Joseph B. Soloveitchik: The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought. New York: Seth Press/The Free Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 10, 1988.
The non-Jewish majority of mankind, including the majority of those called ‘intellectuals,’ know almost nothing of Jewish thought, ancient or modern. Anti-Judaism, and later anti-Semitism, discouraged such knowledge in the past; it is no excuse today. Yet formidable obstacles remain.
Because Jewish thought emphasizes the Law, the Halakhah, it cuts against the libertarian and indeed libertine instincts of our time and place. Christian thought, which criticizes Jewish ‘legalism’ and attempt to summarize the Law by the commands to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, also discourages careful inquiry. For their part, Jews themselves have never much proselytized; orthodox Judaism intentionally discourages too-curious ‘outsiders.’ Lawgivers command; study of the law serves obedience, and is not to be undertaken from an attitude of ‘mere curiosity.’
This latter difficulty need not prove insuperable. Great rabbis have written books accessible to conscientious non-Jews. Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed remains the paradigm of these. But Maimonides was and remains a controversial and complex figure, his understanding of Judaism tinctured by Greek and Arabic philosophy. Modern readers will need a mastery of those philosophers before they can approach Maimonides.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik speaks in terms more familiar to us. Educated at the University of Berlin, he knows the writings of Kant, Hegel, and the major German theologians. As a member of a distinguished rabbinical family, he began serious, disciplined academic training in childhood. This background makes him a lucid and profound commentator on a conflict that very nearly defines Western culture: the conflict between Jerusalem and Athens—more specifically, Jewish tradition and modern philosophy (call it ‘Berlin’).
The Halakhic Mind complements Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, published five years ago. In Halakhic Man, he distinguishes the man governed by Jewish law from the more familiar Homo religiosus, whose emotionalism and quest for transcendence inclines toward mysticism. In The Halakhic Mind Soloveitchik distinguishes the thought of Halakhic man fro modern philosophic thought.
Under pressure from the discoveries of twentieth-century physics, Soloveitchik observes, modern philosophy has split into two major factions. Logical positivists attempt to evaluate all realms of human life by the criteria of modern scientific method; apart from the fact that this simply rules morality, politics, and religion out of philosophic inquiry, it does not have much explanatory power. This leaves the field open to various philosophers who, deriving their thought from Hegel, do not reject scientific method but do not suppose it the last rational word on the nature of reality. “Epistemological pluralism” results—the selection of a rational method of inquiry appropriate to the object of the inquiry. Unfortunately, like its practical counterparts, moral relativism and political pluralism, cognitive pluralism tends toward chaos, an egalitarian stew wherein all the ingredients look and taste the same.
Soloveitchik wants to redeem the common sense behind epistemological pluralism—that the criteria of knowledge in physics differ from the criteria of knowledge in religion, for example—without sacrificing cognitive and ethical hierarchy. He insists that any psychical act has a logical shape to it; even the most passionate lover must apprehend his beloved. Thus Homo religiosus “substitutes neither belief for knowledge nor faith for critical reasoning; no less than the philosopher himself, he is an enthusiastic practitioner of the cognitive art.”
Soloveitchik sees the problem: “apprehension” here can mean false perception or misunderstanding as easily as true, and lovers of God do not always much care for rationality. Soloveitchik rejects religious sentimentalism as a “pretentious and arrogant” attitude that “frees every dark passion and every animal impulse in man.” “It is of greater urgency for religion to cultivate objectivity than perhaps for any other branch of human culture.”
This returns him to the importance of law. Law makes religious love and religious thought manifest. It makes subjectivity objective, susceptible to rational inquiry. “Subjectivity cannot be approached directly; it must first be objectified by the ‘logos,'” the word of God.
It should be needless to say that for Rabbi Soloveitchik “objectification reaches its highest expression in the Halakhah”—which Law, he cautions, one must not confuse with the causal natural law of scientists. To confuse halakhic law with natural law would be to deny free will to human beings, and therefore to deny any merit to our obedience to God’s laws.
As for religious liberalism, it “has traveled in the wrong direction—from objectivity to subjectivity,” sacrificing religiosity to liberalism along the way. Aiming at objectivity will yield a different result: “Out of the sources of the Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.”
Rabbi Soloveitchik’s pair of books will remain an indispensable introduction to Jewish thought and its response to modern philosophy.
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