The (Inexpressible) Faith of a Child

A Sub-section of my essay: “Misunderstanding in Good Faith: Confronting Rav Soloveitchik’s Position on Interfaith Dialogue”

According to Soloveitchik, the God-man relationship expresses itself in the triad of private experience, objective norms and judgements, and concrete acts in the external world. Although all aspects of our religious life are correlated with one another, it is the subjective relationship with God that is the essence of faith, and our desire to interpret the world in light of that relationship. Our childlike emotional connection is in many ways an aboriginal response to spiritual reality. Commenting on Likkutei Torah’s approach to the symbolism of Matzah, representing the boundless and unqualified trust bnei Yisrael put in G-d on the night of redemption, he says approvingly:

“It is the naive approach of the child, a commitment based not on a rationally explicable reason, but on an inner, intuitive, emotional, inexpressible experience” (FF 63)

This pre-rational faith defies objective analysis, is inseparable from our experience of the world and will give rise to experiencing various contradictory states (e.g. G-d’s remoteness and immanence). Nonetheless, for Soloveitchik, it is this experience that forms the existential background of all religion.

This is hardly what we might expect of Halakhic Man who prides himself on his exoteric and adult religion! Indeed, in the drash above, hametz represents the fully grown individual who interprets his experience within the categories of a sensitive intellect. Yet, whilst these show “homo theoreticus in his full glory and majesty”, they “can never bring man into the presence of G-d” (FF 65.) The religious person, unlike the scientist, cannot ignore the qualitative aspects of reality and work wholly in concepts and abstractions. The reason is that the norms and concrete acts- the very things halakha conceptualises- result from the spirit trying to objectify itself in the outside world. As a result, for the religious mind, “the world he knows is identical to the world he experiences”. It is through entering into the ideal world of Halakha that a Jew can claim full flourishing of his cognitive, creative personality but it cannot lose its connection to the experience that gives it living content.

Soloveitchik perceived his inability to communicate to his students the link between halakha and subjective religiosity, to be his greatest failing:

They lack the experiential component of religion, and simply substitute obscurantism for it.... How can I convey experiences to my students? I simply do not know how... My students are my products as far as lomdus is concerned. They follow my method of learning... However, when it comes to my philosophical experiential viewpoint, I am somehow persona non grata. My ideas are too radical for them.

Evidently, the lack he felt in his own students, was one that he felt in culture at large and amongst those of all faith communities. A certain loneliness, and inability to communicate religious experience, comes from the nature of faith itself. Yet, contemporary man exacerbates this problem by “searching not for a faith in its singularity and otherness”. They are committed members of religious communities but deny as superfluous, the defeat, withdrawal and sacrifice involved in genuine faith. They don’t appreciate that one can never fully translate it into terms that those not of their faith can understand:

Each faith community is engaged in a singular normative gesture reflecting the numinous nature of the act of faith itself, and it is futile to try to find common denominators

To deny this feature, in the terms of Confrontation, is to eschew the ‘double confrontation’ in favour of a ‘single confrontation’. Unless we say that our faiths are singular, we diminish the grandeur of both.

Why I Could Not be an Academic

It’s the first time that I am trying to write an academic essay in two years, and I realise why I am no good at it.  My housemate has asked me to write an article for Degel which is an academic journal published by the Alei Tzion community.  It is about Rav Soloveitchik’s approach to interfaith dialogue- a much misunderstood topic and one that I already know quite a lot about.  Moreover, I have read and re-read his works until they are coming out my nose. 

I should  be able to just sit down and write it!  Yet three things prevent me.  Firstly, no matter how clear, sublime and radical the thoughts are in my head, they never translate when I try and write them down where they appear dull and repetitive.  The sparkle and fizzle of my chaotic brain count for nothing so long as I can’t find the right structure to place them in or where the exact formulation remains on the tip of my tongue.  As R'. Soloveitchik himself says:

Feelings, emotions, thoughts and ideas become clear, and are grasped only after they are expressed in sentences bearing a logical and grammatical structure.  As long as one’s thoughts remain repressed, as long one has not bought them out into the open, no matter how sublime and exalted they may be, they are not truly yours; they are foreign and elusive.

Secondly, I end up deleting as many (if not more) words than I write.  At work, I write a lot of documents very quickly.  I act with complete professionalism and yet I care less about them.  As such, I can churn them out to a high quality as I know that my thoughts will be good enough even if the words don’t express what I want to say 100%.  Yet with a philosophy essay, I’m never quite happy with the formulation and see the objection to the statement even before I get the chance to write it.  This makes for a slow process!

Thirdly, and this isn’t necessarily a bad quality, I am never completely sure of my position.  So much has been written about Rav Soloveitchik, and so many conflicting opinions, that every time I read something new, I begin to unnecessarily doubt all that I thought.  It certainly doesn’t help that the Rav was not entirely consistent in his terminology, application of his opinions or typologies of Genesis!  Whilst the general trend is consistent, he certainly provides others with enough material to prove me wrong!

So there we have it.  Only time will tell if I manage to write this essay.

Poem: A Dream of Freedom

A dream of freedom
A mountain over our heads
The bitter morass, the child doth wail
It looms, the mountain
It looms

Curiously it’s still
Just hanging, right there
Above it’s still, just falling, right there
And the shadow it casts
Just black

The false prophet, he cries:
“The mountain its yours.
There’s nothing beyond, only rock
One place for you, accept it”
Your lot

A shout once stifled
Into many whispers, much louder
Receptive to words, words of the ancestors
A light remembered, the light…
It beckons

Cracks in rock, though small
Through perseverance and dynamite
Widen and widen, minds narrow and narrow
Only one goal, no matter how
AVALANCHE

With structure now
gone and boundaries now
gone, And light it
seeps in; and happiness, it wells up; and joy, it overfl
ows. The prophet, yes, he wails: “Will it! Do it!”
Take your chance, he urges...

And the media urge: use, destroy with it; bathe, run in it; focus, diffuse it; harness, flow with it; whisper, shout about it…
And the people shout: FLY
For the people heard what they want;
and with structure now gone, and boundaries now gone
they did what they want

The sun, it doth burn
The fair skin into charred.
Some heavenward fly, greedy hands grab
Power from flight weary, gasping,
On ground


New masters, same work
Face our toil, without shade
The people cry, oh why, can’t we just
Have a mountain that’s over
Our head?

Annals of history are such
Yet hope, of freedom, still remains
Where shade, not from a mountain extends
But from a ‘canopy of peace’
Amen.

Confronted Man - Tragic Philosophy: Part 1

I fear that philosophy- taken to its proper conclusions- is a necessarily tragic ethic that rightly belongs with the rest of Greek culture.  It starts with the individual self who doubts and questions; and ends, at best, with knowledge and facts.  If a man confronts the world as something-to-be-known, he is making it into something of an entirely different order than himself:  The subjective will of man over and against the objective and lifeless order of the world.

As R’ Soloveitchik says:

Even the most abandoned voluptuary becomes disillusioned like the king of Ecclesiastes and finds himself encountering something wholly other than his own self, an outside that defies and challenges him…  He discovers an awesome and mysterious domain of things and events which is independent of and disobedient to him

Why should we be disillusioned?  Surely, man can end up as much with victory, as defeat.  He can end up conquering the world with his superior intellect and knowing everything there is to be known.  Quite so, but as Wittgenstein states, “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered [and thus know all true facts about the world], the problems of life remain completely untouched.  Of course there are no questions left…” 

What the person really wants to find is precisely what he can’t; there are no more questions to ask and reality has no more to yield.  In fact, it is precisely this cognition that brings into sharp relief our inability to find meaning in the world: “The facts all contribute to setting the problem, not to its solution” (Wittgenstein).  The absurdity of existence lies in us witnessing fact after random fact without being able to give answer to the question of “Why?”  Facts are clearly stated but it is the lack of a language- our lack of grip- on questions of meaning that lead us to the philosophical conundrum that Albert Camus once pondered.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy

This then is philosophy; by standing external to all events and things as the impartial judge, you will only ever become acquainted with things (like scientific facts) that can be known externally and impartially.  You will never be able to reach out to that which is beyond your intellectual grasp.  You will never become acquainted with the interiority of the other.  The intimate- knowing- relationship with the world, other people and G-d that fill life with meaning will be missing.

This can be seen most forcefully with Maimonides whose highest goal was to know G-d and yet where this was the one thing (necessarily, according to his philosophy) that completely evaded him.  To know something was for it to be demonstratively true; where impartial logic would demand it be so.  Here, Aristotle was King knowing every true statement under the sun.  What Aristotle missed, however, was that you can know all this and it not bear on the most important problem of life.  To declare anything in the world as G-d would be to cheapen the concept and yet, that is all we can know in a demonstrative fashion.  Moses, according to Maimonides, achieved his perfection by knowing the whole world and knowing that it was not G-d.  Thus, the highest level of man consists of being aware that there is nothing he can know of G-d, nothing he can say about Him and continually being reminded of the distance between them. 

This realisation could lead to breakdown:

Man may despair, succumb to the overpowering pressure of the objective outside and end in mute resignation, failing to discharge his duty as an intellectual being, and thus dissolving an intelligent existence into an absurd nightmare. (Soloveitchik)

Yet, the alternative route of carrying out your intellectual duty is, as we have seen, no less tragic.  One is left, as Wittgenstein points out, at a place where solipsism, idealism and realism meet.  Solipsism, because “The world is my world” where yours is the only subjective self that you meet.  Idealism, because only what is possible to be ‘thought’ can be the case, and G-d and ethics are outside that.  Realism, because “The world is all that is the case” independent of my will.  Here the philosopher left with a lonely, detached individual facing a cold, hard, objective world.

Maimonides, Soloveitchik and Wittgenstein all bide us to fulfil our duty as intellectual beings and advance in the scientific world.  Yet, solving these problems “shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved”.  How can a philosophical ethic be achieved on this basis?  How can we go on without knowing the interiority of the other?  Why not just commit suicide?

Help, that isn’t

Trying to help people isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!

I spend half my life holding the door open for people.  After all, isn’t that the polite, even gentlemanly, thing to do?  Yet unless you judge it just right, it ends up being more of an inconvenience than a help.  If they are just that bit too far away, then there are only two possible options.  Either they start quick-stepping to the door so that they can get through without making you wait. Or, they walk at the pace they would have done anyway and you end up standing there like a lemon.  The former is making them unnecessarily rush and expecting them to show gratitude for it!  The latter means that you both end up feeling uncomfortable with the situation and yet, unable to change what you are doing.

Another example is on the London Underground where the ‘right’ thing to do is to give up your seat to the elderly or those less able to stand.  You see someone on a busy, rush-hour train out of the corner of their eye and a surge of compassion comes over you.  You gesture for them to take your place, whilst you are prepared to stand in the sweaty abyss.  What a knight in shining armour! What princely valour!  Except, of course, when the corner of your eye misjudges someone’s age.  If you actually ask a middle-aged woman to sit, you are basically saying that they look elderly and worthy of special treatment, despite the multitude of middle-aged women there!  They laugh or give a half-smile, feeling acutely embarrassed that they were asked and say “no, you’re alright”; and you sit there embarrassed watching the floor so you don’t feel compelled to be nice again.

There are just so many examples.  I’m certainly careful before trying to be a peacemaker, when often the two people would rather have a good spat and don’t want my patronising nonsense.  What’s the moral of the story?  I don’t know.

Facetious Insignificance

A large part of what I like about halacha and Judaism is that things matter and nothing is to be treated lightly.  Our actions and deeds, the world and all its objects have meaning for us.  This is not necessarily to say that there is meaning out there to be discovered, as maybe we construct much of it for ourselves.  It is, however, a statement that everything should evoke a rational, ethical and emotional response from human beings.  More than anything, it a moral imperative to be serious and engaged with the world in such a way that befits our human dignity.

Any serious response involves making distinctions, putting things into categories and deciding priorities.  In the Jewish setting, this is embodied in commandments and custom but the ethical dimension may well evoke a less formal response in other cultures.  It is no less true than in any academic discipline where information is sorted, categorised and interpreted.  

Yet, too many people leave their rationality at the laboratory door, at work or in the academy, and take a ‘live and let live’ attitude to their lives outside.   It is the scientific categories and distinctions, for example, that really matter and everything else is plain vanilla by comparison.  And just like its corresponding ice cream flavour- why make a fuss about it?  With a twinkle in the eye and a shrug of the shoulder, any life-affecting obligation can be shook off:

‘Who cares what lifestyle I choose so long as I don’t harm anyone?  Morality is culturally relative and people can live as they please.  Why distinguish or categorise people or actions as that just excludes!’ 

This is not to say that no argument exists for relativism, libertarianism or excluding regulation from certain areas of your life.  It’s the way some people say with a look that tells you that it doesn’t matter a darn bit how you answer them.  The people for whom rationality is pointless because any distinction just doesn’t matter- to them.  Care-free people for whom any action is equal and every distinction irrelevant if it simply doesn’t bother them! 

This attitude in extremis- a failure to draw distinctions or let them impinge on you in any way- is a denial of one’s humanity.  It reminds me of a case in Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat about a patient who had a brain tumour and underwent a personality change, becoming complete superficial and uncaring:

Testing left-right discrimination was oddly difficult , because she said left or right indifferently…

‘Left/right. Right/left.  Why the fuss? What’s the difference?’

‘Is there a difference?’ I asked

‘Of course,’ she said, with a chemists precision.  ‘You could call the enanitiomorphs of each other.  But they mean nothing to me.  They’re no different for me.  Hands… Doctors… Sisters…’ she added, seeing my puzzlement.  ‘Don’t you understand?  They mean nothing – nothing to me.  Nothing means anything… at least to me.’

‘And this meaning nothing…’ I hesitated, afraid to go on.  ‘This meaningless… does this bother you?  Does this mean anything to you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ she said promptly, with a bright smile, in the tone of one who makes a joke, wins an argument, wins at poker…. Nothing any longer felt “real” (or “unreal”).  Everything was now “equivalent” or “equal”- the whole world reduced to a facetious insignificance

I’m not saying that those who don’t agree with examining the small things in life has a neurological disease but perhaps they are not fulfilling their true potentiality as a rational being.  Of course, what I like about Judaism may be what another hates.  This is what someone said was the best thing about leaving the religious-Jewish fold (http://daashedyot.blogspot.com/2010/08/better-know-kofer-sam.html):

The best thing... hmmm... maybe that you don't have to take everything so seriously. Every choice and action isn't considered such a major issue that you always need to be absolutely confident is the exact right thing to do

Now, whilst I certainly don’t believe in being confident that my actions are the exact right thing to do (in fact, I think halacha is about doing things even without that certainty), I certainly think my actions should be considered.  Whilst prohibitions or commands may be highly annoying, I’m not one for a care-free disposition and no-one can accuse me of treating things with a facetious insignificance.

Pro-Israel, Pro-Freedom of Speech

Dear UJIA,

I would just like to pass on my support and encouragement to UJIA Chairman Mick Davis, after the so-called 'shockwaves' that have been sent through the Jewish community.

I have both donated to and benefited from UJIA-funded activities and am now encouraged to do more so in future. 

As a Zionist, I support your activities.  As an advocate of Israel, I realise the potential for public criticism being mis-used and the need to be careful.  But as a critical human being, I am pleased to hear people speak their mind.

One may agree or disagree with particular views expressed.  However, it is absolutely right that the oft-used phrase "just because we support Israel, doesn't mean we support all government policies" isn't merely theoretical or vacuous.  And certainly the view of another Jewish leader that "diaspora Jews should never criticise Israel" is absurd and immoral.

As with everything else in life, Zionists have a plurality of opinions.  It is good for Mick to express his.  I'm glad UJIA is showing itself as a "big tent" for all Zionists

Shabbat Shalom.

Neil Clarke