Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik

Selichot, 1993 by Harold M. Schulweis

[Note:   J. B. gave his Shiurim, lectures for periods of two hours. The lectures at the Yizkor were four hours. Forewarned is forearmed.]

Once my father entered the Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, late in the afternoon after the regular prayers were over, and found me reciting Psalms with the congregation. He took away my psalm book and handed me a copy of the tractate Rosh Hashanah. "If you wish to serve the Creator at this moment, better study the laws pertaining to the festival. While the congregation would recite Piyyutim on the Days of Awe, Rav Haym would study Torah. On Rosh Hashanah he would study the laws of Shofar, on the Day of Atonement the laws pertaining to the sacrificial order of the day." My Zeyda prayed with a Talmud open.

To recite the Psalms is fine. It is a matter of piety, of emotion, of feeling, of yearning to be close to God. But there is a deeper way to relate to God, to commune with God, to imitate Go,d and that is through the intellect, through the mind, through the geometry of the law. The pietist, the mystic, the religious romantic seeks to escape from the world and to ascend to God but the man of religious intellect seeks to bring God into the world and to impose the categories of divine intelligence upon the world itself. God does not recite psalms, but God Himself studies Torah – which is the architecture of the universe. And so we read in the Talmud Berachoth 8a, "From the day the temple was destroyed the Holy One has nothing in His world but the four cubits of halachah alone.”  This is the world of J. B. Soloveitchik, who died this year and was born in Pruzhan Poland on February 27, 1903. He was a scion of a dynasty of great halachic thinkers. His grandfather, Rav Haym Soloveitchik, known as the "Brisker Rav,” revitalized Talmudic study through his emphasis upon scientific classification and rigorous analysis of the text. His father, Rav Mosheh, was the Mitnagged Rabbi of Khoslavitch, a white Russian town. Though the town traditionally elected a Mitnagged as its rabbi, the populace consisted largely of Lubavitcher Hasidim. And when the seven year old Joseph was sent to study Talmud at the local chedr, he came under the tutelage of a devotee of Habad. He was so dominated by the study of Tanya, the central classic of Habad Hasidut, that he devoted most of the study time to the teaching of the mysteries of Chabad. This would not do, and Joseph Soloveitchik's mother, noting the slow rate in her son's knowledge, prodded her husband to take him under his wings. The next twelve years, young Joseph studied Talmud with his father almost exclusively. His father remained the dominant figure in his life.

And from his mother, herself the daughter of a rabbi, he was acquired a lifelong taste for literature. He read Ibsen, Pushkin, and Bialik. With private tutors he received a secular education equivalent to that of high school. His father and he studied the dialectics of the Talmud, of course Mishna Torah, but Rav Moshe never as much as opened the Maimonides Guide To The Perplexed.

It was his mother who encouraged Joseph, at the age of twenty-two, to leave home and to study at the University of Berlin. His major was philosophy. and his interest was in mathematics and in the thinking of Immanuel Kant. He completed a doctoral thesis on the neo-Kantian philosopher, Hermann Cohen. It's title was "Das Reine Denker und die Sinkonsitatuerung bei Hermann Cohen.”  The influence of philosophy is apparent throughout the works of Soloveitchik. There are constant references to Plato and Aristotle, to Leibniz, to Rudolph Otto and the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard.

At the octocentennial of Maimonides in 1935, Soloveitchik's lecture was on "Maimonides and Kant of the Conception of Freedom of Will and the Problem of Physical Causality in the Modern Theory of Knowledge.”  It was not incidental that Soloveitchik was drawn to Kant and to Hermann Cohen, for neo-Kantianism was radically idealistic. It held that the Mind, with its a priori categories space and time, cause and effect, and relationshipj, were the true source of knowledge. It insisted that the Mind was the sole source of truth, the foundation of reality as well as of knowledge. Hermann Cohen in particular recognized the supremacy of the mathematical and scientific interpretation of reality. So Cohen characterized his own system as a mathematical-scientific idealism which equated ultimate being with mathematic scientific laws as developed by the mind.

Throughout his writings, and especially in The Halachic Man, J. B. Soloveitchik understands the Jewish law as a kind of geometry like physics. Like science, halachah transforms qualitative perceptions like light and sound into quantitative relations. Just as Plato and Aristotle understood the permanent beneath the flux, sought to find the fixity and regularity and orderliness of the phenomenal world, so halachah is the objectification of religion which ends in precise and authoritative laws.

Throughout his writings, halachah is not analogized with ethics or aesthetics but with mathematics, with the scientific, deduction method of Galileo and Newton. Like theoretical physics, Halachah imposes its principles onto the world. Those ideal principles were revealed at Sinai.

Soloveitchik is taken with the quantification in Jewish law. What may appear to us as minutiae, is for J. B. halachic metaphysics. Not simply to eat matzah, but to know how much matzah is required to fulfill the mitzvah of eating matzah at the Passover Seder. The length of the tzitzit must be twelve times the width of the thumb. The measure of the phylacteries must be two fingers by two fingers, and necessarily square. It must be sewn so as to retain a square shape. Their diagonals must be those of a square so that all angles be equal. The sukkah is to be at least seven handbreadths, the shofar one handbreadth, the mikvah must contain at least forty se'ahs. Astronomical time is important for the application of ideal to real. When the sun goes down and when the sun rises up. a new day begins. In a matter of minutes, Sabbath begins or Sabbath leaves.

For Soloveitchik, the halachic personality is not a passive personality subject to the bombardment of sensations. The halachist orders the world, controls the world, assigns parameters to the world, the halachist sanctifies the world: in applying the ideal of halachah to the world of creation. God empowers the halachic man to sanctify the world - God and halachah marks out holy and profane.

Soloveitchik mentions a number of instances in which the halachic control of the world includes the inner world of man. He mentions that the Gaon of Vilna, the great Talmudist of the eighteenth century, learned on Sabbath afternoon that his brother had died. He displayed no emotion. It was, after all, the Sabbath. But after the Sabbath, when he concluded the havdalah, he burst into tears. This is the model of the Aristotelian man of dignity who pursues the golden mean.

Once again and closer to home, Soloveitchik reports when the beloved daughter of R. Elijah Pruzna, the maternal grandfather of Soloveitchik, was sinking in sickness, her brother entered the room where the father was wrapped in tallith and tefillin, and informed Rav Elijah that his daughter was dying. Rav Elijah checked with the doctor who told them that her death was imminent. He returned to his room, removed the phylacteries of Rashi and put on the phylacteries of Rabbenu Tan, because he knew of course that after his daughter's death he would be an onen, a mourner and would be exempt from wearing the tefillin.

What appears to you and me as being unusually rigid and stringent behavior, for Soloveitchik represents the triumph and control, order of the halachic mind over passion and emotion. This is the stoic tranquility and equilibrium of ish ha-halachot. This is very much in the attitude of Spinoza, who we recall reminded us "not to cry and not to laugh, only to understand.” 

His insistence with this outlook is the strong emphasis on this worldliness and on optimism. Again, Soloveitchik recalls, "When my father, Rabbi Moshe, was standing on the bimah on Rosh Hashanah and prepared for the order of the sounding of the shofar, a Chabad Hasid who was to blow the shofar trembled and began to weep. Rabbi Moshe said to him, 'Why are you weeping? Do you weep when you take hold of a lulav? Why is the shofar different? Are they not both commandments of God?'" J. B. has an ear for such remarks, and he wants to understand why his grandfather contrasted the shofar and the lulav. He goes on to explain that the shofar cries and moans and is associated with sin and guilt and the desire to escape from this world. According to the outlook of Chabad leader R. Shneur Zalman, the shofar expresses a yearning to transcend this world and to rise to the realm of the hidden infinite "deus absconditus," the hidden God. That mystic attitude resonates with the "ontological pessimism of mysticism.”  The lulav is the fruit of goodly trees. It speaks of an immanent God who dwells in the midst of reality. The lulav symbolizes this world – eating, drinking, smelling, touching, seeing, and this is the world in which halachah operates.

What is suspect to Soloveitchik is excessive joy and excessive sadness.   The halachic personality will not dance in the streets on the Passover night, nor will he shout out his prayers on the Days of Awe. He experiences these events through contemplative reflection. Again, one is reminded of the tones of Spinoza's "amor dei intellectualis," the intellectual love of God.

This is Soloveitchik's “Promethean halachic view of the universe” that embraced life. The halachist is not fearful of the opinion of the masses, not fearful of the tragedies that befall men in life. It is noteworthy that halachists from the Gaon of Vilna, to the grandfather and father of Soloveitchik, never visited cemeteries and never prostrated themselves upon the graves of their ancestors because the memory of death would distract them from the study of Torah. "My father Rabbi Moshe told me that when his father Rabbi Haym, seized by the fear of death, he would throw himself heart and mind into the laws of the defilement of the corpses and the laws of mourning in order to calm the turbulence of his soul.”  This controlling power of halachah is consonant with the Talmudic counsel that tells you that if the evil inclination seizes hold of you, drag it with you into the house of study. The divine presence does not reside in sadness, in melancholy or in passivity.

J. B. contrasts the Jewish sages with the Christian saints. The church fathers devoted themselves to a religious life in a state of compulsion and duress, battling with the allure of life and carnal this-worldly pleasures. Not the sages – he rejoices in the world and in the imperatives which he has created. The ideal world of halachah is his very own, his own possession. The halachic man is creative, is confident, is joyous.

Soloveitchik knows the end of confession at the end of Neilah. "What are we? What is our life? What is our goodness? What is our virtue?" However, at that very moment, one thought flashes over him. I am at the center of the universe. My very existence reflects the image of Divine Presence. "Do I not study the Torah, the cherished playthings of the Holy One, blessed be He? The angels themselves long to learn Torah from me! This is a paean to self-esteem. Stand before God! What majesty and strength girdles halachic man when he utters this phrase.”  No humanist, no Pico della Mirandoli, no Ludwig Feuerbach can exceed the religious humanness of Soloveitchik – competent, powerful, creative, optimistic.

"I am lonely. Let me emphasize however that by stating that I am lonely I do not intend to convey to you the impression that I am alone. I thank God to enjoy the love and friendship of many. I meet people, talk, preach, argue, reason. I am surrounded by comrades and acquaintances. And yet companionship and friendship do not alleviate the passional experience of loneliness which trails me constantly. I am lonely because at times I feel rejected and thrust away by everybody not excluding my most intimate friends. And the words of the psalmist, ‘My father and my mother have forsaken me’ ring quite often in my ears like the plaintive cooing of the turtledove. It is a strange, alas absurd experience engendering sharp innervating pain as well as a stimulating cathartic feeling. I despair because I am lonely and hence feel frustrated. On the other hand I also feel invigorated because this very experience of loneliness presses everything in me into the service of God."

These are the words of no other than J. B. Soloveitchik. It is a different person. What has erupted, burst into the power and confidence and optimism and strength of the halachic personality? He who has dedicated his entire life to study now looks at the world and find himself a stranger in that world. Here is Soloveitchik different from the one who describes the dignity and majesty of man, "For thou has made him but little lower than the angels.”  The man of halachah dynamic, creative, triumphant, victorious now feels himself lonely and weak. It is as if we were reading not J. B. Soloveitchik, but a page from Soren Kierkegaard's journal in 1836: "I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me but I went away and wanted to shoot myself." Soloveitchik who speaks of the majestic man, of the halachic personality achieves control over the world and himself, now confesses his terrifying loneliness, his estrangement, his alienation. "I am lonely because there is no one who exists like the "I" and because the way of the existence of the "I" cannot be repeated, imitated or experienced by others." Do you know me? Do you know my inner soul? What of the community in which the Man of Faith lives? We have friends, we have conversations and exchanges but we speak about the general not the unique. We speak surfaces and not the depths. I am myself "homo-absconditus," the man who is hidden, even to you. "Can a sick person afflicted with a fatal disease tell the thou who happens to be a very dear and close friend the tale of a horror stricken mind confronted with the dreadful prospect of death? Can a parent explain to a rebellious child who rejects everything that the parent stands for his deep seated love for him?

Soloveitchik's mood is altered and so too his dreams of salvation. Unlike the Halachic man, the lonely man of faith redemption is not in success, not in control, but in defeat in accepting a horror will. The character of lonely man is not that of halachic person. Instead of commanding, accept; instead of conquering, give; instead of confrontation, retreat; instead of rational and reasonable analysis, feel. "When the hour of estrangement strikes, the ordeal of the man of faith begins and he starts his withdrawal from society." He returns to his solitary hiding and the abode of loneliness.

It is not easy to square this apparent contradictoriness. For Soloveitchik the duality is not a matter of different moods. It is an acknowledgment of two opposing selves, two disparate images, two religious personalities that are embodied in the soul and spirit of faith. There can be for Soloveitchik no total reconciliation of these two typologies; for him Hegelian synthesis is too facile.

The conflict between emotion and reason, between halachic personality and Lonely man of faith is permanent. They exist simultaneously in man. Both aspects are created in God's image. But the conflict is all important.  There is a twoness in J. B., an image of Papa and an image of Mama.   There is in Soloveitchik the father, the grandfather, the "King-teacher" who addresses the mind; who teaches law to classify, conceptualize, reconcile texts and opinion. It is the father – cerebral, serious, learned, the joy of the triumphant intellect.
He tells us that his father's lectures were delivered in his grandfather's parlor. J. B. sits on the bed listening to his father. His father would open a Talmudic text and then quote from the commentaries of the Rav or Tosafists or Rabad. Father would find a contradiction in Maimonides' commentary:  "Our teacher Moses – why did you do this?” And then his father would find a reason and justify Maimonides. J. B., the child, would be elated. "Mother, mother, Maimonides is right. He has overcome Rabad. Father helped him. How wonderful father is." That's the joy and pride in the great Talmudic chess master.

The "Saint- teacher" focuses on the invisible, intangible letters of the Torah = on the soul, inner life, on the heart. He is concerned not only with "deeds", acts, but with experience, with worship of heart. There are the Masora of fathers and Masora of mothers. Fathers translate the intellectual text, mothers translate living experience. "From mother I learned ‘to feel the presence of the Almighty and the gentle pressure of his hand resting on my frail shoulders.  Without mother's teaching, often transmitted in silence, I would have grown up a soulless being, dry and insensitive.”  Papa-mama, the man of Halachah, the lonely Man of faith, reason and emotion, the Misnaged and Hasid.

In one of his essays he concludes, "Creation screams from primordial chaos; religious profundity springs from spiritual conflict. The Jewish ideal of religious personality is not the harmonious individual determined by the principle of equilibrium but the torn soul and the shattered spirit." And perhaps as we enter into the High Holidays we may think of this conflict in terms of our own inner struggles and find new meaning in the biblical imperative "and ye shall afflict your souls.”  Not to find in the spiritual struggle morbidity, sadness. But to find in it the depth and complexity of God.

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