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

[David Riceman]

Micha Berger wrote:
> It's not just a matter of HM, it's
> how HM is expected to navigate the ramatayim tzofim. The 2 peaks are
> to provide conflict, which then forces choice and creativity. One of
> those peaks is the calling to be the HM.
>   
I'm handicapped here, since I haven't found a copy of RT.  Once he 
becomes a scientist (or historian or philosopher) he's no longer HM.  In 
addition to the citations from HM see Mah Dodech Midod, the section 
entitled Mitzvas H Barah, Me'iras Einayim, #5 (on p. 233 in BSod HaYahid 
V'haYahad).
> : I don't see a large emphasis on choice in HM; it is you, not the author, 
> : who links creativity and free will.
>
> Remember, this creativity is his way out of being torn by the dialectic.
> It's not just comprehension, it's comprehension of the conflict as he
> confronts it as each moement in time.
>
> (It is probably of a piece with telling his students who are LORs to
> make up their own minds, as they see the community and its issues,
> rather than necessarily always following his own pesaq.)
>   
This isn't behirah.  See MDM, in the section I cited, #1 (pp. 230-231).  
Clarity leads to inevitability, not to choice.  How would you react if 
Gauss had told you, "It's true that I proved that a degree n polynomial 
has n roots, but had I chosen differently I could equally well have 
proven that it has 3n roots", or if Newton had told you "It's true that 
I proved that a cannonball travels in a parabola, but had I chosen I 
could equally well have proven that it travels in an ellipse."  The 
creativity of HM is precisely in understanding a sugya so clearly that 
he has no choice about how to explain it or pasken from it.
> My blog entry as a whole was about following HM and RYBS's plan in
> general. Yes, at times I worked with the sloppy assumption that MO (in
> the US) was a group of people who are trying to live by RYBS's hashkafos.
>   
In spite of being a graduate of Maimonides, I had practically no contact 
with Rabbi Soloveitchik, so I have no idea what his plan was.  The 
institutions he influenced, however, were not designed to produce HMs.  
They were aimed at producing more rounded people.
> But this critique of HM as it plays together with his other works --
> particularly in how he handles the confrontation with olam hazeh -- is
> not the "Mussar objection". It's simply that you can't teach the masses
> to be creative until after you teach them how to tell when they're
> creating, and when they're destroying. Creatively finding a way for
> conflicting goals to coexitist, whether you use the word "synthesis"
> in some non-Hegelian sense (as RNLamm does) or harmonious coesistence
> (RARR's term), looks too much like an invitation to compromise. It's
> not something to encourage in amateurs.
I wan't clear.  The mussar critique is directed against the assertion 
that "in Volozhin we're healthy".  Following the Rambam, ikkar halacha 
induces the golden mean in an already harmonious person living in  
already harmonious society.  Every person has to adjust it to his own 
personality via humroth and kuloth, and every society has to adjust 
based on the tendencies that society instills in its inhabitants.  HM 
rejects that.

Your critique in these posts is that HM can function only with a very 
high level of expertise, and I think that's false.  Even someone who 
slavishly follows the MB or SSK is capable of doing with them what HM 
does with Hazal and rishonim.  That's enough to enable a person or a 
community to implement HM as a master plan for how to live.  They may 
not all be poskim, but they can all try to devote their lives to 
understanding the world via the a priori categories of Torah.

Another critique of HM, irrelevant to this thread, is that the 
categories of Torah are not really a priori, v'od hazon lamoded.

David Riceamn