[Avodah] The challenge of Torah U' Madda for our time

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 02:30:21PM -0500, Saul Guberman via Avodah wrote:
: An article by Rebbetzin Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz...
...
: https://rpschwartz.com/2017/01/05/what-are-we-so-afraid-of-the-challenge-of-torah-umadda-for-our-time

This seems to be the topic de jour on Facebook, but I must admit my read
of the article doesn't really align with how most people responded to it.
Truth be told, I hear in the paper a 3 part argument:

1- MO is about the harnessing of modernity in the service of Hashem. And
therefore there is something wrong with MO's unwillingness to address
Post-Modernism.

2- This unwillingness is due to an overly slavish attachment to R JB
Soloveitchik's thought. Which:

a- has Brisk's high wall between halakhah, which is seen as the only
really important thing, and first principles. And

b- draws from the field of philosophy as it existed before he game to
YU. Thus closing the door on post-Modernism.

3- But if MO did address Post-Modernism as is ought, it would accept
the historicization and psychlogization of halakhah.

Here I believe Rn/Dr RPS conflates two things, based on the two aspects
of point 2:
There is the psychologization of halakhah the way RSRH or a Telzer would
do it -- explaining taam hamitzvah in terms of the mitzvah's effects
on the psyche. Or historical explanations, or....

And to someone who chose R' Shimon's derekh over Brisk specifically
because of enjoying discussions of why, that sounds wonderful.

Rav Shimon in particular, whose hashkafah is very humanistic -- one
where the primary value is ehralchkeit, and frumkeit its handmaiden,
and who emphasizes the need for a healthy self-image and sense of
self-worth, has a lot to say MO Jews are ready to hear.



And then there is the historical and psychological study of those
who made the halakhah, and understanding the law in that light. Which
would be a call to embrace Historical School Judaism. Because we know
from experience that the Historical School is unlikely to support a
traditional halakhic process, we can also posit that there are bigger
reasons for our not heading in this direction than tunnel-vision focus
on the Rav's thought. Chassidishe posqim would be no more satisfied.

That said, I agree with the idea that we need a broader range of
ideologies, and that MO is losing something by overly focusing on the
Rav's derivative of Brisk. (I have commented elsewhere on the difficulty
of adapting the Rav's very subjective worldview to something that could
actually be followed by the masses -- people who are neither academics
nor posqim.)

Just to focus on one set of metaphors:
> It wasn't until the twenty-first century that Peter Galison asked us
> what Einstein was spending all of his days working on (reviewing patent
> applications in the Bern patent office, that's what), and asked us to
> think about how looking at numerous patents directed towards coordinating
> timekeeping on the railroads, so that distant trains could be sure
> that they were leaving and arriving in stations on the same schedule,
> might have affected the ways he thought about questions of simultaneity,
> distance, and speed so implicated in the theory. The purely theoretical
> achievement of Special Relativity turns out to have a very practical
> and concrete grounding. That does not change the theory, the equations,
> their implications -- but it does force us to rethink both what science
> is and who are the people who do it.

And:
> That I understand that the Theory of Universal Gravitation was the
> product of a specific man [Isaac Newton] situated in a particular
> cultural context, who was involved in some rather nasty fights about
> credit, priority, attribution, and authority -- none of that means that
> I will jump out of my third-floor kitchen window because gravity is not
> "real" or not "true." The choice is not that either our scholars are
> pure, abstracted intellect or they have nothing to say that we must
> take seriously.

Unpacking that metaphor would yield a call for a Bernard Revel Graduate
School and a Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan (RIETS). But despite
the findings in Revel, it wouldn't shake my faith in the traditional
Talmud Torah of RIETS or how RIETS should teach its students about how
to interpret halakhah and work with their congregants in making halakhic
decisions.

And there already is a Revel, a place of Orthodox Wissenschaft, and
the Rav's presence in YU and his role in YU's thought didn't even slow
that down.

If we're talking about a post-Modern approach in Revel, it wouldn't bother
me. It wouldn't speak to me; I think post-Modernism doesn't fit the whole
notion of orthodoxy in any field very well, including Orthodox Judaism.
But that's not the problem. And in fact, maybe ony a Post-Modern Orthodoxy
will speak to many of those Millenials who are leaving.

The problem is (EMPHASIS added):
> Todays Centrist Orthodox world -- the world of Yeshiva University, the
> world that produces the overwhelming majority of the Modern Orthodox
> world's rabbis and Torah teachers -- would generally be comfortable
> with an academic approach to Jewish history. Normative Orthodoxy would
> reject historicizing the text of the Torah itself. And in between we
> have the hakhmei hamesora and the HALAKHIC PROCESS. How we think about
> them, in what context we situate them, and whether we allow ourselves
> to think critically about them using the tools of modern scholarship
> is the unavoidable intellectual challenge for Torah U'Madda for the
> twenty-first century.

The Jewish People tried historicizing the halachic process. Zekhariah
Frankel's dream led to C. Halakhah is a process given to us by G-d,
on the same side of this equation as the text. Perhaps protected
from the psychology of the people because it is supposed to be the
result of human exploration; lo bashamayim hi doesn't make precedent
any less binding.

Last, the author doesn't represent Einstein's relationship with QM
as I would. (Although the history f science is her field, not mine.)
Rather than being too old-world to embrace that new, seemingly irrational,
thing, he was one of its early key players, even while objecting to the
possibility that the world works that way.

And this too can be worked into the metaphor.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

--
Micha Berger             Mussar is like oil put in water,
micha at aishdas.org        eventually it will rise to the top.
http://www.aishdas.org                    - Rav Yisrael Salanter
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