Where is the Halakhic Heart?

Steven Gotlib

“My students are my products as far as lomdus is concerned. They follow my method of learning. However, somehow there is a reservation in their minds regarding my philosophical viewpoint. They consider me excellent in lomdus. However, when it comes to my philosophical experiential viewpoint, I am somehow persona non grata… I am not so interested in finding the cause for this problem but rather in its therapy. What is the proper therapeutic viewpoint? How can we change it? I do not know.”^[1]

– Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik to the faculty of Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work, 1974

Much ink has been spilled recently in discussing the lens through which Modern Orthodox Judaism ought to view the world. In a thoughtful Lehrhaus article, Jonah Rocheeld lamented the contemporary state of our community. In his words, “[w]e have treated the Torah like a codebase to be debugged and optimized for maximum legal efficiency. But in the process of fixing every “error” and reconciling every contradiction, we have accidentally deleted the soul… Legal categories expand, laws metastasize, and more of our day-to-day comes under the purview of Halakhah—but we are left feeling emptier than when we began.”

I have found myself in full agreement with Rocheeld’s assessment. Indeed, his conclusion is somewhat unsurprising given how much of Modern Orthodoxy’s rabbinic leadership likely reads his description as a feature rather than a bug in the first place.

This, I believe, is rooted within an understanding of Halakhah that itself is based on a profound misunderstanding of the philosophical methodology modeled by Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. As he wrote in The Halakhic Mind, “there is only a single source from which a Jewish philosophical Weltenschauung [(worldview)] could emerge; the objective order – the Halakhah. In passing outward from the Halakhah and other objective constructs to a limitless subjective flux, we might possibly penetrate the basic structure of our religious consciousness.”^[2] That is to say that, for Soloveitchik, one ought to begin with an understanding of Halakhah and work backwards to build a worldview around it. Or, as Rabbi Dr. Mark Smilowitz explained it, “halakha provides the most reliable method for determining the content of Jewish philosophical concepts.”^[3]

The core thrust of Soloveitchik’s most influential book, Halakhic Man, seems to stem precisely from this mentality. “When halakhic man approaches reality,” Soloveitchik writes, “he comes with his Torah, given to him from Sinai, in hand. He orients himself to the world by means of fixed statutes and firm principles… Halakhic man, well furnished with rules, judgements, and fundamental principles, draws near the world with an a priori relation.”^[4] Yet some of the most divisive (some might even say “off-putting”) lines of the same work are also inextricably tied to this ideal and can lead to a troubling reality in which awareness of Halakhic minutiae seems to dominate and even replace our emotional/subjective appreciation for beauty. For example,

Halakhic man is not overly curious, and he is not particularly concerned with cognizing the spring as it is in itself. Rather, he desires to coordinate the a priori concept with the a posteriori phenomenon.

When halakhic man looks to the western horizon and sees the fading rays of the setting sun or to the eastern horizon and sees the first light of dawn and the glowing rays of the rising sun, he knows that this sunset or sunrise imposes upon him anew obligations and commandments…

When halakhic man chances upon mighty mountains, he utilizes the measurements which determine a private domain… When he sees trees, plants, and animals, he classifies them according to their species and genera. Many laws are dependent upon the classification of the species.^[5]

It ought to come as no surprise that such a worldview, with its absolute conviction that “Halakhah has a fixed a priori relationship to the whole of reality in all of its fine and detailed particulars,”^[6] leads to precisely the outcome identified by Rocheeld when taught at face value to generation after generation of Modern Orthodox thought leaders. Though Soloveitchik and his most committed students no doubt find meaning within such an approach, it’s easy to see why it can come off as unsatisfying to many. The following story, for example, is apparently shared by Soloveitchik as laudatory, while many who I’ve spoken to have found it highly tragic:

The beloved daughter of R. Elijah Pruzna [Feinstein] took sick about a month before she was to be married and after a few days was rapidly sinking. R. Elijah’s son entered into the room where R. Elijah, wrapped in tallit and tefillin, was praying with the congregation, to tell him that his daughter was in her death throes. R. Elijah went into his daughter’s room and asked the doctor how much longer it would be until the end. When he received the doctor’s reply, R. Elijah returned to his room, removed his Rashi’s tefillin, and quickly put on the tefillin prescribed by Rabbenu Tam, for immediately upon his daughter’s death he would be an onen, a mourner whose dead relative has not as yet been buried, and as such would be subject to the law that an onen is exempt from all the commandments. After he removed his second pair of tefillin, wrapped them up, and put them away, he entered his dying daughter’s room, in order to be present at the moment his most beloved daughter of all would return her soul back to its Maker. We have here great strength and presence of mind, the acceptance of the divine decree with love, the consciousness of the law and the judgement, the might and power of the Halakhah, and faith, strong like flint.^[7]

In reading Rocheeld’s diagnosis of Modern Orthodoxy’s primary problem below, it is hard not to place it into conversation with Soloveitchik’s framing above:

We have far more access to information today than people did in the past. We have libraries, both physical and virtual, with thousands of books and manuscripts against which we can test our assumptions and beliefs. And when presented with the opportunity to optimize, we do. We optimize our Sabbath observance, our prayer, our standards of kosher food. We are inundated with knowledge and expected to apply it to our lives.

It is easy to forget that the Jews of yesteryear, for better or for worse, did not have access to a fraction of the resources we do. Most towns were lucky to have a single set of the Talmud, and the idea of hundreds of laymen regularly studying Torah from the text was inconceivable. While Judaism has always been a demanding legal system defined by Halakhah, the limitations of the past meant that people’s lives could not be dominated by the analysis of religious minutiae as they so often are today. Their religious knowledge came through the rabbi’s sermons and his community guidance, but their day-to-day lives were characterized by an individual and collective experience of the divine.

For example, we begin our requests for rain and sustenance on Sukkot. Many of us likely imagine some far-flung corner of the earth where our food is grown before being packed onto a ship and transported thousands of miles to be placed on grocery store shelves. Granted, we appreciate food and pray for it, but the experience is not embodied; it is understood theoretically. Far more important for many Modern Orthodox Jews today are the technical aspects of the prayer for rain: On what day of the year do we begin praying for rain? What if one forgets to recite the appropriate prayer? Must the prayer be repeated from the beginning, or may one continue?

The warmth of spontaneous religious experience, in other words, has become frozen and buried beneath the cold snow of text-based intellectualism. This is also similar to the findings of Soloveitchik’s son, Rabbi Dr. Haym Soloveitchik, in his groundbreaking essay Rupture and Reconstruction. As the younger Soloveitchik wrote, “[i]f I were asked to characterize in a phrase the change that religious Jewry has undergone in the past generation, I would say that it was the new and controlling role that texts now play in contemporary religious life.” This posed somewhat of a problem because Halakhah was meant to “constitute a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed.” ^[8] Nowadays, however,

A tireless quest for absolute accuracy, for ‘perfect fit’ – faultless congruence between conception and performance – is the hallmark of contemporary religiosity. The search is dedicated and unremitting; yet it invariably falls short of success. For spiritual life is an attempt, as a great pianist once put it, to play music that is better than it can be played. Such an endeavor may finally become so heavy with strain that it can no longer take wing, or people may simply be weary of repeated failure, no matter how inspired. The eager toil of one age usually appears futile to the next, and the performative aspiration, so widespread now, may soon give way to one of a wholly different kind, even accompanied by the derision that so often attends the discarding of an ideal. Yet this Sisyphean spirituality will never wholly disappear, for there will always be those who hear the written notes and who find in absolute fidelity the most sublime freedom.^[9]

The phenomena described by Rocheeld throughout his article seem to precisely fulfil the younger Soloveitchik’s prophecy. And yet, the predicament our religious community currently finds itself in need not be blamed on the elder Soloveitchik’s Weltanschauung.

Rupture and Reconstruction famously ends with a long and profound comparison between High Holiday Services in Bnai Brak vs Boston:

In 1959 I went to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up in Boston and never having had the opportunity to pray in a haredi yeshiva, I spent the entire High Holidays period – from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – at a famous yeshiva in Benei Berak. The prayer there was long, intense, and uplifting, certainly far more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. And yet there was something missing, something that I had encountered before, something that perhaps I had taken for granted. Upon reflection, I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged student body…

[In Boston,] the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn’t know what they were saying, and, bored, wandered in and out. Yet at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the ne’ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed.

What had been instilled in these people in their earliest childhood, and which they never quite shook off, was that every person was judged on Yom Kippur and, as the sun was setting, the final decision was being rendered… These people did not cry from religiosity but from self-interest, from an instinctive fear for their lives. Their tears were court room tears, with whatever degree of sincerity such tears have. What was absent among the students in Ponevezh and in other contemporary services – and, lest I be thought to be exempting myself from this assessment, absent from my own religious life too – was that primal fear of Divine judgment, simple and direct.^[10]

Of course, Dr. Soloveitchik acknowledges that the core question is not how the High Holidays are experienced but rather “the 255 other – commonplace – days: to what extent is there an ongoing experience of [God’s] natural involvement in the mundane round of everyday affairs?”^[11] His observation, and the following observation Rocheeld makes in his article, are symptoms of a greater problem:

Modern Orthodoxy promised coherence, and it delivered it. Tragically, as is so often the case, we did not understand what we had until we tore it apart and inspected its insides. But try as we might to reassemble the system and reach the spiritual highs of the past, the feeling we seek remains stubbornly out of reach. Nevertheless, we humans are denied the privilege of “unknowing.” We must move forward with these lessons in hand—not seeking a bug-free existence, but living with tension, embodying uncertainty, and hopefully rediscovering the route to Paradise.

Precisely a way forward, however, can be found in understanding that even Soloveitchik himself may not have seen Halakhic Man as a personal ideal, but rather an idealized image of others. Rabbi Reuven Ziegler, for example, has argued based on Halakhic Man’s  introductory citation, that “[w]hen drawing his portrait of halakhic man, it seems, the Rav had before his eyes primarily Brisker man.” Therefore, “Rav Soloveitchik portrays a type that he clearly considers beautiful and highly admirable. Yet, despite his great esteem for this type and even his identification with it, it describes only one facet of his own religious personality, which was open to a wider range of experience and feeling, and interested in broader areas and sources of knowledge, than those pursued by the pure exemplar of halakhic man he so powerfully describes.”^[12]

Indeed, another side of Soloveitchik can be glimpsed in his book And From There You Shall Seek. In it, Soloveitchik unpacks several stages of the human-divine relationship:

At first, human questioning brings man to the revelational encounter. Through his striving for the absolute, for the contingent and the eternal, he encounters the divine command and the supranatural authority that demand of him to follow a particular way of life… In the second stage, man begins to befriend the revelational experience and to feel trust in it; he tries to link it to his experience of God within the system of lawful and orderly nature; he identifies with the consciousness of the God of the world, which expresses the wonder of lovingkindness, compassion, and blessings, as well as with the consciousness of a God above and beyond the world, which demands absolute subjugation and commitment from the individual…

The imperative nature of man’s behavior gradually palls at the dawn of the third stage, the stage combining love with awe, when the soul longs for its Creator out of the aspiration for total attachment and strives to achieve this in a running movement without any retreat. While the goal in the second stage is to imitate God, the end of the third stage is to cleave to Him. What is the difference between the two aims? Imitating God includes aspects of total freedom and total subjugation. Cleaving is an entirely free activity. Man lives according to the Torah and the commandments in great joy. He desires to do the will of God as if the will of the Infinite were also the will of the finite individual. In the third stage we see the wonder of the identification of wills.^[13]

Soulless subjugation to the minutiae of Halakhah, in other words, is not an end goal within Soloveitchik’s worldview. It may be a necessary stop along the way for some, but the ultimate ideal is quite different. Soloveitchik clearly writes in And From There You Shall Seek that:

Man does not cleave to God by denying his actual essence, but, on the contrary, by affirming his own essence. The actual, multicolored human personality becomes closer to God when the individual lives his own variegated, original life, filled with goals, initiative, and activity, without imagining some prideful insolent independence. Then and only then does the personality begin to have a divine existence. Judaism insists that destroying man’s uniqueness and originality does not bring man closer to God, as the mystics imagined. Man’s road to God does not wind among faraway hidden places – in which man concentrates on a mysterious pyre in which his individuality goes up in flames – but, rather, among the spaces of real being, filled with movement and transformation.^[14]

It is true, for Soloveitchik, that “God joins with the individual only in the merit of the community which is loyal to Him and seeks Him.” However, it is also true that “man cleaves to God through the full realization of his personality… Judaism has given a measure of approval to the ethical view that fulfilling the ideal of coming close to God is the result of man’s fulfilling his own essence through activities directed at both the self and the other.”^[15]

Per Rabbis Drs. David Shatz and Reuven Ziegler, one of the titles that Soloveitchik experimented with for And From There You Shall Seek since initially writing it in the 1940s (just after completing Halakhic Man) was Ish Ha-Elokim, “Godly Man.” They argue in the volume’s introduction that there ought to be “little doubt that the three works from the 1940’s – Ish ha-Halakhah, The Halakhic Mind, and Ish ha-Elokim – are parts of an ambitious intellectual program and are related to one another in various ways”^[16]. They further note that the joint Israeli publication of Halakhic Man and And From There You Shall Seek, under the title of Ish ha-Halakhah: Galuy Ve-Nistar (Halakhic Man: Revealed and Hidden) may imply that “Ish ha-Halakhah portrays the “external” aspect of halakhic man, while U’Vikkashtem mi-Sham captures the hidden, inner core.”^[17]

Regardless, Shatz and Ziegler emphasize that And From There You Shall Seek “occupied a central and especially important place in its author’s mind, and indeed no analysis of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s understanding of religious experience and consciousness – his religious phenomenology – can be complete without taking account of and grappling with this rich and complex work.”^[18]

Soloveitchik writes similarly in a posthumously published essay entitled Halakhic Morality that Halakhah, in its ideal form, “taxes our intellectual capacity and willpower as a great doctrine and a divine discipline, but also fascinates our hearts as a romance. It requires extraordinary concentration of mind and the harnessing of will, but it also gives one an exalted emotion.”^[19] Halakhic Morality, he writes, ultimately “flows not from the highly trained mind comprehending God but from the heart sensing and feeling God; from the exalted, great, versatile, transcendental experience from one’s inner religious life – a life which is divided into a number of incompatible patterns, full of inner conflicts and tensions, dominated by the heightened contrast of ecstasy in God’s companionship and the pain of loneliness and abandonment by God, by the discordant feelings of self-appreciation and self-effacement, and by the dichotomy of contemptus mundi and amor mondi.”^[20] Indeed,

Each individual finds in the colorful God-experience whatever appeals to him. He searches through the total span of the spectrum of the religious experience. He finds that some of the shafts of colorful and brilliant light, notwithstanding their high moral potential, do not correspond to his innate moral being and are only remotely related to the needs which he considers the strongest. For instance, the judicial imperious, domineering type will normally be attracted to the aspect of din, justice, and to a morality nurtured by this emotion rather than by that of rahamim, mercy. The meek and humble, self-deprecating, character will show a proclivity for the opposite shaft of light. In short, the selection of the basic norms of the religious experience depends upon the organization of the self.^[21]

Of course, how much weight to give essays that Soloveitchik chose not to publish in his lifetime is subject to fierce debate beyond the purview of this article. That the undated manuscript of Halakhic Morality is one of only two in this posthumous volume that he himself named, knowing it would give every impression of being related to his most popular work were it to be published, is perhaps telling in some way. More telling is Soloveitchik’s public lamentation, which also opened this article:

As a teacher I can transmit my ideas to my pupils on an intellectual level. When it comes to the transmission and passing of experiences I feel so inadequate. Sometimes it drives me to despair…

When it comes to experiencing the emotional component of religion, boys who are really learned simply act like children. This is why they accept all types of fanaticism and superstition. Sometimes, they are even ready to do things which border on the immoral. They lack the experiential component of religion, and simply substitute obscurantism for it. I have never seen such obscurantism as I see among some of my students today… I have never seen so much naive and uncritical commitment to people and to ideas as I see in Ame;rica. This is the main problem we have today.^[22]

Based on these writings, it may be possible to conclude that Soloveitchik found himself in personal agreement with Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s critique of Halakhic Man:

Ish Ha-halakhah? [Halakhic Man?] Lo hayah v’lo nivra ella mashal hayah [There was never such a man; the phrase is used as a parable.] Soloveitchik’s study is brilliant, but is based upon the false notion that Judaism is a cold, logical affair with no room for piety… No, there never was such a typology in Judaism as the halakhic man. There was—and is—an Ish Torah [man of the Torah] who combines halakhah and aggadah, but that is another matter altogether… Torah is the more comprehensive word. Halakhah has very little to do with theology… In Ish ha-halakhah [Halakhic Man] there is no room for the spontaneous, for raḥmanut [compassion].^[23]

If my observations are correct, much of the paradox described by Rocheeld derives from a halakhic worldview within the Modern Orthodox community that finds its roots in a limited (maybe even, borrowing Soloveitchik’s language, “naive and uncritical”) understanding of Soloveitchik’s Weltanschauung. Graduates of Modern Orthodox institutions are often intimately familiar with the framework of the Halakhic Man but most are never exposed to And From There You Shall Seek or Halakhic Morality. As such, the experiential pursuit of individuality, creativity, and spontaneous appreciation tend to face death by a thousand technicalities. Put differently, we find ourselves so busy trying to acquire a Halakhic Mind that we fail to develop a Halakhic Heart. With a fuller understanding of Rav Soloveitchik’s key writings, this need not be the case.^[24] The keys to Paradise, perhaps, have been in plain sight all along – a reality which makes the possibility of their loss all the more tragic.

^[1] “Religious Immaturity” in Aaron Rackeffet-Rothkoff, The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Volume 2 (Ktav, 1999), 238. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Daniel Rynhold for pointing me towards this source and for offering comments on an early draft of this article.

^[2] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (The Free Press, 1986) 101.

^[3] This is because, for Soloveitchik:

The “logos” as a normative agent is still authoritative regardless of its “biography.” Whatever be the psychological history of geometry, Pythagoras’ theorem is autonomously valid. The criterion of evidence and adequacy is not the transcendent source, but the indispensability of certain concepts and their constitutive experience. The task of the logician and the philosopher is not to survey the cognitive act from a causal, but from a normative and descriptive perspective. The genetic problem is the concern of the anthropologist and explanatory psychologist but not of the philosopher. Now it follows that, if sociological and psychological genetics are irrelevant to the philosophy of science, there is no reason for the philosopher of religion to limit his interpretation to causal designs. Unfortunately, while neither the mathematician nor physicist is troubled by the history of their disciplines, the philosopher of religion is still a slave to genetics. In contrast with genetic methodology, a philosophy of religion, following a retrospective procedure – from the objective to the subjective realm – does not eliminate its own object. The method of reconstruction yields more than relational explanatory exposition. It offers a multidimensional religious outlook to the homo religiosus. (Ibid, 87-88)

^[4] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man 40th Anniversary Edition (JPS, 2023), 17

^[5] Ibid 20-21

^[6] Ibid 23

^[7] Ibid 78.

^[8] Haym Soloveitchik, Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy (Littman Library, 2021) 3

^[9] Ibid 11

^[10] Ibid 38-39

^[11] Ibid 39

^[12] Rabbi Reuven Ziegler, “The Halakhist as Creator: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man” in Dr. Stuart W. Halpern (ed.) Books of the People: Revisiting Classic Works of Jewish Thought (Maggid, 2017) 291-292. On the other hand, Lawrence Kaplan has argued that in Halakhic Man “we see reflected not only the faces of Soloveitchik’s father and grandfather, but the face, the image, the personality, and the creative spirit of Rabbi Soloveitchik himself” (Kaplan, “Translator’s Introduction” in Halakhic Man 40th Anniversary Edition, cxiii).

^[13] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, And From There You Shall Seek (Ktav, 2008) 149-150

^[14] Ibid 87-88

^[15] Ibid 89.

^[16] Ibid xxxv-xxxvi. This is corroborated by Halakhic Man’s translator, Rabbi Dr. Lawrence Kaplan, who suggested that the three volumes “form a unit and are best examined together.” (Kaplan, “Translator’s Introduction” lxvi.

^[17] Ibid, xxxvi. Such an understanding, it should be acknowledged, returns us to the same place that Halakhic Man finds itself in. As Shatz and Ziegler put it, “another way of stating the relationship between the two works would be that whereas Ish ha-Halakhah presents halakhic man analytically – breaking down the whole into parts – U-Vikkashtem mi-Sham  is synthetic, showing how a halakhic personality may be built” (ibid). The critical difference is that the myopic subjugation of one’s own interest and identity into an incomplete perception of the halakhic personality is avoided thanks to this fuller understanding.

^[18] Ibid xi

^[19] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Morality: Essays on Ethics and Masorah (Maggid, 2017) 185

^[20] Ibid, 185

^[21] Ibid, 190.

^[22] Rackeffet-Rothkoff, 238-239. Rabbi Menachem Genack wrote about Soloveitchik’s self-perception of inadequately transmitting experiential value in the following story:

One summer when I was learning with the Rav with a small group of students in Boston, the Rav told us, “Min ken nisht farshteyn Elul ohn Likkutei Torah—You cannot understand Elul without studying the Baal HaTanya’s work Likkutei Torah.” He obtained copies of Likkutei Torah for all of us, but he taught it only once. He thought that we students—especially me—were not so interested, but in truth we were completely innocent of his charge. At the time, he told us Y. L. Peretz’s (fictional) story about the Beis HaLevi, who arrived at the beis midrash of a former student who had become a Chassid and was now the Bialer Rebbe. According to the story, as the Bialer Rebbe spoke, the wintry afternoon was transformed, the sun emerged, the snow melted and the trees began to bloom. Then the Beis HaLevi looked at his watch and said, “It is almost sunset. We must daven Minchah,” and the icy cold winter returned. The Rav looked at me and said, “Genack, that’s you!” (though again, I emphasize that I did not actually have any objection to his teaching the Baal HaTanya).

For the purpose of this article, the most interesting aspect of the above story to me is that Soloveitchik seems to have compared himself in the moment with the chasidish rebbe rather than his Brisker ancestor.

^[23] Samuel H. Dresner, “Heschel and Halakhah: The Vital Center in Conservative Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 43 (1991): 25–26.

^[24] Fascinatingly, a similar fate seems to have befallen Soloveitchik’s ancestor, Rav Chaim of Volozhin. Most in the yeshiva world are only familiar with the fourth gate of Rav Chaim’s magnum opus, the Nefesh HaChaim, which explores at length the concept of Torah Lishma. The other gates, which place that conception into its proper theological context, seem rarely to be the subjects of formal or informal study. This has been described as “an unfortunate practice which misleads students into thinking that they may have formed some sort of understanding of this work and as a result they will not have the impetus to study the rest of the book and to truly absorb its important messages” (Avinoam Fraenkel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum Volume 1: Rabbi Chaim Volozhin’s Nefesh HaChaim with Translation and Commentary (Urim, 2015) 53 n49).