C. S. Lewis and the Scandal of the Evangelical (and Orthodox Jewish) Mind

Ryan Harper at the Huffington Post has an article on C. S. Lewis' influence on American evangelical Christianity, noting that Lewis is particularly valuable in countering arguments based on relativism. Harper argues, though, that the very strength of Lewis' ideas are having the detrimental effect of furthering Mark Noll's "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind."

As is the tendency with all powerful ideas, Lewis's arguments have become a rhetorical talisman, an epistemological panacea. Because they offer a number of compelling insights that strike at the root of important questions, they are taken to resolve all root matters. Therefore, however new the wineskins, readers of popular evangelical apologetics end up drinking some version of that sound old Oxford vintage.



The result of this Lewis-worship is a two-fold narrowing of evangelical intellectual life. First, as Lewisian thought becomes the discursive structure of critical inquiry, it ceases to be the object of critical inquiry. Lewis is never put in the dock for inspection, revision, abandonment or refinement. Lewis is the dock.


Second, an evangelical milieu that so prides itself on its "engagement" with secular thought and culture begins to count reading and rehearsing Lewisian argument as such engagement. "Engagement" thus becomes a second-hand affair -- synonymous with finding out what C.S. Lewis has said on a given topic. But the 21st century has some new topics; and while it is unwise to execute some great divorce with the past and its great thinkers, each generation must write its own books.

Lewis certainly has had an influence on me and I openly admit that when making arguments about the need to put forth coherent statements about ultimate values, that I am channeling Lewis. That being said I see myself as engaging in a conversation with Lewis, a conversation that goes to different places. For me, the bigger issue than just trying to make moral statements is trying to pass those statements on to one's children. (See "When Lesbian Nazis in Bell-Bottoms Attack.") Perhaps this is because Lewis lived in a world in which even his atheists were still deeply in touch with a traditional culture. I live several generations down this path and worry when the heritage of the Enlightenment, based ultimately on early modern Christian thought, will finally run out on us.

This problem posed by Harper needs to be taken a step further. Yes, Lewis was a powerful writer. That the evangelical community has an unhealthy relationship with him I think, though, is due to the fact that it has yet to produce a writer who can match him. Perhaps this is the true scandal of the evangelical mind. Forget about being able to match secular academic culture; it has yet to match C. S. Lewis. Thus the theological conversation never moves beyond Lewis. Readers have nothing better to read than Lewis as writers are not capable of doing anything but reproducing Lewis.

I would go so far with this as to make a comparison to Orthodox Judaism and R. Samson Raphael Hirsch. Hirsch, a nineteenth-century German rabbi, was certainly the Jewish writer that most influenced me as a teenager and college student. Now as Dr. Alan Brill once pointed out to his class, Hirsch as a major influence on American Orthodoxy is a fairly recent phenomenon, due in large part to his having many descendants who translated his work into English and got them published. The other side to this, I would point out, that in terms of looking for books on Jewish thought that were sophisticated enough to pass muster with an intelligent teenager and which took an engagement with an outside world as a given I did not have much in the way of alternative options but for Hirsch. So this millennial American Orthodox teenager found himself in a situation in which the only Orthodox Judaism he could relate to was from nineteenth-century Germany. This is not a critic of Hirsch. He was a great thinker and writer. I am sure if I would be able to read him in German I would appreciate him all the more. That being said one has to ask why I was never given any serious twentieth-century Jewish literature to relate to. (The closest thing I could think of is Herman Wouk's This is My God which is Hirsch updated for 1950s America.)


As for me, I must admit that there was something particularly dangerous in Hirsch in that, considering my Asperger mental framework, I was not intuitively aware that I was not operating in nineteenth-century Germany and that I should not be trying to be a nineteenth-century German. So I had to push forward on my own to realize that I needed to face the reality of the twenty-first century and its unique issues; all this without the help of a useful Modern Orthodox literature. More recently I have begun reading the books of R. Jonathan Sacks and at least he is a step in the right direction. But until Modern Orthodoxy builds its own literature, it will remain caught between feeding off of Haredi and secular sources, while trying to create some personal dialectic whole between the two, and reaching back to some past thinker and trying to make him relevant for the present.


(Before readers bring up the examples of R. Joseph Soloveitchik and R. Abraham Isaac Kook, let me point out that I have been writing about my own personal experience as a teenager trying to mature into an intellectually serious Orthodox adult. Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Kook were not major influences on me at that point in my life. Furthermore, neither of these thinkers set out a coherent weltanschauung like Hirsch's Horeb, certainly not one that can be presented to teenagers. Most importantly, any attempt to use thinkers like Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Kook, both of whom distinct non-products of late twentieth century American culture, runs the same risk as turning to Hirsch.)

Making Goethe Jewish

David Goldman has an article, "Faustian Bargains," on the continued importance of German cultural tradition for Judaism. Much of the article focuses on Orthodox Judaism, particularly R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Michael Friedländer and R. Joseph Soloveitchik. Unlike most narratives, which focus on the Kantian philosophical tradition, Goldman argues for the preeminence of German literature, particularly Goethe, for understanding German-Jewish relations. According to Goldman:


Two German thinkers demarcate the opposite poles of German culture and its Jewish response. One was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose Critique of Pure Reason leapfrogged 2,000 years of debate about the ultimate nature of reality. We cannot penetrate into the inner nature of objects that we perceive, Kant asserted: All we can know is the mechanisms for understanding them that are hard-wired into our brains. The apogee of Enlightenment rationalism, Kant thought that reason would prescribe ethics and foster world peace. The poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) saw instead the dark side of the Enlightenment: Freed from constraint, tradition, and faith, modern man faced instead existential despair and self-destruction. Men use reason, Mephistopheles tells God in the prologue to Goethe’s great drama Faust, to be beastlier than any beast. Kant dismissed Judaism as a relic of ancient irrationality; Goethe learned Hebrew and drew on the Bible to make sense of the spiritual crisis of modernity.

Jews who veered toward assimilation embraced Kant’s universalism, most prominent among them Hermann Cohen, Germany’s leading academic philosopher in the last years of the 19th century. Cohen never abjured his Jewish identity and struggled until the end of his life to reconcile the unique calling of Israel with Kant’s universalism. His story has become an object lesson in failed assimilation. The Jewish encounter with Goethe in many ways is more telling, for its failures as well as successes. Some of the great rabbis of the 19th century did not hesitate to draw on Goethe’s reading of the Bible; Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik saw theological importance in Goethe’s rejection of scientific determinism.

Are Haredim to Blame for the OTD Phenomenon?

Michael Makovi wrote a series of comments that I thought deserved a posting of its own. He offers an eloquent Modern Orthodox challenge (which may make it beside the point) to Rabbi Dovid Schwartz and the Haredi community as to their responsibility in causing people to abandon ritual observance.


Rabbi Schwartz,

As I indicated, what most troubled me about your letter was that while it was quick to defend the secular Zionists and such (which is remarkable - I do sincerely thank you), nevertheless, it was quick to condemn the contemporary OTDs and such. You admit the "broken school system", and you admit that the school systems are unable to impart true religiosity unless they include 8+ years of kollel. Shouldn't this set off alarms in your head? Perhaps the OTDs are responding to these failures of the school system?

I know more about the Modern Orthodox community than the Haredi one, so it is difficult for me to speak of the Haredi one except as an outsider looking in, but what I see, from where I stand, is that the Haredi community forces an outdated and obsolete worldview on its students. The Haredim try to teach their students as if it is still 1800, as if nothing has changed. My rabbi, Rabbi Marc Angel writes an insightful essay "Modern Orthodoxy and Halakhah: An Inquiry" (printed in Seeking Good, Seeking Peace), in which he argues that the difference between Modern Orthodoxy and Haredism is that they mentally live in different times. The Modern Orthodox want to understand the sages of previous times, but they want to themselves live in today's world. The Western-European Sephardim were similar; they were completely observant, but they lived amidst the greater non-Jewish society, and participated fully. When the Haskalah came, the Jews of Holland and Italy were barely affected, because they were already full participants in the Renaissance. Rabbi Menashe ben Israel had his portrait done by his friend Rembrandt! Rabbi Marc Angel, in "Thoughts on Early American Jewry" (in Seeking Good, Seeking Peace) writes about a Reform historian who mistook the American colonial Sephardim for Reformers, because they dressed normally and spoke English. Rabbi Angel responds that for an Orthodox Sephardi, to dress like his non-Jewish neighbors and speak their vernacular did not contradict living a fully Orthodox lifestyle.

Similarly, Rambam would have been "Modern Orthodox" in that he tried to follow the Talmud, but admitted that he lived in 11th-century Spain (and later Egypt) and not 6th-century Babylonia. Thus, the Mishneh Torah will often say, "The law ought to be like this, but back when I was in Spain, we did like this."

The Haredim, by contrast, try to mentally live in a world that no longer exists, and that in any case, is out of sync with the outside world. The Haredim try to pretend they're still in 18th-century Lithuania or Poland.

The more gifted and intelligent children will realize that something is amiss, that something is being hidden from them. Their intellectual perspicacity will not tolerate this. As Rabbi S. R. Hirsch says:
It would be most perverse and criminal of us to seek to instill in our children a contempt, based on ignorance and untruth, for everything that is not specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences, in the belief that by inculcating our children with such a negative attitude ... we could safeguard them from contacts with the scholarly and scientific endeavors of the rest of mankind…You will then see that your simple-minded calculations were just as criminal as they were perverse. Criminal, because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in order to protect the truth, and because you have thus departed from the path upon which your own Sages have preceded you and beckoned you to follow them. Perverse, because by so doing you have achieved precisely the opposite of what you wanted to accomplish... Your child will consequently begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish (Collected Writings vol 7 pp. 415-6, quoted in Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch—Torah Leadership for Our Times by Rabbi Dr. Yehudah (Leo) Levi).
The brighter students will realize that according to their teachers, Judaism can survive only in darkness and ignorance. Rav A. I. Kook attributes the rise of secular Zionism and the like to the fact that the secularists had more idealism than the religious. As one of my rabbis put it, the secularists were talking about changing the world while the religious talked about meat and milk spoons. The situation is exactly the same today. The OTDs, etc., see the outside world as being more idealistic, more learned, more culturally and intellectually advanced, than the religious community.And you cannot underestimate the influence of mis-education. I have a friend who became a baal teshuva, but went back to non-observance when he started seeing all the stories of revoking conversions. He said, if the Orthodox have so little humanity, so little morality, if they're so perverse and misanthropic, then what do I need with them? He had Haredi relatives, and he heard disgusting and repulsive remarks from them about converts, saying that no converts are really authentic, etc. He said, if the Orthodox can so reject people who truly want to be Jewish, then he doesn't need the Orthodox.

Hillul hashem is powerful, in case we didn't already know.

(By the way, this friend of mine, I've told people that his violation of mitzvot is greater and more G-dly than the observance of others. Why does he violate the mitzvot? Because he saw the Orthodox abusing converts and refusing to give gittin to their agunot, and burning trash cans in Meah Shearim in order to protect mentally-ill child-abusers. I'm not saying I agree with my friend; in fact, I've tried to convince him to become observant again, and in any case, I've seen all the same disgusting things he has, and yet I've myself remained observant nevertheless. My point, however, is that I respect (though disagree with) his reaction - viz. going "off the derekh" - more than I respect the mitzvah-observance of others. Look at the reasons he doesn't keep mitzvot anymore - his reasons to violate the mitzvot are more G-dly than the reasons others keep them!!)

Rabbi Schwartz, you say, "And even the much maligned hamon ahm should not be underestimated. While it may be true that many received no more than a cheder education ponder for a moment how vastly superior that system must have been to our own elementary chadorim in that it stood it's students in good stead to live ehrlicha upgeheetaneh lives for a lifetime. Is the fact that in our system having 20 plus years of schooling not being enough, such that anyone who didn't spend 8+ years in Kollel after the chasunah is tsorich bedeeka acharov supposed to be a compliment? That the ahava and yirah that we implant is so flimsy that it will fold like a cheap camera in the face of a few college courses or six months in an office environment?"

Maybe what you've just written should give you pause. Perhaps the OTDs of today are not entirely to blame; perhaps they are the products of a "broken school system". Why shouldn't we judge them as favorably as you judged the secular Zionists?

I will admit that in many ways, the religious state of affairs in prewar Europe was superior to what we have today. Professor Menachem Friedman describes in "The Lost Kiddush Cup" how the Haredim today have rejected their families' mesorot, and no longer use their own grandfathers' kiddush cups. Professor Friedman notes that the kiddush cup is a symbol of tradition, and that if the cups of old are no longer considered kosher, then a great break in tradition has occurred.

Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz's Eyes to See shows at length how the prewar Jews were more concerned with ethics and morality than Orthodox Jews are today. Rabbi Schwarz presents a very ethical and humane Judaism, one that would make Rabbi S. R. Hirsch proud, one that puts less emphasis on technical ritual observance, and more on how one treats his fellow man. Rabbi Schwarz follows the Sifra and says we were brought out of Egypt for the sake of the mitzvot bein adam l'havero. He notes that in Beitzah, and unkind Jew's credentials as a Jew are questioned, a Shabbat-violating Jew's bona fides are not questioned.

Rabbi Yehuda Amital writes (here):
We live in an era in which educated religious circles like to emphasize the centrality of Halakha, and commitment to it, in Judaism. I can say that in my youth in pre-Holocaust Hungary, I didn't hear people talking all the time about "Halakha." People conducted themselves In the tradition of their forefathers, and where any halakhic problems arose, they consulted a rabbi. Reliance on Halakha and unconditional commitment to it mean, for many people, a stable anchor whose purpose is to maintain the purity of Judaism, even within the modern world. To my mind, this excessive emphasis of Halakha has exacted a high cost. The impression created is that there is nothing in Torah but that which exists in Halakha, and that in any confrontation with the new problems that arise in modern society, answers should be sought exclusively in books of Halakha. Many of the fundamental values of the Torah which are based on the general commandments of "You shall be holy" (Vayikra 19:2) and "You shall do what is upright and good in the eyes of God" (Devarim 6:18), which were not given formal, operative formulation, have not only lost some of their status, but they have also lost their validity in the eyes of a public that regards itself as committed to Halakha. Rabbi Amital, like Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz, sees an overemphasis on ritual observance and a lack of concern for morality.

Rabbi (Dovid) Schwartz, perhaps this is why the OTDs do what they do? Perhaps prewar Europe was better than today's Orthodoxy? Perhaps this superiority of prewar Judaism is the cause of the OTD phenomenon? Perhaps the existence of OTDs is a result of the inferiority of today's Orthodoxy?

Oh, and see Dr. Yitzchok Levine's very Hirschian piece, Orthodoxy, Then and Now.

Spoof Ads for Kupat Ha’ir

As readers of this blog know, I have a particular interest in the Haredi charity organization Kupat Ha'ir. It makes outlandish and theologically dubious claims about rabbis having supernatural power to aid people who give to their charity. It also publishes almost comical offers for segulot (special signs) that take on an air of "buy one get one free" salesmanship. A dear colleague sent me a pair of Hebrew ads mocking Kupat Ha'ir with fake Kupat Ha'ir style ads. The person noted:

For those who feel that it might be in poor taste to be so cynical: refer to RSRH's [Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch] comments to this week's parashah (14:11 – s.v. ha'mibli ein kevarim] – The sharp irony, even at this time of unmatched fear and despair, demonstrates the sense of humor that is a  typical trait of the clear headed tribe of Yaakov."

My only problem is that these ads are only slightly more ridiculous than the regular Kupat Ha'ir ads.

For an offering of 90 Shekels (approximately $25), Torah scholars will hand out, on your behalf, kosher bread to birds; on the afternoon of the Holy Sabbath of the Torah Portion of Bishalach from midday until sunset.

There is a Jewish tradition of putting out food for the birds before this particularly Sabbath because we read in the Bible from the Book of Exodus about how the birds ate the Manna. I was thinking that we could ambush such rabbis by dropping in Mary Poppins to sing "Feed the Birds," sending them running with their hands over their ears.

מבצע מיוחד לתורמי קופת העיר

ביום ט"ו בשבט ראש השנה לאילנות היום המסוגל לישועה, יתפללו מנין ת"ח חכמים בעשרה

גני חיות (הנקרא ז"ו בלע"ז) בארץ הקודש, ויאמרו פרק שירה עם כל חיה ועוף בנפרד, כל

חיה והפסוק שלה, מילה במילה, י"ג פעמים (כמנין ז"ו). בפה מלא ובשפתים דולקות.

ודבר זה ידוע כסגולה בדוקה ומנוסה, כמבואר בסה"ק. וידוע כחם של חיות הקודש ובפרט

בשבת שירה. ובפרט בשנה זו שט"ו בשבט חל ביום שבת קודש, שמצטרף קדושת השבת

לקדושת היום. וידוע מה שאמר הרה"ק ר' בער מחאנדעלינסק זצוקלל"ה וזי"ע ועכי"א, שטוב

צפצוף א' של עוף בתמימות, מכל התורה והתפלות שאינם בתמימות.

:בשעת נתינת המעות יכונו הת"ח בשמות הללו

ארי"ה ,בגי' גבור"ה, להמתיק הגבורות העליונות ,בסוד מיתוק הפירות. והוא גי' ג"פ ע"ב דויסע ויבא ויט. וגי' ג"פ חסד. וגי'   (ג"פ גלגול, ויכוין לינצל מג' גלגולים, בסוד פעמים שלש עם גבר. (ומסוגל מאוד לתיקון עוון גילוי אריות

.ג'רפ"ה, לתקון הרפ"ח ניצוצין. גם יכוין ג'ירפה ביו"ד שהיא בגימ' רחמי"ם

.היפופוט"ם, בגי' רע"ו, לתיקון עץ הדעת טוב ור"ע. בסוד ר"ה לאילנות

.שוע"ל, היוצא מס"ת הפסוק "בפועל כפיו נוקש רשע". והוא כמנין מצורע. לתיקון השועל של הס"א היוצא מבית קדה"ק

"וביציאתם מגן החיות יכונו הת"ח בכלליות בסוד "וכל בהמתם" שעולה "מרדכי גרוס". וכן עולה "אני עמכם בקרי

התלמידי חכמים ישבתו כ"א במקומו כבר מערב שבת. שלא נבוא לחילול שבת ח"ו. ורק אצל

חיות שומרות שבת, עפ"י פיקוח ועד משמרת השבת. ורק חיות אשר אינם גולשות רח"ל

במקומות האסורים, עפ"י הוראות ועד הרבנים לעניני תקשורת ואינטערנעט. וכ"ז בשיתוף עם

הועד לעניני מקומות הקדושים. ונדפס על נייר בלא חשש גניזה וחילול שבת ושביעית. ללא

.היתר מכירה ופירות נכרים ופיאות של ע"ז

ולאחר התפלה ואמירת הפסוקים יתקיים סעודת פירות ברוב עם, כפי מנהג ישראל בחצרות

הקודש מקדמת דנא, עם ל' מיני פירות מיוחדים מהאיים הרחוקים, שרידים מוצלים מהרעש

.הנורא שפקד את מדינת 'האיטי' אשר בחצי הכדור התחתון ממש

:תרום י"ג פ' ט"ו ₪ בא' מהמוקדים הידועים, ותמלא את הפתקא המצורפת

!!!הזדמנות של פעם בחיים

!!!אל תחמיץ

שלש סגולות במחיר אחד

!גם ט"ו בשבט

!שבת שירה

!וגם גן חיות

שם ______________________

שם האם__________________

סכום התרומה______________

סוג הישועה________________

שם הבע"ח שברצונך שיתתפלל

עליך_____________________

שם אמו של הבע"ח_______

בקשה מיוחדת

ועוד ע"י עשרה מנינים של תלמידי חכמים מובהקים

שנבחרו אחד אחד ע"י ועד הרבנים לעניני זאאולאגיע שע"י

המרכז הזואולוגי העולמי

SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY FOR CONTRIBUTORS TO KUPAT HA-IR

On Tu b'Shvat, the New Year for Trees, the day that is a segulah for salvation, a minyan of talmidei chachamim will pray in ten zoos throughout the Holy Land. They will recite perek Shirah with each animal and bird separately, each animal with the appropriate verse, word by word, thirteen times [the gematria of the Hebrew letters zayin and vav – zoo] with great intent.

This act is known as a proven and oft used segulah as is explained in the holy sefarim. The powers of the holy animals are well known – especially on Shabbos Shirah, and especially this year when Tu b'Shvat and Shabbos Shirah coincide, when the kedushah of Shabbos is co-joined with the kedushah of the day. It is well known that the holy rabbi, R. Ber of Chondalinsk" zt' l, may his merits protect us, was wont to say: "The pure chirping of a bird is preferable to all Torah and prayer that are not pure."
Once the monies are given [to the Kupah], the talmidei chachamim will have the following kavanos:

Lion [Hebrew aryeh]  which in gematria equals gevurah [strength] – to sweeten the heavenly gevuros – that are contained within the secret of the sweetness of the fruit … and this is especially effective in the tikkun of the sins of gilui arayos.

Giraffe – [Hebrew gimmel, resh, peh, heh] – a tikkun for the 288 [resh, peh, heh] sparks – they will also have kavanah for the name giraffe with the addition of a yud [between the gimmel and resh] which in gematria equals the word rachamim – mercy.

Hippopotamuses [Hebrew hippipotamim]- 276 [heh, peh,yud, peh, vav, tes, mem, yud, mem] in gematria to bring tikkun to the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge [tov vera - vera in gematria is 276] that is part of the mystical meaning of the New year for trees.

Fox [Hebrew shu'al] which is alluded to in the last letters of the passuk: b'poel kapov nokesh resha [lamed, vav, shin,ayin] – which is equivalent to the gematria of metzora, which is a tikkun of the fox of the sitra achra who emerges from the Holy of Holies.

When they depart from the zoos, the talmidei chachamim will reflect on the secret of the words v'chol b'hemtom which is equivalent to the gematria of [the name] Mordechai Gross and the words ani imachem b'keri.

Each talmid chacham will be in his selected spot already on erev Shabbos so that we not, chas veshalom, come to violate the Shabbos and they will only select animals who are shomer Shabbos under the supervision of the Committee for Shmiras Shabbos. The animals will also only be those who do not surf, Heaven forbid, in forbidden places, according to the instructions of the Rabbinical Committee Regarding Communications and the Internet. All of these [arrangements] are in co-operation with the Committee for the Holy Places. [The  announcements] are printed on paper [produced] without any fear of chilul Shabbos or requiring genizah or that is [produce] of the seventh year, without relying on the heter mechirah, produce of non-Jews or wigs [made of hair] offered to idols.

After the prayers and recital of the pesukim, a public seudah of fruit will be held as is the custom of Jews in the Holy Halls [of the chassidim] with thirty special fruits brought from distant islands, remnants of those saved from the terrible earthquake that struck Haiti which is located on the bottom half of the globe.

Contribute thirteen times fifteen [tes, vav]  at one of the known sites and fill out the attached form.

A ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY!
DON'T MISS OUT!
THREE SEGULOS FOR ONE PRICE:
             TU B'SHVAT
             SHABBOS SHIRAH
             AND ZOOS!

(Not my translation)


(Insert and bottom, my translation)

Name _
Name of the Mother _
Donation Amount _
Type of salvation _
Name of the Wild Animal That You Wish Prayed Upon _
Name of the Mother of the Wild Animal _
Specific Request_


Furthermore this is being done by ten groups of knowledgeable Torah Scholars, each one chosen by the Rabbinic Committee for Zoological Matters of the Global Zoological Center.

Jonathan Rosenblum on Hirsch: the Op-ed Version

Jonathan Rosenblum just published an op-ed version of the speech he gave at KAJ. What I find interesting about the written version is that Rosenblum has removed all criticism of the Haredi leadership, the Gedolim, that permeated the KAJ speech. The closest he comes to criticizing the Gedolim is when he says:

His [R’ Hirsch’s] writings are filled with an enormous confidence in the power of Torah to uplift and transform every period of history. Accordingly, he addressed the entirety of German Jewry on a monthly basis on the major issues of the day. No Torah scholar of comparable stature fills that role today.

Gone is any discussion of the need for a Torah world that values all sorts of people, not just people who sit and study all day. Rosenblum also omitted his talk about the spiritual value of living in the world and going out and earning a livelihood on a day to day basis.

To me this says two things about Rosenblum. One, that, when he spoke at KAJ, there was no mistake; he did not simply sound like he was being critical of the Haredi leadership. If did not mean to say anything serious or controversial by what he said at KAJ then there would have been no need censor himself for a general audience. Two, that Rosenblum lacks the spine to stand up for his beliefs and accept the real live consequences of those beliefs. Ultimately Rosenblum wants to be able to maintain his belief in dealing with the modern world, a belief necessary in order to justify his continued relevance, while still maintaining himself as a part of the Haredi world.

Jonathan Rosenblum’s Non-Haredi Defense of Haredism

Jonathan Rosenblum is a highly gifted speaker and writer and is without question one of the most effective apologists the Haredi community possesses. There is a certain irony to this when considering Rosenblum’s background and mode of thinking. This is made all the more poignant in light of his recent speech at KAJ. As I will demonstrate, the fact that the Haredi community relies on someone like Rosenblum highlights a fundamental weakness within Haredi ideology.

In many respects, Rosenblum’s case parallels that of R’ Yakov Horowitz of Project YES, a Haredi organization that works with at-risk teenagers. As I have already discussed, in earlier posts, R’ Horowitz’s analysis of the problems in the Haredi community and his recommended solutions are insightful and to be admired. The problem is that, in practice, they go against the very basic fundamentals of the Haredi worldview; if the Haredi community was to seriously implement what R’ Horowitz suggests they would be finished. Rosenblum is, if anything, a more extreme example.

Rosenblum is effective as a Haredi advocate precisely because he is not a product of the Haredi world and is someone who, by definition, could never have been produced by that world. He did not grow up Haredi. In fact, he did not grow up Orthodox at all, but only became religious as an adult. Rosenblum is not a product of Mir or Lakewood but of the University of Chicago and Yale. Rosenblum’s background is important to understanding his work. If Rosenblum had grown up Haredi and had gone onto the University of Chicago and Yale he would have been cast out. More importantly, when reading Rosenblum’s work you find an American conservative, not all that different from William Kristol or David Brooks. Like them, he is a product of American academia, who rebelled against its liberal culture. While Rosenblum is not a secular Jew and has made common cause with Haredim, his mode of doing so is a product not of the Haredi community but of American conservatism.

Because Rosenblum’s mode of thinking is distinctively non-Haredi, it should not surprise anyone that his beliefs are somewhat different from what one would expect to find in the Haredi community. His speech at KAJ is an excellent example of this. Judging from his speech, Rosenblum is a Hirschian; he assumes that Hirsch’s methodology is legitimate in of itself and not simply as a tool to hook people into Judaism. This is not a position acceptable to the Haredi community in terms of what matters most, as a position to be accepted internally within the community. I would love to see him try to give the same speech at an Agudath Yisroel convention.

Rosenblum, because of the situation that he is in, seems to twist himself into all sorts of interesting positions. For example, during his speech, he talked about his teacher, the late R’ Nachman Bulman, and how Rabbi Bulman, a Gerrer Hasid, was a supporter of R’ Hirsch. After the speech, R’ Yosef Blau pointed out to me that Rosenblum was being somewhat disingenuous when he referred to Rabbi Bulman as being a Gerrer Hasid. Rabbi Bulman might have come from a Gerrer family and maintained contacts with Gerrer all his life but he also went to Yeshiva University and, unlike many others, he never denied it. So while Rabbi Bulman might have been a devoted follower of R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch, he was hardly a representative figure of the Haredi community and he did not pick up his Hirschian ideals from them.

As a final example of the incongruity of Rosenblum’s position I would point to a comment he was kind enough to write about my earlier post in which he defends Rabbi Mantel:

In any event, the central point that Rabbi Mantel made is, in my opinion, incontestable: no one should think that the Hirschian derech is one easily followed and unless one is vaccinated with Rav Hirsch's pure yiras shomayim [fear of heaven], it is fraught with danger. I felt that he offered a necessary corrective, or Hegelian antithesis, if you will, to some of my remarks.

First of all, Rabbi Mantel went much further than simply saying that to be a Hirschian one needs to truly be motivated by a fear of heaven; doctors, lawyers, and professors can also fear heaven. Secondly, I would like to call attention to the nature of the defense that Rosenblum uses, that there is a need for a Hegelian antithesis. Officially, in the Haredi community, one is not supposed to be familiar with the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) beyond what you need to pass the Regents exams in high school. My guess is that Rosenblum did not pick up his knowledge of Hegel in a Haredi yeshiva. More importantly, the notion that a society needs to be balanced by contradictory viewpoints is a distinctively non-Haredi idea. A Hirschian or a Modern Orthodox worldview can grant a legitimate place to its opponents, even to Haredim, but if you are going to be Haredi you have to assume that all other positions are inherently illegitimate; there is the opinion of the Gedolim and everything else must be rejected.

Ironically enough, while the Haredi community may reject Hirsch they need him, possibly even more than Modern Orthodox Jews do. Hirsch provides an essential loincloth for Haredi outreach because he can appeal to people outside the community. So, as with the theory of evolution, it is okay to accept Hirsch when you are trying to make people religious as long as you do not make the mistake of taking him too seriously and become a personal believer. Similarly, the Haredi community requires people like Jonathan Rosenblum to defend them. Rosenblum is very effective at presenting a Haredi world that irreligious people can respect and appreciate. The problem, though, is that Rosenblum’s Haredi community has little to do with the Haredi community as it actually exists; if they were, they would cease to be Haredim and become Hirschians instead.

The Two-Hundredth Birthday of R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch: Celebrating his Life or Mourning his Death?

This past Shabbat I had the good fortune to be in Washington Heights and attend K’hal Adath Jeshurun’s (KAJ) celebration of the two-hundredth birthday of R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88). Hirsch is an important figure in my life. I do not exaggerate when I say that I remain an Orthodox Jew today in large part because of his writings. He was the leading figure of nineteenth-century Orthodox Jewry in Germany. He was famous both for his uncompromising defense of traditional Jewish practice and his willingness to incorporate secular knowledge into his thought. KAJ is essentially the congregation that Hirsch built, albeit transported to New York during the 1930s. At this event, there were a number of interesting speakers and events, which, for better and for worse, are a reflection of the state of Hirschian thought today.

As a featured speaker KAJ brought in columnist Jonathan Rosenblum. Rosenblum spoke about the continued importance of Hirsch to today’s issues and what Hirsch can teach today’s rabbinic leadership. Unlike many rabbis today, Hirsch’s Judaism was not on the defensive; he did not simply bunker down and try to figure out more ways to “protect” his community from the dangers of the outside world. On the contrary, Hirsch’s Judaism was on the offensive; he believed that traditional Judaism had a message for all Jews and for the entire world and that it could compete with the best of what the world had to offer. Hirsch saw Judaism as a community that encompassed many different types of people, from all walks of life. He offered a Judaism which also valued people who did not sit and study all day, but who lived in the world. Not only did Hirsch speak to the issues of the day, but he also spoke in a manner which people from all walks of life could comprehend.

Without actually naming anyone specifically, Jonathan Rosenblum had attacked the Haredi rabbinate for being out of touch. What followed can only be described as a farce. As if to prove Rosenblum’s point, after he was finished, KAJ’s rabbi, R’ Yisroel Mantel, promptly stood up and gave an impromptu speech, bemoaning the fact that we do not have Rav Hirsch anymore and that his doctrines have fallen into the hands of doctors, lawyers, and professors, who use it to belittle Torah. In this day and age what we need to do is listen to the rabbis, the gedolim. In effect R’ Mantel attacked Jonathan Rosenblum, at an event honoring Hirsch, for defending the things that Hirsch stood for. In essence, we have a Haredi rabbi who officially rejects the beliefs upon which his congregation was built upon yet, for some reason, stills holds his post. We have a congregation which has, by and large, abandoned the ideals that it was supposed to be the embodiment of.

This encapsulates what has happened to Hirsch and his theology; it failed to maintain itself as its own coherent movement; its inheritance has been split by Haredim and Modern Orthodoxy. The Hirschian movement has proven unable to stand up for its own ideals against the Haredi claim to halachic authority. Those who were left, who did not go Haredi, were not able to justify maintaining itself as a separate movement outside of Modern Orthodoxy. An important voice in the Orthodox world, one that might have been able to transcend the divide between Modern Orthodox and Haredi, has been lost.

Can "Walmart" Destroy the Haredi World? II

(This is the conclusion of my earlier article, “Can Walmart Destroy the Haredi World?”)

The rise of the internet, and in particular the rise of the blogosphere, has created a modern incarnation of many aspects of the Enlightenment. In an earlier post, I discussed how the act of blogging seemed to me to hearken back to the confessional style of autobiography exemplified most famously by Rousseau’s Confessions. A blogger puts forth his “private” thoughts before the public. This creates the persona of a unique self. By doing this the blogger is declaring that he is his own unique individual with his own vision of the world and that as such he has value in of himself without any recourse to any social institution or tradition.

This Enlightenment view of the individual was a direct challenge to traditional views and it can be seen as laying the groundwork for Kant. Once we have created the individual as something possessing its own authority then this individual, which we have now created, can turn around and challenge the traditional authority. The modern internet has repeated this same process. Ultimately the internet can be seen as Kant’s Enlightenment on steroids. The internet gives each individual the power to sit and judge traditional authority based on his own thoughts and understanding. The blogosphere is nothing if not precisely this. Now every Moshe David Jew, with a connection, has an open forum to criticize and judge the gedolim, religious sages, and be heard by people around the world.

Just as the traditional world of European Jewry proved ill-equipped to take on the Haskalah of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the modern Haredi world is ill-equipped to take on the modern “Haskalah on Steroids.” It is not just that the internet gives people access to opinions that are “heretical” and people might become convinced by them. The very act of confronting a variety of opinions and choosing between them, even if one chooses the “right” one, is a sword to the very heart of the Haredi worldview. For one is no longer submitting to received authority but is placing oneself as the authority before which all traditional authority most bow.

The only traditional European Jewish community that had any real success at confronting the challenges of modernity was the Hirschian community in Germany. While most people, when reading Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, focus on his willingness to incorporate secular learning within the rubric of Judaism, to me what was so crucial about Hirsch was how his vision of Judaism empowered the individual. For Hirsch Judaism was something a person chose out of something within himself. There was nothing in Hirsch about how you must listen to the gedolim, the gedolim are always right and if you do not listen to the gedolim God is going to throw you in Hell. For Hirsch, the important question was how to take one's moral ideals, theoretical beliefs in God, and put them into something concrete. For Hirsch, that vehicle was the performance of the Divine commandments found in the Bible and Jewish law.

Hirschian Judaism could survive the Haskalah, because it did not run counter to Kant’s Enlightenment. On the contrary, Hirschian Judaism was dependent upon it. It too believed in the authority of the individual. While Kant’s enlightened individual challenged traditional society to justify itself before the authority of reason, Hirsch’s individual Man of Israel challenged the enlightened world to live up to its own ideals and put them in practice.

For all of its faults, Modern Orthodoxy continues in this Hirschian tradition of individual authority. Modern Orthodoxy does not have authority figures which one must submit to without question. It has nothing to fear from the internet or any blogger. On the contrary, the Modern Orthodox world can welcome all bloggers, even those who attack Modern Orthodoxy, as people who are taking up their rightful mantles as individuals. The Haredi world could never accept bloggers, particularly bloggers who criticize the Haredi world. To do so means accepting the fact that these people have legitimate authority as individuals and do not have to submit to Haredi authority.

In the end, I do not understand how Rabbi Horowitz can speak of the Haredi world accommodating itself to the world of the internet. For the Haredi world to do this would mean that they would have to accept the notion of the individual being able to judge traditional authority instead of meekly submitting oneself to it. That would mean the end of the Haredi world and the triumph of Modern Orthodoxy. So what does Rabbi Horowitz believe? Does he really believe in the authority of individuals? If he does, how can he still call himself part of the Haredi world?