Soloveitchik and Levinas: pathways to the other - Biography

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Seymour Kessler

EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND RABBI JOSEPH B. SOLOVEITCHIK, (1) among the greatest Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, hailed from the same section of northern Europe, the Polish/Lithuanian Pale, then part of the Russian empire. Both stemmed from families steeped in mitnaggid tradition with a basic mistrust of the Chassidic world and of mysticism in general. Levinas was raised in a traditional, middle-class Yiddish-speaking family. His father owned a bookstore in Kovno, and he was exposed early on to secular studies including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, as well as the plays of Shakespeare. Soloveitchik, scion of a rabbinic dynasty, was born in Belarus, Russia, and was educated by his father, among others, in the so-called Brisker method of Talmud study. It is not known whether or not the two men ever met (2) or, for that matter, ever read each other's essays. Nevertheless, there is an intriguing overlap in the themes to which they devoted much of their intellectual energies--God, Torah, ethics, holiness, infinity, time, messianism, existence, among others--and although their audiences and purposes differed in many ways, they came to similar end points by different roads.

Whereas Soloveitchik addressed himself largely to the scholars in the Orthodox community, Levinas spoke to his colleagues in university departments of philosophy, Jew and non-Jew alike. The former spoke of a religious life in a modern, largely secular world; the latter emphasized a humanism in which all action and knowledge were subordinated to ethics. In their philosophical work, both relied on texts drawn from Biblical, Talmudic, and other Judaic sources. Both saw the study of Torah as the key to the continuity of the Jewish tradition. Soloveitchik provided a philosophical framework for contemporary Orthodoxy that legitimated intercourse with the secular world in the light of halakhah, while Levinas focused intellectual attention on traditional Judaic ethics as the basis for Western philosophy.

Soloveitchik was renowned for his erudition and the depth of his religious scholarship; the lectures he gave during the course of his life continue to be published. His grasp of wider philosophical issues was generally respected within the Orthodox community but, with the exception of a handful of intellectuals, was largely ignored outside this community. At 22 years of age, Soloveitchik moved to Berlin to study philosophy and received his doctorate in 1931; his dissertation focused on the philosophical thinking of Hermann Cohen. A year later he emigrated to Boston and established himself as a pulpit Rabbi. In 1941 he succeeded his father as the Rosh Yeshivah of the Rabbi Yizchak Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshivah University in New York City, which became his base for intellectual activity for over 40 years. He died in 1993.

Soloveitchik's early philosophical writings, written in 1944, were Ish hahalakhah (translated by Lawrence Kaplan and republished as Halakhic Man in 1983) and The Halakhic Mind, published without revision or additions in 1986. Several other essays followed, crowned by The Lonely Man of Faith, an essay which appears to be the major statement of Soloveitchik's mature philosophical thought.

Throughout his writings, Soloveitchik emphasized the primacy of halakhah as an absolute that gave structure and meaning to Jewish thought and practice. No authentic Jewish philosophy, in his view, could be derived without taking halakhak into account. Halakhah represented more than a rigid code of behavior; it "is not a random collection of laws, but a method, an approach which creates a noetic reality." (3) In part, The Halakhic Mind can be read as a critique of liberal Judaism's rejection of halakhah as well as the Maimonidian attempt, in the Guide to the Perplexed, to understand halakhah on the basis of philosophical rationalism. In Soloveitchik's view, halakhah cannot be founded on non-Jewish sources.

One reason Soloveitchik was interested in philosophy was that it provided a rationale for the autonomy of religious belief. (4) His rationalism is one of duality in which religion constituted "an autonomous cognitive domain" (5) and in which religious subjectivity might be constructed from its objective (or cultic) elements. He was influenced by the emerging theories of indeterminacy in physics and correctly saw that such theories undermined the Newtonian world view with its split between reason and faith. From this standpoint a way was opened to formulate religious beliefs on a cognitive basis distinct from scientific cognition. In The Halakhic Mind, Soloveitchik discusses the then-budding divergence between the so-called hard and soft sciences and sided with arguments that scientific truth is not simply socially constructed. (6) Needless to say, Soloveitchik's essays also show a distinct bias against mystical or non rational experiences, although in part such experiences appear in his analyses of The Lonely Man of Faith.

Levinas's early education was disrupted by the upheavals in Eastern Europe following W.W.I. By the time he was 17 he enrolled at the University of Strasbourg and studied under Charles Blondel and Maurice Pradines and, in contrast to Soloveitchik, who received a rather conservative philosophical education in Berlin, was exposed to what was then the avant garde of philosophical thinking. In 1928 he audited Edmund Husserl's lectures at the University of Freiburg and became acquainted with the then-newly published work of Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. (7) His preliminary doctoral thesis was an interpretation of Husserl's phenomenological thought in Heideggerian terms, published in 1930 as Theorie de l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de husserl, a book which introduced Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals to phenomenology and to Heidegger. (8)