[Avodah] Modern Orthodoxy

[Michael Makovi]

I'm listening to Rabbi Sacks's shiur about cyclical versus historical
(prophetic) time
(http://www.csstorage.org/audio/downloadaudio.php?audio=21), and I
largely agree.

However, around 41:30, I vehemently disagree. Rabbi Sacks said Rav
Hirsch justified being a German/French citizen and an Orthodox Jew, by
distinguishing between private and public life. But this is
Mendelsohn, not Rav Hirsch.

Rav Hirsch held precisely the opposite of this bifurcation; as he says
in "Religion Allied to Progress",
"Judaism is not a religion, the synagogue is not a church, and the
rabbi is not a priest. Judaism is not a mere adjunct to life: it
comprises all of life. To be a Jew is not a mere part, it is the sum
total of our task in life. To be a Jew in the synagogue and the
kitchen, in the field and the warehouse, in the office and the pulpit,
as ... father and mother, as servant and master, as man and as
citizen, with one's thoughts, in word and in deed, in enjoyment and
privation, with the needle and the graving-tool, with the pen and the
chisel--that is what it means to be a Jew. An entire life supported by
the Divine Idea and lived and brought to fulfillment according to the
Divine Will. The more, indeed, Judaism comprises the whole of man and
extends its declared mission to the salvation of the whole of mankind,
the less it is possible to confine its outlook to the four cubits of a
synagogue and the four walls of a study."

Moreover, Rav Hirsch says in "The Relation of General to Specially
Jewish Education".
"We have to lament that the great Jewish scholars, in whom that age
[of religious upheaval in the wake of the Enlightenment and
Emancipation] was by no means poor, were prevented by seclusion to
which the political situation of their people had condemned them from
themselves making a firsthand acquaintance with the general cultural
strivings of of the age. With their keen insight they would quickly
have greeted what was true and good in general culture as something
closely akin to the Jewish outlook, and they would have been the first
to prepare a home for it in their own circle. We have to lament that
an opposition [between religion and science, or between the physical
and the spiritual] which might find some justification in other
denominations [viz. Christianity] was carried over without more ado
into the field of Judaism, without anyone asking whether owing to the
peculiar nature of the Jewish religion it did not here lose much of
its acuteness."

Rav Hirsch, according to Rabbi Yehiel Weinberg, rather held that the
Torah is the form and derech eretz the matter. As Rabbi Dr. Eliezer
Berkovits says in Judaism: Fossil or Ferment,
"In all its rawness and dark demoniac wildness, this world is
extremely precious for man's salvation. The Spirit as such, in the
realm of human existence, lacks efficacy. Faith alone will not move
mountains; but faith will move mountains if it has hands and bodies
and machines at its command. The physical, the material, the “mundane”
are indispensable for the Spirit, if it wishes to take effect in this
world. Only through the instrumentality of the Material can the
conscious aspiration of the Spiritual find expression and realization
in the life of men. A man cannot even think goodness with a brain; he
can certainly not do good without a body. All energy and power in this
world has its seat in the material and organic ground of life; all
purpose and value, in its spiritual manifestation. The Purposeful, on
its own, is powerless; the Powerful, by itself, purposeless.1 The
greatest waterfall, left to itself, will only fall; the finest blue
print, left in the drawer of the engineer, will not move a single
wheel. The two realms find their salvation in their
“interpenetration.” The Spirit alone may redeem the Mundane from its
blind demoniac purposelessness; the Mundane alone may reciprocate by
offering liberation to the Spirit from the prison of its
powerlessness. The two realms meet in man; and in their
interpenetration, through man, this world is transformed into the
Kingdom of God. By investing the Mundane with value and significance
and the Spirit with power and effectiveness, the act of
interpenetration becomes the sanctification of life."

Moreover, says Rabbi Berkovits in Towards Historic Judaism,
"Judaism looks upon life as the raw material which has to be shaped in
conformity with the spiritual values contained in the Bible. Judaism
is a great human endeavor to fashion the whole of life, every part and
every moment of it, in accordance with standards that have their
origin in unchallengeable authority. Its aim is not merely to
cultivate the spirit, but to infuse prosaic, everyday existence with
the spirit. Its great interest is not the human soul, but the living
human body controlled by the forces of the soul. It is in and of this
world. It will never yield to the obstinacy of that gigantic mass of
raw material which we call life, and which so reluctantly allows
itself to be molded by the spirit. It will never reconcile itself to a
divided existence of which part is Caesars’ and part God’s. The whole
of life is one piece; the whole of life is the testing place for man.
Judaism is in love with life, for it knows that life is God’s great
question to mankind; and the way a man lives, what he does with his
life, the meaning he is able to implant in it – is man’s reply. Actual
life is the partner to the spirit; without the one the other is
meaningless."

I find it difficult to find any bifurcation between the physical and
spiritual, between the public and the private, between anything and
anything else; we rather find harmonious "interpenetration". Rav Kook
may have made great use of the concept of unity and harmony, and given
it mystical and metaphysical basis, but the idea was not his own. (Nor
was it Rav Hirsch's; the idea is G-d's.)

Michael Makovi