Novel Formulations

The trigger for my ongoing project on Rav Moshe is a letter he sent on October 3^rd, 1984, in advance of the US Presidential Election wherein Ronald Reagan was elected for a second term, urging the Orthodox community to vote. The letter is interesting on its own terms, but the frequency with which it is raised makes it an ongoing concern for anyone concerned with US orthodoxy. Below, I lay out Rav Moshe’s political theology of US liberalism, which he mentions in the letter but which he develops more robustly elsewhere in his writings. Elsewhere, and possibly in another post here, I will lay out the problems that emerge when you try to read the letter through any sort of theory of democratic politics.

First, the letter itself. Here is an image of the letter:

And here is a digitized version of the body of the letter:

On reaching the shores of the United States, Jews found a safe haven. The rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights have allowed us the freedom to practice our religion without interference and to live in this republic in safety.

A fundamental principle of Judaism is hakaras hatov — recognizing benefits afforded us and giving expression to our appreciation. Therefore, it is incumbent upon each Jewish citizen to participate in the democratic system which guards the freedoms we enjoy. The most fundamental responsibility incumbent on each individual is to register and to vote.

Therefore, I urge all members of the Jewish community to fulfill their obligations by registering as soon as possible, and by voting. By this, we can express our appreciation and contribute to the continued security of our community.

Against Instrumental, Parochial Reasons for Voting

The key reason this letter is invoked is because it provides a non-instrumental reason to vote—something more principled that “make sure you get yours!” (or rather, “make sure we get ours”). The last line does carry a more instrumental melody—“and contribute to the continued security of our community”—but this is shockingly absent throughout the rest of the letter. This is particularly true when contrasted with other Orthodox authorities attempts to encourage voting, which fall entirely within the instrumental range. See, for example, the letters collected here by the Agudah. The only other one to mention a non-instrumental reason for voting is the one from the moetset of the Agudah in 2008, in which it feels like an afterthought after the primary, instrumental reason, and where it is clearly downstream from Rav Moshe’s letter.

In contrast, Rav Moshe gives instrumental reason a clearly secondary status. His primary reason is “hakaras hatov”—gratitude—which is underlined in the original text of the letter. His letter expounds upon the spiritual and material flourishing of the Jews in the US and how that flourishing is directly tied to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Sure, voting can help the Jewish community secure its own interests, but more importantly: it is how the Jewish community can properly show its gratitude to the country for making it possible to lead safe, secure lives in line with the dictates of Orthodox halakhah.

Thank God for US Liberalism

It is worth noting how he very clearly and specifically envisions the US as a liberal state (liberal in the political-philosophy sense, not the partisan sense). This is a broader theme in Rav Moshe’s writings. In a derashah he gave for the Shabbat Zakhor of 1939, on the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the US Constitution, he said that America had “enshrined in its law that it does not maintain any particular faith or ideology, and that each person can do as they will” (Darash Moshe, vol. 1, 416). This is in contrast with the totalitarian governments of Germany and Russia, and with Amalek—whom he characterizes in the derashah as specifically illiberal, attempting to enforce ideological conformity through violence (see my previous post on this aspect of the derashah). Figured as a sort of Anti-Amalek, the US makes flourishing Jewish life possible by creating space for any and all non-violent ideologies and systems of belief.

This is a key feature of the US for him, and he mentions it regularly. In a letter about non-Jewish prayer from 1963, he remarks that “the Lord’s Prayer” said in US schools is not problematic for Jews, in part because “the rulers of our country are men of kindness (anshei ḥesed), and they do not want to impose their religion upon the other citizens—therefore they established the text that they did” (Igrot Moshe OH 1:25). The unique ḥesed of the US is tied to how it enables the Jews to flourish as Jews without imposing on them some other religion or restricting their Jewish observance. Intervening in then-ongoing debates about prayer in schools, with most Jewish organizations opposing the practice, Rav Moshe says that it is fine because the US government is fundamentally multi-cultural.

Similarly, the one letter where Rav Moshe does use the phrase “malkhut shel ḥesed” (lit., “kingdom of kindness”) to refer to the US (Igrot Moshe HM 2:29) is about how the US grants funding to all educational institutions in the country—including Jewish schools teaching their students Torah! The Jews are beneficiaries of this liberal environment—not to mention the welfare state—where instead of compelling education for a specific belief system, or even just only supporting that one belief system, the US government actually supports education for all kinds of different belief systems. Because it maintains what political philosophers call “liberal neutrality,” the US creates a welcoming environment in which Jewish life can flourish and perpetuate itself.

Notably, Rav Moshe does not see this as merely a happy accident. In the speech for the anniversary of the constitution, he says that in creating a liberal society, “they are acting in accordance with the will of the Holy One, blessed be He.” US liberalism is itself a fulfillment of the will of God (!). Moreover, the Jews’ arrival on American shores was an act of divine providence, as he says in his letter about state funding: “The Holy One, blessed be He, in His abundant mercy upon the remnant that survived from among the Jews of all the lands of Europe… brought us here.” God brought the Jews to a liberal state with significant welfare programs which encourage the flourishing of all religions in a pluralistic manner. This theological affirmation of US liberalism is the background for Rav Moshe’s articulation in his letter on voting that life in the US is something for which Jews should express gratitude.

Before expanding on the relationship of voting and gratitude, I should note that Rav Moshe is not simplistically rosy-eyed about the liberal environment in the US. In a 1979 responsum about how doctors should behave on shabbat and whether or not they should violate shabbat in order to save a non-Jew, he suggests that US liberalism actually heightens the pragmatic necessity of doing so (Igrot Moshe OH 4:79):

Given the situation in our countries today, hostility (eivah) poses a serious danger—even in countries where Jews are generally allowed to live according to the laws of the Torah—since in any case it is unacceptable that, on that basis, one should refuse to save a life.

The liberal environment of the US is a double-edged sword. The permissiveness of US government when it comes to ideological and religious multiculturalism does not extend to risk to life. In fact, Rav Moshe sees the purpose of states as protecting life (in a minimal sense; see the constitution derashah), so allowing religious beliefs to take precedence over saving a life would contradict their very purpose.

Moreover, the liberal environment also means that freedom of the press is a fact with which Jews must contend. In the continuation of the letter, he argues that the combination of free press with advanced information and communication technologies mean that eivah is always a concern, because actions by Jews in any one place could lead to antagonism against Jews anywhere else.

But in our time one must, it seems to me, be concerned about danger in every place; and also because of the dissemination of information through newspapers, immediately whatever is done anywhere in the world, there exists the stumbling block of learning from place to place, and also incitement to increase hatred to the point of murder is great through this. Therefore it is clear that in our time this must be judged as an actual danger, and it is permitted when such a case arises.

The expectation of liberal multiculturalism is reflected in the government, but ultimately permeates all of society. Living in the US therefore constitutes a historical gift to the Jews, but also brings with it its own strictures and standards. On balance, however, this is not really so different from the past—in some ways, this is Rav Moshe’s point in the responsum. There was always a concern for hostility from non-Jews on this point, and in a liberal society, that still exists, even if some of the dynamics are different. Despite that, life in the US still clearly represents a historical step forward for Jews, and for that they should be grateful.

Gratitude for Liberalism

This brings us to the issue of the relationship between gratitude and authority. Rav Moshe’s basic argument in his 1984 letter is that the gracious use of power for a person’s sake engenders a responsibility to show gratitude.

In context of Rav Moshe’s letter, it is very clear that the gracious use of power in question is the creation, maintenance, and enforcement of US liberalism. The US creates a liberal, pluralistic space in which Jewish communities can flourish, in ways we can call both positive and negative. In a “negative” sense, the US avoids establishing any one religion as the religion of the land. Even if it is in some sense a Christian country (there’s a Christian majority, it was founded by Christians, etc.), the US’s governing institutions refrain from treating Christianity as if it were the law of the land. In this way, it enables non-Christian—and even Catholic—communities to flourish.

In a “positive” sense, it grants funding to Jewish educational institutions alongside all other educational institutions. It is committed to equal access to education and providing the funding for such education, including in some ways to religious education. This combination of multi-cultural liberalism and the welfare state yields a truly remarkable situation for the Jews, one for which they should rightly show gratitude.

This gratitude is gratitude to the state. The Jews should see themselves as having received something of value from the state and as therefore bearing some sort of obligation toward it, if not exactly a debt. They should discharge this obligation, Rav Moshe says, by participating in the democratic process. Voting is not an inherent good, on this model, but something that gains value by virtue of being valued by the state.

This is, to put it mildly, a somewhat strange way to think about democratic governance. I’ll address that, hopefully, in a future post.

Readers, I have started another side-project, this one on Rav Moshe Feinstein’s political theology of voting. I expect this one to be relatively short (maybe even just a few blog posts), but I think there’s some interesting stuff there worth talking about. It started with his 1984 letter encouraging people to vote, and fleshing out the background to that has expanded it a little. In this post, I just want to do something else, which is to lay out his claim that Amalek is characterized by illiberalism and violence.

Rav Moshe and Amalek

Throughout Rav Moshe’s writings, he seems to define Amalek in terms of two different but related qualities: 1. Personal wickedness. 2. Denial of miracles—the relationship between them being that personal wickedness could motivate a person to deny otherwise evident miracles. In one rather unique text, however, he sees Amalek as denying miracles—but sees the way in which they do this as in some sense more fundamental.

In 1939, Rav Moshe gave a Shabbat Zakhor derashah marking 150 years since the establishment of the US constitutional regime in 1789 (published in Derash Moshe, 415–416). The derashah is in some ways a paean to US liberalism (more on this in another post) but the US is here framed in opposition to Amalek—and its twentieth century analogue, the totalitarianism of Russia and Germany (“Russland” and “Ashkenaz” in Rav Moshe’s Hebrew). R. Elli Fischer wrote a good article on this for the Lehrhaus nearly a decade ago, focusing on the American part of the derashah. Here I want to focus on Amalek.

“Every False Faith”

In this derashah, he does indeed say that Amalek “wanted to show that Israel’s success was not miraculous at all, and that therefore there was nothing to fear from them.” However, what matters more is not only that they believe that, but indeed that they “wanted to show” that this was true—that they wanted to spread this belief—and that they wanted to do so violently: “they should have begun by arguing their case with words and proving the correctness of their claim, or acknowledging defeat if unable to do so. They did not do so, but instead attacked immediately. In doing so, they revealed that the true core [of their ideology] was the sediment.” Here the denial of miracles turns out to be merely a mask (of which Amalek itself may not even be aware) for its true concern, violence. The naturalistic ideology merely serves the purpose of power and force.

In this, Amalek is exceptional, but not entirely unique:

“Every false faith in the world, and every empty ideology in the world, claims to illuminate the world and presents attractive visions meant to captivate the eye and entrap the soul. But because many people do not willingly follow these ideologies, their adherents turn to coercion, forcing everyone they can to accept their creed and ideology at sword- and spear-point.”

Belief systems, Rav Moshe says, all make promises as a way of attracting adherents. Many—perhaps even most—of these promises will ultimately prove false. Trying to maintain their level of followers, to say nothing of trying to grow, therefore leads them to resort to violence. However, this is a built-in problem which any social order other than the Torah (which is not “false”) will have to deal with. Hence, “no kingdom has the right to adopt any one creed or ideology [as its official belief system]. For in the end, only raw power will remain, not the ideology, and the result will be destruction in the world, as we see with our very own eyes” (reminder: he wrote this in 1939).

Amalek foregrounds this exactly by foregrounding violence. Instead of trying to gain adherents through persuasion and argument—through participating in “the marketplace of ideas”—Amalek started with violence. Amalek is explicitly and intentionally illiberal—it aims as ending pluralism and dialogue through violence. While all such faiths hope to ultimately emerge as the sole victors of open dialogue, Amalek shifts this focus on being the sole victor into a plan of action rather than a hope, and therefore shifts its means from free discourse to violence.

Conclusion

The derashah stages an opposition between Russia-Germany-Amalek, on the one hand, and US liberalism on the other. The US is characterized, he says, by a constitutionally-enshrined neutrality toward all creeds and ideologies. It is committed to protecting the bodily safety and security of its citizens and ensuring order, but beyond that makes no claims about the good and the right. Hence, it need enact no violence to attempt to coerce beliefs. This pluralistic framework is exactly what will lead Rav Moshe to refer to the US as a “malkhut shel hesed”—a kingdom of kindness—and as following God’s will. The opposition between Amalek and America is therefore between the illiberal combination of political power and belief, on the one hand, and the liberal insistence on keeping them separate, on the other.

The only exception to this binary opposition is the Torah. Rav Moshe admits that the Torah clearly envisions the Torah as being enforced by a king. Now is not the place to get into how he envisions that working, but I would note three things: 1. He says that this king will be “a righteous king.” 2. He says that the Jews give the Torah over to the king to enforce, suggesting both an inherent differentiation between politics and the Torah, and the consent of the Jews in their integration. 3. Most importantly, he explicitly sees this as an exception! This is not how normal politics works. The Torah, of all belief system and social orders, does not have the normal “impurities” of violence that corrupt all others. Any non-Torah political order—even a Jewish one—which attempts to forward a vision of the good life would inevitably suffer the corruptive force of violence and coercion.

I’m no longer traveling, but now I’m preparing for a conference, so I figured I would just share another piece of Rav Shagar I’ve had translated in my Google Drive for God knows how long. This one is from his shiur on Likkutei Moharan I 27, vol. 1, p. 331.

The essay, titled “Prayer in a World of Doubt,” deals with the topic known in Hasidut as “foreign thoughts” (mahshavot zarot)—intrusive thoughts which may come to a person during prayer, and the proper way to respond to them. This discourse is extensive and varied, with different descriptions of the thoughts and the proepr response appearing in the teachings of different Hasidic thinkers.

Rav Shagar interprets the foreign thoughts as heretical thoughts—specifically, the idea that perhaps prayer does not work. The question he confronts is: What should you do if—in the moment when you are praying—the thought comes unbidden to your mind that prayer does not work?

His answer, similar to that given by some Hasidic thinkers, is not to embrace the foreign thoughts or to reject them, but to simply accept them as part of who you are in that moment, existing alongside your prayer. Not only can you hold this contradiction, says Rav Shagar, but this is in fact a critical element of faith. See the quote below.

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“In many places, “foreign thoughts” have been explained as “idolatrous thoughts,” and thus they can be presented also as doubts about faith that arise in the mind of the praying person as he prays, when suddenly the question arises within him as whether there is even anyone listening to his prayer. “Foreign thoughts” could refer to thoughts of lustful sin, but these thoughts typically derive from questions as to the existence of a creator who hears a person’s prayer. Passionate commitment (mesirut nefesh) in prayer, described in this teaching as a sacrifice and as death, means being willing to accept the doubt that arises in a person while he prayers, knowing not to respond to this doubt, but also not to suppress it and push it out of his mind in order to return to the flow of the prayer, but rather to live it out. Only then can a wondrous process take place: when a person’s doubts about faith are present alongside his prayer, it becomes a paradoxical source of elevation enabling him to reach the deepest, highest form of faith. It is the praying person’s willingness to give up on certainty, his willingness to leave his faith where it is, that brings faith to its lofty and proper place.

Our faith often derives from a desire to feel secure in our world, to grab hold of an uncertain world. Meanwhile, Rebbe Nahman proposes a faith that is not characterized by security and complete certainty. This faith leaves doubt where it is, and because it is willing to leave room for faith, it is the highest level of faith. The moment a person is willing to passionately commit and pray from within that space, without the gain which comes from certain faith, a surprising process takes place: a deep faith emerges which can springboard the praying person to another level of closeness to God. The end goal of knowing is not knowing, and thus the very readiness to commit without absolute security in the presence of a prayer who attends to prayer—this expresses faith in the infinite. This is not prayer which derives from certainty in a specific image of God who answers to the requests of his supplicants, rather it is an address to the infinite with its many possible faces. Let me emphasize that Rebbe Nahman’s words (as I interpret them) do not intend to portray prayer as a search for a personal covenant between a person and his creator in the midst of heresy—as in Rav Kook’s harmonistic approach—but on the contrary, the idea of passionate commitment in prayer (mesirut nefesh) is to know how to sustain heresy within faith, as per Rebbe Nahman’s understanding of the “empty space.” Faith is a leap. A person must continue the work of faith-based prayer even from a space of doubt.”

In my last post, I introduced the idea of thinking Rav Soloveitchik, particularly his early essay, “Sacred and Profane,” in context of the Baden school of Neo-Kantianism. In this second post, I want to deep the connect, exploring  how the Baden context might illuminate the essay’s rejection of “skeptical nomadism” and its discomfort with history and psychology.

Against Skeptical Nomadism

A significant portion of “Sacred and Profane” is dedicated to a discussion of settlers and nomads. It is tempting to simply read this in terms of the similar dichotomy Rav Soloveitchik lays out in “Majesty and Humility” and The Emergence of Ethical Man, denoting different elements of human nature—the cosmic, universal, wandering and the local, particular, settled elements of what it means to be human. These likely are related, but the section from “Sacred and Profane” has something important to add to the discussion.

In “Sacred and Profane,” the settler is the person who “settles in” to their values. They have what Rav Soloveitchik calls “place consciousness,” but “place” here is understood metaphorically. “Place” refers to specificity and particularism—to being in this one place instead of anywhere or everywhere else. The “settler” attaches themselves to a specific set of values and is committed to them, much as a literal settler attaches to a piece of land. Echoing Rav Soloveitchik lifelong focus, the settler is the one who is willing to sacrifice for their values, rather than subordinating them to expediency and utilitarian calculations.

The nomad, in contrast, is the cultural skeptic who refuses to attach themselves to anything which might bind them. Expounding on the mysterious “ish itti” figure from the Yom Kippur sacrificial service, Rav Soloveitchik says: “He is a ‘spiritual nomad.’ He has neither culture, religion, nor a philosophical outlook of his own” (73). In their rational-critical freedom, nomads essentially divorce themselves from human values and any particular worldview—seeking only momentary utility.

The connection between nomads and skepticism owes more to Kant than to Windelband, but before explaining that, it is worth noting that it is a part of Kant that Windelband really emphasizes. In an essay simply titled, “Immanuel Kant,” he talks at length about Kant’s rejection of skepticism. This is a theme that matters quite a bit for Windelband, both because he sees the point of philosophy as the determination of values and a worldview, and also because he simply thinks relativism is bad, ridiculous, and ought to be rejected.

In terms of Kant, the exploration of nomads and settlers in “Sacred and Profane” is just expanding on an image taken wholesale from the beginning of Kant’s Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Discussing Metaphysics’ role as “queen of the sciences,” Kant remarks,

At first, her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was an absolute despotism. But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy; while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities. But their number was, very happily, small; and thus they could not entirely put a stop to the exertions of those who persisted in raising new edifices, although on no settled or uniform plan. (Taken from 1900 translation by J. M. D. Meiklejohn, available online)

Here Kant says that skeptics refuse the work of trying to create metaphysical pictures of the world the way nomads refuse the work of creating settled societies. This work, he says, has mostly gone on haphazardly, or as the despotic dominion of dogma. Skepticism may have done the work of clearing away despotic dogmatism, but in refusing to construct an alternative, it creates philosophical anarchy, rather than order or civilization. The work of philosophy, then, is to encourage and improve the construction of metaphysics, so that it can be done in an orderly, systematic manner and actually accomplish its ends. For Windelband, as for Rav Soloveitchik, this is the work of reflection that enables the creation of a worldview and values.

Notably, Rav Soloveitchik’s presentation reduces the three terms of Kant’s metaphor (despotism-nomadism-settlement) to just two (nomadism-settlement). Kant’s opposition between skepticism and dogma, with constructive metaphysic as the ideal—though it has to be done well—which is opposed to both of them becomes an opposition between skepticism and affirming any worldview at all.

We could just chalk this up to Rav Soloveitchik being in some sense an apologist for traditional Judaism. He would be the first to admit that he isn’t trying to arrive at truth in a vacuum, from first principles—he thinks traditional Judaism is correct, and he is more concerned with determining what it means than with trying to demonstrate its veracity. But I think the context of Windelband and Neo-Kantian values philosophy, invoked by Rav Soloveitchik in the very midst his expounding the settler-nomad dichotomy, is important. Windelband himself locates philosophy both in opposition to skepticism, and not in opposition to dogma. While he wouldn’t celebrate dogma per se, the role he gives philosophy is one of critical reflection on certain areas of human life and activity, deriving values from them and using them to create a philosophical worldview. While still a critical endeavor, it takes certain things as givens in a way that is not easily integrated with Kant’s analogy—but which fits well the version in “Sacred and Profane.”

The Attack on History and Psychology

Another key point of intersection with Windelband and Baden Neo-Kantianism is Rav Soloveitchik’s opposition to historicism and psychologism—to any attempt to explain values (among other things) by reference to historical events or elements of human psychology.

In “Sacred and Profane,” he is less full-throatedly antagonistic to these moves, but it still comes through, both in his opposition between “eternity” and historical time—his insistence on the possibility of free action not derivable from historical forces—and his derision of psychological explanations of teshuvah. In regard to history, Rav Soloveitchik asserts that the Jewish experience of time requires belief in the “Ketz”—literally “the End.” But instead of this referring to the end of history—as if history would simply continue until it reached its natural end—it refers to the possibility of an irruption into and interruption of history. Thus both the possibility of personal change and of historical revolution (one of his examples of belief in the Ketz is Rabbi Akiva’s support for the Bar Kokhva rebellion) depend on this extra-historical possibility. This isn’t quite where Windelband ends up on the topic of freedom and historical necessity, but there is a shared discomfort with the reductively historical.

In terms of psychology, Windelband was fighting against the idea that what humans could, in practice, do with their minds was a source of truth regarding logic and philosophy. Rav Soloveitchik will elsewhere fight against the idea that elements of human psychology could be a factor in making changes to halakhah. In “Sacred and Profane, the stakes are not legal but theological and existential, and Rav Soloveitchik is more ambivalent, making room for psychological explanation, but only as a lower level to repentance. There is a form of teshuvah, he says, which “is not supernatural but psychological.” It results from normal mental dynamics and achieves a form of inner “purification. However, he says, there is a higher form of teshuvah which can have a cathartic, transformational effect on the human personality. This, he says, “is not a psychological phenomenon but a theological one, transcendent and nonrational” (76).

As noted, in “Sacred and Profane,” he is more ambivalent than oppositional. Probably the best example of when he is oppositional toward these ideas is his famous “Surrendering to the Almighty” lecture, where he says:

“One must not try to rationalize from without, the chukei haTorah and must not judge the chukim u’mishpatim in terms of a secular system of values. Such an attempt – be it historicism, be it psychologism, be it utilitarianism – undermines the very foundations of Torah umasora, and leads eventually to the most tragic consequences of assimilationism and nihilism, no matter how good the intentions are of the person who suggests it…

To speak about Halacha as a fossil, Rachmana litzlan, is ridiculous. Because we know, those who study Halacha know, it is a living, dynamic discipline which was given to man in order to redeem him and to save him. We are opposed to shinuyim (changes), of course, but chiddush is certainly the very essence of Halacha. There are no shinuyim in Halacha, but there are great chiddushim. But chiddushim are within the system, not from the outside! You cannot psychologize Halacha, historicize Halacha, or rationalize Halacha, because this is something foreign, something extraneous.

As a matter of fact, not only Halacha. Can you psychologize mathematics? I will ask you a question about mathematics; let us take Euclidean geometry. I can give many psychological explanations of why Euclid said that two parallels do not cross, or the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If I were a psychologist, I could interpret it in psychological terms. Would it change the postulate, the mathematical postulate? And Marah d’alma Kula – Almighty God – when it comes to Torah, which is from HaKadosh Baruch Hu, all the instruments of psychology, history, and utilitarian morality are being used in order to undermine the very authority of the Halacha.” (see the transcription and links here: https://arikahn.blogspot.com/2013/03/rabbi-soloveitchik-talmud-torah-and.html)

Here psychology and historicism are put alongside utilitarianism, and all three are said to lead to nihilism. Relativism—what Rav Soloveitchik essentially has in mind with “nihilism”—was a long-time concern for Windelband, and Windelband ties in utilitarianism as well in an essay on the importance of tradition in education. It would be hard to underestimate the importance of critiquing utilitarianism for Rav Soloveitchik, so I wouldn’t reduce it to Windelbandian influence, as it were. Rav Soloveitchik’s more instrumental understanding of reason means that he can say “rationalize Halacha” and mean “make Halakhah utilitarian,” which Windelband would never abide. Nevertheless, the constellation of themes in this lecture seems significant.

None of what I have said in these two posts should be taken to reduce Rav Soloveitchik to Baden’s influence, or for that matter, to reduce the importance of other philosophical schools in his theology. Hopefully this has helped to clarify and illuminate the materials with which he was working and the context in which he understood himself to operating.

I’ve been tugging on a thread in my Rav Soloveitchik research for a while, and recently hit on a what seems like a fruitful new direction: Baden or “South-Western” Neo-Kantianism.

The thread in question is the central importance of “values” (sometimes called “axiology”) in Rav Soloveitchik’s theology. At this point, my sense is that it would be hard to overstate their importance (but this is always the way with interesting research questions). At one point he says quite directly: “humans are axiological creatures” (Besod Hayehid Ve’hayahad, 261). I can’t lay out the full story here, which requires getting into the phenomenology of Max Scheler, but I laid out some main points in a recent post here:

The Modern Intellectual and the Heart of Norms in Rav Soloveitchik’s Writings

Which brings us to now, to this post. After reading the first draft of my chapter on the Mesorah Community, my advisor mentioned that one thinker who might be relevant to the issue of values is Wilhelm Windelband, the founder of Baden Neo-Kantianism—parallel to Hermann Cohen, the founder of Marburg Neo-Kantianism. Rav Soloveitchik’s engagement with Cohen is pretty well known, and Mark Smilowitz wrote a dissertation just a few years ago on Rav Soloveitchik’s engagement not just with Cohen but also Natorp and Marburg Neo-Kantianism more broadly. Nothing seems to have been written on his engagement with Windelband, however.

On the one hand, perhaps this isn’t surprising. Rav Soloveitchik cites or mentions Windelband all of 4 times in his writings: once in his dissertation, twice in The Halakhic Mind, and once in “Sacred and Profane: Kodesh and Hol in World Perspectives.” However, as I have begun to read/read about Windelband’s philosophy, I have been increasingly struck by the amount of overlap with Rav Soloveitchik’s thought. Here’s I just want to highlight how Windelband and his school of Neo-Kantianism underly “Sacred and Profane,” in a manner which is explicit in the text but the extent of which is easy to miss.

“Sacred and Profane” in its Own Context

“Sacred and Profane” was originally a yartzheit lecture Rav Soloveitchik gave in memory of his father. It was then published in English in 1945 in a YU student publication, HaZedek II:2–3 (May-June 1945), republished in Gesher 3, No. 1 (June 1966), and then in Jewish Thought 3, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 1993). It was also published in Hebrew in the 90’s as well, first in Hatzofeh in Elul/September 1993, and then in the Hebrew collection Ha’adam Ve’olamo, which I have written about here:

Against Absolute Security: Rav Soloveitchik’s Warnings About Zionist Fantasy

The reference to Windelband in the essay is fairly brief. In a section defining a “Weltanschauung” or “worldview,” he says that “The modern theory of value, since Lotze, Windelband, and Rickert, the fathers of modem axiology, declares truth to be not a correlative to some ontological entity but a value that reigns supreme. If one says, ‘my culture,’ it implies not only the culture of ‘my acquaintance’” (62; page numbers are to the Jewish Thought edition). These two sentences are little more than philosophical name dropping, repeating the ideas of the preceding lines while informing the audience of their philosophical provenance and historical context. They add so little that the Hebrew translator or editor felt comfortable simply removing them entirely.

But context is important. Rav Soloveitchik wanted to tell his audience that “Sacred and Profane” was drawing on the Baden school, and once we know that, we can see how Baden concerns mark the whole text, and we can better understand what the essay is trying to do.

Weltanschauungen and “World Perspectives”

Windelband inaugurated his particular brand of Neo-Kantianism in a search both for what Kant really meant and for the continuing relevance of philosophy in the 19^th century. As part of that, he argued that philosophy has a key role to play in the formation and refining of a Weltanschauung, or “worldview” (this is simplifying a much more complicated story but is essentially correct).

“Worldview” is a word which appears in “Sacred and Profane” (62), but the more frequently used term is the one that appears in the title: “world perspective.” It is very clearly being used as a translation of “Weltanschauung”: “A world perspective is not a cognitive approach to the world; it is not merely a matter of knowledge. One may be acquainted with any culture although the object of one’s knowledge need not be identical with one’s personal outlook. Cognition does not make for a Weltanschauung” (61).

So the title of essay does not reflect Rav Soloveitchik’s desire to compare the Jewish and non-Jewish understandings of the sacred and the profane—what the title might intuitively suggest, and something Rav Soloveitchik immediately does in the initial section of the essay. What the essay is fundamentally about is creating a Jewish Weltanschauung, in the same or a similar way that the Baden school talked about creating a philosophical Weltanschauung.

Values as the Core of Philosophy and Worldviews

Here is where values come in. Windelband interpreted Kant’s critical method to mean that philosophy’s job is to create norms and rules for each of the three key areas of human life: reason, will, and feeling, reflected in the areas of thinking, ethics, and aesthetics. Philosophy’s job is to reflect on these areas of human life and derive their core values, which could then be used to judge and critique these areas. In doing so, philosophy creates a worldview addressing all areas of human life. Hopefully, this would lead to a process in which, over time, the values would be realized more and more perfectly in practice. Philosophy’s capacity for reflectivity and critique make it uniquely suited for this project.

In “Sacred and Profane,” Rav Soloveitchik is reflecting on the values of the sacred and the profane as embodied in halakhah and Jewish texts (like the Rabbi Akiva pieces toward the end). Through reflecting on these and determining the core concepts of sacrality and profanity at their core, Rav Soloveitchik can create normative values representing a key part of the Jewish worldview.

This is what he is doing in the section on holiness and religion as troubling the individual rather than comforting them—parallel to Halakhic Man’s famous footnote 4—and in the section on the risk of holy ideas becoming corrupted.

This also plays a role in Rav Soloveitchik’s work more broadly. The final line of The Halakhic Mind is “Out of the sources of Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation” (HMi, 102). This is the project of creating a halakhic philosophy that he is concerned with throughout Halakhic Mind, toward the beginning of The Emergence of Ethical Man, in early versions of what would become The Lonely Man of Faith, and elsewhere. This is the topic of Mark Smilowitz’s dissertation on Rav Soloveitchik’s “reconstructive” method and his attempt to create a halakhic philosophy in this manner. Smilowitz primarily works off Marburg Neo-Kantianism—the focus of Rav Soloveitchik’s dissertation—but given what he says in “Sacred and Profane,” it seems likely that Baden is in the mix as well.

This post has gone long, so I’m going to make the two final points of comparison into a second post discussing how “Sacred and Profane” borrows an analogy straight from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and how it captures Rav Soloveitchik and Windelband’s discomfort with historicism, psychologism, and utilitarianism.

In the months after October 7^th, a lot of online discourse focused on whether or not it was possible to “eliminate Hamas” (one of the few explicit goals publicly expressed by those directing Israel’s war). Opponents and critics of the war insisted that “Hamas is an idea, and you can’t kill ideas,” and supporters of the war responded with examples of when a comparable group had, in fact, been eliminated. Then the two sides would go back and forth talking past each other, mainly pivoting around the question of whether you really could kill enough people in a short enough time to eliminate an idea.

Nobody argues with the theoretical possibility: If one person has a unique idea they’ve never told anyone, it dies when they do. Presumably the nuclear bombing of Japan caused enough devastation fast enough to kill a few ideas. But critics had two points to make, one practical and one theoretical. The practical point is simple: Even if killing an idea is possible in theory, it may be impossible in practice.

Case in point, back in January, U.S. intelligence estimated that Hamas had recruited almost as many new soldiers as Israel had killed. The strategy of eliminating Hamas by killing people was obviously having an effect (elimination of key leaders, trained soldiers, weapons and structures, and so on), but it was not achieving the goal of eliminating Hamas.

The theoretical point is subtle and often unstated, so it’s worth drawing out: You can kill ideas, you just don’t do it by killing people. To kill an idea, you delegitimize it. You demonstrate that it cannot accomplish its goals, and that its goals aren’t good goals anyway.

In Hamas’s case, defeating Hamas militarily actually does help delegitimize it, because it shows that Hamas cannot actually achieve its goal of defeating Israel. However, it also helps legitimize Hamas by presenting military conflict between Israel and Palestinians as an unavoidable reality. To kill the idea of Hamas, you have to not just demonstrate that Hamas cannot achieve its own goals, you have to demonstrate that they’re not good goals—that armed conflict between Palestinians and Israel is neither inevitable nor good, and therefore people seeking to promote Palestinian flourishing need not take the Hamas route.

When critics of the war in Gaza insisted that Israel needed to put forward a clear plan for Gaza for the day after, they often meant: because that is how you eliminate Hamas. The idea that you kill ideas by killing people is ceding the whole conversation to the side of violence, when in reality it must be much broader. Israel promoting the idea of Gazan flourishing without Hamas itself helps weaken the Hamas idea.

Epilogue: Things I didn’t have space for

I wanted this to be short, so I just want to quickly note things that would have taken too long to write out properly:

1. As a good example of this dynamic: the changing fates of monarchy and democracy. Aristotle knew what democracy was but dismissed it as a poorer form of governance, yet in the modern era it has attained wild success both in practice and in how people see it. In contrast, people used to think of kings as a good way to accomplish good goals, yet for various reasons this has shifted and monarchy no longer enjoys popular legitimacy.

2. My discussion of “legitimacy” here has basically been entirely functional: an idea gains legitimacy if it is good at attaining good goals, and loses legitimacy if it isn’t. However, it is most definitely the case that people are frequently attached to—and grant legitimacy to—ideas in defiance of functionality. That question is in some ways the key theme of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, a classic of political theology, and more directly in Eric Santner’s The Royal Remains.