Heftsa or Gavra?

While ATID's 2008 Scholar-in-Residence, Rabbi Carmy gave a seminar to the ATID Fellows based on a Hebrew translation of this article. A recording of it and his other speeches from ATID's Winter Conference are available online at www.atid.org/events/07-12-19.asp.

Mattan and David asked me to comment on the prospective need for Jewish thought in coming years. The task of Jewish thought or theology, as I see it, is to clarify what, as God-fearing Jews, we ought to think and why, and to facilitate the coincidence of our lives with our ideals.

Because Jewish theology is about commitment and integrity, it devolves upon individuals for whom such commitment is a full-time engagement. Rambam, at the beginning of the Guide, goes out of his way to stress that the search for wisdom cannot be pursued in fugitive hours when one is not preoccupied with worldly pleasures, in the twilight between a day at the beach and the night after, or, he might add, the interstices of a career consumed by the quest for secular academic approbation.

To be sure, religious purity and moral virtue alone cannot substitute for scholarship or logical inference or articulateness. All these are necessary but not sufficient for clarity about our beliefs and their relation to our actions. Though we can learn a great deal from individuals uncommitted, even hostile, to the religious or to Orthodox belief or practice-their erudition cannot be dispensed with and their criticisms do not always deserve to be dismissed-yet we cannot allow to dictate our agenda the ironist who merely sits on the sidelines, out primarily for entertainment, or whose main satisfaction is the opportunity to heckle. The point is to learn how to conduct our lives, not how to theorize about how we would lead our lives if we were to live them, and not just talk about living them.

The failure to distinguish between engagement with religious reality and philosophical or academic chatter is often revealed in the tendency to substitute name-dropping for serious thought. Sometimes gesturing at big names like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Geertz and Foucault or labels like post-structuralism provides convenient shorthand for argument and reflection. Often, however, simply asking what the vaunted theorists and movements are actually asserting and what reasons or arguments buttress their claims dispels the mystery. It is neither necessary nor worthwhile to make a great show of agonizing over the desperate need for an Orthodox response to ideas whose content and rationale we do not understand. If you can't explain it with a minimum of jargon, chances are it's less important than you think.

Opposed to this tendency is the conviction voiced by votaries of towering Jewish luminaries like R. Soloveitchik and R. Kook, or leading non-Jewish thinkers like Kant or Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein and the like that their hero has said the final word and obviated the need for further effort. I firmly believe that guides of the recent and not so recent past have bequeathed us inexhaustible resources for our edification and education. With respect to any really important question it is likely that they have said something of relevance and value.

But "something" is not always enough. If the task of theology is to clarify our thought and direct our lives, it is necessary that we be able to reformulate the wisdom of previous generations and other minds in a manner that is adequate to our self-understanding and the challenges we face: "The words of the dead are modified in the guts of the living." Celebration is easy, as easy as the reflexive cynicism to which it is ostensibly opposed. Theology is hard. Aside from the profound unresolved conflicts that testify to the stature of the greatest thinkers, we have our own difficulties and paradoxes to work through. The very fact that R. Kook or the Rav devoted relatively little attention to a problem we regard as crucial is proof enough that we conceptualize the matter differently than they did. Even if we can extract something of relevance and value from their work we cannot avoid the labor required to make their insights our own. If you can't explain it with a minimum of quotation, it probably won't help much.

II

Here are some areas that require substantial attention and creativity:

First and foremost, the great task confronting the contemporary Orthodox thinker is the same as that which called forth the best in the Rav and R. Kook and their less influential confreres: how to make the categories of religious life real for the present generation. The magnificent achievements of the past continue to speak to us. However, we cannot simply repeat them like embalmed slogans. We must refresh them in our own language; doing so, we create our own literature. The Rav, R. Kook and R. Hutner, to mention only three of the most creative Orthodox thinkers of the 20th century, experimented with a variety of prose genres. We may deliberately model our efforts to communicate Torah on their compositions or explore new modes of writing-shorter, longer, more exegetical or more personal, more poetic or more argumentative. What we must share with them is absolute commitment to Torah, painstaking discipline of thought and accurate expression, and ruthless honesty with ourselves.

How to interpret sacred texts and what makes for authoritative interpretation has become increasingly crucial for our community. In part this is due to blatant cynical experiments at "pushing the envelope" of interpretation-if the text never means what it appears to say, then anything goes. This anarchic impulse has analogies in other disciplines but naturally it is most troubling in the realm of religious truth. We can usually counter the attempts to stretch the "seventy faces of Torah" to the breaking point by mobilizing our reserves of common sense, as we would do in ruling out distorted interpretations in other areas. Nonetheless, even in the course of ordinary, uncontrived learning we have been compelled to become far more self-conscious of the process of interpretation than our predecessors were. What counts as a truthful or at least legitimate construal of a text? Who counts as legitimate arbiter of interpretation? These questions will not be answered conclusively by importing some novel methodology from the humanities, but require instead a greater awareness of the immanent rhythms of the classical process of learning and reaching decisions in Torah. Sensitivity to these matters cannot be taken for granted and cannot be dispensed with.

R. Soloveitchik, of course, made a compelling case for the centrality of Halakha to Judaism and consequently to Jewish thought. Insofar as Judaism, like life, is about action rather than contemplation, and insofar as our relationship to G-d is manifested first and foremost in obedience to Him and solidarity with Him, we cannot forsake the primacy of Halakha and moral action, and our intellectual life will follow that pattern.

Partly due to the new preoccupation with authoritative interpretation, partly because we have had the chance to reflect on the achievement of our predecessors, our work will frequently be required to confront self-consciously, the variety of normative texts at our disposal. When, in the course of any inquiry, we privilege one type of source (Bible, Halakha, canonical commentaries and so forth) or one historical period, or regard one orientation as more authoritative than another, we must be ready to explain and justify our decisions. Our continuing recognition the primacy of the practical will be enriched by discussions articulating the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of our fundamental texts.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to Jewish belief in modernity is the distinctive nature of Jewish peoplehood. All particularity is a stumbling block to universalistic, homogenizing rationality. Unlike other universalistic religions, Judaism is defined by membership in a particular national community with a singular commitment and way of life. How we balance the religious and the national elements of Judaism is a matter of inestimable importance for the nature of Orthodox life and thought. If you stress too much the purely national aspect of Jewish identity, you succumb to the lure of secular nationalistic chauvinism, all the more dangerous because wrapped in the mantle of religious language. If your theology does not do justice to the national element, you cannot account for the fundamental fact that Jews who fail to share your commitment remain Jews and you are left with a sectarian group rather than the people Israel.

Though R. Kook and R. Soloveitchik, among others, have dealt with this tension between human merit and divine election, the covenant of fate and the covenant of destiny, the proper synthesis, and its translation into lived reality, is elusive, and current trends, such as the erosion of ethnic distinctiveness in the West, reflected in the widespread acceptance of intermarriage, the unsettled situation in Israel and the failure of Zionism to "normalize" Jewish existence, and the glee with which liberal ideologists can associate convictions of religious distinctiveness with the culture of violence, necessitate vigilant reformulation in the light of our changing situation.

It may have been prescient of the Rav to devote a lengthy manuscript to a Jewish theology of the family. Whatever the private behavior of elites and underclass, divorce, at that time, was not yet treated as a normal no fault rite of passage (in New York State, for example, civil divorce was granted only for adultery or extreme cruelty!). It was unimaginable that other rejections of conventional marriage would become sacrosanct in the eyes of the cultural establishment. Jewish ethics is not primarily about taking the right public positions; it is about living the right kind of life. Life is about personal relations and especially about our intimate, everyday personal relations. Are personal relations governed by fidelity to God and to the human beings to whom we are committed or are they comprehended in terms of our preferences alone? If we cannot experience the love that is born of fidelity to duty, then our attempts to respond obediently to halakhic imperatives and ideals are liable to be burdensome where they should be full of joy. Hence we must elaborate on a theological understanding of personal relations that is more than a recitation of particular halakhot.

Lastly, the present age, despite its extravagant demands for autonomy, is submissively deterministic when it comes to taking responsibility for our actions and omissions, and quite subservient to the zeitgeist when it comes to delineating our range of options in the face of prevalent social mores and trends. Jewish theologians cannot usurp the office of science and need not undertake the function of analytic philosophy in this area. However, as I have argued elsewhere at length, freedom is not something that we either have or don't have-it is something that we create by using and lose by abdicating. Here we surely have the responsibility of facilitating the imaginative scope and creative depth that enables individuals to develop freedom of the will. It is our task to make real the adventure that is ours, if we choose it, as finite, vulnerable yet free human beings.

Reviewing this brief list, it occurs to me that everything returns to the question of identity: Who are we, who are willing to take our stand as religious individuals, as part of a divinely founded religious community, who aim to conform our lives intellectually and actually to that commitment? One aspect of our identity is the question of who and how Torah is properly interpreted. The other pertains to the way we choose to create ourselves in action: how we understand our identity as Jews in conjunction with our identification with, and difference from, the rest of humanity, how we sanctify our everyday lives, and ultimately, whether we experience ourselves as heftsas, as passive entities molded by outside forces, or as gavras who with the help of G-d and in partnership with Him, venture to shape our own destinies before Him.

Rabbi Shalom Carmy teaches Jewish Studies and Philosophy at Yeshiva University and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Tradition.