Tradition vs. Traditionalism : Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought [1 ed.] 9789401206426, 9789042024786

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Tradition vs. Traditionalism Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought

VIBS Volume 197 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Daniel B. Gallagher Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry

Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Alan Milchman Peter A. Redpath Alan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala ˇ Emil Višňovský Anne Waters John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Philosophy and Religion PAR Kenneth A. Bryson, Editor

Tradition vs. Traditionalism Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought

Avi Sagi Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover photo: ©Avi Sagi Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2478-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Philosophy and Religion PAR Kenneth A. Bryson Editor

Other Titles in PAR

Rem B. Edwards. What Caused the Big Bang? 2001. VIBS 115 Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell, Editors, Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. 2003. VIBS 143 Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson. The Curve of the Sacred. 2006. VIBS 178 Brendan Sweetman. The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent. 2008. VIBS 193

Editorial Board of PAR Rod Nicholls (webmaster) Deane-Peter Baker D. de Leonardo Castro Elijah G. Dann Russ Dumke Carl Kalwaitis Michael Sudduth Gregory MacLeod

Harriet E. Barber Stephen Clark Gwen Griffith-Dickson Jim Kanaris John C. Duncan Pawel Kawalec Esther McIntosh Ludwig Nagl

CONTENTS Editorial Foreword

ix

Introduction

1

ONE

Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge

PART ONE

The Tense Encounter with Modernity

15

TWO

Soloveitchik: Jewish Thought Confronts Modernity

21

THREE

Compartmentalization: From Ernst Simon to Yeshayahu Leibowitz

43

PART TWO

The Harmonic Encounter with Modernity

61

FOUR

Religious Commitment in a Secularized World: Eliezer Goldman

63

David Hartman: Renewing the Covenant

85

FIVE

PART THREE Between Old and New: Judaism as Interpretation SIX

5

115

Scripture in the Thought of Leibowitz and Soloveitchik

119

Halakhah in the Thought of Leibowitz and Soloveitchik

135

EIGHT

Eliezer Goldman: Judaism as Interpretation

155

Epilogue

“My Name’s my Donors’ Name”

173

SEVEN

Notes

177

Bibliography

199

About the Author

211

Index

213

EDITORIAL FOREWORD An aspect of Professor Avi Sagi’s book brings to mind the wonderful biblical story of Job as he wrestles with God, on the one hand, and three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, on the other. The friends surely think that Job offended God, though they are reluctant to say so. Unknown to them, God accepts Satan’s wager because He is confident that Job will do the right thing, though God neglects to tell Job that this is a test. Even Job’s wife implores him to curse God knowing that the action would cast him into the nothing. This, she reasoned, is preferable to suffering. Job refuses to curse God but puts Him in the docket. Why treat me this way, he wails. Have I not been a good servant? The resounding boom from Heaven leaves no doubt that God is in charge. What follows is God’s brilliant speech and the divine reminder of our metaphysical insignificance. We best learn from the past. Sagi’s book examines the connection between the past and the present. Too strong an attachment to the past denies the present; while too strong, a focus on the present denies the significance of tradition. Yehuda Amichai’s poem “All the Generations Before Me” is an attempt at reconciliation. It begins from the rift between past and present. Professor Sagi is critical of this view as he focuses on the present to reclaim tradition, however; “Two basic responses to this challenge emerge in the current study: the tense and complex model represented by Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, and the harmonic model represented by Goldman and Hartman.” (Epilogue p. 361). This conundrum is at the heart of the dialogical tension between the ways of God and the ways of human beings; how the past directs the present and how the present reinterprets the past. How do we reconcile the absolute truths of the Abraham religions with our fundamental freedom to enter into relationship with the Sacred? Can this conversation be authentic, if we operate in metaphysical awareness of our insignificance, struggle, and challenge, or can we interpret the Eternal as unfolding in history? The challenge of the Abraham religions is to engage the Sacred as ground of the possibility of present experience. This dialogical process, it seems to me, is what Job saw. While all faith traditions struggle with this problem, Sagi’s informative book nestles it in the Jewish tradition and details how the conversations between past and present are ongoing in Jewish religious communities. I am pleased to welcome Professor Avi Sagi’s book to the PAR special series community, and thank him for his contribution. Kenneth A. Bryson Editor PAR special series Value Inquiry Book Series

INTRODUCTION This book is an attempt to contend with the meaning of tradition in the current reality, apparently post-traditional. Like all stories, this one too has “heroes” playing major and minor roles, all entirely of my choice. The main ones have been present in my life and in my academic work for decades—Eliezer Goldman, David Hartman Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. I have studied their works and have been involved in an ongoing intellectual dialogue with them about the meaning of the tradition and its present manifestations ever since I began this quest. With some of them, I have also been engaged in a sustained personal dialogue, as a student or a colleague, and sometimes as both. In this sense, this is a personal book. It tells the story of my readings and my analysis of them, focusing on issues I have found compelling. This is not, however, a private book; it is not in the confessional genre because in my dialogue with these thinkers I rely on critical tools, both philosophical and reflective. I re-examine their work mainly from one central perspective—how they contend with fundamental questions bearing on the relationship between the present and the past. My view is that these thinkers offer new and interesting possibilities of returning to the tradition, which I consider in this book together with their implications. The course I pursue in this book was not a casual choice for me. The basic intellectual and existential insight that guides my philosophical work in general is that dialogue plays a crucial role in the shaping of a balanced critical and philosophical stance. Dialogue is a valuable tool in fostering a disposition of openness and self-criticism. It liberates us from intellectual narcissism and challenges accepted certainties, thereby contributing to deeper and more dynamic thinking. Dialogue is impossible without a culture of attentiveness conveying a readiness to be open to the world of the other. Dialogue assumes active passivity, meaning a deliberate decision to adopt a passive stance in which the other, instead of the self, is often the protagonist. But dialogue is impossible unless the partners bring their full selves to it, including all the constitutive elements of their being: language, culture, memory, and so forth. In the absence of this fullness, the dialogue is not an exchange between living creatures but between abstract entities. The dialogical encounter is paradoxical: the partners to the dialogue make room for one another and enter into a disposition of attentiveness, but do not renounce their selves. Contrary to Buber’s view, a dialogue does not lead to a different ontological occurrence where “I” and “thou” transcend themselves; instead, the dialogue takes place from and within the parties’ being. These basic insights have accompanied me throughout my work; I try to listen, understand, and be attentive to what emerges from the texts I read.

2

TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM

Trained in a phenomenological tradition, I hold that the first and decisive stage in the process of understanding is description, involving an effort to explicate the texts fully. Yet, even when accompanied by the epoche’s suspension of judgment, this stage this does not imply liberation from one’s personal fullness. I read the texts anew from my personal lebenswelt, which is the background for the questions posed to the texts. In this sense, even if most of the book is an analysis of other thinkers’ work, these chapters present my views as well in my questions, in my critique, or in my acceptance of the views presented in the texts. Although most chapters have appeared before as articles, the possibility of returning to the tradition that concerns me in the first chapter was already a leitmotif of my writing when the original versions appeared. In their publication, I followed a systematic plan and have now assembled them together so as to present a wider and more complex picture, revising them for publication at times also due to changes in my views or in my knowledge. Departing from this dialogical stance, the book extends an invitation to embark in a critical voyage of consciousness, whose significance lies in its very ability to re-examine the obvious and pose anew questions supposedly answered long ago. As a voyage, it enables liberation from the obvious and acquaintance with new challenging horizons, which might suggest new options even to those who are not personally troubled by the issues discussed in this quest. Chapter Six is a slightly modified version of my article “Contending with Modernity: Scripture in the Throught of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Joseph Soloveitchik,” published in the Journal of Religion 77, 3 (1997), © 1997 by the University of Chicago. I gratefully acknowledge permission to republish this material. Many have accompanied me at different stages of the writing: teachers, friends, and students. I owe all of them deep thanks for the opportunity they have given me to learn and to teach. I am especially grateful to Menachem Mautner and Dror Yinon. Their reading of my work, their serious criticism and, above all, their longstanding friendship, have significantly contributed to my endeavor. Thanks to Ken Bryson, the editor of the series, for his careful reading, and for his support and advice. I also thank Shoval Shafat, Avshalom Westreich, and Yakir Englander, who helped in the preparation of the book. For many years now, the Shalom Hartman Institute has been my home. I could hardly have completed this project, and others I have undertaken, without the Institute’s warm support. The Shalom Hartman Institute, a meeting place of Torah and scholarship, embodies a fascinating model of dialogical culture affecting all those who enter it. I am grateful to all its members for this gift, and most especially to David Hartman, the Institute’s founding director. David Hartman is a paragon of the integration between profound intellectual engagement and responsive care for the present needs of Jewish life. Not only is he one of the

Introduction

3

protagonists in this work but he has also assumed the task of building a welcoming home where Jewish creativity might flourish, and this book owes him a great deal, as a thinker and as a man. I owe special thanks to Batya Stein. Her meticulous reading, her analysis, and her superb translation and editing made her an active partner in the creation of this book, and vital to its English version. My thanks here are only a small measure of my deep appreciation. This book is dedicated with endless love to my wife, Rivka Begun-Sagi. Her unfaltering love and care and her constructive criticism epitomize the closeness and the I-thou bond that infinitely enrich my life.

One RETURNING TO TRADITION: PARADOX OR CHALLENGE 1. The Paradox The general theme of this book is a critical analysis of the possibility of a dialogue between contemporary Jews and Jewish tradition, which I will pursue along two courses. The first is a study of the positions articulated by several contemporary Jewish thinkers who, in my view, have made a significant contribution to this question. The second is a critical discussion of options within Jewish thought on several crucial topics in the dialogue with tradition, formulated sometimes vaguely and sometimes more explicitly. In this chapter, I introduce the conceptual framework used in the book as a whole. The opening question of this discussion is: is a return to tradition possible? Can modern/postmodern individuals go back to adopt what is past and gone? And if such a return is impossible, can they live without any tradition shaping and constituting the basic perceptions of their encounter with reality? What kind of dialogue with tradition is open to a contemporary Jew? These questions suggest that the concept of “returning to the tradition” is ostensibly paradoxical or perplexing. Let us consider this issue in greater detail. In a brilliant and inspiring article, Zygmunt Bauman points to the paradoxical features. His argument deserves special attention, since he offers a sharp, radical formulation of the apparent rift between tradition and the modern/postmodern world. According to Bauman, the paradox emerges at an even earlier stage, in the very concept of “tradition” instead of in the later return to it: “The paradox of tradition is that once it has been spoken the tradition is no more what its spokesmen claim it to be.”1 The reason is that those who defer to the tradition accept that it relies on a tacit authority that requires no justification. The use of arguments to affirm tradition shows, according to Bauman, that the tradition has lost its authority, which has shifted from the tradition itself to the choices and loyalties of the subject. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the concept of “tradition” represents the present and the future instead of the past. Choice and loyalty reflect the present (when the choice is made), and the future (when the choice will be actualized): “The noun ‘tradition’ moves now, verb-like, from the past to the future tense.”2 The first certainty of tradition, a tacit certainty, has lost its power. We speak of the tradition, we examine it and compel it. For Bauman, however, speaking about tradition is a sign of its demise: “Tradition vanishes in the self-same discourse which purports to make its presence tangible” (49).

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM

Speaking about tradition signals a renewal, a new move, involving the identification of tradition and the ascription of a role and a meaning to it. Yet, this very renewal turns tradition into something it is not. Bauman sums up his analysis and states: “Tradition lives only posthumously, in the experience of detraditionalization” (49). According to Bauman’s formulation, then, the problem lies in the gap between life within a living tradition and the attempt to understand tradition and place it within a meaningful context relevant to those living outside it. People living within a tradition do not relate to it reflectively; they do not ask about it since they do not live outside it. The character of traditional life is such that tradition totally organizes life, and life outside it is altogether meaningless. The question about tradition deviates from this totality. Tradition, then, has an a priori character, and constitutes the complex of meanings, insights, and practices of the traditional society; it is the glasses through which its members see the world. Hence, it cannot become a subject for criticism, just as the person wearing glasses sees through them but not them. This total, a priori character is manifest in four aspects, which John Thompson points out.3 First, the hermeneutical aspect. Tradition is the complex of preliminary assumptions that constitutes the metaphysical and social Weltanschauung of a traditional society. This society perceives these assumptions as certainties that it transmits them from one generation to another, determining its members’ orientation in the world. Second, the normative aspect. Tradition regulates the complex of present and future norms. Third, legitimacy. Tradition determines what a legitimate authority is. Finally, identity. The ethos, myths, and norms of tradition shape individual and collective identity. All these four aspects have lost their power for the individual living outside tradition. The phrase “outside tradition” should include not only those who reject tradition and make autonomy the supreme organizing principle of human life. Living outside tradition also means assigning a decisive role to reflectiveness. A reflective life means the loss of primary innocence and immediacy and, from this perspective, any return to the past is impossible. As Hans Georg Gadamer has noted, we cannot restore the past. In a strong critique of Friedrich Schleiermacher, for whom the return to the original situation is the challenge of hermeneutics, Gadamer argues: “The reconstruction of the original circumstances, like all restoration, is a pointless undertaking in view of the historicity of our being. What is reconstructed, a life brought back from the lost past, is not the original.”4 If we cannot return to the past, we cannot revive tradition as it had been. Tradition, then, is an “enclosed garden” not only to those endorsing a detraditionalist stance. Even those longing for tradition must admit that returning to it means forging something new, which is not exactly similar to tradition itself.

Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge

7

Since Søren Kierkegaard, the issue of return emerges as the most decisive existential question. Kierkegaard recurrently asks in his philosophical work: can a person return to the beginning, lose reflection, and rediscover the original innocence, the lost immediacy? His answers to these questions are contradictory. At times, he held that this type of return is not only possible but is even a normative demand, and at times, he held that human beings are fated to live in perpetual exile outside their original homeland because, as reflective creatures, they cannot return to innocence.5 Kierkegaard and the existentialist tradition considered the possibility of return focusing on the life of the individual. The question that troubled these thinkers was: can individuals return to their pre-reflective reality? A more fundamental problem underlies this question: can individuals live in harmony with themselves or are they perhaps doomed, because of their reflective character, to live with the rift and the self-contradiction? Bauman and Gadamer shift the focus of the discussion from the individual’s inner relationship to the relationship of the individual or the collective to the past, original reality. The difference, then, is twofold. First, the present discussion deals not only with the individual but also with the collective. Second, the question troubling these thinkers is precisely the return to the past, the same past that was not especially interesting to Kierkegaard because he had been concerned with the possibility of returning to the self. Bauman and Gadamer point out that the return to the original past is impossible. If this is the case, argues Bauman, the concept of tradition is paradoxical, as is the one of returning to it. Adopting this paradox of tradition or the return to it leads us to the complementary paradox. If we adopt the claim that this return is impossible, the possibility of self-identity will become the decisive issue. Following Heidegger and Kierkegaard, Gadamer claimed that, as final creatures, what rules us is what we have received from the past. The past, meaning tradition, conditions our perceptions and shapes the different options from which we can choose since we “stand always within tradition … we do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us.”6 According to Gadamer, hermeneutical circularity is what epitomizes tradition’s rule over our perceptions and our behavior. As Heidegger has already pointed out, this circularity shows that we have preconceptions and a conceptual framework that precede the datum we know, be it a written text or another phenomenon. This datum is a given within our original preconceptions.7 Gadamer continues this line of thought and claims: The circle, then, is not formal in nature, it is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning

8

TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the communality that binds us to the tradition.8

This link to tradition comes to the fore in the role that prejudices play in forging our ways of understanding.9 Gadamer is strongly critical of the Enlightenment, which tried to liberate humanity from the chains of tradition, from the chains of the prejudices constitutive of our perceptions. In a sentence that has become a dictum, he states that the “fundamental prejudice of the enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself” (239-240). According to Gadamer, the significant contribution of Romanticism lies precisely in the rejection of exaggerated rationalism and in the bolstering of tradition as a crucial foundation of our existence (248-250). Adulthood, Gadamer explains, does not mean release from tradition and adoption of the approach that individuals create themselves ex nihilo. True, human beings can choose between several options, but it is tradition that provides the options (249). Tradition, then, is constitutive of self-identity. In the wake of the existentialist tradition that emphasized the centrality of the given, namely, the web of socio-cultural contexts conditioning our identity, Gadamer claims: “All self-knowledge proceeds from what is historically pre-given, what we call with Hegel, ‘substance,’ because it is the basis of all subjective meaning and attitude” (269). This analysis leads to a paradoxical result: as reflective creatures, we cannot return to the tradition, but neither can we live and establish our identity outside it. The characteristic feature of human life, in whose absence social life is impossible, is the organization of the human experience within the framework of tradition.10 Hence, the paradox of the return to tradition is also the paradox of the very possibility of establishing self-identity. Is there a way out of this labyrinth? 2. Between Tradition and Traditionalism Like many other paradoxes, the paradox of the return to tradition is crucial in the molding of consciousness. The paradox can function as a new opening, providing a new perspective on our old perceptions and submitting them to criticism. Like Husserl’s epoche, a paradox may direct our theoretical inquiry to areas suggesting a new approach that had remained blurred in our daily pursuit. To contend with the paradox of the return to tradition, I wish to draw a distinction between two terms: tradition and traditionalism.11 I will argue that the paradox of the return to tradition emerges because traditionalism replaces the concept of tradition. The paradox, then, emerges due to the equation of two different and even contradictory concepts.

Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge

9

Demonstrating this analytical claim would ostensibly require us to begin with a clarification of the concept of tradition, outlining its differences with the concept of traditionalism. Yet, given that the new concept of traditionalism often hinders our understanding of tradition, I will begin with it and then proceed to clarify the concept of tradition, as necessary. What, then, is traditionalism? Succinctly, this concept represents our image of tradition. According to this image, a traditional culture is one ruled by closed, set, and rigid frameworks. These frameworks establish the complex of social arrangements, institutions, norms, ethos, memories, and hopes of the people in the community. A person living in a traditional culture is entirely determined by its tradition, which shapes the legitimate questions and the answers, determines legitimate behaviors, perceptions, and aims, and sets standards of evaluation in all areas of life.12 Tradition is the sole metaphysics, ethics, and practice. According to this image, we think of tradition as absolutely certain, leaving no room for questioning any of its foundations.13 Traditional individuals, according to this approach, assume that their tradition is an unquestioned truth and hence have no interest in other traditions, which they perceive as false. Traditionalism ascribes a dimension of holiness to the tradition and, on these grounds, will not permit its undermining or subversion in any way.14 Traditionalism assumes that tradition rules human subjectivity and individualism, or assigns them a marginal role, given that all individuals must and actually do shape their lives according to a fixed and self-evident order that precludes autonomy, namely, the development of a personal lifestyle. Traditionalism also assumes that people living in a traditional culture are not reflective. They live spontaneously, since individuals become reflective only when they face choice and need to decide.15 The decline in the power of tradition forces reflectivity. In this new reality, people must ask themselves what do they truly know and what do they only think they know, unlike the situation when tradition is dominant. These questions, argues Berger, direct individuals to their experience and their empirical existence as individuals.16 The perception of tradition through the image of traditionalism creates a split and a rift between pre-modern and modern life. Traditionalism views modern individuals—reflective, skeptical, autonomous creatures, wielding sole authority over their agenda and choice of identity—as the absolute antithesis of traditional ones. What does this image of tradition draw on? What are the sources of the concept of traditionalism? Is it the product of a rigorous study of living traditions or is it perhaps our projection on the tradition? Does it convey the statements of people living in a traditional culture? Finally, to what extent does the concept of traditionalism fit the living culture?

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These questions compel more a careful consideration of historical traditions. Many of the characteristics that traditionalism ascribes to tradition fail to portray it accurately. Traditions undergo changes, some even revolutionary ones.17 In the context of these changes, norms, ethos, and even myths sustain drastic transformations. Some of them reflect socio-economic changes, some are the product of cultural and value changes, and some reflect the fruitful dialogue between cultures. Closure and rigidity, then, two of the traditional characteristics, fail to describe correctly actual developments within traditions. Nor is tradition necessarily uniform. At any given time, a cultural tradition may show differences and changes derived from the many contexts visà-vis which members of this community shape their traditional world. Furthermore, reflective criticism of the tradition is often an inherent element of it, when its members re-analyze the foundations of their existence. Such a process usually unfolds at times of vast change or when such change appears imminent, whether because of the encounter with other cultures or because of socio-economic or cultural changes that demand a response. Often, however, an interesting contrast emerges between the actual processes that traditions undergo and their description by members of the culture who live within them. The justification of dynamic processes usually resorts to traditional metaphors, articulating change as the genuine and profound meaning of the tradition itself.18 Traditionalism sometimes masks an actual process, possibly because the unique holiness ascribed to the tradition leads its members to recoil from interpretations that would relativize it. They therefore seek to explain the change as reflecting what they view as the tradition’s deeper layers, thereby bridging the gap between old and new. The conclusion warranted by this analysis is that scholars who analyze tradition through a traditionalist perspective actually reiterate images held by the tradition’s followers, images they developed in order to understand change by means of static concepts. What is allowed to members of the tradition, however, is not necessarily allowed to the scholar. Scholars, precisely because of the reflectiveness typical of their pursuit and the critical skepticism that is supposedly their beacon, must re-examine the fit between traditionalism and tradition. As noted, the fit between them is imperfect, and traditionalism is a hazy concept that rebuts tradition as is. 3. The Challenge Let us reconsider the paradox of the return to tradition in light of the distinction between tradition and traditionalism. For the modern, reflective, skeptical, and autonomous modern person, the path of return to traditionalism is quite obviously closed because traditionalism is an invention portraying tradition incorrectly. But is a return to tradition also blocked? I will argue that, because of

Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge

11

the denial of traditionalism, the reflective person can return to tradition. “Posttraditionalists” can return to tradition as it is because they need not trip on traditionalism’s concealing haziness. After the removal of traditionalism, the “post-traditional” person can see tradition as dynamic and changing and capture its uniqueness as a dialogue. According to traditionalism, tradition comes from the past. Schils points out that tradition means traditum, namely, something transferred or delivered from the past.19 But this approach, anchored in etymology, is far from the events of living traditions. The tradition, as Gadamer indicates, is not something we enter as if it were sealed and concluded.20 We are partners in its development. This partnership is not a new feature typical of the modern way of life but a basic characteristic of tradition itself. Every generation engages in a dialogue with its entire traditum, involving a ceaseless “fusion of horizons” between the present, and whatever comes from the past.21 Nor is the encounter between past and present one between two entirely separate elements because the past also partly shapes the present. According to Schleiermacher’s romantic view, the individual must overcome the temporary gap between the present and the past in order to meet the tradition as is. By contrast, Gadamer argues: Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged, because it separates, but it is actually the supportive ground of process in which the present is rooted….. In fact, the important thing is to recognize the distance in time as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which all that is handed down presents itself to us.22 Dynamism, then, is not an accidental but a constitutive feature of tradition. Returning to the past is an escape from tradition to traditionalism, from the real to the apparent. Precisely because we are reflective instead of spontaneous creatures, we can liberate ourselves from traditionalism and truly understand the character of the tradition as an intergenerational dialogical event. A return to tradition is possible, as long as groundless perceptions of it do not fetter it. In light of this analysis, we can explicate the concept of the return to tradition more precisely: this return means, above all, a change of disposition. Returning to tradition means acknowledging the links between past and present that come to the fore in the persistent dialogue between these two time dimensions. Returning to tradition means overcoming the presumed alienation between what was, what is, and what will be. It is also the renewed acknowledgement of tradition’s role in establishing personal identity. Tradition plays a twofold role in establishing identity. First, it provides the materials of personal

12

TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM

identity—the perceptions, beliefs, norms, myths, and ethos that confirm what we already are, and provides the basic language of our identity.23 Second, tradition provides the precondition of human freedom because it sets up the options that instill meaning into the concept of choice.24 The existential dialectic tension between freedom and submission to the given is mediated by a dialogical process, through which personal identity is molded as a free return to the given. Impositions that had appeared as a given become a product of human choice. Personal identity, then, is not a return to the past but a free return to a process of dialogue with the tradition as a process that constitutes identity. These two meanings of the return to tradition are mutually complementary. The return to tradition as a change of disposition enables the existentialist choice of return to the dialogical process as one that constitutes identity, and vice-versa, the return to the dialogical process conveys a change of disposition. According to this analysis, and contrary to widespread descriptions that contrast tradition with freedom and autonomy, freedom is the core of the return to tradition. This freedom underlies both the change of disposition and the dialogical process, on condition that we do not interpret freedom in Sartre’s version as an absolute self-assertion unconditioned by anything beyond it. The return to tradition is incompatible with this concept of freedom. It views Sartre’s freedom as an absolute abstraction of human existence because human freedom is not the antithesis of the given, of the existentialist projection conveyed in the givenness of tradition. Instead, freedom reflects this givenness. In a passage of his journal, Kierkegaard contrasts these two concepts of freedom: That abstract freedom of choice (liberum arbitriun) is a phantasy, as if a human being at every moment of his life stood continually in this abstract possibility, so that he never moves from the spot, as if freedom were not also an historical condition…. It seems to me that the matter can be illuminated in the following way. Take a weight, even the most accurate gold weight – when it has been used only a week it already has history…. This history continues with use. So it is with the will. It has a history, a continually progressive history.25 Human freedom is a freedom constantly imprinted with the signs of human and historical existence as embodied in tradition and culture. Instead of opposition to these signs, this human freedom is a lucid recognition of freedom’s limits and conveys an acknowledgement that human existence does not create itself ex nihilo.

Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge

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4. The Borders of Tradition What, then, are the borders of a dialogue that we will view as participating in the tradition? A religious and a secular person engage in a dialogue with the past according to the parameters of the tradition as described by Gadamer. Can we say they are sharing the same tradition? This question arises because, although an intergenerational dialogue takes place, these two positions depart from entirely different starting points and worldviews—one shapes the world in religious terms, whereas the other sees the world as devoid of religious sanctity and as a human product. Textual identity, then, does not ensure that all participants in the textual discourse share the same preliminary assumptions. Since the fusion of horizons is what shapes the meaning of the texts and the meaning of tradition itself, we find that the secular and the religious person live in different traditions. The horizons through which tradition is shaped are, as noted, dynamic. Nevertheless, “intra-traditional” dynamism is obviously different from a dynamism conveying a split and a breach. The instance discussed in this book highlights this difference. Despite the differences in the horizons through which Jews from different generations spoke with their past, one common denominator shaped the construct of the intergenerational discourse: the acknowledgement that the discourse unfolded within a religious context. By contrast, secular individuals speaking with their past do so through a deliberate modification of the meaning of their past and present horizons. The intergenerational discourse thus reflects a decisive transformation in the context of the meaning that constitutes tradition, and the question is: when the secular and the religious person return to the tradition, are they both returning to the same construct? The apparent conclusion is that, if at all possible, a return must rely on a diffuse perception of the tradition. But this is a practical instead of a theoretical problem, given that the different relationships developed in the return to the tradition will probably show a “family resemblance” in several elements. First, the materials of the tradition—the ethos, texts, myths and norms—are similar. Second, the intergenerational dialogical structure that constitutes the tradition, which is a fusion of horizons between past and present, also largely ensures uniformity and similarity. The reason is that the past shapes an essential part of the present horizon.26 The “family resemblance” concerns not only the materials but also, and mainly, the present horizon itself. Even if the attitude to the approved texts changes so that they represent holiness for some but not for others, the special attitude toward them remains strikingly similar. This attitude is manifest both in the acknowledgement of tradition’s key role in shaping identity, and its vital role in creating the perceptual context through which we grasp reality and assign it meaning.27 Finally, the consciousness of belonging to the same tradition also plays a significant role in creating the resemblance.

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These and other elements do not and need not guarantee that the tradition will remain uniform and rigid, since these characteristics draw on the traditionalist image of the tradition. Nor can they ensure that alternative and strikingly different versions of the tradition will not develop, a possibility that arises from the very fact that the intergenerational dialogue is free. The extent of “family resemblance” between the different versions will determine the borders of membership in the “same” tradition, and some versions might no longer belong. Decisions on this question, however, will rest on a genuine critique of actual historical and cultural processes instead of on an a priori assumption of abstract criteria. In any event, “family resemblance” ensures the continuity of the tradition, not its absolute uniformity. In order to speak of “the same tradition,” this continuity appears to be a sufficient condition. This book will trace the course of several fundamental approaches that have reshaped the dialogue with Jewish tradition in the postmodern era. The distinction between tradition and traditionalism will enable us to track the type of mentality embodied in each of these approaches. Some are aware of the reflective, critical, dialogical element typical of tradition, while others shape the attitude to the tradition through the prism of traditionalism. Do these differences lead to variances in practice? Is someone who thinks in traditionalist terms necessarily more conservative and rigid than someone aware of the concept of traditionalism? One of the main theses I attempt to demonstrate in this book is that no correlation prevails between the constitutive image of personal consciousness and actual practice. Quite the contrary, the traditionalist image often functions as a balancing factor or as compensation for revolutionary practice. At the same time, acknowledgement of tradition’s complex character shapes not only a more realistic consciousness but also leads to higher correlation between consciousness and practice. Regardless of these distinctions, the story of contemporary Jewish thought is a story of return to tradition. This story, or some chapters from it, is my concern in this book.

Part One THE TENSE ENCOUNTER WITH MODERNITY

INTRODUCTION At the focus of the following chapters are Jewish thinkers who engage in a deliberate attempt to affirm Judaism in its confrontation with modernity, but also affirm modernity in principle. In the terms adopted in this book, these thinkers seek to return to the tradition vis-à-vis and from within modernity. In an attempt to clarify the challenge that modernity poses to the affirmation of the tradition, I schematically outline below the phenomena of modernity and the challenge they pose to Jewish existence. Peter Berger suggests that modernity is a term that describes not only the factual changes that took place in society, the economy, or religion. Part of the phenomenon of modernity is the “modern consciousness”—men and women interpret themselves anew. This consciousness, argues Berger, is “a datum… an empirical a priori,” meaning that this consciousness is what shapes our attitude to the empirical world.1 People reinterpret not only themselves but also the entire world in light of their modern consciousness. But what shapes the modern consciousness? I address the meaning of modernity in relationship to three classic foci through which Western culture has always expressed its values and beliefs: God, the world, humankind. Modernity conveys a revolution and a fundamental change in each of these elements and their mutual relationships, and this transformation shapes modern consciousness. My claim is that the thinkers I will discuss contend with modernity adopting central aspects of the “modern consciousness,” even if they explain this consciousness in traditional terms. Let us consider each of the foci noted above. God. A most definite proclamation of modernity’s changing view of God is Nietzsche’s statement about “the death of God.”2 Instead of an ontological statement claiming that “this entity” called God does not exist, this is a statement about God’s irrelevance to the understanding of human existence. Nietzsche himself stresses this when saying: “We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.”3 Sociologists and historians have indicated that “the death of God” is the final stage of a long process in which Lutheran Protestantism and Calvinism played a significant role. Protestantism turned God into a transcendent entity lacking a real presence in the world. The sacramental dimension of Catholicism was restricted to a minimum, and even the Church was no longer a place for divine “grace” on earth. Protestantism sought to emphasize divine transcendence on religious grounds, adducing God’s absolute sublimity and otherness and intending to shape a new religious world view. In the course of history, however, the notion of God’s transcendence culminated in the notion of God’s irrelevance to existence. The World. The removal of God from the world entails a series of cultural and existential implications. The most important is that the world is empty of

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God. We were now approach the natural and human worlds, no longer full of the divine presence, through the immanent tools at our disposal: the senses and empirical knowledge. For Protestantism, emptying the world of divine presence is a sign of its “fall,” yet this idea may implicitly acknowledge the existence of a “neutral realm.”4 Protestantism did leave humanity one dimension through which it might communicate with God—“the word of God” as embodied in Scripture. Beyond it, however, the world is entirely secular. This dramatic change had implications for life in general, among them: the growth of modern science as the sole tool for understanding the world, the removal of all the teleological explanations that had usually rested on the assumption of God’s existence, a more positive evaluation of diversity and variety in human culture evident in a pluralistic weltanschauung, and so forth. The common denominator of these and other signs of modernity is that the value and meaning of the world rests on immanence, dismissing transcendence as a significant element. Humankind. If we return to the Protestant view, the utter detachment of heaven and earth thrusted humankind solely onto itself. People could no longer rely on the world or on any religious institutions to ensure their redemption. Even the “word of God” is currently in the hands of human beings. They must be the ones to distil the “spirit” from the “word,” to grasp God’s demand from them, no longer absolutely sure that this is the divine expectation. Kierkegaard, whose thought reflects the Protestant-Lutheran tradition, summed up the human responsibility for decoding the religious demand when he said, “Ordinarily we human beings do not have an immediate relationship to God. His will is proclaimed to us in abstracto in His Word… but I, this concrete I, am not told: In these concrete circumstances you are told to do this and this. No, every single individual must, so to speak, translate God’s commands in concreto.”5 Even if wrong, all a person can do is surrender “in unconditional obedience.”6 This abandonment of humanity to itself is what planted seeds of terror, alienation, and human hopelessness in religion, and affected the development of similar feelings of dread and the absurd in modern existence. A world without God, without order, was no longer home to human beings. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Kafka, Camus, and many others, expressed this sense in their work.7 But alienation also denotes that human consciousness has matured. Instead of being part of nature, human consciousness confronts nature. The complementary feature of alienation, then, is freedom, as stressed in the writings of existentialist thinkers from Kierkegaard onward, who were a kind of seismograph of modernity. Whereas some where exhilarated by freedom, others experienced the pain of alienation, but both freedom and alienation are products of modernity. Stefan Zweig offers an interesting formulation of one version of this relationship, when he writes in an

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autobiographical note: “The homeless man becomes free in a new sense: and only he who has lost all ties need have no arrière-pensée.”8 Modern individuals differ from their predecessors in the unique role they assign to personal consciousness and to their role as human creatures in what has become a human world bereft of God. They seek to understand their existence and their relationship with the world, and their quest begins with their consciousness. In this voyage of reinterpretation, human consciousness wavers between hopelessness, estrangement, and alienation on the one hand, and a sense of freedom and power on the other, between isolation and terror as opposed to a sense of wide human solidarity. In this part of the book, I deal with Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whose views are pervaded by a tense and dialectic perspective of modernity’s challenges.

Two SOLOVEITCHIK: JEWISH THOUGHT CONFRONTS MODERNITY 1. The Subjective Shift To what extent was Soloveitchik able to adopt the values of modernity while also preserving Jewish tradition? The measure of his endorsement of modernity can be inferred from the “subjective shift” so prominent in his thought. At the opening of The Lonely Man of Faith, Soloveitchik formulates this shift in radical terms: Whatever I am going to say here has been derived not from philosophical dialectics, abstract speculation, or detached impersonal reflections, but from actual situations and experiences with which I have been confronted… Rather than talking theology, in the didactic sense, eloquently and in balanced sentences, I would like, hesitantly and haltingly, to confide in you, and to share with you some concerns which weigh heavily on my mind and which frequently assume the proportions of an awareness of crisis.1 This passage emphasizes that Soloveitchik’s religious philosophy is an attempt to reach self-understanding, focusing on the individual and the individual’s relationship with God.2 This type of philosophy, which may be characterized as self-explication, takes the human experience as a datum requiring interpretation. In his book on Martin Buber, Malcolm Diamond draws a distinction between confessional and apologetic theology. Whereas apologetic theology seeks to justify faith to non-believers through rational knowledge, confessional theology strives to clarify faith to believers through language. This theology, argues Diamond, seeks to remain as close as possible to the believers’ religious experience.3 Confession, or self-explication as a form of philosophy, represents a profound turning point in the Jewish philosophical tradition. Jewish philosophy had traditionally focused on demonstrating the content of religious faith in an attempt to justify a metaphysics that fits religion. Its supreme object was God.4 The philosophy dealing with self-explication is not concerned with proof but with description. The description of this inner world does not necessarily dispel doubts, nor is it necessarily universal:

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM Whatever I am going to say today is the result of my own thinking and my religious experience of Jewish values…. Whatever I am going to say should be taken as a soliloquy, as a monologue. I am thinking out loud and trying to spell out my experiences… If someone will find my experiences and my interpretations commensurate with his own, I shall be amply rewarded. However, if one should not concur with me and should feel that my experiences do not correspond with his own attitudes, I shall not feel hurt.5

Soloveitchik’s claim that he had never been troubled by the confrontation between science and religion, or between tradition and biblical criticism, epitomizes this shift. His problems are in no way theoretical. His concern is the plight of the “contemporary man of faith” and the range of meanings attached to a life of faith in modern society.6 The function of philosophical discourse is descriptive instead of ontological or epistemological. Philosophical speculation, the discourse itself, is a voyage of human redemption. Exposing and describing the inner world is potentially redemptive because it explicates to human beings the world in which they live, not because it provides them with metaphysical answers. This discourse teaches that the surrounding world, however complex, has inner meaning and cohesiveness. Self-explication enables us to reach self-transparence and understand the world, and this understanding is redemptive.7 In this sense, Soloveitchik continues the Kierkegaardian tradition that approaches the philosophical pursuit as a human voyage to the self. Kierkegaard sees philosophical writing as an existential concern, through which individuals come to understand and accept their existence: “Assigned from childhood to a life of torment that perhaps few can even conceive of, plunged into the deepest despondency, and from this despondency again into despair, I came to understand myself by writing.”8 The titles of Soloveitchik’s books—The Lonely Man of Faith, Halakhic Man—point to this focus on inner dimensions.9 This exposure of the inner world, unlike the concealment typical of classic philosophical writing, affirms and endorses the personal biography. For Hegel, who represents the classic consciousness of the Enlightenment legacy, only the universal is valuable as representing the essence subsuming the individual’s “own dignity.”10 But for Soloveitchik, people express their value and dignity in their concrete-individual existence, as evident in the role he assigns to personal biography. He explicitly refers to his personal biography and views it as a stable element that constitutes and shapes concrete existence instead of an ephemeral episode. Consider the following passage, on the religious experiences of his childhood: Within the darkness of the metamorphoses, something constant and stable attracts my attention… This something resembles a shielding tree, under which a tired soul sat. An anchoring point, as it were, for perplexing exis-

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tence. This stability is the religious experience that frames all the impressions and scraps of unrelated memories from my early childhood, entwined in the religious experience.11 After a poetic description of several Jewish holidays, Soloveitchik states: “Why are the impressions of the High Holidays so firmly and perennially imprinted, so unforgettable? I do not know. I must surely have a disposition for elegy, or for religious melancholy.”12 These experiences require no justification and can be rejected or accepted, and he accepts them unquestionably. The shift to subjectivity provides the key to a new justification of the religious domain. Whereas traditional religion rests the justification of its certainties on rational knowledge, the religious domain assumes meaning through the religious experience itself. Experience is an autonomous realm that cannot be exhausted or understood through any other context, and becomes religion’s starting point. Peter Berger views this shift from tradition to experience as one response of religious culture to the confrontation with modernity, and refers to it as the “inductive option.”13 Berger accurately notes that this shift is characteristic of Protestantism, which emphasizes the removal of God from the world,14 and follows its course through his analysis of Schleiermacher’s thought. But the thinker who appears to have explored this shift most profoundly is Kierkegaard,15 whose influence on Soloveitchik is considerable. Soloveitchik’s perception of the religious experience as independent and autonomous is evident in the following statement: The modern philosophy of religion is neither apologetic, agnostic nor mystic. It has a cognitive claim and a methodology of its own. It is not interested in the genetic approach to the religious act, nor does it raise the old problem of causality. It by-passes the “how”question and turns it over to explanatory psychology. The focal problem is of a descriptive nature: What is the religious act? What is its structure, context and meaning?16 In this perception, religious life is independently meaningful and unfolds in an autonomous context. The meaning of religion emerges through its description and analysis, a perspective pointing to phenomenological influences. Phenomenology is the school that enabled the acknowledgement of religion as an independent realm. It developed explication and genetic phenomenological analysis as an expression of the separation between the described datum and the “external world,” ensuring the independence of the religious experience. In Soloveitchik’s later works, however, a contrary trend becomes dominant. Instead of his support for the autonomy of the religious experience, the claim that the religious experience reflects not only the world of the religious individual but that of human beings in general assumes primacy—the human creature is a homo

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religiosus. Often, Soloveitchik emphasizes an immanent human yearning for the transcendent to the point that, ontologically, the human being is “the personality uniting body and soul, the empirical and the transcendental, the transient and the eternal.”17 This yearning attests to a deep need for God that, unsatisfied, dooms us to live in an estranged, alienated, and absurd world: “Religious faith… is the root and the summit of existentialist consciousness. Without it, no experience of existence is possible, all is meaningless, and everything becomes completely absurd.”18 2. God’s Transcendence and the Subjective Experience The view that turns religiosity into the realization of human ontology enables Soloveitchik to contend directly with Nietzsche’s formulation about the “death of God.” Buber outlines the two basic reactions of the believer who refuses to accept “the death of God”: the theological and the existentialist. The theological reaction argues that God’s absence from the world is a sign of divine transcendence, “the living God is not only a self-revealing but a self-concealing God.”19 The existentialist reaction places the blame and the responsibility for “the death of God” on human beings. In Buber’s words: “Sartre has started from the ‘silence’ of God without asking himself what part our not hearing and our not having heard has played in that silence.”20 Soloveitchik also endorses both reactions, which are often cited together. Because God is transcendent, the responsibility for God’s presence in the world is incumbent on humanity: The omnipotent Holy King, who creates and sustains all the worlds… is hidden and concealed…. Man is the one who should release the “Holy King” from his fetters, from the concealment, from the nebulous haze… The Sovereign of the World is omnipotent, except for the matter of his revelation. Concerning his revelation it is we, human beings, who are actively influential.21 For Buber, the idea of God’s transcendence represents a significant shift from his characterization of God as “the eternal Thou.” For Soloveitchik, however, the tension between God’s transcendence and immanence, between the closeness and immediacy of God as opposed to divine remoteness, are the “exasperating paradox”22 shaping the experience of faith. Resolving this tension is the initiative of human beings, whose task is to activate God’s presence in the world. The subjective shift assumes new meaning here; not only is the religious experience the linchpin of the philosophical explication, but the very fate of the transcendent God in this world is also a human concern. At the root of the shift to the individual and to the emphasis on

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the relationship between human beings and God as the essence of the religious experience, therefore, is divine transcendence.23 From a phenomenological perspective, one conclusion appears justified here: “The religious experience is a composite phenomenon involving not only God but the ego and the sensuous environment of the homo religiosus.”24 Not only are human beings the bearers of the relationship with God, but human reality is the place where God’s transcendence is realized—humanity meets God in this world.25 Divine transcendence becomes manifest in the world through the dimension of Halakhah and, in Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik outlines the profile of this figure. Halakhic man, more than a person who observes or studies Halakhah, reflects the synthesis between the scientist or the mathematician and the religious person. The scientist approaches the world cognitively, resorting to the a priori/ideal system of laws that deconstructs the mystery of existence. By contrast, the religious person opens up to the existential mystery and longs for the transcendent. Since halakhic man is religious, he yearns for transcendence, but since he also has something of the scientist, his religious experience deviates from the transcendent toward the effort to activate transcendence within the concrete world: Halakhic man… longs to bring transcendence down into this valley of the shadow of death… homo religiosus is a romantic who chafes against concrete reality. Halakhic man, however, takes up his position in this world and does not move from it. He wishes to purify this world, not to escape from it… His goal is not flight to another world that is wholly good, but rather bringing down that eternal world into the midst of our world.26 The passion for the transcendent is evident in the “this-worldly” focus directing us to a reality where we strive to encounter God through an act of faith: shaping a world bound by halakhic norms. The world shaped through this system of norms is one of holiness, reflecting the religious experience of God’s presence: “holiness is created by man, by flesh and blood.”27 Through Halakhah, then, human beings make room for God in the world. But how do the objective halakhic system and the subjective religious experience coexist? Soloveitchik suggests the relationship between them is dialectical. One of his recurring fundamental intuitions is that Halakhah does not exhaust the meaning of Judaism: “Judaism embraces not only ‘do’ and ‘do not do,’ forbidden and permitted, liable and free, impure and pure, but also grand and tender feelings, deep concepts, longings and eternal aspirations.”28 So how does this intricately complex and rich world find expression in Halakhah? Does Soloveitchik suggest a separation between Halakhah and the individual’s inner world? Is experience an addition to the normative system? His answer is that Halakhah itself bears the drama of the subjective experience, as an objectification or a “translation” of the subjective world.29 Halakhah, then, offers a

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synthesis between “meaning,” and “romanticism.”30 Soloveitchik argues that Kierkegaard, who emphasizes the experiential-subjective dimension, “lacked the understanding of the centrality of the act of objectification of the inner movement of faith in a normative and doctrinal postulate system, which forms the very foundation of Halakhah.”31 Three denotations of objectification appear in Soloveitchik’s thought: discipline, realization, and shaping. According to the first denotation, objectification curbs and organizes within a normative framework the subjective experiences swamping the individual;32 it dams the feelings and experiences that inundate us without any control on our part.33 The subjective religious experience cannot be an integral part of the personality since, by nature, this experience is spontaneous, incidental, and ephemeral. Halakhah, therefore, functions as an organizing tool of the subjective world: “It serves to make the experience, the spontaneous gush of emotions, a part of our larger selves, and helps to integrate it into our total personalities.”34 Soloveitchik raises defined objections against the subjectivization of religious experience. First, subjectivization has implications for human life in general. Detachment from an objective-rational framework has brought “complete chaos and human depravity to the world… The individual who frees himself from the rational principle and who casts off the yoke of objective thought will in the end turn destructive and lay waste the entire created order.”35 The concrete expression of human dignity is self-control, which strengthens human existence, and enslavement to subjective feelings is “paganism.”36 Second, religious experience has an object—God. For human beings to address God without the backing of a solid normative framework is improper, since this affronts divine honor: “Our Halakhah has been extremely rigorous concerning formality and order. Halakhah wanted to prevent anarchy and lawlessness in the individual’s approach to God.”37 Finally, Soloveitchik raises three claims against a subjective religious experience untouched by an objectification process: (1) Religious emotion is “volatile, ever changing, and unstable, even within one individual.”38 (2) A subjective experience is entirely private: “each person feels an experience differently. Rituals would continually have to be reformulated to correspond to the feelings of different individuals at different times.”39 Lack of discipline and institutionalization undermine the foundations of united and sustained collective existence. (3) If the experience is entirely subjective and has no external system to organize it, We have no reliable gauge to differentiate secular types of response from the genuinely religious experience. There are many non-religious reactions which claim transcendental qualities of holiness. The love impulse, the aesthetic quest of the artist… can easily be confused with the religious

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experience. But in fact they are inherently secular and do not reach out beyond the stimulated sense to God.40 According to the second denotation, the human spirit attains realization within objectification. The spirit, then, is immanently inclined toward selfexternalization. This statement appears to be strongly similar to the Hegelian thesis, and Soloveitchik often chooses Hegelian formulations. For instance:”There is a definite trend towards self-transcendence on the part of the spirit. It strives to escape its private inwardness…. The morphological process of self-realization from the inward to the outward is typical of the spiritual act.”41 Halakhic norms are an externalization of the spirit, its tangible manifestation in concrete existence.42 Yet, and despite the similarities, Soloveitchik’s is not a Hegelian stance. In the Hegelian outlook, objectification is the absolute realization of the human spirit, which does not return to the previous, spontaneous stage. For Soloveitchik, however, as for Kierkegaard,43 the relationship between the subjective experience and the objectification process is dialectical; objectification does not cancel the subjective experience, which at times breaks through the borders of the objective framework. Soloveitchik formulates this tension as follows: “The religious coin has two sides: an abstract, objective Halakhah, and a subjective reality. Sometimes, objectivity exceeds subjectivity… Halakhah exceeds experience… Yet, sometimes, a wellspring of stormy religiosity striving for God ripples from Halakhah, as if Halakhah itself could not contain the transcendental defeat within its quantitativeness.”44 Soloveitchik illustrates how subjective experience collapses the boundaries of the objective framework in some types of prayers, suggesting “the love for God failed to find satisfaction within the intellectual discipline that halakhic sages imposed on the ritual.”45 Similarly, he views days of judgment and compassion as times in which “subjectivity breaks the borders of objectivity and is exposed in all its formative and amorphous greatness.”46 The objectification process follows the course of the spirit, dialectically shifting between its subjective givenness and the objective system delimiting its boundaries, without collapsing them. Finally, objectification has a shaping power, and is the very process creating and awakening the religious experience: “the objective act of performing the mitzvah is our starting point. The mitzvah does not depend on the emotion; rather, it induces the emotion. One’s religious inspiration and fervor are generated and guided by the mitzvah, not the reverse.”47 In sum, Halakhah is the expression of the living link to God, of religious feelings expressed through a normative system that makes transcendence manifest in the world.

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM 3. Halakhah and Freedom

The assumption that human beings make room for transcendence in the world emphasizes human freedom and responsibility. But is the halakhic ethos an ethos of freedom? Can the religious-halakhic world internalize the unique role that human freedom plays in modern consciousness? Soloveitchik is aware of the tension between modernity and religion in this regard: “Modern man… insists that he is free, that indeed, all restrictions are repressions and do harm. Adnut, however, insists that man be humbled before God, that he recognize the Master who bestows all gifts.”48 Soloveitchik contends with this tension and draws a distinction between two concepts of freedom and autonomy. According to the first or Kantian concept of freedom, human autonomy is expressed in the role of human beings as sovereign legislators, on whom the law is not imposed from outside. Soloveitchik rejects the concept of freedom as legislation on several grounds. First, because this concept is opposed to the meaning of Halakhah as “the word of God”: “Halakhah rejects changes in basic axioms, it is subject to tradition and to the Oral Law.”49 Second, Soloveitchik finds the concept of Kantian freedom lacking because “the freedom which is rooted in the creation of the norm has brought chaos and disorder to the world.”50 Although Soloveitchik does not develop this idea, he is probably conveying here the same apprehensions he expresses regarding the subjectivization of the religious experience— without solid objective boundaries, we may become prisoners of our impulses and instincts. The concept of freedom Soloveitchik does adopt is the “freedom of realizing the norm,” meaning that the person is free to mould the world in light of the law. In his view, whereas the first concept of freedom brings “chaos and disorder,” “the freedom of realizing the norm brings holiness to the world.”51 In this context, Soloveitchik directs the reader to Hermann Cohen, although the distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for” rests on Friedrich Nietzsche.52 The self-molding ethos so fundamental to modern culture is entirely incompatible with the Kantian concept of freedom because, without yielding to God, human beings are not free. Their personalities merely reflect that they defer to their givenness. In this sense, the individual is enslaved,53 and the only law that determines existence is the law of causality.54 Self-molding means overriding one’s natural tendencies and impulses and acting in ways that overcome the law of causality.55 Hence, self-molding entails an act of selfsacrifice and Soloveitchik, in a formulation resonating with Kierkegaardian echoes, writes: “The beginning of religious action is the sacrifice of the self and its end—finding the self. A person, however, cannot find himself unless he sacrifices himself.”56

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Individuals find themselves through self-renunciation and self-discipline or, more precisely, they create and engender themselves. Before this process, they are controlled by their past, by the cluster of factors that determined them or, in Heideggerian terms, by their “thrownness.” After it, they overcome their past and bring about “a radical transformation of a whole way of life leading to a rebirth of the personality.”57 In truth, this dichotomy between two modes of human existence reflects the essential dualism of human life itself: But man himself symbolizes, on the one hand, the most perfect and complete type of existence, the image of God, and on the other hand, the most terrible chaos and void to reign over creation…. Judaism declares that man stands at the crossroads and wonders about the path he shall take. Before him there is an awesome alternative—the image of God or the beast of prey, the crown of creation or the bogey of existence, the noblest of creatures or a degenerate creature.58 This dualism has been a basic feature of Christianity since Paul.59 Protestantism took dualism a step further when it emphasized that the Christian has two dispositions, one spiritual, and one material.60 The material, “external man” is so sinful and corrupt that only God’s grace will ensure redemption.61 This view also influenced Kant who, on the one hand, stresses the value of autonomy in moral action. On the other, and in line with Protestant tradition, he supports a rigid dualism and claims “man is evil by nature,”62 such “crooked wood” that we might wonder “how indeed can one expect something perfectly straight to be framed out of it.”63 This “radical evil” is “inextirpable by human powers,”64 and moral action is only possible through God’s grace, an idea obviously incompatible with the emphasis on autonomy.65 Soloveitchik’s reaction to this dualism is complex. He does not endorse an optimistic stance that assumes human beings can create a stable moral order on their own. Without divine authority, he holds, the “baser part” will become the controlling force, and “the inability of modern secularism to motivate ethical behavior in private or public life is evidence of this truth.”66 Although he does not adopt the version that moral life depends on God’s action, he does embrace the claim of dependence on belief in God.67 Soloveitchik sides with an existential pessimism compatible with his critique of over-subjectivity; he does not trust human beings to cope by themselves without God. This shift from dependence on God’s action to dependence on belief is extremely significant, since belief is a personal matter, an individual decision. Even if human freedom is reduced to a realization of values, even if individuals must shape themselves against factuality, the final decision is a personal one.

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Adopting this decision as the fundamental drive of life requires full awareness of human beings as a choosing creatures: The assumption than man is free, that he has been endowed with the spiritual courage to make choices and with the power to determine the fate of his religious and moral life—this assumption cannot rely on the idea of belief by itself; it also depends on knowledge,68 on a feeling of being wholly charged by the tension present in this God-given factor of free choice… for without the awareness of self the element of “free will” will not be activated in man; without an awareness of self, man can neither create, determine nor decide.69 The ontological structure of human reality comprises three instead of two poles. On the one hand are the two basic ontological poles of human existence, the base and the virtuous, the drives and impulses. On the other, God’s image. Creating a balance between these two poles is a human concern. Ontological existence depends on an existential decision: “Judaism has always held that it lies within man’s power to renew himself, to be reborn and to redirect the course of his life. In this task, man must rely upon himself; no one can help him. He is his own creator and innovator. He is his own redeemer.”70 Soloveitchik adopts Kierkegaard’s ontology, which holds that three elements are ontologically constitutive of the self: on the one hand are the two opposing poles of factuality and freedom, which determine the ontological structure of the self. On the other is the self’s relationship with these poles, wherein the self freely balances between them. Only this complex relationship is the self.71 The similarities between Soloveitchik’s and Kierkegaard’s existential characterization extend even further and, like Kierkegaard, Soloveitchik also argues that obeying God is the pinnacle of human freedom.72 In sum, Soloveitchik incorporates into the religious existential experience the values of human freedom and autonomy that modern culture “brought down” to the world, but interprets them so that they merge with a life of loyalty and obedience to Halakhah. 4. The Meaning of Alienation Alienation is the complementary facet of freedom, accentuating the difference between human beings and their surroundings.73 Soloveitchik too accepts alienation as the starting fact of human existence: “From an existential metaphysical perspective, exile is a universal experience. Our exile is but a reflection of the general, metaphysical consciousness of exile oppressing every human being, and not only the Jew. Man was cursed by God and sent away from Eden as a homeless creature.”74

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“Homeless” and “exile” are concepts that Soloveitchik takes from existentialist literature. In Being and Time, Heidegger portrays this anxiety as a reality in which we no longer feel at home.75 In his wake, Buber distinguishes between historical periods when human beings view the world as their home and others when they feel estranged.76 Soloveitchik does not accept Buber’s anthropological version and regards alienation as a metaphysical feature. As a result, the concept of exile undergoes a radical metamorphosis, so that its traditional version is only a manifestation of the basic experience of alienation. Soloveitchik’s perception of alienation as a metaphysical instead of a cultural experience emerges not only from these statements but also from the link he assumes, like Pascal and Camus, between alienation and selfconsciousness: And defeated must Adam the second feel the very instant he scores his greatest 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.77 Elsewhere, he notes: “For what causes man to be lonely and feel insecure if not the awareness of his uniqueness and exclusiveness?”78 A consciousness of self makes human beings different. Instead of an object like any other, they are object and subject at the same time, part of reality but also out of it, and thus alienated from it. The sense of alienation evokes a feeling of existential anxiety, of ontological insecurity, and a sense of the absurd—life is meaningless: We are aware that our lives commenced and will be terminated without our consent… We lack faith in the justifiability of our existence and we are bereft of an ontic fulcrum. This is a metaphysical experience, not merely psychological or rational… A pervasive meaninglessness, purposelessness, and an absurdity of life convey themselves to the introspective, sensitive person.79 Alienation and absurdity are metaphysical experiences, but the vast scientific and technological achievements of modern existence only intensify them. The victory in having conquered the world and learned to control it makes our sense of defeat even more poignant: “Modern man is wise and powerful,

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sharp, adept at all areas of science and technological research… his calculations near perfection… and still he fears…feels insecure.”80 Our scientific victory notwithstanding, ontological security remains a chimera. Victory has only deepened our feelings of frustration and loss. Soloveitchik, like other thinkers who preceded him, claims that the modern individual devotes vast efforts “to forget his worries and the emptiness of existence itself.”81 Have we succeeded? Can we escape the experience of alienation? On the one hand, Soloveitchik claims that the modern person is an aesthete in the Kierkegaardian sense of this term, realizing a life of immediacy and unity with nature.82 On the other, he stresses that the initial human fascination with the power to constitute reality was followed by the realization that these victories could not solve existentialist-ontological problems. The sense of alienation and estrangement penetrates and tears apart all our human defenses, since it is part of our being. But although he accepts alienation as the fundamental human plight, Soloveitchik does not adopt the interpretations of existentialist, phenomenological, and atheistic thinkers. Rather, he continues the tradition that begins with Kierkegaard, which acknowledges the fact of alienation but assigns it religious meaning.83 Since Soloveitchik assumes that the passion for transcendence is immanent to human existence, alienation is the precise reflection of this unconsummated passion. A distinction, then, is required between the experience of the absurd and the meaning of this experience. The experience of the absurd is an ontological feature of human reality, but its interpretation rests on the assumption that alienation is a negative manifestation of religiosity. The correct interpretation of the absurd involves obvious implications: the very experience of the absurd reopens the horizons of the religious experience because it evokes our longings for the transcendent. As the “judge” in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or offers the aesthete infinite despair as an experience that opens up the horizons of infinity,84 so Soloveitchik suggests despair and alienation as a voyage to redemption and liberation: Latent in these long hours of dark despair, of the deus absconditus, is an element that purifies and redeems religious life… At one point or another in the long voyage of life, man must reach the absurd stage wherein he will find himself abandoned and impoverished… Man must acknowledge this tragic fact… a person unaware of the contradiction deeply embedded in his personality lives in an illusory world, unredeemed.85 Contending with alienation and despair exposes us to our essential attachment to God: “The transcendental ‘adventure’—‘the flight of the alone to the Alone’—is precipitated by despair. Man in his chancing upon the contradictory and absurd in life apprehends the vision of a hidden God – deus absconditus.”86

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Is redemption from alienation and despair possible? Soloveitchik’s writings indicate that the experience of faith is one of rift and estrangement.87 Recognizing that the experience of alienation has religious meaning does not redeem humanity, and my self-acknowledgement as a homo religiosus fails to deliver safety, peace, understanding, and meaning. But Soloveitchik also offers another view, predicated on the possibility of redemption. This redemption will not lead to a sense of being immediately connected to the world and to nature, but will provide a sense of ontological security.88 Human redemption relies on three vehicles: prayer, attachment to the other, and Halakhah. On prayer, Soloveitchik writes: “The experience of redemption and salvation is a precise representation of the idea of prayer. To pray is to alleviate terror… to pray means returning home.”89 Prayer enables redemption because it relieves the sense of remoteness from God that is at the root of alienation. In prayer, we experience “an interrelationship with God which can dispel the existential restlessness and unhappiness of man.”90 Instead of merely a ritual, prayer becomes a “unique experience” that realizes the human existential need for God and offers meaning and security. Attachment to the other is another path to redemption. According to Soloveitchik, an essential part of the alienation experience is “the existential alienation between the I and the Thou, however close they may be.”91 The mode of consciousness that discovers our isolation from the world also discovers our detachment from the other. Basically, human beings are lonely entities. Our deepest experiences are non-communicative and non-transferable.92 “Adam absconditus and Eve abscondita”93 cannot transmit personal feelings. Closure is ontological: “’To be’ means to be the only one, singular and different, and consequently lonely… The ‘I’ is lonely… 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.”94 The tragedy of human existence is unique because no redemption is possible without attachment to the other, without speech: “Redemption is… synonymous with mutual engagement, with the revelation of the word, in other words—with the appearance of speech.”95 Communication nevertheless becomes possible because God joins the human community,96 thereby imposing on every human being an obligation to turn to the other: “If God abandons His transcendental numinous solitude, He wills man to do likewise and to step out of his isolation and aloneness.”97 Communication ceases to be the first datum of human existence, as Buber holds,98 and becomes a duty through which individuals learn to set themselves limits, because without self-sacrifice and self-restraint we cannot acknowledge the existence of the other as an independent entity.99 In Kierkegaard’s terminology, without the normative dimension, the other is “other I” and not “other-You.”100

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Can the individual exit this ontological closure? Soloveitchik claims that, as a result of the normative dimension, “Adam absconditus and Eve abscondita, while revealing themselves to God in prayer and in unqualified commitment, also reveal themselves to each other in sympathy and love on the one hand and in common action on the other.”101 But how is mutual discovery possible if we assume that the personal experience is by nature non-communicative? This problem appears to expose Soloveitchik’s thought to a logical paradox—if the personal experience is nontransferable, we must, as Wittgenstein requires us, “be silent” about it. In a more restricted interpretation of the meaning of human attachment, we could claim that in a normative love relationship we develop empathy toward the other that enables some degree of closeness to the other’s experiences—closeness, but not thorough fulfillment. A mutual attachment, therefore, without bridging the gap between I and Thou, generates understanding and respect for the mystery in every individual life. Human discourse is an activity involving empathy and analogy, drawing us closer to the world of the other but also preserving the individual’s autonomy and uniqueness. Communication redeems us, however, from the destructive power of loneliness and alienation, which no longer threaten to bring about the collapse of our existence. The concept that Soloveitchik uses to describe this existential plight is “solitude.” I sense myself as different and unique, but also recognized as an individual.102 The redeemed community is a community of redeemed individuals living with a sense of solitude, affirming each other’s existence. Soloveitchik refers to this type of communication as a “friendship” “rooted in the depth of personal entity and in the web of consciousness, drawing on the human yearning to cleave to the other and join two separate entities sharing something in common.”103 The third dimension enabling redemption is Halakhah: “The ideal of halakhic man is the redemption of the world not via a higher world but via the world itself, via the adaptation of empirical reality to the ideal patterns of Halakhah.”104 According to Soloveitchik, halakhic man is redeemed because his existence is not constituted by the given natural reality within which he finds himself; his existence is not predicated on his “thrownness” in an alien, hostile, and incomprehensible world. Halakhah offers a normative system that creates an intelligible world of meaning: Halakhic man knows no fear or dread in the full sense of the term. When he approaches the world, he is armed with his weapons—i.e., his laws— and the consciousness of lawfulness and order that is implanted within him serves to ward off the fear that springs upon him. Halakhic man does not enter a strange, alien, mysterious world, but a world with which he is already familiar through the a priori which he carries within his consciousness.105

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We contend with alienation at the practical instead of the theoretical level, by reshaping the world and rejecting its givenness. The process of shaping the real world through a system of ideal norms clarifies that the given cannot impose itself upon us, since we are free to create it as we understand.106 5. Between Openness and Closure On what grounds does Soloveitchik embrace the factuality of alienation? What is the justification for his openness to the modern human experience? Several answers are possible, pointing to Soloveitchik’s complex attitude to modernity. First, this attitude is part of his general affirmation of human reality, resulting from the subjective shift discussed above. If the religious experience emerges through the relationship between a concrete creature living in a given environment and God, and if this experience unfolds in an actual human setting,107 it implicitly affirms human reality as is. Soloveitchik embraces alienation as a conclusion of the religious experience as he describes it. This is an interesting development: the subjective shift, a consequence of adopting modernity, itself generates the affirmation of alienation. Once alienation is affirmed, it also becomes part of the religious experience. Second, the affirmation of alienation starts from the assumption that Halakhah is inner-worldly and deals with actual human existence. Soloveitchik draws a distinction between topical and thematic Halakhah, and the first is the most significant in the present context. Soloveitchik indicates that he uses the term “topical” in its Greek sense, namely, in the sense of “surface.”108 The “surface” of topical Halakhah is human reality as is, without transcending its boundaries.109 This feature of Halakhah is succinctly formulated in the following passage: The [topical] Halakhah does not venture outside of the human world, and the human world is a very small world. Whatever is relevant to man, to his interests, to his self-fulfillment and his self-realization is relevant and pertinent to the Halakhah. Whatever is irrelevant to man is irrelevant to the topical Halakhah.110 Topical Halakhah supports human responsiveness to the rift and crisis of human existence and their transformation into an essential part of consciousness. This responsiveness conveys the rootedness of topical Halakhah in concrete existence, without implying submission or passivity vis-à-vis evil and suffering. Quite the contrary. Recognizing a fact is not synonymous with accepting it, and acknowledging evil is a condition for assuming an active stance against it. Soloveitchik confesses he could never have accepted Ghandi’s and Nehru’s philosophy. His hero is Jacob, who “engaged in combat with the mysterious antagonist on a dark night.”111

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Soloveitchik rejects all other-worldly interpretations of evil. Relying on a “this-worldly” outlook, he deals with evil through human action but views the contest with the absurd as a religious gesture of faith. Although no leap into the transcendent is necessary, normative action is itself a worldly manifestation of the transcendent. Two elements, then, shape Soloveitchik openness to the concrete experience of the modern person: his characterization of the religious experience and the meaning he ascribes to Halakhah. In his approach, the basic datum of human existence is incorporated into the structure of religious existence. The constitutive elements of modernity—the centrality of subjectivity, freedom, alienation—become the constitutive elements of religion.112 The internalization of modernity is so deep that, at times, Soloveitchik engages in a typological interpretation of religious history. He views the nation’s ancestors—Abraham, Jacob, Judah, Moses, King Solomon, and even the messiah—as archetypes of the fundamental human experience.113 Soloveitchik objects to the idea of messianism and calls it an “alien growth” because it removes the personal dimension from the “belief in the messiah.” The messiah is a concrete figure paradigmatic of human existence: Redemption will come through the figure of a flesh and blood redeemer, with all its distinctive signs… Although a finite, limited, and conditioned, creature that is here today and tomorrow in the grave, man can rise up to a divine mission. The personal-messianic aspect grants a central role to the notion of choice, which endowed man with the ability of selftranscendence and the power to rise to infinity and eternity.114 In this formulation, Soloveitchik follows Kierkegaard, who acknowledges human experience as constitutive of religious faith and views Abraham and Jesus, the prototypes of Christian belief, as figures expressing the complexity of human existence.115 The incorporation of modernity into the religious paradigm is evident in the metamorphosis of religious language. Traditional concepts such as “redemption,” “exile,” “repentance,” “messiah,” and “creation” undergo modification and come to denote not only events in the world but also personal experiences. The alienated individual living in a factual world is in exile, and redemption translates into an existence of singularity and ontological certainty.116 Repentance is the shaping of the renewed personality through a process leading to redemption.117 Creation, like repentance, represents the transition from exile to redemption,118 and “exile” describes the human plight of being thrown into factual existence. Redemption, creation, repentance—all point to a process that human beings experience through their very existence: “it lies within man’s power to renew himself, to be reborn… no one can help him. He is his own creator and innovator” (182). The personal messiah, as noted, is for Soloveitchik a paradigm of human existence. But if we

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define the human task as the transition from exile and alienation to redemption, whoever accomplishes this task is the messiah. Soloveitchik says so explicitly: “He is his own redeemer; he is his own messiah who has come to redeem himself from the darkness of his exile to the light of his personal redemption” (182). His endorsement of such a radical move, hardly different from absolute immanence, is predicated on an assumption of religion as the deepest reflection of human experience. The question of Soloveitchik’s attitude to modernity, however, remains open. Is his religious-halakhic interpretation of the human plight merely an ex post facto recognition of the changes wrought by modernity, or his genuine view of the believer’s experience? A preliminary query demands attention: What is Soloveitchik’s attitude to human reality in general? Does he adopt it unconditionally or does he express reservations about it? Soloveitchik’s endorsement of reality is qualified. His attitude to human reality as the ultimate datum is dialectic, as evident from the meaning he assigns to Halakhah. Yet, contrary to the responsiveness he evinces in his topical Halakhah, his perspective here attests to his reservations. Thematic Halakhah does not view human reality as the sole “datum” and takes a much broader view, “beginning with the here and now, the finite existing experience, and concluding with our awareness of eternity. The frame of reference of the thematic Halakhah is not only a this-worldly one, but is transcendental as well.”119 According to thematic Halakhah, the foremost human obligation is to understand the order of reality and act accordingly. The dialectic between topical and thematic Halakhah is, for Soloveitchik, essential to Jewish existence, which fluctuates between the endorsement of concrete reality and the focus on an ideal order that is not unduly concerned with it. This complex attitude toward human reality is a leit-motif of Soloveitchik’s works. Already in Halakhic Man, these two contradictory trends emerge between the lines. Soloveitchik presents in this work the ethos of shaping the world: “Halakhic man’s ideal is to subject reality to the yoke of the Halakhah.”120 “The task of the religious individual is bound up with the performance of commandments, and this performance is confined to this world, to physical, concrete reality…. Only against the concrete, empirical backdrop of this world can the Torah be implemented” (33-34). Yet, a contrary trend also emerges, focusing on the ideal and neglecting concrete reality: “His [halakhic man’s] deepest desire is not the realization of the Halakhah but rather the ideal construction” (23). “Halakhic man is not particularly concerned about the possibility of actualizing the norm in the concrete world” (63). According to this trend, the halakhic ethos is no longer the shaping of the real world but the concern with an abstract one. Innovation and theoretical constructions epitomize halakhic man’s freedom and creativity (65, 99).

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Both approaches appear in Halakhic Man synchronically,121 although a later work favors the theoretical view over the realistic trend of contending with existence.122 Accordingly, Soloveitchik argues that when halakhic man discovers no harmonic balance is possible between the ideal and the real, he “retreats into his singularity and his ideal world” (90). The tension between a trend assuming the two trends are synchronic as opposed to one assuming a hierarchical relationship between them shows that the dialectic between topical and thematic Halakhah also guides Soloveitchik’s thought. He is not necessarily sure that topical Halakhah is the “correct” trend. A permanent tension between openness to human reality and reservations about it marks his thought, withdrawing into the ideal world of Halakhah. In an attempt to understand this complexity, we must also consider whether Soloveitchik recognizes a “neutral world” without any religious meaning, built and understood solely through human knowledge. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whose thought resembles and interfaces with Soloveitchik’s in several ways,123 compartmentalizes the religious domain. Leibowitz definitely acknowledges the existence of a neutral world, and circumscribes religion to the normative realm.124 Through their endeavor, scientists do not realize a religious value but only their will to know the world, and knowledge of the world plays no part in drawing us closer to a transcendent God. Our only tie with God is through the Torah and the commandments. Soloveitchik does not endorse this view. The world is not neutral. His attitude to the world is mediated by the following religious elements: First, a refusal to recognize a world that is entirely secular, which rests on the postulate that the basic human stance is vis-à-vis God: “The characteristic and unique in Judaism is the motif of continuity between the holy and the profane. Judaism consistently sought to differentiate the holy from the profane, but not to separate them… God dwells at the center of secular existence.”125 Religion, according to Soloveitchik, cannot acknowledge a domain bereft of God because the religious experience forges through the whole range of human activity. The relationship with God shifts to the subjective, but does not dwell only in the depths of self-reflection: “Peering from and rummaging in the most hidden corners of natural and spiritual reality, you will find human consciousness longing for its beloved.”126 The whole world becomes a medium for the human encounter with God.127 The world, then, is never entirely empty of the divine. Soloveitchik’s claim that the homo religiosus is not only theocentric but also “ontocentric” epitomizes this view: “He [man] is not concerned with interpreting God in terms of the world but the world under the aspect of God.”128 The basic religious experience of God’s constant presence within existence, despite divine transcendence, challenges humanity, but does not create a separate compartment for religion.

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Second, Soloveitchik often emphasizes that scientific and social action represent compliance with the obligation of imitatio Dei: “Yet man is bidden by the principle of imitatio Dei to create, to be a partner in creation, fashioning form out of chaos… . Man must be creative in both the material and the spiritual realms.”129 “Majestic Adam,” described at length in Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith, conveys dignified human existence through the control and organization of reality and thereby realizes both the obligation of imitatio Dei (18-19) and the image of God within (12-13). Soloveitchik argues in this essay that “the majestic community is willed by God as much as the covenantal faith community” (81), and the human existence of “majestic Adam” is part of the dialectic of religious existence. If the whole of human life is predicated on religious values, we can formulate the above question even more forcefully: is openness to the world determined solely by religion, or is Soloveitchik declaring his unconditional affirmation of reality? Is he offering a modern philosophy that internalizes the values of modern culture or is this, at best, a qualified endorsement? Let us consider an aspect that constitutes a “test-case” of a modern world view: How does Soloveitchik approach secular outlooks predicated on a value system without God? Does Soloveitchik respect them as inherently valid? Is he ready to apply to them the subjective shift that endows human experience with value? Does he assume that only religion conveys the true, the useful, the sole ideal of a full human life? If we answer the last question in the affirmative, Soloveitchik’s openness to the world is extremely limited and confined to whatever is compatible with religion. In a sense, this option is a retreat from a modern world view; it clings to traditional concepts of truth and creates an obvious hierarchy between the religious and secular worlds. Soloveitchik endorses this option unconditionally.130 His critique of the modern world, insofar as it concerns the renunciation of religious, is typological and stereotypical. From Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s existentialist tradition he draws the “they” concept of banal existence. Yet, this characterization is no longer one form of unauthentic human existence but of human existence as such.131 Modern man is materialistic,132 engrossed in the “satisfaction of his lusts,”133 suffering from boredom, frustration, and a feeling of defeat.134 He sometimes goes even further: “This secular culture entails destructive elements, many negative and perverse aspects… and thus as long as one can live without it, so much the better for the spirit.”135 Such stereotypical attitudes toward the modern world, bordering on demonization, are slightly puzzling in a thinker so responsive to it. Note, however, that Soloveitchik often targets this critique precisely against the attempt of secular culture to present itself as self-contained, no longer in need of God. From the “fact” that the human being is by nature a homo religiosus,

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Soloveitchik concludes, as noted, the absolute human responsibility for God’s removal from the world. He does not accept secularization as validly acknowledging that it had indeed removed God from the world and created a godless viable replacement. He absolutely rejects the empirical fact that some people, including Jews, do not want and are not even interested in God. His philosophy never hints at a pluralistic stance, which is essential to the modern experience, and does not consider secularism “intrinsically valuable.” He is willing to take a tolerant view, ready to acknowledge the existence of a secular world that “does not deserve our ire but rather our sympathy and pity.”136 Instead of endorsing a tolerant outlook, Soloveitchik appears to be closer to a paternalistic view. Soloveitchik’s unreceptive attitude toward secularism is evident in his appropriation of truth, when he categorically states concerning the modern individual in general and secular Jews in particular that they are “unwittingly” seeking God. In formulations that appear far removed from modern discourse, he states: “Modern man… is beginning to sense that without God life is gloomy, without aim and without content, and he is beginning to look for a way back to the Master of the worlds. The modern secular Jew is experiencing a similar crisis and he is also suffering from nostalgia and longing for the God of Israel.”137 “Every Jew is forever seeking the Creator of the universe, unwillingly or willingly, inadvertently or intentionally… the more the secular Jew proclaims that he has no relationship to sanctity, the more he feels in the innermost recesses of his heart that he has given false testimony about himself.”138 In this passage, Soloveitchik not only abandons modern discourse but also proposes an alternative “psychology.” This attitude, which to some extent dehumanizes the human experience of the other, is predicated on his basic religious-metaphysical stance. This is the very stance that enabled him to articulate a kind of openness toward the world. In some of his writings, Soloveitchik presents all aspects of modern life as a factual datum out of human control. He is aware of the sociological changes that have affected the Jewish people: There were times when… sanctity was within walls. Judaism was then a private domain, surrounded by walls… It was apart from all the world, from all peoples… There were no fundamental differences of opinion within Jewry; almost the entire people observed mitzvot. Today we find ourselves in a completely different situation… The walls have fallen down. The Jew is part of his surroundings both economically and culturally. Whether we like it or not the fact is that the Jew stands at present with both feet in the general domain.139 Soloveitchik translates this sociological fact into an existentialist construct. In his view, this fact conveys “the existential vulnerability of man“140 that, in

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Jasper’s language, emphasizes “boundary situations” or, in Heidegger’s terms, “thrownness,” namely, the fact that human beings do not create themselves ex nihilo since they are born into a reality they do not control:141 “Even as we emphasize man’s free will, we are also aware that so much of what happens in life is not man’s making. He does not choose the family into which he is born and reared nor the society whose values will have such an impact upon him.”142 The new reality of modernity upon which Jews have unfortunately stumbled requires a new reaction: “We dare not remain behind artificial walls because if we cut ourselves off from the world we shall lose it. Today’s sanctifier is to be found in conquering life, not in removing oneself from it.”143 Soloveitchik emphasizes here that the new circumstances compel a religious restructuring, but this restructuring is not an expression of an essential mode of Jewish existence. Soloveitchik’s philosophy could be said to reflect greater openness toward the human plight of the modern individual as a free creature living in an alienated world. His philosophy, however, does not reflect similar openness or offer a comprehensive modern perspective toward the values of the modern world. Soloveitchik’s attitude toward Zionism illustrates this complexity. He speaks of Zionism as the unambiguous response to “the voice of the beloved that knocketh.” In his sermons, Soloveitchik argues that Zionism is the only correct reaction to the plight of the Jewish people.144 Yet, his perception of Zionism as the adequate religious response to the surrounding circumstances does not imply internalization of Zionism’s values as a secular movement advocating the sovereignty of the individual. This Zionism, he argues, failed in its reading of Jewish history, and cooperation with it is limited.145 Soloveitchik addresses secular Zionism in Abraham’s words: “Stay here with the ass and I and the lad will go yonder and prostrate ourselves.”146 Believing Jews ascend to some places alone and do not take secular Jews with them, despite mutual cooperation in many areas. This uniqueness should be preserved. How should we assess this approach and how can we reconcile it with the considerable openness ostensibly postulated in The Lonely Man of Faith? What we learn is that, in this work as well, Soloveitchik presents a dialectic of simultaneous openness and closure, reflecting the obstacles that hinder harmonization between the religious and secular worlds. This dialectic becomes constitutive of the religious experience and Soloveitchik sums it up in the claim that a Jew has a double identity: “He is a part of the larger family of mankind, but he also has a Jewish identity which separates him from others.”147 At times, Soloveitchik describes this tension through the verse “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you” (Genesis 23:4)—the Jew is a sojourner participating in the life of the society, but also estranged from it.148 Soloveitchik is aware of this harsh tension: “There is something contradictory and psychologically discordant in maintaining this dual role.”149 But this is what Jewish identity means. The tension in Soloveitchik’s thought

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concerning modernity, the simultaneous openness and closure, emerges as his actual Jewish experience. Soloveitchik’s complex attitude to modernity reflects the experiences typical of many observant Jews at the fulcrum of the modern world, who fluctuate between cooperation and spiritual closure, between an understanding of modernity in all its manifestations and the negation of the modern world as possessing a full set of values. Instead of solving the believers’ problem, this dialectic attitude presents their anguish, as both strangers and sojourners in this world. Soloveitchik’s thought, then, articulates the distress of modern Jews, but hardly provides answers to those Jews who wish to affirm modern values, a stance that compels them to recognize the “intrinsic value” of the other’s outlook as justified and self-contained. To contend with this problem, an entirely different revolution is required. Eliezer Goldman and David Hartman, whose work I discuss below, appear to have met this challenge more successfully. In sum, Soloveitchik offers a complex response to modernity, pervaded by a tense and conflicting attitude that simultaneously embraces, and recoils from, modernity. The rift and the contradiction at the core of the encounter with modernity will resonate throughout the rest of the book.

Three COMPARTMENTALIZATION: FROM ERNST SIMON TO YESHAYAHU LEIBOWITZ This chapter considers another response to the challenge of modernity: compartmentalization. Compartmentalization restricts religious life to a defined domain, leaving room for realms of activity to function independently from religious forms of organization. Yet, while compartmentalization enables the preservation of religious life, it also tacitly acknowledges a secular realm of meanings and modes of activity that are not determined by religion. A well known response to the modernistic challenge, compartmentalization is a typical reaction within Protestant tradition. Ernst Simon, who is the subject of my discussion in the first section of this chapter, seeks to apply compartmentalization to Judaism and makes explicit reference to a “Protestant Judaism.” Is compartmentalization possible? Can we envisage separate systems of meaning that are not mutually influential? In sociological and psychological terms, this is questionable. Individuals bear different contexts of meaning in their lives, and transfer them between the different compartments within which they act. A “clean” compartmentalization delimiting contexts of meaning requires a parallel compartmentalization in human consciousness. A compartmentalized praxis, then, necessarily assumes a compartmentalized consciousness, predicated upon cultural and conscious mechanisms able to provide an effective defense against the mutual encroachment of life contexts. The higher the chances of encroachment, the greater the need for strong and rigid mechanisms capable of preventing it, a process that could lead to closure and rigidity, or to deep feelings of rift and schism. In Jewish thought, Leibowitz’s philosophy is a paragon of the compartmentalization model, including all its implications. His paradigm is both an expression of life within a split world at the level of consciousness, together with a rigid organization of meaning. Leibowitz approaches Judaism through a singularly inflexible conceptual system, with Halakhah at its core. In this chapter, I offer a preliminary outline of Leibowitz’s approach and elaborate below in greater detail. The analysis of Ernst Simon’s position is a suitable opening for a discussion of Leibowitz’s work. Simon formulated several major elements of the compartmentalization theory before Leibowitz, in response to the challenge of modernity in a sovereign secular state. Leibowitz continued and deepened Simon’s trailblazing formulation, turning it into the conceptual nucleus of a comprehensive radical outlook. In time, Simon’s contribution was forgotten and the philosophical turnabout was ascribed to Leibowitz. The comparative

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analysis I propose restores credit where due, and helps to shed further light on Leibowitz’s revolution, which drew on the dialogue with Simon himself. 1. Ernst Simon: From Catholicism to Protestantism In 1952, Simon published an article entitled “Are We Still Jews?” The article reverberated widely in the circles of modern Zionist Orthodoxy, challenged its traditional course, and forced it to reconsider its theoretical and practical endeavor to face a crucial question: Can religious-Zionism proceed on its usual path or should it strive for a profound transformation? Simon discerns two models of religions in this article, structured along Catholic or Protestant lines. The Catholic type is total and all-encompassing, includes the full spectrum of praxis and social life, and recognizes no autonomous area outside religion as legitimate.1 Simon argues that historical Judaism is fundamentally Catholic, as manifest in the broad and all-inclusive normative character of Halakhah. Two crises led, in his view, to the weakening, if not the defeat, of “Catholic” Judaism. The first occurred during the Haskalah, the term generally in use to describe the Jewish Enlightenment, when Jewish religion ceased to be the “absolute ruler” (10). The second was the growth of modern Zionist nationalism, which “effectively” ended the rule of Jewish religion. The failure of “Catholic” Judaism deepened as the society that emerged soon after the creation of the State of Israel organized as an independent body functioning according to modern patterns. Simon points to a range of areas that are in no way subject to the inclusive paradigm typical of Jewish religion in such realms as economics, society, and the army. All these institutions are secular products, and religious relationships with each of them develop “almost invariably ex post facto, be it to stamp it with a seal of legitimacy through additions or imitation, or to rebuke it for the desecration it entails” (21). Even in areas of the new society where religious circles do participate actively, they lag after the secular public and catch up a generation later. In his criticism, Simon targeted a group with which he had been closely associated and that, for some time, had counted him among its spiritual leaders: the religious pioneers from Germany who founded the religious kibbutz movement a generation after the foundation of the secular kibbutz movement. Despite his admiration for their endeavor, Simon was also strongly critical. On the one hand, the religious kibbutz adopted the model of a “Catholic” Judaism, striving for the integration and internalization of socialist and Zionist values within the Torah and the commandments. On the other, it organized its life as a closed community, contending with halakhic-religious questions at the expense of more general ones bearing on the relationship between religion and the state. Its success comes at the expense of participation in the society. The religious kibbutz withdraws from Israeli society and renounces the “religious principle of mutual responsibility that

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extends to the entire people” (29). Simon viewed this process of isolation as a distinctively Protestant feature, involving individuals seeking personal redemption and imposing “aristocratic demands” (29) of asceticism upon themselves, while oblivious to the society as a whole. Contrary to the religious kibbutz, Simon identified two prominent circles of “responsible and dynamic ‘Catholic Judaism’ in the State of Israel” (29): the ultraOrthodox “Neturei Karta” group, and the circle that coalesced around Yeshayahu Leibowitz. The first solved the tension between a secularized society free from the rule of religion and the all-embracing religious demand by renouncing the secular pragmatic world. The ultra-Orthodox retreated inwards and broke away from the state and from society, preferring foreign government to Jewish rule because it released them from any responsibility for the sins of the secular Jewish government. Placing Leibowitz and the ultra-Orthodox in the same Catholic category might appear as a distortion of Leibowitz’s thought. He is the modern Jewish thinker most closely identified with a Protestant orientation, since he endorsed compartmentalization and separated religion from other areas of life. More than any other Jewish thinker, Leibowitz founded religious existence on the individual’s sovereign decision. But this objection is evidence of Leibowitz’s success in blurring all traces of his earlier thought, up until the mid-1950s. At that time, Leibowitz had been involved in a struggled for the renewal of Halakhah, seeking to make it the linchpin of the Torah state. In the first anthology of his articles, Torah and Mitzvot in Our Times,2 Leibowitz impresses us as a religious-Zionist thinker strongly aware of the crucial importance of laying foundations for a Torah state. One of the articles in this anthology is entitled “Educating towards a Torah State.” In this article, based on a lecture from 1943, Leibowitz calls for the renewal of Halakhah as a political program, a concern that is also evident in other articles from the early 1950s. At this stage of his thinking, Leibowitz holds that the notion of limiting Halakhah to the individual realm is a relic from an exilic Weltanschauung, developed at a time no Jewish government had existed. He therefore seeks the renewal of Halakhah in order to create a normative system fit for a secular reality. In another article in this anthology, “The Sabbath in the State as a Religious Problem,” Leibowitz claims that the problem of regulating Sabbath laws in a sovereign-secular state “sets a precedent for all other instances of the religious crisis presently confronting religious Judaism in the State of Israel.”3 The failure to find a comprehensive solution to the problems of the Sabbath means that the Torah cannot be the basis for administering the country, an option that Leibowitz rejects. Simon understood that Leibowitz’s stance at this time implied preparing a platform for establishing “the rule of religion in the country.”4 According to Simon, although Leibowitz attacked the rabbinate and the religious establishment for their impotence, he was actually laying the ground for a clerical regime in

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Israel (36). Simon engaged Leibowitz in a passionate debate. Surprisingly, and quite fascinatingly, he focused his attack on Leibowitz’s claim that triggering a halakhic reform able to solve the problems of life in a secular state required the attachment of religious meaning to the state, and its perception in messianic terms. Without ascribing religious value to the state, changing Halakhah is a pointless endeavor (37-38). For Simon, a realist unmoved by messianic visions, this was a perilous argument, and he was led to conclude that even a “dynamic Catholic” perception of Jewish religion is incapable of contending with the surrounding secular reality. Candidly and straightforwardly, Simon admits: “Religious Judaism, in all its forms and manifestations, is presently facing a hopeless situation” (38). Leibowitz and Simon did agree at the time that the new reality had led Jewish religion to a crisis, but differed concerning its solution. Leibowitz continued to uphold the Catholic model of religion for several more years, whereas Simon was already then attempting a revolution. As a man committed to the Torah and the commandments, Simon did not think it possible to renounce the Catholic perception of Jewish religion. Despite his basic loyalties, he outlined the terms of the required religious upheaval: “Objectively, Judaism is indeed a ‘Catholic’ religion, but in the present crisis we can only approach it through ‘Protestant’ subjectivity” (42). Simon was aware of Protestant streams in Judaism, such as the Reform movement. As a Torah-committed Jew, however, he sought to emphasize the line dividing the Protestant version he was proposing from the historical version he called “weak Protestantism”: “The difference between this Protestantism and a weak ‘Protestant’ Judaism… lies in our clear perception of this individual outlook not as an end in itself, that is, as a legitimate interpretation of Judaism, but only as a means on the way to it in the sense of a necessary evil” (42) Protestantism, then, is not a religious ideal but a redeployment in light of the surrounding secular reality. Simon indicated that turning religion into an individual concern and “liberating” some areas of life from the rule of religion is a worthy enterprise for two reasons. First, this is the will of most citizens, who want a democratic secular state. Second, removing the political aspects of religion will enable the development of a new and free approach, because a Protestant outlook may actually enable the renewal of an authentic religious life. Simon’s brilliant article called modern Zionist orthodoxy into question by succinctly pointing to the only two coherent models available in light of secular reality: to abandon participation in public life à la “Neturei Karta,” or to embark on a comprehensive re-organization, including the development of a “Protestant” outlook enabling compartmentalization. How did modern Zionist Orthodoxy contend with Simon’s challenge? Was it willing to undertake a second religious revolution, after the original one marking the very emergence of a religious-Zionist ethos?

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As the history of religious-Zionism so far attests, the answer to this question is unequivocal. Despite a practical willingness to moderate its demands and recognize the fact of secular reality, religious-Zionism has not shown, neither then nor now, any willingness to embark on a re-organization process. Of great interest is the blunt reaction of Isaiah Bernstein, a leading spokesman of Ha-Po‘el haMizrahi and Torah va-Avodah. Bernstein belonged to a radical branch of religious-Zionism, apparently more open to new ideas. And yet, he forcefully rejected them: Jewish religion is not like all others… [It] excludes no area of life from its realm and its authority. Its entire essence is that we are constantly subject to the Sovereign of the Universe and within his realm… and all who see Judaism in its unique existence, in the profound difference separating it from all other nations and all other religions, cannot consent to a separation of domains within the Jewish people and to the designation of Jewish religion as a special area, one among the various realms of life, one detail out of many…. Historic Judaism—until the “Haskalah”… neither knew nor acknowledged areas in the life of the Jewish people that are not subject to the supreme authority of the Torah. Any other approach, even if religious, can be called “Protestantism,” but it is not Judaism.5 Bernstein understands that Simon does not deny the Catholic character of Judaism and is proposing a Protestant model as a practical, ad hoc solution. But for Bernstein this solution is impossible because it entails a “renunciation of the total demand posed by religion” (148). In his view, Simon’s proposition entails the destruction of Jewish religion. Answering Simon’s claim that Judaism had failed to contend with secular reality, Bernstein argues: “The secular reality of our life in recent history is not the failure of Judaism, but the failure of all those who drew away from it” (147). Bernstein’s reaction is intriguing because it is a typical instance of the approach generally adopted by modern Israeli Orthodoxy: a basic unwillingness to accept the existence of a secular reality, independently structured and intrinsically meaningful. Religious-Zionism, which prompted such a profound transformation in the religious world, failed in its contest with secularism. Neither Bernstein nor other religious-Zionist circles have any suggestions for dealing with it. They can offer no keys to religious-Zionists baffled by the tension between their religious commitment and their growing participation in the secular public arena. ReligiousZionist thinkers go on repeating Rav Kook’s doctrine, which promises that secularization is merely a moment in the divine dialectic meant to return the people to their sources or their “selves.” In the interim, they have no way of coping with reality as is.

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The only one among the pioneering figures of religious-Zionism who recognized that the existence of the secular state creates a serious crisis for the movement was Moshe Zvi Neriah, a prominent teacher and leader. Neriah engaged in a harsh controversy with Leibowitz over his proposal for a constitutional reform on the Sabbath. He formulated his critique in a series of articles published in BeTerem, which was also the forum for Leibowitz’s projected scheme. Contrary to his critique of Leibowitz in these articles, in his address at the eleventh convention of the Ha-Po‘el ha-Mizrahi movement on 22 October 1952, Neriah reveals his deep awareness of the rift. Although he persisted in his controversy with Leibowitz and refused to acknowledge a religious crisis, he did acknowledge another crisis affecting religious-Zionism: “Religion suffered no crisis… with the creation of the state. The only crisis I know is the one affecting religious-Zionism when facing the laying of foundations for a secular Jewish state.”6 According to Neriah, the deep problem of the religious-Zionist public in Israel is not the coexistence between religious and non-religious: “Were this the case, everything would come right. The question is how the zealous followers of the holy religion can live together with the zealous followers of the secular religion” (5). Not only did the creation of the State of Israel fail to solve the problem but, vis-à-vis the period that had preceded it, the problem actually became worse in two respects: (1) Secularism uses the laws of the state and its executive tools; (2) This time, we are not merely confronting a specific Jewish community but the agreed representation of the people to all the Jewish communities in the Diaspora and to the Gentile world, meaning that the secular state pretends to be the authentic continuation, as it were, of the historical Jewish people. (13) Given these circumstances, Neriah’s discourse in terms of “spiritual crisis” (13) is not surprising. The trap ensnaring religious-Zionists between two irreconcilable loyalties is the essence of the crisis. Neriah concludes his essay with a question he cannot answer: “How can we bridge the inner mental contradiction of double loyalty: loyalty to the Torah of Israel and loyalty to the State of Israel?” (14). Despite these variations between them, Neriah, Simon, and Leibowitz sense the serious plight of religious-Zionism when facing the secular state. In the early 1950s, however, only Simon offered a concrete alternative. Neriah remained loyal to the total “Catholic” vision. Although acknowledging the predicament, he outlined the pragmatic alternative that religious-Zionism had begun to endorse. This was his formulation in 1952: How, then, will religious Judaism move forward to promote Torah rule in the country? No sage can envisage this… our situation is like that of any group struggling against stronger forces. It cannot predetermine its practical course,

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which is set according to the clash with the forces outside… In Zionism, the victors were not the abstract planners but the pragmatists, who struggled harder over the facts on the ground than over proclamations. We therefore strive for facts every day and, insofar as they are established according to our needs, they bring us closer to the kind of state we long for.7 Neriah looked at the problem as a struggle between two static forces: on the one hand, Halakhah as a total and closed system, and on the other, a secular political reality. By contrast, Leibowitz offered a new definition of the halakhic system: he wanted to spark an internal revolution that would enable it to contend anew with the secular reality in “Catholic” ways. In the early 1950s, Leibowitz shared with Neriah and other religious-Zionist leaders the “Catholic” vision of Jewish religion and, like them, rejected the revolution suggested by Simon. Soon after, Leibowitz proposed an even more radical revolution than the one Simon had suggested. Whereas Simon had viewed Protestant religiosity as a temporary response to secularism, Leibowitz offered a new interpretation of Jewish religion itself, viewing it as Protestant instead of as Catholic. The more prominent “Protestant” features of Leibowitz’s thought are the following. First, he definitely recognizes that life is compartmentalized. More than any other Jewish thinker before him, Leibowitz acknowledged that all aspects of life are now secular, except for the autonomous religious realm: “The religious differ from the secular only in that their lives—besides the mundanity common to all human beings—include features of action and behavior whose source is not natural reality but intentionality toward Heaven.”8 Contrary to the widespread view that Simon had also shared, Jewish religion is no longer all-inclusive but confined to the religious domain, which does not depend on any context of meaning outside it. Second, Leibowitz engages in a “subjective shift.” Although Soloveitchik also takes a similar step, as noted, this move plays a different role in their respective philosophies. Soloveitchik makes the personal experience the center of religious life, a move unavailable to Leibowitz, who identifies religiosity with halakhic praxis. For Leibowitz, then, the subjective shift means that commitment to the halakhic way of life is the product of a personal decision, and this decision is faith itself. Leibowitz tried to downplay the revolution he had generated. In his anthology Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel, he included the article “Education toward a Torah State” noted above. Yet, after his move in a “Protestant” direction, he could no longer leave a title suited to a “Catholic” view, and even needed to correct the text. In the later anthology, the new title of the article was “Education toward Torah in a Modern Society.” Leibowitz’s original article had reflected his “Catholic” program and had ended as follows:

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM To be a religious Jew is not a role confined to the shaping of a specific personal character and the regulation of one’s private life but a commitment to prepare toward the huge role of creating a religious society. Our main innovation is in the deep acknowledgement that no educational-religious activity is possible at present outside the public national framework. Education becomes a political problem in the broad and deep meaning of the term: regulating the affairs of society and the state, establishing a Torah state.9

In Judaism, the Jewish People, and the State of Israel, Leibowitz cites this passage and adapts it to the current reality except that, after the term “Torah state,” he directs the reader to an additional footnote where he writes: “In principle, this is also true even after the creation of the State of Israel, which could serve as a framework for shaping a Jewish social reality. Today (1975), however, stronger emphasis should be given to the meaning of shaping individual life within a collective framework.”10 This footnote conveys Leibowitz’s awareness of the dramatic change in his thought, a change that created a growing and even painful rift with his allies in the pursuit of his previous course within religious-Zionism. What led to this change in Leibowitz’s stance? How did this turnabout evolve in a man who had been a prominent leader of traditional religious-Zionism, and a leading thinker among the founders of the religious kibbutz movement? I hold Eliezer Goldman11 was correct when he claimed that Leibowitz felt Israel was not shaping up as a Torah state but as a secular democracy that extolled nationalism. In these circumstances, Leibowitz could have considered a range of solutions, from the radical denial of the state endorsed by extreme ultra-Orthodox circles and up to a moderate program focusing on attainable religious aims. Leibowitz could not choose the first option because he was a committed Zionist, but the second option did not appeal to him either, because it entailed the impoverishment and corruption of religious life. He therefore elected a new way—he fashioned a “Protestant” Judaism. Leibowitz’s later thinking is a response to the problem that Simon had diagnosed. Although religious-Zionism was still engaged in a dialogue with Simon, its negative response was already an omen of things to come. By the time Leibowitz presented his views, he found no receptive audience. Given the reality of a secular state and a secular society, religious-Zionism returned to increasingly rigid “Catholic” models. Since Simon and Leibowitz, modern Zionist Orthodoxy has not offered any new philosophy capable of coping with the challenges of secularism and of a pluralist liberal society. Instead, it integrated expedient pragmatism and an increasingly rigid and dogmatic “Catholic” theory. ReligiousZionism, which began as a revolution, ended up developing philosophical patterns of thought far removed from modern discourse.

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Leibowitz, as noted, was the only thinker who continued to pursue Simon’s ideas. He elaborated on the Protestant outlook that compartmentalizes religion in an attempt to restore the link with Jewish tradition. A systematic description of his philosophy follows. 2. Leibowitz: Jewish Thought Confronts Modernity In one of his references to modernity, Leibowitz states: “We are inextricable.”12 This assertion epitomizes the unique and even revolutionary character of Leibowitz’s outlook as a religious philosophy: this is a modern Jewish perspective, coping with modernity by internalizing its basic values. The following analysis of Leibowitz’s approach will focus on the same three topics used to examine Soloveitchik’s thought: God, the world, humankind. God: Few Jewish philosophers have placed as much emphasis on divine transcendence as Leibowitz. The basic theological intuition of mainstream philosophical and halakhic tradition is that of a tension between God’s transcendence and immanence. God is sublime and other, but also present in immediate reality as a merciful father, a “Thou” to whom believers direct their prayers and whose moral qualities are for them a religious ideal.13 Contrary to this tradition, Leibowitz endorses the pole of God’s absolute transcendence. An absolute gap prevails between God and human beings, “and the consciousness of this distance becomes an experience of fear and love.”14 Leibowitz’s close association with Maimonides might rest, inter alia, on Leibowitz’s perception of Maimonides as a philosopher who presented a doctrine hinging on “this pure concept of a transcendent God.”15 In his view, “God is not an object of religious thought—since God is not material and cannot be grasped in material terms and resembles nothing at all.”16 Any ascription of human features to God constitutes idolatry: Belief in God in the sense of a divine entity that cannot be grasped in the categories of human thought contrasts with belief in the sense of the qualities and functions ascribed to God that—given the limitations of the human mind—is necessarily a form of anthropomorphism. Our human mind has no qualities or functions that do not derive from the natural reality known to human beings. Hence, whoever ascribes one of these to God sinks into idolatrous faith: he worships a god in human image.17 The World. Resting on the assumption of God’s transcendence, Leibowitz draws a basic conclusion about the meaning of the world: the world is bereft of divinity. The void extends to all areas of human existence, and worldly facts cannot be imbued with religious meaning:

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM The crucial rule (which is also a crucial religious rule) stating that “life follows its course” applies to history as it applies to nature. As natural phenomena result from forces latent in nature and from their mutual integration, so do events in human history follow from the various antithetical forces imprinted in the human soul, and from the struggles waged by human beings driven by these forces against the background of a reality they themselves have shaped.18

According to this assumption, religion neither does nor can provide any type of information about nature or about humanity, and all available knowledge results from the application of human epistemic tools: The Torah does not supply informative material about the world and about nature—this principle is not an ideology about the Torah or an arbitrary interpretation of it, but an empirical datum: we do have some information about the world and about nature—a product of our scientific research. We neither have nor could have learned this from the Torah, and this knowledge does not rest on it at all.19 Furthermore, Leibowitz’s philosophy reinterprets even purportedly religious “facts,” meaning facts with religious meaning or implications. For instance, “holiness” is a fundamental religious category, but the assumption that things or objects are holy is incompatible with the thesis that the world is empty of the divine presence. Leibowitz therefore argues that the category of holiness does not refer to any existing object. In his view, ascribing holiness to objects in natural reality is “idolatry par excellence.”20 The attribute of “holy,” meaning transcendent, is ascribed only to God. The religious meaning of the holiness category in human life is co-extensive with the halakhic system of norms. Holiness, then, is not the description of a fact but a characterization of the religious obligations incumbent on human beings.21 The term “holy” describes these obligations because they transcend factuality; as obligations, they are not part of the given natural world. As a Kantian thinker, Leibowitz held that obligations do not derive from facts but are beyond them. Leibowitz’s interpretation of the “Sinai gathering” provides a good illustration of this transformation of religious facts. The Sinai gathering is the constitutive fact of Jewish religion so that, prima facie, this is a religiously meaningful fact. Relying on a series of moves, however, Leibowitz removes all religious meaning from this fact as well. First, he argues that, factually, this was “the greatest failure in history” because “it did not bring the people of Israel to faith in God and to worship God.”22 Second, acknowledging “the truth of the fact” cannot logically impose an obligation on a human being to worship God: “Even if a person obtained notarial testimony about… [God’s] revelation before them [the

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people of Israel] at Sinai and about the giving of the Torah from Heaven… he could still refuse to worship God” (39). This refusal is not only a description of an expected possible situation but also implies that we cannot conclude the obligation of worship from the fact of the command. The Sinai gathering undergoes a conceptual transformation, no longer referring to an event but acknowledging an obligation: “The meaning of the Sinai gathering is the acknowledgement of the command we have been commanded” (154). In religious language, the Sinai gathering denotes the human attitude to norms: using this language, believers denote that these norms are an obligation incumbent upon them. The concept of “the Sinai gathering” no longer refers to an event that occurred in the past, which is religiously irrelevant, but to the believer’s attitude to the command in the present. This last point brings us to consider the topography of religion. If we assume that God is transcendent and that the world is bereft of God, we appear to be returning to the Nietzschean thesis about the death of God. But according to Leibowitz, religion is not located within the factual domain and the believer is no different from the secular person in this regard. Jewish religion is not all-inclusive and does not cover all areas of human activity; it remains within a defined normative realm. Sociologically, this is the “compartmentalization” response to modernity; Jewish religion has been limited to a particular area of life. Religious individuals, instead of separating from secular life, build a special compartment for their religious selves within it. This compartment is identical to the value system embodied in the halakhic norms, which neither derive from nor depend on any other value system. These norms establish an existence whose only purpose is the worship of God and, within the ordinary life that the believer shares with other members of the human community, a closed normative realm is set aside as the sole expression of religious existence. In Simon’s terms, Leibowitz presents a model of “Protestant Judaism.” But even when he had presented a Catholic model of Judaism at an earlier stage in his thought, his “Catholicism” had remained solely within the normative realm. Leibowitz had even then acknowledged the compartmentalization of human life, reserving for religion only the normative halakhic realm. Religion makes no special statements about the factual realm, or even about value realms that are halakhically indifferent. But Leibowitz never accepted the pure model of Protestantism, which is inherently opposed to the very idea of normative obligations incumbent on an entire society. Simon rightfully points to the typical characteristics of ideal Protestantism: Overemphasis on the individual, his direct link to God, and the redemption of his soul through faith, which is chiefly a personal act, rather than through good deeds, which are always social acts. In typical classic Protestantism,

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM good deeds cease bearing the holy character of commandments, and create cultural compartments wholly or partly detached from religion.23

In sum, although Leibowitz shares in the Protestant model through the very notion of the compartmentalization of religious life, he differs from this model in the unique compartmentalizing mode that he endorses: in Protestantism, religiosity rests on faith or on the private religious experience, whereas Leibowitz builds religious compartmentalization on a system of norms. This compartmentalization of Jewish religion, however, lays the ground for a basic conflict between religious and ethical norms, because the part of life designated for the religious realm does not depend on other value systems. A normative conflict is therefore possible between the contents of religion and the contents of morality. This possibility becomes real when religious norms contradict moral norms, as in the command to sacrifice Isaac. Leibowitz further holds that, even when these norms are not incompatible, a conflict in principle prevails between these two value systems because they uphold different values: for religion, the absolute value is the worship of God, and for morality—the human being. I will not enter here into an analysis and a critique of the conflict theses.24 What I wish to show is that the compartmentalization theory prepares the ground for both the thesis of normative conflict and that of conflict in principle. In this sense, compartmentalization failed to create entirely detached compartments. In truth, Protestant compartmentalization also failed in this endeavor. Just as Leibowitz is aware of the conflict between religion and the moral system, so is a Protestant thinker like Kierkegaard, and his philosophy is a ceaseless attempt to contend with this problem. The constitutive dialectic in Kierkegaard’s thought is the fluctuation between the affirmation of the conflict and the search for harmony.25 In this sense, a description of compartmentalization must pay attention to the relationship that unfolds between the different compartments. Some compartments are entirely separate from the religious domain, among them those containing factual data about physical or psychological-social realms. Nor is religion relevant to some value compartments, such as the realm of aesthetic values. Although the moral compartment does not depend on religion, religious individuals do not relate to it with indifference but with a sense of tension and rift. The source of this tension is the fact that both religion and morality are normative systems. As a father and as a moral being, the religious person loves his son and refuses to murder him, and as a believer, he receives an order to sacrifice him. A comparison between Kierkegaard’s and Leibowitz’s reaction to this split will reveal the unique role that the compartmentalization of religious life plays in Leibowitz’s thought. I have shown elsewhere26 that, for Kierkegaard, the terror and the tension between the moral and the religious obligations are precisely what endow the moral world

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with religious value. Kierkegaard argues that the terror occasioned by the tension between the two demands is what turns Abraham into a “knight of faith.”27 But if we assume that moral values have no religious meaning and the believer’s sole duty is to obey God, how does Abraham, torn between the two demands, become “a knight of faith”? In fact, Abraham’s wrestling and struggling attest to his lack of faith, to his inability to overcome his natural inclinations. When Kierkegaard points to this struggle as evidence of Abraham’s merits as a believer, the result is that the moral obligation assumes religious value. Even if morality does not depend on a divine command and is not determined by it, even if morality is an independent compartment of human life, the good God cares about it. Believers, therefore, struggle with the contradiction between the two horns of the dilemma, wavering between God’s instructions—religion—and their knowledge that God is a good God—morality. A perception of the dilemma as religiously significant means that the moral compartment is also religiously significant. Leibowitz argues that, although believers may have difficulty detaching themselves from their natural world and from the “secular” value system, this is still their religious obligation. He is aware of the difficulty involved in this separation but, unlike Kierkegaard, assigns no religious value to the moral compartment. Hence, Leibowitz’s “knight of faith” is the one who “girds up strength like a lion” and renounces the moral values of his existence as a natural creature because of his “love and fear of God.” The religious struggles that Kierkegaard considers formative become, for Leibowitz no more than an issue related to the believer’s biography as a human creature. Whereas, for Kierkegaard, the religious and the moral compartment encroach on one another, for Leibowitz they stand apart and are delimited. But the question remains open: given the assumption of divine transcendence and of a world bereft of religious meaning, what is the basis of religion and how can a communication channel open up between human beings and God? How can there be room for a religious life when “God is dead”? The answer to these questions lies in the third element through which I examine Leibowitz’s thought: humankind and its unique status in Leibowitz’s religious approach. Humankind. A highly typical reaction of religious thinkers and theologians who embrace modernity is to shift the center of gravity of religious life from tradition to the personal-subjective experience. The subjective, personal experience becomes the crux of religiosity.28 This trend begins with Kierkegaard, who concluded from God’s transcendence that God cannot become an object of human knowledge. Both Kierkegaard and Leibowitz claim that turning God into an object of knowledge is tantamount to idolatry, and human beings can approach God only through the subjective experience. Human beings must look inwards, argues Kierkegaard, and there they will find God. The turn inwards is faith, which Kierkegaard does not view as a subjective-theoretical reflection but as a deliberate

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decision. Faith as an intentional relationship with God is the only place for the religious experience.29 Kierkegaardian thought, then, launches the religious reaction to modernity that became increasingly widespread in Protestant theology and philosophy— embracing modernity and diverting the religious experience to subjectivity. Soloveitchik, whose religious outlook evokes that of Leibowitz, suggested a similar response (see Chapter Two above). Although Leibowitz also engages in a subjective shift, the meaning of this shift in his thought is considerably different from that it assumes for other thinkers. Since Leibowitz identifies Judaism with the normative system, subjective religiosity cannot realize religion. The shift, then, is only manifest in the act of choosing religion. The basis of religious life is not a fact but a voluntary decision, which is faith: “I, however, do not regard religious faith as a conclusion. It is rather an evaluative decision that one makes, and, like all evaluations, it does not result from any information one has acquired, but is a commitment to which one binds himself.”30 Like Kierkegaard before him, Leibowitz argues that faith is a “leap” that human beings undertake freely. The shift is subjective because the religious act, meaning the decision of faith, originates in the individual. But the content of this act is the renunciation of human primacy and a readiness to assume “the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, the yoke of Torah and Mitzvoth.”31 Only this distinction between the act and its content precludes the absolute subjectification of religious life and leaves room for the normative system—the Torah and the commandments. This distinction also preserves absolute divine transcendence, because making the subjective shift the crux of religious life assumes that communion with God is the very core of the religious experience. For Leibowitz, who endorses a radical theory about divine transcendence and rejects even the possibility of relating to “a God who is a person,”32 humankind can relate to God only through the religious obligation: “there is no other content to the faith in God and the love of God than the assumption of the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the yoke of Torah and Mitzvot.”33 In sum, subjectivity is manifest in the definition of the human will as the only source of the religious decision. The aim of this decision and its object is the worship of God. This is the only way of addressing God in the modern world, a world devoid of God. Halakhic praxis is the only channel through which a person living in immanence can relate to the transcendent God, and is the parallel of “God’s word” in Protestant tradition. For Leibowitz too, the other side of human freedom is alienation from nature and the rift with reality, but for Camus, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and others, this alienation is the keystone of human life. Human beings discover they are strangers in a world that imprisons them and enslaves them, and find them-

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selves irreparably detached from reality. For Leibowitz, alienation and rift are the actual normative content. In his view: The very core of the religious experience is the human crisis… Faith is the antithesis of human harmony. From the perspective of faith, man does not and cannot accept natural reality, although he is part of it and cannot transcend it… but a religious person differs from one who does not assume the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven… in that he refuses to accept that he is part of the natural reality and cannot transcend it.34 The rift and the human attempt to transcend reality, which is an expression of this alienation, become the aim of religious life. The religious decision conveys the human will to transcend nature and the refusal to be imprisoned within it. The question of whether this is an attainable aim is irrelevant for Leibowitz, who construes this as an infinite, almost Sisyphean task, whose importance is not contingent on performance. The constitutive dichotomy in this split is that between natural life, including human reality, and God or, more precisely, the worship of God: “the only way man can break the bonds of nature is by cleaving to God; by acting in compliance with the divine will rather than in accordance with the human will.”35 Believers do not embrace religious life in order to overcome natural reality and transcend it, just as they do not assume the yoke of Torah in order to attain freedom. Freedom and the release from nature are the core of religious life, which gradually releases human beings from their prison and from their subjugation to nature and grants them liberation. The full meaning of modernity in Leibowitz’s outlook emerges in his analysis of Halakhah. One of his most crucial contributions to Jewish thought is the “Copernican revolution” implied in his formulations about the place of Halakhah within philosophy, a topic that also occupies Soloveitchik, Goldman, and David Hartman, the other thinkers featuring in this book. I confine my concern here to those aspects relevant to Halakhah’s confrontation with the challenge of modernity, and postpone a fuller discussion of Leibowitz’s theory of Halakhah to Chapter Seven. I examine this issue through the three dimensions that guide the entire analysis: God, the world, and humankind. God. The role of the transcendent within Halakhah is one of the fundamental problems confronting Leibowitz. The assumption of “Torah from Heaven,” suggesting that the Torah is the word of the divine legislator, ostensibly points to God’s immanent presence as a legislator. Leibowitz’s analysis restricts the significance of the transcendent as a constitutive element of Halakhah. He supports a creative thesis of Halakhah, arguing that Halakhah is not the disclosure of God’s word but a human creation.36 He does not accept the view that “any innovation a

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scholar could ever offer has already been heard by Moses at Sinai.” In his view, the stance whereby Halakhah is a human creation is “the dogma of Judaism.”37 Leibowitz points to a longstanding rabbinic tradition supporting the creative theory that includes, inter alia, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (known as HaGra, the Vilna Gaon), Aryeh Leib Heller, author of Ketsot ha-Hoshen, Meir Simha ha-Cohen of Dvinsk,38 and other sages. In this theory, the Oral Law is obviously preferable to the Written Law, since the traditional view approaches the Written Law as “the word of God” and does not convey the human but the revelatory dimension. According to Leibowitz, “since the Written Law is the word of God, human beings cannot know if they understand it correctly ‘because what does human reason know of God’s Torah?’ But ‘the Oral Torah is ours.’ Because we make it, and we are therefore sure to understand it.”39 The preferable status of human interpretation successfully conveys that “the word of God” is transcendent, and all we have is our human mind and knowledge. Leibowitz endorses a far more extreme position and argues that the Written Law derives its authority from the Oral Law: The religion of Israel, the world of Halakhah and the Oral Law, was not produced from Scripture. Scripture is one of the institutions of the religion of Israel. Both religiously and from a logical and causal standpoint the Oral law, the Halakhah, is prior to the Written Teaching, which includes faith and values… the Halakhah of the Oral Teaching, which is a human product, derives its authority from the words of the living God in Scripture; at the same time it is the Halakhah which determines the content and meaning of Scripture.40 This view of the Oral Law releases it from any dependence on factual reality because its status derives from the realm of Halakhah, not from worldly circumstances. In Leibowitz’s formulation: For the believing Jew, the decrees, decisions, rulings, and ordinances of the Oral Law—despite their distinctively human source—are the Torah that we have been commanded. The believing Jew does not make the holiness of Scripture contingent on beliefs, opinions, and outlooks about the quality and the sources of the material found in Scripture, and on its historical and scientific value. This material has been hallowed through the holiness of the Torah, the Oral Law, which thereby determined its religious meaning.41 This approach could ultimately lead to the secularization of Halakhah and dismiss Halakhah’s transcendent dimension altogether, since it is a human creation. Leibowitz responds to this objection by shifting the center of gravity from the origin of the Torah to the purpose of halakhic praxis: the content of Halakhah

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is to worship God, even if the believer does not relate to God, “who has no image at all, and makes an effort to direct his religious consciousness to himself as recognizing his duty to his God. That is the practice of the men of Halakhah.”42 Transcendence, then, is not manifest in the immanent human world through some realization of the divinity, as Soloveitchik holds, but through the believer’s intention. The whole of Halakhah is intended “for the sake of Heaven”—release from natural reality and from factuality so as to comply with the religious demand. Facts have no religious significance “unless they incorporate an intention in the lower world aimed at the upper world; in other words—insofar as human beings act for the sake of Heaven.”43 In Leibowitz’s thought, then, the central concept is not “Torah from Heaven” but “Torah for the sake of Heaven,” evident in his conception of the halakhic system as neither a product of reality nor determined by it. The purpose of Halakhah is to create a structure that will enable the whole of human reality to turn outwards. Transcendence comes forth only in the religious commandment. Its purpose, not its source, determines its character. The full extent of the transcendent disposition within human existence emerges in the pivotal role of the conflict between Halakhah and reality. According to Leibowitz, this conflict encapsulates the ethos of Halakhah, whose focus is the duty to God: “Halakhah cannot—and need not—be adjusted to natural human interests and needs.”44 This statement marks the culmination of Leibowitz’s religious philosophy, which renounces any distinction between the commanding God and the command and locates the religious meaning of the commandment within the normative act per se. Instead of any defined (including “religious”) fact, the alienation of human beings from their concrete existence is what attests to the presence of a religious dimension in their reality. The World. Halakhah functions in an empirical world, as a system of norms related to the world as it follows its natural course.45 Its basic Weltanschauung is “realistic,” and it does not challenge human beings to seek a different reality. Concrete empirical reality is the ultimate reality to which Halakhah relates: The religion of Halakhah is concerned with man and addresses him in his drab day-by-day existence. The Mitzvoth are a norm for the prosaic life that constitutes the true and enduring condition of man…. The Judaism of the Halakhah despises rhetoric, avoids pathos, abjures the visionary. Above all, it rejects the illusory. It does not permit a man to believe that the conditions of his existence are other than they really are. It prevents flight from one’s functions and tasks in this inferior world to an imaginary world which is all good, beautiful, and sublime.(12-13)

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A halakhic life realizes the ideal of transparent consciousness recurrently mentioned by Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. One who assumes the yoke of Torah and the commandments strikingly resembles Camus’ absurd man. Neither seeks refuge in hope beyond reality and both acknowledge that human reality, strange and alien, is the only one we have. As the decision of absurd man conveys the height of human lucidity, this is also true for one who assumes the yoke of Torah: both accept the empirical world as the only human reality. The believer, however, even after renouncing a transcendent presence in their world does not renounce transcendence, the attempt to go beyond reality. Lucidity and acceptance of reality are not sufficient, and the believer’s life conveys the refusal to surrender to it. The believer becomes “the rebel” striving to fashion human reality and cope through concrete action with a world bereft of God by planting Halakhah within the empirical world, conveying an attempt to transcend reality and a refusal to bow to it. Human beings know that the task before them is infinite and perhaps unattainable, because of their limitations. This Sisyphean struggle also dooms them to pain and failure (70). Leibowitz claims that “the capability to worship God may not be part of human nature--‘nature’ simply pointing to that which cannot be transcended. Nevertheless, it is still incumbent on the human being to ‘gird up strength like a lion’—to make a supreme effort to do what cannot be done.”46 Yet, by this “very effort,” argues Leibowitz, “he [the human creature] stands before God, and standing before God in this way constitutes his religious perfection, or ‘redemption.’”47 Human redemption is not an eschatological event, a dramatic change in history, but part of concrete, existential reality. Redemption is an existential metamorphosis related to human knowledge, to conscious transparence and lucidity of the Camus variety, aware that human perfection lies in the eternal struggle, and “the merits of this effort are not contingent on its success.”48 Leibowitz’s claim that the eternal, divine meaning of the Torah lies precisely in its being an endless task best conveys the revolution he urges.49 Religiosity is not a function of the religious system’s divine source, but of the infinite purpose whose accomplishment is entirely in human hands. In sum, through formulations at times simplistic, Leibowitz presents a daring and unique response to the challenges of modernity. He builds a comprehensive philosophical system whose core element is the compartmentalization of religious life from other existential contexts. Beyond confining religion to a defined realm, compartmentalization serves as a kind of prism for reinterpreting traditional Judaism. Like many revolutionaries who work within a traditional culture and affirm it, Leibowitz embraces the traditional rhetoric. He never tires of emphasizing that he is only describing halakhic Judaism, and his revolutionary religious claims unfold through conservative rhetorical constructs. Leibowitz’s formulations help to blur the new interpretation of Judaism he offers in his philosophy, which involves a broad conceptual transformation of the tradition. In the following chapters, I deal with its implications.

Part Two THE HARMONIOUS ENCOUNTER WITH MODERNITY

Four RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT IN A SECULARIZED WORLD: ELIEZER GOLDMAN The last two chapters focused on thinkers whose philosophy suggests a complex and tense encounter with modernity. Tension and contradiction pervade the world of the believer affirming modernity. Whereas tension conveys for Soloveitchik the very nature of religious existence, for Leibowitz it characterizes the concrete life of believers who are required to overcome their natural human values and feelings to transcend into the realm of religious duty. The thinkers discussed in this section represent a more harmonious encounter with the modern world. Their philosophy expresses a deep understanding of human life as a social and historical phenomenon, and a myriad of complex contexts of meanings mediates their concrete formulations. Instead of endorsing the rigid and circumscribed image of tradition embodied in “traditionalism,” these thinkers return to tradition through a lucid recognition of its dynamic character. Given that the thinkers I discuss in this section adopted modernism as their initial perspective for reinterpreting Judaism, I define them as “modernists a priori” instead of “modernists ex post facto.” Modernism ex post facto assumes that “Judaism” is constituted from “within,” to shape a context of life and meaning not necessarily associated with the world “outside.” Were existential circumstances to allow it, the ex post facto modernist would be willing to renounce modernity. Ex post facto modernism, then, contends and struggles with modernism but without fully internalizing it. By contrast, modernism for a priori modernists is a primary and constitutive experience. In the world of a priori modernists, “inside” and “outside” encroach on one another, and they build their inner world through a constant dialogue with the outside. The ex post facto modernist assumes that human beings belong mainly to one community, constitutive of their world and their identity. If forced to turn outwards, therefore, they recurrently search for justifications, contexts of meaning, and analogies from their inner world so as to ease the exit and the absorption from this “outside.” At times, they may even openly reject the outside, or erect walls that compartmentalize it from the inside. A priori modernists acknowledge multiple constitutive memberships. They do not move from the “inside” to the “outside” because they live in what is apparently both “inside” and “outside.” They do not need to engage in a recurrent inner search after justifications for the outside world, or create a compartmentalized religious domain, separate from all others. They construct

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their lives through a network of dynamic contexts of meaning, shaped by their different memberships. Modernists ex post facto appear to enjoy an advantage because, although ostensibly open to the “outside,” they do not grant it the same value they confer upon their “inner” traditional world. The a priori religious modernist, for whom modernism and commitment to an inner religious world are of equal value, faces many other problems as a result of this integration: Is the religious obligation of obedience compatible with autonomy? Is the ascription of holiness to what comes from the past—canonical texts, world views, and so forth—compatible with commitment to the new and changing? My discussion of a priori modernists begins by addressing the thought of Eliezer Goldman. Goldman is a special figure in the landscape of contemporary Jewish thinkers. He is a rare mixture of the practical man and the creative philosopher, whose thought and scholarly work draw on his public involvement and on the legacy of universal and Jewish philosophy. His oeuvre grapples, in critical and balanced fashion, with the problems confronting a modern religious society blending deep religious commitment and openness to the secular world. Many similarities link Goldman with Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, to whom he also devoted some of his studies. But Goldman stands out for his unique critical bent, possibly reflecting his interests as a rigorous philosophical scholar beside his concern as a creative thinker. All these accomplishments, together with his rabbinic and scientific training, come to the fore in his unique intellectual endeavor. 1. Modern Jewish Thought Goldman’s thought can be succinctly described as modern or, more precisely, as a religious philosophy confronting a secularized world. His Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present includes a chapter entitled “Orthodox Jewish Thought Faces Modernity.”1 Although he is not concerned with his personal views in this chapter, the task he undertakes successfully conveys the central challenge to his philosophy in general. Goldman confines himself to the characterization of one of modernity’s essential features— secularization: “We will call ‘secularization’ the abandonment of norms, criteria of legitimacy, forms of life, and perceptions of reality typical of this tradition” (141). He then traces the evidence attesting to the abandonment of traditional patterns and their replacement with secular ones: To modern man, events in his natural and social surroundings appear to be woven into a causal web. When things go wrong, when beset by illness, enemy attacks, or economic setbacks, his immediate response is to search for their natural causes. The social and the political orders appear as an

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artificial product that can be shaped or changed, or a socio-cultural tradition undergoing evolutionary processes. Neither his social standing nor his economic role are predetermined… He is not inclined to resort to divine action as a means of explanation. The normative regime is open to criticism and is perceived as changing in the course of history. In sum, he lives in a world that has undergone a secularization process. (142) Goldman argues that most Orthodox thinkers fail to address the phenomena of modernity and secularism with the required seriousness. They claim “secularism reflects a distorted approach,” largely basing this categorical negation “on the classic theological argument about a purportedly planned world” (142), and attributing the refutation of their theological argument to the “distorting influence of passions” (142). This explanation preserves the classic philosophical tradition that ascribes epistemological error to moral weakness. Goldman notes that even a “philosophically sophisticated” thinker such as Soloveitchik, who is aware of the weaknesses of rational theology and tends to challenge it in his work, is not entirely free of the classic assumption seeking in religion the ultimate explanation of daily reality (142). Similarly, Kook fails “to discern the significance of the fact that modern man leads his daily life in a world he perceives as lacking sacral elements, that the religious is not part of what he accepts as self-evident” (143). Unlike them, Goldman is attentive to the profound transformation of Western culture, and chooses modernity and the secularization typical of the reality common to believers and non-believers as his point of departure. In this sense, Goldman is closer to Leibowitz than to Soloveitchik. Goldman shares with Leibowitz a lucid awareness of the conditions typical of modern life. Unlike Leibowitz, however, Goldman not only contends with modernity but is also conscious of his struggle, and views his thinking as part of the modern discourse. He does not seek to restrict and blur this fact by invoking such concepts as “empirical Judaism” or “historical Judaism,” and realizes that believers reinterpret their religious world out of their life circumstances. But whereas Leibowitz tries to emphasize the steady continuity between old and new, Goldman admits to the change. His thought, therefore, is not only a philosophy that contends with modernity but, in some sense, it is also a Protestant philosophy.2 Although I have stated that Goldman is a postmodern thinker, I do not imply that Goldman agrees with all aspects of postmodernity. He does not share its overall rejection of rationality and rejects only one type, a rationality adducing claims about God that he terms “ontological rationalism.” Following Leibowitz, Goldman proposes a distinction between two types of religiosity—illusional and non-illusional faith.3 Illusional faith is oblivious to human reality as is, and holds: “Religion provides the possibility of transforming human reality by releasing it from its flaws and enabling true closeness to

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God” (361). By contrast, non-illusional faith holds that “human reality must be accepted as is, without illusions about our ability to escape it. It is within it that we must worship God ‘for this is the whole duty of man’ [Ecclesiastes 12:13]” (361). Whereas illusional believers interpret the world according to their personal and religious yearnings, non-illusional believers do not blur the character of reality; the gap between the divine and the human is infinite and unbridgeable. This assumption, the very core of a crucial aspect of modern experience, shapes a sui generis type of religiosity. More precisely, the concepts shaping the two types of religiosity are determined by a consciousness index— illusional and non-illusional. Illusional religiosity is neither more nor less true than the non-illusional variety, if by truth we refer to sincerity or faithfulness. But illusional religiosity is a deception of consciousness—it does not reflect a sufficiently lucid self-consciousness of the believer’s plight in the modern world. The modern world is a given, and the attempt to ignore it or the refusal to take it as the starting point of the religious domain is an illusion. In light of this distinction, we can characterize the whole of Goldman’s oeuvre as an attempt to formulate a Jewish philosophy that balances religious commitment and the refusal of illusional elements, endorsing a non-illusional religious starting point. 2. The Sources of Religious Commitment: Faith What is the justification of religious commitment? How can we justify faith from a non-illusional starting point? Goldman examines the different options: (1) Religious Knowledge. The classic philosophical approach was to justify faith on the basis of truth claims, namely, to establish theological truths metaphysically. These truths include statements about God and God’s relationship with the world in general and human reality in particular. Goldman categorically rejects “religious knowledge.” Following Kantian tradition and according to assumptions widely accepted in the philosophy and sociology of science, he argues that our knowledge is merely a form of order we ascribe to the world: “the rational structure of the world is merely the structure of our tools of thinking, of language, and of consciousness, and also of our tools of experimentation. We discover order in the world because of the selective way in which we organize it in our understanding” (362-363). Awareness of this state of affairs forecloses the option of “ontological rationalism,” in which human knowledge rises from knowledge of the world to knowledge of God. The modern view does not attribute any purposeful order to nature: “Our physical sciences became possible when researchers overcame the inclination to view natural phenomena as purposefully directed” (256). Even if the believer views natural reality as God’s work, “attaining knowledge of God by way of nature is logically impossible. Obviously, the contemplation of nature, and even

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of its beauty, psychologically pushes some individuals into religious faith. What we wish to emphasize is that there is no logical way of inferring religious conclusions from our knowledge of nature.”4 As a thinker well aware of psycho-social aspects, Goldman does not deny that, psychologically, the contemplation of nature may evoke religious feelings, but these feelings are not equivalent to truth claims. Rejecting the classic epistemic course for the justification of religion is not an option that only religious existentialists such as Blaise Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik chose to endorse. Thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, and postWittgensteinians such as Peter Winch, D. Z. Philips, and Norman Malcolm,5 also rejected the epistemic option. Relying on the legacy of the later Wittgenstein, these thinkers emphasized that ordinary believers need not resort to theology to justify their faith, and yet their faith is no less worthy than the theologian’s.6 Philips describes as the “scandal of the philosophy of religion” the tendency to ignore the believer’s actual experience and prefer instead the course he calls foundationalism—the view of faith as a rational approach based on established claims.7 These are not Goldman’s reasons, however, and what determines the difference is the modernistic starting point. In Wittgensteinian thought, claims about the meaning of religion rest on the sociological (one is almost tempted to say phenomenological) viewpoint, which takes as a “datum” the believer’s sociology and psychology as s/he is in her or his concrete life. Wittgensteinian tradition is not sensitive enough to the historical dimensions of monotheistic religions, where theology was a long-standing legitimate concern and, at times, even a religious obligation; it is unaware of the “ordinary believer’s” stance as representing a response to modern society instead of a primary, naïve experience. Goldman, by contrast, does acknowledge the transformation within Western culture, which shifted from an explanation of reality through a religious Weltanschauung to one that perceives it as neutral, namely, secular. He therefore concludes that, to us, who live in a modern world bereft of the divine and cannot endorse the classic teleological and metaphysical rational approach any longer, the epistemic option is foreclosed. (2) Personal Experience. As noted in previous chapters, one typical way of affirming religiosity in the modern world is to endorse the “subjective shift.” Since the world no longer has any religious meaning, and since believers cannot establish their religiosity on metaphysical claims, personal experience becomes the source of religious commitment. Goldman rejects this option as inappropriate to Judaism on several counts. First: “For some Jews, whose Jewish religiosity is well-entrenched, the experiential element of faith is extremely flimsy.”8 Second, personal experience is unique.

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM The experiencing subject can convey to another person the conclusions he infers from the experience, or describe the images that accompanied it. But the experience itself, in its immediacy, is not transmittable and, therefore, so is its subjective certainty. It remains subjective and devoid of interpersonal validity. The common denominator of the Jews’ religious experiences rests on a shared religious tradition, since the character of the experience is affected by the religious tradition of the experiencing subject.9

Goldman diverts the emphasis from experience and knowledge to praxis— the Halakhah typical of Judaism as a “public religion.” Within Halakhah, the religious experience is a by-product of religiosity instead of its constitutive basis. (3) The Power of Tradition. The shift to praxis and to the normative tradition could suggest that religious commitment rests also on the tradition, which claims revelation as a historical event, but Goldman rejects this option too. In his view, one of the critical distinctions between “the handling of faith during the Middle Ages and any possible handling of it at present”10 lies in the very standing of religious tradition. In the Middle Ages, the basic starting point included: “(a) The unshakeable credibility of the tradition stating that the Torah we have is indeed the Torah given at Sinai. (b) The certainty about the prophetic nature of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, as attested by its public nature and by the entire people’s participation in the prophecy” (64). But this certainty, argues Goldman, is unavailable to the modern believer for two reasons. The first is the modern reliance on literary criticism. Medieval tradition took the credibility of the Torah’s literary sources as self-evident, a certainty in the category of an incontrovertible rational truth. This assumption, which the three monotheistic religions shared, was not put to the test in the Middle Ages. But “for us, the usual criteria for determining the authenticity of sources are the criteria of critical research, which claims that if a specific tradition is to be credible regardless of these critical criteria, it must rely on some criterion other than the continuity of the tradition”(64). The datum that medieval tradition had considered certain has turned into the research hypothesis undergoing testing.11 The second reason Goldman adduces points to the conceptual difficulties the concept of revelation entails. We tend to view revelation as an experience taking place at a given time and place: Those who speak of revelation intend some event in the external world or in our inner consciousness that is perceived as a divine message. In our consciousness, revelation features as an external or internal event. [But] unless we are primitive idol worshippers who identify the divinity with a physical object or with some mental state, we understand that God is not a

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datum of experience. This is divine transcendence. God is beyond any physical or mental reality given to us. If so, the revelatory nature of the event is not part of the event as given in our experience.12 As Goldman notes, this reason is one product of the “turnabout in religious philosophy in general, ever since Kant’s theological rational critique.”13 The assumption about God’s absolute transcendence is not just an initial religious intuition (present also in Goldman’s writings).14 Instead, this assumption is also the conclusion we should draw from post-Kantian philosophy about the epistemological and ontological meaning of the objects of our experiential knowledge. So what is the meaning of faith in the modern context? What is the basis of religious commitment? Engaged in a direct dialogue with Leibowitz, Goldman adopts part of Leibowitz’s analysis. Leibowitz views faith, as noted, as a voluntary decision that does not derive from any datum. This conception singles out religious faith as unconditioned, a primary basis not resting on truth claims, through which believers perceive their religious world. Faith is neither the sum of truth claims about the world nor a matter of personal experience. In neoWittgensteinian philosophical terms, faith is the believer’s absolute disposition toward the world.15 According to this approach, revelation is not a datum of experience that justifies religious commitment but a judgment we make while already within a religious world view, “part of our interpretation of the datum.”16 But what is the nature of this interpretation? Does it recognize and affirm a fact that cannot be part of our experience? We will find in Wittgenstein’s philosophy the claim that the religious disposition enables us to adopt “facts” that are not part of our standard experience. For instance, he claims: Christianity is not based on historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. —There is nothing paradoxical about it.17 Goldman also tends to use similar formulations at times: “An event can be identified as revelatory only in light of prior faith in the God being revealed or as a result of an interpretation that ex post facto assumes the existence of the God being revealed… The revelatory nature of the event is contingent on faith. Faith cannot fundamentally rest upon revelation.”18

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The price of such an approach is the endorsement of an epistemology allowing for a “religious experience” that does not meet the criteria of our empirical experience. Aware of this conclusion, Goldman claims: The nature of an event such as revelation can hardly be part of the experience itself. Only if we assume that the revelation experience is unusual, not subject to the criteria of ordinary empirical knowledge, and bearing a special mark of certainty, we can avoid concluding that the attribution of revelatory qualities to any experience is a matter of interpretation, and probably one that cannot be tested.19 In this passage, Goldman draws a contrast between “religious experience” and interpretation. The perception of revelation as interpretation is not identical with its perception as a historical event. Goldman points to the antithesis experience/interpretation without explicitly stating what his stance is. But we may assume that Goldman endorses the view of revelation as interpretation instead of as experience, and not only because of his explicit statement in the cited passage but because of a fundamental tenet of his thought in general, whereby only the standard empirical experience is valid. This experience, as we will see, percolates into the process of reinterpreting religious traditional statements and largely shapes the legitimate religious perception. Plausibly, then, even if Goldman does associate interpretation with the “identification of a revelatory event,” the meaning of assuming that revelation is a product of interpretation is evident in the standing of revelation within the normative system. Revelation is, to use a term that John Searle coined, an “institutional fact,”20 a fact without meaning outside a religious context. It denotes a “fact” only in the religious domain and assumes meaning only within it. What does revelation mean? Goldman, in a response resembling Leibowitz’s, states that revelation is a perception of the entire halakhic system as heteronomous, and, more precisely, as a system legislated by God.21 The concept of “revelation,” then, instead of denoting a norm within the system, is a judgment about the system as a whole. Revelation is a meta-normative or second-order claim, which determines the halakhic norms’ very standing. These norms, whose meaning does not depend on any external context, appear as a divine commandment. This interpretive judgment is itself the act of faith since it entails implications for believers: a system of norms perceived as divine law coerces the faithful to obey and comply. Human beings are not the rulers but the subjects of the law. This is the implication of shifting the concept of “revelation” from the factual to the normative realm. In Goldman’s thought, this shift is consistent with the shift of other factual concepts, such as “providence,” to the normative realm.

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This is one of the most interesting innovations of Goldman’s philosophy: the believer engages in interpretation through faith. The hermeneutical pursuit becomes one of the believer’s essential features instead of a one-time event. Believers, as believers, are constantly interpreting, not only their fundamental beliefs but the entire range of religious statements that their faith compels. The conscious, pivotal standing of interpretation in the religious world confirms my view that Goldman is not one more thinker contending with modernity but a postmodern thinker, fully aware of its meaning in the traditional cultural continuum. 3. Faith: Between Decision and Triggering Experience Assuming that faith is the believer’s primary disposition could lead to the conclusion that faith is a kind of “leap,” a “direct voluntarism” that is not anchored in concrete human experience. This is the crucial difference between Goldman and Leibowitz. Goldman, as noted, is aware of the psychological and sociological aspects of religious faith and, unlike Leibowitz, points to its experiential sources. Although Goldman does emphasize that experience cannot serve as a logical justification of faith, his attempt to describe the processes leading to the religious experience conveys his reservations about Leibowitz’s overstated existential dichotomy. Goldman makes extensive reference to fundamental religious experiences. For instance: It appears that religious faith is ultimately related to negation. We come to believe in the “existence” of the Creator by denying natural and human reality. Unsatisfied with a conditioned reality, we come to sense the possibility of one that is necessary and unconditioned—divine “reality.” Faith is the affirmation of a divine “reality” experience, which is the complete antithesis of ordinary reality and makes conditioned reality altogether possible.22 Note that Goldman links this experience to Wittgenstein’s position in the Tractatus: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist it would have no value.”23 In Goldman’s view, the meaning of these statements is “the conception of the world as a creature and a sense of standing before the Creator.”24 This formulation probably draws on Schleiermacher’s religious philosophy, which occupied Goldman at length, and emphasizes the fundamental human sense of dependence as the basis of the religious experience. As a balanced thinker, however, Goldman does not claim

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that dependence is the cause of religiosity but the primary religious experience per se: I am not sure we have fully gauged the depth of a situation precluding any option of attaining knowledge about the Creator of the world through recourse to the world: the experience and contemplation of the world are not a means for arriving at a theoretical idea of the Creator, which is entirely incompatible with the system of categories we use to grasp nature. Ultimately, the position of the religious person depends on a faithful act of choice. Although the believer obviously sees the world in a different light, from the world as a given he cannot attain faith. (311) Goldman conveys here the unique dialectic between faith and the human experience. Logically, faith is an unconditioned disposition that conditions the religious world view, but experientially, the primary religious experience is one of dependence or nullification of the human reality. In many ways, the dialectic between the religious experience and the unconditioned disposition closely resembles that of “hermeneutical circularity.” The believer does not approach the world without “fore-conception” of it, in Heidegger’s terms, but this knowledge is re-explicated through the concrete experience of the world. In this primary religious experience, a decision to choose faith epitomizes the negation and nullification of the conditioned world. Yet, for Goldman, religion in this form refutes the Jewish experience because it ultimately cancels the meaning of religious acts performed in everyday life. This is a nihilistic and crippling experience “because it destroys or dismisses all reality except that of the Creator, precluding any option of our understanding or connecting with God” (355). It leaves no room for such religious acts as prayer either, because in the “primeval religious experience… we encounter divine holiness in the ‘devouring flame’ that prevents access” (367-368). Jewish religiosity, including such concepts as “revelation” and “the giving of the Torah,” fashions for Goldman a new relationship between human and unconditioned transcendent reality: In my understanding, Judaism enables a radical solution to the fundamental question of the relationship between divine and human reality. It basically accepts the situation described above stating that, ontologically, divine reality is indeed an abrogation of human-natural reality. But the idea of giving the Torah tells us—and this is obviously a purely religious instead of a theoretical content—that the divine gives some meaning to human life and human pursuits when they are organized around one basic activity—divine worship. The divine revelation in the Torah and the commandments, which creates the religious norm for Judaism, is a radical in-

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novation. It is unrelated to the ontological situation, because the normative is not derived from reality. It is not a product of human culture, as attested by its radically heteronomous nature. Yet, it addresses human culture and is intended for it, thereby endowing it with meaning from a religious perspective, which in itself it lacks and that the ontology of faith must negate.25 This is a puzzling formulation: How does this reversal unfold? How does the negative and destructive religious experience become corrective? Concepts such as “revelation” and “the giving of the Torah” do not denote a different type of religious experience, an option we have rejected already. Goldman’s explanation of the reversal involves a bold and fascinating move, claiming that the transformation takes place within the concrete domain of Halakhah: the commandment is the “basic datum” of Jewish religion. Goldman rejects Leibowitz’s notion of a paradox, whereby Halakhah rests on faith but also constitutes faith.26 Goldman claims that Leibowitz is “following… conventional illusional views”27 when he assumes an experiential foundation apart from the normative world. According to Goldman: Observance of the commandments (when intended as a religious rather than as a traditional act) is itself faith. The deepest content of faith is the Jew’s conviction that he can worship God by preserving his Torah. This is what he pins his hopes on. Without this conviction, his entire way of life would lose all reason or meaning. Thus, the claim that the Torah and the commandments are not the institutions of Jewish faith but its essential content is neither an overstatement nor a paradox. If any paradox is to be found here, it is at a much deeper point—in the very possibility of worshipping God. (367) The claim that the commandment or the normative system is the religious starting point implies the absolute shift of religiosity from the subjective, experiential, or epistemic realm to the practical one—Jewish religiosity means concrete action in a real world. Through this shift, Goldman becomes a partner of such thinkers as Wittgenstein on the one hand28 and of Leibowitz and Soloveitchik on the other.29 From Goldman’s perspective, this shift also recognizes Jewish religion as a system of norms that applies to the Jewish collective instead of as a subjective individualistic experience. Making the normative system the basic datum of Jewish religiosity does not mean a complete dismissal of the experiential element, but its redirection and rerouting within the system. Goldman rejects Leibowitz’s claim, which makes “the value of prayer contingent on its mechanical foundation.”30 Prayer does reflect a religious experience, but one organized and constituted through

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the religious act itself. In this sense, Goldman adopts the model that Soloveitchik developed in Halakhic Man. Soloveitchik emphasizes in this work that Halakhah does not eliminate the religious experience but changes its direction; the religious experience is no longer denial and nullification, but communion with the transcendent within the normative domain. 4. The Commandment as the Fundamental Religious Element The shift that makes the normative system the constitutive element of religion forces Goldman to examine a familiar question: the meaning of the commandments. Traditionally, we approach this question as synonymous to that of the reasons for the commandments, which usually adopts the following formulation: “What does the Commander intend through this command?”31 Answering this question, however, is impossible for both theological-ontological and epistemological reasons. Goldman formulates the first critique as follows: “Can we possibly ascribe intentions or purposes to God as we ascribe intentions and purposes to human beings?” (306). This formulation adduces only a theological argument: God is not an entity acting to realize a purpose. Ascribing purposeful activity to God is incompatible with the concept of God as a perfect entity that lacks nothing, and hence does not act to realize goals as yet unattained. Goldman then points out that the general context of the question inquiring into the reasons for the commandments implies a view of the world as purposeful: as reality in general has a purpose, so do the commandments. Relating to Maimonides’ view of the commandments, Goldman claims: “In this sense, the Torah and the commandments fit into Creation. They were given for known purposes, as all living beings have a purpose. If man was given the commandments, it was to foster the natural purposes inherent in his essence” (307). Yet, argues Goldman, we no longer view reality as purposeful. Scientific knowledge does not assume that the human rational order reflects an ontological-purposeful one. The classic outlook speaks of one purposeful framework for both nature and the normative law, but this is no longer the case: “The path mediating between divinity and the human spirit by means of a ‘natural law’ expressing the cosmic logos has been blocked, and no middle course is possible between them” (311). To this critique, Goldman adds an epistemological argument: Even if we assume that this is so [that ascribing intentions and purposes to God is possible], on what basis can we assume that God’s purposes are identical to our view of what is acceptable? Human discretion is haphazard. The concept of what is “acceptable” is vague, and ultimately rests on what ordinary people think and customarily use as an explanation. (306)

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To claim some form of correspondence between our knowledge and God’s intention also assumes “some continuity between divine wisdom and human understanding” (306), viewing them as basically not different. The first of Goldman’s critiques rests on the notion of God as a perfect entity, and the second emphasizes divine transcendence. God’s transcendence is fundamental to Goldman’s religious outlook, as it is to Leibowitz’s. Goldman is aware of this commonality: “We share a radical view of divine transcendence that negates any immanence and any immanent holiness.”32 Goldman notes in these critiques that the very inquiry into the reasons for the commandments implies presuppositions about the world and about God. Isolated or beyond this context, “the question about the reasons for the commandments is not a real question.”33 But Goldman understands that turning this into a pseudoquestion does not do away with the underlying religious dilemma: “Dismissing the meaning of the problem touching on the reason for the commandments does not dismiss the problem of the Torah’s meaning in general. Quite the contrary, we confront a serious dialectical situation demanding a radical solution.”34 Goldman, then, embarks on a basic programmatic change by shifting the question from the reason or the cause to the meaning. This shift is highly significant and provides further proof of Goldman’s close ties with the neoWittgensteinian tradition. One of Peter Winch’s basic claims in The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy is that we can best understand social behavior through the category of meaning instead of through the category of causality. The category of causality seeks to justify social behavior by relying on truth claims about the world. By contrast, the category of meaning claims that social behavior is the ultimate datum and, therefore, we should only interpret the concepts of any given community, such as “primitive society,” “in the context of the way of life of those peoples.”35 The constitutive context of meaning is the socio-cultural context of the society in question, without expecting that a metaphysical or cosmological world view will provide a rational foundation for social norms and concepts.36 Goldman applies this basic insight to the meaning of the commandments. The commandments are the basic datum of religion and their interpretation must proceed by disclosing the meaning they embody instead of by reducing them to their causal-purposeful justification. Goldman therefore concludes that the halakhic system “organizes life according to one central demand: the worship of God,” and “repeatedly organizes the world as well into a symbolic system focused on this action.”37 Concerning this question, Goldman relies on ideas that Soloveitchik develops in Halakhic Man. In this essay, Soloveitchik illustrates “how Halakhah gives new meaning to astronomical, physical, and biological natural phenomena, how it makes special and unique use of space and time categories, how it imprints the world with the religious category of holiness. The evening, the sun, twilight, daybreak, menstruation—all acquire new symbolic meaning as

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landmarks in a life organized within halakhic parameters” (314). In Wittgensteinian terms, natural facts also assume new meaning within the religious “language game.” Goldman thereby shows that “the worship of God through the commandments is an autonomous religious activity, which cannot be derived from any other element” (315). Goldman stresses that, in this context, dealing with the reason for each commandment separately is pointless, since the meaning of each commandment is an integral part of the system: “The reason for each separate commandment is of no interest to us at all” (315). Trying to understand what each commandment means would resemble a person’s attempt to understand one isolated move in a chess game, without attention to the system that is its only source of meaning. This view challenges the traditional perception, which is inclined to explain the commandments in causal terms, and actually requires Goldman to reframe the entire hermeneutical tradition on this matter. His suggestion is to translate what tradition had interpreted in causal-purposeful terms into consequential terms: Had R. Meir said that the Torah declared the menstruant impure for seven days in order to make her as dear to her husband as she had been on their wedding day, we have no guarantee that this is indeed the reason for the ruling on menstruant women. In our view, no special reason is necessary for this matter per se, but our knowledge that the commandment actually has the effect that R. Meir described is important. (315) The system of the commandments, then, has fashioning power. Although this power is not the reason for it and although attempts to explain it piecemeal are worthless, the system does have real, concrete effects. Goldman thereby completes the process of transforming the meaning of the halakhic way of life, liberating it from elements incompatible with our standard experience and making worship intrinsically and autonomously valuable as the embodiment of the intuition that religious commitment is absolute and unconditioned. 5. Religious Language, Empirical Experience, and Interpretation The meaning of the religious way of life in Goldman’s thought was the topic of the previous section. Goldman stresses its complete autonomy—the halakhicnormative system need not rely on truth claims, metaphysics, or any external context of meaning. Religious life will be fully autonomous only when religious language is itself detached from any other external context. The question is whether this is possible. Goldman devotes one his most basic and programmatic works, “Scientific and Religious Statements: Several Basic Differences” to this question. He strives to draw a distinction between religious and scientific language and points

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to two fundamental differences between the two types of statements: (1) Contrary to the religious statement, which is unintelligible, the scientific statement is intelligible. (2) Contrary to the religious statement, which cannot function as an explanation, the scientific statement can. What, then, are religious statements? Goldman defines them as “declarative phrases whose subject is one of God’s names or appellations, and their bearer an ordinary agent” (340). They are unintelligible because the attribution of an action such as creation, creativity, will, and so forth to God contradicts the understanding of the concept of God as a transcendent entity. Transcendence precludes the ascription of any attributes to God, not even metaphysical ones (341), so that “all religious statements are ultimately opaque” (341). A scientific statement may also be unintelligible, be it because the subject fails to understand its meaning or because it contradicts another statement, but not by prior determination. By contrast, the religious statement “is unintelligible in principle” (342). The second difference, obviously related to the first, is that a religious statement cannot be the basis for an explanation of phenomena in the empirical world and cannot function within the scientific discourse. What is unintelligible cannot serve as the basis of an explanation: For a statement to be part of a scientific explanation, we must be able to conclude from it and in combination with other statements a phrase pointing to the phenomenon we wish to explain. But no specific conclusion can be drawn from a statement that is in principle unintelligible, since it is impossible to determine what derives from it and what contradicts it. (342343) Goldman illustrates this through an analysis of the concept of providence, discussed below. According to Goldman, providence cannot function as a historical explanation, since the common view of it “ascribes to God action in time. It says that God at a given time, on a given date, brings the king of Assyria upon them” (351). This outlook assumes that God acts in time, but this involves a “logical contradiction and not only a theological paradox” (353), because time is not a category that applies to God but to the world. Religious statements about providence are unintelligible and cannot be the basis of an explanation because we have certain basic expectations from a scientific explanation. The explanation of a historical phenomenon needs to contend with such questions as: “Why did things happen as they did—and not otherwise? Or “Why did they happen at that particular time and place?” Had things happened otherwise, therefore, what serves now as an explanation could not possibly serve as one. The same is true from another perspective: a particular ex-

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM planation of event x could be refuted as follows: were this explanation correct, not only x would have happened but also y, but y did not happen, and the suggested explanation is therefore incorrect. None of this applies to the providence claim. We may adduce the claim that an event is providential concerning any event or combination of events, and no event or combination of events enables the refutation of such a claim, all contrary to what we demand from a scientific explanation. (343)

The view that scientific and religious statements function within the same discourse is therefore unacceptable. Whereas the function of the scientific statement is to explain the world, the function of the religious statement is exclusively religious. How, then, can we affirm religious statements? Does not their unintelligibility compel some form of action? To contend with this difficulty, Goldman seeks to differentiate between statements and claims. The statement is a linguistic expression, while the claim ascribes to it a particular content. The believer, as a believer, affirms religious statements and thereby conveys the canonicity of the traditional texts,38 but without necessarily affirming the statement’s claims. More precisely, the believer may reject the statement’s conventional interpretations because of their failure to pass the test of analytical or experimental criticism. If we reject these interpretations, the believer must offer new ones, a process expressing the nature of religious life as interpretation. This basic analysis enables us to outline the role of standard empirical experience and of scientific language within the religious domain. A comparison with the attempts of Wittgensteinian tradition to cope with this question will serve to clarify Goldman’s claim. According to this tradition, religious language and religious life create an entirely independent world of meaning. Rush Rhees, one of Wittgenstein’s disciples and colleagues, describes religious language as “expressive and confessional.”39 According to this tradition, religious language is a “language game” that cannot rely on foundations outside it because other contexts supposedly do not influence religious language and the religious domain. This description of human life assumes the possibility of an individual playing two different and entirely incoherent language games. Winch can therefore claim that a person can sometimes take part in contradictory language games, such as Darwinism and the Genesis story.40 Goldman’s approach is diametrically different. Life and the religious domain are not two autonomous and mutually sealed territories. Our life experience shapes and influences our interpretations of religious statements: “The religious person… will continue to affirm them [religious statements] despite all experience. This does not mean, however, that experience is inconsequential. The conclusion to draw from an experience that contradicts the statement as usually interpreted at any given time is not to negate the statement

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but to negate the accepted interpretation.”41 Experience, then, plays a negative role, foreclosing interpretations and understandings and compelling a renewed interpretive effort. The understanding that a person’s experiences and understandings encroach on one another and that full compartmentalization of different areas of life is impossible reflects the sociological insight that characterizes this philosophy, which views human beings as unified creatures shaping the totality of their existence out of the totality of their experiences. Goldman’s detailed analyses of Halakhah confirms this insight. In this context, two points deserve mention: (1) One of Goldman’s crucial contributions to the understanding of the halakhic domain is his identification of a meta-halakhic foundation of basic outlooks and presuppositions that steers halakhists in their interpretation and application of Halakhah.42 These outlooks are part of the halakhist’s cultural baggage. The halakhic decision is not a product of halakhic inference, but uses the meta-halakhic component as its guide. By recognizing the meta-halakhic component as constitutive of Halakhah, Goldman precludes a view of Halakhah as a sealed normative system, a description that many believers tend to adopt. Halakhists bring with them basic views about justice or morality so that, as a normative system, Halakhah is not detached from its bearers’ experiences. (2) Goldman indicates that Halakhah actually recognizes elements that guide our standard experience. Causality, for instance, is “a condition of moral and halakhic responsibility” (350). In a world of atomistic events unlinked by causality, we cannot transgress the “do not murder” prohibition. In penal law, causality is a condition of punishment. These examples illustrate that basic beliefs about the structure of reality are pervasive in Halakhah (350). If religion is an integral component of our life experience, the description that Soloveitchik and Leibowitz endorse of rift and dichotomy between the religious domain and our life experience, is inappropriate.43 Instead of making this dichotomy a constitutive value, human beings should engage in a hermeneutical endeavor leading to interpretations of religious statements that do not contradict their standard understandings. Goldman recognizes that periodic changes in religious outlooks “show that personal and historical experience play a crucial role in deepening our view of religious quests” (344-345). His recognition of the historical-cultural-social character of human life leads Goldman to conclude that religious individuals also build their world on these foundations. They do not live in a compartmentalized religious domain, closed and circumscribed. Instead, their actions reflect the myriad of particularistic communities within which they function, leading to the dynamic character of religious life. Following the review of Goldman’s new analysis of the “revelation” concept, let us consider his interpretation of the concept of “providence.” According to the new interpretation, the concept of providence does not make a

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statement about God’s action in the world and its origin is not in the language of facts about the world. Instead, its meaning and denotation are within the normative system itself. To clarify this matter, Goldman quotes Maimonides: It is a positive commandment to scream and sound the trumpets for every tribulation that befalls the public…. This commandment is one of the ways of repentance—for if the congregation screams and sounds the trumpets when a misfortune happens, they will realize it happened to them because of their evil deeds.… But if they fail to scream or sound the trumpets and say, instead, the misfortune that befell us has natural causes and struck us by chance—this amounts to cruelty and leads people to cleave to their evil ways, and this will bring further misfortunes in its train.44 Following Maimonides’ view of providence in the Guide of the Perplexed, stating that God does not act in the world, Goldman tries to claim that Maimonides is offering here an interpretation of providence whereby “we are commanded to view tribulation as a reason for repentance. Tribulation must be a sign for us of the need to account for our acts, to repent.”45 The causality ruling human history is no different from natural and historical causality. Normatively, however, “we are commanded to see certain events as the hand of God, and connect them to our own acts.” Human beings, then, ascribe religious significance to factual events through halakhic normative responses. Goldman thereby illustrates how a declarative phrase about the world becomes a normative statement. We interpret the declarative phrase “the world is under God’s providence” as a normative statement claiming: “Given certain events, you are obliged to act” in line with the normative ways of Halakhah. This is a description of the new framework that Goldman proposes concerning opinions and beliefs, complementing the one he had outlined for understanding the halakhic way of life. His philosophy suggests a new justification and a new description of halakhic life. It preserves the canonical status of holy texts and of the halakhic way of life, but pours into them a new meaning that profoundly incorporates the modern transformation. 6. Old Wine in New Bottles? Daniel Boyarin draws attention to the unique role of Midrash in establishing our relationship with the past: “it preserves contact and context with tradition while it is liberating. The relation between midrash and the Bible provides not only a model of the relation between text and interpretation but between the present and the past.”46 Midrash quotes biblical verses but uses them in a new discourse instead of interpreting their original meaning. This intertextuality, quoting the

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Bible in an entirely new context, reflects continuity and commitment to the tradition together with innovation and development. The relationship between Midrash and text, or the intertextual phenomenon, largely reflects the typical structure of renewal processes in a traditional culture. This culture does not reject the old but pours it into new molds. In the course of this process, however, the content changes and diversifies. Students of the history of Jewish philosophy find this model useful for understanding the conceptual and theoretical revolution sparked in the Guide of the Perplexed, where we see traditional views assuming a different meaning in the new philosophical context designed by Maimonides. Recognizing the existence of this phenomenon is nowhere dependent on the question of whether revolutionaries are aware of embarking in a trailblazing course. A conceptual and/or normative transformation in a traditional society committed to the past usually involves disregard of its innovative dimension, and its instigators tend to perceive it as an exposure and realization of elements already latent in the tradition.47 In this sense, Goldman’s philosophical endeavor is sui generis. Although committed to the normative and conceptual tradition of Judaism, his thought entails a deep transformation of ideas and outlooks commonly accepted by the “ordinary believer.” Unlike past revolutionaries, Goldman is conscious of the transformation prompted by his thought. In his view, the importance ascribed to the concern with classic Jewish philosophy focuses precisely on this question: For the modern religious Jew, the concern with medieval Jewish philosophy is significant for a further reason. It illustrates an alternative approach to the data of Judaism, different from the one commonly accepted in ordinary Orthodoxy. Psychologically, it is important that we accept medieval scholars as classic Jewish thinkers, even when they are far away from philosophical thought, and that we grant this type of thinking a measure of legitimacy.48 Classic thought, then, instead of a fulcrum of compelling normative ideas, becomes a paradigm for the possibility of conceptual transformation and a relevant source of psychological inspiration. The question that still remains open is why not abandon this tradition altogether. If its power does not derive from truth claims about the world and about God, why affirm it? The transformation conveys a complex attitude of both affirmation and renewal of the past, but why affirm the past in the first place? Goldman, like Leibowitz, rejects such objections outright because they incorrectly assume that the only justification of value decisions lies in truth

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claims. The following passage by Isaiah Berlin excels at formulating the intuition that both Leibowitz and Goldman share: Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. “To realize the relative validity of our convictions,” said an admirable writer of our time, “and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need, but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral, and political immaturity.49 Even without accepting all of Berlin’s views, thinkers such as Goldman or Leibowitz do agree with him on one basic point: absolute commitment to a value neither does nor can rely on truth claims about the natural or metaphysical world. A commitment evident in the readiness to act according to one’s values and strive for their realization is a practical-existential decision instead of a translation of truth claims. A value commitment reflects what the agent holds is worth doing and is not a conclusion that rests on factual claims. Furthermore, Goldman’s is a philosophy “from the inside,” which is not intended to justify the religious domain in external causal terms. Goldman accepts the experiential datum of the religious world as he embraces other cultural attainments. As complex entities, individuals shape their lives by balancing the different elements that make up their spiritual worlds. The justification for their individual choices as believers does not lie in the hidden horizon of an unknown will, in some heroic decision, or in a “leap” from faithlessness to faith. Contrary to Leibowitz, who in his later thought overstates the individual at the expense of Judaism’s inherent collectivism and, to some extent, even acknowledges this turnabout,50 Goldman holds that the community of faith and its ways of life are the basic datum of the believer’s life. His adoption of this datum in preference to an existential decision of the Leibowitz variety attests to Goldman’s sensitivity to socialization processes in the shaping of spiritual life. Awareness of these processes is manifest in Goldman’s emphasis on the input of cultural elements noted above, and is evident in the privileged position he allocates to the collective dimension in the understanding of religious existence. The pivot of Goldman’s philosophy is his attempt to understand and interpret the values and the culture of the religious collective. In the normative realm, Goldman shifts the question from a causal to a meaning context, and he does the same concerning the justification of the religious decision. Believers do

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not justify their faith by relying on external reasons, since such a justification returns truth claims about the world through the back door. But they can justify their decisions by acknowledging the value of the normative tradition borne by the community of faith. According to this model, we do not expect philosophers to justify their decisions by adducing external reasons but through the “story” of the meaning inherent in the spiritual world they have endorsed. Does this philosophy reflect the views of the “ordinary believer”? If this term denotes the masses of observant Jews, the answer to this question is unequivocal: Goldman’s thought is far away from their spiritual world. For the ordinary believer, God is both a transcendent and an immanent entity, the absolute other but also the “Thou.” This believer adopts a metaphysical language expressing truth claims about the world or about God. Goldman’s philosophy is inconsistent with the experience of many observant Jews. Not only does it replace the old bottles with new ones, but it also offers a new wine, in a process strikingly similar to the paradigm of Midrash. If these remarks entail criticism of Goldman’s thought, they are to some extent a repetition of the criticism that targeted classic Jewish thinkers in the Middle Ages, and particularly Maimonides. The polemic against Goldman appears to be stronger because Goldman is a modern philosopher well aware of the autonomy of the religious domain. This autonomy means that we must describe the religious world in its terms, according to the actual ways of life it embodies instead of resorting to external theories and concepts. If the data I described is part of the believers’ lebenswelt, the large gap between the believer’s world and the philosophy proposed to describe it does not work in philosophy’s favor. Believers who are theoretically and practically committed to their faith and their ancestral tradition and also to the achievements of science and philosophy are trapped in the tension between the two worlds. This tension, though inspiring and stimulating, may not be amenable to resolution. Accepting the tension between the worlds may be the utmost that believers committed to their values can expect. I do not intend these reflections to detract in any way from the value of Goldman’s philosophical endeavor. They merely outline the basic difficulty confronting believers committed to several contexts of meaning, which require them to reorganize their world. Goldman’s philosophy, more than the outlooks formulated by Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, illustrates the problematic involved in the return to tradition. This return is not a “leap” into a world of innocence and immediacy through the notion of “traditionalism.” Returning to tradition means shaping a relationship between the present and the past. This is the characteristic feature of traditional life that Goldman describes in rigorous and brilliantly critical fashion, and his endeavor illustrates such a return. Although the return he outlines may not suit everyone, this is not necessarily a flaw since, as noted in Chapter One, the return

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to tradition is not a return to “the same” tradition. No tradition is “out there” awaiting those who return to it, and tradition is precisely the dialogue between the present and the past, reflecting the historical nature of human existence. Contrary to Goldman, Soloveitchik and Leibowitz were not sensitive to tradition’s constitutive process. Goldman’s sensitivity did not prevent him from proposing a “critical” return to the tradition, namely, a return cognizant of its character. Most individuals observing a given tradition think through it instead of about it. The tradition is the glasses through which they see without seeing the glasses themselves, so that its character remains mostly hidden. Descriptions of tradition, as noted, often resort to the “traditionalism” to which Soloveitchik and Leibowitz also resorted. Goldman presents another view: return to the tradition accompanied by consciousness of the tradition. This complex move requires conscious and explicit transformations of elements from the past. This return to tradition, therefore, is possible only to the few. I do not mean my critique of Goldman to undermine the legitimacy of his thought or detract from its value, but to point out that a return to the tradition cannot rely on one approach fit for all.

Five DAVID HARTMAN RENEWING THE COVENANT 1. The Philosophical Project David Hartman’s thought is a modernist undertaking. The first modernist characteristic of this endeavor is the philosophical project it seeks to realize. Most Jewish philosophers study traditional texts using historical, sociological, and philological methods. Relying on the classic distinction of hermeneutists Emilio Betti and E. D. Hirsch, we could claim that scholars of Jewish thought focus mainly on the meaning of classic texts instead of on their current significance.1 These scholars, then, focus on the study of the past instead of on the encounter between past and present. Hartman’s starting point is entirely different. He turns to the past in order to engage in a conscious dialogue with it about questions in the present. Like Hans Georg Gadamer, he is interested in the fusion of horizons between past and present.2 For Hartman, as for Gadamer, this meeting with the past is the authentic meaning of affirming tradition. His philosophical project is the explication of his commitment to the past in the present, acknowledging the difference between them. Since he begins from the present, affirming the past involves him in a ceaseless process of interpretation.3 Hartman also draws a distinction between “Jewish philosophy” and “Jewish thought.” Jewish philosophers try to uphold a commitment to the past while constantly engaged in a dialogue with other cultures; the Jewish philosopher is interested in building a “bridge between his particular tradition and other contemporary cultures.”4 By contrast, Jewish thinkers explicate aspects or periods of their tradition but ignore the complexity of contemporary life, which rests on simultaneous membership in several cultural communities. In an interesting controversy with Leibowitz, Hartman points to three models for reading Jewish tradition: In the first, the self-sufficiency model, the believer feels no need to interpret Jewish religious belief and practice in ways that would make it intelligible to those outside its own particular framework. Judaism is regarded as complete unto itself; its categories of thought—both cognitive and practical—are internally justified and therefore may be incomprehensible to those outside the framework of a halakhic way of life.5

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This model assumes that the believer is, above all, a member of a Jewish community constituted from the “inside.” The second model proposes an inverse move and argues: “Jewish self understanding should be expressed in categories of thought and principles of action intelligible to a universal audience…. Universality thus becomes the ultimate criterion by which to justify and explain Judaism” (93). This model claims that believers belong, above all, to the universal community, and constitute their discourse through constant engagement with the “universal” outside. Hartman does not endorse either of these models and proposes a third, to which we may refer as the synthetic model: “its adherents acknowledge the particularity of many aspects of Jewish thought and practice…. At the same time, however, they believe that Judaism is not sui generis but participates in a universal framework of human reason and sensibility” (93-94). As usual for him, Hartman founds this synthesis on two biblical paradigms: on the one hand, the typology of the creation that assumes a universal human platform, and on the other, the typology of the exodus from Egypt and the Sinai revelation that highlights Jewish particularism. These two typologies shape the dynamic relationship between the Jewish “inside” and the universal human space, a relationship that is a permanent component of Jewish identity and consciousness (94). The synthetic model that Hartman adopts reaffirms his philosophical project. A Jewish philosopher is a person deeply rooted in a cultural and social reality, but also part of other contexts of meaning crucial to his life, his identity, and his religious consciousness. Precisely in light of this complexity, she looks for ways of affirming her tradition. From this perspective, Jewish philosophy is a project seeking to reconstruct the tradition by making it relevant to the philosopher’s concrete reality. Hartman is aware of the turnabout involved in this characterization of Jewish thought, and draws a contrast between medieval and modern Jewish philosophy. The epistemological or metaphysical problem of the relationship between an understanding based on knowledge and one based on revelation troubled medieval Jewish philosophers. For the medieval thinker, then, the problem was the ostensible conflict between rational knowledge and tradition: “the medieval thinker faced the problem of how to deal with other available sources of knowledge” (202). Questions of truth and validity do not trouble modern Jewish philosophers, and their problem is religion’s relevance to contemporary life. In the secular world, the religious personality appears as an anachronistic figure. Modern Jewish philosophers experience a loss of self-value and self-certainty (203). They search for meaning in religion and in religious life within a secular context that appears to negate or threaten the very possibility of it. Hartman formulates his philosophical project as follows:

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Rather than articulating a clear theology, my concern is with formulating aspects of a religious anthropology…. I am not concerned with proving that God created the universe in seven days, but, rather, with understanding the human implications of accepting the doctrine of a creational universe. How does the notion of creation affect the way a human being organizes his daily life? (12) Hartman’s philosophical project is a response to a problem. Yet, his very readiness to acknowledge a crisis experience rests on Hartman’s basic affirmation of the reality surrounding the Jewish philosopher. Hartman could have dismissed this sense of crisis by relying on Leibowitz’s familiar argument: religious individuals should transcend their concrete existence and adopt a religious way of life without expecting certainty and self-value in return. From Leibowitz’s perspective, the very act of turning this crisis into a problem, of enlisting intellectual and emotional resources to restore the relevance of religious life to contemporary reality, is tantamount to idolatry and negates the significance of religion. Leibowitz did acknowledge that the religious experience involves a crisis, but viewed the crisis as religion’s constitutive foundation instead of as a problem awaiting solution. In this sense, Leibowitz’s philosophy implies a persistent negation of this world as a source of religious value. Hartman’s starting point is entirely different. He assumes that, since religion plays a role in the organization of existential meaning, it must fit in with other life-constitutive contexts. This is not only the starting point of his philosophy but also its climax because, as shown below, Hartman’s philosophy backs it with religious arguments. Religion reaffirms concrete life, which was the original context for the question about religion’s relevance. Prima facie, a philosophical project of this kind should lead to a philosophy presenting a new perspective, typical of the context within which it originated and from which it seeks to return to the tradition. In this sense, this philosophy is a product of its time and its place. Yet, in some of his writings, Hartman presents his philosophical project in terms strikingly similar to what he had called “Jewish thought.” For instance, after describing the crisis confronting modern Jewish philosophy, Hartman states: “the task of Soloveitchik and of other modern religious philosophers is to describe the inner spiritual life of the religious person” (204). In a later work, Hartman argues that his concern is the “phenomenology of Halakhah.”6 Phenomenology is a methodology seeking to explicate the datum. It claims to have found release from the speculative perspective in favor of the datum, which guides the actual discovery process. Phenomenology, according to Husserl and even more so according to Heidegger, enables the datum to manifest itself.7 Hartman’s philosophical project as

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outlined so far, and its perception in phenomenological terms, are therefore contradictory. This contradiction could merely reflect inconsistency or insufficient attention to the problem involved in the transition from speculative to phenomenological language. Hartman could also be using phenomenological concepts rhetorically, without intending the entire baggage ascribed to phenomenological discourse. But my argument is that Hartman uses phenomenological concepts to suggest that the philosophical speculation attempting to merge past and present is not without precedent in Jewish tradition. The transition to phenomenological language, then, substantiates the anchoring of the new in the old, a process typical of traditional cultures undergoing conceptual transformation.8 Yet, Hartman’s entire philosophical project conveys an attempt to tone down the transformational implications of his thought by pointing out that the new views are part of a continuous Jewish tradition. Maimonides, whose thought is the Jewish paradigm for integrating the new and the old, plays a key role in this context due to Hartman’s interpretation of the Maimonidean project. Hartman examines Maimonides’ thought in the light of four possible options for establishing a relationship between different contexts of meaning within which believers find themselves. The option that will emerge as the most fitting for an analysis of the Maimonidean project is the synthetic one that, as noted, reflects Hartman’s view. The analysis of these options, then, will provide a deeper perspective on Hartman’s philosophical project. The first option, “insulation,”9 assumes that whatever is alien to the religious way of life constitutes a type of threat requiring a protective response. The believer justifies his response by claiming “his body of knowledge and his way of life are guaranteed authenticity by divine revelation” (9). Reliance on revelation does not, in this view, need further verification or confirmation from an extra-religious context. It relies on its inner truth. Hartman’s critique relates to the implications of this model for other closed systems: Contemporary experience shows that this cultural insulation, this way of exclusion, need not be supported by a divine revelatory claim. There are secular cultures which claim similar insulations from attack and need for justification for their systems of knowledge and values. Reference to God in a religious world can justify insulation; in a secular world naked claims of absolute power and superior-race theories can serve the same end. (9) This critique, however, misses Hartman’s wider approach from several perspectives. First, it ascribes a preferable status to religion as immune from a tendency toward violence and belligerence. “Contemporary experience” shows how wrong this estimate has proved. Second, it leaves open the question of why his critique of religious insulation addresses its implications in a non-religious

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context. Is Hartman not critical of religious insulation per se? Third, does “reference to God” justify insulation? Is this not a challenge to the covenant’s theological assumptions, as Hartman outlines them in his writings, whereby God turns to human beings as finite creatures living in defined circumstances? According to Hartman’s philosophy, insulation is a religious problem, whereas in this passage, insulation entails harsh implications only for the non-religious world. Whatever the answers to these questions, Hartman rejects insulation in this text, even if he does not excel at formulating his critique of this option. Hartman refers to the second option as “dualism,” and describes it as follows: .

One’s tradition can be preserved by remaining behaviorally loyal to its values while nonetheless accepting the conflicting truth-claims of another system. This bifurcation is possible if the active, willing nature of man’s being is severed from its reflective, rational aspect: My knowledge does not get in the way of my practices. My wisdom never interferes with my will. (9-10) Hartman holds that this approach “suggests dishonesty” (12), because an abstract theoretical system entails practical implications. Theory and practice, then, cannot be entirely divorced, contrary to the starting assumption. Another option Hartman examines is “rejection” (13). According to this option, individuals committed to their theoretical outlooks will reject their tradition and their religion altogether. As opposed to this claim, Hartman argues: “the unified and integrated person may not have to reject tradition” (14). Rejection, then, is not the sole option available to people living in two communities sustaining a tense relationship: religion and intellectual culture. The fourth option is “integration,” which ascribes value and significance to tradition and to reason. Whoever chooses this path “refuses to believe that man must choose between God’s mind and his own” (15). How, then, is the tension settled between two languages serving to shape two communities ostensibly so different? Hartman’s answer is complex. The human mind demanding sovereignty acknowledges its limitations. It is constituted by the combination of sovereignty and acceptance of its finitude. Yet, in those realms that consciousness identifies as open to possibilities of human action, it does not refrain from acting. Believers use their mind: “He [the believer] feels confident that he can maintain a posture of critical loyalty to the tradition because he knows that the tradition encourages and values the use of human reason. God does not play tricks nor does He deceive the human mind” (16). Religion too affirms the power of human consciousness, and is subject to its interpretation. This model does not foster obedience but critical thought and

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the integration of different worlds, through the development and encouragement of interpretation mechanisms that make religion intelligible (17-20). The underlying basis of this model is a preference for harmony over opposition. Harmony rests, above all, on religious considerations that affirm human reason, instead of on sociological considerations that take socialization processes into account and ultimately enable human beings to live with selfalienation and conflict between different contexts of meaning. As noted in Chapter Four above, Goldman founds his philosophical project (closely resembling Hartman’s in many ways) precisely on the sociological insight that life’s different contexts are mutually encroaching and not self-isolated. Resting the quest for harmony on a religious consideration appears to point to the limitations of Hartman’s thought, but this is not so. Religious-theological language is a translation of sociological insights into religious language. The difference between Hartman and Goldman, then, hinges on whether we need religious language in order to validate sociological insights. Goldman, as a critical thinker, holds that the sociological insight suffices to compel a religious redeployment, whereas Hartman holds that the sociological insight must have an anchor in religious language, since only this language justifies a critical loyalty to religion. According to Hartman, the hero of the “the way of integration” is Maimonides. Maimonides’ philosophical and spiritual world merges, on the one hand, the authority of Halakhah and tradition and, on the other, the critical mind “capable of independent reflection and evaluation” (104). The concluding lines of the book again underscore the paradigmatic character of Maimonides’ life: “Maimonides was a witness to the fact that intense love for a particular way of life need not entail intellectual and spiritual indifference to that which is beyond one’s own tradition.”10 Maimonides or, more precisely, the Maimonidean myth, plays a crucial role at pivotal points of Hartman’s thought. From the perspective of Hartman’s philosophical project, Maimonides’ spiritual world and Maimonides’ personality are a paragon of integration and harmony between different language communities. Maimonides appears to confirm and validate Hartman’s philosophical project, a project seeking to bridge religious commitment and modernism, subordination to the tradition and openness to other cultural worlds. Maimonides becomes the “inner” protagonist of Jewish tradition and his endeavor, unprecedented in Judaism, becomes the ideal representation of the tradition’s dynamism and vitality. In a more recent work, Hartman views Maimonides and Soloveitchik as exemplary models of challenges to modern Orthodoxy: “What makes these two masters of Halakhah so perplexing for the traditional Orthodox community is their apparent challenge to the belief in the self-sufficiency of Torah studies.

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Soloveitchik and Maimonides brought the wisdom of the world into the inner sanctum of the beit midrash.”11 Hartman’s philosophical project answers the challenge posed by these two figures by developing a Jewish theology or a Jewish philosophy based on the synthesis model, “fusing horizons” between particularism and universalism, past and present, subordination to the past and the endorsement of autonomy. The basis of this fusion is the recognition that people, as concrete creatures, belong to different communities that shape their contexts of meaning. Through his philosophical project, Hartman means to join the different contexts and the different communities, thereby shaping the religious consciousness rooted in the actual circumstances of the Jewish philosopher’s life, namely, in the present. By its very nature, then, this project is part of a modern Weltanschauung. 2. Confronting Modernity Although his philosophical project is a modern endeavor, Hartman did not devote much attention to a conceptual analysis of modernity and confined himself to pointing out its problematic nature for the religious person. According to his view, the two main problems are, first, secularization and the detraditionalization process,12 and second, modernity, which set up an ideal of autonomy that is sharply critical of the believer’s passivity and submissiveness.13 Nevertheless, Hartman does not hesitate to state: “We believe that the experiential and intellectual encounter with modern values and insights can help deepen and illuminate one’s commitment to the tradition.”14 How is this reversal in the role of modernity possible? How can modernity, based on a negation of tradition and of the past and an emphasis on the present and on autonomy, help to deepen the attachment to tradition? Before formulating a theoretical answer to this question, Hartman returns to his personal experience: I am grateful that the secular spirit of the modern world has made the medieval option of fear of God’s punishment spiritually irrelevant. I felt dignified and challenged as a teacher of Torah in not having the support of God’s punitive powers as a fallback for awakening interest in Torah. In my experiences as a teacher, I never saw Judaism as necessarily weakened by the modern emphasis on the significance of the present or by people’s indifference to or distaste for the terrifying descriptions of divine retribution awaiting the sinner found in the liturgy and rabbinic midrashim.15 This passage suggests that the role of modernity is criticism. It dismisses one kind of interpretation of the tradition and replaces it with other options. On the surface, the negation of these options does not follow from the religious

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tradition as such but from the modernist stance. Modern individuals cannot go back to affirm the tradition relying on the threat of divine sanction, but might return to it precisely because they acknowledge its significance to the present. Yet, although their return to the tradition and their rejection of some of its aspects appears to rely on basic modernist assumptions, this is not the case. In my view, Hartman’s crucial innovation is his anchoring of the modern experience within the religious world of meaning. The stress on the present and its relevance do not represent an “external” perspective from which one returns to the tradition. For Hartman, religiosity itself affirms the present and the individual’s stance at a given time and in a given place. Judaism or, more precisely, halakhic Judaism, is decidedly modern, as shown below. 3. God in Hartman’s Thought: Is “God Dead”? Hartman’s thought, like that of many modernist religious philosophers, conveys the ceaseless tension between God’s removal from the world and the urgent religious need to retain him as the actual object of the religious experience. This tension has evoked a range of reactions and leads, in Hartman’s thought, to interesting turns in God’s systematic role. A recurrent typological distinction in Hartman’s writings is that between the biblical and the talmudic periods.16 The typical feature of the biblical period is the direct link between nature, morality, and history. Morality is part of nature so that, when Cain sins, Abel’s blood cries from the ground. Heaven and earth witness the covenant between Israel and their God, and adherence to this covenant or its breach affect natural events. God, according to Hartman, “became incarnate” in the tribes of Israel.17 God is prominently present in history, in nature, and in morality. The biblical period was the era of unmediated innocence, when the world was full of the divine presence and human beings were in a direct relationship with God. Two archetypal images are the embodiment of this period: the creation and the exodus from Egypt. The creation story expresses God’s absolute sovereignty in history. God acts as an artist who realizes his yearnings by creating the universe.18 The image of God as an agent active in history culminates in the exodus from Egypt,19 an archetypal symbol of religious faith based on a historical event. The talmudic period, by contrast, reflects the experience of exile and historical defeat, which intensify the sense of human history as detached from God and nature. History is not managed by God, directly or indirectly, and “the world pursues its natural course,” so that the relationship with God is no longer mediated by nature or the reality. According to Hartman, the talmudic period signals “the beginning of the religious neutralization of history.”20 What mediates the relationship with God is

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the “commitment to a normative way of life,” not events in the world (3). Whereas the biblical creature had met God at historical events, for the person living in the talmudic period, God’s presence in history is no longer evident. God is silent, and human beings meet him by observing his commandments and studying Torah.21 In the biblical period, God is revealed at a particular time and place in the lives of actual human beings, while from the talmudic period onward God is embodied in the word, in the Torah: “The word… Torah culture, embodies the living reality of God.”22 The prime image of this period is the giving of the Torah at Sinai, when the image of God as the giver of the Torah overrides that of God as an agent in history. Through this event, the Torah becomes the medium for the discourse between human beings and God, a medium that replaces actual experience.23 Hartman holds that God’s neutralization from history may have allowed Maimonides to adopt Aristotelian metaphysics, which assumes that God is not an agent in history.24 In a sharp transition from the description of the past to a concern with its relevant implications for the present, Hartman states that the Maimonidean tradition is especially significant today because it teaches that the biblical emphasis on divine action is not the only available option for Jewish existence (140). This assertion indicates that Hartman’s typological distinction between the biblical and the talmudic periods is not a chapter in the intellectual history of Jewish tradition but the realization of his basic philosophical project—engaging in a dialogue with the tradition in order to answer the questions of the present. This perspective enables us to contend with the next question: On what grounds does Hartman consistently prefer the talmudic to the biblical period? The main reason for his choice is his basic philosophical project. The talmudic period is preferable because it is responsive to the demands of the modern individual, who is unwilling to renounce autonomy and freedom. Whereas the biblical period is theocentric, with God as the only agent active in history and nature, the talmudic period is anthropocentric, shifting the drama from the creation to actual human history. Only human beings are responsible for God’s presence in the world and, to ensure it, they must study Torah, observe the commandments, and pray.25 In light of this analysis, we can at this stage reformulate God’s systematic place in the world. In the biblical period, the transcendent God is present in the world, namely, God is immanent by virtue of his actions. From the talmudic period onward, God is transcendent and his presence in the world depends on human beings, who realize it in the normative system instead of in the real world.

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4. God as a Being in the World or as an Object in Religious Language: Between Expressivism and Realism Since God’s role in the world is determined by human beings and by their normative attitudes toward God, we may ask: is God a real object existing in the world, or only an intentional object in human discourse? God is transcendent by the very fact of his being an intentional object to whom believers relate, but the key question concerns the nature of this transcendence: is it, as Husserl claims, an immanent transcendence, constituted by the believers’ intentional attitude? Or is God a transcendent being in the real world, except that believers encounter God through the organization of their religious world? This question has farreaching theological and religious implications because it touches on God’s role in the organization of religious meaning. To understand Hartman’s complex response to this question, I will place his thought in a broader theological-philosophical context. Pluralist theoreticians of religion are divided on this question. Realistic pluralists assume that God exists beyond the different relationships formulated by different religions. Theologians such as John Hick support an approach known as “universal pluralism,”26 claiming that God, or the being, or the absolute are one, and every particularistic religion reflects a mode of experiencing it. The differences reflect a gamut of cultures that represent God in different ways.27 Hick develops this approach extensively and, in this chapter, I confine myself to a brief summary.28 Hick, who is influenced by Kant’s distinction between the noumena and the phenomena,29 draws a distinction between the being, which is God, and the modes of experiencing him. The being is one while the modes of experiencing him are many, though all are different modes of experiencing the same thing. To illustrate his approach, Hick returns to the Greek parable about the blind laying their hands on different parts of an elephant’s body, each one of them perceiving the object differently and yet all perceiving the same thing.30 The being or the absolute is infinite, and thus beyond language and thought, so that the object of worship in the different religions is the absolute as perceived in the religious experience instead of in itself.31 According to Hick, then, different and apparently incompatible religious experiences are complementary and relate to the being’s different aspects. This view has long been at the center of a critical controversy. S. Mark Heim, who developed his approach in direct confrontation with Hick, suggests another model of realistic pluralism, which I will call “radical pluralism.”32 Heim argues that Hick’s pluralism is ultimately artificial because it is confined to the phenomenological level of God’s different manifestations, and it assumes that the noumena, God or the absolute being, is one and identical in all religions. This pluralism, then, relies on a universalistic assumption, to which radical pluralism objects, whereby every religion relates to an actual transcen-

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dent God instead of to God’s manifestations. Even if God is transcendent, it does not follow that believers do not have an experience of God as such, which need not be identical with the experience of all of God’s features.33 Heim, therefore, argues that religions can grasp the divine entity per se,34 and then claims that every religion grasps the divine being differently: “the God in who we [Christians] believe is not quite the same as that of the Jew or Muslim, since our God’s character is fundamentally defined by different standards.”35 According to this approach, religions offer different concepts of God that reflect not only our views but God per se. Radical pluralism is realistic because it assumes the existence of a God that is not contingent on us and is beyond our perception, and it is radical because it assumes that each religion presents a different being as divine. This approach closely resembles that formulated by Peter Winch. Winch argues that the question of what is real is not beyond religious language and, consequently, only within a religious language can there be any meaning to “the conception of God’s reality.”36 Instead of suggesting that religious language is expressive and thus lacks realistic cognitive content, Winch offers that the concept of “God” assumes its meaning only within a religious context.37 Despite their differences, Hick and Heim share two assumptions. The first is that God is a real being in the world, and the second is that God is a transcendent being and therefore different from all others. Expressive pluralism differs from realistic pluralism precisely in its rejection of any claims of existence about God, or any religious ascription to God. Instead of an unconditioned being with links to humanity or an intentional object of religious activity, God is a concept whose sense and meaning are intelligible only within religious language and practice. This approach changes not only the standard meaning ascribed to the concept of “God” but also the meaning of religion: instead of a type of link between human beings and God, religion is a life pattern whose source and meaning are part of human activity. With the flourishing of postmodernism, more and more thinkers have come to endorse this model of pluralism.38 Expressive pluralism emphasizes that, usually, a person’s attachment to a religion is not the result of a critical examination of this religion and the proofs of its truth. Generally, individuals are born within a community subscribing to a given religious tradition.39 The willingness to adopt a religious faith and its values is motivated by several factors, such as social ties, commitment to an active tradition, or a religion’s ability to organize the complex of a person’ experiences within a framework that endows them with meaning.40 Believers do not choose a religion because they find its proof persuasive. Not only do they not make philosophical or theological justifications a condition of their religiosity, but they are not especially impressed by philosophical or theological critiques either.41 Although these facts do not, in and of themselves, substantiate

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a non-realistic approach to religion, they do prepare a platform for it: if the believers’ attachment to a religion is not a function of its truth, religion must have another role. Supporters of expressive pluralism emphasize the role that religion and faith in God play in the organization of human experience by conferring meaning upon existence per se. Gordon Kauffman offers a sharp formulation of this notion when he claims that the analysis of religion must rest on the awareness that the discourse about God is only meaningful within a symbolic framework, which develops in a particular historical context. Like other religious symbols, the symbol of “God” emerges when a picture of the world gradually unfolds within a given set of historical circumstances and allows people to cope, more or less successfully, with their needs for survival. Like other symbols, this one too is a product of human imagination.42 Within this approach, the concept of “God” has a practical function, as one of the concepts that organize our life and our actual experience.43 Let us reconsider Hartman’s standpoint in view of these distinctions. Prima facie, Hartman’s view resembles Hick’s, as evident in Hartman’s use of realistic language in regard to God. God is described as creator, as acting in history, and as revealed. God is a partner to the Sinai covenant, and the covenantal discourse would not be possible were one of its partners not real. Hartman’s concept of revelation, which I consider below, is a subtle variation of Hick’s realistic pluralism. In A Living Covenant, Hartman conveys his objection to expressive positions and presents a distinctly realistic view: I do not claim that religious statements are merely expressions of normative judgments or are no more than imaginative stories meant to sustain a moral vision of life. Besides serving as carriers of meaning and normative commitment, religious statements also suggest existence claims. God is not only a term used to describe one’s religious commitment. “God talk” is not exhausted by the subjective way of life of the individuals. For people who have religious faith, their prayers of praise, thanksgiving, and petition refer to a definite objective reality. Accordingly, I do not accept attempted translations from apparent factual statements in Judaism to “ways-of-life” statements having no objective reference.44 But the picture is more complex. Beside the realistic language, we also see Hartman’s increasing recourse to expressive language, supported by the historical typology discussed above. The historical typology assuming that, from the talmudic period onward, God is not active in history and in nature, raises a question: where is God active? Ostensibly, he is active in the actual giving of the Torah. The real God, then, is revealed in the world as legislator, but Hartman goes further and argues, as noted, that God is embodied in the Torah.45 As

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shown below, Hartman shifts the main weight of religious life to a commitment to the community and to tradition: “My position is that you don’t begin with ‘my God’ but with ‘the God of my father.’ The crucial issue in Jewish education is not whether you can sense the living presence of God but whether you feel a personal, existential identification with the tradition.”46 According to this shift, God is not embodied in the Torah itself but in “the halakhic life of the community.”47 Although these formulations do not undermine the realistic perception of God, they do point to the minimization of God’s role in religious life, which is shaped by the tradition and by Halakhah. In this sense, Hartman’s approach is closer to Milbank’s than to Kaufman’s, which is more radical.48 But if God is embodied in the Torah, in Halakhah, or in the communal tradition, and if the concept of commitment refers mainly to the tradition—what is God’s role in the organization of religious life? Hartman appears to be suggesting, as noted, that God’s main role is that of legislator. On careful scrutiny, however, his revelation theory compounds the problem. Hartman adopts Hick’s pluralistic notion that all religions have an element in common: all reflect the divine revelation, but we need not choose one as the true religion.49 In his view, the divine revelation is an expression of God’s willingness “to meet human beings in their finitude, in their particular historical and social situation, and to speak to them in their own language” (247). Instead of a theory of one revelation, then, Hartman offers a theory of multiple divine revelations. This multiplicity rests on two mutually combined assumptions, one theological and one anthropological. Revelation is always fragmentary, since “divine-human encounters cannot exhaust the divine plenitude“(247). Revelation is, above all, an encounter between God and concrete individuals, which means that God turns to human beings taking this concreteness into account. Hence, revelation is not “a source of absolute, eternal, and transcendent truth” (248). The obvious conclusion is that, in principle, revelation cannot be universal and is always particular. The different religions are different expressions of divine infinity. Awareness of this situation of multiple faiths “is spiritually redemptive” (248). According to this approach, whereas one religion will make P an obligation, another will make its negation (non-P) an obligation. The incompatibility of religions is a classic expression of the character of revelation. We have no need for a criterion establishing each religion’s measure of truth—all are true in the sense that all are manifestations of an encounter between God and human beings. The advantage of this approach over Hick’s is obvious: Hartman does not assume a distinction between God and God’s image, and every religion worships God in its way. But this approach has pitfalls too, and the following analysis provides a vantage point on the problems evoked by the minimization of God’s

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role in religious life on the one hand, and the ascription of a decisive role to tradition and communal life on the other. The first problem concerns the question of what exactly is Hartman’s theory purported to offer—a new approach to religion, or a second-order theory about religions as such. If Hartman is suggesting a second-order theory, his approach obviously contradicts the claims of the different religions. For instance, Christianity believes that Jesus is the redeemer and the messiah, precisely the belief that Jewish worshippers deny. Different religions contradict each other’s beliefs. Hartman tries to claim that each religion proposes a fragmentary truth, correct for itself without negating the truth of another, and this is precisely the point at which his view deviates from the beliefs prevalent in different religions. Second, how this theory of revelation explains the religious value of the different religions is not entirely obvious. Hartman makes a theological and an anthropological assumption, but neither compels the conclusion he seeks to draw. Even if God is an infinite plenitude that no single revelation can exhaust, it does not thereby follow that God continues to reveal himself. All we can conclude from God’s infinite plenitude is that no revelation can contain him, but not that he reveals himself anew. Furthermore, only Christianity ascribes the revelation to God, while Judaism and Islam hold that the content of the revelation are the obligations or the book that is at their root. According to these religions, God’s infinite plenitude is irrelevant to the character of the revelation. As noted, the language that Hartman uses to speak about God’s revelation as God’s embodiment or incarnation in the Torah or in Halakhah is close to the language of Christianity. But this closeness returns us to the fundamental problem: if we subscribe to the standard Jewish belief that God is revealed as the legislator when giving the Torah to Moses, his infinite fullness is entirely immaterial to our stance concerning multiple revelations, just as the finite fullness of the legislator has no bearing on the validity of the law. Third, does Hartman’s theory claim that historical religions are a product of a culture and other concrete details, or that they embody true norms and beliefs? If the first, this is a reduction of religion to history. If the second, and given that truth is not contingent on concrete historical circumstances, what exactly is the place of concrete history in the shaping of religion? Finally, this theory assumes a link between the concrete history of society and culture and their religious expression. The link between Christian society and culture and their manifestations in Christian religion or religions, however, is not clear. Why is the wearing of phylacteries compatible with Jewish instead of Islamic history? Or why is eating the sacramental wafer compatible with Christianity instead of Judaism? Every religion may have normative expressions, myths, an ethos, or symbols related to the concrete history and the

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language of members of a given religious community, but why assume that all expressions are in this category? This question is especially significant given that many religious expressions bear no concrete historical markings. Pointing out these problems is significant because they expose Hartman’s world view and its revolutionary character and show that, ultimately, revelation loses its significance relative to its contents. In Hartman’s view, the contents express a culture and a community. God’s status is determined within the contextual meaning of these contents and not outside them. Believers attribute to a set of contents the status of revelation. Hartman argues that identifying revelation with a defined content does not point to a fact that occurred in the past but to a religious experience taking place in the present. The Torah and the commandments are an embodiment of God and, in this sense, they are revelation. A past historical event is of little, if any, significance for actual practice and experience. Note that Leibowitz also shifts the religious meaning of revelation from the past to the present. Yet, for Hartman, this shift is manifest in an experience of God’s presence, while for Leibowitz it is embodied in the decisive role of a present decision in determining the Torah’s religious standing. So far, Hartman’s theory appears to grant God real status in the world as a transcendent being, even if progressively reducing God’s meaning in the organization of religious life. Yet, Hartman’s formulations sometimes bring him close to the expressive approach. Evidence of such closeness is a text, for instance, where he contends with the problem of God in response to the question “How do you know there is a God?” I believe that you do not begin from “he is my God and I will praise him,” but from “my father’s God, and I will exalt him” [Exodus 15:2]. In other words, the spiritual-communal framework with which you identify attests, through its existence, to the worship of God. So, I did not find God at a given place, on a given day, at a given corner, or through a personal mystical experience, but within the context of a communal life, in the people’s attitude to God. The people of Israel, throughout their historical evolvement, are a framework enabling me to build a spiritual world of my own, so that my spiritual world is a gift of a community that built its life on the consciousness that there is something beyond human beings… Spiritual life is built on prayer, on the Sabbath, on the study of Torah, and this entire framework is a significant testimony to me. To me, this life points to God’s existence.50 This text indicates that we can determine God’s presence relying on the community’s organization of its normative life, which is constituted as worship. The normative community is the primary foundation within which the believer

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[Hartman] finds himself. This primary nature is evident in the fact that, in their community, believers are exposed to the “worship of God” instead of to God himself. The community shapes a consciousness of worship relating to a transcendent element “beyond human beings.” But this element is a communal product. In this approach, the experience of faith does not include an element of passivity, of exposure to a divine voice coming from “outside.” Faith is an active shaping of consciousness based on a normative pattern that sees in this act an expression of some element beyond humanity. God is an element within religious language, whose standing remains blurred and undefined, a kind of border concept denoting that immanence is not everything. Can this being become the object of direct contact beyond the normative? Hartman’s answer is: “God does not exist separately from human value patterns, from a person’s self-perception, his view of his personality, of the society he lives in and its accepted patterns”;51 “The God of Israel depends on who is Israel in order to understand who he is. Hence, the history of the Jewish people builds the spiritual conception of God. “52 These formulations are extremely close to the expressive pluralism of Kaufman or Milbank, and highly compatible with the increasing emphasis in Hartman’s writings about the primacy of community and of commitment to tradition, which I discuss below. The problem is that, contrary to this trend, we also find in Hartman a definite acknowledgement of divine transcendence, and of the religious passion directed toward it. As a theologian who draws on the talmudic tradition, Hartman presents it as predicated on a dialectic relationship between confidence in human action and the awe of the encounter with the numinous.53 Hartman offers a highly sensitive analysis of talmudic texts extolling intellectual autonomy but also indicating that God is ultimately a transcendent being: It should be understood that we are not dealing here with the claim that God transcends the intelligible or the ethical, nor with the claim that there is an infinite power and mystery to God’s plenitude that goes beyond the human community…. What does threaten covenantal consciousness in those biblical stories is the feeling that in God we encounter a furious irrational Force Whose unpredictability makes it impossible for us to rely on His commitments to us. (45) According to Hartman’s historical typology, these statements would appear relevant only to the biblical period, since in the talmudic period God became transcendent and was no longer active in history. Hartman emphasizes: “In rabbinic literature, God’s sudden fury manifests itself more rarely. Nonetheless, we continue to find the theme of God’s unpredictability” (46). These claims, which are incompatible with Hartman’s set typology, are significant because

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they point to a hidden facet of God that halakhic normativeness does not exhaust. This facet recurs in prayer, as Hartman shows, and especially that of the days between Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur (56-57). Pervading the prayers for the “days of awe” is a sense of dread and human worthlessness before God, feelings obviously incompatible with the expressive approach, which fixates God’s absolute immanence within the religious language. According to Hartman, prayer also represents an aspect pointing to a deviation from God’s absolute immanence. In a typical personal aside, Hartman argues: “I do not sense a wish to pray because God misses my prayer, I pray because I wish to build an intimate relationship with him! Without prayer there is no intimate relationship, there is an abstract relationship, a relationship of commandment, but the relationship with God should not be built on command.”54 This analysis, then, suggests that the process of minimizing God’s role and fixating him as an immanent object within halakhic language entails a trend that preserves God’s traditional standing as a transcendent being that is not embodied within this language. How should we explain this tension? One option is to argue that Hartman does present two incompatible and contradictory options, both typical of his thought. On the one hand, he wishes to retain halakhic tradition as is, and he must locate God as an actual transcendent being. On the other, dominating his philosophical project is a quest for meaning and relevance, when meaning refers to a kind of correspondence between the tradition and the circumstances of his life as a modern thinker. From this perspective, God can only be part of real practice, of the culture and the way of life, because modernity places tradition at the center as the organizing language and the bridge between past and present. God is therefore located within the tradition instead of beyond it, thereby losing his status in the world of beings. A God within the tradition is located within the realm of normative halakhic language, which conveys the actual practice of individuals and of a community shaping their life according to this practice. The philosophical contradiction is typical of the person living between two worlds— between past and present, between tradition and contemporary cultures. Instead of denoting the failure of the method, this contradiction signals that theory is incapable of exhausting real life, given the unbridgeable chasm between life and our reflection upon it. The world of Halakhah is a real world wherein God acts, consoles, heals, kills, and gives life. In philosophical reflection, however, God is the object of religious language. The resulting tension is inevitable. Hartman’s theology does not fully explore the death of Nietzsche’s God and, in one way or another, brings the traditional God back to life. The contradiction between the two trends softens God’s return to the stage of human history. He appears as an object of religious passion and of normative intentionality instead of as an agent directing the course of history. Hence, Hartman can

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say: “I do not really speak of the God of history, but of a God who is found within a community in a historical context. I do not speak of God within historical events. The meaning of the exodus from Egypt, for instance, is that people saw freedom as a necessity, as the foundation of spiritual development.”55 Although Hartman is extremely close to Leibowitz in this view of God, he dissociates from him in his readiness to speak of God directly: God needs the community, Aristotle’s god does not need the community… the cry of the prophets is the cry of God, who depends on the community’s mode of life… Aristotle’s god is not profaned in the world, because he does not need people… but when you draw closer to the God of Israel, you draw closer to an entirely different God, a God who depends on the way on which you build your life. There, total independence is perfection, here perfection is in dependence.56 In Hartman’s theology, then, God’s absolute transcendence and his removal from the world are not a sign of his death but of his irrelevance. God is highly relevant to human beings, but they are the ones who determine how relevant and, in this sense, God depends on them. The conclusion of this analysis is that the realist and expressive trends of Hartman’s philosophy assign a crucial role to human beings. In this sense, Hartman’s philosophy is modern, and even utterly postmodern. I noted this shift from God to the subject in contemporary Jewish thought in the writings of Leibowitz, Soloveitchik, and Goldman. Leibowitz and Soloveitchik place different emphases on the shift to subjectivity, evident in different aspects of faith: a shift to the individual subject and a shift to the community. The religious decision or the religious experience, for instance, is uniquely personal, while normative life is communal. Like Goldman, Hartman too emphasizes the communal aspect as the decisive element of this shift to subjectivity. 5. Humankind: The Shift from God to the Human The shift to human existence is manifest in Hartman’s thought at different levels: (1) The rejection of the theocentric stance. (2) Human beings as the bearers of the relationship with God. (3) The human role in interpretation. (1) The rejection of the theocentric stance. Standard religious approaches perceive religion as a divine demand from human beings. Human beings are required to transcend their desires, their feelings, needs, and yearnings and, in sum, their concrete being, to become worshippers. In Leibowitz’s thought, this self-transcendence is Judaism’s prominent hallmark and its symbol is the binding of Isaac. Hartman acknowledges that the paradigm of the binding of

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Isaac is widespread in Jewish tradition, from the Talmud and up to Soloveitchik and Leibowitz. He rejects it, however, and chooses an alternative tradition stating that Judaism does not require human beings to transcend their existence. Contrary to the unconditional obedience required by the binding model, Hartman sets the model of Abraham in Sodom. This model assumes that not only can humankind rely on its moral assumptions, but also that these assumptions pose conditions and validate God’s command.57 The paradigm of Abraham in Sodom gives religious sanction to human autonomy and to the validity of human understandings. It assumes that religion itself affirms concrete human finitude. Religion is not an ideal demand addressed to the ideal person.58 Instead, human finitude is a constitutive foundation of religious life.59 According to Hartman, the acknowledgement of finitude as a crucial component of religious life is part of the creation process: Creation involves an irreducible separation between the world and God. It encourages us to take both God and the world with extreme seriousness in their radical separateness. In the biblical story of creation, God confirms and legitimizes finitude: “And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). If existence in its otherness from God is pronounced good, then our finitude has intrinsic dignity and significance.60 Like many existentialist thinkers who influenced his thinking—from Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche up to Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre—Hartman claims that this religious insight is also the key to authentic and non-alienated existence (259). In a chapter of A Living Covenant entitled “The Celebration of Finitude,” Hartman elaborates and develops ideas that had already appeared in his other works and points to the compatibility between modernism, which demands recognition of human dignity, and halakhic tradition. The Sinai covenant, which is the foundation of halakhic obligations, requires human beings to amend their personal, social, and political surroundings without assuming that eschatological redemption should replace finite human reality (257). Revelation addresses finite creatures at a given time and place and the Torah is at the center of human life as is, without striving to transcend it. 61 In brief, this approach vigorously rejects the theocentric lure, which emerges recurrently in the history of religions in general and in Jewish tradition in particular, preferring instead the concrete centrality of human life, namely, the anthropocentric view.62 (2) Human beings as the bearers of the relationship with God. Despite the theological language of a “covenant” with God, human beings are at the center of Hartman’s thought since they are the active agents. God and his commandments are meaningful only within the framework of human actions.63 The

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significant element for the present discussion is the shift of religious life—from an activity addressing a transcendent God and seeking his response, to an activity oriented toward human reality through the normative system of the Torah and the commandments. When acting within this system, human beings do not await God’s action. Instead, they are the only actors, they control reality and grant God meaning and a “place” in religious life. The most striking evidence of this shift is in their role as interpreters of the Torah. (3) The human role in the interpretation of the Torah. The interpretation of the Torah, especially in its halakhic aspect, often evolves as a persistent effort to grasp the “intention of the text.” This approach reflects deep religious intuitions that view God’s will as the sole foundation of the halakhic obligation and as already embodied in the text. Against this view, Hartman proposes a view of the text as open to different and contradictory interpretations. He repeatedly directs us to the talmudic tradition crowning all interpretations as “words of the living God” and states that, even after a halakhic ruling, alternative halakhic positions do not become false or illegitimate.64 This hermeneutical stance appears to subvert the canonical status of the text and undermine the text per se. The assumption that the text is open to interpretations could mean that no text exists at all, and one view claims that halakhic tradition rests on the deconstruction of the text.65 Hartman, however, argues that saying that a text is open to interpretation implies that a text exists, at times unequivocal in its meaning, except that this text’s special quality is its openness to interpretations. Its constitutive elements are vagueness and multivalence, designed to enable multiple interpretations: “God loves you when you discover ambiguity in His word. He loves you for the forty-nine ways to make this pure and forty-nine ways to make it impure. Revelation is not always ‘pure and simple’ but may be rough and complex.”66 The interpretation of the Torah is the work of an “interpretive community” (119), a community of students engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the Torah. In Hartman’s view, this is the deep meaning of Torah she-be-al peh [Oral Law], which “has no final form. It always awaits the creative input of serious and committed students to add their voices to the unending discussion” (120). The three aspects of the shift to subjectivity are mutually complementary, and culminate in the third. Since the Torah is meant to be at the center of human life and bears its stamp, and since the relationship with God is created by human beings, interpretation becomes the focus of religious life. Interpretation embodies the underlying foundation of Hartman’s thought. Instead of a return to the past, to the giving of the Torah at Sinai, this is an inclusion of the Sinai event within interpretation and within concrete life: “I do not live by what happened at Sinai; I live by what Jews did with what happened at Sinai” (120).

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Hartman places the Jewish community at the center, anchoring his communitarianism in religious and sociological insights. From a religious perspective, he notes that making Halakhah a constitutive element of Judaism means that Halakhah is oriented toward the community instead of toward the individual: “Only within the community do we hear the commanding word of the living God of Israel…. The community so invades one’s identity that it would be correct to claim that one’s primary consciousness is of a ‘we.’ I am a ‘we’ before I become an ‘I,’ and the ‘I’ surfaces only after it has appropriated fully the sense of ‘we.’67 From a sociological perspective, this religious language confirms that the individual is a product of socialization processes that begin with birth within a family that is, above all, a socio-cultural cell.68 Making communitarianism the foundation of the covenant and of human life entails two aspects whose relationship is dialectic. Since the community is the bearer of the tradition, commitment to the community is also a commitment to the tradition. From a theological perspective, as noted, the emphasis is not on the personal religious experience but on the identification with the tradition,69 which is impossible without identifying with the community: “Only one who joins the community in the liberation struggle from Egypt can participate in the covenantal listening to the divine commandments from Sinai.”70 Because of this identification with the community as the bearer of the tradition, however, Hartman reaches a pluralistic conclusion that also recognizes non-Orthodox and secular movements as the bearers of a full Judaism. In a daring theological move, Hartman concludes that the covenant with the Jewish people implies recognition of a Jewish life that does not have the Torah and the commandments as its foundation. 71 The primacy of community is an expression of the primacy of tradition over the religious experience, but also of the community’s release from the theological assumption that views the Torah as its foundation. What is the individual’s place in this scheme? What is the place of human autonomy? Is communitarianism antithetical to individuality? Hartman endorses the views of communitarian circles on this count.72 He rejects the romantic and the solipsistic Cartesian perspectives in favor of an approach that begins from a sociological and historical context—identity begins with tradition and community life: “The traditional Jew does not begin with immediacy, but by listening to a story from his or her parents, by first participating in the drama of the collective standing before God at Sinai… A Jew’s self-assertion has to be within the family.”73 Personal autonomy develops through dialogue and confrontation with tradition and, through this process, the language of tradition becomes a personal, individual language.74 The contents of the tradition, then, affirm moral autonomy. The philosophical project, as noted, rests on the assumption that the believer belongs to several mutually influential and interpenetrating communi-

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ties, and the interpretive tradition of Judaism assists this multicultural encounter.75 Yet, interpretation serves not only to adjust the tradition. Jewish tradition also provides a starting point for the critical evaluation of contemporary culture: “A living tradition can provide a person with a critical perspective on contemporary social reality by pointing to alternative possibilities and by providing a sense of distance that enables one to evaluate current beliefs and practices.”76 Although the discovery of autonomy and human freedom entail, as noted, an experience of alienation,77 Hartman’s thought shows no traces of such an experience. He repeatedly relates to a phenomenon typical of modern life—the loss of metaphysical certainty, the lack of confidence in values—but he never speaks of alienation. Furthermore, his philosophical project is marked by a sense of overcoming this loss of certainty and by a renewed affirmation of human dignity. Like Goldman, then, Hartman assigns alienation no role in his scheme. According to his historical typology, he identifies an original unity between nature, morality, and human existence in the biblical period, from which Jewish tradition then draws away. Gradually, a space for human action and responsibility replaces this unity. Unity, then, characterizes a period that Jewish history has rejected and substituted by the Oral Law, a cultural project that conveys the dignity of human beings as creatures of value. The rise of the culture and tradition project leaves no room for alienation since the original unity, instead of a desirable goal, marks an earlier historical stage in the development of the Jewish people, when the later stage is preferable. Like Goldman, Hartman’s thought approaches human life as developing out of and within a sociological-historical context. This insight translates into an understanding of Jewish life as an intergenerational dialogue, a sense of historical and cultural continuity that not only does it not prevent the development of an autonomous personality but indeed encourages it, turning tradition into the individual’s “home.” These understandings are not a fertile soil for the growth of a sense of alienation that, as historians, philosophers, and sociologists explain, develops from the sense of “a lost home.” Hartman relates to alienation as a psychological state requiring therapy. The original assumption of unity is the expression of an infantile consciousness, and the therapeutic process provides release from it by turning people into autonomous creatures who trust their powers to shape their world. This autonomy is evident in the Oral Law, a paragon of absolute human sovereignty. Historically, alienation is the reverse of the Enlightenment project, whose ultimate concern was to make the world intelligible and familiar.78 Failure to satisfy this passion often resulted in an oppressive sense of alienation. An alternative to this project emerged, claiming that the genuine paradigm of human life is culture, which is by nature historical and therefore marked by a human stamp.79 Although people may feel alienated from their culture, the historical-

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social characterization of culture enables a more nuanced, less dichotomous perception: at the extremes are the radical options of absolute identification and absolute negation, with different forms of critical, creative views of the tradition in between. In any event, alienation is not a primary relationship with the culture as it is a primary relationship for modern individuals discovering the abyss that separates them from the world. In this regard, Hartman is already part of the postmodernist discourse, which answered the challenge of culture and hardly fostered the alienation experience. Neither is the American experience, so decisive in the shaping of Hartman’s spiritual world, a suitable soil for the growth of alienation feelings. This is an experience full of optimism and confidence in the power of the sociocultural environment to provide a suitable framework for a full and meaningful life. It recognizes the power of the human creature, as an individual and as a member of society, to amend and improve life. The roots of the alienation experience are in Europe, from where it was “imported” to the United States by different European thinkers. Hartman’s thought, then, reflects a recognition of the central role that society and culture play in the creation of identity and an optimism typical of American social reality. Hartman’s concept of the covenant, which fully affirms human reality as is, encapsulates all these insights. The covenant rejects the option of negating present existence in favor of an ideal past or future and leaves no religious room for the experience of alienation, which reasons external to religion also negate. The covenant, then, is a religious concept that revalidates basic extra-religious viewpoints endorsed by Hartman. This analysis has implications for the third dimension of modernism: the world. Modernism, as noted, empties the world of any religious significance and makes it neutral. Hartman’s contribution is to offer an approach that preserves the world’s ontological neutrality while pouring religious meaning into human life. The world acquires religious meaning by virtue of human action instead of by virtue of its metaphysical foundations. Hartman, therefore, devotes a great deal of attention to the analysis of the human world—the world of culture. 6. The Shift to Praxis: Denying Utopianism and Halakhah Two mutually complementary aspects convey Hartman’s view of the world as a human arena, where human action instead of a metaphysical order determine religious value. The first is the absolute affirmation of human reality, namely, the rejection of utopia. The second is a shift of the center of gravity from the intellectual-philosophical realm to the realm of praxis, namely, to Halakhah. Hartman is part of the most recent trend within Jewish thought, which rejects utopia. Leibowitz and Goldman are also part of this trend. Hartman’s uniqueness lies in his theological and philosophical investment in the negation

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of utopia. So far, the analysis of Hartman’s comprehensive historical typology has focused on two of its three periods: the biblical and the talmudic. The third period is the growth of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel.80 This is a unique era, in that the Jewish community assumes absolute responsibility for shaping its destiny in history. Until then, the community had directed responsibility and freedom toward the text and the tradition. In the Zionist era, the Jewish community takes responsibility for action, marking a new stage in Sinai covenantal history. In Hartman’s view, Zionism is the essence of the subjective shift and restricts God’s role in history even further. Hartman recurrently emphasizes this point, precisely in light of the possibility that the establishment of Israel could lead to the renewal of eschatological or restorative messianism. The success of Zionism could return to consciousness and to Jewish existence the approach rooted in the biblical typology, against which Hartman offers his philosophy.81 These steps—assuming responsibility for the historical reality and acknowledging human ontology—lead Hartman to negate utopia. He draws a distinction between “radical hope” and “halakhic hope.”82 Radical hope can become manifest in the restoration of the past and in the eschatological amendment of reality. The paradigm of radical hope is the exodus from Egypt, which breaks historical continuity and returns to the creation paradigm: the active God who changes historical reality.83 By contrast, the paradigm of halakhic hope is the Sinai covenant, which reaffirms human reality as is, including its weaknesses and limitations. Whereas the exodus made finite human reality irrelevant, the Sinai covenant makes these conditions an essential part of the covenant.84 In this view, the concept of messianism undergoes a transformation or, more precisely, a process of demythologization. Relying on Maimonides,85 Hartman argues that messianism conveys an affirmation of the Torah and the commandments and the realization of all the values of the Sinai covenant, namely, the endorsement of human reality and a ceaseless effort to amend it.86 In sharp opposition to Gershom Scholem, Hartman points to the “conservative” and restraining role of Halakhah. Hartman’s use of Scholem’s thesis reveals the profound difference between them. Whereas Scholem has a negative attitude toward Halakhah precisely because it is conservative, Hartman views this conservatism as a key element, because it expresses the ascription of value to the concrete world in the present instead of to the past or the future beyond it. On these grounds, the term conservative appears in the text in quotes.87 Hartman rejects the messianic pathos and the yearning for future redemption in favor of the living present. A life of Torah and commandments concretized in a finite reality acknowledges the value of this reality, and also sets the challenge of its ceaseless amendment. The denial of utopianism marks the culmination of the modernist process that ascribes value and significance to the human world, replacing the previous view that had ascribed value to the

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world, if at all, because it reflected a purposeful metaphysical structure. Utopia predicates the existence of a perfect, ideal world that must be realized everywhere and at all times. Hartman objects to this view, stressing that the image of a perfect world draws on and reflects particularistic views of culture and society. And yet, utopianism transcends the confines of the culture that engendered it, a problematic that Hartman discusses when he writes: The modern-day recognition of the human sources that influence religious outlooks on life—a particular community, particular teachers, a specific family tradition—prevents us from giving convictions of faith an absolute epistemological status… Accordingly, I do not regard those with different understandings of the meaning of human existence—including atheists—as affected by hubris or malice that prevents them from seeing what is obviously the truth… I cherish the epistemological humility commended by William James: “Neither the whole of the truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer… It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and to make the most of his own blessings without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.”88 Hartman also holds, rightfully, that the utopian idea involves harsh existential implications. It diverts the individual from the present to the future, negating the present for the sake of the future: In this view of covenantal faith, which is essentially a protest against the world as presently constituted, human beings are strangers wandering in an unredeemed world that awaits the realization of the eschatological vision… This view [is]… a deprecation of human finitude, freedom, and uncertainty, all of which are considered part of the fallen human state and will eventually be overcome.89 Criticism, change, or social progress need not draw their contents from any absolute idea. Social criticism returns to reality, examines the flaws and injustices in need of amendment, and points to the real options latent within it. Hartman shares this critical approach and offers social responsibility instead of eschatology: The covenant does not suggest any promise of resolution for the finite human condition. Rather, it teaches the community how to be responsible for its social and political existence even within the uncertain and possibly tragic conditions of history and even though many events are beyond human control.90

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Halakhah plays a special role in this philosophy. It functions as a critique of reality while also expressing confidence in it. Hartman emphasizes this point, noting that observing the commandments in a reality that is ascribed negative value is a questionable proposition. Pauline Christianity negated the commandments precisely because it negated the real world, material life. Since the Torah, in its view, represents the affirmation and the lure of the flesh, it cannot fully express faith. For this version of Christianity, faith is not a practical matter but an inner spiritual concern.91 By contrast, the basic halakhic ethos calls for the amendment of the world. Halakhic praxis is inner-worldly and does not seek to achieve another ideal reality. Halakhah acknowledges the existence of an imperfect world but perfection, for Hartman, is not a constitutive element of Judaism since even the Jewish God, unlike the Aristotelian one, does not express perfection.92 In sum, from a modernist perspective, Hartman is a sober and critical modernist or he is already within a postmodernist discourse that has renounced metaphysical certainty altogether. Despite this renunciation, Hartman does not fall into cynicism or nihilism. Criticism and the absence of ultimate certainties is not a reason for abandoning the world, for “philosophical suicide” as Camus calls it, unless one assumes that metaphysical certainty is the ideal and, in its absence, a nihilistic stance is the only option left. Hartman’s thought affirms an ultimate, limited reality. This affirmation is a combination of a Jewish interpretation with the Sinai covenant at its crux, and the modernist experience, which is central to Hartman’s thought. As a basic experience, modernism is affirmation and, in this sense, Hartman differs from Soloveitchik and also from Leibowitz. Both these thinkers contended with modernism, but neither adopted it as constitutive of their religious philosophy. Even if modernism played a role in the shaping of their religious consciousness, it was never deliberately included in their religious world or granted religious sanction. In this sense, neither one was a priori a modernist in his selfperception. Although Soloveitchik and Leibowitz adopted modernism as a permanent element in human life, both shaped a philosophy imbued by a dialectic attitude toward modernity, pervaded by contradictions. Hartman, like Goldman, offers another model for affirming modernity. Both recognize a need for reinterpreting religion in light of a modernist stance, given that the concept of a “pure” Judaism constituted from within does not reflect Jewish tradition or the historical and social contexts within which Jews have always lived. Jewish tradition attests to an ongoing discourse between the “outside” and its dynamic, innovative development.93 Goldman emphasized the historical and sociological aspects of this development in Jewish tradition from theoretical and historical perspectives. Hartman succeeded in proposing a theological interpretation of this openness. In either garb, the dialectical

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component disappears and the religious experience is no longer one of contradiction and conflict. The affirmation of Jewish religiosity presents a model of harmony between religion and life. 7. Again on “God is Dead”: Between Nietzsche and Hartman The full meaning of Hartman’s theology is evident in his answer to the modernist challenge that Nietzsche formulated as “God is dead.” This thesis, as noted, epitomizes the subjective shift that reinstated human sovereignty. The shift generated two contrary trends. The first, represented by Nietzsche, claims that “God is dead” and removes God from the human realm. God, or, more precisely, the image of God, is merely a remnant of a dead culture. The death of God proclaims that a new horizon has opened up. The opposite trend seeks to reconstruct religious life after the subjective shift. It recognizes the “death of God” as an expression of theology’s futility, but claims that the focus of religious life are human beings, not God. From being the object of the religious obligation, human beings become the subject of the relationship with God. Kierkegaard’s philosophy marks the beginning of this trend. In this view, the “death of God” is a kind of reparation of mythical religious approaches. According to these approaches, God is an entity found in the world, as recognizable and knowledgeable as other objects. God, however, is a transcendent entity that is not within the world, and hence forever unknowable. In the distant dialogue between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, therefore, Kierkegaard holds that the “death of God” implies the death of a mythical perception of God, which seeks God as a worldly entity instead of where it should be sought: “God is subject, and hence [exists] only for subjectivity, in inwardness.”94 The faith relationship, then, is one of inner reflection. Instead of bringing back the old approach making God the entity’s ontological source, this reflection constitutes the relationship with God as a personality, a concrete entity. As Kierkegaard notes in a passage in his journal: Immanently (in the imaginative medium of abstraction) God does not exist or is not present—only for the existing person is God present, i. e., he can be present in faith… If an existing person does not have faith, then [for him] God neither is nor is God present, although understood eternally God nevertheless eternally is.95 Buber would eventually endorse this course, claiming against Sartre: “Sartre started from the ‘silence’ of God without asking himself what part our not hearing and our not having heard has played in that silence.”96 Note that this controversy on the “death of God” occurs within the Protestant realm that, on

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the one hand, took divine transcendence to extremes, and, on the other, displaced the human creature to the center of religious life. Several modernist Jewish thinkers responded to the challenge of the “death of God” and attempted, like Kierkegaard, to restore God’s position within the religious experience. The religious experience became for them the place for the meeting with God. Among these thinkers are Buber, Soloveitchik, and in the most extreme formulation, as usual, Leibowitz. In this regard, the move that Hartman proposes is radically different and, in this section, I re-analyze the shift from theology to anthropology in his writings. The Kierkegaardian trend of restoring God’s position through the religious experience is easily identifiable in Hartman’s writings and entails no innovation. Hartman’s significant contribution is the claim that the shift from theology to anthropology is immanent to Judaism as a historical-cultural phenomenon. This shift, then, is not a response to the crisis of modernity but reflects Judaism’s most prominent manifestation. In many ways, and unlike Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, Hartman is a Hegelian or, more precisely, a post-Hegelian thinker, in his adoption of a historical perspective in his philosophy. In Hartman’s view, a correct analysis of the historical-cultural phenomenon of Judaism provides the clearest perspective for the understanding of this shift. In the typology discussed above, God moves away from the world in the talmudic period, and the historical arena becomes a human space. God’s removal from the world, then, is not a sign of “the death of God” and the rise of modern subjectivism, but an essential expression of actual Jewish history. Hartman holds that human beings do not remove God from the world, but God removes himself for their benefit. These statements do not derive from a theological stance but rest on the phenomenological analysis of religious history as it appears in the texts. What do we have after God’s removal? Hartman’s answer: the Torah. Unlike Leibowitz or Goldman, who failed to explain the Torah’s religious meaning after removing God from the world, for Hartman the Torah is the link mediating between God and humanity. But the normative character of this link shifts away from God, and human interpretation determines the meaning of the Torah. Hartman identifies the open and dynamic nature of the interpretation that establishes the meaning of the canonic text, yet rejects the approach that interpretation discovers the meaning latent in the text. The text’s meaning is determined within the “interpretive community,” which engages in this pursuit generation after generation, to this day. The Oral Law is an “infinite discourse,” a perception assigning to human beings a crucial role in shaping the normative structure of their lives. The divine dependence on human interpretation and human values turns human beings into the object of religious reflection, given that the meaning of God is contingent on human consciousness. Anthropology, then, is the means for making theology itself intelligible. As noted, the rise of subjectivism is for

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Hartman an immanent expression of normative Judaism that does not often speak of God but with God—through prayer. This tradition has, modestly but resolutely, restricted the divine role to the normative framework, and has shaped a consciousness perceiving this restriction as the deepest expression of the covenant between God and human beings. The concept of the covenant is the linchpin of Hartman’s thought. It symbolizes the shift from theology to anthropology, and conveys the paradox that this shift entails. On the one hand, this is a covenant between unequal partners, and on the other, the weaker, human side, is the only bearer of the covenant’s realization in the world. The human side is responsible for God’s presence in the world and, according to Hartman, this is the essence of God’s love for human creatures. Is this radical move immanent to Jewish tradition? Did God remove himself from the world for the benefit of human beings? Is Hartman’s philosophy an attempt to narrate modernism in traditional religious language? These questions require further discussion. A theory’s power lies in its ability to reformulate and challenge its conceptual framework. Hartman’s philosophy is a fruitful and original thesis that draws on the momentous questions confronting the modern believer, which he weaves through a critical exchange that profoundly respects Jewish tradition and sets the stage for further discussion.

Part Three BETWEEN OLD AND NEW JUDAISM AS INTERPRETATION

INTRODUCTION At the core of Jewish culture are texts.1 These texts are not only the bearers of Jewish culture but also its object, since this is a culture of written texts that constitutes itself through a synchronic and diachronic dialogue with them. Later readers interpret ancient texts by writing new ones. Jewish textual culture is built as an ongoing series of interrelated texts, in a movement typical of the fusing horizons discussed in Chapter One above. The dialogical, intergenerational attitude toward texts raises a series of questions. Among the constitutive texts of Jewish culture, Scripture and Halakhah are considered holy, and are perceived as canonic texts of compelling standing. What, then, is the nature of the dialogue with these texts? Is a fusion of horizons with holy writings, whose authoritative and compelling status demands absolute compliance, at all possible? Is it possible to return to a tradition founded on canonical texts whose meaning and validity are beyond the present and beyond any dialogical context? These questions pose ongoing challenges to the idea of tradition in the sense outlined in Chapter One above, and this part of the book is a critical appraisal of the attempts to meet these challenges by the Jewish thinkers discussed in the book.

Six SCRIPTURE IN THE THOUGHT OF LEIBOWITZ AND SOLOVEITCHIK Many parallels join these two thinkers, and my focus in this chapter is on the meaning they assign to Scripture. The comparison will reveal that, despite the differences between them, they endorse a similar solution to one of the fundamental questions asked by modern believers—how to preserve the holiness of the biblical text vis-à-vis the challenge of biblical criticism and of scientific findings. Although Soloveitchik and Leibowitz are not the only modern Jewish thinkers troubled by this question,1 their unique solution implies a revolutionary change while also reaffirming their deep religious commitment to Jewish tradition. The following claims outline the shared foundations of their attitude toward the biblical text: (1) The status of the biblical text is not at all dependent on historical, literary, or scientific statements. (2) Biblical texts are religious texts, and only the religious context endows them with special religious meaning. (3) Given (1), the justification of (2) does not require the rejection of science or of religious cognition so as to set up an alternative” religious science.” These shared premises assume different meaning in the thought of each one of these thinkers, in line with their theoretical methodology. 1. The Meaning of Scripture in Soloveitchik’s Thought Soloveitchik unequivocally states: 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 conception 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 foundations upon which the sanctity and integrity of the Scriptures rest.2 Soloveitchik chooses an entirely personal wording for these statements, and speaks about never being perturbed by the scientific-empirical context or by

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the textual analysis of biblical criticism. But the assumption that this is merely a biographical report is hardly acceptable. Instead, the personal tone of this passage accords with the existentialist mode that characterizes Soloveitchik’s thought. His “datum” is the concrete person, and his philosophy focuses on the explication of concrete existence; scientific questions, then, or even biblical criticism, have no bearing on his concrete experience as a believer. He is not concerned with metaphysical speculation but with the individual believer. In the opening lines of The Lonely Man of Faith, Soloveitchik states: It is not the plan of this paper to discuss the millennium-old problem of faith and reason. Theory is not my concern at the moment. I want instead to focus attention on a human life situation in which the man of faith as an individual concrete being, with his cares and hopes, concerns and needs, joys and sad moments, is entangled. Therefore, whatever I am going to say here has not been derived from philosophical dialectics, abstract speculation, or detached impersonal reflections, but from actual situations and experiences with which I have been confronted. Indeed, the term lecture is, in this context, a misnomer… I would like, hesitantly and haltingly, to confide in you, and to share with you some concerns which weigh heavily on my mind.3 Existential philosophy does not strive for a pure metaphysical truth; it goes inward instead of outward, describing and analyzing the elements that mold human existence as is. The philosophizing process is meant to make the elements found within human existence transparent, not to transcend them. Soloveitchik’s confession, then, is not merely a description of events but of the process through which human beings gain access to their experience. The word has redemptive powers, and individuals can use it to explicate their existence to themselves. In Soloveitchik’s terms: “All I want is to follow the advice given by Elihu the son of Berachel of old who said, ‘I will speak that I may find relief’ [Job 32:2]; for there is a redemptive quality for an agitated mind in the spoken word and a tormented soul finds peace in confessing.”4 These “underlying assumptions” affect the attitude to Scripture. Soloveitchik does not argue that science and research are not credible, nor does he offer a critique or an “alternative science,” whether literary or empirical. Biblical criticism does pose worthy questions. His claim is different: these sciences are existentially irrelevant to believers. What in the existential starting point makes all extra-textual, scientific information immaterial? This issue is especially significant in any discussion of Soloveitchik who, in The Lonely Man of Faith and in other works, stresses the religious value of science as a pursuit where human beings imitate their Creator.5 How can believers, then, deeply committed to scientific activity to the point of viewing it as almost a form of

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imitatio Dei, disregard the findings of scientific inquiry when they approach the biblical text? Soloveitchik is aware of this question when arguing his position. In his discussion of the two different descriptions of Creation in the Book of Genesis, he claims: We are also aware of the theory suggested by Bible critics attributing these two accounts to two different traditions and sources. Of course, since we do unreservedly accept the unity and integrity of the Scriptures and their divine character, we reject this hypothesis which is based, like many other Biblico-critical theories, on literary categories invented by modern man, ignoring completely the eidetic-noetic content of the biblical story. It is, of course, true that the two accounts of the creation of man differ considerably… However, the answer lies not in an alleged dual tradition but in dual man.6 Soloveitchik approaches Scriptures as a believer, implying a preliminary hermeneutical assumption that enables him to understand the text. Understanding, however, does not mean entering the cosmology or the “scientific” theory of the creation of man suggested by Scripture, but relating to its existential or ontological meaning: Soloveitchik views both accounts of creation as reflecting the fundamental duality constitutive of human experience. Scripture is not the story of a past event, meant to contend with competing historical narratives; it suggests a basic human ontology, enabling human beings to understand themselves in a new and deeper light. This perception of human experience as a dialectic between the “first” and the “second Adam” is not a type of scientific information, teaching human beings about themselves, but a process that fashions existence. Scripture imposes on believers an existential duty, commensurate with the starting point they bring to the text. Soloveitchik’s analysis of the Book of Job in his essay “Kol Dodi Dofek” is an impressive articulation of this reading of Scripture. Prima facie, Soloveitchik’s analysis relies on a problematic starting point: the Talmud (TB, Bava Bathra 15a) offers different dates for Job’s time, pointing out they are incompatible—if Job lived in Moses’ time, he could not have lived in King Ahasuerus’ times, and vice-versa. But in his exegesis, Soloveitchik assumes that Job lived in Jacob’s time, and in Moses’ time, and in Ezra and Nehemiah’s time.7 This approach is neither the development Peli calls “thickening into one time,” nor is it a continuation of what Peli, following Heinemann, views as typical of the rabbinic homily.8 When Job lived is entirely immaterial to Soloveitchik, and what matters is the paradigm embodied in “Jobism” as an archetype of human existence. In his view, given the options proposed by the

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sages, Job embodies the person who lacks a sense of responsibility toward the other, impervious to “the historical cry of the people.”9 Just as the twofold description of the creation of Adam becomes eternal because it reflects the basic structure of humanity, so does the book of Job. Soloveitchik’s reliance on Job to draw conclusions about contemporary reality is evidence of the timelessness of Job’s story. The eternal message of Scripture is not concerned with scientific information but with the existential-ontological meaning of human existence. Peli does acknowledge the importance of hermeneutics (“derush”) in Soloveitchik’s religious world, but not sufficiently. According to Peli, hermeneutics is Soloveitchik’s method for conveying his thought: Thought that involves a synthesis between two worlds that have drawn apart… If we were to take this comparison further, instead of “synthesis”…we would say “syncretism.” That is, full and equal acceptance of the two worlds, the Western-humanistic, and the Jewish-halakhic, with all the apparent and essential contradictions between them. This acceptance requires that the two worlds be seen as one.10 But what is the nature of this “derush,” how precisely does it join the Western and halakhic worlds? If it rejects science and literary criticism, how does Peli’s “syncretism” develop? If it is a literary genre entirely separate from the text, the text becomes merely a platform, unrelated to what is built upon it. Is this a basis for syncretism? Beyond these questions, Soloveitchik articulates a stance about the existentialist-ontological meaning of the biblical text: the text teaches something essential about human beings. Soloveitchik’s views about Scripture are extremely close to those of Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Fuchs, especially the second. Bultmann’s key idea was demythologizing Scripture. He sought ways of reconciling modern views of the world and of creation with the meaning of the biblical text in general and of the New Testament in particular. In a more generalized formulation, the problem is how to understand historical documents transmitted by tradition.11 To contend with this problem, Bultmann suggested the notion of a demythologized exegesis. He distinguished myth from mythology: whereas a myth is an oral or written account of events entailing the participation of supernatural forces or entities,12 mythology is an image of God as a terrestrial, human entity,13 a perception incompatible with modern consciousness. Demythologizing is not concerned with myth but with the problem of mythology, and strives to discover the myth’s original meaning. Demythologizing, argues Bultmann, indicates that “faith itself demands to be released from any specific world picture… be it mythical or scientific.”14

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As Moshe Schwarcz rightfully notes, demythologizing has a positive and a negative meaning: “In its negative sense, demythologizing is meant to be a critique of the mythical world picture because it conceals the original meaning; in its positive sense, demythologizing offers an existentialist interpretation that exposes the mythical bent required by human existence.”15 Bultmann, therefore, draws a distinction between the rendition of Scripture written at a given time and within a given culture, and the kerygma, the text’s eternal message. The demythologizing project does not purport to abrogate mythological statements but to reflect the hermeneutical method intended to disclose their original meaning. From Bultmann’s point of view, the mythical symbols are “a window to the sacred.”16 The text’s original meaning is existential, and does not rest on historical facts or metaphysical truths. Yet, Bultmann claims that this existential meaning compels subservience to the text and to the religious starting point, which presumes a pre-understanding of God and of the text’s meaning.17 Believers come to the text with underlying assumptions, which do not vanish in the course of the hermeneutic process. Believers remain believers, and Bultmann stresses the hermeneutical role of subjective faith: “The most ‘subjective’ exegesis is always the most ‘objective,’ that is, one in which a person guided by questions touching on his own existence is able to grasp the claims of the text.”18 Believers, then, grasp the text through the perspective of their existence and their problems, which guide their search for answers within the text. According to this view, believers are not forced into a confrontation between Scripture and their personal understandings and knowledge, since the meaning of Scripture is existential instead of informative. The scientific world view of the modern person is irrelevant to the search for the text’s existentialist kerygma. Religious experience does not compete in the realm of human knowledge, nor does Scripture offer a metaphysical or historical narrative; instead, it offers existential meaning to believers guided by their existential questions. Soloveitchik’s position is close to Bultmann’s: the starting point of his hermeneutical endeavor, as a believer, is the demythologizing of Scripture, although he is closer to Fuchs in his understanding of what the demythologizing process means. Fuchs does not accept Bultmann’s thesis arguing that the ultimate object of interpretation is the text; instead, he suggests that the text offers us an interpretation of ourselves and a critique of our self-understanding: “The text unfolds itself, speaks up in what it says about us. Here we can see interpretation taking place less as ‘understanding’ than as ‘language,’ in that the text interprets itself by what it has to say about us.”19 In the terms coined by Anthony Thiselton, Scripture is a “transformationist text,” meaning it can change the reader’s being.20

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This hermeneutical tradition reaches impressive formulation in the thought of Paul Ricoeur. For Ricoeur, hermeneutical activity is a process of selfunderstanding that unfolds through the “conquest of the distanciation” between the self (the reader living in the present), and the other (the text belonging to some past era). Ricoeur, who adopts the Hegelian tradition and Dilthey’s hermeneutical approach, holds that self-understanding develops by means of objectification processes through which the self perceives itself in a “mirror” that includes texts, events, and other works. In the hermeneutical process, a person meets the mirror, allowing Ricoeur to say: “Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self-understanding by means of understanding others.”21 Ricoeur does acknowledge that the text is the “other,” no trifling matter since we often tend to view the text as a mirror of ourselves and find in it what we already are. Hence, the acknowledgement that the text is other automatically acknowledges a distance between the reader and the text that self-understanding processes will serve to mediate. The hermeneutical process will release the person from the Cartesian perception of the self as enclosed within its being. According to Ricoeur, the greatest weakness of the Cartesian, narcissistic self is a result of its failure to experience the critical-reflective process of hermeneutics, so that the self reflects a “false consciousness.”22 Critique develops in the confrontation between the self on the one hand, and “expressions of life,” in Dilthey’s terms, centered on texts, on the other. Ricoeur can therefore claim that the hermeneutical reflection unfolds “by means of corrective critique from misunderstanding to understanding.”23 In sum, the encounter with the text plays a crucial role in the reconstitution of the self. Soloveitchik too views the biblical text above all as an “other,” playing a crucial role in our self-interpretation. The Bible interprets us and offers a critique of our self-interpretation. Individuals do not see the dialectic inherent in their existence and tend to perceive themselves as unidimensional, and Scripture teaches us that this perception is mistaken. According to the new interpretation suggested by the text, the crises afflicting modern believers are not a transient episode but the essence of human existence, which we consciously tend to overlook. “Jobism” is the tendency to be secluded within one’s private experience, and Scripture teaches us that this self-perception is mistaken.24 Scripture’s interpretation of human existence functions in ways similar to that of conscience in Heidegger’s thought—it redirects us to our selves and challenges us to mold ourselves. Unlike Bultmann, who claims that the believer enters the text, Soloveitchik argues that believers are thrown back onto themselves to shape the unique structure of human existence, which Scripture offers us as the meaning of our lives. In sum, the holiness of the text does not depend upon facts, whatever these might be, and Scripture is not a source of additional, alternative information. The context for understanding Scripture is religious, and the meaning that keeps

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this context together is the existential experience. Scripture offers us a critical interpretation of our existence and becomes the challenge to our self-fashioning. Leibowitz is a partner to the demythologizing of the biblical text, and he too rejects the view of Scripture as alternative science. The meaning of Scripture lies in its role within living Judaism, which is halakhic Judaism. An analysis of his position follows. 2. The Meaning of Scripture in Leibowitz’s Thought Like Soloveitchik, Leibowitz argues that the scientific context is irrelevant to the question of the holiness and meaning of Scripture: “For the believing Jew... the holiness of Scripture does not hinge on beliefs, views or outlooks about the nature and the sources of the material found in the Bible and its historical and scientific value.”25 In addition to this distinction between the holiness of Scripture and its scientific-informative value, Leibowitz argues that Scripture never purported to supply information, nor can it do so. This statement relies on two arguments. The first is the characterization of these texts as holy texts. Whereas the category of holiness is only meaningful in a religious context, human knowledge belongs in the secular domain, so that whatever is part of the holiness category cannot serve as a means in the secular realm. He therefore rejects the option of a confrontation between Scripture and science, and argues that entering such a confrontation is synonymous with endorsing a secular outlook, namely, this is “the approach of someone entirely unaware of what the concept Holy Scriptures means—a pure religious category. The whole matter of information supply—as all matters concerned with meeting a human need or realizing a human value—is worldly rather than sacred.”26 As a second argument, Leibowitz raises an interesting theological consideration: One who approaches Scripture for the scientific information it provides... attests that he does not intend to worship God but that God (as it were) will worship him and serve his needs concerning information.... A person who truly believes... does not expect Scripture to teach him something about the world, nature, humanity or history; if he is interested in these problems—he will take the trouble of perusing these questions as far as science will allow, and will not dare to trouble God with them.27 The perception of Scripture as an informative text not only abrogates the category of holiness, but is also an act of defiance—instead of human beings worshipping God, God serves human beings. Scripture, then, not only never meant to provide scientific information but is also incapable of doing so. According to Leibowitz, this claim does not rest

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on “an ideology about the Torah or an arbitrary interpretation of the Torah, but is an empirical claim. We have some information about the world and about nature as the product of our scientific inquiry, and this information neither was nor can be retrieved from Scripture.”28 Leibowitz does not acknowledge the possibility of a “religious science.” As a modern person, he knows that science rests solely on empirical human knowledge, and delimited within its parameters. Knowledge unattainable through human cognition is not knowledge to begin with.29 With this claim, Leibowitz returns to one of the classic arguments of epistemology emphasized in the work of two thinkers who contributed to his Weltanschauung—Kant and the early Wittgenstein. Both stressed that human cognition cannot transcend its characteristic boundaries, as this would lead it to “a problem fraught with antinomies and paralogisms.”30 The conclusion warranted by this approach is a project demythologizing Scripture similar to the one that Soloveitchik endorses. Soloveitchik, in the wake of Bultmann, embarks on this move for existentialist reasons. Leibowitz, however, does so on the basis of two considerations—one religious, relating to the meaning of holiness and the status of God, and another epistemological, relating to the meaninglessness of mythological statements. The epistemological considerations underlying Leibowitz’s demythologizing endeavor are worth noting. His approach is not surprising, however, since religious considerations per se can only lead to a negative view of mythology, whereas the epistemological course enables a process that distils the original meaning of the text from the language of myth, as the following example shows: Ascribing any meaning to the first verse of the Bible beyond the great proclamation regarding the world’s standing before God is impossible, since this verse is unintelligible outside a religious context. Although this matter needs epistemological analysis, it is also a crucial theological issue. Even without going into this matter in depth, two issues can be pointed out: (1) “In the beginning” is untranslatable into any term or concept expressing something in the reality apprehended through human thought. Anyone with some grasp of philosophy—at least since Kant’s time— knows that the conceptual analysis of the infinity of time (and space) as attributes of the world brings with it antinomies and paralogisms. Answers to this problem, therefore, are meaningless to us… (2) Nor does the concept of “creation” parallel anything we have experienced or any concept derived from knowledge of the reality we perceive.31 Similarly, Leibowitz points out that the verse “And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai” (Exodus 19: 20) shows that “the human language in which the Torah is written may not be construed literally.”32 The gap between natural,

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mythical language and religious cognition forces us to delve into natural language in search for its deeper, hidden meanings. For instance, the only meaning of the verse “In the beginning God created” is that “the world is not God.”33 The religious kerygma the text teaches us is merely “the mighty call addressed to human beings to acknowledge the futility of heaven and earth.”34 Overcoming mythical language also enables us to understand anew the meaning of Scripture as a whole: From the standpoint of religious faith, the Torah and the entirety of Holy Scripture must be conceived as a demand which transcends the range of human cognition—the demand to know God and serve Him—a demand conveyed in various forms of human expression: prescriptions, vision, poetry, prayer, thought, and narrative.35 In this sense, behind much of Leibowitz’s religious thought is an attempt to motivate the believer to join in the demythologizing project. The purpose of pointing out the futility of endorsing a mythical (or scientific) world view concerning Scripture is to lead the believer toward a renewed process of biblical exegesis. When believers understand that the kerygma of the text does not lie in the information it provides, they become receptive to the possibility that the mythical meaning of the text is basically religious, entirely concerned with the meaning of the obligation to serve God. Whereas Soloveitchik’s existentialist stance places him closer to Fuchs and Ricoeur, Leibowitz endorses the Bultmannian Weltanschauung. But although he agrees with Bultmann that demythologizing exposes the text’s meaning, Leibowitz does not accept Bultmann’s claim that the purpose of the text is to teach us something about human beings. Instead, argues Leibowitz, the text points to the human religious obligation. Like Bultmann, Leibowitz too adopts the believer’s subjective viewpoint, and his revolutionary analysis is largely devoted to a discussion of the presumptions the believer brings to the text. His innovation is that he adopts Wittgenstein’s perspective on faith as a way of life that constructs the world picture through which human beings grasp the world. Faith is not a cluster of possible statements about the factual world assuming a status comparable to that of other statements.36 Instead, according to this approach, the meaning of faith emerges through the analysis of its mode of functioning within religious life. Leibowitz endorses this viewpoint and indicates that, in the lebensvelt of Jewish religious faith, we witness a hierarchical reversal in the relationship between Scripture and the Oral Law. Religious life does not assume its shape through “the five books of the Torah or... from the Bible, and it is not from them that we draw our sustenance.”37 Leibowitz repeatedly emphasizes this point in his writings,

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stressing that this is not an ideological assertion but a description of the living Jewish religion: The historical Jewish people never lived nor intended to live—and, in religious terms, was not meant to live—according to Scripture, but in fact lived according to the Oral Law. The impulse for its existence, its struggle, and its suffering came from a way of life dictated by Halakhah, instead than by values, trends, and visions that can be retrieved from Scripture.38 Leibowitz assumes that Scripture is the antithesis of Halakhah and the prayer book: whereas the second constitutes the living Jewish experience, “Scripture is not a constitutive moment in Judaism.”39 In light of this approach, Leibowitz argues that the Bible acquires its status as Holy Scripture through living Judaism, namely, through the Oral Law. Halakhah is what determines that some texts instead of others assume the status of Holy Scripture, and this status bears halakhic implications.40 Halakhah is also what provides the hermeneutical principle for interpreting Holy Scripture and the believer, whose world is shaped by religiosity as a way of life, ascribes to Scripture the meaning epitomized by this way of life per se.41 The entire halakhic corpus is, for Leibowitz, the normative embodiment of the duty to worship God, a duty that constitutes the meaning and sole purpose of this system.42 This pre-understanding determines the parameters of biblical exegesis: “The concern of the Torah and of Scripture is the acknowledgement of the human stance before God… the demand that the human creature should worship God.”43 Soloveitchik, who endorses the Fuchs variety of the existentialist approach, views the binding of Isaac or the drama of Job as instances of the confrontation between the ideal and the empirical structure of human consciousness. The story of Isaac teaches that the self assumes its shape through “infinite renunciation,” by transcending empirical givenness: “The beginning of the religious act is the sacrifice of the self, and its end—the finding of the self. But man cannot find himself without sacrificing the self before finding it.”44 The book of Job also teaches believers to be critical of Job’s attempt to detach himself from the community. Leibowitz cannot accept the thesis that the purpose of Scripture is to “serve” man, to offer a critique of his consciousness and his existence. The focus of religion is not the confrontation within consciousness but the religious obligation, and the believer should therefore seek the kerygma in the text instead of in a self-reflective approach. The story of Isaac is thus a narrative embodiment of the demand to worship God and to renounce all human values in the name of this obligation. The kerygma is eternal: “The daily performance of the Mitzvoth, which is not directed by man’s natural inclinations

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or drives but by his intention of serving God, represents the motivation animating the Aqedah.”45 Similarly, Job thinks that the meaning of the world is open to human understanding, and God makes him aware of his mistake: “Creation—insofar as it is divine—has no meaning at all; all developments and events within it are absurd.”46 Job, like Abraham, must also pass a test: “Is he prepared to believe in God not because of God’s function in Creation—His wisdom or justice—but because of his divinity?” This is the believer’s eternal test, since it is the criterion for distinguishing “fear of God not for its own sake,” which sees God as an instrument in the service of man, from “fear of God for its own sake,” which accepts the yoke of the religious obligation.47 This radical distinction between the realm of facts and the realm of values is characteristic of Leibowitz and reappears in his attitude to Scripture, but the issue still remains inconclusive. Even if Scripture does not provide information about the world, what is its reliability as a text given at Sinai? How to contend with the problem of biblical criticism? Leibowitz reverses the hierarchical relationship here as well—Scripture becomes holy because of Halakhah, not because of the Sinai revelation. Revelation, from the perspective of Judaism as a way of life, is the act of ascribing Halakhah itself to Scripture. The Oral Law “sanctified the Torah as divine revelation. The Jew lives through the Oral law but always sets the Lord before him, as revealed in the Torah.”48 Although slightly cryptic, these sentences probably mean that the concept of revelation is religiously meaningful only insofar as it does not provide information about an event that occurred at a given time and place, because facts are part of the secular realm—the realm of cognition that, according to Leibowitz, involves no values. As a concept, then, revelation is intelligible only within Halakhah’s normative system. But since revelation does not reflect a defined norm, this concept becomes a type of value relationship toward the normative system in general. This concept requires translation, from mythicalnatural language into religious language. In the act of translation, the sole meaning of revelation is “knowledge of the command we have been commanded.”49 Almost inevitably, this view of revelation results in another hierarchical reversal, parallel to that between Scripture and the Oral Law. For Leibowitz, Halakhah is a creative activity,50 and the human endeavor epitomized by Halakhah is what ascribes to this activity the value of God’s word: “The Jew believes that the decisions, the rulings, the decrees and the regulations of the Oral Law—despite their unquestionable human source—are actually the Torah by which we must abide.”51 The religious meaning of the entire system is not a function of its source, but of its purpose. Halakhah as a way of life is not meant to teach us the

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theological principle of “Torah from Heaven” but to direct our way of life “toward Heaven,” making biblical criticism irrelevant. 3. Summing up The crucial achievement of Soloveitchik and Leibowitz concerning the meaning of Scripture is the justification of its absolute autonomy. Scripture is independent from human cognition in that it is neither contingent on historical sources nor on the information they supply. Yet, whereas Soloveitchik finds factual information existentially irrelevant, Leibowitz finds scientific-factual information irrelevant to the religious obligation. Neither Leibowitz nor Soloveitchik, however, would agree with the thesis of the new criticism claiming that Scripture, like any literary text, enjoys absolute autonomy, in the sense that it offers an intra-textual world picture. This is not surprising since both thinkers approach Scripture as believers, expecting that the religious guidance they will gain through this text will fuse with their prior religious experience but will add a unique clarity to it. On this point, they continue the dominant hermeneutical tradition of Heidegger, Bultmann, and Gadamer, who presume “pre-understanding” or hermeneutical circularity, namely, they presume that the interpreter has a preunderstanding of what will be found in the text: “No exegesis is without presuppositions, inasmuch as the exegete is not a tabula rasa, but on the contrary, approaches the text with specific questions or with a specific way of raising questions and thus has a certain idea of the subject matter with which the text is concerned.”52 Bultmann, Leibowitz, and Soloveitchik rely on their religious world for this pre-understanding of Scripture, and the general hermeneutical principle fuses easily with the religious world view. Bultmann further argues that a genuine concern with Scripture requires a religious perspective. The text of Scripture, then, instead of a pre-understanding of its contents, requires a special attitude as a holy text meant to guide humankind, a feature that singles it out from all other texts we also approach with presuppositions.53 Soloveitchik differs from Leibowitz on the crucial question of whether our first understanding of the text is tentative or definitive. Soloveitchik, without stating so explicitly, fully endorses Bultmann’s presumption claiming that we approach the text from an “existential relation.”54 On these grounds, Bultmann concludes: “The understanding of the text is never a definitive one; but instead remains open because the meaning of the Scriptures discloses itself anew in every future.”55 The existential plight of believers shapes the questions they bring to the text in search of its kerygma, so that changes in their existential situation lead to changes in the meaning they disclose in the text.56

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The meaning of the creation story for Soloveitchik, as a dialectic between two modes of human existence, is contingent on the modern human condition. Although Soloveitchik does not fully admit this, he interprets biblical stories from a modern perspective. Consequently, the understanding of the kerygma’s existentialist meaning may have been different in the past and may also be different in the future. By contrast, Leibowitz does not argue that believers approach Scripture from their existential stance, or that they expect to find in it divine guidance concerning the conduct of their lives. Believers will find this guidance in Halakhah, which shapes a fixed and unchanging meaning for the biblical text, so that Leibowitz cannot adopt Bultmann’s fifth thesis concerning the tentativeness of pre-understanding. Quite the contrary: the understanding is definitive, recurrently describing the meaning of Judaism as it is already embodied in Halakhah. Although their success in preserving the status of Scripture is a significant achievement, the work of Soloveitchik and Leibowitz is still fraught with problems. Is it possible to understand the entire text of Scripture by resorting to one exclusive key? As for the meaning of this question regarding Soloveitchik: Can Scripture be interpreted from a purely existential perspective? Are all the narratives and norms presented in Scripture a description and critique of concrete human consciousness? Does not the “pre-understanding” Soloveitchik brings to the decoding of the text bar our access to Scripture per se? Believers, as described by Soloveitchik, find in Scripture no more than their world view, unconditioned by the text or even by generations of Jewish tradition but merely by the cultural-philosophical outlook with which they approach the text. Soloveitchik’s perception of Scripture is too close to the hermeneutical deconstructionist starting point, which questions the existence of a fixed stable text and assumes instead the continuous creative process: the reader is the writer of the text. But this closeness to deconstructionism is hard for believers, since genuine attention to a holy text requires us, if at all possible, to overcome subjective assumptions; to hear the eternal word of God instead of recurrently finding human consciousness in it. Kierkegaard, a thinker who deeply influenced Soloveitchik, was sensitive to this problem and emphasized the deep responsibility incumbent on believers, who can easily mistake their personal understanding for God’s will. In Kierkegaard’s view, this problematic is what shapes religious life, and he drew the warranted religious conclusion from the hermeneutical problem: the believer’s life is a prolonged struggle over the very meaning of faith itself.57 Although Soloveitchik often described a life of faith as a dialectical experience,58 he released the meaning of Scripture from this flux, but without sufficiently substantiating this view in his writings. A further question concerns the link between this existentialist interpretation and the normative sections of the Bible. Biblical normative injunctions

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extend to different realms of life and are not concerned with human consciousness or with its critique. Similar questions arise regarding Leibowitz: Is he correct when claiming that the only meaning of Scripture is the description of divine worship? Alternative interpretations of different sections of Scripture could be suggested, which are not focused on divine worship. His exegesis is merely one of many possible and available interpretations of Scripture, and definitely not the sole one. The biblical text is often an open text that invites diverse interpretations, and we can hardly confine it within the narrow boundaries that Leibowitz charted. This is definitely true for Leibowitz’s interpretation of the story of Job or the story of Isaac, but even more so for other narrative texts such as Song of Songs, Esther, or even Ecclesiastes. Even if we accept for the purpose of the discussion that the only meaning of Halakhah is the duty of divine worship, Leibowitz’s attempt to make this assumption the only valid principle of biblical exegesis is unsuccessful. It exacts too high a price by overlooking different options of textual interpretation, some even frequently endorsed in Jewish tradition. Rejecting the approach that examines Scripture in light of its sources or in light of the scientific information it provides does not require endorsing an approach that largely abrogates a quintessential feature of the biblical narrative—its openness to exegesis and homiletics. The main problem, however, is Leibowitz’s claim that the normative corpus of Scripture reflects only the religious obligation of divine worship. Many biblical commands deal with the regulation of human life instead of with the religious purpose of divine worship. Scripture nowhere suggests that the normative realm is only a means to a religious end. This critique obviously goes beyond Leibowitz’s exegesis of the biblical text, and concerns the deep foundations of his analysis of Halakhah itself.59 Releasing the text from the scientific problematic and perceiving it as autonomous does not require us to offer one single principle of interpretation. For this purpose, we need to develop a philosophy that will substantiate two assumptions. One is hermeneutical, justifying the principle of the text’s independence from any factual contexts, be it the text’s sources or the scientifichistorical information it may contain. If we do not proceed beyond this stage, we may face a religious challenge because freedom from factual contexts appears to require that we also give up such “religious facts” as the Creation and even the Sinai revelation. An additional, theoretical stage is required, justifying the sacred and compelling standing of the text while also providing a renewed interpretation of the religious facts. Of the two thinkers considered here, only Leibowitz suggests a philosophy attempting this complex move. Without substantiating such a philosophy, the achievement of releasing Scripture from

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factual contexts remains incomplete, since it fails to answer the believer’s basic questions concerning the status of the Sinai revelation. Finally, we should consider this chapter’s findings in the perspective of the return to tradition outlined in Chapter One. The two thinkers discussed in this chapter are aware of the problematic involved in the return to Scripture as a holy canonical text. Ultimately, the difficulties stem from the attempt to return to the text from the present, out of a cultural context entirely different from the religious one of Scripture. These thinkers asked themselves whether, in Ricoeur’s terms, it may be possible to narrow the distanciation between present and past. Both answered positively, though relying on different arguments that reflect different patterns of return to the tradition. Soloveitchik claimed that the return to Scripture is possible because the biblical text became a reflectivecritical foundation of the present. The return to tradition, then, takes place by bringing the past into the present. By contrast, Leibowitz held that the return to the biblical text is possible because the time dimensions are irrelevant; the kerygma of the biblical text transcends the past and the present and imposes an eternal demand on the believer. Soloveitchik’s discussion of the return to Scripture conveys a dynamic and dialogical perception: the return is a return to the tradition. Leibowitz’s attitude to Scripture, by contrast, conveys a return to traditionalism. As noted in Chapter One, we often find that underlying the return to traditionalism is a frontal contest with the challenges of the present. Leibowitz’s discussion about the status of the biblical text also expresses a desire to answer these challenges in a way that invalidates the present, a strategy compatible with his compartmentalization stance. This strategy, as noted, strives to preserve a clean, “protected” religious space, without encroachment from other reality contexts. Unsurprisingly, he adopts a similar stance in his approach to Scripture. Soloveitchik, as noted, sets up a dialectical model of life fraught with contradictions, simultaneously affirming and not affirming the present. His view of the biblical text reflects this dialectic. Returning the biblical text to the present is, implicitly, an affirmation of the present. But Scripture is a reflectivecritical interpretation of the present, so that this is a re-examination instead of a full affirmation. The next chapter, dealing with the views of Soloveitchik and Leibowitz concerning Halakhah, will show that the differences revealed in their respective perceptions of Scripture gradually fade away in their interpretation of Halakhah.

Seven HALAKHAH IN THE THOUGHT OF LEIBOWITZ AND SOLOVEITCHIK In the previous chapter, I examined the attitudes of Soloveitchik and Leibowitz to the meaning of Scripture for a contemporary person. In this chapter, I deal with their attitudes to the meaning of Halakhah. Halakhah and Scripture are the two foundations of historic Judaism, and an analysis of their attitude to each of them and to the relationship between them will clarify more fully these thinkers’ views of Judaism. Halakhah plays a unique role in the thought of Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, as the mode that epitomizes religious existence. Both view it as the medium shaping and expressing the believers’ consciousness, and embodying the totality of their values and beliefs. Instead of merely a system of norms compelling believers, Halakhah is the datum from which believers infer their place in the world and the character of their relationship with God. This turning of Halakhah into the pivotal philosophical issue involves a “Copernican revolution” in Jewish thought, which had traditionally focused on metaphysical and theological questions. Jewish philosophy had traditionally related to the institutions and the significance of Halakhah only from a theoretical perspective, deriving its role from the philosophical Weltanschauung. Halakhah had been part of a comprehensive theoretical tapestry instead of an independent irreducible element, although this statement should be qualified: the writings of Judah Halevi and Moses Mendelssohn do show incipient recognition of Halakhah as an autonomous realm. Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, then, introduced a dual innovation. First, both strive to describe and characterize Halakhah as it actually is. The history of Jewish thought records only few attempts to turn Halakhah into a subject of thematic inquiry. Second, contrary to the concern of mainstream Jewish philosophy with the spiritual world, the reality of everyday Jewish life had, until the last two centuries, centered on Halakhah. Both these thinkers, then, see the practical dimension as the prism for understanding Judaism. Given their common starting point and given the noted similarity between them, a comparative analysis of the meaning of Halakhah in their thought and of Halakhah’s role in the commitment to tradition is in place. 1. Halakhah as a Human Creation One apparently modernist expression in the thought of Soloveitchik and Leibowitz is their characterization of Halakhah as a human creation. In the

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following discussion, I consider the meaning of this perception of Halakhah in the context of their philosophy, and the extent to which it represents an acknowledgement of human autonomy. These are issues every legal theory broaches. Basically, these questions are concerned with the role of the judge—does the judge make law or discover law? Whereas the first option views the judge as a legislator, the second approaches the judge as “the mouth of the law,” in the apt wording suggested by Montesquieu. According to the first option, the judge fulfills a constitutive role as creator of the law, whereas according to the second, the judge’s role is merely declarative.1 Translating this general formulation into the terms of the current context leads to a basic question about the attitude of Halakhah toward Scripture and the Sinai revelation. According to the first option whereby judges make law, Scripture does not constrain halakhic sages, who play a constitutive role in the shaping of Halakhah—a human creation. According to the second, halakhic sages discover what was given at Sinai and play only a declarative role.2 In the attempt to decode the relationship between past and present, this question is decisive. The first option upholds the primacy of the present, of the halakhist’s concrete activity within a given place and time, whereas the second focuses on the disclosure of the past, which is given a constitutive role in Halakhah. Soloveitchik and Leibowitz endorse the view of halakhic sages as the creators of Halakhah, an approach ostensibly compatible with their modernist orientation. Neither of them ever tires of emphasizing the role of the human element in the constitution of Halakhah. On closer scrutiny, a more complex picture emerges. Let us begin with Soloveitchik’s view. According to Soloveitchik, the most prominent characteristic of halakhic man is the independence and creativity that characterize the halakhic endeavor: Halakhic man is a mighty ruler in the kingdom of spirit and intellect. Nothing can lead him astray; everything is subject to him, everything is under his sway and heeds his command. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, has, as it were, handed over His imprimatur, His official seal in Torah matters, to man; it is as if the Creator of the world Himself abides by man’s decision and instruction.3 The assertion that Halakhah reflects human autonomy and creativity contradicts, prima facie, the assumption that God is the Torah’s supreme legislator. How can we reconcile the assumption that the Torah is “from Heaven” with the claim that the Torah “is not in Heaven”? Soloveitchik’s response is that halakhists derive their authority from the divine legislator: “The Holy One, blessed be He, has, as it were, stripped Himself of His ornaments—i.

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e., His dominion—and has handed it over to Israel, to the earthly court. The earthly court decrees, and the Holy One, blessed be He, complies.”4 Halakhah as a human creation, then, even when failing to disclose the hidden contents of revelation as such, reflects the will of the divine legislator who invested halakhists with the authority to shape and create Halakhah “on the basis of their intellect and knowledge.”5 The study of halakhic authority points to two models: one epistemic, the other deontic.6 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. Whereas the scientist epitomizes the epistemic model, the legislator embodies the deontic model. The perception of Halakhah as a human creation is easy to reconcile with the deontic model, which balances the recognition of God’s word as absolutely valid with the authority invested in human beings to determine Halakhah. Not surprisingly, then, Soloveitchik relies on the deontic model of Halakhah. A more careful analysis, however, reveals that the term “creation” has a unique meaning within Soloveitchik’s discourse. In his view, halakhic sages express their creativity in two dimensions: (1) The free theoretical construction of Halakhah; (2) The autonomous act of issuing a decision. In Halakhic Man and in “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod,”7 Soloveitchik develops the thesis that the halakhic sage strongly resembles the modern mathematician, who deals with an abstract conceptual system. Halakhic man too “built a world of ideas and discovered the free halakhic construction” (75). As a creative person, the halakhic sage fashions an internally coherent conceptual world, and Halakhah thereby becomes “a complete deductive method” (81). This pure conceptual world does not derive from reality, just as the conceptual system of the mathematical sciences does not follow from reality. Its source is the free power of halakhic man, “who creates and builds an ideal world” (75). But this presentation of Halakhah as a free construction, exclusively concerned with its internal coherence, suffers from two basic problems: (1) Over-focusing on the conceptual system and its internal relationships may dim the importance of Halakhah’s normative contents. In Nathan Rotenstreich’s formulation: This system [Halakhah] has a logical structure, but has an advantage over logic: it has a direction that guides the decision… Although the construction may be possible as far as internal consistency is concerned, it may be impossible regarding the internal logic of its normative system that, by definition, is not neutral concerning its options.8 (2) The perception of halakhic activity as fundamentally a theoretical construction may lead to an implausible gap in the characterization of Ha

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lakhah. On the one hand is the Halakhah of the study house, which focuses on theoretical study; on the other is Halakhah as a system to be concretized in reality, “soiled with the gritty realia of practical Halakhah.”9 Soloveitchik’s writings do not provide an answer to the first problem but the second problem, as noted below, is one of the pivots of his halakhic thought. Whatever the solution to this problem, the creative dimension in Soloveitchik’s thought comes to the fore mainly on the emphasis on Halakhah as a free theoretical construction. In Halakhic Man, however, Soloveitchik stresses an additional dimension. Creativity comes to the fore not only in the theoretical construction but also in the autonomous decision of the halakhic sages.10 Regarding the nature of this autonomy, and the question of whether it implies that the sages make Halakhah, Soloveitchik states: The freedom of halakhic man refers not to the creation of the law itself, for it was given to him by the Almighty, but to the realization of the norm in the concrete world. The freedom which is rooted in the creation of the norm has brought chaos and disorder to the world. The freedom of realizing the norm brings holiness to the world.11 Through his halakhic activity, then, halakhic man discovers the contents of revelation. Aaron Lichtenstein, one of Soloveitchik’s most distinguished disciples, describes halakhic activity as a discovery of what already exists in the given principles.12 The process of discovery unfolds through the actual realization of Halakhah in the world; each application of the norm to a new situation discovers what is already latent within the law.13 This interpretation, which appears to fit Soloveitchik’s formulations, restricts the creative dimension that Soloveitchik ascribes to halakhic activity, and is even antithetical to the notion of theoretical Halakhah as a creative pursuit. If Soloveitchik is to remain consistent in his thinking, this restriction appears inevitable. In “From Thence You Shall Seek,” Soloveitchik does argue explicitly that the content of Halakhah “in itself and in its essence is one of discovery… Halakhah cannot liberate itself from its subjugation to the system of a priori assumptions with which it begins and ends.”14 This restriction of the creative dimension is not a trivial matter since, in the normative practical domain, halakhic sages issue their rulings on the basis of their autonomy. If their autonomy does not imply that they make the law, then halakhic sages only discover the law through their decisions. Creativity is thereby limited to text glosses and excludes practical Halakhah.15 In this spirit, David Hartman justifiably notes that Soloveitchik’s hero is the scholar at the house of study.16

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Soloveitchik emerges as drawing a distinction between the judge and the creative dimension in Halakhah. All that is left of his creativity thesis regarding Halakhah as a legal system is the claim that halakhic decisions are not subject to external authorities, such as prophecy or heavenly voices. Halakhists must act according to their intellect and their knowledge.17 When they do so, the intellect becomes an organon for discovering the content of the Halakhah given at Sinai. In sum, underlying the modern terminology about halakhic creativity is quite a conservative perception of Halakhah as the discovery of God’s word, and creativity is only evident in a realm that is purely theoretical. Leibowitz too supports the perception of Halakhah as a human creation, and this thesis recurs throughout his work.18 In his view, this is the correct representation of Jewish tradition, instead of the view claiming that “whatever a scholar will innovate in the future has already been told to Moses at Sinai.” Leibowitz refers to the claim that Halakhah is a human creation as “the dogma of Judaism.”19 Whereas Soloveitchik founds the idea of creativity on the authority granted to halakhic sages to act according to their understanding, Leibowitz relies on a reversal of the accepted relationship between the Torah and the Oral Law. In his view, the Oral Law is a human creation, but “it is the Halakhah which determines the content and meaning of Scripture.”20 Leibowitz, then, rests the notion that Halakhah is a human creation on the relationship between the text and its interpretation. Given that the significance of Scripture is determined through a process of human interpretation, Halakhah is a human creation. The meaning of this assertion is far-reaching. From the relationship between interpretation and text, Leibowitz infers that not only is the interpretation of Scripture (and thus most of Halakhah) a human creation, but that the very characterization of Scripture as such is a human decision: “The religion of Israel, the world of Halakhah and the Oral Law, was not produced from Scripture. Scripture is one of the institutions of the religion of Israel.”21 Such a radical formulation, making every single element within Halakhah a human creation except for the general idea of the Torah granting authority to its interpreters, raises several problems. First, what is the meaning of the Sinai revelation as the constitutive event of this entire construct? Second, in what sense can we characterize the Torah as divine? As for the first question, Leibowitz argues that the Sinai revelation does not play a constitutive role in the halakhic system, and is merely one of the institutions that human beings shape. Leibowitz distinguishes the factual question of whether the Sinai revelation did take place, which he probably answers affirmatively, from the value question, which determines the event’s constitutive status. Since Halakhah is a human creation, it determines the meaning of the Sinai theophany, which is one of its institutions. The role of this institution is to confer on the halakhic system as a whole the validity of a commandment

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incumbent on everyone.22 The Sinai revelation, then, ascribes to human Halakhah the validity of divine law. This statement, however, remains quite cryptic. Does it not blur the distinction between the commander and the commanded, making the subjective human element the sole foundation of Halakhah?23 If Leibowitz removes from the Sinai revelation its constitutive status vis-à-vis Halakhah, how does the halakhic system return this status to the Sinai theophany? Leibowitz’s position, then, is extremely radical. Since the Sinai revelation lacks constitutive meaning, the claim that the Torah is divine becomes a belief imposed upon the halakhic system through the believer’s decision: “The foundation of our faith is that our Oral Law, which is a human attainment, is the divine Torah binding upon us. This is the dogma of Judaism.”24 This belief, like others in Leibowitz’s thought, has no epistemic significance and is hard to substantiate. It is a kind of primary value decision.25 Ostensibly, this description of Halakhah might offer a plausible theory for the understanding of concrete halakhic activity, since all legislative and exegetic activity unfolds through human-immanent tools—halakhic institutions reflect human activity instead of divine revelation. But Leibowitz is not entirely at ease with the religious price this position exacts and develops two moderating elements. First, in his early work, he does acknowledge that the system’s source is transcendent. In 1930, he writes: “‘Torah’ could have two meanings: on the one hand the transcendent idea… on the other…all the thoughts, the laws, and the rulings ‘that are not in heaven.’”26 Second, Leibowitz claims that halakhic activity derives its authority from the Torah: “The Halakhah of the Oral Teaching, which is a human product, derives its authority from the words of the living God in Scripture.”27 When claiming that Halakhah is a human creation,28 Leibowitz relies on sources explicitly emphasizing that halakhic sages act by virtue of the authority invested in them by the divine legislator. These two factors can, at most, substantiate the idea that Halakhah is subject to “human manipulation,”29 but not that it is entirely human. Ultimately, the tension within Leibowitz’s philosophy reflects the difficulty of reconciling the two elements shaping his thought. On the one hand is his positivist philosophy, which compels him to refrain from statements about God or about the Torah’s transcendence,30 and on the other, the basic assumptions characteristic of Halakhah as a system resting on the authority that God invested in human beings. In light of this analysis, it appears that both thinkers claim that Halakhah is a human creation. In the tension between the two assumptions (“Torah from heaven” as opposed to “it is not in heaven”), both endorse the second assumption: human beings receive the Torah from heaven according to their decision.31 Leibowitz’s formulation is more radical than Soloveitchik’s. This difference

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between them, as shown below, has interesting implications for additional characterizations of Halakhah. 2. Halakhah as a Closed System The perception of Halakhah as a human creation could suggest that halakhic decisions reflect the needs and the conditions of the reality that generated them. Assuming a transition from a creative to a historicist perception of Halakhah, whereby Halakhah is a factual datum that develops from a factual context, becomes highly tempting in these circumstances. But Leibowitz and Soloveitchik categorically reject this option by describing Halakhah as a closed system that is not at all determined by any elements outside it. The key question concerns the nature of the elements within the system that determine its closure. Soloveitchik argues that Halakhah has “an unchangeable rhythm of its own.”32 He describes Halakhah as a “method, an approach that creates noetic unity.”33 He further argues: “The halakhic legal system, as a hokhmah, has its own methodology, mode of analysis, conceptualized rationale.”34 Soloveitchik’s frequent comparison of Halakhah to the natural sciences and to mathematics reveals that the closure of the system reflects its functioning as a legal system, which begins from given assumptions and infers its decisions according to an objective system of rules. Halakhah, then, resembles a deductive system, whose original assumptions are the contents given at Sinai, and its rules an a priori system of laws that was also given at Sinai. The system proceeds from its assumptions by following rules. This perception confirms the limited scope that Soloveitchik grants to creativity in his view of the halakhic endeavor. The perception of Halakhah is that of a formal and positivist legal system, within which the halakhic sage applies “Halakhah” to a given reality and thereby discovers what it includes. Soloveitchik admits that halakhic activity proceeds through questions generated by the unfolding reality. Reality functions for him as the motive impelling halakhic sages to activate the system instead of as an element within the decision-making process: The event is the psychological motive that propels pure thought into its orbit. As soon as it begins its course along its specific orbit, however, its movement is not subject to the event but to compliance with its unique normative-ideal lawfulness… When a rabbi sits in judgment on the question of an agunah, his decision is not prompted by feelings of sympathy… but relies on theoretical halakhic principles. Only critical and precise logical inferences dictate his ruling.35

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This description of Halakhah as a deductive legal system may fit the theoretical type of study common in the Brisk academy of Soloveitchik’s ancestors, but is it a suitable description of the work of halakhic sages in their rulings and responsa? A vast literature on the rules of Halakhah is available, but to what extent do these rules determine the halakhic decision? To what extent do halakhists resort to abstract thought principles? Even a fleeting glimpse at responsa literature will suffice to grasp the non-deductive characteristics of this genre. Contrary to this characterization of Halakhah as a legal formal system, extensive evidence also shows that Halakhah is a system of values, where concepts of good and worthy have primacy.36 The study of halakhic literature also exposes the central role of the halakhist’s discretion. Consider, for instance, Joshua Falk’s analysis of the rabbinic saying “Every judge issuing an absolutely true ruling becomes, as it were, a partner of the Almighty”:37 When they said absolutely true ruling, they meant that the judge issues rulings according to the time and the place, so that the ruling will be absolutely true. This means that he may sometimes deviate from the actual Torah law, because the judge must sometimes go beyond the letter of the law [lifnim mi-shurat ha-din] according to the time and the issue. And when he fails to do so, although the ruling is true, it is not absolutely true. In this spirit, the rabbis taught that Jerusalem was destroyed because rulings abided strictly by the letter of the law rather than going beyond it.38 Falk distinguishes between a “true” ruling, resting on a formal-deductive inference, and an “absolutely true” ruling, which takes the circumstances of the case into account. His view is that what we need is Halakhah case by case instead of Halakhah “by the book.” Falk refers to this deviation from the rule as going “beyond the letter of the law,” but his reading of this expression is strikingly different from that adopted in the Talmud. According to the Talmud, “beyond the letter of the law” means an act beyond one’s duty, whereas for Falk it means an instruction contrary to one’s duty. Falk, who is aware of this difference, sees the use of the expression in both cases as no more than an analogy or, in his words, “in this spirit.” The analogy relies on the feature common to both—a critique of halakhic formalism. From a halakhist, we expect more than this formalism. He is not required to be a creature who lives by the book, insensitive to concrete reality. Falk, and not Soloveitchik, describes the standard operative modes of halakhic man.39 In one instance, Soloveitchik retreats from this deductive-formal model. In an allusion to religious-secular cooperation, Soloveitchik states:

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I once said that there exist problems for which one cannot find a clear-cut decision in the Shulkhan Arukh… one has to decide intuitively. Sometimes one cannot even know whether a decision was correct… Like Abraham in his hour, we pray to God… He should see the dedication with which we work in certain situations… and He should wipe out our errors.40 Reconciling this statement with a perception of Halakhah as a closed, deductive system is not easy. If Halakhah is such a system, is there any room for intuitive decisions that skip the inference process? Does not this skipping hint at a basic flaw in an imperfect system? How can judges not know whether their rulings are true? In a formal-deductive method, drawing a logically correct inference from assumptions ensures correct conclusions, and this action is definitely not intuitive. Whereas the characterization of Halakhah as a deductive system is typical of Soloveitchik as a Brisk scholar, his other statements reflect his stance as a halakhist, aware that halakhic decisions rest on the judge’s discretion and are impossible to deduct from the system’s assumptions. Often, judicial discretion does not rely on the Shulkhan Arukh but on the halakhist’s values and ideas. In this example, the decision to cooperate with secular Jews rests on the religiousZionist ideology of the Mizrahi, which numbered Soloveitchik among its leaders. It was this ideology, instead of the system’s theoretical assumptions, that set intuition on its course. Halakhic decisions thus entail a constant awareness of the possibility of error, together with a deep sense that halakhists “propose” to God what, in their judgment, is the best decision possible. For Leibowitz too, Halakhah is a closed system: “The foundations of the Halakhah are themselves of halakhic nature, and its transformations through the ages reflect factors immanent to halakhic thinking.”41 In his view, what determines the closure of Halakhah is the character of the considerations that guide halakhic sages in their actions. Halakhah, then, is not a deductive system that derives decisions from assumptions, but one where decisions reflect unique considerations. In his view, halakhists “are guided by considerations which appear to them grounded either in the Halakhah itself or in the conditions necessary for halakhic observance.”42 Elsewhere, Leibowitz speaks about the unique consideration and refers to it as “religious interest” and even as “religious opportunism.”43 This characterization of Halakhah as a system that functions on the basis of considerations enables Leibowitz a more realistic description of the halakhic endeavor. First, correct considerations cannot be derived deductively, and the decision concerning the nature of the considerations dictated by Halakhah and necessary for the existence of religion is debatable. Leibowitz states: “The Halakhah cannot be unambiguously defined in terms of its contents.”44 Closure is not determined at the practical normative level but is inherent in the system,

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which functions according to unique, even if potentially controversial, considerations Second, the assumption that Halakhah functions according to human— hence not absolutely valid and necessary—considerations makes halakhic errors intelligible and legitimate. A decision based on a particular consideration may turn out to be erroneous, if the consideration was mistaken. Leibowitz, as usual, offers a radical formulation of this view: “In the divine Torah, therefore, as manifest in its historical-realistic embodiment, we find what we find in all human deeds, including the errors and mistakes that confound human beings.”45 This statement enables Leibowitz then to argue that Halakhah is subject to progress, in the sense that every generation corrects the mistakes of previous ones and will itself be corrected by future ones, an approach allowing him to be critical of well known halakhic teachings. For instance, he argues that the halakhic decision that women are exempted from the study of Torah “is a grievous error and is likely to prove disastrous for historical Judaism.”46 Third, the assumption that some of these considerations reflect needs that must be met in order to ensure Halakhah’s very existence creates a link between Halakhah and reality, since needs are determined according to given factual circumstances. Leibowitz’s stance on several crucial issues also reflects this link. For instance, regarding political, economic, and social questions, he writes: “No religious position can be formulated in principle concerning these problems. Each must be discussed on its own merits, according to the given time, place, and circumstances.”47 Elsewhere, he claims that the command “You shall appoint over you a king” (Deuteronomy 17: 15) is not in accord with the spirit of the Torah, but is accepted “for reasons of national welfare and even the nation’s very existence.”48 Whereas Soloveitchik sets up a deductive model, in which Halakhah functions in detachment from the factual context and relates exclusively to its normative assumptions, Leibowitz is aware of the complex relationships between Halakhah and reality. Often, the halakhic decision does not follow from theoretical assumptions but from the basic consideration of ensuring the existence of Halakhah in a changing reality. Leibowitz even argues the existence of a realm related to the structure and values of the society.49 In the wake of Eliezer Goldman, he calls this realm “meta-Halakhah.”50 Regarding this realm, “we…cannot perpetuate the halakhic decisions of our fathers dating from a social reality which differed radically from our own.”51 Often, according to Leibowitz, the halakhic path for contending with a changing reality will not be interpretation and inference from the given system, which is inappropriate to the new reality, but new legislation.52 Recognizing changing reality as an element that is present in halakhic rulings leads him to conclude that many halakhic norms are “determined only with time.”53 In principle, then, Leibowitz sees no

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difference between different types of halakhic decisions: “The ‘need of the hour’ legislation of our generation will also be a Torah law, as if given at Sinai.”54 But if Halakhah acknowledges and takes into account the social, economic, and political reality, to what extent can we view it as a closed system? According to Leibowitz, two factors ensure the system’s closure—halakhic authority and the purpose of halakhic decisions. In his view, halakhic sages “derive authority from Sinai”55 to act and issue rulings. This authority is what determines that Halakhah is not merely a reflection of reality, because the people in authority determine halakhic norms. An institutionalized system of authority figures mediates the link between reality and the norm, which leads to Halakhah’s closure. Leibowitz, like Soloveitchik, adopts the deontic model of halakhic authority as the basis of the halakhic system’s religious validity. Yet, this element closes the system only formally because, from a content point of view, halakhic decisions can reflect reality. Leibowitz does not offer a systematic theory concerning authority, which is an extremely problematic issue requiring analysis of many questions: Is there an institutionalized authority? Who has the authority? Did historical Halakhah reflect the decisions of the people in authority? How is authority determined? Leibowitz holds that we can overlook these complex questions because the closure of Halakhah is a function of the second principle. In his view, the decisive factor in the closure of Halakhah is the type of consideration guiding halakhic decisions, the intention of “establishing the rule of Torah over their lives.”56 But what does it mean to establish the rule of Torah? One option is that this is an alternative formulation of another of Leibowitz’s key ideas, stating that the central purpose of Halakhah is the service of God.57 This interpretation, although definitely plausible, leads to a strange contradiction in Leibowitz’s thought. We know that, for Leibowitz, “the service of God” means that all human values are annulled and overridden by the “fear and love of God.”58 At the crux of religious life, then, is the religious obligation. But if this is what ensures the closure of the halakhic system, then we must renounce all human values, including the meta-halakhic values that Leibowitz argues are the basis of many halakhic decisions! If we wish to circumvent this paradox, we cannot explain the purposefulness of halakhic decisions as directed toward the service of God and must instead relate to the observance of Halakhah and its preservation as a legal system: Halakhah must contend with reality in order to ensure its survival. The consideration guiding halakhic sages when detecting” needs that must be met in order to ensure Halakhah’s very existence” is how the halakhic system will survive in ever-changing circumstances. The purpose of the halakhic consideration, then, is coextensive with the needs of the halakhic system; not reality and its values impose the decision, but the need to preserve the Torah within it. Regardless of the interpretation we choose, closing the halakhic system does not

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automatically result in the uniformity and identity of halakhic contents throughout history. Halakhic contents are not permanent. Leibowitz indeed argues that some halakhic norms are only “a paradigm offered by the Torah” (156), as proven by the actual functioning of the halakhic system despite a constantly changing reality. This analysis of Leibowitz’s stance points to what we may call his halakhic realism: awareness of the mechanisms, the modes of action, and the rulings of Halakhah as an active legal system. But this halakhic realism is incompatible with Leibowitz’s religious stance, which views Judaism as a “demanding religion” that imposes obligations in conflict with human values (14). Since Halakhah takes into account a changing reality, even if only for the sake of survival, human values are not “annulled and overridden by fear and love of God.” In this sense, the comparison between Soloveitchik and Leibowitz is interesting. Both reach an impasse in their ability to reconcile their theoretical assumptions with concrete halakhic action. This tension, however, is more transparent in Leibowitz’s philosophy, and ultimately evident in his two conflicting characterizations of halakhic law. One views Halakhah as a legal system that regulates religious existence vis-à-vis a given reality. The other, which is a better reflection of Leibowitz’s basic religious assumptions, views Halakhah as an ideal system of laws that is not determined by reality. For Leibowitz, then, the characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system is one of the options available in his halakhic theory, whereas for Soloveitchik, this is the best description of the halakhic system. 3. Halakhah as an Ideal System Leibowitz’s characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system does not mean to present Halakhah as reflecting an ontological system of ideas, since Halakhah is a human creation. The ideal nature of Halakhah merely implies that neither the conditions of reality nor historical changes can determine halakhic decisions. “Judaism in its actual embodiment as the service of God in the form of halakhic practice is ahistorical” (104). From this perspective: “If halakhic rules and regulations changed—or were even deliberately modified—in accordance with changes and innovations in historical conditions, that does not indicate that history is constitutive of Halakhah or a determining factor. The changes reflect forced submission to irresistible external pressure” (104-105). Leibowitz’s philosophy, as noted, involves a measure of halakhic realism that describes Halakhah as is. The above passage, then, does not describe a later shift in Leibowitz’s thought from realism to idealism. The article where Leibowitz presents his thesis about the ahistorical and ideal character of Halakhah is a lecture he delivered in 1980, when he substantiated the notion of

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halakhic realism in “The Status of Women: Halakhah and Meta-Halakhah” (128-131). Halakhic realism is more prominent in Leibowitz’s early thought, while his later writings highlight Halakhah’s ideal dimensions. The religious value of the service of God is the quintessential expression of his characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system. Were Halakhah a reflection of the individual’s needs and values as a concrete entity, it would not be God’s service but the placement of “man at the center—as against what is customarily inscribed on the lectern before the ark in the synagogue: ‘I have set God always before me’ (Psalms 16: 8).”59 Note that the ideality of Halakhah is synonymous for Leibowitz with the Torah’s eternity and divine origin. The eternity of the Torah is evident in our inability to ever fully realize it because of its ideal character and its demand of ceaseless individual devotion: “It always remains an eternal signpost indicating the right direction on an infinitely extended road. Man cannot observe the Torah in its entirety because it is divine, not human… Hence, what is meant by ‘observance of the Torah’ can only be the perpetual effort to observe it.”60 Halakhah as an ideal system is not a mere random aggregation of ideal behavioral norms since, according to Leibowitz, these norms reflect a unified system aiming to serve God.61 Contrary to his frequent claim, then, Leibowitz does not only offer an empirical argument that equates Judaism with a system of norms but also ascribes to them a purpose that endows them with religious meaning. The claim that Judaism is a system of norms could, in principle, be justified empirically. But the claim about the system’s religious meaning is a theory that we cannot directly derive from his description of the halakhic system. Is the service of God Halakhah’s sole purpose? Is not the purpose of many halakhic rules to regulate human life founded on justice and fairness? Abraham son of Maimonides formulates this principle concerning the barmatsra law, which grants the right of first refusal to the contiguous neighbor [bar-matsra] of a property that is for sale: Do you think that their [the sages’] ruling stating that the bar-matsra law does not apply to wives and orphans was arbitrary or unjustified? It is not, for everything Halakhah mentions has definite reasons, obvious to anyone who is wise and understanding… The ruling on bar-matsra is correct and just, and because of its fairness, Gentiles also enforce it.62 Several similar sources cast strong doubt on Leibowitz’s stance: can we disregard norms focusing on the need to regulate human existence? However we may choose to answer these questions, Leibowitz turns his characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system into a foundation of his ethos on the remaking of existence. Real life becomes the arena for human self-molding, for the overcoming of impulses and inclinations, which he defines as an endless task.63

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This definition rests on two claims: one theological and one religious. Theologically, he endorses the claim that God is transcendent and therefore separated from human beings by an infinite gap. In this context, he quotes the verse: “for God is in heaven and you on the earth” (Ecclesiastes 5: 1), from which he concludes that the observance of the commandments, which is “man’s path to God,” can never end, “for after each act the position of man remains as it was before. The aim of proximity to God is unattainable. It is infinitely distant.”64 This approach is surprisingly similar to that of Karl Barth. Leibowitz rejected the claim that Barth had influenced him and claimed “that’s nonsense.”65 If Barth did not influence Leibowitz, they had similar religious intuitions, reflecting Christian traditions more closely than Jewish ones. His religious argument is: since the ideal system reflects the demand to serve God, Halakhah neither can nor needs adaptation to human needs and interests. The very opposition between the norms and the concrete facts of the human condition turn the realization of Halakhah into an endless existential task. Because of the gap between real and ideal, religious existence becomes fraught with crisis, as symbolized in the binding of Isaac [akedah]: What is the akedah? The akedah is the religious crisis par excellence. Here, the Almighty appears before man not as a God for him, but as a God demanding everything from him… as a God demanding divine worship even when it means the renunciation of all human values… all is annulled by the service of God. And there is no greater crisis: the conflict between man’s reality—which includes both his material and his spiritual presence—and his standing before God… A crisis is not an event or a special situation that problematizes faith, but the essence of religious faith, the essence of the fear of God. It negates the superstition about the harmony of human existence.66 Crisis in Leibowitz’s philosophy, then, unfolds in the believer’s consciousness as a result of the tension between the ideal demand and factual existence,67 a matter touching on the very essence of religious life. The nature of the religious life shaped by the halakhic system emerges as extremely relevant to the meaning of halakhic norms. If crisis is not a mark of religious existence, we will have to conclude that the ideal norm is not in conflict with concrete reality. Phenomenologically, an unequivocal description of religious life as stamped by crisis is hard to endorse. Leibowitz might have avoided this problematic by claiming that this is a normative instead of a factual description—crisis should be a mark of religious life. But this would be a strange claim: if religious life is not phenomenologically marked by crisis, ideal norms and factual existence are not in such a sharp conflict and the very

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characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system clashing with factual existence appears questionable. The claim that religious life is a life of crisis does not reflect an empirical description of Halakhah but a theory of Halakhah that is not easy to substantiate. In sum, this problem undermines the very characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system and its symbolic identification with the binding of Isaac prevalent in Leibowitz’s writings. Whereas the characterization of Halakhah as an ideal system is, as noted, only one of the trends that Leibowitz endorses, for Soloveitchik this is his central thesis. This is the view he emphasizes in Halakhic Man68 and in the later essay, “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod.” The ideality of Halakhah has a dual meaning, corresponding to the dual meaning of Halakhah in his thought: Halakhah as a theoretical activity—“the pure halakhic thought activity”—and Halakhah as a system of norms to be realized in the world: “halakhic realization.”69 At the theoretical level, Halakhah’s nature as a pure and abstract conceptual system determines its ideality.70 At the normative-practical level, the ideality of Halakhah means that the normative system does not derive from factual reality.71 Halakhah is an a priori legal system through which the believer approaches reality,72 it is the form and the reality, it is matter.73 Soloveitchik’s claims are at times slightly blurred, and my discussion suggests a plausible interpretation that relies on textual support. Regarding Halakhah as theory, Soloveitchik can support a conceptual framework that perceives it as a human creation.74 By contrast, concerning Halakhah as a normative system, he cannot endorse a conceptual framework, for two reasons: (1) Soloveitchik assumes that Halakhah is a necessary and a priori system, characteristics hardly compatible with a perception of Halakhah as a free construction of the human mind. (2) The basic religious assumption, stating that the contents of Halakhah epitomize a “vision of supra-cognitive and supraontological revelation,”75 implies that Halakhah is not a human construction but the discovery of a given content through human cognition.76 These assumptions enable Soloveitchik to characterize the halakhic system by relying on Platonic or Husserlian theories. According to Platonic thought, Halakhah is a system of ontologically independent ideas discovered by the human mind. By contrast, Husserlian philosophy is a midway theory between Platonism and conceptualism, stating that ideas are in transcendental consciousness and we come to know them though objective and unmediated observation. Soloveitchik rejects the Husserlian theory because of its claim that ideas are immanent to consciousness. In such a construct of Halakhah, the Sinai revelation and the giving of the Torah become meaningless. Soloveitchik, then, supports Platonic theory.77 This conclusion corroborates my claim that Soloveitchik supports a declarative theory of Halakhah: through the halakhic endeavor, halakhic sages discover the system of ideas. Ultimately, autonomous

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intellectual activity is directed toward “transcendental conjunction with the infinite intellect of the Torah Giver,”78 the source of ideas. This analysis points to the vast gulf between Leibowitz and Soloveitchik. Although Leibowitz does not relate to Halakhah as a system of given ideas, he still views it as an ideal system, in the sense that it does not depend on reality. For Soloveitchik, Halakhah is not only independent of reality but is also a system of given ideas. What are the relationships between this system of ideas and the real world? An interesting tension emerges here in Soloveitchik’s thought, which is already evident in his early essay, Halakhic Man. On the one hand, Soloveitchik claims that “his [halakhic man’s] deepest desire is not the realization of the Halakhah but rather the ideal construction.”79 And then notes: “Halakhic man is not particularly concerned about the possibility of actualizing the norm in the concrete world.”80 These statements provide a good perspective on the Platonic viewpoint, which focuses on the transcendent, on the pure idea. From this viewpoint, the ethos of shaping the world also undergoes modification—no longer an ethos of shaping a real world but one of fashioning a theoretical world. The freedom and the creativity of halakhic man emerge in this world through theoretical innovation and construction. But Soloveitchik also offers the halakhic ethos of shaping the real world: “Halakhic man’s ideal is to subject reality to the yoke of the Halakhah”81; “The task of the religious individual is bound up with the performance of commandments, and this performance is confined to this world, to physical, concrete reality…. Only against the concrete, empirical backdrop of this world can the Torah be implemented.”82 These two contradictory trends appear to reflect the two meanings of Halakhah in Soloveitchik’s thought: as a theoretical and as a normative-practical system. If we perceive Halakhah through the pure conceptual dimension, the purpose of the system is the abstract construction per se. Taken one step further, this perception places Halakhah squarely within a world of ideas. But if Halakhah is a normative-practical system, the religious ideal becomes the realization of the norm in the world. Whereas in Halakhic Man Soloveitchik outlines both trends, in “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod” he ranks them hierarchically, and the conceptual theoretical system emerges as preferable to realization.83 Acknowledgement of this hierarchy enables Soloveitchik to claim that, upon discovery that no harmony is possible between the ideal and the real, halakhic man “retreats into his uniqueness and into his ideal world.”84 The theoretical approach, then, does not envisage an endless effort to realize the ideal within the real as a constitutive value of the halakhic system. By contrast, the approach that views Halakhah as a system for endowing this world with holiness compels a Sisyphean struggle for the realization of the norms in

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concrete existence. Accordingly, Soloveitchik argues that “heroism is the content of Judaism.”85 This issue provides further evidence of the differences between Leibowitz and Soloveitchik. Leibowitz characterizes Halakhah as a system of norms to be realized in the world. Accordingly, he outlines a consistent approach that views the effort to realize Halakhah in the world as a religious demand. Furthermore, since he views the tension between the ideal and the real world (where Halakhah is to be realized) as fundamental, crisis and conflict become the essential characteristic of religious existence. By contrast, Soloveitchik holds that this tension may wane once we perceive Halakhah as a theoretical system, and crisis and conflict are not a necessary feature of religious existence. This analysis enables us to reconsider the meaning of the crisis and the conflict of religious existence in Soloveitchik’s thought. Several scholars have indicated that Soloveitchik proposes more than one model of ideal religious existence. His thought, they claim, wavers between the ideal of religious existence as harmony and the ideal whereby religious existence is synonymous with suffering and crisis. Lawrence Kaplan offers an interesting analysis of this problem.86 In his view, the solution to the presence of two contradictory models lies in the different languages Soloveitchik uses to address different target audiences. His works in English, meant for the modern American reader, present the ideal of rift and crisis. In this presentation, Soloveitchik intends “to warn his English readers… about the almost demonic pretension of majestic man in the modern world… and hence… the Rav’s feeling concerning the need for the virtues of withdrawal, failure, and self sacrifice, which are not the virtues of majesty.”87 By contrast, in his works in Hebrew, “the Rav turns inward. These articles do not deal with the connection between the Jew and Western culture; instead, they examine the type that is fashioned by the commitment to the world of Halakhah… and here…the ideal type, is a harmonious personality.”88 This distinction is implausible. First, the Orthodox American Jew, Soloveitchik’s disciple, reads his Hebrew and his English works. We can hardly assume that Soloveitchik was not aware that his readers in both languages were the same audience. The assumption that the esoteric trend claimed by Kaplan guided Soloveitchik’s writing is thus questionable. Second, echoes of the harmonious approach resonate in Soloveitchik’s works in English and evidence of the non-harmonious approach is present in his Hebrew works.89 Pinhas Peli offers a developmental model of Soloveitchik’s thought.90 Peli postulates three stages: the first—suffering is equivalent to the religious experience; the second—suffering is identical to the religious plight; the third— suffering is an expression of religious action. But this development is not continuous and consistent because “From Thence You Shall Seek,” which Soloveitchik published later although he had written it much earlier, offers a harmonious model of existence.

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In my view, an approach claiming that both models prevail synchronically and reflect a persistent basic tension between two religious worldviews appears more plausible.91 Soloveitchik himself explicitly presents this synchronic view in his book Remembrance Days,92 when he relates to Maimonides’s distinction between one who is a subject and one who is the ruler of his soul. In his view, some Jewish leaders “have excelled in their moderation, peace of mind… and wondrous harmony” whereas, for others, “their lives were a long trail of personal inner struggles against bad dispositions, wrangling between heaven above and a menacing abyss.”93 In his view, this is the “eternal conflict”94 between the two approaches. Part of the solution to the question of synchronic development, of two models, lies in the two different meanings of Halakhah: Halakhah as a theoretical construction and Halakhah as a normative system requiring implementation. If Halakhah is above all a theoretical construction, the oppressive tension between real-concrete existence and the ideal demand does not translate into a rift within existence itself. If, as noted, halakhic man’s “deepest desire is not the realization of the Halakhah but rather the ideal construction,”95 we have no conflict and religious existence begins and ends with the harmony of theoretical speculation. But once we apprise Halakhah as a normative system to be realized in existence, Halakhah is “in a real world, turbulent and tumultuous, constantly changing. It confronts reality, faces destiny, and turns outward.”96 The confrontation with real existence through ideal norms creates rift and conflict. “Catharsis,”97 for instance, which emphasizes the rift, relates to the concrete realization of Halakhah in a real world burdened with feelings, impulses, and desires. What for Leibowitz serves as an obvious characterization of religious life, then, reflects for Soloveitchik one trend, related to the perception of Halakhah as an ideal norm to be realized through existence. But precisely at the point their paths meet, the difference between them also emerges: For Leibowitz, a crisis or a conflict is the expression of the content-value opposition between religion and the demands of human reality. But this crisis does not make faith itself dialectical and tension-laden, because the identity between faith and the religious obligations dismisses the option of the subjective element being constitutive of religion itself.98 For Soloveitchik, however, the conflict experience becomes the core of religious existence, as reflected in the tension between the ideal norm and real existence, a tension that is the arena where Halakhah is to be realized. In sum, Soloveitchik and Leibowitz view Halakhah as an ideal human creation, which forces human beings into an endless struggle for its realization. This struggle involves rift and conflict with existence and, not surprisingly, both

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these thinkers single out the story of the akedah as a paradigm of religious existence.99 This story, which both view as an expression of the readiness to sacrifice all human values and feelings, excels in conveying the ideal nature of Halakhah. To what extent do the characteristics of Halakhah proposed by both thinkers, all or some, fit Halakhah as it actually is? Can their perception be a sufficient basis for understanding Halakhah? A full answer to these questions requires that we first consider Halakhah as an active legal system. The theoretical datum must be Halakhah itself, in all its expressions: responsa, rulings, customs, and so forth. Only a thorough and comprehensive inductive analysis will be able to substantiate a comprehensive theory of Halakhah. This theory, like all theories, cannot begin from “superfluous” assumptions reflecting religious, philosophical, or theological positions. The impression left by this survey of Soloveitchik’s and Leibowitz’s views is that, although they did discern a central meaning in Halakhah, their philosophical presumptions determine their mode of analysis. At the focus of these presumptions, as shown below, is the restoration of religious commitment in the modern world or, in the phrase coined in this book, the return to tradition. 4. Halakhah and the Return to Tradition Chapter Six above deals with Soloveitchik’s and Leibowitz’s approach to Scripture, and contrasting it with their attitude to Halakhah provides an interesting comparison. The crucial element they both sought to substantiate was the autonomy of Scripture and its liberation from the problematic of its historical context. This trend recurs in their analysis of Halakhah, which both see as an ideal system unconditioned by any historical context. At the same time, the differences in their perceptions of Scripture and of Halakhah are also evident. Soloveitchik presented an outlook of dynamic discourse with Scripture, perceiving it through the perspective of the dialogue between the past and the present. Scripture functions as a critical and reflective foundation of present existence. This dynamic and dialogical perception disappears when he deals with Halakhah, which emerges as an ideal conceptual structure detached from reality. It engages neither in a dialogue with reality nor in a critique of it, and draws no sustenance from it. Soloveitchik describes Halakhah as a closed, autonomous system, a compartmentalized, sealed realm, precisely as Leibowitz perceives religious existence. This approach compelled Soloveitchik to adopt a new perception of rift and tension. Soloveitchik holds that the tension and the dialectic result from living simultaneously in a religious and a modern community. Presently, this tension has abated, since one trend in his thought offers retreat from this complex life into the ivory tower of theoretical Halakhah, which is entirely divorced from life. Furthermore, the

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trend that emphasizes the rift also originates in the difficulty of realizing the ideal within the real, of realizing Halakhah in concrete existence. This is not a rift between different worlds of equal value. Leibowitz presents a more consistent approach. Halakhah, like Scripture, is a closed and ideal system, compartmentalized from other realms of life. Halakhah is a hard and demanding system, which thrusts individuals into a life of tension and crisis. Tension is part of the human biography, reflecting the difficulty of realizing Halakhah in real existence. This is not the tension that constitutes religious life, which Soloveitchik outlines at length. The conclusion that this view warrants is that both thinkers return to tradition through traditionalist concepts. Traditionalist concepts enable both of them to create a closed, unchanging halakhic world. But what had been possible in a theoretical discussion about Jewish religion becomes problematic in a discussion about Halakhah. When discussing Halakhah, both thinkers, unintentionally, in different scopes and at different levels of awareness, return to the language of tradition. This should not surprise us because actual Halakhah, contrary to its characterization through traditionalist concepts, is dynamic and real instead of closed and ideal. The Torah was given to human beings, in their human garb and confronting their values and their historical-real existence. A detailed discussion of Halakhah’s realistic character is beyond the scope of this chapter. If my conclusions in, for instance, Judaism: Between Religion and Morality are correct, then “halakhic man” (meaning one who assumes the yoke of the Torah and the commandments) does not renounce all his understandings and values invoking “fear and love of God,” as Leibowitz claims. Quite the contrary: he wishes to create the “heavenly kingdom” at the core of, and in deep commitment to, concrete life. This kingdom affirms earthly existence instead of negating it. As the next chapter will show, these insights are the foundations of Eliezer Goldman’s philosophy.

Eight ELIEZER GOLDMAN JUDAISM AS INTERPRETATION My concern in previous chapters focused on positions that perceived the tradition (Scripture and Halakhah) through metaphors of traditionalism. In this chapter, I explore Eliezer Goldman’s approach, who approaches the canon through the concept of tradition outlined in Chapter One. Goldman’s thought is a denial and a critique of the concept “Judaism.” This concept is a codeword for an entire perception of Judaism as a religious and social phenomenon, a closed normative system of values and an unequivocal world view. As a concept, “Judaism” determines the borders of legitimacy, the “inside” and “outside,” the normative and deviant. This use of this term involves an ontological and an epistemological assumption. The ontological assumption is that an entity called Judaism exists regardless of the believer’s vantage point. This assumption reflects an essentialist view of Judaism, and rests on a more general view whereby normative systems located in history and in culture embody entities. Just as these entities are similar to others and we understand them in the context of a metaphysic of entities, so should Judaism. The epistemological assumption is that we can understand this entity independently of the observer’s vantage point. A realistic epistemology, which assumes that believers can know Judaism as is and that their perspectives are not bound by it, provides the best understanding of the essentialist perception of Judaism. This approach, obviously highly seductive, derives from a given view about the religious meaning of Judaism. As a halakhic and as a conceptual system, Judaism is the embodiment of the one and only religious truth, which reflects God’s will, and also the latest information about reality imparted by God through the Torah and its interpreters. Consequently, the truth of Judaism is marred if it fails to reflect the purest truth. Goldman, as noted, presents a contrary world view, which rejects the essentialist ontological assumption and the epistemological realistic assumption. Instead of an ex post facto consequence of theoretical moves whose meaning emerges within the particular context of the issue at stake, the non-essentialist and non-realistic perspective is a conscious point of departure in Goldman’s thought. Goldman notes that Judaism cannot be isolated from the hermeneutical process that shapes it and determines it, neither philosophically nor halakhically. The religious person is not one who knows the divine truth while not “involved”

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or, in phenomenological terms, not “interested” in the final product. Judaism is a dialogical-dialectic process of absorption and reinterpretation of the past, and the analysis that follows is relevant to the philosophical and the halakhic contexts. One of Goldman’s most basic programmatic works—“Scientific and Religious Statements: On Several Fundamental Differences between Them,”1 focuses on the philosophical question. In this article, Goldman strives to establish a distinction between religious and scientific statements, as differing on two fundamental counts: (1) the scientific statement is intelligible whereas the religious statement is not. (2) The scientific statement can function as an explanation whereas the religious statement cannot. What, then, are religious statements? Goldman defines them as “statements whose subject is the names or titles of the Almighty, and their object is a regular verb” (340). They are unintelligible, since the attempt to ascribe to God an act such as creation, will, and so forth, contradicts the understanding of God as a transcendent entity. This transcendence precludes the ascription of any attribute to God, even a metaphysical attribute, so that “all religious statements are ultimately ambiguous.” Although scientific statements may also be unintelligible, they are not so in principle. The unintelligibility of scientific statements could be the product of the subject failing to apprehend their meaning, or from a contradiction between two statements. By contrast, the religious statement is “unintelligible in principle” (340). The second difference, obviously related to the first, is that a religious statement cannot be a basis for explaining phenomena in the empirical world nor can it function within scientific discourse. What we cannot apprehend, cannot be the basis for an explanation: If a statement is to serve as the component of a scientific explanation, we should be able to infer from it a statement that, together with others, will point to the phenomenon we wish to explain. But no conclusion can be inferred from a statement that is unintelligible in principle, since it is impossible to determine what necessarily follows from it and what contradicts it. (340-341) Goldman illustrates this matter through an analysis of the concept of Providence. According to Goldman, this concept cannot function in the context of a historical explanation, since the notion of Providence “ascribes to the Almighty action in time. It says that God, at this particular time, at this specific date, placed the Assyrian king on his throne.” (351). This perception assumes that God operates in time, which is “not only a logical contradiction but also a theological paradox” (353), since time is not a category that applies to God but to the world. Religious statements about Providence, then, are neither intelligi-

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ble nor can they be a basis for an explanation, since we have several basic assumptions and expectations about scientific explanation. The explanation of a historical phenomenon is supposed to provide answers to such questions as: “Why did events unfold as they did rather than otherwise?” or “Why did they happen at this particular time and place?” Hence, had events happened otherwise, what now serves as an explanation could not possibly have been one. From another perspective: we could try to refute a particular explanation of event x through the following claim: if this explanation had been correct, not only would x have happened but also y, but y did not happen and, therefore, the proposed explanation is incorrect. None of this holds concerning the claim of Providence. The claim that the event is a providential act can be raised regarding any event or combination of events, and no event or combination of events enables a refutation of this claim, contrary to our demand from a scientific explanation. (343) We must therefore reject the approach that scientific and religious statements function within the same discourse. The scientific statement functions as an explanation of the world, whereas the sole role of a religious statement is religious. The problem, then, is: how can we affirm religious statements, given that they are unintelligible? Does not the incomprehensibility of such statements compel some kind of human action? To contend with this problem, Goldman tries to discern between the statement and the claim. The statement is a linguistic expression, while the claim ascribes to it a given content. Believers, as believers, affirm religious statements. They thereby express the canonic status of the “traditional religious texts and statements,”2 but they do not necessarily affirm the claims expressed in them. More precisely, believers may reject accepted interpretations of the statement for failing the test of analytical or experimental criticism. Rejecting traditional claims requires believers to offer new meanings of the religious statement, expressing the character of religious life as interpretation. The claim that religious life is interpretation does not relate only to linguistic statements. This aspect of interpretation is crucial, but no less central is the claim that human beings, in their real lives, engage in the interpretation of events they perceive as religious. In his article “On Providence,”3 Goldman rejects the traditional approach that ascribes to God a providential function, but he does retain within the religious context the notion of “Providence” as part of the traditional conceptual web. This concept, then, is a classic instance of affirming the statement on the one hand while rejecting the traditional claim on the other. What, then, is the positive meaning emerging from the concept of “Providence”?

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM Halakhah commands us to relate to certain manifestations of the natural world surrounding us or to the historical world in which we live, not only as they are given in reality but also from another perspective… We are not commanded to provide a causal explanation of history through an alternative, parallel system to ordinary causality. We are commanded to see in certain kinds of events the hand of God, and to connect between them and our actions. This is not a causal link, but a call for soul-searching, an opportunity for repentance. The first question that arises in the mind of a Jew beset by tragedy is not how did it happen and what were the causes, but how he should connect the tragedy to his own actions—the tragedy is a catalyst for self-examination.4

A careless reading of this passage might evoke the impression that Goldman is adopting here the theses developed by Soloveitchik in his discussion of evil: Man’s existence of destiny gives rise to an original approach to the problem of evil…. When the man of destiny suffers, he says to himself: “Evil exists, and I will neither deny it nor camouflage it.… 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… to its practical aspect. The problem is now formulated in straightforward halakhic language…. The fundamental question is: What obligation does suffering impose upon man?... We do not inquire about the hidden ways of the Almighty but, rather, about the path wherein man shall walk when suffering strikes. We ask neither about the cause of evil nor about its purpose but rather about how might it be mended and elevated. How shall a person act in time of trouble? What ought a man to do so that he not perish in his afflictions?5 Both thinkers divert the question from the causal to the practical level, and both assume divine transcendence as one of the main arguments for rejecting the causal explanation. Finally, both claim that what ultimately explains the religious meaning of the events is the believer’s concrete interpretation of these events in their lives. The link between Goldman’s and Soloveitchik’s outlooks is undeniable. Goldman himself is fully aware of it,6 and he is intensively concerned with the study of Soloveitchik’s thought. But for my current purposes, what is especially significant is the difference between them. Despite his program, Soloveitchik does not refrain from dealing with the covenant of destiny in the context of what we might refer to as “the metaphysics of revelation.” At the public level, for instance, Soloveitchik identifies “six knocks”7 that epitomize God’s manifesta-

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tion in history and ultimately compel one reaction instead of another. In Soloveitchik’s terms, a person could “miss the moment” by failing to understand the true meaning of historical events.8 At the personal level, Soloveitchik’s thesis appears to suggest he is continuing the existentialist tradition, which explains concrete existence as a creative personal interpretation of the imposed reality. At the public level, however, we find one correct interpretation and one that misses the moment. The proposed hermeneutics, then, is entirely realistic. On closer scrutiny, we see that Soloveitchik uses the guise of a new existentialist terminology to propose a realistic interpretation at the personal level as well. His answer to the question about the concrete meaning of evil is: “The halakhic answer to this question is very simple. Afflictions come to elevate a person, to purify and sanctify his spirit… In a word, the function of suffering is to mend that which is flawed in the individual’s personality.”9 Whereas the terms of the question are practical, the terms of the answer are metaphysical-teleological: afflictions play a role in human education. This readily available answer leaves no room for creative interpretation. We know a priori the reason and the purpose of suffering. We do not confine ourselves to the “mending and elevation” of suffering, we also understand it. Soloveitchik’s thought wavers between a commitment to traditional approaches and an attempt to engage in a renewed reading of the tradition. This dialectic often tilts the scales in favor of a traditional approach couched in a new language. By contrast, Goldman deliberately and consistently offers a new outlook. He absolutely rejects the “metaphysics of revelation.” In his view, the religious meaning ascribed to events that are merely natural reflects a practical hermeneutical decision, and individuals are the ones who estimate that some events compel them to reexamine their ways of life. What are the foundations that shape interpretation? Do they derive from “pure Judaism” or from human experience in general? Goldman’s answer is that the secular and religious realms are not two autonomous and mutually closed territories. Goldman resolutely dismisses the compartmentalization thesis offered by Leibowitz, precisely because it sketches human life as taking place in several closed and delineated realms that do not influence one another. According to Goldman, experience shapes and influences our interpretation of religious statements. At one point, Goldman argues that non-“Jewish” contexts fulfill mainly a negative role: The religious person… continues to affirm them [religious statements] in the face of every experience. But this is not to say that experience is irrelevant. The conclusion from an experience that contradicts a statement as interpreted at a particular time is not the negation of the statement but the negation of the accepted interpretation. Hence, experience plays a

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TRADITION VS. TRADITIONALISM negative role—it closes up certain ways of interpretation and understandings and compels us to embark in a renewed interpretive effort.10

The emphasis on the negative role of the broader life context could evoke the impression that Goldman accepts a radical deconstructionist position whereby every individual interprets or, in deconstructionist terms, “rewrites” the text. Goldman’s philosophy, however, differs from that of Leibowitz and the later Soloveitchik precisely on this point: they embrace the post-Hegelian and existentialist tradition that emphasizes individual detachment and alienation from social reality. Relating directly to Soloveitchik, Goldman claims: “Soloveitchik’s later writings are less appealing to me because I do not identify with the sense of the individual’s alienation from nature and from society.”11 Goldman repeatedly rejects this hermeneutical solipsism, and assumes that the socio-cultural context plays a positive role in the formulation of the interpretation. In his opening to an alternative interpretation of the concept of Providence, he writes: Theology, then, depends not only on the religious contents but also on the conceptual framework, even that of the philosophical system, which is periodically subject to change. We can therefore understand why two people dealing at different times with the same religious contents, seeking to understand, explain, and consider the role of specific statements, will express themselves so differently.12 Elsewhere, Goldman advances this claim concerning his theory of Halakhah. I present a detailed discussion of this theory below, but one of his remarks is relevant to the present concern. In the context of his theory, Goldman introduces a new concept in the philosophy of Halakhah and speaks of “metahalakhic norms.”13 These norms, which are part of Halakhah, reflect overarching principles, a supreme value system that guides judges in their halakhic rulings. Prominent instances of such norms are the saying about the Torah in Proverbs 3:17, “her ways are ways of pleasantness” (drakheha darkei no`am), and the talmudic notion of preserving harmony with the Gentile surroundings by seeking “ways of peace” (mipnei darkhei shalom). Judges will not necessarily couch their “value statements” in these formulations but these values are, explicitly or implicitly, part of halakhic procedure, as the variant interpretations of halakhic material offered by different judges will demonstrate. In this interpretive process, the judge’s cultural context plays a significant role: “One cannot ignore the contradictory value statements of God-fearing Jews, and the possibility that value statements of renowned rabbis influenced by their cultural social surroundings will affect practical Halakhah in their times.14

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The awareness that experiences and thoughts encroach upon one another and that life’s realms are not entirely compartmentalized reflects one of Goldman’s characteristic sociological insights, stating that human creatures are united selves who use the entire range of their experiences to shape their lives. Their religious interpretations change according to their different experiences, and according to the range of knowledge and value contexts that form their world. In this sense, the Judaism of Maimonides, for instance, instead of being “pure,” is a reflection of the hermeneutical context through which Maimonides reinterprets Jewish tradition. For Goldman, the significance of classic Jewish thought is not in the content it bequeaths, since this content is no longer relevant to us, but in its value as a paradigm for the legitimacy of interpretation within Jewish religion. In Goldman’s terms: For the modern religious Jew, the concern with medieval Jewish philosophy is important for a further reason. It illustrates an alternative approach to Judaism, different from the one commonly accepted in Orthodox Judaism. The recognition of medieval scholars as classic Jewish thinkers, even by those far removed from philosophical thought, is important psychologically, and confers on it a measure of legitimacy.15 Classic thought, then, becomes a paradigm for the possibility of philosophical transformation, and a key source of psychological inspiration. Daniel Boyarin emphasizes the special role of midrash as a unique way of relating to the past that “preserves contact and context with tradition while it is liberating. The relation between the Midrash and the Bible provides not only a model of the relation between text and interpretation but between the present and the past.”16 Midrash cites biblical verses, but does not explain their original meaning and uses them instead within a new discourse. This intertextual phenomenon, citing biblical verses within an entirely different context, reflects continuity and commitment to the tradition on the one hand, and renewal and development on the other. The relationship between Midrash and text, or the intertextual phenomenon, reflects in many ways a characteristic structure of renewal processes in traditional culture. This culture does not replace the old and, instead, pours it into new vessels. In the course of this process, the contents change and diversify. That this is also the model suited to an understanding of the conceptual and theoretical revolution that Maimonides introduced with his Guide of the Perplexed cannot but impress students of Jewish philosophy. Traditional perceptions and concepts assume a different meaning within the new philosophical context structured by Maimonides.

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Acknowledging the existence of this phenomenon is entirely independent of whether the instigators of the revolution were aware of the revolutionary nature of their actions. A conceptual and/or normative transformation in a traditional society committed to the past does not generally entail recognition of its innovative nature, and its authors tend to perceive it as the exposure and realization of elements latent within the tradition itself. In this sense, Goldman’s is a sui generis philosophical endeavor. Although he is committed to the normative and the conceptual traditions of Judaism, his thought involves a deep hermeneutical transformation of the approaches and concepts common among “ordinary believers” committed to the ancestral tradition. Unlike other revolutionaries, Goldman is aware of his thought as involving change and transformation and he views the religious individual as an interpreter first. As noted at the opening of this chapter, Goldman conveys this general view of the status of interpretation not only in his attitude to Jewish philosophy and one of his most significant contributions is the application of these insights to practical Halakhah. Highly instructive in this regard is Goldman’s involvement in a political controversy known in 1950s Israel as the “Leibowitz-Neriah controversy.”17 Leibowitz published a series of articles in the early 1950s demanding renewed halakhic legislation meant to contend with the reality of Jewish sovereignty, adducing proof for its need mainly from the Sabbath laws. Neriah opposed Leibowitz’s proposals in radio broadcasts and in writing. In his view, we can unequivocally infer the laws relevant to life in a sovereign state from halakhic sources, and specifically from the laws on the saving of individual lives (pikuah nefesh). Goldman did not support Leibowitz’s position, claiming that the only way to contend with the reality of Jewish sovereignty was to enact new halakhic laws and that the new circumstances required revolutionary change. He also rejected Neriah’s approach, however, and did not hold that existent halakhic material can easily be a source for deriving the required halakhot. He definitely opposes Leibowitz’s stance. Traditionally, the main route for contending with new halakhic problems is not new legislation, which is hard to enact and threatens Halakhah’s traditional character. As usual, Goldman offers a moderate formulation when stating that the “traditional path of ‘halakhic jurisprudence’ [darkei hora’ah]”18 is to be preferred instead. Goldman’s opposition to Neriah’s stance is even more interesting in its resistance to deductive inferences about political reality from individual life, namely, to any extrapolation from private to public law. According to Goldman, any such inference is contingent on the answer to a prior question touching on the perception of the state:

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We do not transfer halakhic principles directly to concrete questions arising before us. Rather, we do so through a theory of the state and its roles on the one hand, and through some theoretical expansion of the halakhic concept [in our context: pikuah nefesh] we wish to use. There is no logical-formal imperative to follow this course, nor could there be. Even after accepting all the halakhic assumptions, this conclusion could be avoided by opposing the roles of the state… He who thinks that the state is a grievous evil invented by Zionist heretics that, had we resisted them and continued to rely on the favor of Gentile rulers, our material circumstances would not only be better but we would also have been spared all these troublesome questions, will not deal with these issues as suggested. The point that needs to be emphasized is that we are not dealing here with a “reality” that is automatically bound by “Halakhah.” A distinguished contemporary thinker has already said: “No concept or principle bears a sign proclaiming automatically: use me in this case.” Only through a theory of the state and its roles can we create a concept of state for Halakhah. This is a far-fetched conclusion. It could ultimately mean that the halakhic stance about the state might depend on an evaluation of its historical role.19 Contrary to Neriah’s view, then, Goldman proposes what he calls “the third way,” claiming that “there are foundations in Halakhah from which we can create a concept of the state in Halakhah and derive principles that will apply to such a state.”20 Goldman introduces here, for the first time in the philosophy of Halakhah, the concept of “creative halakhic thought.” In this creative process, halakhic sages rely on the sources at their disposal, but use them only as the first building blocks in a new structure, which will also reflect their world and their values, which are partly extra-halakhic. The use of these building blocks is imperative, insofar as the purpose of this endeavor is to express commitment to the tradition. But this commitment is not sufficient, and halakhic man must also be involved in actual creativity instead of confining himself to the theoretical variation proposed by Soloveitchik.21 The deep opposition of this approach to legal or halakhic formalism is obvious. Elements of this controversy assume full theoretical conceptualization in Goldman’s article series “Religion, Morality, and Halakhah,” where he offers a blueprint for a philosophy of Halakhah in general and for the relationship between Halakhah and morality in particular. In these series, Goldman points out that Halakhah is a legal system—as we expect the rejection of formalism in the legal realm, so should we expect it in the halakhic realm. We cannot approach halakhic inferences as logical deductive inferences that turn the judge merely into the “mouth” of the law, as in the Montesquieu saying. Goldman indicates that a formalist theory is unable to clarify the structure and operation of Halakhah. He points out the logical fallacies of this approach and of those

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derived from the special character of Jewish law, offering instead an alternative halakhic theory that places judicial discretion and assessment at its center, directing judges but not deciding in their place. One of Goldman’s key contributions, as noted, is the concept of “metahalakhic” norms, which reflect the judge’s value statements and mediate between these statements and the concrete halakhic norm.22 The perception of Halakhah as mediated by meta-halakhic norms points to the decisive role of creative interpretation. The individual is not only a medium for transmitting Halakhah, but its actual creator. Goldman is well aware of the religious allure of a formalistic perception of Halakhah, which he calls fundamentalist. According to this view: God’s Torah is complete. It does not suffer from the drawbacks of a human legal system. Turn it and turn it, that all is in it. There is no reality that formal Halakhah will not contend with, and we must only seek the pure halakhic truth as revealed in the Torah and in the Oral Law. The process of halakhic decision-making is free from any ideological biases.23 Goldman proposes a contrary approach that could paraphrase the above passage as follows: God’s Torah is complete. It suffers from the drawbacks of a human legal system. Turn it and turn it, that all is in it. There is no reality that Halakhah cannot contend with, and we must not seek pure halakhic truth since the Oral Law does not express that type of halakhic truth. The process of halakhic decision-making was never free from ideological biases, even when not formulated explicitly. How can we say that “God’s Torah is complete” if it is affected by the dynamic changes of human reality? The answer to this question depends on the meaning of the adjective “complete” ascribed to the Torah. If completeness refers to a closed system that we only apply to reality, then God’s Torah is not complete since such application is impossible. But if completeness means that Halakhah can contend with a new reality through interpretation and creativity, then God’s Torah is complete. It does not foreclose options of creative interpretation. The Torah’s completeness, as Moshe Israel Hazzan taught, is precisely that it does not close and seal what is in principle open to change. The Torah’s openness and inclusiveness, says Hazzan, is the expression of its eternity and its totality.24 Goldman does not derive the openness of Halakhah only from the classic consideration that Joseph Albo had already raised, stating that no book can have

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answers for all situations. Instead, his openness reflects a more fundamental limitation: The truth is that the impossibility of formulating norms with clear rules of implementation does not depend on a lack of foreknowledge about expected circumstances, but on the essential limitations of language. Norms unavoidably rely on general categories or on paradigms that must serve as a model for a range of similar situations, thereby opening up the way for the multiplicity and blurring of meaning… Modern sages, whose ways of thinking about Halakhah are surprisingly close to the conceptual thinking of jurists in the Roman tradition, could foster an illusion of Halakhah as a closed discipline based on clear-cut principles.25 Even the perception that is most crucial from the believer’s perspective, then, stating that Halakhah is the word of God, is determined and applied according to human interpretation. Believers never cease to be interpreters, even in this realm, invariably bringing all their values with them. They meet the legacy of the past within horizons charged with their present, and the result reflects the nucleus of the past dressed in the garb of the present. Goldman emphasizes that we cannot isolate Halakhah from extra-halakhic cultural contexts and perceive it “only as the sum of halakhic norms and authority norms,”26 because in this formalistic view of Halakhah, change and development are devoid of meaning. From an external perspective, says Goldman, we explain meaning through the adaptation of Halakhah to reality’s changing circumstances, but this external perspective cannot clarify the mechanism that makes responsiveness to circumstances legitimate.27 Yet, if Halakhah also includes a meta-halakhic component, the question of legitimacy has an answer: If… one acknowledges the legitimacy of a certain responsiveness to the pressure of needs, it is by virtue of meta-halakhic norms that enable us to see the halakhic system as a frame for proper living… The halakhic technique must therefore be implemented in a way that ensures the fundamental existential needs of the entire people.28 The meta-normative value system, then, is a mechanism that mediates between the “clean” halakhic nucleus and the reality to which we apply Halakhah. If meta-normative values derive from the judge’s rulings, culture, or education, then mediation takes place through a mechanism of interpretation between “Halakhah” and reality. This mediation is not a separate part of Halakhah. Only a formalist deductive outlook will view the implementation of interpretation mechanisms as a deviation from Halakhah. From a formalistic

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perspective, when a gap emerges between Halakhah and reality, “taking reality into account is interpreted as a compromise, as conceding on the letter of the law.”29 The fundamental difference between halakhic formalism and a moderate realistic view of Halakhah, then, lies precisely in this question: what is the standing of meta-normative values that embody the activity of judgment and evaluation? In a consistent and brilliant analysis, Goldman rejects the formalistic theory of law endorsed by Kelsen and Hart.30 This critique deserves note because, since the publication of Menachem Elon’s monumental work, the prevalent view is that formalistic theories of law, and mainly those of the Kelsen variety, are the most appropriate for understanding Jewish law.31 Goldman had already rejected these views in the early 1960s. Beyond his detailed arguments, Goldman’s education in the United States at a time realistic theories of law were prevalent probably enabled him to adopt a new, more fruitful and more adequate perspective than that offered by formalistic theories regarding law in general and Halakhah in particular. Goldman views formalistic halakhic theories that the Gaon of Vilna’s disciples and the Brisk academy spread in the nineteenth century as close to “the thought patterns prevalent in the tradition of Roman law.”32 These theories neither exhaust halakhic practice nor provide a suitable explanation for change and development, or for the controversies and the local character of halakhic rulings typical of Jewish law. Goldman, however, claims that adopting a realistic theory of law can also lead to an extreme stance, dismissing procedures and rules in favor of the judge’s creative interpretation (284). Against this stance, Goldman had already emphasized the importance of halakhic technique in the “Leibowitz-Neriah” controversy and, in its wake, in his article series “Religion, Morality, and Halakhah.” The meta-normative system, then, determines the aim and the desirable halakhic result, but the judge arrives at this result by means of traditional halakhic technique. This operation of Halakhah indicates that Halakhah is, in Gadamer’s terms, a “fusion of horizons” between past and future, between diachronic and synchronic, and therefore dynamic by nature. Halakhah also includes norms that lack any textual source. These norms reflect human evaluation and judgment about what is good and desirable, from a social and from a divine perspective. Goldman emphasizes the decisive role of autonomous human cognition in the shaping of halakhic life. He recurrently directs the reader to Saadia Gaon, to Maimonides, and to Jacob Anatoly (330332). All of them, each in his way, stresses that the text does not provide a halakhic solution to all existential problems. Goldman sums up the position of Anatoly who, in his view, deals extensively and comprehensively with the theoretical foundations:

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The Noachide law requiring the establishment of a legal system did not include detailed laws but only the obligation to sustain a system that would impose justice in human relationships. Jacob Anatoly holds that this feature of the law is not abolished even after laws were explicitly formulated in various places in the Torah. The general commandment demanding that human relationships be fairly regulated remains in force. The number of potential new situations requiring regulation is endless… and setting up a legal system that could be valid once and for all is impossible. Beside the explicit ordinances, an additional source is needed for the principles that should be applied. For Anatoly, this source is logical inference [sevarah]… For generations, Torah sages continued to settle these laws by applying their own logic in changing situations that came before them in their judicial capacity… On the same grounds, permission and authority were granted to the king, to the town’s elders, and to its artisans to deal with legislation that regulates human affairs. (332-333). In the implementation of meta-halakhic principles, interpretation generally addresses halakhic procedure, but logical inference and autonomous discretion are independent elements that do not resort to canonical sources. The sevarah makes the fundamental canonical source—the Torah—redundant: “Why do I need a verse, it is logical!” (TB Ketuboth 22a). Goldman knows that going beyond the borders of halakhic formalism and deduction raises theological religious questions: What is God’s standing as the giver of the Torah? If interpretation is so decisive, in what sense is Halakhah the word of God? The answer to this question demands separation between the two fundamental areas where human judicial activism is evident: meta-halakhic principles and rational autonomous legislation. The theological-religious explanation of meta-halakhic principles lies in the classic assumption that Halakhah was given to human beings and implemented by the “sages and the institutions of the community” (325). Since human beings are the recipients of the Torah, they must not be passive and may implement it according to their knowledge and understanding. The meta-normative system thus reflects the human partnership in the creation of the Torah, a partnership that is a cornerstone of the Torah itself. The dimension of autonomous human legislation is more problematic. This legislation is not only a human interpretation of God’s word, it is a human creation. So how can it be the word of God? Goldman answers this question by relying on Maimonides and on Jacob Anatoly: The criterion of the judge or the legislator is “to imitate the ways of God who founds reality on the law.”33 In other words, the rational criterion of

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This aspect of human activity, then, has religious meaning in the sense that judges imitate God through their halakhic endeavor, even when they are not applying God’s word to reality. The religious dimension emerges in the purpose of the halakhic endeavor—the regulation of fairness and justice and the human imitation of divine modes. According to this approach, however, the halakhic endeavor is religiously meaningful even when not applying or interpreting God’s word at Sinai. In autonomous halakhic legislation, the halakhic sage operates as a molder of reality instead of as an interpreter of canonical texts. And yet, this activity too reveals the interpretive character of Jewish existence, since the religious meaning that is ascribed to the legislative act and provides the agent’s religious impulse, rests on an interpretation of what is desirable and proper in the eyes of God. Goldman alludes to this autonomous dimension in the Torah and in Halakhah to challenge critics of Torah va-Avodah, a movement of religiousZionist pioneers active in the early decades of the twentieth century. The objections to this movement argue that its ideology has no support in the sources. Goldman’s significant innovation in this regard is the link he points out between the Torah va-Avodah idea and Saadia Gaon’s philosophy. Goldman shows that, according to Saadia Gaon: “Obligations and prohibitions compelled by reason and practices deemed necessary by reason are a divine command since they are commanded by reason” (444-445). While analyzing Saadia Gaon, Goldman emphasizes that his description of human reality is static, but this does not detract from the importance and the contemporary relevance of the move he proposes: In a historical dynamic reality such as ours, we may infer from Saadia Gaon’s position as described here that amendments in the social order required by reason are also divine demands. This was a decisive religious legitimation of the social demands that follow from general considerations of justice, even if they are not inferred from any particular halakhot. (445446) According to this analysis, the idea of Torah va-Avodah continues an ancient philosophical tradition beginning with Saadia Gaon. From the perspective of Goldman’s philosophy, the importance of this historical anchoring transcends any concerns about the legitimacy of this movement. This analysis again points to the element dominant in Goldman’s thought: instead of approaching the Torah as a closed system whose rules resemble deductive inference, we approach it in dynamic terms reflecting the interpretive and

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creative role of human creatures: “Problems in a dynamic reality demand solutions involving true innovation. Shaping a Torah-inspired society is only possible if we have a dynamic concept of the Torah itself. Existing halakhot cannot be applied as they are to in order to solve worldly problems.” (328). In this context, Goldman inserts the expression “expanding the concept of Torah” (329). Goldman finds in the work of Samuel Hayyim Landau, a prominent leader of the Torah va`Avodah movement, the dynamic perception that expands and opens the Torah. Landau emphasizes that the Torah is more than a “book of laws,” it is a charismatic foundation that enables change and dynamic reactions to reality.36 This analysis shows that, according to Goldman, religious Zionism as a revolutionary movement reflects a highly adequate halakhic theory. The article series “Religion, Morality, and Halakhah” includes several observations pointing to the inner relationship between halakhic theory and religious Zionism in this philosophy. The critique of fundamentalism or of trends that have become prevalent since the nineteenth century, which turn Halakhah into a closed system divorced from reality, target ultra-Orthodox circles. Even if theoreticians of Jewish law (chiefly Elon, who is not suspect of ultra-Orthodox loyalties) did adopt a closed positivist theory of Halakhah, my claim is still valid. Not only does the criticism target ultra-Orthodox circles directly, but Goldman also wrote his programmatic articles long before the publication of Elon’s huge study. This description clarifies the centrality of interpretation in Goldman’s religious outlook. The believer faces reality as an interpreter. At the theoreticaltheological level, interpretation emerges in the ascription of religious meaning to natural events. This interpretation endeavor is manifest, above all, at the practical level: believers must find out what is required from them as believers. They cannot turn to the holy texts, and they cannot find answers in a metaphysical theory that will replace causal standard explanations. Religious meaning is personal, in the sense that individuals examine their lives and ask themselves what is required of them here and now. Although Goldman in “On Providence” finds a connection between his stance and that of Maimonides,37 the “Protestant” elements embedded in his position are hard to ignore. In the Protestant approach, the natural reality emptied of God does not assume religious meaning. An infinite chasm separates human beings from the transcendent God. As a result, the individual remains alone with the holy text that formulates the word of God in abstracto. The actual concrete demand, the word of God in concreto, is embodied in the concrete act of understanding, when individuals re-examine God’s expectations from them in the totality of their existence.38 In Goldman’s outlook, the individual is not alone when confronting the fundamental question—what does God want from me? As a committed Jew, he

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finds a coherent frame of reference in Halakhah’s normative structure. But Protestant foundations are prominently evident in two dimensions of Goldman’s thought. The first is the exclusion of metaphysical categories from the process of interpreting natural events. The second is the concrete interpretive act that, even if conducted within the framework of Halakhah, does not replace the personal stance, the individual self-examination. We may interpret natural events as a “call to self-examination,”39 but the meaning of the self-examination and its practical consequences belong within the realm of the individual’s life. At the same time, and contrary to the elements of Protestant tradition embraced by such thinkers as Soloveitchik and Leibowitz who are close to him, Goldman rejects “interpretive closure.” Interpretation evolves within a cultural context that combines synchronic and diachronic aspects. Goldman’s individual is not the autarchic creature of Greek tradition or of the Enlightenment and romanticism. His individual has defined contextual characteristics and belongs simultaneously to at least two cultures: the tradition that bears the legacy of the past and the contemporary culture of which s/he is always part. At the practical-halakhic level as well, the interpretive dimension is crucial. Goldman rejects positivist or formalistic theories of Halakhah because they do not grant suitable weight to the interpretive aspect. This aspect is embodied in the meta-halakhic dimension that emphasizes the judge’s initial judicial act, and in the autonomous legislative dimension, in which interpretation turns into a molding, creative act. The emphasis on the element of creative interpretation in Goldman’s philosophy could lead to its identification with deconstructionist theories of Jewish tradition. Susan Handelman devoted an entire book, which had wide repercussions, to justify the thesis about the connection between deconstructionism and Jewish tradition.40 In her view, the analysis of rabbinic literature shows that this tradition did not set sharp borders between text and interpretation, although it did relate to holy texts.41 One of the main sources Handelman relies upon to support her thesis, which was also the source for the book’s title, is the talmudic legend in TB Menahoth 29b (“When Moses ascended to heaven…”). This source enables the conclusion that halakhic sages, through their interpretation, recreate the text. As Boyarin and Stern show, however, Handelman is mistaken in her analysis of rabbinic tradition, which is definitely a tradition of interpretation. Obviously, Goldman does not endorse Handelman’s approach, which negates the substantive continuity typical of Jewish tradition. For him, as noted, the very reference to texts expresses the canonical attitude toward them. In halakhic tradition, canonic texts are not texts that halakhic sages apply to reality in all circumstances. Their canonicity emerges, above all, in their constantly renewed interpretation. This interpretation is neither free nor subjective, not only because the interpreter operates within a given interpretive community but also, and

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mainly, because interpreters must translate their interpretations and their values into the legitimate mechanisms of the halakhic system itself. Interpretation and innovation do not aim from the tradition outward, but unfold within tradition’s very constructs. At the same time, Goldman is aware of the radical nature of interpretation processes in Jewish tradition, and even directs the reader to the talmudic legend in TB Menahoth. In the passage cited below, he explicitly formulates the relationship between interpretive radicalism and balancing elements that preserve continuity: The character of a legal system is determined as much by the ways of thinking typical of its bearers and the techniques customarily used to implement its principles than by its substantive norms. Halakhic thought has undergone extremely radical transformations in the course of its history. If, according to the talmudic legend, Moses would not have known what R. Akiva and his disciples were saying when they were interpreting the Torah, we cannot assume that R. Akiva and his disciples would have understood the author of Kezot Ha-Hoshen or of R. Hayyim of Brisk in their conceptual-halakhic analysis.42 The balance to interpretive radicalism are not necessarily elements of content—“the substantive norms”—but mainly “ways of thinking… and techniques.” These theoretical statements are highly significant because halakhic tradition provides them with adequate support. The thesis identifying Judaism with interpretation relies not only on the historical analysis of the philosophical tradition but also, and mainly, on the identification of halakhic tradition’s basic constructs. In Chapter Four above, I argued that Goldman’s outlook does not only contend with modernity but that, in a sense, is a postmodern philosophy. Following the analysis offered in this chapter, some unambiguous postmodern features in Goldman’s thought become evident. Many postmodern theoreticians view postmodernism as chiefly a critical stance, and we can hardly ignore the “critical” dimension of Goldman’s philosophy. His thought involves an attempt to map out and describe the rules of the game or, in Wittgensteinian terms, the “language game” of the system described. Goldman’s philosophy is above all reflective, and takes Jewish philosophical and halakhic tradition as a given. The analysis identifies Jewish tradition as a tradition of interpretation. This identification leads Goldman to acknowledge his partnership in the interpretive process. He is explicitly aware of the time-place dimension of the interpretive processes to which he, and all other members of the interpretive

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community, are partners. In this sense, his philosophy recognizes hermeneutical pluralism and the relativization of interpretation. Goldman completes this dimension with a critique of the human model prevalent during the Enlightenment and Romanticism, whereby human beings are sovereign and autonomous, subjects who can be characterized in detachment from their surrounding culture. A universal, authentic self exists, knowable and approachable despite the cultural guise.43 Whereas Leibowitz and Soloveitchik, Goldman’s predecessors, accepted this ethos about human beings, Goldman categorically dismissed it by rejecting the dichotomy between religious existence and the totality of human experience. He also rejected the attempt to locate halakhic exegetes beyond their cultural surroundings. Goldman identifies the human being as a cultural creature in the sense developed by Clifford Geertz: human beings cannot be isolated from the range of characteristics shaping their actual experience in the world. Human beings are never “just” human, they are always particular, and they reflect a given culture. Goldman sees human existence as shaped by intercultural discourse. Believers weave their identity through a dialogue with contemporary culture on the one hand, and with their ancestors’ tradition on the other. In this sense, Goldman is a partner to the definition of the dialogical identity that Charles Taylor sums up in the notion of multiculturalism.44 Goldman’s closeness to these postmodernist ideas is in no way surprising. Two philosophical traditions that incipiently conveyed moods that would become dominant in postmodernist thought nurtured his philosophical education and his thought—the American legal realist tradition, which affected his perception of Halakhah as a legal system, and American pragmatism, on which he wrote his dissertation. In sum, Goldman’s seminal work offers new horizons for understanding Jewish tradition, bringing together new tools from contemporary cultural, sociological, and philosophical discourse with rigorous historical analysis. Directing critical thought to history and to the past leads to the growth of a new, fresh stance toward the present, that combines openness and commitment, and can be a paradigm for an integration of new and old. Goldman’s though provides a potential model for returning to tradition through the canonical texts, affirming the concepts of the tradition without resorting to traditionalist approaches.

Epilogue “MY NAME’S MY DONORS’ NAME” The title of this epilogue is a line in one of Yehuda Amichai’s best known poems, “All the Generations Before Me.”1 The first stanza opens with the line: “All the generations before me/ donated me,” and the final line in this stanza reads: “My name’s/ my donors’ name. / It binds.” The poem brings across the power of the past—the past marks the poet’s name, implying his destiny and his identity, so much so that his name is that of all the preceding generations. The entire poem is stamped by the tension and the hardship that the shadow of the past casts upon the present. Amichai adopts an approach that affirms the past, and all three stanzas end with the words: “It binds.” But a closer look shows to what degree the past, when imposed on the present, subdues and subjugates dynamic development. First, the very assertion “My name is my donors’ name” fixates the individual as a donated object, an item with a price tag: “All the generations before me/ donated me, bit by bit, so that I'd be/ erected here in Jerusalem, like a house of prayer/ or charitable institution.” The image of a person as a defined space—a house of prayer or a charitable institution—intensifies the process of de-subjectivization turning subject into object. Second, all three stanzas end with the rhythmical statement: “It binds,” a formulation conveying self-alienation and defamilarization: not I bind myself but “it” binds me, something external coerces me. The past projects itself on the individual with traumatic power. The complex attitude toward the past culminates in the second stanza of the poem, which brings forth the past’s oppressive dimension: I'm approaching the age of my father's death. … I have to change my life and death daily to fulfill all the prophecies prophesied for me. So they’re not lies. It binds. Amichai’s generation is the generation that created the State of Israel, one culturally detached from previous Jewish generations more than any other. Members of the preceding generation had detached themselves from the traditional parental home and had attempted, consciously and deliberately, to mold a new life, with the “new Hebrew man” as their central ethos. A painful experience of rift, charged with memories and longings, accompanies this

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detachment. In this sense, the parents of Amichai’s contemporaries had belonged to the “generation of the desert”—rooted in the past but seeking to part from it so as to embark on the building of a new culture. Amichai’s generation grew up with the ethos of a new, future-oriented culture. When considered against this background, the return to the past emerges as especially intriguing. The leit-motif in Amichai’s poem is the past, not the future. But this return to the past is hard, and requires a collapse of personal identity, an absolute change—“I have to change my life and death.” His poem is thus a deep expression of the unresolved relationship between past and present. Barring an ongoing dialogue between past and present, the discovery of a debt to the past can lead, on the one hand, to an understanding of the past as binding and to a decision to subordinate the present to the past, possibly inviting a rejection of the present. On the other hand, when the past bursts into a present that had so far been clean from any attachments to it, the shock could lead to a total rejection of the past. Amichai’s poem involves an attempt to reconcile a past and a present grown apart, so he begins from the rift between them. This is the starting point I criticized in Chapter One, which assumes that tradition is already lost to the children of the present. If tradition is lost, returning to it could be brutal. In contrast, the view of tradition offered in this book assumes an ongoing dialogue between present and past. We do not return to tradition as one going home from exile, but are within it and share in its molding. The challenge to this dialogical perception is the present. The present, modern experience has made many inroads among those who opened up their hearts and thought to it. Rejecting the experience of modernity does not shield us from the need to contend with it, even if only to dismiss it. The thinkers discussed in this book, crucial figures in Jewish thought since the mid-twentieth century, all share a recognition of the fundamental significance of modernity to the continuity of tradition. Two basic responses to this challenge emerge in the current study: the tense and complex model represented by Soloveitchik and Leibowitz, and the harmonic model represented by Goldman and Hartman. In the first model, a person committed to tradition is involved in a constant struggle to prevent the assimilation of the past into the present. Human beings, by nature, are creatures of the present. Our world, our experiences, our knowledge, all unfold in the language of the present. According to this model, a commitment to tradition leads to a troubled encounter between present and past, with complex results: tradition develops patterns that do not suit it and is pushed in a non-dialogical direction that increasingly seals it and makes it extrahistorical or meta-historical. Leibowitz and Soloveitchik, then, sought to evade the dialogical course. The person committed to tradition is a hero, living between worlds and struggling to find the proper relationship between them,

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trapped in the collision between two incompatible realms —the realm of the present and the diametrically “other” realm of tradition. In the second model, the response to tradition is harmonic. The relationship between present and past is not one of strangeness and alienation, not even one of tension and struggle. The present is central to the shaping of tradition. Goldman and Hartman never tire of stating that what constitutes Judaism is constant interpretation, and we do not have a pure, meta-historical Judaism, which disregards time as irrelevant. They are, however, fundamentally divided on one issue. Whereas, for Goldman, the dialogical process mediating between present and past is primarily sociological-cultural, for Hartman it rests on a theological stance—the human-God relationship. The historical process, then, is not a contingent event but the realization of an ideal pattern. This book sought to shed new light on the commitment to tradition and its meaning, placing at the center an ongoing dialogue whereby the past directs the present and the present reinterprets the past. Zelda’s beautiful account of the dialogical relationship between past and present could not be a more fitting ending for it: On that strange evening Someone asked: Is it possible to change the past? And the sickly woman answered angrily: The past is not a pearl Sealed within a crystal box Nor a snake within an alcohol jar— The past sways Within the present And when the present falls into a pit— The past falls with it— When the past looks up to heaven All life rises with it, Even life from a very distant past.2

NOTES Chapter One: Returning to Tradition: Paradox or Challenge 1. Zygmunt Bauman, “Morality in an Age of Contingency,” in Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash and Paul Morris (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 49. 2. Ibid. 3. John B. Thompson, “Tradition and Self in a Meditated World,” in Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1996), 91-93. 4. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Harper, 1962), 149. 5. For an extensive analysis of this question see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000). 6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 250. 7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), 194-195. 8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 261. 9. Ibid., 262. 10. Cf. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Books, 1979), 45-47. 11. On this distinction, see Edward Shils, The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1997); Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), xxix-xxx. Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) applies this distinction to Arab society. See also Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), 26. 12. S. N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1973), 121, 139. 13. Cf. Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 11-32. 14. Cf. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change and Modernity, 209. 15. See Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 19-20. 16. Ibid., 32. 17. See, for instance, Moshe Halbertal, Interpretive Revolutions in the Making: Values as Interpretative Considerations in Midrashei Halakhah [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999). 18. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change and Modernity, ch. 14. 19. Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 12. 20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 261. 21. Ibid., 273. 22. Ibid., 264-265. 23. Thompson, “Tradition and Self,” 93. See also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269.

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24. See Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 157-159; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 47-52. 25. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 6 vols. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), § 1268. 26. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273. 27. Cf. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change and Modernity, 209; Thompson, “Tradition and Self,” 93-94. Part One – Introduction 1. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Books, 1979), 7. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, New York, 1974), 119-120, 199. 3. Ibid., 119-120. 4. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 111-112. 5. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 6 vols. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), § 4479. 6. Ibid., § 1372. See also Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 148. 7. See, for instance, Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1975), 51. 8. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Cassell, 1953), v. Chapter Two - Soloveitchik: Jewish Thought Confronts Modernity 1. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1997), 1-2. 2. Cf. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, On Repentance: The Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, ed. Pinhas H. Peli (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996). 3. Buber’s philosophy, according to Diamond, is an instance of confessional theology. See Malcolm L. Diamond, Martin Buber: Jewish Existentialist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 39. See also Avi Sagi, “The Relationship between ‘IThou’ and ‘I-Eternal Thou’ in the Philosophy of Martin Buber” [Hebrew], Daat 7 (1981), 147. 4. See also Lawrence Kaplan, “Models of the Ideal Religious Man in R. Soloveitchik’s Thought” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 4 (1984-1985), 328. 5. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering,” in Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering, and the Human Condition, ed. David Schatz, Joel B. Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation, 2003) (henceforth, “Suffering”). 6. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 8. See also David Hartman, “The Rav’s Response to Modernism” [Hebrew], in Jubilee Volume: In Honor of Morenu Hagaon R. Joseph B.

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Soloveitchik, ed. Shaul Israeli, Norman Lamm and Yitzhak Raphael (Jerusalem and New York: Mossad Ha-Rav Kook and Yeshiva University, 1984), 34-35. 7. Ibid., 7-8. 8. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 6 vols. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), § 6227. See also Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), ch. 4. 9. See also Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Divrei Hashkafah [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: WZO, 1992), 135-136; Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 259-260; Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Be-sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Orot, 1976), 415-416. 10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), 109. 11. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hashkafah, 135. 12. Ibid., 135-136. 13. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Books, 1979), ch. 5. 14. Ibid., 126. 15. For a detailed analysis, see Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, especially Part 2. 16. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 85-86. 17. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Yemei Zikkaron [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: WZO, 1986), 145. See also 139ff. 18. Soloveitchik, Be-sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad, 429. See also the following works by Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha`arakhah [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, WZO, 1982), 102-107; “From Thence You Shall Seek,” in Halakhic Man: Revealed and Concealed [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: WZO, 1979), 131; On Repentance, 260-265. 19 . Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1952), 89. 20. Ibid., 92. 21. Soloveitchik, Yemei Zikkaron, 36. See also 50, 91-92, 98, 150; idem, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha`arakhah, 61-62, 141. 22. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 48. 23. On this point, Soloveitchik follows Kierkegaard. See Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, ch. 8. 24. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 46. 25. Soloveitchik, “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 135. 26. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man , trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 40-41. For an interesting contrast between Soloveitchik’s approach and the existentialist outlook of Albert Camus, see Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002). 27. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 47. 28. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks: Five Addresses on Israel, History, and the Jewish People, trans. S. M. Lehrman and A. H. Rabinowitz (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation, 2002), 92.

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29. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 56-59, idem, Lonely Man, 55-56, idem, The Rav Speaks, 93. 30. Ibid. 31. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 108. 32. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hashkafah, 37-39; idem, Yemei Zikkaron, 53-54. On the biographic background of discipline and self-restraint see idem, Divrei Hagut veHa‘arakhah, 173-174. 33. See Halakhic Man, 56-59. 34. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, ed. Abraham R. Besdin (Jerusalem: WZO, 1979), 74. 35. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 141. 36. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 153-154, where Soloveitchik draws a distinction between paganism and the ritual of idolatry. 37. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hashkafah, 121. 38. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 144. 39. Ibid., 145 40. Ibid., 145-146. 41. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 67. 42. Ibid., 68. See also Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 55-56. 43. See Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, ch. 4. 44. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hashkafah, 137. 45. Ibid.., 125. 46. Ibid., 144. 47. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 143-144. 48. Ibid., 21. 49. Soloveitchik, “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 206. Obviously, this assumption restricts the creative element emphasized in Halakhic Man. See also below, ch. 8. 50. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 153, n. 80. 51. Ibid. 52. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zaratustra, trans. R. J. Hollingadale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 89. On the Nietzschean intuition, see Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1953), 62ff 53. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 222-225. 54. Ibid., 172-175. 55. Ibid. 56. Soloveitchik, Be-sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad, 428. 57. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 174. 58. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 108. See also 124-128; idem, Yemei Zikkaron, 111-112; idem, Be-Sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad, 421; idem, Reflections of the Rav, 179180. 59. See Romans 7:22-23. 60. See Martin Luther, Reformatorische Schriften von der Freiheit einer Christenmenschen (Braunschweig, 1889), 295. 61. See Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman, Religion and Morality, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 98-99, and references.

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62. Imannuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore H. Green and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 27. 63. Ibid., 92. 64. Ibid., 32. 65. See Sagi and Statman, Religion and Morality, 99-101. 66. See Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 194. 67. For further development of this distinction, see Sagi and Statman, Religion and Morality, 85-86. 68. Emphasis in the original. 69. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 142. 70. Ibid., 182. 71. For a detailed analysis, see Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence. See also Avi Sagi, “The Art of Existence: Three Approaches in Kierkegaard’s Thought,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 31 (1991), 473-484. 72. See Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, 122; Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 222-224. 73. See Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002), ch. 1. 74. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha`arakhah, 102-104. 75. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 233. 76. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 126. 77. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 37. 78. Ibid., 41. See also Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 105. 79. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 85. See also idem, Divrei Hagut veHa‘arakhah, 121, 249, 253, and idem, On Repentance, 239. 80. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha‘arakhah, 105. See also idem, The Rav Speaks, 92. 81. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 85. 82. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 117-119. 83. See Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, chs. 3 and 5. 84. Søren Kierkegaard, Either Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 225. 85. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 253. 86. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 3. See also idem, Divrei Hagut veHa‘arakhah, 241-242. See also ibid., 218, for a description of this experience in personal-biographic terms. 87. For a detailed analysis, see Gili (Mivtzari) Ziwan, Religious Existence in the Face of Modernity according to Rabbi Soloveitchik [Hebrew] (M.A. Thesis: Bar-Ilan University, 1993), ch. 3. 88. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 34-37. 89. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 108. 90. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 87. 91. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 226. 92. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 133-134. 93. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 68.

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94. Ibid., 40-41. 95. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 256. See also Benjamin IshShalom, “Language as a Religious Category in the Works of Joseph Ber Soloveitchik” [Hebrew], in Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift: Collected Papers in Jewish Studies, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher (Jerusalem: Academon, 1992), especially 806-807. 96. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 43-44. 97. Ibid., 60. 98. In Lonely Man, 67-68, Soloveitchik engages in a concealed confrontation with Buber. 99. See Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 230. 100. See Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 53 . 101. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man, 68. 102. 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), 102-105. 103. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 184. 104. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 37-38. 105. Ibid., 72. 106. Ibid., 66. 107. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 45-46. 108. Soloveitchik, “Suffering,” 88. 109. Ibid., 93. 110. Ibid., 94. 111. Ibid., 103. See also Soloveitchik, “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 144, and idem, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” 102-105. 112. See Ziwan, Religious Existence, 152-157. 113. See Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha`arakhah, 105, 253; idem, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” 102-105; idem, Yemei Zikkaron, 70-82. 114. Soloveitchik, Be-Sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad, 404-405. Cf.also Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 182. 115. For extensive discussion of this issue, see Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence. Cf. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967) 25-26. 116. Besides the sources mentioned in this chapter, see also Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 166; idem, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah 255, 259, 266, 299; idem, Yemei Zikkaron, 165. 117. See, for instance, Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 165-166. 118. Ibid., 182. 119. Soloveitchik, “Suffering,” 93. 120. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man , 29. 121. For a further instance of a synchronic approach, see Soloveitchik, Yemei Zikkaron, 70-82, where he explicitly mentions an “eternal conflict” (82) between the two views. 122. See Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah 81-82, 89-90. 123. See below, ch. 8.

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124. For further discussion, see ch. 3 below. 125. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 175. Cf. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 82-83. 126. Soloveitchik, “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 124. 127. Ibid., 122-123. 128. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 45. 129. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 26. 130. Cf. Hartman, “The Rav’s Response,” 38. 131. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve- Ha‘arakhah, 261-263. 132. Ibid., 60. 133. Soloveitchik, Yemei Zikkaron, 122-123. 134. Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks, 93-94. 135. Ibid, 28. 136. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, 181. 137. Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks, 92-93. 138. Ibid. 21. 139. Ibid., 153. 140. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 49. 141. This approach originates in Kierkegaard. See Sagi, “The Art of Existence.” 142. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 41. 143. Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks, 154. 144. For instance, see ibid., 29-30. 145. See Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” 99-105. 146. Ibid., 102. See also Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks, 43-47. 147. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 170. 148. See, for instance The Rav Speaks, 73-74. 149. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, 171. Chapter Three - Compartmentalization: From Ernst Simon to Yeshayahu Leibowitz 1. Ernst Simon, Are We Still Jews [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Hapo`alim, 1983), 10. The article appeared originally in Luah Haaretz 2 (1951), 97-129. 2. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Torah and Mitzvot in Our Times: Lectures and Articles 1943-1954 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Massada, 1954). 3. Ibid., 87. 4. Simon, Are We Still Jews, 35. 5. Isaac Bernstein, Mission and Pathway [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Moreshet, 1956), 146-147. 6. Moshe Zvi Neriah, Religious Judaism in the State of Israel [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Ha-Po‘el ha-Mizrahi, 1953), 3. 7. Moshe Zvi Neriah, “The Disputation Pamphlet” [Hebrew], in The Royal Turban (Kefar ha-Ro‘eh: Hei-Ro‘i, 1992), 319-320. 8. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Faith, History, and Values [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Academon, 1982), 86 (henceforth Faith), 142. Excerpts from this book appear in translation in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans.

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Eliezer Goldman et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) (henceforth Judaism). This book also includes translations of excerpts from Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1976) (henceforth Yahadut). Whenever translations are available, I refer the reader to Judaism. 9. Leibowitz, Torah and Mitzvot in Our Time, 67. 10. Yahadut, 45. 11. See Eliezer Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present [Hebrew], ed. Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 246-249. 12. Yahadut, 45. 13. See also Avi Sagi, Judaism: Between Religion and Morality [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), especially ch. 13. 14. Faith, 86. 15. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides, trans. John Glucker (Tel Aviv: MOD, 1989), 27ff. 16. Yahadut, 362. 17. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Talks on the Ethics of the Fathers and on Maimonides [Hebrew] (henceforth Ethics) (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1979), 129. 18. Yahadut, 91. 19. Ibid., 340. 20. Judaism, 87. 21. Ibid., 85-87. 22. Faith, 151. 23. Simon, Are we Still Jews, 251. 24. For a detailed analysis, see Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman, Religion and Morality, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), chs 6-7. 25. I discuss this question extensively in Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000). 26. See Avi Sagi, “The Suspension of the Ethical and the Religious Meaning of Ethics in Kierkegaard’s Thought,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 32 (1992), 83-103. 27. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30. 28. See Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Books, 1979), where Berger refers to this as “the inductive possibility.” See his analysis in ch. 4. See also Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 80; Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Holt, 1978), 168. 29. For further discussion, see Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence, ch. 7. 30. Judaism, 37 (emphasis in the original). See also Yahadut, 345. 31. Ibid. 32. Leibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides, 69. 33. Leibowitz, Judaism, 44. See also Leibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides, 64-66; idem, Yahadut, 342-343.

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34. Faith, 57. 35. Judaism, 22. 36. For a clarification of both positions see Avi Sagi, “Halakhic Praxis and the Word of God: A Study of Two Models,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1992), 305-329. 37. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1988), 100. See also Leibowitz, Ethics, 64. 38. Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, 99. 39. Ibid., 100. 40. Judaism, 12. 41. Yahadut, 350. 42. Judaism, 76. 43. Ibid., 219 44. Yahadut, 28. 45. Judaism, 69. 46. Ethics, 107. 47. Judaism, 70. See also 46. 48. Ethics, 144. 49. See Judaism, 71. Chapter Four - Religious Commitment in a Secularized World: Eliezer Goldman 1. Eliezer Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present [Hebrew], ed. Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 141. 2. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, “A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity,” in Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity: A Thesis Eleven Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 149. 3. See Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 361-371. 4. Ibid., 257 (my emphases). 5. See Norman Malcolm, “The Groundlessness of Religious Belief,” in Reason and Religion, ed. Stuart C. Brown (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 143-157. 6. Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 114. 7. D. Z. Philips, Faith After Foundationalism (London: Routledge, 1988), 3. 8. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 257. 9. Ibid. 10. Eliezer Goldman, “Revelation in Philosophical Discourse”[Hebrew], De`ot 46 (1977), 64. 11. Ibid. See also idem, Expositions and Inquiries, 258. 12. Ibid. 13. Goldman, “Revelation in Philosophical Discourse,” 64. 14. See, for instance, Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 361-371. Cf. Avi Sagi, “Religious Language in the Modern World: An Interview with Eliezer Goldman” [Hebrew], Gilayion Ne’emane Torah va-Avodah (August 1995), (henceforth Interview). 15. On Wittgenstein see, for instance, Alan Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar, and God (London: Epworth Press, 1976), 73-87.

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16. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 258. 17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1980), 32. 18. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 258. 19. Goldman, “Revelation in Philosophical Discourse,” 64. 20. John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 50-53. 21. See Interview, 18. 22. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 311-312. See also 361-371. 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1974), 6:41. 24. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 367. 25. Ibid., 313. See also 367. 26. See Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11. 27. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 367. 28. See Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar and God, 29; Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 110, 112-113. 29. See ch. 7 below. 30. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 368. 31. Ibid., 306. 32. Interview, 15. 33. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 306. 34. Ibid., 311 (my emphasis). 35. Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 95. See also Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar, and God, 36-37. 36. Cf. also D. Z. Philips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 24-27. 37. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 314. 38. See Interview, 13. 39. Rush Rhees, Without Answers (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 6. 40. Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 138. 41. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 344. Emphasis in the original. 42. Ibid, 13-14, 82. 43. See Interview, 19. 44. Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), Laws of Fasting 1:1-2. 45. Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries, 356. See also Interview, 16-17. 46. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 37. 47. S. N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1973), ch. 14. 48. Interview, 25. 49. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 1969), 172. 50. See Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1976), 45. Chapter Five - David Hartman: Renewing The Covenant 1. Emilio Betti, Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodic der Geisteswissenschaften (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohar, 1967), 28-29. This distinction is the basis of the book by E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 2. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Harper, 1962), 269273. 3. David Hartman, Joy and Responsibility: Israel, Modernity and the Renewal of Judaism (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi-Posner, 1978), 199 (henceforth Joy and Responsibility). 4. Ibid., 200 5. David Hartman, Conflicting Visions: Spiritual Possibilities of Modern Israel (Schocken Books: New York, 1990), 93. 6. David Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1999), xv. 7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 58-59. 8. S. N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1973), ch. 14. 9. David Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976), 8. 10. Ibid., 214. See also David Hartman, Israelis and the Jewish Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), x-xii. 11. David Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2001), 18-19. 12. See, for instance, Joy and Responsibility, 54-55, 203. 13. See David Hartman, A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1985), 1-2 (henceforth Living Covenant). 14. Joy and Responsibility, 132. 15. Living Covenant, 301 16. Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 19-20, 109-110, 135-140; Joy and Responsibility, 1-4. 17. Ibid., 2. 18. Ibid, 18-19; Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 34. 19. Hartman, Israelis and the Jewish Tradition, 105. 20. Joy and Responsibility, 3. 21. Ibid; see also Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 137. 22. Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 8. See also Joy and Responsibility, 6. 23. Hartman, Israelis and the Jewish Tradition, 105. 24. Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 135-140. 25. Ibid., 34, 47.

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26. Yong Huang, “Religious Pluralism and Interfaith Dialogue: Beyond Universalism and Particularism,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 37 (1995), 127-128. 27. John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 105. 28. On a similar position developed by Jewish theologians see, e.g., Daniel Polish, “Understanding Religious Pluralism,” Religion and Intellectual Life 4 (1987), 50-63. 29. See, for instance, Hick, God Has Many Names, 104-105; idem, Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983), 119-120. 30. John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 37. 31. Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 111. 32. S. Mark Heim, “The Pluralistic Hypothesis, Realism, and Post-Eschatology,” Religious Studies 28 (1992), 207-219. 33. Ibid., 213. 34. S. Mark Heim, Is Christ the Only Way? Christian Faith in a Pluralistic World (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1985), 25. 35. Ibid, 143. 36. Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 82. 37. Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), ch. 7. 38. On the link between postmodernism and expressive pluralism in modern theology and philosophy, see the summary of Nancy Murphy and James W. McClendon, “Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies,” Modern Theology 5 (1989), 191214; John Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-Two Responses to Unasked Questions,” Modern Theology 7 (1991), 225-237. 39. John Hick, “Religious Pluralism and Absolute Claims,” in Religious Pluralism, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 194. 40. Keith Ward, “Truth and the Diversity of Religions,” Religious Studies 26 (1990), 3; Huang, “Religious Pluralism and Interfaith Dialogue,” 133. 41. On this point in Wittgensteinian tradition see, for instance, Norman Malcolm, “The Groundlessness of Religious Belief,” in Reason and Religion, ed. Stuart C. Brown (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); D. Z. Philips, Faith After Foundationalism (London: Routledge, 1988); Avi Sagi, “Yeshayahu Leibowitz—A Breakthrough in Jewish Philosophy: Religion without Metaphysics,” Religious Studies 33 (1977), 203216. 42. Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 39-40. On this issue, see also Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” 228-229. 43. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 199. 44. Living Covenant, 202-203. 45. See Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 7-8, 11. 46. Ibid., 126. 47. Ibid., 239. 48. See Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, 39-40.

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49. See Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 243-266. 50. See David Hartman, “The God of the Communities of Israel” [Hebrew], interview in Questions about God, ed. Yizhar Hess and Elazar Sturm (Or Yehuda: Hed Artsi, 1998), 13. 51. Ibid., 17. 52. Ibid., 18-19. 53. See Living Covenant, ch. 2. 54. Hess and Sturm, Questions about God, 16. 55. Ibid., 19. See also Hartman, Israelis and the Jewish Tradition, viii. 56. Hess and Sturm, Questions about God, 22. 57. See Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 12-14. 58. See David Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 10-12; Joy and Responsibility, 13. 59. Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 34. 60. Living Covenant, 259. 61. See Joy and Responsibility, 19. 62. Ibid. See also Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 260. 63. For a detailed discussion, see pp. 92-93 above. 64. Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 21. 65. Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 66. Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 22, based on a passage from TB Hagigah 3b that speaks of these “forty nine ways” in the page preceding this quotation. 67. Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 255. See also Joy and Responsibility, 10, 28-29, 116, 150; Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 127, 239; idem, Torah and Philosophic Quest, 83-85. 68. Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 256. 69. Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 126. 70. Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 9. 71. Ibid., 8-9. 72. For the link between Hartman’s and Charles Taylor’s writings see, in particular, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); idem, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 73. Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 256-257. 74. See Joy and Responsibility, 29; Hartman, Conflicting Visions, 256. 75. See Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 4-5. 76. Ibid., 3. 77. See above, pp. 18ff, 57. 78. See Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), ch. 2. 79. See Menachem Mautner, “Law as Culture: Toward a New Research Paradigm” [Hebrew], in Multiculturalism in a Democratic and Jewish State, ed. Menachem Mautner, Avi Sagi, Ronen Shamir (Tel Aviv: Ramot-Tel Aviv University, 1998), 562564. 80. See, in particular, Hartman, A Heart of Many Rooms, 29-36.

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81. See Living Covenant, 227-228. 82. Joy and Responsibility, 233. 83. Ibid., 249. 84. Ibid., 250-253. See also Living Covenant, 229-231, 258-262. 85. Ibid., 288-289. 86. Ibid., 288-293. 87. See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1995), 116. See also Joy and Responsibility, 233-235, and Living Covenant, 226-228. 88. Ibid., 257-258. 89. Ibid., 258. 90. Ibid., 261. 91. This thesis is extensively developed in the Epistle to the Romans, mainly chapters 3-8. 92. See Joy and Responsibility, 38-39; Hess and Sturm, Questions about God, 22. 93. For a detailed theoretical development of this approach see Avi Sagi, “Identity and Commitment in a Multicultural World,” Democratic Culture, 3 (2000), 167-186. 94. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:200. 95. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 6 vols. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), § 1347. 96. Martin Buber, Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1952), 69. Part Three – Introduction 1. See Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Chapter Six - Scripture in the Thought of Leibowitz and Soloveitchik 1. For a general discussion of these questions, see Shalom Rosenberg, “The Study of Scripture in Modern Jewish Religious Thought” [Hebrew], in The Bible and Us, ed. Uriel Simon (Ramat-Gan: Dvir, 1979). 2. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1965) 7. 3. Ibid., 5-6. 4. Ibid., 2. For further analysis of this philosophy, see above, ch. 2. 5. Ibid., 8-14. 6. Ibid., 9-10. 7. 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), 60. 8. Pinhas Peli, “The Uses of Hermeneutics (“Derush”) in the Philosophy of J. B. Soloveitchik: Method or Essence?” [Hebrew], Daat 4 (1980), 125. 9. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” 60. 10. Peli, “The Uses of Hermeneutics,” 120.

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11. Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 110. 12. Rudolf Bultmann, “Der Sinn des Mythos und der Entmythologiserung,” in Kerygma und Mythos, vol. 2, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (Hamburg: Evangelische Verlag, 1952), 183. 13. Ibid., 1:120. 14. Ibid., 1:180. 15. Moshe Schwarcz, Language, Myth, Art [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1977), 223. 16. Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 49. 17. R. Bultmann, “Das problem der Hermeneutik,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Kirche, 47 (1950), 62-63. 18. Ibid., 65. 19. For the quote from Fuchs, see James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, The New Hermeneutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 60. On the differences between Bultmann and Fuchs, see also Joseph Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 107. 20. Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), ch. 1. 21. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 17. 22. Ibid., 18. 23. Ibid. 24. See also Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Mi-Ma‘amakim” [From the Depths] in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha‘arakhah (Jerusalem: WZO, 1982), 117136. 25. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1976), 350 (henceforth Yahadut). Excerpts from this book have appeared in translation in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) (henceforth Judaism), and whenever translations are available, I refer the reader to them. 26. Yahadut, 339. 27. Ibid., 344-345. 28. Ibid., 340. 29. For further analysis of this issue, see above, ch. 3. 30. Judaism, 140. 31. Yahadut, 340. Emphasis in the original. 32. Judaism, 140. 33. Ibid. 34. Yahadut, 340. 35. Judaism, 140. 36. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 53-55; idem, Culture and Value, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 29, 51, 54.

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37. Yahadut, 13. 38. Yahadut, 348. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 349. 41. For further discussion, see Avi Sagi, “Unity of Scripture Constituted through Jewish Traditions of Interpretation,” in One Scripture or Many? Canon from Biblical, Theological,and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Christine Helmer and Christof Landmesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), 186-216. 42. For a detailed analysis of Leibowitz’s stance, see below, ch. 8. 43. Yahadut, 340. 44. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “On the Love of Torah and the Redemption of the Generation's Soul” [Hebrew], in Be-Sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad, ed. Pinhas Peli (Jerusalem: Orot, 1976), 428. 45. Judaism, 14. 46. Yahadut, 397. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 349. 49. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Faith, History, and Values [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Academon, 1982), 154. 50 . On the two main theories concerning Halakhah as disclosure or creativity see my paper, “Halakhic Praxis and the Word of God: A Study of Two Models,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 1 (1992) 305-329. For a detailed analysis of Leibowitz’s approach, see ch. 7 below. 51. Yahadut, 350. 52. Rudolf Bultmann, “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible,” in The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1988), 242. 53. Ibid., 247, thesis 3. 54. Ibid., 246-247. 55. Ibid., 247, thesis 5. 56. Ibid. 57. See Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA.: Rodopi, 2000), especially ch. 8, section 5. 58. See ch. 2 above. 59. On this issue, see Avi Sagi, Judaism: Between Religion and Morality [Hebrew], (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1998), Part 2. Chapter Seven - Halakhah In The Thought Of Leibowitz And Soloveitchik 1. See Edgar Bodenheimer, Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 341-345, 439-440; G. W. Paton, A Textbook of Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 198-204. 2. See Avi Sagi, “Halakhic Praxis and the Word of God: A Study of Two Models,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1992), 305-329. 3. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: JPS, 1983), 80 (henceforth Halakhic Man). 4. Ibid., 81.

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5. Ibid., 80. 6. See Avi Sagi, The Open Canon: On the Meaning of Halakhic Discourse, trans. Batya Stein (London: Continuum, 2007), ch. 12. 7. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod” [“What is Your Beloved More than Other Beloved” citing Song of Songs 5:9] [Hebrew], in Divrei Hagut ve-Ha’arakha (Jerusalem, WZO, 1982) (henceforth, “Mah Dodekh”). 8. Nathan Rotenstreich, Studies in Contemporary Jewish Thought [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978), 74. 9. Halakhic Man, 85. 10. Ibid., 78-81. 11. Ibid., 153, n. 80. 12. Aaron Lichtenstein, “R. Joseph Soloveitchik,” in Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century (Washington, Bnai Brith, 1963), 201. 13. Ibid., 290. See also Sagi, “Halakhic Praxis.” 14. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “From Thence You Shall Seek,” in Halakhic Man: Revealed and Concealed [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: WZO, 1979), (henceforth, “From Thence You Shall Seek “), 204-205. 15. Halakhic Man, 99-100; “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 205. 16. David Hartman, The Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1985), 63-64. 17. “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 205. 18. See, for instance Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1976) (henceforth Yahadut), 145-146, 192, and elsewhere. See also Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Eliezer Goldman et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) (henceforth Judaism), 4, 11-12. Judaism includes translations of sections from Yahadut and from Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Faith, History, and Values [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Academon, 1982), (henceforth Faith), Whenever translations are available, I refer the reader to Judaism. 19. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, On Just About Everything: Talks with Michael Shashar [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1988), 100. 20. Judaism, 12. 21. Ibid. 22. Faith, 154-155. 23. Rotenstreich, Studies in Contemporary Jewish Thought, 87. 24. Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, 98. 25. See Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “Replies to Critics” [Hebrew], Iyyun 26 (1976), 278. 26. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “Thoratreuer Zionismus,” Zion 2 (1930), 62. This idea appears also in Yahadut, 192, 27. Judaism, 12. 28. Yahadut, 145-146; Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, 100-101. 29. Yahadut, 192. 30. Yahadut, 342-344. 31. Halakhic Man, 80; Judaism, 171-172. See also Sagi, “Halakhic Praxis,” and Yohanan Silman, “The Divine Torah that ‘Is Not in Heaven’: A Typological Analysis”

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[Hebrew], Bar-Ilan: Annual of Bar-Ilan University Studies in Judaica and the Humanities, ed. Moshe Hallamish (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1987). 32. “Mah Dodekh,” 77. 33. Ibid., 81. 34. Abraham Besdin, Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought (Jerusalem: WZO, 1979), 146. 35. “Mah Dodekh,” 72. 36. I discuss this issue at length in Judaism: Between Religion and Morality [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1998). 37. Cited in Tur, Hoshen Mishpat, Laws of Judges 1. 38. Derishah, ad locum. 39. On this issue, see Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar, Transforming Identity: The Ritual Transformation from Gentile to Jew—-Structure and Meaning (London: Continuum, 2007). 40. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks: Five Addresses on Israel, History, and the Jewish People, trans. S. M. Lehrman and A. H. Rabinowitz (New York: Toras HoRav Foundation, 2002), 49-53. 41. Judaism, 97. 42. Ibid., 4. See also Yahadut, 55. 43. Ibid., 313. 44. Judaism, 3. 45. Yahadut, 192. 46. Judaism, 129. 47. Yahadut, 313. 48. Judaism, 89. 49. Ibid., 128; Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, 114. 50. Judaism, 128. 51. Ibid., 131. 52. Ibid., 171-172; Yahadut, 370-374. 53. Judaism, 4. 54. Ibid., 172. See also 166-167. 55. Ibid., 169. 56. Ibid., 4 57. Yahadut, 312-313. Cf. Rotenstreich, Studies in Contemporary Jewish Thought, 94. 58. Judaism, 14. 59. Ibid., 97. See also 17-22. 60. Judaism, 27-28. 61. Faith, 142. 62. Abraham son of Maimonides,Responsa (Jerusalem: Mekitse Nirdamim, 19541957), #97. See also Jacob Anatoli, Malmad Hatalmidim (Lake, 1866), 71b-72a; Maggid Mishneh on The Code of Maimonides, Laws of Neighbors, 14: 4; Simeon Shkop, She‘arei Yosher (New York: Hava‘ad Le-Hotsa’at Sifre Ha-Gaon R. Shim‘on, 1980), Part 5, ch. 1. For extensive discussion of these issues, see Sagi, Judaism: Between Religion and Morality, 199. 63. Yahadut, 199. See also 61, and Judaism, 28-29.

Notes

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64. Judaism, 15-16. 65. Leibowitz, On Just About Everything, 58. 66. Faith, 58. See also 57, 61. 67. See Avi Sagi, “The Akedah: A Comparative Study of Kierkegaard and Leibowitz” [Hebrew], Daat 23 (1989), 121-134. 68. For instance, Halakhic Man, 17-19. 69. “Mah Dodekh,” 81. 70. “Mah Dodekh,” 80-81. 71. “Mah Dodekh,” 76-77. Cf. Halakhic Man, 147, note 24. 72. Ibid. 73. “Mah Dodekh,” 89. 74. Halakhic Man, 8. 75. “From Thence You Shall Seek,” 216. 76. Ibid.. 77. See Rotenstreich, Studies, 66; Michael L. Morgan, “Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Platonism,” Journal of Religion 66 (1986), 194-198. 78. “Mah Dodekh,” 81. 79. Halakhic Man, 23. 80. Ibid., 63. 81. Ibid., 29. 82. Ibid., 33-34. See also 37-38, 40-41, 43-44, 90-91. 83. “Mah Dodekh,” 81-82, 89-90. 84. Ibid., 90. 85. Soloveitchik, The Rav Speaks, 105. Cf. idem, “The Community,” Tradition 17, 2 (1978), 12-13. 86. See Lawrence Kaplan, “Models of the Ideal Religious Man in Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Thought” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 4 (1985), 327339. 87. Ibid., 338. 88. Ibid. 89. See, for instance, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1997), 83-84, and Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (which was originally written in Hebrew), 139, note 4. 90. Pinchas Peli, “On Man in the Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik” [Hebrew], Daat 12 (1992), 99-100. 91. See Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), chs. 6 and 9. 92. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Remembrance Days [Hebrew], trans. from Yiddish by Moshe Krone (Jerusalem, WZO, 1986). 93. Ibid., 77. 94. Ibid., 82. 95. Halakhic Man, 23. 96. “Mah Dodekh,” 81. 97. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Catharsis,” Tradition 17, 2 (1978), 38-54. 98. See Sagi, “The Akedah: A Comparative Study.” 99. On Leibowitz, see ibid. On Soloveitchik, see, for instance, Joseph B.

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Soloveitchik, On Repentance, ed. Pinhas Peli (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 225-226, 245-248; idem, “On the Love of Torah and the Redemption of the Generation's Soul” [Hebrew] in Be-Sod ha-Yahid ve-ha-Yahad, ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusalem: Orot, 1976); idem, “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah,” Tradition, 17, 2 (1978) 71-72. Chapter Eight - Eliezer Goldman: Judaism as Interpretation 1. Eliezer Goldman, Expositions and Inquiries: Jewish Thought in Past and Present [Hebrew], ed. Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), (henceforth Expositions), 340-345. 2. Avi Sagi, “Religious Language in the Modern World: An Interview with Eliezer Goldman” [Hebrew], Gilayion Ne’emane Torah va-Avodah (August 1995), 13. 3. Expositions, 346-357. 4. Ibid., 356. 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. Berhnard Rosenberg (New York: Ktav, 1992), 55-56. 6. See Sagi, “Religious Language in the Modern World,” 19. 7. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” 68-76. 8. Ibid., 62-68, 76-80. 9. Ibid., 56. 10. Expositions, 344. 11. Sagi, “Religious Language in the Modern World,” 19. 12. Expositions, 354. 13. Ibid., 300. 14. Ibid., 305. 15. Sagi, “Religious Language,” 25. 16. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 37. 17. For a general review, see Asher Cohen, The Talit and the Flag: ReligiousZionism and the Vision of a Torah State [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 1998), ch. 8. 18. Expositions, 399. For a similar, later critique that does not mention Goldman, see Tamar Ross, “The Woman’s Status in Judaism: Several Reservations on Leibowitz’s Mechanism for Accommodating Halakhah and Reality” [Hebrew], in Yeshayahu Leibowitz: His World and Philosophy, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995), 148-161. 19. Expositions, 402-403. 20. Ibid., 398. 21. See Goldman’s implied criticism in Expositions, 299. 22. Ibid., 300. 23. Ibid., 294. 24. Moshe Israel Hazzan, Responsa Kerakh shel Romi (Livorno, 1832), # 26, 116b. 25. Expositions, 299. 26. Ibid., 303.

Notes

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27. Menachem Mautner, The Decline of Formalism and the Rise of Values [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Ma`agalei Da`at, 1993), ch. 1. Cf. Yaakov Katz, “Halakhah in Historical Perspective” [Hebrew], in Halakhah and Kabbalah: Studies in the History of Jewish Religion, Its Various Faces, and Social Relevance (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), 1-6. 28. Expositions, 303. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 280-293. 31. See Menachem Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, 4 vols., trans. Bernard Auerbach and Melvin J. Sykes (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1994). The first original Hebrew edition appeared in 1973. 32. Expositions, 325. 33. Citing Jacob Anatoly in Expositions, 332. 34. In note 14, Goldman directs the reader to the “Code of Maimonides, Hilkhot De`ot, end of Chapter One” (reference is to 1:5-7). 35. Expositions, 333. 36. On this question, see Aryei Fishman, Judaism and Modernization on the Religious Kibbutz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially ch. 1. 37. Expositions, 356. 38. For a systematic formulation of this approach see Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self, trans. Batya Stein (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 128-129. 39. Expositions, 356 40. See Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (New York: State University of New York, 1982). For critiques of the book see David Stern, “Moses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts 4:2 (1984): 193-204. Handelman rebutted in “Fragments of the Rock—Contemporary Literary Theory and the Studies of Rabbinic Text: A Response to David Stern,” Prooftexts (1985): 75-98, and Stern responded in the same issue, 96-103. See also Daniel Boyarin, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Intertextuality and Midrash,” Poetics Today 8 (1987), especially notes 3-4. 41. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, 41. 42. Expositions, 324. 43. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), ch. 2. 44. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Epilogue 1. The English translation of this poem, by Harold Schimmel, appears in Yehuda Amichai, Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Riverdale-onHudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1992), 23. 2. Zelda, The Poems of Zelda [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985), 222. The poem is untitled.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Professor Avi Sagi teaches philosophy at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, where he is also the founding director of a graduate Program of Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies. Sagi is a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He has published extensively on continental philosophy, philosophy of religion and ethics, Jewish philosophy, philosophy and sociology of Jewish law. Among his books: Religion and Morality (with Daniel Statman); Judaism: Between Religion and Morality; Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd; The Open Canon: On the Meaning of Halakhic Discourse; Multiculturalism in a Democratic and Jewish State (with Menachem Mautner and Ronen Shamir); Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self; Transforming Identity: The Ritual Transformation from Gentile to JewStructure and Meaning (with Zvi Zohar).

INDEX Abraham, 36, 41, 55, 103, 129, 143 Abraham son of Maimonides, 147, 194 absurd, 18, 23, 24, 31, 32, 36, 60, 129, 179, 181 akedah (binding of Isaac), 102, 103, 128, 140, 148-149, 153, 195 alienation, 11, 18, 19, 30-37, 56, 57, 59, 90, 106, 107, 160, 173, 175 anthropocentrism, 93, 103 anthropology, 87, 112, 113 Aristotelian god, 102 autonomy, 6, 9, 12, 28, 29, 30, 64, 76, 91, 93, 105, 106, 130 -of halakhic sages, 138 -of scripture, 153 -of the religious domain, 83 -of the religious experience, 23 endorsement of, 91 human, 28, 103, 105, 136 individual's, 34 intellectual, 100 modern ideal of, 91 moral, 105 personal, 105 Bauman, Zygmunt, 5, 6, 7, 177, 185 Betti, Emilio, 85, 187 Bible, 80, 81, 121, 124, 126, 127, 121, 125, 128, 131, 161, 190 Boyarin, Daniel, 80, 161, 170, 186, 196, 197 Brisk -academy, 142, 166 R, Hayyim of, 171 Buber, Martin, 21, 24, 31, 33, 67, 111, 112, 178, 179, 181, 182, 190 Bultmann, Rudolf, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131 190, 191, 192 Camus, Albert, 18, 31, 56, 60, 109, 178, 179, 180, 181 choice, 5, 9, 12, 30, 36, 72, 82, 93 Christianity, 29, 36, 69, 95, 98, 110, 148, 188

commandments, 37, 38, 44, 46, 56, 59, 60, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 93, 99, 104, 105, 108, 110, 148, 150, 154 as an autonomous religious activity (Goldman), 76 holy character of, 54 Maimonides' view of the, 74 negate the real world, 110 negated by Pauline Christianity, 110 reasons for, 74, 75 traditional explained in casual terms, 76 communitarianism, 105 community, 9, 10, 63, 75, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 108, 109, 178, 195 closed-, 44 commitment to the, 97 -as the bearer of the tradition, 105 faith-, 39, 82, 83 God who is found within a, 102 halakhic life of the, 97 human-, 33, 53, 100 institutions of the, 167 interpretive-, 104, 112, 70, 171172 Jewish-, 48, 86, 105, 108 Job's detaching from, 128 majestic-, 39 modern-, 153 the normative-, 99 Orthodox-, 90 practice of a, 101 primacy of, 100, 105 redeemed-, 34 religious-, 99 universal-, 86 compartmentalization, 43, 45, 46, 53, 54, 60, 79, 133, 159 consciousness, 8, 19, 33, 34, 35, 43, 66, 68, 89, 99, 108, 113, 128, 149, 184 believer's-, 135, 148 compartmentalized-, 43

214 -of belonging to the same tradition, 13 -of the distance from God, 51 -of the enlightenment legacy, 22 -of lawfulness, 34 -of the tradition, 84 -of worship, 100 correlation between consciousness and practice, 14 covenantal-, 100 deception of, 66 existentialist-, 24 faith as an active shaping of consciousness, 100 falce-, 124 human-, 18, 19, 38, 43, 89, 112, 128, 131, 132 infantile-, 106 inner-, 68 Jewish-, 86 metaphysical-, 30 modern-, 17, 28, 122 personal-, 14, 19 primary consciousness of a 'we', 105 realistic-, 14 religious-, 59, 86, 91, 110 self-, 31, 66 transcendental-, 23 transparent-, 60 web of, 34 covenant, 79, 85, 89, 92, 96, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 158, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193 creation crown of, 36 -of man, 121-122, 131 -of the world, 36, 39, 74, 86, 87, 92, 93, 103, 108, 119, 122, 126, 129, 132, 156 man as a partner in, 39 culture, 10, 12, 98, 99, 101, 106, 107, 109, 123, 155, 165, 172, 178, 186, 189, 190, 191, 197 Christian-, 98

Index contemporary culture/s, 85, 101, 106, 170, 172 cultural changes, 10 cultures, 10, 94 a dead culture, 111 dialogue between cultures, 10, 85 ethos of a new culture, 174 human-, 18, 73 intellectual-, 89 Jewish-, 117 living-, 9 modern-, 28, 30, 39 a product of a culture, 98 religious-, 23, 82 secular-, 39, 88 surrounding-, 172 textual-, 117 Torah-, 93 traditional-, 9, 60, 81, 88, 161, 170 western-, 17, 65, 67, 151 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 124 Eisenstadt, S. M., 177, 186, 187 evil, 9, 35, 46, 79 exile, 30, 31, 36 exodus, 86, 92, 101, 107 explication, 21, 22, 23, 24, 85 freedom, 11, 12, 18, 19, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 56, 93, 101, 105, 107, 108, 132, 138, 149 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 85, 130, 177, 178, 187 Gaon of vilna, 58, 166 Halakhah meta-, 144, 145, 146, 160, 163, 165, 167, 170 topical-, 34-37 as human creation, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 146, 149, 152, 153 thematic-, 25, 34, 36, 37

Index halakhic man, 136, 137, 138, 142, 148, 149, 150, 153, 163, 179, 180, 182, 192, 193, 195 Handelman, Susan, 170 Hazzan, Moshe Israel, 164, 196 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 18, 28, 30, 38, 40, 177, 181, 187 Heim, S. Mark, 94, 95, 188 hermeneutics Dilthey's hermeneutical approach, 124 Halakha as a hermeneutical principle, 128 hermeneutic process, 123, 124, 155 hermeneutical activity (according to Ricoeur), 124 hermeneutical assumption, 121, 132 hermeneutical circularity, 7, 72, 130 hermeneutical context of reinterpretation of Jewish tradition (by Maimonides), 161 hermeneutical deconstructionist starting point, 131 hermeneutical endeavor, 79, 123 hermeneutical method, 123 hermeneutical pluralism (of Goldman), 172 hermeneutical principle, 128, 130 hermeneutical problem, 131 hermeneutical reflection, 124 the hermeneutical role of subjective faith, 123 hermeneutical solipsism, 160 hermeneutical stance, 104 hermeneutical tradition, 76, 124 (of Heidegger, Bultmann and Gadamer), 130 hermeneutical transformation, 162 hermeneutics, 6, 122 (Soloveitchik's), 124, 159, 190, 191, 192, 199

215 practical hermeneutical decision, 159 Hick, John, 94-97, 188 Hirsch, E.D., 85, 187 holiness, 9, 10, 52, 64, 75, 125, 126, 150 divine-, 72 brought by "freedom of realizing the norm" (Soloveitchik), 28, 138 created by man, 25 of text (or scripture), 13, 58, 119, 124, 125 of the Torah, 58 immanent holiness (Goldman), 75 homo religious, 23-24, 25, 33, 38 hope halakhic-, 108 radical, 108 Husserl, Edmund, 8, 87, 94, 149 identity, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 63, 86, 105, 107, 146, 152, 173, 177, 189, 190, 194 believers', 172 choice of, 9 collective, 6 dialogical (Goldman), 172 double, 41 "I"-, 31 Jewish, 41, 86 personal, self-, 7, 8 textual, 13 idolatry, 51, 52, 55, 87, 180 immanence, 18, 27, 37, 56, 75, 100 of God, 24, 51, 57, 83, 93, 101, 111 of the passion for transcendence (Soloveitchik), 24, 32 of the world, 18, 59 immanent to consciousness, 149

216 to halakhic thinking, 143 to Jewish tradition, 112, 113 tools, 18, 140 transcendence (Husserl), 94 immediacy, 6, 7, 24, 31 Israel, 179, 194 God of, 40, 100, 102, 105 people of, 52, 53, 92, 99, 100, 137 religion of, 58, 139 state of, 44, 45-46, 48, 49, 50, 108, 162, 173, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191, 193 Torah of, 48 tribes of, 92 Israeli society, 44 Israelis, 187, 189 Judaism Catholic-, 43, 44, 45, 46, 53 dogma of, 58, 139, 140 empirical, 65 essentialist perspection of, 155 failed to contend with secular reality, 47 Halakha doesn't exhaust the meaning of (Soloveitchik), 25 halakhic, 59, 60, 92, 125, 146, 155 historical, (pre-modern) 40, 44, (pre-halakhic) 47, 65, 144 inherent collectivism of, 82 living, 125, 128 Maimonides', 161 meta-historical, 175 non-Orthodox, 105 normative, 113, 155, 162 Orthodox, 161 Protestant, 43-50, 53, 55, 56 "pure", 110, 159 religious, 45, 46, 48, 183 secular, 105 traditional, 60, 187, 193 -as a continuity between the holy and the profane, 38 -as a "demanding religion", 146

Index -as a dialogical-dialectic process, 156 -as a normative system (Leibowitz), 56, 147 -as a "public religion", 68 -as a radical innovation, 72-73 -as a wandering, 29 -consists of heroism (Soloveitchik), 151 -has a constant shift from theology to anthropology, 112 -justified and explained by universality, 86 -shaped by hermeneutical process (Goldman), 155 Kafka, Franz, 18, 56 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 29, 52, 66, 69, 94, 126, 181 Kauffman, Gordon, 96 Kerygma, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 191 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 12, 18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 39, 54-56, 67, 103, 111, 112, 131, 177-184, 190, 192, 195, 197 Leibowitz-Neriah controversy, 48, 162-163, 166 Lichtenstein, Aaron, 138, 193 Maimonides, 51, 74, 80, 81, 83, 88, 90, 91, 93, 108, 147, 152, 161, 166-169, 184, 186, 187, 189, 194, 197 majestic Adam, 39 community, 39 man, 151 messianism, messiah, 36, 37, 46, 98, 190 metaphysics, 9, 21, 76, 93, 158, 159, 188 Milbank, John, 99, 100, 188 Mizrahi movement, 47, 48, 143, 144, 183

Index modernism, 63, 64, 90, 103, 107, 110, 113, 178 morality, 54, 55, 9, 92, 106, 154, 163, 166, 169, 177, 180, 181, 184, 192, 194 myth, 10, 12, 13, 90, 98, 111, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129, 178, 191 mythology, demythology, 108, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 191 Neriah, Moshe Zvi, 48, 49, 162, 163, 166, 183 Neturei Karta, 45, 46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 18, 24, 28, 53, 101, 103, 111, 178, 180 noumena, 94 numinous, 33, 100 objectification 25, 26, 27, 124 ontology, 24, 30, 73, 108, 121 Oral Law, 28, 58, 104, 106, 112, 127, 128, 129, 139, 140, 164 Orthodoxy modern-, 47, 100 ordinary-, 81 Zionist-, 44, 46, 47, 50 particularism, 86, 91, 188 Peli, Pinchas, 121, 122, 151, 178, 190, 192, 195, 196 phenomena (Kant), 94 phenomenology, 23, 25, 32, 67, 87, 88, 94, 112, 148, 156 pluralism, 94, 188 expressive, 95, 96, 100, 188 hermeneutical, 172 radical, 94, 95 realistic, 94, 95, 96 universal, 94 postmodernism, 95, 171, 188 prayer/s, 27, 33, 34, 51, 72, 73, 96, 99, 101, 113, 127, 128, 173, 186, 196 Protestantism, 17, 18, 23, 29, 43-47, 49-51, 53, 54, 56, 65, 111, 169, 170

217 Providence, 70, 77-80, 156, 157, 160, 169 redemption, 18, 22, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 45, 53, 60, 103, 108, 192, 196 reform movement, 46 religion and morality, 54 religiosity, 27, 60, 66, 67, 72, 92, 95, crux of, 55 illusional/non-illusional (Leibowitz, Goldman), 65, 66 Jewish, 72, 73, 111 a negative manifestation of, 32 protestant, 49, 54 religious experience as a byproduct of, 68 -as a realization of human ontology (Soloveitchik), 24 -as a way of life, 128 -idenntified with halakhic praxis, 49 -shifted from subjective realm to practical one, 73 subjective-, 56 "sui generis" type of-, 66 religious experience, 21-28, 32, 35, 36, 38, 41, 54, 56, 57, 68, 7074, 87, 92, 94, 99, 102, 105, 111, 112, 123, 130, 151 religious kibbutz, 44, 45, 50, 197 religious-Zionist, 47, 48 circles, 47 ethos, 46 ideology, 143 leaders, 49 pioneers ("Torah va-Avodah"), 168 public, 48 thinker/s, 46, 47 revelation, 24, 68, 70, 72, 73, 79, 9799, 104, 119, 129, 137, 138, 140, 185, 186 Halakha as a vision of supraontological-, 149 knowledge based on, 86, 88 metaphysics of, 158, 159

218 -as an experience in the present, 99 -as God's will to meat finite creatures, 97' 103 -as a historical event, 68, 70 -as an interpretation of the datum, 69, 70 -as a perception of hetronomous Halakha, 70 -ascribed to God (by Christianity), 98 -consist mainly of the obligations (according to Judaism and Islam), 98 -in consciousness, 68 -in the external world, 68 -in Torah and commandments, 72, 129 -is not universal but particular, 97 Sinai-, 52-53, 86, 129, 132, 133, 136, 139, 140, 149, theory of multiple divine revelations (Hartman), 97 Ricoeur, Paul, 123, 124, 127, 132, 191 Saadia Gaon, 166, 168 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 24, 103, 111 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 6, 11, 23 science, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 178 Searle, John, 70, 186 secular, 26, 27, 38, 40, 44, 47-50, 64, 65, 67 culture/s, 39, 88 democracy, 50 domain, 125 Jewish government, 45 Jews, 40, 41, 143 life, 53 movement/s, (Zionism) 41, (Kibutz) 44, 105 outlook, 125 person, 13, 53 political reality, 49 public, 44, 47 reality, 45, 46, 47, 49

Index realm, 43, 125, 129, 159 religion, 48 religious life within a secular context, 86 religious-secular cooperation, 142 society, 45, 50 state, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50 value system, 55 secularized world, 18, 38-41, 45, 64, 86 secularism, 40, 47-50, 65 modern secularism, 29, 40, 91 secularization, 40, 47, 64 of Halakha, 58 process, 65, 91 self, 30, 124, 128, 172, 180, 189 awerness of, 30 constitution of the, 30, 124 Cartesian, narcissistic, 124 finding the, 28, 128 ontological structure of the, 30 returning to the, 7 -acknowledgement, 33 -alienation, 90, 173 -assertion, 12, 105 -certainty, 86 -concealing, 24 -consciousness, 31, 66 -contained, 39, 42 -contradiction, 7 -control, 26 -discipline, 29 -examination, 158, 170 -explication, 21, 22 -externalization, 27 -evident, 9, 65, 68 -fashioning, 125 -fulfillment, 35 -identity, 7, 8 -interpretation, 124 -isolated, 90 -knowledge, 8 -molding, 28, 147 -perception, 100, 105, 124 -realization, 27, 35

Index -reflection, 38, 128 -restraint, 33 -renunciation, 29 -revealing, 24 -sacrifice, 28, 33, 128, 151 -sufficiency, 85, 90 -transcendence, 27 -transparence, 22, 36, 102 -understanding, 21, 86, 123, 124 -value, 86, 87 self (present) vs. text (past), 124 voyage to the, 22, 177-179, 184, 192, 195, 197 Sinai collective standing before god at, 105 divine commandments given at, 105 giving the Torah at, 68, 93, 104 Halakha from, 58, 139, 141, 145 Halakha is not only an interpretation of the text given at, 168 halakhic sages "derive authority" from, 145 Lord's coming down upon, 126 text given at, 129 -covenant, 96, 103, 107, 108, 109 -gathering, 52, 53 -revelation, 86, 136, 139, 140, 149 -theophany, 139, 140 state secular state, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50 Torah state, 45, 49, 50, 196 subjectivity, 8, 9, 23, 29, 27, 36, 46, 56, 104, 111 suffering, 35, 39, 40, 128, 151, 158, 159, 178, 182 Taylor, Charles, 172, 178, 189, 197 theocentrism, 93, 102, 103 theology, 21, 67, 87, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113, 160, 178, 182, 188

219 Jewish, 91 Protestant, 56 rational, 65, 67 Thiselton, Anthony, 123, 191 Torah Torah and commandments, 44, 46, 54, 59, 98, 103, 105, 108, 153 Torah from heaven, 52, 56, 58 Torah study, 90 Torah va-Avodah movement, 167, 168, 185, 196 transcendence, 18, 25, 27, 28, 36, 38, 59, 60 divine, 17, 24, 25, 38, 51, 55, 56, 69, 75, 100, 112, 158 God's, 17, 24, 25, 51, 55, 69, 75, 77, 102, 156 immanent- (Husserl), 94 self-, 27, 102 Torah's-, 140 -comes forth only in the religious commandments, 59 -immanent to human existence, 32 universalism, 91, 188 utopia, 107, 108, 109 Winch, Peter, 67, 75, 78, 95, 185, 186, 188 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 34, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 126, 127, 171, 185, 186, 188, 191 Zionism, 41, 49, 108, 193 as a secular movement, 41 Religious-, 44, 47-50, 169, 196

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