28 2 Cohen01

Incompatible Parallels: Soloveitchik and Berkovits on Religious
Experience, Commandment and the Dimension of History

Jonathan Cohen
Modern Judaism, Volume 28, Number 2, May 2008, pp. 173-203 (Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mj/summary/v028/28.2.cohen01.html
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Jonathan Cohen
INCOMPATIBLE PARALLELS:
SOLOVEITCHIK AND BERKOVITS ON
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, COMMANDMENT
AND THE DIMENSION OF HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
I believe it can be said that Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Eliezer

Berkovits were the premier intellectual leaders of modern Orthodoxy
in the United States in the late twentieth century. Both benefited from
an extensive Torah education, were mentored and inspired by great
Eastern European rabbinic figures, and then went on to pursue
doctorates in philosophy at the University of Berlin in the early
thirties. Eventually, both immigrated to the United States, where each
took up a position of spiritual leadership in their respective com-
munities (Soloveitchik in Boston and New York and Berkovits in
Chicago), achieving broad recognition as theologians and Judaic
scholars. While Soloveitchik was doubtless the more renowned and
representative figure, and was regarded as the most authoritative
leader of American modern Orthodoxy, Berkovits also established a
widespread reputation as an original thinker and as an Orthodox
‘‘critic from within.’’ Towards the end of his career, Berkovits made
his home in Israel, where he continued to publish important works in
Jewish law and theology.1
In a discussion with a friend some thirty years ago I remember
saying that R. Soloveitchik had not, in my view, ‘‘internalized’’ modern
historical consciousness and its implications for contemporary Jewish
self-understanding. I contended at the time that the massive influence
of historical context on the development of Jewish belief and practice
seemed to have had no impact on R. Soloveitchik’s theology. His
thought seemed to me to be cast in a matrix of timeless typologies that
allowed no significant place for the historical dimension in theological
or halachic discourse. My friend could not countenance the possibility
that there was a serious intellectual challenge that R. Soloveitchik had
not thought through, and intimated that I probably had not looked
‘‘deeply’’ enough.
doi:10.1093/mj/kjn002
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174 Jonathan Cohen
Some years after this, Prof. Michael Rosenak, my teacher and

mentor, said to me, almost in passing, that in his view Eliezer Berkovits
was the only Orthodox thinker who ‘‘took history seriously.’’ This
sounded accurate to me at the time. In the very same issue of Tradition
where Soloveitchik’s famous essay ‘‘The Lonely Man of Faith’’ originally
appeared (Summer, 1965), immediately following, there also appeared
an important essay by Berkovits called ‘‘Orthodox Judaism in a World of
Revolutionary Transformations.’’2 While Soloveitchik, in ‘‘The Lonely
Man of Faith,’’ placed emphasis on the trans-historical character of
primordial religious experience (as crystallized in Jewish halachic
practice), and cautioned the community against being swept away by
the modern ethos, (although he considered certain elements of the
modern project to be legitimate and even charged with religious value)
Berkovits cautioned Jewry against complacency in the face of the
profound changes that modernity had brought in its train, changes that
could not but affect the very substance of Jewish thought and practice.
For Soloveitchik, nothing seemed to be essentially wrong with the
halachah as such, while Berkovits wrote of the halachah as subsisting in a
state of ‘‘Galut’’ from which it had to be redeemed.3 While Soloveitchik
wrote, in ‘‘Kol Dodi Dofek,’’4 that suffering could not be explained
within the framework of a ‘‘metaphysical teleology,’’ and that the proper
Jewish response to the problem of theodicy was to look to one’s deeds,
Berkovits, in his book Faith After the Holocaust,5 took up precisely
this task, namely: the attempt to integrate the Holocaust within a
‘‘teleological’’ philosophy of history.
In the time that has passed since I first became concerned with
these issues, the problem of the interaction between Orthodoxy and
historicity has not diminished in importance. Since then, however,
Soloveitchik’s early essay The Halakhic Mind6 has been published,
giving evidence that he did indeed think through the issue of histo-
ricity and religion quite seriously. Soloveitchik’s orientation to the
relationship between religious experience, halachic practice and the
question of history could no longer be written off as mere dogmatism.
Positions merely asserted in ‘‘The Lonely Man of Faith’’ and other
essays were found to be theoretically grounded in The Halakhic Mind.
Interestingly, this essay, while written in 1944, was only published
in 1986, when ‘‘the Rav’’ was nearing the end of his active career.
We might never really know the reason why he chose to release this
essay so late in life. Perhaps he thought that some of the more
abstruse discussions of twentieth century developments in mathe-
matics, physics, and philosophy contained in it would not be accessible
even to the most educated of his readers. It could also be that
Soloveitchik, like Maimonides in his time, was wary of the implications
that might be drawn from some of the views expressed in the essay.
Incompatible Parallels 175
Perhaps as he grew older he felt that, whatever the risks, his legacy
should include an explicit theoretical grounding of his lifelong project,
namely: the articulation, by way of concepts drawn from philosophic
discourse, of what appeared to him to be certain fundamental
religious impulses underlying the halachic system.
Whatever the case, it will be our contention that a careful reading
of The Halakhic Mind reveals R. Soloveitchik’s perspective on religious
subjectivity, revelation, commandment, and history to be highly origi-
nal and not easily classifiable as ‘‘orthodox’’ in the conventional sense.
From a systematic point of view, however, it is precisely Soloveitchik’s
most original understanding of the foundations of Jewish religious
experience and practice that precludes an evolutionary or linear-
historical approach to halachic development.
Some of Eliezer Berkovits’ early theological writings are now
becoming the focus of a renewed interest.7 Although Berkovits
professed what could be termed a more ‘‘progressive’’ approach to
halachic development,8 his understanding of religious experience,
revelation, and commandment seems to be much closer to that of
‘‘classical’’ Orthodoxy. Precisely because of that, however (and perhaps
surprisingly for some readers), within the framework of his approach,
the halachah becomes much more susceptible to the impact of
historical developments.
In this essay, we will restrict ourselves to an analysis of some of the
major theological writings of Soloveitchik and Berkovits, and not make
any claims as to the continuity or discontinuity obtaining between
their theological and halachic writings.9 As we know from research
conducted by others, the actual halachic dispensations of active
rabbinic figures do not always reflect the spirit or even the letter of
their theological reflections.10 All we permit ourselves to say is that
Soloveitchik’s theology, while remarkably innovative qua theology,
introduces an ideational framework that is most congenial to what
might be called halachic ‘‘perennialism,’’ while Berkovits’ theology,
though perhaps more traditional (although not exclusively so) contains
elements that have the potential to beget a more dynamic approach.
SOLOVEITCHIK ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS FORMS,

AND HISTORY
Soloveitchik’s The Halakhic Mind provides the reader with a most

systematic account of the relationship between religious experience,
religious forms and the dimension of history. At the outset, it should
be remarked that The Halakhic Mind is written from a decidedly
anthropocentric perspective, wherein religion is portrayed as a species
176 Jonathan Cohen
of human consciousness and activity, comparable in certain respects to

ethics and aesthetics.11 According to Soloveitchik, all these realms
must be approached by way of a cognitive method appropriate to
the human sciences, as distinguished from the natural sciences.
Following Dilthey, Soloveitchik differentiates between a hermeneutics
of explanation, proper to the natural sciences, and a hermeneutics
of understanding, proper to the human sciences.12 A hermeneutics of
explanation purports to give a genetic, causal account of empirical
phenomena in the external world, phenomena that do not derive from
the human spirit. The category of ‘‘cause and effect’’ is employed in
characterizing the antecedent–consequent relations between physical
events taking place outside of human consciousness. The cause and
effect continuum is conceived as subsisting within a dimension of
quantified, linear time. Time is understood either, in the Aristotelian
sense, as the measure of motion and therefore as derivative from
physical motion, or, in the Newtonian sense, as a ‘‘void’’ (like space),
forming the ‘‘background’’ wherein the drama of the interactive
motion of matter takes place. In either case, time is seen to be a
‘‘system of reference,’’ related in some way to physical change in the
empirical world.
In the human sciences, on the other hand, the ‘‘subject matter’’
consists of works or actions conceived to have their origin in the
human spirit. The phenomena that are the proper concern of the
‘‘humanities’’ have their own species and vector of motion. Instead
of moving only within the spatio-temporal realm from ‘‘causes’’ to
‘‘effects,’’ they move from the internal–spiritual realm outwards to
the spatio–temporal realm. In addition, they often reflect a time-
consciousness very different from the one assumed by the scientist in
his quest to bring quantitative order to the welter of qualitative data at
his disposal. Internal time-consciousness is not experienced as con-
stituted by atomic ‘‘moments,’’ separated from each other such that it
can later be said that one ‘‘influences’’ the other. Neither is such
experience divided into discrete historical ‘‘periods,’’ the differences
between which are considered to be constitutive and more important
than any continuity that may obtain between them. The internal sense
of time can sometimes be characterized in terms of Bergson’s under-
standing of ‘‘duration,’’ wherein time is experienced as an essential
continuity and flow.13 ‘‘Past’’, ‘‘present’’ and ‘‘future’’ can sometimes
even be sensed as contemporaneous. Within that continuity and flow
qualities, rather than quantities, can often be perceived and
articulated.14 When this happens, time takes on an almost tangible,
rather than analytic quality. In the world of religious experience, we
know of cases whereby the sacred time wherein a certain event takes
place is part of the substance of that very event. When ‘‘externalized’’
in the spatio–temporal realm, this phenomenon becomes accessible

by way of the religious calendar, when the time of a given com-
memoration is part and parcel of its experiential quality (the ‘‘time’’ of
repentance and forgiveness, or the ‘‘time’’ of anticipation of the
redemption).
What course, then, does this motion from the ‘‘internal’’ to the
‘‘external’’ follow? At this point, let us listen to R. Soloveitchik’s own
words, and then analyze them closely (emphases mine):15
‘‘. . . there is a process of objectification, however imperfect, in the realm
of inwardness. Thus, ethical subjectivity is converted into proposi-
tions, norms, values, etc., which are nothing but objectified correlates
of an elusive subjective stream. In the aesthetic sphere, subjectivity finds
expression either in the discipline of aesthetics or in works of art.
Both are objectified aspects of ephemeral subjectivity. Religion, which is
perhaps more deeply rooted in subjectivity than any other manifestation of
the spirit, is also reflected in externalized phenomena which are evolved
in the objectification process of the religious consciousness. The aggregate
of objective religious constructs is comprised of ethico-religious
norms, ritual, dogmas, theoretical postulates, etc.’’
Already at this point, certain features of Soloveitchik’s account of
religious experience and externalization are surprising from a conven-
tionally orthodox point of view. First of all, religion is dealt with as a
‘‘manifestation of the spirit’’ in much the same fashion as ethics and
aesthetics. On the one hand, Soloveitchik is hard at work, both in The
Halakhic Mind and other essays, to emphasize the uniqueness of the
religious dimension and its irreducibility to other realms of human
consciousness and activity.16 He insists that religious phenomena not
be ‘‘explained’’ by reducing them to functions of historical, political or
sociological developments. He also insists that religion differs from
ethics in featuring ‘‘cult’’ and ‘‘ritual’’ and not remaining content with
‘‘ethos.’’ Yet, when he compares religion to ethics and aesthetics in
this context, he finds a structural similarity in the way these spiritual
pursuits originate and then externalize themselves. With regard to
ethics and aesthetics, at least, religion is not regarded as being
possessed of an ‘‘extraterritorial’’ status, calling for an exclusive
methodology of interpretation not relevant to other forms of spiritual
expression.
Secondly, the process of objectification, whether in ethics,
aesthetics or religion is imperfect. The ‘‘constructs’’ (!) of institutiona-
lized religion only imperfectly reflect the subjective, experiential base
from which they are derived. No religious system, then, is a perfect
reflection of the interaction between the human and the divine, which
is ‘‘elusive’’ and ‘‘ephemeral’’ and takes place in the deepest and least
accessible recesses of human subjectivity. Here, too, religion is
178 Jonathan Cohen
different from ethics and aesthetics not in essence, but in degree.

Religion is ‘‘more deeply rooted in subjectivity than ethics and
aesthetics,’’ but does not operate with an entirely different set
of rules. Further on, Soloveitchik will also say that the halachah of
Judaism is a species of the religious externalization process—not
essentially to be distinguished from the overall religious gesture, a
kind of ‘‘religion, only more so:’’ ‘‘Objectification reaches its highest
expression in the Halachah. Halachah is the act if seizing the
subjective flow and converting it into enduring and tangible
magnitudes.’’17
Finally, objectification is a ‘‘process’’ that ‘‘evolves.’’ Now it is clear
that Soloveitchik does not mean by ‘‘process’’ and ‘‘evolution’’ what is
conventionally described as ‘‘historical development.’’ On the con-
trary, Soloveitchik explicitly distances himself from the conception of
development usually assumed in historical studies, whereby the histo-
rical and cultural context, embedded in the coordinates of space and
time, decidedly determines the character of the phenomena under
investigation. Still, even from the perspective of an organic-continuous
rather than atomistic-causal conception of time, it would appear that,
for Soloveitchik, there is a passage of time wherein the apparatus of
institutional religion ‘‘unfolds’’ and ‘‘crystallizes.’’ It is not dropped
from heaven in one fell swoop.
Let us now consider two more passages from The Halakhic
Mind, wherein the transition from subjectivity to objectivity is
described in more detail. First, the following (again, emphases
mine):18
‘‘To illustrate, we may analyze the triad in the God–man relation:
first, the subjective, private finitude-infinity tension; second, the
objective normative outlook; and third, the full concrete realization
in external and psychophysical acts. A subjective God–man relation
implies various contradictory states. These are wrath and love,
remoteness and immanence, repulsion and fascination (on the part
of divinity), tremor and serenity, depression and rapture, flight and
return (on the part of man), etc. This subjective attitude in man is in
turn reflected either in the form of logico-cognitive judgments or in
ethico-religious norms, e.g., God exists; He is omniscient; He is
omnipresent; He is omnipotent; He is merciful; He is vengeful; He is
the Creator, etc. You shall love God; you shall fear Him; you shall
worship Him; you shall love your fellowman, etc. These judgments
and norms lying in the immediate proximity of the psychophysical
threshold tend to externalize themselves. They find their concrete
expression in articles of faith, in prayers, in physical acts of worship,
and in other practices and observances, all of which lie in the
external world. Ostensibly, religion, though flowing in the deepest
subliminal ego-strata, is an eternal quest for spatialization and
corporeal manifestation.’’
If we look closely at the beginning of the passage, we see that once

again Soloveitchik places the fundamental religious experience, the
encounter between the divine and the human, or ‘‘revelation,’’ in the
private, subjective sphere. It is not placed in the external world as a
discrete historical event. This internal realm is a sphere of inchoate
and indeterminate ‘‘flow.’’ It is a stratum that is characterized by
contradictions and paradoxes. First and foremost, the encounter is
described as a ‘‘finitude-infinity tension.’’ Soloveitchik, however, is not
speaking only of a formal, logical contradiction. The encounter he
describes is personal and relational, begetting contradictory emotions
in both God and the human being. Most importantly, the experience
is located ‘‘in man.’’ God is experienced within as approaching and
withdrawing, approving and rejecting, etc. No doubt, for Soloveitchik
the ‘‘man of faith,’’ this encounter is not regarded as a mere ‘‘subjec-
tive’’ illusion. Certainly, Soloveitchik is sincere in bearing witness to an
actual encounter, however mysterious, between the eternal, transcen-
dent God and the ‘‘God-thirsty soul’’19 of the human being. This pri-
mordial encounter, however, does not take place in ‘‘the full light of
day.’’ It rather takes place within the human soul. It is then translated
from the realm of the indeterminate, inchoate and paradoxical to the
coherent, determinate and realizable as it passes through a human prism.
The objectification process takes place in the religious consciousness
and not beyond it. Only in the realm of the most subjective recesses is
God described as having a role in the encounter (‘‘on the part of
divinity,’’ ‘‘on the part of man,’’ etc.). ‘‘Logico-cognitive judgments’’ or
‘‘ethico-moral norms’’ are a ‘‘reflection’’ of a ‘‘subjective attitude in
man.’’ These ‘‘judgements’’ and ‘‘norms’’ are then described as having
an inherent drive to externalization. This drive, for Soloveitchik, here
as elsewhere, is the sign of a mature and responsible religiosity20
that does not remain content with the inner experience but seeks to
give it form and stability within the external coordinates of space and
time. Nowhere, however, is God described as taking an active, direct
or exclusive role in specifying even the overall articles of faith or
moral maxims of Judaism, not to mention the details of halachic
practice.
Yet, this is only part of the story. If we were to base ourselves on
the above passages alone, the implication might be drawn that the
human being should strive to place him/herself in a position of direct
encounter with God, and this at the level of ‘‘private subjectivity.’’
Theology, ethics, and ritual would then be regarded as mere,
idiosyncratic ‘‘reflections’’ of a particular encounter, while each
person would be called upon to recreate the encounter in the recesses
of his/her individual soul. Nothing could be further from
Soloveitchik’s purposes. Soloveitchik repeatedly and expressly rejects
180 Jonathan Cohen
any attempt to intuit a pure ‘‘spirituality’’ as distinct from the articles

of faith, ethical maxims and concrete spatio-temporal manifestations
that ‘‘reflect’’ it. According to Soloveitchik, inward spirituality is
accessible only by way of its external manifestations.21
In justifying this claim, Soloveitchik has recourse to two bases of
argument: one cognitive and one ethical. From a cognitive point of
view, he describes subjective inwardness as ‘‘mysterious,’’ ‘‘clan-
destine,’’ ‘‘enigmatic,’’ and unfathomable. In this sense, subjectivity
is comparable, for Soloveitchik, to the Aristotelian concept of
matter.22 Matter was postulated by Aristotle as the formless substrate
that is the carrier of all the forms. Yet pure matter can never be
experienced or ‘‘known,’’ for it always comes to us within the matrix
of form. Similarly, religious subjectivity is unavailable to us in its
‘‘pure’’ state. Even if we think we have succeeded in articulating the
structure of an inner experience, that articulation must itself be
regarded (if only by virtue of its linguistic character), as a surface
phenomenon, a kind of ‘‘form’’ in its own right.23 Further penetration
is always called for, and the process of ‘‘reconstructing’’ the subjective
experience that gave birth to the principles, maxims or practices of
a given religion is endless. This is true even if we begin the ‘‘recon-
struction’’ process from a phenomenological analysis of objective
religious forms. A fortiori, any ‘‘jumps’’ into subjectivity that disregard
the actual psycho-physical forms that embodied human beings have
generated in order to give expression to inner religious states and
conflicts must miss the mark. While the motivation for some such
jumps may have been salutary, namely the need to ‘‘protect’’ the
particularity of religious experience from reductions to ethics,
psychology or sociology, they eventually lead to a kind of pietism or
mysticism devoid of any rational corrective.
In addition, writes Soloveitchik, pure religious subjectivism—of
the kind valorized by Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard24—turns the reli-
gious person’s attention away from ethical questions that are part and
parcel of the religious domain itself—such as: ‘‘What must I do in my
daily life in order to live in a way that is acceptable to God?’’ There is a
retreat from practical decision making and the implementation of
norms to the realm of inwardness, leading to a kind of spiritual self-
preoccupation. While it is true for Soloveitchik that the primordial
encounter with God is buried in the recesses of subjectivity, it should
not be ‘‘arrested’’ there, thereby degenerating into a kind of religious
sentimentalism and ‘‘extravagant’’ individualism. The religious impulse
is universal, and must be made equally accessible to all persons in
the public realm. Further, when religion is separated from the
social, communal and normative dimensions, the result is not merely
spiritual elitism. A religious inwardness that alienates itself from

‘‘ethical authority,’’ ‘‘moral awareness’’ and the gesture of uncondi-
tioned obedience to collective norms can become ‘‘corrupted,’’ and even
‘‘barbaric.’’25
Having come this far, a most important question presents itself:
who is the ‘‘subject’’ that is the carrier of ‘‘religious subjectivity?’’
Whose consciousness is the fountainhead of entire religious systems—
creeds, maxims and commandments? Four alternatives come to mind:
(1) great religious personalities, (2) a kind of Kantian (or Husserlian)
universal transcendental ego (3) the ‘‘collective subjectivity’’ of a given
group—such as the Jewish people or (4) the mind of God Himself. Two
of these possibilities can be discounted immediately, based on remarks
made by Soloveitchik in this text and elsewhere. For Soloveitchik, as
we have seen, the religious phenomenon is ‘‘exoteric,’’ and ‘‘demo-
cratic to its very core.’’26 No single human consciousness, not even
that of figures such as Moses or Rabbi Akiva, should be regarded as
the creative source of the Judaic religious system, or of any religious
system. A universal, transcendental ego also does not seem to be an
option, at least as far as Judaism is concerned.27 True, certain
overarching features of religious experience, as testified to by people
of different faiths (fascination and repulsion, self-worth and self-
abnegation, etc.) and as articulated by the likes of Rudolf Otto,28 were
seen by him to lie at the root of universal religious gestures, such
as prayer and ritual. Yet Soloveitchik seems to be most earnestly
searching for the subjective roots of the particularities of the Jewish
religion, the most ‘‘mature’’ religion whose ramified objectifications
provide a counterweight to the corruptions attendant upon religious
anarchism.
Now, it might be expected that for an Orthodox Jewish thinker
like Soloveitchik the origin of creative religious subjectivity would be
located in the consciousness of God. It would then be He who, in
His encounter with Israel, externalizes, from the recesses of His
consciousness, the various religious forms that the Jewish people are
called upon to realize in their individual and collective lives. Such
a view, although still ‘‘subjectivistic,’’ and not ‘‘historical-empirical,’’
could nonetheless be regarded as a species of classical Orthodoxy,
namely a view that sees God as the explicit source of the explicit forms
of Judaism. Yet, surprisingly, nothing either in the tone or the content
of The Halakhic Mind would seem to support such a view. First of all,
as we mentioned, the text of The Halakhic Mind refers to religion
throughout as a human phenomenon, albeit the fruit of a genuine,
inner encounter between the divine spirit and the human spirit. Even
passages that would seem to present religion as the creation and
182 Jonathan Cohen
dispensation of divinity, ultimately refer back to human subjectivity.

Let us examine one such passage: At the end of Part Three of The
Halakhic Mind, Soloveitchik writes as follows:29
‘‘The objective religious order is identical with the psycho-physical
religious act in which the living historical religious consciousness comes to
expression. Just as the most concrete expression of art is to be found
in books, paintings, etc., so are the most reliable sources of religious
objective constructs to be found in religious literature containing
norms, dogmas, postulates, etc. The canonized Scriptures serve as the
most reliable standard of reference for objectivity. Through the
method of reconstruction, God’s word, the ‘letter of the scriptures,
becomes an inner word, a certainty, insight, confession’ of the God-
thirsty soul. Deus dixit is the only objective source of all apocalyptic
religion.’’
If we were to isolate the last sentence of this most remarkable
passage from its context, we would have before us a statement typical
of classical Orthodoxy. We could then plausibly interpret it as follows:
we should not seek the source of ‘‘apocalyptic religion’’ (namely, that
religion that holds out redemptive promises to a historical people
based on a living revelatory encounter) in finite, ‘‘subjective’’ human
creations but rather in the ‘‘objective,’’ absolute word of God. Once
the sentence is read in the context of the paragraph as a whole (and of
the text of The Halakhic Mind as a whole), however, its meaning
changes most significantly. True, ‘‘the canonized scriptures’’ are ‘‘the
most reliable standard of reference for (religious) objectivity.’’ Yet we
know from all that we have gleaned from The Halakhic Mind thus far
that, for Soloveitchik, the ultimate source of the religious phenom-
enon lies in the realm of subjectivity, not objectivity. Admittedly, as
we have seen, Soloveitchik insists that the pathway to subjectivity
must begin with objective religious phenomena, and like many other
modern students of religion, he encourages us to seek the sources
of religiosity in the forms of lived religions.30 He also describes
the ‘‘canonized scriptures’’ (a historical-communal phenomenon) as
‘‘God’s word.’’ But we have seen that for Soloveitchik anything that is
articulated as a word, a text, or a canonized work is ultimately
derivative, since the actual encounter with God is inchoate, paradox-
ical and ultimately inexpressible. Through ‘‘reconstruction’’ we work
back from those texts that have been objectified by the canonizing
community as the word of God—to the subjective encounter with God
that takes place in the recesses of the God-thirsty soul. Soloveitchik
certainly trusts the Judaic tradition of canonization and interpretation
as ‘‘the most reliable’’ source of ‘‘religious objectivity’’ that he knows.
Yet the ‘‘event’’ of revelation, that actual encounter between God
and the God-thirsty soul, does not take place in the text, or in
the commandment, or in spatio-temporal history, but rather in the

subjective consciousness that externalized it.
By process of elimination, but not only by process of elimination,
we are left with a fourth possibility for the characterization of the
‘‘subjective consciousness’’ that is the source and carrier of significant
religious forms for Soloveitchik. In the above paragraph, this source is
described as ‘‘the living historical religious consciousness.’’ From here
we know that we are speaking of a consciousness located within
temporality, yet one that has experienced what Soloveitchik calls ‘‘the
intrusion of eternity upon temporality.’’ Earlier in The Halakhic Mind,
he writes, ‘‘Revealed religion rests upon the idea of a charismatic social
ego that is the living incarnation of the faith.’’31 The ‘‘subject,’’ then, of
Soloveitchik’s ‘‘religious subjectivity’’ is what could be called (and is
called by Soloveitchik elsewhere) ‘‘Knesset Yisrael’’32—the ‘‘charismatic
social ego’’ of the Jewish people.
To understand this point, it might be helpful if we examine once
again what Soloveitchik has taken from Dilthey and what he has omitted
or consciously changed. Dilthey, it will be remembered, wished to
distinguish between the methodology of the natural sciences and a
methodology, not less ‘‘scientific,’’ but more appropriate to the analysis
of works of the human spirit. He proposed that the ‘‘understanding’’ of
works of the spirit, as opposed to the ‘‘explanation’’ of the lawful
relations obtaining between physical phenomena, proceed by an analysis
of human ‘‘externalizations’’ to a recapitulation of the inner creative
process that gave birth to them. By way of historical-philological analysis,
the researcher was to move from the linguistic and historical context of
the work to the individual subjectivity of the creative artist. It would
appear that Soloveitchik, in order to distinguish between the study of
religion, and certain other forms of scientific investigation, appropriated
Dilthey’s method of ‘‘reconstruction,’’ namely a pathway wherein the
‘‘external’’ ‘‘objectified’’ phenomenon is ‘‘understood’’ such that it
might provide clues to the ‘‘internal’’ creativity by way of which it came
into being. Yet Soloveitchik was not primarily concerned with uncover-
ing the ‘‘clandestine egos’’ of great religious individuals.33 Nor was he
concerned with locating the creative process of those individuals
within a ‘‘historical’’ context which would then be traversed in an act
of interpretive ‘‘empathy.’’34 As will be remembered, as far as religious
subjectivity is concerned, time is often experienced as continuous and
simultaneous. It is not necessary first to isolate a particular religious
consciousness in a particular time and place in its radical uniqueness and
specificity, only then to overcome this distance by a ‘‘leap’’ of universal
human empathy. The individual and the universal are not the only
categories we have at our disposal. It is within particular religious
communities that we find, ready-to-hand, a legitimate and distinct
184 Jonathan Cohen
experience of temporal continuity and contemporaneity, enabling

individuals to link up with their collective past with immediacy—without
the need to pass through what Ravidovicz has called ‘‘alienation’’ and
Ricoeur has called ‘‘distanciation.’’35
At the conclusion of our analysis, it would appear that we have
come upon a somewhat paradoxical situation. Soloveitchik, perhaps
the representative figure of modern Orthodoxy, would seem to have
borne witness to a kind of religious experience that cannot readily be
expressed within the rubric of conventional Orthodox ‘‘narratives.’’
Yet the very substance of his unconventional testimony regarding
the fundament of religious experience would seem to provide the
theoretical grounding for a most conservative orientation to Halachic
development. How so? On the one hand, it is clear from the above
analysis that the category of Mitzvah, an ethico-religious norm, already
‘‘objectified’’ out of the inner experience of religious encounter, then
translated into a ‘‘psycho-physical’’ practice, is ultimately a derivative,
and not a primary religious category. There is nothing in The Halakhic
Mind that might reinforce the ‘‘classic’’ Orthodox belief that the
details of the Mitzvot were revealed to Israel at Sinai in broad daylight
in an historical-empirical ‘‘encounter.’’ Something very different would
appear to be the case. The Bible, which is the ‘‘canonized Scripture’’
of the ‘‘charismatic social ego’’ known as ‘‘Knesset Yisrael,’’ tells the
story of Sinai in such a fashion that it provides a ‘‘window’’ into a very
discrete and private religious experience whereby the people felt both
overwhelmed and supported, where they sensed themselves as ‘‘going
up’’ and God as ‘‘coming down.’’ Biblical metaphors and narratives
convey the sense of a covenantal, mutual ‘‘self-revelation’’, as articu-
lated so beautifully in ‘‘The Lonely Man of Faith.’’36 The Bible, with its
narratives and laws, including the narrative of revelation, is an ‘‘objective
correlate’’ of the collective religious subjectivity of the Jewish
people. This trans-historical, trans-geographical religious conscious-
ness, wherein God has been encountered, and is still encountered, is
what is religiously primary for Soloveitchik.
So much for Soloveitchik’s ‘‘heterodoxy.’’ Still, it would seem that
two components of Soloveitchik’s understanding of Jewish religiosity
place a kind of systematic limitation on halachic innovation. First, as
we have seen, Soloveitchik depicts the time-experience of Knesset
Yisrael as continuous and contemporaneous. It is not cut up into
discrete ‘‘periods’’ each characterized by its own ‘‘zeitgeist.’’ Even
‘‘revolutionary transformations’’ in the ‘‘external’’, spatio-temporal
world need not necessarily touch upon the primordial, ‘‘internal’’
source of Jewish ‘‘certainty, insight’’ and ‘‘confession.’’ Second, there
is another organic continuum proceeding from the realm of religious
experience, to that of objectified articles of faith and ethical norms,
then again to that of psycho-physical practices. It could perhaps be

said that while the Mitzvot are not primary, and derive ultimately from
the ‘‘welter’’ of religious experience, they are nonetheless the outer
husk of an internal religious subjectivity. They are mediators between
religious insight and the psycho-physical world. But, like the Freudian
ego, they grow organically out of religious ‘‘libidinal’’ energies. Since,
then, both historical time and the vector of ‘‘objectification’’ from the
internal to the external are characterized by Soloveitchik as contin-
uous (in keeping with the experience of the ‘‘charismatic social ego’’
of the Jewish people), it would be most incongruous if modern
historical consciousness, with its quantified, periodized and causalistic
experience of time, were to be given the normative authority to deter-
mine the character and future course of halachic development.
BERKOVITS ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, MITZVAH, AND HISTORY
In attempting to articulate the difference between Soloveitchik’s and

Berkovits’ understanding of the primordial religious experience under-
lying Jewish faith and practice we might compare the way they addressed
this foundational issue with the manner in which it was approached by
the two great medieval Jewish thinkers: Maimonides and Yehudah
Halevi. On the one hand, one could say that Soloveitchik’s discussion of
the constitutive experiences of Jewish religion is more ‘‘experientialist’’
and less ‘‘intellectualist’’ than that of Maimonides. Maimonides was not
one to celebrate paradox, or to valorize conflict as compared with
psychological and philosophical harmony.37 Further, Maimonides did
not appropriate philosophy as a mere resource for the articulation and
justification of experiences that he considered to be of pre-philosophical
or extra-philosophical origin. It would appear, or so some scholars of
Maimonides maintain, that he was concerned with weaving philosophi-
cal rationality into the very fabric of Jewish religiosity,38 or so others
maintain, with undertaking a relentless examination of the foundations
of ‘‘Jerusalem’’ and ‘‘Athens’’ from an uncompromisingly philosophical
perspective.39 Still, in one important respect of concern to us here,
Soloveitchik can be regarded as a ‘‘Maimonidean.’’ Both Maimonides
and Soloveitchik describe the substance of the divine-human encounter
as a state of soul rather than as an external, historical event. For
Maimonides, in the Guide of the Perplexed, II: 33,40 the essence of
revelation consists in the apprehension of intellectual truths. In his
account of the gathering at Sinai, both Moses and the Israelite people are
described as comprehending truths, although Moses’ understanding of
the principle of God’s unity and existence is on a higher level than that
186 Jonathan Cohen
of the people. Due to the perfection of his intellect and imaginative

faculty, Moses was more acutely aware than any human being before
or after him of the vastness of the expanse separating the knowledge of
nature from the knowledge of God.41 He also gained understanding
concerning the ways in which the divine wisdom is embedded in the
workings of nature. These internal, theoretical insights were then
translated into a practical, ramified life-system that was meant to wean
the Israelite people away from idolatry and gradually lead the more
enlightened among them in the direction of a disinterested love of God.
For Yehudah Halevi, on the other hand, revelation is an actual,
external historical event, enacted on an empirical, ‘‘spatio-temporal’’
stage, before an entire people. It is a real, almost ‘‘physical’’ encounter
between God and the people of Israel.42 This encounter then becomes
the paradigm for a mode of religious experience that is accessible in
principle to all Jews—either directly, or by way of the re-enactments of
earlier encounters prescribed by the Torah. Regarding this distinction
between internal religious subjectivity and external religious ‘‘encoun-
ter,’’ Berkovits not only explicitly invokes Yehudah Halevi;43 he places
himself squarely in Halevi’s theological tradition.
On first reading, it would seem that there are many parallels
between Soloveitchik’s and Berkovits’ accounts of the fundamental
religious experience. As distinct from other well-known modern
Jewish thinkers like Buber and Rosenzweig, both Soloveitchik and
Berkovits speak not only of ‘‘love’’ and ‘‘fellowship’’ as features of the
divine-human encounter, but also of ‘‘danger,’’ ‘‘terror’’ and a sense of
insignificance in face of the ‘‘overpowering’’ presence of the Divine.44
It could be that in doing so they bear witness, as heirs of a long-
standing Eastern European religious ethos, to some of the more
austere aspects of classical Jewish religiosity, aspects that were alien to
the mode of spirituality represented by Buber and Rosenzweig.45
Similarly, they are both influenced by Otto’s description of the
paradoxical character of the religious encounter, in which the human
being is both overwhelmed and sustained, crushed and supported,
forced to retreat and encouraged to advance.46
Despite these important parallels, there remains a basic incompat-
ibility between the accounts of Soloveitchik and Berkovits. For
Soloveitchik, as we have seen above, the drama of the paradoxical
relationship between the divine and the human, between the finite
and the infinite, is enacted within the confines of the subjective
religious consciousness. The ‘‘stage’’ of the religious drama is the
human soul, although, in the case of Jewish religiosity, Soloveitchik
would seem to speaking of some kind of collective Jewish soul. From
this ‘‘core,’’ the dynamic of religious experience is transposed from
the soul to the body. The ‘‘event’’ of the encounter does not take
place originally within the coordinates of space and time. Rather it is

enacted in a dimension wherein these coordinates, and their
stabilizing influences, have no effect. It is only in a kind of second
gesture that the unstable, chaotic and perhaps even anarchic features
of the encounter are translated into communicable theological princi-
ples, formulable ethical maxims, well-defined canonical texts and
discrete religious practices. For Berkovits, on the other hand, the
encounter takes place in broad daylight. It is to be compared to an
actual ‘‘meeting’’ between two human beings, possessed of both a
body and a soul. In the original encounter, both body and soul
participate, and the stage of the encounter is history—the space-time
matrix.47
Following are some of Berkovits’ formulations concerning what he
calls the ‘‘event’’ of ‘‘encounter’’ between God and man. It will be
readily visible that for Berkovits, such ‘‘events’’ have a structure similar
to that of ‘‘meetings’’ between human beings. In this respect,
Berkovits follows not only the medieval thinker Yehudah Halevi, but
also the modern Jewish thinker Martin Buber (emphases mine):48
‘‘In the Bible, God and man face each other, as it were: God does
want something of man and man may entreat God . . . .The founda-
tion of Biblical religion, therefore, is not an idea but an event, which
may be called the encounter between God and man . . . . Again and
again, the children of Israel are admonished—‘take heed lest you
forget what you have seen and heard, what has been shown to you.’
There is a continual reference to sense perception . . . The text insists,
of course, on the incorporeity of God; but it also stresses, and with
hardly less fervor, the importance of the sense impressions at ‘the
stand at Sinai.’ ’’
As we can see from above, it is very important to Berkovits to
emphasize that the ‘‘whole person’’ (as Buber would have it), body and
soul, senses as well as consciousness, is involved in the ‘‘encounter.’’
We are not dealing with an inward ‘‘event,’’ taking place in the soul,
which is then later translated into cognitive principles and eventually
into physical gestures. For Berkovits, revelation is an external event,
taking place from the first in the open spaces between God and man.
As we mentioned, both Soloveitchik and Berkovits refer to the
primordial religious experience as paradoxical. Yet Berkovits’ account
is unique in that it couches its description of the paradox in stark,
‘‘physical’’ terms:49
‘‘The peril that emanates from ‘contact’ with the divine Presence has
nothing to do either with the sinfulness of man or with the judgment
of the Almighty. It is something quite ‘physical,’ almost ‘natural’ if
one may say so. A man wilts in the heat of the midday sun, or dies of
exhaustion if he is exposed to long to cold weather . . . How, then,
188 Jonathan Cohen
dare he hope to stand in the presence of the ultimate source of all

energy and all power in the cosmos; how dare he approach it and
survive! . . . divine nature is so charged with primordial forcefulness
and vitality of being that its nearness naturally overwhelms all indivi-
dual existence.’’
If the encounter between God and the human being were to
remain at this ‘‘physical,’’ ‘‘natural’’ level, it would not really be an
encounter at all. In order for God and man to meet ‘‘face to face,’’ the
human being must not be crushed, overwhelmed or consumed by
the divine energy. The human being must become a true partner in
the encounter, and be possessed of the kind of free will that would
allow him either to respond to the divine call or to resist it. Since God
is desirous of an actual relationship with humans, and since, in the
‘‘natural’’ situation, human beings would not be able to face God, God
must allow the ‘‘meeting’’ to transcend its ‘‘physical’’ dimensions. In
His care for the human being, God limits Himself, hides Himself, and
thereby sustains the human being. He thereby adds a moral dimension
to the relationship, a dimension of care and concern, beyond mere
power and energy. Berkovits, following Biblical, prophetic accounts of
the encounter, puts it thus:50
‘‘The hiding God is, therefore, not only a ‘physical’ necessity, as it
were, in order to protect the human being against the ‘consuming
fire;’ it is a moral necessity too that He should be ‘hiding,’ so as to
preserve the personal identity of man, without which no encounter is
possible. Man may confront the Divine Presence only because God
curbs and constrains—as it were—His transcendence. God denies
Himself in order to affirm man. By an act of divine self-denial man is
made free to deny Him.’’
In spite of divine ‘‘humility’’ and ‘‘self-denial,’’ however, the ‘‘sensual’’
dimension of the encounter is never entirely dissipated. Since the
encounter itself involves both body and soul, the norms demanded of
man in the encounter address both body and soul. The Mitzvah that is
addressed to the human being in the encounter is not a derivative
category, a mere ‘‘outer’’ reflection of a religious drama that takes
place in the inner recesses of the soul. It is part and parcel of the
primordial event of encounter. In placing the Mitzvah at the root of
primordial religious experience, as the very stuff of the God-man
encounter, rather than characterizing it as a secondary gesture meant
to stabilize the religious phenomenon in the framework of space and
time, Berkovits would seem to be closer to what is commonly
conceived as ‘‘classical’’ Orthodoxy.51
Let us examine this proposition, as well as its practical implica-
tions, more closely. On the one hand it would appear that Berkovits
also wishes to create a separation between the ‘‘encounter’’ or
‘‘meeting’’ with God in itself, and what can be learned from the
encounter:52
‘‘The encounter itself is revelation—in it God reveals His presence to
man—but it is not teaching. It is, of course, hardly possible not to
learn something of importance from the encounter; however its
immediate significance lies not in what may be imparted to the mind,
but in the event itself, that it actually happens between God and this
creature, man. The truly overwhelming element in all revelation is
that God should address Himself to man, that the ‘‘two’’ may ‘‘meet’’
at all. The fact that God does ‘‘speak’’ to man is the basically religious
concept and is in itself of far greater significance than even the truth
which He communicates. The most wonderful aspect of revelation is
not so much its contents—the Word of God—but its possibility, the
encounter itself with God.’’
On first reading, it would appear that Berkovits, like Rosenzweig and

Fackenheim, is decisively differentiating between revelation and law.53
What God reveals is his caring Presence, that he is ‘‘for us,’’ concerned
for us and desires that we love Him in return. The ‘‘teaching,’’ ‘‘truth’’
or ‘‘content’’ that we take from the encounter is of secondary signif-
icance, when compared with the wonder of the meeting itself.
Berkovits, however, does not go so far as to say that all such
‘‘content’’ is ‘‘shot through’’ with human interpretation while only the
revelation of the Presence involves the Divine. True, the most
unexpected and improbable aspect of revelation is the very possibility
that the transcendent God would approach human beings in order to
address them; it is this aspect that represents the unique dimension of
living religion, as distinguished from metaphysical speculation. In this
matter, however, Berkovits does not actually go beyond what has
already been written by Yehudah Halevi:54
‘‘But the human mind cannot believe that God has intercourse with
man, except by a miracle which changes the nature of things . . . .
Then it is possible that the mind might grasp this extraordinary
matter, viz. that the Creator of this world and the next, of the
heavens and lights, should hold intercourse with this contemptible
piece of clay, I mean man, speak to him, and fulfill his wishes and
desires.’’
The fact that the encounter itself is the primary religious datum does
not exclude the possibility that certain very definite ‘‘teachings’’ are
woven into the original ‘‘meeting’’ itself, and not derived or translated
by human beings in a supplementary gesture. First of all, according to
Berkovits, the structure of the encounter-event per se carries an
imperative within it. In the encounter, it is revealed that God cares for
His creatures and that He ‘‘delights’’ in this caring orientation.55 The
manner of His approach to human beings becomes a paradigm and
190 Jonathan Cohen
prototype for the way human beings are to relate to the world and to
others. It becomes crystal clear that this orientation, exemplified by
God, is also the will of God. Such an imperative need not be seen as
an austere and stern dispensation, as legal imperatives are often felt to
be among those who value spontaneity above all. It is the object of
God’s desire, and in fulfilling it, we express our own desire that our
own conduct reflect His desire. For Berkovits, then, ‘‘The encounter
itself reveals not only God’s concern, but what He desires of man.’’56
Now, this is all well and good, and fits well with Rosenzweig’s
notion of ‘‘commandment,’’ as distinguished from his notion of
‘‘law.’’57 ‘‘Commandment,’’ for Rosenzweig, represents an imperative
experienced in immediacy as coming from God, as opposed to ‘‘law,’’
which is the humanly articulated formalization of the implications of
‘‘commandment.’’ Yet Berkovits wishes to claim that not only ‘‘com-
mandment’’ is experienced in the immediacy of the encounter; ‘‘law’’
is experienced as a divine gift as well:58
‘‘The law is the bond that preserves the relationship of divine
concern beyond the fundamental religious experience of the
encounter itself. The encounter passes quickly, but the law of the
Lord remains forever. As the crystallization of what God desires of
man, the law is the guarantee of God’s continued interest in man. As
long as the law of God stands, He too remains involved in the destiny
of man. When the mystery of the encounter has faded away, God is
still related to man by way of His law. When the precious moment in
which man is granted the certitude of the actualization of the
Presence has sunk into the dark womb of the past, the ‘fellowship’
with God may still be maintained by doing the will of God. The law is
the avenue of contact beyond the point of encounter.’’
In the above-quoted paragraph, Berkovits implicitly questions a com-
monly held distinction. Many moderns, perhaps under the abiding
influence of the Romantic ethos, distinguish between the ‘‘charis-
matic’’ founding of religions and the inevitable ‘‘routinization’’ and
‘‘bureaucratization’’ that sets in after the founding experience has
passed.59 Naturally, ‘‘charisma’’ has more appeal than formalization.
Even Rosenzweig would seem to have fallen prey to this assumption in
his distinction between ‘‘commandment’’ and ‘‘law.’’ It seemed to
Rosenzweig to be contrary to authentic religious experience that God
should encounter human beings as a Lawgiver, as distinguished from a
Lover who ‘‘commands’’ us, as lovers often do, to love Him in return.
According to Rosenzweig, human beings then draw the implications
of this ‘‘commandment’’ for the whole matrix of human life and
activity, and so the Law is born. Although, for Rosenzweig, the laws
of the Torah have the potential to become ‘‘commandments’’ when
they are experienced and performed as genuine expressions of the
commandment to love God, the basic distinction between ‘‘law’’ and

‘‘commandment’’ remains. Berkovits, on the other hand, has no
reservations about including the Law in the original revelatory
experience. For him, the formalization of the immediate imperative
to imitate God’s care, and the very fixity of the law that results from
this formalization, is simply an augmentation of the original Divine
gift. God wishes to be accessible to human beings always, and not only
within the framework of ‘‘peak-experiences.’’60 He therefore prolongs
his care and involvement with humans beyond the infrequent
moments of encounter by allowing for a constantly accessible renewal
of relationship.
In light of the above, we see that Berkovits’ orientation to the
category of Mitzvah is different from that of Soloveitchik. First of all,
we have seen that for Berkovits the ‘‘stage’’ of revelation is history, not
religious inwardness. In history, in the original founding experience,
God already gives His desire the form of Law. Law is not a secondary
or tertiary category representing a translation of chaotic religious
experience into reliable forms. It is a primary category, appearing
within the foundational religious experience itself. It is not the bodily
correlate of an experience that originates in the depths of the soul.
It is rather that category that makes the interaction of the body and
soul possible, especially after the immediacy of the encounter has
passed.
According to Berkovits, ‘‘we can know nothing of the religion of a
pure soul,’’61 and we are not charged to search for such a religion,
working, as it were, ‘‘back’’ from ‘‘external’’ religious forms to ‘‘inter-
nal’’ religious experience. Not only, as Soloveitchik also tells does,
does the understanding of religion begin with an analysis of practice;
any religious investigation of Judaism will always end by describing a
phenomenon that represents an integration of intention and practice.
Religious experience and religious practice are not to be understood
as subsisting on a continuum of ‘‘inner’’ to ‘‘outer’’ or ‘‘depth’’ to
‘‘surface.’’ According to Berkovits, both body and soul are equal
partners in striving for the God-orientation of all life and the
proliferation of the religious awareness in history. The soul, the seat
of ethical and religious consciousness, is by itself historically impotent.
Plato and Kant to the contrary, intellectual understanding, no matter
how penetrating and all-encompassing, cannot by itself generate
desire, motivation and action.62 The body must be made to cooperate.
Yet the body, although accepted and valued by the Jewish tradition as
indispensable for the infusion of ethics and religion into the full
matrix of human life, seems to be inherently ‘‘egocentric,’’ concerned
with its own survival, pleasure, and power. A means must be found,
then, wherein the body itself may ‘‘willingly’’ participate in both ethics
192 Jonathan Cohen
and religion in its own terms. The awareness of limitation by an

‘‘other,’’ or by another order of relatedness to God, must somehow
become ‘‘second nature’’ for the body, and not just a desideratum for
the soul. The body must become possessed of an almost ‘‘instinctive’’
sensitivity to the needs or requirements of the ‘‘other.’’63 This can
come about, as we know from Aristotle and Maimonides, only by way
of repeated deeds exemplifying the ethical or religious disposition to
be cultivated.64 Such a result, writes Berkovits, can be attained only by
way of the Mitzvah, that comprehensive gesture that unifies both
soul and body in directedness toward an ‘‘other,’’ whether human or
divine.
For this reason, the very ‘‘legal’’ character of the law is part of the
Divine gift and the Divine plan from the very beginning. The law must
be ramified and ubiquitous, regularizing and stabilizing the ‘‘other-
awareness’’ of the body itself. It is only through such cooperation
between consciousness and practice that ethics and religion have any
hope of being realized in the world. Otherwise, the trend that has
characterized human history until now will persist, namely: the
attainment of religious bliss in cloistered settings by spiritual virtuosos,
while the arena of history is left wide open for egocentricity, power
and violence.
In some of the writings of Soloveitchik, the impression is created
that the human being, though certainly charged with the imperative of
civilization in the ‘‘surface’’ world of human interaction and history,
finds greater spiritual significance in the inner ‘‘depths’’ of religious
experience and within the framework of an intimate covenantal
community.65 The Mitzvah is judged not so much by its historical
efficacy, but by its ability to reflect or invite a primordial and
perennial structure of religious experience. For Berkovits, on the
other hand, one of the most important reasons for the advent of the
‘‘holy deed,’’ or Mitzvah, as well as one of the chief criteria for judging
its worth, is the possibility of its historical efficacy. The Mitzvah
does not invite the Jew to participate in a discrete, alternative, inner
time-consciousness, characterized by continuity and ‘‘duration.’’ The
Mitzvah is meant first and foremost to contribute to the proliferation
of ethics and religious relatedness in that very ‘‘external’’ dimension
of time that ‘‘houses’’ the movements and interactions of bodies,
including and especially human bodies.
The reasoning offered by Berkovits for this perspective is as
follows: the Jewish tradition presents us with the option of the holy
deed, a deed that allows the religious consciousness to take root in the
material-biological world, and provides material-biological life with
spiritual direction. The deed, by its very nature, is social, and not merely
the social expression of a private consciousness, or the external
reflection of a state of intimacy.66 Religious acts are not to be com-

pared to works of art, works that are judged by their ‘‘authenticity’’ as
the outer expression of an elusive inner consciousness. They are to be
compared to historical events, and as such they are judged by their
ability to affect other historical events. For a deed ‘‘to be,’’ accord-
ing to Berkovits, it must be effective in the external world. It cannot
merely function as the necessarily distorted reflection of an
‘‘unworldly’’ religious consciousness; it must be born in the world
and at home in the world. As Berkovits writes, deeds are ‘‘the stuff of
which history is made.’’67 The origin of the Mitzvah is historical—the
actual event of the encounter at Sinai, and the end of the Mitzvah is
historical—to infuse all human activity with the paradigm of care and
sanctity.68
Deeds performed by individuals, as intrinsically valuable as they
may be in themselves, cannot always be relied upon to change the
overall course of ‘‘power history’’ in the direction of care and concern.
The deed, in order to insure its ethical and religious impact, must,
according to Berkovits, be integrated into the life-forms of a
historically efficacious group.69 In Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith,
one gets the impression that what he calls ‘‘covenantal community’’ is
a mere extension of the intimacy of the I-Thou-He relationship. The
‘‘community’’ is the arena for the expression of true care, concern,
and willingness to sacrifice for the ‘‘other’’ on a somewhat larger scale.
The Jew lives out the care-imperative on the plane of communal
intimacy. He relates to comprehensive, universal human concerns,
however (the eradication of disease, ecology, etc.), by way of
‘‘Adam 1’’ categories: cooperation, collegiality, neighborliness, etc.70
For Berkovits, on the other hand, the group wherein the genuine care
orientation is to be first implemented is not the ‘‘community,’’ but the
‘‘people’’ or the ‘‘nation.’’ ‘‘Communities’’ do not necessarily make
history; peoples and nations do. In order for the deed to become what
Berkovits calls ‘‘history-making,’’ it must shape the life-patterns of a
‘‘living society in reasonable control of its general order of life.’’71 This
means a sovereign nation living in its own land. In order that ‘‘God’s
desire’’ for care and concern in history should be realized, one must
‘‘start with the smallest unit of living reality within which the deed
of Judaism may be history-making.’’72 The Jewish group, then, for
Berkovits, is not a matrix for the enactment of divine-human, or inter-
human intimacy. It rather provides the basis for what Buber has called
‘‘an order of life for a future mankind.’’73 It is not the largest possible
group that could still feel like a family, but rather the smallest possible
group that has the potential to be a universal historical force.
This important difference between Soloveitchik and Berkovits
concerning the theological status of the historical dimension can be
194 Jonathan Cohen
extrapolated from some of their other writings as well. One could

conceivably make the case that ‘‘Kol Dodi Dofek,’’ is Soloveitchik’s
most explicitly ‘‘historical’’ essay. How could anyone say that
Soloveitchik did ‘‘not take history seriously’’ when, in this essay, he
interprets momentous, concrete historical events as normative ‘‘calls’’
to the Jewish community?
The unusual constellation of votes at the United Nations that
allowed for partition, the victory of the few over the many in the War
of Independence, the message spread abroad that Jewish blood will no
longer be spilled indiscriminately, the fact that no other nation ‘‘made
the wilderness bloom’’ until modern-day Jews undertook to cultivate
the land of Israel, the vindication of Jewish nationhood and sover-
eignty in the face of Christian claims that the Jews are a ‘‘ghost’’
people, the reawakening of Jewish identity as a result of the success of
the Zionist project—all these are portrayed by Soloveitchik as ‘‘knocks’’
on the door of the beloved people Israel, in order to awaken her to
active participation in the building of a new society with common
goals and strivings, not only a common fate.74 Is not this a most
convincing example of a vital regard for history?
So it would seem. Upon closer reading of ‘‘Kol Dodi Dofek,’’
however, especially when compared to Berkovits’ book Faith after the
Holocaust, a different perspective emerges. First of all, Soloveitchik
responds only to the events surrounding the advent of the State of
Israel, and steadfastly refuses to offer a theological interpretation of
the Holocaust. All a Jew can do in the face of the Holocaust is to
ask ‘‘how will I live from now on with this unspeakable suffering?’’
No meaning-structure can contain the event of the Holocaust, and
it cannot and should not be integrated into a teleological philosophy
of history.75 It would seem that only positive historical events are
theologically interpretable, while extreme negative events are not.
Further, the events surrounding the establishment of the State do not
form an immanent pattern. History itself contains no immanent
patterns of meaning. History is more like a sounding board for the
pulsations of a trans-historical, transcendent love dynamic between
God and the Jewish people. First God was hidden and we desperately
searched for Him. Now God is calling us and we are hiding.76
In addition, historical events are cast as representations of timeless
halachic and aggadic paradigms. Joining the fray against Israel’s
enemies is a case of ‘‘Lo ta’amod al dam re’echah’’ (you shall not stand
aside while the blood of your companion is being spilled).77 Hitler’s
Germany was a reincarnation of Amalek, as are the Arabs who seek
Israel’s destruction.78 The imperative of Jewish self-defense is an
instance of the halachic category of ‘‘Kvod Hatzibbur’’ (the honor of
the community), etc.79 History, then, is not the framework wherein the
pattern of contemporary events originates. History is merely the

external screen that reflects the inner vicissitudes of the relationship
between Knesset Yisrael and the Divine Presence, as experienced in
the collective Jewish soul.
Berkovits’ Faith After the Holocaust presents a very different orien-
tation to history.80 For Berkovits, history is not merely the external
stage upon which a deeper theo-human psychodrama is played out.
The course of world history and Jewish history can be seen to reveal
an immanent dialectic. It is both the origin and locus of a this-worldly,
concrete and highly embodied Messianic drama. Within history, two
opposing forces are at work—the desire for power and the desire for
care. Most peoples and nations have striven, in the course of history,
for the aggrandizement of their own power and control over others.
This drive (a most prosaic, yet ubiquitous and destructive impulse) is
the force that has animated the massive attempts at empire-building
with which world history has been replete. One nation, however,
experienced, in the course of its history, an encounter with a caring
God. They emerged from the encounter with a desire to realize
that which God desires—justice, mercy, lovingkindness—in history.
Certainly, this people Israel did not always live up to the vision to
which they dedicated themselves. Yet they never entirely abandoned
their vision of a world predicated on care rather than power.81
As a care-oriented people, the people of Israel found itself at
cross-purposes with the dominant historical forces. For Berkovits, it
was only ‘‘natural’’ that such a people should find itself cast aside by
the power-oriented majority, living in a state of ‘‘Galut’’ without a
power-base of its own. In contradistinction to Soloveitchik, Berkovits is
prepared to account for the Holocaust within the framework of a
comprehensive philosophy of history. The Holocaust represents the
inner logic of ‘‘power history’’ taken to its final conclusion.82 The
Jewish people, the living reminder of the possibility of the founding of
history on an alternative basis, on the basis of care rather than power,
represents the ultimate threat to the unlimited proliferation of power,
both as a guiding principle and as a real political force. As soon as
technology made it possible, then, one of the premier representatives
of both the theory and practice of power, Nazi Germany, took it upon
itself to eradicate this people from the face of the earth.
As we have seen, then, for Berkovits, the overall course of human
history discloses an inner, immanent dynamic. This, however, does not
mean that Berkovits does not experience a guiding Divine hand at
work behind the ‘‘natural’’ dynamic of power and Galut. On the one
hand, Berkovits maintains, both in his theology of the encounter and
in his philosophy of history,83 that man has been given free will so that
he might decide for faith without duress. In order to enable free will,
196 Jonathan Cohen
(as opposed to blind obedience or obedience on the basis of fear), to

be expressed, God diminishes Himself, as it were, and does not
intervene when individuals and nations bent on evil go about their
bloody business. God is not only the mighty One; He is ‘‘mighty’’ in
His silence and restraint.84 Yet, He does take ‘‘overall responsibility’’
for history. He will not allow ‘‘power history’’ to overwhelm ‘‘faith
history,’’ or the principle of care in the world, altogether. The
founding of the State of Israel represents, for Berkovits, a reassurance
granted by God, by way of the historical course of events, that the
option of ‘‘faith history’’ is still alive.
This reassurance, however, though experienced as an act of grace
on the part of God, is not so much an episode in a trans-historical
love-narrative between God and the Jewish people, as Soloveitchik
would seem to portray it. Berkovits does not speak of this ‘‘smile on
the face of God’’85 by way of a commentary on selected passages from
the Song of Songs, as Soloveitchik does. The divine response comes
only at a time when the ‘‘natural’’ dynamic of history has run its
course. Paradoxically and dialectically, ‘‘power history’’ contains its
own nemesis within it. Once the unlimited quest for power is given
unlimited reign, and technology progresses to the point where
civilization can actually be wiped out, ‘‘power history’’ cancels itself
out.86 The total quest for power, with the tools of total warfare, means
the end of history and the end of human life on earth. The human
race has arrived, then, according to Berkovits, at a Messianic juncture.
Either the principle of power will be replaced by the principle of
care—or humanity will be wiped out, and there will be no one left to
dominate. In our very own times, the human race is faced with its
greatest ‘‘free choice’’ ever. Either abandon the principle of power
as the governing principle, and subordinate power to care, or be
responsible for world destruction. It is absolutely uncertain what
course humanity will take, and therefore there is no pre-determined
assurance of redemption. Yet the empowerment of the Jewish people
represents a hint as to the direction things should and must take. This
development also places a tremendous burden on the Jewish people,
as the people that must represent the principle of care in its collective
life—and offer it as a serious option to the world.
For Berkovits, this historical turning point bears comprehensive
implications for the halachah—that legal ‘‘crystallization’’ of the care-
orientation meant to serve as a world-historical force. When the Jewish
people did not have ‘‘reasonable control of its general order of life,’’
in the Galut, the halachah was not challenged to confront and inform
all the public pursuits of a sovereign society. Neither was it called
upon to face the world at large, and to make its message both
concretely visible and intellectually communicable to the nations.
At this historical juncture, for Berkovits nothing less than a Messianic

emergency, the halachah is enjoined to emerge from its own Galut,
and to address, while making full use of its native legal and inter-
pretive categories, all the issues on the agenda of a modern sovereign
society charged with the responsibility of representing the care
option in ‘‘common cause’’ with the nations of the world.87 Such a
characterization of the contemporary condition of the Jewish people
cannot but constitute an implicit goad to halachic development and
innovation.
SUMMATIVE REMARKS
As we have seen, Soloveitchik’s theology would seem to provide ample

grounding for a criterion of halachic ‘‘authenticity’’ (namely the
degree to which a certain halachic practice reflects the timeless
structure of collective Jewish religious experience) while providing less
grounding for a criterion of historical ‘‘efficacy’’ (the degree to which
such a practice might contribute to the institution of ‘‘care’’ not only
as a communal norm, but as the basis for the conduct of a sovereign
people in active intercourse with the nations of the world). Berkovits,
on the other hand, wishes to provide theological grounding for
a criterion of historical efficacy that can serve as a counterweight
to the criterion more commonly valorized in orthodox circles—
‘‘authenticity.’’
Within the framework of this essay, we could not explore the
degree to which these different weightings and groundings actually
find expression in the halachic discourses and pronouncements of
these two religious figures. Nonetheless, we might have shed some
light on the potential for halachic innovation allowed for by their
understandings of central theological issues, namely—the structure of
fundamental religious experience, the category of mitzvah, and the
matrix of history.
For Soloveitchik, fundamental religious experience is internal to
the collective Jewish soul, and has the structure of a love-relationship,
with all its vicissitudes of rapturous intimacy and lonely despair.
It does not take place in full light of history, but in the dark ‘‘recesses’’
of the human spirit, most particularly the collective Jewish spirit.
Mitzvah is a derivative category, representing the outer husk of
religious experience as translated into the time–space matrix. This
matrix is the external ‘‘screen’’ upon which the internal dynamic is
cast, but the ‘‘screen’’ itself is not possessed of a religiously significant
dynamic of its own. What others see as the linear dynamics of history,
then, cannot, for Soloveitchik, serve as a genuine stimulus for motion
198 Jonathan Cohen
in the halachic sphere. The continuous, uninterrupted ebb and flow of

the eternal love-relationship between God and Israel is what informs,
and must continue to inform, the repetitive motion of the halachah.
Even the seemingly novel events that have both traumatized and
inspired the Jewish people in our own times are to be understood, to
the degree that they can be understood, in terms of that selfsame love
dynamic.
For Berkovits, on the other hand, the ‘‘encounter’’ with God takes
place in the open spaces of history. In the encounter, the orientation of
‘‘care’’ as represented by God’s turning to man, is experienced as both
sustaining and commanding. Mitzvah, then, is not a derivative category;
it is woven into the very experience of the encounter. Like the
encounter itself, it originates in history, and is not merely reflected in
history. As we said, it is born in history, and lives in history. For that very
reason, it is manifestly exposed to history. Without a robust interaction
between the ‘‘soul’’ of care and the ‘‘embodied’’ dynamic of history, the
mitzvah, as the union of the body and the spirit, withers and dies.
History does have its own religiously significant inner dynamic: the
conflict between power and care. Power has dialectically cancelled itself
out, and care must be vigorously pursued and exemplified in the
sovereign life of the Jewish people, by way of the regularities of Jewish
law, so that it might provide a compelling alternative to the norm of
power. The inner dynamics of world history and Jewish history have
reached a point where they can and must serve as a stimulus for a
transformation of the halachah—from a Galut phenomenon to a Torah
for a sovereign nation and a threatened world.
HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM
NOTES
1. For summaries of the life, thought and works of Soloveitchik

and Berkovits see Steven T. Katz (ed.), Interpreters of Judaism in the Late
Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp. 1–15, 325–342.
2. See Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Vol. 7, No. 2
(Summer, 1965), pp. 5–67, 68–88. ‘‘The Lonely Man of Faith’’ will
henceforth be referred to as LMOF.
3. See also Eliezer Berkovits, ‘‘The Galut of Judaism,’’ Judaism, Vol. 4,
No. 3 (Summer, 1955), pp. 225–234.
4. The essay ‘‘Kol Dodi Dofek’’ (henceforth KDD) by Soloveitchik
appears together with a Hebrew translation of LMOF in a Volume entitled
Ish Ha’Emunah (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 65–106.
5. (Jerusalem, 1973), henceforth FAH.

6. (New York, 1986), henceforth HM.
7. Recently, some of Berkovits’ important essays are being repub-
lished in English, translated into Hebrew and discussed in academic
articles. See, for example David Hazony, ‘‘Eliezer Berkovits and the
Revival of Jewish Moral Thought,’’ in Azure, No.11 (Summer, 2001),
pp. 23–65 and idem., ‘‘Eliezer Berkovits – Theologian of Zionism,’’ in
Azure, No. 17 (Spring, 2004), pp. 88–119; and Eliezer Berkovits, Essential
Essays on Judaism, David Hazony (ed.), (Jerusalem, 2002).
8. See in particular Berkovits’ book Not In Heaven: The Nature and
Function of Halakhah (New York, 1983).
9. For an examination of the connection between features of
Soloveitchik’s philosophic thought and his halakhic orientation see
Avinoam Rosenak, ‘‘Hashpa’ot Shel Modelim Philosophi’im Al
HaChashivah HaTalmudit Shel Harav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik,’’ unpub-
lished M.A. thesis (Jerusalem, Hebrew University, 1994).
10. For an illustration of this point with regard to the thought of
R. Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook see Yitzchak Herman, ‘‘Adam
Chadash: Tirgum Hagut HaRa’ayah Kook MiTorat Adam LeTeoria
Chinuchit,’’ unpublished doctoral dissertation, ( Jerusalem, Hebrew
University, 2000).
11. HM, p. 67.
12. HM, pp. 63–74. See also Wilhelm Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the
Study of History (Princeton, 1996), pp. 229–234, and idem., Introduction to
the Human Sciences (London, 1988), pp. 77–88.
13. See Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (London, 1913).
14. See Soloveitchik, LMOF, pp. 45–48.
15. HM, p. 67.
16. HM, pp. 69–70, 93–99. See also Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man
(Lawrence Kaplan trans.), (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 6–8 and p. 144, note
7 for his views on the cognitive independence and uniqueness of religious
perceptions.
17. HM, p. 85.
18. HM, pp. 68–69.
19. HM, p. 81.
20. HM, pp. 67–68. See also LMOF, p. 35 where he writes that ‘‘the
total faith commitment always tends to transcend the frontiers of fleeting,
amorphous subjectivity and to venture into the outside world of the
well-formed, objective gesture.’’
21. HM, pp. 51–52, 77–81.
22. HM, pp. 75–76.
23. See LMOF, p. 23, where Soloveitchik writes: ‘‘the communication
lines are open between two surface personalities engaged in work,
dedicated to success and speaking in clichés and stereotypes—and not
between two souls bound together in indissoluble relation—each one
speaking in unique logoi. The in-depth personalities do not communicate,
let alone commune with each other.’’ See also pp. 44–45.
200 Jonathan Cohen
24. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Philadephia,

1976), pp. 12–20; and Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
Vol. 1 (Princeton, 1992), chap. 2, pp. 189–251.
25. HM, p. 80.
26. LMOF, p. 40. See also Halakhic Man, p. 44.
27. For the notion of the ‘‘transcendental ego,’’ see Edmund Husserl,
Logical Investigations, Vol. 2, (London, 1970), pp. 540–542.
28. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, (New York, 1958).
29. HM, p. 81.
30. See for example Julius Guttmann, On the Philosophy of Religion
(Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 13, 18.
31. HM, p. 79.
32. See Soloveitchik, On Repentance (Pinchas Peli trans.) (Jerusalem,
1980), pp. 130–137.
33. Soloveitchik does compare the works of great individual thinkers,
such as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, yet he does so only to show
that their ‘‘clandestine egos’’ are radically dissimilar and ultimately
inaccessible, despite the superficial similarities that seem to present
themselves in the Guide and the Summa. See HM, pp. 72–74.
34. For the concept of ‘‘empathy’’ in interpretation, see Wilhelm Dilthey,
Selected Writings H.P. Rickman, (ed.), (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 226–228.
35. For the sense of ‘‘alienation’’ as a crucial moment in interpreta-
tion, see Ravidovicz, Simon, ‘‘On Interpretation,’’ in Simon Ravidovicz,
Studies in Jewish Thought (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 47. For the concept of
‘‘distanciation,’’ see Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
(Cambridge, 1981), pp. 131–144.
36. See LMOF, pp. 44–45.
37. See, for example, the fourth and sixth chapters of Maimonides’
Eight Chapters, where he clearly favors a well-balanced and harmonious
structuring of the soul, according only limited value to inner conflict
(concerning statutes that seem to the uninitiated to have no rational
justification. In the Guide, III: 31, however, we are assured that all the
statutes have a rational justification). See Isadore Twersky (ed.), A
Maimonides Reader (New York, 1972), pp. 367–379.
38. Julius Guttmann is partial to this view. See his Philosophies of
Judaism (Philadelphia, 1964), p. 155.
39. This is the view of Leo Strauss. See his Persecution and the Art of
Writing (Chicago), 1968, pp. 108–109, concerning the issue of the
‘‘radical’’ and ‘‘relentless’’ examination of teachings undertaken by the
great minds.
40. See the translation by Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963), pp. 363–366.
Maimonides’ discussion of revelation in this chapter is many-faceted and
enigmatic. Yet a reading consistent with the text, as well as with what
Maimonides writes elsewhere, would seem to indicate that since Moses’
perceptions were of a higher order than that of the people, he understood
the principles of the existence and uniqueness of God in a more penetra-
ting way than they did—although they, too, are depicted as understanding
rather than witnessing. All of the other commandments, apart from

the first two of the Decalogue, are described as belonging to the class
of ‘‘generally accepted opinions and those adopted by virtue of
tradition. These, by their very nature, are not acquired by intellectual
penetration, but, rather, are put in place by the prophet in order to
ensure the proper political and psychological conditions for the
intellectual quest for God.
41. I owe this insight to my teacher Prof. Eliezer Schweid. See his
commentary on Maimonides’ Eight Chapters called Iyyunim BeShemonah
Perakim LaRambam (Jerusalem, 1969), in particular his commentary on
Chap. 7.
42. It should be noted that Maimonides also seems to describe
revelation in this way in his Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah, Ch. 8,
Halakhah 1. Yet his more authentic view, in my opinion, is to be found in
the Guide, written for readers with a philosophical education. There, his
statements, and their implications, point clearly to the view that the
significance of the Sinai revelation is not to be found in its historical-
empirical character, but rather in theoretical insight that was attained to
by its participants.
43. See Berkovits, Eliezer, God, Man and History (Middle Village, NY,
1959), p. 10, henceforth GMH.
44. For an analysis of the elements of terror and danger as features of
the divine-human encounter in the thought of Soloveitchik, see David
Hartman, Love and Terror in the God-Encounter (Woodstock, VT, 2001),
pp. 182–187.
45. For a critique of the lack of ‘‘sternness’’ and ‘‘austerity’’ and an
excess of ‘‘granting’’ and ‘‘liberation’’ in the thought of Buber and
Rosenzweig see Leo Strauss’ introduction to the English edition of his
book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York, 1965), p. 14.
46. See Otto, op cit., pp. 12–40.
47. GMH, pp. 116–117, 141–155.
48. Ibid., pp. 14–15. For the kinship between Berkovits’ understanding
of a personal, unmediated ‘‘encounter’’ between God and human beings
and that of Yehudah Halevi, see Halevi’s Kuzari I:91. For an indication of
the influence of Buber, see Martin Buber, The Way of Response, N. Glatzer
(ed.), (New York, 1966), pp. 138, 140.
49. GMH, p. 32.
50. ibid., p. 35.
51. For some typical, ‘‘classic’’ yet contemporary understandings of
revelation, see Milton Himmelfarb, (ed.), The Condition of Jewish Belief
(New York, 1966), especially the views of Norman Frimer, Norman Lamm
and Aharon Lichtenstein.
52. GMH, p. 16.
53. For this differentiation between revelation and law, see Franz
Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning Nahum Glatzer (ed.), (New York, 1955),
pp. 117–118; and Fackenheim, Emil, Quest for Past and Future (Boston,
1968), pp. 80–81.
202 Jonathan Cohen
54. The quote is from H. Slonimsky’s translation of the Kuzari

(New York, 1971), p. 43.
55. GMH, p. 102
56. ibid., pp. 86–87.
57. See Rosenzweig, op. cit., p. 116.
58. GMH, p. 87.
59. For these concepts, see Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, H.H. Gerth
& C. W. Mills, trans. (London, 1947), pp. 245–252.
60. For the concept of ‘‘peak-experiences,’’ see Abraham Maslow,
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York, 1971), pp. 168–179.
61. GMH, p. 119.
62. Ibid., pp. 93–95, 100–101.
63. Ibid., pp. 112–114.
64. See, for example, Aristotle, Ethics, J.A.K. Thomson, trans. (London,
1959) Book 2, pp. 55–56. See also Maimonides, Eight Chapters, Chap. 4 in
Twersky (ed.), A Maimonides Reader, pp. 367–376.
65. See LMOF, pp. 20–30.
66. GMH, p. 134.
67. ibid.
68. Ibid., p. 136. It would appear that Soloveitchik, in LMOF,
pp. 50–52, is propagating the same ideal calling for the unification of
the holy and the profane realms, namely: the infusing of the of the
profane with holiness thereby sanctifying history. It should be noted,
however, that for Soloveitchik, this model of ‘‘infusion’’ can be realized
only in Messianic times, in the indefinite future. As for the present,
however, the Jew is called upon to ‘‘oscillate’’ between ‘‘holy’’ (having to
do with community intimacy) and ‘‘profane’’ (having to do with world-
building and civilization) activities. See LMOF, pp. 48–50, 54–55.
69. GMH, pp. 133–137.
70. See LMOF, pp. 21–33.
71. GMH, p. 134.
72. ibid., p. 137.
73. See Martin Buber, ‘‘Hebrew Humanism,’’ in his Israel and the World
(New York, 1963), pp. 240–263. The phrase quoted is from p. 251.
74. KDD, pp. 77–82.
75. Ibid., p. 68.
76. The same pattern can be discerned in the way that Soloveitchik
interprets the transition from prophecy to prayer in the ‘‘sacred history’’
of ‘‘Knesset Yisrael.’’ See LMOF, pp. 34–43.
77. KDD, pp. 100–101.
78. Ibid., pp. 101–102.
79. Ibid., p. 82.
80. A full section in FAH, entitled ‘‘A Jewish Philosophy of History,’’—
Chap. 4, pp. 86–97—deals explicitly with the dimension of history.
81. See FAH, pp. 112, 158–169.
82. Ibid., pp. 116–119.
83. GMH, pp. 34–35, 79–80. FAH, pp. 61, 104–106.
84. FAH, pp. 94, 108.

85. Ibid., p. 156.
86. Ibid., pp. 137–143.
87. In GMH, p. 137, Berkovits speaks of the Jewish people as a nation
that must make ‘‘common cause’’ with the nations of the world in
realizing an ethic of care. In FAH, written after Israel’s ‘‘splendid
isolation’’ in the Six-Day War, and under the specter of the Holocaust,
Berkovits portrays Israel and the nations as dichotomous opposites
(representing ‘‘care’’ as opposed to ‘‘power’’) and seems much less
optimistic about the possibility of international cooperation. See FAH,
pp. 114–115.

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Incompatible Parallels: Soloveitchik and Berkovits on Religious

Experience, Commandment and the Dimension of History

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Tel Aviv University at 10/23/10 9:35PM GMT

I believe it can be said that Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Eliezer

Some years after this, Prof. Michael Rosenak, my teacher and

SOLOVEITCHIK ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS FORMS,

Soloveitchik’s The Halakhic Mind provides the reader with a most

of human consciousness and activity, comparable in certain respects to

in the spatio–temporal realm, this phenomenon becomes accessible

different from ethics and aesthetics not in essence, but in degree.

If we look closely at the beginning of the passage, we see that once

any attempt to intuit a pure ‘‘spirituality’’ as distinct from the articles

spiritual elitism. A religious inwardness that alienates itself from

dispensation of divinity, ultimately refer back to human subjectivity.

the commandment, or in spatio-temporal history, but rather in the

experience of temporal continuity and contemporaneity, enabling

then again to that of psycho-physical practices. It could perhaps be

BERKOVITS ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, MITZVAH, AND HISTORY

In attempting to articulate the difference between Soloveitchik’s and

of the people. Due to the perfection of his intellect and imaginative

place originally within the coordinates of space and time. Rather it is

dare he hope to stand in the presence of the ultimate source of all

On first reading, it would appear that Berkovits, like Rosenzweig and

commandment to love God, the basic distinction between ‘‘law’’ and

and religion in its own terms. The awareness of limitation by an

reflection of a state of intimacy.66 Religious acts are not to be com-

extrapolated from some of their other writings as well. One could

pattern of contemporary events originates. History is merely the

(as opposed to blind obedience or obedience on the basis of fear), to

At this historical juncture, for Berkovits nothing less than a Messianic

As we have seen, Soloveitchik’s theology would seem to provide ample

in the halachic sphere. The continuous, uninterrupted ebb and flow of

HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

1. For summaries of the life, thought and works of Soloveitchik

5. (Jerusalem, 1973), henceforth FAH.

24. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Philadephia,

rather than witnessing. All of the other commandments, apart from

54. The quote is from H. Slonimsky’s translation of the Kuzari

84. FAH, pp. 94, 108.

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