of conscious subjective tensions in two stages: 1. Standard commandments that record the subjective dimension’s usual state. 2. Imitation, conjunction, and prophecy, which record the subjective dimension’s deep layer. (B)  Acts and events: 1. In the stage parallel to the subjective dimension (a): Tension between scientific research and revelation. 2. In the stage parallel to the subjective dimension (b): Scientific research is a preparation for revelation.

(2) Subjective Dimension (a) Usual State (Surface and Deep)23

(C) Consciousness of the Deity: (1) Tension (external layer) Spiritual-conscious expression: Natural consciousness vs. revelational consciousness. Parallel divine model: Divine attributes (mercy and justice). (D) Consciousness of the Deity: (1) Tension Release (deep internal layer) Spiritual-conscious expression: Love and awe (transformation). Parallel divine model: kabbalistic terms (tzimtzum and expansion).24

22   Although the subjective stages are described in R. Soloveitchik’s discussion as a development, they could still be read as an explication, meaning that subjective religious consciousness is exposed in depth one stage after another. 23  In other words, the external, “surface structure” of religious-subjective consciousness. This dimension includes an external and an internal layer. The following stage, the second dimension, is the deep layer of subjective consciousness, which was called “foundational.” Formally, both stages of the usual situation (tension and tension release) could be defined as separate dimensions, in which case consciousness would have four stages, of which three would be subjective. This is indeed what R. Soloveitchik did in the summary (see below, 190). 24   These stages have already been discussed above regarding chs. 3–5 of And from There You Shall Seek, and here I add the subjective-unified dimension of conjunction.

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Table (cont.) Stages of Religious Consciousness

Structural Breakdown

(3) Subjective Dimension (b) Conjunction (Foundational) State Unified Consciousness

(E) Consciousness of the Deity: (1) Conjunction (without tension). Spiritual-conscious expressions: 1. Personal aspect: Love alone 2. Social aspect: Concern for the material and spiritual needs of the other. Parallel divine models: 1. God as the infinite intellect in the Aristotelian epistemological tradition and in the neo-Kantian model of cognition.25 2. The God of mercy (without justice).26

Chapters Eleven and Twelve of And from There You Shall Seek focus on the ideal of conjunction, and therefore deal with a matter that relies on rich and loaded traditions of Jewish thought. R. Soloveitchik’s discussion is marked by these traditions, and he clearly sought to allow expression to most of them. The central problems related to the concept of conjunction that concerned philosophical and mystical traditions in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period are at least two:25 26 (1)  The theological aspect. (2)  The concrete aspect. These aspects are clarified below in greater detail: (1)  Conjunction and Union—Theological Discord. The distinction between conjunction—where the personality of the one who unites with God ostensibly survives despite the fusion with the object of conjunction—and union—where the individual personality becomes blurred—has already been noted. Religious consciousness unquestionably includes a dimension of longing for absolute absorption within the Deity. This dimension, however,   See below, pp. 131–149.   On this model, see below, pp. 188–189.

25 26



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raises serious theological problems of reward and punishment and of personality loss. Does union play any role in the structure of religious consciousness? Is union a constitutive component of religious consciousness and what is its attitude to conjunction? (2)  Conjunction and Union—Realization. To reach these aims is indeed the highest aspiration of religious consciousness. But is this maximalist purpose at all attainable? After all, however purified, man is still part of a material world and of a reality that separates him from fully realizing the option of communion. Hence, many thinkers held that this ideal is only attained after death. Eschatological concepts evolve within religious consciousness as a reaction to the gap between a partial, lacking present and a perfect future. How, then, does consciousness consolidate the ideal of conjunction and union, be it as an actual, realizable goal or as a future-utopian one? Shedding light on these problems may clarify why R. Soloveitchik devoted two separate chapters to the issue of conjunction. In Chapter Eleven, R. Soloveitchik does not recoil from radical formulations slipping into union with God or from intimating the possibility of union with the deity in the real world. In Chapter Twelve, R. Soloveitchik returns to the moderate stance that absolutely negates union and is also critical of mystics. Specifically: the two chapters deal with the divine presence and with conjunction in a material world. The difference lies in the focus and in the diversity: in Chapter Eleven, consciousness is wholly directed upwards, to the heavenly ideal, whereas in Chapter Twelve it is turned downwards, to the realization of the ideal in the material world. Chapter Eleven places greater emphasis on the descent of the heavenly,27 whereas Chapter Twelve highlights the rise of the earthly and the turbid. In Chapter Eleven, R. Soloveitchik wrote:

27   This chapter includes formulations attesting to the drawing down of holiness and its presence in the terrestrial world from the perspective of religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik adopts wordings with latent “magical” overtones: “When a quorum of ten Jews recite the sacred prayers, they draw down the Deus Absconditus, the hidden God, whom the entire heavens cannot contain (In the original Hebrew lo ikhalkeluhu, according to 2 Kings 8:26; 2 Chronicles 6:18) into their confines” (84). On the notion of “drawing down,” see Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 163–165. Although this approach does not feature often in R. Soloveitchik’s writings, he does view it as an authentic expression of this consciousness. Compare Yuval Cherlow, “The Holiness of Place for R. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Studies in Religious-Zionism and

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chapter five Dialectical love—love that is cushioned with awe—rises to the level of total pure love. Intellectual yearning for conjunction with God appears hand-in-hand with recoil out of dread, in a sort of running back and forth,28 turning into “madness”29—the “madness” of absolute love, ultimate and without successor. It is all clinging and joining, all running toward without running away. What is the love of God that is befitting? It is to love the Eternal with a great and exceeding love, so strong that one’s soul shall be built up with the love of God, and is continually enraptured by it, like a love-sick30 individual whose mind is at no time free from his passion for a particular woman, the thought of her filling his heart at all times. (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 10:3). (81–82)

R. Soloveitchik adopts a maximalist stance here. The dialectic vanishes altogether in the sense that awe no longer appears in religious consciousness. Conjunction is presented as union. Not in vain did R. Soloveitchik choose to quote Maimonides, since this maximalist state is only tolerable in its intellectual manifestation.31 R. Soloveitchik sharply rejected the mystical version of the union. Why? For R. Soloveitchik, the unio mystica is antinomian, that is, it directly violates Halakhah. “Because the mystics denied man’s full selfhood, they made light of a way of life in which the religious aspect of the Supreme Primeval Will32 is fulfilled. They did not understand the ethical nature of religion” (88). Mystics even supported a radical retreat from social life and, as is well known, the ascetic trend is alien to the spirit of Halakhah. By contrast, intellectual union does not frustrate halakhic behavior. R. Soloveitchik definitely relies on the concluding chapters of The Guide of the Perplexed, where Maimonides describes the perfect individual as one whose mind is turn toward heaven but, in his actions, is involved in social and halakhic behavior. He ignores the rational tradition of Maimonides’ disciples in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who

Law in Honour of Dr. Zerah Warhaftig, ed. Eliezer DonYihya, Ella Balfer, and Moshe Halamish (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2001), 252–253. 28  In the original Hebrew ratso va-shuv, according to Ezekiel 1:14. 29  In the original Hebrew shigaʿon, according to Proverbs 5:19. 30  In the original Hebrew holeh holi ahavah, according to Song of Songs 5:8. 31   On the connection between this quotation from Maimonides and the ideal of intellectualism, see Howard Kreisel, Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 225. See also Ehud Benor, Worship of the Heart: A Study of Maimonides Philosophy of Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 50–51. 32   The meaning of the term “Will” in this context to denote the authoritarian and arbitrary source of the law contradicts the mystical meaning (probably Keter) intimated as a component in a structured scheme of the emanation.



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did not recoil from claiming that rational conjunction is antinomian and from demanding retreat into asceticism.33 R. Soloveitchik, focuses on a literal reading of Maimonides: Mishneh Torah, the moderate and balanced book of laws, offers the correct interpretation of The Guide of the Perplexed, and not vice-versa. The rational tradition is also the conscious component offering a new perspective on the consciousness of the divine, a perspective that turns it into a consciousness of union: the union of knowledge, knower, and known, as discussed below. An interesting version of the intellectual nature of the conjunction bordering on union appears in an example of the halakhic foundation that institutionalizes this ideal suggested by R. Soloveitchik: Those who instituted the Kedushah [the communal prayer whose theme is sanctification] added a prayer to Ezekiel’s prophecy [of “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place,” Ezek. 3:12]: “From his place may He turn toward us with compassion,” “From Your place, our King, may You appear and rule over us.” When will You leave Your place, which is separated and removed from the creature you made, and gather34 us unto You? Jewish thought interpreted the foundational principle of divine providence as conjunction with God, as the desolate reality holding fast to the living, eternal Reality. Man must become an abode for the Shekhinah and strive to have God’s eyes35 always upon him. Divine providence parallels man coming closer to God. Sober, realistic Halakhah36 once again leads the camp but also gathers all the fluctuations of religious consciousness, coining firm concepts that reflect ways of actualizing the idea of communion. (83)37

The liturgical text of the Kedushah, which had previously expressed a conscious dialectic,38 supports now a one-dimensional conjunction in which the human creature strives to be gathered forever into the divine bosom. Moreover: the text had previously been an ­expression

33   See, for instance, Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of a Fourteenth Century Jewish Neoplatonic Circle (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1996), 183–210; 246–249; idem, “Ethics and Asceticism in the Neoplatonic School of the Fourteenth Century” (in Hebrew), in Between Religion and Ethics, ed. Daniel Statman and Avi Sagi (RamatGan: Bar-Ilan University, 1993), 185–208. 34  In the Hebrew original u-te’esof, according to Genesis 25:8, 17, and more. 35  In the Hebrew original eynei Adonai, according to Zechariah 4:10, and so forth. 36   R. Soloveitchik relates to the Kedushah (in the prayer) as a halakhic issue resembling providence, to which he relates already in Halakhic Man as a distinctively halakhic question. See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 309–317. Possibly, however, R. Soloveitchik is relating here to his comments below, meaning the holiness of place and time. 37   The translation was slightly modified in this quotation. 38   See above, ch. 4.

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of mysticism, and is now explained between the lines through a ­Maimonidean-rational interpretation:39 R. Soloveitchik notes that providence “parallels” man’s closeness to God. Such a model appears in The Guide of the Perplexed III: 17. Maimonides, as we know, argued that the scope of providence is determined by the intellectual achievements of the one who is a subject of providence. R. Soloveitchik adopted the simplistic interpretation of Maimonides: the Holy One, blessed be He, watches over man according to his intellectual achievements, that is, according to the sum of intelligibles he has acquired. This outlook reflects the individualistic trend of Chapter Eleven: conjunction is examined according to a person’s individual achievements. Medieval rationalist literature presented conjunction as entirely personal.40 By contrast, in Chapter Twelve, conjunction is examined chiefly according to the extent of social involvement: “Communion with God is linked to communion with other people” (89).41 In Chapter Eleven, then, R. Soloveitchik supported a conjunction bordering on communion (“running forth without running back”) or, at least, he did not deny the possibility of complete union according to medieval rationalist tradition. By contrast, in Chapter Twelve, R. Soloveitchik rejected union with God altogether: “one cannot speak of man uniting with God, but only of man in communion with God” (87). Throughout the communion process, private individuality survives: “man does not reach communion with God by denying his actual essence but, on the contrary, by affirming his own essence” (87). An analysis of the model that negates union leads to the conclusion that the preservation of individuality does not enable complete detachment 39   Mysticism, then, is possible at the “surface,” subjective level of consciousness, but not at the deep level. The reason is clear: the risk entailed by mysticism increases the greater the closeness to God. Resonating between the lines is also the negation of a mystical interpretation of Maimonides’ chapters on conjunction (at the end of The Guide of the Perplexed). See David R. Blumenthal, Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006). 40   R. Soloveitchik therefore presents in ch. 12 the unique approach of R. Judah Halevi, who holds that conjunction “can occur on the individual level (the prophet) or the national level (the congregation of Israel)” (188, note 17), contrary to Maimonides, who is discussed in these two chapters. R. Soloveitchik perceives Maimonides as a classic and perfect model of Jewish religious consciousness. All the contradictory and complementary dispositions of this consciousness are therefore reflected in Maimonides’ works. 41   R. Soloveitchik relied on the exegesis of “devekuth to Him” as meaning “cling to the sages and their disciples” (see, for instance, Sifrei on Deuteronomy 49; TB Ketuboth 111b).



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from the conscious dialectic. The conjunction ideal is realized in the course of material life. “Man’s road to God does not wind among faraway hidden places—in which man concentrates on a mysterious pyre in which his individuality goes up in flames—but, rather, among the spaces of real being, filled with movement and transformation” (88). The ending of this passage attests that the dialectic is also preserved in a situation of conjunction. Even those who yield, as it were, to a pure love of God, still experience the fluctuations and transformations of consciousness, and love cannot be absolute and exclusive. Several other distinctions are evident. In Chapter Eleven, man aspires to conjunction leading him to the eternal world, and he endeavors to realize eternity in the here and now as far as possible. The consciousness of conjunction in this discussion is directed to the eschatological sphere. Consciousness seeks hints of the future-dream world in the present turbid reality. “The state of conjunction with God, whose essence is in the eschatological vision found in the prophecies of the End of Days, has begun to be realized even in this divided world, in the actual life of man with his flawed, sterile existence” (84–85). By contrast, in Chapter Twelve, the search to realize eternity in the present is pushed to the margins of consciousness; eternity itself becomes “abstract aspirations and experiences” (90). In this discussion, yearning is a priori directed to the present, and R. Soloveitchik therefore emphasizes in this chapter the social aspects of communion and its connection to the other. Furthermore: in Chapter Eleven, the natural abode of the Shekhinah is above, as it were, and kabbalists interpret its presence in the terrestrial world as “offensive” to the Deity. By nature, the Shekhinah unites with the sefirah of Keter, which is how R. Soloveitchik interpreted the sanctification of the moon.42 “The Shekhinah itself, as it were, is in need of redemption, and man prays for the redemption of the Shekhinah, with which he too will be redeemed” (83). In Chapter Twelve, however, the Shekhinah appears in the terrestrial world as if that were its natural abode, which is how R. Soloveitchik interprets Maimonides’ view that the sanctification of the First Temple and of 42   On the opposite interpretation in Halakhic Man see, for instance, Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 283–285, and other references to the sanctification of the moon. The vision of the elevation of the sefirah of malkhut to keter at the end of days appears, for instance, in Schneur Zalman of Liady, Ma’marei Admor ha-Zaken [Sayings of the Old Rebbe] (Brooklyn, NY: Karnei Hod Torah, 1957), 301, 353.

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Jerusalem by King Solomon is permanent, whereas the first sanctification of the land by Joshua was valid only for its time. “The principle that the sanctity of the First Temple is permanent is based on the presence of the Shekhinah there. There is an identification here of sanctity with Shekhinah, which distinguishes the sanctity of the Temple from the first sanctification of the land” (190, note 17). At the building of the Temple, the divine presence was exposed as a fact and a datum. Hence, rather than a drawing down act, conjunction is a historicalsocial event. To sum up: R. Soloveitchik’s approach presents the conjunction layer of consciousness as one of love without awe, where union replaces the dialectic, though hints of the dialectic are still discernible. Between the lines, R. Soloveitchik does not recoil from ascribing flux and turmoil to the state of conjunction as well. Despite the yearning for a union that blurs the personality, we still negate such union; we long for social detachment, yet reach conjunction through society; we seek the future, yet focus on the present. The implication for the structure of consciousness is clear: on the one hand, the consciousness of conjunction is simple and uniform (only love), and on the other, it is complicated and dialectical (love and awe). In sum: despite the critique of mysticism, the ideal of mystical as well as mystical-intellectual communion is still present in religious consciousness. In Chapter Eleven, such an ideal occasionally surfaces in religious consciousness, and R. Soloveitchik significantly illustrates it by resorting to the Kedushah, a text originating in Hekhalot and Merkabah literature (83–84). In Chapter Twelve, the mystical ideal of communion is unequivocally rejected. Despite the dialectical hints, the structural skeleton of consciousness is clear: radical fluctuations of love and awe take place during the first two stages of consciousness, whereas the third one is solely love. Ultimately, arbitrary traumatic revelation becomes, at the deepest layer of consciousness, a revelation of love. Of the third layer of consciousness it is said: “the desire behind the revelation is not that man be absolutely subservient or fearful, but rather that he be totally redeemed”(92).43 Revelational consciousness radically changes its character. Previously, it had reflected recoil, shock, and chaos; now 43   R. Soloveitchik used the examples of Moses who was afraid at the beginning (at the burning bush), but after the golden calf asked to see the divine glory (“in a cleft of the rock,” Exodus 33:22). The act of love, however, remained unfulfilled: Moses saw “the back” of the Holy One, blessed be He.



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it reflects unbounded love. R. Soloveitchik clarifies at the opening of the discussion on the mechanism of conjunction (Chapters ThirteenFourteen), that the concern of the third and highest stage of subjective consciousness is to overcome the fear and anxiety characteristic of revelational consciousness. Henceforth, anxiety disappears and is replaced by “permanent friendship between God and man” (92). (2)  Knowledge, Knower, and Known R. Soloveitchik’s view of conjunction, as noted, is intellectualist on the one hand, and consistent in its reservations concerning the mystical model of conjunction on the other. Did R. Soloveitchik preserve the uniform, ostensibly non-dialectical structure of this stage of consciousness? The above analysis still found fluctuations between conjunction and union. The question, then, is whether the dialectic is also found in the corresponding divine model. R. Soloveitchik states that the divine model fitting the consciousness of conjunction is rooted in a mechanism that relies directly on Maimonides’ Aristotelian epistemology. This theory basically involves the abstraction of the form of the object to be known and its union with the apprehending intellect:44 “This principle appears in two places in Maimonides’ thought: in the Mishneh Torah, in reference to God’s omniscience (Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:10) and in The Guide of the Perplexed (1:68) as an idealist assumption referring to human cognition—to finite knowledge at the time when cognition is operating” (94). R. Soloveitchik fluctuated between two different approaches concerning Maimonides’ epistemological model: 1. Phenomenological terminology and explanations in the interpretation of the Mishneh Torah. 2. Neo-Kantian terminology and explanations in the interpretation of The Guide of the Perplexed (“an idealist assumption”).

44   For the background of this discussion, see the second and detailed part of John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

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The differences in contents between the two interpretations of Maimonidean sources are: 1. In the Mishneh Torah, the discussion centers on divine knowledge, whereas in The Guide of the Perplexed it addresses human knowledge as well. 2. In the Mishneh Torah, the discussion extends also to moral knowledge (“theoretical moral knowledge” [94]), whereas in The Guide of the Perplexed the stress is on the apprehension of intelligibles as the basis of conjunction. For Maimonides, as is well known, virtues and probably also their discussion are only meant to create appropriate conditions for the apprehension of intelligibles. 3. This difference derives from the previous one: in the Mishneh Torah, the discussion is also concerned with the practical layer of action, whereas in The Guide of the Perplexed, the discussion is rationalabstract. Clearly, however, the deepest and most fundamental stage of religious consciousness for R. Soloveitchik is the rational-epistemological one, resting on neo-Kantian or phenomenological assumptions. R. Soloveitchik justified his recourse to the moral and practical examination through the commandment of conjunction with God,45 which the rabbis had founded on adherence to scholars “who know God” (92). Scholars support “moral action” as “the goal of knowledge” (93), and they therefore uphold the union of knowledge and practice or, in other words, purposeful action. The intellectual aspect, however, is essential to the understanding of conjunction, and R. Soloveitchik relied on the Maimonidean-Aristotelian model as an explanation of this process. Why did R. Soloveitchik not confine himself to the epistemic idealist explanation? The phenomenological approach does enable the preservation of the solid halakhic foundation, since phenomenology too relies on an essentialist analysis of the concrete-sensorial world. By contrast, epistemic idealism precludes a view of the practical, extracognitive level as a component of creative knowledge.

  See above, pp. 116–119.

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The Unity of Knowledge (1): The Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides deals with the union of knowledge, knower, and known in the Mishneh Torah and in The Guide of the Perplexed, and devotes a separate discussion to this issue in each work. His concern is epistemological: in both texts, Maimonides examines the relationship between the knowing subject and the known object, and in both he draws a distinction between human and divine knowledge. Maimonides states in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:10: “The Holy One, Blessed Be He, realizes His true being, and knows it as it is, not with a knowledge external to Himself, as is our knowledge. For our knowledge and ourselves are separate. But as for the Creator, blessed Be He, He and His knowledge are One, in all aspects, from every point of view.” This description, according to R. Soloveitchik, makes “reference to God’s omniscience” (93). As shown below, R. Soloveitchik’s explanation comes close to the phenomenological approach. In The Guide of the Perplexed I:68, Maimonides opens: You already know that the following dictum of the philosophers with reference to God, may He be exalted, is generally admitted: the dictum being that He is the intellect as well as the intellectually cognizing subject and the intellectually cognized object, and that those three notions form in Him, may He be exalted, one single notion in which there is no multiplicity.46

Maimonides then proceeds to describe the epistemic process as a principle that, in R. Soloveitchik’s formulation, “was raised to a wondrous height by Maimonides, who placed it at the very center of the Jewish world-view” (94). To the description of The Guide of the Perplexed, R. Soloveitchik added the neo-Platonic conception of the “emanation” analyzed by Maimonides (The Guide of the Perplexed II:12).

46   Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 163. The view of God thinking himself is part of Aristotelian tradition. See, for instance, Richard Norman, “Aristotle’s Philosopher-God,” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, Psychology and Aesthetics, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1979), 93–102. For studies on Maimonides’ approach, see the references ad locum in Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. into Hebrew by Michael Schwartz (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2002).

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Let us begin with R. Soloveitchik’s comments on the margins of The Guide of the Perplexed, which easily reveal their epistemic idealist meaning: In his The Guide of the Perplexed (I:68), Maimonides expanded this principle, introducing it into the realm of man. He concludes that human cognition is an “emanation from God through the Active Intellect,”47 and that every cognitive act is an infinitesimal participation in the Deity’s infinite understanding. There is no such thing as finite knowledge, and man cannot know anything except through God’s transfinite knowledge. Within God, the knower unites with the thing known, and even human cognition, limited and relative as it is, is rooted in this type of wondrous unity. Maimonides therefore established an idealist principle— that wherever there is knowledge (including human cognition), there is a unity of the subject and the object. When one grasps the intelligible essence of an entity, one penetrates it and unites with it. Instead of cognition as an act of imaging external objects which retain their stability and independent existence even after they are apprehended (as asserted by the ancient realism of images),48 there is an active, creative cognition; it penetrates the realm of the object, conquers its otherness,49 takes it captive, and conjoins with it. At first, before the intellect acts, there are two separate realms: the private realm of the potentially apprehending subject and the realm of the “something” that is to be apprehended, the potential object. Afterwards, when the person overcomes the potentiality and becomes an active apprehender, the boundary between the subject and the object is blurred, and the two of them join together, through the act of cognition, into a complete unity with no distinction between the “I” and the “thing.” When the individual is involved in active cognition, the difference between the principle of cognitive unity [as applied to] God and [as applied to] man is manifested in the contrast between continuity and interruption. Divine cognition is infinitely continuous. (97–98)

47   R. Soloveitchik cites from The Guide of the Perplexed II:36. Maimonides speaks of prophecy, which he considers as a level essentially linked to intellectual apprehension. 48   Meaning the approach supporting the extra-conscious existence of universals. 49   R. Soloveitchik deals here with the “intelligible” dimension of the object. This is an unquestionable fact, since he repeatedly emphasizes that his description is “idealistic.” Concealed in his terminology, however, is a hint to entirely different sources. Scheler presented a phenomenological analysis of reality, and based it on various principles. The first states that reality “is only given in the intentional experience of the possible resistance of an object.” This stance of the object vis-à-vis mental-voluntary activity is perceived as the opposition of a specific “something” or of the “corporeal world.” The terminology of the object’s opposition might reflect a phenomenological analysis in Scheler’s style. See Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper, 1960), 220–221.



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What are the sources for this description of the act of cognition as an interpretation of Maimonides in the Guide? Before turning to the interpretation, I wish to present a series of assumptions: 1. The entire passage can be interpreted in Aristotelian terms, and is composed of two Aristotelian principles: (a) Cognition as an abstraction of form. (b) A model of divine knowledge as including all perfect forms. The second principle is clearly formulated in medieval interpretations.50 2. Despite (1), the passage cannot be fully understood through Aristotle and his medieval interpreters since R. Soloveitchik explicitly claims that his approach is idealistic. 3. The perception of infinite divine cognition as continuous and of human cognition as partial and fragmentary fits the approach of Solomon Maimon, as Aviezer Ravitzky has already argued.51 4. The perception of thought as a creative process is distinctly articulated by Hermann Cohen. 5. Therefore, R. Soloveitchik created a synthesis between (3) and (4). These assumptions are explained at length below. The terms that R. Soloveitchik uses in this passage (“idealist principle,” “penetrating the external object instead of imaging”) reflect the neo-Kantian idealist foundation. Maimon’s approach is necessary to understand R. Soloveitchik. Maimon saw a need for relating to several issues of the unity of knowledge through hermeneutic means, that is, in the context of his interpretation of The Guide of the Perplexed.52 R. Soloveitchik too opts for a presentation of the unity of knowledge as communion as an interpretation of Maimonides. Hence, traces of Maimon are evident not only in the contents but in the form of the hermeneutical genre.

50   Dov Schwartz, “Divine Immanence in Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 3 (1994): 249–278; Schwartz, Central Problems of Medieval Jewish Philosophy, 1–26. 51   Aviezer Ravitzky, “Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge: Between Maimonidean and Neo- Kantian Philosophy,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986), 162–163, 167–168. 52   See Gideon Freudenthal, “Solomon Maimon: Philosophizing in Commentaries” (in Hebrew) Daat 53 (2004): 125–160; idem, “Solomon Maimon: The Maimonides of Enlightenment?” in Moses Maimonides (1138–1204): His Religious, Scientific and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts, ed. George K. Hasselhoff and Otfried Fraisse (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), 347–362.

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In his interpretation of knowledge, knower, and known, Maimon relied on the principle of the unity of knowledge adopted by Leibniz, contrary to Kant. According to Leibniz, sensoriality is a lower and incomplete degree of thought and, given this principle, the essential distinction between reason and sensoriality disappears.53 Maimon states: “And the difference between His infinite intellect, may He be exalted, and our own, will be only formal.”54 He illustrated this through mathematical-creative thought, wherein “the forms of thought and their subjects are as one.”55 The mathematical example clarifies the identity between the subject (the thinker’s cognition) and the object (of the thought), or between creator and creation. In this way, Maimon formulated the principle of unity of consciousness in his systematic philosophical writings.56 Infinite cognition is therefore continuous and perfect, whereas human cognition is partial and imperfect, but this is merely a formal distinction. “Knowledge, knower, and known in actu being one applies not only to the intellect of God, may He be exalted, but to all intellect in actu.”57 R. Soloveitchik used such an approach to explain intellectual communion in an idealist post-­Kantian version: since there is no essential difference between the intellect and the apprehended object—at first as a sensorial object, which is actually an imperfect intellectual object, and then as an intellectual object— knowledge and known are united. Divine intellect thinks in a continuous and infinite process, and the act of thought therefore unites with its objects. Relying on Maimon enables R. Soloveitchik to achieve two goals:

53   On the changes in Maimon’s thought on this issue see Charlotte Pearlberg Katzoff, The Object of Knowledge in the Philosophy of Solomon Maimon and its Relationship to the Thing In Itself in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Ph. D. dissertation: Columbia University, 1971), 114. 54   Solomon Maimon, Solomon Maimon: Giv’at Hammore (in Hebrew), ed. S. H. Bergman and N. Rotenstreich (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1965), 107. See also Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, trans. Noah J. Jacobs (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 14; Ravitzky, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge,” 182, n. 30. 55   Maimon, Giv’at Hammoreh, 107. See David R. Lachterman, “Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition, and the Infinite Intellect: Reflections on Maimon and Maimonides,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30 (1992): 497–522. 56   See Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, ch. 5; Charlotte Katzoff, “Solomon Maimon’s Critique of Kant’s Theory of Consciousness,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 35 (1981): 185–195. 57   Maimon, Giv’at Hammore, 105.



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1. He presents an interpretation of Creation that relies on idealism. The Holy One, blessed be He, creates the objects in the world by thinking them. 2. He exposes a criterion for distinguishing the divine intellect (infinite all-encompassing knowledge) from the human intellect (partial knowledge). In Maimon’s approach, however, the unity of knowledge is not a process but one knowledge (similar to intuition);58 the unity of knowledge, knower, and known exists without a process and even without time. Maimon’s approach could be said to be close to Cohen’s “origin,”59 and perhaps even striving for Cohen’s conception of creativity. The fact is that Maimon did not present thought as a creative process. By contrast, R. Soloveitchik’s approach emphasizes the creativity and the process character of thought, an aspect that is not exhausted in Maimon’s approach. Hermann Cohen’s epistemic idealism provides R. Soloveitchik the foundation for speaking of process and creativity, enabling the option of completing the interpretation according to Maimon and also of interpreting R. Soloveitchik in slightly different terms. According to Cohen, as noted, cognition or thought (Denken) infinitesimally reduces the sense (Empfindung) attesting to the concrete-qualitative world, as in R. Soloveitchik’s wordings in the above passage: “conquers the otherness” and, instead, re-creates the objects as cognitive objects in a constant and continuous process (“objectivization”). Objects, then, are not “alien” to cognition since they themselves are its products. The process of creation in cognition is conducted through a series of judgments. Thought is a creative rather than a receptive process of “imaging”60 and, in such a dynamic, no essential distinction prevails between thought and its objects. Cohen clarified that the “basic form” (Grundform) of thought and of being is not the concept (Begriff  ) but

58   On this question, see Gideon Freudenthal, “Philosophical Mysticism in Maimonides” (in Hebrew), in Maimonides and Mysticism, ed. Abraham Elqayam and Dov Schwartz (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009), 89–90. 59   Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, 262–265. 60  In his use of the term “image,” as noted (p. 14, note 38), R. Soloveitchik adopted the terminology of Samuel Hugo Bergman, but this matter requires further study. See, for example, Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, Magnes, 1091), 9.

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the judgment (Urteil).61 In his dissertation, R. Soloveitchik wrote as follows on the process character of epistemic idealism: For Cohen, thought is not a given but a self-constituted infinite process (ewiger Prozeß). Thought and process are identical. The infinite task that thought sets itself and its self-development shape the essence of thought. The a priori character of the given contradicts the purity of thought. Pure thought negates both the sense (Empfindung) and the ripe data of knowledge such as, for instance, the innate ideas of rationalism. Pure thought means thought constituted by basic autonomous principles in an endless process. Thought itself is subordinate to this constitution, which is parallel to being.62 The act of thought, the function of thought, and, in Cohen’s terms, “the creation” (das Erzeugen), meets the demands of absolute unity that is created in an orderly continuity. The contents of thought, which stand as conclusive facts of thought, never create such a unity . . . the process character of thought conditions its unity.63

Cohen argued that modern philosophy, which emphasizes the subject and self-consciousness, must turn thought into an object (Substanz).64 Thought and its objects, then, are identical, and the distinction between subject and object collapses. R. Soloveitchik refined Cohen’s approach even further by comparing it to Natorp’s analysis of the consciousness stage of knowledge. Whereas Natorp poured the subjective into consciousness, Cohen rested consciousness only on “objective data (objektivierte Daten) and on foundations of substances.”65 In R. Soloveitchik’s terms in And from There You Shall Seek, he states that the subject (thought) penetrates, as it were, the object and unites with it so that no boundary is actually discernible between them. The subject, then (thought and all the more so the consciousness of a “thinking I”), does not exist as an independent element (the realms “blur”). A description of the subject that, as it were, discerns the presence of the object before it, is only metaphorical. In thought, no division exists between object and subject, since the thought that creates the object and the object itself are one (cognition, as noted, is the objective reality).

  Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), 47.   Josef Solowiejczyk, Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen [The Epistemology of Pure Thought and the Construction of Being According to Hermann Cohen] (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1932), 36. 63  Ibid., 64. 64   Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 213. 65   Solowiejczyk, Das reine Denken, 103. On the subjective perception of the “task” according to Natorp, see ibid., 74. See also Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, 76–78. 61 62



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To this perception of thought as a creative process, R. Soloveitchik added Maimon’s approach, whereby infinite divine cognition creates the objects by thinking them, and human cognition shares in segments of this continuous thought. But R. Soloveitchik disregarded the difficulty involved in this approach: Cohen’s presentation of thought as a process precludes the cognitive unity of knowledge, knower, and known because it is predicated on an infinite ideal, whereas cognitive unity is an actual option. The above interpretation of R. Soloveitchik’s approach according to Cohen does not suit the original Maimonidean view, since cognition according to Maimonides is receptive. To reiterate: cognition apprehends forms from the outside, and these forms exist in the intellect that apprehends them and are actually identical with it. The intellect in actu, then, is a collection of forms that have been abstracted from their contents in the cognitive process. Relying on Maimonides’ sources and on the mode of his discussions, it is possible to state that knowledge is not a receptacle for collecting intelligibles. Intellect as such is not an actual entity; the extra-cognitive sensorial intelligibles build the intellect. By contrast, the epistemic idealistic interpretation absolutely rejects receptivity, and assumes that cognition creates its objects from within according to scientific laws. Extra-cognitive objects merely stimulate cognitive creativity. R. Soloveitchik, then, presented an idealist interpretation à la Cohen of the Aristotelian view of God as thought that thinks itself. The discussion of the approach that presents the Deity as infinite and absolute thought repeatedly contends with the problem of its distinction from human thought, giving rise to various levels of homonymy and analogy. R. Soloveitchik solved the problem by presenting divine thought as the continuous thought of objects, whereas human thought does this fragmentarily. “Divine cognition is infinitely continuous” (98). Hence, divine thought and human thought are partners in the creation of objective reality (Wirklichkeit). This, then, is the meaning of “active and creative cognition.” Knowing the world means creating it as a distinctive cognitive object. Thinking of objects is actually creating them and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, “acquiring them.” This is how R. Soloveitchik interpreted the union of the apprehended form and the apprehending intellect, “knowledge, knower, and known” in Maimonides’ terminology. “Through his cognition he blends with the universe.66 The ­apprehending  In the Hebrew original tevel u-m’lo’ah, according to Psalms 50:12; 82:12.

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individual ­possesses the world, in a relative sense, because he unites with it through his cognition” (99). R. Soloveitchik thus presented the consciousness of conjunction as some kind of sharing and participation in continuous divine cognition, infinite and eternal according to Maimonides’ epistemological model and the idealist-epistemological interpretation of it, that is, a combination of Maimon’s and Cohen’s approaches. Divine Presence (?) An interesting question that merits discussion is whether the epistemological model unfolding from the third stage of religious consciousness implies an immanent view of the Deity. The book of Moshe Avigdor Amiel, Linvokhei ha-Tekufah [For the Perplexed of Our Time], was published about a year before the writing of And from There You Shall Seek. In this book, Amiel enlisted Kant’s approach in an attempt to offer a view of a divine presence in cognition.67 By contrast, R. Soloveitchik adopted equivocal formulations. In the note (190, note 18), he presented an ostensibly immanent approach. At the opening of the note, it patently appears that, in his view, Maimonides had rejected the approach that “only Providence, from the distant reaches of its transcendence, connects the creature with the Creator” (191). On further discussion, the approach he ascribed to Maimonides emerges as clearly theistic. God is defined as the constant cause for the existence of all beings, and the assumption of a Divine Presence is unnecessary. The existence of the world “is not separate” from the existence of God. The meaning of the world’s dependence on God is that “there is no existence without God” (191). According to R. Soloveitchik, however, Maimonides’s approach is predicated on an actual divine presence. Although he insisted on focusing on the concept of existence, R. Soloveitchik’s style leads the reader to approaches postulating a divine presence: “God is the Necessarily Existent, and there is no existence without Him” (191). The end of the note leaves no room for doubt: Maimonides understands the existence of the world not only as caused by God but also as rooted in Him. The Lord God is an eternal rock, the

67   See Dov Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads: A Theological Profile of Religious Zionism, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 56–62.



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source of being. A world whose existence was separated from God would return to chaos. The world in and of itself does not exist at all; only those attaining communion with God enjoy real existence. (193)68

These formulations are clear: causality and the classic approach of affirming reality do not exhaust the world’s association with God. R. Soloveitchik advanced beyond the conceptual dependence of the world on God’s existence. R. Soloveitchik’s interpretation of Maimonides’ approach in The Guide of the Perplexed, then, moves from theism to an approach assuming an actual divine presence, and is an additional indication of the dialectical radicalization in And from There You Shall Seek. The following analysis of R. Soloveitchik’s interpretation of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah will return to this issue. The Unity of Knowledge (2): Laws of the Foundation of the Torah When R. Soloveitchik derives the association between the world and God from the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, the tone changes. In the discussion on the margins of The Guide of the Perplexed, R. Soloveitchik dealt only with the subject facing an outside object, whereas in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah (2:10) he also focuses on self-knowledge and on the confrontation between subjective and objective, a confrontation that takes place within the subject. Such a confrontation is obviously opposed to Cohen’s epistemic idealism. R. Soloveitchik begins by identifying the abstraction of form with the penetration of the object. Cognition according to Maimonides, as noted, is above all the abstraction of form from the object that the cognizing intellect makes present. R. Soloveitchik interpreted this process as “the confrontation between the subject and the object” (95). “Winning” means penetration to the essence of the object. R. Soloveitchik then turns also to the sentence “I exist.” Subject and object are now the ego seeking to know itself. R. Soloveitchik then enters into a convoluted discussion on the structure of the sentence “I exist” in order to emphasize the distinction between the “pure” subject that transcends the judgment (“I think” the sentence “I exist”)69 and the subject of 68  In the note, R. Soloveitchik refers to Maimonides’ account of divine action through “emanation.” The translation was slightly modified in this quotation. 69   The use of the ontological dimension (“I exist”) to illustrate the alienation between subject and object and man and the world hints at Heidegger’s approach, which defines the subject as transcendent, as discussed immediately below.

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the sentence it has uttered, which is both an object (as thought by the “pure” subject) and a subject (“the I”). The division of the ego into object and subject is deeply rooted in Husserl’s phenomenology. The split between a transcendental subject and “the living body” as different expressions of the self is at the focus of Husserl’s discussion on the source selfhood.70 Heidegger criticized the approach of transcendental subjectivity, that is, the “pure” self.71 This phenomenological issue concerning the dimensions of object and subject in the “self ” was thus a matter of concern. Sartre clearly argued that the meaning of the priority of existence over essence is that “man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself.”72 R. Soloveitchik states: Self-knowledge involves objectifying the known ego and separating it from the pure subjective ego. The ego faces itself and knows itself, like one who stands in front of a mirror and looks at his reflection as if it were someone else’s. It thus turns out that self-knowledge means splitting the personality and alienating it from itself. Obviously, for God, who is absolute Oneness, a split of the subject ego from the predicate ego is a priori inconceivable, for it would abolish, God forbid, His perfect unity. God’s self-knowledge is not the self ’s contemplation of a self-otherness, but a knowledge that is unified in all the ways that the self can be unified; a complete, absolute identity of the knower, the known, and the knowledge that reigns in his heavens.73 (95–96)

The issue was and still is the study of cognition although here, R. Soloveitchik strives to understand self-knowledge. Object and subject are the ego knowing itself. One seeking self-knowledge experiences a cognitive split, and turns the subject into the object of knowledge, standing as the consciousness of the “self” facing itself, as a “transcendent” subject seeking to know the object, and in R. Soloveitchik’s formulation: half subject and half object. Such a situation, wherein the knowing “self ” splits into the (knowing) subject and the (known) 70   See, for instance, David Woodruff Smith, “Mind and Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 344. 71   See Dorothea Frede, “The Question of Being: Heidegger’s Project,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 53–56. 72   Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 22. 73  In the Hebrew original bi-mromav, according to Job 25:2.



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object, is described in terms reminiscent of alienation. In his interpretation of the Mishneh Torah, R. Soloveitchik opens with the consciousness of the self so as to clarify to the wise reader that the criteria of Hermann Cohen’s rigid idealism, which entirely deny a consciousness of “I think,”74 are invalid at this point. Scientific cognition is replaced here by religious cognition, so that the research tool in this Maimonidean text is phenomenology. The alienation between subject and object does not exist in the Deity. Henceforth, God is the “absolute other” whose cognition is not split, and this very statement enables the private cognitions of human beings. A style hinting at alienation reflects a phenomenological and religious-phenomenological analysis of existence. Consider the order of the discussion: why did R. Soloveitchik open with this phenomenological analysis (Mishneh Torah) and conclude with the cognitive-scientific analysis (The Guide of the Perplexed) discussed above? Certainly, the discussion here deals with the unified stage of consciousness. At this stage, there is only love, which is wholly a quest for conjunction. The phenomenology of religion affords understanding of this striving for communion with the Deity. But R. Soloveitchik proceeded to propose a cognitive-scientific analysis in order to clarify to the understanding reader that the scientific pole, which is entirely self-affirmation, does not disappear at the unified stage. Union assumes the absorption of the individual personality within the Deity; nevertheless, the individual still fluctuates between total surrender and self-affirmation. Let us return to the phenomenological description of cognitive unity. The starting point is that cognition is alienated from itself and from concrete existence, and the harmonious union of subject and object is found only within divine cognition or through its assistance. R. Soloveitchik states between the lines that divine cognition is the solution to the alienation of human cognition. Since human cognition is set up according to the model of divine cognition, every partial and fragmented human cognition participates in divine cognition. This participation offers a radical solution to the alienation problem in the form of a cognitive union of the particulars in divine cognition and a negation of their independent existence:

74   Meshullam Groll, Selected Writings (in Hebrew), ed. Menachem Brinker, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoʿalim: 1966), 154–155.

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chapter five As explained above, God is both the One and the Only, eliminating the existence of the other, since “everything” exists only in Him and through Him. Everything takes part in His being and depends on Him. The existence of objects is explained by their being rooted in God. Thus the opposition of subject and object is impossible in the context of God’s knowledge of the world. It is impossible to separate the world from God because separation from one’s source of being is ontological death. (96)

Divine knowledge thus dispels “the epistemological tension between objectivity and subjectivity that rules in the area of cognition.” Let us return now to the issue of divine intervention in the world. R. Soloveitchik’s solution, implying the participation of human knowledge in divine knowledge, does not require a presumption of divine presence in the cosmos. Although R. Soloveitchik adopts formulations of divine immanence in his interpretation of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah, and style is certainly not a matter to be overlooked, his view can be interpreted in theistic terms. R. Soloveitchik carefully emphasized that the world’s dependence on God hinges on the nature of existence, being (havayato), ontology. The existence of objects in the world is involved in the existence of God. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, relies on a view widespread in medieval thought, claiming that God knows the world through self-knowledge because divine knowledge contains the essences in their perfect appearance. Such an approach does not require actual and radical involvement in material objects although, in its wake, some thinkers adopted divine immanence.75 The preliminary discussion states that the world is not an “independent object” (97), but this claim does not require actual divine involvement beyond existential dependence (“ontological death”). As R. Soloveitchik continues his discussion on the epistemological model of the Deity, an increasing number of allusions to divine presence appear. In some sense, R. Soloveitchik formulated his ideas gradually. He began with a strong dependence on existence, that is, denying the reality of existing objects without assuming God’s existence. He then drew the conclusions warranted by the deepening and radicalization of the previous idea, namely, the actual divine presence. To some extent, the Mishneh Torah leads to The Guide of the

  See note 50 above.

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­ erplexed.76 What slowly emerges is that the consciousness of conjuncP tion requires a consciousness of divine presence. Duality and Fluctuations in the Cognitive Model What is the basis for the distinction between the interpretations of the Mishneh Torah and The Guide of the Perplexed? Answering this question requires going back to the conceptual and methodological background of the discussion in And from There You Shall Seek: (1) Cassirer’s cognitive-pluralistic approach, which serves as a structural-philosophical frame. (2) The religious-phenomenological approach, which enables the examination of various expressions of religious consciousness (Otto, Scheler, and so forth). R. Soloveitchik sought to show that the path of homo religiosus rests on various types of cognitions. Following Cassirer, R. Soloveitchik held that it is possible to integrate a neoKantian scientific cognition à la Hermann Cohen with the notion of divine presence characteristic of the homo religiosus. This is a genuine integration of cognitive man and homo religiosus. Like the phenomenologists of religion, R. Soloveitchik related to religious consciousness rather than to the extra-conscious world, and the complex structure of the discussion on cognitive conjunction reflects this fundamental idea. At the first stage, R. Soloveitchik presented a theistic approach, which cognitive man would also have largely accepted. At the second stage, R. Soloveitchik formulated a panentheistic view that cognitive man (for instance, Hermann Cohen) would have negated altogether. And yet, precisely such an approach is part of a distinct idealistic-cognitive description, which is impossibly ascribed (according to Cohen) to the divine cognition. An outlook assuming a divine presence, therefore, is indeed found in And from There You Shall Seek. And yet, R. Soloveitchik presented a theistic approach beside it, all in order not to negate the principle of multiplicity of cognitions and the dialectic typical of homo religiosus.

76   The discussion, as repeatedly noted, is phenomenological and has no extrac­ onscious ontological implications. R. Soloveitchik claims, as I have repeatedly stressed, that the divine presence per se does not interest him (8); his concern hinges on the conscious expressions of this issue. The fluctuation between the two poles, the theistic and the immanent, does indeed reflect the moves and the processes of religious consciousness.

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In the description of the divine model taking shape at the deep layer of cognition, R. Soloveitchik insisted on placing a neo-Kantian and a phenomenological interpretation beside one another. The epistemic idealist interpretation fits natural consciousness given that, for R. Soloveitchik, Cohen’s approach is the height of creative scientific cognition. The phenomenological interpretation fits revelational consciousness, since it clarifies the dread of the “mysterium tremendum.” Although R. Soloveitchik reiterated that the third and deep stage of consciousness is unified and rests only on love, he continued to intimate that the dialectic had not disappeared. Religious consciousness, even at its highest stages, continues to fluctuate between the various ways of divine experience (science vs. revelation; self-affirmation vs. receptivity; cognition vs. religion; theism vs. panentheism). The tendency of And from There You Shall Seek to present the extreme dialectical element as specific to Jewish-religious consciousness is also reflected in the description of the third stage of consciousness. The duality of the divine model is explicitly noted at the opening of Chapter Fourteen of And from There You Shall Seek: When man unites with the world, he is also uniting with the Creator. The act of creation is, in essence, an intellectual act of the Holy One, blessed be He, as God of the world.77 On the one hand, God knows the universe as existing in a separate way and as unique, as if His thought were directed at some ontic “externality.” God’s revealed knowledge constitutes the existence of the world. The lawfulness of nature is the uncovering of the Supernal Will from its closed-off infinity. On the other hand, as mentioned above, even if the world is “other,” it still exists within God. He is the source of being, its essence and its purpose. The “all” is included within Him. God’s knowledge of the world is the knowledge of His truth. His essence as the makom [place] of the world,78 as the first and last Existent who contains everything, encompassing and filling all creation. The “other” continues to exist because it is imbued with God’s self-knowledge. Within this metaphysical epistemological riddle is concentrated the whole theory of existence. (101–102)

According to the religious-phenomenological model, God is separate from the world. He is the “absolute other” creating the world from outside. By contrast, according to the idealist-cognitive model that was displaced from human to divine cognition, the Deity creates the  In the Hebrew original elohei olam, according to Isaiah 40:28.   See Genesis Rabbah 68:9; Midrash on Psalms, Buber edn. 90:10; Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 34. 77 78



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world by thinking it. Hence, the objects of the world are included in the divine cognition, and God is therefore involved in the world. R. Soloveitchik explicitly states that, at the deep stage of consciousness, the dialectic of “the experience of the Deity” persists. Whatever the case, R. Soloveitchik preserved the Maimonidean approach whereby the only way of attaining genuine knowledge of the Deity is through the attributes of action. Knowledge of the world as a product of divine creativity on the one hand, and as present in divine cognition on the other, leads to conjunction with God. This is a twoway symmetrical move. R. Soloveitchik clarified above that the union of the knower and the object of knowledge characterizes both divine and human cognitions. God and man know the world, each from his own perspective; their cognitions then unite and conjunction occurs. “By knowing the world the individual knows his Creator and attains conjunction with Him” (102). The divine presence plays a significant role in the explanation of conjunction. Furthermore: religious consciousness even develops a future-messianic model according to this principle. In the future, they will “abolish the ‘idols’79 of ontological pride, which . . . hold on to their brazen independence” (105). In other words, the illusion of existence away from God will be shattered in the future, when existing beings will understand that their existence is involved in infinite divine existence. In sum, the communion of human cognition, will, and action with the parallel elements in the Deity will realize the vision of the end of days. Objectivity and Subjectivity The cognitive model presented the development of the conception of the Deity at the third stage of consciousness. This model also explains imitation and conjunction. Human cognition takes part in divine cognition, and both meet in their knowledge of the world. Since the general cognitive model includes “the identity of thought, will, and action” (103),80 it clarifies not only the subjective consciousness of the Deity  In the original Hebrew gilulim, according to the Alenu prayer.   R. Soloveitchik refers to this as the “divine equation, ‘Thought=Will=Action,’” (103). He justifies the equation as follows: “Contemplation and morality, what is and what ought to be, are blended. True thought is also moral: thought=will. The moral will is the essence of cognition. Both of them are revealed in the continuing creative act. When the individual apprehends the world, he directs his cognition at a lofty moral goal and translates his cognition and volition into a mighty act; he unites 79 80

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but also the objective consciousness of observing the divine command of imitation and conjunction. Subjective religious consciousness rests on the dimensions of norm (“will”) and commandment (“action”), as clarified at length in The Halakhic Mind. Chapter Fourteen of And from There You Shall Seek is largely devoted to the essential place of the objective dimension of religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik was extremely critical of the reduction of the cognitive model to its rational-intellectual dimension: “The knowledge possessed by the Holy One, blessed be He, is not passive or contemplative. Judaism rejects the passive tranquility of the Aristotelian dianoetic [intellectual] life” (103). Furthermore: “Pure cognition, without dynamic initiative or practical action, has no impact” (104). A possible attempt to establish the third stage of consciousness solely on epistemological criteria is fundamentally wrong; R. Soloveitchik did not renounce the oscillation between cognitive idealism and the phenomenology of religion, and his mode and style of writing hint at incipient signs of the existential values that would appear in his writings in the mid1950s (action, overcoming alienation, and so forth). Hence, he did not confine himself to a cognitive model of the Deity based solely on epistemic idealism. The phenomenological interpretation enables the connection between abstract and scientific knowledge of the world and the norm and human activity according to the divine command. “God apprehends, wills, and acts, and He commands man to become a creature who comprehends, wills, and acts, who imitates Him and reaches communion with Him through the blending of thought, will, and action” (103–104). Although the framework of the current discussion in And from There You Shall Seek is cognitive-intellectual, the contents deal with thought as well as with deeds and action. Recourse

himself with the world he has apprehended, and through the world he reaches communion with the Holy One, blessed be He. For surely the world’s existence is rooted in the thought of the Holy One, blessed be He, as the thought of absolute truth and infinite moral will, which is all action and creation” (104). Prima facie, this passage resonates with Socratic echoes—knowledge is the path to virtue. More plausibly, however, R. Soloveitchik returns here to Cohen’s idealist-epistemological approach, whereby pure will creates the principles of morality in a parallel to the creation of objects in scientific cognition. Cohen’s model served R. Soloveitchik to argue for the unity of (for him, divine) thought with the objects it creates, and to the symmetry with human cognition and its actions. This is how R. Soloveitchik explained the philosophical mechanism of imitation and conjunction. Cohen’s thought, then, helps to explain the equation thought=will=action. In some sense, R. Soloveitchik made acrobatic use of his philosophical sources.



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to various philosophical sources has again proved a powerful tool of self-expression for R. Soloveitchik.81 Summary Several years after the publication of And from There You Shall Seek, Abraham Joshua Heschel distinguished conceptual thought, which reflects an informative approach toward the world, from situational thought, which is concerned with an existential-experiential approach. In conceptual thought, the subject faces the object (the world), whereas in situational thought the subject is involved with the object.82 In And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik also presents a fusion of object and subject at the conjunction stage of consciousness. The conceptual framework and the mode of discussion are distinctly intellectualist and phenomenological. R. Soloveitchik genuinely held that experiential consciousness can be described by recourse to conceptual tools, and that the “informative” approach (in Heschel’s terminology) is also latently present in higher and “experiential” stages of consciousness. Nevertheless, R. Soloveitchik strongly insisted on incorporating norms and action into consciousness. In other words, he was not satisfied with the inclusion of conceptual and situational thought within consciousness, and included will and action as well. Unified consciousness has several aspects of action and morality, meaning that even the highest stages of religious consciousness are not detached from its objective dimension.

81   The expression of ideas through the use of ancient and current philosophical sources appears in extreme form in the writings of R. David Cohen (“the Nazir”). R. Soloveitchik’s style is obviously entirely different, but in his thought too, philosophical sources shape his interpretations and their formulation. 82   Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1955), 6–7. The first edition of this work appeared in 1951. Emil Fackenheim claimed that Heschel is more a phenomenologist of religious thought than a systematic thinker. This claim evoked a lively controversy and, in my view, Fackenheim was correct, though this discussion would exceed the scope of this work. On the connection between the writings of R. Soloveitchik and Heschel see Shalom Ratsabi, Between Destiny and Faith: The National Ingredient in Jewish Theological Thought (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003).

Chapter Six

The Conscious Mechanism of Conjunction (1): Intellect and Matter R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological description of religious consciousness exposed the uniqueness of Judaism along two main dimensions— one covert, and one overt. The first dimension revealing Judaism’s uniqueness is its extremeness: Jewish religious consciousness is more complex, more intricate, and more dialectical than the description of religion as portrayed in classic phenomenological analyses. This dimension is implicit between the lines, which is why it requires a sensitive, wise, and understanding reader. The second dimension is Halakhah, as the “objective” component of consciousness that shapes the subjective dialectic, provides it with concrete expression, and stabilizes it vis-à-vis the fluidity of subjectivity. In the opening chapters of And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik presents to the reader the structure of religious consciousness in a style fitting its contents: complexities, oppositions, and fluctuations between extremes. He describes the first subjective stage of consciousness, the “surface” stage, and at times also briefly mentions its objective stage. He then proceeds to discuss the fundamental, second subjective stage of religious-Jewish consciousness, and there too emphasizes its radical polarization. From Chapter Fifteen and until the end of the book, R. Soloveitchik openly addresses the second, unique dimension, that is, the connection of religious consciousness to Halakhah, focusing on two topics: 1. Continuing the description of various aspects of the depth stage in subjective consciousness—the unified stage. At this point, R. Soloveitchik considers the factor that unifies consciousness and identifies it with Halakhah. 2. Describing the “objective” elements of consciousness and the modes in which they reflect, record, and institutionalize its fundamental subjective dimensions (“consciousness of the Deity”). R. Soloveitchik discusses the imprint of the deep subjective stage of religious consciousness on the practical-halakhic Jewish ethos, as

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reflected in such issues as imitatio Dei, conjunction, and prophecy, which he perceives as distinctly halakhic. Whereas the reflection of the “­surface” subjective dimension of consciousness on the “objective” commandments can be easily clarified, the reflection of the fundamental dimension requires far deeper scrutiny. The reason is that we are not dealing here with well-formulated personal commandments prescribing clear action, but with general religious phenomena (conjunction, prophecy), which R. Soloveitchik took pains to present as “objective” commandments.1 My concern so far has been the description of the epistemic and phenomenological aspects of conjunction, and I will now consider its halakhic and behavioral aspects. The circle thereby appears to close. Issues of imitation, conjunction, and prophecy reflect, on the one hand, the deep, subjective, most unified and fundamental layer of consciousness. On the other hand, they connect consciousness to the objective-practical layer because imitation, conjunction and prophecy are the basis of consciousness’ subjective second stage, as shown in the previous chapter, as well as an integral part of its objective-commanding stage—after all, they are still commandments. The objective and subjective dimensions of consciousness are mutually integrated in a perfect manner. This was indeed R. Soloveitchik’s main intention in And from There You Shall Seek—to show that the subjective dimension of religious consciousness, no matter how deep and abstract, cannot be detached from its objective dimension. A Uniform Consciousness My discussion so far has focused on R. Soloveitchik’s declared intention to present the second subjective stage of consciousness as one without any fluctuations, transformations, and dialectic and as entirely uniform: natural consciousness and revelational consciousness become one. Indeed, R. Soloveitchik intimates between the lines that this stage too involves movement between the poles (science v. the experience of revelation, self-affirmation v. self-erasure), but its uniqueness lies in its striving for the unification of consciousness. The basic assumption of

1   On communion as a commandment, see Zachary Breiterman, “Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant’s Mitzvah-Aesthetic,” AJS Review 20 (2000–2001), 23.



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And from There You Shall Seek and of The Halakhic Mind is the correlation between consciousness’ subjective and objective dimensions. The reconstruction of the subjective dimension out of the objective one is thus obviously not limited to one single mode.2 At the first, subjective stage of consciousness, the results of the reconstruction are limited to radical fluctuations between various forms of consciousness, whereas at the second stage, they are unified. The meanings of the halakhic act, then, change according to the subjective character of consciousness. The aim of Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of And from There You Shall Seek can now be defined as the explanation of the mechanism that stabilizes the unity of subjective consciousness, that is, its reflection in objective consciousness (Halakhah). The fundamental tension at the first subjective stage, as noted, had been between natural consciousness and revelational consciousness, since the former is the product of human-rational initiative, whereas the latter is the result of arbitrary heavenly authority. The human quality and the rationality of revelational consciousness are exposed at the second subjective stage.3 What had previously been perceived as the opposite pole turns into a supportive and complementary element, and what had previously been perceived as arbitrary and traumatic becomes intelligible and acceptable. Henceforth, Halakhah is the key to the unity of depth consciousness. Halakhah, which purportedly reflects revelational consciousness, is now rooted in natural consciousness. The objective element of consciousness, Halakhah, is what unifies subjective depth consciousness. 2   On reconstruction in The Halakhic Mind, a principle found also in And from There You Shall Seek, see Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), ch. 2. 3   Avi Sagi presents two models of halakhic authority, one epistemic and the other deontic. “According to the epistemic model, people in authority rely on their knowledge, whereas according to the deontic model, people in authority rely on their power to command and determine norms.” See Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2008), 137. This analysis helps to explain the change in consciousness according to R. Soloveitchik, since the two models unite at the stage of communion and, more precisely, deontic authority becomes epistemic authority. According to the phenomenological method that R. Soloveitchik adopts in And from There You Shall Seek, the relationship between intellect and revelation has no concrete, extra-conscious expression. The answer to this question changes at various stages of consciousness. Cf. Lawrence Kaplan, “Maimonides and Soloveitchik on the Knowledge and Imitation of God,” in Moses Maimonides (1138–1204): His Religious, Scientific and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts, ed. George K. Hasselhoff and Otfried Fraisse (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), 508–509.

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Following is the analysis of Chapter Fifteen of And from There You Shall Seek. Knowledge and Halakhah This move, that is, the coalescence of natural consciousness and revelational consciousness—“to raise human consciousness to the level of spiritual consciousness” in R. Soloveitchik’s terms (107)—occurs following the exposure of three characteristics of Halakhah, which represents revelational consciousness. Since each of these characteristics also emerges as a distinctive expression of natural consciousness, we encounter the union of natural and revelational consciousness: “(1) the rule of the intellect; (2) the elevation of the body; (3) the perpetuity of God’s word” (107). On careful reading, the description of these characteristics shows that, although they are presented as leading to the integration of consciousness, they are not entirely stable. The uniform stage of consciousness is not entirely separate from the dialectical dimension. Let us consider these characteristics, then, beginning with the rule of the intellect. Halakhic Man, to which the first volume of the current work was devoted, deals with the connection between “Brisk” scholarship and scientific cognition. In And from There You Shall Seek, Halakhah is also discussed as a legal element that regulates day-to-day life. The adaptation of the general legal principles of revelation to historical life and to current events takes place through the halakhic ruling (pesak). The act of ruling is a product of modes of thought. On the association of Halakhah and human thought, R. Soloveitchik writes as follows: Intellect is the final arbiter in all matters of law and judgment. The content of the Halakhah, whose essence is revelational, is subjugated to the essence of rational cognition. Studying the Torah is a cognitive occupation like any other intellectual activity. The only authority is reason [higayion] . . . . The freedom of inquiry and investigation in the field of the Halakhah is enormous. Torah scholars have to deduce new ideas from old ones,4 create new and original concepts and specific methods, and delineate distinct realms of thought. Deepening one’s understanding and r­ evealing

4   According to TB Shabbat 31a; TB Hagigah 14a; TB Sanhedrin 93b; TB Zevahim 57a; Genesis Rabbah 26:1, and more.



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innovative, enchanting horizons of knowledge—these are the essence of the Halakhah. There is no change or reform within the Halakhah, but there is unlimited innovation (hiddush).5 When innovation is weakened, the Halakhah becomes sterile. . . . Anyone who is acquainted with the halakhic methodology, so epistemologically complex, that has been transmitted from one generation to the next by the rishonim and the greatest of aharonim, commentators on the Talmud, must admit that the sweep and scope of its ideal-deductive creative thought, its analytic acuity, its subtlety of abstraction and its systematic consistency are at least the equal of the other abstract and precise intellectual disciplines. Indeed, it is even superior to them. The principle of methodological unity and the coalescence of many free constructs into one conceptual whole—the most fundamental principle of any cognitive understanding—stands at the center of halakhic cognition. (107–108)

Establishing Halakhah on a human-cognitive foundation is summed up in the notion of halakhic hiddush. In R. Soloveitchik’s writings, as noted, the hiddush is expressed in two different realms: (1) The Halakhic Ruling (“law and judgment”). The principles of the Oral Law were indeed given at Sinai, but the halakhist was granted great freedom to adapt these general principles to day-to-day events. This adaptation is defined as a hiddush. (2) The “Brisk” Mode of Study (“the sweep and scope of its ideal creative thought”). Hiddush here lies in the re-creation of halakhic concepts after their reduction to their intensive foundations (such as the anticipation of the senses in the thought of Kant and Cohen). In a cautious parallel, the scholar could be said to replace God as the source of the law. The hiddush is entirely in the cognitive, abstract realm, and resorts to extra-cognitive events only to confirm cognitive innovations. Both these realms reflect for R. Soloveitchik the intellectual-human moment of Halakhah. He was therefore extremely critical of those arguing that the endeavor of such sages as Rabbenu Tam, Maimonides, Nahmanides, the Gaon of Vilna, and R. Hayyim of Brisk cannot be considered objective innovations such as those of science. When contending with this claim, R. Soloveitchik tied together the rishonim and the aharonim. But would he not at a later stage, in “Mah Dodekh

5

  According to TB Berakhot 51a; TB Shabbat 118a.

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mi-Dod,” insist that the Brisk rabbi represented an original type of ­hiddush, sharply differentiating him from the sages that preceded him?!6 Already in Halakhic Man, however, R. Soloveitchik traced the sources of the Brisk hiddush, pinning them on the Gaon of Vilna and on R. Hayyim of Volozhin.7 Halakhah invariably rests on intellectual hiddush, be it practical (a ruling) or exceptionally creative (“lomdus”). He hints at the distinction between the two types of hiddush at the end of the discussion: Studying the Torah is an act of free spiritual creation. [It involves] epistemological qualities and noetic values that live and are nourished by the creative spirit and mastery of the thinking individual, who thereby gains entry into the revelational sphere and makes it his own. Revelational consciousness is absorbed into cognitive consciousness with its innovational thinking. (110)

The first sentence describes cognition’s entry into the revelational realm and its conquest. The second sentence describes a counter-movement, that is, the entry of the revelational realm into cognition. The opening of the passage, therefore, hints at theoretical study, which shares the act of Creation and the giving of the Torah with the scholar; the end of the passage hints at actual judicial activity, that is, the implementation of the revelational realm in the material world. R. Soloveitchik thought of hiddush as a further expression of dialectics.” There is a combination here of two contrary elements: the revelational and the rational” (109). Between the lines, we understand that the dialectic of Halakhah is far more complex. The fluctuation is not only between revelation and human cognition, but also between a hiddush that tends to emphasize revelation and one that tends to the dominance of cognition. The tension between rabbis and halakhists on the one hand and scholars in the Lithuanian yeshivot on the other has already been noted. This tension is certainly intensified in the personality of R. Soloveitchik, who was both a halakhist [posek] and a lamdan in his political and educational endeavor. Concerning the claim that a halakhic hiddush is not inferior to a scientific one, one could ostensibly argue for the superiority of science in light of its flexibility and openness: Halakhah is committed to a revelational system and is not allowed to change “its forms of ­sensibility   See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 14.  Ibid., 204, 206.

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and its categories,” whereas twentieth-century science (relativity theory and quantum mechanics) changed its categorial framework. Against this claim, R. Soloveitchik argues in the spirit of conventionalism: “Although modern science has dared to attack the categorial system and adapt it to the needs of a ‘strange’ facticity that it has not interpreted,8 it has not freed itself of having to postulate it. On the contrary, its ideal, a priori nature is emphasized all the more” (109). R. Soloveitchik’s claim is the following: although the notion of space and time stability, for instance, changed in the wake of scientific discoveries, twentieth-century science still needs basic a priori assumptions: in limited relativity theory, the joint conservation of mass and energy replaces two separate laws of conservation, and probability in quantum mechanics replaces fixed location and speed. Most probably, R. Soloveitchik also resorted to an approach claiming that new science complements classic science. “The theory of relativity,” said Max Planck, “seemed at first to introduce a certain amount of confusion into the traditional ideas of time and space; in the long run, however, it has proved to be the completion and culmination of the structure of classical physics.”9 From R. Soloveitchik’s perspective, this approach suffices to protect creative freedom in Halakhah, notwithstanding its subjugation to the principles attained through revelation. Materiality and Halakhah So far, the finding indicates that the unification mechanism of consciousness deals with the union of natural and revelational consciousness. Natural consciousness was represented by two elements: (1) Cognition. Science and scientific cognition build natural cognition. R. Soloveitchik showed that Halakhah rests on this type of pure cognitive activity. 8   Quantum mechanics, for instance, deals with mutual relationships rather than with qualities. See Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 381. 9   Max Planck, “The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics,” in German Essays on Science in the 20th Century, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York: Continuum, 1996), 43. It is a plausible assumption that the analysis of Samuel Hugo Bergman influenced R. Soloveitchik’s approach. See Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Thinkers of the Time (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 30–31.

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(2) Matter. Natural consciousness is characterized by a physical-material foundation.10 Its distinctive aim is to subdue the world, and it rejects metaphysical and spiritual expressions. Halakhah has material aims too. “The elevation of the body” defines Halakhah as concerned with the material, and R. Soloveitchik was particularly concerned with the sanctification of pleasure and joy: A Jew makes a blessing on the real world; the entire cosmos requires blessings and praises. . . . The sort of pleasure that the Halakhah recommends avoids excessive intensity, stimulation of the nerves, and intoxication of the senses. Instead, it has the beauty of the refinement and splendor of life’s aesthetic elements. (112)

The sanctification and refinement of pleasure, expressed in a blessing, rely on the tradition of Jewish thought, as evident in the following brief indicators:11 halakhic literature teaches that “joy is maintained through eating” (113).12 Judah Halevi explained the act of blessing as the creation of pleasure through sobriety and consciousness of enjoyment and contrary to drunkenness, for instance, which leads to sorrow and regret once it passes.13 Maimonides ascribed vital pleasure to the intellect that survives after death.14 Hasdai Crescas and Moses Cordovero did not shy away from ascribing pleasure to God himself.15 In the judgment of religious consciousness, spiritual joy grows out of vital pleasure, which is particularly reflected in eating. R. Soloveitchik’s attitude to bodily acts, particularly eating, is uneven. Religious consciousness wavered regarding the status of eating, and never reached a final, uniform decision. This time, R. Soloveitchik chose to present the fluctuation of consciousness through a technique

10   Allan Nadler, “R. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man: Not a Mithnagged,” Modern Judaism 13 (1993), 134–135. 11   See the note by Yitzhak Heinemann, The Reasons for the Commandments in the Tradition (in Hebrew), vol. 2 (Jerusalem: WZO, 1966), 240. 12   R. Soloveitchik discusses at length the reflection of this principle in the rishonim literature in p. 193, note 19. On additional aspects of this issue, see Yaakov Blidstein, “Joy in Maimonides’ Ethics” (in Hebrew), Eshel Beer-Sheva 2 (1980): 145–163. 13   Sefer ha-Kuzari, III:15–17. 14   On this approach and its problems see Dov Schwartz, “Avicenna and Maimonides on Immortality,” in Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Muslim-Jewish Relations, ed. Ronald I. Nettler (London: Harwood, 1995), 185–196. 15   Warren Zev Harvey, Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1998), 98–133; Yosef Ben Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1986), 60–61.



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of concealed opposition between the text and the long note (193–198, n. 19). On the one hand, he states that the aim of conscious action is to elevate the bodily act to the rank of joy by balancing it, tempering it, and refining it. “Judaism proclaims the redemption of the body: the deliverance of biological existence from the thick darkness of meaningless, undirected bestial drives” (110) Eating is “transformed into a religious ritual and an elevated moral act” (112). Halakhah is meant to enable “modest and delicate” pleasure, while joy derives from the actual cathartic move.16 On the other hand, R. Soloveitchik claims that the bodily act is a technical means for reaching joy as “a spiritual act.” Rejoicing is no longer a feature of eating but an independent level, which eating was meant to help attain. R. Soloveitchik separated the technical dimension of the commandment (“the act of the commandment”) from its fulfillment (“kiyyum”): “In a word, the kiyyum of the commandment of rejoicing on the festivals is rooted in the experience of becoming joined with God, not in the physical act of eating and drinking: this is only the technique for fulfilling the commandment, not the fulfillment itself ” (195, n. 19). The physical act is merely a means for rising to the spiritual level. R. Soloveitchik then proceeded to divide joy, which is the inner experience of “becoming joined with God,” from honoring and enjoying, which are external experiences. In R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, the distinction is between “behavioral rejoicing” and “joy.” The antithesis of pleasure (eating meat, drinking wine, and so forth) are the rules prescribed during mourning (the prohibition of bathing, greeting people, and so forth); by contrast, the antithesis of the joy experience is mourning itself, which is also an inner experience. According to these distinctions, R. Soloveitchik explained why  In his youth, R. Soloveitchik issued two rulings on rejoicing during the festival of Sukkoth: “One is the joy of the festival as in all other festivals, and the other is fulfilling the commandment of rejoicing on the festival of Sukkoth at the Temple because it is written ‘you shall rejoice’ (Leviticus 23: 40). The basis of this statute is that, besides observing the commandment of rejoicing on the festival because it is written that we must share in the joy of eating from the sacrificial offering, a special law applies here and a special fulfillment of joy at the Temple, as expressed in the recitation of the Hallel and thanksgiving” (Joseph Dov Halevi Soloveitchik, Iggrot ha-Grid [Jerusalem: Morasha, 2001], 65a). R. Soloveitchik claims here that there is a joy of the festival expressed in eating, and there is another statute for joy on Sukkoth, which is related to the Temple and expressed through the recitation of the Hallel and thanksgiving. In And from There You Shall Seek (195, note 19), R. Soloveitchik interprets the Hallel and thanksgiving as standing before God and drawing closer to the Holy One, blessed be He. Perhaps the law of rejoicing on the festival refers to refined eating as such as an act of joy; and the special law regarding the Temple refers to standing before God. 16

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mourning is not abrogated on the Sabbath (which does not involve an obligation to rejoice but only one of “behavioral rejoicing”—honoring and enjoyment) but is abrogated on festival days (on which an obligation of “rejoicing” applies). Mourning and rejoicing are incompatible as inner experiences. The redemption of the material act, therefore, is not an aim in itself. The aim of refining eating is to attain “rejoicing in the heart” and “standing before God.” Eating leads to an inner experience, but does not itself become an experience. The tension in the attitude to the bodily act can be summed up as descent vs. ascent: on the one hand, Halakhah “bestows the glory of the Shekhinah on the human body” (111), that is, the traces of the Shekhinah descend to earthly reality and purify it, and on the other, the purpose of Halakhah is to use the refinement of the body in order to ascend to the level of the Shekhinah, “the awareness of standing before God” (197, n. 19). Eating, then, emerges as a fruitful source for understanding the connection between the objective, “earthly” and material dimension, and the subjective dimension of consciousness. This principle is clarified through a comparison with the Greek symposium: Socratic Greek thought attempted to give the dinner table the character of an intellectual gathering devoted to philosophical discussion, in which men of ideas participated. This is the true essence of the Greek symposium. Judaism refused to do this. . . . It devoted the dinner table not to human intellectual matters, but to divine intellectual matters, to discussions of the Torah that we received from God. Every meal must be devoted to discussions of the Torah. Our sages said, “If three people eat at the same table and do not discuss the Torah, it is as if they have eaten from sacrifices to the dead [i. e. idols]” (Avot 3:3). Judaism’s aspiration is not intellectual but moral-revelational. The purpose of all cognitive acts is the fulfillment of the holiness of the body and the spirit. Eating is an act that realizes the idea of holiness, whose meaning is the sanctification of both body and soul. If man eats properly, in accordance with the requirements of the Halakhah, then he is eating before God, serving Him with this “despised” function, and cleaving to Him. A group of Jews who have eaten together summon one another formally to recite blessings after the meal. The individuals who are eating are joined into a spiritual bloc, which is elevated to the status of a group among whom God dwells. (113–114)

This passage clearly implies that eating is not a material technique for the attainment of holiness but its “realization.” Transcendental holiness is concretized in bodily acts. Furthermore: the worship of God is entirely centered on eating itself (“ ‘despised’ function”). The very act of eating is “religious worship” (113). R. Soloveitchik held, as noted,



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that basic subjective consciousness still fluctuates between two perceptions of the physical commandment, without reconciling them. “The elevation of the body” expressed in eating suggests additional important principles in the complex and intricate construction of religious consciousness. Discussing Torah is important, but not because of intellectualism per se. Contrary to the previous characteristic of Halakhah, “the rule of the intellect,” which viewed halakhic innovation as a pure intellectual action that parallels scientific thought and even surpasses it, the current characteristic views the intellectualism of Halakhah as merely a means. The purpose of Torah discussions is “moral-revelational,” that is, the sanctification of the material. This distancing from the pure intellectualism of talmudic-halakhic scholarship is also evident in the social aspects of the meal. Strangers, orphans and widows share in the sacrificial meat, implying “their belonging to a society and their connectedness with others” (113). By contrast, although the scholarly-intellectual ideal could entail social and political implications, it ultimately rests on a radical individualism. The medieval philosophical tradition in which R. Soloveitchik had been trained, for instance, insisted on personal-intellectual communion. Most certainly, the typical Brisk scholar and his unique cognition dictate a social asceticism whose very existence cannot be ignored. Once again, a hidden tension prevails between the various characteristics of unified consciousness. One facet of the seemingly unified consciousness opposes the other. R. Soloveitchik concluded the discussion by referring to Yom Kippur, which prescribes “temporary withdrawal” or temporary abstinence and still has a dimension of joy (a duty to honor the day that abrogates mourning, which is a form of “behavioral rejoicing” although not an inner experience of joy). He thereby tried to show that the goal of Halakhah is not asceticism per se, but the refinement and sanctification of material life. Natural consciousness and revelational consciousness indeed overlap in the ideal of sanctifying the material, but the example of Yom Kippur actually strengthens the dialectics of the unification stage: suffering and joy, asceticism, and the abrogation of mourning—all coexist. Sexual Abstinence The concern of the second characteristic of Halakhah as a mechanism for the unification of consciousness—“the elevation of the body”—is

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that Halakhah relates to the fullness of material life, including to details considered necessary but despised. R. Soloveitchik presents two examples of such details. The first is sexuality, which is the subject of most of the discussion concluding Chapter Fifteen. The second relates to the laws on using the toilet, which rabbinic and halakhic literature did not ignore either.17 The attitude of Halakhah to details exposing the beastly aspect of human beings is perceived as “sanctifying the body” (117). Revelational consciousness and natural consciousness, as noted, coalesce in particular in the affirmation of sexuality and family life. “One who is not married has no joy, no blessing, and no Torah.18 The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself engages in matchmaking”19 (115). The attitude of religious-Jewish consciousness to the conjugal relationship was a significant concern for R. Soloveitchik, and I discuss this at length below.20 Here, I wish to relate briefly to this issue as an element in the integration of religious consciousness and its unity. The positive and constructive attitude of Halakhah to sexual and family life brings revelational consciousness closer, as we know, to the affirmation of natural human needs. On this matter as well, however, R. Soloveitchik chose to point out the accompanying tensions through the contrast between the text and the note. In the text, R. Soloveitchik emphasized the positive attitude toward sexuality and the family, that is, the unified facet of religious-subjective consciousness. In the note, he briefly mentioned the tension that prevails on this question in Maimonidean teachings: Actually, even Maimonides, despite his ascetic tendencies—which were expressed particularly in The Guide of the Perplexed,21 where he described the clash between the bodily instincts and the spirit’s longing for God—had a positive attitude to sexual intercourse. He denounced sexual overindulgence and sexual provocation. He demanded that man uplift and sanctify his sexual life by stamping it with a halakhic purpose. (199, n. 20).

Maimonides represents the tension that prevailed in medieval rationalist literature between the halakhic trend, which strives to moderate and balance sexual activity and supports social and family life, and the   See, for instance, Encyclopaedia Talmudica (in Hebrew), vol. 3, 206–210.   According to TB Yevamoth 62b; Genesis Rabbah 17: 1; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 9: 1. 19   According to Genesis Rabbah 68: 4; Tanhuma Numbers, 18; Zohar I: 91b. 20   See below, ch. 10. 21   On sources in The Guide of the Perplexed, see the next note. 17 18



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ascetic trend, which supports complete devotion to the ideal of wisdom and the acquisition of knowledge.22 The reference at the end of the note to the beginning of Part III in Sefer ha-Kuzari also attests to this: Judah Halevi presents sexual and social abstinence as the supreme ideal, which cannot be realized in the present because of the absence of prophecy, but is clearly the preferred option for the perfect man.23 R. Soloveitchik pointed out that Maimonides had “ascetic tendencies” so that religious consciousness, even at its highest stages, is not free from the tension between sexual balance and extreme asceticism. The unity of consciousness indeed reflects subjective consciousness in a state of communion, and R. Soloveitchik knew that several traditions within Jewish philosophy characterize this stage as one of full sexual abstinence. He therefore clarified: “Sexual relations reflect the image of the human being as differentiating himself from the beasts and (while still in his body) soaring to the heights” and “it is not only the spirit but also the beast in man that worships the Creator” (116). The physical act, as such, becomes an expression of holiness, resulting in a warranted distinction between Judaism and Christianity. To some extent, R. Soloveitchik created an artificial distinction between the two religions, by stating that Christianity focuses on “the immortality of the general [collective] soul” whereas Judaism focuses on “individual immortality and the resurrection of the dead. The body will emerge from its grave in all its glory” (116).24 The reason is that

22   See Steven Schwartzchild, “Moral Radicalism and ‘Middlingness’ in the Ethics of Maimonides,” in The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwartzchild, ed. Menachem Kellner (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990); Dov Schwartz, “Ethics and Asceticism in the Neoplatonic School of the Fourteenth Century” (in Hebrew), in Between Religion and Ethics, ed. Daniel Statman and Avi Sagi (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1993), 186–187; on Maimonides, see ibid., 192–196. See also idem, The Philosophy of a Fourteenth Century Jewish Neoplatonic Circle (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1996), 226–245. 23   On this approach of Judah Halevi and its influences, see Schwartz “Ethics and Asceticism in the Neoplatonic School,” 190–192; idem, “Asceticism and Self­Mortification: Attitudes Held by a Provençal Circle of Commentators of the Kuzari” (in Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 11 (1993): 79–99. 24  Indirectly, R. Soloveitchik appears to have ascribed to Christian scholasticism the view that immortality is not personal. This view was widespread among radical rationalists of all three monotheistic religions, so that “general” immortality evoked wide interest among Jewish thinkers, just as the resurrection of the dead was a concern in Christian sources, and this matter has been discussed at length in the literature. See Dov Schwartz, Messianism in Medieval Jewish Thought (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1997). On the perception of the refined body in the world to come, see ibid., 104–109, and Index, under “adam.” R. Soloveitchik obviously reflected

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the physical act is purified and elevated to the rank of worship. As mentioned, however, R. Soloveitchik admits in the note that religious consciousness (for instance, Maimonides) shows a disposition of radical abstinence. Holiness is thus reached through maximal detachment from material life; holiness does not “descend” to material life and one should instead ascend to it. The final conclusion, then, is that the subjective unified consciousness of communion is actually characterized by an affirmation of marital and family life, although the dialectic between asceticism and a moderate balance is sustained under the surface. Matter and spirit unite and become “one whole unit of psychosomatic man who worships God with his spirit and his body and elevates the beast [in him] to the eternal heavens” (117). The discomfort of the spirit shackled by matter continues to gnaw at religious consciousness, which remains tense between the purpose and the natural tendency to asceticism. The discussion about the body and sexuality again affords a glance into R. Soloveitchik’s methods in the description of religious consciousness. R. Soloveitchik turned to classic and medieval literature, and retrieved from it the tensions and polemics typical of different thinkers. This material served as a source and a basis for the phenomenological analysis of religious consciousness. Henceforth, the various views in the discussions that erupted and the various tensions of the literature turned into characteristics of different facets and dimensions of religious consciousness. Finally, note that R. Soloveitchik often discussed couples and sexuality in his sermons and lectures. Halakhah and Communion So far, my discussion has centered on two characteristics of the unified religious consciousness. The third characteristic, “the perpetuity of God’s word,” will be my concern in the next chapter. These characteristics clarified the mechanism of unification: the basis of both rational-scientific thought and material reality (“the elevation of the body”) is identical to the basis of Halakhah and of halakhic thought.

several emphases in his approach, and sought to formulate a view contrasting Jewish consciousness with Christian consciousness. The translation was slightly modified in this quotation.



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The true explanation of the unified stage lies in Halakhah. Halakhah creates a unified basis, and enables the attainment of the communion stage. Halakhah is the dominant element that unites all the various characteristics. The objective dimension of consciousness, meaning Halakhah, is the condition and the reason for the regulation and the persistence of the depth dimension. In most of Chapter Sixteen, R. Soloveitchik deals with the intellectual-cognitive basis of Halakhah, in two discussions. The first (119–120) addresses the “rule of reason” and the “sanctification of the body,” dealing briefly with the intellectualism of Halakhah and with the “transcendence [that] descends into limited, contingent being,”25 that is, with the spiritualization and subjectification of the physical act per se. But the second, longer discussion (120–121), is entirely devoted to the epistemic modes of Halakhah: In order to formulate the norm in halakhic terms, objective Halakhah requires clear cognition of the object. Without such knowledge, it is totally impossible to discuss the world from a halakhic standpoint. There is therefore an intimate connection between the objective, normative Halakhah and the scientific cognition of the free, creative intellect. There is no scientific or technological innovation that is not of interest to the Halakhah. Efforts are made in the halakhic consciousness to penetrate the secrets of the scientific world. (120) To define the laws, the Halakhah must understand the scientific background and structure of these things. Galileo said that nature is written in [the language of] mathematical equations. It is no overstatement to say that Halakhah writes in the language of orderly scientific reality. (121)

R. Soloveitchik adopted the philosophical-apologetic trend in Jewish thought, stating that Halakhah’s recourse to the sciences attests to its quality and its closeness to the human intellect.26 The above comparison with Halakhic Man reveals similarities of style and radical differences in contents:27 the Brisk scholar remains within the Kantian frame, which claims that objects are shaped within halakhic cognition, whereas the halakhic-practical law described here is based on

  Contrary to Halakhic Man, where the meaning of the descending transcendence is metaphorical (see, for instance, Schwartz, Religion and Halakhah, 151), here the “other” genuinely addresses the material realm. I discuss below the stylistic connection with Halakhic Man. 26   See, for instance, Sefer ha-Kuzari II:64. 27   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik: Halakhic Man—­ Religion or Halakhah? (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2008), 366. 25

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the application of the rules of Halakhah or of halakhic cognition to extra-conscious objects. The reason is that, for the Brisk scholar, objective reality is cognitive reality, whereas for homo religiosus and for the halakhist, objective reality is in the concrete-qualitative world. When R. Soloveitchik turned to describe the unified stage of religious consciousness, he obviously saw homo religiosus before him. The cognitive structure of the scholarly type does not fit religious consciousness. For homo religiosus, Halakhah is, above all, an intentional factor relating to extra-cognitive objects. The Literary-Developmental Move At this point, R. Soloveitchik’s ideas on the mechanism of the unity of consciousness become clear: the intellectual element, that is, the essential intellectual dimension of Halakhah, is clearly the dominant element for him in the process of consciousness unification. He therefore closes with it the explanation of the first two characteristics of the unification mechanism (“the rule of reason” and “the elevation of the body”). Making Halakhah the basis for the unity of subjective consciousness reveals two characteristics of R. Soloveitchik as a thinker: (1) R. Soloveitchik is, above all, a philosopher of Halakhah. The broad phenomenological canvas was meant to emphasize Halakhah as the element welding religious consciousness from its cradle and until maturity. (2) The scholar in R. Soloveitchik does not allow the various merits of Halakhah to attain their proper place. The intellectual element of Halakhah, Torah study, relegates all the others to a minor role. Nevertheless, the introductory discussion on the intellectual dimension of Halakhah (107–110) differs from the closing one (119–121). In the former, R. Soloveitchik presents the rationality of Halakhah both in the abstract scholarly realm and in the actual judicial realm. Although both of them together expose the shared basis of scientific cognition and of Halakhah, the scholarly abstract realm remains dominant. By contrast, in the current discussion, R. Soloveitchik emphasizes Halakhah’s connection to the practical realm only. No mathematization of Halakhah is to be found here, only a broad connection of it to the mathematical-physical sciences and particularly to



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the biological sciences and to technology—botany, chemistry, physics, optics, astronomy, and so forth (120). The reason is clear: the Brisk scholar is not interested in the actual-qualitative world, and the ideal of sanctifying matter is not part of his conceptual framework. Such an ideal requires an outside element, another spiritual “holiness” or transcendence that relates to halakhic activity. The cognition of halakhic man is limited to halakhic concepts. Not so the consciousness of homo religiosus, for whom Halakhah is a decisive and consolidating element that enables the absorption of transcendent realms. This consciousness rests on subjective depths unknown to the Lithuanian scholar. Ultimately, therefore, R. Soloveitchik did acknowledge the dominance of the concrete-judicial aspect of Halakhah in religious consciousness, although this consciousness also seeks to preserve the Brisk scholarly element. And yet, the dominance of the intellectual element vis-à-vis, for instance, the element of sanctification of matter, reflects R. Soloveitchik’s belongingness to his family-scholarly legacy. More accurately, it may reflect his inability or perhaps also his unwillingness to detach himself from the attachment to the centrality of scholarship, despite the diversity of religious consciousness and the importance of experience. A new and interesting dimension of dialectic consciousness appears to emerge here. Consciousness had so far fluctuated between possible and potentially applicable poles. Consciousness may adopt an approach of “elevating the body,” just as it may endorse an ascetic, self-denying outlook. The final result of religious-Jewish consciousness is to endorse the sanctification of life while still sustaining asceticism. And this is only an example. Hence, the dialectic persists at the stage of unified consciousness as well. Here, however, concerning the connection of Halakhah and intellectualism, the fluctuation is between one pole that can be implemented and another that never could be. The religious consciousness described in And from There You Shall Seek cannot identify with the personality of halakhic man, that is, with the Brisk scholar, since his consciousness does not allow for other epistemological approaches, not even extra-conscious entities. The fact that the homo religiosus of And from There You Shall Seek often resorts to Brisk methodology in his scholarly innovations, and may often even lecture in a scholarly style, does not attest to the essential adoption of the scholarly-yeshiva personality. The fluctuation between the actual centrality of Halakhah and the scholarly personality, therefore, is not symmetrical. The homo religiosus of And from There You Shall Seek

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sustains a dialectic wherein one pole is impossible to implement. If we consider R. Soloveitchik’s personality, we find that his admiration for his scholarly ancestors and his frequent recourse to their methodology in his teaching are not the experience of the scholarly Brisk personality but a formal use of its methods. And yet, R. Soloveitchik viewed himself as part of the scholarly continuity, as the end of And from There You Shall Seek attests. The dialectic applies not only to the possible, but also to the impossible.

Chapter Seven

The Conscious Mechanism of Conjunction (2): Prophecy and Tradition Halakhah’s exposure as a constitutive and recording element of unified subjective consciousness reaches a height in the third characteristic of religious consciousness: “the perpetuity of God’s word.” This characteristic includes prophecy and the transmission of the Oral Law from teacher to disciple. R. Soloveitchik’s description of the peak of unified consciousness could lead the reader to expect it to be a state of complete union. The model presented, however, is again one that unites opposites. In this case, the emphasis is literary: R. Soloveitchik constantly intimates that the opposites do not disappear at the highest stage of consciousness. Contrary to R. Abraham Hacohen Kook, for instance, who explicitly and emphatically proclaims a union of opposites, R. Soloveitchik repeatedly stresses that unity is the concealment of opposites. He therefore only hints at the existence of opposites (that is, at the failure of the declared unity) through various literary techniques. Two comments are again in place here on the writing style of And from There You Shall Seek: (1) The contradictions and opposites in this work do not attest to a political-esoteric intention but to the genuine fluctuation of religious consciousness between antitheses and opposite poles. (2) The contradictions attest to the yearning of religious consciousness for unity and to actual efforts to attain it. The dialectical nature of consciousness, however, does not allow for unity. The writing, therefore, reflects the tragic dimension of an unattainable aim. Note that, when presenting the third characteristic of religious consciousness, “the perpetuity of God’s word,” R. Soloveitchik still insists on placing Maimonides at the center. Maimonides is the key figure, both in the discussion of prophecy and of the transmission of the Oral Law. The phenomenological method of And from There You Shall Seek, which has already been discussed at length, allows reliance on Maimonides even when formulating conceptions antithetical to his historical

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approach.1 For R. Soloveitchik, Maimonides is a paragon of religious consciousness, the connecting link between an epistemic, intellectual experience and an emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic experience. He is a man of contradictions as well as a man of harmonious unity, a tempestuous homo religiosus and an indifferent intellectual. Maimonides, therefore, more than any other figure, is a solid model of the reconstruction process of Jewish religious consciousness. Even when R. Soloveitchik failed to accept Maimonides’ principles, he still continued to present him as a model. At the opening of this chapter, then, my discussion will center on various aspects of prophecy in R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological thought, concluding with the transmission of the Oral Law and its place in unified consciousness. The Character of Prophecy R. Soloveitchik treads a thin line on this issue, due to his untiring efforts to include Maimonides in the discourse and turn him into an expression of the ideal model of consciousness. R. Soloveitchik used a style reminiscent of Plato’s cave allegory, describing prophecy as an ascent to the transcendent realm and a return to reality. “The prophet is taken out of the actual world into a wondrous, suprarational, supra-­ontological world. There he is commanded to return to the actual world, to repair it and purify it” (123). This interpretation of Maimonides’ view of prophecy as a transcendent ascent is an overstatement, since Maimonides insisted on presenting prophecy as a natural phenomenon that can be described in scientific and rationalist (psychological, political, and intellectual) terms. Prophecy is, at most, conjunction with the Active Intellect,2 which is a cosmological and psychological element in Maimonides’ thought. The following passage possibly challenges the Maimonidean approach: Judaism is not saying that the vision of the revelation can be brought about by mental effort. Such rationalism, which emerges from time to 1   See David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2 (1982), 249. 2   On this issue in general, see Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).



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time in philosophical religious thought, lowers prophecy to the level of a pedagogical tool and distorts the nature of the divine vision. The revelation of the Shekhinah, in our view, occurs in a realm that is closed to the intellect. (126)

One could still support reliance on Maimonides by claiming that he had indeed stated that God can deny prophecy from one who is fit for it,3 a view lacking scientific explanation according to medieval scientific criteria. Most plausibly, R. Soloveitchik relied on this caveat to distinguish Maimonides’ doctrine on prophecy from views that “distort the nature of the divine vision.” Maimonides, however, definitely rejected the view that prophecy is a realm unconnected to the intellect. Furthermore: the clash between R. Soloveitchik’s view concerning preparation for prophecy and its attitude to Maimonides’ thought cannot be ignored, as shown below. Maimonides strongly refuted the view that prophecy can occur without moral and intellectual disposition and preparation. The prophet must acquire moral and intellectual perfections as a basis for prophecy. R. Soloveitchik highly valued this approach because it allows: (1) To determine two types of prophecy: (a) Prophecy without preparation (a pole in the dialectical ­process). (b) Prophecy after preparation (a unified stage according to ­Maimonides). (2) To determine a process: turning consciousness from dialectical into unified, that is, shifting from type (a) to type (b). (3) To determine a new assessment: scientific apprehension, which had previously been perceived as a pole of self-affirmation, now becomes a preparation for prophecy. To clarify: at the dialectical stage, prophecy is an arbitrary phenomenon of shock in the face of the self-affirmation that follows humanity’s impressive scientific and cultural attainments. By contrast, at the unified stage, prophecy becomes a phenomenon of serenity and inner joy. Preparation for prophecy is what transforms a traumatic event 3   See The Guide of the Perplexed II:32. Late medieval commentators (R. Profiat Duran “Efod,” R. Shem Tov ben Yoseph ben Shem Tov) had already noted that this Maimonidean claim does not reflect his true view. For a conclusive discussion on Maimonides’ view of prophecy see Howard T. Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Klewer, 2001), ch. 3.

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into a desirable one. Hence, R. Soloveitchik cites at length the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 7:1 (124). But as the reader will certainly discern, it is R. Soloveitchik’s dialectical approach that precludes accepting Maimonides’ original view: In Maimonides’ view, it is very important for human beings to seek God and prepare themselves morally for an encounter with Him. Although God does indeed cause man to prophesy and relates to him, he must search for God and prepare himself to encounter Him. God reveals Himself to man in times of crisis and distress even when the individual is not seeking Him; nevertheless, God still expects man to seek Him. (123) Let me recapitulate. As a phenomenon, the revelation of the Shekhinah sometimes precedes the person’s preparation and perfection; indeed, God relates to man at a time when the glory of life is at a low ebb and ugliness has overwhelmed it. But [despite this], man must make an effort to reach the level of the revelation of the Shekhinah. Seeking such a revelation through knowledge and natural will [generally] precedes the supernatural revelation of the Shekhinah. (124–125)

Factually, R. Soloveitchik disagrees with Maimonides and claims that prophecy is possible without preparation. In and of itself, R. Soloveitchik’s view is understandable and states that, at the peak of human scientific achievement, at the height of human pride and power, is the fall. When the Deity that human beings seek in their intellectual striving eludes them and disappears, they are shocked and, for the first time, experience revelation.4 Revelation, then, comes at the low ebb caused by the failure of pride and arrogance. A sense of exaggerated assertiveness cannot be a preparation for prophecy. The failure of science, however, is not a possible basis for prophecy, if we embrace Maimonides’ approach. But we can embrace an entirely different perspective: if ceaseless scientific pursuit is set up a priori as a search for the concealed, then this is not failure but continuity. The scientific inquiry that defines the borders of science well is a necessary condition and a component in the path to the transcendent. Intellectual knowledge in the correct perspective is a preparation for prophecy. At the deep stage of consciousness, scientific inquiry is perceived as a rung from which we climb to religious cognition, to cognition of the miraculous and the concealed. If human beings follow the paved course to the perfection of religious consciousness, the initial traumatic discovery sheds new

4   See above, 16–18. In this discussion, R. Soloveitchik refers the reader to the description of conscious process (124–125).



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light on scientific inquiry: it now becomes a corridor to the concealed. “There is a continuous transition from the concrete to the absolute, from the finite to the infinite” (125). Henceforth, the homo religiosus abandons the closed fundamental assumptions of scientific-epistemic idealism and investigates the world as a preparation for prophecy, that is, for the stage above scientific cognition. Under no circumstances could R. Soloveitchik negate prophecy without preparation. The initial shock is, after all, what enables religious consciousness to launch its initial processes, but in search of other goals: the attainment of conjunction and prophecy. Without the shock, there would be no change of values. The supreme unified stage of consciousness, then, is Maimonidean (in preparatory terms), but not so the initial one. Nevertheless, R. Soloveitchik integrated his approach with that of Maimonides. The phenomenological description of religious consciousness cannot ignore the initial stages of consciousness. Maimonides is a significant concrete model of the religious consciousness studied by R. Soloveitchik. Science and Prophecy The view of prophecy as an “objective” commandment relies, above all, on personal-concrete and active preparation, that is, on the acquisition of moral and intellectual virtues. R. Soloveitchik adapted this Maimonidean approach to modern thought as well. Preparation for prophecy in the modern era means searching for the mystery, for the divine presence, through science and scientific cognition. Knowledge demands “a cognitively framed solution to the problem of the mystery inherent in tangible reality” (125). The qualitative world of the senses, then, which Cohen’s philosophy did not manage to overcome despite his efforts, reflects the “mystery,” that is, the divine presence. For R. Soloveitchik, twentieth-century physics also conveys the mystery. Science helps to define the transcendent element, and its failures enable us to define the borders of science. The aim (prophecy) and the way of attaining it (preparation) are thus equally mysterious: “Not only is the fact of prophecy—God’s encounter with man—an obscure riddle, but even the quest for it, the search for eternity through temporality, is incomprehensible” (125). Contrary to Cohen’s epistemic idealism, which denies a supra-epistemic realm, prophecy’s starting point is the quest for a supra-epistemic realm through the same scientific means.

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Scientific cognition as a preparation for prophecy, therefore, includes two characteristics: (1) An attempt to expose the transcendent and describe it, insofar as possible, through scientific cognition. (2) A delineation of the borders of science and cognition, which enables the continuity between the known and the mysterious. The search for traces of the Deity through science and its limitations ultimately culminates in the divine presence. This process exposes scientific cognition not as an expression of assertiveness and self­affirmation but as a preparation for prophecy. One might argue that R. Soloveitchik interpreted the Maimonidean demand of intellectual perfection as a preparation for prophecy, as a demand to study cognition and its limits. Such an inquiry leads human beings beyond cognition, that is, to revelation. Although he emphasizes the intellectual dimension as a key to both conjunction and prophecy, R. Soloveitchik remained loyal to the phenomenological approach he had adopted, and did not make a final choice between supporters and deniers of rationality. In note 21, he refrains from determining whether preparation is “a moral, intellectual effort or an emotional arousal, seething with the awe of mysterious love”5 (200). The very duty of preparation, which exposes the unified dimension of consciousness, is sufficient for him. The description of Jewish consciousness is not one-dimensional. R. Soloveitchik is attracted to the intellectual trend, as evident in his description of spiritual preparation as the scientific observation of the world and the understanding of the borders of cognition. He would not ab initio have chosen the irrational option, which for him was represented by Judah Halevi and Hasdai Crescas (200). But the phenomenological approach is not confined to a partial description of Jewish religious consciousness and, therefore, R. Soloveitchik did not distinguish between types of preparation. In this light, it is clear why R. Soloveitchik presented the scientific study concerning the limits of cognition as a “mystery” and as “incomprehensible.” He thereby united rationalism and 5  In the Hebrew original, the last phrase is rendered as rotahat be-siludei ahavah, according to Job 6:10. The term silud, meaning awe and anxiety, appears in piyutim such as Eleh Ezkerah, from the musaf service of Yom Kippur. R. Soloveitchik hints here again at the fluctuation between love and awe.



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­ ystery, and Jewish religious consciousness thus ends up resting on m Maimonides as well as on Halevi and Crescas. We therefore find: (1) At the mature stage of subjective cognition too, a fluctuation ­prevails: a. Between emotion and intellect as a preparation for prophecy. b. Between cognition of the mystery through scientific means and its definition as “an obscure riddle.” (2) The two poles—intellect and emotion—are opposite expressions of the same consciousness. In any event, scientific cognition is perceived as paving the way for prophecy, but the connection between them is far deeper: Modern man’s entire cultural outlook is full of contradictions and oppositions. It encounters non-rational elements that cannot be grasped by cognition. Physico-mathematical science encounters the living, qualitative reality; metaphysics encounters the blind and impenetrable substance, mechanical nature; morality encounters sin and evil; art encounters the ugly and the repulsive, and so on. The weight of the irrationality and inconsistency in the perceived world lies heavily on the cultural Weltanschauung (world view). In spite of man’s many human technological achievements and his conquest, to an extent, of matter, the eternal riddle continues to emerge from all the realms of the creation, especially those illuminated by reason. The words of the solution come from Mount Sinai: the God who is sought on the paths of the creation experience reveals Himself in the Sinaitic vision. The mind seeks and prophecy responds. The content of revelation is faith, bearer of the absolute imperative. The child of the creation finds his purpose and his path to perfection in the revelational consciousness, the ontological law—in the prophetic statutes. (127)

R. Soloveitchik identified the problem of creation, “the work of Creation” (ma‘aseh bereshit) not only with physics as Maimonides had done. The riddle of creation is for him the riddle of culture, which the various sciences have failed to decode. Not only the mathematical natural sciences, but also metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics ultimately reach an impasse (127).6 Relying on epistemic idealism and

6   R. Soloveitchik never abandoned Hermann Cohen’s fundamental view that philosophy is meant to explain culture. Although mathematical-physical science is perceived as the highest degree of abstraction, it is only one expression of the culture as a reflection of epistemic-creative activity. Cohen writes: “Consciousness is not only the scientific

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its ­problems, R. Soloveitchik clarified at length why mathematical­physical science failed; it could not deal with the qualitative world. The problematic, then, is expanded here to the other realms of culture as well and poured into the problem of creation. In sum: the wonder of creation remains unsolved. And here we reach a solution. Revelation and prophecy settle the problem of creation: the work of Creation is chaotic and dialectical, whereas revelation and prophecy settle the opposites and lead to unity. Here we can glimpse anew at the mechanism connecting science and prophecy: the sciences present the problem, and revelation provides an answer. Now we have a suitable criterion for differentiating the various stages of religious consciousness. At the first stage, revelation appears as an arbitrary command, and the connection between prophecy and the prophet’s circumstances is somewhat illogical. Prophecy is certainly not a solution to the oppressive problem of creation, and especially not to the problem of the qualitative world. Hence, prophecy is perceived as a traumatic phenomenon. By contrast, at the second stage of consciousness, when prophecy is perceived in the prophet’s consciousness as an expression of the divine presence (conjunction; knowledge, knower, and known), it becomes the answer to the problem of creation. Henceforth, the failures of science become successes: the elusive quality represents traces of the hidden Deity. The Deity is present beyond the borders of cognition and is what constitutes the living, active world. Prophecy attests that the insoluble qualitative element is driven by the divine presence. At the second stage of consciousness, the prophet discovers that revelation is not arbitrary but rather the answer to his conscious, scientific, and cultural questions. The element uniting subjective consciousness, then, is prophecy, whereas the element uniting objective consciousness is Halakhah. At the stage of perfection, the integration of the two elements enables the creation of a united consciousness. The conclusion warranted by R. Soloveitchik’s claims is that the divine revelation in prophetic vision is itself an answer to scientific consciousness. Ethics and art are areas no less legitimate and, consequently, consciousness cannot be confined solely to mathematical science.” See Hermann Cohen, System der Philosophie, Bd 1, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, dritte auflage (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer Verlag, 1922), 17. According to R. Soloveitchik, therefore, ethics and aesthetics are included in the riddle of wonder. Cohen emphasizes that aesthetics is also part of the scientific method, since “the history of culture shows that the concept of culture was not exhausted by [mathematical-physical] science and by ethics.” See Hermann Cohen, Äesthetic des reinen Gefühls, Bd. 1 (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), 5.



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and cultural questions. But the content of the revelation, meaning the divine commandment, is still to be discussed. How does the commandment solve the problem of creation? Or, in R. Soloveitchik’s formulation, how do “prophetic statutes” answer the question of “the ontological law” (127)? At this point, R. Soloveitchik addresses another aspect of the problem of creation: determinism vs. freedom. The description of the process is as follows: “The individual, who began with a search for a reality pregnant with freedom, encounters the compulsion of the Numinous One and ends with the experience of freedom” (128). R. Soloveitchik described a process whose beginning is freedom, its middle—determinism, and its end—freedom. He is not explicit about the stages of this process, except for its end, when he states that compliance with the divine law is the true autonomous freedom. The process intimated in R. Soloveitchik’s description appears to be the following: (1) Freedom. When scientists or researchers of cognition’s borders turn to nature for the purpose of their inquiry, their consciousness is one of freedom. The turn to nature, rather than merely an expression of assertiveness and self-affirmation, is also an expression of freedom. Freedom is not exhausted only through the manipulation of nature but also through the success of consciousness in decoding the structure of the universe. Freedom means the absence of any restraints on both knowledge and control. (2) Determinism. The failure to attain knowledge of nature’s concrete quality, which hinders the advance of both scientists and philosophers, is also the failure of freedom. Nature “relays” an inapprehensible determinism. Sense too is perceived as a deterministic element, which refuses to disappear from philosophical theory and thus precludes freedom in the theoretical control of nature, that is, prevents the formulation of an adequate scientific theory. At this stage, individuals face the law that God imposes on them in the prophetic vision, and the deterministic sense becomes stronger and more powerful. “Blind and impenetrable” nature on the one hand and the arbitrary7 command in divine revelation on the other, control humanity rather than humanity controlling them.

7   Arbitrariness, as noted, follows from the dissociation between the prophet’s situation and the nature of the divine law. I am not claiming that the divine law, either partly or wholly, is pointless.

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(3) Freedom. Manipulative and intellectual freedom is replaced by conscious-autonomous freedom. In the consciousness of prophets and rabbinic scholars, the divine command merges with the moral autonomous command, enabling total freedom in the Kantian sense. The heteronomous-arbitrary command becomes an inner command. “Supra-rational necessity joins with the normative consciousness, and together they are absorbed into one ontological/supra-ontological consciousness” (129). Note that the meaning of freedom changes from the first to the third stage (freedom that is opposed to determinism and freedom that is opposed to heteronomy).8 The giving of the Torah (revelation) is thus an answer to the problem of creation in the fluctuations from determinism to freedom as well. The failure to explain creation, described in the second stage of the process, poses a problem regarding determinism vs. freedom of will. Autonomous freedom is the answer to the problem. Creativity: Natural and Halakhic Order Two explanations have been presented so far concerning the connection between creation and prophecy or the Sinaitic vision, one implicit and the other explicit: (1) Creation poses the question of the qualitative world, and prophecy responds with the divine presence. (2) Creation makes the assumption of determinism, and prophecy balances it with the assumption of autonomous freedom. Chapter Eighteen of And from There You Shall Seek adds an extra aspect: (3)  Creation and prophecy are creative activities.9

8   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein, (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), 213–219. 9   See Walter S. Wurzburger, “The Centrality of Creativity in the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” Tradition 4 (1996): 219–228.



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Like the second explanation, the third too views prophecy and revelation, above all, as the source of the law. In Chapter Eighteen, R. Soloveitchik makes the following claims: Definitions: (1) Ontological order is the act of creation. (2) Halakhic law is moral law.10 Claims: (1) Moral law is the cause and the foundation of the ontological order. Therefore— (2) Halakhic law too is at the foundation of the ontological law. Therefore— (3) Halakhah is the foundation of creation. The explanation of these definitions and claims is the following: R. Soloveitchik adheres to the medieval approach that being is good and non-being is bad.11 Hence, the act of creation is a moral act; granting existence is a good act. “The highest moral good is the totality of what exists” (131). Furthermore: the ontological order at the basis of creation rests on moral principles. R. Soloveitchik’s model is one where realms are united: “All the realms of human experience—the qualitative, the quantitative and symbolic (as described by mathematics and physics), the psychobiological, and the normative—relate the glory of the God of morality and give expression to the eternal imperative” (132). More precisely, Hermann Cohen’s epistemic idealism, which founded cognition on the mathematical natural sciences and even established ethics on the same epistemological methods, dismissed psychology and biologism from the cognitive realms. In his doctoral dissertation, R. Soloveitchik wrote that “Cohen excluded ­logical thought   On various aspects of this issue, see Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman, Religion and Morality, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995); Avi Sagi, Judaism: Between Religion and Morality (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1998). 11   R. Soloveitchik’s view combines the approach of Sa‘adia Gaon in the third chapter of The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, and Maimonides’ neo-Platonic outlook in Guide of the Perplexed III: 10. Sa‘adia Gaon claimed that the world was created because of God’s goodness, and Maimonides represents the view that evil has no independent existence and is merely the absence of the good. 10

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(logische Denken) from psychology. He set an independent sphere for it and thus protected himself from subjectivity.”12 In And from There You Shall Seek, however, R. Soloveitchik insisted on the full union of the various realms so that cognition, psychology, and biology are all based on the moral law, and vice-versa. Yet, he did understand that no explanation is available for establishing on the same basis ontological laws determined by mathematical natural sciences as well as moral laws. One could claim that the same methodology fits both realms, as Hermann Cohen did, but these realms cannot be united nor considered reflections of one another. “The transition from ethics to physics and metaphysics,” he wrote, “remains obscure” (134). The justification for uniting the scientific-cosmic and the moral realms becomes possible, however, through the linkage of the moral law to the divine imperative, that is, to Halakhah. Religious faith enables the identification of the source of halakhic law and scientific law, since halakhic law is the moral law given as a divine command by the same God that created the world. Hence, at its source, the moral law merges with the ontological law. R. Soloveitchik stretched this approach even further and claimed that the difference between the moral-imperative dimension and the ontological dimension of reality is merely one of perspective. These dimensions are different perspectives on the same law.13 “Judaism declares that the only difference between the revelational system of laws and the ontological law is one of perception. The ontological law, which is manifested by the created reality, is revealed to man in the form of the revelational moral command.” (134). R. Soloveitchik’s approach demands that Halakhah be characterized by the following features:

12   Das reine Denken, 14. R. Soloveitchik drew a sharp contrast between Cohen’s view on this point and that of Husserl, who created a connection between thought and psychology. 13   This approach is a “rare moment” of closeness between R. Soloveitchik and R. Abraham Hacohen Kook and his circle, despite the gap and the estrangement between their views. R. David Cohen (ha-Nazir) strenuously endeavored to find a cause for the union of the shared realms and pinned it on their shared methodology. During the 1940s, R. Kook’s writings were not widespread in Europe and certainly not in the United States. A plausible assumption, then, is that R. Soloveitchik’s views on union and his choice of a partial and restricted cognition as the basis for a distinction between the realms were formulated independently, without any direct connection to R. Kook’s thought. And yet, R. Soloveitchik did visit the Land of Israel and did meet R. Kook.



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(1) The source of Halakhah is divine-transcendent, like the source of Creation. (2) But as a law that also reflects the ontological law, Halakhah is indifferent to elements transcendent to the existent (“outside the realm of nature”). Halakhah addresses the “existential experience” in R. Soloveitchik’s style (132). (3) To some extent, this approach requires presenting Halakhah as a law adapted to both natural-cosmic law and to human law, and thus also as a moral-rational law. The united dimension of religious consciousness thus becomes clear. At the first stage, the divine law appears arbitrary in that it is unrelated to the problems and circumstances of the prophet. Divine revelation is also perceived as traumatic due to the detachment of divine law from the person facing revelation. By contrast, at the highest and unified stage of consciousness, divine law as a moral law endowed with absolute validity is perceived as wondrously adapted to natural law. R. Soloveitchik thereby continues approaches within modern Jewish philosophy such as that formulated by Samson Raphael Hirsch, who established the commandments on human cognition and ­morality.14 Divine revelation becomes a desirable and comfortable state also because the imperative contents issued in its context ultimately fit the prophet’s scientific and moral cognition. The united dimension of consciousness (Halakhah and creation) rest on the principle of creativity. The conventional approach in philosophy of science, which R. Soloveitchik endorsed as a satisfactory explanation of scientific activity, presents scientific theories as an ongoing, cognitive-creative activity. Within this context, theories emerge and fall according to different principles (economy, correspondence between different domains, and so forth). Halakhah too reflects ceaseless creative activity, wherein the sages’ tradition and their innovations combine with principles given at Sinai. The ongoing millennia of Oral 14   See, for instance, Nathan Rotenstreich, Contemporary Jewish Thought (in Hebrew), vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1966), 120–121; Noah H. Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976); Lawrence Kaplan, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Philosophy of Halakhah,” The Jewish Law Annual 7 (1987), 188–189; Benjamin Ish-Shalom, “A Critique of Modernity and Postmodernity: R. Soloveitchik and neoOrthodox Thought” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of Rav J. B. Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO, 1997), 356–361.

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Law expresses the creativity inherent in Halakhah. The principle of creativity is manifest in the fact that scientific and halakhic activity both display the creativity of human cognition, although dealing with material that is given and operates according to categorial rules. Creativity, then, is the common denominator that enables to connect cosmic and normative dimensions. A distinction is required, however, between creativity in Halakhic Man and in And from There You Shall Seek. Halakhic man is a partner to divine creation to the point of absolute creative autonomy. Halakhic man created cognitive reality. By contrast, religious consciousness in And from There You Shall Seek stands before the divine creation. This cosmic creation is a given, and homo religiosus does not aspire to rise and become a partner to its creation but only to understand its mystery and reach communion with its Creator. R. Soloveitchik contemplates in curiosity and wonder the consciousness of creativity, that is, the contribution of the creation question to the structure of consciousness. And Again: The Unity of Consciousness (?) As usual, we wonder: does the unified description of the highest stage of consciousness exclude opposites? Has dialectical consciousness indeed been replaced by a united consciousness? Certainly not. “God both faces and hides from man at the time when He reveals Himself to him” (135). The concern of the ceaseless divine revelation is indeed “to leave our comfortable parental homes and the company of our beloved companions and devote ourselves to a sublime aspiration” (135), as was true of Abraham. Yet, devotion to this pursuit is not complete, for two reasons: (1) The divine aspect. The impersonal aspect of the Deity is preserved during the conjunction process of religious consciousness. (2) The social aspect. Devotion to the prophetic experience at all its stages and levels does not eliminate the trauma associated with the detachment and exit from society. At the united stage of consciousness, opposites reconcile but do not disappear. Prophecy raises the prophet as a person—from being part of nature and the universe to the rank of a special existence to whom



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God is revealed. An individual is one specimen of humanity, while prophecy turns him into a personality. The connection with God, however, is not exhausted in the prophet’s personal stand before God. “When the Creator thus reveals Himself in this unique personal revelation, man is granted personal uniqueness and the opportunity to stand before God. This establishes two sorts of relations between the individual and God: a second-person ‘I-Thou’ relation and a third person ‘I-He’ relation” (136).15 Nor does the prophetic stand of the individual before God blur the hidden, concealed dimension of the Deity. Exposure and mutual connection are qualified. The study of the last chapters of And from There You Shall Seek reveals that the complex conscious structure is also present in the deep dimension of subjective consciousness. Present at the united­fundamental stages of consciousness are the initial, “superficial” stages. In sum: the deep stage of consciousness cannot be detached from its dialectic stages. Transmission and Consciousness The transmission and reception of the Oral Torah convey a broader and deeper concept than that [of parents telling their children or teachers their students]. They are embodied in the infusion of the revelational consciousness, in the transmission of the vision of the living God,16 through an experience that rages from one generation to the next. The generations are united, and eras are joined in one point at the focus of the revelation. (139)

In this passage, R. Soloveitchik clarifies that he does not view the transmission of the Oral Torah as an existential situation of dialogue and connection á la Martin Buber. The transmission of the Oral Torah is 15  In this passage, R. Soloveitchik characterizes the prophetic state in Buber’s terms, which enable a suitable description of the dialogical situation typical of this state. The description of God’s personal address to the prophet resembles the existential model of the object turning into subject. Nevertheless, the context of the discussion is clearly the study of consciousness, and R. Soloveitchik applied the model of personal revelation vs. general and cosmic revelation intimated by R. Judah Halevi (The Kuzari IV: 1–3) to the supreme subjective stage of consciousness. The entire discussion is an essentialist description of the conscious-united stage that preserves opposites, and the terminology does not change this framework. See below. 16   See Job 27:2 and the Metsudat Zion commentary ad locum.

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merely a justification and a further expression of the ­phenomenological method dominant in And from There You Shall Seek.17 R. Soloveitchik does not discuss concrete actual transmission, since actual concreteness is bound by time and place. Observance of the law is indeed bound to concrete reality, so that the consciousness of transmission also has an objective-concrete dimension, that is, a historical dimension. Subjective dimensions of the consciousness of transmission, however, are a-historical. R. Soloveitchik’s interest is distinctly essential: transmission as the perpetuity of prophecy. R. Soloveitchik describes at length the connection between teacher and disciples as one in which “the giver’s personality touches that of the receivers” (142), but immediately clarifies that the union between teacher and disciple is not an existential but a distinctively cognitive state. “The student who understands a concept,” writes R. Soloveitchik, “cleaves to the intellect that transmits the concept. If he grasps the teacher’s logic, then he becomes joined to the teacher in the unity of the conceiving intellect (maskil ) and the conceived ideas (muskal)” (142). R. Soloveitchik described the essence of the cognitive situation of prophecy and of Torah study. An encounter of this type certainly includes existential elements, but R. Soloveitchik is not interested in them in And from There You Shall Seek. His interest is focused on prophecy and on Torah study as a collective-essentialist consciousness, which is not bound to any time or any community. The cognitive and phenomenological analysis of conjunction with God (knowledge, knower, and known) applies now to the connection between teacher and disciple. And when the disciple himself becomes a teacher, the emanation goes forth from him to the new student, and so on. The intellectual basis of Halakhah enables the conjunction. Conjunction with the Deity on the one hand and the tradition of the Oral Torah on the other become one, as the following diagram illustrates:

17   Contrary to Michael Berger’s approach. See Michael S. Berger, “U-vikashtem Misham”: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Response to Martin Buber’s Religious Existentialism,” Modern Judaism 18 (1998): 93–118.



the conscious mechanism of conjunction (2) Communion

Teacher

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Communion Communion Deity

Disciple (Turns into Teacher) Communion Communion Disciple (Turns into Teacher)

Deity

Transmission too is an expression of creativity, and in this sense, it joins Creation. When the world emanates from the Infinite, it draws the divine Shekhinah along with it, because it is impossible for an existent thing to emanate from God’s bosom without the divine Shekhinah clinging to it (this is the exile of the Shekhinah). So too is it impossible for a prophet to relate his prophecies to others, or for a Torah scholar to teach Torah to others, without the giver’s personality touching that of the receivers. (141–142)

The consciousness of transmission contributes to the unity of consciousness, and involves an application of the consciousness of both Creation and prophecy. The story about the boy, the young R. Soloveitchik who participates in a struggle to rescue Maimonides from the questions hurled at him by R. Moshe Soloveitchik, clearly confirms that the experience of participation in the discourse about the ancestors and their views attests to the existence of consciousness in its phenomenological sense. The experience is not the “golden fantasy of a little boy; the feeling in it is not mystical. It is a completely historical, psychological reality that is alive even now in the depths of my soul” (145). The sages’ transmission of the Oral Torah and the prophets’ intellectual communion with God, two phenomena recurring at various levels over generations, join one another as the united consciousness. R. Soloveitchik writes: The Torah teacher is always revealed from within the depths of his faithful disciple’s soul. The prophets and sages of the Jewish people burst forth from the depths of the nation’s historical consciousness. The souls of the first generations following the revelation have been transmitted in

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chapter seven the course of the centuries until they are absorbed in the recesses of the historical reality of the Jewish community18 that yearns for redemption. The Shekhinah speaks out of the throat of the destitute,19 reviled, and abandoned “last generation” (Deut. 29:21).20 If this generation so wills it, the revelation is not a vague, ancient vision, but a fresh, living one, effervescent in its being and expressed in the consciousness of eternal awe and yearning. When the Halakhah discusses the transmission of the Torah, the receiving of the tradition (masorah), it is not dealing with an abstract idea, but with something real that urges, yearns, and impels the individual to activity. (142–143)

Jewish religious consciousness is a-historical in the sense that the fluctuations of history do not affect it, and it is one of “eternal yearning,” and it is historical in the sense that is also manifest at the real-­objective level and anchored in the concrete world (observance of the commandments). It exists in the revelation at Mount Sinai as it exists at the time of writing And from There You Shall Seek. The cited passage indeed makes a reference to Holocaust survivors rare at the time of R. Soloveitchik’s writing in the mid-1940s, as a “reviled and abandoned last generation.” Even after the Holocaust, the divine vision was still an essential component of religious consciousness and, in this sense, there is hope even for the survivors. And again: the teacher’s presence in the disciple’s soul does not necessarily reflect a dialogical association but rather a continuity of consciousness.21 R. Soloveitchik chose to conclude And from There You Shall Seek with a discussion of the consciousness of tradition, again highlighting the contrast between himself and halakhic man, the “Brisk” scholar. For halakhic man, the continuity of the scholarly tradition is evident in the creativity of Torah hiddushim, which brings early and later scholars together. In And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik is not against this kind of tradition. Indeed, it is the first component of the consciousness of tradition. After telling the story about the intuitive participation of the young boy, listening to R. Moshe Soloveitchik’s lectures, in the struggle of Maimonides’ interpretations, R. Soloveitchik notes: 18  In the Hebrew original Knesset Israel, which also denotes the kabbalistic sefirah of Malkhut that is synonymous with the Shekhinah. Redemption is thus the connection with Tif ’eret. R. Soloveitchik uses kabbalistic terminology as a metaphor for the learning process and for the tradition of Torah. 19  In the Hebrew original ha-‘ar‘ar, according to Psalms 102:18, meaning screaming or praying. 20   According to Job 15:16; Psalms 48:14; 78:4, and more. 21   See Zvi (Hirsch) Schachter, Nefesh ha-Rav (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Flatbush Beth Midrash, 1999), 54–58.



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In my childhood, only the Rambam was my friend, while at present my study group has grown and includes many Torah scholars. All the sages of the tradition, from the days of Moses to the present, have become my friends! When I solve a problem in the Rambam’s or Rabbenu Tam’s writings, I see their glowing faces expressing their satisfaction . . . It is a very deep experience. It is the experience of the transmission of the Oral Torah. (146)

Meticulous readers will justifiably find here an indirect, concealed critique of the exaggerated focus of the “Brisk” tradition on Maimonides, but R. Soloveitchik indeed established the unified consciousness on the transmission of hiddushim. The deviation from the approach of Halakhic Man is clear: the scholar pays no attention to the prophet, and the transcendent association does not exist for him.22 By contrast, the current discussion in And from There You Shall Seek makes no essential distinction between prophet and scholar. The prophet and his audience, the teacher and his disciple, reflect the united consciousness. Hence, R. Soloveitchik claimed: Prophecy is transmitted through the benevolent whisper of the prophet’s existential coupling with the other, the individual’s merging with the community. The prophet’s consciousness expands and absorbs everything into itself. It shares the revelational vision with society . . . The prophet pours some of his being into the generations that are to come, the minds that have not yet emerged from the dark of nothingness,23 the last generation24 hidden in the fog of the unknown future. The “community of Israel” means the coupling of the first and the last generations of prophet and listener, Torah teacher and disciple, the revelation of the Shekhinah in the dim light of the dawn and the vision of the end of days at the appointed time. (147)

Prophecy and Halakhah both strive to improve society and mend the world. R. Soloveitchik insisted on mentioning Maimonides’ approach in a note to the cited text (note 23), where he states that the teeming emanation bestowed on the prophet propels him to care for the repair of the world. He obviously did not mention in this note Maimonides’ resolute view against the inclusion of Halakhah into ­prophecy. ­Maimonides 22   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik: Halakhic Man— Religion or Halakhah (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2008), 363. 23   According to Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, “Keter Malkhut,” in Kovets Shirei Kodesh leShlomo Ibn Gabirol, vol. 1, ed. Dov Yarden (Jerusalem: n. p., 1971), 43, lns. 64–65. Again, R. Soloveitchik hinted at Creation as an expression of unified consciousness. See Shlomo Pines, “ ‘And He Called Out to Nothingness and It Was Split’: A Note on a Passage in Ibn Gabirol’s Keter Malkhut” (in Hebrew), Tarbiz 50 (1981: 339–347). 24   See Psalms 78:6.

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tenaciously endeavored to separate prophecy from Halakhah. But R. Soloveitchik also mentions Judah Halevi, who does connect prophecy and Halakhah but does not limit prophecy solely to Halakhah. Indirectly, the note hints at several approaches, but the text conveys an unequivocal outlook: prophecy and the transmission of the Oral Torah are two united aspects of the religious consciousness, that is, different expressions of the same consciousness. Between the lines, Creation too appears as a uniting element of consciousness. The ontological, the social, and the normative meet at the supreme stage of consciousness. R. Soloveitchik devotes the last discussion in And from There You Shall Seek to a study of the prophecy phenomenon as an expression of the deep and united layer of religious consciousness. Prophecy is the culmination of his phenomenological analysis, an essential element in the consciousness of the tradition, in addition to the creative consciousness of Torah hiddushim. In R. Soloveitchik’s description of the eternity of consciousness, “prophet and listener” precede “Torah teacher and disciple.” R. Soloveitchik’s fluctuation between his various sources and between the different inclinations of consciousness is evident to the reader when the discussion focuses also on conscious unity. R. Soloveitchik could have in these concluding remarks other layers of consciousness, such as scientific aspirations, senses, feelings, and so forth. Yet, he seems to have felt that it was important to pit the deepest and most unified layer of consciousness, prophecy, against the stable and structured dimension of halakhic cognition. As opposed to the “limited” world view of the “Brisk” scholar, he sees these two dimensions as complementary and integrated elements of consciousness. In sum, communion with God, as the last stage of religious consciousness, is an impossible merger (from the perspective of scholarly halakhic man) of the various dimensions that make up this consciousness. Prophecy as a social and conscious element plays an essential role, beside halakhic creativity.25 Consciousness of the Deity For R. Soloveitchik, as noted, religious consciousness is consciousness of the Deity, and he therefore assigned a corresponding divine 25   R. Soloveitchik joins modern and contemporary Jewish thinkers who viewed prophecy as a factor of consciousness that is also present in the modern world, though he upholds a distinctly Orthodox position. See, for instance, Levi A. Olan, Prophetic Faith and the Secular Age (New York: Ktav, 1982).



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model to every dimension and every stage of religious consciousness. The model suited to the stage of communion is the unity of cognition (knowledge, knower, and known), discussed above.26 In his discussion of prophecy and the transmission of the Oral Torah as “the perpetuity of God’s word,” R. Soloveitchik added another model: The teaching and transmitting of Torah and transmitting the Torah glow with the attribute of hesed, lovingkindness, with which God created the world. Just as God acts with lovingkindness toward the world, so must the prophet act toward his fellow humans. If the prophet’s mind has been “intertwined” with the Infinite and “connected” with the mind of the Creator, he must realize that he is the main conduit through which plenitude from the Eternal flows toward human beings . . .  Just as God revealed Himself through His actions from the hidden, separated Infinite, clothing Himself in the benevolent act of expansion, and thus creating the world, so must the prophet reveal himself to others from within the closed-off isolation of the self. (146)

At the conscious stage of communion, as expressed in prophecy and in transmission, the underlying divine model is the God of lovingkindness. Contrary to the complex epistemic-idealist model that R. Soloveitchik endorsed for explaining the mechanism of communion, here he limited himself to the simplistic model of lovingkindness without justice. Clearly, then, communion is not merely personal-cognitive; it has a distinctive social aspect. This aspect relies on “lovingkindness” and “expansion,” both key terms of emanation and its hypostases in the neo-Platonic and kabbalistic style. Helping the other as prophets do and ensuring the other’s spiritual enrichment as does the transmission of the Oral Torah are integral components of the consciousness of communion. Communion, then, is not merely cognitive; it is not confined to the merger of the knowing intellect and the infinite known intellect. Since God is the Deity of lovingkindness and emanation, communion with this Deity occurs by means of helping others and involving them in the experience of revelation and in prophetic consciousness. This phenomenological description is not a discussion of the problems of existential loneliness and of the meaning of intersubjective communication and dialogue. R. Soloveitchik analyzed religious consciousness with essentialist tools and found that social involvement is an inseparable part of it, but existential problems did not concern him at this stage.

  See above, 131–149.

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chapter seven The Reconstruction of Consciousness: A Summary

In Chapter Twenty, R. Soloveitchik exposes to the reader his aim in And from There You Shall Seek. The convoluted essay, which began with a poetic description in the style of Song of Songs and ended with a description of prophecy and the Oral Torah tradition as the concrete and social expression of communion, is merely “a reconstruct[ion of] the content of revelation” (149). The reconstruction presents an intricate Jewish religious consciousness, which seeks union through struggles and fluctuations. R. Soloveitchik also painstakingly describes the stages of reconstructed subjective consciousness (“transcendent consciousness” in his terminology) and its dimensions. Below is a presentation of subjective conscious structure, citing R. Soloveitchik’s concluding remarks: (1) Tension: Natural consciousness vs. revelational consciousness

“State 1: Trust-Fear” “At first, human questioning brings man to the revelational encounter. Through his striving for the absolute, for the non-contingent and the eternal, he encounters the divine command and the supra-natural authority that demand of him to follow a particular way of life. The revelational experience on this level denies and contradicts man’s intellectual values and aspires to replace the free activity of man’s spirit with the passivity of compulsion and anxiety.” (149)

(2) Refining the tension: Love and awe (transformation)

“State 2: Love-Awe” “Man begins to befriend the revelational experience and to feel trust in it; he tries to link it to his experience of God within the system of lawful and orderly nature; he identifies with the consciousness of the God of the world, which expresses the wonder of lovingkindness, compassion, and blessings, as well as with the consciousness of a God above and beyond the world, which demands absolute subjugation and commitment from the individual.” (149)

(3) Communion (Tension disappears): Love only

State 3: Love and Communion-Passion “The imperative nature of man’s behavior gradually palls at the dawn of the third stage, the stage combining love with awe, when the soul longs for its Creator out of the aspiration for total attachment and strives to achieve this in a running movement without any retreat.” (150)



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In sum, the structure of Jewish religious consciousness according to And from There You Shall Seek comprises two dimensions. The objective dimension is concerned with regular concrete activity. This dimension is based on the commandments of Halakhah, which records in detail the various stages of consciousness’ subjective dimension. Halakhah reflects the dialectical and integrated processes typical of the subjective dimension. The objective dimension expresses the fluctuation between scientific activity, in which scientists and thinkers create theories that allow for an understanding of the universe, and revelation, in which scientists are in a receptive situation: God is revealed to them and imposes on them commands and statutes. This dimension also records the deepest subjective foundation in the commandments of prophecy and communion. The subjective “surface” dimension of consciousness comprises two stages. In the first stage, consciousness fluctuates between the selfaffirmation resulting from scientific activity and the humility created by revelation. Scientific activity exposes human creativity in all its glory, whereas revelation exposes human beings in their helplessness and impotence. Revelation is receptive, and its halakhic contents are not directly related to the state of a person in a state of revelation. At the same time, consciousness creates divine models that reflect the fluctuation: the mercy model (natural consciousness) and the justice model (revelational consciousness). At the second stage of the “surface” dimension, fluctuation changes in two ways: (1) Self-affirmation and humility become love and awe. (2) The poles are no longer stable; rather, love becomes awe and awe becomes love. The description of the fluctuation at this stage is close to Hegelian dialectics. At this stage, consciousness creates a divine model fitting its state—the Lurianic kabbalistic model. The “depth” structure of the subjective dimension of consciousness is ostensibly concerned with the release of tension. At this stage, religious consciousness is characterized by love of God. At the same time, it also creates an epistemological divine model, which clarifies that human knowledge unites with divine knowledge. Another model is thus added to the epistemological one—the model of the God of mercy, seeking the participation of society in consciousness and experience. In fact, dialectic tension is present at this stage as well, but is latent. The essentialist discussion of religious consciousness, then, ends at the unified stage. The aspirations of religious consciousness culminate in communion out of serenity and social influence.

Part two

existence

Chapter Eight

The Negation of Metaphysics: “Kol Dodi Dofek” and the Zionist Homilies And from There You Shall Seek is the last of R. Soloveitchik’s comprehensive works dealing exclusively with the structure of religious ­consciousness and relying on phenomenology as the dominant research method. Henceforth, his focus shifts to an additional direction: the attitude of Judaism in general and of Halakhah in particular to the foundations of concrete existence and to the relationship with the other. During the 1940s, R. Soloveitchik’s interest focused mainly on the various layers of religious consciousness and on the systematic way of exposing them. In particular, he emphasized the relationship between the subjective and objective layers of consciousness. The message of R. Soloveitchik’s thought was that the foundations of religious-Jewish consciousness are unintelligible without an understanding of the essential role of the objective layer, namely, halakhic law. Halakhah records, locates, and restrains the extreme dialectical processes of ­consciousness. In the early 1950s, we find several Jewish thinkers in the United States who show an interest in existentialist thought. Among them are Abraham Joshua Heschel and Will Herberg.1 R. Soloveitchik too emerges as a creative existentialist thinker. From the mid-1950s,   Byron L. Sherwin, “Thinking Judaism Through: Jewish Theology in America,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 124–126. On R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy in light of American Jewish thought, see, for instance, Jacob B. Agus, “The Orthodox Stream,” in Understanding American Judaism: Toward the Description of a Modern Religion, vol. 2, ed. Jacob Neusner (New York: Ktav, 1975) 107–130; Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1983); Shalom Ratsabi, Between Fate and Destiny: The Jewish Theological Discourse in the United States (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003). About a decade later, Emil Fackenheim from Canada would join this group. Finally, note that Abraham Joshua Heschel was deeply influenced by the phenomenology of religion, which is as dominant in his writings as is his concern with concrete existence. Will Herberg placed religious existentialism on the agenda and published an anthology entitled Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicholas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1

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R. Soloveitchik’s teachings turned with great impetus to an entirely different problem that uses other methods of investigation—the tension between a unique subjective and meaningful existence and an objective existence lacking uniqueness. R. Soloveitchik devoted his conceptual energy to a description of the subject’s stance vis-à-vis surrounding objects, given that these objects expose the subject’s objective dimension. R. Soloveitchik began to deal with the question of the connection with the other and with modes of communication, and studied the fluctuations between subjective and objective communication. The method he adopted is the analysis of the connection between object and subject using existential criteria especially evident in the thought of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Buber, applying the dialectic of consciousness to concrete relationships: a subjective relationship that is unique, meaningful, creative, and teleological, and an objective relationship lacking these characteristics. The following chapters deal with the changes and the new directions in R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy as evident in “Kol Dodi Dofek” and in the other Zionist homilies (in this chapter), in the psychological lectures (Chapter Nine), in a series of articles and homilies on family life (Chapter Ten), and in The Lonely Man of Faith (Chapter Eleven). Homiletics As an Expressive Instrument During the 1950s,2 R. Soloveitchik delivered a series of Zionist homilies of which the most important is “Kol Dodi Dofek.” R. Soloveitchik delivered this homily, which conveys the transformation in his thought, on Israel’s Independence Day (5 Iyar 5716, 16 April 1956). This ­homily

1958). R. Soloveitchik became part of these trends, which colored his thought with a different hue, as will be shown in the following chapters. 2   Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkof, The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1 (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1999), 54 ff. On preaching styles in religious-Zionism, see Dov Schwartz, “On Preachers and Preaching in the Religious-Zionist Movement” (in Hebrew), in A Hundred Years of Religious Zionism, vol. 2, Historical Aspects, ed. Avi Sagi and Dov Schwartz (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2003), 357–392. On Zionist preaching in the United States, see Robert V. Friedenberg, “Hear O Israel”: The History of American Jewish Preaching 1654–1970 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 85–106; Nathan Rotenstreich, Studies in Contemporary Jewish Thought (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978), 74–83. See, in particular, various articles by Kimmy Caplan, such as “Between Tradition and Modernity: Rabbi Sivitz and Jewish Preaching in America” (in Hebrew) Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 11 (1993).



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launches a new kind of religious-Zionist homiletics, located somewhere between the homiletics of Rav Harlap, for instance, and that of someone like R. Zeev Gold. R. Harlap’s homilies are kabbalistic-ethical, and they are not meant for a non-elitist public. These homilies are distinctively theoretical and programmatic, and their most important feature is conceptual innovation. By contrast, R. Gold’s homilies are a priori meant for the general public. The dimension of independent conceptual­­programmatic content pales by comparison with the public-­political message. R. Soloveitchik dealt with national-political homiletics but did not renounce the philosophical dimension. The political message does not blur philosophical innovation; quite the contrary. The homily becomes a philosophical work, and philosophy assumes a distinctive teleological-pragmatic dimension. My discussion of the conceptual changes in R. Soloveitchik’s teachings in the 1950s will examine models of conceptual and homiletic progression in “Kol Dodi Dofek.” A Matter of Definition and Formulation In “Kol Dodi Dofek,” R. Soloveitchik discusses the phenomenon of pain and suffering, and this is also his perspective when he approaches the Holocaust and national rebirth. A discussion of R. Soloveitchik’s attitude to suffering will therefore enable understanding of his views on the Holocaust. The key insights on suffering appear in the first pages of “Kol Dodi Dofek,” and will be discussed here at length. R. Soloveitchik writes: Judaism, in its strenuous endeavor to reach a safe shore in a world torn asunder by pain and affliction, in its search for an answer to the profound dilemma posed by the evil which—apparently—reigns unboundedly, arrived at a new formulation and definition of the problem, possessed of both depth and breadth. The problem of suffering, Judaism claims, may be raised in two distinct dimensions: fate and destiny. Judaism has always distinguished between an existence of fate and an existence of destiny, between the “I” subject to fate and the “I” endowed with destiny. It is in this distinction that our teaching regarding suffering is to be found. (51–52)3

3   Pagination refers to the following version: “Kol Dodi Dofek: It Is the Voice of My Beloved That Knocketh,” trans. Lawrence Kaplan, in Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust, ed. Bernhard Rosenberg (New York: Ktav, 1992), 51–117.

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Through this formulation, R. Soloveitchik fully encapsulates the new approach that he adopted to the problem of suffering. First, he clarifies that Judaism had never pretended to solve the problem of the causes of suffering. Its significant achievement is the clear formulation and the structured definition of the problem of suffering, which could be the most essential element on the way to contend with it. As this wording makes clear, he holds that the problem of suffering is insoluble, and will explicitly argue that the question of why there is suffering is unanswerable and to some extent even meaningless. The only possible question is how one should live with suffering. In other words, how will suffering become meaningful in the suffering person’s existence?4 The passage cited also intimates that, on the surface, suffering is dominant. Factually, suffering characterizes Jewish history at least in the generation of the homily’s writing. Suffering is a given that cannot be changed. The principle of suffering as a starting point will characterize R. Soloveitchik’s writing from the time of his writing “Kol Dodi Dofek.”5 The distinction will thus be between evident facts and the meaning ascribed to them. In other words, the distinction between one ruled by suffering and one liberated from the rule of suffering is not external-factual, since suffering is a fact. Paradoxically, however, it is still possible not to surrender to this fact and conduct a life that deals effectively with suffering, as R. Soloveitchik proceeds to explain. R. Soloveitchik laid the foundation for a distinction between suffering as a given and suffering as perceived in the consciousness of the 4   R. Soloveitchik greatly distanced himself from the approach that prevails in biblical and rabbinic literature, whereby suffering is in some way punishment for sins. The protests of biblical figures such as Abraham or Job represent a questioning on the attribution of sin, but do not refute the principle of suffering as punishment. See John Bowker, Problems of Suffering in Religions of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 24–25. R. Soloveitchik also differs in essential ways from Christian ascetic approaches, for instance, which choose suffering resting on their faith in another, spiritual world. See, for instance, Owen Chadwick, Western Asceticism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958). R. Soloveitchik made the question of cause redundant, and stated that suffering is a primary existential datum that does not require justification, since such justification is impossible. Resonating in his approach is Kierkegaard’s existentialist-religious outlook, which views sin and suffering as a given pole of the dialectic typical of the believer. See, for instance, David Jay Gouwens, Kierkegaard as a Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 166–185. R. Soloveitchik diverts the intellectual effort invested in the study of suffering to meaning. On the issue of meaning in existential literature see Yuval Lurie, Tracking the Meaning of Life: A Philosophical Journey (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006), Parts 3 and 4. 5   See below, chs. 9, 10, and 11.



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suffering person: there is a perception of suffering at the level of fate and a perception of suffering at the level of destiny. The listener and the reader understand already at this point that, at the level of fate, suffering is a factual datum, whereas at the level of destiny, suffering is a teleological datum. The distinction between destiny and fate is also a distinction between types of existence and personality: there is an “I” of fate and an “I” of destiny. In other words, the perception of suffering follows from the person’s type of existence and from the character of the individual personality.6 Originality R. Soloveitchik defined an existence of fate through two characteristics: (1) Object. Individuals living an existence of fate are ruled by the surrounding events. They are swept by routine occurrences without critique or personal statements, and they leave no imprint on them since they have no subjective personality.7 A fate-laden existence is therefore meaningless. R. Soloveitchik adopted Paul Tillich’s view: “Twentieth-century man has lost a meaningful world and a self which lives in meanings out of a spiritual center.”8 (2) Negation and Alienation. Given that the individual is created as (at least potentially) possessing a personality, a subjective personality exists below the surface as a fact and as a given. One living an existence of fate, therefore, denies the personal-subjective dimension within himself, since “his being, shattered and torn, contradicts itself and negates its own value and worth” (52). The “I” of fate, then, is characterized by self-negation.

6   See Avi Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, trans. Batya Stein (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 158–166. 7   R. Soloveitchik was influenced in this description by the phenomenological psychotherapy, which was a significant element in the last century. See below, ch. 9. Rollo May, for instance, noted that the emptiness typical of the modern individual is evident in the inability to influence the course of life, personal feelings, and the surrounding world. See, for instance, Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: Dell, 1953), 24. On the philosophical-existential sources of this characteristic see Avi Schweitzer (Sagi), “The Loneliness of the Man of Faith in the Philosophy of Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), Daat 2–3 (1978–1979): 247–257. 8   Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 139.

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An existence of fate is defined as a necessary stage in the path of one facing evil and suffering, and many people indeed experience only an existence of fate. But even those who experience an existence of destiny begin with fate, since this is the initial human reaction at the first stage of exposure to pain. At a second stage, the individual tries to track the, as it were, rational foundations of suffering. R. Soloveitchik described this stage as follows: After this psychic upheaval of the sufferer as the immediate reaction to evil has passed, there follows the intellectual curiosity which endeavors to understand the cosmos and thereby undergird man’s confidence and security. In this stage, a person begins to contemplate suffering and to pose grave and difficult questions. He tracks the intellectual foundations of suffering and evil, and seeks to find the harmony and balance between the affirmation and the negation and to blunt the sharp edge of the tension between the thesis—the good—and the antithesis—the bad—in existence. As a result of the question and answer, problem and resolution, he formulates a metaphysics of evil wherewith he is able to reach an accommodation with evil, indeed to cover it up. The sufferer utilizes his capacity for intellectual abstraction, with which he was endowed by his Creator, to the point of self-deception—the denial of the existence of evil in the world. (53)

R. Soloveitchik’s formulations in this passage are extreme. Their implication is that, in the course of centuries of Jewish philosophy that addressed the problem of evil intensely and at great length and yielded many approaches, the thinkers missed the point, erred, and misled. At the end of the passage, R. Soloveitchik presents mainly two such approaches to the problem of evil: (1) Kabbalah. Kabbalistic sages presented a structured approach to evil (“a metaphysics of evil”). They presented evil as ontological, and pointed to its source in the celestial world. The impure side, the sitra ahra, exists parallel to the holy side; the Kelipoth are a counterpoint to the Sefirot.9 R. Soloveitchik claimed that this approach “accommodates” and “covers up” evil. It holds that, by

9   Note that R. Soloveitchik described the existence of fate relying on a mythical and demonic terminology: “His afflictions [of the man-object] appear shadowy and murky, like satanic forces, the offspring of the chaos and the void which pollute the cosmos that had been destined to clearly reflect the image of its Creator” (52). Intuitively, then, the man of fate anticipates the “intellectual” stage by viewing evil as an expression of heavenly satanic forces.



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admitting the actual existence of evil and introducing it into the system, it has solved its problematic nature. The “metaphysical” approach, however, proved a failure. (2) Maimonides. Contrary to the kabbalists, Maimonides denied the existence of evil. He solved the problem of the flow of evil from the Deity, which is wholly good, by claiming that evil has no reality but is rather a privation (Guide of the Perplexed III: 10). For R. Soloveitchik, this neo-Platonic approach (“the denial of the existence of evil in the world”) is no less than “self-deception.” The main approaches of Jewish thought, then, do not provide the solution to the problem of evil because no such solution is possible. In the following passage, R. Soloveitchik strongly denies the metaphysical approach to the problem of evil: Only if a man could grasp the world as a whole would he be able to gain a perspective on the essential nature of evil. However, as long as man’s apprehension is limited and distorted, as long as he perceives only isolated fragments of the cosmic drama and the mighty epic of history, he remains unable to penetrate into the secret lair of suffering and evil. To what may the matter be compared? To a person gazing at a beautiful rug, a true work of art,10 one into which an exquisite design has been woven—but looking at it from its reverse side. Can such a viewing give rise to a sublime aesthetic experience? We, alas, view the world from its reverse side. We are, therefore unable to grasp the all-encompassing framework of being. And it is only within that framework that it is possible to discern the divine plan, the essential nature of the divine actions. (54)

R. Soloveitchik’s basic assumption, then, is that the human creature is limited, unable to grasp the “all-encompassing framework of being.” Given this assumption, two alternative conclusions are possible: (1) We cannot grasp the world (sometimes a metaphor for divine Providence) but should still attempt to comprehend whatever we can. (2) Since we will never attain an “all-encompassing” grasp of the universe, it is be pointless to try to apprehend it in part.

 In Hebrew original ma‘she hoshev, according to Exodus 26: 1 and elsewhere.

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R. Soloveitchik inclined to the second conclusion: partial apprehension is useless. A contemplation of the reverse side of the rug has neither aesthetic nor informative value. Clearly then, metaphysical language is unintelligible to us.11 Like the “early” Wittgenstein, R. Soloveitchik did not claim that metaphysics does not exist but that, even if it does exist, it cannot be grasped. “[Man] will seek in vain for the solution to the problem of evil within the framework of speculative thought, for he will never find it” (53). To some extent, R. Soloveitchik could be said to have adopted, as did Hermann Cohen, the sharp critical attitude of positivism toward metaphysics. The claim that there is a cosmic but inapprehensible good leads to one conclusion: any concern with this realm is pointless. Dealing with metaphysics is equivalent to describing a rug from the “reverse” side.12 The use of negative kabbalistic terminology again conveys R. Soloveitchik’s critique of the attempt to provide a metaphysical explanation of evil. More precisely: in And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik ignored metaphysics

11   The existential approaches at the basis of “Kol Dodi Dofek” are found mostly in Kierkegaard’s thought: the struggle against a given objective reality, the object-subject dichotomy in human existence as self-negation, and the rejection of metaphysics as a substantial and meaningful topic. For further discussion, see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 17–19. R. Soloveitchik indeed interpreted the existential moment as a negation of the ability of metaphysics to reach absolute truth. For him, fragmentary truth is not truth. For several years after the delivery of this homily, scholars of existentialism were involved in a dispute regarding the possibility of attaining rational truth according to existential philosophy. Some denied this possibility altogether, and others claimed that rational knowledge was attainable, but that the only worthy and significant knowledge concerns the existential human situation. See, for instance, William Barret, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985); Robert G. Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover, 1962), 87. Finally, note that Heschel too, directly and indirectly, criticized the metaphysical theology of Western religions. See, for instance, Fritz A. Rothschild, “Varieties of Heschelian Thought,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought, ed. John C. Merkle (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 88. 12   Here to, R. Soloveitchik is hinting at the kabbalistic term “sitra de-smola.” See, for instance, Zohar, Genesis, I, 17a and 22b. Note also that, as a thinker confronting centuries of Jewish thought, “metaphysical” idioms will certainly appear in his teachings. Furthermore: R. Soloveitchik often uses the term metaphysics in the denotation of “transcendence,” though this is not a felicitous term because his philosophical message is the rejection of metaphysics in the denotation of extra-cognitive or extraconscious spiritual existents. More precisely, R. Soloveitchik was not interested in the existence of spiritual entities. Cf. Benjamin Ish-Shalom, “Language as a Religious Category in the Works of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift: Collected Papers in Jewish Studies, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher (Jerusalem: Academon, 1992), 815.



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as such because he chose an entirely different method for examining religious life—the phenomenology of religion founded by Otto and Sheler. In this discipline, however, metaphysics is examined insofar as it reflects a structured component of religious consciousness. By contrast, in “Kol Dodi Dofek” and in the existentialist writings that followed it, R. Soloveitchik was critical of metaphysics, confronting it on the grounds that it fails to provide answers to existential problems. When stating that metaphysics is irrelevant to religious thought, R. Soloveitchik followed the thinkers of the “theology of crisis” on the one hand, and existentialist thought on the other. The discussion so far suggests that R. Soloveitchik had to present an original religious-Jewish philosophy. He had been extremely critical of the philosophical attempts that had preceded him in the Jewish world, describing them as blurring the problem and as self-deceptive. R. Soloveitchik therefore turned to a pool of sources that, so far, had not been extensively used in contemporary Orthodox thought—existentialist philosophy. It is precisely here, in his critique of existing Jewish philosophy, that the seeping of existentialism into R. Soloveitchik’s thought becomes evident. According to Walter Kaufmann, existentialist thought is characterized mainly by reservations about prevalent philosophical trends due to their distance from concrete life and their helplessness in coping with real problems, which they actually miss. Kaufmann claimed that Kierkegaard, for instance, attacked accepted concepts in Christian scholasticism, and that this fact is constitutive of his thought.13 R. Soloveitchik too had significant reservations concerning directions prevalent in the traditional Jewish world, and thought they had missed the central problem that should have concerned them. His recourse to existentialist thought, which had not been a constitutive element of his own thought until then, is therefore obvious. Existentialist sources drew a distinction between two kinds of existence: meaningless (objective) existence, and unique (subjective) existence, which is not engulfed by triviality. R. Soloveitchik equated meaningless existence, the day-to-day routine of life, with fate existence, and unique existence—with an existence of destiny.14

13   Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland: World, 1956), 17. 14   See, for instance, Dov Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads: A Theological Profile of Religious-Zionism, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 195–198.

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The man of fate cannot overcome the problem of evil because he does not contend with it efficiently. In sum: the man of fate chooses a metaphysical approach, hopelessly endeavoring to understand God, and therefore fails. The man of fate insists on understanding the divine moves, whereas the Deity and its ways are beyond human understanding. By contrast, the man of destiny succeeds in contending with the problem of evil. How? R. Soloveitchik presents an existence of destiny as follows: In the second dimension of human existence, destiny, the problem of suffering assumes a new form. What is the nature of the existence of destiny? It is an active mode of existence, one wherein man confronts the environment into which he was thrown, possessed of an understanding of his uniqueness, of his special worth, of his freedom, and of his ability to struggle with his external circumstances without forfeiting either his independence or his selfhood. The motto of the “I” of destiny is, “Against your will you are born and against your will you die, but you live of your own free will.”15 Man is born like an object, dies like an object, but possesses the ability to live like a subject, like a creator, an innovator, who can impress his own individual seal upon his life and can extricate himself from a mechanical type of existence and enter into a creative, active mode of being. Man’s task in the world, according to Judaism, is to transform fate into destiny; a passive existence of compulsion, perplexity and muteness into an existence replete with a powerful will, with resourcefulness, daring, and imagination. (54–55)

Whereas the man of fate begins from above—in a desperate attempt to understand the divine entity—the man of destiny begins from below, that is, from an understanding of human existence. An existence of destiny is described, above all, via negationis: man is thrown into his environment.16 The environment is a given that can neither be chosen nor changed. The starting point, then, is deterministic. The difference between an existence of fate and an existence of destiny lies in the relationship to the environment as given: the man of fate surrenders to it and is absorbed within it, whereas the man of destiny struggles against its influence. The man of fate is carried by the objective flow, by emptiness and lack of meaning, whereas the man   According to M. Avot 4: 22; Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, Version B, ch. 34.   Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2008), 40–41. 15 16



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of destiny seeks a meaningful life. This is how Kierkegaard explained Socrates’ stance against the “objective spirit” of the people of Athens,17 and this is also the scheme of inauthentic existence into which the individual is thrown as opposed to meaningful authentic existence in Heidegger’s thought. Tillich defined courage as overcoming the fear of emptiness and meaninglessness.18 The man of destiny knows that the fact that the existent is part of a meaningless environment cannot be changed; only preventing its control is possible. What are the ways of struggling against fate and meaninglessness? The answer to this question, so deeply anchored in existential thought, is unequivocal: action and creativity are the expression of an existence of destiny.19 The man of destiny re-creates his personality through suitable action (in R. Soloveitchik’s style: will, vision, initiative, action, and influence). The personality’s action and creativity turn an existence of fate into one of destiny. We can therefore understand how the man of destiny reacts to suffering and evil. The man of destiny assumes, as a starting point, that suffering is a given. The meaning of this statement is twofold: (1) It cannot be changed; human beings are forever doomed to face suffering.20 (2) It cannot be understood. The causes and the reasons for establishing human existence on suffering are incomprehensible to human beings, since only God fully understands them and partial knowledge is useless. The man of destiny knows that the illusion that the situation of suffering can be changed follows from the pretension to understand its cosmic motives and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terms, to create a metaphysics of suffering. From the perspective of the man of destiny, “the end of such

17   See, for instance, Samuel Hugo Bergman, Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, trans. Arnold Gerstein (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1991), 53–54. 18  Tillich, The Courage to Be, 41. 19   On action as constitutive of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, see William A. Shearson, The Notion of Encounter: An Inquiry into the Nature and Structure of the Human Situation and Existential Knowledge in Existentialist Metaphysics (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1980), 16–17. 20   R. Soloveitchik does not relate here to the era of redemption. Elsewhere, by contrast, he formulates a concept of existential redemption in the style of the man of destiny. See Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads, 193–210.

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an effort can only be complete and total disillusionment. Evil derides the captive of fate and his fantasy about a world which is wholly good and wholly beautiful” (55). The man of destiny, then, does not attempt to track the cosmic meaning of suffering but rather its existential-personal meaning. From his perspective, the confrontation with suffering takes place in two stages: (1) Given that suffering is not pointless, it should be ascribed meaning. (2) This meaning implies an orientation to creative action at the existential level. As usual with him, R. Soloveitchik anchors these statements in an exegesis of the sources:21 God’s blessing to the work of His hands sums up their entire purpose in life: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Subdue the environment and subject it to your control. If you do not rule over it, it will subjugate you. Destiny bestows upon man a new rank in God’s world, it presents him with a royal crown, and man becomes transformed into a partner with the Almighty in the act of creation. (55)

The ending of his passage attests to the conception of conquering the world as an expression of “in the image of God” in the verse that precedes the command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:27). We can therefore infer the homiletic move that R. Soloveitchik intended, though he does not formulate it explicitly: the act of creation, the creation of the world, is a result of God being a pure subject. God created the world as unique and special in his world. The human creature imitates this existence: “the image of God” in the human creature is its very ability to live an individual and subjective existence. And as God created his world as a subject, so do we create our own personalities and turn from objects into subjects. The struggle with a meaningless, fate environment, the very struggle that makes human beings unique, is their realization of their having been created in God’s image. The success of the struggle is creativity; if man indeed succeeded in creating himself as a subject despite his existence vis-à-vis the objective “without form and void,” he is God’s partner in the act of creation. By contrast, if man fails and falls into a meaningless existence, he does not realize the image of God in which he was created. The existential21   See Pinchas H. Peli, “The Uses of Hermeneutics (“Derush”) in the Philosophy of J. B. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), Daat 4 (1980): 111–128. On meaning as characterizing consciousness and concrete existence, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 192.



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subjective notion of creativity is poured into the story of Adam, and would eventually be the basis for the interpretation that appeared in the mid-1960s in The Lonely Man of Faith. Halakhah and Suffering So far, R. Soloveitchik presented a clear theory of effective response to suffering: granting meaning to it through creativity and a subjective existence. This theory, as noted, is anchored in the exegesis of the sources. The question is: How is this theory adapted to Judaism? How does a halakhic life reflect creative and subjective existence? R. Soloveitchik answers these questions as follows: His approach [of the man of destiny] is an ethico-halakhic one, devoid of the slightest speculative-metaphysical coloration. When the man of destiny suffers he says to himself: “Evil exists, and I will neither deny it nor camouflage it with vain intellectual gymnastics. I am concerned about evil from a halakhic standpoint, like a person who wishes to know the deed which he shall do; I ask one simple question: What must the sufferer do so that he may live through his suffering?” In this dimension the center of gravity shifts from the causal and teleological aspect of evil (the only difference between causality and teleology being a directional one) to its practical aspect. The problem is now formulated in straightforward halakhic language and revolves about one’s daily, quotidian tasks. The fundamental question is: What obligation does suffering impose upon man? This question is greatly beloved by Judaism, and she has placed it at the very center of her world of thought. The Halakhah is concerned with this problem as it is concerned with other problems of permitted and forbidden, liability and exemption. (55–56)

This passage appears to suggest a new facet in R. Soloveitchik’s early thought as it had been formulated in his 1940s writings. Henceforth, R. Soloveitchik changed the focus of his interest. Halakhah had so far been perceived as an expression and a regulation of the relationship between man and God in a variety of realms. Halakhah had been the objective-practical expression of a full and stormy religious consciousness.22 A new direction appears now, where Halakhah is perceived as a

22  I am not referring here to Halakhic Man, which does not describe R. Soloveitchik himself but his ancestors (see below). Note that, until the early 1960s, the term “objective” has at least three denotations in R. Soloveitchik’s thought: (1) A description of the intra-conscious object as perceived in space and time. This denotation fits

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reaction to suffering, as a mirror of objective-quotidian existence that lacks uniqueness and does not express the personality. Jewish law now fits the proper way of life considering the given existential situation of suffering man.23 Halakhah is sharply contrasted with metaphysics. Halakhah renounces any metaphysical explanations of suffering. R. Soloveitchik pointed out two such types of explanations: the causal one, which establishes suffering on past events (punishment), and the teleological one, which establishes suffering on the future (redemption as compensation or as a prize for the long years of exile). By contrast, Halakhah is only interested in the practical-creative meaning of suffering. We found a rejection of halakhic metaphysical explanations in Halakhic Man too, but Halakhic Man differs in this matter from “Kol Dodi Dofek” on two essential points. First, the cognition of halakhic man in the eponymous work is described according to the epistemic idealism of Hermann Cohen, who utterly rejected metaphysics as a discipline concerned with extra-cognitive realms.24 Second, Halakhah according to Halakhic Man does not refer to the practical-normative system but to the analytical-abstract thought system founded by R. Hayyim of Brisk.25 R. Soloveitchik’s formulations in the last passage lead to the conclusion that the power of Halakhah and its standing in the day-to-day confrontation with the objective existence of suffering are reflected in several realms, some described explicitly and some only intimated: (1) Explication. Halakhah exposes the actual existence of the struggle against suffering as a given. Careful attention to halakhic trends reveals a need to confront suffering.

Hermann Cohen’s philosophy, and is the prevalent one in Halakhic Man. (2) The concrete normative level, contrary to subjective consciousness. This is the denotation prevalent in The Halakhic Mind. (3) Meaningless existence, contrary to unique (subjective) existence. This is the denotation prevalent in “Kol Dodi Dofek” and in the existential writings. 23   On Halakhah’s place in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” substantially and stylistically, see Marvin Fox, “The Unity and Structure of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Thought,” Tradition 24, 2 (1989): 49–56. 24   Contrary to Berkeley and Fichte, R. Soloveitchik claimed in his dissertation that Hermann Cohen refrained from nature’s dependency on “spirit,” that is, on a factor that transcends consciousness. See Das reine Denken, 110. 25   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007).



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(2) Sobering up. The practical-moral structure of Halakhah helps to understand that metaphysics is an ineffective way of contending with suffering. Halakhah is perceived as an anti-delusional ­system. (3) Tools. Halakhah provides ways for contending with the objective state of suffering. Halakhic commandments encourage selfcreative action and teleological thinking. The tool that, more than anything reflects the standing of Halakhah in this confrontation is the commandment of repentance, whose appearance in “Kol Dodi Dofek” is discussed below. Repentance The meaning of self-creativity is purification. R. Soloveitchik chose the clearest instance of Halakhah’s involvement in a cathartic personality change—repentance: In a word, the function of suffering is to mend that which is flawed in an individual’s personality . . . From out of its midst the sufferer must arise ennobled and refined, clean and pure: “It is a time of agony unto Jacob, but out of it he shall be saved” (Jeremiah 30:7); i.e., from out of the very midst of the agony itself he will attain eternal salvation. The agony itself will serve to form and shape his character so that he will, thereby, reach a level of exaltedness not possible in a world bereft of suffering. Out of the negation grows the affirmation, out of the antithesis the thesis blossoms forth, and out of the abrogation of reality there emerges a new reality. The Torah itself bears witness to man’s powerful spiritual reaction to any trouble that may befall him when it states: “In your distress, when all these things come upon you . . . and you return unto the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 4:30).26 Suffering imposes upon man the obligation to return to God in complete and wholehearted repentance. (56–57)

In his early thought, R. Soloveitchik had fluctuated between two meanings of repentance: (1) Changing the past, at least at the spiritual-conscious level. (2) Re-interpreting the past. The latter meaning of repentance is the one he adopts in Halakhic Man, while the former is the one he endorses in all his other contemporary writings. In “Kol Dodi Dofek,” repentance is indeed perceived as a complete change of the personality, which shifts from the status of an object to that of a subject.   See also Deuteronomy 30:2.

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R. Soloveitchik emphasizes that amendment takes place within the sufferer’s “midst.” Halakhah, then, encourages the person to turn inward. Furthermore, the sufferer’s salvation comes “from the very midst” of the agony. Halakhah thus teaches that suffering and distress are a given; they cannot be changed, but we might be saved by recognizing that they exist and that we are irrevocably within them. Halakhah enables the emergence of the existence of destiny from within the existence of fate. Repentance as the amendment and re-creation of the personality is the revelation of the meaning of suffering. At the same time, the mending and creation of the personality are the meaning of lovingkindness. Someone granted a share in God’s plenitude, then, must respond with amendment and purification. If suffering or lovingkindness do not prompt this response, the person “perpetrates a dire sin” (57). R. Soloveitchik appears to tread a thin line here: he distinguishes between causality and meaning or, better, between the metaphysicalspeculative dimension and the existential dimension. At the metaphysical level, the teleological claim that suffering is meant to lead to mending is meaningless, but at the personal-existential level, this is a meaningful claim. At the metaphysical level, the teleology is incomprehensible; at the existential-personal level, teleology explains the confrontation with suffering. We learn that, at the existential level, suffering is meant to elevate a person “from object to subject, from thing to person” (58), and the same could be said of divine lovingkindness. From the Individual to the Collective So far, the discussion has been conducted at the individual level. The description of Job’s figure is the optimal interpretive application of the principles formulated above on the one hand, and the anticipation of their national implication on the other. The Book of Job conveys despair from the informative and causal explanation of cosmic divine conduct.27 This is R. Soloveitchik’s explanation of God’s revelation to Job out of the storm wind. Confronted with suffering, Job is required to make an existential-essential change in his personality. Job had failed

27   On the causal dimension that tannaitic and amoraic literature attached to Job’s suffering, see, for instance, Hananel Mack, Job and the Book of Job in Rabbinic Literature (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2004), 119–126.



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to understand that the meaning of Halakhah is precisely such a change. For instance, the commandment of tzedakah is not exhausted at the practical level. Giving tzedakah means that, henceforth, a person’s existence is realized through the existence of the other. The other’s pain becomes a concrete component in the existence of the giver. This commandment means, in a way, that you “merge with the other person” (60). Tzedakah generally concentrates on the individual. The other example adopted by R. Soloveitchik, prayer, leads the reader to the collective level. Job’s test, according to R. Soloveitchik, was whether he will discover prayer “in the plural.” According to a rabbinic dispute, prayer had not yet been set as an obligation in Job’s times, nor had its wording been finally decided. But Job did pray for his friends, that is, he understood that the meaning of prayer is to join in the sorrow of the collective. Job “began to live the life of the community” (62). The change in the existence of fate and the shift to an existence of destiny is transposed to the collective as well. The shift of the discussion to the communal level is an important feature of R. Soloveitchik’s thought from the mid-1950s onward. This conceptual move takes place parallel to the rejection of metaphysics as playing a part in the understanding of existential problems. The communal orientation expresses the perception of the religious world as characterized by an independent order of its own, and its presentation as an alternative to rational thought is a characteristic of the “theology of crisis.” Emil Brunner writes: “The God of the Biblical revelation is the God of community; the God of rational philosophy is the God of unity.”28 According to revelation, argues Bruner, man cannot realize his nature without the other, and the roots of commonality are in divine nature. The inner logic of this approach is entirely different from (Greek) philosophical logic. Philosophy is by nature individualistic.29 The characteristic of R. Soloveitchik’s national thought is the transposition of existential categories typical of the individual to the national realm.30 The actual existence of the Jewish people is also one of ­suffering in the face of the imperviousness of objective existence.

28   Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 2, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, trans. Olive Wyon (Cambridge, Lutterworth Press, 1952), 64. 29  Ibid., 66. Brunner hinted that philosophy and narcissism share the same root. 30   See Dov Schwartz, The Land of Israel in Religious-Zionist Thought (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), 188–198; idem, Challenge and Crisis in Rabbi Kook’s Circle (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001), 297–307.

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The source of Jewish nationalism, according to R. Soloveitchik, is also a given that cannot be explained rationally. The term “covenant of fate” reflects a situation of irrational isolation specific to Jewish history. Anti-­Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are direct consequences of this situation. In the wake of the historical situation imposed as a “strange necessity” and as an “incomprehensible alienation” (82), the Jewish people developed a consciousness of isolation and self-withdrawal. R. Soloveitchik did not specify what came first, collective-national or personal isolation, meaning the isolation of the Jew as such. On the one hand, the isolation of the Jew is imposed by virtue of the initial status of the Jewish people as “a people that shall dwell alone” (Numbers 23:9). On the other, nationalism is perceived as a therapeutic invention meant to heal individual isolation: “The oppressive sense of fate undergoes a positive transformation when individual-personal existences blend together to form a new unit—a people” (89).31 The phrase “covenant of destiny” is also transposed from the individual to the collective. At the national level, destiny reflects an unwillingness to accept givenness and a voluntary choice of “more exalted, more supernal modes of being” (90). R. Soloveitchik created a complex situation: the covenant of fate comes first. At Sinai, where Halakhah was given, the “covenant of fate” turned into (“was raised to” in R. Soloveitchik’s terms) a “covenant of destiny” (91). By contrast, Halakhah is the very foundation of the “covenant of fate” that preceded the “covenant of destiny.” Halakhah shapes the Jewish existence of fate (83–89). The purpose of this complexity is apparently to clarify that the “covenant of destiny” did not liberate the Jewish people from the “covenant of fate.” The consciousness of isolation is presented as a primordial feature that begins with the patriarchs, who wandered while spreading the “strange” tidings of monotheism in the ancient world. In another Zionist homily, R. Soloveitchik writes: “It seems to me that the content of the Patriarchal covenant manifests itself in the sense of seclusion of the Jew; in his existential isolation.”32   See Yaakov Blidstein, “The People of Israel,” Tradition 24 (3), 1989: 21–41. On the historical meanings of the “covenant of fate” and the “covenant of destiny” and their connection to Buber’s thought, see idem, Society and Self: On the Writings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (New York: OU Press, 2012), 105–110. 32   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks: Five Addresses on Israel, History, and the Jewish People, trans. S. M. Lehrman and A. H. Rabinowitz (New York: Toras Ho-Rav Foundation, 2002), 147. See the detailed discussion below. 31



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The consciousness of isolation and strangeness, therefore, did not disappear with the settling of the “covenant of destiny”; it is deeply rooted in the national consciousness, and the Halakhah given at Sinai institutionalized and even perpetuated this consciousness: The covenant at Sinai consummated the covenant in Egypt. Destiny attached itself to fate; both became one distinct covenantal unity. It is impossible to formulate a world-view that opposes the unity of the people of lovingkindness and the holy nation; that which belongs together cannot be sundered.33 A Jew who participates in his people’s suffering and fate but does not bind himself to its destiny, which expresses itself in a life of Torah and mitzvot, violates a fundamental principle of Judaism34 and impairs his own singularity. Conversely, a Jew who does not grieve over the afflictions of his people, but seeks to separate himself from the Jewish fate, desecrates the holiness of Israel, even if he observes the ­commandments.35 (94–95)

The consciousness of solitude, which is actually anomalous, is a given in Jewish nationalism. In the concrete existence of the Jewish people, a constant dialectic prevails between fate and destiny. Fear as a motivating force of the existence of fate on the one hand, and the voluntary “positive impulses” leading to an existence of destiny on the other, are inextricably linked in the national existence of the Jewish people. Hence, the “normalization” ideal of secular Zionism “is not just a philosophical-historical error but also a practical mistake” (99).36 For R. Soloveitchik, the misunderstanding of this principle and its implications for the relationships between Israel and other nations led to the naïveté and failure of Israeli policy after the creation of the state. R. Soloveitchik’s attempt to understand the existential situation of the Jewish people led him to the conclusion that solitude and difference are national characteristics of the people of Israel. These characteristics were exposed through international politics in the forced isolation of the State of Israel, as R. Soloveitchik clarified in his homilies.37 Specifically, it is not a study of the difference between Israel and  In Hebrew original, revah bein ha-dvekim, according to TB Berakhot 15b.  In Hebrew original mekatsets ba-neti‘ot, according to Tosefta Hagigah 2:3; TB Hagigah 14b–15a. 35   Clearly, then, even when the Jewish people turned its existence into an existence of destiny, it still retained its fate dimension. 36   See Dov Schwartz, Religious-Zionism between Logic and Messianism (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1999), 33. 37   Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks, 75–77. See Schwartz, The Land of Israel in Religious-Zionist Thought, 256–257. See also below, 222–223. 33 34

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other nations that led R. Soloveitchik to determine national uniqueness; rather, uniqueness is a primary, almost axiomatic datum that precedes any discussion or insight. This basic uniqueness has no necessary “teleological” meaning, since it is a primary datum, a kind of fate-objective existence.38 Relying on this datum, a conceptual system can be constructed, which will justify the difference between the Jewish people and other nations and will even use it as a teleological ­element. The View of the Holocaust The discussion so far provides some perspective on R. Soloveitchik’s view on the Holocaust in “Kol Dodi Dofek.”39 The view of suffering as a fate existence also shapes his attitude to the Holocaust. The clearest statement is formulated by negation: metaphysical explanations of the Holocaust are unproductive, and any concern with theodicy emerges as worthless.40 I cite him below on this question at some length: Now, as well, we are living in troubled times, in days of wrath and distress. We have been the victims of vicious attacks; we have been stricken with suffering. During the last fifteen years we have been afflicted with torments which are unparalleled in the thousands of years of exile, oppression, and religious persecution. . . . The well-known metaphysical problem arises yet again and the sufferer asks: “Why dost Thou show me iniquity and beholdest mischief ? . . . For the wicked doth beset the righteous; therefore, right goes 38  R. Soloveitchik intimated that only at the end of days will concrete existence as a kind of given solitude undergo a change. In this eschatological future, it will become clear that “the nation’s Sinai withdrawal from the world will ultimately be a return to it” (“Mah Dodech mi-Dod” in Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah [Jerusalem: WZO, 1982], 59). Nevertheless, I have already clarified that R. Soloveitchik’s eschatological conception does not unequivocally support essential changes in concrete existence. See Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads, 201–206. 39   See Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought after the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 136–141. R. Soloveitchik appears to have influenced, to some extent, the outlook of R. Eliezer Berkowitz. See Eliezer Schweid, Wrestling until Daybreak: Searching for Meaning in the Thinking on the Holocaust, trans. Amnon Hadary (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994), ch. 6; idem, “Orthodoxy Confronts the Holocaust” (in Hebrew), Mahanayim 8 (1995), 18–25; Schwartz, The Land of Israel in Religious-Zionist Thought, 206–209. 40   See, for instance, Howard Wettstein, “Against Theodicy,” Philosophia 30 (2003): 131–142.



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forth perverted” (Habakkuk 1:3–4). However, as we emphasized ­earlier, God does not address Himself to this question and man receives no reply concerning it. The question remains obscure and sealed, outside the domain of logical thought. For “Thou canst not see My face, for man shall not see Me and live” (Exodus 33:20). When the impulse of intellectual curiosity seizes hold of a person, he ought to do naught but find strength and encouragement in his faith in the Creator, vindicate God’s judgment, and acknowledge the perfection of His work. “The Rock, His work is perfect; for all His ways are justice” (Deuteronomy 32:4). If we wish to probe deeply, to question profoundly during a period of nightmarish terrors, then we have to pose the question in a halakhic form and ask: What is the obligation incumbent upon the sufferer, deriving from the suffering itself? What commanding voice, what normative principle arises out of the afflictions themselves? Such a question, as we stated above, has an answer which finds its expression in a clear halakhic ruling. We need not engage in metaphysical speculation in order to clarify the law of the rectification of evil. “It is not in heaven” (Deuteronomy 30:12). If we should succeed in formulating this teaching without getting involved in the question of cause and telos, then we will attain complete redemption, and the Biblical promise, “Take counsel together and it shall be brought to naught; speak the word and it shall not stand; for God is with us” (Isaiah 8:10), shall be fulfilled with regard to us. Then, and only then, will we rise from the depths of the Holocaust, possessed of a heightened spiritual stature and adorned with an even more resplendent historical grandeur, as it is written: “Also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before” (Job 42:10)—double, both in quantity and in quality. The teaching of the rectification of suffering—when it is put into practice—demands of the sufferer both courage and discipline. He must find within himself and draw upon prodigious resources, and subject himself to a rigorous self-examination and self-evaluation, untainted by the slightest hint of partiality or self-indulgence; he must contemplate his past and envisage his future with complete and unwavering honesty. It was not easy for Job to mend his suffering. And we as well, faint-hearted and weak-willed as we are, bound in the chains of fate and lacking personal fortitude, are now called upon by divine providence to clothe ourselves in a new spirit, to elevate ourselves to the rank of the rectification of our afflictions, afflictions which are demanding of us that we provide them with their deliverance and redemption. (62–64)

The Holocaust is discussed in “Kol Dodi Dofek” as an unprecedented nadir of pain and suffering, as expressed in an existence of fate. R. Soloveitchik does not consider other aspects of the Holocaust here. Elements in his teachings that he had formulated previously are applied in this passage directly to the Holocaust, as follows:

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First, the rejection of metaphysics, affirmed here with stunning decisiveness. If we can only manage to gain release from the “impulse of intellectual curiosity,” if we can only derive the correct inferences from the Holocaust without falling into the depths of metaphysics, we will attain “complete redemption.” Traditional explanations on the ways of divine providence are dealt a death blow here. R. Soloveitchik utterly rejects the “cause and telos” explanations. A causal explanation of the Holocaust is possible at least in two directions: punishment for past sins (cause)41 or divine action directed to the future, which is concerned with the establishment of the State of Israel (telos).42 R. Soloveitchik’s tone indicates that internalizing the meaning of suffering in general and of the Holocaust in particular by the personal and national subject will bring salvation. Personal and national amendment is the only suitable response to suffering and to the Holocaust, and will also bring redemption. The causal-metaphysical explanation is an expression of exile. Systematic Jewish thought indeed took shape in exile, starting with Saadia Gaon’s generation. Second, the view of Halakhah as a response to suffering also nurtures the attitude to the Holocaust. R. Soloveitchik clarified that the meaning of suffering is, above all, repentance (“self-examination”). He described repentance as a contemplation of the past from the perspective of the future.43 At the end of the passage, R. Soloveitchik hinted at the parallel between the subjective situation of the individual and the subjective situation of the nation, and this is the link to repentance and mending: at the personal level, the penitent faces a kind of contradiction between the is and the ought. As for the is, the subject’s personality is in a state of breakdown and disintegration. Out of the shards of existence, the subject must create a new personality or a new kind of existence. At the national level, the Holocaust annihilated Jewish nationality and turned it into an ember plucked from the fire. In such circumstances, the duty is to re-create nationality in the sense of

41   This argument appears in the reactions of non-Zionist Orthodoxy to the Holocaust. See, for instance, Eliezer Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 11 ff. 42   This approach was systematically and extensively formulated in the thought of R. Abraham Hacohen Kook. See Schwartz, Challenge and Crisis in Rabbi Kook’s Circle, 28–36, 72–76. Cf. Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, 164–167. 43   This view appears in the second part of Halakhic Man. See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 12.



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endowing suffering with meaning, and the opportunity emerged with the rebirth of the Jewish state. Third, R. Soloveitchik again implicitly distinguished between metaphysical causality, which is the root of all evil, and existential causality. At the metaphysical level, the application of causality categories to the Holocaust is meaningless, as noted. At the existential-personal level, however, which touches on the meaning of the events for the individual, the Holocaust is related to the establishment of the State of Israel insofar as the symmetry between them is concerned: both are events that must be ascribed meaning. One event is an expression of suffering, and the other—of lovingkindness. At the personal level, then, we cannot avoid linking them, although the ontic-causal linkage is pointless. Song of Songs and the Holocaust Every form of homiletics has a moral-preaching aspect. In “Kol Dodi Dofek,” this aspect implies that abstaining from learning the proper lessons from fate, that is, from suffering, could mean missing the moment. In this category, R. Soloveitchik included both the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. If these events fail to bring about actual mending within a specific period of time, the people could miss the moment. To illustrate such a possibility, R. Soloveitchik used Song of Songs. Rather than emphasizing the dialectical element in the biblical narration, as he had done in And from There You Shall Seek, he now presents Song of Songs as an account of errors (66–68). R. Soloveitchik chose Song of Songs as a description of actual existence for the same reason that existentialist thinkers such as Sartre chose to express their ideas through the novel: the narrative framework describes feelings and an existence not bound by rational constructs.44 “But the heart is deceitful,45 and who can discern it?” (67). Precisely when the Beloved knocks on the maiden’s door, “her emotions were stilled, her dreams extinguished” (67). R. Soloveitchik, as noted, indeed held that concrete

44   Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 45  In Hebrew original ‘akov ha-lev, according to Jeremiah 17:9.

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existence is not a subject amenable to rational explanations and, from this perspective, he turned to the listener and the reader to inform them of the danger of a miss. This pattern of irrational narrative also characterizes the Holocaust and national rebirth: Eight years ago,46 in the midst of a night of terror filled with the horrors of Majdanek, Treblinka, and Buchenwald, in a night of gas chambers and crematoria, in a night of absolute divine self-concealment (hester panim muhlat), in a night ruled by the satan of doubt and apostasy which sought to sweep the maiden from her house into the Christian church, in a night of continuous searching, of questing for the Beloved— in that very night the Beloved appeared. “God who conceals Himself in His dazzling hiddenness”47 suddenly manifested Himself and began to knock at the tent of His despondent and disconsolate love, twisting convulsively on her bed, suffering the pains of hell. As a result of the knocks of the door of the maiden, wrapped in mourning, the State of Israel was born! (68–69)

The Holocaust is thus the era when the maiden sought the beloved but could not find him. Only when she returned heartbroken to her bed, only then did the beloved appear. R. Soloveitchik appears to have slid into an explanation of the “hester panim” variety, as he called it, an explanation involving a theological statement. When describing the beloved’s reaction, the six knocks, R. Soloveitchik also fell into the metaphysical trap. These knocks are the ways of God, who navigates and directs history behind the scenes. Furthermore: divine behavior relates to the national rebirth as an event that dictates the beloved’s knocks: Jewish blood is no longer free for the taking; the gates of the State of Israel are open to Jewish refugees, contrary to the time of the Holocaust (“Had the State of Israel arisen before Hitler’s Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews might have been saved from the gas chambers and crematoria” [75]). R. Soloveitchik would certainly explain this according to the distinction he developed, noted above, between ontic and metaphysical causality as opposed to causality as meaning. According to this distinction, the beloved’s knocks are not a theological statement but the meaning that an observer of events assigns to divine suffering and lovingkindness. The description of the 46   Referring to 1948, when Israel was established. This homily was delivered on Israel’s Independence Day in 1956. 47  In Hebrew original mistater, from the ritual songs for the se‘udah shelishit (Ashkenaz), according to Isaiah 45:15. See, for instance, Judah Halevi, Divan, ed. H. Brody, 69.



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Holocaust as an era of hester panim and the description of the national rebirth as a deliberate divine process are meanings that compel amendment and purification. Song of Songs confers existential meaning on the Holocaust: the beloved’s disappearance compels amendment no less than his renewed appearance. The Holocaust and the Covenant of Fate R. Soloveitchik held that a consciousness of solitude and an existence of fate resulted in the characteristics of Jewish nationality. The covenant of fate has negative aspects—imposed suffering and isolation, and the necessary attachment to the God of Israel.48 It also has positive aspects. R. Soloveitchik counts four “positive” features typical of the Jewish people: (1) Equality. The situation of irrational solitude does not distinguish between social classes. The entire nation, for better or worse, shares the same fate. This situation leads to social equality. (2) Fellowship. Solitude evokes a collective emotional attachment (“sympathy”) in the people of Israel, which is evidently manifest in difficult situations (“shared suffering”). (3) Responsibility. Solitude brings mutual responsibility. Paradoxically, this feature is prominent in the attitude of the anti-Semite, who blames the individual Jew for the actions of all Jews. (4) Cooperation. Jewish lovingkindness and philanthropy are a direct result of the community of fate, and they lead to the rejection of egoism in favor of the national collective (83–89). R. Soloveitchik again addresses the covenant of fate concerning the Holocaust in the section entitled “Melancholy Reflections and Confessions.” In order to understand his discussion note that, in R. ­Soloveitchik’s interpretive metaphors, the “camp” (mahaneh) expresses the existence of fate and the “congregation” (‘edah)—the existence of destiny. His critique focuses on the reaction of American

48   See Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads, 181; idem, The Land of Israel in ReligiousZionist Thought, 262–272.

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Judaism to the Holocaust.49 I cite his comments at length below and discuss their meaning: Let us ask a simple question: have we not sinned against the covenant of fate, the covenant made with a camp-people? Have we not transgressed against our obligation to participate in the suffering of the people, to witness and feel its burdens, as the verse states, “and he [Moses] witnessed their burdens” (Exodus 2:11, and cf. Rashi ad loc.)? Let us be frank: During the terrible Holocaust, when European Jewry was being systematically exterminated in the ovens and crematoria, the American Jewish community did not rise to the challenge, did not act as Jews possessing a properly developed consciousness of our shared fate and shared suffering, as well as the obligation of shared action that follows therefrom, ought to have acted. We did not sufficiently empathize with the anguish of the people and did very little to save our afflicted brethren. It is hard to know how much we might have accomplished had we tried harder. Personally, I think that we might have been able to save many. There is no doubt, however, that had we properly grieved over the afflictions of our brothers, had we raised our voices and forcefully demanded that Roosevelt issue a sharp protest-warning, backed by concrete actions, we could have substantially slowed the process of mass murder. We were witnesses to the greatest and most terrible tragedy in our history and we were silent. I do not wish to enter here into a discussion of details. This is a very sad and disturbing chapter in our history. But we all sinned by our silence in the face of the murder of millions. Have we not been summoned before the divine judgment seat to answer for our terrible transgression against the prohibition “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy fellow” (Leviticus 19:16), particularly when we stood idly by not just the blood of our fellow, but the blood of our fellows, in their millions! And when I say “we,” I mean all of us—myself included—rabbis and laymen, Orthodox and freethinkers, the entire spectrum of Jewish political organizations: “your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even all the men of Israel . . . from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water” (Deuteronomy 29:9–10).50 Do you know why we were so indifferent? Because our sense of peoplehood was flawed. We did not properly grasp the whole concept of shared fate and what it means to be a people. We lacked, as did Job to begin with, the attribute of hesed. It was because Job did not possess the sense of shared historical circumstances and shared suffering that he did not know how to pray on   This issue has been discussed at length. See, for instance, Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1939– 1945 (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1981); Moshe Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance 1933–1941: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav, 1982). 50   This source deals with the covenant between God and the people of Israel. 49



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behalf of his friends. He was concerned only for his own well-being and for that of his family. In us, as well, the experience of a camp-people was absent. Therefore, we failed to offer up prayers on behalf of our brothers, both prayers of the heart and prayers consisting of vigorous deeds of rescue. (96–97)

This “J’accuse” exposes complexity in the national dimensions of the fate and destiny concepts. R. Soloveitchik defined the partnership of fate as deterministic. In the terminology that he adopted, the covenant of fate reflects “compulsion,” “against your will,” and “fact.” Hence, the “positive” responses of the nation are also a kind of fact. The first positive national-fate feature, for instance, equality, is a given: antiSemitism does not distinguish between Jews in the East and Jews in the West. At the same time, national sympathy is also a given nationalfate feature of a persecuted people. By contrast, R. Soloveitchik presented some of the fate characteristics as amendment. Amendment is the voluntary, chosen act of a subject facing a fate existence. Furthermore, R. Soloveitchik occasionally presents a claim and its opposite at the same time. “The oppressive sense of fate undergoes a positive transformation when individual-personal existences blend together to form a new unit—a people. The obligation to love one another stems from the consciousness of this people of fate, this lonely people that inquires into the meaning of its own uniqueness” (89). Love for the other is presented, on the one hand, as the meaning that the individual contingently ascribes to the situation of fate; on the other hand, love for the other necessarily “stems” from the national-fate situation. National sympathy is presented as the amendment endorsed by the people facing fate, but also as a state coerced on the nation as a covenant of faith, and perpetuated in the covenant in Egypt. A similar model recurs concerning the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the culmination of suffering, a concentration of anti-Semitism as an expression of fate. Rescue and protest actions would appear to be a necessary expression of the individual and the entire nation vis-à-vis an existence of fate. According to the characteristics of a fate existence, a shared fate leads to necessary participation in the suffering. Solidarity is a Jewish national feature. “The feeling of sympathy is a fundamental feature of the consciousness of the unifying fate of the Jewish people” (84). Halakhah perpetuates this situation in the norms it sets for human beings. But this requires clarification: it is possible to reach the rank of a “congregation,” in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, but a

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congregation’s attitude toward fate is not to fear it and only to find meanings in it (93). Changing fate or the national characteristics stemming from it is just not possible. Secular Zionism was mistaken when it held that Jewish fate had changed with the establishment of a “normal” country; the State of Israel would never succeed in ending “the unique isolation of the Jewish people” (101). Quite the contrary: antiSemitism adopted a national style and is currently directed against the State of Israel.51 Fate existence is unavoidable, and so are the national features derived from it. On the other hand, the fact is that American Jewry, according to R. Soloveitchik, neither showed sympathy nor engaged in action when confronted with the destruction of European Jewry. Not only as individuals but as a collective, American Jews did not show the proper national-fate identifying marks. Rescue activities, then, are a voluntary, chosen amendment at the national level vis-à-vis the horrendous facts of fate. R. Soloveitchik apparently sought to clarify that the Holocaust, as an event of fate, was unprecedented in the history of Jewish suffering. Hence, it led to self-negation and to absolute surrender to a fate existence. The one head of the “two-headed heir”—according to R. Soloveitchik’s metaphor (85)—does not recognize the other. Faced with an event like the Holocaust, the reactions warranted by an existence of fate become only possibilities. This is not a justification of American Jewry. Quite the contrary: R. Soloveitchik does not flinch from hurling accusations. The very event of the indictment, however, points to a view of the Holocaust as the extreme end of fate-objective existence. The foundations of the covenant of fate between God and the people of Israel, which perpetuated the fate isolation that characterizes the people, were undermined given the destruction of part of the people. From Individual to Nation R. Soloveitchik has so far been shown as shifting the true drama of the meaning in the generation’s events to the existential level. The 51   Contrary to approaches that draw a distinction between anti-Semitism and hostility toward the State of Israel for its actions and political positions, R. Soloveitchik considers that the latter is a direct continuation and development of traditional antiSemitism.



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e­ xistential problems of the modern Jew are exposed through the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. The fluctuation between the covenant of fate and the covenant of destiny is what interests R. Soloveitchik, and the historical events are a framework rather than a condition of the discussion. Gerald Blidstein writes: The reader [of “Kol Dodi Dofek”] finds that its philosophical component is not devoted to the question of Zionism and the State of Israel or to the problems of their integration. The central philosophical discussion relates to the description of the “covenant of fate” and the “covenant of destiny” and to the meaning of these concepts for an understanding of Jewish history, particularly during the Holocaust and modernity. Here we have a national and religious philosophy dealing with the nature of the people’s existence in the present and with the mutual connections between its members. The concepts of “covenant of fate” and “covenant of destiny” also and mainly characterize events in Zion and, if you wish, you might hear the echoes of Zionist reality in this discussion. They are not, however, unique to this reality, and a discussion of them is neither explicitly nor particularly concerned with it. Even one claiming that the coining of the concepts of “covenant of fate” and “covenant of destiny” concerns mainly Zionist reality and the problematic attitude to the nonobservant Jew in the context of the return to Zion and the building of the State of Israel, will agree that the discussion of this matter alone fails to address many fundamental topics. This philosophical affair, then, includes the Zionist-political topic, but is not devoted solely to it.52

The Zionist homilies that R. Soloveitchik preached at the MizrachiHa-Po‘el Hamizrachi conferences in the United States seem to reflect a changing trend. They are indeed focused on the religious-Zionist idea, as Blidstein explicitly notes. Yet, he claimed that “this homiletic interest should not be counterposed to the main philosophical endeavor.”53

52   Gerald J. Blidstein, “The Religious-Zionist Commitment of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in The Path of the Spirit: The Eliezer Schweid Jubilee Volume, vol. 1, ed. Yehoyada Amir (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University and the Van Leer Institute, 2005), 441–442. 53  Ibid., 442. Blidstein points out at length that R. Soloveitchik is a “religious­Zionist” but not a “religious-Zionist thinker.” Essentially, this is a significant and illuminating comment. Indeed, the religious-Zionist idea is not the center of gravity in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. But Blidstein himself showed that R. Soloveitchik adapted himself almost “against his will” to the philosophical framework of religious-Zionism as, for instance, in the use of the term “redemption” in reference to the establishment of the State of Israel. Even if R. Soloveitchik did not intend the conceptual content, the terminology proves that religious-Zionist thought has specific parameters and characteristics. R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy, then, becomes part of the religious-Zionist canon, even though R. Soloveitchik himself probably did not see it in this light.

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The homilies, then, do not turn R. Soloveitchik into a typical religiousZionist thinker. Note that the homilies represent the prevalent trend in his thought, as mentioned above: transposing the characteristics of concrete existence from the individual to the national level.54 The connection to the nation and the land are described in terms of suffering, alienation, meaningful as opposed to trivial existence, and so forth. The renewed encounter with autonomous Jewish life after centuries of detachment sharpens and intensifies the existential characteristics described. Furthermore: the gap between the expected and the is also contributes to the emphasis on the existential situation. Below is a brief presentation of the basic parameters of national existence as they emerge from the homilies. My emphasis will be on the following existential characteristics in particular: action, solitude, and heroism. (1) Action. R. Soloveitchik adopted the constitutive principle of ­religious-Zionist ideology, stating that the national goal compels openness to modernity (technology, culture, and so forth). In his national homilies, R. Soloveitchik presented this openness as part of the realm of concrete action. Torah scholars and holy people, symbolized by Jacob the tent dweller patriarch, must be involved in the practical life of the society and the state. Concrete action connects people to their existential and conscious sources. R. Soloveitchik uses the figure of Esau for this purpose, who “came from the field, and he was faint” (Genesis 25:29), and comments: “He is faint, spiritually worn out and cut off from his existential, metaphysical roots” (178).55 Jacob, however, ascribed meaning to routine activity (“the field”). R. Soloveitchik did not hide his view that political activity, for instance, is a kind of “descent” (184), yet the moment of concrete action is a constitutive component of nationality. (2) Isolation. R. Soloveitchik assumed as obvious that Jewish nationality rests on a covenantal connection. This connection is mainly, but not solely, the halakhic command. R. Soloveitchik drew a distinction between the covenant of Sinai, which conveys the giving of Halakhah as an obligation, and the Patriarchal covenant: It seems to me that the content of the Patriarchal covenant manifests itself in the sense of seclusion of the Jew; in his existential isolation; in the fact that he must struggle against certain secular philosophies and

  See Schwartz, The Land of Israel in Religious-Zionist Thought, 257.   Page numbers in the text refer to The Rav Speaks.

54 55



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political forces which the cultured non-Jew ignores; in the fact that the security of society generally does not ipso-facto provide security for the Jew. In other words, the Judaism of the Patriarchal covenant is expressed in our identification with Abraham the Hebrew—“All the world on one side and he on the other.”56 (147)

National isolation follows from two phenomena: (1) The Jewish people is not understood. Its message is strange and uninteresting to the modern world, which is indifferent to its values. (2) The Jewish people senses an existential threat. It is nowhere safe. The Patriarchal covenant underscores the fate uniting all Jews, allowing R. Soloveitchik to pour the contents of the term covenant of destiny into the content of the Patriarchal covenant. Not only does existential isolation characterize the national situation, but it also imbues Jewish nationality with meaning. The clearest expression of isolation is anti-Semitism. R. Soloveitchik paradoxically claimed that the level of hatred is an index of meaning: the greater and more focused the hatred, the more valuable its object. The hostile attitude toward the State of Israel is actually a reflection of its value: “there can be no better indication that the State embodies great symbolic powers and that in it, despite the layer of secular dust that covers it, inheres an inner sanctity that springs from the eternal sanctity of Knesset Yisrael” (172). Isolation, symbolism, meaning, and holiness are mutually entwined. (3) Heroism. Another characteristic of national existence is heroism as a process. R. Soloveitchik distinguished heroism from power.57 Heroism denotes an initiative or a process that are seemingly hopeless, and the very choice of them appears illogical and paradoxical. Since, generally, heroism has no achievements, the choice of the heroic course requires an explanation. According to R. Soloveitchik, “the struggle itself sanctifies” (106). The value, then, lies in the process and not in its results. R. Soloveitchik derives from this notion that Jewish existence is heroic, since an existence that confronts an alienated and secular world makes the struggle hopeless. The struggle

56   According to Midrash Bereshit Rabba: Critical Edition (in Hebrew), ed. J. ­Theodor and Ch. Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrman, 1965), 414. 57  In this context, note the Nietzschean distinction between power and force. See Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 227–228. The text hints at the figure of the romantic hero who struggles against his fate, a struggle that is a value per se.

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for the religious character of the State of Israel is also a heroic one. Again, the importance of this struggle lies in the heroic process, not in its consequences. “What is our greatest achievement? The struggle itself!” (106). The third existential characteristic of Jewish nationality leads us to the heart of national-collective Jewish existence. Jewish existence is paradoxical, in the sense of being simultaneously bi-dimensional. R. Soloveitchik symbolized these dimensions through the terms stranger and resident. One existential dimension, “resident,” is common to all people in all nations. This dimension is concerned with concrete activity (political, scientific, cultural, and so forth). The second dimension, “stranger,” reflects the uniqueness of Jewish existence. This dimension cannot be translated, at least not fully, into the modern language that is a basis for interpersonal and international communication. The Land of Israel is an expression of this existential dimension. “Eretz Israel belongs to the world of intimate relations between us and between the God of Israel. It is a part of the Jewish mysterium and the hidden lot of the stranger-resident. In Eretz Israel there is sanctity, and we long for sanctity, for the Creator whose Divine presence rests upon the stones and sands of the desert” (78). Jewish existence exposes a side of existence alienated from earthly (“objective”) life. National existence, then, is dual. R. Soloveitchik expressed this view in a series of motifs, such as the two sides of the river and stranger and resident, and in such terms as fate and destiny. In his Zionist homilies, the Land of Israel is presented as expressing a certain kind of unique existence—mysterious, authentic, and so forth. This principle is essential and, at times, existence itself casts a shadow over the concrete land. R. Soloveitchik clarifies that great rabbis had experienced the holiness of the Land of Israel even when they had not physically been there. Writing in a way that fits his personal style in the “middle” period of his thought, R. Soloveitchik claimed that “from the personal emotional aspect, I am simply unable to accept the idea of the diminished sanctity of these Gedolim abroad. Do you know why? Because in the spiritual sense they were never abroad!” (146). Being in the Land of Israel is a kind of existence that does not require actual presence. In this sense, existential thought provided R. Soloveitchik with a set of concepts and insights that allowed him to create a basis for Zionist ideology.



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The Rejection of Metaphysics My concern in the previous discussion focused on several ideas that appeared in “Kol Dodi Dofek” and in other Zionist homilies, stressing their integration in the homiletic texture of these texts. The philosophical ideas were wrapped in an interpretive and aesthetic context that is well-understood in light of the homiletic situation. Note that R. Soloveitchik abandoned the trend that tracks the causes of the Holocaust. In his early writings, R. Soloveitchik tried to expose the philosophical and religious trends that led to the systematic destruction. He based these trends on the rejection of rationalism (the philosophers) on the one hand, and the neglect of the concrete divine command (Christianity) on the other or, in R. Soloveitchik’s terms, the rejection of the objective dimension of philosophy and theology. “Kol Dodi Dofek” does not deal with the question of causes but with the issue of meaning. And from There You Shall Seek includes declarations that hint at the Holocaust (“satan taking control”) such as “If not for Supreme Providence, peering out of the cracks58 of a mysterious, alien dominion, the universe would have returned to its primordial chaos.”59 “Kol Dodi Dofek” a priori invalidates declarations pervaded by causal approaches such as this one. R. Soloveitchik, then, applied his disappointment of causal, metaphysical, and historical-ideological explanations to his own philosophy. His view of the Holocaust also indicates the final detachment of his thought from metaphysics. In many regards, then, “Kol Dodi Dofek” is an important link in the explication of R. Soloveitchik’s teachings. Trends intimated in his 1940s writings attained rich expression in this homily, and above all the negation of the way traditional approaches in Jewish thought dealt with life’s problems. In his restrained style, R. Soloveitchik internalized Nietzsche’s strong critique of metaphysics,60 as well as the ­abandonment

 In Hebrew original, metsisah min harakei, according to Song of Songs 2:9.   And from There You Shall Seek, 55, according to Tanhuma, Lekh Lekha, 24; Song of Songs Rabbah 1:6, 7:1, and elsewhere. R. Soloveitchik uses the term providence in “Kol Dodi Dofek” as well, but mainly in the context of the meaning that a person assigns to the historical event rather than to its causes. Hence, providence is a metaphorical term for the atavistic tendency of Halakhah to assign meaning to events. 60   Nietzsche scholars have discussed this issue at length. See Schacht, Nietzsche, 118–186. 58 59

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of metaphysics in several theological and existentialist approaches. According to Albert Schweitzer, for instance, the statement that the road to the shaping of a Weltanschauung goes through metaphysics, “is a fatal error.”61 In his critique, R. Soloveitchik targeted not only continental philosophical trends but also Jewish thought throughout history, which had sought understanding of the ways of providence. The path to God is paved through cognition of the conscious or existential meaning of Halakhah, and is exhausted through this meaning. In And from There You Shall Seek, this path is paved through the study of the ways of religious consciousness, whereas in “Kol Dodi Dofek” it is anchored in the meanings of concrete existence. The course that R. Soloveitchik set in “Kol Dodi Dofek” was realized in other Zionist homilies. With great skill, R. Soloveitchik laid unique and original foundations for religious-Zionist ideology, regardless of whether this had been his intention. He became a great ideologue of the movement in the United States, and, in recent years, in Israel as well.62 The existential situation of the individual, which is transposed to the national dimension, is what determines the essence of religious nationalism. Henceforth, R. Soloveitchik discusses in his writings basic existential categories that will concern me in the following chapters.

  Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics (London: A & C. Black, 1946), xi. S­ chweitzer questioned the validity of knowledge based on the sciences, and claimed that only “moral knowledge” has decisive validity. See Oskar Kraus, Albert Schweitzer: His Work and his Philosophy, trans. E. G. McCalman (London: A & C. Black, 1944), 46. 62   See Dov Schwartz, “ ‘Kol Dodi Dofek’: A Religious-Zionist Alternative,” Tradition 39, 3 (2006): 59–72. This issue of Tradition was devoted mainly to a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of “Kol Dodi Dofek.” 61

Chapter Nine

Finitude and Suffering: Out of the Whirlwind This chapter deals with the psychological and psychotherapeutic thought of R. Soloveitchik as it developed at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s. Awareness of existentialist psychology grew exponentially in the United States at this time, and R. Soloveitchik endorsed this approach enthusiastically. Out of the Whirlwind, a collection of several of his essays dealing with the structure of the psyche, comprises R. Soloveitchik’s psychological thought. (1)  Introduction: Psychology and Philosophy R. Soloveitchik deals with personality structure through several models. In his conceptual discussions of psychology and therapy he stresses, as he does usually, the pertinence of Halakhah. Halakhah’s role in the confrontation with existential problems can be presented from both a negative and a positive perspective: (1) Recognizing Distress. The supreme religious command manifest in revelation and the most important ethical message that holy sources were meant to convey was to raise awareness of crisis and distress (absurd, finitude, alienation, and so forth). (2) Endorsing Distress. The deepest and most direct expression of the absurd is the dialectical fluctuation between opposites. Halakhah is what enables life with the crisis of the absurd. In this chapter, I argue that although R. Soloveitchik did not strive to articulate a systematic psychological theory, it is still possible to trace the outlines of such a theory and to expose its sources. First, I locate R. Soloveitchik’s psychological discussions within a broader framework: the rise of phenomenological and existentialist psychology in the 1950s.

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Awareness of psychological approaches that were influenced by phenomenology in general and by existentialist phenomenology in particular gained ground in the United States during the 1950s, with their discourse generally hinging on some critique of psychoanalysis. The Freudian approach, which was well suited to American liberal trends, dominated psychology and psychiatry for the first twenty years after the Second World War (1945–1965). Heinz Hartmann, Heinz Kohut, and others represented the hegemony of the psychoanalytical school in the United States, and phenomenological psychology developed within this cultural and psychological setting. The first psychologists to make phenomenology a constitutive component of their theoretical and practical outlooks were Donald Snygg and Carl Rogers. Rogers’ theory of the “phenomenal field,” referring to the unique modalities through which individuals know and experience their environment, exerted special influence on the development of psychotherapy in the United States. Rogers thought it important to understand the structure of subjective consciousness—how patients perceive their own selves and their own behavior. Sociology also developed at this time in the United States under the aegis of Talcott Parsons’ approach that, besides its characteristic normative functionality, emphasized the search for meaning as a fundamental need of social existence. Alfred Schutz’s endeavor in the field of phenomenological sociology began to take root at this time. Schutz focused on the inter-subjective dimension of consciousness (experience of, and action with, the other) and turned it into the foundation of his social theory, showing that modalities of inter-relationships are significant.1 Existentialist thought in the United States at the beginning of the 1950s underwent several intellectual developments involving significant implications for psychological criticism. Thinkers with an existentialist orientation conveyed unease with psychology and with psychiatry. In 1952, Paul Tillich published a short essay entitled The Courage To Be, where he reiterated the distinction between fear and anxiety, and claimed that psychology emphasizes particular symptoms   See, for instance, Grace Davie, “The Evolution of the Sociology of Religion,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Michele Dillon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 66; Lawrence A. Pervin, Daniel Cervone and Oliver P. John, Personality: Theory and Research (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), chs. 5–6. 1

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at the expense of knowledge about the personality as a whole. Psychology and psychiatry do not distinguish between pathological anxiety and existential anxiety, which is an ontological characteristic of existence.2 This work influenced American intellectuals and, plausibly, also R. Soloveitchik. In 1953, Hazel Barnes translated into English two chapters from Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Barnes, a scholar at the University of Colorado and herself an existentialist philosopher, entitled her translation Existential Psychoanalysis, after one of the chapters.3 In her introduction, Barnes noted that Sartre contrasts existentialist psychoanalysis with the psychoanalysis of Freud, Jung, and Adler.4 Sartre claimed that psychoanalysis had ignored freedom and choice as fundamental characteristics of existence and thereby missed the view of the psyche as a whole. He was also critical of experimental psychology in general, because of its overall and a priori assumptions about human psychic functioning, and held that psychic characteristics should be studied as “intentional” features. Viewing anxiety, for instance, as an overall characteristic is not enough, and the focus must be on the concrete situation: anxiety about death, about the other, or about the loss of loved ones. In that same year (1953), Rollo May, a foremost existentialist psychologist in the United States, published Man’s Search for Himself,5 which begins with the loneliness and anxiety affecting individuals who face the modern world. About four years later, Barnes concluded the translation of Being and Nothingness. Another event meriting attention is the publication in 1957 of a substantial volume on Karl Jaspers’ philosophy edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. This anthology comprises a series of lucid articles on Jaspers’ psychology and psychopathology written by Kurt Kolle and Ludwig B. Lefebre.6 Developments were also taking place among psychologists, whose attention to existentialist thought became particularly noticeable with

  Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 65.   Jean Paul Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis, translated with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953). 4  Ibid., 35. 5   Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953). 6   Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1957). The book appeared in the series “The Library of Living Philosophers.” On the importance of his psychology and psychopathology for the understanding of Jaspers’ existential philosophy, see Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006), Part 1. 2 3

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the publication of an anthology entitled Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. This anthology, published in 1958, was edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger and included a selection from the contemporary European research literature, including articles by Eugene Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger. May’s two introductory pieces, “The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology,” and “Contributions to Existential Psychotherapy,” were the first systematic presentation of this new direction in psychology.7 According to May, existential psychology “emerged spontaneously” in several places in Europe. “These facts— namely, that the movement emerged spontaneously, without these men in some cases knowing about the remarkably similar work of their colleagues, and that, rather than being the brain-child of one leader, it owes its creation to diverse psychiatrists and psychologists— testify that it must answer a widespread need in our times in the fields of psychiatry and psychology.”8 The Existence anthology was a landmark in the phenomenological and existentialist approach in psychology and psychiatry in the United States and a series of periodicals, which appeared in its wake, established the discipline.9 This new approach created a cultural climate in the United States of the late 1950s. The erosion in psychoanalysis’ dominant status, which would eventually lead to its being pushed aside, began at this time. The new cultural climate left its mark on the Jewish world in general and on R. Soloveitchik in particular, whose lectures in the field were meant to present the adaptation and contribution of Halakhah to the new trends.10 Transition The period discussed here—the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s—is somewhat of a turning point in R. Soloveitchik’s thought, and the psychological issue must be understood in this con 7   Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 163–164.  8   Rollo May, “The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology,” in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 4.  9   Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry, 165–166. 10   Andrew R. Heinze, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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text. I will redefine this turning point as follows: until this period and, more precisely, until the writing of “Kol Dodi Dofek” (1956), R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy had focused mainly on the phenomenology of religion in general and of Judaism in particular. The key phenomenological works written in this spirit are And from There You Shall Seek and The Halakhic Mind. Henceforth, R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy splits into two: on the one hand, he continued to write phenomenological philosophy, and on the other, he adopted a new approach— existentialism. “Kol Dodi Dofek”11 and The Lonely Man of Faith12 are classic existentialist works. To reiterate: I do not define phenomenology and existentialism in the precise historical sense and use these terms on grounds of convenience, but their meaning is determined according to the dynamics of R. Soloveitchik’s thought. Following is a brief presentation of the differences between these two approaches in R. Soloveitchik’s thought: (1) Both philosophies are indifferent to metaphysics as such. Whereas phenomenological thought acknowledges the metaphysical element of consciousness, however, existentialist philosophy rejects metaphysics altogether. (2) The starting point of phenomenological thought is the dialectic, and particularly the pole of self-affirmation. By contrast, the starting point of existentialist thought is generally suffering. (3) The central problems of phenomenological thought are the structure of religious consciousness and the divine-human relationship, whereas the central problems of existentialist thought are the description of fundamental existential situations (anxiety, guilt, suffering, meaninglessness, the state of the object) and communication with the other. (4) Phenomenological thought offers a solution to the dialectic rift. Ultimately, union is possible. By contrast, existentialist thought offers a way of living with the problem, but never its solution. (5) The motivations behind the writing of phenomenological philosophy are curiosity, providing guidance in the worship of God, and the attainment of a religious experience, whereas the motivation for writing existentialist philosophy is usually therapeutic.

  See ch. 8 above.   See ch. 11 below.

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(6) The goals of Halakhah in phenomenological thought are the recording and regulation of conscious inclinations, whereas the goal of Halakhah in existentialist thought is the creation of a meaningful activity. Concerning R. Soloveitchik’s psychological articles in Out of the Whirlwind, my assumptions are as follows: (1) Criticism. R. Soloveitchik stated in several articles that both the metaphysical and the phenomenological outlook are ineffective when articulating, and contending with, the distress of existence. This conclusive statement appeared first in “Kol Dodi Dofek” and was reaffirmed in “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering.” Accordingly, the essay “The Crisis of Human Finitude” is a classic existentialist discussion of the concept of finitude. (2) Consciousness and Existence. Despite the statement in (1), R. Soloveitchik continued to write phenomenological essays (“Out of the Whirlwind,” “A Theory of Emotions”). (3) A Metaphysical Pole. The reason for (2) is that the phenomenological-religious approach plays an important role as one pole of absurd human existence. The metaphysical inclinations of consciousness, although they do not touch the core of human distress, are still part of the jigsaw puzzle of human existence. Such a claim emerges from the analysis of “Out of the Whirlwind.” (4) Dialectic. R. Soloveitchik, then, wavered between negating phenomenology as opposed to perceiving it as an aspect in the study of human existence. The conscious association with metaphysics in R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy is thus a fact, and his attacks, rather than blurring this link, only exposed his entrenched dialectical view. (5) “Sitz im leben.” R. Soloveitchik continued to rely on the phenomenological approach for another reason. Since the setting of the discussion is psychology and psychiatry, he emphasized that feelings are not exhausted at their external level. The implication is that the empirical approach does not provide a full description of the emotional structure, a stance supported by the phenomenologicalessentialist approach. The methodological discussion of R. Soloveitchik’s writings described in brief above will be complemented by a systematic discussion of his



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view on suffering, finitude, and anxiety. These existential categories are clarified in a series of essays published in Out of the Whirlwind. I open, then, with an essay offering a serious critique of metaphysical consciousness (“A Halakhic Approach to Suffering”). I then proceed to the alternative approach, which reveals existentialism as a tool for describing human situations (“The Crisis of Human Finitude”). At a later stage, I show the reawakening of metaphysical consciousness, both as an element in the absurd condition of human existence and as a legitimate approach for describing the psychic emotional structure. (2)  Rejecting the Study of Consciousness The transition from the phenomenological perception of religion to a focus on existential problems, which is already evident in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” was not explained systematically. Both approaches share a rejection of metaphysics as a spiritual existence outside consciousness. In And from There You Shall Seek, as noted, metaphysics was a subjective intra-conscious element. Kabbalistic sefirot, angels, and causal explanations of events in the material world as a consequence of heavenly processes, for instance, have meaning at the subjective conscious level, an issue discussed at length in the first part of this book. By contrast, in works dominated by the existentialist approach, metaphysics is denied its conscious meaning as well. In “Kol Dodi Dofek,” this fact is dramatically exposed in a discussion of the problem of evil. In the early 1960s, R. Soloveitchik reiterated, this time more clearly, his disappointment with phenomenology. Ostensibly, he retreats from the fluctuation between phenomenology, which he never abandoned, and existentialism; in truth, however, he sharply and covertly criticizes phenomenology’s essentialist pretensions. This critique, in and of itself, precludes any genuine study of religious-subjective consciousness’ various dimensions.13 In the following discussion, I show how R. Soloveitchik continued the trends found in “Kol Dodi Dofek” in another article of the same period.

13   Cf. Avi Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, trans. Batya Stein (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 166–172.

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The Struggle against Evil In the lecture “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering,” which he delivered in 1961, R. Soloveitchik determined two levels of halakhic thought: (1) The Halakhic-Positivist Level: The principles and concrete instructions included in Halakhah. Human-rational knowledge is adapted to this system of norms and values. Positivist Halakhah (“topical” in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology) is immanent to human knowledge, that is, the extra-epistemic command is perceived in intra-epistemic categories and becomes an integral component of human knowledge. Positivist Halakhah creates a mapping and a regulating outline of human existence. R. Soloveitchik emphasized that positivist Halakhah has a distinct epistemic dimension, which it does not transcend. (2) The Thematic-Axiological Realm: The attitude to the esoteric, that is, to sacredness, and the experience of it. We are speaking here of an experience and an intuitive perception of “the structural meaningful universe.”14 Axiological Halakhah15 transcends knowledge and addresses the “other” spiritual reality. In other words, it establishes positivist Halakhah on a mapping and a regulation that are extra-epistemic and universal. A considered evaluation will show that the first layer fits both parts of objective consciousness (actions and norms) whereas the second layer fits subjective consciousness. Indeed, the second layer rests directly on

14   Page references are to the essay “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering” in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering and the Human Condition, ed. David Shatz, Joel B. Wolovelsky and Reuven Ziegler (New York: Toras Ho-Rav Foundation, 2003), 86–115. (I will occasionally cite from a version of this lecture found in the library of the Jerusalem College for Women. References that do not quote page numbers are to this source). For a brief description of this essay see Gili Zivan, Religion without Illusion: An Inquiry into the Thought of Soloveitchik, Leibowitz, Goldman, and Hartman (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 2005), 114–118. 15   R. Soloveitchik ascribed an “axiological” dimension to the halakhic-thematic layer too. Positivist Halakhah, then, has normative and axiological characteristics that are inherent in concrete halakhic action, such as finitude, sensitivity, and modesty (see below). The “axiological” layer, however, is wholly constituted by ethical, theological, and metaphysical values that depend on systems external to concrete halakhic activity. The thematic-axiological layer could be called transcendent, but I chose to retain the previous term since R. Soloveitchik himself often resorted to it.



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“Aggadah, Kabbalah, and mysticism.” This layer relates to the spiritualmetaphysical world that we experience or “feel.” This view of halakhic layers fits The Halakhic Mind, and I have dealt with it before.16 R. Soloveitchik contrasts these two layers of consciousness with suffering, which is a given. The mental health context, referring to the place of religion and Halakhah in the process of mental healing, enables us to contrast the halakhic model of consciousness with existential suffering and despair. “The Halakhah certainly did grapple with the absurd phenomenon of evil and had to fit it into a frame of sensible reference” (92). A deep difference, however, is discernible between the attitude to evil and suffering in positivist as opposed to axiological Halakhah. R. Soloveitchik states: The topical Halakhah or halakhic gesture thus fashions its interpretive axiological methods in the mold of finiteness and sensibility. It displays extreme modesty and sobriety in its approach to Being. The thematic gesture, however, is by far more bold and possessed by the spirit of adventure. It exceeds the boundaries of our own ontological awareness, which is imprisoned within a scientifically explainable universe, and attempts to relate itself to parts unknown, to link up the orders of things and events with the transcendental order of the ultimate. (93)

Positivist Halakhah relates directly to existential situations. It is “finite” as well as time and place dependent. This Halakhah relates to the concrete person, to the finite individual who experiences loneliness and existential guilt rather than to an abstract anthropological idea. Moreover, when dealing with the community, positivist Halakhah is not dragged into the idealization of the society (“Knesset Israel ”) but rests on an actual realization of dialogue and mutual communication. By contrast, axiological Halakhah does not confine itself to the borders of concrete knowledge and existence and spreads to infinite spiritual worlds. R. Soloveitchik, as usual for him, seeks to present Halakhah as a recording of the human dialectic recurrently fluctuating between the positivist and axiological poles. This is certainly the reality. Halakhic man too, the Brisk scholar, fails to liberate himself from the consciousness of the homo religiosus at the initial stages of his conceptual course. But is axiological Halakhah truly a legitimate pole of halakhic existence?

16   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), chs. 2 and 3.

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Does it indeed enable a reasonable and effective confrontation with evil? We learn in “Kol Dodi Dofek” that axiological Halakhah views evil as a lack, as somehow a product of human consciousness (Maimonidean rationalism). Furthermore: when evil is located in an inclusive and well-conceived context, its divine source is exposed and it is revealed as good (Kabbalah). An approach such as this one splits off the concrete reality of suffering from the conscious idea of explaining evil, separating evil as an objective reality from suffering as a “subjective experience.” Axiological Halakhah is one of the philosophies whose thinkers have no problem “disposing quickly” (96) with evil. “Sometimes, if a problem is too embarrassing and too tormenting, one simply puts it in the waste basket and ignores it” (97). The temptation, as noted, is to present the halakhic approach as wavering between the subjective consciousness that supplies a theology of evil, and the practical and regulated teleology that stems from actual observance of the religious law. A kind of dialectic of phenomenology and actual existence. Clearly, however, R. Soloveitchik is highly critical of the ineffectiveness of axiological Halakhah. He explicitly conveys his personal disappointment with the irrelevance of axiological Halakhah to the modern era: We know that the friends of Job were not that successful in convincing Job about the nonexistence of evil. Can a rabbi be more successful? . . .  I will be frank with you; I do not know . . .  I can state with all candor that I personally have not been too successful in my attempts to spell out this metaphysic in terms meaningful to the distraught individual who floats aimlessly in all-encompassing blackness . . .  I tried but failed, I think, miserably, like the friends of Job. (99–100)

The mystic consciousness that pushes evil to the margins of existence may have played a significant role in the way the Jewish people faced their sorrows in the past, but is meaningless today. And R. Soloveitchik explicitly clarifies here that positivist and axiological Halakhah are not complementary: objective (practical-normative) consciousness and subjective consciousness are mutually contradictory: “The topical Halakhah could not accept the thematic metaphysic which tends to gloss over the absurdity of evil, and it did not engage in the building of a magnificent philosophical façade to shut out the ugly sights of an inadequate existence” (100). The phenomenological-reconstructionist model that R. Soloveitchik had previously built with such great care collapses in the face of alienated modern existence. Henceforth, mystical-aggadic Halakhah follows from practical Halakhah, but not



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through reconstruction. One could claim that the aggadic-mystical conception adopted the term Halakhah ironically; the reader understands that nothing, not even the link of reconstruction, connects it to Halakhah as a commandment and as an action. The aggadic-mystical system is merely a subjective consciousness, lacking any therapeutic or existential value. How does positivist Halakhah struggle against evil? R. Soloveitchik simply replaces subjective consciousness with ethical-existential consciousness. Instead of the ontological-metaphysical values of axiological consciousness, we now have values taken from ethics and action theory. How? The ethical-value consciousness of positivist Halakhah rests on the following principles: (1) Fact: evil really exists (for instance, disease). (2) Ethos: (a) Evil must be fought through scientific, social, and normative means, creating an orderly behavior characterized by this struggle (for instance, encouraging medicine). (3) Knowledge and faith: awareness of a long-term struggle against evil. Belief in redemption is a structured part of the values of moral consciousness. (4) Ethos (b): defeat (for instance, the triumph of disease) must be borne with “dignity and humility” (103–104). These principles fit modern existence because even a contemporary individual fighting evil does so out of a messianic dream of absolute victory: the “halakhic ethic of evil” is close to the “modern technique of dealing with evil.” But let us not forget that R. Soloveitchik’s main goal in his lecture to doctors and psychiatrists was apologetic. He had to emphasize the advantage of Halakhah, and he did. Halakhah holds an advantage over modernism. Contrary to his other writings, where the defense and the controversy target religious reformers in American Judaism or Christianity, the target public in the lecture on mental health is a community of modern intellectuals represented by doctors and psychiatrists. The advantage of Halakhah focuses on the fourth principle, that is, on the way a person accepts defeat when facing the triumph of evil. Contrary to the modern person, whose ideal moral response to evil is indifference or stoic equanimity, Halakhah makes dignity the ideal reaction. What is the meaning of the distinction between these responses? According to R. Soloveitchik:

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chapter nine Equanimity is a state of mind, dignity a form of existence . . . A dignified existence means a unique existence. Dignity is an existential dimension, not just a psychological idea or a descriptive attribute pertaining to man’s behavior.17 It is more than that. It somehow reflects man’s inner personality, the core of his existential experience . . . Man’s creation “in the image of God” means that man’s existence, in contradistinction to natural existence in the animal kingdom, is a dignified existence. (105)

The meaning that R. Soloveitchik ascribed to the term dignity is an independent characteristic of existence. Dignity is not (only) the attitude displayed toward a person or to any of this person’s social and legal rights; dignity is an inner human characteristic. R. Soloveitchik’s starting point is a stance such as that of Pico Della Mirandola in his On the Dignity of Man, whereby dignity reflects the unique human essence.18 Hermann Cohen, for instance, endorses a similar view and asserts: “In his honor the personality of man is established” and “it [honor] makes man into mankind.”19 Equanimity, by contrast, is not a constitutive characteristic. What, then, is dignity’s concern? What turns this feature into an essential characteristic of existence? R. Soloveitchik presents a new definition here. In his view, a person’s dignity rests on the paradoxical movement of closeness to and distance from God, a definition that emerges from both “topical” and “thematic” Halakhah. Although the dialectic of closeness and distance originates in a phenomenological conception, R. Soloveitchik views it as a concrete existential characteristic, not merely a drive of consciousness but a concrete act. The positivist halakhic commandment relates both to the subduing of the universe through scientific activity and to the norm of humility20 given science’s failure to disclose the divine. R. Soloveitchik further pointed to the laws of the menstruating woman

17   Cf. Walter S. Wurzburger, Ethics of Responsibility: Pluralistic Approaches to Covenantal Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 25–26. 18   See Pico Della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). See also Nathan Rotenstreich, Man and his Dignity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), 49–55. See also Joseph B. Soloveitchik The Lonely Man of Faith (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1997), 15–17. 19   Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: F. Ungar, 1972), 405. 20   R. Soloveitchik recurrently uses the term “humility” or “spirit of humility” to denote the pole of lowliness. And indeed, in religious tradition, humility is reached out of an acknowledgement of God’s greatness (and here—through scientific achievements). See Daniel Statman, “Modesty, Pride, and Realistic Self-Assessment,” The Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992), 429–432.



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as a reflection of closeness and distance in the couple relationship.21 The dialectic, then, characterizes not only the relationship with God but qualitative human structure as such. “Axiological Halakhah” appears to have reawakened in the context of the dialectic movement conveying human dignity. “This is the main, the dominant theme of Judaism, of both thematic and topical Halakhah” (108). The effort to return metaphysics to the discussion, however, does not lessen the sharp criticism he had previously directed at it, and R. Soloveitchik offers no genuine reason for ignoring this criticism. The standing of axiological Halakhah points to the conceptual structure of the lecture as a deliberate A-B-A move. It begins with two types of Halakhah, when axiological Halakhah enjoys legitimate status. In the course of the discussion, axiological Halakhah is rejected as ineffective and even unintelligible. The lecture ends by postulating that dialectic is the key to Judaism’s understanding of the soul according to both positivist and axiological Halakhah, which now returns to the discourse. This move, as noted, attempts to suppress the previous criticism without actually succeeding. In sum, R. Soloveitchik was disappointed with metaphysics and metaphysical consciousness, but could not postulate existence without it. From Masked to Open Criticism The contents and the style of the lecture lead to its necessary comparison with “Kol Dodi Dofek.”22 This essay had not directly criticized the study of consciousness, that is, the subjective dimension of religiosity. The critique had hinged on the effectiveness of metaphysics as such—angels, sefirot, spiritual entities, neo-Platonic hypostases23— none can solve the problem of evil. The philosophical foundation they provide therefore collapses in light of an existence pervaded by pain and suffering. R. Soloveitchik did not specifically relate to metaphysical consciousness, that is, to subjective scrutiny as a reconstruction of objective consciousness, and indeed ignored the adoption of teleological

21   On the couple relationship, a matter of great concern to R. Soloveitchik at this time, see below, ch. 10. 22   See above, ch. 8. 23   On various aspects concerning assumptions about the existence of entities beside God, see, for instance, Brian Leftow, “God and Abstract Entities,” Faith and Philosophy 7 (1990): 193–217.

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Halakhah as the meaning of suffering, together with the addition of metaphysical consciousness. He did not, as it were, dare to refute the theories that had concerned him so extensively in his early thinking, as if the contrast were between philosophy and Kabbalah (without any connection to Halakhah) on the one hand, and practical (“positivist”) Halakhah on the other. The lecture on mental health leaves no room for vagueness: R. Solo­ veitchik’s critique directly targets “axiological-thematic Halakhah,” that is, the subjective consciousness of practical Halakhah. He no longer speaks of The Guide of the Perplexed or of Kabbalah as an “external” metaphysical layer that is not a halakhic reconstruction (as he does, for example, in The Halakhic Mind, which sharply distinguishes between the halakhic Maimonides and the Maimonides of The Guide of the Perplexed ). Henceforth, R. Soloveitchik’s rejection focuses directly on the consciousness derived from Halakhah, which is an “axiological Halakhah,” that is, on the subjective consciousness that he sought to reconstruct from the objective one (the halakhic norm and act). A subjective consciousness of this kind is revealed as meaningless to the religious person facing the modern world, and in fact as superfluous. The dialectic that characterizes concrete existence according to R. Soloveitchik, turns into an actual rift, as described in the following scheme: Dialectic (a) Objective consciousness

(b) Subjective consciousness

(1) Affirmation

(2) Absolute rejection

The trends latent in “Kol Dodi Dofek” coalesced into a categorical statement in the lecture on mental health. The oral presentation allowed R. Soloveitchik greater freedom of expression, and he probably planned to submit the written text to rigorous editing but had no time to do so. Note that, in And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik hinted that existential values of redemption obtain in subjective consciousness (beside metaphysical values that undergo conscious metamorphosis), which is reconstructed from objective consciousness. By contrast, in the lecture on mental health the existential problems lead to a collapse of subjective consciousness and to its shattering and, in fact, to the absolute abandonment of the system, that is, the phenomenology of religion.



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The conceptual transformation disclosed in “Kol Dodi Dofek” is clarified and recorded in the lecture on mental health. R. Soloveitchik continued to rely for many more years on a phenomenological approach, and even published his most classic phenomenological writings (And from There You Shall Seek and The Halakhic Mind) in the last third of the twentieth century. Henceforth, however, he made no attempt to integrate phenomenology and existentialism; henceforth, the appearance of the two approaches side by side could only be explained dialectically. R. Soloveitchik, then, held that a full explanation of the human condition requires two different and contradictory approaches. I will now trace the emergence of the existential motifs that characterized the new philosophical direction that emerged in the 1950s, beginning with an important characteristic of concrete existence—finitude. (3)  Finitude: (a) Incompleteness At the opening of the essay “The Crisis of Human Finitude,” finitude is perceived as an obstacle and a threat to be overcome. R. Soloveitchik also mentions several such responses. Finitude emerges in the course of the discussion as a fundamental existential experience, which exposes the absurd and the dialectic of existence. R. Soloveitchik uses at least three denotations of the term finitude, at times differentiating between them and at times indistinguishably: (1) A Physical-Environmental Denotation. Finitude refers to limitation and inability and, as such, is the antithesis of omnipotence. Since human beings are finite, their powers are limited and they are therefore subject to disease, war, economic and social upheavals, and so forth. (2) A Temporal Denotation. Finitude refers to time and, as such, is the antithesis of infinity. Human beings are not eternal since their lives end at some point. Death is the key to the temporal meaning of infinity. (3) A Conceptual Denotation. Finitude refers to partialness and lack and, as such, is the antithesis of wholeness. Human beings cannot attain wholeness, not because they are not eternal but because wholeness, by definition, is unattainable; all solutions lead to more problems. Even if they were eternal, human beings could not attain wholeness.

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In his articles, R. Soloveitchik focused mainly on the third denotation, that is, on finitude as an experience of incompleteness. In “The Crisis of Human Finitude” he related almost exclusively to this denotation, but still did not refrain from considering the two others. The focus on finitude as incompleteness enabled R. Soloveitchik to identify it with the existential-dialectic experience, which is based on antitheses. Achievement turns into lack, triumph is also defeat, hope and despair are mixed; all clarify and are compatible with the incompleteness of human existence. Incompleteness is what leads to defeat at the moment of mighty conquest and what dilutes joy with sorrow. Finitude is an existential category that interested many thinkers and, before delving into R. Soloveitchik’s views, I will consider the existentialist background of the discussion on finitude. The Discussion in Existentialist Thought The existential condition of finitude was a focus of concern for many existentialist thinkers. Heidegger, for instance, argued that temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is a primary ontological datum that sets the ground for concrete existence.24 Human existence is incomprehensible without assuming temporality as its foundation. In his extensive discussion on temporality in Being and Time, Heidegger clarified that temporality is an expression of finitude (Endlichkeit).25 He also interpreted in broad terms Kant’s conditions of knowledge and, in this context, created the possibility of knowledge about finitude.26 Heidegger, then, established finitude as an almost necessary characteristic of philosophical discussion. Religious existentialist philosophy in particular related to finitude as a problematic and oppressive element typical of concrete existence. Religious existentialist thinkers did not limit themselves to describing the characteristics of existence and searching for its teleological element. Kierkegaard viewed finitude as a potentially alienating element and possibly leading human beings to escape their concrete existence

24   Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 277. 25  Ibid., 378–379. Cf. Ran Sigad, Studies in Existentialism (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1975), 199–207. 26   W. B. Macomber, The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 154–168.

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in a search for infinity.27 The important ethical questions, argued Kier­ ke­gaard, relate to temporal existence, partial and concrete, and finitude was for him the key issue in existential discourse.28 Kierkegaard therefore proposed a teleological solution—endorse finitude, the factual “self ” or the personal-concrete biography. And yet, this solution also implies a dialectic of the finite and the infinite and, therefore, he does not affirm finitude as a test of freedom.29 One instance of a profound analysis of finitude involving existentialist elements is found in Paul Tillich’s thought, which I present below. Tillich became acquainted with Kierkegaard’s writings on the eve of the First World War and exerted significant influence on the modern American religious thought that so affected R. Soloveitchik. He developed Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s concept of finitude and incorporated it into a classic existentialist-religious world view, taking the Kierkegaardian distinction between fear and anxiety as his starting point. In the first volume of Systematic Theology, Tillich presented the anxiety about absence and nothingness as an essential characteristic of concrete existence. “To be finite is to be threatened.”30 The existential anxiety about finitude has three expressions: anxiety about death, about meaninglessness, and about existential guilt. Human existence is temporary and finite, and the element of nothingness is present within it. We are anxious about being unnecessary, contingent. Contrary to God’s “causa sui” that, after Spinoza, Tillich defined as exclusively a divine attribute, man is “thrown” into being.31 Finitude is reflected mainly in the elements of time, space, and causality concerning the object (subject-object). For Tillich, however, time is unquestionably the “central category”32 of finitude. The following discussion therefore focuses on the expression of finitude in time.

  Alaistair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London: Routledge and Paul, 1982), 46–47.   See William A. Shearson, The Notion of Encounter: An Inquiry into the Nature and Structure of the Human Situation and Existential Knowledge in Existentialist Metaphysics (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1980), 21. 29   See Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 77, 104. On Kierkegaardian dialectics see ibid., ch. 4. 30   Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 201. 31  Ibid., 196. Tillich pointed to Heidegger as the source of the formulation he adopted. 32  Ibid., 193. Tillich defined categories as “the forms in which the mind grasps and shapes reality” (ibid., 192). On this issue generally, see Robert P. Scharlemann, Reflection 27 28

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Tillich explained his thought as “religious answers to ontological questions.” The questions follow directly from human existence, whereas the source of the answers lies in the divine message that comes from outside. And concerning finitude, Tillich unequivocally states that “God is the answer to the question implied in human finitude.”33 Following is a brief presentation of the questions relevant to finitude from a time perspective: (1) From an “external” conceptual perspective, temporality has two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the temporal process has a creative dimension, and we actually come about innovations through transience and temporality. On the other, the present is a tie between the past, which progressively disappears in temporality, and the future, which does not yet exist. Transience, therefore, entails a negative-destructive dimension. What, then, is the meaning of this polarity? (2) From an “internal” existential perspective. The poles are revealed here in other categories: on the one hand, humans discover existen­ tial anxiety concerning nothingness. The past disappears and the infinite future places us in a situation of anxiety. On the other, the affirmation of the present is an expression of “courage.” Tillich claims: “Man cannot escape the question of the ultimate foundation of his ontological courage.”34 So what underlies these simultaneous situations of anxiety and courage? And how should the terror of finitude in general be solved? Tillich did ease the existential tension attached to the examination of an “ontological question” by using a “religious answer”: faith in divine omnipotence is the foundation that grants “courage” and the ability to overcome existential anxiety about the three characteristics— time, space, and the subject-object relationship. Divine omnipotence is expressed in various ways. Concerning time, for instance, it is reflected in divine eternity. Tillich writes: “Faith in the almighty God is the

and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich (New Haven, CO: Yale University Press, 1969), 141–148. 33  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 64. John Macquarrie, Studies in Christian Existentialism: Lectures and Essays (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965), ch. 5. 34  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 194.

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answer to the quest for a courage which is sufficient to conquer the anxiety of finitude. . . . With respect to time, omnipotence is eternity; with respect to space, it is omnipresence; and with respect to the subject-object structure of being, it is omniscience.”35 We overcome existential anxiety due to the correlation of anxiety and finitude with the courage granted by divine infinity. Faith redeems humans from the anxiety of infinity by adding it to divine omnipotence rather than by dismissing it. Divine eternity, for instance, enables individuals to affirm, accept, and endorse their temporal finitude. When I say “divine eternity,” I neither mean the scholastic concept of a God transcending time nor temporal infinity. Tillich carefully noted that the meaning of eternity is that God encompasses the temporal eras in their temporality, meaning that God is present at all the segments of temporality typical of concrete existence.36 This is how Tillich explained humans as the meeting point of the finite and the infinite.37 For Tillich, existential anxiety is a result of detachment from divine eternity; alternatively, consciousness of divine eternity liberates from anxiety. Note that divine eternity is not only a philosophical concept but an expression of the attitude of a personal God,38 whose attributes and qualities are fully determined according to the concreteexistential situation. Divine eternity, as noted, includes temporality. When humans understand the meaning of finitude, they are released from their anxiety about it. We had learned that finitude is a threat, and faith dissipates the threat by granting meaning to finite existence. Tillich’s thought restricted the concept of God to temporality by presenting a formula of broad divine presence at all the concrete time segments. The principle of finitude as an anxiety-provoking threat is

 Ibid., vol. 1, 273–274.  Ibid., vol. 1, 274–275. See Scharlemann, Reflection and Doubt, 120. This view of finitude entails some problems and appears to lend support to the critical view of Tillich whereby, “Tillich’s deepest message is a simple No to God and Yes to man.” See Leonard F. Wheat, Paul Tillich’s Dialectical Humanism: Unmasking the God above God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), 252. 37   See, for instance the formulations in Andrew C. Bradley, Ideals of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1940), 246. 38   Various scholars have offered a broad spectrum of views about God in the style of Tillich, from pantheism and panentheism and up to personal and mystical conceptions. In adopting the term personal God, I am referring to a notion of God from the perspective of the human existential condition rather than to the concept as such. 35 36

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constantly present in Tillich’s writings, despite the development in his work over time. Tillich held that anxiety about finitude is most concretely reflected in the fear of death and, in this sense, he is no different from other existentialist thinkers. “Anxiety about non-being is present in everything final.”39 In a collection of Tillich’s sermons, we find the following passage: Death, although natural to every finite being, seems at the same time to stand against nature. But it is man only who is able to face his death consciously; that belongs to his greatness and dignity. It is that which enables him to look at his life as a whole, from a definite beginning to a definite end. It is that which enables him to ask for the meaning of his life—a question which elevates him above his life, and gives him the feeling of his eternity.40

In this sermon, which Tillich entitled “Destruction of Death”, the category of finitude was presented as a key to human dignity and greatness. Overcoming existential anxiety is his dignity. An essential closeness, then, is evident between Tillich’s and R. Solo­veitchik’s thought. The problem of finitude is constantly present in R. Soloveitchik’s writings, and the model of an omnipotent divinity is perceived as a kind of solution to this problem. R. Soloveitchik returns time and again to the formulation whereby the presence of “the Infinite in the limited and bounded”41 is a relief from existential anxiety. My presentation of Tillich, however, was meant to show a model of finitude in the philosophy of R. Soloveitchik’s time in order to illustrate the existentialist-religious discussion of this concept. I will now examine in detail how R. Soloveitchik contended with the problems and the meanings of finitude.

39  Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 67. On the dispute about the existential meaning of death in existentialist philosophy, see Robert G. Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover, 1962), 192–212; Patricia F. Sanborn, Existentialism (New York: Pegasus, 1968), 79–81; Hanoch Tanen, The Conception of an Existential Ethics in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Massada, 1977), 30–31. 40   Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Scribner, 1948), 171. 41   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, And From There You Shall Seek, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav and Toras Ho-Rav Foundation, 2007), 22. In a poetic formulation, he writes: “The creation has drawn the Creator’s heart with one of her eyes that gaze upon the face of eternity. Finitude has drawn the heart of infinitude with one coil of her necklace” (according to Song of Songs 4:9). See also below.



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Finitude As Crisis In “The Crisis of Human Finitude,” R. Soloveitchik drew a distinction between two kinds of crises: surface crisis and depth crisis. The former denotes a crisis of response to an outside source, and its concern is the reaction to natural and social disasters. Since a human being is a finite and vulnerable creature, it is exposed to the threat of the environment. Finitude means vulnerability and detachment. By contrast, the latter kind denotes a crisis of inner distress. This crisis is an experience of finitude in the sense of incompleteness and partialness.42 Finitude is distinctly a dialectic pole: on the one hand, are self-affirmation, values, and intellectual achievements, and on the other, these achievements shatter in the confrontation with finitude, that is, the inability to attain wholeness. Contrary to the surface crisis, which humans confront with scientific, social, and interpersonal tools, the depth crisis is entirely personal.43 The surface crisis is a result of external feelings, such as the melancholia experienced at a funeral, which immediately passes (168).44 By contrast, the depth crisis is the result of an internal struggle, an antithetical wavering between contrasting inclinations expressing incompleteness. This crisis cannot be overcome. The proper way of confronting it is to expose it, embrace it, and deliberately choose it. Surface prayer focuses, at the same time, on praising the Creator, as mystics do,45 whereas depth prayer forewarns of inner distress (161).46 R. Soloveitchik clarifies: 42   See the introduction of David Schatz, Joel Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler to Out of the Whirlwind, xli. 43   R. Soloveitchik did not clarify here whether the crisis of finitude is transitive, that is, whether it can be the object of an inter-subjective dialogue. In The Lonely Man of Faith he gave a positive answer to this question, but in “The Crisis of Human Finitude,” he showed no interest in this question. R. Soloveitchik mentions Job’s openness to the other and dialogical life only at the beginning but then this motif, a remnant of the conceptual direction followed in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” disappears entirely from the discussion. 44   On the perception of feelings as a reaction to an external situation, see, for instance, Edward Smith et al. Atkinson and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology (Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, 2003), 390–391. 45   See Schwartz, Religion or Halakhah, ch. 7. R. Soloveitchik, however, recognized the mystical aspect of consciousness as a legitimate dimension of his phenomenological thought, and his conception of prayer is part of this statement. In “Out of the Whirlwind,” prayer expresses the depth experience of the crisis of revelation: “There is no prayer and there is no soul-searching if man does not experience the ‘great desolation’ ” (136); see also, for instance, R. Hayyim Vital, Ets ha-Hayyim (Warsaw: 1890), Part II, Section 8, ch. 1, 35a. 46   Prayer in the thought of R. Soloveitchik requires further research. See Moshe Sokolow, Educating for Prayer—Utilizing the Writings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik:

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chapter nine Prayer flowing from a heart filled with the inner misery and despair of this contradictory experience is not intercessory petition, which is intended to relieve one of his trouble, but rather has more of a subjective character. It does not ask for help, nor does it try to resolve the crisis. The prayer consecrates the defeat, redeems the misery and elevates it to the level of sacrifice. (167)

As a rule: “Prayer is inseparably bound with crisis” (173). Prayer is a hallmark of worship in general and, according to R. Soloveitchik, has a twofold role: (1) Exposing the existential-internal crisis and providing evidence of its very existence. (2) Serving as a therapeutic tool that offers a way of endorsing the existential crisis. The existential crisis is a given and, therefore, not amenable to healing or overcoming; one must endorse action, that is, live with the crisis. More precisely: one cannot overcome the existential crisis, but can overcome the alienation toward it. Awareness of the crisis enables life and activity with it. Hence the place of prayer: prayer opens up to the worshipper the way to live a life of “salvation.” What is the meaning of “salvation” in this context? Deliberately choosing the life of crisis redeems and purifies the person in the midst of an existential crisis. Worship is expressed through prayer, its aim is to redeem the person who has encountered the experience of the absurd. “There is only one in whom man finds his salvation—God” (178).47 In order to clarify the distinction between surface crisis and depth crisis, R. Soloveitchik set the outline of the following scheme:

Curricular and Instructional Guidelines (New York: Yeshiva University, 2006). As for the first crisis, note that R. Soloveitchik ascribed to the realm of external and surface feelings the Christian ritual, which focuses on the aesthetic and the impressive, whereas Judaism does not limit itself to the external dimension (142–144). R. Soloveitchik’s critique established a common denominator between paganism and Christianity regarding the constitutive aesthetic foundation (ibid.). See Zachary Braiterman, “Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant’s Mitzvah-Aesthetic,” AJS Review 20 (2000/2001): 1–24. 47   On existential concepts that are poured into the notion of redemption in R. Soloveitchik’s thought, see Dov Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads: A Theological Profile of Religious-Zionism, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 193–210.



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Type of crisis

Definition

Confrontation

249

Commandment (prayer)

Surface (external)

1.  Mood (feelings in Struggle and response to external overcoming events) 2.   Subject to the principle of contradiction48

The centrality of exalting prayer (mystics)

Depth (internal)

1.  Experience (absurd, internal dialectic of contradictory inclinations) 2.  Not subject to the principle of contradiction

The centrality of subjective prayer (relief of existential distress)

Free adoption and choice

In other works of R. Soloveitchik, prayer is an expression of dialogue and community, and I discuss this in Chapter Ten below. At this stage, prayer exposes the distress and the problematic rather than the intersubjective relationship. Reactions to Finitude: (1) Activity R. Soloveitchik argued that attempts to contend with the problem of finitude and with the depth crisis take place in two different realms: (1) Human activity (2) Abstract thought and religious-metaphysical philosophy. I examine these two realms below. In each one, R. Soloveitchik cited two types of reaction, rejected one of them, and ultimately adopted the other, as presented in this table:

48  Contrary moods, then, cannot coalesce into one unified experience, and are therefore unstable. “However, when properly chosen and freely accepted by the individual into his total life awareness, emotions may all merge into one experience, interpenetrating and crossing like the weaving of a warp and woof in a piece of cloth” (172).

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Reaction 1. Philistine personality (Job) 2. Daemonic personality (Kohelet)

Thought Evaluation

Reaction

Evaluation

+

1.  Humanistic approach

–

–

2.  Religious approach

+

In the realm of activity, R. Soloveitchik presented reactions to finitude through two types (a philistine v. a daemonic personality,49 Job v. Kohelet), which differ in the way they cope with finitude. Their shared feature is that neither one endorses the experience of finitude nor pursues its implications. Quite the contrary: both seek to overcome the experience, remove it, and repress it. Job prefers to ignore finitude and focus on survival, “without responsibilities and bonds” (153). Kohelet prefers to dismiss finitude by striving for infinity. In order to attain infinity he sets himself extreme goals, moved by the impulse to transcend borders in various areas of achievement (strategy, economy, science, pleasure, and so forth). This type seeks “to transcend finitude and plunge into infinity” (155). Both types fail in the struggle with finitude: Job is shocked following Satan’s deed, and Kohelet understands at the end of his life that his infinite aspirations had remained unsatisfied. To explain Kohelet’s failure, R. Soloveitchik relies on a claim that recurs in his writings from the 1940s onward: the more the researcher and the scientist conquer reality, the more questions and problems emerge: “the wider the areas our intellect explores, the greater and more challenging becomes the mystery of Being as a whole” (156).50 Job’s and Kohelet’s failures expose the absurd of human existence as one founded on contradiction. Reaching a goal is tied to its loss. Striving for a regulating wholeness (Job) or for an ideal one (Kohelet) inevitably exposes lack and incompleteness. As a rule: “The ontic experience is never complete; it is fraught with its own negation” (156). Absurd existence ultimately prevails over attempts to be rescued

49   R. Soloveitchik noted that the source of this term is in the book of Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics, trans. Olive Wyon (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002). Brunner called this personality “daemonic” because it is based on “boundless fantasy” (ibid., 24). 50   See ch. 1 above.



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from it. R. Soloveitchik’s critical view of attempts to overcome finitude indirectly addresses approaches such as Tillich’s, which pretend to offer solutions to an insoluble problem. Shifting the weight to divine infinity is merely a smokescreen that fails to dismiss finitude. And yet, the evaluation of Job’s figure and that of Kohelet differ. Job ultimately succeeded in endorsing finitude and acknowledging the intrinsic absurdity of existence, whereas Kohelet did not. In light of the perception of finitude as a crisis, discussed above, a distinction is possible between the Job and the Kohelet types. R. Soloveitchik writes: Job tried to escape from reality and drugged himself into an illusory sense of serenity and security. He did not understand that the genuine existential experience is fraught with incompleteness and the feeling of distress . . .  Kohelet realized the absurdity of being, the incompleteness of his life and the inner contradictions implied in his total effort of self-activation and self-actualization. However, he too lived in a dream world. He thought that it is possible to overcome the crisis by adopting an aggressive policy. The incompleteness may be superseded by the fullness and perfectedness of the existential experience if man—mature in wisdom and knowledge, and wielding great power—decides to do so. In his pride, Kohelet wanted to reassert himself and to deny the idea of defeat. Arrogantly, he attempted to conquer the invincible, to achieve the unattainable and to realize the impossible. . . . Fundamentally, Kohelet did not grasp the essence of the depth crisis, since he believed in complete self-realization and in the possibility of resolving the existential crisis. (165–166)

Job, unlike Kohelet, was unaware that existence is absurd. He focused on his egotistic, superficial world and could not see the depths of imperfection, whereas Kohelet did. Job sought safety from surface crises, whereas Kohelet strove to overcome the depth crisis. We can therefore understand why Job was ultimately redeemed through prayer, whereas Kohelet remained in his ceaseless pessimism. Job suffered from ignorance and confusion, and the solution was to remove the nebulous screen. As soon as Job was exposed to the depth dimension of imperfection and absurdity through suffering and through the verbal revelation (God’s revelation out of the whirlwind), he immediately changed the mode of his existence and prayed for the other, acknowledging the inter-subjective connection. Kohelet, however, was aware of the depth dimension, but his pride prevented him from defeating it. Kohelet’s illusion did not derive from ignorance but rather from knowledge of this basic existential category. Kohelet’s character, his hubris, precludes resurgence.

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In the passage dealing with Kohelet, R. Soloveitchik resorted to dialectic writing. At the beginning of the passage, he argued that Kohelet knows the depth crisis, and at its conclusion, he rejected this claim. The reason is that the experience of incompleteness has two epistemic dimensions that follow from one another: (1) Knowledge of imperfection as a characteristic of “internal” human existence (depth crisis), and not only as a result of “external” circumstantial events (surface crises). (2) Knowledge of the constancy of imperfection, thus the impossibility of overcoming it. Kohelet knew (1), but his pride did not allow him to understand that (2) necessarily follows from (1). Thus, he was ostensibly conscious of the depth experience but an existentialist analysis of Kohelet’s approach shows that, from the start, there was no basis for the pessimist biblical thinker to know the depth dimension of the crisis. In truth, Kohelet never grasped the depth of the existential absurd. If we do not understand that the experience of the absurd is an existential characteristic that cannot be changed, we do not really know this experience. Moreover, Kohelet missed the real questions that should be raised vis-à-vis the depth crisis: How does one live with such a crisis? What is its purpose? What is the action we should adopt in its light? Kohelet devoted his energy to a delusional misleading question: how to overcome a crisis that cannot possibly be surmounted. Contrary to Job, then, Kohelet is incapable of experiencing the depth crisis. Between the lines, R. Soloveitchik hints that Kohelet’s character prevented him from undergoing the depth experience of the absurd. Job, by contrast, could recover, and this was the reason that R. Soloveitchik ended the article with the figure of Job. He again noted that “Job lacked the dialectical experience” (176) and clarified how this flaw could be corrected: by centering on the “self-related, inward, dialectical existence” (176). The active reaction vis-à-vis finitude, then, means recognizing the depth dimension and living accordingly. Reactions to Finitude: (2) Thought At the conceptual level too, we find two reactions to finitude— “humanistic” and religious. The “humanistic” reaction holds that the development of humanity is actually the defeat of finitude. This reaction, founded on the Enlightenment and on political utopias, suggests that



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cultural, social, and scientific progress will in the end lead to perfection. This response is rejected as illusory: “Apparently, cultural ascent and scientific achievement do not relieve man of the curse of vanity and incompleteness which presses on his frail shoulders” (157). The second, “the religious-metaphysical” reaction, is the one that R. Soloveitchik endorses and requires further discussion. R. Soloveitchik describes it as follows: The incompleteness of our existential experience at all levels is rooted in the nature and destiny of man. He is a creature and, as such, a part of a finite reality—and finitude is incomplete, deficient and impregnated with paradoxes and absurdities. Death is an integral part of the biological process. The “x” cannot be separated from the equation— there is always an unknown quantity involved in the cognitive performance. Beauty is somehow projected against the dark background of ugliness, and absolute goodness is engaged in an eternal contest with Satan. Maimonides and Leibniz termed the incompleteness of our being malum metaphysicum, a metaphysical evil, from which man can never free himself. Intoxication with our given existence is accompanied by disillusionment. Yet we can somehow relieve ourselves of this burden of despair brought on by the tantalizingly full existence which recedes into vast distances like a mirage as soon as we think that we have found our destination. We can accomplish this by consecrating our incompleteness as an offering to God, giving up our illusions of grandeur and glory, of success and conquest—not like Kohelet, forcibly, because we have tried all recipes for happiness and found them ineffectual, but on account of our craving for dignity and majesty: for fulfillment not through accomplishment without, but through ascent within. We find dignity and majesty not in the madness of “draining” one conquest “to the dregs” in order to pass on to another, but in self-conquest and self-giving; in the quest for catharsis, for redemption by returning my existence to its Owner; in the heroic sacrifice. (157–158)

The phrase religious-metaphysical response originates in Leibniz’s Theodicy, which divides evil into three types: physical, moral, and metaphysical. Leibniz articulated the conception of metaphysical evil following the Guide of the Perplexed. The approach rests on several Maimonidean elements, as follows: (1) Evil does not exist independently. Evil is the absence of completeness, which is the good.51 51   This approach was formulated in “Kol Dodi Dofek.” See ch. 8 above. See, for instance, John Hostler, Leibniz’s Moral Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1975), 84.

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(2) Human beings, therefore, as creatures who develop and actualize, are subject to some evil because they are incomplete. (3) Even if we derive from (1) and (2) that lack is greater than completeness, that is, that evil is greater than the good, it is still impossible to claim that the world is evil since the purpose of reality is not Man.52 Metaphysical evil, then, is the incompleteness that characterizes human beings as such. In “Kol Dodi Dofek,” however, we saw that R. Soloveitchik had rejected this metaphysical outlook as ineffective, comparing it to the contemplation of a carpet’s reverse side. By contrast, in “The Crisis of Human Finitude,” this approach is presented in positive terms. The religious-metaphysical approach is a key to the adoption of finitude; because of it, the homo religiosus willingly assumes the paradoxical quality of finite and incomplete life. He is aware that closeness to God ends in distance, and that striving for a moral purpose ends with the acknowledgement that this purpose cannot be realized. The religious-metaphysical approach channels the homo religiosus to renounce completeness and, thereby, dialectical existence as well. Are the antithetical approaches in these two articles compatible, and if so, how? R. Soloveitchik discerned different emphases in the religious metaphysical approach. He split the argument of (1) and (2). In “Kol Dodi Dofek” he relied on claim (1), stating that evil is a privation, whereas in “The Crisis of Human Finitude” he relied on claim (2), stating that accepting incompleteness characterizes the human experience as such. Claim (1) is missing from the above cited passage by R. Soloveitchik. We find, then, that R. Soloveitchik presented the metaphysical statement that denies the reality of evil as a meaningless statement, but ascribed great significance to the presentation of incompleteness as a component of human nature. To reiterate: R. Soloveitchik agreed to view the perception of evil as privation as an existential statement about human nature but not as a metaphysical statement about divine conduct. These statements enable an adequate understanding of his underlying meaning: the conceptual reaction to finitude is its very

52   On this argument, see Dov Schwartz, Central Problems of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2005), 27–59.



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perception as an element of human existence, and the recognition of incompleteness as an immanent characteristic of human life. Anxiety about Nihility Contrary to Tillich, who made nihility and fear of it the foremost motivation of the crisis of finitude, in “The Crisis of Human Finitude” R. Soloveitchik emphasized incompleteness as the central element of the crisis. Fear of nihility actually appears in R. Soloveitchik’s discussion of the surface crisis, which reveals the fragility of human existence vis-à-vis the cosmos. Consequently, the conflict between temporality and eternity troubles R. Soloveitchik less than imperfection—a fundamental existential fact. The end of the article, therefore, addresses neurotic anxiety. It is not the threat of nihility that is the reason for anxiety, so that endorsing the depth experience of the absurd is not related to nihility: If, in treating neurotic anxiety, modern psychiatry holds the view that what makes us fearful is not a particular threat to one’s physical existence but rather a threat to a certain value with which one identifies himself and to which one is unconditionally committed, it has hit upon a central truth. (177)

Anxiety is driven by the threat to values, so that recognizing and endorsing the dialectical experience of the crisis is the key to overcoming the anxiety. In other writings, R. Soloveitchik relates to finitude as the fear of death behind heroism. Many of these writings—such as his eulogies53— relate directly to the experience of nihility, whereas others are biographical-therapeutic essays. For instance: Surely—Halakhah proclaims—death offers man an opportunity to discover greatness and indeed heroism: to build—even though he knows he will not see the end of the building he is busy with . . .—not for himself but for the coming generations. Death teaches man to raise his physical self beyond himself and to identify with the eternal covenantal community. Not only does death not release man from his duty, Halakhah warns us, but it indeed exalts and encourages his role as a historical entity and expands his moral

53   Marvin Fox, “The Rav as a Maspid,” in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik: Man of Halacha, Man of Faith, ed. Menachem D. Genack (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1998), 185–207.

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Death is perceived as granting meaning to one’s finite human existence as a “historical entity.” Mourning laws, such as reciting the Kaddish prayer (which exalts God) at the end of the funeral ceremony, emphasize the “heroic” meanings of death. R. Soloveitchik found concrete teleological meanings in death: one is altruism, that is, action for a future in which one will have no part, and the other—participation in eternity. Most plausibly, R. Soloveitchik intended this participation to refer to the immortality of the soul, whereas Tillich relies on eternity as a divine attribute. Both of them, however, considered finitude a threatening element evoking existential anxiety, and both viewed the deep recognition of the existential condition of death and its implications as granting release from anxiety. Fear of death leads to the affirmation of finitude and to the recognition of its value and its advantages. R. Soloveitchik would embrace finitude in its temporal and detached sense in “Out of the Whirlwind,” and the circumstances of this disposition are discussed below. Not so in “The Crisis of Human Finitude”: here the full focus is on finitude as an absurd experience of incompleteness. Summary Two essential principles emerge from an analysis of “The Crisis of Human Finitude”: (1) Cognition and Choice. In R. Soloveitchik’s view, awareness of the existential crisis of finitude is supremely important. This importance attaches both to the value of recognizing the incompleteness of human existence and to the therapeutic dimension of this recognition—a life that embraces the crisis. Again: the therapeutic dimension is not overcoming of the crisis, which is impossible; rather, this dimension refers to a life that embraces the absurd. 54   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Ha-Rav she-Hotamo Kedushah ve-Ha‘arakhah,” in Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah (Jerusalem: WZO, 1981). See also Dov Schwartz, “On Finitude and its Existentialist Sources in the Thought of David Hartman” (in Hebrew), in Renewing Jewish Commitment: The Work and Thought of David Hartman (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 493–516.



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(2) Adapting Halakhah to Finitude. R. Soloveitchik identified worship as meant to disclose the existential crisis and to regulate life while embracing it. Prayer, and particularly the subjective prayer that seeks to ease distress, attests to Halakhah’s turn to the existential crisis. The distinction between Tillich’s discussion of finitude and that of R. Soloveitchik merits attention. Both presented finitude as a problem, but emphasized different aspects of it. But the deep distinction between them is that Tillich considered it his task to offer a clear and rational presentation of the problems and to devise theological solutions to them. R. Soloveitchik, however, assumed that his task was to reject solutions to the problem of finitude. No theological solutions that will release the tension are available. At most, we can expect Halakhah to enable a dignified life while embracing the tension. Finitude was presented in R. Soloveitchik’s lecture as an existential experience, an absurd existential condition that is a given. The story of the various human types is actually the story of their attitude to this fundamental experience, beginning with indifference and an attempt to blur it and repress it, through an attempt to overcome it and ignore it, and up to its endorsement and deliberate choice. Between the lines, R. Soloveitchik created a value scale of the various human situations and enabled us to trace different existential processes (from indifference to choice and so forth). (4)  Finitude (b): Temporality “Out of the Whirlwind” is an essay with a complex structure. R. Solo­ veitchik presents in it an essentialist discussion of kinds of revelation and their connection to finitude. In this discussion, finitude is contrasted with eternity, and is reflected in the anxiety about nihility and the dread of death. At the core of the article, R. Soloveitchik halted the systematic philosophical discussion and moved to autobiographical and therapeutic writing. The article deals with revelation as a dialectical and intricate phenomenon, which can never be settled and unified. In “Out of the Whirlwind,” the dialectical principle in R. Soloveitchik’s writing reaches unprecedented heights. Revelation, then, is a true reflection of both the religious experience and the human condition.

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I begin with an analysis of the personal description and its implications, and trace the essentialist abstract conceptual development in the article. Personal Writing David Schatz, Joel Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler, who edited the book Out of the Whirlwind, describe the eponymous essay as “the only essay in this volume in which he specifically alludes to his own encounter with suffering. This essay was written shortly after his own bout with cancer (in late 1959 through early 1960) and the impact of this encounter with his own mortality is sharply felt” (xxxvii). “Out of the Whirlwind” uses a terminology and a framework that are distinctly phenomenological, but R. Soloveitchik still found it right to present at its core an autobiographical confession that transcends phenomenological writing. Hence, I open with an analysis of R. Soloveitchik’s autobiographical confession, which helps to understand the sequence and the context of the articles that R. Soloveitchik wrote in this period of his thought, from the mid-1950s onward. R. Soloveitchik describes his personal experience of distress as follows: My existential awareness was an absolute one. Non-being did not enter into it. I would not sustain my gaze upon nihility. Whenever I started to think of death, my thoughts were dashed back and they returned to their ordinary objective, to life. When I looked upon my grandson, I always tried to think of him as if he were my contemporary. I believed that we would always do things and play together. Then sickness initiated me into the secret of non-being. I suddenly ceased to be immortal; I became a mortal being. The night preceding my operation I prayed to God and beseeched him to spare me. I did not ask for too much. All I wanted was that he should make it possible for me to attend my daughter’s wedding, which was postponed on account of my illness—a very modest wish in comparison with my insane claims to life prior to my sickness. The fantastic flights of human foolishness and egocentrism were distant from me that night. However, this “fall” from the heights of an illusory immortality into the valley of finitude was the greatest achievement of the long hours of anxiety and uncertainty. Fundamentally, this change was not an act of falling but one of rising toward a new existential awareness which embraces both man’s tragedy and his glory, in all its ambivalence and paradoxality. I stopped perceiving myself in categories of eternity. When I recite my prayers, I ask God to grant me life in very modest terms. A more logical self substitutes himself of a self who was intoxicated to the



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extent of insanity with the vision of being. I do not have to tell you that modesty is perhaps the most relevant element in prayer, both as to the efficacy and dignity of the latter. (131–132)

In the face of “The Crisis of Human Finitude” and in light of the sitz im leben and the biographical context of the two articles, we may proceed with the following series of statements. The first three relate directly to the perception of finitude as such, and the last two to its connection to the character of R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy in general: (1) From a Surface Crisis to a Depth Crisis. Two stages are discernible in R. Soloveitchik’s description that, as noted, are clearly formulated in “The Crisis of Human Finitude.” The author presents an experience of “external” crisis in the initial encounter with the terror of the illness. Members of the family (daughter, grandson) represent the fear of death and the will to life arising in its wake. In the first stage, the writer confronts “anxiety and uncertainty” as moods.55 In the second stage, he embraces the experience of finitude, no longer thinking in terms of “eternity” and consciously choosing temporality. Once the absurdity of existence has been embraced, victory and defeat serve together and moods no longer undermine the experience. (2) Reappraising the Elements of Finitude. Whereas in “The Crisis of Human Finitude,” anxiety about death and nihility plays no role in the perception of finitude, in “Out of the Whirlwind” this anxiety is the key to this perception. The more complex meaning of incompleteness is replaced by a primeval anxiety about privation, disintegration, and disappearance without trace. “Out of the Whirlwind” deals with suffering, but an important component of the experience of suffering is anxiety about nihility: This shock [which transports man out of his usual self  ] is a result of one’s encounter with non-being, of his peeping into the abyss of nihility. Man suddenly realizes that his existence is not secure and self-evident to the extent that the opposite, non-existence, is unthinkable. The man of sorrow begins to understand that the existential experience is an antithetic one. (130)

55   On the distinction between anxiety as a mood and anxiety as an existential characteristic, see, for instance, May, Man’s Search for Himself, 37.

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(3) Prayer. Prayer is again revealed as the immediate religious means for exposing the existential condition. Prayer attests that the writer has detached himself from the initial moods and delved deeply into the fundamental existential condition. Again, prayer is not exhausted by consciousness but includes a therapeutic dimension as well: it enables life with finitude. Prayer is, seemingly, an expression of Halakhah in general. (4) Philosophy As Personal Therapy. In “Out of the Whirlwind,” R. Soloveitchik began to adopt a typical existentialist style that would reach a climax in The Lonely Man of Faith—biography as a constitutive component of the philosophy. The personal autobiographical writing serves as a means for raising and formulating problems and also as a therapeutic tool. R. Soloveitchik’s personal writing was not meant to solve an existential problem but to formulate it and expose its roots. No true solution, no way of overcoming this problem, is available. Finitude is articulated through the autobiographical writing, and the existential condition emerges in the story of the prayer as well. (5) The Perception of Existentialism As Rational. The dispute about the rationality of existentialist philosophy is as long as the inquiry into this philosophy.56 Indirectly, R. Soloveitchik conveyed his view on this matter in the course of pouring concepts of rationality and logic into the terminology he had adopted. In this autobiographical-philosophical passage, he describes the encounter with finitude. This move elevates the author to a new, deep existential dimension that, in many ways, could be called authentic existence. The move is described as “a more logical self ” that replaces the nonauthentic self. At least at this stage of his thought, when he began using the tools offered by existentialist philosophy, R. Soloveitchik saw human decisions as rational. The role of philosophy—and R. Soloveitchik indeed thought in teleological terms as well—is to direct toward choice of the rational option. R. Soloveitchik then shifted to an autobiographical description of the loneliness he experienced during his illness (132–134). Two dimensions

56   See H. J. Paton, In Defense of Reason (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 213–228; William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958); Fernando Molina, Existentialism as Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962).



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are again discernible in this experience: in the first, surface dimension, the writer feels loneliness out of jealousy and rebellion against fate: “Why should I be different from others?” (133). In the second, depth dimension, the writer recognizes the experience of loneliness as both constitutive and purposeful. Loneliness presents the person as chosen: “Elisha, upon being elected, abandoned his father and mother” (134). The description of two personal and intimate experiences, that is, finitude as anxiety about nihility and loneliness, is not typical of the style and content of the article. This is an existentialist-therapeutic style, whereas the essay as a whole was written in a phenomenological style. At no time did R. Soloveitchik bring the study of religious consciousness so close to a description of real existence as in “Out of the Whirlwind,” but this nearness is merely schematic, and involves no pretension of synthesis between the essentialist and existentialist perspectives. I now leave the “existentialist breakthrough” in “Out of the Whirlwind” and turn to an analysis of the phenomenological principles underlying this work. Revelation: (1) Suffering and Finitude Revelation as a religious experience involves two aspects or expressions that R. Soloveitchik never tired of reiterating throughout his writings: (1) “Cosmic” Revelation. Humans meet God in creation and in the cosmos. Cosmic revelation is an experience of self-affirmation and exaltation. It is also characterized by a connection to the material world, which is subject to and involved in concrete reality. (2) “Visionary” or Kerygmatic Revelation. God is revealed to humans and imposes commandments on them.57 “Visionary” revelation is 57   R. Soloveitchik excluded the Sinai epiphany from the phenomenological discussion of revelation. He refers to revelation as a “metahistoric event,” which he describes as “fraught with strangeness, horror and unknowability” (134). These characteristics, particularly the latter, exclude the event at the “birth” of Judaism from the discussion and turn it into a given fact. Clearly, then, what R. Soloveitchik intended by “commandment” is the embrace of the absurd condition and the understanding of its depth dimensions. Revelation guides man to knowledge about the dialectic of existence, implying that kerygma is a counter-reaction to alienation. R. Soloveitchik says so explicitly below: “I believe that the essence of the passional message consists in a simple sentence: Do not disown the passional encounter with God. Instead of rejecting

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an experience of suffering and pain, which is also characterized by a distinctly transcendent association: it ties up with the other reality. At first glance, the opening pages of “Out of the Whirlwind” show that R. Soloveitchik’s primary concern with revelation hinges on the dimension of suffering—the “visionary” dimension—which is the one that characterizes revelation as such: “Faith is a passional experience, an experience of suffering” (118); “Revelation has opened up to man a new existential dimension, the one of suffering. It has endowed man with the capacity for sacrificial action—sorrow” (120). “Out of the Whirlwind” characterizes the experience of revelation as, above all, one of suffering. Suffering itself becomes an object of phenomenological discussion, both regarding its contents (an essential definition of humans through suffering) and regarding its terms (“self-transcendence,” “numinous,” and so forth). R. Soloveitchik drew a distinction between two dimensions of the experience of distress: pain and suffering. Pain is an experience common to all living creatures, but suffering belongs to the realm of the spiritual personality, in other words, man’s existential awareness. He realizes his uniqueness and otherness as a being who, while possessing a complex structure and a highly delicate nervous system that provides him with certain capabilities which were denied to other animals, is not just part of the physico-chemical world. (123)

Suffering is specific to man, a creature characterized by existential loneliness and anxiety about nihility, which differentiate him from other living beings. The essentialist distinction between man and his organic surroundings was a matter of concern to phenomenologists.58 Pain characterizes exposure to the negative side of creation and is therefore typical of the cosmic experience: man confronts the forces of nature and discovers the randomness of its terrors. By contrast,

it, assimilate the remembrance of suffering into the all-embracing existential awareness” (140). Kerygma is, above all, awareness, and its concern is to prevent alienation from the absurdity of existence. This understanding is the basis for the interpretation of biblical prophecies (Isaiah, Ezekiel) in this essay. Halakhah as a given is, in many ways, outside the phenomenological discussion of revelation. 58   See, for example, Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); David Woodruff Smith, “Mind and Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 348.

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suffering characterizes the “visionary” experience. Suffering as a feature of revelation is a key concern in And from There You Shall Seek,59 but the difference is obvious: “Out of the Whirlwind” is dominated almost entirely by discussions on the meaning of suffering while the cosmic dimension of the experience of revelation is pushed to the margins, reawakening only at the end of the essay. By contrast, in And from There You Shall Seek, the cosmic dimension of revelation is almost as significant a topic as suffering. “Visionary” revelation exposes two situations of distress or, more precisely, distress within distress: .

(1) Suffering. The element unique to revelation is not the climax of self-fulfillment but rather suffering. Revelation is the source of pain, as attested by the structure and the content of “Out of the Whirlwind.” (2) Anxiety. The direct existential cause of the distress of suffering is finitude, manifest as the anxiety of nihility. This approach is not found in And from There You Shall Seek. Finitude is perceived in its temporal meaning, excluding its general sense of incompleteness. Like all other existential categories, finitude and temporality are presented by R. Soloveitchik in two layers: (1) Sense and Feeling. In the external level, finitude is the anxiety of nihility, that is, the anxiety of death. This anxiety is an additional element of humanity; other living creatures do not experience the anxiety of nihility. (2) Experience. In the deep level, finitude is an existential experience. It gives meaning and responsibility to human existence, and we endorse it as a moral and teleological element. The anxiety of nihility and the endorsement of finitude as an experience have a distinctly religious aspect, which is the meeting “with God—with the Being per se who both bolsters and negates other beings, whose existence is all-inclusive and at the same time all-exclusive . . .  the One for whom man is questing, searching and longing, and from whom he flees” (124–125).

  See ch. 2 above.

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The experience of finitude is one of the transmutations of religious consciousness, whose stages of development were discussed in the first chapters of the present work. R. Soloveitchik deals with the depth experience of finitude as a consciousness of finitude. Anxiety about nihility is a reaction to the traumatic encounter with the infinite God, just as self-transcendence is a reaction to the encounter that longs and yearns for communion with God.60 Finitude, however, is not exhausted in the consciousness of revelation but also in our concrete living with revelation and in the search for its meanings. R. Soloveitchik clarified that “visionary” revelation involves a further layer, which is again revealed through prayer: What is prayer? The dialogue between man and God; they both address themselves to each other. And what is a dialogue if not the mutual revelation of those engaged in it? Through the catastrophic God reveals Himself to man, and the latter, out of the depths and darkness, calls out and discloses his heart to God who spoke to him through the whirlwind of distress. The whole idea of prayer rests upon the premise that God meets man through the latter’s encounter with non-being. (137)

This passage merits close attention: the view of prayer as dialogue does not yet reflect the inter-subjective dialogue in whose context one subject discovers another subject, the other. A dialogue of that kind would be the topic of The Lonely Man of Faith at a later stage.61 In the current essay, dialogue refers to a mutual turning. R. Soloveitchik is still concerned with our “existential consciousness,” “interwoven in a time texture” (138). In other words, the place of the other is determined as part of an essentialist discussion on the status of prayer. The other, then, does not yet have the status of a unique subject whose singular existence makes communication impossible. And yet, this phenomenological discussion already suggests that revelation, both cosmic and “visionary,” is not exhausted through God’s one-sided revelation: revelation has, as it were, two sides, and the human side is expressed in prayer. Anxiety about nihility drives humans to turn to God, that is, to pray. This turning is merely the exposure of the mutual turning: God commands and humans recount their distress.62 Finitude, then, is the   See ch. 1 above. I discuss this concept immediately below.   See below, ch. 11. 62   And from There You Shall Seek emphasizes that, in the first stages of consciousness development, the two turnings are unsymmetrical and disconnected. In sum, the content of revelation is not related to the distress of the one experiencing it. 60 61



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source of a dialogue, and the dialogical connection endows finitude with meaning. Another meaning of finitude is a commitment to serve God, and this is the meaning that R. Soloveitchik chose for the conclusion of “Out of the Whirlwind.” The delusion of eternity precludes the sense of having missed out the divine call, which takes place within time. Finitude in its temporal sense is therefore the key for responding to this call: “Each moment of conscious existence is a Divine gift out of which the summons to the service of God emerges” (149). Serving God includes Halakhah but is not exhausted by it, and R. Soloveitchik includes intellectual understanding within it. “The great intellectual may discover new rules guiding the cosmic occurrence and thus serve God by explicating unknown aspects of His primordial will imbedded in creation” (148). Metaphysical consciousness reawakens in the discussion about finitude. Revelation: (2) Dialectic At the opening of “Out of the Whirlwind,” as noted, R. Soloveitchik presented two options of revelations, a division to which he repeatedly returns. One is an encounter with God through knowledge of, and involvement in, the cosmos (“cosmic revelation”); the other is an encounter with God through a vision- bearing message, that is, as a source of Halakhah (“visionary” or “catastrophic”63 revelation). The former option is briefly described here and there (116–117, 122), whereas the latter is explained systematically and at great length (116–131). Indeed, the essay as a whole means to clarify this option and describe its many nuances. The description of the second path to revelation is complex and intricate, and shows traces of the first path. R. Soloveitchik contrasted the two types of revelation, pointing out that visionary revelation contradicts the achievements already attained and the personality as it finds itself in the course of cosmic revelation. He writes: In describing the revelational experience, we have isolated two antithetic moments. First, there is the moment of shock, when finite man, upon being confronted with infinity, becomes aware of the ontic void, of the

63  In the sense of “the act of instantaneous overturning or shattering of existential patterns” (135).

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chapter nine inner contradiction within his existential experience, and suddenly realizes that the very foundation of his existence has collapsed. In other words, man in his rendezvous with God is confronted by non-being, by nihility, since God, addressing Himself through apocalypse, negates any other existence. Second, there is the moment of ecstasy and rapture which rehabilitates and reconstructs man to heights unattainable at a cosmic level. Meeting God is a glorious and the most blessed event; it helps man transcend himself and make him greater than he really is. Man becomes transported out of himself and suddenly awakens to new dimensions of reality that were alien to him before. Communion with God elevates the spirit, cleanses the heart and spurs on the mind to absurd greatness. At the cosmic level, the fellowship with the God whose image is reflected in the great drama of creation, in natural law and mechanical regularity, affords man a consummated and fulfilled existence. The rendezvous with the God dwelling within being brings the ideal of self-realization within his reach. The God of the cosmos is the well of the existential experience; to come close to this well is tantamount to the finding of one’s self. Yet no act of rising above oneself is involved in the God-man relationship within the cosmos. However, the apocalyptic experience of God expresses itself in a leap outside of oneself,64 in a journey from a here-and-now reality to the numinous. (121)

This passage enables a re-examination of the course of development from And from There You Shall Seek to “Out of the Whirlwind” and of the conceptual closeness between them. Consider the following aspects in the development of R. Soloveitchik’s approach: (1) Process. In And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik offers two models of revelation. One model presents it as the result of a structural process. After the self-affirmation that had come in the wake of scientific achievements shattered when confronting the failure to attain concreteness, the divinity reveals itself. A second model presents revelation as an ontic event that cannot be structured in any way.65 “Out of the Whirlwind” presents two mutually contradictory structural models, one at the beginning of the essay and the other toward its end: (a) Personality. The first structural model in “Out of the Whirlwind” is the antithesis of that in And from There You Shall Seek insofar as the personality states that characterize revelation are   That is, self-transcendence. See below.   See ch. 2 above.

64 65



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concerned. And from There You Shall Seek, as noted, opens with the self-affirmation of the cosmic experience and ends with the crisis of the revelation experience. By contrast, “Out of the Whirlwind” opens with the crisis experience of revelation, which is only then followed by self-affirmation. Shock and humility are the primary human situation. Only at a subsequent stage do humans become aware of the event’s quality: they have succeeded in shifting from ordinary existence to self-transcendence, hence the emergence of self-affirmation. This model was presented in detail in the passage cited above, from the opening of the article. (b) The Source of the Experience. A second structural model in “Out of the Whirlwind” fits, to some extent, the one that appears in And from There You Shall Seek. R. Soloveitchik then proceeds to argue that catastrophic visionary revelation occurs only when we live through the cosmic experience per se, without awareness of the absurdity of existence. “If man at the cosmic level of existence is not mindful of the dialectics of being . . . and does not identify God who called for him out of the ontic consciousness, then the great cosmic experience is supplanted by the nihilitic catastrophic” (138). Man then misses the meaning of the cosmos, and remains self-alienated. The message or the kerygma of visionary revelation is that existence is absurd, an understanding that can also be reached through observation of, and involvement in, the cosmos. When we fail to receive this message, catastrophic revelation occurs, as happened to Job: “The cosmic address was supplanted by the apocalyptic address” (140). The model, then, works as follows: the cosmic experience leads to visionary revelation insofar as the person failed to derive the message through natural experience. Formally, the process here to some extent resembles the model of And from There You Shall Seek. (2) Absurd. On close scrutiny, revelation in “Out of the Whirlwind” is not truly the process it purports to be but rather a dialectical event wherein humiliation and greatness are interrelated. Both the cosmic and the visionary dimensions are present together in the revelation event. In this sense, the difference between And from There You Shall Seek and “Out of the Whirlwind” is not merely a variant direction but an altered trend: the structure, the process, and the model are abandoned in favor of a description of the

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situation as absurd: “The encounter of covenantal man with Deus Revelatus is an experiential performance in which the total personality is involved” (122). We do not have an actual process here but a personality wavering between opposite poles. The movement between cosmic and visionary revelations turns the structuring into a formal analysis, without hold on conscious reality. The two structural models presented in the previous section collapse and melt. In truth, religious consciousness recurrently fluctuates between one and the other: “The paradoxical alternation between these two revelations is, as a matter of fact, a basic motif within our existential consciousness” (137). (3) Consciousness. R. Soloveitchik resorts to phenomenological terminology in his description of the revelation experience. He borrows from the essentialist analysis of religion the attempt of consciousness to reach self-transcendence and the realm of the numinous, and he clarifies revelation through them. R. Soloveitchik also declared that he deals with the “cognitive level” of the revelation experience, and that religion has epistemic paths of its own (127). R. Soloveitchik, then, opened “Out of the Whirlwind” with a phenomenological clarification of revelation and examined at length its traumatic characteristics, that is, the consciousness of suffering and finitude. In the course of the discussion, he shifted to a personal-biographic style of writing that, as it were, bears a message: conscious-essentialist discussion does not fully exhaust the phenomenon of existential crisis and distress. After this personal exposure, R. Soloveitchik returns to the phenomenological analysis of the crisis. “Out of the Whirlwind” clarifies that the religious experience cannot be exhausted through a one-sided perspective or method. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, sought to contrast cosmic and visionary revelations. Several of his remarks, however, hint to some inclusion of the first revelation in the second. For instance: “Man passes over the boundary of selfhood and becomes greater than he really was destined to be in the cosmic scheme of things” (122). He does not say here that the visionary level contradicts the rise of man in the cosmic scheme of things, but rather that it is greater. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, argued that [the visionary encounter] “is an experiential performance in which the total personality is involved. It is more a ‘sense-experience’ than a noetic, intellectual act” (122). An experience that includes

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the entire personality is not limited to a narrow rational aspect, but does not exclude it either. A consciousness of vision does not undermine its cosmic component but places it in another light and locates it within an experience of fullness. The dialectic, then, is between the isolated cosmic experience and its inclusion as a component in the entire experience of the personality. Figure 1 reflects the approach that is intimated in R. Soloveitchik’s writings: Figure 1

Revelation

(1) “Visionary”

(a) “Visionary” dimension

(2) “Cosmic”

(b) Cosmic-natural dimension

In his description, R. Soloveitchik brings the dialectic to extremes. In fact, R. Soloveitchik presented two models of revelation in “Out of the Whirlwind.” These models differ from one another precisely in the description of the cosmic experience or the cosmic encounter with God. According to the first model, there is no self-transcendence in the self ’s encounter with the cosmic Being.66 This experience will only be found in the kerygmatic “apocalyptic” revelation, that is, in a revelation that involves a vision or a message. According to the second model, the cosmic encounter with God is also characterized by selftranscendence and by “going out toward the absolute”: Both through the cosmic occurrence and through the spiritual drama of man, God makes His wisdom and will known. This revelation to which cosmic man is receptive is attained only in the rapturous experience of Being in all its glory and grandeur. Creation, abounding in orderliness, architectural magnificence and overpowering beauty, is the medium which is employed by God for disclosing Himself to man. In a word, God reveals Himself through the ontic experience, the experience of being, which abolishes the barriers of finitude and goes out toward the absolute. (135)  In the passage cited above: “Yet no act of rising above oneself is involved in the God-man relationship within the cosmos” (121). 66

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Figure 2 reflects the two models of revelation. In the first model, I presented in detail its meanings and developments, whereas in the second model I only noted its differences with the previous one: Figure 2 First Model “Cosmic” Revelation (1b) in Figure 1 above

“Visionary” Revelation (1a) in Figure 1 above

Self-affirmation (Without self-transcendence)

Self-affirmation (Self-transcendence)

Pain

Suffering

Metaphysical explanation (evil as privation)

Meaning

Phenomenological model

Phenomenological and existential model

Monologue

Dialogue

Isaiah

Ezekiel Second Model

“Natural” revelation Self-affirmation (Self-transcendence)

“Visionary” revelation Anxiety and Suffering

Selfaffirmation (Self-transcendence)

Why did R. Soloveitchik present two such models concerning selftranscendence? In order to answer this question, we must re-examine Figure 1 above. When the cosmic experience (1 in Figure 1) is detached from the visionary experience (2), it cannot reach the climax of selftranscendence. Involvement in the cosmos through the search for God’s traces in creation without the halakhic message misses the climax; the cosmic experience without the shock of finitude and of the search for its meanings is barren. By contrast, when the cosmic experience (1b) is integrated into the visionary experience (1), it grants selftranscendence. The exit from selfhood to transcendent dimensions, that is, the transition to the subjective sphere, is attained only on the halakhic basis of the commandment and the kerygma. More precisely: the “visionary” stage of visionary revelation (1a) precedes, analytically, its cosmic stage.



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Assuming that this is a simple problem, and that a division into an independent cosmic revelation and a cosmic revelation as an aspect of the visionary experience could solve the problem, would be mistaken. R. Soloveitchik created a complex and intricate structure of revelation; whatever side of it we contemplate, we will find the reflection of the dialectic. He claimed that prophecies and prophets can be ranked and classified according to the components of the revelation and its various aspects. Some emphasized the cosmic side at the expense of the visionary whereas, for others, the visionary side was dominant. Then, in “Out of the Whirlwind,” R. Soloveitchik identified Isaiah’s prophecy with the dominance of the cosmic aspect in the visionary revelation,67 and Ezekiel’s prophecy with the emphasis on the visionary aspect of this revelation.68 The reason is that Isaiah prophesied at a time of relative wellbeing,69 and Ezekiel at a time of distress (destruction and exile). Isaiah’s prophecy was indeed visionary in its character, but emphasized the cosmic dimension. Isaiah began with a vision and ended with creation. “Isaiah saw God outside creation—high and exalted—and he rediscovered Him within creation” (143). By contrast, Ezekiel’s visionary prophecy was entirely catastrophic and ends with “the great dialogue with the hidden, numinous, mysterious God, abiding behind the heavens” (147). Ezekiel began with creation (more precisely, with the failure of the encounter with creation) and ended with a vision. His prophecy emphasized the distinctly transcendent dimension within visionary revelation. Returning now to Isaiah’s prophecy, note that R. Soloveitchik described the cosmic aspect of revelation as follows: The vision in all its strangeness and otherworldliness focused Isaiah’s glance upon the here-and-now reality and he began to explore not the beyond but the various dimensions of the cosmos, searching for God 67   “While the confrontation of Isaiah with God is apocalyptic, transcendental and numinous, his response was this-worldly” (143). 68  Two issues deserve mention here: (1) R. Soloveitchik carefully chose Ezekiel’s chariot prophecy as an expression of revelation, since it includes both a cosmic and a visionary element. A centuries-old philosophical tradition established this prophecy on metaphysics and, within it, on the causes of Being. (2) Contrary to the widespread rabbinic approach, which assigns greater qualitative value to Isaiah’s prophecy than to that of Ezekiel, R. Soloveitchik actually presented Ezekiel as living through visionary experiences directly out of his distress. 69   R. Soloveitchik linked the period of wellbeing to the cosmic revelation. He indeed clarified that distress carries with it a visionary revelation, but he did not explain why he assumes that wellbeing brings with it a cosmic revelation.

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chapter nine who addresses Himself to man not through the apocalyptic trauma but through the joyous cosmic experience. (143)

This description confuses the reader. On the one hand, the cosmic experience is not transcendent. The prophet does not search for dimensions beyond the concrete world. The cosmic dimension of visionary revelation emerges as immanent: the experience is given within it. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the transcendent dimension of the search for God within the cosmic experience. The first epistemological characteristic of the homo religiosus, and R. Soloveitchik never denied this, is the search for the hidden divine dimension beyond reality. The Deus absconditus exposed through creation assumes a departure to the other reality. Given R. Soloveitchik’s conceptual mood, the warranted conclusion is that the cosmic experience itself is constantly wavering between a focus on the concrete and on self-transcendence, meaning there is a clear visionary dimension (“strangeness,” “otherworldliness”) in the cosmic aspect of the visionary experience. The two models of revelation reflect a dialectical move in the experience itself, that is, in the cosmic aspect of visionary revelation. Isaiah’s prophecy is described in the following figure: Figure 3 Revelation (A) Visionary

(1) Visionary dimension

(B) Cosmic

(2) Cosmic-natural dimension (immanent)

(a) Cosmic dimension

(b) Visionary dimension (transcendent)

The result is the constant presence of the dialectic at various levels and in the diverse aspects of prophecy. Isaiah alternated between the cosmic dimension of visionary prophecy and the transcendent dimension of cosmic prophecy. Ezekiel was entirely on the transcendent visionary side. Holiness reflects the dialogue between Isaiah and Ezekiel: “the whole earth is full of His glory” (a cosmic immanent dimension) alternates with “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place” (a transcendent



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visionary dimension). Rather than conceptual hair-splitting or exaggerated conscious wavering, these appear to be emphatic expressions of the dialectical principle and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terminology—of the “absurd” as the foundational principle of the revelational experience. One could again attempt to understand R. Soloveitchik’s complicated conceptual moves in light of a renewed analysis of the metaphysical response to suffering in his thought. As he did in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” both in “The Crisis of Human Finitude” and in “Out of the Whirlwind,” R. Soloveitchik presents the Maimonidean approach that views evil as a privation lacking existence on its own. In “Kol Dodi Dofek,” R. Soloveitchik entirely rejected this metaphysical response, and in “The Crisis of Human Finitude” he found a positive aspect in it—the emphasis on human imperfection. In “Out of the Whirlwind,” R. Soloveitchik’s approach is different. He wrote as follows about “the optimistic doctrine denying evil” (126): All this, however, is fine if we consider evil within the frame of reference of creation, in the form of pain and corruption. Then we may say that evil is only a privation of the true good, but as privation of the true good it is still good. It is perhaps better for the natural primitive man to live a short period of time than for him not to live at all. Yet when we shift the perspective from creation to revelation, from pain to suffering, from a physical sensation to a spiritual experience, I do not believe that the metaphysical approach is applicable. For here the question is not “Why suffering?” and we are not trying to formulate a dialectic of sorrow, but rather “How should we handle suffering?” and our inquiry aims at a halakhah of suffering. (127)

R. Soloveitchik presents a twofold structure of response to the suffering: when we discuss the cosmic aspect of the experience or the cosmic dimension of the visionary experience (1b in Figure 1 above), we will adopt a phenomenological approach. In the study of the cosmic aspect, there is room for a metaphysical perspective. Just as religious consciousness is built of mystical, practical (halakhic), epistemic, and other aspects, it also includes the metaphysical aspect. In sum, the causal and ontic consideration is present in the study of the cosmic revelation. By contrast, when we discuss the “visionary” experiential aspect of visionary revelation (1a), there is no room for either the phenomenological approach or for the metaphysical consciousness it offers in the context of the general essentialist study of religious consciousness. Here, the only possible approach is an analysis of the concrete experience and, in other words, a search for the meaning assigned to circumstances of pain and distress. The understanding of revelation is made possible by

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a two-sided examination: the conscious-subjective and metaphysical side, and the existentialist-concrete side. The personality experience is subject to both substantive and methodological alternation, shifting between essentialism and concrete existentialism. In sum: R. Soloveitchik’s categorical determination is that man must inform finitude with meaning. He presented two meanings, which are three, as they emerged from the previous discussions: (A) Dialogue:70 (1) Prayer (B) Dialogue: (2) Revelation (C) The service of God. Summary The flow of R. Soloveitchik’s ideas in “Out of the Whirlwind” and in other of his works, as well as the order and the nature of their emergence, is no less interesting than their contents. R. Soloveitchik contends with suffering in a few models (metaphysical, conscious, and existentialist) that recur in his writings. Each use of a specific model, however, is different and unique. These set models are to him as clay in the potter’s hands, which he repeatedly kneads with homiletic virtuosity. The reader repeatedly becomes aware of dialectic as the pivot that connects R. Soloveitchik’s various reflections. R. Soloveitchik alternated between visionary revelation as a unique and independent phenomenon and the visionary revelation that is subordinated to a structured model (meaning one that takes place after the failure of cosmic revelation); between the failure of cosmic revelation to reach self-transcendence and its success; between the absolute negation of metaphysical consciousness and its moderate affirmation; between rational negation and its affirmation, between the adoption of phenomenology and the final disappointment with it. And we have not thereby finished listing the full spectrum of dialectical options found in “Out of the Whirlwind.” Alternation as an independent end and as a constitutive ethos does indeed characterize other contemporary writings of R. Soloveitchik. What is clear is that R. Soloveitchik no longer strives for a unified, harmonious consciousness free of oppositions, as he had done in And from There You Shall Seek. Henceforth, the absurd 70   Note that the dialogue here reflects a mutual turning rather than an intersubjective exposure.



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is the supreme principle that explains the religious phenomenon. Starting from the mid-1950s, then, R. Soloveitchik’s phenomenological and existentialist thought discards the perception of religion as a solution to existential problems. Revelation does not offer a solution to distress, but certainly helps humans to overcome alienation, to recognize the dialectic situation in which they find themselves, and to embrace it. The mitzvot of remembrance (to blot out the memory of Amalek and so forth) present the aim of Halakhah as the overcoming of alienation (141). Revelation thus enables a meaningful life. It guides us to live with distress and to become aware of the depth layers of our existence: it does not, however, dismiss distress. In sum, “Out of the Whirlwind” is an essay based on the perception of finitude as temporality and as anxiety about death. The conception of visionary revelation develops accordingly. Cosmic and rational experience, however, do not disappear. The phenomenological approach, which excels at describing the cosmic experience and is also helpful in its approach to suffering, is not abandoned either. The human condition is not fully comprehensible without the study of consciousness. An important datum does emerge from the essay’s analysis: the sharp rejection of metaphysics we encountered in the essay “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering” is somewhat tempered in the current discussion and, to some extent, reflects R. Soloveitchik’s alternation during this period between the study of consciousness and the expression of the concrete human condition. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik is no different from several existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, who wavered between embracing phenomenology and targeting it for constructive or destructive criticism. Despite the criticism, however, phenomenology remains in the background of the turn to concreteness. In the mid-1950s, R. Soloveitchik began to oscillate between explaining the religious experience solely on the basis of its existential foundations and integrating this explanation into aspects of religious consciousness. These aspects, such as the cosmic experience, are mostly but not solely rational. The description of concrete suffering oscillates between concreteness and the consciousness of suffering. R. Soloveitchik’s mixed attitude to phenomenology could be explained as a “passion for metaphysical unity.”71 Is there indeed any religious thinker that does not tend toward a view of the cosmos as a whole, 71  In the terms coined by Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002), 65.

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finite in space and time, for whom the ultimate explanation is not rooted in an outside element, be it will or reason?72 The inclination to study religious consciousness, including its various rational and nonrational expressions, is therefore always present in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. In the early period of his thought, it is actually dominant. In the middle period, it struggles to survive in the face of cruel disappointment with its ineffectiveness and with the temptation of the human condition. However, it never vanishes. (5)  Emotions: The Test of Consciousness The article “A Theory of Emotions” is a phenomenological analysis of our emotional and epistemic structures and their connection to religion. This analysis seeks to persuade us that emotion, rather than a one-dimensional or vague phenomenon, is rooted in a complex setting made up of parallel feelings, understandings, and objects. Accordingly, emotion can be the subject of a defined and rather precise phenomenological inquiry, as extensively covered by Scheler.73 Alternatively, the essence of emotion cannot be grasped without careful understanding of its psychological and epistemological surroundings. An examination of the approaches that R. Soloveitchik formulates in the article points to the integration of several models concerning the anatomy of emotions. His starting point is phenomenological psychology, which supports eidetic analysis and an impartial intuitive observation of emotions. Fragmentary Freudian notions and concepts are also present in R. Soloveitchik’s formulations. In the course of the discussion, R. Soloveitchik tried to expose the psychological trends mentioned in Halakhah and in other Jewish sources. Note that “A Theory of Emotions” was also first formulated in a lecture dealing with mental health and, therefore, bears a psychological and programmatic character. Anatomy of Emotion: Two Models Since R. Soloveitchik did not strive to articulate a system, he did not dwell on the structure of emotions and left it to the reader to disclose 72   See G. J. Warnock, “Criticisms of Metaphysics,” in The Nature of Metaphysics, ed. David F. Pears (London: Macmillan, 1957), 131. 73   See William A. Sadler, Existence and Love: A New Approach in Existential Phenomenology (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 49–50.



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his intentions. Implicit in his formulations are several psychological approaches and, above all, psychoanalysis. R. Soloveitchik strenuously tried to draw a distinction between his own and the Freudian view, leaving the reader somewhat confused since he himself alternates between two dominant models of emotions: one Freudian and the other phenomenological.74 First, however, consider R. Soloveitchik’s clear statement on the fundamental structure of emotions: “Let us remember that emotions, even at their highest level, are nothing but reclaimed and refined instinctive drives, converted crude and primitive physiological impulses and energies. As such, they all can be traced back to the parent instinct in the biological world, namely, self-preservation” (199). Even before this passage, which is pervaded by Freudian undertones, R. Soloveitchik was critical of Freud. His critique hinges on the centrality of dialectics in emotional life, which I discuss at length below. R. Soloveitchik opened up with an a contrario claim, clarifying that he does not argue the existence of an emotional dialectic at the underlying level. Quite the contrary: at the primeval level, emotions are not marked by contradiction or absurdity. On this basis, consider R. Soloveitchik’s view on the structure of emotions: When Freud speaks of ambivalence, he has in mind the immediate, primordial, direct, unanalyzed emotional response to some event, before the person has had a chance to cast a reflective glance upon it. In the very essence of the feeling of love, there is hidden resentment and hate, and in his tempestuous emotional outbursts, one loves and hates at the same time. This running to two opposite poles of feeling is unknown to Judaism. The primeval emotion, which comes uninvited and strikes us with its full elemental power, is not antithetic or dialectical. (188)

This passage indicates that R. Soloveitchik’s critique addresses the moral level: “Sincerity and honesty in emotional life is a basic principle of the Judaic ethic” (188). Freud argued that the unconscious include antithetical feelings,75 whereas R. Soloveitchik negated this claim as

74   For notes on the connection between the two models dealing with consciousness, see Rollo May “On the Phenomenological Bases of Psychotherapy,” in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 366–368. 75   See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Washington Square Press, 1952), 341–342; 434–435.

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immoral. The emotional foundation according to R. Soloveitchik can now be described as follows: (1) The Source of Instincts. This layer is not immediately accessible and therefore needs to be exposed (“traced back,” [199]). The source of the survival instinct is biological. (2) Instincts. A set of primeval emotional instincts and drives, “ego drives” in Freudian terminology, which primarily reflects physiological impulses that enable existence. R. Soloveitchik seems to have been referring to the repressed realm beyond consciousness, pointing to ego drives rather than to libidinal instincts. In his critical passage on Freud, R. Soloveitchik emphasized the principle of cathexis—an unmediated emotional-instinctive concentration on objects and events. (3) Conscious: Impulses and instincts are “reclaimed and refined” and undergo a process of “sublimation” (199). Henceforth, they flow rationally and systematically through adaptation to values, norms, and rational principles. Beside the psychoanalytic model, R. Soloveitchik presented a structural-value model of emotions. In this model, the feeling’s object of reference plays a central role. R. Soloveitchik writes: The objective reference inherent in the affective experience is of a twofold nature: theoretical cognitive predication and axiological assessment. When I say, for instance, “I love my neighbor,” there is a double objective stratum to be isolated: there is someone whom I call “neighbor,” and this person is worthy of my love. (181)

This analytical model is also triangular. Feeling is a personal expression of two depth layers, as follows: (1) A Cognitive Level. Knowledge of an object or an event (in R. Solo­ veitchik’s example, knowledge of the other). (2) An Axiological Level. On the basis of (1)—an ethical evaluation of the object and its standing (in the example: the other is worthy of love): “The appraisal of the worth of an emotion must not be a performance detached from the external experience to which a person reacts emotionally” (182). (3) Feeling. This is the personality level that is a product of the two depth levels (1–2), and focuses on the feeling toward the object (in the example: love for the other).



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This analytical model relies on an integration of the principle of cathexis in psychoanalysis and the intentionality principle in phenomenology. According to these principles, knowledge and feeling are directed toward a specific object or event: “The affective act [i.e., feeling an emotion] is an intentional experience, having reference to an object” (180). R. Soloveitchik’s achievement in the presentation of this principle is that a discussion about the value of a feeling without reference to an objective layer is barren and meaningless. In this sense, the discussion is related to the conceptual framework set up by R. Soloveitchik in The Halakhic Mind: subjective feeling can only be evaluated when we take into consideration its objective dimension: “the axiology of our emotional experience is heteronomous. It is subject to universal valuation within the objective realm” (182). After clarifying R. Soloveitchik’s presentation of the emotional structure, we must consider whether and how intervention within it is possible.76 R. Soloveitchik emphasizes at the opening of “A Theory of Emotions” that he is concerned with “religion” and with “Halakhah.” This context clarifies that the emotions studied have a definite religious connection and that he has no pretension to offer a psychology as such. I discuss this issue further below. R. Soloveitchik’s discussion about intervention in emotions, therefore, hinges on Judaism’s view on this question. In order to articulate this position, R. Soloveitchik presents a third (synthetic) model of emotions, as shown below. Dialectic As Key: Third Model What is the principle that should guide our understanding of the emotional structure of religious experience? Ancient and modern psychology offered different answers to this question. R. Soloveitchik’s view was unequivocal, and can be summed up as “the polarity of existential awareness” (179). Dialectical alternation, then, is the basic assumption in a theory about the emotional-religious structure. The dialectical principle compels several assumptions about the character of religiously connected emotions. These assumptions determine yet another, third, model about the structure of emotions. This model hinges on an interemotional attachment:

76  Intervention here means an attempt to channel the feeling at the psychological level and an interpretation of the emotion at the cognitive level.

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(1) “Emotional Wholeness.” Emotional life is a whole and, as such, we can examine it as a system that includes several components.77 Proper knowledge of emotional life is impaired in the following cases:78 (a) Restricting emotions to one specific emotion or pre-determining one specific emotion as dominant. (b) Disregarding the surroundings of the emotion’s appearance (the other, the community, and so forth). (2) “Conservation of Emotional Energy.” R. Soloveitchik presented here a variation on the Freudian economic model. The feeling does not appear ex nihilo; it is always a link in an emotional chain or a reaction to a previous emotional state. The succession of emotions is twofold: (a) Temporal Succession. The feeling “is born out of a previous emotional experience and points toward a new experience into which it will gradually pass” (186). (b) Dialectical Succession. “Each emotional experience is provided with an implicit reference to its opposite, in either a past or a future experience” (187). (3) Unmediated Emotion. Emotions themselves are not dialectical. The fundamental emotion is primal, undefined, and direct. The initial emotional relationship with the object is not at all complex or defined. This determination has psychological-anatomic as well as moral significance: (a) Structure. The initial emotion is simple and immediate (if left alone). 77   This approach is typical of phenomenological psychology and of Gestalt. Frederick Buytendijk, the Utrecht contemporary psychology theorist, states: “Gestalt psychology, through its rejection of the doctrine of isolate sensations, the theory of association, and all atomistic interpretations of the so-called ‘contents of consciousness’ strongly promoted the interest of psychologists in the ideas of Husserl and his students.” Frederick J. J. Buytendijk, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and its Significance for Contemporary Psychology,” in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 358. 78   R. Soloveitchik wavers here between epistemic and axiological formulations. His style clearly denotes that he intends both proper knowledge of emotions and proper behavior, that is, the reduction of emotions or the isolation of a particular emotion lead to a religious-moral flaw as well (“damaging complications for the religious development of the personality,” 179). Indeed, he argued that “only when the critical awareness shifts the emotion into the total life experience and directs the glance of the person toward the outside, do the emotions become ethicized, endowed with meaningfulness, not confined to oneself ” (202).



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(b) Value. This initial-primeval course should not be disturbed. Emotion as is should be allowed expression and development.79 Complicating the initial emotion with contrasts and polarity is immoral and exposes “a shallow personality and a lack of truthfulness.” (188). R. Soloveitchik was very critical here of the Freudian approach. The clarification of this anatomic model of emotions leads us to the proper approaches to their treatment, which are already directly and indirectly present in the religious view that R. Soloveitchik conveys in the article. The emotional model he discusses enables dialectics as well. Following are the approaches to treatment and their source of authority: (1) Positive Intervention in the Emotional System. Intervention in emotions takes place when the initial emotion consolidates and assumes shape. It is at this point that knowledge confronts this emotion with others through contrasts and complements. The emotional dialectic, then, appears at the critical-hermeneutical level. “[The antithetical experience] comes to the fore not in the emotion itself, but in the awareness of it” (188). Intervention surfaces in two ways, one only intimated and the other clearly articulated: (a) Interpreting the Emotion Itself. For instance, meeting the absolute and the sublime evokes an outburst of primeval emotion. The reflective interpretation of the initial emotion presents it as a simultaneous combination of attraction and love on the one hand, and resistance and fear on the other.

79   R. Soloveitchik presented this religious-axiological claim in the name of Judaism, as follows: “The depth of the emotion and the power of the experience have not been limited by Judaism. The primordial emotion is not purged or even restrained for the sake of remaining within the boundary of the tangible and practical. We allow our naïve emotions to flow naturally, without trying to stem their onrush. Only after a while do we raise them to the plane of critical interpretation, at which they are interwoven into the fabric of our time-continuum. Thereby, they are connected with events in which we are not directly involved at present, and with experiences which warrant the release of a rival antithetic emotion” (196–197). One instance of this is aninut (the initial phase of mourning, which begins at death and ends with the burial) which exempts the person from observance of the commandments, avoiding interference with the crisis of loss. It is followed by the phase of avelut, which commences after the burial, and is expressed in the Kaddish prayer, whose words are not related directly to the loss (194).

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(b) Interpreting the Emotion in the Context of Other Emotions. For instance, at the critical level, the initial sense of joy at a wedding turns into calm and restrained solemnity. This process unfolds when individuals become aware of death and of themselves as transient, finite, and lonely. The couple creates continuity through a new generation, thus confronting nihility and loneliness: “in the marriage event, the critical emotional awareness sees the tragedy of human destiny. It drives two strangers to unite in order to combat a dreaded fiend—death” (193). The dialectic of joy and tragedy appears at the critical stage, when the emotion is examined in an overall ­perspective. (2) Negative Intervention in the Emotional System. As the interpretation that confronts the emotion with other emotions reflects a positive and desirable form of intervention, so the attempt to balance attributes by resorting to the golden mean reflects a negative and destructive form of intervention. Balance distances the personality from emotional extremism but also prevents the free flow of primordial emotion and, thereby, pulls out the rug from under genuine dialectics: “emotional depth is irreconcilable with the theory of the golden mean” (196). In this context, R. Soloveitchik did not address the duality in Maimonides’ thought. He emphasized the boundless love of God in various Maimonidean sources,80 but played down Maimonides’ enthusiastic support for the golden mean, which he ascribed solely to Aristotle (“Aristotelian doctrine”; “Aristotle’s worldview” [195]). In sum, the ordered and finite Aristotelian world (from both a scientific and moral perspective) cannot tolerate emotional dialectic, not even an extreme love of God. (3) The Source and Authority of Values. R. Soloveitchik absolutely rejects rationality as a source of values. Reason does not dictate the judgment of emotions and the way of handling them. Values are acquired through direct observation of the essence and its meanings. “Axiological structures and moral ideas are intuited through our emotional experiences” (197). Love of God is not derived from a rational understanding of God’s greatness nor from an analysis 80   “Like a love-sick individual” (Laws of Repentance 10:3). For a balanced analysis of the Maimonidean sources, see Howard T. Kreisel, Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999).



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of creation; it is a direct consequence of an emotional intuition (“heart” and not “mind,” 198). This approach fits phenomenological psychology when viewed as an “aprioristic, eidetic, intuitive, purely descriptive, and intentional science of the psychical, which remains entirely within the realm of the natural attitude.”81 R. Soloveitchik’s psychological outlook combines several models of emotions and of personality, and particularly psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and existentialism. This approach matches the trends in phenomenological and existential psychology. During the 1950s and 1960s, as noted, phenomenological and existential psychology gained prominence in the United States. Ludwig Binswanger, Frederick Buitendyck, and their colleagues related directly or indirectly to Heidegger’s thought as a key to personality theory and to therapy. Phenomenological and existential psychologists clarified that it was not their intention to refute psychoanalysis. Quite the contrary: they affirmed it as a theory that is efficient, for instance, in the treatment of certain personality disorders, but held that this theory does not delve into existential anxiety and guilt—the foundations of the personality. “Existential analysis,” writes Binswanger, “is able to widen and deepen the basic concepts and understandings of psychoanalysis.”82 R. Soloveitchik adopted the view claiming that the psychoanalytic model enables an “external” mapping of the personality, whereas the phenomenological and existential models expose its depth dimension. Repressed instincts and emotions hide the dialectic, the absurd, and the existential suffering that are the foundational layer. Only Love (1): Controversy “A Theory of Emotions” evokes the feeling that this essay is somehow different. Usually, R. Soloveitchik’s primary interest is the primacy of Halakhah. Even when he opens his essays with an analysis of a general

81   Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Husserl’s Original View on Phenomenological Psychology,” in Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and its Interpretation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 422. 82   As quoted in May, “The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology,” 7.

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phenomenon (religious, psychological, existential, and so forth), the reader understands that R. Soloveitchik’s main concern is to highlight the position of Judaism in general and that of Halakhah in particular, emphasizing their primacy. By contrast, “A Theory of Emotions” strives, above all, to adopt a structural and axiological stance on psychological questions, present it to the interested public, and impress them. The halakhic view and the supremacy of Judaism is only one of the layers in this essay, albeit an essential one, and one indication is that the stance of Judaism is clarified indirectly through the discussion with the mistaken and misleading positions of Christianity. Again, R. Soloveitchik’s partner to controversy is Christianity, and he describes its emotional focus on love in isolation from other emotional components: This is the reason for our acceptance of the total emotional experience, our rejection of the split table of emotions, of the hypostatization or absolutization of select emotions and the exclusion of others. Christianity, for instance, has absolutized the emotion of love and elevated it to an almost mythical level. It does not realize that a one-sided reduction of the emotional activity of man contributes both toward the impoverishment of human creative abilities and aptitudes, and also toward a distortion of our existential awareness and world-picture—which has, in turn, led to false conclusions and hypocritical practices. . . . Our responses must be as multifarious as the happenings themselves. (183)

What is the basis of R. Soloveitchik’s critique? The motif of love is perceived in Christianity as a fundamental principle, responsible for its unique character.83 Adolph von Harnack has already clarified that, after we remove self-love and the remnants of ritual from the gospel, it can be reduced to one sole principle: love.84 Theologians argued that ancient Greek ethic was individual, whereas love deals with our connection to the other, to society, and to God.85 The source and the core of love, however, are found in God—God creates love. The creation of the world is a direct consequence of God’s unconditional love. The objectivity and independence of love are evident in that it applies not only to those who deserve it because of their personality and deeds but also to those who do not. August Francke and other theologians

83   See Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (London: S. P. C. K., 1957), 42. 84   Adolph von Harnack, “What is Christianity?” in Sources of Protestant Theology, ed. William A. Scott (New York: Bruce, 1971), 270. 85   Nygren, Agape and Eros, 45.

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even argue that, as such, human beings have no entitlement vis-à-vis God and, by definition, they deserve to be hated and rejected.86 Be it as it may, love is exposed in its uniqueness precisely in love for the sinner and the fiend. The general and undiscriminating character of divine love places it in tension with divine justice, which separates the innocent from the guilty and the sinner from the righteous.87 Nygren pointed to four characteristics of divine love: (1) Divine love is spontaneous and lacks any external motive. Its foundation is solely in the divine sphere. (2) Divine love is not subordinate to any values—it is above value. God does not love the sinner more than the innocent. (3) Love is creative. It is entirely indifferent to values but per se creates a value: to be loved. (4) Love creates the conditions and the disposition for the relationship with God.88 Human love, however, is concerned with yearning and egocentrism and, in brief, with love not for its own sake. In this light, R. Soloveitchik’s one-sided description of the place of love in Christian theology does not seem far from the truth. Christianity in R. Soloveitchik’s interpretation, then, focused on love as the sole creative element in human emotions and on spontaneity as the most essential characteristic of Christian love. More precisely: not only did Christianity reduce emotional creativity to love but it also made this creativity entirely dependent on God. God is the source of love, and love depends solely on God. Humans are the passive element in the perception of love as the constitutive element of the scale of values. R. Soloveitchik argued that, since emotions cannot be reduced to love, however heavenly, this approach leads to hypocrisy. Fiery hatred is presented as love. The proper way, then, as represented by Halakhah, is the channeling of negative feelings and, accordingly, their location and integration in the general emotional makeup. The   August Francke, “The Love of God toward Man,” in Sources of Protestant Theology, ed. William A. Scott (New York: Bruce, 1971), 213. 87   See, for example, Trevor Williams, Form and Vitality in the World and God: A Christian Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 166–176. 88   Nygren, Agape and Eros, 75–81. See also Avital Wohlman, Loving God: Christian Love, Theology and Philosophy in Thomas Aquinas (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005), 23–24. 86

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Christian notion of love precludes a proper attitude to emotions and, ultimately, to a genuine dialectic, because an authentic alternation depends on an overall perception of emotions. Only Love (2): The Other The problem of the other began to interest R. Soloveitchik in essays written at the end of the 1950s and, in “A Theory of Emotions,” he discusses it in the same style. R. Soloveitchik related to the actual acknowledgement of the other as an element outside the “self,” implying a withdrawal from egocentrism and from the exclusive focus on the “self.” R. Soloveitchik also addressed the emotional communication with the other and held that it must shape the feelings of the individual. “The other, the thou, is drawn into our inner emotional world and we permit him to share our attention” (202). But the reader will still not find a discussion of the other’s being as a subjective, unique, and special “other,” with whom full communication is impossible. In “A Theory of Emotions,” the principle of the intentionality of emotions requires that the emotion refer to the object. The initial intuition, however, is not rooted in the object itself but in its meaning to the feeling person. The other is still an object to which the “self ” applies cognitive and emotional rules, enabling it to enter his own world; the other, then, is not a subject with whom communication is impossible and is instead exposed and described in distinctly phenomenological terms, “through analogy, or through immediate insight and intuition, or through an empathetic gesture” (203).89 R. Soloveitchik stressed that, for the feeling person, the meaning of the other can be entirely egocentric, and he focused on the feeling of love as the litmus test of the very connection with the other. He categorically states that love for the other, as a distinct interpersonal emotion, can be an egocentric feeling, and interprets in these terms the journals of the anonymous young man in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. Kierkegaard sought to clarify that the young man’s failure to   These terms are taken from the Fifth Meditation of Cartesian Meditations. Empathy is what Husserl calls “experiencing someone else.” See Edmond Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 101, 104, 124. On intersubjectivity and its expressions in Husserl’s thought, see David T. Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 82–109. On analogy, for example, see ibid., 92–95. 89



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reconcile with his beloved shows he had not understood the concept of “repetition.”90 The young man had also failed to take into account the suffering he had experienced since abandoning his beloved. For R. Soloveitchik, however, authentic repetition had failed due to the egocentrism of the young man’s love.91 When might love grow out of true knowledge of the other’s existence and when is it merely an expression of egocentrism? R. Soloveitchik’s answer again rules out the isolation of one emotion, arguing it should be located in the general and continuous context of the emotional range. Love is egocentric and meaningless when detached from the lover’s other emotions and from the emotional surroundings, namely, the other. Judaism, says R. Soloveitchik, claims that “if emotions are left as detached, closed-up experiences, they can never become conjunctive, since the person refuses to emerge from his egotistic shell and is not ready to give up his self-centrality” (201). Echoes of Eric Fromm’s approach, whose book about love had appeared several years before “A Theory of Emotions,” are evident in this passage. Fromm argued that love cannot be detached from the personality as a whole, so that a theory of love should be founded on a theory of personality and on human existence.92 Fromm opened this work by declaring that “all his [man’s] attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation.”93 Love as an expression of the fullness of personality is also the basis for May’s discussion of this issue.94 According to R. Soloveitchik, the whole (“emotional totality”) takes into account the feelings of the other as well and turns egocentric love into inter-personal love. Hence the general statement: emotion becomes meaningful when integrated into different emotional makeups—the self ’s and the other’s. The halakhic example is the joy of the commandment that, on the one hand, rests on self-affirmation, 90   See, for instance, Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. George L. Stengren (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1980), 348–349; Edward F. Mooney, “Repetition: Getting the World Back,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alaistair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 290–292. 91   “A Theory of Emotions,” 200. On the concept of “repetition” in Kierkegaard’s thought, see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, translated by Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 19–22. 92   Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), 6. 93  Ibid., vii. 94   May, Man’s Search for Himself, 238.

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and on the other, on the joy of the poor and the needy.95 Personality and community complement one another and imbue the emotion with meaning. Psychology in Context The analysis of “A Theory of Emotions” again shows that R. Soloveitchik’s thought in the “middle” period (1955–1965) does not pretend to present a defined psychological method but rather direct attention to the new psychological dimension emphasized by existentialist thinkers. R. Soloveitchik presented psychoanalytical and phenomenological theories without sliding into empirical psychology. His statements are often context-bound, and the essays on finitude, suffering, and revelation clearly support this perception. Nevertheless, we could say that, in the “early” period (up until the mid-1950s), R. Soloveitchik was not particularly interested in the existentialist approach and continued to adhere to the principle postulating the unity of religious consciousness. By contrast, in the middle period, he embraced both existentialism and phenomenology—despite the antitheses he found between them— whilst he despaired from the unity of consciousness. More precisely, he changed his starting position and accepted the dialectical principle as constitutive of his thought. Summary “The sanctification of the dialectic” is even more consistent and allencompassing in R. Soloveitchik’s thought than in Tillich’s thought, for instance. The preceding discussion is a classic articulation of this principle in psychological terms. In some sense, R. Soloveitchik created an existential-religious philosophy according to the “secular” model of existentialist philosophy. Whereas thinkers such as Barth and Tillich found solutions to the distress of existence in the religious Being, philosophers such as Sartre and Camus did not delude themselves concerning such solutions. R. Soloveitchik tended to support Sartre’s and

95   On the Maimonidean source that R. Soloveitchik relies on, see G. J. Blidstein, “The Concept of Joy in Maimonides” (in Hebrew), Eshel Beer-Sheva: Studies in Jewish Thought 2 (1980): 145–163.



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Camus’ views concerning the lack of an absolute solution. Religion enables us to live with dialectic as a fact of life and find it meaningful, but does not allow us to remove it from the existential agenda, pointing to a difference in the focusing and the concern of R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy. Ultimately, however, his thought is articulated without striving for a method. In this sense, he is no different from a thinker such as R. Abraham Yitzhak Kook, despite the abysmal discrepancies between them. Even though R. Soloveitchik did not strive to formulate a defined psychological theory, he was highly influenced by phenomenological and existentialist psychology when it first emerged in the United States in the 1950s. These approaches rejected the pretension of traditional psychological models to uncover the deep and fundamental layer of the personality, and argued instead that this layer is made up of existence and consciousness conditions. R. Soloveitchik enthusiastically supported the view that basic existential situations (finitude, suffering, and anxiety) are the foundation of “surface” psychological expressions (fear, “surface crisis,” love). Unlike the existentialist trend in psychology, however, he included in the fundamental layer not only existential conditions but also expressions of consciousness. The foundations of the personality include dialectical poles of consciousness too, such as self-affirmation and self-effacement. The sources of emotions are also in metaphysical consciousness, a view that has no place in existentialist psychology.96 R. Soloveitchik joined the attempt to create a bridge between intuitive and essentialist views on the one hand and other psychological approaches on the other, which began at the time he wrote the essays discussed in this chapter.97 Should we still seek to trace the contours of R. Soloveitchik’s psychological outlook, we could say: R. Soloveitchik supported the notion of fundamental personality layers as including existential conditions together with expressions of consciousness. He ascribed this integrative approach to Halakhah: Jewish law fits the depths of the personality concerning both existential and consciousness conditions.

96   Jacob Golomb has already shown that psychologization in Nietzsche’s thought marginalized the metaphysical dimension. See Jacob Golomb, Nietzsche’s Psychology of Power (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987). 97   See, for instance, Aron Gurwitsch, “The Phenomenological and Psychological Approach to Consciousness” (in Hebrew), Iyyun: A Hebrew Philosophical Quarterly, 4 (1953).

Chapter Ten

Between Subject and Object: Essays on Family Relationships At the end of the 1950s, R. Soloveitchik discussed issues in family relationships, including sexuality, in a series of essays and sermons. These essays, published under the title Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships, reflect the change in R. Soloveitchik’s thought since the publication of “Kol Dodi Dofek.” A consistent process is indeed evident from “Kol Dodi Dofek” up to The Lonely Man of Faith, involving a rejection of the phenomenological-religious approach as exclusive and the rise of the existentialist approach. To the essentialist study of consciousness, a description of the foundations of concrete existence has now been added. At times, R. Soloveitchik created a tension between the two approaches, and at times they appear next to one another in his writings, without any inner struggle. Family Redeemed is a middle link in this process. The gist of the ideas found in The Lonely Man of Faith appears in Family Redeemed. These essays have so far been discussed briefly on their own,1 and in this chapter, I present their integration into R. Soloveitchik’s thought. I must note to begin with: R. ­Soloveitchik’s biography is particularly important for the understanding of the essays on the family,2 but I will not explore this ­question until the publication of an authorized analysis of his life history. I will therefore focus on a discussion of ideas that reflect R. Soloveitchik’s thought from the mid-1950s until the end of the decade.

1   See in the introduction to Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships, ed. David Shatz and Joel B. Wolowelsky (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation, 2000), xiii–xxviii (numbers in parentheses after cited passages refer to pages in this edition); Gerald Blidstein, “The Matrimonial Covenant” (in Hebrew), Akdamot: A Journal of Jewish Thought 13 (2003): 255–261. 2   Attempts to trace the influence of Buber’s marriage, for instance, on his dialogical teachings have proven extremely fruitful. See Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, vol. 1, The Early Years, 1878–1923 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 336–341.

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It is a plausible assumption that R. Soloveitchik shaped his view of the couple relationship (which relies mainly on Maimonides’ Laws of Marriage and on rabbinic midrashim) following his encounter, in particular, with Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Though this philosophy had accompanied R. Soloveitchik during the “early” period of his thought as well, it left an essential mark on him from the “middle” period onward. Kierkegaard’s starting point was the Hegelian approach that marriage, as a moral move that is not exhausted through the socialproductive aspect, is a reflection of an individual’s consciousness in the other. Human beings go through a dialectic process of alienation through awareness of the partner’s consciousness on the one hand, and by overcoming alienation on the other.3 Kierkegaard too presented the couple relationship as an overcoming of alienation following the meeting with the “other.” Connecting with the partner makes individuals aware of their concrete existence;4 moreover, it also exposes them as subjects. Their partnership easily turns into an inter-subjective connection. Like Hegel, Kierkegaard too was opposed to the Kantian perception of marriage as a contract. R. Soloveitchik’s discussions on the couple relationship rest mainly on two characteristics, evident in “Kol Dodi Dofek”: the objective and the subjective. He uses this pair of characteristics, sometimes simultaneously, in two different denotations: (1) A Phenomenological Denotation. The objective is a practical (action) and normative expression of the subjective, which is the conscious (rational and irrational or supra-rational emotions and connections). The objective is mainly a result of the will, whereas the subjective is a result of emotion and experience and, to some extent, of reason as well. In this denotation, the objective is the realm of the stable and the subjective, when lacking objective regulation, is the dangerous and “fluid” realm. “There are two aspects to the religious gesture in Judaism: strict objective discipline and   See, for instance Judith N. Shklar, “Hegel’s Phenomenology: An Elegy for Hellas,” in Hegel’s Political Philosophy—Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 82–83; Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 139. 4   See Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 21–22. 3

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  293 exalted subjective romance” (40). Obviously, rigorous halakhic law is identified in R. Soloveitchik’s writings as the objective expression of consciousness, and this is the denotation that prevails throughout. (2) An Existential Denotation. The objective is a basic characterization of unspecified, biological, and non-singular existence, whereas the subjective is a fundamental characteristic of meaningful, dignified, and inter-related existence. Subjective existence is the desirable one whereas objective existence is the threatening and dangerous one, unless integrated into subjective foundations. Total devotion to subjectivity is still dangerous too, but unspecified objective existence is a constant threat to the search for meaning and connection. This denotation, which is not widespread in R. Soloveitchik’s early thought, is clearly articulated in “Kol Dodi Dofek.” In 1964, R. Soloveitchik formulated this approach as follows: “Man may despair, succumb to the overpowering pressure of the objective outside and end in mute resignation, failing to discharge his duty as an intellectual being, and thus dissolving an intelligent existence into an absurd nightmare.”5 In the types of couple and parenting relationships that R. Soloveitchik presented in the various essays, the duality of the objective and the subjective is almost invariably present. The first characteristic denotes a biological attachment, without connection and meaning either within the couple or between the child and the parents. The second presents the couple and parenting relationship as an overcoming of oppressive modes of existence (loneliness, shame, guilt, and anxiety) through a close and meaningful relationship between the partners or between children and their parents. At the same time, biological functioning is related to the actual regulation of the couple relationship through halakhic law, as if the halakhic order paralleled the laws of nature. Subjective meaning is indeed similar at both the phenomenological and existential levels, according to the characterizations in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. Whereas subjective meaning at the phenomenological level is always characterized by and reconstructed from an act or a

5   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, 6, 2 (1964), 11. On subjectivity, meaning, and dignity, see, for instance, Nathan Rotenstreich, Man and His Dignity ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), 108.

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norm, at the existential level it is an alternative to natural-biological existence. The foundations of R. Soloveitchik’s thought and the formulations he endorsed are part of the theological discussions on the couple relationship. Emil Brunner, traces of whose work are strongly evident in R. Soloveitchik’s thought, had already argued that the distinction between man and woman “goes down to the very roots of our personal existence, and penetrates into the deepest ‘metaphysical’ grounds of our personality and our destiny.”6 Brunner emphasized that not in vain had Scripture added the divine image to the creation of the couple (“male and female He created them”—Genesis 1:27): a marriage bond is a moral institution, not only a natural one. “The sexuality of man,” argued Brunner, “is always, in some way or another, connected with love, and it is the love element which characterizes it as either spiritual or demonic.”7 In his view, the institution of marriage in the modern world has collapsed because it rests solely on love. A couple relationship that develops solely from an element that is immanent to it—subjective love—will be precarious. It is “subjective individualism, more than anything else, which has caused the present crisis in marriage.”8 Hence, Brunner concluded, marriage must be based on a heteronomous and objective element, which is “the divine order of creation.” Modern Protestant theology made an effort to present the marriage bond as an expression of human existence on the one hand, and of the human-divine bond on the other. Karl Barth, for example, vigorously argued that the couple relationship is a model of covenantal attachment not only between husband and wife but also between God and his community.9 R. Soloveitchik read these theological writings and transmuted them into existentialist contents and terminology, such as the very establishment of object-subject relationships. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik’s thought is clearly affected by Kierkegaardian philosophy.

  Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947), 345. 7  Ibid., 347. 8   Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 345. 9   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation (New York: Scribner, 1958). 6

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  295 Suffering As a Starting Point In the early period of his thought, R. Soloveitchik perceived human existence as subject to alternation between ebb and flow, self-­affirmation and self-effacement, euphoria and suffering. The starting point is a dialectic that begins at the zenith (scientific achievement, self-­affirmation and so forth). By contrast, the essays on the family reflect the change of direction previously discerned in “Kol Dodi Dofek” and later in The Lonely Man of Faith: the starting point of human existence is suffering and loneliness. The flow, the self-affirmation, and the euphoria are the later pole in a process that begins with existential suffering and ­loneliness.10 I begin with the existentialist characterization of suffering, and then address loneliness. The reversal of starting points is particularly evident in R. Soloveitchik’s analysis of sexuality. He negated, as noted, the definition of kedushah [sacredness] as a substantial entity that exists beyond human activity.11 Kedushah denotes a process, the characterization of a regulating, directing, and balancing human activity. Rather than a heteronomous activity in the sense of an exalted existence or a divine gift, then, kedushah is autonomous. In his discussion of sexuality, R. Soloveitchik reiterates that kedushah is concerned with action directly related to the material body: “sacredness of the personality is born of the naturalness of man, not of his transcendence” (73). The sanctification of the body is a process that characterizes human activity from the beginning, and R. Soloveitchik described it as follows: Kedushah is a passional experience born of bewildering and painful events, of struggle and combat with one’s self and others. In a word, it is a heroic performance attained only when one’s life story becomes an epos, a narrative of great and courageous action. Holiness is not won easily, at no sacrifice. It emerges out of sorrow, confusion and inner turmoil. . . . Kedushah is an expression of an existence determined by a sense

10   Loneliness as a characteristic of existence is first intimated in “Kibbud u-Mora: Honor and Fear of Parents” (134–137). In the essays on family life, however, it reaches final formulation in “Adam and Eve” (15–18), which was most probably written after The Lonely Man of Faith. My main concern in this chapter are the existentialist insights he developed before The Lonely Man of Faith. 11   See, for instance, Danny Statman, “Aspects of Rav Soloveitchik’s Moral Approach” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of Rav J. B. Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi ( Jerusalem: WZO, 1997).

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chapter ten of great seriousness, bordering on the sacrificial and passional destiny, conscious and heroic in its fearlessness and resolution. (74–75)

The starting point of material existence is the chaotic feature of physicality, “primitive lust” (75). Human existence is doomed to struggle with unrestrained physicality, a struggle that cannot be waged without recourse to abstinence and asceticism. R. Soloveitchik therefore adopted the classic distinction between asceticism for its own sake and a wish for a total cleansing of all that is material, and a teleological abstinence that seeks to refine and regulate physical inclinations.12 His style shows that he does not differentiate between the two approaches regarding the intensity of the suffering or even one’s very givenness to suffering; the distinction lies in the meaning and the purpose ascribed to the suffering: “Yet the pain involved in this operation [of recreating human existence] is not the paroxysm of death but the travail of birth” (76). Clearly, then, by the very fact of our existence we are gripped by suffering. The distinction between “shyness” and “shame” provides an additional perspective on the pole of suffering as a starting point of human existence. Shyness is the fear for privacy in the face of the other who threatens to penetrate it. Shame is concerned with an existential situation, where we sense guilt and disappointment about the fundamental characteristics of our humanity. Knowledge of the incompleteness and precariousness of human existence and of the gap between current and ideal existence points to the shame element, which is particularly evident in the couple relationship. “A minute later,” writes R. Soloveitchik, “man forgets the absurdity of imaginary self-portraiture and becomes lost in abstracted musing about himself—and again, when awakened, experiences the pain of failure” (82). R. Soloveitchik integrated two approaches in the conception of shame as distinct from shyness, as follows: (1) Shame. Shame is an essential characterization of sexuality, and religious philosophy placed particular emphasis on it. Brunner argued that shame is inherent to sexuality, regardless of its ­regulation

12   On the history of this problem, see Dov Schwartz, “Ethics and Asceticism in the Neoplatonic School of the Fourteenth Century” (in Hebrew) in Between Religion and Morality, ed. Avi Sagi and Danny Statman (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1994), 185–208.

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  297 or legitimation. The marriage context does not dispel shame, which is the more intense the greater the partners’ spirituality. Sexual shame is “not, as a superficial materialism would suggest, something which is artificially produced, something added, but it is a genuine human feeling, founded deeply in human nature.”13 Anthropomorphization in biblical sources ascribes God many material functions, claimed Brunner, but never marriage. Brunner dealt with the sense of shame as an expression of humanity, and R. Soloveitchik understood this as a classic existential state. (2) Guilt. The sense of guilt and ending reflects human existence as is. Here, R. Soloveitchik endorsed the concept of guilt in Heidegger and in phenomenological psychotherapy. Guilt does not ­concern a specific event but touches on the foundations of concrete existence, and implies an inability to control the existence we are “thrown” into. The deterministic dimension of concrete existence is the direct reason for guilt.14 Religious existential philosophy founded existential guilt directly on original sin.15 R. Soloveitchik combined shame and guilt by viewing existential guilt as the basis of shame in general and of sexual shame in particular: When man realizes that the factum of existence and the ideal of existence are in sharp conflict, he disapproves of himself and feels embarrassed and ashamed. Basically, shame is due to a feeling of guilt, to an awareness of culpability, to the knowledge that I am not the one I should have been, that I failed to realize what was expected of me, that I lead a disappointing existence. This feeling overcomes us when we engage in self-portraiture. (80)

R. Soloveitchik describes here a defined existential awareness of a concrete “self ” (“self-portraiture”), whereby selfhood is subject to guilt a priori. Existentialist-religious philosophy also construed a concept of existential gilt. Kierkegaard saw the cause of guilt in the gap between perfection and eternal happiness in contrast to temporary concrete   Brunner, Man in Revolt, 348.   See Piotr Hoffman, “Death, Time, History: Division II of Being and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 210–211; Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: Norton, 1953), 85. 15   On Brunner and Tillich, see Brunner, Man in Revolt, 350; Alexander J. McKelway, The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964), 147–150. 13 14

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existence. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, internalized the gap between present and future and between potential and realization as the cause of existential guilt. But the context of R. Soloveitchik’s discussions concerning the balance and refinement of sexual relationships shows that he views existential guilt as relating first and foremost to physicality that, per se, is seductive and unrestrained. The physical situation is a deterministic element, uncontrollable to begin with. The essential element of existential guilt, then, is chaotic physicality. Balance, regulation, and refinement are interventions in a situation of guilt, which is a given. “Its powerful impact [of sexual pressure] upon the human mentality works itself out as a paradoxical experience of sin and shame” (85). Shame and guilt are fundamental characteristics of human existence, and they are given. Again we face a model of external feelings driven by fundamental existential conditions. In the second part of the article,16 R. Soloveitchik claimed that “if equality and reciprocity formed the essence of the union realized through carnal means, man would not have felt ashamed of his sexual desire” (103). This statement contradicts the view expressed in the first part, claiming that shame is an existential datum specifically typical of humans. The contrast confirms the distinction between the two parts of the article, which the editors joined together, when the first part is more strongly influenced by existentialist thought and the second by phenomenological thought. A Set of Connections The starting point of suffering is deep-seated: suffering stems from the actual physicality of human existence. R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy, then, will engage in a search for ways of redemption from suffering, ways essentially rooted in the divine involvement in concrete existence. This involvement is expressed in two modes, which appear in existentialist literature: (1) Law and Duty. R. Soloveitchik adopted the model set up by Kierkegaard, of a religiosity that does not ignore the passion and eroticism of love but refines them and transforms them into ­religious   On the split of this essay, see the editors’ introduction to Family Redeemed, x.

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between subject and object: essays on family relationships  299 love.17 Kierkegaard was critical of the view of love and sexuality adopted by Romanticism as it came to the fore in Lucinde, the scandalous novel by Friedrich von Schlegel. He rejected the concrete realization of love as the union of opposites assumed in Romanticism. Only religion, which adds God to the man-woman connection, fulfills the couple relationship and provides eroticism with a content for redemption.18 Kierkegaard vehemently argued that only God can teach human beings what is love. “Love is a passion of the emotions,” writes Kierkegaard, “but in this emotion a person, even before he relates to the object of love, should first relate to God and thereby learn the requirement, that love is the fulfilling of the law.”19 R. Soloveitchik relied on Kierkegaard for the claim that the couple connection is redeemed only through God’s imperative and normative involvement. Only a marriage subordinate to duty will bring redemption. (2) The Connection. The divine involvement in the encounter of a man and a woman exposes it as an event of subjective connection. Martin Buber argued that relationships of connection expose the partners to the divine. “When a man loves a woman so that her life is present in his own, the You of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal.”20 Buber’s dialogical approach definitely influenced R. Soloveitchik’s conception of the couple relationship as communication and as a solution to the problem of existential suffering and loneliness. Exposure of the couple to the “eternal Thou” attests to the kind of connection between them.

17   On the tension between eros and agape—the tension between human earthly love and the pure and impartial love of God for his creatures—see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). See ch. 9 above. 18   See George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130–134. 19   Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 112. The term law (νόμος) relates to the laws of the apostles (according to Letter to the Romans 13:10). See also Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 270–275. 20   Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 154. As shown below, the terminology coined by Buber influenced the shaping of an inter-subjective connection in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. Ernst Simon wrote in “The Dialogue” that “the woman is not an ‘object’ to the man . . . and the man is not a subject to the woman. Despite all the difference between them, they are equal partners in the I-thou connections” (Akiba Ernst Simon, Aims, Junctures, Paths: The Thinking of Martin Buber [in Hebrew] [Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1985], 262).

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I turn now to the elaboration of these sources in R. Soloveitchik’s thought. In his view, redemption from the suffering originating in carnality lies in the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, at three levels: (1) The Individual. The individual’s quest for subjective existence. (2) The Couple. The couple’s quest for a subjective connection that enables connection and dialogue. (3) The Community. Subjectivity assumes a social dimension. Usually, these three levels are merely stages in a development wherein the individual’s quest for subjective existence leads to the couple relationship and the couple’s pursuit of subjectivity leads to a social-­communal subjectivity in which God plays a significant role. R. Soloveitchik dealt at length with the individual’s pursuit of subjective existence in the first parts of “Kol Dodi Dofek” and in the article “Confrontation.” As for the subjective dimension of the couple relationship, he discusses this topic at length on the essays on family relationships. The key discussion in this regard is in “Marriage,” and I will therefore consider several aspects of this essay below. Now on a personal note: as a reader and a committed student of R. Soloveitchik’s who is not one of his friends or disciples, I was puzzled when reading The Lonely Man of Faith in my youth.21 I could not accept that a key link was missing from the redeeming inter-­subjective relationship described in this work—the couple relationship. The duality in the relationship between Adam and Eve that is described at length in The Lonely Man of Faith was, in my view, above all a result of their being husband and wife, woman and man. The complexities of the couple relationship, including its sexual and communicative aspects, are fundamental to its tension and duality. At the center of The Lonely Man of Faith, R. Soloveitchik poses several questions hinging on the difference between the two creation stories in Genesis that call for solution not only at the personal but also at the couple level, given that they are the first couple in Scripture. The publication of Family Redeemed completes this missing link, particularly in the essay that preceded The Lonely Man of Faith—“Marriage” (1959). In this essay, R. Soloveitchik draws a distinction between objective ­marriage   On this work, see ch. 11 below.

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between subject and object: essays on family relationships  301 (the story of Adam the first) and subjective marriage (the story of Adam the second). The first type of marriage assumes meaning by turning outward, that is, through the partners’ contribution to society and through their function in it, and particularly the continuation of the species. By contrast, the second type of marriage assumes meaning through an inward turn, in the inter-subjective experience. An examination of the starting point in the second type of marriage reveals an additional existential characteristic besides shame and guilt: existential loneliness.22 R. Soloveitchik suggests that the root of existential loneliness is not far from shame and guilt: Apparently, according to the second account, God was concerned not with the couple’s biological motives and goals . . . but with the spiritual incompleteness of lonely man and his need for ontological oneness with another individual. In a word, the focal point in the second story of the emergence of man is not the biological urge, but the tragic urge of man,23 who as the only conscious being in creation is well aware of his greatness and the vast opportunities which lie before him, and at the same time, of his inner contradictions, imperfections and final defeat. (33)

The gap between current existence as given, by contrast with wholeness and eternal happiness, is one of the causes of shame and guilt, as noted. Since the inner contradictions cannot be settled and wholeness is unattainable, concrete individuals understand that their end is defeat. The characteristics of human existence lead to existential loneliness. The inner contradictions that R. Soloveitchik had in mind will be my immediate concern below. Existential loneliness thus emerges as another dimension of the incomplete, partial, and incontrollable existence that is revealed in feelings of shame and guilt.

22   The motif of loneliness has a rich tradition in poetics and in philosophy. See, for instance, P. Lowe, “The Question of Self-Consciousness in the Poetry of Percy Shelley and T. S. Eliot,” Yeats Eliot Review 19, 3 (2002): 11–26. In his later works, for instance, Buber emphasized the connection between loneliness and alienation. See, for instance, David Barzilai, Homo Dialogicus: Martin Buber’s Contribution to Philosophy (in Hebrew) ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Baeck Institute, 2000), 199. 23   The romantic model of a struggle lost in advance, a struggle against all odds, appears a few years after the writing of this passage in “Catharsis,” Tradition 17, 2 (1978): 38–54. Jacob’s struggle until dawn is described as an absurd act (Divrei Hagut ve-Ha‘arakhah, 242). Rollo May noted that tragedy reflects respect for human existence and an emphasis on human rights and human fate. He further argued that this claim does not imply support for pessimism. Tragedy is an expression of freedom and self-realization. See May, Man’s Search for Himself, 75, 78.

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The painful and depressing existential experience of the individual can be “transformed” into the redeeming experience of the couple relationship. R. Soloveitchik is not referring here to final redemption, which is an eschatological question. Inner contradictions still exist and wholeness is not within grasp, but redemption implies communication with an “other” in the same situation and a sharing of the painful experience. The redeeming experience is presented in teleological terms: “The cause of marriage is the exasperating and desolate feeling of loneliness; the goal of marriage is the redeeming experience of life in fellowship” (33).24 The first aim of marriage is inter-subjective dialogue. The goal derived from this principle is the expansion of communication to a third partner: the child. R. Soloveitchik claimed at the opening that marriage, as an immanent and experiential set of values that is not merely a biological need, does not require a child when seeking meaning; intimacy and romanticism are enough. “A childless marriage is just as sacred as one blessed with offspring” (32). Later, however, the subjective and immanent connection between the partners emerges as insufficient: The Halakhah says marriage fulfills a basic need of the human personality, namely, the need for existence in community. However, the community can be attained only through the quorum required by God in his original scheme of creation. The quorum consists of three people, and one of the three is a child. In the threefold community, the two original partners find their happiness and self-fulfillment. (50–51)

The experience of marriage requires an additional purpose: children.25 According to Halakhah, the purpose of continuing the species has its roots in the biological-objective dimension of marriage. Inter­subjective communication is presented, according to R. Soloveitchik, as a constant process of destruction and construction: the parent-child connection collapses and is replaced by the man-woman connection (“that is why a man leaves his father and his mother, and cleaves to his wife” [Genesis 2:24]), which widens yet again to a parent-child connection and so forth. The meaning of offspring in marriage is therefore

24   R. Soloveitchik did not stress here the element of renunciation in the appearance of the woman and in life together with her. As Barth noted (The Doctrine of Creation, 296), with the creation of the woman, Adam “experienced a loss.” 25   R. David Cohen (ha-Nazir) discusses this issue in relation to the status of women. Cf. Dov Schwartz, Religious-Zionism between Logic and Messianism (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1999), 325.

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  303 essential and necessary. The subjective and teleological conception of marriage oscillates between the connection within the couple as an aim that is sufficient per se (subjective) and its dependence on the dual connection of man-woman and parent-child (subjective-objective),26 that is, as a heteronomous goal. The internal contradictions typical of human existence are rooted in the alternation of the connection between subjectivity and objectivity. The dialectical element, rather than absent, is in the background of discussions about marriage and parenthood as well. The Covenantal Connection Halakhic law defines and records extensively and in great detail the objective-regulative connection between the partners. R. Soloveitchik’s philosophical task was to expose the foundations of the subjective connection that completes the objective tie, and his conceptual challenge was to provide an explanation for the integration between the subjective and the objective and, in fact, for the reflection of the subjective in the objective. Two basic elements of the subjective connection merit attention in R. Soloveitchik’s essays on family life: (1)  Mitigating the Given Characteristics of Existence. Existence has its starting point in loneliness, suffering and pain, guilt and shame. The subjects’ exposure before one another creates the inter-­subjective communication that enables the mitigation of these existential features, and the possibility of this mitigation is what drives the subjects to seek the inter-personal connection. (2) Renunciation. A twofold renunciation enables the inter-subjective connection: (a) Renouncing sexual freedom and opting for fidelity to the partner (“carnal withdrawal from easily attainable pleasures” [49]). (b) Renouncing self-concern through the creation of the next generation, that is, the child. This renunciation is presented

26   Hegel claimed that “it is only in the children that the unity [of marriage] exists externally, objectively.” Cited in Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 141.

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chapter ten as imitating God in the act of contraction, referring to God’s recoil so as to enable the creation of the world.27

Halakhah institutionalized renunciation as the foundation of the subjective connection, as evident in the discussion on the meaning of marriage and its six aspects in the essay “Marriage” (49–60). The subjective connection is not exhausted in a positivist terminology and a defined content, since it is “supra-rational” and “supra­historical.” Its integration in the objective connection requires a special theological model, which R. Soloveitchik developed from various biblical and legal sources: the covenantal model.28 The covenantal agreement records a relationship involving commitment and constancy. The covenant includes objective legal regulation as well as a hidden connection of closeness and belongingness. The covenant uniting God with the patriarchs and the people of Israel includes a set of laws, norms, and concrete commitments that apply to God too. For instance, the covenant requires God to fulfill his promises. Moreover, the covenant reflects an inter-subjective connection of partnership and belongingness between the two sides: The mutual relationship of the two partners is of an absolute nature that encompasses not only property rights, but existential rights as well. The partners belong to each other in a peculiar way; they are united by a personal bond which reaches deeply into the most hidden spheres of the human personality. (46)

The covenant adds a communal dimension to the marriage bond’s objective commitment, in which God shares. This model will recur in The Lonely Man of Faith in regard to the concept of faith.29

27   See 38–39. On contraction [tzimtzum] as a metaphor, see ch. 5 above. The phenomenological discussions on recoil that R. Soloveitchik presented at length are intimated in the term mysterium tremendum (39). 28   David Hartman’s writings deal with this model. See several of the contributions in Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar, eds., Renewing Jewish Commitment: The Work and Though of David Hartman (in Hebrew) ( Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Shalom Hartman Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001). 29   See ch. 11 below.

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  305 Redemption from Loneliness Marriage was found to mitigate existential loneliness. The intersubjective connection in marriage and its characteristic communal dimension help to bear the pain of loneliness. The question is whether marriage is also a remedy for existential loneliness. Does the couple relationship offer a full solution to a subject seeking connection with another? R. Soloveitchik, as noted, answered in the negative. The discussion of divorce reveals that marriage does not lead to full disclosure and absolute knowledge. The conception of marriage as a covenant, argued R. Soloveitchik, includes “an element of persistence or consistency (44),”30 and one must therefore explain the very possibility of divorce. R. Soloveitchik’s explanation is twofold: the collapse of the covenantal connection could follow either from the couple’s eroded readiness to connect or from a flaw in the connection itself.31 I will focus on the former possibility, which R. Soloveitchik defined as deriving from the personality. R. Soloveitchik argued that human beings alternate between the numinous and the kerygmatic types. The former type becomes totally engrossed in the sublime without any social remnants,32 whereas the latter is open to the community, to society, and to the family. The numinous type reflects the pole of loneliness in the personality. The dialectic can therefore be defined as an alternation between connection and loneliness, or between the affirmation and negation of inter-subjective exposure. R. Soloveitchik’s new conception here is that the marriage bond fits the social but not the numinous pole. He writes:

30   Here too, R. Soloveitchik applied Kierkegaard’s characteristics of love to love in marriage, a step that Kierkegaard himself refrained from taking. See Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 300–314. 31   This is a formal division between the talmudic categories of gavra and heftsa. R. Soloveitchik actually denied the existence of holiness as an independent reality, as noted (text around note 11). Both explanations, then, ultimately rest on the personality of the partners. The erosion of the connection is defined as the elimination of sacredness through an act of adultery and so forth. 32   R. Soloveitchik adopts a term distinctly associated with the phenomenology of religion (Rudolf Otto), further confirming the separation between the phenomenological discussion he develops in And from There You Shall Seek, and the existentialist perspective. Whereas in the phenomenological discussion he does not point to the social and communal aspects as constitutive, in the existentialist discussion he resorts to the “other.”

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chapter ten It [marriage] does not reach into the very core of the personality, which remains a mysterium, a subjective experience inexpressible and outside of all media of externalization and objectification. Only social Adam and Eve are welded: lonely Adam and Eve have never joined this community. Therefore, marriage is changeable because it does not embrace the whole of man. Only a part of him is engaged in this institution, and that is why disengagement is permissible. (62–63)

This passage clarifies that subjects never succeed in revealing their full being and uniqueness, nor does the inter-subjective marriage tie entirely solve the problem of existential loneliness. The kerygmatic dimension creates the marriage, but does not succeed in dismissing the numinous aspect. A marriage unfolds within a delicate balance between the objective and subjective dispositions that make up the personality, whereas divorce occurs when the numinous aspect becomes dominant and marginalizes the kerygmatic one. In R. Soloveitchik’s terms, “numinous man terminates the social commitment of kerygmatic man” (63). According to R. Soloveitchik, then, the human personality can be fully pictured as follows: there is an absolute subjective dimension through which one cleaves to God as an absolute subject—“numinous, lonely man.” Echoes of Buber’s view of God as the absolute “Thou” that cannot be “It” and is not subject to any objectivity again resonate here. The Deus absconditus, defined in religious tradition as infinite and devoid of attributes, does not enter the dialogue. The subjective dimension of the personality, which exists beside its objective one, is not fully realized in the marriage covenant. The kerygmatic pole enables the inter-subjective connection on the basis of objective ­commitment and religious obligation. But “marriage, notwithstanding its covenantal character, is not an institution of absolute worth” (62), and cannot “embrace all phases of the existential drama” (63). The subjective dimension of the personality is not entirely transferable, and the partners therefore remain as subjects even after their connection. In the article “Confrontation,” R. Soloveitchik presented this approach in clear terms: “For, in all personal unions such as marriage, friendship, or comradeship, however strong the bonds uniting two individuals, the modi existentiae remain totally unique and hence, incongruous, at both levels, the ontological and the experiential.”33

  Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” 15.

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between subject and object: essays on family relationships  307 R. Soloveitchik adhered to the romantic notion of marriage as a union of opposites (object and subject): as long as balance prevails between the poles, the marriage is sustained, and when the balance is altered in the numinous direction, divorce comes. The alternation of the personality, therefore, does not disappear even in the covenantal connection, and loneliness is only partially redeemed. Redeeming Sexuality Let us return to R. Soloveitchik’s discussion of sexuality and consider the place of the covenantal connection in its context. R. Soloveitchik claims that there are three levels of sexual relationships. At the first level (“natural-paradisiacal”),34 relationships reflect full delivery to the natural impulse of procreation and the survival of the species. Fundamentally, sexual activity lacks any personality or purpose beyond the survival of the species.35 At the second level (“aphrodite-hedonic”), sexual activity is pro-active, selective, focused, and purposive in its pursuit of pleasure. The “other” is seen merely as a source of sexual satisfaction. R. Soloveitchik adopted the aesthetic and religious evaluation that Kierkegaard expressed concerning erotic love as “only enhanced and augmented self love”36 that is not truly “love,”37 and as “defined by the object.”38 In “The Seducer’s Diary,” Kierkegaard argued that erotic love is “something that keeps many young girls from ever learning to

34   For the hermeneutical sources of this level’s connection to paradise, see Shlomo Pines, “Nahmanides on Adam in the Garden of Eden in the Context of Other Interpretations of Genesis Chapters 2 and 3” (in Hebrew), in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Aharon Mirsky, Avraham Grossman, and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1988), 159–164. 35   The description of this level implies a criticism of the medieval rationalist­Maimonidean outlook and of the ascetic views prevalent among Ashkenaz pietists at the time. According to these approaches, sexuality is not a choice but rather part of the very definition of human beings as animals. Sexual activity is compared to eating and drinking—acts performed in order to survive. 36   Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 267. 37  Ibid., 7. The terms used for “erotic love” [Elskov] and “Christian love” [Kjerlighed] are different in Danish. See also ibid., 311. See also P. L. Quinn, “Kierkegaard’s Christian Ethics,” in Alaistair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 354–361. 38   Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 66.

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love.”39 For R. Soloveitchik, one who seeks the pleasures of sexuality as such is “egocentric, self-loving and self-adoring” (91). Since the second level describes the human situation before any divine involvement in the family cell, humans may be considered a given. The starting point of the human situation, as noted, is suffering and existential guilt. The second level is thus characterized by a sense of existential guilt because the one who enjoys sexual activity has been liberated from the “natural-paradisiacal” level and has shifted to the purposive-hedonistic level, whereas his partner remains at the primary level, that is, has not left the “it order” (92). Yet, both the sense of existential guilt and the fact that for the first time we face a “community” attest that sexual activity, despite its vulgarity, carnality, and hedonism, is no longer at the level of a natural primeval impulse. At the third level, sexual activity is redeemed. Sexual activity becomes an expression of the need for communication. Its partners, man and woman, are two individuals afflicted by existential loneliness. Sexual activity reflects the break-in of loneliness and the creation of a connection. R. Soloveitchik used terms common in Buber’s texts when he presented it as an expression of the transition from an “I-it” to an “I-thou” connection, which turns the objective relationship into a subjective one and, actually, into a community. “Erotic love tears down the barriers within which the individual is shut in. Erotic love delivers the I from his loneliness and leads him toward the thou” (94).40 R. Soloveitchik used the rich symbolism ascribed to sexuality, from Scripture up to Kabbalah and the medieval rational interpretations of the Song of Songs, in order to formulate the principle that sexuality is not to be judged in itself. The power of sexuality is in the expression it grants to communication, to connection, and to the ability to create a community that God is a partner to. At the same time, the existential moral conception viewed the couple relationship as an expression of the inter-subjective connection.41 At the second, hedonistic level, sexuality does not release us from existential loneliness whereas, at the third level, it allows exposure to, and connection with, the other.

39   Søren Kierkegaard, Either Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 377. 40   See William A. Sadler, Existence and Love: Existential Phenomenology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 98–99. 41   See, for instance, Hazel E. Barnes, An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Knopf, 1967), 165.

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  309 An important distinction between the spirit of Kierkegaard’s approach and that of R. Soloveitchik’s is discernible here: Kierkegaard affirmed marriage—incidentally, contrary to the interpretation of Buber42 and of R. Soloveitchik himself 43—due to its importance to the concrete existence of its partners and to the awareness of such an existence. By contrast, he saw erotic love as self-love and exploitation of the order, as noted. Kierkegaard emphasized that erotic love wanes with time, whereas love within marriage survives because it is bound to duty. Generally, in his Christian as well as his other texts, Kierkegaard’s discussion of marriage is detached from his discussion of erotic love, as if they were two separate topics. According to R. Soloveitchik, by contrast, Judaism does not replace erotic love with another, “true” love, but rather views it as a physical expression of a noble contact. Marriage becomes sacred precisely because of the partners’ erotic relationship. Judaism focuses on erotic love, and the religious obligation applies to it directly. “If you should inquire as to the essence and meaning of the institution of marriage,” wrote R. Soloveitchik, “I would say that through marriage the miraculous transition from the I-it contact to an I-thou relationship occurs” (95). Sexual activity is a “metaphysical cry,”44 and the physical union is no less than a reflection of a “metaphysical union.” R. Soloveitchik, then, founded sexual activity on a terminology borrowed from the existential and existentialist-religious realm. In “Confrontation” too, he presented objective, one-dimensional, and unconfronted existence in the shape of sexual temptation, contrasting it with marriage as an expression of inter-subjective existence.45 R. Soloveitchik’s detailed discussion of the functionality and purposiveness of the sexual act is certainly exceptional in contemporary Orthodox Jewish thought. But we must remember that halakhic and moral literature deals at length and in detail with the sexual act, its modes, and its boundaries. Medieval Ashkenazi pietistic literature

42   See Robert L. Perkins, “Buber and Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Encounter” (in Hebrew), in Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume, ed. Yohanan Bloch, Hayyim Gordon and Menachem Dorman (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982), 251–257. 43   R. Soloveitchik counted Kierkegaard among the supporters of “modern mysoginies” (71). 44   The term metaphysical is not used successfully in R. Soloveitchik’s writings, given that R. Soloveitchik’s message throughout is the uselessness of metaphysics. R. Soloveitchik used this term to denote “meaningful.” 45   Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha ‘arakhah, 119.

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and kabbalistic literature addressed sexual activity and its meanings at great length, but these texts were generally unavailable to a broad public since their authors recommended that they should be read only by married men and kabbalistic scholars. In his own essays and sermons, by contrast, R. Soloveitchik released this topic from all previous limitations and conditions. His conceptual daring, however, went no further. And yet, R. Soloveitchik did fill a vacuum in contemporary Jewish thought, and included the topic of sexual relationships and its implications within modern Orthodox Jewish philosophy. Between Form and Content: Honoring Parents Discussions so far have shown that, in the essays on family life, the existential starting point is dominant. R. Soloveitchik relies upon a distinctively existentialist terminology: object and subject, loneliness and guilt, relationship, connection, and so forth. The conceptual turnabout that appeared in “Kol Dodi Dofek” came alive in the essays on family life and attained final form in The Lonely Man of Faith. Nevertheless, the conscious-essentialist approach that had characterized R. Soloveitchik’s “early” thought still resonates in his essays on family life. This is true not only in his description of the dialectical poles (Hermann Cohen’s epistemic idealism, for example, never ceased to accompany R. Soloveitchik’s thought as an expression of the self-affirmation pole), but also in the phenomenological approach to the study of consciousness. The article “Kibbud u-Mora: Honor and Fear of Parents” begins with a phenomenological approach and ends with an existentialist approach. From a literary and terminological perspective, the first part of the article (126–142) is based on a classic phenomenological approach, despite its conceptual-existentialist usage. By contrast, the second part (143–157) is based on an existentialist approach, despite its conceptual-phenomenological usage. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, outlined the basis of his phenomenological approach in The Halakhic Mind. He claimed that the subjective dimensions of consciousness should be reconstructed from its objective dimension.46 He engaged in this reconstruction at length in And

46   See, for example, Jonathan Sacks, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik’s Early Epistemology: A Review of The Halakhic Mind,” Tradition 23, 3 (1988): 75–87; William ­Kolbrener,

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  311 from There You Shall Seek.47 In this long work, however, R. Soloveitchik did not dwell on the analysis of specific commandments: he did not, for instance, take the commandment of the Sabbath to reconstruct at length and in detail the subjective consciousness at the basis of the objective act. Such a reconstruction may indeed be found in the essay “Kibbud u-Mora: Honor and Fear of Parents.” The editors of the anthology Family Redeemed attest that this essay was written in the late 1950s, but its first part, like long sections of Out of the Whirlwind,48 have deep roots in his 1940s thought. Not only did R. Soloveitchik engage in a conscious reconstruction of the commandment to honor parents but he also spelled out conscious complexities that had not been discussed in And from There You Shall Seek and certainly not in The Halakhic Mind. These works, either briefly or at length, presented the scheme of consciousness. R. Soloveitchik did not deal with potential dissonances in the transition from the objective to the subjective stages of consciousness. By contrast, the discussion of the commandment to honor parents begins with an analysis of inconsistencies and friction between the various dimensions of consciousness, that is, of potential gaps between outside and inside. For instance, a man granted the subjective experience of feeling respect for his parents and the knowledge suited to such feelings may have an “unrefined and rude” (129) character that precludes this experience’s full expression. He may often transgress the commandment of honoring one’s parents. The subjective consciousness of such a person is perfectly adequate but it is not reconstructed from his acts, since the transition from one dimension of consciousness to another is not proper. Alternatively, another man may rigorously observe the laws of honoring his parents so that his objective consciousness may be fit, but feel no respect for them nor does he acknowledge any moral obligation toward them, and his subjective consciousness is therefore flawed. Halakhah, argued R. Soloveitchik, has developed a “tolerant attitude” (130) toward this

“Towards a Genuine Jewish Philosophy: Halakhic Mind’s New Philosophy of Religion,” Tradition 30, 3 (1996): 21–43; Yossi Turner, “Religious Practice According to Rav Soloveitchik: Divine Command or Human Creation” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of Rav J. B. Soloveitchik (in Hebrew), ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO, 1997), 383–402; Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), chs. 2 and 3. 47   See chs. 1–7 above. 48   See ch. 9 above.

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incongruence between the dimensions of consciousness. He thereby remains loyal to his approach, that Halakhah applies to the practical as well as to the epistemic dimensions of consciousness. How does R. Soloveitchik reconstruct subjective consciousness from the halakhic act and from the norm of honoring parents? The reconstruction’s point of departure is the concept of loneliness. Yet, contrary to the concept of existential loneliness mentioned above that I discuss at length in my analysis of The Lonely Man of Faith,49 in the essay “Kibbud u-Mora” the concept refers to social loneliness. The individual is helpless and anxious when isolated. Existential loneliness, by contrast, may also affect a person well rooted in a supportive social network. Hence the three layers of subjective consciousness: (1) The Pragmatic-Utilitarian Layer. The result of helping the other (parents) now is that the other (children) will help in the future. (2) The Moral Layer. The utilitarian element raises to the rank of “ethical idealism” (139). God founded the world on mutual dependence; the individual cannot exist without help from his close and distant surroundings and grace is therefore the foundation of human existence. This understanding blunts, as noted, the utilitarian motivation, and honoring parents is now implemented out of a moral world view (“gratitude”) that reshapes the concept of obligation. (3) The Ontic Layer. The moral approach of dependence leads to the self’s existential cooperation with the other. The individual reduces his own self in the face of the other and, in R. Soloveitchik’s terms, I go out of myself “toward the thou” (141), and the thou “encroaches upon my privacy and individual separateness” (142).50 The temptation here too is to interpret the ontic layer in existential terms, but the text does not impose this interpretation. R. Soloveitchik speaks mainly of “an existence in solidarity and sympathy” (142). He does not interpret existential cooperation as a dialogical connection in Buber’s terms but as a sense of loving one’s neighbor and a solidarity of sharing “the same fate and ­destiny” (142).   See ch. 11 below.   R. Soloveitchik endorses a perception of parenthood as an experience. Another instance of this approach is Brunner’s view of parenthood as an inter-subjective union and a unique existence. See Brunner, The Divine Imperative, 345–346. The style of the “thou” encroaching upon the “I” appears in ibid., 320. 49 50

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  313 Although this is a different kind of existence, existence with the other, R. Soloveitchik still refers to an emotional and conscious system rather than to distinctive existentialist categories. In brief: in his discussion on honoring parents, R. Soloveitchik sought “to delve into the live religious consciousness” (132). Introducing the commandment to love one’s neighbor marks a change of direction in the essay. Henceforth, the existentialist approach will push the phenomenological one aside. Formally, R. Soloveitchik continues the discussion on honoring parents and sets up a parallel threefold division of the dimensions of loving the other: (1) The Pragmatic-Utilitarian Dimension. “You must not do to others what you do not want others to do to you” (143). The negative formulation, in the style of Hillel the Elder, implies the actual recognition of the other as equal to the self. (2) The Moral-Altruistic Dimension. “A bond of ontic solidarity” (145). This dimension is already formulated in positive terms, and its concern is doing good for the other as prescribed in commandments to visit the sick, comfort mourners, and so forth. (3) The Ontic-Existential Dimension. “Do for your neighbor whatever you are willing to do for yourself ” (145). Rather than merely the symmetrical reverse of the first dimension, R. Soloveitchik identified this dimension with “community existence.” The connection is not only one of solidarity and purposiveness; the other and the “self ” become an existential unity, that is, a new type of existence. “No longer is there a boundary separating the I from the thou” (145). The commandment to honor parents points to an existentialist core, despite the continued phenomenological resonance. His starting point is suffering. R. Soloveitchik opened the discussion with cases of parents hurting their children, be it by destroying their assets (“were they to take a purse of his, full of gold, and cast it in his presence into the sea”) or by publicly shaming them. This opening deals with the “human power of endurance and sufferance” (150). Suffering as a given, discussed at length above and in the previous chapter, is not fully explained in “secular” existentialist terms. The categories of “union in love, the existential community, the sharing with others” (152) are insufficient to describe the suffering constitutive of an individual’s connection to his parents. For that purpose, new existential models are required, based

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on categories “borrowed from our religious life (152).” The model created by R. Soloveitchik, which fits the general existentialist model of honoring parents, is that of God’s partnership in the existential community. This partnership enables connection and mutual exposure between “self ” and other. R. Soloveitchik distinguished “yir’at ha-onesh, fear of punishment” from “yir’at ha-romemut, fear of the exalted,” and categorized fear of parents as fear of the exalted. In the wake of Otto’s characterization of holiness as a special kind of mystery, R. Soloveitchik characterized the divinity as esoteric. The wonderful riddle that is the divinity is revealed, above all, through the origin or the beginning.51 At the cosmic level, origin links up with creation, and at the personal-existential level, origin is the parents. Hence, the “fear of the exalted” reflects the sense of mystery regarding both the parents and God. Formally, this is a phenomenological analysis focusing on the experience of the divine in ­consciousness52 and the derived experience of parenthood. The result, however, is a new kind of community that God is a partner to, which enables the special connections within it: “the mora relationship to a parent must not be torn out of the context of relations to God” (155). The community is not only temporal-local; the actual set of relationships that the revealing God is a partner to continues throughout history. R. Soloveitchik again makes the giving of the Torah and the loyalty to it the foundation of Jewish religious consciousness. And yet, his use of this principle is distinctly existential: the receiving community makes it possible to overcome the existential fear, the fear of death, of ­finitude, and of “meaningless” (156) existence. The eternal community is the covenantal community, which is fulfilled through “a commitment to a singular modus existentis” (156). R. Soloveitchik stresses that Judaism is not a therapeutic system helping to release anxiety but a kind of existence (more precisely, communal existence) with eternity. The link with the “origin” mitigates existential anxiety. Honoring parents is an expression of this link. R. Soloveitchik, then, has created a phenomenological context for an existentialist discussion. The experience of the divinity and of its mystery is no more than a conceptual-formal context for a discussion about overcoming existential fear and anxiety. We overcome anxiety   R. Soloveitchik used the German term Ursprung.   See, for instance, Steven W. Laycock, “God as the Ideal: The All-of-Monads and the All-Consciousness,” in Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Daniel Guerriére (Albany: SUNY, 1990), 254. 51 52

between subject and object: essays on family relationships  315 by changing our stance toward the other and by creating a different kind of existence—communal existence. In this sense, the essay “Parenthood: Natural and Redeemed” fits the philosophical framework of the essays about family life. In this essay, R. Soloveitchik drew a distinction between the parents’ natural connection with their children, conveyed mainly through the ­mother’s ­devotion to them, and the covenant and redemption connection rooted in ties of education, responsibility, commitment, and assistance by both parents. R. Soloveitchik’s distinctive existential concern is expressed in the starting point—the mother’s pain in childbirth. The principle that “any act of redemption is bound up with sacrificial action” (111) sheds light on the starting point. Renunciation continues as the mother brings her child into the covenantal community through the process of education. R. Soloveitchik’s discussion of natural and redeemed parenthood focuses on the relationships of the father, the mother, and the children in the covenantal community by comparison to these relationships in the natural community. The special relationships within the covenantal community enable a possibility of overcoming existence “within finitude” (123) and having a share in eternity. Whereas the essay “Honor and Fear of Parents” oscillates between the essentialist study of subjective consciousness reconstructed through the commandment and an understanding of concrete parenthood, the essay “Parenthood: Natural and Redeemed” deals almost entirely with the existential meaning of parenthood as membership in the community. The Essays on Repentance One further issue merits attention in this context. At the time he was writing his essays on family life, R. Soloveitchik began a series of annual lectures sponsored by the Rabbinical Council of America during the Days of Awe. These lectures, which began in 1962, were later published by Pinchas H. Peli.53 Repentance is assumed in these lectures to have its starting point in existential fear and other situations leading to sin.

53   Pinchas H. Peli, ed., On Repentance in the Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (New York: Paulist Press, 1984). The numbers in parentheses in the following citations refer to this volume.

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For R. Soloveitchik, sin is committed in an ­atmosphere of “­flattery of men in positions of power, indolence, imagined or real fear, weakness or spinelessness; such is ‘the path of sin’ ” (57). Moreover, sin causes “terrible isolation” (117). R. Soloveitchik’s draws various distinctions between explicit halakhic requirements of repentance—confession, relinquishing sin—and mental and conscious process in the penitent’s personality. On the one hand, we find “acquittal” and “the deed of the commandment” (pe‘ulat ha-mitzvah), and on the other, “purification” and “observance of the commandment” (kiyyum ha-mitzvah). Purification and observance, rather than limited to individual action, seek the essential transformation of the personality. R. Soloveitchik focuses less and less on the phenomenological notion of changing the past in consciousness and increasingly on the mental and conscious state of the penitent. The lectures on repentance hardly ever address the problem of dialogue and communication and emphasize instead the situation of the individual. Nor do they coalesce into an overall trend of exposing the problem of the other. R. Soloveitchik did split repentance into individual repentance and the repentance of the people of Israel, which is a homogeneous unit.54 The repentance of the collective atones for the sins of the individual but this atonement is not complete because the collective cannot possibly substitute for the individual’s existential state. The collective, as noted, is perceived as an ontic unit and R. Soloveitchik does not dwell on the problem of intersubjective existential communication. Hence, and despite the change in R. Soloveitchik’s concerns—clearly evident in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” in the essays on family life and, as shown below, in The Lonely Man of Faith—the phenomenological method is still present in his writings, though not as the dominant trend. Summary The discussion focused on the philosophical implications of the essays on family life. These essays mostly reflect R. Soloveitchik’s interest in the range of problems that accompany human existence in a modern and alienated world. As for the philosophical sources, R. Soloveitchik followed the path of a relatively moderate neo-Orthodox theology   R. Soloveitchik used the term Knesset Israel.

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between subject and object: essays on family relationships  317 such as that of Brunner, who is explicitly mentioned in the essays, a theology that founds religious being on the dialectic described according to criteria of religious thought. This theology relates to existential problems directly, and finds in religion an approach to these problems and a pretension to solve them. R. Soloveitchik, however, focused on a very specific angle of sexuality and marriage. Neo-Orthodox theology dealt at length with the status of the woman and her functionality vis-à-vis the man, whereas R. Soloveitchik was less concerned with this issue. He focused on sexuality and marriage as disclosing the human situation and reflecting specific existential realms such as the problem of the other. Sexuality and marriage are a mirror of the alternation between object and subject and of the inter-subjective relationship. The family too, which includes the next generation, expresses dialogical connections and existential situations. The use of the sources attests to the conceptual focus: R. Soloveitchik read the philosophical-religious texts through an existentialist interpretation. He shifted the concern of the theological discussions on humanity from a pre-figurative meaning to concrete situations. The essays on the family are misleading. Anyone expecting to find them dealing with the couple relationship, with marriage, and with sexuality will be disappointed. For R. Soloveitchik, the expressions of a couple relationship are a cover concealing the deep and fundamental root, and this root is human existence. R. Soloveitchik is not interested in marriage as such, but in the inter-subjective connection revealed through it. The partner experiencing guilt, shame, and loneliness is the “other,” and connection with this partner is redeeming. Similarly, R. Soloveitchik is not interested in a study of sexuality as such. He does not attempt to discuss the range of implications entailed by the sexual act, such as the connection between violence and addiction, identity and effacement, and control and lack of control in the sexual act. R. Soloveitchik wanted to focus on the inter-subjective model that emerges thanks to the divine involvement and by means of the halakhic command, which will take shape in The Lonely Man of Faith. Finally, the style of these essays is worth noting. Contrary to “Kol Dodi Dofek,” where R. Soloveitchik related to a defined historical event and to its existential and ethical implications, the essays on family life are not time-bound. The context affected the style too, and these essays are one more link in the traditional chain of preaching. Preaching views biblical figures as ideal types reflecting the ways of the

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world, in the spirit of Nahmanides’ exegesis. Moreover, R. Soloveitchik adopted a style widespread in the typological preaching of the twentieth century, such as the division into natural and personal aspects in man vis-à-vis Adam (in other words: Adam the first and Adam the second) and the derivation of general human characteristics from the biblical archetype. Such divisions are often found in the preaching of Karl Barth, Karl Reiner, and others.55 In the essays on family life, R. Soloveitchik used biblical figures to denote patterns of relationships, and he develops this type of preaching in The Lonely Man of Faith, as shown in the next chapter.

  See ch. 11 below, Appendix 1.

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Dialogue and Faith: The Lonely Man of Faith The Lonely Man of Faith,1 based on a lecture that R. Soloveitchik delivered at the National Institute of Mental Health at Yeshiva University, is founded on his conception of faith. The main focus in my current discussion, focusing mostly on this conception, will draw a comparison between the “early” and “middle” periods in R. Soloveitchik’s work, presenting his discussion of faith in light of his sources through a phenomenological-religious and philosophical-existentialist analysis. I will first trace the development of R. Soloveitchik’s thought on faith from And from There You Shall Seek2 to The Lonely Man of Faith. My claim is that this development is reflected in several conceptual and stylistic characteristics: (1) In And from There You Shall Seek, faith records the constant and ongoing dialectical situation of humanity. Faith is the choice of a dialectical way of life and provides the motivation to contend with it. And from There You Shall Seek reflects a view of faith as encapsulating a consciousness of polarities. Halakhic Man,3 being a description of the Brisk dynasty scholars rather than of R. Soloveitchik himself, does not enter into a deep discussion of faith because the scholars’ consciousness is described according to Hermann Cohen’s epistemological idealism. In this approach, non-epistemic factors such as feelings and existential states lack any philosophical meaning. By contrast, in articles written in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them included in Out of the Whirlwind,4   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1997).   And From There You Shall Seek, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav and Toras HoRav Foundation, 2007). 3   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983). 4   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering and the Human Condition, ed. David Shatz, Joel B. Wolowelsky and Reuven Ziegler (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation and Ktav, 2003). 1 2

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faith no longer fully reflects the dialectic situation but rather the pole opposed to success and self-affirmation. Faith reflects the unresponsiveness of nature and of society to the lonely man, an experience that reflects loneliness, alienation, and suffering. (2) In And from There You Shall Seek, faith is an entirely individual experience. True, R. Soloveitchik never blurred the communalsocial nature of Halakhah, but faith as such is regarded here as a feature of human intimacy. In his early works, the need to discuss the “other” had never surfaced. By contrast, in The Lonely Man of Faith, the other, society, and the community play an essential role in the experience of faith, both concerning its definitions and its therapeutic role. (3) Another feature characterizing the development of R. Soloveitchik’s thought touches on his sources. In his early thought, the neo-Kantian philosophy of Hermann Cohen that had concerned R. Soloveitchik in his dissertation (later published as a book) is a constant partner to the dialogue, to which R. Soloveitchik then added the conventionalist philosophy of science. This addition explains the phenomenon of hiddush since, according to Cohen, there is only one absolute scientific truth. Even when R. Soloveitchik shifts to the use of a different terminology and to other sources of influence, Cohen’s epistemological idealism still serves as a key intellectual frame of reference. Henceforth, R. Soloveitchik gradually abandons this frame and his starting assumptions change. Epistemic idealism, however, is still a latent element shaping R. Soloveitchik’s thought at all times, both positively and negatively. (4) Finally, a consideration that is no less important touches on the character of the discussion. In And from There You Shall Seek, the discussion of faith is conceptual. R. Soloveitchik offered a speculative clarification on the status and the place of faith in the life of believers. Factual-experiential occurrences are also described with phenomenological-systematic tools. By contrast, the most penetrating explication of faith in The Lonely Man of Faith resorts to ideal types, and particularly to “the man of faith” himself, and to a personal and revealing writing style. The analytic approach is replaced by a descriptive-biographical one. The changes in the status of Halakhah in R. Soloveitchik’s various works, and particularly in Halakhic Man as opposed to The Lonely Man of Faith, have been extensively discussed in the growing scholarly



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literature of recent years. By contrast, the discussion that follows deals at length with the distinction between the conception of faith in And from There You Shall Seek and in The Lonely Man of Faith. Let me emphasize again: the publication of The Lonely Man of Faith marks a change in R. Soloveitchik’s approach to faith, which is reflected in several of its characteristics. The central one is that, in And from There You Shall Seek, he posits a connection to the other and to the community that even intensifies in the mid-1950s in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” where it is expanded to the national sphere.5 This connection, however, is not an essential component of his phenomenological discussion of faith. At this time, the concept of faith is explored and clarified as a constitutive component of the individual, the personal believer. The projection of the personal tension onto the collective, and questions about the possibility of a community whose members are believing men of faith are almost entirely absent from R. Soloveitchik’s writings up to this point. In sum: the intimate tense connection between the individual and God is the dominant one in R. Soloveitchik’s early thought. By contrast, in The Lonely Man of Faith, the connection of faith to the “other” and to the community of believers plays an essential role. The possibility of communication between believing subjects and between them and the absolute subject, God, is at the center of his discussion on faith. An important reason for the difference between these two works is their variant methodology, that is, the phenomenological discussion of religious consciousness in And from There You Shall Seek and the existential autobiographical-therapeutic discussion in The Lonely Man of Faith. In a sense, phenomenological discussion is still part of the inclusive methods, where the individual as such does not play a decisive role. Loneliness is not a subject for the phenomenologist’s discussion. This philosophical course, shifting from an inclusive philosophical method to a personal-existential style of writing is quite widespread among twentieth century Jewish thinkers. R. Soloveitchik is among those for whom philosophic inquiry became a reorientation mechanism facilitating exploration and self-discovery . . . Idealistic philosophy afforded him [the Jew] a means of transcending his personal biography, linking it instead to the

5   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek: It Is the Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh,” in Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust, ed. Bernhard Rosenberg (New York: Ktav, 1992), 57–117.

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chapter eleven history of his culture. And existentialism . . . placed the actual experiences of individuals searching for their way as the proper point of departure for coming to terms with the “problem of man.”6 All this conformed to the self-understanding of a Jew who felt that the course of contemporary history was totally expressed in the individual’s search for self, and in the return from collective history to its biographical underpinnings.7

Faith: A Flexible Concept Characteristically, already at the opening of The Lonely Man of Faith, R. Soloveitchik essentially narrows the concept of faith until it sheds all its traditional realms of discourse. How? R. Soloveitchik opens with a personal tone, where he directly presents himself as a typological model of “a man of faith” (5).8 Faith, then, will be dealt within an “autobiographic” mode, and writing will be a therapeutic activity. R. Soloveitchik draws away from an abstract analysis of the concept of faith, and his writing turns to the inner world and to his concrete personality.9 Henceforth, he will suggest the range of problems that concern him, exposing their negative aspects: I have never been seriously troubled by the problem of the Biblical doctrine of creation vis-à-vis the scientific story of evolution at both the cosmic and the organic levels, nor have I been perturbed by the confrontation of the mechanistic interpretation of the human mind with the Biblical spiritual concept of man. I have not been perplexed by the impossibility of fitting the mystery of revelation into the framework of historical empiricism. Moreover, 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. (7)10

 6   The link leading from idealism to existentialism, at least concerning its religious dimension (Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain and others) appears to be the phenomenology of religion.  7   Eliezer Schweid, Jewish Thought in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction, trans. Amnon Hadary (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), 352–353.  8   Henceforth, all references in parentheses in the text are to pages in The Lonely Man of Faith.  9   See Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2008), 119–121. 10   This passage has evoked great scholarly interest. See, for instance, Lawrence Kaplan, “Models of the Ideal Religious Man in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Thought” (in Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 4 (1984): 327–329.



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This passage recognizes various meanings of faith at various times, since R. Soloveitchik was well aware that, in the nineteenth century for instance, biblical criticism had been viewed by many Jewish thinkers as a threat to the belief in revelation and in the holiness of the text. Nevertheless, in his view, the modern person’s faith is not at all troubled by this matter, just as the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution are not a matter for serious discussion. R. Soloveitchik, then, does not delude himself: what had concerned R. Samson Raphael Hirsch and R. David Zvi Hoffman, for instance, does not concern him. Many issues that had troubled religious-Zionist thinkers are, in his view, no longer relevant.11 R. Soloveitchik, then, clearly excludes traditional contents and problems from the modern meaning of faith. Just as he rejects all the traditional approaches on the problem of evil in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” he does so here concerning the concept of faith and notes: “The cultural message of faith changes, indeed, constantly, with the flow of time, the shifting of the spiritual climate” (105). If we wish to understand the meaning of faith in our generation, we must turn to its meaning in the conceptual web that R. Soloveitchik weaves in his essay. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik persisted in his rejection of metaphysics in general and of the methods that had guided Jewish thought throughout the ages, particularly concerning such questions as the human-divine connection, a rejection that had already featured clearly in And from There You Shall Seek. But the difference between the concepts of faith adopted in And from There You Shall Seek and in The Lonely Man of Faith is also significant. In And from There You Shall Seek, the concept of faith assumes absolute meaning, to the point that R. Soloveitchik uses it to distinguish Judaism from other religions in general and from Christianity in particular. R. Soloveitchik was quite determined when he stated the position of “Judaism” and of “Halakhah” in shaping the status and role of faith. Not so in The Lonely Man of Faith, where he clearly retreats from the certainty of the mid-1940s. “Whatever I am about to say,” writes R. Soloveitchik, “is to be seen only as a modest attempt on the part of a man of faith to interpret his spiritual perceptions and emotions in modern theological and philosophical ­categories. My ­interpretive

11   See Dov Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads: A Theological Profile of ReligiousZionism, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden: Brill, 2002), ch. 1. The discussion here is partly based on this chapter.

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gesture is completely subjective and lays no claim to representing a definitive Halakhic philosophy” (9). Faith As a Dialectic Pole In And from There You Shall Seek, faith is perceived in its basic Kierkegaardian sense as a recognition and a recording of the existential tension, which R. Soloveitchik transformed into religious consciousness. More precisely: faith is a tool that enables us to live with the tension and even encourages dialectical tensions of this type. Faith emerges in And from There You Shall Seek as an element that helps us to accept the tension revealed between the two poles: the dynamism of nature and its imperviousness, affirmation, and lowliness. Faith is the confrontation with scientific-intellectual success together with the failure to penetrate nature; equally, faith is the confrontation with the heroic human stand before God, together with the disappearance of God and the attending pain. The consciousness of faith is dialectic. In The Lonely Man of Faith, faith reflects one of the poles. Faith, as noted, emerges with the pole of recognition of nature’s imperviousness and the pole of suffering, which reflects the believer’s persistent dialecticalSisyphean process. Rather than a balancing and therapeutic element or a source of motivation for living with the tension, faith explicitly represents the pole of lowliness, as R. Soloveitchik notes: The genuine and central cause of the feeling of loneliness from which I cannot free myself is to be found in a different dimension, namely, in the experience of faith itself. I am lonely because, in my humble, inadequate way, I am a man of faith for whom to be means to believe, and who substituted “credo” for “cogito” in the time-honored Cartesian maxim. Apparently, in this role, as a man of faith, I must experience a sense of loneliness which is of a compound nature. (4–5)

Between the lines, R. Soloveitchik endorses the critique of Descartes’ thought as a classic model of subjective rationalism, in the model of Heidegger in “Letter on Humanism”12 and of Gabriel Marcel’s claim that the only certainty provided by the cogito relates solely to the

12   Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in The Existentialist Reader: An Anthology of Key Texts, ed. Paul S. MacDonald (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 236–269.



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e­ pistemological subject.13 This type of subjective epistemic certainty does not touch on questions characteristic of concrete existence but, according to R. Soloveitchik, is the starting point for such questions. Faith in The Lonely Man of Faith has thus lost its essential connection to the pole of affirmation and to the finding of divine traces in natural laws, in philosophy, and in the contemplation of nature. Faith is entirely detached from any connection with affirmation. R. Soloveitchik would henceforth be concerned with the “passional experience of contemporary man of faith” (6) and with the meaning of being a “tormented soul” (22).14 To be a believer is to experience the confrontation with a meaningless natural and human reality and thus experience the torment. So where has the pole of affirmation gone? This perception of faith requires fundamental changes in the set of anthropological-typological definitions. Making faith a characteristic of the homo religiosus, as he did in And from There You Shall Seek, no longer fits its true meaning. In The Lonely Man of Faith, therefore, R. Soloveitchik sets up two types: Adam the first, who represents majestic man, and Adam the second, who represents the man of faith. An examination of the man of faith’s various characteristics, then, will reveal the concern as well as the contents of faith. The typological description that R. Soloveitchik chose to employ in The Lonely Man of Faith conveys that rational analysis cannot provide a full description of existence, whereas the description of events, situations, and feelings successfully reveals the existence of faith. Following, then, is an attempt to describe the characteristics of existence through these types and their reactions. Majestic man seeks to subjugate reality and place its powers at his service (“and subdue it”). Henceforth, the pole of self-affirmation undergoes a process of “personification” and differentiation, that is, it is embodied in a distinct and unique figure, majestic man. At the same time, the pole of lowliness is personified by a specific type, the man of faith.15 Majestic man is characterized by an active consciousness that 13   Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel Press, 1971), 16. See also Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 128. 14   See Pinhas Peli, “On Man in the Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), Daat 12 (1984): 103–105. 15   On the various characteristics of this type, see Aryei Fishman, Judaism and Collective Life: Self and Community in the Religious Kibbutz (London: Routledge, 2002), 10–20. In phenomenological-religious thought, these types converge into the divine

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has already been defined by Kierkegaard as one that always focuses on elements outside consciousness and, in this case, on the concrete world through the mathematical sphere.16 His consciousness is not directed to his own existence, as conveyed by the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.” In order to subdue reality, majestic man creates a series of ideal systems—mathematical and physical—that imitate reality and, with their help, subdues concrete reality to his needs. Again, the pivot is the conventionalist philosophy of science: The most characteristic representative of Adam the first is the mathematical scientist17 who whisks us away from the array of tangible things, from color and sound, from heat, touch, and smell which are the only phenomena accessible to our senses, into a formal relational world of thought constructs, the product of his “arbitrary” postulating and spontaneous positing and deducing. This world, woven out of human thought processes, functions with amazing precision and runs parallel to the workings of the real multifarious world of our senses. The modern scientist does not try to explain nature. He only duplicates it. In his full resplendent glory as a creative agent of God,18 he constructs his own world and in mysterious fashion succeeds in controlling his environment through manipulating his own mathematical constructs and creations. (18)

R. Soloveitchik presents a radical version of the conventionalist approach whereby the scientific theory is arbitrary, “subjective arbitrariness” in Reichenbach’s terms.19 Arbitrariness strengthens the image of majestic man as a creative and entirely independent figure.20

entity and, as such, they represent two aspects of the divinity. Karl Barth claimed that, on the one hand, God reflects majesty and, on the other, God is a person or subject. See Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Gifford Lectures 1937–1938, trans. J. M. Haire and Ian Henderson (New York: AMS Press, 1979 [1939]), 33–34. 16   See Ralph Henry Johnson, The Concept of Existence in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 77–78. 17   He usually means the Newtonian scientist, who deals with the mathematical natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). 18   R. Soloveitchik emphasized that the existence of majestic man is not inferior in its standing before God to that of the man of faith. Both types of existence are deliberate divine creations and, as such, both please God. R. Soloveitchik appears to have transposed the Heideggerian principle stating that inauthentic existence is no less real than authentic existence for existential-religious thought. 19   Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time (New York: Dover, 1958), 36–37. Reichenbach questioned the absoluteness of this statement. 20   See Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 25.



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He does not even depend on rational considerations of “thrifty” or convenient (but not “true”) explanations in the creation of a scientific theory, as several conventionalist approaches note; there is no limitation to the “duplication” and control of nature. In this sense, there is no difference between And from There You Shall Seek and Halakhic Man on the one hand and The Lonely Man of Faith on the other: the creation of mathematical-physical theories is the product of reason’s absolute freedom.21 Majestic man is the antithesis of the feeling of dependence on the absolute, through which Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto describe the religious experience. Majestic man creates his ideal models and, as such, does not need to seek divine traces in his creation; he himself—according to Cohen’s epistemic idealism22—creates worlds! This statement emphasizes majestic man’s absolute freedom and control, but without implying that he denies the reality or the power of God. Indeed, quite the opposite: he feels himself a “creative agent,” God’s emissary.23 Since he realizes his creative ability, which is granted by God, he does not need to “follow the traces.” Nor does the experience of facing a threatening nature that reflects the divine presence, an experience to which majestic man is a partner,24 change the picture. The experience is described as follows: Majestic man, even when he belongs to the group of homines religiosi and feels a distinct need for transcendental experiences, is gratified by his encounter with God within the framework of the cosmic drama. Since majestic man is incapable of breaking out of the cosmic cycle, he 21   On other distinctions in the conception of science, see David Schatz, “Science and Religious Consciousness in the Thought of R. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: WZO, 1996), 325–332. These important distinctions touch more on the social status of science and on its application than on the philosophy of science that concerns me here. 22   The connection of majestic man to Cohen’s thought has already been noted by Lawrence Kaplan. See Lawrence Kaplan, “The Religious Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Tradition 14, 2 (1973): 44. 23   R. Soloveitchik emphasized that Adam the first, or majestic man, is a legitimate representation of God’s servant, although this analysis differs from his analysis of Adam’s story in “Confrontation,” Tradition 6:2 (1964): 5–9. See Appendix two below. 24   Lawrence Kaplan, “Maimonides and Soloveitchik on the Knowledge and Imitation of God,” in Moses Maimonides (1138–1204): His Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts, ed. Gorge Hasselhof and Otfried Fraisse (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), 516–517. Kaplan’s article offers important insights but our approaches appear to differ, and R. Soloveitchik’s teachings are open to many interpretations.

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The description of majestic man’s “cosmic experience” indirectly relies, once again, on Hermann Cohen’s interpretation of Kant. According to both Kant and Cohen, scientific laws are reached by applying thought categories to the “given” (das Gegebene), which transcends knowledge as a “preliminary assumption of the sense and the image.”25 Cohen, however, restricted “the given” to a minimum, going so far as to categorize as a mistake the thesis that something that has not emerged from thought can be assigned to it.26 Hence, although majestic man ostensibly has a transcendent experience, no element in his conceptual world transcends knowledge and his experience is therefore not truly transcendent. Majestic man’s ritual and image needs dictate the use of the term transcendent in reference to this experience. Yet, this is a cosmic-immanent experience and, more precisely, an epistemological experience given a transcendent interpretation. Not so the man of faith. Both majestic man and the man of faith are in a quest for the element beyond the qualitative world. For majestic man, however, this element is knowledge and its models, whilst for the man of faith it is the divine presence. As R. Soloveitchik writes: While Adam the first is dynamic and creative, transforming sensory data into thought constructs, Adam the second is receptive and beholds the world in its original dimensions. He 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.27 In a word, Adam the second explores not the scientific abstract universe but the irresistibly fascinating qualitative world where he establishes an intimate relation with God. (23)

The dichotomy between majestic man and the man of faith is thus maximal: the philosopher-scientist (the Marburgian neo-Kantian and the conventionalist) shows no interest in the teeming qualitative world, while the man of faith is indifferent to the ideal models that 25   Hermann Cohen, System der Philosophie, Bd 1, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, dritte auflage (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer Verlag, 1922), 587. 26  Ibid., 81. On this question, see the captivating description of Hans Georg Gadamer, “A New Epoch in the History of the World Begins Here and Now,” in The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Richard Kennington (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 7–11. 27  In And from There You Shall Seek, the blessing is what encourages the quest for God in “cosmic phenomena.”



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knowledge creates. His subjective consciousness is not directed to the mathematical representation of the objects but to their real existence. The man of faith is focused on his private existence and on the dialogic relations with God. As such, then, he is alone, and the command that expresses his existence is “to till it and to keep it.” The term “Hebrew man of faith” appears in William Barrett’s Irrational Man, one of the first significant works on existentialist philosophy. Barrett contrasted the “Hebrew man of faith” with the “Greek man of reason” in the context of a confrontation he created between Hebraism and Hellenism. The quest of the Hebrew man of faith is for a concrete existence. Barrett writes: The man of faith is the concrete man in his wholeness. Hebraism does not raise its eyes to the universal and abstract; its vision is always the concrete, particular, individual man. The Greeks, on the other hand, were the first thinkers in history; they discovered the universal, the abstract and timeless essences, forms, and Ideas . . . The Hebraic emphasis is on commitment, the passionate involvement of man with his own mortal being (at once flesh and spirit), with his offspring, family, tribe, and God; a man abstracted from such involvements would be, to Hebraic thought, but a pale shade of the actual existing human person.28

In place of Barrett’s Hellenism, R. Soloveitchik posits Cohen’s epistemological idealism. But R. Soloveitchik adopted faith as an existential characteristic of the quest for reality and even as a problem of connection and communication, as shown below. More precisely: in And from There You Shall Seek, faith records the tension between scientific-philosophical majesty on the one hand, and the quest for teeming qualitative nature on the other, whereas in The Lonely Man of Faith, faith reflects only the quest for reality. In And from There You Shall Seek, the discursive proofs of God’s existence, which is the channeling and balance of the religious experience, played an important role. In The Lonely Man of Faith, the opposite direction prevails: the decay of religious experience leads to rational proofs.29 For R. Soloveitchik, then, faith is closely connected to the foundations of concrete existence (extracting it from epistemological ­idealism)

28   William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 77–78. 29   “The cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, etcetera.” (The Lonely Man of Faith, 51, note).

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and, as he notes, it is an “existential experience.” Knowledge of the qualitative-concrete and finite world becomes an existential experience. Indeed, faith reflects the attempt to penetrate reality and expose the “image of God” that is within it. The approach opposed to this reality on the one hand, and to epistemological idealism and scientific conventionalism on the other, reveals the deep difference between the two types regarding their motives as well. Majestic man strives to manipulate nature. By contrast, the man of faith strives for “another mode of existence through which man can find his own self, namely, the redemptive” (25). The approach to reality as a hidden divine demand is only one aspect; the man of faith seeks to decode the meaning of personal existence and thereby attain the redemption he longs for. This redemption is merely a palliative to suffering, loneliness, and pain. A preliminary formulation would be that redemption is related to the possibility of communication between the man of faith and others whose existence is distinctively subjective (another man of faith and God). Unquestionably, presenting the man of faith as a figure whose interests are in radical conflict with majestic man prevents a true dialogue between the two ideal types, the subjective and the objective, and I address this issue below. What merits attention here is that the model of loneliness and pain as a primary and fundamental datum of existence had already emerged in R. Soloveitchik’s essays on family life Family Redeemed.30 The need for a personal redemption that is tied to the intersubjective connection while anchored in the objective dimension of existence is also considered in great detail in these essays. Yet, channeling the models and concepts that appear in these essays into the issue of faith requires a more general elaboration, different from questions of coupledom and parenthood. A Life of Faith R. Soloveitchik does not clarify precisely the meaning of the term faith, and often uses it as an a priori datum. Furthermore, faith appears as a typical characteristic of the figure and the action of the man of faith.

30   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships, ed. David Shatz and Joel B. Wolowelsky (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation, 2000).



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Conceptual clarification cannot exhaust the term faith, since such a clarification is still an abstract reflection. The meaning of this term, then, can be discussed in connection with an existence of faith or a life of faith. Here too, a distinction prevails between And from There You Shall Seek and The Lonely Man of Faith. Whereas in the earlier work the reader becomes acquainted with the conceptual-phenomenological explication, at the center of the later one is the concrete figure. In the earlier work, R. Soloveitchik tried to define the phenomenological state of faith through the conceptualization and articulation of a dialectical process. In The Lonely Man of Faith, the speculative concept is replaced by a description of real life. When phenomenological writing is replaced by biographic and therapeutic writing, faith is revealed as the pole of rift and pain. According to this caveat, one might assume that faith according to The Lonely Man of Faith reflects a constitutive foundation or an element directing to a specific type of concrete existence that is characterized by a sense of challenge and mission (actually redemption). The fundamental and original characteristic of an existence of this kind, as noted, is pain and imperviousness. But what are the roots of the pain and the imperviousness? Suffering and pain are an “external” emotional expression of an “internal” real-existential situation. The foundations of this type of existence, “a life of faith,” should therefore be properly defined. Generally, the existence of majestic man can be characterized as objective, and that of the man of faith as ­subjective.31 The three general elements that build up the experience of faith-subjective existence are: (1)  Existential loneliness. (2)  Renunciation and sacrifice. (3) Time and eternity. I will now define the three elements that constitute faith and their possible sources.

31   See Abraham Schweitzer (Sagi), “The Loneliness of the Man of Faith in the Philosophy of Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew) Daat 2–3 (1978–1979): 251–255. R. Soloveitchik describes objective and subjective existence in connection with Halakhah in Kol Dodi Dofek.

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(1)  Existential Loneliness The man of faith is aware that he is not only “alone,” he is also lonely. “Aloneness” is a “practical surface experience,” which immediately disappears when we join a group of other people. By contrast, “loneliness is nothing but the act of questioning one’s own ontological legitimacy” (31). R. Soloveitchik again differentiates between a “surface” feeling and a “deep” situation (for instance, fear vs. anxiety, facing death vs. finitude). The man of faith is lonely because he is not understood. The redemption he strives for, which is concerned with a life of value and meaning, is incomprehensible to the surrounding society, that is, the society of majestic men. Loneliness is an existential component of the human figure. Kierkegaard had already clarified that “‘the knight of faith’32 is assigned solely to himself; he feels the pain of being unable to make himself understandable to others, but he has no vain desire to instruct others.”33 Heidegger argued that the subject is “thrown” against his will into a world of objects wherein he is to realize himself; thus, he is lonely.34 Rollo May presented loneliness as an expression of existential anxiety.35 From the start, subjective existence confronts meaningless objects. This loneliness has a distinct social meaning: the man of faith operates in a social world (“a natural community”) of indifference to and alienation from his values. According to R. Soloveitchik, the natural community is a manipulative association of rational creatures, majestic men, who are prevented from “realizing the metaphysical dilemma and existential paradoxicality, indeed absurdity, embedded in the human ‘I’ awareness” (30).36 The kind of connection that might redeem the man of faith from his existential loneliness is ­meaningless 32   R. Soloveitchik too resorts to this expression in reference to Abraham. See The Lonely Man of Faith, 50. See also David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2 (1982): 244–245. 33   Sǿren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 80. On the impossibility of speech and communication in Kierkegaard’s thought, see Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 84–89. 34   Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 236–237. 35   Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), 27. 36   See Gili Zivan, “The Religious Experience According to R. Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Faith in Changing Times: On the Teachings of R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, ed. Avi Sagi ( Jerusalem: WZO, 1996), 221; Benjamin Ish-Shalom, “Language as a Religious Category in the Works of R. Joseph Ber Soloveitchik” (in Hebrew), in Rabbi



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in such a community. Unawareness of the problem precludes any understanding of cathartic personal redemption and of the very need for it. R. Soloveitchik relied on Heidegger, who had viewed communication as the discourse typical of authentic existence. This kind of discourse exposes human-concrete existence in the world, the being here (Dasein). Authentic discourse is contrasted with artificial discourse.37 But R. Soloveitchik seems to have made authentic discourse between subjects, insofar as it depends on them, impossible: And defeated must Adam the second feel the very instant he scores his great success: the discovery of his humanity, his “I” identity. The “I” awareness which he attains as the result of his untiring search for a redeemed, secure existence brings its own antithesis to the fore: the awareness of his exclusiveness and ontological incompatibility with any other being. Adam the second suddenly finds out that he is alone, that he has alienated himself from the world of the brute and the instinctual mechanical state of an outward existence, while he has failed to ally himself with the intelligent, purposive inward beings who inhabit the new world into which he has entered. Each great redemptive step forward in man’s quest for humanity entails the ever-growing tragic awareness of his aloneness and only-ness38 and consequently of his loneliness and insecurity. (37)

Mordechai Breuer Festschrift: Collected Papers in Jewish Studies, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher, vol. 2 ( Jerusalem: Academon, 1992), 799–821. 37   Heidegger, Being and Time, 204. See also Harrison Hall, “Intentionality and World: Division I of Being and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Gignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 138–139. The intersubjective connection as a problem was emphasized in phenomenological and existentialist psychological writings. Carl Rogers, for instance, would write that “interpersonal communication is almost never achieved except in part” (Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become [Colombus, OH: C. E. Merrill, 1969], 222). On language and revelation in the work of R. Soloveitchik, see also Ish Shalom, “Language as a Religious Category.” On the distinction between genuine and technical or formal dialogue in Martin Buber’s thought, which also reflects the thought pattern of R. Soloveitchik here, see Paul E. Pfuetze, Self, Society, Existence: Human Nature and Dialogue in the Thought of George Herbert Mead and Martin Buber (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 170. 38   R. Soloveitchik hints here at an idea he develops below, in the second characteristic typical of the man of faith: the more the man of faith understands the meaning of redemption as interpersonal (or more precisely, intersubjective) communication, the more he understands that such communication is impossible. This is a latent meaning of the failure (the ability to connect) which arrives at the height of success (understanding the idea of redemption). Only God’s intervention will enable the connection. See below.

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When the characteristics of faith are formulated according to the man of faith type, we find that faith is related to an existential situation of alienation39 and the confrontation with it (or, more precisely, the attempt to alleviate it). Lack of communication with the natural community exposes the rootedness of loneliness, which is not confined to the social-communitarian aspect. According to R. Soloveitchik, the social dimension of loneliness rests on its natural-cosmic dimension. Loneliness has a cosmic meaning as well, then, which R. Soloveitchik had already discussed at length in And from There You Shall Seek: reality does not reveal itself to the man of faith but hides and vanishes when confronted with the sincere and desperate attempt to understand its essence and its purpose (the imperviousness of the nature pole). Added to these two dimensions is a distinctly religious-theological and metaphysical aspect: even God eludes the (rational and experiential) human yearning to know Him. Alienation, then, is also evident in God. Loneliness is thus a three-staged process: (1) natural-cosmic; (2) social; (3) divine. But the social-communal aspect of loneliness, that is, the impossibility of communication as a characteristic of faith, is the essential innovation of The Lonely Man of Faith. Man cannot, by definition, expose his deep existential structure to the other. He is unique, and his existential basis is intransitive. Hence the failure that comes with success. When the man of faith finally succeeds in discovering the nature of his existence, he finds that it cannot be explained in rational or emotional terms. Like Abraham, the “knight of faith” according to Kierkegaard, so the man of faith comes to learn that he is, by definition, incomprehensible to those surrounding him. “‘To be’ means to be the only one, singular and different, and consequently lonely” (40–41). Adam the second, therefore, “has no companion with whom to communicate” (38). Making the pole of suffering and imperviousness the starting point of faith sheds light on the distance from rationality and feeling typical of the pole antithetical to faith, thereby precluding genuine communication. The split between majestic man and the man of faith compels a starting point of loneliness and lack of communication, and the conception of faith is shaped accordingly.

39   See Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002), ch. 1.



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(2)  Renunciation and Sacrifice The man of faith knows that redemption from loneliness is attained through self-retreat and sacrifice. R. Soloveitchik presented a paradoxical model: when the man of faith succeeds (by discovering his identity and his existence), he fails (the state of loneliness and renunciation); in his failure (loneliness and sacrifice) he attains success (redemption through communication with “the other”). “The medium of attaining full redemption is, again, defeat. This new companionship [with a special and unique friend like the man of faith] is not attained through conquest, but through surrender and retreat” (39). Faith, then, is linked to renunciation and sacrifice. Here too, R. Soloveitchik relies on Kierkegaard, who wrote: “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.”40 The renunciation of the “knight of faith” that Kierkegaard describes in the context of the binding of Isaac hinges mainly on morality, but also involves another important dimension. Samuel Hugo Bergman, whose articles influenced R. Soloveitchik’s thought and style, described the “movement” typical of Abraham: “The renunciation of the world. The renouncing man detaches himself from his ties to the world. Through this detachment from the outside, he turns these ties into something internal, ideal.”41 What he renounces is the realization of the loving ties between the binding father and the bound son in the exterior world. But in R. Soloveitchik’s discussion, the man of faith renounces initiative and “subduing” the other, since what must be clarified is: (1) How will the lonely man find his friend? Majestic man and the man of faith coexist in one society and, ostensibly, do not look different. The experience of an existence pervaded by suffering and indifference touches the innermost layers of the “self.” How, then, will what R. Soloveitchik called “existential companionship” be

40   Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 46. See also Reidar Thomte, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion (Westport, CO: Greenwood, 1948), 56–57. 41   Samuel Hugo Bergman, “Sǿren Kierkegaard and the Binding of Isaac” (in Hebrew), in Thinkers and Believers (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1959), 125.

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sustained? This problem was clearly formulated by Jacques Maritain: “I am known to other men. They know me as object, not as subject. They are unaware of my subjectivity as such.”42 How, then, will one man of faith living a subjective existence find his companion, who also lives a similar existence? (2) In the previous questions, we assumed that the man of faith seeks to connect with another subject but is unable to find him. A deeper question is how will the man of faith be aware of the actual need for communication with the other and of the concomitant cathartic experience? The man of faith is, by definition, a lone, introverted subject. How will he know that his redemption lies in exposure to the other? The answer lies in renunciation and sacrifice: God reveals to man the secret of communication, in a manifestation of divine grace. The redemptive experience percolates into the believer’s consciousness through divine revelation. The man of faith then finds that an exterior mediator is required, a “He.” Faith implies a recognition of limitations, a gathering inward, and a dependence on the absolute subject—God. The man of faith a priori renounces any initiative and manipulation of the other. Dependence on the absolute assumes a social face: “Adam the first met the female all by himself, while Adam the second was introduced to Eve by God, who summoned Adam to join Eve in an existential community molded by sacrificial action and suffering, and who Himself became a partner in this community” (43–44). This is how a “community of faith” or “covenantal community” is built, where the “I” and the “thou”—two lonely men of faith—are exposed to one another by virtue of the presence and participation of God (“He”) in the community of faith. The perception of God as the initiator, mediator, and enabler of the connection with the other is clearly articulated in Karl Barth’s analysis of the creation story. Barth writes: God Himself brings her to him. God Himself brings and gives her to him.43 Without this link, everything which precedes and follows is unthinkable. It is God’s relationship to man, His mercy toward him, which brings about this completion of his creation, giving meaning to 42   Will Herberg, Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 48. 43   According to Genesis 2:22: “and brought her to the man.”



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the existence of woman and disclosing her secret. Naturally the completion of man’s creation in the relationship of I and Though, of male and female, in the mutual encounter and duality of the two, is the work of God . . . He creates not only the I and Thou, man and woman, but also their mutual relationship.44

It is God that enables the encounter between Adam and Eve, and exposes the dialectic of their intersubjective relationship.45 R. Soloveitchik applied Barth’s approach to the terminology and the existential problematic he presented in The Lonely Man of Faith. This approach recurs in the model offered by Buber, whereby the existence of God enables the dialogical connection, and is indeed a guarantee of its ­existence.46 The pole of suffering and imperviousness that is mentioned in And from There You Shall Seek assumes a distinctly social-­communal aspect. Reliance on God’s mediation is, as noted, the renunciation of the man of faith: “If God had not joined the community of Adam and Eve, they would have never been able and would have never cared to make the paradoxical leap over the gap, indeed abyss, separating two individuals whose personal experiential messages are written in a private code undecipherable by anyone else” (68). Since the two men of faith are characterized by introversion, the relationship between them is a paradox. Going out of the self toward the “other” is intrinsically contradictory, since the meaning of the subjectivity characterizing the existence of the man of faith is a non­transferable uniqueness. Only God’s intervention enables to bridge the gap between men of faith. Unlike for Buber, for instance, who 44   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation, part I (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958), 298. 45   Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism, 33–34. 46   See Rivka Horowitz, Discoveries Bearing on the Germination of Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Hebrew series), vol. 5, No. 8 (1975), 185. Cf. Zvi Kolitz, Confrontation: The Existential Thought of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1993), 45; David Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights, 2001), 168; Ephraim Meir, Jewish Existential Philosophers in Dialogue (in Hebrew) ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004), 67. Note, however, the difference between R. Soloveitchik and Buber. Buber makes connection a foundation of life and, in many ways, higher than the individual’s personal existence. The dialogical association is certainly more interesting than individual existence. See, for instance, Pfuetze, Self, Society, Existence, 140. For R. Soloveitchik, by contrast, individual existence is fundamental and no less interesting than the existence of relations. Furthermore, R. Soloveitchik presented at the time extensive discussions about individual existence without resorting to question of dialogue; at times, the existential characteristic is not social.

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assumes that the finite I-Thou precedes the eternal I-Thou,47 for the man of faith, the eternal I-Thou precedes and conditions the connection between man and other.48 Furthermore: unlike Buber, who holds that man confronts God with his independence and his autonomy in the context of their dialogue, and contrary to André Neher, who went even further and claimed that God needs the covenant more than man,49 R. Soloveitchik did not abandon the phenomenological model that speaks of a “creature-feeling” as a human characteristic, in the style of Schleiermacher and Otto.50 R. Soloveitchik views man as absolutely dependent on God for his redemption through the covenant. In sum: the encounter and the dialogue with the other depend on the presence of the divine element. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik’s teachings fit Jacques Maritain’s approach, who stated: “Religion is essentially that which no philosophy can be: a relation of person to person with all the risk, the mystery, the dread, the confidence, the delight, and the torment that lie in such a relationship.”51 God is revealed, above all, as allowing the paradoxical connection between two men of faith, and this connection is tied to renunciation and to a sense of worthlessness given the divine power and the mysterium tremendum that defines it. Renouncing initiative is added to another basic renunciation. The state of faith, as noted, is related to suffering. The man of faith does not seek redemption in order to eradicate suffering, which is not possible. “Only the covenantal community consisting of all three grammatical personae—I, thou, and He—can and does alleviate the passional 47   See Avi Sagi (Schweitzer), “The Relationship between ‘I-Thou’ and ‘I-Eternal Thou’ in the Philosophy of M. Buber” (in Hebrew), Daat 7 (1981): 151–152; Yehoyada Amir, “Buber: The Finite Thou and the Eternal Thou” (in Hebrew), in Martin Buber: On the Centenary of His Birth, ed. Yohanan Bloch, Hayyim Gordon, and Menachem Dorman (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982), 89; Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work: The Early Years, 1878–1923 (New York: Dutton, 1981), 354–371. See also Ish Shalom, “Language as a Religious Category,” 819. 48   R. Soloveitchik did not renounce the dialectic here either, and the integration of the prophecy and prayer communities leads to the wavering between divine and human initiative. See, for instance, The Lonely Man of Faith, 56–58. 49   André Neher, The Prophetic Existence, trans. William Wolf (South Brunswick, NJ: Barnes, 1969), 120–121. This book was first published about ten years before The Lonely Man of Faith. 50   See Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 433; Robert Gibbs, “Teaching Rosenzweig as a Philosopher and Lévinas as a Jewish Thinker,” in Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Raphael Jospe (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 222. 51   Herberg, Four Existentialist Theologians, 45–46. Maritain clarified that he deals with the intersubjective relationship.



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e­ xperience of Adam the second [the man of faith]” (53). Recognizing pain as the basic datum of existence that can be alleviated but not avoided is the renunciation of the man of faith who, a priori, renounces a theodicy that could blur and deny suffering. The man of faith acknowledges suffering and seeks to share the existential experience of pain with another subject in the covenantal community. The goal, in his view, is communication. “The loneliness of the man of faith is an integral part of his destiny from which he can never be completely liberated” (79–80). In the essays on family life, which are largely a preface to The Lonely Man of Faith, renunciation for the sake of communication is epitomized by sexual fidelity. The partners give up sexual experiences with others (adultery) and take upon themselves other halakhic limitations. By contrast, faith requires us to renounce initiative and power. Only God can enable the dialogue. Another difference between these works concerns the alleviation of tension and pain. The tension and the pain that characterize faith and the existence of faith cannot be entirely resolved and, therefore, one must learn to live with them. By contrast, the intersubjective relationship of marital partners, which unfolds within defined objective limitations, is a teleological relationship (to bring forth and educate children) that, to some extent, enables tension release. In any event, the model of renunciation as the foundation of the connection emerges in the discussions about family life, and is developed in detail in The Lonely Man of Faith. (3)  Time and Eternity A significant feature of the man of faith is his attitude to the “experience of time” (71). R. Soloveitchik’s earlier writings offer different time perceptions: (1) In The Halakhic Mind, objective time for homo religiosus is in a mid-position between quantitative and qualitative time. (2) In “Sacred and Profane,”52 the dominant element in the experience of time of homo religiosus is the qualitative element. (3) In Halakhic Man, the pure halakhic type leans in a quantitative direction. 52   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Sacred and Profane, Kodesh and Hol in World Perspectives,” Gesher 2, 1 (1966).

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The time perception of majestic man, according to his definition, is consistent with the quantitative-mathematical perception of halakhic man: “The time with which he works and which he knows is quantified, spatialized, and measured, belonging to a cosmic coordinate system” (70). On the time perception of the man of faith, R. Soloveitchik writes as follows: In retrospect, covenantal man re-experiences the rendezvous with God in which the covenant, as a promise, hope, and vision, originated. In prospect, he beholds the full eschatological realization of his covenant, its promise, hope, and vision. Let us not forget that the covenantal community includes the “He” who addresses Himself to man not only from the “now” dimension but also from the supposedly already vanished past . . . as well as from the as yet unborn future, for all boundaries establishing “before,” “now,” and “after” disappear when God the Eternal speaks. (71)

The starting point in a faith existence is, once again, tragedy and paradox, and the experience of time is included in such an existence. Action in the present, then, is paradoxical, since the present is abstract and lacks essence, missing either past or future. On the one hand, man is a historical creature, and on the other, he is supra-historical.53 Initially, the man of faith confronts an unstable temporal existence. Such an existence is one of the expressions of loneliness. Only the appearance of God (in the covenantal community) gives meaning to paradoxical time and makes the man of faith responsible for both past and future. Until the appearance of God, the man of faith had been subject to quantitative time, which for him is meaningless; through God’s revelation, he becomes aware of the qualitativeness of time. Note that halakhic man too is a partner in the past and the future insofar as the

53   The version of the paradox intended by R. Soloveitchik is not clear. Several versions have been considered in existentialist thought. Sartre, for instance, related the paradox of temporality to the other as well: “I myself am historical to the extent that others also make history and make me, but I am a transhistorical absolute by virtue of what I make of what they make of me, have made of me and will make of me in the future.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 161. See also, for instance, Hanoch Tennen, The Conception of an Existential Ethics in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan: Massada, 1977), 60–61; Dov Schwartz, “On Finitude and its Existentialist Sources in David Hartman’s Thought” (in Hebrew), in Renewing Jewish Commitment: The Work and Thought of David Hartman, vol. 1, ed. Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Shalom Hartman Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 495.



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continuing tradition of Torah innovations is concerned; and the tradition has a supra-temporal and supra-local dimension.54 The difference between halakhic man and the man of faith, besides the tendency of halakhic man toward quantitative time, is the following: for halakhic man, the supra-temporal element is reflected in the scholarly tradition, whereas for the man of faith, what turns an unsubstantial and paradoxical temporal existence into a meaningful and qualitative one is God’s revelation. Faith and the “Other” Having clarified that the starting point of faith is the pole of suffering and imperviousness, we can define the functionality of faith in the concrete existence whose characteristics were described above. Faith relates directly to the encounter and the connection with the other. This tie between faith and the possibility of dialogue has been discussed at length in the philosophy of Buber, who specifically states: “I said he believes, but that really means he meets.”55 R. Soloveitchik articulates this approach as follows: In the existential community . . . one hears not only the rhythmic sound of the production line, but also the rhythmic beat of hearts starved for existential companionship, and all-embracing sympathy and experiencing the grandeur of the faith commitment; there, one lonely soul finds another soul tormented by loneliness and solitude yet unqualifiedly committed. (41–42)56

In other words, faith does not help a man leading a lonely existence, an existence that cannot be imitated, to reveal himself to the other and create a community. The “other” is, on the one hand, another man of faith, and on the other, God Himself. Faith, then, fulfills a distinctively redemptive role, which allows man to create a dialogue with another man and thus establish a social and communal existence. Without faith, extricating oneself from the fetters of existential loneliness, or even understanding it in the proper light, would be 54   See Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 26–27. 55   Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Continuum, 2004), 49 (emphasis in original ). 56   See Kaplan, “Models of the Ideal Religious Man,” 331–332.

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i­ mpossible. Furthermore, creating a teleological community is impossible without faith. Faith is the element that grants man the strength and the power to overcome constraints in the relationships between God and the world, individual and society, time and eternity. Paul Tillich recurrently emphasized in his writings the community of faith concept. He claimed that, as a structured part of the personality, faith requires its own language, the language of faith, and therefore, “only in a community of language can man actualize his faith.”57 By contrast, R. Soloveitchik saw faith as a pre-communal state, though he did agree that the most effective way of coping with this situation and its problems is in the context of a community—“the covenantal faith community” (79). In 1950, Gabriel Marcel published a work entitled The Mystery of Being,58 where he posited the existence of various types of thought. Primary thought rests on the “objective” method of the empirical sciences. By contrast, the second type of thought is transcendent, with consciousness perceiving itself as a unity beyond “objective” categories. Subjective consciousness continues with its characteristic transcendence, turning to the “other” as an immediate partner in the being and essence that the “self ” takes part in,59 including a quest for the divine. Subjective consciousness, then, is inter-subjective in the most basic “ontological” sense of the concept (in Marcel’s terminology). Formally, Marcel’s thought models resembles the structure of consciousness in And from There You Shall Seek and, to some extent, the division between majestic man, who relies on scientific thought, and the man of faith, whose existence is subjective and who is interested in transcendent existence. Marcel, however, views the turn to the other as a characteristic of the second type of thought. Acknowledging the other’s existence is an immediate and direct expression of transcendent consciousness. The issue of the “other” does indeed fulfill an important role in his theological-existential thought. Marcel’s philosophy is an interesting cultural link enabling us to understand the change recorded in R. Soloveitchik’s thought from And from There   Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 24.   Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1950). 59   As Moshe Schwartz showed, this is a fundamental move that transcends Buber’s dialogical philosophy. See Moshe Scwarcz, Jewish Thought and General Culture (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1976), 130–144. 57 58



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You Shall Seek, where the other does not play an essential role, to The Lonely Man of Faith, where communication with the other is a significant component. Faith in The Lonely Man of Faith, which enables a dialogue with the other and with God, is rationally and factually irreducible. “Only peripheral elements of the act of faith can be projected on a cognitive, pragmatic background” (101). Faith, then, has a deep existential meaning that is not exhausted through explanation nor amenable to conceptual-rational translation, since faith is the very core of subjectivity, hence the difficult and perhaps hopeless role of a message of faith to a modern generation that finds the existential experience of cathartic redemption and genuine dialogue entirely alien. The message of the modern world directs us to an extra-conscious object and its conquest, whereas the message of faith directs consciousness to a lonely existence and, in its light, to intersubjective communication. Acknowledgement of the other does not mean his recognition as an object, but acknowledgement of his being a subject with a personal existence. This philosophical-existential claim is the precise aim of R. Soloveitchik’s biographical-therapeutic writing in The Lonely Man of Faith. Turnabout One conclusion of The Lonely Man of Faith is that these two types— the man of faith and majestic man—build the human being. The oscillation and the rift between them is what characterizes personality: Adam the first, majestic man of dominion and success, and Adam the second, the lonely man of faith, obedience, and defeat, are not two different people locked in an external confrontation as an “I” opposite a “thou,” but one person who is involved in self-confrontation. “I,” Adam the first, confronts the “I,” Adam the second. In every one of us abide two personae—the creative, majestic Adam the first, and the submissive, humble Adam the second. As we portrayed them typologically, their views are not commensurate; their methods are different, their modes of thinking, distinct, the categories in which they interpret themselves and their environment, incongruous. (84–85)

R. Soloveitchik created an existential structure that is both subjective and objective. He thereby endorsed a widespread existential philosophical model that rejected pure subjective existence on various grounds,

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both ethical and concrete. Heidegger, for instance, presented human existence as a combination of the authentic and inauthentic or as an oscillation between them, and negated exclusive authenticity.60 This model extends also to the associations between man and other (Adam and Eve), which also becomes dual and combined. This appears to be the way that R. Soloveitchik interpreted the dual relationship in Buber’s thought. Already in I and Thou, Buber laid the foundation for the existential leap between the “I-Thou” and the “I-He” relationships. Natural and human reality do not allow for purely subjective relationships: The world of It (Eswelt) . . . offers him [man] all manner of incitements and excitements, activity and knowledge. In this chronicle of solid benefits the moments of the Thou appear as strange lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfaction behind them, shattering security—in short, uncanny moments we can well dispense with.61

Human existence is based on the presence of these two types and these two sets of relationships between the individual and the other. The oscillation between majestic man and the man of faith turns into a rift when majestic man seeks to take over the experience of faith and translate it into his own terms. The rift emerges because the experience of faith is untranslatable. As a unique experience, it is intransitive. The man of faith is once more thrown into existential loneliness, and the dialectic becomes a recurrent crisis. Faith, then, relates directly to the perception of an inner oscillation between various types of existence, product of a deliberate divine plan. Faith expresses a hope of balance between the extreme poles in the present or at the end of days.62 The other, then, enables the reflection of personal consciousness, and the problem of dialogue and relationship leads to the problem of the religious person’s conscious dialectic when confronting the modern world. 60   See, for instance, William B. Macomber, The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 89–90. 61   Buber, I and Thou, 32. See Abraham Shapira, Between Spirit and Reality: Dual Structures in the Thought of M. M. Buber (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1994), 153–154. 62   See Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads, 193–210.



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The concept of faith thus assumes new meaning in R. Soloveitchik’s thought as formulated in The Lonely Man of Faith, different in two essential aspects from its previous articulations and, to some extent, also from And from There You Shall Seek: (1) Reality. Faith turns, above all, to the existential situation of the concrete person, and the man of faith is defined and shaped accordingly. Faith, then, is not the psychological characterization of a particular ability or an epistemic characterization of one or another abstract truth, nor is it exhausted by a phenomenological discussion of religious consciousness. (2) Redemption and relationship. The second element is no less important: faith becomes a necessary or even exclusive component in the process of personal and purifying redemption. Personal redemption at this point is essentially rooted in the question of the other, that is, in the ability to discover the other, in mutual exposure, and in the possibility of dialogue. Through faith, the person manages to find a companion, to establish a community, and even to discover the concealed God. “Faith” in R. Soloveitchik’s version is such an elementary characteristic that, at times, one finds it needs no explanation whatsoever. Faith is not a way of approaching life, but rather life itself. From And from There You Shall Seek to The Lonely Man of Faith We can now re-examine the development of R. Soloveitchik’s conception of faith in light of his sources and his times. This development is evident both in “external” characteristics, stylistic and formal, and in the essential features of the method. And from There You Shall Seek takes rational and emotional achievements as its starting point, and the distortion of the quest for God as its opposite pole; faith can then reconcile and balance the tense process. R. Soloveitchik may have been directly influenced by the work of Barrett, who claimed that theodicy presents God as a metaphysical object amenable to logical thought. This approach was meant to give security in a world where human beings feel homeless. “But reason cannot give that security; if it could, faith would be neither necessary nor so

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difficult.”63 Faith, then, is the element that emerges in response to the collapse of trust in reason. In And from There You Shall Seek, faith grants us power to contend with the collapse of reason brought about by an elusive God and impervious nature. In this work, neo-Kantian philosophy and the conventionalist approach to science lead to absolute distrust in the power of reason. The negation of attributes plays a central role in the process of reason’s collapse. R. Soloveitchik thereby adopted Schleiermacher’s model: the inability to describe God focuses the philosopher’s attention on the believer and, more precisely, on the feeling of faith.64 And from There You Shall Seek definitely describes a philosopher-scientist who longs for God and discovers the pole of disappointment and indifference, when faith is what helps him to live with this tension. Not so in The Lonely Man of Faith. This work describes a suffering man who, above all, seeks to understand his existence. Suffering and indifference as a starting point a priori rule out any chance of a perfect balance. Furthermore, pouring rational characteristics into the figure of majestic man precludes a view of faith as a dialectical record of the tension between philosophy and actual experience. The man of faith does not know the experience of nature’s responsiveness on the one hand and its indifference on the other; he also gives up on nature as a source of knowledge about God.65 Contrary to And from There You Shall Seek, faith itself does not ensure the man of faith’s motivation or healing. In The Lonely Man of Faith, faith is not a balancing element. Quite the contrary, faith records the pole of suffering and imperviousness and expresses the hopeless quest for redemption through the encounter with the other and through self-sacrifice. Redemption is entirely dependent on divine grace: “Only when he [Abraham] met God on earth as Father, Brother, and Friend—not only along the uncharted astral routes—did he feel redeemed” (50). The perception of faith changes according to its function: in And from There You Shall Seek, faith appears in the tension between the open and the concealed, whereas in The Lonely Man of Faith, faith appears in the situation of concealment. In And from There You Shall Seek, faith helps the individual to live a life of tense process, whereas   Barrett, Irrational Man, 97.   See, for instance, Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 94. 65   This experience is described at length in The Lonely Man of Faith, 47–52. 63 64



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in The Lonely Man of Faith, faith describes and expresses the “pessimistic” pole of the tension.66 In And from There You Shall Seek, faith itself is, in many regards, a kind of (individual ) redemption, whereas in The Lonely Man of Faith, faith is a situation (a kind of existence) that drives the believer to seek redemption. The Lonely Man of Faith, which appeared several years after And from There You Shall Seek, precedes it in its description of the existence of faith. The man of faith becomes acquainted with the type of experiences presented in the work from the early period, but from a different starting point: the pole of indifference and suffering. Hence the different status of faith in each one of these works: in And from There You Shall Seek it is a functional status, which helps to cope with a life of tension and persist in it, whereas in The Lonely Man of Faith, faith plays a descriptive role (a kind of existence), and only from this perspective is its functional status ultimately exposed. The cause appears to be rooted in the style of writing, which attests to the realm of discussion. In And from There You Shall Seek, the writing is phenomenological-religious. R. Soloveitchik seeks to describe the life characterized by a dialectical experience. By contrast, in The Lonely Man of Faith, the writing is biographical-therapeutic. That is, R. Soloveitchik describes the kind of existence compelled by faith out of his own experience, on the assumption that such writing would inspire other men of faith to create a covenantal community. One may view And from There You Shall Seek and The Lonely Man of Faith as complementary or choose to emphasize the differences between them, but they clearly mark a process of development in R. Soloveitchik’s approach to faith. Background and Sources We have followed the development of R. Soloveitchik’s conception of faith, emphasizing his philosophical sources and the cultural climate of their emergence as well as his own consciousness of innovation vis-à-vis traditional Jewish thought.67 Unquestionably, R. Soloveitchik 66   Again, the therapeutic role of faith is present in The Lonely Man of Faith. R. Soloveitchik refers to the ties between men of faith as a “faith commitment” (42). Faith, however, reflects above all a state (the pole of suffering and imperviousness). 67   This consciousness emerges in Kol Dodi Dofek.

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developed his ideas in the course of a theoretical dialogue with philosophical, religious, and existential conceptions, and many scholars have already pointed to the incorporation of Kierkegaardian ideas in his thought. In many regards, his thoughts on faith may be viewed as a “Jewish version” of various religious-existential motifs raised in modern Protestant philosophy from Schleiermacher and up to Niehbur and Tillich, as well as in non-religious existential thought. R. Soloveitchik also engaged in a substantive and critical dialogue with Jewish sources. Besides his knowledge of phenomenological-religious sources, R. Soloveitchik was largely a religious-Zionist thinker. Religious-Zionist thought tried to understand the order of the world and the plans of Divine Providence; in this regard, it was no different from traditional Jewish thought.68 The guiding of history and the examination of its standing in light of the idea of redemption had been a concern of Jewish thought for centuries. But religious-Zionist philosophy is unique in that many thinkers considered it their role not only to describe the theological background of the period but also to inquire into the character of the person active at the time of redemption. The new religious type, the messianic anthropological model, concerns religious-Zionist thought no less than the cosmic and human aspects. The figure, the personality, and the consciousness of the believer are no less important than the concept of faith itself. R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy is an indication of the extreme “human” and anthropological shift in religious-Zionist thought. The development of his conception of faith was affected by religious-Zionism, be it directly under its influence or as a counter-reaction and a sobering response.

68   See, for instance, Schwartz, Faith at the Crossroads; idem, The Land of Israel in Religious-Zionist Thought (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997); idem, ReligiousZionism between Logic and Messianism (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1999); idem, Challenge and Crisis in Rabbi Kook’s Circle (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv; Am Oved, 2001).

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Appendix 1 The Creation Story: On the Sources of the Dual Split One source dealing with the creation story and counted among those that have most strongly influenced modern religious discourse is the discussion on the subject by Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Generally, R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist writings are not influenced by the “crisis theology.” Barth and the thinkers in the theological group that he founded did not engage in a dialogue with modern science, contrary to R. Soloveitchik who did. Moreover, Barth and his colleagues were not particularly interested in the social aspect of dogma, whereas the community plays a significant role in R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist philosophy. These observations, however, do not apply to the subject of Creation, which left a mark on R. Soloveitchik’s preaching style. In the third volume of Church Dogmatics, The Doctrine of Creation, Barth offered a consistent interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis. R. Soloveitchik, by contrast, although aware of Barth’s exegesis and possibly even influenced by it, did not pretend to offer a consistent interpretation of Adam’s stories in Genesis. His sole aim was to clarify several motifs in order to base feelings of loneliness and alienation on the sources and their exegeses. In this appendix, I compare between Barth’s and R. Soloveitchik’s interpretations. Barth explained at length the meaning of the two stories of creation, pointing out that each one requires a different interpretation method (233),69 and that the second story “compels us to consider the relationship between creation and covenant from a very different—indeed from the opposite angle” (228). Barth also traced the meaning of the differences between the two stories, such as the changes in the description of the creation of man and the use of the name God (Yahweh) as opposed to the Lord God (Elohim) (234). R. Soloveitchik was certainly familiar with Barth’s discussion, and my intention here is to examine whether Barth’s influence on him was substantive or merely formal. As will   Henceforth, the numbers in parentheses refer to Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, The Doctrine of Creation. Gerald Blidstein touched briefly on the closeness between R. Soloveitchik’s exegesis and that of Barth. See Gerald Blidstein, “The Matrimonial Covenant” (in Hebrew), Akdamot: A Journal of Jewish Thought 13 (2003), 256. See also Alan Brill, “Elements of Dialectic Theology in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s View of Torah Study,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, vol. 1, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2006), 265–296. 69

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be shown, R. Soloveitchik’s trend of thought and his emphases are essentially different from Barth’s, the formal closeness between them notwithstanding. Adam the First Barth argued that the first description of creation presents, for the first time, a presence and confrontation between “I-Adam” and “ThouGod.” This is the meaning of creation “in the image.” “In the image of God” is not a feature or an attribute of humans. He wrote: “He [man] would not be man if he were not the image of God. He is the image of God in the fact that he is man” (184). The partnership of Adam and God is expressed in the fact that Adam is responsible and active vis-à-vis God. The first description of creation indeed presents Adam as extremely powerful in the sense that he is a partner to the divinity, but Barth emphasized that “the biblical witness makes no reference at all to the peculiar intellectual and moral talents and possibilities of man, to his reason and its determination and exercise” (185). The cooperation between man and God follows from the very definition of man as such. The partnership and the analogy between man and God are evident in yet another fact: man is alone just as God is alone. Man was not created as a group or as a species among other species. The only relationship of the human creature is with another human creature, and this statement emerges from the very act of his creation as male and female: “Man is no more solitary than God. But as God is one, and He alone is God, so man as man is one and alone, and two only in the duality of his kind, i. e. in the duality of man and woman” (186). We thus find that, for Barth, God’s uniqueness is what dictates human uniqueness and aloneness. The meaning that R. Soloveitchik derived from the first story of creation is different from, and largely antithetical to, Barth’s. R. Soloveitchik actually saw in the first story a direct reflection of the conquest of creation by applying intellectual talent. Scientific thought is what grants control to Adam the first.70 R. Soloveitchik poured Hermann

70   Although Adam indeed ignores moral dilemmas, this need not imply that he lacks moral principles. “Adam the first . . . also displays creativity in the world of the norm: he legislates for himself norms and laws because a dignified existence is an



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Cohen’s epistemic and scientific idealism into the figure of Adam the first, and presented this approach as an expression of God’s image. “Adam the first . . . engages in creative work, trying to imitate his Maker (imitatio Dei). The most characteristic representative of Adam the first is the mathematical scientist who whisks us away . . . into a formal relational world of thought constructs.”71 He therefore emphasized the element of loneliness in his description of Adam the second.72 Adam the first was and remained the rational creature guided by the truths of mathematical-physical science. By contrast, Barth stated in his exegesis of the first story of creation that intellectual ability does not turn Adam into God’s image; therefore, he resorted to an analogy when stating the partnership between man and God, as Emil Brunner had already noted.73 R. Soloveitchik thought it was important that the fluctuation between scientific knowledge and an existence of faith should be determined already in the creation of Adam the first. Barth did not think so. Finally, Barth thought it important to clarify at length that the broad human sway over the world is not an independent attribute but a reflection of divine sovereignty. The image of God in no way overshadows human “creatureliness” (189). Barth strove to restrict the vast scope of authority granted to humans or, more precisely, to place it under the right light. R. Soloveitchik did endorse this statement but reversed its focus: he used it in order to grant full legitimacy to the action of Adam the first. R. Soloveitchik relied on divine authority to clarify that Adam the first too worships God in his own way. Divine authority enabled him to control existence and, as such, he is God’s

orderly one. . . . Adam the first is always an aesthete, whether engaged in an intellectual or in an ethical performance” (The Lonely Man of Faith, 18–19). 71  Ibid., 18. 72   “‘To be’ means to be the only one, singular and different, and consequently lonely. For what causes man to be lonely and feel insecure if not the awareness of his uniqueness and exclusiveness? The ‘I’ is lonely, experiencing ontological incompleteness and causalness, because there is no one who exists like the ‘I’ and because the modus existentiae of the ‘I’ cannot be repeated, imitated, or experienced by others.” (The Lonely Man of Faith, 40–41; see also ibid., 49–50). Barth viewed loneliness as already present in Adam the first, since he saw the first story as a preparation for the second. See below. 73   Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 2, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952), 64. As a rule, Barth rejected analogical thinking, and Brunner therefore noted (note 1) that Barth’s recourse to analogy in this regard causes him “special satisfaction.”

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servant. “In doing all this, Adam the first is trying to carry out the mandate entrusted to him by his Maker.”74 Continuity v. Polarization A further distinction between Barth’s and R. Soloveitchik’s approaches lies in the relationship between the two stories. Barth emphasized that the attitude to the other reflects true humanity, and that God’s image is reflected at the most qualitative level of human interaction. The creation of man and woman in the first story is a kind of paradigm of both the relationship between man and God and of the relationship with the other. Barth later claimed that the fact of dual creation may be viewed as a “type of the history of the covenant and salvation which will take place between him and his Creator . . . But these are matters which are more explicitly treated by the second biblical witness, and we will not anticipate their development at this point” (186–187). Barth saw the second story of creation as a development and expansion of the first, in the sense that the first story is an external description of creation, whereas the second is a description “from inside” (232).75 The incipient existential dialectic is intimated in the first story, which focuses on the confrontation and cooperation between Adam and God, while the full analysis and particulars of this dialectic appear in the second story of creation. This is the story that presents, in detail, the dialectical confrontation between Adam the second and Eve: on the one hand, the woman as other is part of the human creature, as symbolized by the side, and on the other, she is “a being with its own autonomous nature and structure” (296). This is the dialectic meaning that would not have been exposed were it not for the detailed story (297). God’s intervention is what made the dialectical association possible, as already noted in this chapter. Barth clarified that the statement “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18) acquires meaning due to the fact that creation is as yet unfinished (287). The second story thus continues the description of creation.   The Lonely Man of Faith, 19.  In this assumption, as in others, Barth relies on the theory of Scripture’s literary sources. R. Soloveitchik stated that biblical criticism was not a problem that concerned him (ibid., 7), and this clarification definitely eased his selective and critical use of Protestant philosophy. 74 75



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R. Soloveitchik obviously did not see the second story of creation as a development of and a complement to the first but rather as its antithesis. The first story reflects a distinct attitude adopted by Adam toward himself and toward the world, whereas the second story expresses an entirely different approach. The dialectic does not appear at all and is not even intimated in the first story of creation. Adam is complete in his existence. Contrary to And from There You Shall Seek, which describes the fall of the scientist, The Lonely Man of Faith discerns no cracks in scientific knowledge. The second story of creation, therefore, exposes a new dialectic dimension. Only after we become acquainted with Adam the second do we understand that human existence, including epistemic-scientific existence, is not exhausted by a one-dimensional perspective. The first story, however, never hints to this dialectic. More precisely, the difference between R. Soloveitchik and Barth is not only literary. Barth does not think that the dialectic involves a traumatic exposure. In his view, awareness of human existence is disclosed progressively, beginning with the core in the first description and up to the full explication in the second. By contrast, R. Soloveitchik held that epistemic-scientific existence is self-contained and self-sufficient from the start, and our awareness of it as one of the poles in the fluctuation of human existence is therefore a shocking experience. The relationship between the two stories of creation will concern me in the discussion of the second story as well. Adam the Second Barth interpreted the second story of creation as, above all, a cosmic and theological-abstract statement; only afterwards did he pay attention to the existential and dialogical meanings. Barth opened with the claim that Adam the second is involved in the universe and has a defined mission in it. “To till it and to keep it” means worshipping God with the rest of the world’s creatures. The first story presents Adam’s place in a far more “anthropocentric” mode than the second. The split between a stand vis-à-vis nature on the one hand, and involvement with nature on the other reflect, respectively, control over the earth as opposed to tilling it. “God,” Barth hyperbolically argues, “needs the farmer or gardener” (235). The purpose of Adam the second is the following:

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chapter eleven The existence of man within the whole is indeed the existence of one who is commissioned to serve and work. He must give himself to till and keep the earth in order that it may have meaning when God will bring it to perfection. In this function man is responsible to both God and the creature. And in this function he fulfills the meaning of his own existence. Yet it must not be forgotten that it is not he but God who will plant the earth and therefore fulfill its hope and bring about its perfection. And it is not he but God who will create the other condition for the fulfillment of his hope, who will provide a mist for the earth and therefore rain and humidity76 without which the service and work of man would be in vain. (237)

The meaning of human life is ultimately determined by God and derives from the human place in the cosmos. The task imposed on humans follows from the divine and cosmic world. The dual name, Lord God, reflects the combination of creation and covenant poured into the second description of human creation. Barth derived from the interpreted text the pre-figurative meanings that interested him as a Protestant theologian. I will not enter into these meanings here but will trace how R. Soloveitchik read Scripture as a description of, and a therapy for, existential problems. Let us now consider the connection between creation and Adam the second in the thought of R. Soloveitchik. Adam the second turns to the qualitative world out of curiosity rather than out of an attempt to impose mathematical-physical models on it. He looks “at every beam of light, in every bud and blossom, in the morning breeze and the stillness of a starlit evening.”77 But this curiosity is not necessarily an involvement in nature in the sense of tilling it and keeping it. Adam the second is troubled by the question of nature’s indifference and by teleology.78 The answer he seeks, however, concerns the intersubjective relationship and the existential community. His approach is modest in its pretensions and does not seek to amend the cosmicdivine world. For him, “the Truly Real seems to disappear from the cosmic scene.”79 R. Soloveitchik did not assign great significance to the cosmic aspect that occupied Barth at great length. R. Soloveitchik’s explanation for the difference between the two stories lies in the distinction between   According to Genesis 2:6.   The Lonely Man of Faith, 23. 78   The first and second questions are described in ibid., 21–22. 79  Ibid., 47. 76 77

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a turn to the objective outside (control over nature) and a turn to the subjective inside. In some sense, a contrast with Barth prevails here as well: whereas Adam the first turns to nature and is interested in subduing it out of curiosity and empathy, Adam the second has a consciousness of uniqueness and ontological incompatibility with other creatures, as in the formulation of R. Soloveitchik, who added: Adam the second suddenly finds out that he is alone, that he has alienated himself from the world of the brute and the instinctual mechanical state of an outward existence, while he has failed to ally himself with the intelligent, purposive inward beings who inhabit the new world into which he has entered.80

In my analysis of these remarks, I noted that they convey a blatant alienation from existence. According to Barth, Adam the second turns to his surroundings and becomes part of them, whereas according to R. Soloveitchik, he is estranged from them. Natural curiosity generates withdrawal and rejection, and the explanation of the divine names follows accordingly. Whereas Barth sees the combination Lord God as an integration of creation and covenant, a wondrous blend of two aspects, R. Soloveitchik views it as a polarization of these aspects and as disappointment with one of them. In his view, Adam the second “had to shift his transcendental experience to a different level at which the finite ‘I’ meets the infinite He ‘face-to-face.’ This strange communal relation between man and God is symbolized by the Tetragrammaton.”81 It is therefore clear why, for Barth, God intervened in the second creation story immediately with the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Man successfully overcomes being dust and ashes with God’s active assistance. God is therefore “refuge and hope” (237). Already at an early stage, God assists man to overcome the existential fears that follow from his being “dust from the ground.” R. Soloveitchik did agree with Barth that breathing the breath of life is not a metaphor for “some divine potential or endowment in Adam symbolized by imago Dei,” yet does reflect the experience of God.82 Barth’s focus, however, is on active divine assistance, whereas R. Soloveitchik’s is on the human experience of God. For R. Soloveitchik, God becomes an active ­element

 Ibid., 37.  Ibid., 51. 82  Ibid., 23. 80 81

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only when he enables communication between two men of faith or, in other words, with the establishment of a community. Despite the deep differences between Barth’s and R. Soloveitchik’s readings, one cannot ignore the closeness between them and, more precisely, the meaning that R. Soloveitchik chose out of the many options that Barth presented. Barth’s interest was to find cosmic and pre-figurative aspects in the biblical story, but he was not oblivious to the dialogical aspect of the text. Quite the contrary, he emphasized that the creation of the woman implies exposure to the other and the founding of the covenant. Barth emphasized in his writings that the Bible is not an impersonal text; its concern is the divine revelation and, as such, it is a turn of the “I” to the “Thou.”83 He clarified that what follows from the second story of creation is that “to be created good, man needs a being like him and yet different from him, so that in it he will recognise himself but not only himself, since it is to him a Thou as truly as he is an I, and he is to it a Thou as truly as it is an I” (290). According to Barth, God is revealed to humans in this dialogical fashion as well, and the covenant therefore rests on a recognition of, and a reflection in, the “other.” The reflection in the other is a result of responsibility and freedom (292).84 Furthermore: existential loneliness becomes a covenant when a human being confronts the other. This is the basis for the expansion of the second story of creation vis-à-vis the first: the I-Thou connection in the sense of a “help to match him” (Genesis 2:18) “belongs to the history of creation” (290) and complements it. Summary Two main differences emerge between Barth and R. Soloveitchik: 1) Relationship and Contrast. Contrary to R. Soloveitchik, Barth viewed the second story as an expansion of the first. In his view,

83   See, for instance, John McConachie, The Barthian Theology and the Man of Today (London: Harper and Brothers, 1933), 109. 84   Freedom is obviously not a free choice in the sense of two or more options but in the sense of affirming and opting for the divine decision: “He chooses the fact that he is elected. He decides for the decision which has been made concerning him. He remains man” (293).



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the first story set the foundations for a confrontation between “I” and “thou,” and the second story detailed the meanings of the communication with the other. R. Soloveitchik also ascribed this meaning to the second story, but he saw it as a contrast to the first. The type of the first story does not know confrontation with the other as such. 2) Added Values. Barth ascribed additional meaning to the second story, beyond communication with the other. R. Soloveitchik was largely indifferent to cosmic and theological elements of this kind and confined himself to the issue of the connection and the confrontation between the “I” and the “thou.” This analysis suggests that Barth and R. Soloveitchik are close on one point, namely, the dialogical emphasis in the second story where Adam and Eve appear as subjects, though Barth seldom resorted to this existentialist terminology. Barth and R. Soloveitchik appear rather different and distant, then, and the similarity between them is merely formal and hermeneutical. Hence, the claim that R. Soloveitchik “conducted a significant philosophical dialogue with Protestant thinkers such as Otto, Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth,”85 seems to require further examination. R. Soloveitchik’s terminology concerning the existentialist and phenomenological stance of the individual and the community is certainly based on these thinkers. But did he indeed engage in a true dialogue with them? His claim, after all, is that only Halakhah enables a correct perspective on the individual and the community. Protestant thinkers did offer the correct “diagnosis,” just as existentialist psychologists did discern the true problems of the individual. But R. Soloveitchik does not accept even a trace of these thinkers Christian religious thought, nor does he discuss it as such. R. Soloveitchik’s view on the Jewish-Christian dialogue, as reflected in the article “Confrontation,” is discussed in Appendix 2 below.

85   Gili Zivan, Religion without Illusion: An Inquiry into the Thought of Soloveitchik, Leibowitz, Goldman, and Hartman (in Hebrew) ( Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 2005), 192.

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chapter eleven Appendix 2 The Lonely Man of Faith and “Confrontation”

The article “Confrontation,” first published in 1964, has been discussed mainly in regard to the message about inter-religious dialogue that people sought to find in it.86 This article considers the issue at the focus of The Lonely Man of Faith, inter-subjective communication,87 and its lines of thematic development largely fit those of The Lonely Man of Faith. “Confrontation,” however, includes several important changes, which I discuss below. The Individual In the first part, “Confrontation” presents a triple developmental model of human existence based on the duality of object and subject: 1) Object. One-dimensional existence for the individual, lacking awareness and a sense of inner tension as well as external tension in the individual’s standing vis-à-vis the surroundings. Objective existence is that of “a simple natural being.”88 This existence entails a moral aspect: objective existence is hedonistic and leaves no traces. 2) Subject. Confrontational existence, where individuals stand vis-àvis their freedom and capabilities (inner tension) and vis-à-vis the objective world (external tension). As such, human beings are conscious of the gap and tension between their own existence and the complete existence they could achieve; internal existential tension appears in the wake of the divine command. As for external ­tension, 86   On the connection of this article to the inter-religious dialogue see Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter, 131–165; Daniel Rynhold, “The Philosophical Foundations of Soloveitchik’s Critique of Interfaith Dialogue,” Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003): 101–120; Reuven Kimelman, “Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel on Jewish-Christian Relations,” The Edah Journal 4, 2 (2004): 1–21; Eugene Korn, “The Man of Faith and Religious Dialogue: Revisiting ‘Confrontation,’” Modern Judaism (2005): 290–315. 87   For a discussion that merges these texts see Kolitz, Confrontation: The Existential Thought of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik. 88   Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, 6, 2 (1964), 5.

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we are exposed to our loneliness vis-à-vis the world of nature, which reflects an objective order. Two reactions are ­possible:

(a)  Subduing nature through scientific knowledge. (b)  Despair and “absurd nightmare.”

The first reaction implies a contest, because nature does not respond to the human intellectual momentum. “The order of things and events, in spite of its intrinsic knowability and rationality, does not always respond to human inquiry and quite often rejects all pleas for a cooperative relationship.”89 The Torah encourages science’s contest with indifferent nature, even though such attempts expose the subject’s loneliness. 3) Inter-Subjective. Whereas the previous stage denoted the subject’s contest with the object, at this stage the confrontation is between one subject and another. The problem here is not overcoming opposition but actual communication with another subject, who is also characterized by loneliness and by a non-transitive uniqueness. Two subjects discover that communication between them, language and dialogue, simultaneously unite and separate. “When Adam addressed himself to Eve, employing the word as the means of communication, he certainly told her not only what united them but also what separated them.”90 I turn now to the distinctions between The Lonely Man of Faith and “Confrontation” and to their significance. In The Lonely Man of Faith, the starting point of objective existence is the subduing of nature (majestic man). According to this work, human beings, by their very definition as God’s image, are not objects in the first sense that was determined in “Confrontation,” that is, existing in a natural and passionate state. In The Lonely Man of Faith, objective existence is realized as the subduing of nature, whereas in “Confrontation,” objective existence does not approach nature as an object of control. In “Confrontation,” nature does not stand vis-à-vis the object and the object merges with it.

 Ibid., 11.  Ibid., 15.

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The question is: why is there no real confrontation between majestic man and nature in The Lonely Man of Faith? Does majestic man fail to sense the strangeness and opposition of nature? The answer is simple: nature is not subdued through a direct encounter. In order to subdue nature, majestic man turns to the abstract mathematical world first. R. Soloveitchik clings to the conventionalist approach in the philosophy of science, whereby only at the first stage does curiosity move the scientist to turn directly to the qualitative world. At the second stage, scientists focus on the structured-mathematical world of their creation, so that nature is in no way an object of confrontation. Majestic man does not sense loneliness when facing nature and does not view it as a “hostile” element. As noted: “The modern scientist does not try to explain nature. He only duplicates it.”91 A further distinction between these two texts concerns the nature of the existential characteristic of loneliness and the possibility of inter-subjective connection. In The Lonely Man of Faith, loneliness is absolute and a priori precludes any possibility of communication. One could never become aware that another equally special subject exists were it not for God’s grace. Only divine involvement enables intersubjective awareness. Inter-subjective communication, then, is only possibly in the context of a community (I, thou, and it-God). In “Confrontation,” by contrast, awareness of the other’s subjective existence does not entail divine mediation and grace. Inter-subjective existence is a given that can be encouraged, turned into a norm (“divine commandment”) and sanctified. Dialogue, however, is a primary element of existence. R. Soloveitchik writes: “When Adam addressed himself to Eve, employing the word as the means of communication, he certainly told her not only what united them but also what separated them. Eve was both enlightened and perplexed, assured and troubled by his word.”92 Both subjects learn by themselves the meaning of the inter-subjective connection. “In fact, the closer two individuals get to know each other, the more aware they become of the metaphysical distance separating them.”93 R. Soloveitchik painstakingly noted that the divine commandment is an essential component of the second level of existence. The

  The Lonely Man of Faith, 18.   “Confrontation,” 15. 93  Ibid. 91 92

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subject becomes a subject in the wake of the divine command. But the inter-subjective connection is perceived in “Confrontation” as a fundamental characteristic of human existence rather than a result of divine grace. The personal redemption of The Lonely Man of Faith is the starting point of existence in “Confrontation.” The question of emphases also merits attention. In The Lonely Man of Faith, R. Soloveitchik let the reader understand that loneliness is not entirely redeemable, but he still strove for a concept of redemption. True friendship “is the exclusive experience awarded by God to covenantal man, who is thus redeemed from his agonizing solitude.”94 By contrast, in “Confrontation” he unequivocally argued that loneliness is a necessary existential characteristic of human life. Such a characteristic does not change in light of divine intervention either and, accordingly, redemption does not imply the elimination of loneliness but a life of dignity and balance with loneliness: “Man is a social being, yearning for a together-existence in which services are exchanged and experiences shared, and a lonely creature, shy and reticent, fearful of the intruding cynical glance of his next-door neighbor.”95 The threat that the inter-subjective relationship could become a subject-object relationship accompanies existence. R. Soloveitchik endorsed Sartre’s style, even though we have no evidence of Sartre’s direct influence on him. According to Sartre, the gaze accompanies the subject regardless of whether the other is present there or not. But the gaze is not an abstract, artificial element; the gaze is the concrete characteristic of being visible. For R. Soloveitchik, the balance between two subjects is delicate and fluid. The inter-subjective relationship could turn into “a formal subject-object relationship.”96 Community An additional point of encounter between The Lonely Man of Faith and “Confrontation” is in the transition from individual to community. Once again, the axis of the discussion differs in these two texts. In The Lonely Man of Faith, the community of faith stands mainly

  The Lonely Man of Faith, 69.   “Confrontation,” 16. 96  Ibid., 17. 94 95

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vis-à-vis the community of majesty or the natural community, leading the individual to fluctuate between them. The tension between them is reflected in the individual’s dialectical existence. By contrast, in “Confrontation,” the community of faith stands vis-à-vis other communities of faith, that is, the confrontation is inter-religious. In both texts, the inter-subjective connection of individuals is displaced to the communities. But in The Lonely Man of Faith, the communities are intrareligious, that is, they are variations of the same religiosity, whereas in “Confrontation,” the communities are founded on different religions. In “Confrontation,” loneliness is a stable and constant characteristic of individual existence and this fact radiates to the community as well. No genuine bridge exists between communities of faith. Each one of these communities is enclosed in its own inner circle and interreligious dialogue is doomed to failure. Eugene Korn argued passionately that R. Soloveitchik’s view would have changed in light of the change in the attitudes of the Catholic Church toward Jews and Judaism, which occurred two years after the publication of “Confrontation” (the Nostra Aetate encyclical) and culminated in the recognition of the State of Israel in 1994.97 Concerning R. Soloveitchik’s stance, note the following: 1) We must differentiate Judaism as a culture from Judaism as a religion. The cultural element is universal and refers to the stance visà-vis nature and its conquest. The religious element is the particular and refers to “the numinous nature of the act of faith itself.”98 2) Inter-religious dialogue is possible in the cultural realm, as long as it is conducted with mutual respect. If the relationship of the non-Jewish to the Jewish world had conformed to the divine arrangement for one human being to meet the other on the basis of equality, friendship and sympathy, the Jew would have been able to become fully involved together with the rest of humanity in the cosmic confrontation.99

This principle includes four conditions that make the dialogue reciprocal and egalitarian.

  Korn, “The Man of Faith and Religious Dialogue,” 238ff.   “Confrontation,” 19. 99  Ibid. 97 98

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3) Inter-religious dialogue is not possible concerning the religious element. “The word of faith,” the logos, is non-transferable. And the reason is that revelation is personal. Korn’s claim is certainly correct regarding a dialogue that emphasizes the common denominator of the religions participating in it. The cultural dialogue seeks mutual enrichment regarding such issues as the standing of religion in the modern world, but not concerning the phenomenological dimension of experiencing the divine presence.100 Christianity’s adoption of an attitude of respect and reciprocity toward Judaism makes the dialogue possible. A ritual religious dialogue, however, is impossible by the very definition of the religious element as intransitive. Even when a genuine cultural dialogue does take place, the ritual religious element still remains intransitive. The ideal dialogue is thus dialectical. The ritual religious element a priori precludes the option of a full dialogue.

  Cf. “The Man of Faith and Religious Dialogue,” 306.

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Epilogue

From phenomenology to Existentialism The previous volume pointed out the coherence of R. Soloveitchik’s thought in the mid-1940s: Halakhic Man, And from There You Shall Seek, and The Halakhic Mind complement and enrich one another. This is not the case, however, in the transition from the “early” period of R. Soloveitchik’s throught to works written in the mid-1950s. His interests changed to some extent over the years, and so did his sources. In this epilogue, I briefly sum up this process. The Question of the Sources in And from There You Shall Seek The question of the sources, as shown below, is essential when we seek to understand the contents of R. Soloveitchik’s thought. This is not merely a formal-academic matter; the choice of his sources reveals the character of his views. And from There You Shall Seek had fitted perfectly into R. Soloveitchik’s cultural world, where at least four different currents and undercurrents that had left their mark on the 1920s and 1930s met up: 1) The Phenomenology of Religion. R. Soloveitchik was highly influenced by the essentialist approach to religion, which “brackets” the world outside consciousness. In And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik applied to Jewish sources the approaches of, for instance, Max Scheler, Rudolf Otto, and Reinhold Niebuhr. 2) The Theology of Crisis. Theologians such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner influenced R. Soloveitchik’s model of an arbitrary revelation and a jealous God. Revelation is a paradox. Most probably, R. Soloveitchik had reservations about the extremism of Barth, who drew a radical distinction between reason and the religious message and traced God’s image accordingly, and he preferred

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Brunner’s more moderate outlook instead.1 The arbitrary model, however, draws largely on Barth’s pessimistic starting assumption about human nature and on the uncompromising rejection of metaphysics as an extra-religious realm. 3) Existentialism. Incipient signs of religious existentialism begin to appear in And from There You Shall Seek. Existentialist anxiety and its balance in a religious context make the potential influence of thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel highly plausible. The mark of Heidegger, who R. Soloveitchik apparently viewed as mainly a phenomenologist, is also evident in this work. But the existentialist layer in And from There You Shall Seek is merely an anticipation, involving conceptual starts to be developed at a later stage. Knowledge of Kierkegaard and of religious existentialist thinkers begin to strike roots in this work, but do not yet leave a significant mark. 4) Epistemic Idealism. Although R. Soloveitchik did adopt trends from religious throught, as the previous three items suggest, he never abandoned the “rational” aspect in the description of religion, using terms he borrowed from Hermann Cohen. The question of the sources of And from There You Shall Seek is important because reliance on different sources is one of the ways that R. Soloveitchik used in order to emphasize the dialectics of consciousness. At times, different passages can be read and interpreted simultaneously according to different philosophical and cultural traditions. R. Soloveitchik’s writing style reflects the dialectical contents. In works from the mid-1950s and in The Lonely Man of Faith, the existentialist motif intensifies and becomes central, although traces of other cultural and religious approaches are still evident in this work. Existentialist psychology, which became prominent in the United States in the 1950s, is also significantly present in R. Soloveitchik’s thought, and the focus of his works changes. And from There You Shall Seek, then, is a work that should be understood against the background of a period and its cultural characteristics. R. Soloveitchik attempted to show in this work that Judaism occupies a unique and significant place in the confrontation with 1   See, for instance, Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947), 95. See also the summary of Justo L. González, A History of Christian Thought, vol. 3, From the Protestant Reformation to the Twentieth Century (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1975), 436–437.



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the problems raised by modernity and in the way religion proposes to cope with them. Maimonides In this sense, Maimonides’ key role in And from There You Shall Seek is thus understandable. R. Soloveitchik’s identification with this prominent figure follows also from Maimonides’ teachings. Maimonides’ world view did not target the intellectual and cultural achievements of contemporary thinkers for overall criticism. Instead, and contrary to Islamic theologians, he adopted the scientific approach of Moslem philosophers while questioning some of their assumptions. He thereby saw Judaism as a perfect religion, contrary to the specific faults he found in others. R. Soloveitchik endorsed this approach. He did not offer an overall critique of contemporary religious philosophy and prevalent cultural trends, as Judah Halevi had done in his time. And from There You Shall Seek is indeed extremely critical of Christianity, but he is highly influenced by the religious phenomenology that emerged in the wake of the First World War and even before it. Hence, Maimonides is the figure that reflects and symbolizes R. Soloveitchik’s philosophical orientation. The central role of Maimonides in R. Soloveitchik’s writings deserves further clarification at this point. R. Soloveitchik does quote the Mishneh Torah at length in support of his views. The apparent reason for this is obvious: the chain of scholarship and the Oral Law are a solid foundation in the thought of R. Soloveitchik, who tirelessly emphasizes the centrality of transmission from one generation to the next. But there is a further, hidden reason: Mishneh Torah is a work that is wondrously adjusted to the objective dimension of consciousness, as R. Soloveitchik shows at length in The Halakhic Mind. In this work, R. Soloveitchik claimed that an act is not completed through action as such but expresses a dimension of consciousness. Complete consciousness, however, cannot be described without its concrete aspect, yet consciousness is not exhausted by its subjective dimension. Only Judaism, therefore, offers a perfect picture of consciousness. Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, in all its diverse features, reflects practical consciousness. This work is not a collection of practical directions, like the Shulkhan Arukh. Mishneh Torah reflects an entire consciousness of action: reasons for the commandments, abstract ideas, the past (the laws of the Temple and others), the future (the laws on the Messiah),

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and so forth.2 As the practical-objective dimension of consciousness restrains the passionate subjective one, so does Maimonides as a practical halakhist limit and contain R. Soloveitchik’s intense and impassioned thinking. R. Soloveitchik’s ideas stretch far, and the secret of his defense of Orthodox Judaism is to turn action into a regulating and balancing consciousness. On these grounds, R. Soloveitchik states in The Halakhic Mind that the Mishneh Torah, contrary to The Guide of the Perplexed,3 is a successful reconstruction of consciousness. For this reason too, Maimonides, the man of practical Halakhah, remains R. Soloveitchik’s constant companion. Uniqueness The two central innovations in And from There You Shall Seek concerning the uniqueness of Judaism or, more precisely, religious Jewish consciousness, are the following: (1) Radicalization. R. Soloveitchik held that Jewish religious consciousness is complex, intricate, and diverse in ways hardly ever recorded in the literature dealing with religious consciousness. In his view, Judaism presents a series of dialectical constructs that are located within other dialectical structures. Consciousness is made up of many shifts and transformations, when external fluctuations rely on even deeper, foundational shifts. This muddle of emotions and conscious attitudes appears in various cultural trends: the descriptions of the hero in Romantic literature, the Freudian and Jungian analysis of the structure of the psyche, and the struggle against negative dispositions in Jewish Musar literature. R. Soloveitchik brought all these trends together in the phenomenological description of religious Jewish consciousness, thereby radicalizing it to extremes. (2) Halakhah and Consciousness. The extremism just described expresses the subjective dimension of consciousness, and R. Soloveitchik 2   For an extensive study of this question, see Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 3   See Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 1, Religion or Halakhah, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), ch. 3.



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argues that religious Jewish consciousness closely ties this dimension to the “objective” one. The commandments are perceived as a regulating element, which prevents subjective extremism from developing into mysticism or madness. R. Soloveitchik encouraged the understanding of kabbalistic-mystical motifs as integral components of consciousness, but opposed the mystification of consciousness. The extreme dialectical structure of consciousness does apply to hidden mystical dispositions as well, but the regulating framework of Halakhah does not allow these dispositions to go beyond the margins of consciousness. Clearly, then, R. Soloveitchik’s interest focuses on the study of consciousness and, as such, And from There You Shall Seek is fundamentally a phenomenological-religious work. And yet, it already contains incipient signs of interest in existentialist philosophy. Between the lines, the reader is exposed to formulations and discussions dealing with individual concrete existence. For instance, Kierkegaard’s significant influence on R. Soloveitchik is also evident, as noted, at the time the essentialist study of consciousness from a phenomenological perspective had been his main concern. This hidden trend develops during the 1950s and becomes central in a series of essays such as “Kol Dodi Dofek” and The Lonely Man of Faith. In these studies, the phenomenological research of consciousness is pushed to the margins and interest shifts to the possibility of dialogue and communication in light of the starting points of concrete existence—loneliness and subjectivity. Problems extensively discussed in the philosophy of Heidegger on the one hand, and of Buber on the other, become central in the “middle” period of R. Soloveitchik’s thought, that is, until the end of the 1960s. The shift becomes patently evident: the problem of the other, which had not been important in R. Soloveitchik’s early articles, becomes the central issue from the mid-1950s onward. Nevertheless, note that the models of consciousness presented in And from There You Shall Seek were not abandoned in the middle period. R. Soloveitchik continues to write essays based both on the study of consciousness and on the existential situation, but he does not create a synthesis between these two approaches. The essay “Kibbud u-Mora: Honor and Fear of Parents,” which appears in Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships,4   See ch. 9 above.

4

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and the article “Al Ahavat ha-Torah U-Ge‘ulat Nefesh ha-Dor,”5 which were written in 1959–1960, begin with the consciousness model and end with the existentialist model. These approaches are contiguous but do not interact. The periodization of R. Soloveitchik’s writings, then, is not as rigid and stable as the initial analysis appears to suggest. And yet, the characteristics of the early and middle periods are clearly evident: the first is marked by the study of consciousness and the second by the study of existence, which is added to the study of consciousness and is mostly unaware (at least explicitly) of the differences and the tensions between them. The difference between religious phenomenology and existentialism in R. Soloveitchik’s thought is already evident in their respective starting points: R. Soloveitchik’s variety of religious phenomenology begins with a distinctly religious assumption—human beings seek God. The discussion also clarifies the opposite—though less interesting to R. Soloveitchik—assumption: God seeks human beings. The starting point is thus clearly religious, focusing on the complex and polar relationships between human beings and God. The intricacies and hesitations of consciousness, by definition, oscillate between the quest for and the recoil from God. By contrast, the existentialist approach found in “Kol Dodi Dofek,” in the essays on family relationships, and in The Lonely Man of Faith begins from a “secular” starting point: the sense of loneliness and avoidance of communication. The theoretical discussion does expose the religious roots of the feeling, such as the incomprehensible standing of the man of faith vis-à-vis majestic man, and even offers a solution through divine involvement in the community. The starting point, however, is a given existential situation that has no compelling religious description: suffering and loneliness. This situation leads human beings to seek its reasons but, in itself, can be defined and illustrated in entirely “secularized” terms:

5   Printed in Divrei Hashkafah (in Hebrew), trans. from Yiddish Moshe Krone ( Jerusalem: WZO, 1993), 203–216 (appeared first in Ha-Do’ar, 1960). R. Soloveitchik refers there to religious consciousness as “existentialist consciousness. Cf. Alan Brill, “Elements of Dialectic Theology in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s View of Torah Study,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2006), 278–282. R. Soloveitchik, as noted, was not always rigorous in his use of philosophical terms, and perhaps this was his intention to begin with. In my view, as noted, R. Soloveitchik strove to describe the religious experience and philosophical methods, both phenomenological and existentialist, proved too limited for this purpose.



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(1)  The givenness of suffering and loneliness. (2) The very formulation of such situations as therapeutic. (3) The need to gain knowledge of the other as therapeutic. (4) The creation of an existential community that will regulate intersubjective communication. After clarifying these models, the religious element enters the picture and plays a dual role, as follows: (1) Exposing the reasons for suffering and lonelines (the message of faith in a secular and thus alienated world). (2) Offering a solution to this situation that facilitates knowledge of the other and the establishment of a community (prophecy, prayer, and so forth). This structure does not fit And from There You Shall Seek, which begins with a quest for God and its failure that leads to arbitrary revelation, thereby gradually exposing a complex and dialectical religious consciousness. Furthermore: some of R. Soloveitchik’s writings from the mid-1950s show a fluctuation between phenomenology and existentialism. Despite the discord between these two approaches, R. Soloveitchik did not choose between them. The dialectic of religion is manifest in R. Soloveitchik’s writings in the recurrent shifts between phenomenology and existentialism, a shift that is not found in And from There You Shall Seek and in other writings of this period. The place of science in the structure of consciousness, as noted, when Hermann Cohen’s epistemic idealism is present in the background, is still discussed in this work as a conscious and existential option. This issue surfaces regarding natural consciousness in And from There You Shall Seek and majestic man in The Lonely Man of Faith. Although R. Soloveitchik viewed critical idealism as a constant representation of the self-affirmation pole in human activity, it plays no essential role in The Lonely Man of Faith as it did in Halakhic Man, for reasons I discussed at length in the previous volume. In And from There You Shall Seek, R. Soloveitchik endeavored to conclude the phenomenological voyage to the depths of consciousness at a unified, harmonious stage. Despite his efforts, however, the tension is still evident, and I cannot escape the feeling that the description of contrasts and fluctuations in this work is far more powerful than the description of harmony. The sense that emerges from And from

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There You Shall Seek is that these contrasts are the authentic description of religious consciousness, a perception that came to dominate R. Soloveitchik’s thought so decisively that phenomenology, whose strength lies in the exposure of consciousness’ subjective structure, failed to trace their full influence and scope. This appears to be the key reason for R. Soloveitchik’s focus on existentialist sources as well, beginning with “Kol Dodi Dofek.” R. Soloveitchik never relinquished phenomenology, but during the 1950s and 1960s he also shifted his emphasis to existentialism. The delayed publication of And from There You Shall Seek and The Halakhic Mind itself reflects R. Soloveitchik’s respect for phenomenology, even when existentialism conveyed his world view in more direct and faithful ways. R. Soloveitchik’s Existentialist Thought Lawrence Kaplan argued that Jewish existentialist thought is no different from existentialist thought in general, and the only distinction is that between religious and secularized existentialism.6 I will not discuss Kaplan’s distinction here and will instead consider R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy vis-à-vis existentialist philosophy, asking whether this is a unique Jewish existentialism. Answering this question requires to clarify anew that existentialism shares a perception of humans as concrete action. A considerable number of existentialist approaches have been linked to Marxist and socialist thought. One instance is Sartre’s statement: “What we mean to say is that a man is nothing but a series of enterprises, and that he is the sum, organization, and aggregate of the relations that constitute such enterprises.”7 R. Soloveitchik’s approach is unique in his view of Halakhah as action that reflects concrete human existence. This view presents Halakhah as an existentialist ethic, that is, as a set of actions reflecting existential characteristics such as anxiety, finitude, and loneliness, and exclusively shaping human beings in two alternative ways:

6   Lawrence Kaplan, “Does Jewish Existentialism Have a Special Character?” (in Hebrew), Catharsis 4 (2006), 72–73. 7   Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 38.



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(1) Halakhah, as action, grants meaning and thereby solves existential problems. (2) Halakhah enables life with the existential characteristics. Ontologically, R. Soloveitchik offers no original suggestions. Halakhah does not suggest a new conception of consciousness and of the actual human experience. The question is therefore more acute: can we see this as Jewish existentialism? I think so. Is this an original approach in the tradition of Jewish thought? The answer is complex. The conception of Halakhah as reflecting and defining human beings, teaching them to live with their problems, is not new. By contrast, existentialism as such does not rest on Jewish sources. Nor did R. Soloveitchik seek to delve into a deep study of existentialism, and he apparently confined himself to acquiring general knowledge about it and tracing the cultural climate created by this movement, at least in the United States. In this sense, R. Soloveitchik reflects a unique Jewish phenomenon, which finds its own way within existentialist philosophical ­currents. Again: The Connection with Maimonides Not everything has been said about R. Soloveitchik’s connection with Maimonides. The indirect, formal relationship with Maimonides, which guided R. Soloveitchik’s existentialist philosophy, appears to merit attention. In his introduction to Pirke Avot (Eight Chapters), Maimonides created a triangular ethical model: (1) A natural disposition (“temperament”), which is an inalterable datum;8 (2) a moral quality, such as generosity or avarice; (3) an act, such as giving or refusing to give charity. By means of an act, one can affect and fashion the moral quality, and the Torah does indeed intervene in the practical realm. R. Soloveitchik adopted a model that is formally similar: (1) An existential foundation. These are the existential foundational characteristics, which are inalterable. Anxiety, guilt, and loneliness are a datum that reflects human existence by its very definition. 8  Introduction to the Ethics of the Fathers, ch. 8. The deterministic element of basing moral attributes on temperamental dispositions recurs in medieval philosophy. See, for instance, Dov Schwartz, The Philosophy of a Fourteenth Century Jewish NeoPlatonic Circle (in Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1996), 217–221.

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(2) Emotions. This is the layer that appears as moods or emotions, such as fear of death, love or hatred for the other, and so forth. (3) Balance. Regulating emotions through action. In R. Soloveitchik’s model too, action regulates fluid and fragile moods and emotions, and Halakhah is what intervenes in the regulating and balancing practical realm. Halakhah records the existential situations and enables the emotional balance according to them. The similarity to Maimonidean thought, then, is not exhausted by the anatomy of the psyche’s structure but extends to the apologetic move of the Torah’s intervention in this structure. Maimonides faced a specific ethical theory, to which he referred as “hearing truth from he who says it,” and explained the Torah’s intention according to the theory he had adopted by claiming that it seeks the middle way. R. Soloveitchik was also confronted by an anatomy of existence, and explained Halakhah’s intentions according to the existential theory he had endorsed. Even if we have no evidence of such a direct Maimonidean influence on R. Soloveitchik’s thought, the closeness of the Maimonidean model to R. Soloveitchik’s style of thought is impressive. Hence, Maimonides’ thought denotes the changes in R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy. Committed Openness? R. Soloveitchik’s oeuvre in the “middle” period, from And from There You Shall Seek to The Lonely Man of Faith, is multifaceted and affected by a plethora of philosophical and cultural influences. Generally, it strives to describe the essentialist structure of religious consciousness as well as the existential problems confronting the modern religious person. No wonder that R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy, contrary to Halakhic Man for instance, became a focus of public interest at the time of writing this volume, particularly within the young religiousZionist public and its educational institutions. Advocates of renewal and religious vitality confronting the traditional establishment find they can identify with R. Soloveitchik’s teachings and, in this sense, his teachings do in a way anticipate postmodern religiosity. Can a phenomenological and existentialist philosophy, which so often emphasizes the absolute validity and power of religious law, be the basis of a personal, anti-establishment religiosity? This is too heavy a question to consider in a work dealing with R. Soloveitchik’s actual teachings.



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An important question is the place of openness to philosophy in general in the world and thought of R. Soloveitchik. Many have dealt with David Singer and Moshe Sokol’s challenging assumption that R. Soloveitchik used general sources because of a “personal preference” but not as a “religious imperative.”9 On the surface, this assumption is correct: Halakhic Man is generally formulated in the terms of epistemic idealism and the conventionalist outlook in the philosophy of science, and its aim is to describe the Brisk scholar. And from There You Shall Seek resorts extensively to texts from the phenomenology of religion to describe Jewish religious consciousness. The texts that raise existential questions rely directly and indirectly on existentialist philosophy. No one will question this. It is equally clear that R. Soloveitchik saw general philosophical sources as a tool for expressing Jewish ideas and, as such, these sources remain as merely a means. But the true question that should be asked is whether R. Soloveitchik considered it necessary to deal with issues in Jewish thought using non-Jewish cultural tools. In other words: can we deal with the attitude of Jewish thought to current problems without the scientificphilosophical language of modernity? More precisely: my study found that R. Soloveitchik’s motivation in Halakhic Man was apologetic, and he therefore used the scientific language of his time and place. But can an Orthodox Jew living in a modern world and not confined to the world of Torah be satisfied with the traditional description of a Lithuanian scholar? I think that R. Soloveitchik’s answer to this question is absolutely no. For him, only a specific philosophical terminology can describe the manipulations of majestic man (epistemic idealism and conventionalism in the philosophy of science). I hold that R. Soloveitchik would agree that a modern person can neither understand the essence of religious Jewish consciousness without phenomenological language, nor alienated religious existence in the modern world without existentialist language. The former question, as noted, concerned him in the 1940s and the latter question—from the mid-1950s. If ­philosophical-scientific language is indeed necessary for building a Jewish-modern world view, R. Soloveitchik can no longer be classifed as one who rejects openness as a divine command to the modern person. The importance of philosophical language is not confined to the

9   David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2 (1982), 249.

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first claim, that literary form reflects content; its importance is that, given the description of religiosity’s problems in the present, we must resort to the modern world. R. Soloveitchik’s philosophical endeavor, from beginning to end, can certainly be described as clearly apologetic: the essential and necessary place of Halakhah in the world of the modern Jew. And yet, this task requires openness. In R. Soloveitchik, openness first appears in his illustrations and his style but, on close scrutiny, it is revealed as an imperative need of the method, adding to the standing of R. Soloveitchik’s teachings as a focus of interest for modern religiosity.

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Subject Index Abasement, 17, 18 Abrogation, 50, 105, 121, 160, 161, 207 Absolute, 13, 15, 18, 67, 106, 111, 126, 139, 142, 173, 175, 181, 182, 190, 216, 237, 240, 253, 269, 274, 281, 289, 304, 305, 320, 345; absolute aloneness, 120, 360; absolute freedom, 117, 327; “absolute other,” 3, 35, 41–42, 73, 76, 143, 146; absolute subject, 306, 321, 336; absolute surrender, 119, 220; absolute unity, 111, 138 Abstraction, 30, 131, 141, 249–250; cognition as an abstraction, 131, 135, 141 Absurd, 54, 227, 249, 253, 256, 266, 267–68, 275, 277, 283, 293, 296, 332, 359; absurd existence, 232, 233, 241, 248, 250–51, 252, 259, 267, 273; despair and “absurd nightmare,” 359; and evil, 235, 236; existential absurd, 252, 257; model of revelation, 267–68 Action, 148, 149, 222, 367, 374. See also Commandments Active intellect, 134, 170. See also Conjunction; Soul Activity, 31, 36, 49, 57, 58, 59, 69, 86, 89–90, 93, 95–96, 148, 156, 157, 186, 190, 222, 224, 232, 248, 249, 284, 295, 322, 371; creative activity, 21, 46, 59, 62; halakhic activity, 167, 182; intellectual activity, 36, 95; as reaction to finitude, 249–252; scientific activity, 181, 191, 238; sexual activity, 162, 307; spiritual activity, 89, 90 Aesthetics, 6, 57, 90, 158, 175, 200, 225, 307; aesthetic experience, 57, 170, 199. See also Art; Judgment Affirmation, 120, 164, 198, 207, 240, 244, 256, 274, 305, 324–25; self-affirmation, 295. See also Self-affirmation Aggadah, 235, 236–37 Alienation, xv, 75, 142, 143, 148, 197, 210, 222, 223, 224, 227, 236, 242, 248, 267, 275, 292, 316, 320, 332, 333, 334, 349, 355, 371, 375 Analogy, 139, 286, 350, 351

Angels, 233, 239. See also Prayer Anger, 69–73 Antinomy, 99, 126–27 Anti-Semitism, 210, 217, 219, 220, 223 Anxiety, xiv–xv, 71–72, 74–75, 102, 190, 229, 231, 233, 244, 258, 259, 264, 270, 289, 293, 314–15, 372, 373; about nihility, 255–56, 257, 259, 262, 263–64; anxiety about death, 229, 243, 259, 263, 275; existential anxiety, 54, 70, 71–72, 229, 243, 244, 245, 246, 256, 263, 283, 314, 332, 366; fear and anxiety, 53, 70, 131, 228, 243, 314, 332; and finitude, 243, 244, 245, 246, 259, 261, 264, 275; Judaism not meant to release, 314; neurotic anxiety, 255; overcoming, 314–15; suffering and anxiety, 27, 72, 73, 259, 270; tension of anxiety and awe, 102, 107; and visionary revelation, 263; vs. fear, 332 Apocalypse. See Redemption “Aphrodite-hedonic” sexual activity, 307 Aristotelian epistemology, 131, 135, 139, 148, 282 Art, 175, 199. See also Aesthetics Asceticism, 80–83, 84, 87–88, 126–27, 161, 162–63, 164, 167, 296 Ashkenazi pietists, 309–10 Assertiveness, 12, 28–29, 35, 37, 172, 174, 177 Assimilation, 105 Atonement. See Repentance Attributes, 30, 147, 189, 238, 282, 306, 350; attributes of action, 147; divine attributes, 7, 16, 30, 48, 49, 55, 66–73, 77, 79, 89, 99, 114, 120, 121, 123, 182, 243, 244, 245, 256; of hesed, 189, 218–19; of mercy, 80–83; negation of, 30, 31, 33, 346; negative attributes, 30; Tetragrammaton as an essential attribute, 120–21. See also Analogy Authenticity. See Existentialism Autonomy, 118, 119, 182, 338 Awareness, 19, 52, 61, 62–63, 81, 106, 227, 235, 237, 248, 267, 281, 282, 292, 297, 309, 332, 333, 353, 358, 360; existential awareness, 256, 258, 262,

392

subject index

279, 284, 297; kerygmatic revelation, 261–62. See also Consciousness; Visionary, visionary or kerygmatic revelation Awe, 109; anxiety and awe, 102, 107; awe of mysterious love, 174; and desire, 111; love and awe, 116, 126, 190, 191; love without awe, 130 Axiological Halakhah, 234, 235–36, 239, 240 Balance, 6, 13, 64, 65, 80, 82, 85, 86–87, 88, 105, 116, 162–63, 198, 282, 298, 307, 329, 346, 361, 366, 374 Being, 101, 235, 250, 263, 269, 288 Binah. See Sefirot Blessings, 28, 110, 158, 160, 190, 204 Brisk scholarship, x, xii, 29, 91, 94–95, 97, 103, 112, 113, 154, 155–56, 161, 165–66, 167, 168, 186, 187, 188, 206, 235, 319, 375. See also Hiddush Catastrophe, 271; catastrophic revelation, 264, 265, 267, 271 Categories, 8–9, 10, 41, 82, 156–57, 215, 234, 243, 258, 328, 342, 343; existential categories, 42, 209, 226, 233, 242, 243, 244, 246, 251, 263, 313–14. See also Finitude; Object; Origin Causality, 15, 16, 42, 68, 69, 141, 205, 208, 214, 215, 217, 225, 233, 243; causal explanation of the Holocaust, 214; causal explanation of the material world, 233; existential causality, 215; metaphysical causality, 215; past sins as cause, 214 Certainty, 14–18, 19, 20, 22, 325 Choice, 256; and faith, 32, 33, 319; and freedom, 229, 249 Christianity, 83, 95, 163, 323, 367; Christian scholasticism, 201; and the concrete divine command, 225; and love, 284, 285–86; and natural religiosity, 84–86, 88; polemic against, 76–80, 108; respect for Judaism, 363. See also Ethics Cognition, 21–22, 58, 102, 135, 140, 143, 146, 157, 165, 182, 206, 226, 268; as an abstraction, 131, 135, 141; awareness of existential crisis of finitude, 256; and choice, 256; cognitive idealism, 148; cognitiveintellectual analysis, 148, 165;

cognitive man, 24, 25, 145; cognitive objects, 139–140; cognitive-pluralistic approach, 145; cognitive split, 142–43; cognitive unity, 134, 139, 143; and the consciousness of the deity, 115–149; and creativity, 134, 139–140, 182; divine cognition, 135, 139, 143–44, 146–47; extra-cognitive qualitative realm, 10, 37; and feeling, 278; fluctuations in the cognitive model, 145–47; halakhic cognition, xii, 35, 165–66, 188; of halakhic man, 167, 206; and homo religiosus, 24–25; human cognition, 134, 135, 143, 147, 155, 156; idealist-cognitive model, 146–47; intuitive cognition, 19–20; and mathematical natural sciences, 179; and morality, 181; natural cognition, 157; and ontology, 19, 25; and reality, 24, 25, 37, 166, 182; and reason, 8–10; and religious consciousness, 145; and revelation, 156, 268; scientific cognition, xi, 143, 154, 157, 173, 175; and the senses, 8–10; subjective cognition, 175; transcending cognition, 25; vs. religion, 146. See also Intellect and intellectualism; Thought [Denken] Collective, 84, 88, 163, 184, 217, 220, 224, 321–22; from the individual to the collective, 208–12, 316 Commandments, 49, 50, 51, 61, 71, 78, 79, 80, 110, 115, 117–18, 123, 132, 159, 161, 181, 186, 211, 249, 261, 311, 313, 315, 316, 326, 367–68, 369, 173.152; as consciousness, 81; “deed of the commandment” [peʿulat ha-mitzvah], 316; halakhic (divine) commandments, 50, 55, 73–74, 76, 81, 86, 118, 177, 191, 207, 209, 237, 238, 270, 287–88, 360; honoring parents, 311, 313–14; joy of the commandment, 287–88; “objective” commandments, 152, 173; “observance of” [kiyyum ha-mitzvah], 316; reasons for, 81, 117–18, 367–68; of repentance, 46, 48; and revelation, 55, 81; of tzedakah, 209. See also Action; Halakhah Committed openness, 374–76 Communication, xii–xiii, 321, 333–34, 360, 369; in couple relationships, 299, 300, 302, 308, 360; difficulty of, xvi; and the man of faith, 330, 336, 339,



subject index

343, 356; with the “other,” 231, 264, 286, 302, 343, 357 Communion, 108, 125, 127, 129, 130, 135, 136, 147, 161, 163, 164, 189, 190, 191; with God, xiii, 55, 85, 116–19, 128, 141, 143, 148, 182, 185, 188, 264, 266; and Halakhah, 164–66 Community, xii; communal existence, 314; covenantal community, 336, 338–39, 340; divine involvement in, 370; existential community, 341; of faith, 320, 321, 336, 342, 345, 361–62; in family relationships, 300, 315; Halakhah on individual and community, 357; intra-religious communities, 362; of majesty, 362; natural community, 332, 334, 362; teleological community, 342; that God is a partner to, 308, 314; transition from individual to community, 361–63. See also Halakhic man Concreteness, xii, xv, 100, 111, 184, 209, 238, 345; and complete consciousness, 367; concrete action, 222; concrete divine command, 225; concrete existence, xviii, 193, 216, 222, 240, 242–43, 245, 273, 297–98, 329–330, 331; concrete-qualitative world, 18, 29, 33, 137, 166, 330; concrete reality, 7, 13–14, 25, 29, 184, 236, 261, 326; concrete relationships, 194; concrete suffering, 275; and cosmic experience, 272; existential-concrete examination of revelation, 274; and Halakhah, 73–75, 167, 193, 372–73; humanconcrete existence, 333; of imitation, 120; of nature, 178; of tzimtzum, 103. See also Existentialism Conjugal relations. See Family relationships Conjunction, 104, 119, 128, 131–32, 143, 145, 148, 152, 287; conjunction ideal, 105; of consciousness, 106, 129, 130, 131, 140, 144–45, 149, 151–168, 169–191; with God, 115, 116, 117, 119, 132, 147; and union, 104, 108, 109, 122–131 Consciousness, 1, 6, 39–40, 90, 100, 106, 114, 127, 151, 152–54, 161–62, 188, 252, 269, 275, 289, 293, 316, 370; of action, 367; active consciousness, 325; of the believer, 99–100; collectiveessentialist consciousness, 184; commandments as, 81; complete

393

consciousness, 367; of conjunction, 129, 130, 144–45, 149, 151–168, 169–191; conscious metamorphosis, 240; conscious reality, 106, 129, 268; conscious-subjective examination of revelation, 273–74; conscious transformation, 109; consolidation of, 47–49; correlation between subjective and objective dimensions, 153; and creative process of reason, 21–22; criticism of the study of, 239–241; cultural consciousness, 26; dialectical consciousness, 53–56, 64, 112, 114, 119–122, 194; dual consciousness, 54–56, 119–122; emotionalexperiential consciousness, 110; and emotions, 276–288; eternity of, 129, 188; ethical-existential consciousness, 237; and existence, 232, 326; existential consciousness, 264; experimental-religious consciousness, 94; of faith, 324; of finitude, 264, 268; fluctuations of, 117, 158–59; and freedom, 118; and God, xiv, 4–5, 65–88, 89–114, 115–149, 188–89; and Halakhah, 226, 368–69; highest stage of, xvi; of the homo religiosus, 235; instinctive consciousness, 105, 107; intellect and emotion as poles of, 175; inter-subjective dimension, 228; intra-conscious element, 233; of isolation, 210; Jewish consciousness, 14, 45, 67, 85, 87–88, 112, 114, 115, 122, 146, 151, 162, 167, 170, 174, 186, 190, 191, 193, 368–69, 375; layers of, 65–66, 115; metaphysical consciousness, xiii–xiv, 233, 239–240, 265, 274, 289; mystic consciousness, 236; natural consciousness, 54, 56–60, 62, 63, 75–77, 78, 81–82, 87–88, 146, 153, 154, 157–58, 161, 162, 190, 191; objective consciousness, 153, 236, 239, 240, 311–12; ontic consciousness, 267; ontology and, 17, 57, 89, 93, 105, 107, 109, 175, 178, 188, 237, 342, 355, 373; passionatesubjective dimension of, 368; and phenomenology, 369, 371; practicalobjective dimension of, 368; prophecy as consciousness, 52–53; psychological consciousness, 90; reconstruction of consciousness, 190–91; rejection of the study of by Soloveitchik, 233; religious-subjective consciousness,

394

subject index

162; revelational consciousness, 17–18, 51, 54, 56, 60–63, 75, 78, 79, 80–81, 82, 87, 130–31, 153, 154, 156, 157–58, 161, 162, 190, 264, 268, 273–74; and science, 172–73, 371; self-consciousness, 2, 138; of solitude, 211; spiritual existence outside of, 233; subjective consciousness, xiii–xiv, 228, 237, 240, 310–12, 329, 342, 368–69; of suffering, 153, 268, 275; synthetic model of, 106; and tension, 101, 106, 116, 123, 161, 190, 291; transcendental consciousness, 4–5, 7, 18, 72; transcendent consciousness, 17, 190; and transmission, 183–88; unified consciousness, 4, 124, 143, 157–166, 169, 173, 176, 181, 182–83, 185; of uniqueness, 355; unity of consciousness, 163, 182–83, 185, 188; value of, 82, 237. See also Extraconsciousness; Objective layer of consciousness; Objective/objectivity; Religious consciousness; Subjective layers of consciousness; Subjective/ subjectivity; Unity, of subjective consciousness Continuity vs. polarization, 352–53 Contradiction, 36, 94, 111, 116–17, 120, 169–170, 175, 214, 249, 250, 251, 266, 277, 301–2, 303, 995. See also Opposites Cooperation, 217, 312–13, 350, 352 Correlation, 107, 111, 153, 245 Cosmic, 99, 269, 314, 354–55, 356; cosmic experience, 45, 262, 267, 269, 270, 272, 275, 328; cosmic-immanent experience, 328; cosmic revelation, 261, 263, 265–66, 267–69, 270–72, 273, 274; cosmic tension, 105–6; natural-cosmic dimension, 334 Couples. See Family relationships Covenant, 338; covenantal community, 336, 338–39, 340; covenantal connection in marriage, 303–4, 305, 306; covenantal connection in sexuality, 307; covenantal man, 268, 340, 631; covenant of destiny, 210–11, 223; covenant of fate, 210, 217–222; covenant of Sinai, 39, 52, 55, 175, 181, 186, 210–11, 222–23, 304; honoring parents, 315. See also Commandments Creation, 5, 10, 17, 19, 28, 29, 44, 45, 59, 61, 68, 99, 105, 137, 156, 176, 178, 181, 182, 185, 188, 262, 273, 295,

301, 302; Creator (God) within the creation, 24, 27, 30, 33, 37, 39, 44, 45, 204, 265, 266, 270, 304; as expression of unified consciousness, 188; feeling of createdness, 28–29; freedom vs. determinism, 177–78; God outside of, 84, 101, 102, 271; and Halakhah, 178, 179, 181, 182; man as partner in, 117, 139, 146, 182, 261; origin links with creation, 9, 24, 314; story and mystery of, 31, 39–40, 49, 98, 137, 175–77, 178–79, 269, 284, 300, 322, 336–37, 349–357; work of Creation [maʿaseh bereshit], 175. See also God, as Creator Creativity, 46, 56, 58–59, 60, 137; and cognition, 134, 139–140, 182; and consciousness, 21–22; creative action against suffering, 204, 205; creative activity, 21, 46, 59, 62; creative agent, 327; creative freedom, 157; creative knowledge, 132; creative process of reason, 13, 21–22; creative spirit, 57, 156; divine creativity, 147; exceptionally creative [lomdus], 156; existential-subjective idea of creativity, 205; and halakhic activity, 182; and human cognition, 182; of love, 285; natural and halakhic order, 178–182; and relationships, 194; and scientific activity, 181, 191, 238; self-creativity, 74, 207; and the temporal process, 244; transmission as expression of, 185. See also Freedom Creator. See Creation; God, as Creator Crisis, 38, 41, 47, 247–48, 255, 268; crisis experience of revelation, 267; existential crisis, 248, 256–57, 268; external crisis, 259; and finitude, 247–252, 255, 256–57; theology of, 16, 69, 201, 209, 349, 365–66; two kinds of, 18, 35, 172, 227, 248, 344. See also Depth crisis; Surface crisis Curiosity, xvi, 49, 182, 231, 354–55, 360; intellectual curiosity, 198, 213, 214; natural curiosity, 355 Daemonic personality, Kohelet as, 250–52 Darwin’s theory of evolution, 323 Datum, 9, 12, 130, 197, 212, 242, 275, 298, 330, 339, 373 Death, 39, 68, 125, 144, 158, 214, 241, 243, 246, 253, 257, 258, 259, 282, 296,



subject index

332, 374; anxiety about, 229, 243, 259, 263, 275; fear of death, 246, 255–56, 259, 314. See also Mourning Deity, concept of, 3. See also God Depth crisis, 247, 249, 252, 259 Despair, 18, 25, 33, 38, 47, 70, 117, 119, 208, 235, 242, 247, 248, 253, 293, 359 Destiny, 68, 197, 201, 202–5, 219, 224, 253, 282, 294, 296, 312, 322, 339; covenant of destiny, 210–11, 221, 223; existence of, 195, 198, 201, 202, 203, 211, 218; and fate, 195, 211, 219, 224, 312; man of destiny, 202, 203–5; national dimensions of, 219. See also Fate Determinism, 119, 177–78, 202, 297 Dialectics, ix–xi, xvi, 4, 5, 27, 94, 97, 106, 131, 141, 145, 156, 161, 164, 171, 172, 176, 211, 215, 232, 238–39, 240, 243, 274–75, 277, 288–89, 292, 295, 303, 305, 310, 319–320, 337, 346, 352–53; dialectical consciousness, 42, 53–56, 64, 76, 83, 100, 107–8, 112, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 127, 129, 152, 154, 167–68, 169, 171, 182, 183, 193, 194, 289, 344, 366, 369; dialectical experience, 88, 252, 347; dialectical religious consciousness, 2, 45, 46, 48, 67, 77, 85–86, 87, 89, 97, 111, 114, 119, 146–47, 151, 317, 368, 371; and emotions, 277, 279–283; of existence, 241, 242, 252, 254, 352, 362; existential-dialectic experience, 242; and faith, 32, 320, 324–330, 344, 346; and finitude, 247, 249, 257; fluctuations in, 112, 114, 115, 117, 152, 191, 227; fluctuations of, xviii; and freedom, 3, 119; and Halakhah, 29–30, 46, 77, 109, 111, 156, 191, 235, 239, 240–41, 255; and the imitatio Dei, 119–122; and love, 6, 39, 126; and method, xvii–xix; and phenomenology, 231, 232, 236, 238–39; and revelation, 87, 115, 265–274; sanctification of the dialectic, 288; subjective dialectic, 151; as transformation of the poles, 107 Dialogue and faith, 319–363 Dignity, 237–38, 239, 246, 253, 259, 361 Disorder, 39–42 Distress, xiii, xiv–xv, 18, 32, 47, 172, 208, 212, 227, 232, 247, 251, 257, 258, 262, 264, 268, 271, 273, 288; distress within distress, 263; and prayer, 249,

395

257; and repentance, 45, 73–74, 207; and revelation, 275 Divine Providence, 68, 69, 101, 127, 199, 213, 214, 348 Divine world [olam ‘atsilut], 51, 59, 354 Divorce, 305 Dogma, social aspect of, 349 Duality: of the divine model, 146–47; and fluctuations in the cognitive model, 145–47 Duty. See Ethics Dynamism and assertiveness, 28–29 Eating, 158–161 Ecstatic/ecstasy, 3, 4, 26, 69, 81, 97, 110, 266. See also Mysticism Ego, 142 Eidetic reduction. See Phenomenology Ein-sof. See Infinite “Elevation of the body,” 154, 158–162, 164, 166, 167 Elitism, 83–84, 85, 86–87, 88 Elohim, 349, 354. See also God Emanation, 33, 55, 59, 107, 121, 133, 134, 184, 187, 189. See also Kabbalah; Neo-Platonism Emotionality, 54, 67, 70, 89, 100, 108–9, 110, 170, 174, 217, 224, 232–33, 313, 331, 345, 374; anatomic model of, 281–83; conservation of emotional energy, 280; dialectics of, 277, 279–283; emotional-experiential consciousness, 110; emotionalsubjective religion, 78; emotional wholeness, 280; emotion-existential situation, 100; inter-emotional attachment, 279–281; negative intervention, 282; phenomenological analysis of, 276; as preparation for prophecy, 175; primeval emotions, 108, 259, 277, 278, 281, 308; test of consciousness, 276–288. See also Feeling; Love; specific feelings, i.e., awe, fear, joy, love, etc. End of Days, 45, 129, 147, 187 Environment, 202, 204, 228, 241, 247, 326, 343 Epistemology, 6–7, 8, 9, 11, 112, 144, 146, 148, 155, 156, 179, 191, 272, 276; Aristotelian epistemology, 124, 131; epistemic idealism, ix, xvii, 12, 20, 24, 25, 29, 32, 35, 59, 63, 75, 132, 134–35, 137, 138, 139, 146, 148, 173–74, 179, 310, 319, 320, 327, 329–330, 366,

396

subject index

371, 375; epistemological experience, 25–26, 170, 328; epistemological pluralism, 24; epistemological tension, 144; extra-epistemological elements, 9, 13, 15, 20, 53, 234; extra-religious epistemology, 53; and homo religiosus, 131; Maimonidean epistemology, 115, 131–32, 133, 140; mythical religious-epistemological model, 60; rational-epistemological stage of consciousness, 132; subjective epistemic certainty, 325; supraepistemic realm, 58, 173–74 Epoché [restraint], 93 Equality, 217, 219, 298, 362 Equanimity, 237, 238 Eretz Israel. See Israel Eschatology. See End of Days; Eternity Esotericism, 83, 84, 88, 169, 234, 314 Essence, 80, 92, 138, 141, 142, 282, 329, 340; of being, 12, 49, 128, 238, 334; divine essence, 5, 67, 98, 122, 128, 129, 146; of Halakhah, 154–55 Essentialism, xiii, 274 Eternity, 3, 15, 46, 63, 71, 85, 246, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 265, 314, 315, 331, 339–341, 342; of consciousness, 129, 188; divine eternity, 244–45; infinite eternity, 5, 98. See also Time Ethics, 41, 227, 243, 278, 317, 344; autonomous, 118; ethical idealism, 312; ethical-religious perfection, 41; existentialist ethics, 237, 372–73; and feeling, 278; Greek ethic, 284; and Halakhah, 205, 237; Judaic ethic, 277; Kabbalistic ethical homilies, 195; Kantian ethics, 118; of Maimonides, 373; practical-ethical cognition, 115; and religion, 126; and science, 175, 179, 180. See also Christianity; Morality Ethos, 115, 121, 151–52, 237, 274 Evil, 43–44, 45, 198, 199, 202–3, 204, 213, 215, 236, 239, 253; and absurd, 235, 236; metaphysics of evil, 198–200, 253–54; as privation, 254–55, 270, 273; struggling against, 234–39. See also Good Evolution see Darwin Exile, 185, 206, 212, 214, 271 Existence, 24, 140–41, 144, 209, 218, 232, 236, 287, 303, 313, 333, 335, 355, 362; absurd existence, 232, 233, 241, 248, 250–51, 252, 255, 259, 267, 273;

communal existence, 314; concrete existence, 193, 216, 222, 240, 242–43, 245, 273, 297–98, 329–330, 331, 333; confrontational existence, 358; and consciousness, 232, 326; cosmic existence, 99; dialectical experience, 242, 252, 254, 352, 362; and faith, 325, 331, 339, 347, 351; of fate, 197–201, 202, 203, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220; of God, 17, 19, 20, 99, 140, 144, 337; human existence, 6, 42, 72, 73, 202, 203, 232–33, 234, 242, 243–44, 250, 252, 255, 256, 263, 289, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 301, 303, 312, 317, 333, 344, 353, 358–361, 372–73; intersubjective existence, 309, 316, 360; Jewish existence, 210, 223, 224; material existence, 69, 296; meaningful vs. trivial existence, 222; meaningless existence, 201, 204; national existence, characteristics of, 222–24; objective existence, 194, 201, 206, 209, 212, 293, 358, 359; and ontology, 24, 25, 144, 229, 242; priority of existence over essence, 142; religious existence, xii–xiii, 86, 99, 375; spiritual existence, 3, 233; subjective existence, 99, 194, 201, 204, 205, 293, 300, 309, 316, 330, 331, 332, 336, 343–44, 360; true existence, 99; unique existence, 201, 224, 238 Existentialism, xiii, xiv, xviii, 370; characteristics of existential foundation, 373; character of, 201; concrete-existentialism, 111; differences from phenomenology, 231–32; emotion-existential situation, 100; ethical-existential consciousness, 237; existential tension, 33, 101, 194, 244, 324; existential absurd, 252, 257; existential anxiety, 54, 70, 71–72, 229, 243, 244, 245, 246, 256, 263, 283, 314, 332, 366; existential awareness, 256, 258, 262, 279, 284, 297; existential categories, 42, 209, 226, 233, 242, 243, 244, 246, 251, 263, 313–14; existential causality, 215; existential community, 341; existential companionship, 335–36, 341; existential consciousness, 237, 264; existential-concrete examination of revelation, 274; existential cooperation, 312–13; existential crisis, 248, 256–57, 268; existential



subject index

denotation and family relationships, 293; existential-dialectic experience, 242; existential distress, 249; existential-essential change, 208–9; existential experience, 149, 181, 238, 241, 251, 257, 259, 263, 266, 302, 330, 339, 343; existential fear, 314, 315, 355; existential guilt, 235, 243, 283, 297–98, 301, 303, 308; existentialist approach to parents, 310, 313–15; existentialist ethics, 237, 372–73; existentialist model, 370; existentialist psychology, 366; existential loneliness, 301, 305, 308, 312, 331–34, 341–42; existential meaning of faith, 343; existential meaning of Halakhah, 226; existential model of revelation, 270; existential psychology, 228–230, 283, 289, 357; existentialist-religious philosophy, xv, 23, 288, 297, 366; existential-subjective idea of creativity, 205; existential tension, 244; and existential thought, 232, 235, 374; existential thought, 71, 139, 193, 201, 203, 224, 228, 229, 231–32, 242–46, 275, 298, 342, 348, 372–73; existential value, 148, 237, 240; and finitude, 241–42, 256–57; finitude as a fundamental existential experience, 241–42; and Halakhah, 181, 372–73, 374; Jewish existentialist thought, 372–73; ontic-existential dimension of love, 313; and the “other,” xv–xvii; phenomenology to existentialism, 365–376; philosophical-existentialist analysis, 319, 343; as rational, 260; religion as solution to existential problems, 275; secular model of existentialist philosophy, 288; theological-existential thought, 342. See also Existence; Finitude Experience, 15–16, 68, 82, 97, 100, 170, 178, 250, 252, 267, 268–271; aesthetic experience, 57, 170, 179, 199; collective experience, 84; cosmic experience, 45, 262, 267, 269, 270, 272, 275, 328; dialectical experience, 88, 241, 252, 347; emotionalexperiential consciousness, 110; existential experience, 149, 181, 238, 241, 251, 257, 259, 263, 266, 302, 330, 339, 343; and finitude, 263; and Halakhah, 181; intellectual, 117, 170; intuitive-experiential outlook, 20;

397

and Kabbalah, 98–101; ontological experience, 24, 25, 34, 61, 306; religious experience, 16, 18, 26, 28, 38, 42, 57, 58–59, 60, 76, 82, 84–87, 91, 94, 231, 249, 257, 261, 268, 275, 279, 327, 329; and revelation, 61, 62, 73, 82, 119, 190, 261, 265–66, 267, 268, 273; sense-experience, 92, 268; subjective experience, 23, 236, 301, 306, 311; transcendental experience, 4–5, 24–25, 26, 98, 327–28, 355 External-objective world, 10 Extra-cognitive dimension (sensorialqualitative or transcendent), 10, 12, 25, 26, 37, 58, 139, 155, 166, 206. See also Cognition; Sense; Subjective/ subjectivity; Transcendence Extra-consciousness, 22, 36, 39, 93, 94, 114, 115, 145, 166, 167, 343. See also Consciousness Extra-epistemological elements, 9, 13, 15, 20, 53, 234 Extra-religious epistemology, 53 Fact [Tatsache], 22, 25, 27, 33 Failure, 17, 18, 26, 31, 37, 49, 117, 119, 120, 169, 178, 199, 250, 266, 271, 274, 296, 334, 335, 371; of science, 172, 173, 176, 177, 238, 239, 324 Faith, 1, 3, 30, 32–34, 62, 237, 244, 262, 324–330, 331, 339, 342, 344, 347, 363, 371; as antithesis of original sin, 33; and choice, 32, 33, 319; community of faith, 320, 321, 336, 342, 345, 361–62; conceptual-phenomenological explication of faith, 331; and concrete existence, 329–330; consciousness of, 324; and critical reasoning, 112; and dialectics, 32, 320, 324–330, 344, 346; dialogue and faith, 319–363; existence of, 325, 331, 339, 347, 351; existential meaning of faith, 343; faith-subjective existence, elements of, 331; as a flexible concept, 322–24; and the individual, 321, 346; Jewish and nonJewish views on, 42–47; a life of faith, 32, 330–34; man of faith, 43, 45–46, 51, 320, 322, 323–24, 325, 328–29, 330–31, 332–34, 335–39, 340–41, 342, 343, 344–46, 347, 370; and the “Other,” 341–45; and reality, 329, 345; redeeming humans from anxiety, 245; and religion, 31–34; revelational faith [emunah giluyyit], 34, 61,

398

subject index

62; Soloveitchik’s background and sources, 347–48; suffering as starting point of, 334, 346; and tension, 346–47, 362–63 Family relationships, 291–318, 339. See also Marriage Fate, 48, 49, 68, 117, 204, 213, 215, 261; anti-Semitism as an expression of, 219; community of fate, 217, 220; covenant of fate, 210, 217–222; and destiny, 195, 211, 219, 224, 312; existence of, 197–201, 202, 203, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220; man of fate, 198, 202–3; nation fate, 219, 220; shared fate, 218; and suffering, 197, 211, 212. See also Destiny Fear, 53, 54, 66, 71, 108, 109, 289, 374; and anxiety, 53, 70, 131, 228, 243, 314, 332; of death, 246, 255, 256, 259, 314; existential fear, 314, 315, 355; fear and attraction, 89, 106; of God, 70, 72, 80, 107. See also Death; Finitude Feeling, 77; external feelings, 298; feelings and situations in search for God, 27; and finitude, 263, 314; imitatio Dei as product of the dialectic of feelings, 119–122; instinctive feelings, 67, 72–73, 106–7, 108, 278; and objective reference, 278; of recoil and attraction, 90; religious feeling, 90; subjective feelings, 36, 279; surface vs. deep feelings, 332. See also Emotionality; Sense; specific feelings, i.e., awe, fear, joy, love, etc. Fellowship, 217 Finitude, xiv–xv, 54, 71, 101, 227–289, 314, 315, 332, 372; and dialectics, 247, 249, 257; finitude in time, 243–44, 257–58, 263, 275; and infinity, 54, 71, 101, 241, 250 First Existent, 99 Forms of sensibility, 10, 156–57. See also Categories Free choice. See Choice; Freedom Freedom, 57, 61, 80, 116, 117, 118–19, 154, 202, 229, 243, 356, 358; abrogation of, 121; absolute freedom, 57, 117, 327; and autonomy, 119; and choice, 229, 249; consciousness of, 59, 118; and creativity (creative freedom), 56, 58, 60, 157; and dialectics, 3, 119; freedom-commitment dialectic,

3; and Halakhah, 154, 155, 157; intellectual freedom, 178; negation of, 62; reason’s absolute freedom, 327; sexual freedom, 303; vs. determinism, 177–78 Frustration, 55 Fulfillment [kiyyum], 159 Genesis, book of. See Creation God, 4, 22–23, 100; as the “absolute other,” 41, 42, 143, 146; and cognition, 115–149; communion with, xiii, 55, 85, 116–19, 128, 141, 143, 148, 182, 185, 188, 264, 266; and community, 308, 314; community including, 308, 314; confrontation between God and man, 28–29; conjunction with, 115, 116, 117, 119, 132, 147; consciousness of, xiv, 65–88, 89–114, 115–149, 188–89; cosmic encounter with, 269; as Creator, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 43, 44, 50, 54, 63, 81–82, 86, 99–100, 101, 105, 107, 133, 140, 146, 147, 163, 182–83, 189, 190, 198, 213, 247, 352; divine attributes, 30, 48, 49, 55, 66–73, 77, 79, 89, 99, 114, 120, 121, 123, 140–41, 243, 245, 256, 336; epistemological model of, 144–45; existence of, 17, 19, 20, 99, 140, 144, 337; fear of, 70, 72, 80, 107; and homo religiosus, 37, 39, 43, 58, 99, 254, 272; human relationship with, 1–2, 5, 239, 244, 334, 355–56, 370; I-Adam, Thou-God, 350–52; image of, 39, 55, 65, 115, 204, 238, 266, 294, 328, 330, 350, 351, 352, 359, 365; immanent view of the Deity, 140–41; impersonal aspect of, 182; intellect of, 137; involved in the world, 147; jealous God, 69–73, 365; and justice, 65–88; and knowledge, 134, 142, 144, 146, 265; love of, 78, 126, 129, 191, 282–83, 284, 285; man of God, 110, 117; meeting God, 266; and mercy, 65–88, 102, 103, 115, 124, 191, 336; as metaphysical object, 345; and mysticism, 5, 7, 113; nature as source of knowledge about God, 346; navigating history behind the scenes, 216; omnipotence of, 72, 244, 245, 246; omniscience of, 131, 133; ontological model of God, 19, 110, 111, 114, 144; outside of creation, 84, 101, 102, 271; path



subject index

to, 226; “perpetuity of God’s word,” 169; personal God, 245; and pleasure, 158; power of, 327; and purpose, 39, 146; rational-purposeful mode of, 39; and reality, 4, 5, 6, 7, 19–20, 26, 30, 47, 92, 120, 121, 141, 144, 327; reason incapable of describing, 30; revealing self to man, 41, 48–49; and revelation, 90, 208–9, 264, 340; search (quest) for God, 1, 2, 4, 6–7, 8, 11, 13, 14–18, 19–20, 25, 26–28, 29–32, 45, 54, 57, 59, 81, 84, 90, 97, 100, 172, 270, 272, 345, 371–72; separateness of, 50; serving God, 265, 274; as a stern judge, 69–70, 71; and tension, 26–28, 75, 120, 123–24, 346; as the Tetragrammaton, 355; as thought that thinks itself, 139; transcendence of, 70, 99; and true friendship, 361; and tzimtzum, 89–114; of unity, 209; world’s dependence on, 144. See also Creation; Elohim; Providence; Shekhinah; Spirit/spiritual; Torah; Tzimtzum [withdrawal]; Yahweh Golden mean, 282. See also Ethics; Morality Good, 43, 45, 78, 179, 198, 199, 200, 236, 253–54, 273, 313, 356; absolute good, 67; wholly good, 75, 199, 204. See also Creation; Evil; Morality Greatness, 17, 246, 255, 266, 267, 282–83, 301 Guilt, 231, 285, 293, 310, 317, 373; existential guilt, 235, 243, 283, 297–98, 301, 303, 308; and family relationships, 293, 297–98, 301, 303 Habad, 91, 102, 103, 112 Halakhah, ix, x–xi, xvii, 1–2, 26, 36, 45–47, 50, 64, 65, 81, 94, 95–96, 110, 112–13, 120, 122, 156, 191, 210, 219, 238, 279, 323–24, 357, 372, 374, 376; and absurd, 54; advantage of, 237–38; and autonomy, 118; axiological Halakhah, 234, 235–36, 239, 240; and balance, 374; change in status of, 320–21; communal-social nature of, 320; and communion, 164–66; and concreteness, 73–75, 167, 193, 372–73; and consciousness, 226; covenant of fate, 210–11; and creation, 178, 179, 181, 182; and creativity, 178–182, 188, 205, 206; and death, 255–56; and dialectics, 29–30, 46, 77, 109,

399

111, 156, 191, 235, 239, 240–41, 255; and distress, xv, 227; dynamism and assertiveness, 28–29; and eating, 158–161; and elitism, 86–87; essence of, 154–55; and ethics, 205, 237; and evil, 44–46, 205, 234–39; existence of religion beyond halakhic cognition, xii; and existentialism, 181, 226, 372–73, 374; and existential thought, 232, 235, 372–73, 374; and experience, 181; and faith, 323; and family relationships, 302, 303–4, 311–12, 317; and finitude, 257; and freedom, 154, 155, 157; and Halakhah, 368–69; halakhic activity, 167, 182; halakhic behavior, 126, 152; halakhic cognition, xii, 35, 165–66, 188, 226; halakhic (divine) commandments, 50, 55, 73–74, 76, 81, 86, 118, 177, 191, 207, 209, 237, 238, 270, 287–88, 360; halakhic foundation, 126, 127, 132; halakhic law, 78, 81, 154, 155, 165, 178, 193, 289, 293, 303; of halakhic man, 167, 206; halakhic records, 109–12; halakhists and elitism, 86–87; and hiddush, 155–57; and humility, 29–32; and imitation, 120; individual and community, 357; and individualism, 357; and intellect, 161, 165, 166, 167, 184–85; Job failing to understand, 208–9; Judaism and halakhic principles, xi, 47, 55, 64, 95, 193, 219, 283–84, 289, 323, 373, 376; judicial aspect of Halakhah, 167; and knowledge, 154–57; literarydevelopmental move, 166–68; and Maimonides, 19, 20, 121, 187–88, 240, 368; and materiality, 157–164; and mental healing, 235; and metaphysics, 206, 233; and morality, 178; mysticalaggadic Halakah, 236–37; natural and halakhic order, 178–182; and negative feelings, 285; no mathematization of Halakhah, 166; norm and act, 240; and objective consciousness, 151, 153; opaqueness and humility, 29–32; as a paradigm of revelation, 50; and phenomenology, 232; positivist Halakhah, 235, 237, 238, 239; and prayer, 257, 260; primacy of, 283–84; and prophecy, 188; and psychology, 227, 230, 276; rationality of Halakhah, 166; as regulation, 45, 154, 165, 205, 369, 374; and religious consciousness,

400

subject index

81, 87, 94, 96, 151–52, 153, 165, 167, 181, 205, 226, 373; and renunciation, 304; and repentance, 207–8, 316; and revelation, 153, 154, 156–57, 191, 209, 270, 275; as “rule of the intellect,” 154, 161; and science, 156–57, 165, 166; and sexual activity, 161–64, 309, 317, 339; source of, 34, 181; status of, 28–32, 64, 96; striving to improve society, 187; subjective consciousness, 166, 169, 176, 191, 237, 240, 312, 368–69; and suffering, 45–46, 205–7, 208, 213–14; teleological Halakhah, 239–240; and tension, 73, 116, 156, 160, 257; thematic-axiological realm of thought, 240; and thought, 234–35; tolerant attitude of, 311–12; and transcendence, 167, 181; and transmission of the Torah, 186; two levels of halakhic thought, 234, 239; unification of, 161–62, 164–65; as unified subjective consciousness, 157–166, 169; unio mystica violating, 126. See also Cognition; Commandments; Consciousness; Halakhic man; halakhic man; Hiddush; Objective/objectivity Halakhic man, x, 58, 188, 340; Brisk halakhic man, 97, 103, 113, 155, 161, 166, 167, 186, 188; cognition of, 35, 165–66, 167, 206; consciousness of, 118, 167; and freedom, 119; and hillukim, 29, 58; and homo religiosus, 29, 113, 118–19, 165, 339; and Kabbalah, 92; and metaphysics, 35; as partner to divine creation, 182. See also Faith, man of faith Harmony, 43, 90, 116, 198, 371 Hasidism, 91, 103, 112, 113, 309–10. See also Habad Hegelian dialectics, 191 Hermeneutics, 68, 101, 135, 281, 357 Heroism, 222–23, 255–56 Hiddush, xi, 154–55, 156, 186, 187, 188, 320. See also Creativity; Innovation [hiddush] Hierarchical complementarity, 62 Hillukim, 29, 52 Hokhmah. See Sefirot Holiness, 7, 51, 75, 98, 160, 163, 164, 167, 211, 223, 224, 272, 295, 314, 323. See also Revelation; Transcendence Holocaust, 76–80, 95, 186, 195, 212–15, 221, 225; and the covenant of fate,

217–222; and the Song of Songs, 215–17 Homiletics, x, xvii, 194–95; family life homilies, 291–318; Zionist homilies, 193–226 Homo religiosus, 74–75, 119, 131, 167–68, 170, 173, 182, 325, 327, 339; and cognition, 24–25, 29, 112, 145, 167; and consciousness, 43, 44, 87, 91, 92, 97, 113, 166, 235; and God, 37, 39, 43, 58, 99, 254, 272; and halakhic man, 29, 113, 118–19; and Jewish mysticism, 112–13; Maimonides as, 19–20 Humanities, 12, 13; “humanistic” reaction to finitude, 252–53 Humility, 37, 45, 46, 237, 238, 267; humility and crisis, 35; and the status of Halakhah, 29–32 Idealism, 105, 129, 135, 137, 143, 146–47, 148, 235, 312, 371; epistemic idealism, ix, xvii, 20, 24, 29, 32, 35, 59, 63, 75, 132, 134–35, 137, 138, 139, 146, 148, 173–74, 179, 310, 319, 320, 327, 329–330, 366, 371, 375 Ideal models, 14, 29, 170, 327, 328–29 Identity, 38, 107, 136, 142, 147, 317, 333, 335 I-He relationship, 344, 355 Image, 43, 143, 312; of God, 39, 55, 65, 115, 204, 238, 266, 294, 328, 330, 350, 351, 352, 359, 365; receptive process of “imaging,” 137 Imitation of God [imitatio Dei], 122, 152, 204, 351, 355; and communion, 116–19; as the product of the dialectic of feelings, 119–122 Immanence: cosmic-immanent experience, 328; and cosmic revelation, 272; immanent connections in marriage, 302; immanent view of the Deity, 140–41; and pantheism, 7; “transcendent or immanent,” 5, 92, 99, 110 Immortality, 163, 256, 258 Imperative, 65, 175, 179, 180, 299, 375 Incompleteness, 241–42 Indifference, 35, 68, 237, 257, 332, 335, 346, 347, 354 Individual/individualism, 128; and community, 357, 361–63; faith and the individual, 321, 346; individual existence, 362; individual in family relationships, 300; from the



subject index

individual to the collective, 208–12; and isolation, 312; and mutual dependence, 312; triple developmental model of human existence, 358–361 Individualism: from individual to nation, 220–24 Infinite [Ein-Sof ], 5, 17, 98, 99–100, 102, 136, 246 Infinitesimal, 9, 134, 137. See also Cognition Infinity, 13, 15, 32, 33, 100, 105, 146, 243, 245, 251, 265; and finitude, 54, 71, 101, 241, 250. See also Infinitesimal Inner light. See Or Penimi [inner light] Innovation, xi, 154–55, 156, 161, 165, 167, 195, 244, 334, 341, 347, 368. See also Hiddush Instinct, 70, 277, 278, 283, 333; instinctive consciousness, 105, 107; instinctive feelings, 67, 72–73, 106–7, 108, 278; natural instincts, 72–73, 90, 162, 278, 333, 355 Intellect and intellectualism, 126; Active intellect, 134, 170; of Adam, 351; apprehending intellect, 139–140; cognitive-intellectual analysis, 148; conjunction and prophecy in the intellectual dimension, 174; divine intellect, 49, 136, 137, 160; and finitude, 247; human intellectual momentum, 359; infinite intellect, 124, 136; intellect and matter, 151–168; intellectual activity, 36, 95; intellectual-cognitive basis of Halakhah, 165, 166; intellectual curiosity, 198, 213, 214; intellectual experience, 117, 170; intellectual freedom, 178; intellectual perfection, 171, 174; intellectual value, 190; and the mystery of Being, 250; noetic, intellectual act, 268; as preparation for prophecy, 175; unity of the conceiving intellect, 184. See also Cognition; Halakhah; Thought [Denken] Intelligence [binah]. See Sefirot Intentionality, 274, 279, 286. See also Phenomenology Intervention, 144, 279, 281–82, 298, 337, 352, 361, 374 Introversion, 337 Intuition, 18, 20, 53, 92, 94, 98, 137, 234, 283, 286, 289; intuitive cognition, 19–20 Irrationality, 8, 11, 51, 119, 175

401

Isolation of the Jewish people. See Jewish people Israel. See State of Israel; Zionism I-Thou relation, 183, 308, 309, 338, 343, 344, 356, 357, 360; I-Adam, Thou-God, 350–52 Jealousy, 69–73 Jewish people, 51; isolation of the Jewish people, 210, 217, 222–23; Jewish nationalism, 209–10, 211, 215, 216, 220–24. See also Judaism; State of Israel; Zionism Joy, 26, 27, 57, 68, 110–11, 158–59, 161, 162, 171, 242, 282, 287–88 Judaism, 85, 90, 93, 159, 193, 239, 314, 367; American Jewish community, 218, 220; and Aristotelian dianoetic life, 148; Catholic Church’s attitudes toward, 362; Christian respect for, 363; compared to other faiths, 31, 33, 42–47, 65, 163, 323; and erotic love, 309; and halakhic principles, xi, 47, 55, 64, 95, 193, 219, 283–84, 289, 323, 373, 376; Jewish existentialist thought, 372–73; Jewish religious consciousness, 14, 45, 67, 85, 87–88, 112, 114, 115, 122, 146, 151, 162, 167, 170, 174, 186, 190, 191, 193, 368–69, 375; neo-Orthodox Judaism, 316–17; Orthodox Judaism, 95, 101, 201, 309, 368, 375; phenomenology of, 231; and revelation, 170–71; and suffering, 195–96, 209–10; supremacy of, 284; uniqueness of, 151, 366–67, 368–69. See also Halakhah Judgment, 21, 27, 138, 154, 155, 158, 213, 218, 282; concrete-judicial aspect of Halakhah, 167; epoché [restraint], 93; God as a stern judge, 69–70, 71. See also Justice [din]; Law, legal theory Justice [din], 65–88, 89, 99, 106, 107, 114, 115, 123, 124, 189, 191, 213, 285. See also Judgment; Law Kabbalah, 91–101, 106, 121, 189, 198–99, 233, 235, 236, 240, 308, 310, 369; and experience, 98–101; Lurianic Kabbalah, 89, 91, 94, 109, 191; and ontology, 91, 99, 110, 112, 198. See also Hasidism; Sefirot; Shekhinah; Tzimtzum [withdrawal] Kaddish prayer, 256 Kantian epistemology, 58, 118, 165, 292

402

subject index

Kedushah [Sanctification prayer], 110, 127–28, 130, 295–96 Kelipoth, 198–99 Kerygmatic or visionary revelation, 261–62, 263, 265–66, 267–69, 270–72, 273. See also Revelation “Knesset Israel,” 186, 235 “Knight of Faith,” Abraham as, 332, 334, 335 Knowledge, xvi, 115, 132, 144, 146, 147, 148, 234, 237; absolute knowledge, 305; creative knowledge, 132; divine knowledge, 132, 133, 135, 144, 147, 191; and God, 134, 142, 144, 146, 265; and Halakhah, 154–57; of human existence, 296; of imperfection, 252; knowledge-knower-known, 115, 127, 131–32, 136, 139–140, 142–43, 147; moral knowledge, 132; of the “other,” 371; scientific knowledge, 56, 148, 351, 353, 359; self-knowledge, 141, 142, 144, 146; transcending knowledge, 234, 328; unity of knowledge, 133–140, 141–45 Land of Israel. See Jewish people; State of Israel Language, 30, 55, 103, 165, 200, 205, 224, 359, 375 Law, 29, 118; and concrete reality, 184; divine law, 46, 47, 119, 177, 181; and freedom, 119; halakhic law, 178, 293, 303; and hillukim, 58; human law, 181; law and duty, 298–99; laws of nature, 3, 59, 293; laws of the Torah, 29, 141–45, 172; moral law, 75, 178, 179, 180, 181; natural-cosmic law, 181; ontological law, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181; Oral Law, 169, 181–82, 183–86, 188, 367; rational law, 10, 49, 181; revelational system of laws, 180; scientific laws, 22, 29, 54, 139, 180, 328. See also Halakhah; Judgment; Justice [din] Law, legal theory: Oral Law, 189 Logic (in the sense of cognitive idealism). See Cognition Lomdus, 156 Loneliness, 260–61, 301, 302, 306, 321, 324, 330, 334, 355, 360, 361, 370–71, 372, 373; cosmic meaning of, 334; existential loneliness, 305, 308, 312, 331–34, 341–42; and family relationships, 293, 295, 303;

redemption from, 305–7, 335; and sacrifice, 335; social loneliness, 312 Love, xiii, 146, 219, 335, 374; absolute love, 126; awe of mysterious love, 174; Christianity as “religion of love,” 76–80; and dialectics, 6, 39, 126; dimensions of, 313; divine love, 44, 48, 105, 285; erotic love, 298–99, 307, 308, 309; eternal love, 107; and fear, 109; of God, 78, 126, 282, 284, 285; love and awe, 89–90, 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 116, 126, 190, 191; love-desire, 109; love without awe, 130; lovingkindness, 189, 208, 217; loving one’s neighbor, 313; one-dimensional, 122; “only love,” 283–88; and the “other,” 286–88; pure love, 108, 126, 129; and revelational consciousness, 130–31; self-loving, 308, 309; transmutations of, 66; “true love,” 309; unbalanced love, 79–80; unconditional love, 79, 284; union of opposites, 299. See also Family relationships Man, 328, 330; of contradictions, 170; covenantal man, 340; of destiny, 202, 203–5; of faith, 43, 45–46, 51, 320, 322, 323–24, 325, 328–29, 330–31, 332–34, 335–39, 340–41, 342, 343, 344–46, 347, 370; of fate, 202–3; of God, 110, 117; of harmonious unity, 170; majestic man, 226, 325–28, 336, 343, 344, 360, 370; of reason, 329; of sin, 75; of sorrow, 259. See also Halakhic man; Providence Marburg school, 8, 9, 10, 96, 328–29 Marriage, 282, 292, 294, 297, 299, 300–303, 304, 305–7, 309, 317. See also Family relationships Marxism, 372 Materiality, 69, 124, 144; and Halakhah, 157–164; intellectual-material layer, 108; material existence, 69, 161, 296; material life, 108, 129, 162, 164; material world, 37, 43, 44, 45, 68–69, 125, 156, 164, 233, 261; physical-material foundation, 158; sanctification of the material, 161. See also “Elevation of the body” Mathematical natural sciences, 13, 18, 57, 175–76, 179, 180; Adam I as a mathematical scientist, 351; and the majestic man, 326; as product of reason’s absolute freedom, 327; search



subject index

for God in, 59. See also Mathematics; Physics; Science Mathematics, 9, 20, 25; mathematical constructions, 12, 31, 326; no mathematization of Halakhah, 166. See also Mathematical natural sciences; Science Matter: intellect and matter, 151–168; sanctification of matter, 167; and spirit, 164 Meaning and meaningfulness, 194, 223, 232, 270, 287, 293; existential meaning of faith, 343; meaningful existence/life, 194, 196, 197, 203, 208, 275, 289, 341; subjective meaning, 294–95 Meaningless existence. See Existence, meaningless; Objective/objectivity, objective existence Mental health, 235, 237, 240–41, 276 Mercy [rahamim], 27, 57, 65–88, 89, 99, 106, 107, 114, 123, 191; God and mercy, 102, 103, 115, 124, 191, 336 Metaphysics, 6, 7, 13, 31, 35, 58–59, 89–90, 146, 175, 180, 200, 215, 231, 232, 233, 237, 294, 332, 336, 345, 360; and Halakhah, 206, 233; metaphysical consciousness, xiii–xiv, 233, 239–240, 265, 273, 274, 289; metaphysical thinking, 36, 201; metaphysical truths, 35, 36, 95; metaphysical unity, 275; metaphysics of evil, 198–200, 253–54, 270; and natural consciousness, 59; negation of, ix, xiv, xviii, 35–36, 44, 158, 193–226, 232, 233, 236, 239–240, 273–74, 275, 323, 366; and religious consciousness, 201; religious metaphysical philosophy, 249, 253–54, 334; and suffering, 203, 207 Modernity, 221, 222, 367, 375 Morality: and cognition, 181; moralaltruistic dimension of love, 313; moral conception of couples, 308; moral imperative, 180; moral knowledge, 132; moral law, 75, 178, 179, 180, 181; moral layer of subjective consciousness, 312; moral purpose, 254; moral qualities, 373; and prophecy, 171. See also Ethics Mourning, 159–160, 161, 216, 256 “Mysterium tremendum,” 35, 41, 51, 67, 69, 104, 122, 146, 338 Mysticism, 4, 6, 92, 98, 101, 109, 112, 114, 124, 125, 127–28, 235, 247, 369;

403

criticism of, xi; and the ecstatic, 97; and God, 5, 7, 113; and halakhic man, 91, 113, 236–37; Jewish mysticism, 98, 112–13; mystical model of conjunction, 131–32; mystical version of union, 126; mystic consciousness, 236; and phenomenology, 95, 96, 105, 110; and prayer, 247, 249; rational vs. mystical-kabbalistic, 96, 97. See also Kabbalah Myth, 284; cosmogonic-mythical sense, 103; mythical religious-epistemological model, 60 Nationalism. See Jewish people Natural sciences. See Mathematical natural sciences Nature, 330; imperviousness of, 324; laws of nature, 3, 59, 293; and the lonely man, 320; and majestic man, 359–360; natural and halakhic order, 178–182; natural cognition, 157; natural community, 332, 334, 362; natural consciousness, 54, 56–60, 62, 63, 75–76, 78, 81–82, 87–88, 146, 153, 154, 157–58, 161, 162, 190, 191; natural-cosmic dimension, 334; natural-cosmic law, 181; natural curiosity, 355; natural-instinctive feeling, 90; “natural-paradisiacal” sexual activity, 307; natural reality, 344; natural religiosity, 83, 84–86; natural revelation [natürlicher Offenbarung], 55; prophecy as a natural phenomenon, 170; revelational vs. natural, 96; and science, xiv, 359, 360; as source of knowledge about God, 346 Negation, 197, 250; of attributes, 30, 31, 346; existence of religion beyond halakhic cognition, xii; and explanations of the Holocaust, 212; of freedom, 62; of metaphysics, ix, xiv, xviii, 35–36, 44, 158, 193–226, 232, 233, 236, 239–240, 273–74, 275, 323, 366; negative intervention in the emotional system, 282; of phenomenology, 232; self-negation, 197, 220; and values, 197 Neo-Kantianism, 8, 11, 13, 15, 20–23, 24, 59–60, 135, 145, 320, 328, 346 Neo-Platonism, 43, 100, 189, 239 Nihility, 68, 255–56, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263–64, 266, 282; anxiety about,

404

subject index

257, 259, 262, 263–64; nihilitic catastrophic, 267 Norm, 148, 165, 238, 240, 293–94, 312, 360. See also Ethics; Will “Nothingness,” 72, 99, 100, 187, 243, 244 Object: applied to fate, 197; cognitive objects, 139–140; objects and divine cognition, 147; thought into object, 138; woman not an object to man, 301; world not an independent object, 144 Object and subject, 141–42, 143, 336, 343, 358–361; alienation between, 141–42, 143; causality concerning, 243; conceptual vs. situational thought, 149; and the ego, 142; essays on family relationships, 291–318; objective and subjective, 96, 99, 147–49, 194, 300, 301, 306, 307; subject-object structure of being, 245 Objective data [objektivierte Daten], 138 Objective layer of consciousness, 65, 115, 122, 123, 151–52, 165; and concrete activity, 191; correlation with subjective, 153; practical-objective dimension of consciousness, 368; and suffering, 234–35. See also Halakhah Objective/objectivity, 46; feeling and objective reference, 278; of love and awe, 284; of the majestic man, 331; “objective” commandments, 152, 173; objective consciousness, 236, 239, 240, 311–12; objective dimension, 80; objective existence, 194, 201, 206, 209, 212, 293, 358, 359; objective reality [Wirklichkeit], 138, 139, 166, 236; objective-regulative connections in family relationships, 303; “objective spirit,” 203. See also Objective layer of consciousness Objectivization, 137 Omnipotence, 72, 241, 244–45, 246 Omnipresence, 245 Omniscience, 131, 133, 245 Ontic layer: of consciousness, 312–13; ontic-existential dimension of love, 313 Ontology, 5, 6, 7, 24–25, 90, 91, 98, 107, 109, 144, 147, 177, 235, 301, 332, 333; and cognition, 19, 25; and consciousness, 17, 57, 89, 93, 105, 107, 109, 175, 178, 188, 237, 342,

355, 373; and existence, 24, 25, 144, 229, 242; and experience, 34, 61, 306; and Kabbalah, 91, 99, 110, 112, 198; model of God, 19, 110, 111, 114, 144; ontological law, 175, 177, 179, 180–81; ontological pluralism, 23–26; supra-ontological world, 170, 178; and transformation, 106–9; and tzimtzum, 103, 106, 107 Opaqueness and humility, 29–32 Openness, 374–76 Opposites, 40, 64, 66, 90, 95, 108–9, 111, 116, 169, 175, 176, 182–83, 227, 299, 307. See also Dialectics Opposition concealed, 158–59 Origin [Ursprung], 9–10, 24, 57, 102, 314. See also Creation; Science; Tzimtzum [withdrawal] Originality, 197–201 Original sin. See Creation; Sins Or Makif [surrounding light], 104 Or Penimi [inner light], 104, 107 “Other,” xv–xvi, 286–88, 302, 307, 341–45; “absolute other,” 3, 35, 41–42, 73, 76, 143, 146; “Wholly other,” 102 “Other side” [sitra ahra], 198. See also Kabbalah Pain, 37, 195–97, 209, 214, 239, 262, 263, 270, 273, 295, 296, 301, 302, 303, 305, 324, 330, 331, 333, 339. See also Suffering Panentheism, 115, 145 Pantheistic view, 7 Paradox, 31, 337, 340, 365 Parents, 183, 293; honoring parents, 310–15. See also Family relationships Penitence. See Repentance Perfection, xvi, 41, 82, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 213, 253, 297, 354 Peripatetics, 19 Personality, 74–75, 102, 105, 142, 167–68, 183, 203, 206, 214–15, 260, 265, 274, 281, 282, 294, 316, 322; and community, 86, 288; conjunction vs. union, 124–25, 130, 143; and connections (relationships), 184, 185, 302, 305–6, 307; and consciousness, 82, 289; daemonic personality, Kohelet as, 250–52; and existence, 197, 238, 287, 289; and feelings (emotions), 278–79, 283, 287, 305; of Job, 208, 250–52; and



subject index

revelation, 266–67, 268–271; spiritual personality, 43, 262; structure of, 227, 229, 250, 266–67, 283, 289, 295, 342, 343; subjective dimension of, 197; subjective personality, 306 “Phenomenal field” of Carl Rogers, 228 Phenomenology, xi–xii, xiii, xviii, 98, 103; aim of, xvi–xvii; conceptualphenomenological explication of faith, 331; concern of, 92; and consciousness, 369, 371; and dialectics, 231, 232, 236, 238–39; differences from existentialism, 231–32; and emotions, 276; epoché [restraint], 93; and existentialism, 231–32, 365–376; and family relationships, 292–93, 310–12; and Halakhah, 232; and Judaism, 231; and mysticism, 95, 96, 105, 110; negation of, 232; phenomenologicalconceptual discussions, 116–19, 331; phenomenological description of Jewish religious consciousness, 368; phenomenological description of religious consciousness, 101; phenomenological model of revelation, 37–38, 270; phenomenological psychology, 228, 276, 283, 289, 297; phenomenologicalreconstructionist model, 236; phenomenological-religious analysis, 319, 347; phenomenological research on consciousness, 369; phenomenological sociology, 228; of religion, xvii, 13–14, 36, 64, 145, 146–47, 231, 291, 319, 347, 365, 367, 370; religious-phenomenological approach, 36, 64, 145, 146–47, 367, 370; as a research method, 193. See also Consciousness; Neo-Kantianism; Religious consciousness; Time Philistine personality, Job as, 250–52 Philosophy: existentialist-religious philosophy, xv; openness to, 375; philosopher-scientist, 346; philosophical-existentialist analysis, 319, 343; philosophical-scientific language, 375; philosophy of science, 181, 375; Religious philosophy, xv, 23, 221, 288, 293, 297, 367. See also Dialectics; Existentialism; Metaphysics; Phenomenology “Photographing the given,” 14 Physicality. See Sexuality

405

Physics, 12, 14, 19–20, 97, 157, 167, 173, 175, 179, 180, 343. See also Mathematical natural sciences; Science Place of the “other,” 264 Pleasure, 27, 28, 158–59, 250, 303, 307, 308 Pluralism. See Ontology, ontological pluralism Positivism, 31, 200, 304; positivist Halakhah, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 Post-Kantianism, 136 Postulate, 44, 93, 157, 239 Pragmatic-utilitarian: dimension of love, 312; layer of consciousness, 312 Prayer, 47, 209, 219, 248, 258–59, 264, 274, 371; and crisis, 247–48, 249; and distress, 249, 257; and Halakhah, 257, 260; Job’s prayers, 209, 251; and mysticism, 247, 249; prayer rituals, 27, 70; rejected prayers, 47, 48; and revelation, 48, 264, 274; subjective prayer, 249, 257; surface vs. depth prayers, 247. See also Kaddish prayer; Kedushah [Sanctification prayer]; Mysticism Principle of all principles, 99 Prophecy, prophets, 18, 27, 41, 42–43, 74, 115, 129, 152, 182–83, 371; absence of prophecy, 163; antiMaimonides approach to prophecy, 50–51; chaotic model of, 56; character of, 170–73; emotion as preparation for, 175; as expression of united layer of religious consciousness, 188; and Halakhah, 188; and intellect, 174, 175; and intellectual dimension, 174; and morality, 171; and prophecy, 176; prophecy and tradition, 169–191; prophecy as a natural phenomenon, 170; prophecy as consciousness, 52–53; prophecy of Isaiah, 271; and revelation, 172, 176; and science, 172, 173–78; striving to improve society, 187; teacher and disciple as the audience, 187; transcendent dimension of Ezekiel’s prophecy, 271; types of prophecies, xxx Providence, 52, 128, 140, 225, 226; divine Providence, 68, 69, 101, 127, 199, 213, 214, 348 Psychology, 72, 82, 170, 179, 227, 238, 260, 284, 288; existential psychology, 228–230, 283, 289, 357, 366; and

406

subject index

Halakhah, 227, 230, 276; and logical thought, 179–180; and morality, 180, 280; phenomenological psychology, 228, 276, 283, 289, 297; psychological consciousness, 90; psychological reality, 185; psychological states and analysis of emotions, 71, 276–281, 283, 289; psychological thought of Soloveitchik (finitude and suffering), 227–289. See also Emotionality; Feeling Punishment, 81, 90, 125, 206, 214, 314. See also Reward Pure reason. See Reason Purification, 106, 125, 160, 164, 170, 207, 217, 248, 308, 316, 345 Purity [Reinheit], 5, 138 Purpose, 20, 30, 48, 59, 125, 132, 161, 164, 302, 334; and God, 39, 146; and Halakhah, 145, 160, 162, 210; and morality, 117, 254; and revelation, 43, 175; and suffering, 45, 296; Torah study as purpose, 161 Qualitative world, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 27, 35, 37, 56, 58, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 328, 354, 360; actual-qualitative reality, 93, 167; concrete-qualitative world, 18, 29, 33, 137, 166, 330; external qualitative world, 10; extra-cognitive qualitative realm, 10, 37; qualitative and sensory realm, 8, 10, 11, 29; qualitative reality, 12, 35, 37, 96, 175; subjective qualitative order, 23 Quality, 9, 18, 153, 165, 176, 177, 213, 217, 219, 254, 267, 373 Quantum mechanics, 97, 157 Quest for God. See God, search (quest) for God Racism. See Anti-Semitism Radicalization, 112, 141, 144, 368 Rationalism, 8, 30–31, 53, 79, 138, 170–71, 174–75; as antithesis of revelation, 81; conceptual-rational religiosity, 23; existentialism as rational, 260; Maimonidean, 109, 236; rational-epistemological stage of consciousness, 132; rationality of Halakhah, 166; rational law, 10, 49, 181; rational philosophy, 78, 93, 209; rational religiosity, 23, 30, 31; rational vs. mystical-kabbalistic, 96, 97; rejection of, 225; and revelational

consciousness, 54, 153; scientific rationalism, 30, 75, 94; structural and “rational” model of revelation, 37–38; subjective rationalism, 3, 324–25; “supra-rational,” 304 Reality, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 25, 30, 31, 38, 43, 55, 92, 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 117, 125, 127, 144, 160, 164, 170, 173, 177, 180, 185, 186, 199, 207, 221, 234, 253, 254, 271, 272, 329–330, 334; actual-qualitative reality, 93, 167; and cognition, 24, 25, 37, 166, 182; concrete reality, 7, 14, 25, 29, 184, 236, 261, 326; conscious reality, 106, 129, 268; cosmic reality, 36–37; of evil, 199, 254; extra-consciousness reality, 22, 93, 145; and faith, 329, 345; and God, 4, 5, 6, 7, 19–20, 26, 30, 47, 92, 120, 121, 141, 144, 327; human reality, 325, 344; and Job, 251; knowledge of, 13, 19; and majestic man, 325, 326; metaphysical reality, 36, 96; natural reality, 344; objective reality [Wirklichkeit], 138, 139, 144, 166, 236; qualitative reality, 12, 35, 37, 96, 175; religious reality, 24, 77; and science, 13, 24, 165, 250; search for, 177–78; sensorial reality, 58; tangible reality, 173; and transcendence, 51, 170, 262, 266; Truly Real, 354. See also Sense Realms [rashuyot], 3–4; absolute realm, 15; aesthetic realm, 6, 90; blurring of, 138; experiential-action realm, 68; extra-cognitive qualitative realm, 37; Halakhah as a balance in the practical realm, 374; hermeneutical-theological realm, 68; of human experience, 178; national realm, 209; “numinous” realm, 90; practical realm, 166; private realm of the potential apprehending subject, 134; of prophecy, 171; qualitative and sensory realm, 11, 13; realm of the “something” that is to be apprehended, 134; religious realm, 90; revelational realm, 156; scholarly abstract realm, 166; supra-epistemic realm, 58, 173–74; thematicaxiological realm of thought, 234, 240; transcendent realm, 170; union of realms, 180 Reason, xiii–xiv, 276, 282, 292, 345–46, 365, 370; from certainty to certainty through reason, 14–18; creative



subject index

reason, 13, 21–22; critical reasoning, 112; and experience, 15–16; impotence of, 8–14; limitations of, 1–34, 97; man of reason, 329; power of, 15, 346; pure reason, 20; reason’s absolute freedom, 327; rule of reason, 165, 166; and science, 15, 59, 63, 346; and the senses, 136; transcending limits of, 3. See also Cognition Reasons for the commandments. See Commandments Receptivity, 146; and revelation, 51, 64, 74, 191, 269 Reciprocity, 81 Reconstruction, 113, 153, 170, 190–91, 239, 311, 312 Redemption, 28, 43, 44, 57, 129, 186, 213, 214, 237, 253, 299, 302, 330, 331, 335, 338, 343, 345, 346–47, 348; of the body, 159; existential values of, 240; individual, 312, 347; from loneliness, 305–7, 335; of the material act, 160; personal redemption, 330, 333, 361; and relationships, 299, 302, 315, 345; from suffering, 206, 298, 300 Rejection, 67, 113, 120, 217, 240, 284, 355; of metaphysics, 206, 209, 214, 225–26, 233, 275, 323, 366; of objective dimension, 80, 225; of objective-religiosity, 78–79; of phenomenological religious approach, 291; of rationalism, 225 Rejoicing, behavioral, 159–160, 161 Relationships, 194; and redemption, 299, 302, 315, 345; relationship and contrast between Soloveitchik and Barth, 356–57. See also Family relationships Religion, 126, 338; cognition vs. religion, 146; conceptual-rational religiosity, 23; dialectic of, 371; as an essential characteristic of humans, 8; ethical-religious perfection, 41; existential-religious philosophy, 23; existentialist-religious philosophy, xv; experimental-religious consciousness, 94; and faith, 31–34; inter-religious dialogue, 358, 362–63; intrareligious communities, 362; Jewish religious consciousness, 87–88; Judaism as a perfect religion, 367; and mental healing, 235; messianic anthropological model, 348; and models of union, 106; mythical

407

religious-epistemological model, 60; and natural religiosity, 88; natural religiosity, 83, 84–86; negative theology, 30; rational religiosity, 30, 31; religious component in man, 11; religious existence, xii–xiii, 86, 99, 375; religious experience, 38, 279; religious feeling, 90; religious imperative, 65, 65, 375; religiousmetaphysical reaction to finitude, 252, 253; religious perfection, xvi; religious-phenomenological approach, 36, 64, 145, 146–47; religioussubjective consciousness, 162; religious subjectivity, 23; religious thought and metaphysics, 201; revelational religion, 84; as solution to existential problems, 275; stages of religious experience, 18–19. See also Christianity; Consciousness; Dialectics; Epistemology; Existentialism; Halakhah; Hasidism; homo religiosus; Judaism; Kabbalah; Mysticism; Phenomenology; Religious consciousness; Religious philosophy; Subjective/subjectivity; Theology Religious consciousness, x–xi, xiii–xiv, xviii, 3, 7, 12, 14, 36, 46, 53, 57, 59, 64, 65, 73, 75, 76–77, 81, 89, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 275, 324, 372; and Brisk scholarship, 97; and the cognitive man, 145; cognitive structure of scholars not fitting with, 166; and conjunction, 122–131; as a consciousness of oppositions, 96; dialectical religious consciousness, 2, 45, 46, 48, 67, 77, 85–86, 87, 89, 97, 111, 114, 119, 146–47, 151, 317, 368, 371; finitude transmuting, 264; Jewish consciousness, 14, 45, 67, 85, 87–88, 112, 114, 115, 122, 146, 151, 162, 167, 170, 174, 186, 190, 191, 193, 368–69, 375; and Kabbalah, 99; and metaphysics, 201; phenomenological description of, 101; prophecy as expression of united layer of, 188; and radical abstinence, 164; rationalepistemological stage of, 132; revelational religious consciousness, 65–66; stages and structure of, 123–24, 193, 374; subjective religious consciousness, 67, 89, 113, 114, 148; and tension, 1, 28, 75, 76–77, 103, 120, 324; and two models of

408

subject index

revelation, 268; unified religious consciousness, 157–166; and the uniqueness of Judaism, 151. See also Halakhah; Phenomenology Religious philosophy, 221, 296, 367; existential-religious philosophy, xv, 23, 288, 297 Remembrance, 275 Renunciation, 303–4, 315, 331, 335–39 Repentance, 46, 207–8; commandments of, 46, 48; and family relationships, 315–16; and justice, 73–75; as selfexamination, 214 Responsibility, 217 Resurrection, 163 Revelation, 17–18, 43, 47–49, 76, 175, 209, 263, 264, 275; absurd model of revelation, 267–68; as antithesis of rationalism, 81; “apocalyptic” revelation, 269; catastrophic revelation, 264, 265, 267, 271; Christian denial of, 80; and cognition, 156, 268; and commandments, 55, 81; concept of in And From There You Shall Seek, 35–64; conscioussubjective examination of revelation, 273–74; cosmic revelation, 261, 263, 265–66, 267–69, 270–72, 273, 274; crisis experience of revelation, 267; and dialectics, 87, 115, 265–274; divine revelation, 27, 34, 48, 63, 176–77, 182; existential-concrete examination of revelation, 274; existential model of revelation, 270; and finitude, 257–58; and God, 90, 208–9, 264, 340; and Halakhah, 50, 153, 154, 156–57, 191, 209, 270, 275; and Judaism, 43–44, 170–71; natural revelation [natürlicher Offenbarung], 55; negative aspects of, 62; as an ontic event, 266; as a paradox, 365; and personality, 266–67, 268–271; phenomenological model of revelation, 37–38, 270; positive revelation [positiver Offenbarung], 55; and prayer, 48, 264, 274; and process, 266; and prophecy, 172, 176; and receptivity, 51, 64, 74, 191, 269; revelational consciousness, 51, 54, 56, 60–63, 75, 78, 79, 80–81, 82, 87, 130–31, 153, 154, 156, 157–58, 161, 162, 190; revelational experience, 265–66, 268; revelational faith [emunah giluyyit], 34, 61, 62;

revelational realm, 156; revelational religion, 84; revelational religious consciousness, 65–66; revelational system of laws, 180; revelational vs. natural, 96; and science, 146, 152; structural and “rational” model of, 37–38; suffering and finitude, 261–65; and teleology, 38, 39, 48; and two models of revelation, 268; visionary or kerygmatic revelation, 261–62, 263, 265–66, 267–69, 270–72, 273, 274. See also Experience Revenge. See Vengeance of God Reward, 68, 81, 90, 107, 108, 111, 125. See also Punishment Rule of reason. See Reason Sabbath, 160, 311 Sacredness, 234, 295, 302, 305 Sacrifices, 107, 160, 248, 253, 295, 331, 335–39, 346 Salvation, 33, 40, 47, 57, 207, 208, 214, 248, 352 Sanctification, 127, 129–130, 158, 160, 161, 165, 167, 224, 288, 295. See also Kedushah [Sanctification prayer] Science, 16, 22, 63, 76, 371; and cognition, xi, 174; cognitive-scientific analysis, 143; and consciousness, 172–73, 371; and ethics, 175, 179, 180; and extra-cognitive reality, 12; failure of, 172, 173, 176, 177, 238, 239, 324; and Halakhah, 156–57, 165, 166; and nature, xiv, 359, 360; philosopherscientist, 346; philosophical-scientific language, 375; philosophy of science, 96, 181, 375; and the proof of God’s existence, 20–23; and prophecy, 172, 173–78; and reality, 13, 24, 165, 250; and reason, 15, 59, 63, 346; and revelation, 146, 152; scientific activity and creativity, 181, 191, 238; scientific cognition, xi, 143, 154, 157, 173, 175; scientific knowledge, 56, 148, 351, 353, 359; scientific laws, 22, 29, 54, 139, 180, 328; scientific rationalism, 30, 75, 94; scientific truths, 320, 351; tension between science and religion, 23–24, 76, 123; use of to understand reason, 9; vs. revelation, 146. See also Mathematical natural sciences; Mathematics; Physics Scientific method, 13, 85, 86, 173–74; philosophical scientific method, 11



subject index

Secularization/secularism, 68, 77, 82–83, 222, 223, 288, 313, 370–71, 373; secular Zionism, 211, 220 Sefirot, 59, 98–99, 102, 119–122, 198–99, 233, 239. See also Kabbalah Self, the, 2, 74–75, 105, 142–43, 189, 269, 287; and the “other,” xv, 312, 313, 337, 342; Selfhood, 126, 142, 202, 268, 270, 297 Self-affirmation, 17, 35, 37, 45, 46, 53, 57, 66, 143, 146, 152, 162, 171, 174, 177, 191, 231, 247, 261, 266–67, 270, 287–88, 289, 295, 310, 320, 325, 371 Self-concealment, 216–17 Self-concern, 303–4 Self-consciousness, 2, 138 Self-creativity, 74, 207 Self-deception, 198, 199, 201 Self-effacement, 289, 295 Self-examination, 213, 214 Self-fulfillment, 263, 302 Self-knowledge, 141, 142, 144, 146 Self-negation, 197, 220 Self-portraiture, 296, 297 Self-sacrifice, 346 Self-transcendence, 2, 3, 4, 5, 68, 262, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 274 Self-understanding, 322 Self-withdrawal, 210 Sensation [Empfindung], 10, 21–23 Sense, 20, 21; as a deterministic element, 178; and finitude, 263; knowing God through our senses, 23; qualitative and sensory realm, 173; sense-experience, 268; sensoriality as incomplete degree of thought, 136; sensorial-real experience, 92; thought reducing the sense, 137, 138. See also Extra-cognitive dimension; Feeling Separation, 102, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 117, 144 Sexuality, 295, 317; “primitive lust,” 296; redeeming sexuality, 307–10; sexual abstinence, 161–64, 296; sexual activity, 162, 307, 308, 309–10; sexual fidelity, 339; sexual freedom, 303 Shame, 293, 296–97, 298, 301, 303, 317 Shekhinah, 5, 30, 33, 40, 43, 46, 61–62, 74, 98, 127, 129–130, 160, 171, 172, 185, 186, 187. See also God Shevirah [breaking], 101 Sins, 46, 74, 75, 78, 175, 208, 214, 285, 298, 315–16; original sin, 33, 41, 297. See also Creation

409

“Sitz im leben,” 232, 259 Size, 9, 10, 12, 15 Sobering up, 207 Social remnants, 305 Solitude, 28, 211, 217, 222, 341, 361 Song of Songs, 1, 5, 27, 39, 69, 190, 308; and the Holocaust, 215–17 Soul, 3, 4, 13, 16, 17, 27, 40, 41, 47, 59, 61, 71, 101, 126, 160, 185–86, 190, 239, 325, 341; immortality of the soul, 163, 258 Space, 4, 9, 28, 38, 129, 157, 184, 243, 244, 245, 276; empty space [makom], 102, 107. See also Time Spirit/spiritual, 5, 10, 19, 32, 44, 52, 55, 61, 68–69, 72, 74, 75, 78, 80, 96, 107, 108, 121, 126, 157, 160, 164, 165, 174, 189, 190, 197, 207, 213, 239, 294, 322, 323, 329; creative spirit, 57, 156; in family relationships, 294, 297, 301; free spirit, 61, 63, 119, 156; and God, 98, 99, 105, 107, 162, 163, 266, 269; inner spirit, 62; and joy, 158, 159; metaphysical spirit, 58, 233, 235; “objective spirit,” 203; spiritual activity, 89, 90; spiritual-conscious expression, 90, 106–9, 123, 124, 154; spiritual-emotional activity, 89; spiritual existence, 3, 170, 200, 233; spiritual experience, 4, 57, 82, 170, 273; spiritual personality, 43, 262 State of Israel, 211, 214, 215, 220, 221, 223, 224. See also Zionism Stimulus, 12, 21, 29 Stoic. See Indifference Style, 42, 75–76 Subject and object, 336, 343, 358–361; alienation between, 141–42, 143; causality concerning, 243; conceptual vs. situational thought, 149; and the ego, 142; essays on family relationships, 291–318; objective and subjective, 96, 99, 147–49; subjectobject structure of being, 245 Subjective layers of consciousness, 65–88, 90, 106–9, 112, 122, 123–24, 130, 146, 148, 151–52, 153, 184, 191, 228, 233; conception of the Deity at third stage, 147; correlation with objective, 153; divine commandment as essential to second level of existence, 360–61; Halakhah as unified subjective consciousness, 157–166, 169; inter-subjective

410

subject index

dimension, 228; moral layer of, 312; ontic layer of, 312–13; and the “perpetuity of God’s word,” 169; pragmatic-utilitarian layer of, 312; religious-subjective consciousness, 162; replacing with ethical-existential consciousness, 237; second subjective layer, 115; subjective religious consciousness, 89; and suffering, 234–35; transformation of, 108; uniform nature of, 152–54; unity of, 153, 163 Subjective/subjectivity, 46; faithsubjective existence, elements of, 331; intersubjective connection, 342; inter-subjective dimension, 359–361, 362; intersubjective existence, 309, 316, 360; of the man of faith, 331; passionate-subjective dimension of consciousness, 368; subjective cognition, 175; subjective connections in marriage, 302, 303, 304; subjective consciousness, xiii–xiv, 240, 310–12, 329, 342, 368–69; subjective dialectic, 151; subjective existence, 99, 194, 201, 204, 205, 293, 300, 309, 316, 330, 331, 332, 336, 343–44, 360; subjective experience, 236; subjective feelings, 36, 279; subjective meaning, 294–95; subjective qualitative order, 23; subjective rationalism, 3, 324–25; subjective relationships, 194; transcendental subjectivity, 142; unified subjective consciousness, 157–166, 169, 176; unique subjective meaningful existence vs. objective existence lacking uniqueness, 194. See also Consciousness; Extra-cognitive dimension; Feeling; Objective/ objectivity; Subjective layers of consciousness Subjugation, 61, 117, 157, 190 Sublime, 24, 25, 38, 90, 182, 199, 281, 305. See also Aesthetics Success, 177, 204, 253, 274, 320, 324, 334, 335, 343 Succession, 280 Suffering, xiii, xiv–xv, xvii, 37, 45, 69, 72, 82, 195–97, 198, 203, 204, 206, 212–15, 222, 227–289, 324, 330, 334, 346, 370–71; anxiety and, 27, 72, 73, 259, 270; concrete suffering, 275; consciousness of, 268, 275;

divine suffering, 217; as an external emotional expression, 331; and family relationships, 295–98, 303, 313; and finitude, 259, 261–65; and Halakhah, 205–7, 208, 239–240; and indifference, 346; of Job, 208–9; and joy, 161; and love, 287; man of faith acknowledging, 339; personal writing on by Soloveitchik, 258–261; pole of suffering, 296, 324, 334, 337, 341, 346; redemption from, 206, 298, 300; starting point of, 298–303. See also Pain Surface crisis, 247, 249, 259 Surrender, 10, 117, 119, 143, 196, 202, 220, 335 Surrounding light. See Or Makif [surrounding light] Symbolism, 17, 18, 101, 223, 308 Tam, Rabbenu, 187 Task [Aufgabe], 31, 138, 202, 354 Teleology, 45, 48, 56, 67, 68, 194, 195, 197, 207, 212, 236, 242–43, 256, 260, 263, 296, 342, 354; and causality, 69, 205; and relationships, 194, 302, 303, 339; and revelation, 38, 39, 48; and suffering, 206, 208; teleological Halakhah, 239–240. See also Purpose Temporality [Zeitlichkeit]. See Time Tension, 26–28, 32, 33, 49, 76, 77, 87, 102, 104, 106–7, 144, 162–63, 164, 190, 191, 194, 198, 285, 321, 329, 339, 346, 347, 358, 362, 371; alleviation of, 339; anxiety and awe, 102, 107; and consciousness, 101, 106, 116, 123, 161, 190, 291, 370; and cosmic experience, 32, 100, 104, 105–6; cosmic tension, 32, 100, 104; existential tension, 33, 101, 194, 244, 324; external tension, 358–59; and faith, 346–47, 362–63; and family relationships, 300, 321, 324; first tension, 27, 100, 153; and God, 26–28, 75, 120, 123–24, 346; and Halakhah, 73, 116, 156, 160, 257; inner tension, 358; and Kabbalah, 91, 99, 106, 121; love and awe, 102, 105, 106–7, 190, 285; natural consciousness vs. revelational consciousness, 190; and religious consciousness, 1, 28, 75, 76–77, 103, 120, 324; between science and religion, 23–24, 76, 123; second tension, 27, 28, 30; and tension, 300



subject index

Tetragrammaton, 120–22 Theistic view, 106, 116, 140, 144, 145 Thematic-axiological realm of thought, 234 Theodicy, 212, 339, 345 Theology, 5, 7, 14, 69, 79, 94, 99, 225, 342; Christian theology, 44, 79–80, 285, 294; of crisis, 16, 201, 209, 349, 365–66; of evil, 236; negative theology, 30; neo-Orthodox Jewish theology, 316–17; of the Third Reich, 79. See also Christianity; Judaism; Religion “Theology of Crisis,” 16 Theory of the intellect. See Intellect and intellectualism Third Reich, 79 Thought [Denken], 138, 148; “basic form” of [Grundform], 137–38; conceptual thought, 149; divine thought, 49, 139; existential thought, 71, 193, 201, 203, 224, 228, 229, 231–32, 242–46, 275, 298, 342, 348, 372–73; and finitude, 252–55; God as thought that thinks itself, 139; and Halakhah, 154–55, 234–35; human thought, 139, 154, 326; logical thought [logische Denken], 179–180, 213, 345; metaphysical thinking [metaphysischen Denken], 36, 201; psychotherapeutic thought, 227–289; and the “pure” subject, 142; religious thought, 31, 39, 49, 80, 171, 201, 243, 252, 317, 357, 366; situational thought, 149; thematic-axiological realm of thought, 234; thought into object, 138; thought of origin, 9–10; thought reducing the sense, 137 Time, 9, 235, 264, 280, 331, 339–341; concreteness bound by time and space, 184; creativity and the temporal process, 244; and finitude, 241, 243–44, 257–58, 263, 275; past and future, 340; temporality [Zeitlichkeit], 71, 173, 242, 244, 245, 255, 257–58, 263, 275. See also Eternity; Space Tools to deal with suffering, 207 Torah, ix, xi, 29, 39, 69, 74, 86–87, 103, 141–45, 154, 156, 160, 161–62, 166, 178, 184–85, 186, 187, 189, 207, 211, 222, 314, 341, 359, 373, 373–74, 375; Oral Torah, 183–85, 187, 188, 189, 190, 367. See also Hiddush

411

Tradition and prophecy, 169–191 Transcendence, 2–4, 25, 97, 102, 119, 165, 187; and cosmic experience, 272; divine-transcendent, 181; of God, 70, 99; God transcending time, 245; and halakhic activity, 167; selftranscendence, 2, 3, 4, 5, 68, 262, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 274; transcendental consciousness, 17, 18, 72, 190; transcendental experience, 4–5, 24–25, 26, 98, 327–28, 355; transcendental holiness, 160; transcendental subjectivity, 142; transcendent dimension, xiv, 271; “transcendent or immanent,” 5, 92, 99, 110; transcending cognition, 25, 105; transcending knowledge, 234, 328; and visionary revelation, 272 Transformation, 62, 73, 102, 107, 152, 190, 241, 302, 316; of fate, 210, 219; and ontology, 106–9; of opposites, 77, 107–9, 111. See also Awe; Fear; Feeling; Love Trust, 16, 190, 346 Truth, 13, 15, 36, 93, 146, 255, 285, 374; abstract truth, 345; metaphysical truths, 35, 36, 95; scientific truths, 320, 351 Tzedakah, 209 Tzimtzum [withdrawal], 66, 89, 91, 92, 94, 101–6. See also God; Kabbalah; Origin [Ursprung] Unification, xvi, 161–62 Unified consciousness. See Consciousness Union: complete union, 169; and conjunction, 122–131; consciousness of, 127; intellectual union, 126; of opposites, 169; between teacher and disciple, 184; yearning for, 130 Uniqueness, 13, 28, 57, 105, 152, 238, 262, 337, 350, 355, 359; of Judaism, 64, 112, 151, 224, 368–372; national uniqueness, 211–12; unique subjective meaningful existence vs. objective existence lacking uniqueness, 194. See also Existence, unique existence Unity: absolute unity, 111, 138; cognitive unity, 134, 139, 143; God of unity, 209; harmonious unity, 143, 170; of knowledge, 133–140, 141–45;

412

subject index

metaphysical unity, 275; of subjective consciousness, 163, 166. See also Consciousness, unified consciousness Value, 73, 82, 103, 190, 200, 223, 234, 240, 247, 255, 257, 278, 302, 332, 357; added values in creation story, 357; change of, 173; of divine love, 285; of emotions and feelings, 278, 279, 281; ethical values, 237; existential value, 148, 237, 240; of finitude, 256; independent values, 10, 26, 120; metaphysical values, 237, 240; and negation, 197; noetic value, 156; of sacrifice, 107; source of, 282–83 Vengeance of God, 69–73 Virtue. See Ethics; Morality Visionary: prophecy of Isaiah, 271; visionary experience, 271. See also Kerygmatic or visionary revelation

Wholeness, 241, 247, 250, 280, 301 Will, 61, 98–99, 148; divine will, 40, 49; free will, 119, 202; Inscrutable Will, 49; Supreme Primeval Will, 126. See also Ethics; God; Purpose Wisdom [hokhmah]. See Knowledge; Sefirot Worship, 66, 81, 86, 111, 160, 164, 231, 248, 257 Yahweh, 349, 354. See also God Yeshiva, 95, 167 Yeshivot, 95, 156 Zionism, 211, 221; religious-Zionism, 222, 323, 348, 374; secular Zionism, 211, 220; Zionist homilies, 193–226

Names Index Abraham, 182, 223, 334, 335, 346 Adam: Adam I as the majestic man, 325–28, 336, 343, 350–52, 359–360; Adam II as the man of faith, 325, 328, 333, 334, 336, 339, 343, 353–56; continuity vs. polarization in story of Adam and Eve, 352–53; encounter between Adam and Eve, 337, 357, 359, 360; sources of dual split in Adam, 349–350 Adler, Alfred, 229 Amiel, Moshe Avigdor, 140–41 Angel, Ernest, 230 Aristotle, 19, 30, 43, 51

Eliyahu of Vilnius see Gaon of Vilna Eve, 337, 352–53, 357, 359, 360. See also Adam Ezekiel, 270, 271, 272

Barnes, Hazel, 229 Barrett, William, 329, 345 Barth, Karl, 35, 69–70, 94, 295, 336–37, 349–352, 353–56, 356–57, 365–66 Bergman, Samuel Hugo, 11, 15 Binswanger, Ludwig, 230, 283 Blidstein, Gerald, 221 Brunner, Emil, 209, 295, 297, 317, 351, 365 Buber, Martin, 194, 299, 306, 308, 309, 337–38, 341, 344, 369 Buitendyck, Frederick, 283

Halevi, Judah, 51, 52, 95, 120, 121, 158, 163, 174, 175, 188, 367 Harlap, Yaʿakov Moshe, 195 Harnack, Adolph von, 284 Hasdai Crescas see Crescas, Hasdai Hartmann, Heinz, 228 Hayyim of Volozhin. Hayyim Vital see Vital, Hayyim Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 292 Heidegger, Martin, 71, 95, 142, 194, 203, 242, 243, 275, 283, 297, 324, 332, 333, 344, 366, 369 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 3, 41, 149 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 118, 181, 323 Hoffman, David Zvi, 323 Husserl, Edmund, xiii, 93, 142

Camus, Albert, 275, 288–89 Cassirer, Ernst, 60, 145 Cohen, Hermann, xii, xiv, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 20, 21–22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 57, 59, 60, 84, 96, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 173, 178–79, 180, 200, 206, 238, 310, 319, 320, 327, 328, 329, 366, 371 Cordovero, Moses, 158 Crescas, Hasdai, 158, 174, 175

Francke, August, 284–85 Freud, Sigmund, 229, 276, 277–78, 280, 368 Fromm, Erich, 287 Gaon, Saadia. See Saʿadia Gaon (Saʿadia ben Joseph) Gaon of Vilna, 155, 156 Gold, Zeev, 195

Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, 74 Irgas, Yosef, 103 Isaac Luria see Luria, Isaac Isaiah, 270, 271–72

Descartes, René, 324 Dohm, Pierre, 12

Jacob, 222 Jaspers, Karl, 229 Job, 208–9, 213, 219, 250–52, 267 Judah Halevi see Halevi, Judah Jung, Carl, 229, 368

Eddington, Arthur, 12 Einstein, Albert, 12 Ellenberger, Henri F., 230

Kant, Immanuel, 8–9, 14, 16, 25, 84, 136, 140, 328 Kaplan, Lawrence, 372

414

names index

Kaufmann, Walter, 201 Kierkegaard, Søren, 32, 33, 71, 111, 194, 201, 203, 242–43, 286–87, 292, 295, 297, 298–99, 307, 309, 326, 332, 334, 335, 348, 357, 366, 369 Kohelet, 250–52 Kohut, Heinz, 228 Kolle, Kurt, 229 Kook, Abraham Yitzhak, 169, 289 Korn, Eugene, 362–63 Lefebre, Ludwig B., 229 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 136, 253 Luria, Isaac [Ha-Ari], 36, 104 Maimon, Solomon, 135–37, 139, 140 Maimonides (Moshe Ben Maimon), 15, 19–20, 36, 40–41, 50–51, 56, 94, 104, 109, 110, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 125, 128, 131–32, 133–141, 143–45, 144, 147, 155, 158, 162, 163, 164, 169–173, 175, 185, 186–87, 199, 240, 253–54, 273, 282, 292, 367–68, 373–74 Marcel, Gabriel, 324, 342, 366 Maritain, Jacques, 14, 336, 338, 366 Marx, Karl, 372 May, Rollo, 229, 230, 287, 332 Minkowski, Eugene, 230 Moses, 218 Moses Cordovero see Cordovero, Moses Nahmanides, 155, 318 National Institute of Mental Health (Yeshiva University), 319 Natorp, Paul, 21, 138 Neher, André, 338 Niebuhr, Reinhold, ix, 2–3, 7, 35, 105, 348, 365 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 225 Nygren, Anders, 285 Otto, Rudolf, ix, 8, 23, 24, 35, 41, 51, 54, 60, 69, 71, 90, 102, 104, 108, 111, 145, 314, 327, 338, 357, 365 Parsons, Talcott, 228 Peli, Pinchas Hacohen, 315–16 Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni, 238 Planck, Max, 12, 157 Plato, 43, 170

Plotinus, 30, 43 Poincaré, Henri, 12, 25 Ravitzky, Aviezer, 135 Reichenbach, Hans, 326 Riki, Emmanuel Hai, 103 Rogers, Carl, 228, 333n37 Saʿadia Gaon, 118, 179n11, 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 71, 142, 215–16, 229, 275, 288–89, 361, 372 Scharlemann, Rovert, 98 Schatz, David, 258 Scheler, Max, ix, 1–2, 16, 36, 41, 53, 54, 60, 92, 145, 276, 365 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, 229 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 299 Schleiermacher, Friedrich David Ernst, 8, 24, 33, 53, 327, 338, 348 Schneur Zalman of Liyyadi 102 Scholem, Gershom, 106 Schutz, Alfred, 228 Schweitzer, Albert, 226 Singer, David, 375 Snygg, Donald, 228 Socrates, 203 Sokol, Moshe, 375 Solomon Ibn Gabirol see Ibn Gabirol, Solomon Soloveitchik, Hayyim, 91, 156, 206 Soloveitchik, Moshe, 91, 185, 186–87 Soloveitchik, Yitzhak Ze’ev, 91 Spinoza, Baruch, 30, 243 Tam, Rabbenu, 155, 187 Tillich, Paul, ix, 3, 7, 42, 98, 105, 197, 203, 228–29, 243–46, 255, 257, 288, 342, 348 Underhill, Evelyn, 75, 111 Vital, Hayyim, 102 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 200 Wolowelsky, Joel, 258 Yosef Irgas see Irgas, Yosef Ziegler, Reuven, 258