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Gershon Hepner

The Torah that was not written by halakhic man

The Bible doesn’t mention that the sky is blue,

and yet the threads that Jews put on their fringes are supposed

to make them think of God, who’s in the sky.

If true, here is the paradigm this problem to me posed.

 

The Torah tells us most commandments quite unclearly,

reminding Jews that over all their heads is God,

and doesn’t mention once what we see clearly, nearly

oblivious of the color of the sky. How odd!

 

It is as if the Torah had been written by

halakhic man of J. B. Soloveitchik. What

is relevant about reality, like sky,

by him must be explained, because by God it’s not.

 

In his article  “Loving the Law.” First Things, 1/1/12, R. R. Reno quotes Meir Soloveichk  giving a podcast, the 10-Minute Mitzvah series, “Farewell to a Planet and Hello to Jewish Law”:

When it comes to law and commandment, Jews dream differently than Christians. This became especially clear to me when I first read Halakhic Man, a profound and poetic reflection on Jewish life by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the most influential rabbinic scholars of the twentieth century. In this book, which is one of the last century’s great spiritual classics, Soloveitchik provides powerful evocations of the metaphysical dream of Judaism, a pronomian vision of swimming joyfully in the sea of Talmud…….

Halakhic Man opens with a description of our modern scientific personality, “cognitive man,” as Soloveitchik calls him. He is oriented toward the world as it is, seeking to understand and grasp reality in accord with its immanent laws and principles. Cognitive man is in the best sense secular. He wants to know, but he accepts the length and breadth of this world as his proper domain. Over and against him Soloveitchik depicts his opposite, the spiritual seeker he calls homo religiosus. This personality seeks something beyond the here and now, something that transcends what can be measured or weighed or counted. He wants to climb the ladder of being, ascending to great and magnificent heights far above the mundane order of this world.

As a personality type, cognitive man plays little role in Soloveitchik’s analysis, as he integrates the secular or this-worldly orientation into his own view of Jewish life. However, homo religiosus provides an enduring spiritual option and temptation, for he reflects our natural spiritual impulses. Tears and anguish by the graveside express our rebellion against the cold laws of nature. Our hunger for eternity and premonitions of the divine disturb, unsettle, and override the laws and logic and reason.

These tensions within the soul of homo religiosus suggest the metaphysical contrast that plays a central role in Soloveitchik’s thinking. We are finite creatures—and yet we long for the infinite. We are human—and yet we wish to see the divine. Thus, as he observes, “religious experience, from beginning to end, is antinomic and antithetic.” Our desire for transcendence disrupts the lives we lead along the horizontal plain of immanent existence, creating a spiritual anxiety that seeks resolution.

Faced with this sharp contrast, Soloveitchik concludes, rightly, I think, that our natural religious impulses will lead us to focus on the vertical eruptions of transcendence at the expense of our loyalty to the mundane, horizontal realm of finite reality. For many, Soloveitchik notes, “the craving for transcendence clothes itself in ascetic garb, in an act of negation of life and of this world, in a denial of the worthwhile nature of existence.” In comparison with eternity, this world is as nothing, or worse than nothing because a distraction, a temptation. Unable to face the contradiction of finite and infinite, homo religiosus reaches upward, trying to stamp out all reminders of his older, earlier entanglements in worldly life.

At other times, Soloveitchik observes, homo religiosus searches life for transcendent moments: the sunset that inspires or the embrace and kiss that enraptures. Or perhaps homo religiosus turns toward death, seeing in the grave a sublime power that he imagines will provide a dark entry into eternal realms. Or he focuses on worldly pleasures that promise the transports of ecstasy. Although seemingly rooted in this world, none of these spiritual strategies forges a lasting loyalty to finite existence. Instead, as Soloveitchik writes, “concrete, empirical reality serves as the only springboard from which man may make his plunge into the supernal, and it is the supernal realm alone that serves as the object of the religious individual’s deepest longings, the goal of his ultimate quest.”

About the Author
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored "Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel." He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
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