[Avodah] R' Soloveitchik on religious turmoil, pesak halakhah

[Michael Makovi]

>From "Orthodox Judaism Moves with the Times: The Creativity of
Tradition", by R' Emanuel Rackman, Commentary June 1952

Some quotes I found very powerful, mostly regarding Rabbi Soloveitchik:

(1)
	Soloveitchik regards as altogether too simple the popular notion of
religious experience as one preeminently pleasing and soothing-a
stream of delight and relaxation and an asylum from the frustrations
of life. This conception of religion Rabbi Soloveichik deems a fraud,
the result of a surrender on the part of religious thinkers to the
desire of the mass of men to lose themselves in states of bliss. It
also echoes Rousseau in his flight from reason, and much subsequent
romanticist thought. Religion's invitation has been misinterpreted to
say: "If thou cravest peace, if thou cravest integration, make the
leap of faith." In the flight from reason and the rejection of
objective truth, Rabbi Soloveichik sees the cause of the moral
deterioration of contemporary man. He would prefer to see religion
wedded to a cold objectivity and rationality, even though faith and
reason may at times appear to conflict with one another, rather than
derive religion from man's instinctual longings.

	Also, he asserts, the highest form of religious experience comes from
constant turmoil and from the experiencing of life's irreconcilable
antitheses-from the simultaneous affirmation and abnegation of the
self, the simultaneous awareness of the temporal and the eternal, the
simultaneous clash of freedom and necessity, the simultaneous love and
fear of God, his simultaneous transcendence and immanence. True, with
the departure of Sabbath's peace, Jews may sing, 'The Lord is my
Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures." But the road to the green pastures is a narrow and winding
one, along a steep cliff, with a bottomless pit below. It is the other
words of the Psalmist-"From the deep I called unto Thee, O Lord"-that
describe the most authentic religious experience, and the deep is a
deep of antinomies, doubts, and spiritual travail.In A sense, it can
be said that Rabbi Soloveichik is trying to fuse the emotional
intensity of existentialism with the hard logic of rationalism.

(2)
	Yet in traditional Jewish style, his philosophy is derived from, and
applied to, the Halachah of Judaism. He is not content with the way in
which Jewish scholars have heretofore examined the sources: to
reconcile conflicting authorities and to arrive at the correct rule of
Law is only one phase of Jewish jurisprudence. Soloveichik finds the
essential antinomies of religious reality also incarnated in Halachic
matter. A dispute over the extent of liability in a particular tort,
the question of a prohibited form of work on the Sabbath, or of the
proper preparation of a temple offering-all these may become for him
the basis of a theological insight. In this, he is in the tradition of
the illustrious Abraham I. Kook, late Chief Rabbi of Palestine, who
derived a philosophy of Jewish community, as opposed to mere
"collectivity," from Talmudic law on the acquisition of property.

	Given the premise that all the Law is God's revealed will, it follows
logically that all of it will have theological significance. The
totality of the Law is taken by Soloveichik as a realm of ideas in the
Platonic sense, given by God for application to the realm of the real.
Just as the mathematician creates an internally logical and coherent
fabric of formulas with which he interprets and integrates the
appearance of the visible world, so the Jew, the "Man of Halachah,"
has the Torah as the divine idea that vests all of human life with
direction and sanctity. Legislative change is irreconcilable with
Halachah, yet creativity is of its very essence. "The Halachah is a
multi-dimensional everexpanding continuum which cuts through all
levels of human existence from the most primitive and intimate to the
most complex relationships" (from an unpublished lecture by Dr.
Soloveichik). Thus, though Halachah refers to the ideal, its
creativity must be affected by the real.

(3)
Halachic creativity is not an ingenious academic exercise. The man who
would bridge the distance between the ideal and the real, who would
discover what is the intent of divine will in a new and unprecedented
situation, must employ the dialectic of reason in fear and
trembling-his thinking must be part of a religious agony. God willed
that man obey his Law. God also willed man's welfare. Sometimes the
Law and man's welfare come into seeming conflict. The pious jurist
must then probe the sources and the commentaries of the saints, must
descend into that same crucible of pain out of which the right way was
originally revealed.

(4)
[Permitting the draft of rabbis for the military chaplaincy,] Rabbi
Soloveichik admitted that he had not approached the sources with
complete objectivity; that he had had certain intuitive feelings and
held certain basic values that prejudiced him in favor of the decision
rendered by Yeshiva University and guided him in his exploration of
the various aspects and facets of the problem. But this lack of
objectivity is merely a fundamental avowal of inevitable human
limitation, and is not to be confused with arbitrariness. As anyone
who has studied the Talmud knows, the Halachah is too objective a
discipline to permit an approach based on transient moods.
Nevertheless, in the deepest strata of Halachic thinking, logical
judgment is preceded by value judgment, and intuitive insight gives
impetus to the logic of argument.

(5)
[Quoting Rabbi Soloveitchik, permitting the Jewish community to adopt
and raise as Jewish its share of abandoned babies; even though
statistically, the babies are probably gentile.] "One school sees, in
a naturalistic fashion, life and death on a biological level
exclusively and identifies Pikuah Nefesh (the obligation to conserve
life) with the saving of a carnal existence from extinction. The other
school introduces an idealistic motif. It maintains that the law of
Pikuah Nefesh which is based upon a value judgment-the appraisal of
life as the highest good-transcends the bounds of biological fact and
extends into the domain of spiritual activity. Life is not only a
factumn but also an actus, not only a tangible reality but also an
abstract ethical value to be attained. Death is both a biological and
ethical-spiritual phenomenon. The failure of an individual to realize
his own personality in a manner decreed by his creator at birth is as
tragic as his physical disintegration. One may save a life not only
through medical skill but also by extending moral help. Hence,
whenever man's inner life, his unique relationship to God, and the
mode of his existence as an individual and social being are to be
determined, we encounter the problem of Pikuah Nefesh, which means
here the preservation of a spiritual identity. .... Hence [the concept
of] majority finds no application in this case."

(6)
However, as has been demonstrated, the Orthodox view does not exclude
Halachic creativity or changes, flexibility, and. growth in concept
and method in order to meet the most perplexing of the problems that
trouble the religious minds of today. But it insists that such
evolution must be organic, i.e., it must be a further unfolding of
historical continuity and develop authentically out of tradition.
Orthodox Jews feel that they are helping the revealed Law to fulfill
itself, and in their Halachic creativity they move slowly and with the
same turmoil of soul that characterizes the authentic religious
experience, but with the firm faith that where the basic values of
Judaism still live, the Law will suffice to meet the requirements of
life.

Michael Makovi