[Avodah] Can you build a community around Halakhic Man?

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 01:49:03PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
: 1. I think you denigrate "the masses".  Looking up a halacha in Shemirat 
: Shabbat K'Hilchatah is indeed paskening, and consulting an English 
: translation to clarify what Rashi means is indeed hiddush...

I disagree. I am not so much denigrating the masses as disagreeing with
your definition of pesaq and chiddush. In particular, that they serve
in the roles RYBS describes. (In general as well, but that's
irrelevent.)

RYBS is relying on the individual's tension between cognitive man and
homo religiousis to fuel creativity. This creativity finds its expression
in halakhic man. This creativity is also how man resolves the tension
between (what others call) Torah and Madda. Thus, the creativity is the
individual's unique way of resolving his personal tensions of conflicting
goals and callings. Conflict requires choice, bechirah motivates
creativity.

It's how man deals with his own encounters; not reading how others
resolved theirs. SSK's words aren't /his/ choices. He can choose whether
or not to follow them, but that's one side of the dialectic, the
submission of homo religious, not its resolution.

: 2.  I don't think the author of Halachic man thought of himself as a 
: halachic man.  "Halacha has a fixed a priori relationship to the whole 
: of reality"(Kaplan's translation p.23)  Yet halacha has no concept 
: corresponding to the Kantian "a priori".  That Rabbi Soloveitchik had to 
: use a concept external to halacha to delineate it is adequate evidence, 
: not only that he did not construe himself as a halachic man, but also 
: that halachic man is not interested in a Torah UMadda type of 
: synthesis.  He just doesn't care about Madda, since its categories are 
: not those of halacha.

Halakhic Man is an archetype. There is no person who fully embodies the
type. That's not the point. I'm sure RYBS felt he had some Halakhic Man
about himself; probably felt "not enough".

: 3.  I don't know what you mean by a community.  You can certainly set up 
: an intentional community where you and your friends can study Rambam and 
: Kierkegaard and play Rachmaninoff...

I mean a large group of people. The masses. A neighborhood that wasn't
consciously planned to be a hand-picked collection of benei aliyah.

:                                             What will you do if your 
: kids decide to study Rabbeinu Tam and Lucretius and play Bach?  The 
: problem with using a description of a personality as a guide to behavior 
: is that personality may not be easy to transmit, either by genetics or 
: by training.

If my kids were capable of becoming halachic men and women, both in
ability and in inclination, I would encourage it. But I am currently
of the opinion that doing so to a group of hundreds or thousands will
lead more people to compromising their observance and values than
to sanctity. That the gap between MO's theory and practice is more
fundamental than simply the limitations of real human beings. It's that
people below a certain point of personal development are actually worse
off trying to live by RYBS's words.

Creatively picking one's way through the conflicts when one lacks the
worldview and knowledge to do so gives the individual the autonomy to
make bad choices; trying for synthesis or harmonious coexistence of
ideals, he merely compromises them.

I laid out three categories of derekh. I'll explain by example:

1- In Mussar, one is given not only what the ideal looks like, but also
tools for how to get there.

2- In Chassidus, one is given the ideal, and a person is encouraged to
do it to the best of their ability. A person who acheives some measure of
deveiqus in 2% of his waking hours is better off than someone who doesn't.

3- In RYBS's worldview, it's all about creating and decisionmaking.
Halakhah maximizing autonomy by giving you a means of answering
conflicting callings. However, someone who doesn't know how to asses
those callings, or even much about their content, will make a travesty
of observance. In that way, it's unlike Chassidus's linear more-is-better.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             With the "Echad" of the Shema, the Jew crowns
micha at aishdas.org        G-d as King of the entire cosmos and all four
http://www.aishdas.org   corners of the world, but sometimes he forgets
Fax: (270) 514-1507      to include himself.     - Rav Yisrael Salanter