11 - Joseph Soloveitchik and Halakhic Man

Summary

The modern philosophical critique of revealed religion in general and traditional Judaism in particular has been primarily normative, as opposed to epistemological, in nature. Take Spinoza, for example. While he contrasted theology and philosophy in epistemological terms - inasmuch as theology, in his view, does not possess any truth-value as opposed to philosophy, whose goal is the truth - his primary contrast between the two was normative - inasmuch as he claimed that theology leads only to obedience to God, as opposed to philosophy which gives rise to the love of God. As for the Mosaic Law, for Spinoza it possessed only a purely political significance and lacked any broader moral or spiritual, much less any intellectual value.

Kant adopted Spinoza’s critique of Judaism, and in a similar vein argued that “Strictly speaking Judaism is not religion at all” but “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.” Of course, for both Spinoza and Kant, denying any value to Jewish law was tantamount to denying any value to Judaism in toto. By contrast, modern Jewish thinkers who sought to find the significance and value of Judaism as residing in something other than the study and observance of the Law could agree with the view of Jewish law taken by Spinoza and Kant, without believing that they had thereby rejected Judaism as a whole.