[Avodah] Fwd: Torat Chaim VeAhavat Chesed

Micha Berger via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Thu Jun 11 11:17:46 PDT 2015


On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 4:27pm I forwarded an essay by RYK that had
appeared on R/Dr Alan Brill's blog, Kavvanah.

In it he proposes from personal experience that MO would be enhanced by
shifting away from its focus on RYBS's Briskkeit and in particular that
elements of his Hungarian Chassidic birth community would be of great
value.

:    Personally, my rejection of the Maimonidean ethos and realization of
:    the degree to which chassidut can speak to the modern searcher was a
:    long and arduous process. It came about as a result of a deep sense
:    of betrayal by Maimonides, the champion of Rationalist Judaism. I for
:    many years was the object and fool of Maimonides "the seventh reason"
:    as presented in his introduction to the Guide by not seeing his
:    philosophic views. In that passage, Maimonides condones misleading
:    the masses for their greater good, even to the point of advocating
:    contradictory ideas for different audiences and then obscuring those
:    contradictions.

:    Growing up in Satmar and then Brisk, I was oblivious to his
:    non-halakhic writings and led to believe that he fully and literally
:    believed every word he wrote in the Yad...

I think it's wrong to think the 7th principle applies to the Yad. While
the Rambam may not have believed every word in the Moreh as it would
seem to someone reading it naively, I do think "he fully and literally
believed every word he wrote in the Yad." And in fact, that was the
whole point of the project -- to outline all of halakhah, to document
the TSBP. Not to hint at something for the meivinim without risking
that the hoi palloi mistake his words in a heretical way. It's simply
not meaningful concept for a book he titled Mishneh Torah.

I am uncomfortably using the Rambam as a poster boy for rationalism. In
the Rambam's day, science hadn't been invented yet. Claims about physics
weren't based on emprical proof and experimental process. It was
Natual Philosophy, and the weight of an a priori argument. A lot of it
really ended up on reliabilism; deeming the Greeks as reliable sources
on such things -- after 1,5000 years of their theories reigning. And
therefore, quite honestly, much the same kind of thought that we use
to accept mesorah.

The word rationalism changed meaning.

What I think we really mean is a willingness to be meqabel es ha'emes
mimi she'omro, rather than take a maximalist attitude toward mesoretic
and Torah-derived statements. But that's quite a bit meta from anyone
today using the Moreh as a foundational element of their hashkafah.


In particular, RYK mentions three items he believes would enhance MO:

:    1) Truth. We live in a post-modern world where objective truth is
:    rejected and absolute claims are frowned upon. I would go as far as to
:    say that rationalism (in the general and colloquial sense) as a source
:    for Emunah is bankrupt, it increasingly speaks to fewer people...

I don't think it ever worked. As one of my favorite truisms goes:
    The mind is a wonderful organ
    for justifying decisions
    the heart already reached. 

People accept the rational argument that fits the experiential
justification that really underlies their beliefs.

Aristo thought otherwise, which eventually led to the Qalam and the
Scholasticists -- including R' Saadia Gaon and the Rambam. But then
Scholasticism collapsed, the scientific method arose, leading to a dispute
between the Empiricists and Idealists which in turn forced the discipline
of philosophy away from belief in the reality of an objective rigorous
proof. Experimental eproof, yes. Incontravertible objective philosopy,
not so much. Kant then gets all transcendental, and talks about the
synthetic a priori. (Knowing things without proof that don't simply boil
down to a matter of translations. In the recent past, I mentioned how
we know the Euclidean posulates hold in flat space, that Reimannian ones
hold in a spherical space, and our knowledge about morality and ethics.)

This was the zeitgeist when the Besh"t lived. (Besh"t 1698-1760;
Kant 1724-1804.)

Someone who is given a proof whose conclusions don't fit their experience
is likely to reject the soundness of the givens / postulates / first
principles on which it's based. Just as someone who accepts a proof is
making synthetic judgments about the quality of the foundations of that
proof before even making an analytic decision that the logic seems sound.

So even if no one makes a logic error, every proof relies on
interpretation of experience.

RYBS was not a rationalist in this sense. Brisk is very experiential,
to the point of eschewing the study of hashkafah altogether. They
are rational when it comes to how to learn, but the value of learning
is in the experience of learning.

When RYBS does do philosophy, he calls it halachic hermeneutics.
Neo-Kantian and Existentialist observations of what halakhah says to
the one following it about life. He makes no claims about the function
or cause of halakhah, he makes few theological observations. For example,
to RYBS tzimtzum speaks mostly to the value of anavah as an emulation
of His "Retreat" to give us room.

RYBS's Neo-Kantianism is a very different project than the Rambam's
Scholasticism.

...
:    However, during those rare occasions when they do pay attention to the
:    biblical "stories," their orientation is a-rational. They absolutely
:    "believe" those stories, but their belief is internal: it is true
:    because it happened in the Torah. That is where these events transpire
:    and that is where these stories matter. Asking about their historicity
:    is, as far as they are concerned, foolish and missing the point.

And also a given. It may not be stated as the point, but the confidence
given to authority which is a necessary component of the rebbe-chassid
relationship means accepting Chazal's historical and scientific claims
as being from ruach haqodesh. And not stam as meshalim.

The kind of agnosticism about the historicity of medrashic material you
are recommending we import Chassidus to justify would itself leave a
chassid aghast. And even after citing the long chain of rishonim and
acharonim who speak against assuming medrashic stories are historical,

And you want to extend that beyond medrashic stories into foundational
stories in Tanakh and maybe in the chumash as well?

Given my above assertion that the only thread that runs consistently
through "rationalism" from the Rambam to today is to choose qabel es
ha'emes mimi she'omro over taking some baal mesorah's statement maximally,
one actually needs what's left of the Rambam's hashkafic legacy to
accomplish this, not Chassidus.

:    2) Spiritualization. As scholars have pointed out, chassidic teachings
:    contain elements of spiritual psychology. They provide us with a
:    language which helps us infuse our lives with meaning. One can point
:    to many examples where this psychological spiritualization occurs in
:    chassidut, I will mention two of them.

:    3) Social Change. One of the most pressing tensions in the community
:    is how to reconcile our values with our convictions; what to do
:    when halakha points us in one direction and our values in another
:    direction. We are tempted to follow our values but pulled to abide by
:    our halakhic commitments....

:    Chassidut is very explicit about the value of religious aggression. The
:    following two quotes are often encountered in chassidic writings,
:    "even a thief says a prayer before he breaks in to his victim's home"
:    (quoted on the margin of Brachot 63A, from the Frankfurt manuscript),
:    and "an aggressive stance towards the Divine bears results" (Sanhedrin
:    105A). While the provenance of these texts is Talmudic, they take on
:    significant prominence in Chassidic theology. They become the impetus
:    for an aggressive theology which is informed by a religiosity that
:    sees itself driven by a Divine immanence which infuses our values and
:    ethical intuitions with spiritual resonance, subsequently leading to
:    radical societal change.

:    Such change is actually an integral part of Chassidic social history.
:    When one looks at recent major changes in traditional Jewish society
:    it is hard not to notice that the forerunners were often Chassidim. The
:    last sixty years have seen far reaching social and political change.

Both of these are not specific to Chassidus, but would be true of any
Ism that draws attention fo the notion that halakhah is merely a "floor"
rather than the sum total of behavioral expectations.

For that matter, self development and societal needs are both more central
to Mussar than chassidus. Pretty much its defning features, really. Which
(aside being my own pony in this race) has the advantage of being closer
to being consistent with MO's current gestalt; it's easier to get from
here to there.

OTOH Chaasidic maximalism means that statements made in the past have
to be accepted as being from ruach haqodesh, and consequently change
in these communities is minimized. Not only because isolation is part of
the survival strategy, but because of reverence for and desire to emulate

Chassidic isolation is indeed part of their survival stategy. It's hard
to leave when you know no other social context and speak with an accent.
And knowing that you stand for something greater than yourself in the
eyes of those who see your uniform makes it harder to sin. (Harder, not
impossible.) But it's not one of the three elements of Chassidus RYK
wrote about.

:    The two most dramatic changes that have happened is that Jews are now
:    sovereign and women have made significant progress in their pursuit of
:    religious equality. The pioneers of both these changes were driven, at
:    least in part, by a chassidic ethos. R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson,
:    the Rebbi of Lubavitch, was one of the first orthodox scholars to
:    champion female Talmud scholarship, while R. Avraham Yitzchak Kook,
:    a serious student of Chassidut, was an outspoken early proponent of
:    a Zionist state.

RAYK is a student of the Leshem, and thus of the Gra's school of Qabbalah.
Not Chassidus.

You might be able to make a more generic argument for a need for more
Qabbalah in MO. Personally, I'm an engineer by inclination, not just
training, and my own head doesn't lean that way. Although I had more
success with the Leshem Haqdamos uShe'arim, which incidentally heavily
draws from the Moreh and Yesodei haTorah, than I did with Qela"ch
Pischei Chokhmah, the later parts of Derekh H' or Tomer Devorah after
ch. 1.

At least in the golah this might be true; in Israel, those of the DL
community who are an appropriate audience for Qabbalah already have RAYK
in numerous interpretations.

Also, Chassidus's approach to Qabbalah puts the Ari Za"l on an even
higher pedestal than the Gra did, and elevate R Chaim Vital from *a*
talmid of the Ari to his sole authorized presenter. The Gra is willing
to question something from RCV that chassidim would literally consider
Torah min haShamayim.

Which, for the more socially and humanistically minded, might well turn
Eitz Chaim 49 ch. 3
<http://www.kab.co.il/heb/content/view/frame/30236?/heb/content/view/full/30236&main>
into a show stopper. (But this isn't the place to discuss it.)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Never must we think that the Jewish element
micha at aishdas.org        in us could exist without the human element
http://www.aishdas.org   or vice versa.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                     - Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch



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