[Avodah] "Copying from Christian Thinkers"

[Shalom Carmy]

"I was hoping people would understand that I was bothered by the very fact
that RYBS would have based his most famous essay on Jewish thought on
Christian thinkers without even mentioning the fact.  From Brill, it seems
that the ideas were practically copied right out of books by Brunner and
Barth.  Does anyone else have trouble with this?"

1. If the Rav is being accused of plagiarism, how account for the fact that these same Christian thinkers, and many others, are repeatedly mentioned in the Rav's major works, and several of them are discussed in Lonely Man? There is a secret here only for those who are ignorant of the entire current of 20th century religious thought.

2. In fact Lonely Man was originally delivered to an audience of Christian theologians. (This is why all the halakhic discussions are found in the footnotes.) Are we to understand that the Rav fooled the sophisticated Christians by "copying" from books that were, at that time (and to some extent today) at the center of their intellectual world? That he has continued for generations to fool the Christian theologians who teach this work in their classes?

3. It is perhaps necessary to dispel the illusion that serious thinkers suck ideas out of their thumbs. Serious thinkers, and even more so great thinkers, engage the thought of their times, they digest what others have said, they benefit from the concerns of others. If they are to address the intellectual crises of their day, they must think together with, and against, the best minds of their time. And then they put their own stamp on these ideas. For a psychoanalyst, this means coming to terms with Freud etc. For a physicist it means Einstein and Heisenberg etc. For a religious thinker it means grappling with Barth, Otto, Kierkegaard, Newman and so forth.

4. To reduce any serious educated person, let alone a gadol b'Yisrael, to the level of an elementary school student cutting and pasting a term paper says more about the intellectual horizons of those who entertain these fantasies than about the work they claim to comment on. I am saying this as politely as I can.

5. I invite anyone who wishes to study a few pages of Barth or Brunner etc and come to their own conclusions about whether the Rav's writing is "practically copied right out of their books."

6. I particularly recommend reading Barth and Brunner over the next two weeks. I am not sure whether a random sampling of the Church Dogmatics or the Moral Imperative or the commentary on the Epistle to the Romans will contribute anything positive to the casual reader's yirat Shamayim. Such a pursuit, however, would be a distraction from yentishkeit and a wholesome respite from the regimen of rekhilut. What greater boon can there be for Yamim Noraim than to be deflected from these activities?

Ketiva vaHatima Tova,

Shalom Carmy