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text: Crisis and Faith
  משבר ואמונה
  New York: Sanhedrin Press, c1976
  
  
  Crisis and Faith
  
  Preface
  
  A sense of uncertainty about the future of the Jewish people seems to be all-pervasive among Jews. The problem of Jewish survival is uppermost in our mind. There is little doubt that the people of Israel is passing through one of the most perilous periods in its long history. It is involved in a three-fold crisis. As part of the Western world Jews are affected by the crisis of Western civilization, which, before anything else, is a crisis of the spirit. The West is spiritually exhausted. Its value foundations have been eroded. This decay has, of course, invaded the Jewish communities. It has undermined Jewish value standards; it has played havoc with the spiritual health of wide sections of Jewish youth.
  There is also an internal crisis to contend with, due to our own spiritual exhaustion. The genocide perpetrated on the Jewish people by the Western world did not only sweep away one third of Israel, but destroyed its most important spiritual reservoir. It is very likely that in the holocaust of European Jewry eighty per cent, or more, of the creative vitality of the Jewish people was strangled. We have survived, but in a state of biological as well as spiritual weakness. It is the tragic aspect of the Jewish situation that it has to contend with the eroding forces of Western spiritual disintegration while in a condition of great weakness, itself brought about by the moral bankruptcy of that civilization, as it became manifest in the ghettoes, in the concentration camps and the crematoria. It is because of this sapping of vital strength that we seem to be unable to come to grips with so many of our internal problems.
  Finally, there is the ultimate crisis, that of Jewish survival. With the rise of Nazism, something entirely new entered Jewish history. Until then, the threat to Jewish existence had been usually local. Individual Jews, single communities, were attacked and often destroyed. The eclipse of Western conscience permitted Nazism to conceive the idea of the total destruction of the Jewish people. Ever since, the crisis of Jewish survival has been total. Since the end of the Second World War this total crisis has never disappeared from the agenda of world history; only its modes have varied and our understanding of it was occasionally obscured.
  Naturally, the problem of Jewish survival has been intensified as a result of the deepening demoralization of Western civilization under pressure from oil-rich Arab sheiks and potentates. We, therefore, have all the more reason to put our own house in moral and spiritual order and to gain an adequate understanding of who we are and what we stand for in the story of man’s struggle and striving on this, not all-too fortunate, globe of ours.
  We shall attempt to deal with this threefold crisis of our existence. I am fully aware of the fact that whatever I may be able to say in this volume derives its life and ultimate validity from the faith of Judaism that has sustained our efforts all through history, that has accompanied us in our defeats, that has inspired us to our triumphs, and that is leading us to the realization of the goal that God intended for us, and through us, for the human race.
  ELIEZER BERKOVITS
  <i>Skokie, Illinois, July 1975</i>
  
  I Ego Loss
  
  Introduction
  
  <i>Our generation has formulated some seductively shining slogans: self-fulfillment, personal freedom, liberation from the taboos of the past, from an absolute law, the new morality and situation ethics, etc., etc. They all sound extremely progressive. And who among us–and especially among us Jews living in the twentieth century–would not like to be known as a liberal. Thus, instead of setting an example for our youth, we thought that there was no safer path to the future and to a happy life, free of hangups, than to let our children lead us. For some time now, a change has been afoot, imperceptibly, gradually. A growing number of Jews are no longer as confident as they used to be that we are really progressing, that we are moving toward some glorious future, indeed toward a future of any kind. Many among the most liberal-minded Jews are no longer as comfortable with the slogans of this new age as they used to be.</i>
  <i>We have started feeling ill at ease. We have become rather doubtful whether our former expectations will ever come true. We hardly know what to expect for the future of American Jewry and the future of Judaism in America. We are perturbed by the increasing divorce rate, by the erosion of the quality of Jewish family life, and by the high percentage of intermarriage. Some of our best young people are drifting into alien worlds and alien lives. An inordinately high number of them have been involved in the so-called “drug culture.” They seem to have been an easy prey for every fad in vogue. Many others are just drifting aimlessly, living without a purpose. We sense that something is wrong somewhere. A system which promised human progress seems to have rendered only disintegration and loss of substance.</i>
  <i>Survival may be threatened from without, by outside enemies–and God knows Jews the world over have enough of those–but, even more by the enemy within, by the disintegration of Jewish identity. When identity is caught up in a process of erosion, there can be no hope for survival. Of course, whereas in the past survival has been a uniquely Jewish problem, today it seems to have deepened into a universal concern. When properly understood, the reason for it is neither political nor material, but spiritual. The most striking feature of our times is the spiritual exhaustion of Western civilization. The problem of Jewish identity and the erosion of Jewish values result partly from the crisis of Western civilization, of which modern Jewries have been an intimate part and in whose disintegration they now share.</i>
  <i>Of course, ever since the holocaust of European Jewry, Jews ought to have been on their guard against being taken in by “modernism” and “progress.” What happened to the six million Jews in Europe was not the work of the Nazis or of the German people alone. Neither the Nazis nor the Germans were a race different from the generality of mankind. Only because human kind is what it is could what happened happen. All over Europe there were the collaborating nationalities, the collaborating churches, the encouraging silence of the Vatican. All over the world there were the barbarously indifferent governments, whose absence of concern, and often determined refusal to help the persecuted, actually encouraged the European executioners. It is enough to think of the refugee ships, which could find no single free port willing to admit them, and which were ultimately forced to return to Europe and Germany, in order to realize that Western civilization is morally bankrupt. We usually speak of the Jewish tragedy of the holocaust. In fact, the tragedy of mankind was greater by far than the specific tragedy of the Jewish people. The Jews were shattered and broken, but did not collapse morally and spiritually because of inner rot. In the ghettoes and the concentration camps Western civilization revealed the bankruptcy of the spirit at its very heart.</i>
  <i>We should have been on our guard and were not. But now that disillusionment has become the lot of Western man in general, now that the signs of the exhaustion of this civilization are all around us, we shall be well advised to take cognizance of some of the telling features of this eclipse of modern man.</i>
  
  1 Collapse of Values
  
  
  
  
  
  We have asserted that this civilization is in a process of disintegration. In the past, there was a pretense that it was functioning in accordance with a system of values. There existed a dividing line between right and wrong, between good and evil. At least, there was an understanding of the distinction. Today, the dividing line has become blurred and uncertain. There is hardly a Thou-shalt or a Thou-shalt-not that is not being questioned. The value system of the West has collapsed.
  There are two ways of looking at values, and interpreting their origin. Buber1<i class="footnote">Martin Buber, <i>Eclipse of God</i>, Harper &amp; Row, New York, 1952.</i> makes reference to the fact that Kant had no place for God in his <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i>. Theoretically, the existence of God was not to be proved. In his <i>Critique of Practical Reason</i>, he gave God status as a postulate of practical reason. Yet in his posthumous work one finds that he was struggling with the problem of the reality of God to the very end. According to Buber, Kant was searching for a source from which to derive the quality of absoluteness inherent in the ethical law. Kant understood that without God no ethical law could be absolutely binding. One might say that Sartre is the philosopher who represents the most extreme opposing view. According to him, man is initially nothing and has to create himself out of nothing; he is the creator of his own values. To this Buber responds by maintaining that man can only discover values; he cannot create them. Unfortunately, in this respect modern civilization sides with Sartre against Buber. In a sense, it is the logical consequence from what one might call the scientific world view.
  For some time now, the modern scientific mind has denied the existence of all Absolutes. There is no absolute Truth, nor an Absolute God, and—of course—there are no absolute values. It has insisted that all our value concepts are relative. This means in essence that man is the creator of his own values. This position has been pursued to its ultimate consequence by the logical positivists who maintain that values are purely a matter of taste. One person likes cherry pie, another may enjoy incest or dislike it. It is all the same. Of course, if man is the creator of his own values, one might ask: which man? which people? which society? which system of government? It is enough to raise the question in order to realize how such relativism must lead to moral confusion, conflict, and chaotic anarchy. The psychopath—why indeed does one dub him thus?—who kills out of conviction is neither more or less right or wrong than the humanitarian—why indeed do you call him that?—who saves with compassion. What is right for one may be wrong for another; what is justice in one country may be inhuman in another. And no one may judge or condemn. All that one may be able to say is: “I like it!” or “I dislike it.” Man in the general, in the abstract, does not exist. He is always an individual, this man, that man, a certain kind of a human being, living at a certain time, in a specific situation, in this society or another. So that if man is the creator of values, it is every man creating his own values, everyone doing his own thing and being convinced that it is right, good, and beautiful. One might also say the test of values is success. Good is what succeeds; bad, that which fails.
  At the close of the Second World War, speaking to the assembled leadership of the S.S. about the massacre of the Jewish people in Europe, Heinrich Himmler had the following to say:
  “To have gone through that and to have remained an honest man just the same, save for the exceptions due to human nature, that is what has made you tough and strong. This is a glorious page in history, never before, never again to be written.” The statement is not really surprising; it is neither inhuman, nor absurd. It has its own truth, its own logic. Within the frame of reference of this civilization, it makes sense. In a world in which man creates his own values, where all principles of behavior are formulated by man alone and all morality is relative to the man and the society who conceive it, it does make good sense to commit genocide and yet to consider oneself an honest man, the author of a glorious page in human history. It is the ultimate manifestation of the collapse of the value system of modern civilization.
  
  
  
  This collapse of values has had its most fateful consequences in the area of education by giving birth to the principle of permissiveness. “Do not frustrate the poor child, do not stunt the free development of his personality. Let him have his own way.” Such were the principles of a new education. The slogan was ‘to every child a childhood.’ All this was very well meant, but children also have certain rights, among which, for example, is the right to learn the difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between honesty and cheating, between excellence and mediocrity. If the child is not taught the difference, he assumes that there is no difference, that the educators themselves, parents and teachers, do not care about the difference. Finally, the child will come to realize that neither parents nor teachers care very much about the youth entrusted into their care. Permissiveness indeed means that they do not care; they do not care because the system of values has collapsed for them within their own personal life conduct.
  In our days we have witnessed the rebellion of young people against “the establishment,” insisting that every one is entitled “to do his own thing.” It was a rather pathetic and pointless rebellion. For their elders, “the establishment,”—politicians, lobbyists, governments etc.—were all out doing their own thing. That is why the world today is balancing precariously at the brink of the abyss. What matters in human life is not so much what a person does, but the standards of values by which he acts. Permissiveness has been the betrayal that the elder generation perpetrated on its children. It has been modern civilization’s abdication of responsibility toward the future. Of course, one cannot help being permissive toward one’s children, if one is permissive in one’s life style and ethical and moral conduct. In a condition of the disintegration of all value standards betrayal of the future by permissiveness is unavoidable.
  Of course, every school system reflects the image of the society that maintains it and in the midst of which it attempts to function. The school system in this civilization has ceased to provide educational institutions. The schools may offer instruction in the “Three R’s,” they may teach skills in the sciences, history, and languages. But the teaching of skills is not education. Education is concerned with the character, the personality, the soul of the young. A disintegrating civilization is incompetent to educate.
  
  
  
  However, the root of the trouble goes much deeper. In modern civilization there has been a gradual loss of the sense of meaningfulness of existence, not just in the life of the individual, but in the universal All. A world anchored in the will of a Creator has a spiritual quality to it; it has intended meaningfulness. Buber, discussing the idea of revelation, says that one of the things that happens to a man who encounters God, the Divine Presence, in life, in history, is that he comes out of the experience with a sense of meaningfulness. He may not immediately be able to articulate the meaning in words, he may not succeed in grasping it clearly and distinctly, but he has gained the overwhelming conviction that from now on nothing can be meaningless. The essential quality of meaningfulness in reality has been absorbed by his entire being. He knows now that what he has to do is to go out into life and find it.2<i class="footnote">Martin Buber, <i>I and Thou</i>.</i> Modern man has lost this sense of meaningfulness in existence.
  Science has transformed the universe into a chance event coming from nowhere, arising out of nothingness, propelled on by laws of nature that function because they function, having neither purpose nor inherent meaning. There is no plan, there is no goal. What is, is because it is. No wonder we have ended up talking of the absurdity of existence. The consequences of this loss of the sense of meaningfulness are twofold. What is the value of man himself in a universe in which the All itself is a chance event? He is but one infinitesimally small chance event among billions of other chance events. Man experiences a loss of his sense of his own value resulting in a declining respect for human life and human dignity. The tragic increase of crime, the inhuman forms of terrorism the world over, stem from this debunking of the dignity of man in modern civilization. Nietzsche said it well: Man loses faith in his own value if no infinitely valuable whole works through him. Once man understands himself to be a chance event in an indifferent universe, rather than the bearer of the divine image in the midst of creation, he loses his metaphysical dignity. Caught in the net of a completely materialized universe, represented by a mathematical formula, not only does he lose his own sense of value, he loses all sense of respect for what he encounters and any sensation of awe for the surrounding universe.
  The loss of meaningfulness is responsible for another pervasive feature of this civilization, namely boredom. When the value system has collapsed, one action is much like any other, and in a meaningless universe nothing can be taken too seriously. Without values there is no direction; without meaning there is no goal, there is no basis for genuine commitment to one distinctive course of action rather than to another. One is “into” this one day, “into” that another. No other generation of man had so much leisure time as ours; no other had so little knowledge of what to do with it as ours. With time hanging as heavy as lead on the soul of modern man he is trying desperately to free himself. Sensual indulgence, or addiction to drugs, are natural outcomes as avenues of escape from boredom, emptiness, meaninglessness. Young people seem to be more sensitive to the dissolution than their elders. More than any other segment of the population they are asking the questions about the aim, the meaning, the value of it all, and they receive no answers.
  
  
  
  That which is responsible for the collapse of values and the loss of meaning has also brought upon man the misery of his alienation. Modern man is alienated from God and Nature, from his fellowmen, from himself, from reality itself. He lives in loneliness in the midst of multitudes, like a stranger in the world that is no longer home to him. He is personified by Kafka’s non-hero, who, with his attempt to get into touch with the Castle doomed to failure, lives on in a state of disconnectedness.
  There are varied roots for man’s manifold alienation. We shall deal with those that—as discussed earlier—are also the causes of the dissolution of values and meaning.
  The scientific method generalizes and objectifies, so that science cannot deal with the individual and personal. Quantification by mathematical formulae closes out the qualitative aspects of reality and existence. Now, this is necessary for the purpose of scientific research and elucidation of the physical nature of the world. Scientific coolness and objectivity has an impressive dignity of its own within the confines of quantification. But when science becomes scientism and claims to be the only source of truth, nature is turned into the cold and heartless dominion of the impersonal that is completely indifferent towards man. Every kind of personal experience, whether aesthetic, religious, spiritual, or mystical, is then derided as the purely subjective <i>Schwärmerei</i> of romanticists, to which nothing corresponds in the truth of objective reality. No bridge is possible from the completely objectified impersonal realm of nature to the subjective personal realm in which alone man may exist.
  What is man within the purview of scientism? Like everything else, he too must be objectified. The personal essence of his being is disregarded. He is turned into a specimen, a sample of a species. He is treated like another object among objects. To what does he amount in an objectified impersonal cosmos? Arthur Eddington, the distinguished astro-physicist, with a rich measure of delightfully English humor, has put it this way:
  “Nature seems to have been intent on a vast evolution of fiery worlds. As for Man—it seems unfair to be always raking up against Nature her one little inadvertense. By a trifling hitch of machinery—not of any serious consequence in the development of the universe—some lumps of matter of the wrong size have occasionally been formed. These lack the purifying protection of intense heat or the equally efficacious absolute cold of space. Man is one of the gruesome results of this occasional failure of antiseptic precautions …”3<i class="footnote"><i>New Pathways in Science</i>, Cambridge University Press, 1935, p. 309.</i>
  From the exclusively scientific point of view man is the outcome of a slight malfunction in cosmic engineering, an unimportant cosmic oversight. What Eddington is saying is that the inescapable result of the scientific objectification of all reality, including man’s existence as well, is ultimate estrangement and cosmic homelessness. Man loses his status in the cosmos. He does not really belong there. He is a rootless stranger in the universal structure, torn from what is most precious to him, his individuality, which is robbed of the last shred of its dignity and is turned into a ghostly shadow of objectified reality. Man thus becomes a cosmic refugee. Cosmic insecurity invades his whole being. He is all alone, surrounded by the freezing indifference of the universe. He neither knows his place, nor does he know—much less understand—himself. This is man’s metaphysical identity crisis.
  Therein lies also the ultimate reason for the collapse of values and the loss of meaning. Meaning, purpose and value are the hallmarks of personal existence; they are the essential qualities of the personal life. The quantified world of generalized abstraction has destroyed the ontological validity of personal reality, leading to the dissolution of values and the disintegration of meaning. It has brought upon man the most tragic aspect of his alienation, estrangement from his very humanity. Contemporary man has lost all sense of direction. He is wandering aimlessly in the roadless wasteland of his unsure humanity.
  In his book on alienation,4<i class="footnote"><i>The Age of Alienation</i>, Random House, New York, 1971, pp. 185-86.</i> Bernard Murchland discusses Dewey’s approach to the subject. According to Dewey, “the problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man’s belief about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life.” The task was to establish harmony and partnership between the “so-called subjective values” of aesthetics, religion and ethics, and the “presumed objective” truths of science. The consciousness of science is to be integrated fully with the consciousness of human values. When this is achieved, says Dewey, “the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical, the scientific and the moral and the ideal will be destroyed.” The problem was thus well defined. But how was it to be solved? Dewey’s humanist naturalism may be a good slogan, but it is no solution to the problem. Values belong exclusively in the personal dimension. Science has no norm for that dimension.
  Dewey’s position, however, is no longer relevant. In his days it was still meaningful to say that the most serious problem of the times was to coordinate man’s scientific beliefs about the world with his beliefs about values, because people still held rather strong beliefs about values and meaning. The man of today, on the other hand, has reached a condition of complete value disorientation. His present condition resembles that of Meursault, the non-hero in Camus’ novel, <i>The Stranger</i>. In the eyes of Meursault all is futility. One course of action is not much different from any other. Out of a semblance of duty he attends the funeral of his mother but the event itself means nothing to him. On the way home from the funeral he picks up a girl, not because he desires her much, but simply because “what’s the difference!” He murders a man for much the same reason. Nothing really matters. But Meursault is sent to prison, and he finds salvation in death row, where finally he is able to lay his heart open to “the benign indifference of the universe.” He is at peace now with his fate, for he has discovered unity with cosmic indifference. He is no longer a “Stranger;” he has found home in a world that has ceased to be home for man. He has overcome his estrangement by becoming one with universal indifference. “To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.” The “Stranger” is at home in homelessness; he finds happiness by being reconciled to absurdity. He overcomes his alienation by realizing that in our “indifferent universe” there is nothing to which it is worth relating in a personal manner, not even to one’s own fate. Meursault is saved by the revelation of his brotherhood with cosmic meaninglessness.
  With perspicacity and intellectual courage, Camus drew the final conclusion from man’s modern predicament. Having surrendered his soul to secularism and scientism, man finds himself stranded on an alien shore. He solves the problem of his alienation by recognizing it as itself meaningless. It is meaningless to ask for meaning in a cosmic ocean of meaninglessness. There is no problem of alienation where alienation is the authentic form of being. One is not a stranger where nothing human is at home, where brotherhood is oneness with an impersonal brotherless universe. This is indeed the ultimate logic inherent in the contemporary intellectual situation. The problem is not that of Dewey, how to reconcile scientific truth with spiritual and ethical values. The problem is how to regenerate man’s atrophied value sense, how to resurrect the collapsed standards of ethics and morality, how to regain the spiritual quality of human existence. What is required is the healing of man’s alienation by restoring him to the dignity of personal status in the context of a universe of meaningfulness.
  
  2 Depersonalization
  
  
  
  
  
  Lacking adequate understanding of the nature of the problem, certain trends in modern civilization have attempted to escape the disintegration. One of them we see in the search for what is often referred to as a higher consciousness, as if by some magic man might be saved from his contemporary predicament. Especially among younger people there is the tendency to find a savior in some guru, some mystical cult, Eastern mysticism, drugs, etc. What is implied in most of these trends is essentially a surrender of personal existence in exchange for a high measure of liberation from personal responsibility. Man, who has been depersonalized by science in theory and by modern technology in practice, tries in his desperation to embrace his depersonalized condition as a virtue that may serve him as the very source of his salvation.
  Although what used to be known only a few years ago as the drug culture is now in decline (though not, of course, drug use or addiction), it may be enlightening to look closely at some of its features. Most of them are shared by the more authentic forms of oriental and other types of mysticism that are now more and more replacing the drug-induced mystical experience. We shall consider the claims that were made on behalf of the drug culture; we shall examine their validity, and finally we shall analyze the reasons that were responsible for its currency.
  Timothy Leary, one of the chief interpreters of the drug culture, and some of his associates describe the mystical quality of their drug-induced experience in the following words:
  “All the harsh, dry, brittle angularity of game life is melted. You drift off—soft, rounded, moist, warm. Merged with all life….your individuality and anatomy of movement are moistly disappearing. Your control is surrendered to the total organism (i.e. the universe, our interpolation). Blissful passivity. Ecstatic, orgiastic, undulating unity….All is gained as everything is given up …” Most of the other authors who treat of the subject, write in the same vain. One comes across statements like, “When the ego controls dissolve in a milieu of trust, the world within is glowing, serene and meaningful …”5<i class="footnote"><i>The Psychedelic Experience, A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead</i>, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, p. 59.</i> The surrendering of control and the merging into the All are the ever-recurring themes. Often it is called the ego death. One of the LSD enthusiasts would wax poetic and sing:
  The ego is dead—
  Killed during its last hysterical ravings,
  To become we.6<i class="footnote">Sidney Cohen, <i>Beyond Within</i>, Atheneum, New York, 1967, p. 112.</i>
  The desire to get rid of the self is obvious everywhere. Aldous Huxley, in his little book <i>The Doors of Perception</i>, spoke of becoming a non-self. The goal is to give up individual consciousness and, by dissolving into the universe, replace it by what is called cosmic consciousness. In a sense it is very similar to a Hindu type of mysticism, differing only in that it dispenses with the long and arduous discipline and leaps to the goal in the instant of drug-induced ecstasy. With ego death comes blissful passivity. Man gives up all his ambitions, there is no more desire to act; he is freed from all hang-ups. Since nothing really matters very much, all aggressiveness disappears and tolerance increases. The knowledge of the meaning of life is no longer dependent on the unreliable speculative and discursive intellect. It comes to one by intuition. Laws of logic are cast aside. One “feels” the meaning of life. Opposites are no longer contradictory. Universal unity does not only pre-empt the laws of contradiction; it is also universal reconciliation that surpasses the categories of good and evil. It is beyond good and evil. Finally, as one is delivered of the “world of selves,” one becomes also free of moral judgment and utilitarian considerations, one has been emancipated from the world of self-assertion. In this state one finds true enlightenment and love. One knows that brotherhood is real. One is absorbed into a perfect world of universal harmony and love, perfect beauty and all goodness.
  
  
  
  What is the validity of these claims? Do they make sense? Let us look first at the ethical implications. Oneness, peace, harmony, freedom from hang-ups and frustration, love and brotherhood, are the age-old dreams of man, the longings of his heart and soul. Of the heart and soul of <i>man</i>! But what can be their meaning in an egoless state, when man’s individuality has been dissolved, when the “I” has become one with “It” and with “That”? Complete identification between oneself and other people is a noble ideal…as long as there is me and you, me and other people, I and Thou. But what is the value of identification between one non-self and other non-selves? Indeed, if there are no selves, and individuality has dissolved, where is there a problem? Nor can there be hang-ups and frustrations where there is no ego. But again, it is not man who has been delivered of them, rather it is the hang-ups and frustrations that got rid of man. It is not much of an achievement that in psychedelic mysticism one is free of self-assertion, cocksureness, and aggressiveness. In a state of ego-death how could there be self-assertion! The problem is how a man, a human being, can free himself from those rather unpleasant traits. An ego-less being will, of course, be as free of moral judgment as the color green is free of the temptation of adultery. Ethics, morality and judgment are meaningful only in the realm of the personal life; they have no place in the universe of non-selves. One may escape from problems and from oneself by the dissolution of the human individual.
  All the misdirected enthusiasm of this type of mysticism is due to the confusion between oneness and unity. Unity is an ideal only between selves. Oneness is not unity; it is dissolution of selfhood; it is union between entities without selfhood. Oneness requires the extinguishing of all traits of personal existence. Unity is good; oneness is neither good nor evil, it is in the dominion of value neutrality below the threshold of good and evil. When that young poet in psychedelia celebrated the death of his ego that was killed in order to become “We,” he did not know what he was talking about. “We” is the union of “I” and “Thou.” (Buber mentions that he meant to write a book on “We” as a sequel to his <i>I and Thou</i>). Once the “I” is killed and the “Thou” is dead too, there can be no “We” either. A herd of non-egos is not “We.”
  The confusion is most pitiable when ego death is interpreted as the embracing of brotherhood and the revelation of love. One wonders what brotherhood could mean among non-selves. How can one non-self identify itself with another ego-less, non-individual! Timothy Leary instructs the “Traveller” in psychedelia to use the moment of ego-lessness for the attainment of love. One cannot help wondering what on earth he is talking about. What is ego-less love? What is love without an I and a Thou?
  Aldous Huxley, who started it all, had a deeper understanding of the drug-induced cosmic consciousness. Describing “the manifest glory of things,” he says that his participation in it left no room for any other concern, “above all the concerns involving persons. For persons are selves, and in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows….seemed enormously irrelevant.”7<i class="footnote"><i>The Doors of Perception</i>, Harper and Row, New York, pp. 18, 22, 34.</i> This, of course, is appropriate to the condition of ego-loss. It confirms Leary’s “blissful passivity.”
  Many writers on their experiences are under the same kind of delusion we have examined thus far. They would testify to “the feeling of passivity that was overwhelming.” They speak of the absence of the capacity for feeling, of taking an interest in anything, of the ecstasy that comes from losing the ever-present feeling of being oneself, of letting go of the overpowering flood of emotion, of loving and hating. Such interpretations all confirm the same phenomenon. In the state of “blissful passivity” one is incapable of feeling anything or taking an interest in anything. Of course, in such a condition there can be no hate, intolerance or aggressiveness, but neither is there room for either love or brotherhood. Losing one’s ego and merging with everything else may be blissful, but it is not brotherhood. The effortless absence of self-assertion and intolerance, while in a state that negates the possibility of either, is mistaken for universal love.
  The same criticism applies to the other claims. The drug-user is enlightened, he “feels” intuitively the knowledge of the meaning of all existence. But what is meaning in the domain of ego-dissolution? The problem of the meaning of life exists only for the individual human being. Once the ego is dissolved, the problem of meaning cannot arise. Then again it is maintained that the “Traveller” on his trip through psychedelia rejoices over the perfect freedom that he has achieved. Freedom is one of the immortal ideals—of man; an ideal for man only because it may be denied to him and he can only become <i>himself</i>, his own self, in a condition of freedom. But a non-self, a non-individual, a non-ego, is always what it is; it can neither be oppressed nor can it be liberated. Freedom for a non-self can only mean being free from having to be a self. So might the dead, too, rejoice over their complete freedom.
  
  
  
  Despite the fact that this kind of “mysticism” is on the way out, such a critical analysis of it is necessary in that it illustrates an attempt to cope with the problems of the collapse of values, the disintegration of meaning and the despair of alienation. It affirms man’s ethical and moral disorientation on the level of normal consciousness, and his estrangement from the universe. It maintains, by implication, man’s spiritual bankruptcy on the personal level of life.
  This chemically-manufactured cosmic consciousness surrendered all hope at resolving the human dilemma by restoring man to the metaphysical dignity of personal existence. It accepted the irrelevance of the individual that follows from the purely scientific interpretation of reality as final. However, it tried to save man from the scandalous status of being Nature’s little indiscretion by putting him back into the universe, united with it in authentic oneness. Unfortunately, this way one heals alienation much too radically; man overcomes his alienation by losing his selfhood, and the rest of the struggle for the recovery of values is lost. This is a desperate attempt to find a cure for the spiritual exhaustion of Western civilization: withdraw man into the womb of the universe, recall him from his distinct humanity into the cosmic ocean and all problems …no, are not solved; but the struggle is over, for man has departed.
  One must have some respect for Camus’ Meursault in <i>The Stranger</i>, whom we discussed earlier. He at least has the courage to face this cold and indifferent universe that has become modern man’s heritage, in the stupidity of all its limitless size and vastness. He is too intelligent to seek “love” by submerging his ego in the All. He retains his own selfhood in the full authenticity of its meaninglessness and finds “brotherhood” with the cosmic indifference that is the share of us all.
  True, chemically-induced mysticism is fading away, yet it is important to understand the issues involved. The mystical tendency of the times, though rejecting chemical manipulation, pursues the same goals that inspired the drug-culture. The ideas are very similar. Solutions are seen in the surrender of individuality, in cosmic oneness, in the achievement of some form of cosmic consciousness and thus, reaching reconciliation, peace and love. In these tendencies, and other less-significant religious cults and fads, the common denominator is modern man’s inability to face the problems of his existence in responsible personal choices and decisions. Man seems to be unable to cope with his own personal reality. He is anchorless in a universe that is drifting in an ocean of meaninglessness.
  
  3 The New Morality
  
  
  
  
  
  The New Morality or, as it is also called, Situation Ethics, ostensibly appeared on the contemporary scene as a protest and an alternative to the established value system of the West, which, justifiably, was found wanting. The New Morality raised some valid questions and recognized serious problems arising within the accepted value standards of Western civilization. Yet, its solutions are in themselves another manifestation of the collapse of values and meaning, and if it does not seek ego loss, it certainly reduces the status of man.
  At least by the theoretical acceptance, if not by very consistent practice, the ethics of Western civilization were based on universal principles. There was the Decalogue, ethics based on reason, on Nature, on duty, the categorical imperative; there were entire ethical systems claiming universal validity. The New Morality refers to these as “code ethics,” legalism. They all prescribe in advance what human behavior ought to be in a given situation. They do this on the basis of what they consider to be universally valid principles from which they deduce rules of conduct. Code ethics yields deductive morality.
  It is relatively easy to say what the New Morality does not want. It rejects code ethics, ethics of universal principles. What then does it affirm? It is rightly called situation ethics. One of its leading proponents gives the following illustrative example. One day, before an election, while travelling in a cab, he asked the driver how he was going to vote. The driver’s reply was that in his family they had always voted the straight Republican ticket, but this time, “No!—there are times when a man has to push his principles aside and do the right thing.” The incident is quoted to illustrate the idea that right and wrong cannot be legislated in advance. One has to make the choice when the moment of decision arrives. On what basis does one make situational decisions? There is one, and only one, fundamental principle that the New Morality recognizes, namely the principle of love. However, no rules and no laws may determine in advance what love requires.
  A critique of the New Morality summed it up in the following words:
  “…it seems that we have reached a point at which the whole ambitious structure of moral theology is revealed as a complete futility. Every man must decide for himself according to his own estimate of conditions and consequences; and no-one can decide for him or impugn the decision to which he comes. Perhaps this is the end of the matter after all.” To which Bishop Fletcher, a prophet of the New Morality, adds: “This is precisely what this book is intended to show.”8<i class="footnote"><i>Situation Ethics, The New Morality</i>, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1966, p. 37.</i> In other words, situation ethics maintains that anything and everything may be right or wrong. It all depends on the situation.
  
  
  
  One is entitled to say that situation ethics has quite a distinguished ancestry. Its form of subjectivism, of utmost personal involvement in decision making, has been deeply influenced by existentialism. Kierkegaard insisted that truth was subjectivity. In a sense, one may say that certain aspects of Buber’s teaching must have influenced the New Morality. While Buber would maintain that he was not an antinomian, he considered himself an anomian. Like the new moralists, he had no use for code ethics either. According to him, revelation had no contents. God speaks to man from each concrete situation, challenging him to respond without giving any indication how he should respond. Man alone must choose between the numerous possibilities in each situation. He responds through the deed upon which he decides. One might see in Sartre another one of the forerunners of this kind of ethics. In his essay, <i>Existentialism as a Humanism</i>, Sartre tells the story of a young man who came to consult him during the Nazi occupation in France. He was in a dilemma. On the one hand, as a young Frenchman, he felt that it was his duty to escape to England to join the Free French. On the other hand, leaving France would mean abandoning his old mother whose only support he was. How was he to decide, not between a right and a wrong, but between two rights? There was no ethical law to prescribe conduct in that situation. The case is used to illustrate the point that code ethics does not work in a real situation. One can make decisions only in the light of the prevailing situation which, according to Sartre, is always unique and not repeatable.
  When Fletcher’s book, <i>Situation Ethics, the New Morality</i>, came out with his suggestion that the only principle to guide human behavior is love and in each situation one should consider anew only what the command of love is, one reviewer commented that this “…is quite a long thought for an eighteen-year-old, during a passionate moment, in the back seat of a car.” This is very much to the point. What is proposed by the New Morality is indeed “quite a long thought,” not only for an eighteen-year-old but for every human being. To figure out in each situation, independently of any rule or law, as well as of any previous experience, whether personal or vicarious, what love requires, is easier said than done. Let us see what this means in actual practice. Fletcher puts it this way: “Is adultery wrong?…I don’t know. Maybe. Give me a case. Describe a real situation.” This applies to all questions of morality and ethics. Fletcher continues: “Or perhaps somebody will ask if a man should ever lie to his wife, or desert his family, or spy on a business rival’s design or market plans, or fail to report some income item in his tax return. Again the answer cannot be an answer, it can only be another question…. Have you a real question, a concrete situation?”9<i class="footnote">Ibid., 142-3.</i>
  It is important to appreciate the full implications of such a position. The sanctity of the word does not exist as a principle; a promise, a vow—by itself—has no value; family obligations are ethically neutral or rather non-existent. No-one can obligate himself with regard to a future situation. Honesty as such is neither an ideal nor a valid principle of action. There is only love. But now think of the real man, the human being as he exists in reality; consider his failings and shortcomings, his egocentricity, his innate bent to rationalize. If you now tell this man: there are no prescriptive rules of behavior, a word may be broken, family ties do not bind, honesty is a mere sound—all you have to do is love, and you send him with this kind of preparation into life, will he be able to act in accordance with unselfish love? The irony of situation ethics is that while it pays so much attention to every single situation, it disregards the fundamental human situation, man’s inadequacy, his failings and foolishness. Tell this man (not the non-existent ideal one, but the one whom we know in actual fact, in the actual situation) that all moral discipline, all principled behavior, all rules, are worthless, and release him into each one of his situations with the sole command of love—you may be sure he will behave like a bull in a china shop. The end result for any society must be chaos.
  However, not only the failings to which human nature is prone, but even more so, the complexities of most situations, render the New Morality questionable. Consider the case of the young Frenchman who sought Sartre’s advice in that situation of conflict of duties between the call of France and the claim of his mother. How is love to decide between two commandments of love? How can the choice be made, if all principles that might give guidance are rejected and one leaves the decision, without any advanced teaching, to the spontaneity of the moment? Obviously, the young man was in a situational predicament and turned to the authority he recognized in Sartre.
  Bishop Pike wrote a book on case histories treated by the New Morality. The situation in one of his cases was that the wife was an alcoholic. Since normal married life was hardly possible, ergo the liaison between the husband and another woman could be justified in the name of love. Well, it is not that simple. What about one’s love responsibility toward the sick wife? How are the two claims, the need of the wife and that of the husband, to be weighed against each other? And can the husband alone, obeying the command of love as he understands it, do the weighing? Most people are unlikely to see their situation as it is in truth; a detached outsider might be much better equipped to do the evaluation. The one who is involved and is to make the decision in complete independence and in situational spontaneity has only a subjective view that is often distorted by his own bias and his usually rationalized self-seeking. Given human nature and the complexities of the human situation, it is essential to send the human being into the situation of decision making well-prepared by a sound appreciation of the values of human existence, of ethical principles for guiding human conduct, and of the practice of self-restraint and discipline.
  There are, of course, exceptional situations. However, the only hope for the morally right deed in the exceptional case lies in the acknowledgement of universal values and principles that are affirmed and proved by the exception. In a book on the Maquis, Alexander Miller discusses the moral problems with which the underground fighters were confronted in France. Was it permissible for them to forge, to steal, to kill? The response was, “Yes, everything is permitted—and everything is forbidden.”10<i class="footnote">Alexander Miller, <i>The Renewal of Man</i>, pp. 99-100.</i> What did he mean? The very asking of the question and the recognition that everything was forbidden meant that the maquis were aware of “code ethics” as a rule, and acknowledged it. But this was an exceptional situation. There were vast and often overwhelming issues and considerations involved. There was no other way to meet those higher considerations than by breaking the rule. One knew that one broke a rule; it was with the necessary sense of the tragic, in a situation of great moral tension, after a great deal of heart-searching. Thus the Maquis. From the angle of the New Morality one would look at it differently. An action as such is neither permitted nor forbidden, only the situation determines right or wrong. When the Maquis kill, there is no confrontation with conscience. There is no advance ruling that ‘thou shalt not kill,’ to which a serious measure of consideration is due. The situation rules <i>ab novo</i> and spontaneously, thou shalt kill. One prefers the attitude of the underground fighter who realized that what he was doing was a tragic necessity. It is this sense of the tragic, that originates in the confrontation between a conscience and an objectively valid norm, which alone lends moral dignity to the deed. It is the only extant safeguard against the inadequacies of human nature. If at times it becomes unavoidable to take a life, woe unto man if he does it without realizing that the rule is thou shalt not kill, and fails to try to justify his action in the searching and accusing light of that rule. Only the full realization of what ought to be, the heart-searching confrontation with the principle, will—where nothing else is meaningfully possible—lend the quality and the dignity of the moral and the right to the breaking of the universal principle.
  In truth, the New Morality itself is a symptom of the collapse of standards and of the spiritual exhaustion of Western civilization that we have analyzed. The tablets of the law are shattered and there is nothing left but love. Love is, of course, a noble ideal. Unfortunately, man is not yet ready to be able to base on it either his own life or the structure of human society.
  
  
  
  However, the other aspect of our earlier discussion, man’s loss of metaphysical status and disintegration of personal authenticity, is also manifest in situation ethics. There is a logical fallacy at the very core of this kind of ethics. The New Morality not only asserts that general principles are of no use for ethical behavior, but, by implication, it assumes that man may free himself from such principles, from the acceptance of universally valid and commanding guidelines for human conduct.
  The New Morality does acknowledge at least one supreme principle, that of love, and universalizes it. But why is it binding? That man is capable of love does not obligate him to love. Is it because it is the best that man can practice and that can happen to him as an individual and society? In other words, one accepts another principle of some “code ethics” as a universal law above love, i.e., act so that you do the best. But what is the best? How is it determined? Shall we say, the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism! A Christian might say that love is the supreme principle because it is Jesus’ message to the world. But then another principle supervenes—that of faith in Jesus. It will be the principle of faith that prescribes the law, the law of love.
  We have to probe deeper. Situation ethics maintains that every situation is essentially different from every other situation. Every situation is new; it is unique, not repeatable. Therefore, past experience is worthless. This makes sense on the assumption of another principle, that of the incoherence of all situations. The principle of incoherence is universalized; it demands that one decide spontaneously in each situation. This too would yield the categorical imperative of a “code ethics.” Act so that the maxims of your action are always spontaneous. But on what grounds is the principle of incoherence affirmed? True, every human situation is unique. Yet one might recognize a bond of continuity between the situation supplied by the personal continuity of the one acting in a unique situation. The “unique” situation does not stand in isolation but has its place in the connected structure of personal history. It may therefore not be altogether pointless to allow past experience to have a word to say in the decision of each new situation. Furthermore, if there should be some coherence, not only between the situations of each individual, but also between the situations in the life of one person and in those of another, or some measure of similarity and relatedness—as surely there is—between the situations through which one generation of men passes and another, then, of course, the logical thing is to let past experience of other people and other generations inform one’s “spontaneous” decision in each new situation. The principle of incoherence is an essential affirmation of the New Morality. On what is it based? Surely not on the principle of love. It may very well be that if one should accept coherence, the demands of love would be rather different than if one assumes incoherence.
  What is most important, however, is to realize that in order to know what the demand of love is, one must have some idea of what man in the general sense is. One loves a human being differently from the way one loves a plant or an animal. Before one may know how to act with love towards a fellow human being, one must first answer the question, what is man? If man is judged to be nothing but a kind of higher animal, then to love him would mean mainly to satisfy his biological needs and love between sexes would require only that they service each other in the most efficient manner. Once we accept certain universal principles as to the nature of man, general rules are bound to follow. If man is not a mere animal, but a person with a continuous identity and with a conscience, his commitments will have to be enduring and his responsibility will reach beyond the present situation. Prescriptive ethics will play an important part in his life. Fletcher’s question—is adultery wrong?—might also be asked in a different form. One might ask: is murder right? The New Morality would have to give the same reply as in the case of adultery: “Maybe, it depends. Describe a real situation.” Quite clearly, a statement of this kind implies a preconception concerning the value of human life, i.e. that its value is relative, relative to each given situation. Only because one subscribes to the universal principle that life is not holy in itself, can one maintain that murder is a neutral act. Whether it be right or wrong depends on the situation. From this point of view of the New Morality, Himmler’s statement to the S.S. leadership, that we quoted above, would still be right. There is no reason at all why in a certain situation one may not deem an entire people to be nothing better than a parasitic infection on the body of human society, and proceed with enthusiasm to its extermination as an act of love towards mankind. In other words, the new moralist does not face the situation without advance rule and guidance. Situation ethics in the case of the taking of a life may function as it pretends to because it adopts the principle of the relativity of the value of life. This too is deductive ethics; it is code ethics. He who declares, “Thou shalt not kill,” rules differently, because he judges the value of life by a different standard.
  The attitude that adultery may be right or wrong according to the situation is not based on a given situation, but is determined by the adoption of an evaluation of marriage in principle and in universal terms prior to any situation. It implies a ruling about the nature of marriage which, like any other code ethics, prescribes the “spontaneous” decision in each situation. Fletcher gives us his evaluation of marriage in principle, observing that “the triple terrors of conception, infection, and detection, which once scared people into ‘Christian’ relations (marital monopoly), have pretty well become obsolete through medicine and urbanism.”11<i class="footnote"><i>Situation Ethics, etc.</i>, p. 80.</i> Quite clearly this kind of situation ethics is deductive like any other form of ethics. It is deduced from Fletcher’s understanding of the nature of marriage. If indeed marriage is nothing else but a “triple terror” that has lost the sceptre which it once held over the frightened female section of mankind, then, of course, the rights or wrongs of adultery depend on medical technology and the progress of urbanization. One should, however, realize that with this view of marriage one is involved in universal principles, for with it one has made a declaration about man and woman, their relationship to each other, and their place in the scheme of things. It is then the principle that gives guidance to the decision that might be reached in the concrete situation. The principle prescribes the rule which demands that what once was an absolute value should be now treated as one relative to each situation. Should one have a different opinion about what man and woman are, should one believe that they find the highest fulfillment of their relationship in a covenant that is meant to endure all through life in the presence of God, that therefore this relationship is to be sanctified, the guidance provided by such an evaluation of marriage on principle would, of course, be rather different.
  Whether we realize it or not, we never get away from principles, advance rules, prescriptive laws. The New Morality is a desperate attempt to give some respectability to the everyone-doing-his-own-thing type of life style of a bankrupt civilization. While its spontaneous situational decisions are the symptom of the dissolution of values, the implied general principles on which it stands are—in the main—a reflection of man’s reduced status in the scheme of things. The principle of incoherence is another version of man’s alienation from the world around him as well as from himself. The reduction of the value of life to each situation is the result of the loss of his metaphysical dignity as a person, his reduction to “thinghood;” only things have value relative to the situation. Of course, there is always the panacea of love. But what is love, if man lives in the river of forever incoherent situations, if he is reduced to the level of “thinghood?” If left to the spontaneity of the situation, love is overwhelmed by the biologically impersonal in man; it is defeated by the forces that drive man, rather than guided by the values willed by man in personal authenticity.
  
  II The Personal Life
  
  Introduction
  
  <i>The conclusion to be drawn from our analysis in the previous chapters is that modern man has decided that he can make it on his own. Believing that he can be sufficient unto himself, he now lives like a stranger in a cosmos that is anchorless; his life is rootless, he drifts aimlessly in an ocean of meaninglessness</i>.
  <i>Jews in the Western world were deeply involved in a culture and a civilization to which they made significant contributions, but which in its essentials was not of their own making. As long as the culture of the West itself was a going concern, one could have thought that it embodied modern man’s march onward toward a brighter future. But this civilization has sickened manifestly and its sickness has invaded the life of the Jewish people. It is eroding the traditional values of Judaism; it is undermining the moral fibre of wide sections of the Jewish communities; it is eroding the strength of the Jewish family; it confuses Jewish youth. I do not know how other sections of the general community will cope with the moral and spiritual sickness of our time. I do know, however, that we Jews have to turn inward, to our own resources of the soul and of the spirit</i>.
  <i>In former times, Judaism had an authentic competitor, a strong, self-assured civilization that was not Jewish and exerted overwhelming influence. It shaped and formed Western Jews more than did Judaism. Today, the situation is fundamentally different. The competitor is itself on the run, in a state of disintegration. It has lost its seductive charm. What we have to contend with now is a spiritual vacuum-the loss of vision, the loss of faith, the loss of trust. The West itself is overwhelmed by a chaos of the spirit and moral helplessness. Perhaps now, in this hour of crisis of Western civilization, we might be induced to let our own roots down in the authentic soil of Judaism. Seldom before did we have as much reason to turn inward, to seek strength, inspiration, vision, in our own spiritual resources than in this hour of mankind’s religious, spiritual and ethical exhaustion. This is no longer a religious demand of preserving Judaism, but it is a matter of preserving life in human dignity and meaningfulness by the only means available to us. It is also the best service we can render to mankind at large</i>.
  <i>In order to develop a Jewish position in relationship to the main issues that were raised above, we shall have to analyze the source of meaning and value in Judaism, and to show how man’s cosmic alienation is healed in the context of a philosophy of cosmic interrelatedness. We shall indicate the place man holds within the Jewish world-view and determine how Judaism sees human nature, answering the question: what is man? We shall do this with the help of the presentation of what we consider to be Jewish sexual ethics, for it is in its sexual ethics that a society’s concept of what a human being is finds its clearest expression</i>.
  
  4 Meaning, Value and Person
  
  
  
  
  
  We saw that from the purely scientific point of view the world is an unplanned, inexplicable chance event that is because it happens to be. We also showed that such a universe lacks meaning and value. The insignificance of our globe in purely materialistic terms is explained by Eddington, to quote him once again, with the help of the following example. Imagine, he says, New York’s Grand Central Station filled with particles of dust from the floor to the ceiling and from one end to the other. Concentrate on one particle of dust. That particle of dust represents the size of the earth in relationship to the universe. In quantitative terms, this earth of man is as ridiculously insignificant in its comparative smallness as the rest of the universe is idiotic in its limitless vastness. There is nothing more stupid than mere quantitative size. The mathematically quantified and scientifically objectified universe lacks quality; because of that it is without meaning and value.
  Yet, there is meaning in the world, for man knows about meaning. He searches for it. Even when he denies it, he affirms it. If he reaches the conclusion that there is no meaning to life, he must have some idea of what that meaning ought to be and looking around in the world he cannot find it. Only in the light of some expectation of meaning can he reach the judgment that existence is meaningless. Of course, where there is meaning, there is value; that which is meaningful is valuable, and only that which is valuable can be meaningful. What is the significance of the fact that man asks about meaning and searches for it?
  Camus was of the opinion that the universe was meaningless; only man in it knew about meaning, only he can introduce meaning into it. Notwithstanding the high esteem in which one holds Camus, this kind of reasoning is clearly fallacious. If the universe were meaningless, a chance event, how could man know about meaning? He is part of that same universe, formed by the same impersonal forces. It would be the mystery of all mysteries, the miracle of all miracles, if an unplanned, purposeless, indifferent universe had produced meaning in that tiniest little lump of matter that owed its very existence to a failure of “antiseptic precaution” in Nature. It would be an even deeper mystery than God’s creating the universe <i>ex nihilo</i>. Meaning cannot be a chance event; it has to be <i>meant</i>, intended, willed.
  That the world is God’s creation is not a statement about cause and effect. Creation is essentially different from causation.1<i class="footnote">Cf. this author’s volume <i>God, Man and History</i>, Jonathan David Publishers, New York, 1959, ch. 8.</i> Causation is an event; creation is of the spirit. Creation introduces the idea of intention into the universe. The world is intended, planned, purposed. The world is because it is meant to be. This is, of course, not a scientific statement. But no statement about meaning can be scientific. Yet, meaning is of the very essence of man. To say that the world is divine creation is affirmation of its quality. Creation is the qualitative dimension of reality. The fact that reality issued from the will of God, that it is purposed by God, gives value to being as its essential quality. The world is valuable because of its creation. Creation redeems existence from the nausea of “Istigkeit” (to use a term of Meister Echhart), from the dumbness of mere being. The scientific-quantitative description is an attempt at showing how the world appears; it cannot deal with what it is. The world as creation dwells in the dimension of ends; its quantitative interpretation represents one of its aspects that has meaning only because it provides the means for the realization of ends. Without the reference to the dimension of ends, a scientifically objectified being drowns in absurdity.
  If Camus’ Meursault found redemption for his alienation when, in the absurdity of his own existence, he discovered brotherhood with the meaninglessness of our indifferent universe, the man who lives in the created world is not in need of such desperate solutions at which one grasps in order to overcome the dread of a prison’s death row. The man of creation knows himself as part of a cosmos that comprehends all in the unity of a divine plan. He knows that his existence is intended like the being of everything else that surrounds him. He knows of no cosmic alienation. As God’s creature he belongs in God’s creation. He is not crushed in his physical insignificance by the vastness of the universe. He is meant like everything else. He has his place within the whole and holds it. The innumerable galaxies do not frighten him. The cosmos is his home, no less than it is theirs.
  The man who knows himself as part of creation is distinct from the rest of the universe in that he knows. He who knows of plan and meaning is responsible. Facing the world as creation, man faces God. That is the foundation of his being as a person. To be a person is to be responsible. God’s call to man calls him from the realm of “thinghood” into personal life.
  
  
  
  The Jew who lives in the presence of God knows that the world is purposed and that, therefore, it is valuable and meaningful. But what is the purpose, what is the meaning? The more fundamental question is, why creation at all?
  The most common answer found in philosophical as well as kabbalistic writing is: “It is the nature of the Good One to do good.” Rabbi Shneur Zalman in the <i>Likutei Amarim</i> maintains that God created with His attribute of <i>gedulah,</i> which is the attribute of <i>ḥesed</i>. In other words, He created out of lovingkindness. But lovingkindness toward whom? There is no answer to the question. Prior to creation, there is nothing apart from God. Toward whom, then, is God exercising lovingkindness when He creates? All such and similar explanations are of no avail. In order to act kindly, there must already be something in existence to be the recipient of kindness. But nothing needs nothing, one cannot be kind to nothing.
  The only acceptable explanation seems to be that of Maimonides, who maintains that all we can say in reply to the question why God created is: It was His will to create. Obviously, He must have willed this world, otherwise He would not have brought it into being. The point Maimonides makes is that, no matter what reason we may think we have found for God’s creating, we shall always be able to ask: What for? Did He create the universe to reveal His mightiness? What for? Did He wish to reveal Himself to man, to give him the Torah, the commandments? What for? An infinite being like God, possessing perfection, could not be in need of anything. To want anything would be desiring something. But why should God desire anything? What could He be lacking? Therefore, all we know is that the world is the result of an act of divine volition; but there is no answer to the “why?”
  We might go one step farther. The purpose of the act of creation must have been a divine one. On account of that, its knowledge is inaccessible to man. Even if God desired to communicate to man His own divine reason for wanting to create, our finite minds would not be able to grasp it. He would have had to bestow upon us His divine intellect in order to inform us of the meaning of creation unto Himself. It is, of course, an impossibility to be man, equipped with God’s mind.
  One thing, however, is certain. Since the world is creation, there is purpose to it; there must be meaning in existence. Victor Frankle, in his <i>Man’s Search for Meaning,</i> disagrees with those psychologists who are of the opinion that man is determined by his drives, such as the desire for pleasure or for power, or whatever else the case may be. According to him the importance of the drives is exaggerated. What is decisive for human existence is man’s will for meaning. In the concentration camps, Frankle found that it was not the physically fittest people who had the best chance for survival, but those who, in spite of everything, were still able to retain some sense of meaningfulness in existence.
  Martin Buber maintains that one of the results of a revelational experience is that man comes out of it with the conviction of life’s meaningfulness, with the certainty that from now on nothing can be meaningless. However, what the meaning is according to Buber is not revealed. Revelation has no content according to him. With the certainty that life is meaningful, man has to go into the world and discover the meaning for himself. Sartre believes that man has to create his own values. As we saw earlier, Buber, in disagreement, maintains that values cannot be created; they exist, they are given; they have to be discovered. Similarly, there is meaning; one has to discover it for one’s personal life. In essence, Frankle says the same. One cannot tell anyone what the meaning of one’s existence is; but meaning confronts man and he has to respond to it. There is a serious problem inherent in such a position. If man alone can discover the meaning of his life, if he has to find it, to choose it from among many other possibilities, then clearly everyone is to choose the meaning of his own existence. But if it is up to man, to everyone individually to choose, who is to decide on right or wrong? Every choice of each person is as valid as that of any other. There are then no objective standards by which to choose and to decide. While the practice of human kindness toward all may be meaningful for one person, genocide may be equally meaningful for another. Yet meaning must be personal, it has to be the meaning of my own life; it cannot but be subjective. But if so, the distinction between right and wrong disappears. The floodgates of anarchy, everyone doing his own thing, have been opened on mankind.
  The solution to the problem would seem to be that the subjectively chosen meaning has to be found or discovered or created within an objectively given frame of reference. For a Jew this objective frame of reference is the Torah and the <i>Mitzvot</i> (commandments), which determine for all Jews in common the meaning of being Jews, to live in accordance with the will of God as revealed in His Torah. Outside of this objectively given frame of reference there can be no meaning in being a Jew. In fact, even a person who does not practice Judaism can only be a Jew if he is qualified to be one in conformity with the objective standards that determine what it means to be a Jew.
  However, while the objective frame of reference determines the meaning of being a Jew, it does not determine the specific meaning in the life of this specific Jew or of the other. In other words, that subjective meaning which is essential for every individual in his own personal, unique life situation is not determined by Torah and <i>Mitzvot</i>. It is here and here alone, that Buber and Frankle come into their own. It is up to every individual to discover the subjective meaning of his own personal life, what to do with his life within the objective frame of reference. Others may advise him, may help him, but ultimately the choice must be his own, the decision must be his.
  No one can really tell anyone else what the meaning of his life should be. This is just as well; only a puppet could be so instructed. It is of the very essence of human existence to search for this personal meaning to one’s personal existence, to formulate it, to discover it. It is of the very essence of life’s adventure and man’s creativity. It may even be that, while the meaning of one man’s life is something very tangible and definite, that of another is the search for it. It is told of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov that, lying on his death bed, he was heard to say: “Now I know what I have lived for.”
  As far as a Jew is concerned, despite the fact that he might often feel frustrated, depressed, or dejected at not being able to discover the subjective, personal element within the meaning of his existence, his life can never be completely meaningless. For he shares with all other Jews in the objective meaningfulness to be found within the frame of reference of Torah.
  
  
  
  When modern man seeks for meaning in his life, he usually thinks of self-realization or self-fulfillment. Very often, however, self-realization becomes a form of depersonalization. What is the self? That which is complete within itself knows not of the desire for self-realization or of the drive to self-fulfillment. He or it is what it is and is thus already realized. A tree, for instance, does not strive for self-realization. True, it may be growing, developing from an acorn to an oak, yet at every moment of its existence it is what it is, without expectation of the next phase of its growth. As man looks upon it, an acorn may be seen as a potential oak. But the acorn knows nothing of its potentiality. It is complete in itself. This is the characteristic of every impersonal form of existence. It is fully comprehended in each now; fully realized in its momentary existence. The impersonal lives in timelessness, under the threshhold of time. Only of the impersonal is Locke’s definition of time valid. For the It, time is a continuous dying; each Now is the end of its world, to start again with every new Now.
  To strive for self-realization presupposes freedom. One must be free to choose among different possible courses of action the one that will lead to self-fulfillment. But freedom is a possibility of being, i.e., a form of non-being, something yet to be, a not-yet. What is complete within itself has no freedom; it is already realized. Thus, the self is forever unfinished, is always what it may yet be. By way of its freedom the not-yet is incorporated in every Now of the self. Its Now is open-ended; it is anticipation of the future. The not-yet is forever present in the life of the self. Because of the element of freedom that is part of his destiny, man’s presence is expectation. What does he expect? Himself! In freedom man reaches out toward the not-yet of his being for selfhood. The self of the moment is the self that has to be transcended in order that man may come more richly and more authentically to himself. The personal life is a process of self-transcendence. If one accepts the moment-self as the authentic one, one should not really speak of self-realization. The self of the moment is already realized. In this case, self-fulfillment can only mean living completely in a Now that has lost its open-endedness toward the future. It is the “timeless” dimension of impersonal “thing-hood.”
  When God addressed Adam and gave him his first commandment, He called him from the innocence of completed thinghood in an eternal Now into the personal reality of the not-yet and revealed to him human freedom as the source of responsibility. Only because man is forever not-yet, because his humanity consists in self-transcendence, can he be the recipient of divine commandments. A tree, an animal, and a man when he shuts himself into the satisfied self-acceptance of the eternal Now, know of no Thou-shalt or Thou-shalt-not. Responsibility is the freedom of self-transcendence. Only because of that could man be entrusted with the revelation of God’s word for him. If then man seeks for the specific meaning of his individual existence in “self-realization” within the process of self-transcendence, forever breaking out of the imprisoning Now along the road, he may be granted to hear the Word, guiding him to his own most personal self-transcending destiny.
  
  5 A Jewish Sexual Ethics
  
  
  
  
  
  In the context of the contemporary secular civilization the sexual revolution had to come. It derives its energy as well as its plausibility from varied sources. Firstly, it is the open manifestation of the rebellion against Christian sex ethics which had been occurring under the surface for several generations. It is a revolt against the Christian denigration of the human body and against the Christian approach to sexuality which for many centuries determined the official moral climate in the West. In spite of all the developments in Christian thought since its early days, Christian theology could not fully emancipate itself from the apostle Paul’s teaching on sex, according to which “it is good for a man not to touch a woman,” and “if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.”2<i class="footnote"><i>Corinthians</i> 7, 1, and 9.</i> Thus sex could never completely free itself from the tarnish which was attached to it, as well as to everything else that was of the body, in early Christian thought.
  In fact, only because of this begrudging submission to sex on the part of the Western religious conscience could the ideas of repression and guilt gain such overwhelming importance as they were given in modern psychology. Yet the fact that the rebellion broke into the open with such self-assurance is chiefly due to man’s only more recently acquired self-understanding, which is inseparable from his view of the cosmos and his own place in the scheme of things. On the basis of modern scientific progress contemporary man has formulated his view of life and existence, views which, however, have not—and cannot be—scientifically validated and which are often no less dogmatic than the dogmas of the most religiously orthodox. One should not call this a philosophy, but rather a meta-science. As we saw, according to this meta-science, the cosmos in its entirety is a chance event and man himself, of course, a ridiculously insignificant chance event in the unlimited ocean of a basically meaningless universe. The shattering of the Tablets of the Law, also the direct result of this meta-science, and the subsequent relativization of all values, led in fact to a destruction of all standards, with man walled in on all sides by absurdity. As if this were not enough, modern psychology completed the reduction of man to the level of an animal, a rather complex one but still only an animal. Norman O. Brown, who in a brilliant volume attempts to give us a psychoanalytical explanation of the meaning of history in the Freudian tradition, has the following to say about the present age: “For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure seeking animal. Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, and philosophic exaltation of the life of reason have all left man overly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic.”3<i class="footnote">Norman O. Brown, <i>Life Against Death, the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History</i>, Random House, New York, 1959, p. 31.</i> The emphatic affirmation that try as he might, man can never be anything but an animal presents him with only one choice: he can either strive to become an ascetic animal, and since he will never fully succeed, he will be a neurotic, or he can recognize himself for what he is, a pleasure-seeking animal, and live accordingly. That is what the contemporary sexual revolution is all about—man, accepting himself as an “animal,” wishes to get rid of his neurosis. Now, not all psychologists are Freudians who would accept Freud’s meta-psychology according to which man is fully comprehended by the pleasure principle. Yet all of them that dominate the climate of the age, following a meta-psychology of their own, reduce what used to be considered the essence of man’s humanity to an accidental derivative from his specific animality.
  Given this kind of a meta-science and meta-psychology, which are uncritically accepted by a generation that they begat, the sexual revolution against all repression and inhibition is fully justified. On the basis of its premises, the resulting principle of a liberated sex ethics—that every kind of sexual activity and relationship between consenting adults is permissible—cannot be gainsaid.
  
  
  
  As with every other aspect of Judaism, a Jewish sexual ethics cannot be maintained meaningfully without an understanding of the presuppositions on which it is based. The statement that the world is creation implies that all the vital forces in which human nature shares, that are present within man and carried into life through man, have their place within the scheme of all things. Thus, human sexuality has its Creator-intended function within the plan of creation; it is world-related, handed to man with a goal directed beyond the individual.
  That God created man in His own image, that He breathed into his form the breath of life is, of course an uncompromising rejection of all meta-science and all meta-psychology, which reduce man into a mere member of the animal kingdom. But that man is not an animal is a Jewish affirmation that cannot be given up without surrendering Judaism itself. Man’s humanity is not something derived, an epiphenomenon of his animality; it is as originally given as his instinctual equipment and biological frame. Because of that man’s “animality” too is human. Whereas the secularist of today animalizes the human, Judaism humanizes the so-called animal. Our great teacher, Hillel, considered caring for the body a <i>Mitzvah,</i> a religious responsibility because it meant looking after the “divine image” in which man was created. Notwithstanding all the theological problems of anthropomorphism presented by the concept, it is the whole man, body and mind, instinct and spirit, that was created in God’s image and as such in his complex entirety, represents that image on this earth. Nor is this just teaching unrelated to man’s self-experience. It is more than doubtful that the reduction of man does justice to his existential reality. The reductionist theories are contradicted by the daily behavior of the human being. Man not only desires instinctively, he wills, plans, chooses, accepts responsibility, and creates.4<i class="footnote">Cf. Silvano Arieti’s excellent book, <i>The Will to be Human</i>, Quadrangle Books, New York, 1972.</i> In a public debate with a “radical” Jewish theologian, I induced him to clarify his goal for man. He wanted man to be a healthy animal. What he was unable to grasp was that it was impossible for man to be a healthy animal for the simple reason that in order to be that man has to make a choice, a decision. But no healthy animal, because it is healthy, could ever <i>want</i> to be a healthy animal. Only a sick man could want to be a healthy animal.
  The point of view presented here has been succinctly expressed by Ignace Lepp, who wrote:
  “Only a false reductive method, which takes the most rudimentary for the most natural, would permit us to speak of human instincts as if they were essentially identical with animal instincts. All human instincts are intimately penetrated by the psyche. This is why purely psychic traumas can provoke respiratory and digestive troubles. And the more evolved man becomes, the more his biological instincts become bio-psychic. If we try to deny this state of things we will end not with “pure” animal nature but with a mutilation of human nature.”5<i class="footnote">Ignace Lepp, <i>The Authentic Morality</i>, Macmillan, New York, 1965, p. 177. The idea that human instincts are not identical with animal instincts is a thought that was well understood by the great medieval Jewish talmudist and philosopher, Maimonides. Cf. his <i>Shemoneh Perakim</i>, ch. 1.</i>
  Because of what man is, human sexuality cannot find its fulfillment in the simplicity of primitive satisfaction. As a rebellion against the repressions and inhibitions of a society that has no spiritual, religious or even mere philosophical basis for its sexual taboos, a “return” to primitive sexuality may have its validity. But because man is human and not animal, primitive, purely biological sexuality is bound to leave him empty and wretched. Ultimately a return to the purely biological is not open to him. The natural for man is never purely biological, it is always psychosomatic, or to use Ignace Lepp’s terminology, bio-psychic. Back to nature can only mean back to human nature. Any other kind of “return” is unnatural.
  
  
  
  What are the consequences of these presuppositions? Firstly, just because even the biological and instinctual in man is not purely biological, but in its bio-psychic nature is altogether human, it is not to be rejected, but on the contrary, it is to be accepted. Judaism does not allow for any denigration of the body. The body is not bad, it is not the source of all evil. Saadia Gaon, the outstanding talmudic scholar and Jewish philosopher of the tenth century, had occasion to state unequivocally:
  “As to the objection that is raised against the defilement and the contamination of the soul consequent upon its union with the body, we say, in reply thereto, that the body of man contains no impurity in and by itself. It is, on the contrary, entirely pure, for defilement is neither a thing subject to sense perception nor a requirement of logic. It is purely a decree of the Torah. This law has declared unclean certain secretions of human beings after their discharge from the body, although they do not defile while they are within the body. The aforementioned allegation can be maintained only if he that makes it will impose upon us rules that he has invented out of his own mind and make it obligatory upon us to consider as reprehensible what he so regards. That however, we shall not permit him to do.”6<i class="footnote">Saadia Gaon, <i>The Book of Beliefs and Opinions</i>, translated from the Arabic by Samuel Rosenblatt, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1955, p. 249.</i>
  In other words, while there are indeed in the Bible some ritual laws regarding certain bodily secretions, the body as such is “entirely pure” and as such, according to Saadia’s understanding of Jewish teaching, not only a worthy abode, but even an appropriate companion for the soul on this earth. Integrating Saadia’s view with the idea of the bio-psychic unity that man is, we would say that the body is body only in man’s death, just as the soul is soul only after his death. In life, however, they are linked to each other in such a manner that they interpenetrate. Because of this psychosomatic unity, a denial of either one of them is a betrayal of both. Within Judaism, man is acknowledged in his bio-psychic reality. This is the basis of a Jewish sexual ethics. It excludes primitive biological sexuality as well as sophisticated ascetism.
  This does not mean that there is no adequate appreciation of the power of internal drives, of the libido, especially in its sexual manifestation. On the contrary, there is a great deal of understanding for the struggle in which a person may be involved in trying to control his sexual desire. There is recognition for the fact that human beings may at times, in certain situations, not be able to control their sexuality. For example, a married woman who is forced to submit to sexual intercourse and as the act proceeds becomes cooperative is not considered an adulteress, because once she was forced into that situation she was acting against her will—“closed with desire”—and became powerless against her instinct.7<i class="footnote"><i>Talmud Bavli, Ketubot</i> 51b. Cf. also <i>Ḥagigah</i> 16a, the advice given to a person in the case where he is incapable of controlling his sex drive. Cf. the discussion of the passage in <i>Tosafot ad locum</i>.</i>
  The rabbis in the Talmud are not a bit prudish when they discuss sex. According to their opinion no one is secure in the face of sexual temptation. The most remarkable stories are told about some of the greatest teachers and their weakness of the flesh. Such a story is told of Rabbi Amram the Hasid (the pious). One day they brought to Nehardea some women who had been kidnapped and ransomed. They put them up in the attic of Rabbi Amram, taking care to remove the ladder to the attic. It happened that the flames of the fire illuminated the face of one of the women and Rabbi Amram noticed her. He took the ladder that—according to a bit of exaggeration we assume, could normally be moved only by the combined strength of “ten men”—and set it in the opening in the attic. As he was climbing up, feeling that by himself he could not control his desire, he started shouting: “There is a fire in the house, there is a fire in the house of Rabbi Amram” thus arousing his neighbors and exposing himself to disgrace.8<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Kiddushin</i> 81a.</i>
  While Rabbi Amram was still able to save himself in the last minute by his own exertion, the matter was not so simple in the case of Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Meir, two of the most distinguished teachers of the Talmud. It is told that each of them in his time had derided sinners who could not resist temptation. For their proud self-assurance they were tested by the Tempter. To Rabbi Akiba he appeared in the shape of a woman in the top of a palm tree. Rabbi Akiba went and started climbing the tree after her. To Rabbi Meir the Tempter appeared as a woman on the opposite bank of a river. There was no bridge so the rabbi got hold of a rope that was tied to both sides of the river and started pulling himself across. According to the story both rabbis were saved from sinning because the Tempter was ordered to desist. Because of their merits as great teachers of the Torah, they were protected by a special act of divine grace.9<i class="footnote">Ibid., ibid.</i> Yet, not always did temptation find such favorable resolution in the life of Talmudic teachers. Occasionally there is failure which leads to spiritual tragedy.10<i class="footnote">Cf. e.g. the case of Rabbi Ḥiyya Bar Ashi, ibid. 81b.</i>
  The rabbis in the Talmud had nothing to learn from a Freud regarding the tremendous power of the libido. Nevertheless, they had a very positive evaluation of its function. Rabbi Samuel, the son of Nahman, for instance, comments on the words of the Bible that at the end of creation God saw everything that he had made and behold it was <i>tov me’od,</i> very good: <i>tov,</i> good, that is the <i>yetzer tov,</i> the good inclination in man; <i>tov me’od,</i> very good, that is the <i>yetzer hara,</i> the evil urge in him. The question is, of course, asked: How is this to be understood, how is it possible to call man’s innate inclination for evil “very good?” The Midrash responds: This is to teach you that were it not for “the evil inclination,” man would not care to build a house for himself, he would neither marry nor beget children, nor would he attend to the affairs of human existence.”11<i class="footnote"><i>Bereshit Rabbah</i> 9,9.</i> What Rabbi Samuel calls the <i>yetzer hara</i> seems to be rather close to the Freudian libido or id. It is the vital energy that sustains the life of man and is the source of the sexual drive. Its function is necessary; without it human life would not be possible.
  The same idea is expressed in a rather moving story from the life of Abbaye, one of the outstanding teachers in the post-mishnaic talmudic period. He once overheard a man and a woman making arrangements to set out together early in the morning on a journey on foot. Said Abbaye to himself: I shall follow after them in order to keep them from sinning. He followed behind for three parsangs across meadows. It turned out that as far as the two travellers were concerned it was a very innocent trip. As they reached their destination, Abbaye heard them take leave of each other with harmless civilities: “It was a long way. Our company was pleasant. So long.” Abbaye was rather ashamed, recognizing that he himself could not have travelled with the woman so innocently. “Leaning against a door, he was visibly upset and pained until an old sage came by (to whom Abbaye must have told the reason for his mental anguish) and taught him: The greater a man, the stronger his <i>yetzer,</i> his instinctual drive,” or shall we perhaps render it by saying—the stronger his libido.12<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Sukkot</i> 52a.</i> Sexuality is vitality; but human greatness is also a manifestation of vital energy. Normally, only non-vital people will enjoy comparative freedom from sexuality, but neither will they be burdened with creative potential for human greatness.
  The positive value of universal sexuality is maintained with a sense of humor in the following tale. On a propitious occasion, the Jews asked for merciful support against the <i>yetzer hara</i> of sexual excess (or as we might also say in modern parlance, against the sexual libido). Their prayer was granted and the <i>yetzer hara</i> was handed over into their power. However, a prophet warned them: “Look out now! If you kill this one, the world will be destroyed.” They tied him up for three days. At the end of the three days, when a fresh egg was needed for a sick person, they searched for one in all the land of Israel but could not find a single one. What to do now was their problem. Should they kill him? They would destroy the world. “Let us then ask that he be reduced to half size (meaning that the sexual drive should be limited to marriage alone). But no half things are granted by heaven.” So they decided to blind his eyes, which helped somewhat to reduce his strength.13<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Yoma</i> 69b.</i> There is in this tale an understanding of sexuality as a universal principle that serves life, as well as of the interrelatedness and unity of all life forces. One has to accept the <i>yetzer hara</i> in its universal reality, for without it man could not maintain himself. He depends on nature’s “libido” for his sustenance. But one cannot desire it for the life of nature and limit it only to certain forms of personal life. No half things are granted by heaven. One has to acknowledge the <i>yetzer hara</i> in the wholeness of its universal function.
  
  
  
  However, just because sexuality is a universal life force, it surfaces in man originally as an impersonal drive. It is not what man does, but what is happening to man. One could very well leave it at that, if man were nothing but nature, i.e., animal. There is reason to assume that in the animal kingdom sex is indeed utterly impersonal. It is not what an animal does, but something cosmic that enacts itself through the animal (although the Talmudic teachers were able to discern signs of the personal in the sex act in certain cases even in the animal world).14<i class="footnote">Cf. for instance T.B. <i>Eruvin</i> 100b.</i> However, since the sexual instinct finds its normal satisfaction in union with a member of the other sex, this fundamentally impersonal drive points powerfully to another person. In the animal realm it is essentially a pointing from genital to genital; in the human experience it is a call from one bio-psychic being to another, in other words, a call from person to person.
  True enough, just because man is not merely instinct but also will, not only pleasure-seeking but also meaning-pursuing, he may, if he so chooses, consciously attempt to reduce himself to the genital level of sexuality, and thus instead of becoming a healthy animal become a sick human being. But if he accepts himself in the fullness of his bio-psychic reality, he will find that this most impersonal drive of his nature directs him to the realm of the personal in the most fundamental of all human encounters. The contact between two human beings is never so close, never so intimate or so total as with bio-psychic union between a man and a woman. Unless one sees clearly how in the sexual union the crudely impersonal calls for its accommodation within the most fundamentally personal, one fails to understand the nature of human sexuality. Joseph Fletcher, possibly the most influential protagonist of situation ethics, writes for instance, with true “pharisaic” self-assurance: “The ethical ‘pharisees’ … fail to see that the most evil and destructive traits are not those of the sexual appetite, which is biologically given and morally neutral in itself, but the irrational emotional passions such as hate, fear, greed, ulcerous struggles for discreet status — all of our self-regarding (“sinful”) and antisocial impulses.”15<i class="footnote">Joseph Fletcher, <i>Moral Responsibility: Situation Ethics At Work</i>, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1967, p. 85.</i> What Fletcher apparently does not see is the fact that while what he says about the sexual appetite is indeed true on the animal level, it is not true at all on the level of man. Because in the human experience this most impersonal of all instincts demands its satisfaction in the most personal of inter-human relationships, what is biologically given loses its natural innocence and moral neutrality. In the context of the most intimately personal, the impersonality of the sexual impulse becomes, due to its incomparable energy and driving power, the most self-regarding and the most antisocial of impulses which man has to personalize. Because the sexual union is the most elementary of all interhuman encounters, in which the most impersonal instinct seeks its satisfaction in the most intimately interpersonal realm of human existence, the manner of its satisfaction cannot but fatefully determine the resolution of the conflicts as they arise when the other “self-regarding and antisocial impulses” break into the interpersonal domain. It may therefore very well be that how man deals with personalizing the impersonal in his sex life is the core of all human morality.
  It should be obvious by now that the fundamental principle of the sexual ethics that we have in mind is to personalize the impersonal. It is Jewish because it derives from the two presuppositions of the Jewish world-view that we indicated earlier, namely that the world is creation, and that man is a bio-psychic being. We shall now attempt to develop in more detail the consequences that follow from the basic principle in the light of the two presuppositions. What is the significance of the idea that the cosmos is creation in this context? We saw that the rabbis in the Talmud saw sexuality as a universal force that sustains the life of the world. Its function in nature is quite obviously procreation in its universality. However, what in nature is a given function, in creation is a goal-intended purpose of the creator. In support of the idea, the Talmud quotes the verse from Isaiah:
  “For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens,
  He is God;
  That formed the earth and made it,
  He established it,
  He created it not a waste. He formed it to be inhabited…”16<i class="footnote">Isaiah 45:18.</i>
  To the last line of this verse the Talmud attaches the comment that the purpose of creation, as far as man is concerned, is to understand that the earth must be sustained not as a waste-land but as a place to be inhabited. But since the earth as an inhabited place can only be maintained by procreation, the rabbis were able to formulate their insight by saying: The world was created for procreation. Obviously they do not mean the absurdity that the purpose of the creation was human procreation. The phrase on which they base their interpretation is set in the cosmic context of the creation of heaven and earth. They have in mind “procreation” as a universal purpose. Nevertheless, from these words of Isaiah they derive man’s responsibility to “multiply and to increase.”17<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Eduyot</i> 1, 13; also <i>Gittin</i> 41a. An interesting legal consequence in mishnaic times was the law in the case of a slave who was originally owned by two people and was set free by one of the owners. Now he was in the anomalous situation of being half free, half slave. As a slave he could have married a slave girl; as a free man he could have married a free woman. As half and half he could not marry either. Therefore, the remaining half-owner was obligated to set him free fully, for “He created it not a waste, He formed it to be inhabited.” Needless to say, in contemporary society the governing phrase of the interpretation may have further application to man’s responsibility in the face of the destruction of the ecological order and balance in the universe.</i> The universality of the sexual instinct places man by way of his sexuality in the universal context, only this time the universe is creation. The impersonal drive that takes hold of man seeks the realization of a divine purpose through him. But the purposeful, the goal-oriented, is found only in the realm of the personal. In man the impersonal, universal sex impulse seeks its satisfaction in a personal world. Once again the impersonal points to the other, only this time the other is God. Once again the impersonal is to be personalized, this time in an encounter with God by accepting responsibility for the function of the sexual instinct that was allocated to man by the Creator, by consciously making oneself available for God’s purpose in life.
  To personalize the impersonal sexual instinct is thus a twofold responsibility towards God and towards one’s partner in the bio-psychic encounter of the sexual union. However, on the level of the interpersonal encounter, responsibility stems from the biblical commandment: “And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,”18<i class="footnote">Leviticus 19:18.</i> which in the area of the God-man encounter receives the formulation, “Thou shalt love the Eternal, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy might.”19<i class="footnote">Deuteronomy 6:5.</i> Rather significantly, the rabbis in the Talmud interpreted the phrase “with all thy heart” to mean, with both your inclinations, with the <i>yetzer hatov,</i> the good inclination, and with the <i>yetzer hara,</i> the evil inclination. But we have seen earlier that they also identified the “evil inclination” with the libido.20<i class="footnote"><i>Berakhot</i> 54a.</i> Indeed through the personalization of the libido in its sexual manifestation by using it consciously in the service of a God-intended purpose, one loves God with one’s whole heart, even with one’s <i>yetzer hara</i>. (Of course, the sexual instinct is not the only manifestation of the <i>yetzer hara</i>.) It is doubtful whether in the entire course of man’s history anyone has degraded the reality of love in the world more than Freud, who saw in it nothing but libido energy displacement resulting from frustrated sexuality. We owe him the delightful idea that, for instance, tenderness between mother and child is nothing but the energy-residue from aim-thwarted sexuality. It is the unavoidable deduction from the reduction of man to the animality of the pleasure principle. The truth that we affirm is the recognition of love as an originally given force in the wholeness of the bio-psychic reality of man. It is the most truly personal as the libido is the most truly impersonal. It is through love in the interpersonal encounter that the libido in its broadest meaning is redeemed from the prison of its impersonality.
  
  
  
  The fully personalized sexual union is the fully humanized one. It relates one at the same time to the Creator as well as to a fellow being in the wholeness of each other’s humanity. What in nature is assumed to be purely biological is integrated in its humanized form into the bio-psychic structure of man. However, since humanization implies also the acknowledgement of the divine purpose of the sexual function, the personalized and thus humanized sex act becomes a <i>Mitzvah,</i> legalistically formulated, a divine commandment; in its existential quality, an ethical deed within the structure of a deocentric personal life. In fact, Talmudic texts occasionally call the sex act a <i>Devar Mitzvah,</i> a matter of <i>Mitzvah,</i> not only in its God-relatedness, but also as what takes place in the interpersonal level between a man and a woman.21<i class="footnote">See e.g. T.B. <i>Pesaḥim</i> 72b.</i> Similarly, one might call any act of kindness and care for another human being a <i>Devar Mitzvah</i>. It is rather different a phrase from the four letter word which designates the sex act in its biologically impersonal, and we might now say, dehumanized form. As a <i>Devar Mitzvah,</i> the biologically impersonal is transformed into the human and personal. Jewish sexual ethics can perceive of the sexual act in its most humanized and personalized transformation as an act of sanctification. To sanctify oneself at the moment of intercourse is the ideal of sexual fulfillment.22<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Shevu’ot</i> 18b.</i>
  One may even say that the humanized transformation of the impersonal quality of the sexual instinct is the climax in man’s striving for sexual liberation. We indicated earlier in our discussion that the contemporary sexual rebellion that wishes to do away with the taboos of this civilization had its justification. A civilization which has brought upon itself the collapse of all value standards, which has exiled meaning from the cosmos, whose summation is correctly expressed in the idea of the absurdity of existence, has indeed no grounds on which to base those restrictions on sexual activity which were accepted in the past. However, liberation from sexual codes that can no longer be supported by the basic affirmations of a contemporary society throws man back once again into the domain of the biologically impersonal. Because of the tremendous power of the sexual instinct, man falls into the thralldom of mighty impersonal forces when he liberates himself from social taboos. The sex act is not so much an act as a letting go. It is not man who acts, rather it is something that happens (the impersonal does not act) through man. This, of course, may be enjoyable for a while, but as man allows free entrance to the impersonal into his life, and as the impersonal gets hold of him with its powerfully driving energy, in the long run it cannot but depersonalize man as a whole, “dehumanizing” him far beyond the sexual aspect of his life. Freedom, like love, is of the very essence of personal existence. He who submits to the biologically impersonal is held captive by necessity, the essence of the impersonal. It is not enough to free oneself from meaningless taboos. If one wishes to be human, one has to commit one’s freedom to personalizing the impersonal within man’s bio-psychic reality.
  The humanizing of the impersonal does not in any way take away from enjoyment of the sexual act. It does not attempt to “spiritualize” the act. It wants what it says, to humanize it, including also its full enjoyment within the bio-psychic human reality. In fact, the enjoyment itself is part of the living realization of Judaism. In talmudic times, a <i>Talmid Ḥakham,</i> a Jew who leads a life of piety informed by Jewish learning, would engage in the sexual act once a week. But it was customary to do so on the night of the Sabbath. Rabbi Solomon Yitzḥaki (Rashi), the classical commentator of the Talmud who lived in the eleventh century, explains the reason for the custom thus: “It is the night of joy, of rest (being <i>Shabbat</i>) and of bodily pleasure.”23<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Ketubot</i> 62b.</i> The context into which humanized sensuality is integrated brings about its joyous sanctification.
  Such affirmation of earthly needs and vital impulses is characteristic of the whole system of Jewish law. Sabbath and holy days are not observed “spiritually,” nor should they be so observed. Man is not a spirit. On the Sabbath, therefore, not only the soul should find peace but the body too should rest. One celebrates the day not only by meditation and prayer, but also by wearing Sabbath clothes and by partaking of the Sabbath meals. The Sabbath meal itself is a <i>Mitzvah;</i> it is divine service. And, if properly performed, it is a service of a far higher quality than that of prayer and meditation alone, it is the service of the whole man. The enjoyment of the Sabbath is neither spiritual nor material; it is <i>wholly</i> human. Body and spirit celebrate the Sabbath in communion. The Jew who keeps the Sabbath may say that the material enjoyments of the day enhance his spiritual elation, and his spiritual elation renders the material enjoyments more gratifying. In the unifying act of the <i>Mitzvah,</i> the Sabbath acts as “a spice” to the palate and as an exhilarating joy for the spirit of man.24<i class="footnote">See my <i>God, Man and History</i>, p. 125-6.</i>
  All this may well be said also of the sensual joy of the body. The spiritual in man is never purely spiritual, as the biological is never purely biological. Thus, we may say that it is not only the pleasure of the body that enhances the <i>Oneg Shabbat,</i> the joy of the Sabbath; it is also the joy of the Sabbath that dignifies the pleasure of the body. However, what is said here in the special case of the Sabbath may only be so stated because of its applicability to the widest range of Jewish living. Sensual enjoyment is fully accepted within the purposefully directed experience, which is the essence of its personalization. The biblical commandment, “and thou shalt rejoice before the Lord, thy God,”25<i class="footnote">Deuteronomy 12:19.</i> is not addressed to the spirit of man or to his soul, but to his entire bio-psychic reality. To rejoice before God in the wholeness of human nature is the <i>Mitzvah</i>.
  The Talmud tells the story of a man who was extremely careful in the observance of the commandment of <i>Ẓiẓit,</i> of wearing ritual fringes on the four corners of one’s garb. Once he heard that there was a prostitute in a city by the sea whose fee was four hundred gold pieces. He sent her the four hundred gold pieces and a time was arranged for him. When the day arrived, he went to the door of her house. Her maid went in and told her: “That man who sent you the four hundred pieces of gold has come and sits at the door.” Said she: “Let him enter.” He entered. She had prepared for him seven beds, six of silver and one of gold. They were arranged one above the other and between each there was a ladder made of silver. The highest bed was the one of gold. She climbed up to the top and lay down naked in the golden bed. They he too climbed up to sit down opposite her in the nude. At this moment the <i>Ẓiẓiyot,</i> the four fringes of his garb, came and slapped him across the face. At this, he broke away and sat down on the ground. She too came down and sat on the ground. Said she to him: “By the Capitol of Rome! I shall not let you off until you tell me what blemish you saw in me.” Said he to her: “I swear I have never seen a woman as beautiful as you, but there is a commandment that God commanded us, its name is <i>Ẓiẓit</i>. The words in which they are written contain the phrase, ‘I am the Lord your God’ twice, meaning: I am the one who calls to account; I am the one who will reward. Now, they (the <i>Ẓiẓit</i>) appeared to me as if they were four witnesses.” Said she to him: “I shall not let you off till you tell me your name, the name of your city, of your rabbi, the name of the school where you study Torah.” He wrote it all down and placed it into her hand. Then she got up and divided all her property into three parts: a third for the government, a third for the poor, a third she took with her, apart from “that bed linen” (which was not included in the division). She proceeded to the study house of Rabbi Ḥiyya and said to him: “Rabbi! Command that I be made a convert.” Said he to her: “My daughter, is it perhaps that one of the students appealed to your eyes?” She took the note (that he had given her) from her hand and gave it to him. Whereupon (after reading it) he said to her: “Go and take possession of what you have acquired.” The story concludes with this moral: And so the same bed linen that she once spread out for him to serve his lust, she now spread out for him in consecrated union. This was the reward for the <i>Mitzvah</i> of <i>Ẓiẓit</i> in this world. How much in the world to come, who can tell.26<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Menaḥot</i> 44a.</i>
  Apart from a very few stylistic alterations, we intentionally told the story with exactly the same simplicity as it is found in the Talmud, because every part of it and almost every phrase is important for the understanding of the teaching that is being communicated.
  The story begins with a full recognition of the almost irresistible force of the sexual instinct. The young man is a Talmudic scholar, a pious man. As used to be customary, in addition to observing the commandments of the Torah as befits a student of the Torah, he dedicates himself to the strictest observance of one specific commandment. His sexual desire in this case is not a momentary temptation. The prostitute is extremely expensive, and he has to sacrifice a small fortune in order to get to her. He has to wait for the appointed day and he has to go on a long journey, for she lives in a city “by the sea.” When he arrives, he has to undergo the indignity of having to sit at her door until he is admitted. None of this deters him. He is like one possessed. It is not accidental to the story that the young man had chosen the commandment of the fringes for especially conscientious observance. For of this commandment the Bible says:
  “And it shall be unto you for a fringe that ye may look upon it and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them; and that ye go not about after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye used to go astray.”27<i class="footnote">Numbers 15:39.</i>
  Now, quite clearly, sexuality is that instinct in man which is most likely to lead him astray after “his own heart and his own eyes.” If our young Torah student dedicated himself to the strictest observance of the <i>Ẓiẓit</i> commandment, it was due to the fact that he realized his own weakness in the face of temptation and was struggling to overcome it.
  As he enters the prostitute’s boudoir there is no meeting between them. It is nudity that meets nudity; his sexual desire meets her greed. It is an accommodation between a man who has been reduced to the pleasure principle, and a woman who has been reduced to cupidity. It is sex in its classically impersonal manifestation. What could be more impersonal than an appointment between lust and greed!
  The fringes that take on a life of their own and slap his face are the symbolical expression of his own resistance. The merit of the <i>Mitzvah</i> saves him from complete failure. As he is about to sink into the ectasy of impersonality, a kind of an ego death, he is called back into the personal level of his being, and tears himself away and sits on the ground. The sight of him on the ground calls her from the impersonality of prostitution. She sits down with him on the ground. They sit there still naked, but no longer in the nudity of lust and desire, but in the nakedness of their frail humanity, amidst the ruins of their human dignity. And now “<i>mimaamakim,</i>”—from the depths—to use a phrase of the psalmist, they call to each other. For the first time person meets person. They talk to each other. “She said to him” and “he said to her,” and so again and again. When he first heard about her, she was the celebrated prostitute whose fame was spread across the lands. He had not even set eyes on her; she was the anonymous symbol of sex to him. But now, sitting opposite each other on the ground, he recognizes her as the most beautiful woman he ever saw. He acknowledges her in her full feminine dignity and is able to appreciate her beauty without the eyes of lust. When he first appeared at her door, he was nameless. He was “a man who had sent her the four hundred pieces of gold.” That was enough, nothing else mattered. But now she asks him about names; his name, the name of his city, the name of his rabbi, the name of the house of study where he learns Torah. Names, names, names! Having emerged from the wilderness of impersonality, she is longing for personalization. Who are you, where do you come from, who made you what you are, and how was it achieved? As she meets him as a person she finds herself as one. It is one of those revelational I-Thou encounters about which Martin Buber has taught us and which have within themselves the mystery of sudden transformation. It is redemption from impersonality. She comes out of it a changed human being. And so we assume does he. Finally, his struggles with the heart and the eyes that lead one astray are over. He has gained himself a new heart and he sees with new eyes. Now, the <i>Mitzvah</i> of <i>Ẓiẓit</i> is fulfilled, not only in ritual observance, but also in recovered personal dignity.
  The understanding between the man and the woman is subtly hinted at in the story. She says to him: Tell me your name and all the other names. But he does not tell. He writes it all down for her and …no, the text does not say “he gave her the note” but “ …and put it into her hand.” In this context, “he gave her the note,” would have meant mere technicality of conveying an object from one person to another, the purely physical act of handing over a piece of information. “He put it into her hand,” is the entrusting of something precious into safekeeping. It is not just handing over, it is communication. He did not answer her questions by word of mouth. He wrote it all down. “Please, don’t forget! This is who I am. That is where I come from. This is how I became what I am. All this I place into your hand. Keep it.” The importance of the note is revealed at the end of the story. The rabbi asks her: is it perhaps that one of the students appeals to your eyes? Once again the eyes appear in the story as the doors of temptation, against which the young man sought protection by means of the <i>Mitzvah</i> of the fringes. Now, this is actually what she wants, one of the rabbi’s students. But she does not answer, she does not explain, she does not defend herself. She is silent. And as he, without answering her questions, entrusted the note into her keeping, so now she, in silence, hands over the note to the rabbi. And once again the phrase is used which corresponds exactly to the phrase used for his entrusting the note into her hands. The text does not say, “she gave the note to him;” but instead, that she brought the note out from her hand and gave it to him. The rabbi sees it and accepts her.
  What did Rabbi Ḥiyya see? How was his question answered? There was a beautiful woman in front of him, who could have had the great ones of Rome at her feet. Yet, she was coming to his door to be converted. It is a matter of ultimate importance to her, yet she does not plead her cause. Is there a man involved? She is silent, but with one of those silences that tell more than any words could tell. A silence of truth and trust. Yes, indeed, there is a man. She hands him his paper. The rabbi notices that she had been treasuring it as a trust, which she now surrenders from her hand into his safekeeping as it was entrusted to her. The rabbi reads: there is a man who desired to be known by this woman for what he was, a Jew, who has a master, a student of the Torah. And wanted her not to forget him. She kept his trust and now placed their joint destiny into the rabbi’s hands. Not a word is said. The rabbi understands. Strangely, as he gives his blessing to their union, the rabbi uses what one might think is most inappropriate language in the situation: “Go and take possession of what you have acquired.” It would seem to us that there words are chosen intentionally to make the point of her transformation. Originally, in her state of impersonality, she wanted possession in its impersonal form. She did not want him, but his gold pieces. But now that the impersonality of their relationship has been redeemed, it is person who takes the place of possession.
  There is one more aspect to this story. Though redeemed from his lust, the man is fully open to the woman’s beauty. She, on the other hand, does not hide the fact that she desires the man, but the whole man, in his bio-psychic completeness. The story ends with a statement of the sensual enjoyment of their union, that is seen as the this-worldly reward for the careful observance of the <i>Mitzvah</i> that protects a man against going astray after his “heart” and his “eyes.”
  This story contains all the basic principles of a Jewish sex ethics. It recognizes the force of the sexual instinct while illustrating how this instinct in its impersonal givenness depersonalizes a human being. It need not be repressed. Indeed, it can be raised to the personal level of human existence as the natural outcome of the personalization of the relationship between a man and a woman who encounter each other in the completeness of their bio-psychic being. Finally, as in our earlier systematic presentation, so in the story too, personalization is twofold. It is accomplished between the Jew and his God, and between the man and the woman. Thus they are rejoicing together in the presence of God. Once redeemed from the bondage of the impersonal, neither the eye nor the heart has to be denied. They lead, but do not lead astray.
  One might ask: is this kind of a transformation of the sexual instinct possible? In answer, one might point to the sex life of the Jewish people through the many centuries during which they remained within the structure of their own religious culture and civilization. This kind of personalized sensuality has indeed been generally practiced by Jews through many generations, and has been one of the main sources of the effectiveness of the sexual morality of the Jewish people. Whereas, for instance, according to Freud’s theory of instincts, as civilization progresses, the guilt feeling continues to be intensified and increased,28<i class="footnote">Cf. <i>Civilization and its Discontents</i>, Hogarth Press, London, 1949, pp. 120-122; see also the discussion of this point by Herbert Marcuse in his <i>Eros and Civilization</i>, Vintage Books, New York, 1962, ch. 4.</i> there is nothing of this found in the moral history of the Jewish people. This is no argument against the Freudian psychoanalytical technique of treating neurosis, but it is indeed a refutation of the fantastic meta-psychological myth created by the genius of Freudian imagination. We have to remember that Freud, though himself a Jew by birth, was creating the meta-psychological superstructure to his psychoanalytical technique against the background and within the confines of a non-Jewish and to a large extent spiritually anti-Jewish civilization. As we indicated at the beginning of our discussion, it was a civilization that in its religious manifestation equated sex with sin and in its secular expression reduced man to the level of an animal. Within such a world view, guilt, repression, and inhibition have, of course, an entirely different quality and force than within the Jewish world view we have outlined. Where sex as such is accepted as the positive life-sustaining principle of divine creation, the thought of it does not automatically generate a feeling of guilt. The woman in our story divided all her property, but “that bed linen” she carried with her along the long road of her own transformation which in the end led her to her man. The idea of repression as it is used by Freud may have its place within a culture that sees the body as bad and fallen; it has, however, no place at all besides the recognition of the bio-psychic validity and dignity of human existence. Within a Jewish sexual ethics one might speak of inhibition, but not of repression. However, in Judaism even inhibition has significantly less negative a connotation than within the Freudian construction. With Freud, inhibition is altogether imposed from without. When the pleasure principle clashes with the reality principle, civilization is born as a result of the inhibition of the id. Inhibition is not a choice, but a necessity, and since man is an animal, completely comprehended by his libido, the necessity is alien, external to his nature. No wonder then that with the progress of civilization, inhibition becomes more and more oppressive, the sense of guilt deepens, and finally, one day the individual may no longer be able to bear the burden, and civilization itself will collapse in a universal neurotic conflagration. However, where inhibition is not altogether alien to human nature, when it is not altogether externally imposed, when it is not only a necessity but a choice of man, then inhibition is not merely repressive but also positively formative. It has a positive, intrinsically goal-inspired direction.
  The fifteenth century Jewish philosopher, Rabbi Joseph Albo, has an interesting comment on human nature, which has some bearing on our discussion. In the story of the creation the Bible says at the end of each day: And God saw what He had made and behold it was good. However, after the creation of man, this statement is missing. Albo explained: There are two kinds of perfection, of nature and of man. Nature’s consists in its being, man’s in his becoming. Nature is always in the present, therefore judgment could be passed upon it. As it was created, so it was completed. Man, however, is goal-directed; he was, therefore, incomplete at his creation. The evaluation had to be left in abeyance.29<i class="footnote">Joseph Albo, <i>Sefer HaIkkarim</i>.</i> For the purposes of our discussion we might say an animal is a creature of an enduring present. It lives completely in the Now; a human being, on the other hand is future-open, goal-oriented. Inhibition is a denial of the Now. If one sees man as an animal, inhibition is denial. An animal, because the future is closed to it, cannot tolerate delay in the satisfaction of its instincts, but within the Freudian meta-psychology the progress of civilization is a progressive delaying of satisfaction, a progressive violence done to a creature, that is completely enrapt in its Now. On the other hand, within a religious culture like Judaism, man as a bio-psychic entity is seen as essentially future-open. Inhibition in such a context is not delay, but postponement. But whereas delay is frustration, postponement is growth; whereas delay is violence against the Now, postponement is care of tomorrow; whereas delay is denial, postponement is promise. Within the Jewish sexual ethics one should replace the term inhibition by that of discipline. Inhibition imposed upon a creature of Now is oppression, while discipline chosen by the future-open man is liberation.
  Herbert Marcuse explains that Freud found his theoretical analysis corroborated by the great diseases and discontents of contemporary civilization: “an enlarged cycle of wars, ubiquitious persecution, anti-Semitism, genocide, bigotry, and the enforcement of illusions, toil, sickness, and misery in the midst of growing wealth and knowledge.”30<i class="footnote">H. Marcuse, op. cit., p. 71.</i> Could it not be that, rather than the “diseases and discontents” corroborating the theory, it is the theory that is responsible for them; not just Freud’s theory of the instincts alone, but it, too, within the scientism of the modern age, which for several generations now has been disabusing man of his “illusions” regarding his human status and teaching him with such pervasive intellectual lucidity that man is really “nothing but.” What wonder what he is acting more and more like one who is “nothing but!”
  
  
  
  Two consenting adults engaging in intercourse have little to do with any kind of ethics. It is an arrangement, admittedly more civilized than rape. Jewish sexual ethics is not about sex, but about the union between a man and a woman that includes sexual fulfillment. But why marriage? Could the personalized relationship between them not be realized in the presence of God and yet within the privacy of their consciences? What need is there for its official legalization? In all honesty, one would have to say that the ethical character of the union, as we have defined it, may not <i>co ipso</i> require such public recognition. And indeed, some of the leading rabbinical authorities, like Rabbi Abraham of Posquieres (died 1198) and Naḥmanides (died 1263), were of the opinion that such a union, was in theory permissible.31<i class="footnote">We are referring to the concept of the <i>pilegesh</i>, a union in which a man and a woman live as husband and wife, but without any formal enactment of a marriage ceremony and contract. For the two authorities quoted see the gloss to Maimonides, <i>Yad HaḤazakah, Hilkhot Ishut</i>, ch. 1, 4, and <i>Kesef Mishneh ad locum</i>.</i> Nevertheless, it was frowned upon and generally forbidden in actual practice. Naḥmanides was of the opinion that if allowed, it would lead to promiscuity. What he means is that while the ethical character of the union may not in itself require public sanction, given human nature, and leaving the conclusion and termination of the union completely to the individual conscience, it would in most cases lead to unchastity, to the pursuit of sexual activity on the impersonal level. It may not be true in every case, but the ethical rules and laws of a culture and society have to be formulated with a view to the anticipated behavior of the generality of mankind.
  However, we have to probe deeper. The highest form of the personalization of the relationship between a man and a woman finds its expression in their complete dedication to each other. It includes unquestioning trust in each other, the full acceptance of one’s partner in his or her comprehensive humanity. A love that does not have the courage to commit itself “forever” is lacking in trust, in acceptance, in faith. Love fully personalized desires to be final, ultimate. But how can one commit oneself forever? Only by accepting the bondage of the responsibility of the commitment. In the ups and downs, in the struggle of daily existence, the trust and the faith are tested, often as if by fire. The highest form of personalization of the union is the ultimate of love; but it does not come easy. It is a continuous challenge, it is a task at which man and woman have to work unremittingly. It is not simply a matter of working at sexual compatibility, but at the realization of the potential of their mutual bio-psychic humanity. To persevere often in difficult situations, when it might seem that one’s original hopes have faded, is the highest expression of trust in the human potential of oneself as well as one’s partner. To persevere with the task of personalization is an expression of one’s faith in the possibility of renewal and regeneration. It is faith in man’s capacity for interpersonal care, trust, and love. It is trust that this capacity can be awakened through faith in its existence. It is love in its universal significance. It is confidence that notwithstanding frustrations and disappointments, there is a basic quality of preciousness present in the human being to whom we originally commited ourselves “forever” on which one may continue to work for the realization of the meaning of the original commitment. And this is decisive. This is the secret of personalization of the bio-psychic relationship. It is not an event that is achieved in one moment of grace, but is a process that may take a lifetime, requiring a life-long commitment. Bearing in mind the power of the sexual instinct, and in recognition of the demanding task of its personalization which is inseparable from the continued maturing and deepening of the inter-personal relationship between a man and a woman in the widest sense, the official character of the marriage bonds is an ethical requirement for the surrendering of one’s freedom to dissolve the union at a whim, because of a momentary disaffection or disillusionment. It is indeed a serious business. The binding formality of the marriage is the mutual acceptance of the responsibility to persevere in the task of the full actualization of each other’s potential for the inter-personal life, it is a commitment to the trust in that potential and as such an affirmation by innumerable daily deeds of one’s faith in the human being on the universal plane. The formal marriage is not to be based on the present love that at this moment unites two human beings, but on the trust in the self-transcending power of that love, in its as yet unfathomed potential that through care, devotion, and the practice of basic humanity and decency will carry two human beings to the richest bio-psychic fulfillment of which they are capable. However, just because personalization is the goal, the Jewish marriage does not include the commitment “till death us part.” Failure is always possible, mistakes are often made, and the relationship may degenerate into such an abysmal failure of impersonality that divorce may become a moral necessity.
  Thus far, we have discussed marriage only from the angle of the purely personal and, in a sense, self-centered relationship between a man and a woman. However, as we saw, personalization has to be pursued also on the cosmic level by relating the interpersonal union to the divine purpose of creation that seeks its realization through it. It includes the conscious identification of a man and a woman with that purpose, of merging by choice with the cosmic stream of continued propagation of new life, thus becoming partners of God in the work of creation. This new life, the life of a new generation, is no longer a purely personal matter. Because of its manifold implications and consequences, it is a matter of communal relevance and concern. This aspect of the task of personalization asks for the integration of the Jewish marriage within the religious ethics of the totality of Jewish living. This is the public share in every marriage. In the interest of the new life, it has to ensure, as far as humanly possible, the durability of the union. However, there is a specifically Jewish concern with every Jewish marriage. One might say that at the start of the way of the Jew through history stand the words which God said of their father Abraham:
  “For I have known him, to the end that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice; to the end that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him.”32<i class="footnote">Genesis 18:19.</i>
  The conscious identification with the divine purpose of the life-propagating cosmic principle is not simply the biological transmission of life from generation to generation. This would still be an act of inpersonality. As far as the Jew is concerned, the cosmic principle is personalized when it is made to serve the transmission of the life of Judaism from generation to generation, What God had “spoken of Abraham” was never meant to be “brought upon him” in his own lifetime. It was to find its fulfillment in the course of the fullness of the bio-psychic history of all his children. Judaism is a process through history, beginning with Abraham, the father, moving towards its culmination in Abraham’s child, the Messiah, when all history will be fully redeemed from the bondage of the impersonal. Because, in history, Judaism is forever striving for its realization, it is always lived with a sense of the not-yet. It is forever lived in the future and with responsibility toward that future. It is what it will yet be. A Jew, who desires to be one, is always a link in the generations, a child that receives and a parent that transmits with the intention and the freely accepted responsibility of furthering through time the bringing about at the end of time what God had “spoken of Abraham.” Personalization of the union between a man and a woman is to be sought on the interpersonal level, in the presence of God, with the acceptance of responsibility for the historic destiny of all Israel. That is what Jewish ethics means by marriage and family. That is what we mean by the marriage formula: “Thou shalt be sanctified unto me according to the law of Moses and Israel.”
  
  
  
  We have analyzed what we consider to be the basic principles of a Jewish sexual ethics that may be crystallized from Jewish tradition. We shall now deal with some of the consequences for actual behavior that follow from these principles.
  Originally, it was customary for marriages to be arranged by a matchmaker or even through a <i>shaliaḥ</i> (an agent with the power of attorney), without the groom and the bride seeing each other first. However Rab, one of the most authoritative teachers of the Talmud in the second century taught: “It is forbidden for a man to espouse a woman without having seen her first, for he might find some blemish in her that might alienate him from her.” Significantly, the reasoning why such a situation should be prevented from arising is based on the biblical verse: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.33<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Kiddushin</i> 41a.</i> In other words, not simply because of possible disappointment, but because the personal relationship of love between one human being and another may be prevented from becoming a reality. Another teaching of Rab should be read in a similar light. Child marriages were once an acceptable practice, but Rab declared: A father is forbidden to give his minor daughter in marriage until she has sufficiently grown to be able to say: “This is the man I want to marry.”34<i class="footnote">Ibid., ibid. Cf. also <i>Tosafot</i> ad loc., under <i>Assur le’adam</i>, trying to justify, by pointing to the precarious situation of the Jewish communities in the Middle Ages, why the rule of Rab was not adhered to.</i> Rab also warned people against marrying for the sake of money.35<i class="footnote">Ibid. 70a.</i> The words of the Bible, “Thou shalt not go astray after your own eyes and after your own hearts,” were interpreted a generation earlier by Rab’s teacher, Rabbi Judah the Prince, editor of the <i>Mishnah,</i> as including the warning: “A man shall not drink from one cup while setting an eye on another.” Several generations later, another teacher in the Talmud applied this not only to a case when a man is intimate with his wife while thinking of a strange woman, but even to a case of polygamy where a man is thinking of another one of his wives.36<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Nedarim</i> 20b.</i> Another talmudic teacher, Rabbi Assi, taught that a man is forbidden to compel his wife to have intercourse. Others before him had already enjoined that a man should be extremely considerate in intimacy with his wife. He should be aware of her needs, he should please her before the intercourse, he should communicate with her before the act and even during it, bringing joy to her.37<i class="footnote">See e.g. T.B. <i>Eruvin</i> 100b and <i>Berakhot</i> 62a. Cf. also the relevant passages in the code of Maimonides, <i>Ishut</i> 15, 17 and <i>Tur Even HaEzer</i> ch. 25, also <i>Shulḥan Arukh</i>, ibid.</i> In a striking passage, Rabbi Levi, also of the second century, gave a rather surprising interpretation to the following words of God through the prophet Ezekiel: “…and I will purge out from among you the rebels and them that transgress against Me…”38<i class="footnote">Ezekiel 20:38.</i> by saying: “These are the people who compel their wives into intercourse, who are intimate with their wives even though they hate them…who quarrel with them when they are together, who have sexual relationships while drunk, who engage in the sex act even though they have already divorced their wives in their hearts…”39<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Nedarim</i> 20b.</i> The medieval commentators explain this passage with particular reference to the drunk. One says: his sex act is not a true union but an act of prostitution, for he is bent only on the act itself. Another says: because of his drunkenness, he does not consider his wife at all.
  Because of the nature of the relationship between man and woman, all these rules of sexual behavior are enjoined on the husband. But there are also some statements which speak of the conduct of the wife in the sex act. For example: “Our masters said: ‘when a woman lies with her husband and thinks of a man whom she saw in the road, there is no greater lewdness than that…’ ”40<i class="footnote"><i>Midrash Rabbah, Bemidbar</i> 9.</i> The very strong phrasing is an indication that from the point of view of the most intimate interpersonal relationship, this was considered a worse degradation of its moral character than even the act of outright sexual unfaithfulness. All these rules and principles of behavior have one thing in common: they all aim at the elimination of the impersonal from the sexual union and its consecration through personalization. They are equally binding on both sexes. They are directed against using another person as a sex object. In accordance with talmudic methodology, the rules are usually derived from, or homiletically related to, some verse in the Bible. Most impressive, however, is the statement of Rabbi Levi, who as we saw, applied the terms of “rebels and transgressors” against God to people who degrade the satisfaction of their sensual desires to the level of the wholly impersonal. It is considered rebellion and transgression against God. This is in keeping with our main thesis. Personalization includes relatedness to the divine purpose. Sex indulged on the impersonal level is not only a degradation of one’s sex partner, but also a rejection of what God intended sex to be.
  A few more words have yet to be said on the question of birth control. Does our presentation not exclude it completely? This is not the place to give a comprehensive or even somewhat adequate discussion of the subject.41<i class="footnote">The subject has been treated excellently by Rabbi D.M. Feldman in his work, <i>Birth Control and Jewish Law</i>, New York University Press, 1968.</i> It should be stated, however, that Jewish sexual ethics does not insist that the sex act always be directed toward procreation. If that were so, marriage could not continue beyond the wife’s child bearing age. Marriage to a woman who was not fertile would then be against Jewish law. While at one time such a marriage was to be dissolved after ten years, the custom is—as explicitly stated in the <i>Shulḥan Arukh</i>—no longer to be observed.42<i class="footnote"><i>Shulḥan Arukh, Even HaEzer</i> 1,3, <i>Rema</i>.</i> Cases of actual birth control, permitted or even required, are discussed in the Talmud and ruled upon in the codes.43<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Yevamot</i> 12b and other places.</i> Special cases of rape, of threat to the health of the mother, and numerous others, have been discussed in the rich responsa literature through the ages. It is not the intention of our presentation to give rulings in specific cases. What we should bear in mind is that whenever birth control is permissible or even mandatory, or when a certain union, even though childless, is yet to be maintained, what then follows in practice is, just because it is done in the light of the teaching of the Torah, still an act of personal relatedness to God, the creator of life! Because the question was originally asked of Judaism, one acts then with full awareness of one’s responsibility toward the divine purpose that seeks its realization through us.
  Jews today disagree as to what extent Judaism requires of them that they adhere to the interpretation of <i>halakhah</i> (Jewish law) as promulgated by one or the other trend within Judaism. It seems to us, however, indisputable that anyone who desires to live his life as a Jew, will have to adopt a sexual ethics whose goal it must be to personalize his sexual relationship on the threefold level that we have indicated: the interpersonal, as between man and woman; the cosmic, as between God and man; and the historic, as between the individual Jew and the destiny of the Jewish people through the ages. Of a union established on such foundations, Rabbi Akiba would say: A man and a woman who are worthy, the <i>Shekhinah</i> (Divine Presence) dwells in their union.44<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Sotah</i> 17a.</i> Through their achievement in the personalization of their relationship, their life together makes room for God within the bio-psychic fulfillment of human existence, for a God not of asceticism or of life-denying spirituality, but a God of a faith of life-affirming and life-desiring sanctification.
  
  III Torah For Living
  
  6 The Concrete Situation and Halakhah
  
  
  
  
  
  
  We recall Sartre’s example of the young Frenchman who could not decide between his two duties and who had no code to guide him. Exactly this kind of a problem has confronted Judaism since its inception. Within the framework of Judaism the young man’s problem would be formulated in the following manner: Take the case of a <i>Milḥemet Mitzvah</i>, a war of aggression against the Jewish people of a kind that the Torah commands that even a “bridegroom has to leave the bridal chamber” in order to join the ranks.1<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Sotah</i> 44b.</i> One young man is the only support of his old mother, and the Torah commands him, “Honor your father and mother.” Which <i>Mitzvah</i> should the son follow? Now this is a typical halakhic problem. Indeed, it is in order to meet the challenge of each unexpected new situation on the basis of the teaching of the Torah that the <i>halakhah</i> or, as it should be called in its origin, the <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i>, the oral Torah, had to be placed beside the <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i>, the written Torah. Similarly, the case histories of Bishop Pike, to which we made reference in the third chapter2<i class="footnote">See above, p. 27.</i> are exactly the kind of questions that are dealt with in the <i>halakhah</i>. The woman who was an alcoholic to the extent that, as we would say, <i>Ḥayyei Ishut</i>, marital life, became impossible, represents indeed the kind of question that has been discussed in innumerable responses of the rabbis (though the case need not have been alcoholism, but some other affliction having the same results). Judaism has codes but — as with all codes — they do not deal with specific situations that are often unique. However, for very potent reasons — and we have analyzed them above — Judaism does not leave the decision to the husband to act spontaneously, guided only by “the law of love” as he understands the law in the unique situation of assumed incoherence with any previous procedure of a similar nature. There are no codes for specific situations. <i>Halakhah</i> is the life of the Torah that renders decisions in the concrete situation in the spirit of the principles and values that are the very heart of the Law.
  
  
  
  Rabbi Joseph Albo, the fifteenth century Jewish philosopher, was a disciple of Rabbi Ḥasdai Crescas, himself a philosopher and outstanding rabbinic scholar from the school of the great Rabbenu Nissim (<i>Ran</i>). His background is well-authenticated. Albo has the following to say for the need of a <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i>, an Oral Tradition not set out in any code:
  “It is impossible that God’s Torah should be complete in such a manner that it should provide in advance for all times. The forever emerging new particulars of the law, the affairs of men, in laws, and things enacted, are too numerous to be contained in a book. Therefore, at Sinai Moses received orally general principles, briefly hinted at in the Torah, so that through them teachers in each generation may promulgate the new particulars.”3<i class="footnote"><i>Sefer HaIkkarim</i> III, ch. 23.</i>
  This is a bold statement coming from a spiritual descendant of Rabbenu Nissim. Albo intends to explain why <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i> is not enough. The Law, as it is laid down in the Torah, cannot rule in anticipation of every possible new situation. It is for this reason that the <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i> was needed to guide the teachers by general principles to reach decisions in the concrete situation. This is the very essence of the <i>halakhah</i>.
  Let us see how <i>halakhah</i> functions; what is the work that it does. Let us look at some quite well-known examples, as well at others less well-known. A very famous case of a halakhic problem and its solution is Hillel’s <i>prosbul</i>. To put it concisely and perhaps not quite accurately, it was the transformation of private debts into public debts. Otherwise, in accordance with the written law of the Bible, these debts would have been forfeited in the <i>shemittah</i> year. This was a bold innovation, which Samuel, of a later generation, would have liked to abolish. How and why was it instituted by the great Hillel? He was committed to the law of the <i>shemittah</i>. But in his time, this law came into conflict with other valid concerns of Judaism. On the one hand, there was a Torah obligation to protect the interests of the poor who, as the seventh year was approaching, could not obtain any loans for fear that in the <i>shemittah</i> year the money would be lost. On the other hand, there was also the important practical consideration for the effective functioning of the economic process within society, which is also a valid concern of Judaism. Rab Ḥisda expressed the meaning of the term <i>prosbul</i> with an etymologically monstrous, yet essentially correct interpretation: <i>pros bulee ubutee</i>, an ordinance in the interest of the poor and the rich.4<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Gittin</i> 36b, 37a.</i> Where did Hillel find the authority for his innovation? Where was it written in the Torah? It was, of course, not found in any text, in any code. He found it within himself. There was a clash between equally valid laws, principles and concerns of the Torah. He had to find a resolution to the conflict. There was no text, no <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i> to tell him which course to follow. He could find the solution to the problem within his own understanding of the comprehensive ethos of Judaism as he was able to gather it in his own heart and in his own conscience from the totality of the Torah-teaching and the Torah-way of life.
  Let us consider another example. According to the written law of the Bible, two witnesses are required in order to establish a fact in court. Yet, in the case of a husband who has disappeared, the teachers of the Talmud accepted the testimony of one witness alone to prove the death of the husband in order to allow the wife to remarry. How could they rule in this manner against an explicit law of the Torah? There are all kinds of interpretations for this bold innovation.5<i class="footnote">See T.B. <i>Yevamot</i> 88a, and the relevant commentaries <i>ad locum</i>.</i> However the technicality of the ruling may be explained, the decisive motivation for the ruling was, as it is clearly stated in the Talmud:6<i class="footnote">T.B. ibid.</i><i>mishum agunah akeelu boh rabbanan</i>, meaning: in order to save the wife from the status of an <i>agunah</i>, i.e., from being a woman tied, to the end of her days, to a man who has disappeared, they applied the law leniently in her case. Once again, it is the authentic halakhic problem situation. There is the written law of the Bible, but this time it is in conflict with another obligation of the Torah-true Jew, the care and concern for a woman whose husband has disappeared. Once again, there was no written code to consult. On the basis of the rabbis’ understanding of the overriding Torah-purpose formulated nowhere explicitly, but absorbed into their own consciousness as the result of a life of dedication and commitment to Torah and its living realization, they gave the answer, a halakhic solution to a halakhic problem.
  The examples are innumerable. For instance, the case of Rabba bar Bar Ḥana who had hired some workers to carry some barrels of wine. Somehow, the workers broke the barrels and the wine was lost. Whereupon Rabba took away their clothes as a guarantee for, or in lieu of, damages, to which he thought he was entitled. They brought the case for adjudication before Rab, who ruled that the clothes were to be returned to the workers. Asked Rabba: “Is this the law?” And the answer was: “Yes! for it is written; ‘That you walk in the way of good men.’ ” The clothes were returned. The workers, however, were not yet satisfied. “We have worked all day and we are hungry,” they said, claiming their wages. Ruled Rab: “Go and pay them their wages.” Once again Rabba asked: “Is this the law?” and the answer was given: “Yes! For the verse in Proverbs concludes: ‘And keep the paths of the righteous.’ ”7<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Baba Metziah</i> 83a.</i> Legalistically speaking, Rabba, of course, was right. Such was not the law. But the case before Rab presented one of those characteristically halakhic problems. There was the law of damages. But there was also the obligation to care for the disadvantaged. Once again, the decision was made on the basis of a rabbi’s appreciation of the more comprehensive concern of the Torah. Rab’s decision was not in accordance with the specific law of damages, but with the total purpose of the Law of the Torah. It was <i>halakhah</i>.
  We shall conclude with the discussion of two more cases. In recent times, due to a <i>cause celebre</i> in Israel, the problem of the <i>mamzer</i>, of the bastard according to biblical law, became for a while the preoccupation of many of us. Without commenting on the case itself, let us see how certain aspects of the problem were dealt with in the Talmud. There is, for instance, a statement by Rabbi Yoḥanan, the leading teacher of his time in Eretz Yisrael, who swore that he could prove that <i>mamzerim</i> were present in a family. According to the law, that would disqualify its members from intermarriage with the “pure families.” Yet he refrained from revealing the facts. As he said: “What can I do? Some of the <i>gedolei hador</i>, the great men of this generation, are mingled among them.”8<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Kiddushin</i> 71a.</i> The question might well be asked: Who gave Rabbi Yoḥanan the authority to disregard a biblical commandment and allow marriage with members of a family who were, by the law of the Torah, to be excluded from the community? But once again we have before us the typical halakhic problem. There is the law on <i>mamzerut</i> in conflict with another law and concern of Judaism, the respect due to the <i>gedolei hador</i>, the great men of Israel, who are bearers and teachers of the Torah, whose function is vital for the preservation of Judaism and the Jewish people. There was no code extant to tell Rabbi Yoḥanan how to act. On the basis of his total understanding of what Judaism demands of the Jew, he decided not to reveal the facts. In the Talmud itself, his decision is related to a principle formulated by Rabbi Yitzḥak: “Once a <i>mamzer</i> has ‘sunk’ into a family, leave him there,” meaning that even though one could determine which part of the family is “pure” and which is not, do not investigate, do not ferret out the <i>mamzer</i>. This principle is further broadened into the rule that if one knows with certainty of a <i>mamzer</i> who could be simply singled out, but the case is not generally known, one is not permitted to reveal the truth. One might wonder how such leniency could be justified in the face of a clear biblical ruling on the exclusion of the <i>mamzer</i> and his descendants all generations from intermingling with the community. Undoubtedly, here, too, biblical teachings in conflict with each other in a given situation had to be considered. On the one hand, the law concerning the <i>mamzer</i>; on the other, considerations of justice and pity for the innocent person and his offspring. (The rabbis in various places had the courage to question the justness of the law regarding the <i>mamzer</i>.) Thus, with true halakhic boldness, out of their comprehensive interpretation of Judaism’s meaning, they limited the application of the law.
  One of the most striking examples of halakhic boldness and independence found in the Talmud is the great debate about the <i>tanur shel Akhnai</i>, the oven of Akhnai. The subject matter of the debate itself is irrelevant to our discussion. The dispute over the law in this case raged between Rabbi Eliezer, the son of Horkenos, and the other masters. Since his colleagues did not accept his arguments, the mighty Rabbi Eliezer wrought a number of miracles to prove that he was right. The miracles were disregarded. Finally, a voice from heaven came to the support of Rabbi Eliezer declaring: “What do you want from Rabbi Eliezer? The <i>halakhah</i> is always as he teaches it!” What was there for the rabbis to do? The Talmud continues the story: Rabbi Joshua then stood up and said (quoting from the Bible, somewhat out of context): “It is not in heaven!” And this explanation is given: Said Rabbi Jeremiah: “What does it mean, ‘It is not in heaven?’ The Torah has already been given to us on the mountain. We pay no attention, not even to a heavenly voice. Because You (God) have already written in the Torah at the mountain: ‘Decide according to the majority.’ ” 9<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Baba Metziah</i> 59b.</i>
  How did the rabbis resolve the confrontation between the divine voice, which they clearly received, and their own consciences as to what was the right decision in the case of the oven? They beat the divine voice with God’s own words, as they understood those words. However, their own personal share in the decision is obvious. For one could have easily argued with Rabbi Joshua: it is true that one should rule in accordance with the majority opinion, but only when the discussion is among men. However, in a debate with God Himself, how dare you rule against God? Indeed, how dare you enter into a debate with Him? Yet, the rabbis did rule against the voice from heaven. Once again, there was a conflict between two demands of the Torah: whether to obey the heavenly voice, or to administer the law in a given case as they were able to understand it. Once again, the conflict was resolved on the basis of a more comprehensive principle which, in the rabbis’ own estimation, deserved priority. The story itself finds its charming conclusion as follows: Rabbi Natan met the prophet Elijah (who, in Jewish lore, occasionally walks among the people and reveals himself to them) and asked him, “What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do in that hour (of the great debate)?” Said Elijah: “He laughed and exclaimed, ‘My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.’ ” 10<i class="footnote">Ibid., ibid.</i> The postscript to the story is decisive. To His own joy, God is overruled. A specific word of God is controlled by a more comprehensive divine command. Therein lies the secret of the creative vitality of the <i>halakhah</i>. We might now formulate it more generally. When, in a given situation, a specific law is in conflict with another law, principle or concern of the Torah, the specific law may be limited in its application, reinterpreted, adapted, suspended or changed in this one situation, but not abolished, by the overruling concern of the total Torah.
  We may now be in a better position to understand why the <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i>, the Written Torah, is not enough, why it needed to be completed by a <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i>, the Oral Torah and why the <i>halakhah</i> could not be anything else but oral teaching. Every written law is somewhat “inhuman.” As a code laid down for generations it must express a general idea and an abstract principle of what is right, of what is desired by the lawgiver. But every human situation is specific and not general or abstract; in a sense, every human situation is unique. No general law speaks to the specific situation. The uniqueness of the situation will often call for additional attention by some other principle, which has its validity within the system. Two witnesses are necessary to establish a fact. That rule has general validity. But the woman whose husband has disappeared is in a specific situation. The law of the Torah itself calls for responsible care for her specific right. Resolution can be found only in the totality of the ethos of the law. But no written code can provide the resolution. Once you write it down as a code you have generalized it. Only the Oral Torah, alive in the conscience of the contemporary teachers and masters who can fully evaluate the significance of the confrontation between one word of God and another in a given situation, can resolve the conflict with the creative boldness of application of the comprehensive ethos of the Torah to the case. Thus, <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i>, as <i>halakhah</i>, redeems the <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i> from the prison of its generality and “humanizes” it. The written law longs for this, its redemption, by the Oral Torah. That is why God rejoices when He is defeated by His children. Such defeat is His victory.
  According to an opinion in the Talmud, God concluded His covenant with Israel only on account of the Oral Tradition.11<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Gittin</i> 60a.</i> A covenant is a relationship of mutuality. The covenantal relationship could find no expression in the revelation and acceptance of the Torah at Sinai. It was a case, as the Talmud puts it, of <i>kafah aleihem har kegigit</i>, a law given, imposed. Only in <i>halakhah</i> is the covenant, as mutuality of relationship, fully present. <i>Halakhah</i> is not subjective adjustment at all (though a specific law may be adjusted, but not for the sake of adjusting to the situation). The very essence of covenantal mutuality cannot be subjectivity; but neither can it be without subjective involvement on both sides. <i>Halakhah</i> is not subjective, but it has a subjectively creative element to it. The halakhist recognizes the will of God as expressed in the Torah; he is wholly committed to the law and the teaching of the Torah. But in the mutuality of the covenant the responsibility has fallen to him to take upon himself the risk of determining, in the light of the totality of Torah teaching and Torah living, the manner in which the will of the other party to the covenant is to be realized in a specific situation. Ultimately, he has to do that in the independence of his own Torah-imbued conscience. This is our share in the covenant, the existential component of our participation in it. Loyalty to the Torah, to the divine partner to the covenant, demands that we accept the responsibility, notwithstanding the risk involved in the subjective aspect of our participation. Only thus may the generality and abstractness of the written Torah be transformed into <i>Torat Ḥayyim</i>, its realization in whatever situation Jews may find themselves in the course of history.
  As we confront unanticipated situations, can we in this generation proceed with the same surety of method and authenticity of purpose as did the teachers in the time of the Talmud and, in some measure, for a while even beyond it? Unfortunately, for the time being, the answer has to be in the negative. In the course of the ages a calamity has overtaken the <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i>, the Oral Torah. In the course of time, what was to be oral teaching became more and more committed to writing. The first “text” of the Oral Torah was the <i>Mishnah</i>. In the <i>Gemara</i>, which is usually understood to be the explanation of the mishnaic text, one notices the struggle of the Oral Torah, still very much alive, with the mishnaic phase of its solidification. There is a continuous tension between the oral teaching and the written word of what, too, was, in its origin, <i>Torah SheBe’al Peh</i>. The text is “corrected”; often a law formulated in the <i>Mishnah</i> as a general principle is interpreted to mean only a single rule in a specific case. The plain meaning of the text is often changed into its very opposite by an insertion. Interpretation is often “creative,” in that it may disregard syntax and literal meaning. The whole of the <i>Gemara</i> testifies to the unavoidable struggle of the spoken word of the <i>halakhah</i> with its solidification in a text. But then, the <i>Gemara</i>, too, was “concluded.” And now the Oral Torah had been committed to two texts. However, the second text has a much less solidified form of the oral teaching than the first. There is an essential difference between the spoken and the written word. Whereas the <i>Mishnah</i> was, indeed, a transformation of the spoken word into the written one, the <i>Gemara</i> was the writing down of the spoken word in a manner that preserved its essential spoken quality. The <i>Mishnah</i> is a text; the <i>Gemara</i> is more like notes for a text.
  Then came the third phase, that of the codifiers. Maimonides, for instance, in his <i>Mishneh Torah</i>, imitating the mishnaic style, transformed the “notes” of the <i>Gemara</i> into a text, and thus transformed the entire extent of the Oral Torah into a new kind of <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i>. The ultimate outcome of this process was, of course, the <i>Shulḥan Arukh</i>.
  Thus, what was not meant to be did come about: the Oral Torah became a written one. In fact, this whole development took place in actual violation of a principle of the Torah, according to which it was forbidden to commit the Oral Torah to writing.12<i class="footnote">Ibid. 60b.</i> Why, then, was it done? One might apply to this entire development what was said in the Talmud of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, who allowed themselves to study the written version of certain parts of the oral tradition. It is said that they did it following a verse in Psalms13<i class="footnote"><i>Psalms</i> 119:126.</i> which, in a famous Talmudic interpretation reads: When it is time to act for God, one may violate His commandments.14<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Gittin</i> 60a.</i> They meant to say that, since it was impossible to preserve the entire body of the oral teaching in memory alone, some parts of it had to be put into writing, especially in the light of the vicissitudes, uncertainties, and destruction of communities and talmudic academies in the history of the Jewish people in many lands. This conclusion is supported by Maimonides’ Introduction to his monumental halakhic work, the <i>Mishneh Torah</i>.
  This means that the transformation of the Oral Torah into a text was brought about by the course of history. When the spoken word was forced into the straitjacket of a written mould it was an unavoidable violation of the essence of <i>halakhah</i>. It was no one’s fault; nevertheless, it was a spiritual calamity of the first magnitude. Orthodoxy is, in a sense, <i>halakhah</i> in a straitjacket. Having had to transform the Oral Torah into a new written one, we have become Karaites of this new <i>Torah SheBikhetav</i>, forced upon us by external circumstances.
  It was part of the spiritual tragedy of the <i>Galut</i> that exactly what <i>halakhah</i>, in its original vitality and wisdom, was intended to protect us from, has happened. God can no longer rejoice over His “defeat” by His children. It is a condition we have had to accept. It is the price we have paid for the preservation of our identity and Jewish survival.
  Today however, we are faced with unprecedented new challenges and problems, problems of a true halakhic nature, which require solution in the true halakhic spirit. This is true in the free societies in which Jews live, but it is compellingly manifest in the State of Israel. When some leading rabbinical authorities there maintain that <i>halakhah</i> can solve all of the problems that may be raised for Judaism in a modern state they are right and they are wrong. They are right, for <i>halakhah</i> in its original strength could solve all such problems. Yet, they are wrong, for <i>halakhah</i>, in its present strait-jacketed state, cannot fulfill that function.
  This is certainly no plea for reform. We believe that many of our inherited moulds are leaking and cannot meaningfully contain the life that has fallen to the lot of our generation. What is needed, first of all, is to retrace our steps. To return to the original <i>halakhah</i>, to rediscover it, and, having rediscovered it, to restore it to its original function. If only the problem were thoroughly understood, it would liberate us from the stultifying burden of this “Karaite <i>halakhah</i>”. We would then see that in this generation, we have been called upon, as it were, by another <i>bat kol</i> to accept the responsibility to make use of whatever is still left of the Oral Torah in its textual solidification. It would be the beginning that would lead us back to the original source and strength of <i>halakhah</i>. It would be the beginning of its restoration to its original vitality and dignity, for the sake of which God concluded this covenant of mutuality with Israel. What is needed is not less study of Torah, but better study of Torah. What is needed is at least one talmudical research institute that would be dedicated to this task of rediscovery of <i>halakhah</i> and—at first—its intellectual restoration. What is needed is not less dedication to <i>halakhah</i>, but more faith in <i>halakhah</i>. Where there is greater faith, greater boldness is justified.
  As in the past, because it was a time to act for God, and shackles had to be placed on the Oral Torah in violation of God’s command, so now the hour has come when the need to act for God places upon us the responsibility to free the Oral Torah from its shackles in obedience to God’s original command. There are risks involved in such an undertaking. Because of it we need, not less, but more <i>yirat shamayim</i> (fear of God).
  
  7 The Status of Woman within Judaism
  
  
  
  
  
  Unfortunately, very little is being done to cope with some of the most serious problems that afflict the Jewish people internally, which bodes ill for the future of Judaism. This is most disturbing in the ethical and moral realm. Our first concern in this regard is the status of woman within Judaism.
  In the context of a religious civilization, the thought that the union between a man and a woman may be deserving of the company of the Divine Presence suggests a dignity granted to the woman which may hardly be surpassed. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to gain a clear view of how the woman was seen in Jewish tradition, how she was evaluated. There seems to be no consistent philosophy about her nature, no uniform designation of her function and place in society. Her position appears to differ on the different levels of experience and thought.
  There are numerous statements in which the teachers in the Midrash and the Talmud expressed their opinions on the nature of women. Some of these are outright offensive, to which—we assume—no Jew can subscribe any longer; others are only a little less objectionable. For example, basing itself on the relevant Hebrew word of the biblical text, one homily comments:
  Before God made woman out of the rib, he considered whether he should not make her from some other part of the body. The head? No! Not from the head, he said, for she would carry her head too high. Not from the eye that she should not desire to see everything. From the ear? Not from the ear either; she would be listening in to everything. From the mouth? She would become a chatter-box. Making her from the heart would make her an envious creature. He would not make her from the leg that she might not become a run-about, or from the hand, for she should want to touch everything. He made the woman from the rib, which is hidden in the body, that she might become retiring and modest. It did not help. All these characteristics are in her.15<i class="footnote"><i>Bereshit Rabbah</i> 18.</i>
  As if this were not enough, others add that women are gluttonous, lazy, quarrelsome, and thievish.16<i class="footnote">Ibid. 45.</i> They were believed to be addicted to witchcraft. Even the most kind and humane of teachers, Hillel, observed: The more wives, the more witchcraft.17<i class="footnote"><i>Mishnah Avot</i> 2, 8.</i> Women were said to be weak-willed.18<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Shabbat</i> 33b; <i>Kiddushin</i> 30b.</i> The woman was considered considerably more sensuous than man. It was maintained that a woman preferred one measure (<i>kab</i>) of life with sexual license to nine measures of it with the obligation of chastity.19<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Sotah</i> 20a.</i> We find also some appreciative statements. Women are merciful, more hospitable than men, more considerate of the needs of a stranger, and have greater understanding for them.20<i class="footnote">Ibid. <i>Megillah</i> 14b; <i>Berakhot</i> 6b.</i> Yet, when Rab took leave of Rabbi Ḥiyya to go from the land of Israel to Babylon, Rabbi Ḥiyya blessed him with the words: May God protect you from what is worse than death. At first Rab did not understand. Could there be anything worse than death? He thought about it and found the verse in Ecclesiastes: “…and I find more bitter than death the woman…”21<i class="footnote">Ecclesiates 7:26. For the talmudic reference see T.B. <i>Yevamot</i> 63b.</i> However, could indeed this be the final biblical word about women? Did not the author of <i>Proverbs</i>, who according to tradition is identical with that of <i>Ecclesiastes</i>, declare the very opposite when he said: “Whoso findeth a wife findeth a great good, and obtaineth favor of the Lord”?22<i class="footnote">Proverbs 18:22.</i> How is the contradiction to be resolved? Simple. If she is good, there is no end to her goodness; if she is bad, there is no end to her wickedness.23<i class="footnote"><i>Midrash Soḥer Tov</i> 59.</i> Needless to say all these generalizations carry little convincing power. We shall yet discuss what we consider to be their significance.
  It is surprising that such negative opinions could find their place beside most positive expressions of appreciation of the function of woman in the life of the people. The views of a number of rabbis in the Talmud may be condensed in the following comprehensive statement:
  A man without a wife is not a complete human being; together they are Adam. A man without a wife dwells without joy, without blessing, without goodness, without atonement, without Torah, without peace; yes, without life.24<i class="footnote">Cf. T.B. <i>Yevamot</i> 63a; 62b; <i>Midrash Rabbah Kohelet</i> 9,7.</i>
  In the light of this, it is easily understandable that the rabbis should also have taught that a man should love his wife as himself and honor her more than himself.25<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Yevamot</i> 62b.</i> Similarly, Rabbi Halbo taught that man should forever be caring about the respect with which he treats his wife, for blessing is found in the house only on account of her.26<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Baba Metzia</i> 59a.</i> In the course of Jewish history, these appreciative views determined the quality of Jewish marriage and family life. In general, the wife was loved and respected to a greater degree than in any other culture and civilization. This was the source of the strength of the Jewish home in antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and right up to our own days, the source of its strength, joy and blessing. This view of the woman and her importance has guided Jewish family life as if the negative evaluation did not exist at all. It is rather mysterious how such contradictory outlooks could be part of the same tradition. Shall we perhaps say that there is no contradiction here? Different people thought about the same subject differently. After all, the same biblical phrase in the Hebrew original that, as we saw, was used in order to suggest that God was contemplating from which part of Adam’s body to form Eve and thus became the basis of the rather objectionable description of the feminine characteristics, is in another place used to prove that God gave a greater measure of understanding and insight to the woman than to the man.27<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Niddah</i> 45b.</i>
  It is difficult to accept such an explanation. The function of the woman has been established metaphysically in the Bible. Even if we should accept the biblical story at its face value, Eve was intended by God to be a helpmate to Adam. As such, it is hardly conceivable that those negative characteristics could be attached to her by nature. The biblical statement would then be the seed of any Jewish view of woman that in itself would bestow a certain dignity on her because of her place in the scheme of creation. One might say that her existential dignity received its metaphysical affirmation in the <i>Song of Songs</i>. Rabbi Akiba declared: All the songs (in the Bible) are holy; the <i>Song of Songs</i> is the holy of holies.28<i class="footnote"><i>Mishnah Yadayim</i> 3,5.</i> It is true that the love between Shulamit and the King was mystically interpreted as the love covenant between God and Israel, yet the very fact that the love relationship between a man and a woman could serve as a symbol for the purest and holiest of relationships within the reality of the Jewish experience elevates it to the rung of the holy of holies. The words “Love is strong as death,”29<i class="footnote">Song of Songs 8:6.</i> are illustrated in the Midrash as much by the love with which God loves Israel as with the love a husband loves his wife.30<i class="footnote"><i>Midrash Rabbah Shir HaShirim</i>.</i> The comparison does not mean that a sensuous element is being introduced into the God-Israel covenant, an idea which, as a result of questionable influences, abounds in certain forms of Jewish mysticism. On the contrary, the comparison is only possible because love between a man and a woman is the highest form of personalized relationship. This, however, should exclude those negative appreciations of female characteristics that we have quoted earlier from talmudic and midrashic sources. How is such a personalized relationship possible with one who is a gluttonous runabout, quarrelsome, thievish, and addicted to witchcraft? It would seem that there is a tension between teaching and certain forms of male experience.
  
  
  
  Before suggesting a solution as to how the tension between teaching and experience might have come about, we shall have to consider another level on which the status of the woman finds its expression. From what has been shown thus far it should be obvious that it is always men who express views about women. While there are statements about how good a good wife is and how bad a bad one is, there is not a single saying recorded about how good a good husband is or how bad a bad husband may be. And even when statements are most appreciative of the women, they speak of her importance <i>for</i> man, as if the meaning of her existence were fully comprehended by what she represents as an adjunct to complete the life of a man. An opinion transmitted in the name of Rab, of whom we know that his marriage was not a very happy one, is characteristic. Regarding the importance of the man in the life of the woman he maintained: “A woman is a <i>golem</i> (an unfinished product). She will make a covenant only with one who makes her into a (completed) vessel.”31<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Sanhedrin</i> 22b.</i> At the root of it all is the idea that the manner in which the male and female principle complete each other in the world is determined by the aggressive or active nature of the male and the passive and receiving nature of the female.
  This is mainly reflected in the legal status of the woman. Because of the legal form of the marriage contract she was originally greatly disadvantaged. While the husband could divorce her at will and against her will, she could not, and cannot to this day divorce her husband. The husband would inherit her property, but a widow does not inherit her husband and has to be maintained by her children from the estate they inherit. The heirs of a man are his sons, not his daughters. The daughters have to be supported and must be provided with an appropriate dowry, but they do not inherit as equals with their brothers. Women are not admitted as witnesses or as judges. Similarly, their religious status is also severely limited. They are under no obligation to fulfill the highest commandment of Judaism, to study Torah. Since they are not obligated to study, they can have no obligation to teach. Therefore, while it is incumbent upon a father to teach his son Torah, the same duty does not apply to the mother. But not only was there no obligation for a woman to study Torah, the teaching of the written law to her was actually frowned upon, while the teaching of the oral tradition was forbidden.32<i class="footnote">See T.B. <i>Sotah</i> 20a, Maimonides, <i>Yad HaḤazakah, Talmud Torah</i> 1,13; <i>Shulḥan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah</i> 246,6.</i> Her place as a member of the religious community is strictly limited. While she is obligated to adhere to all the negative commandments, she is exempted from the duties to practice most of the positive commandments whose observance depends on a specific time of the day or the year. She does not have to put on <i>Tefilin</i> (phylacteries) or to wear <i>Ẓiẓit</i> on the corners of her clothes, she does not have to dwell in booths during the <i>Sukkot</i> festival, etc. She cannot be part of <i>Minyan</i>, a quorum of ten Jews required for a congregational religious service.
  We may now be in a better position to understand how those negative opinions about female characteristics might have come about and might, notwithstanding their exaggerated generalization, often have been derived from experience. There is little doubt that notwithstanding these rather limiting rules and regulations, Judaism produced numberless <i>Ẓadkaniyot</i>, women who were pious, chaste, virtuous, and charitable often in a self-sacrificial sense and to an ideal degree. Yet we have to consider what must have been the effect of the position granted to the woman on the great majority of their sex. Since education was essentially Torah education, many women had no education at all. They were of course taught the duties appertaining to their responsibilities as wives and mothers, and also learned from the example of the living tradition that surrounded them. As compared to the education of the sons, many of the daughters of Israel must have been intellectually as well as emotionally stunted. They were largely excluded from and were often mere spectators of the drama of the creative forms of religious life. Their legal status, too, was often that of a passively receiving, protected member of society. It should not, then, be surprising if many of them were thievish, because they might have felt that they did not have the share in the family fortune that was due to them. That they were quarrelsome is quite believable; dissatisfied people often react to their surroundings in such a manner. With our better psychological insight, we may well understand that a deeply frustrated person may seek comfort in over-eating and become gluttonous. Some of the other negative characteristics too, which were ascribed to women in talmudic times, are better understood as psychological reactions to their condition. We need not at all be convinced that the good woman, whose goodness was said to be limitless, was indeed potentially a better human being than the bad one, whose wickedness, it was maintained, was without end. Could it not have been that the good woman was meeker by nature and because of that readily accepted her status, whereas the bad woman was more vital, more energetic, with a stronger will of her own and because of that, much more frustrated. Her “wickedness” might have been her unconscious rebellion against her inability to make meaningful use of her natural gifts. Rabbi Eleazar, a talmudic teacher of the early part of the third century, has an interesting comment on the creation of woman, which has a bearing on this aspect of our discussion. We read in the Bible that God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.”33<i class="footnote">Genesis 2:18.</i> This rather awkward English phrase stems from the fact that an attempt is made to give as accurate a rendering of the idiosyncrasy of the Hebrew text as possible. A more literal translation of the second part of the sentence would read: I will make him a help meet <i>opposite</i> him. The phrase, “opposite him,” is explained by Rabbi Eleazar to mean: If man deserves it, she will be a help meet <i>to</i> him; if not, she will be “<i>opposite</i> him,” i.e. against him.34<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Yevamot</i> 63a.</i> It may well have been the case that the numerous shrews about whom the talmudic records know were the kind of women that the society or some men deserved. All those sweeping generalizations about women may say very little about what women are, but rather about what they become in the circumstances in which they had to live.
  
  
  
  In fact, talmudic tradition shows a great deal of compassionate awareness of the disadvantaged position of the woman. Rab, with whose opinions relating to women we are now somewhat familiar, urged husbands to be extremely careful not to hurt their wives by unkind words. For since a woman’s tears run easily, the punishment is fast.35<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Baba Metzia</i> 59a.</i> While a man had the right to divorce his wife, and legally it could be done for the least of reasons, yet, maintained Rabbi Eleazar, he who does it, causes the altar in the sanctuary to weep. He applies to the case the words of the prophet Malachi:
  And this further ye do:
  Ye cover the altar of the Lord with weeping, and with sighing,
  Insomuch that He regardeth not the offering anymore
  Neither receiveth it with good will at your hand.
  Yet ye say: ‘Wherefore?’
  Because the Lord hath been witness
  Between thee and the wife of thy youth,
  Against whom thou hast dealt treacherously,
  Though she is thy companion,
  And the wife of thy covenant.36<i class="footnote">Malachi 2: 13-14; For Rabbi Eleazar see T.B. <i>Gittin</i> 90b. It is true that because of the biblical reference to “the wife of thy youth” he speaks only of a first divorce. Our concern is with the spirit of the statement, rather than its homiletical technicality.</i>
  Whereas Rabbi Eleazar states that the very altar of God weeps over the wrong done to a woman betrayed by an arbitrary divorce, the plain meaning seems rather to suggest that it is the women, in their misfortune, who surround the altar with weeping and sighing. Indeed, that is how Rabbi Haggee understood it and therefore applied the prophet’s castigation to an event in the history of the Jewish people. According to him, the prophet, who lived during the period of the second Temple, was referring to the behavior of some Jews after they had returned from the Babylonian exile. During the long and arduous journey from Babylon to the land of Israel, the faces of their wives were blackened and parched by the sun, and they lost their attractiveness. At that, their husbands left them. The women came to the altar of God weeping. Said God: How could I receive your temple offerings, when the misery of these women calls to Me from the same altar where you want to serve Me! You have robbed, you have violated, you have taken her beauty from her, and now you send her away. I am astounded.”37<i class="footnote"><i>Midrash Rabbah, Bereshit</i>, 18,8.</i> This is a remarkable statement. God rejects their divine service, because of the injustice they have done to their wives. Yet what they did was perfectly legal. According to the marriage contract one may send one’s wife away even because one has found a more attractive woman.38<i class="footnote">Cf. the last <i>Mishnah</i> in <i>Gittin</i>.</i> It is then the conscience of Judaism that finds fault with the moral quality of an action that is completely legal. Implied in the statement of Rabbi Haggee is a criticism of the form of that legality. Malachi’s phrasing, that these men acted treacherously against their “companions” and “the wives of their covenants,” is significant. Companionship is a fully personalized relationship, and it is because the union between a man and a woman is meant to be a covenant that it could have served as a symbol of God’s covenant with Israel. It is then in the light of the covenant idea, identified as the fully realized personalization of the relationship, that the nature of the legality of the divorce becomes morally objectionable. One cannot live in an adequately realized covenanted relationship with God if one lives with one’s wife in impersonality. Impersonality is injustice towards another human being, a crime; in the sight of God, sin.
  The following moving story is told in the Talmud, illustrating the critical awareness with which Judaism viewed some of the practices which prevailed in the Jewish community in the talmudic period. It was customary for married students to leave their wives for long periods in order to go to distant schools to study Torah. In the Talmud, the question is discussed, if such a husband leaves his wife without her permission, how long would he be permitted to stay away from home: thirty days, or even two to three years? The codes disagree as to which opinion to follow. Nevertheless, it was said that even those who leave home for only thirty days without the consent of their wives were taking their lives into their hands. In support of the story it is told that one, Rabbi Rehumee, was wont to study Torah with Raba in Meḥoza. Normally, he would return home on the day before <i>Yom Kippur</i> (the Day of Atonement). Once, being deeply involved in his studies, he delayed returning. His wife was waiting anxiously, saying to herself: he is coming now, now he is coming! As he did not come a tear fell from her eyes. At that very moment her husband was on a roof; the roof collapsed under him and he died.39<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Ketubot</i> 62b.</i> Needless to say, the death of her husband was not much help to the poor woman, yet the story shows an insight into the sacrificial service of these women. The severity of the punishment indicates that Rabbi Rehumee had no adequate appreciation of the loneliness of his wife. Though what he did was the accepted practice, there was something very wrong about it in the view of the Talmud itself, if an inadvertent delay could have brought death down on the man. Once again, we have an example of the moral conscience implying a rather severe criticism of a legally established form of married life.
  It would seem that the conscience of Judaism was ill at ease with certain forms of the institutionalized order of the husband and wife relationship. This had its consequences for the legal status of the woman as well. Already in talmudic times certain aspects of the original marriage and divorce laws were modified in favor of the woman. In certain cases, for instance, when a condition developed after the marriage of a kind that the woman could not be expected to live with her husband, the authorities would compel the man to divorce his wife.40<i class="footnote">Cf. e.g., T.B. <i>Ketubot</i> 77a.</i> According to some authorities this meant that one could even use corporal punishment if he refused to do as he was ordered.41<i class="footnote">See <i>Tosafot</i>, ibid. 70a. <i>Yotzee Veyitten ketubah</i>.</i> With what right one could do that presented a problem. According to the law, a divorce could only be effected by the husband himself and never against his will. Yet, these were situations when from the point of view of the conscience of the teachers of the Torah, one had to free the wife from the obligation of continuing the marriage. A solution was found by bringing pressure on the husband until he says, I am willing to divorce her. The legal validity of this formula has been well explained. It is important, however, to understand that the ethical conscience required and found a way to modify the application of the original law within the framework of the law. There are other similar cases where an even more drastic modification of law application was established within the confines of the law itself. In certain situations when problems arose, the rabbis hit upon much more elegant solutions. They formulated the phrasing of the declaration that is needed for the legal conclusion of the marriage in such a manner that they reserved to the recognized rabbinical authorities the right even to invalidate a marriage retroactively.42<i class="footnote">Cf., for instance, ibid. 3a.</i>
  Even more striking is the case of the <i>Moredet</i>, the “rebellious” wife, who refuses to continue to live with her husband. Basing himself on the Talmud, Maimonides formulates the law in this case as follows: “One (i.e. the court) asks her why she “rebels.” If she says: “I dislike him and cannot willingly be intimate with him,” one compels him (i.e. the husband) to divorce her immediately. For she is not like a prisoner that she should (be forced to) have intercourse with one whom she hates.”43<i class="footnote"><i>Yad HaḤazakah, Hilkhot Ishut</i> 14,8.</i> Maimonides’ formulation reveals his psychological insight into what might be expected from the continuation of such a relationship. It starts out as incompatibility. The wife dislikes her husband. However, should she be compelled to continue the marital relationship with him, her dislike is bound to turn into hatred. Once again we have an example of how ethical considerations drastically limited the power of the husband to divorce his wife or to refuse to divorce her.
  Similar considerations for the well-being of the woman brought about modifications in other areas of the law. We have discussed earlier the fact that in order to establish the death of a husband and thus free his widow to remarry, the legal requirement to establish a fact by two witnesses was dispensed with, and the testimony of a single witness was admitted as sufficient testimony. And whereas normally women could not qualify as witnesses, in this case the testimony of a woman was also accepted. Of course, very sound reasons were adduced in the Talmud for allowing this—and other changes—in the law. What matters is that in cases of conflicts between a moral principle that demanded the protection of the personal dignity and well-being of a woman, and the impersonal objectivity of the law, a specific law had to yield to the transcending ethos of the comprehensive concern of the Law. We might say that in all these cases the ultimate comprehensive concern of the Law in general was allowed to modify the form of the application of a specific law. Finally, toward the end of the tenth century, Rabbenu Gershom of Mayence imposed the <i>Ḥerem</i> (a form of excommunication) against divorcing a woman against her will.
  
  
  
  There exists, then, a tension between the moral conscience of the tradition or, as we may also put it, between the ultimate ethos of the Law, and its institutionalization in specific laws. There can be little doubt that the tension is normally due to the fact that, inevitably, the actual institutionalization of the ethos is always time-conditioned; it cannot be achieved independently of the people whose adherence to it is demanded. This need not contradict the faith of a religious Jew who believes that the Torah as God’s revelation has validity.
  No less a halakhic authority than Maimonides expressed the same idea in his well-known interpretation of the biblical divine service by means of animal sacrifices. According to Maimonides, prayer, while not the highest form of divine service, is yet superior to that by animal sacrifices. Yet the sacrificial service was allowed, for, says Maimonides, human nature does not change suddenly. Since in biblical times animal sacrifices were the generally understood mode of serving a god, the Torah—in order, as it were, to wean the Jews from idolatry—tolerated sacrifices, but ordered the children of Israel to offer them to God and not to idols. At a certain juncture in the spiritual and social development of the Jewish people, this was the only way of teaching them how to serve the One God. To quote Maimonides’ own words: “…God refrained from prescribing what the people by their natural disposition would be incapable of obeying, and gave the above mentioned commandments (i.e. regarding animal sacrifices) as a means of securing His chief objects, viz., to spread a knowledge of Him…and to cause them to reject idolatry.” This educational method is ascribed to the “wisdom” of God. There was no other way of dealing with the problem, for while God may work miracles in the world, “the nature of man is never changed by God by way of miracles.”44<i class="footnote">Maimonides, <i>The Guide for the Perplexed</i>, III 32, translated by M. Friedlander.</i>
  Now theologians and religious thinkers may disagree with Maimonides’ interpretation of the meaning of the sacrificial service in the Temple, but the principle of interpretation that he uses will still have his authority. For one who believes in the eternal validity of the Torah, the divinely revealed teaching, Maimonides’ principle is vital to safeguard his faith. Is it not possible for a believing Jew to make peace with certain biblical laws without applying to them Maimonides’ principle of interpretation? This is not the place to discuss the subject comprehensively, but let us consider one or two examples. Let us take the case of the Jewish slave. That a Jew should buy another Jew as a slave is an intolerable thought which is rejected by everything that the teaching of the Torah in its religious and ethical significance stands for, yet it was a fact accepted and incorporated in a law.45<i class="footnote">Exodus 21: 1-6.</i> Obviously slavery was an institution that in biblical times, given human nature, social and economic conditions, could not have been abolished by any law. So the law limited the duration of the slavery. The slave had to be set free after six years of service. The Bible insists on calling the slave “thy brother,” and prescribes how he is to be treated: “Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy God.”46<i class="footnote">Leviticus 25: 39-43.</i> The rabbis in the Talmud then went on to explain that the slave’s standard of living had to be equal to that of the master. “Do not yourself eat fine bread and give him the coarse one. Do not you drink old wine and let him have only new wine. Sleep not on a soft bed, while he has to sleep on straw. So much so that people would say: ‘He who buys himself a Jewish slave buys a master for himself.’ ”47<i class="footnote">T.B. <i>Kiddushin</i> 22a.</i> The biblical law regarding a father selling his minor daughter (less than 12 years and a day old) to be a maid-servant is similar in essence.48<i class="footnote">Exodus 21: 7-11.</i> It is inconceivable that today the most orthodox of orthodox Jews would allow such a practice. Even if the State of Israel were established in full conformity with Torah and Jewish law, it is inconceivable that both these laws should not be completely abolished and with the full approval of the orthodox rabbinate. Both cases are examples of time-conditioned practices, which could not be abolished by the law abruptly, but which were, however, legally limited, modified, humanized. They were absorbed by a net of laws and regulations that incorporated the thrust of the transcending ethos of the Torah, thus educating the people and guiding their moral development along lines which would lead to the complete abolition of the objectionable practices. What we learn from Maimonides’ principle of Torah interpretation49<i class="footnote">That it does have general validity and was not used by Maimonides exceptionally in the case of <i>Korbanot</i> (animal sacrifices) one can see by the fact that it is in essence the principle which guides his interpretation of the reasons for the biblical commandments (<i>Ta’amei HaMitzvot</i>) practically in its entirety.</i> is that no matter what the meaning and the truth of the teaching may be <i>sub specie aeternitatis</i>, when the ethos of the teaching is incorporated in the legalized and institutionalized forms of social organization, one cannot disregard the capacities of human nature to understand and to implement the imperative of the teaching. This is the root cause of the tension that often prevails between the law and the transcending spirit that formulates the law, which has been responsible for the process within the <i>halakhah</i>.
  Can there be any doubt that the status of the woman reflected in the Talmud was, to a large extent, influenced by the climate and the mores of a passing day? For instance, according to the Midrash, it is the “way” of the woman to stay in her house, whereas the “way” of a man is to go out into the market place and learn wisdom from other people.50<i class="footnote"><i>Midrash Rabba, Bereshit</i> 18.</i> This understanding of the “way” of the woman found its formulation in the code of Maimonides in the following manner:
  “…Every woman has the right to leave her house in order to visit her parents, pay condolence calls, to attend festive meals (on the occasion of weddings, etc.), rendering loving-kindness to her female friends or relatives so that they in turn would visit her, for she is not in a prison that she should not be able to go and to come. However, it is shameful for a woman to go out regularly, outside the house or into the streets. A husband should prevent his wife from doing this. He should not allow her to go out more than once or twice a month, according to need. For it is becoming for a woman to sit in the corner of her house, as it is written: All glorious is a king’s daughter within the palace.”51<i class="footnote"><i>Yad HaḤazakah, Ishut</i>, 13, 11; the biblical quotation is from Psalms 45:14.</i> The biblical quotation may, of course, easily be interpreted differently and brought much nearer to its intended meaning. Yet this is how the verse was used in the Talmud and, in view of the mores of the times, with full justification. This has nothing to do with the intentional oppression of the woman. Considering the moral climate of the times, the daily life of the people in the streets and the market places, it might indeed have been in the best interest of the woman to stay indoors as much as possible. The reference to “a king’s daughter” has to be taken seriously. In the consciousness of those days, the restriction on her movements did not contradict her dignity as a woman. On the contrary, it was understood as society’s concern for the protection of her dignity as a princess. The duties of a wife toward her husband were formulated as follows:
  “Every woman has to wash the face, hands, and feet of her husband, mix for him his cup of wine, prepare his bed, and stand and serve him, for instance, by handing him water, a dish, and clearing away from before him.”52<i class="footnote">Ibid. ch. 21, 3.</i>
  Needless to say, the law as such is incompatible with the status that the woman had in the ethos of Judaism. In the actual practice of married life it could hardly have been reconciled with the injunction that one should honor one’s wife more than oneself and love her as oneself. Surely, these “duties” were at cross purposes with the terms which the prophet Malachi uses for a married woman: a “companion,” a “wife of the covenant.” Once again, we have here an example of the tension between the more fundamental conscience of the Law and its formulation in a specific case in view of circumstance whose practical strength could not be ignored. From the point of view of the transcending conscience of the Law, the real significance of its formulation in this specific case found its expression not in what it imposed on the wife, but in that from which it liberated her. For this is how Maimonides, on the basis of the talmudic determination, concludes the paragraph we have quoted: “However she does not have to stand and serve his father and his son.” In the language of the time, the fact that she owed certain services only to her husband and not to any other member of his family meant that she was a wife and not a servant. In the circumstances of the times this was a great step forward. A law of this kind, joined to the moral admonition to honor her more than oneself and to love her like oneself, was in fact moving Jewish society towards the goal of the covenantal relationship between husband and wife.
  What we have to see is the success of this method in bringing about the rich penetration of the Jewish marriage by the ethos of the covenantal personalization of the relationship between a man and a woman in the course of history. Indeed, through the ages the marital union in the Jewish home was sufficiently pure and consecrated to serve as the symbol of the covenant between God and Israel. There was no question at all of the woman not being granted the full dignity due to her as a person. The functions of husband and wife were different, the heavier burden did fall on the woman in the house, yet as to their equality in human dignity — in general — there could be no doubt. Normally, the ethical climate in the Jewish marriage was determined by the comprehensive ethos of Judaism, as if the legal disabilities of the wife did not exist.
  
  
  
  What follows from all this for the contemporary situation? There can be little doubt in the mind of any thinking Jew that those time-conditioned elements that, in talmudic times and later still, influenced the formulation of the laws regarding the status of the woman, have been overcome to a very large extent by the Jewish people of today. And we are not thinking here of the majority of Jews who today may be considered secularists, but of the majority of religious Jews, who accept the Torah as divine revelation, who adhere to the laws of Judaism and strive toward the fullest realization of <i>halakhah</i> in their own lives as well as in that of the community. Who among religious Jews still adheres to the old law that, since “her house is not a prison,” a wife should be permitted to leave it once or twice a month, according to need? Which Jewish husband still expects his wife to look upon him as if he were “a prince and a king,”53<i class="footnote">Cf. Maimonides, <i>Yad HaḤazakah, Hilkhot Ishut</i> 15, 20.</i> simply because he is her husband? In our understanding, a man who, independently of being a husband, indeed deserves to be respected like a “prince and a king,” would neither demand of his wife such respect nor would he accept it from her. On the other hand, should he demand or even accept it, it would itself be proof that he was not worthy of it. Do religious Jews today allow their wives to serve them by washing their faces, hands, and legs, and fulfilling those other duties which are prescribed by the law? Apart from the respect due to our wives as human beings, our self-respect would not allow us to accept this kind of service from our wives, or even from any other human being. This is so not because we are modern Jews, not because this is the second half of the twentieth century. This is so because we are Jews. This has been so for many generations, on account of what Judaism has made of us. In my home in Rumania, we had a village girl working for us as a servant. In the morning, she would clean the shoes of the family, she would set the table and, of course, put a jug full of water on it. Occasionally, as would be the case with children, we would dirty our shoes during the day, but we were not permitted to ask the maid to clean them again for us. During the day, if we wanted clean shoes, we had to clean them ourselves. When during a meal the water bottle would be emptied, the maid might have been asked by the lady of the house to bring another jug of water to the table, but we children were not allowed to ask her to bring a glass of water especially for us. Our father explained: the maid has certain duties in this house, she works, and she is paid for her work. But she is not the personal servant of anyone in the house. Our father was not a modern Jew. His education was chiefly Bible, Talmud, and the codes of Jewish law. He was teaching his children what Judaism had taught him. Could it have been conceivable to him to pay any regard to those “duties” of a wife to her husband, with whose talmudic sources and codification he was well familiar?
  The truth is, that in the Torah-educated Jewish conscience, the ethos of Judaism has overcome many of the time-conditioned elements that unavoidably found their way into the legal formulation of the Law in a distant past. Notwithstanding the biblical law of inheritance, today in orthodox Jewish families, wives do inherit their husband’s property and daughters inherit together with sons. Of course, there are ways of justifying this within the <i>halakhah</i>. What is decisive is that these ways were found and a new practice has developed within the framework of the Law. We have heard that a woman cannot be admitted as a witness in court. Yet we also heard that in certain cases her testimony was accepted. Is this the ultimate limit of what is possible within the system of the <i>halakhah</i>? Of course, there was a reason for the exception; but have all the possible reasons been exhausted? A woman cannot be a judge, yet Deborah of biblical fame was a judge, indeed the supreme judge of her time. Again, there is an explanation for this exception,54<i class="footnote">See T.B. <i>Baba Kama</i> 14a, <i>Tosafot, Asher Tasim Lifnehem</i>.</i> but again one might ask, have all the explanations of what is possible within the Law already been given? One does not ask these questions because the Torah has become a burden and one wishes to break away from it; one asks because one believes in the eternal vitality of the divine revelation, because one is committed with one’s whole existence to the proposition that the teaching is <i>Torat Ḥayim</i>, the way of life for the Jew.
  We saw how within the <i>halakhah</i> itself there have been significant developments that would limit the power of the husband by compelling him, in certain cases, to divorce his wife by annulling the marriage retroactively, and recognizing the freedom of the wife to demand a dissolution of the marriage in certain circumstances. Yet we have to acknowledge that more has still to be done. The case of the <i>Agunah</i>, of the deserted wife or the wife whose husband has been missing for a long period of time, is still challenging the conscience of the Law for a solution. In our own days, with civil divorce, there are many cases when, after a marriage has been dissolved by the civil authorities, the husband, often out of spite, refuses to divorce his wife by the giving of a <i>Get</i> (a divorce document) as required by Jewish law. Many human tragedies result from the present situation.
  In a halakhic work, published several years ago in Jerusalem, I have shown how these and other related problems may be solved and, thus, a great deal of human suffering avoided, within the rules of <i>halakhah</i>.55<i class="footnote">C.F. my work <i>T’nai Be Nisu’in uveGet</i>, Mosad Harav Kook, Jerusalem, 1966.</i> It is halakhically possible to introduce conditions into the <i>ketubah</i> (the marriage contract) that if certain eventualities should arise in the future, the marriage is to be annulled retroactively. Thus, for instance, in the case of soldiers missing in action, or in cases where civil divorce had taken place but the husband refuses to give a <i>get</i>, under appropriate safeguards the marriage would be annulled and the wife would be free to remarry. According to <i>halakhah</i>, annullment would have no detrimental effect on either the legal or moral status of the children.
  Another problem that could easily be resolved is that of <i>Ḥalitzah</i>. According to biblical law, when a man dies without leaving any offspring behind, his brother must marry the widow and if he refuses, the ceremony of <i>Ḥalitzah</i> is to be performed. The widow is not free to remarry without first having been released by that ceremony. However, already in talmudic times, the levirate marriage was largely discontinued and replaced by <i>Ḥalitzah</i>. Needless to say, in the present social and moral climate, the institution of levirate marriage has lost its original meaning and purpose. On the other hand, that it has been in the main abandoned renders some aspects of the <i>Ḥalitzah</i> ceremony objectionable for the widow as well as for her brother-in-law. Understandably, in many cases, both parties are greatly embarrassed by it. In addition, all kinds of problems may arise as, for instance, when the whereabouts of the surviving brother cannot be ascertained. At times, the brother-in-law refuses to go through with the <i>Ḥalitzah</i> ceremony because he considers it demeaning. In other cases, worse still, he uses the need for his consent in order to blackmail the family of the widow. Every practising rabbi is familiar with the human agony arising from such situations, which befall especially Torah-observant women. I have proven conclusively that in the case of the husband’s death, a childless marriage can be annulled retroactively by means of a <i>tenai</i> (condition) appropriately incorporated in the <i>ketubah</i>.
  Unfortunately, the rabbinical establishment moves very slowly, if at all. At the time of this writing, two men are imprisoned in Israel. One, convicted as a rapist, has been condemned to a long prison term. He is married and the rabbinate, with the authority of the state, imposed an additional jail sentence on him until he divorces his wife. The other is a case of a Jew who, all through his married life, neglected his wife and family, never worked, and never accepted any kind of responsibility. He too was imprisoned and will have to stay there till he agrees to divorce his wife of his own free will. Both men are adamant in refusing to obey the demand of the rabbinate. It is difficult to understand how the Israeli rabbinate can remain insensitive to the indignity imposed upon the Torah itself by such degrading wrestlings with the inadequacies of human nature. In the meantime, of course, the misery of the wives deepens with every passing day. When these cases will be resolved, if they ever should be, other cases of a similar kind will follow and the indignity and the suffering will be repeated. Yet all this could be prevented by the introduction of an appropriate formula into the marriage contract, for which there is sufficient validation within the <i>halakhah</i>.
  We are confronted with a challenge to the conscience of Judaism, with a very test of its humane quality. Apart from the happiness of numerous human beings, which alone should be a matter deserving the highest compassionate priority among the concerns of the rabbinate, the moral dignity of the Law itself is at stake. The situation is ethically intolerable.
  The day will come when the problem of the <i>Agunah</i> and other similar problems will be solved, as they well may be, within the framework of the <i>halakhah</i>. More and more young couples who abide by the <i>halakhah</i> are now demanding that appropriate conditions be included in their <i>ketubah</i>. They do this as a requirement of their Jewish conscience, out of loving concern for each other, in order to avoid possible human misery in the future, and in order to protect the ethical dignity of their marriage. There is little doubt that as more and more Torah-observant young couples will realize that there are halakhically valid possibilities to eliminate those problems that have plagued us in the past, the pressure on the rabbinate will become strong enough to turn the halakhically possible into the humanly real.
  In addition to the legal status of the woman, a new concern that agitates many of us today is the religious status of the woman in the daily life of the Jewish community. This is truly a contemporary problem, resulting from radically changed intellectual, social, and economic conditions. The concern deals with what should be the place of the contemporary Torah-observant woman, who adheres to the rules of the <i>halakhah</i>, in the religious life of the community. Many of these women are well educated at colleges and universities, and have a broad, and often highly specialized, secular education. Is it conceivable that they should continue to be excluded from any serious study of Torah and Talmud, and of the other disciplines in the study of Judaism, as they were in the past? What is bound to be the quality of Jewish life, in the homes and the communities, if intelligent, mentally alert women, otherwise fully involved in the moral, political, social and economic issues of the day should be-as a matter of religious principle-relegated to the status of the ignoramus within the realm where they ought to have their spiritual and religious roots, the realm of Judaism? Is the Jewish woman of today, who intellectually, socially, and, often professionally too, is indeed the equal of her husband, to remain only a passive participant in the daily religious life of the community, often only the spectator to Judaism which, apparently, is essentially a male concern and responsibility?
  Once again, we have reached a juncture at which the comprehensive ethos of the Torah itself strains against its formulation in specific laws. It is, however, the very essence of the <i>halakhah</i> to be responsive to such a strain, and by its resolution to bring about an even richer realization of the Torah itself. Not only is the status of the woman at stake, but the status of Judaism itself. For if in its application it could not do full justice to the Jewish woman in her present state as she is longing for participation in the drama of Jewish realization in accordance with her capacity and spiritual need, its form of such application becomes itself highly questionable. Those who understand the true nature and function of <i>halakhah</i>, and are committed to halakhic Judaism, cannot accept such a suggestion. With unreserved openness and sensitivity to the genuineness of the problem, with faith in the vitality of the <i>halakhah</i>, with humility and yet with intellectual courage, the necessary halakhic work will be accomplished that will define the status of the woman anew, justly and meaningfully.
  
  8 Conversion According to Halakhah
  
  
  
  IV Messianic History
  
  Introduction
  
  <i>Nowhere has the crisis of the spirit in Judaism found more dramatic expression than in the State of Israel. There are, unfortunately, two Israels, a secular one and a religious one. The form that the division between the two has taken on is itself one of the most serious symptoms of the crisis. Since the State of Israel is central to Jewish life the world over, the Jewish people outside the State cannot be indifferent to the spiritual situation within the State, especially since it is from there that they have hoped for a renaissance of all Israel</i>.
  
  9 The Spiritual Center?
  
  
  
  
  
  In our youth, Ahad Ha’am was our ideological hero. Even those among us who did not accept his secularism did make our own the idea of the spiritual center, probably with even greater conviction than the secular Zionists. The religious Zionists took their name (Mizraḥi) from the Hebrew rendering of the spiritual center idea, <i>Mercaz Ruḥani</i>. If we ask ourselves what has become of this idea, we have to confess with sadness that thus far the State of Israel is far from being the spiritual center the Jewish people have hoped for. For instance, in one of the areas of this author’s chief scholarly preoccupation we have received no new significant ideas in our search for a meaningful and philosophically valid interpretation of Judaism in this era of Jewish and world history. In our struggle to understand the Jewish experience through history, to interpret the meaning of Jewish destiny, the significance of being a Jew, we have received very little from Israel. Numerous encyclopedic works have been published, but no new seminal thoughts that might illuminate the intellectual, ethical, and religious problems of our times and help dispel the confusion of minds have reached us from Zion, no help to cope with the puzzlements of human existence in today’s world in general or with those of our specific Jewish experience. True, great and inspiring achievements have been accomplished in the rebuilding of the land and in maintaining its existence against a host of enemies. In the field of learning and scholarship remarkable feats are to be noted. But the idea of a spiritual center for the Jewish people remains a dream.
  In former years we would say: Wait! have patience! Israel is beset by so many problems of mere survival, the tremendous exertions of ingathering the exiles, the continuous wars! A little country, besieged on all sides by so many enemies, however great its heroism, has no energy left to be creative in the spiritual field. Wait until all these problems of naked biological-physical survival have been solved and watch what a glorious <i>Mercaz Ruḥani</i> will emerge in the State of Israel. Today we greatly doubt the validity of such apologetics. The almost seven “fat” years between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War were years of relative tranquility, permeated—justly or vainly—with a sense of security. Yet we saw very little movement towards the realization of the spiritual center; if anything, the tendency was in the opposite direction. The truth, of course, is that the human spirit is not more creative in times of calm and ease, of relative well-being and material security. Rather it is in times of tension and crisis, in situations when it is confronted with the ultimate problems of human existence, of the meaning and purpose of life, that man is spiritually most originally productive. Something has gone awry with the early vision of “We are going up to the land to build it and to be built in it.”
  
  
  
  It would seem that this “reborn” nation of the Jews in Israel suffers from some fundamental misunderstanding as regards the nature and destiny of the Jewish people of history. One of the basic facts about us is that we are a small people. The biblical words, “Ye are the few among the nations” have, unfortunately, remained true to this day. Had it been left to the natural process of reproduction as it occurs among most nations, there should have been by now several hundred million Jews in the world. But man’s inhumanity saw to it that we remain “the few among the nations.” But this small people has had a unique significance in the history of mankind. It has had an incomparable impact on the minds and souls of men, out of all proportion to its numbers, its material resources or its physical strength. This small people has been a great nation. To put it once again in biblical language, “For what great nation is there that hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is whensoever we call upon him? And what great nation is there that hath statutes and ordinances so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?” (Deuteronomy, 4,7.) The fact that the Jewish people have been one of the very great peoples of history is not due to its numbers or its material resources, but exclusively to its spiritual-religious vitality and influence. Once more, as the Bible formulated it: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, saith God.” Not that might and power are not needed in history (there is reason to hope that in the wake of the European Holocaust, the Jews have learned that lesson for all times to come), but the world significance of this people does not derive from it. Furthermore, this little great nation has demonstrated a survival capacity which, considering the odds against Jewish survival through the ages, has certainly been unique, if not mysterious. Since smallness, and material weakness in a people are not normally conducive to survival in extreme circumstances, it is reasonable to assume that the mysterious survival capacity of this people can be due only to its spiritual strength, emanating from a religious faith and national commitment to it. These factors—its relative material insignificance in terms of a mundane world history, its greatness in spite of it, its unique survival capacity—have determined the nature of the Jew and his historic destiny, in suffering as well as triumph, in times of martyrdom as well as in times of glory, not the least among which is the rise of the State of Israel.
  We submit that all this means is that Jews are not <i>Kekhol haAmim</i>, like all the other nations. Whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not, we are not a “normal” people in the sense of the rest of the nations. We can make no greater mistake than to try to normalize our condition. The moment we sever our link with the historic destiny of the Jewish people, which has its roots in the dimension of the spirit and faith, we cease being the “great nation” and are left only with the attribute “ye are the few.” We become then a mere cumbersome adjunct to the affairs of the world, a small, weak, insignificant people in world-historic context. This reduction to “for ye are the few among the nations” has happened in the State of Israel as the result of the widespread secularization and materialism of Israeli society. In the realm of the secular and the material, little Israel is inconsequential indeed. We who have been intellectually steeped in the secularism of the West will not be impressed by the secularism of the choicest of the Mapam or Mapai ideologists. Compared to the secularists of our intellectual training, they are indeed parochial. We have been excited by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau Ponty, to mention only a few. We have learned a great deal from them and we have been challenged by them and were compelled to wrestle with our own conscience. They have kept us intellectually alert and on the go. Beside this kind of secularism, that of Israel pales into boredom. If we want ideological materialism we have direct access to the masters and can easily forego its second and third rate version in Hebrew. As to the practical materialism of Reḥov Dizengoff in Tel Aviv, we find it in a much more seductive style right here where we are. Some people in Israel have developed an <i>Olam Hazeh</i> (This World) philosophy. The discovery is rather naive, somewhat childish. To what does it amount in comparison to the <i>Olam Hazeh</i> with which Jews in the Western world are familiar and which is readily available to them! In the earlier days of Zionist innocence, one might at least have argued from the point of view of the political insecurity of the <i>Galut</i> (diaspora). But what security is there today for the Jew, or the State of Israel, in a world that is seen exclusively in the light of an <i>Olam Hazeh</i> philosophy? It would be much better for all of us to face the fact that Kasrilevke is Kasrilevke even when secularized, and Piczericzin remains Piczericzin even in its most modern Hebrew edition.
  One wonders what impression Israeli-style secularism, be it even supported by some form of philosophical materialism, must make on the new immigrant from Soviet Russia. The problems of absorption are serious. Most of the immigrants have hardly any knowledge of Judaism, hardly any religious bent or interest. But they are possessed of an unclear longing for Jewish identification. To settle in Israel today, in a small and poor country, beset by innumerable internal problems and by a frightening array of external enemies, in the midst of a world with a very few uncertain friends, is at best a most exacting adventure. It can be undertaken with idealism, with surety of purpose and certainty of meaning. But what does the average immigrant from Russia find in the realm of ideals and meaning in Israel today? He discovers the “socialism” of kibbutzim that can exist only because the state is supported by Jews who live in capitalistic societies the world over. Secularism, materialism, socialism, it was their share in a much more impressive package in one of the mightiest countries in the world. There is, indeed, civil freedom for the immigrant in Israel. But what is its value for a scientist, an engineer or an artist, who, on the one hand, finds no opportunity to pursue his profession and, on the other, is confronted with a paucity of ideals and goals that could give content and direction to his longed-for identification with his Jewish destiny?
  
  
  
  One of the most serious consequences of the secularization of the Jewish people in Israel has been forcefully revealed to us in the wake of the Yom Kippur war. The most important ideological conclusion that we are compelled to derive from the war is that Israel has been forced back into Jewish history. One of the fundamental mistakes of Zionism has been—and this was clear to some of us long before now—that it set for its goal the normalization of the Jewish people. We shall return to our land; we shall have a state; our own government, judiciary, police, army. Jews will again be farmers, laborers; they will be normally distributed among all trades and professions. We shall speak Hebrew again and create a new Hebrew literature. In short, we shall be normal like all the other nations. Zionism was trying to emancipate us from the Jewish destiny of the ages. It was attempting something new, to wean us of our involvement with a divine plan for man and to seek salvation solely for our national exile. In the State of Israel, it was attempting to break out of Jewish history and to enter on Israeli history. The Yom Kippur war forced Israel back into the classical destiny of the Jewish people. We have learned that as in the past the Jew was homeless, so a state of the Jews, too, may be homeless. Once again it has become true: “Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” The course of history forces us back to our historic identity.
  The attempt to escape Jewish destiny by way of Zionism has undermined the moral security of the people that dwells in Israel. Wide sections of Israeli youth, alienated from the historic continuity of Jewish people, have become unsure of the moral validity of our claim to the land of our fathers. And indeed, there is no Israeli claim to the land; there can only be a Jewish claim. Where there is no continuity, there can be no return. Only in the uninterrupted chain of all Jewish generations is the certainty to be found that this has been our land all through our exile, and has been taken from us by force. Our forever articulated faith in <i>Ge’ulah</i>, in the coming Redemption, has been our eternal protest against anyone who held possession of the land of our fathers. But this faith is inseparable from the historic destiny of our Jewishness. The moment we reject identification with it, our claim to the land of Israel can only be based on the right of conquest. We either return to the Holy Land or there is no land for us to return to.
  Even more serious than the moral uncertainty of the claim, if it is to be based on Israeli history, is the puzzlement and the loss of bearing that has overtaken Israeli society in the wake of the Yom Kippur war. All this struggle, blood letting, sacrifice, endless hardship, what are they all for? Where is the end to it all? Is it worthwhile? The hidden cause of the traumatic shock of the war has been the sensing of the loss of historic purpose, the loss of a transcending national destiny. Zionism attempted to replace Messianism. The vision of the future was replaced by the desire for the immediacy of the present. A new national purpose was to be forged for this ancient people. What we got is manufactured national reality, trying desperately to cut its roots from the soil of past history. But no nation can live with a borrowed national destiny, nor can it survive with a plastic national identity. Zionism has its justification only as an instrument of Jewish Messianism. It did have this character in the early days of the Jewish resettlement in Eretz Yisrael. The <i>ḥalutzik</i> idealism of the pioneers was a secularized manifestation of the messianic hunger of the Jewish people of history. That is why it could withstand all the trials and tribulations and triumph. Now that it has spent its inherited resources, large segments of Israeli society are left with a rootless secularism, without memories, but also without expectations. It is altogether of today and all its future can be nothing but an eternal repetition of today. What it holds for man, it must deliver now; its only rewards are the fruits of the passing hour. A nation cannot live by that. It drags a society down to the level of the crudest forms of a demoralizing materialism. Therein lie the causes of the most serious internal problems of Israeli society.
  
  10 Torah in Exile; Torah in Israel
  
  
  
  
  
  As one whose lot has been to work not only in the fields of religious philosophy and theology, but also in that of <i>halakhah</i>, I am obliged to state that, being confronted with the many challenges to halakhic Judaism as they have arisen in this entirely new era of Jewish history, we have received not one original work of Torah, not one <i>ḥiddush</i>, not a single new halakhic insight, that may in the least help us in solving the new problems of a new day. The rabbinate in Israel, the heads of the Yeshivot, and certain elements in the orthodox camp in Israel, often supported by their counterparts in other countries, share a heavy burden of responsibility for the secularization of Israeli society.
  The religious establishment in Israel occasionally refers to the land as the center of Torah. This is, of course, true. Israel has become the new center of Torah and talmudic learning and scholarship. Unfortunately, there are today only two centers of Jewish life left in the world: the United States and Israel where there can be no doubt that the level of Torah study and knowledge in the Yeshivot and other institutes of higher learning by far surpasses anything that may be found in the rest of the world. However, the question that intrigues us is: Is this the new Torah center for which we religious Zionists, especially those among us who were ideologically close to the <i>Torah Va’Avodah</i> movement of religious <i>ḥalutziut</i>, hoped in our younger years about a generation ago? We hoped for a renewal of <i>halakhah</i> as <i>Torat Eretz Yisrael</i>, as having the specific quality of the Torah germane to the new reality of the Jewish people reestablished in the land of the fathers. We were looking forward to a quality of Torah interpretation and application, of which it is said in the Midrash that “there is no Torah like the Torah of Eretz Yisrael, no wisdom like the wisdom of Eretz Yisrael.”
  What is the uniqueness of that Torah and that wisdom? There is only one Torah. What difference does it make where it is studied. If it is Torah, it is Torah even in Chicago; if it is not, what does it matter that it is being taught in the sanctuaries of B’nei Brak? In order to ask the question, one need not be ignorant of the teachings regarding the mystical illuminations which are granted in the holy land. Our concern here is with the manifest nature of Torah and <i>halakhah</i> in the context of the new reality of the people in its national home. What then is the Torah in <i>Ḥutz la’Aretz</i>, outside of <i>Eretz Yisrael</i>, and how is it distinguished from <i>Torat Eretz Yisrael?</i>
  One might give the answer in one short sentence and say: Outside of Eretz Yisrael, as the people of Israel is in exile, so is its Torah. What does this mean? The Torah is not only <i>Torat Emet</i>, a Torah of truth, it is also <i>Torat Ḥayim</i>, a Torah of life. The Torah aims at giving guidance and shaping the life of the Jew in its entirety. Its goal is the realization of its ethical, spiritual, and religious teachings in the life of the Jewish people, in the private as well as the public domain, in the daily life of the individual as well as in the historic performance of the people. Private conduct as well as social policies, the economic order and the political structure, these are all the vital concern of Torah. It is because of its concern with the totality of the life of the people that the teaching may be called <i>Torat Ḥayim</i>. With the people, the Torah, too, went into exile. In the <i>Galut</i>, wide areas of Torah application got lost. For instance, with the loss of national sovereignty and the dispersion of the people, there were no more political problems with a bearing on national survival to confront the Torah. The problems as well as the challenge to the wisdom of Torah-application were missing. Furthermore, in the exile of the people, their economic order and social structure are, of course, determined by the civilization in the midst of which the Jew finds his place. Naturally, in these circumstances, there is no possibility of applying the teachings of Judaism to the mundane areas of the social fabric. If Judaism teaches that the study of the Torah has to lead to the deed, in the exile of the people some of the basic principles of the Torah could not find realization in the areas for which they were intended.
  Needless to say, not all the exiles were alike. In Babylon, for example, where a high measure of internal autonomy was allowed the Jewish communities in the areas of their close settlements, the life of the people could be organized by the values of Torah teaching, even in the economic and judicial spheres. Where the internal autonomy was more restricted, so also was the possibility of Torah-application. Finally, in modern times, especially in the West, that kind of internal Jewish independence disappeared completely. Thus, further segments of the teaching were forced out of the realm of action into the corner of abstract Torah study, without any possibility of practical realization. The Torah found its “Four-cubit World,” in the <i>Takkanot haKehillot</i> (Ordinances of the Communities, which unfortunately no longer exist either), in the Jewish home, in the family, in synagogue customs, and in Jewish education. Judaism was forced out of the public domain into the limitations of the private one. Broad layers of the Torah were thus pried away from the comprehensive life of a normal people, for which they were originally intended. The vital link between Torah and reality was severed in the exile of the people. That is the Torah in <i>Ḥutz la’Aretz</i>. It is Torah in exile. It is Torah imprisoned in the private domain. The living Torah needs the dialectical tension of the confrontation with a total reality that asks questions and presents problems. Torah is alive when it meets the challenge, struggles with the problems, seeks for solutions by a continuous deepening of its self-understanding, thus forever discovering new levels of meaningfulness in the depth of its inexhaustible eternity. Torah in exile lacks the life-sustaining challenge of the confrontation; it is stunted in its vitality and, for lack of possibilities of Torah-realization, it is greatly impaired in its wisdom of Torah-application.
  
  
  
  With the establishment of the State of Israel, sovereignty has been returned to the people in the land in all the public areas of its existence—the political, economic, judicial, educational, and social. For the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple, divine providence has placed into the hands of the Jewish people the possibility—and thus the responsibility—of redeeming the Torah from its imprisonment in the private domain, and leading it out into the public domain of national existence. Only Torah that toils and is effective—not only in the private life of Jews but within the comprehensive reality of a sovereign Jewish people—can rightly be called <i>Torat Eretz Yisrael</i>. Such Torah goes out to meet the problems arising from the complexities of this radically new situation of a state of the Jews in the second half of the twentieth century. The challenge opens up fresh wells of the creative vitality of <i>halakhah</i>, hidden in the Torah itself, though their existence might not normally have been suspected in past <i>Galut</i> generations. This is the Torah of <i>Eretz Yisrael</i> that we need today; Torah that in the confrontation with the urgent demands of the new reality recovers the original vitality of <i>halakhah</i> and thus renders it capable of realizing the comprehensive Torah purpose in the public domain of the nation for the first time since the destruction of the second commonwealth.
  In earlier days, we were looking forward to this kind of renewal of the original vitality of <i>halakhah</i>. When we argued earlier in a previous chapter that the straightjacket of the written-down word has been forced upon the <i>halakhah</i> and that <i>halakhah</i> had to be restored to its original function of dealing with each new situation effectively in accordance with the comprehensive purpose of the Torah, we had in mind chiefly the situation in the State of Israel. Nowhere is the need for the functioning of the <i>halakhah</i> in keeping with its essential nature of normalcy greater than in Israel. Not only are the problems arising from the radically new situation of restored national sovereignty more urgent there than anywhere else; the problems are more genuinely Jewish than anywhere else. Whereas outside the State of Israel the “new situations” are often dependent and conditioned by forces not directly related to Jewish existence and often inimical to it, in Israel the “new situation” emerges from the new national reality of the Jewish people. The need and the problems are authentically Jewish in their demanding urgency. Unfortunately, thus far <i>halakhah</i> has not been able to cope convincingly with the challenge that this new phase in Jewish history has delivered to it. Often, we cannot help doubting whether the halakhic establishment in Israel is even aware that there is a challenge, that there are problems that require an approach rather different from the one required in former times in the Polish, Lithuanian, or Hungarian <i>Shtetl</i>. Rather than finding in Israel <i>Torat Eretz Yisrael</i>, one meets much more with Torah of the <i>Shtetl</i>. This is not said without awe and love for the greatness of the Torah of the <i>Shtetl</i>, that has sustained us through many generations in the past. But we must understand that the <i>Shtetl</i> was an organic structure. It developed naturally in the unnatural conditions of the <i>Galut</i>. <i>Halakhah</i> in the <i>Shtetl</i> was the appropriate application of the Torah to the <i>Galut</i>-conditions of Jewish life that was Jewish chiefly in the private domain. However, the <i>Shtetl</i> that has been transposed from the <i>Galut</i> to the State of Israel is an unnatural, artificial structure, out of context, out of place. This has not been without critical consequences in the quality of Torah study and interpretation in Israel. As we indicated, what we have in Israel is essentially <i>Torat Ḥutz la’Aretz</i>, but it is no longer the Torah that we were able to admire in the great Torah centers in the <i>Galut</i>. The Torah of the <i>Shtetl</i> in its natural habitat was responsive to the life of the people in <i>Galut</i>. However reduced the area of possible Torah application was, this was the life of the Jewish people. The study of the Torah emerged from it, it was itself the child of that life. The quality, the originality, the genius of that Torah interpretation were all the authentic manifestations of that life, however stunted it had to be in its <i>Galut</i>-conditioned anomaly. But this Torah of the <i>Galut</i> that has found a new home in the unnatural <i>Shtetl</i>, transferred artificially to the new reality of Jewish existence, has lost the fertile soil from which it grew. The <i>Shtetl</i> in the State of Israel is an imitation. The quality of Torah study and interpretation is, on the whole, the imitative repetition of a lost glory.
  Notwithstanding our failures and ineptitude, Israel is central to the existence of the Jewish people the world over. It is essential to Judaism and to the survival of the Jewish people in a threefold sense. Beginning with God’s command to Abraham to immigrate to the land which he would show him, Jewish history has focused around it. Jewish history in the land determined for all times the self-understanding of the Jew. The future for the Jew meant expectations inseparable from the land. But without those expectations Jewish history becomes meaningless. The land as the home of a Jewish people restored to its inheritance, in accordance with those expectations and contrary to the laws of a mundane world history, affirms the entire direction of the movement of this people across the ages towards the messianic “later days.” The rise of Israel demonstrates the fact that the existence and survival of the Jewish people are rooted in the messianic dimension of world history. We have reached a point in Jewish history at which the mere existence of the Jewish State is essential to Judaism. We know today that, should Israel be destroyed, it would be the end of the Jewish people, an event that would render the two thousand years of <i>Galut</i> a futile exercise in meaningless misery. The physical reality of the state is directing Jewish history and Jewish existence into the dimension of faith and of the spirit, within which Israel has survived and within which alone it has been authentically Jewish; the dimension within which alone it has been a great nation of decisive influence in human history. Whether we believe in it or not, the mere existence of the state has a messianic quality, for in the realm of the purely secular and material, this little Israel makes very little sense indeed. But, of course, in that realm neither the Jew nor Jewish history make much sense either. The emergence of the state, after twenty centuries of exile, is an event in the messianic history of the Jewish people and the world. The State of Israel is the spiritual center of all Israel not on account of what it is, but because it is.
  The secularists, submerging completely in the present moment, cutting their moorings from the memories of the past and the expectations of the future of historic Israel, landed themselves in a dead-end street of history. The religious establishment, unable to grasp the messianic quality even of the material aspects of the present moment, imprisoned themselves in memories. They landed in a dead-end street of the spirit. Both will have to retrace their steps. Both will have to discover the eternal in the contemporary; the secularists by moving back into the continuity of Jewish historic existence, the religious by moving forward to embrace the new reality with respect and love and to integrate it into the context of the historic continuity of Torah-application in the contemporary situation.
  
  11 Exile and Redemption
  
  
  
  
  
  If we divert our attention from the spiritual and religious problems of the day and try to focus on the external political situation of the Jewish people, what do we behold?
  Once again, and even more dramatically, the moral and spiritual exhaustion of the human race leaps into view. The most glaring manifestation of the international collapse of values today is to be found in the United Nations. The U.N. has become a shameless organization of international hypocrisy, and thus the dangerous derider of truth, justice, and human decency. It has become the source from which the poison of international demoralization seeps into the councils of governments, paralyzing them, and rendering them impotent to deal effectively with the all-encompassing problems that threaten the very survival of man on this globe. Nothing could be more natural than that this spiritual debacle of the human race should be reflected in the situation of the Jewish people. As in the past, so today, the plight of Israel, of the Jewish people, is the moral barometer of mankind. This is a heavy burden to bear, but we have every reason to be proud of it.
  With the Hitler era, something entirely new entered Jewish and world history. Whereas during the specifically Christian era of Jewish persecution the genocidal criminality was normally limited to localized communities, from the beginning of Western civilization’s Nazi phase the threat to Jewish survival became total. The crisis is all-comprehensive. The survival of the Jewish people in its entirety is at stake. This is what we sensed anew in the trying weeks that preceded the Six-Day War in 1967. We realized what the State of Israel meant for all of us. We could not have survived another holocaust. With the Yom Kippur War, we awoke to the same realization that total crisis was upon us. The truth is that, ever since the days of the European holocaust, the Jewish people the world over has been confronted with the ultimate question of Jewish existence. In the days of my rabbinate with the Jewish Community in Berlin under the Nazis, I would occasionally preach on the concept of <i>Am Olam</i>, the Eternal People, and would define it as the colossus of time in confrontation with the colossi of space. However, now that everything seems to be in the balance, can we still speak of ourselves as the <i>Am Olam</i>, with the same kind of self-assured faith and faithfulness? Already there are authors who write about the last Jew and the end of the Jewish people. Of course, one could have done the same—and perhaps with even greater justification—in the year 69-70 C.E., when we had as yet not withstood two millenia of exile. Yet we are still around, and have had—in spite of everything arrayed against us—an incomparable impact on the entire course of world history. But since this is another phase of the total crisis, we had better look to our faith, attempting to understand it anew in the light of these darkened horizons.
  
  
  
  Since the earliest days, two concepts were essential to our self-understanding. They have accompanied us throughout our long history and we have lived with them through the ages. Precisely because of that, we have taken them so much for granted, so that by now we are hardly able to appreciate their mysterious—perhaps supernatural—quality. The two concepts are <i>Galut</i> and <i>Ge’ulah</i>, Exile and Redemption.
  The idea of <i>Ge’ulah</i> is, of course, identical with the idea of Messianism, the faith that, no matter how long the Exile may last, one day the Jewish people will return to Zion and Jerusalem and find redemption in their ancient homeland. Such faith is not easy to explain. How was it possible for an entire people to hold on to this kind of an irrational faith during all the generations of their manifold exiles? The entire course of world history contradicted that faith. In the light of world-historic realities, in the midst of the bitter <i>Galut</i> experiences, the faith was an absurdity. But no less unique and inexplicable than the faith in Redemption “at the end of times” has been the exile history of the Jewish people. In the course of human history numerous nations were uprooted and exiled from their homeland. But as the result of such catastrophies, they disintegrated and ultimately disappeared from the face of the earth. The only exception is Israel. True, faith in <i>Ge’ulah</i> gave us the strength to endure in <i>Galut</i>. However, as we have indicated, that faith itself requires explanation. It will not do to explain a puzzle with an enigma.
  Perhaps even more surprising than the faith and the history is the nature of the mourning in our exiles, the emotional intensity with which the Jewish people, year in, year out, through the many centuries, wept for the loss of Zion and Jerusalem. On <i>Pesaḥ</i>, reciting the <i>Haggadah</i>, we speak that declaration of identity between the generations: “In every generation, a Jew is obliged to see himself as if he, in his own person, had been redeemed from Egypt.” In the course of time, the sentence has received many penetrating interpretations. Yet I doubt that there have been, at any one time, too many Jews who succeeded in looking upon themselves as if, indeed, they themselves had been participating in the Exodus. But, as I recall the intensity of the mourning, the weeping, wailing and lamenting all through the ages up to our own age, it becomes obvious that in every generation Jews in their multitudes have conducted themselves as if they themselves had lost Zion and Jerusalem and were personally exiled from the holy land; as if they had witnessed the <i>Ḥurban</i>, the destruction, with their own eyes, as if it had happened to them directly. Possibly this wholly personalized <i>Avelut</i> (mourning) asks even more for an explanation than the faith in Redemption itself.
  Consider the Jewish stance in history. On the one hand, there is <i>Avelut</i>, mourning of a kind that made manifest complete identification with the past. In every generation, we saw ourselves as if we ourselves had been exiled from Zion and Jerusalem. On the other hand, by the unwavering faith in <i>Ge’ulah</i>, we have always identified ourselves with the future. We were so sure that one day the Redeemer would come that at times we felt as if something of the promise had indeed been fulfilled. After the mourning period of the <i>Drei Wochen</i> (Three Weeks) and <i>Tisha B’Av</i> (the Ninth of Av), there follows <i>Shabbat Naḥamu</i>, the Sabbath of Consolation, which we have observed in every kind of exile as if indeed we had been comforted. The celebration of the <i>Seder</i> and the observance of the festival of <i>Pesaḥ, Zeman Ḥerutenu</i>, the Season of our Freedom, often in the midst of the most abject oppression, has given the Jew a very real sense of personal redemption. Or again, in the joyous liberation from the burdens of the past year as the holy day of <i>Yom Kippur</i> comes to its climactic close, the Jew is granted, in anticipation, a measure of the bliss of the fulfillment of the times. The weekly <i>Shabbat</i>, too, has granted rest and peace <i>Me’en Olam Haba</i>, as if from the world to come. On the one hand, complete identification with the past, the origin of our Exile; on the other, complete identification with the future through anticipatory faith in Redemption. On the one side, mourning; on the other, consolation. Past and future, exile and redemption, embracing each other in every present moment. In all the exiles, the Jew has lived in the past and the future more than in the present; they were more important than the present. We have drawn the past from behind and the future from before us and sunk them into the contemporary moment in which we found ourselves in each generation. Thus, living with the past in memory and with the future in faith, we have saved the present from the domination of time. In every generation we have succeeded in establishing the present moment as a point in eternity. Without it we could not have remained on the stage of history.
  
  
  
  Still, how was it possible for us to accomplish this? It may very well be that the secret of our eternity is hinted at in the nature of our national mourning, to which we have already referred. It is a matter of general experience, and the rabbis expressed it by saying that it has been decreed that as time passes the dead be forgotten. As time passes pain and sorrow subside, the wound heals. One is able to forget. Yet, we have never been able to forget the death of the second Jewish commonwealth. On the contrary, ever since the <i>Ḥurban</i> we have been declaring: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” What kind of a loss has this been that could never be forgotten?
  One of the most tragic experiences in the life of one of the fathers of the Jewish people may perhaps provide the explanation. Our father Jacob mourned for his son Joseph all through the years. He believed that his son was dead. Why could he not forget? The explanation the tradition gives is: it is a law of life that as the years pass the dead are gradually forgotten. Joseph, however, was not dead. Jacob’s endless mourning contained within itself a glimmer of hope. Similarly, in the case of the national mourning of the Jewish people. The very fact that through the centuries the Jewish people have not been able to act naturally and to forget meant that, somehow, the mourning carried within itself the intimation that in spite of the <i>Ḥurban</i> there was no death. This kind of mourning that time could not soothe contained the seed of a hope, of the tiding of new life, of the coming redemption. Only an eternal people can hold on to its past with such intensity and save it from sinking away into unredeemed oblivion. Something of the very reality of <i>Ge’ulah</i> has been present in the <i>Galut</i>. The heart of the nation always knew throughout history, with some mysterious awareness that could never be doubted, of life eternal. There has never been an exile in which a measure of the redeeming force and vitality of the promised future has not been present. In every one of his exiles, the Jew strove, built, and created. This redeeming vitality, present in all exiles, has been the source of our mysterious faith in ultimate redemption. In actual fact, an advanced share of <i>Ge’ulah</i> has forever accompanied the <i>Galut</i>.
  4
  Normally, we think of <i>Galut</i> as a phenomenon of Jewish history. It is, however, vital that we understand what <i>Galut</i> has meant in the foundation and formation of Judaism. <i>Galut</i> did not start with the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jewish people to the four corners of the world. It stands at the very beginning of the road. Even before there was a Jewish people there was already Jewish exile. It all started with the call to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee.” This is how the path of the first Jew began—exile and promise. When the father of the nation-to-be was still childless, it was already decreed and revealed to him: “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; and afterwards shall they come out with great substance.” (Genesis, 15,13) Once again, even before there was a Jewish people there was already Exile and the promise of Redemption. Not only did this exile not destroy the sovereignty of the Jewish people but, on the contrary, it was through Exile that Abraham became the father of Israel and it was in Exile that the children of Jacob became the people of Israel, the children of Israel of history. It happened in Egypt that they were for the first time referred to as a people, when Pharaoh said of them: “Behold, the <i>people</i> of the children of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.” In our Egyptian exile we became a nation. What is the significance of all this?
  There are two kinds of exiles. There is a national exile which begins with <i>Ḥurban</i>, with the destruction of the sovereignty of the people and their dispersion into alien lands. However, prior to national exile, and more fundamental and universal, there is cosmic exile. National exile is a phenomenon in the history of nations; cosmic exile bespeaks the spiritual quality of the universal human condition at any one time in history.
  What do we mean by “cosmic exile?” God has His plan for the world. The entire creation is infused with a divine purpose that longs for and seeks its realization in the cosmos in general and in human history in particular. Since, however, mankind has its own goals such as passion for power, desire for domination, for possessions and pleasures, such egotistic human drives deny the divine purpose in the creation of man. As a result, God’s own purpose finds itself in Exile in the history of mankind. So long as the divine plan remains unrealized in history, the history of mankind tells the story of—what Jewish tradition calls—<i>Galut haShekhinah</i>, the Exile of the Divine Presence. God Himself is, as it were, a refugee in the world of men. It is this exile that is prior to, and at the root of, every national exile. It is on account of this that the history of the Jewish people begins with Exile. The call that went out to Abraham was a call for identification with the divine plan in history. This, however, compelled him to leave everything behind and to join the Exile of the Divine Presence in history. But by way of this identification with the divine purpose and the divine <i>Galut</i>, he became Abraham, the father of a “multitude of nations.” The Egyptian exile was of similar significance for his descendants. Egypt was one of the phases of the exile of the divine plan in history. To have been in <i>Galut</i> at the very beginning of their way meant that the starting point of the way was identification of the children of Jacob with the Exile of the Divine Presence. Yet it was through this identification that they became the people of Israel, <i>Am Eḥad</i>, one people in the world. The association of the children of Israel with the cosmic <i>Galut</i>, sharing in it right from their beginnings, made them the Jewish people.
  However, precisely on this account, Exile is not only misery and disaster, but also challenge and responsibility with life-giving and life-sustaining meaning. The symbol of the Roman occupation in ancient Israel was the city of Caesarea. Comparing the symbol of Caesarea with that of Jerusalem, the Talmud says: If they tell you Caesarea and Jerusalem both are settled or that both are destroyed, do not believe it. But if they say Caesarea is settled and Jerusalem destroyed or Jerusalem is settled and Caesarea destroyed, believe it. For when one is safely established, the other cannot be so. (T.B., <i>Megillah</i>, 6a). In this manner, the Talmud expressed the confrontation between two principles in history. In the world of triumphant Caesarea there is little room for Jerusalem, the Holy City, just as in the world of established Jerusalem, there is no place for the Caesarea of the Caesars. At the time just preceding the destruction of the second Jewish commonwealth, there was a very real choice before the people: either find a place in the world order of the Roman Empire which was wide open to them, or identify themselves with the destiny of the <i>Shekhinah</i>, of the Divine Presence, with the divine exile that was unavoidable within the <i>pax romana</i>. The Jewish people chose between these two possibilities. The result of their choice was the <i>Ḥurban</i>, the destruction of their state and their dispersion. But it is only because of that choice that the people of Israel are still the people of Israel and are still around in the world of men.
  In other words, this <i>Ḥurban</i> was not just disaster. It was choice! We chose to side with the divine plan for man, which was denied in the world of Caesar. The destruction of Jerusalem and of the state was not a disaster that overwhelmed the Jewish people with the blind force of a natural catastrophe. What happened was the result of a free choice of unparalleled heroism in human history. True, it brought exile down upon our heads. Yet this consciously determined embracing of Jewish destiny granted us our eternal share in life. The source of our suffering has also been the source of our survival. And so, too, has it been to this day, the source of our timelessness.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  There is this difference between national and cosmic exile. National exile—the dispersal of an entire people from its homeland—is stagnation, loss of vitality, decline, and, ultimately, disappearance. This is the law in the world of Caesar. But in the cosmic exile of the divine purpose there is never stagnation, never irreversible stagnation. The realization of the divine purpose may be again and again tragically delayed, but it cannot be defeated. This exile is forever a process—often one of roundabout paths beyond immediate human understanding—towards its realization. As the Kabbalists would say, the fall is often the prerequisite for the rise. The Exile of the Divine Presence in history is a continuous progression toward Redemption. Because we have identified ourselves from the very beginning with the cosmic exile, which indeed constitutes the essence of our being, we have been able to find the certainty of our redemption—and often a measure of its fruition in anticipation—at the very heart of our various exiles. This is the secret of Israel eternal.
  Our Exile, then, is twofold: national and universal, the exile of the people, and the exile of the <i>Shekhinah</i> in which we share. Because of that, Jewish messianism is also twofold. The Talmud teaches that the only difference between the present world and the days of the Messiah is the freedom from alien subjugation. But Isaiah prophesied: A nation will not raise the sword against another, nor will they learn the art of war any longer. Both are right; both redemptions are needed; national redemption for the national exile, universal redemption for <i>Galut haShekhinah</i>, for the exile of God in human history. Jewish history seeks redemption in a twofold drive. It drives for national redemption among the nations, as well as universal redemption for all the nations. For this reason every form of national redemption can only be <i>Atḥalta deGe’ulah</i>, the beginning. Only universal redemption may be acknowledged as <i>Ge’ulah Shelemah</i>, redemption completed and time fulfilled. No separation between the two is possible. Jewish history has been moving on a double track. At times, we are warned “not to force the end;” at others, as at the time of the return from Babylon, we are punished for not having “gone up like a solid national phalanx.”
  
  
  
  The phase of the Exile in our times has to be recognized as total crisis because of the radically new event—the total threat—that entered Jewish history. It is usually referred to as the <i>Sho’ah</i>, the Holocaust. This is probably not the right term. In our exiles, we have experienced numerous holocausts—during the crusades, the Black Death, the Chmelnicki pogroms, the massacres in the Ukraine at the end of the First World War, etc., etc. This catastrophe, however, was different from all of them, not just in degree, but in kind, in its essential quality. The proper name for it is not <i>Sho’ah</i>, but <i>Ḥurban</i>, annihilation. For the first time in our history, the Exile itself was destroyed. After every other national catastrophe, there was still enough strength left in the Jewish people to continue, to rebuild and to recuperate. As we have indicated earlier, something of the awaited redemption was present in every one of our exiles. This time what happened was radically new. In our generation, the generation of Nazism, of humanity’s betrayal of all the values without which life itself becomes absurd indeed, the <i>Galut haShekhinah</i> (the Exile of the Divine Presence) reached its nadir, its most tragic intensification in history. Since Jewish existence interlocks with the <i>Galut haShekhinah</i>, we too were forced down to the depth of suffering and martyrdom and at the end of it we were left completely exhausted. Even that spark of <i>Ge’ulah</i> which was present before in every <i>Galut</i> and which alone enabled us to continue, to rebuild and to create anew, was extinguished this time. Our faith was shaken to its foundations.
  At this fateful hour in Jewish history there was only one remedy left for the destruction of the <i>Galut</i>, and it had to be as radical and revolutionary as the destruction itself; national redemption in the sight of all men through the restoration of Israel’s sovereignty in the land of Israel. Redemption was long overdue. It had to come. Without it, we would not have been able to continue. The rise of the State of Israel, after two millenia of such Exile and at the moment when it occurred, has become the reviving force, calling back to life the “dry bones” of the shattered <i>Galut</i>. Divine Providence had no choice but to grant us a measure of national redemption to meet the national <i>Ḥurban</i>. However, therein lies too the cause for this new phase of the total crisis that has broken over us since the Yom Kippur war. The national redemption, <i>because it had to come</i> for the sake of Jewish survival, was running ahead of <i>Galut haShekhinah</i>, of the redemption of the Divine Presence from its exile in the affairs of men and nations. The national redemption of the Jewish people came without a corresponding measure of universal redemption. This is the root of Israel’s present problem. In our days, a civilization that has been drifting ever since its spiritual and moral collapse in the era of Nazism is once again being tested. What a degradation of the dignity of man that formerly proud nations can be treated today by oriental potentates like big daddy treats his little children to whom he grants pocket money according to whether they please him or displease him! Is a darker eclipse of human values imaginable than when the conscience and the standard of values of formerly great nations are determined by the amount of oil Arabia is willing to allow to reach them? What a demoralization of international order, what a derision of international justice! International cynicism is eating away the last shreds of the moral fibres of human society, already sickened by the universal catastrophe of Nazism. Mankind is on the road to universal chaos. As in the days of Nazism, with the selling out of the Jewish people to Hitlerism, the world was moving fast towards the second World War, so today with the cynical willingness of formerly great nations to sell the State of Israel and the Jewish people for a barrel of oil, the world is approaching the day of reckoning, the hour of the thermonuclear Armageddon.
  
  
  
  We concede this is indeed a metaphysical interpretation of Jewish existence. But Jewish survival testifies to the fact that we are a “metaphysical” people. As in the time of triumphant Nazism, so today the plight of the <i>Shekhinah</i> in human history is dramatically reflected in the destiny of Israel. If it were otherwise we would not be Jews. Because our destiny has been linked to <i>Galut haShekhinah</i>, to the Exile of the Divine Presence, once again in this hour of the total demoralization of the international order the crisis is total. Once again everything seems to be in the balance. But just because the crisis is total, the promise too is total. God’s own destiny in human history is linked to our own destiny. He needs us no less than we need Him. This is probably the deepest meaning of the idea of being “a chosen people.” God has joined His fortunes among men to our fortunes, as we have joined our destiny to Him on this earth. He let it be said by the mouth of His prophet, “Ye are My witnesses, saith God.” And the rabbis commented: “If you are my witnesses, I am God; if not, I am not God.” But since God will be, so must the witness too. This is the source of our suffering, the source of our dignity, the guarantee of our survival till the end of days. We have reached a juncture in world history when the existence of the Jewish people cannot be separated from the existence of the State of Israel. And the future of the people of Israel is inseparable from <i>Ge’ulat haShekhinah</i>, from the redemption of God Himself from His man-created exile. Because of that, Israel will still dwell in Zion and Jerusalem long after the wells of Arabia had been forced to surrender their last drop of oil.
  The question, of course, is: what is our function, the function of the Jewish people, in such a scheme of history? It would seem to us that no matter what our reaction to the scheme may be, we shall remain the witnesses. What God has started with us He will complete. Too much remains unfinished; too much awaits its justification; too much waits for its redemption. God will not die in His exile. As far as we are concerned the question is: shall we just endure our destiny or willingly embrace it? We shall not escape it. This is the lesson that we must learn from the Yom Kippur war. The State of Israel has been forced back into Jewish history. If the tragedy of the Yom Kippur war will bring home to us the futility of our desire to become a “normal” people and will induce us to recover the ethos of the Jewish stance in history in the context of <i>Galut</i> and <i>Ge’ulah</i>, it may yet be turned into a triumph of our struggle for survival within the messianic wave of world history. Only in that context can it be said that the state of Israel has come to stay. Of course, it is going to stay. The attempt to break out of that context has failed. It is going to fail again and again. The God of history will not let us go. We are not being asked. There is no escape for Israel from the historic destiny of Israel. The question again is: shall we only endure it, or shall we find the ultimate meaning of our human existence in it by embracing it with resolute determination and dedication. There has hardly ever been a more worthwhile moment in history to be a Jew in the classical context of <i>Galut</i> and <i>Ge’ulah</i> than at this time of moral and spiritual exhaustion of the human race.
  
  V Conclusion
  
  Introduction
  
  <i>We started our discussion with an analysis of the erosion of all standards of value and meaning in the world. Mankind seems to have reached a dead-end street. All the dreams have already been dreamt and found wanting; all the visions viewed and discarded; all the ideals deserted. Man seems to have already had his future and stands now in a wasteland of history with his only wretched preoccupation how to save his skin from the ultimate disaster</i>.
  <i>Yet there are some bright spots even in this dark horizon. They harbor some promise; they represent the challenge and the opportunity. Young people were among the first to notice that something was amiss; they were among the first to sense the loss of purpose, of worthwhile goals, in this civilization. Many rebelled. Their rebellion was a symptom of the sickness, a manifestation of the need for spiritual integrity. The drug culture was such a symptom of the sickness. It was a desperate cry for some magic source of human salvation, as young people sensed that they were drowning in meaninglessness and absurdity. Salvation did not come; the sickness and the cry remained. Nearer to the present hour, we recognize the same restless search for new horizons among the young in the drift towards Eastern mysticism, in the longing for some secret formula to be received from the divine wisdom of some guru who happens to be in the vogue, some mystical incantation to which one may cling in order to save oneself from suffocation in the spiritual vacuum of this declining civilization. The same desperate search is motivating some of the new fangled faith-oriented fad groups like the Jesus freaks and others. All this is no solution, but still only the symptoms of the sickness. However, the direction of the search indicates a sensing of the dimension whence alone healing may come, pointing to the realm beyond the material, the domain of the spirit, the homeland of all meaning and worthwhile purpose to guide human existence. It is the dimension indwelt– as will ultimately be discovered– by the spirit of God</i>.
  <i>Of late, one may notice how this longing for internal security of the spirit is gradually spreading to the adult population as well. This rather late and slow awakening is, of course, not unrelated to the economic insecurity and political imbalance that recently–and especially since the Yom Kippur war–threatens to engulf all of mankind. Energy crisis, the threat of international bankruptcy, social and political disorders, starving millions– and no vision, no ideals, no faith, but a spiritually and morally exhausted human race to cope with the world-encompassing problems of humanity’s survival. It brings home the truth that science and technology alone will not do the job; that new foundations of the spirit, and in the spirit, are needed in this world that has lost its anchor and is drifting dangerously into the “Final Solution” of thermonuclear oblivion</i>.
  
  12 The Need of The Hour
  
  
  
  
  
  We Jews had our full share of the sickness of the age. An inordinately high percentage of our young people participated in all those adventures of man’s contemporary hopelessness and despair in the drug culture, in radical movements, in the flight to the gurus, in the escape to the Jesus freaks. We need not apologize for it to anyone. It only shows that Jewish youth has a high sensitivity to the disintegration of values.
  On the other hand, in many places we are aware now of a dawning realization that <i>Lo Zu haDerekh</i>, that this is not the way. A turning homeward has begun. Among young people, as well as among adults, there are not a few who have started to realize that the search for new foundations is most hopefully directed to our own resources, to the sources of Judaism. There is a famine in the land, not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of God. Not that “hunger for bread and thirst for water” do not exist, but perhaps external, economic and political insecurity is needed to make man fully aware of his human condition, of his spiritual starvation. The signs of this “famine” may be observed by all who care to look for them. In my own experience, I notice it by the subjects on which Jews of all “denominations” wish to hear lectures and attend classes. They are: Jewish ethics as applied to the manifold concerns of contemporary man, and—most surprisingly—Talmud, Talmud, Talmud and, of course, faith after the holocaust, with the emphasis on faith, faith, faith.
  These are the questions of destiny directed to us in this hour:
  Do we have a full understanding of the nature of this hunger?
  Do we have the capacity to satisfy it?
  Can we provide the new foundations, the new anchor?
  Are we able to reconstruct a world of values, of faith and hope for our people?
  Can we do it from the sources of Judaism?
  The task is twofold: a) intellectual-spiritual; b) psychological-emotional. Let us consider the first part first. Whether they like it or not, once Jews left the ghettoes, they have been living in continuous confrontation with another culture, another civilization. If now, in this hour of the exhaustion of this culture, there is a search for standards and values, for new spiritual foundations, and if we are to respond to this search effectively, we must understand that culture and civilization critically, we must understand wherein it has failed and why. And we must find the strength to cast the searching darkness of man’s contemporary predicament, of his present-day spiritual confusion and despair, on the sources of Judaism and make them light up, as once the <i>Urim veTumim</i> lit up in response to the searching questions of the High Priest. It requires consistent study and hard work to unlock the response of the Torah to the problems of our time. It demands a sympathetic and penetrating understanding of those problems, as well as the ability to bring the wisdom of the Torah to bear on those problems in such a manner that the searching mind may find intellectual and emotional peace. <i>We dare not be just demanding in the name of the Torah; we have to be convincing with the truth of the Torah</i>.
  
  
  
  Such a process of responding, interpreting and teaching, must be introduced into our educational philosophy on all levels. There is at least one serious shortcoming in our educational philosophy. In our Day Schools and Yeshiva High Schools, the curriculum is divided into <i>Limudei Kodesh</i> and <i>Limudei Ḥol</i>, sacred studies, the teaching of Jewish subjects on the one hand, and secular studies of a general nature on the other. These two sections of the curriculum are kept strictly separated from each other, representing two worlds that do not recognize each other. But one cannot educate effectively in this manner. The two areas of knowledge cannot be kept apart in the mind and soul of the student. If one may paraphrase the words of Maimonides from the Introduction to his <i>Guide for the Perplexed</i>, by this kind of an educational process one either does violence to one’s intellect by one’s faith, or one violates one’s faith by one’s intellect. In either case, growth is stunted and the development of personality potential is frustrated. One cannot teach Torah as if one lived in the isolation of an Eastern European ghetto and at the same time give instruction in general secular subjects as they are taught in an open society. An intellectual bridge has to be built between the <i>Limudei Kodesh</i> and the <i>Limudei Ḥol</i>, integration has to be established, a unified philosophy of education conceived and implemented. The confrontation with the culture of the world in the midst of which Jews live cannot be ignored. We dare not steal away from it. We have to acknowledge it, face it, and meet it with the intellectual and emotional strength of Judaism.
  There is nothing new about this in the intellectual and spiritual history of Judaism. In long ago past centuries, some of the greatest luminaries of the Torah scholarship showed us the way. Jews in the domain of Islamic culture knew of this confrontation and met it brilliantly; for instance, Saadia Gaon, Baḥya Ibn Pakuda, Maimonides, Crescas, Gersonides, to mention only a few. When Maimonides maintained that one needed logic to understand mathematics, that one should study mathematics as an aid to the study of physical science, and physical science in order to understand the universe of creation, which understanding is the only door that gives admittance to the inner courts of the palace of the King of Kings insofar as man may know Him at all, he was not only subordinating the entire area of the general so-called secular, studies to <i>Yedi’at Hashem</i>, but turned it into a vital auxiliary leading to the knowledge of God, and thus sanctified it. In this scheme, there are no <i>Limudei Ḥol;</i> all is <i>Kodesh</i>, all leading to a more profound understanding of Judaism.
  We do not say that the method of Maimonides is applicable today as he understood it. But the principle has been established. In modern times, Samson Raphael Hirsch and Ezriel Hildesheimer acknowledged the confrontation and accepted the unavoidable challenge, meeting it with no small success with their principle of <i>Torah Im Derekh Eretz</i>. One might sum up the gist of that principle by saying that the modern orthodox Jew from the Hirsch and Hildesheimer school was fully aware of the concerns of the age in which he lived. With those concerns he approached the Torah to discover the relevance of Judaism in relationship to those contemporary concerns. Already Saadia Gaon in the Introduction to his <i>Emunot VeDe’ot</i> takes issue with those who believe that any attempt at a philosophical interpretation of Jewish teaching may lead to heresy. He maintains that any such faint-heartedness is a sign of insufficient faith in the truth of the Torah. Because we have faith in the truth power of Judaism, we may well meet with confidence the unavoidable challenge of a mundane civilization around us, especially in its present state of disintegration. In this dimension lies the intellectual and spiritual responsibility of the hour to provide for the hunger of this generation, <i>Lishmo’a et devar Hashem</i>, to hear the word of God.
  
  
  
  The other aspect of the responsibility that I have called the psychological-emotional, I see in the approach to the majority of the Jews today and especially to a searching, inquiring, and often failing youth. The approach must be motivated by our acknowledgment of the reality of <i>Klal Yisrael</i>, the indivisible unity of all Israel. If we do wish to help them, if we do wish to make use of the opportunity that this twilight hour of human destiny offers us in the service of the Torah, the right approach to our fellow Jews is of decisive importance. What I have in mind is well illustrated in the Talmud. Discussing the biblical statement regarding Israel, “Ye are children unto the Lord your God,” commented Rabbi Yehudah: When you do conduct yourself like children, you are called children; but when you do not, you are not so called. Rabbi Meir, however, maintained: <i>Bein kakh uvein kakh atem keru’im banim</i>, either way, even when you fail, you are still acknowledged as children. It would seem to me that too many among us have adopted the position of Rabbi Yehudah, setting themselves up as judges over their brethren to determine who is to be recognized as being among His children and who not. The talmudic view obviously favors the position of Rabbi Meir. For whereas not a single biblical passage is quoted to support Rabbi Yehudah, a whole series of verses from the Bible is adduced to buttress Rabbi Meir’s statement. Did not Jeremiah call them, “Foolish children.” Foolish, yet children! Did not Moses say of them that they were “Faithless children!” Faithless, yet children! And how did Isaiah refer to them? “A seed of evil-doers, children that deal corruptly.” A seed of evil-doers, yet children! Concludes the Talmud: Maybe “children that deal corruptly” they are called, but <i>Bnei Me’alya lo mikru</i>, good children, are they not called? And the answer is: It is of them, even if they departed from God completely and turned to the idols, that Hosea said that even they are destined to be recognized as “children of the living God” (T.B., <i>Kiddushin</i>, 36a). Rabbi Zundel, the saintly teacher of Rabbi Israel Salant, founder of the Mussar movement, when referring to the Jews of his time would forever recall Rabbi Meir’s phrase, <i>Bein kakh uvein kakh</i>, either way….
  I believe that Rabbi Meir’s position is an expression of faith in <i>Am Yisrael</i>, in the Jewish soul that is in every Jew. What this means we can see with our own astonished eyes in the Jewish awakening that is taking place within Russian Jewry almost two generations after the Communist revolution, among young people who had no Jewish education, no experience of Jewish living, no awareness of Jewish history, who grew up far removed from any Jewish cultural activity. Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, there is the spark that ignites and moves them to heroic, sacrificial affirmation of their Jewishness. I am thinking of the Russian Jew, who in an underground private synagogue prays: <i>Alef, Beit, Gimmel, Dalet; Alef, Beit, Gimmel, Dalet</i> … because that exhausts all his knowledge of Hebrew and thus he prays, perhaps, the greatest prayer of our times. If such things are possible, how can one not have faith in the hidden spark of Jewishness in every Jew. Either way, they are called <i>Banim lashem</i>, God’s children.
  Let an example from my own personal experience show what I mean by the right approach to our fellow Jews. One <i>Erev Shabbat</i>, a distinguished orthodox rabbi in Chicago asked me to see a young girl, who was in town for the weekend with her father. The father was desperate. He had come from afar to spend some time with his daughter, who was staying at a Christian missionary school in the area. The rabbi thought that I was the right person to see the girl since her problem was a matter of theology and religious philosophy. I saw her on a Saturday night. She came with her father. She was all Christian piety and lovingkindness. Her natural loveliness and vitality were completely subdued into calm and simplicity worthy of a nun. She was a young girl who, like so many of the young people of that generation, had been “into” everything. Finally, she had converted to Christianity and was chosen to be educated as a missionary. After the social preliminaries in the company of the family were over, we retired into my study. I realized soon enough that my task was not to talk theology to her, or to prove to her the superiority of Judaism over Christianity. Before anything else, I had to understand her. We talked, or rather I let her talk, encouraging her to continue, to go on, occasionally asking a question, making a remark. Finally, after about three hours, when I thought I understood her, I said to her quietly: “You have been hurt, badly hurt.” At which she started crying. After that everything went relatively easily; after that we could talk about Judaism and Christianity, about being a Jew, about almost any other subject under the sun. She stayed with us for a few weeks. Then she went home with her father, returned to her people and to its faith. The experience also changed the life of the entire family, who became <i>Shomrei Mitzvot</i>, Torah-observant Jews.
  As we try to provide for the spiritual hunger of our day, before anything else we must try to understand, to act with kindness, and brotherly love. If we wish to offer guidance to the perplexed, we can only do it if we forever bear in mind that all of them, without distinction, <i>Keru’im banim lashem</i>, are called God’s children. We can only meet the challenge and respond to the opportunities of these times with faith in <i>Am Yisrael</i>, in the promise hidden in every Jewish soul.
  Thus far we have dealt with the challenge and the opportunity outside of Israel. However, the situation is very similar in Israel. <i>Medinat Yisrael</i> provides the greatest challenge and the richest opportunity for the implementation of the Torah in the full context of the life of <i>Am Yisrael</i> that has been granted to us since the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth. As we look back, especially over the past few years, we are saddened by the long series of missed opportunities. In particular, after the Six Day War hearts were open to listen, waiting to hear and willing to understand. Well, we declaimed about miracles—and indeed there were many—but the Torah camp in Israel failed to bring to the consciousness of the majority of the population, in sustained effort and continuous personal commitment, the meaning of Jewish destiny, the significance of being Jewish, the value and the meaning of Jewish life in a Jewish state in the second half of the twentieth century.
  It has failed to speak out clearly with the voice of the Torah on vital and burning social and moral issues and problems. And after the Yom Kippur war, in these days of internal crisis, loss of faith—even of secular faith—the voice of the Torah is not heard interpreting intelligently and speaking to the fateful problems of the day. The great majority of what calls itself—with no small conceit—the “<i>Yeshiveh Velt</i>,” and to a large extent the rabbinate too, is completely isolated from the people, their concerns, problems, troubles and sorrows. There are many rabbis in Israel, but the people in Israel have no rabbis. Commenting on the words of the Psalmist: “I shall walk before the Lord in the lands of the living,” Rabbi Yehudah (the <i>Amora</i>, not identical with the <i>Tanna</i> quoted above) explained: The land of the living? …the market places. That is where one has to walk, if one desires to walk before God. But this is exactly what God asked of Abraham: Walk before me. I often direct the attention of my students to the words of the Psalmist: “Planted in the house of the Lord, they shall flourish in the courtyards of God.” The study of the Torah should plant us in the house of God, but we—and through us the Torah—can flourish only in His courtyard, the market places of which Rabbi Yehudah spoke, the homes in which people live, the factories in which they toil, the communities in which they deal with their fellow men. There are opportunities untold, but we must learn <i>to understand that the method of authority will not work; what is needed is the method of persuasion</i>.
  The truth is that, regrettably, the “Torah camp” in Israel is not capable of using the method of persuasion. It has secluded itself from the life and the living concerns of the people. It has neither the necessary education, nor because of its negative attitude to what it calls <i>Limudei Ḥol</i>–all general knowledge—the intellectual capacity to speak meaningfully and convincingly to the great majority of the people. But it is even more incapacitated by its psychological-emotional approach, not only to the secular majority of the people in Israel, but even to certain sections of the religious community. Is it not enough just to recall the intolerance, the unkindness, yes, even the venom and often violence, with which various groupings and personalities treat each other even within the orthodox section itself! A generation ago there lived a great Jewish soul in the Land of Israel, the saintly Rabbi Kook, of blessed memory. In one of his most moving statements about the upbuilding of the land and its redemption, he made reference to a passage in the Talmud, tractate <i>Yoma</i> 9b. It is explained there: The First Temple, why was it destroyed? Because of three sins: idolatry, sexual immorality and bloodshed. But during the period of the Second Temple, they were busying themselves with the fulfillment of God’s commandments, they were practicing the rendering of acts of lovingkindness toward each other, why then was it destroyed? The answer is: Because there was among them <i>Sinat Ḥinam</i>, causeless hatred. Said Rabbi Kook: if the Temple was destroyed because of <i>Sinat Ḥinam</i>, it will have to be rebuilt through <i>Ahavat Ḥinam</i>, causeless love. Yes, love needs no cause; it is its own cause.
  Contemplating the dangers besetting all Israel, the threats to our very survival — not at all unlike those in the days of Nazism — how can we think of facing the challenges of this hour without the strongest possible unity of all Israel, without the highest grade of responsibility toward <i>Klal Yisrael</i>, without being carried forward by the deepest sense of <i>Ahavat Yisrael</i>? How can we do it without realizing that <i>Bein kakh uvein kakh</i>, either way, such are the Jews that God has still left; that, either way, they are the only brothers and sisters still left us, upon whom alone we may count and who count on us!