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Modernity and Jewish Orthodoxy: Nietzsche and Soloveitchik on Life-Affirmation, Asceticism, and Repentance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2008

Daniel Rynhold  and
Michael J. Harris
Daniel Rynhold
Affiliation:
Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University
Michael J. Harris
Affiliation:
London School of Jewish Studies
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Extract

Much ink has been spilt over the question of “Nietzsche and the Jews” ever since the distortion of Nietzsche's manuscripts by his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, forged the links with Nazism that would be further developed by the likes of Alfred Bäumler into a “carefully orchestrated cult.” Though it is a portrait long dismissed in the academic world, a combination of Nazi propaganda and some subsequent scholarship has ensured that the picture of Nietzsche as a virulent anti-Semite who provided Nazism with its conceptual underpinnings lingers in the popular mind. Most scholars, however, now accept at worst a more ambivalent picture. Others go beyond ambivalence, with Weaver Santaniello turning the accusation of anti-Semitism on its head by arguing that Nietzsche's contempt for anti-Semitism was one of the driving forces behind his critique of liberal Christianity, which in its use of “conservative theological concepts . . . perpetuate[s] anti-Semitism.” Even Crane Brinton, arguably one of those scholars most responsible for perpetuating the misrepresentation of Nietzsche as an anti-Semite, insisted that he had never maintained “that Nietzsche was a ‘proto-Nazi’.” But whilst Nietzsche is almost universally exonerated from the charge of personal anti-Semitism, Brinton's claim that “occasionally [Nietzsche] comes very close indeed to the Nazi program,” though based on poor use of Nietzsche's writings and rightly dismissed by Walter Kaufmann, continues to find echoes even amongst more careful Nietzsche scholars, who claim that he “did have some responsibility for Nazi crimes.”

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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 101 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 253 - 284
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Copyright © President and fellows of Harvard college 2008

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References

1 Translations of Nietzsche's works are cited by part and/or section number and are abbreviated as follows:

A The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmannn; New York: Penguin Books, 1976) 565–656.

BGE Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Random House, 1966)

D Daybreak (trans. R. J. Hollingdale; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)

EH Ecce Homo (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Random House, 1967)

GM On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; New York: Random House, 1967)

GS The Gay Science (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Random House, 1974)

HH Human, All Too Human (trans. R. J. Hollingdale; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

TI Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Penguin Books, 1976) 463–563.

WP The Will to Power (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; New York: Random House, 1967)

Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Penguin Books, 1976) 103–439.

Works by Joseph B. Soloveitchik are cited by page number and are abbreviated as follows:

FR Family Redeemed: Essays on Family Relationships (ed. David Shatz and Joel B. Wolowelsky; Jersey City: Ktav, 2000)

HM Halakhic Man (trans. Lawrence Kaplan; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983)

SP “Sacred and Profane,” in Shiurei Harav (ed. Joseph Epstein; Hoboken: Ktav, 1974) 4–32.

UM “Uvikashtem MiSham,” in Halakhic Man—Revealed and Hidden (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1979) 115–235. Translations are our own.

2 So described in the introduction to Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? (ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) 2.

3 Examples can be found in Arnold Eisen, “Nietzsche and the Jews Reconsidered,” Jewish Social Studies 48 (1986) 1–14; Siegfried Mandel, Nietzsche and the Jews (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998); and Menahem Brinker, “Nietzsche and the Jews,” in Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism?, 107–25. The Golomb and Wistrich collection contains a good selection of views on the topic.

4 Donna Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God, and the Jews (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994) 133. Another version of the more philo-Semitic line can be found in Jacob Golomb, “Nietzsche's Judaism of Power,” Revue desétudes Juives 146–47 (1988) 353–85.

5 Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (New York: Harper, 1965) vii.

6 Ibid.., 215.

7 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 291–92.

8 Golomb and Wistrich, introduction to Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism?, 9.

9 BGE §251. Inexplicably, this is one of the sections that Brinton quotes to support his claims about the Nazi overtones of Nietzsche's thought.

10 Michael F. Duffy and Willard Mittelman, “Nietzsche's Attitudes Toward the Jews,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988) 301–17, at 307. Nietzsche often expressed his preference for the Old Testament over the New; see, e.g., BGE §52; GM 3, §22. Duffy and Mittelman's three-fold distinction is substantially anticipated in Israel Eldad, “Nietzsche and the Old Testament,” in Studies in Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition (ed. James C. O'Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner and Robert M. Helm; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 47–68. A similar position is articulated by Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998) 117. Yovel presents this analysis in earlier works also, e.g., in his “Nietzsche and the Jews: The Structure of an Ambivalence,” in Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (ed. Jacob Golomb; London: Routledge, 1997) 118.

11 HH 1, §475,

12 BGE §270.

13 See Golomb, “Nietzsche's Judaism of Power,” 354.

14 See, e.g., D §205.

15 As Shalom Rosenberg points out, “God is dead” is a more ambitious claim than “God does not exist.” The latter is a metaphysical thesis; the former is also an anthropological one that hints at the human need for God and the tragic implications for humanity of his “death.” See Shalom Rosenberg, “Nietzsche and the Morality of Judaism,” in Nietzsche, Zionism and Hebrew Culture (Hebrew) (ed. Jacob Golomb; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002) 317–45, esp. 319.

16 EH 2, §1.

17 See, for example, Zarathustra's famous injunction to remain faithful to the earth and not to grant credence to those who speak of other-worldly hopes (Z, Prologue, §3), and Nietzsche's condemnation of “the concept of the 'beyond', the 'true world' invented in order to devaluate the only world there is—in order to retain no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality!” (EH 4, §8).

18 Jonathan Sacks, review of Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, ed. Jacob Golomb, Le'ela 47 (1999) 62.

19 Indeed, elements of Duffy and Mittelman's threefold distinction coincide with the four eras of Judaism discussed by one of the most significant early reform theologians Abraham Geiger. Geiger is similarly well disposed towards the pre-prophetic era for the rather Nietzschean reason that is was a period “of vigorous creation, unfettered and unhindered.” (Abraham Geiger, “A General Introduction to the Science of Judaism,” in Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism [comp. Max Wiener; trans. Ernst Schlochauer; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1981] 156). He also has high hopes for the era of liberation that corresponds to Nietzsche's modern Judaism. Interestingly though, the second period, that of tradition, which takes place in Duffy and Mittelman's priestly-prophetic era, for Geiger, lasts until the sixth-century completion of the Babylonian Talmud, and is seen as one that “took root in the spiritual heritage of the past and at the same time still maintained a certain degree of freedom in its approach to that heritage” (ibid., emphasis added). Geiger's ire is reserved for the period of rigid legalism “characterized by toilsome preoccupation with the heritage as it then stood,” (ibid.), which lasted from the sixth until the eighteenth century.

20 See e.g. Z, Prologue, §3; 1, §3; and 1, §4; as well as TI 5.

21 E.g., GS §276; EH 2, §10.

22 See our fuller discussion of the eternal recurrence in the section, “A Nietzschean Perspective: Eternal Return and Repentance of Love,” below.

23 TI 10, §4.

24 TI 5, §5.

25 A §18.

26 GM 3, §21. Nietzsche states explicitly several times in GM 3 that, nevertheless, the ascetic ideal is, paradoxically, necessary and life-promoting. For a lucid discussion of this and other complexities regarding Nietzsche's attitude to asceticism, see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) 114–37.

27 A §9.

28 GS §135.

29 BGE §195. Nietzsche does not believe that Judaism was always hostile to life. His view is that “[o]riginally, especially at the time of the Kings, Israel also stood in the right, that is, the natural, relationship to all things”, but that subsequently “priestly agitators” fostered a morality “no longer the expression of the conditions for the life and growth of a people, no longer its most basic instinct of life, but . . . become the antithesis of life . . . the 'evil eye' for all things” (A §25).

30 TI 5, §1.

31 WP §383. See also WP §384. As Graham Parkes points out (“Nietzsche and Zen Master Hakuin on the Roles of Emotion and Passion,” in Nietzsche and the Gods [ed. Weaver Santaniello; Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001] 121), the verb ökonomisieren, rooted in the word oikos (household), connotes, among other things, the domestication of the wildness of the passions.

32 GS §139.

33 HM, 30.

34 HM, 31. Soloveitchik contrasts the life-affirming nature of halakhic man not only with the outlook of the homo religiosus of other faiths, but even with other trends within Orthodox Judaism such as the early Musar movement, which “symbolized the world perspective of the universal homo religiosus, a perspective directed toward the transcendent . . . the nihility of this world, its emptiness and ugliness” (HM, 74). Even more significantly, as Allan Nadler has shown, Soloveitchik's life-affirming modernism departs radically from the Mithnagdic [anti-Hasidic] worldview of his forebears. “Soloveitchik's Halakhic Man: Not a Mithnagged,” Modern Judaism 13 (1993) 119–47.

35 Cf. HM, 35: “Temporal life becomes transformed into eternal life; it becomes sanctified and elevated with eternal holiness.”

36 HM, 30.

37 HM, 30. m. 'Abot 4:17 actually reads: “Better is one hour of repentance and mitzvot in this world . . ..”

38 m. 'Abot 4:21.

39 HM, 63.

40 m. 'Abot 4:17.

41 HM, 32.

42 HM, 33–34. See also, especially, HM, 149 n. 41, where Soloveitchik explicitly contrasts the perspective of Halakhah with what he terms the Greek, and especially Platonic, “negation of the body”; and HM, 46: “An individual does not become holy . . . through mysterious union with the infinite . . . but, rather, through his whole biological life, through his animal actions.”

43 HM, 40.

44 HM, 40.

45 HM, 41–43.

46 FR, 75–76.

47 FR, 77. It is noteworthy that another highly influential figure for modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, adopts a closely similar view: “What is holiness? . . . The character of normal life is not annulled, normal human activity, the life of the private individual and of society, etiquette and respect, are not obliterated; rather they are elevated in an ideal ascent” (R. Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot HaKodesh [Hebrew] [3 vols.; Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1978] 2:292). Rosenberg, “Nietzsche and the Morality of Judaism,” 337, highlights the life-affirmation common to Kook and Nietzsche. See also Smadar Sherlo, “Strength and Humility: Rabbi Kook's Moral System and Nietzsche's Morality of Power,” (Hebrew) in Nietzsche, Zionism and Hebrew Culture (ed. Jacob Golomb; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 200) 347–74, on similarities between the two thinkers including life-affirmation and the insistence that the passions should be sublimated rather than quashed. Jason Rappoport, “Rav Kook and Nietzsche: A Preliminary Comparison of Their Ideas on Religions, Christianity, Buddhism and Atheism,” The Torah U-Madda Journal 12 (2004) 99–129, alludes to the life-affirmation shared by the two thinkers but otherwise, in our view, mostly overstates the similarity between Nietzsche and Kook.

48 FR, 77–78.

49 See Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) ch. 7.

50 UM, 207–8.

51 UM, 207.

52 UM, 207.

53 UM, 208, 213–14.

54 It is worth noting that Nietzsche is mentioned on seven occasions in HM, though never specifically in connection with life-affirmation, asceticism and the passions. See HM, 68, 109, 114, 141 n. 4, 152 n. 64 and 164 n. 147 (two occurrences).

55 y. Kiddushin 4:12. Louis Jacobs in Beyond Reasonable Doubt (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999) 216, argues that this passage has been widely misunderstood and that Rav means simply that one must look after one's health and not refrain from wholesome food. Jacobs's evidence is the context of the passage, which appears soon after another teaching by Rav which focuses on the importance of protecting one's health and well-being, namely that it is forbidden to live in a city which has no physician, bathhouse and courts to maintain law and order. The teaching of Rabbi Jose that one should also not live in a city with no vegetable garden comes next, followed by our passage. However, Jacobs ignores the possibility of thematic development. It is plausible that the intention of our passage is to go further than the statements that precede it by asserting that not only ought one to look after one's health from the religious perspective, but one should make the effort to positively enjoy permitted food as well.

56 See, e.g., Gen. Rab. 45:5 on the barrenness of the Matriarchs as a divine device for rendering them more physically attractive to their husbands; b. 'Erub. 54a on taking what physical pleasure is available in brief human existence; b. Ta'an. 11a (the statement of Samuel concerning fasting, and the view of Rabbi Eliezer HaKappar concerning the Nazirite; R. Eliezer's statement also appears in Sifre, Num 30, b. Ned. 10a and elsewhere); the various statements endorsing relative freedom of sexual expression within marriage in b. Ned. 20b; the statement in the name of R. Yitzhak in y. Ned. 9:1, criticising the adoption of any prohibitions beyond those mentioned in the Torah; and the statements in b. Yebam. 62b about the deprivations suffered by an unmarried man.

57 Gen. Rab. 9:7.

58 Kuzari 2:50. Halevi expands on this theme in the same passage. See also Kuzari 3:1 and 3:5. In 3:1 Halevi states that the religious Jew “loves the world and length of days,” though this love is based on the radically non-Nietzschean grounds that these facilitate one's portion in the world to come.

59 See, e.g., Kook, Orot HaKodesh, 3:292.

60 See Norman Lamm, The Religious Thought of Hasidism: Text and Commentary (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1999) ch. 9; Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 84–87.

61 b. Ta'an. 11a–b. A positive view of the Nazirite's asceticism is also provided in Sifre Zuta 6:8. Interestingly, Soloveitchik follows neither side of the classical rabbinic debate about the Nazirite. Rather, he denies outright that the Nazirite is an ascetic figure. See UM, 213.

62 See, e.g., the negative statement of R. Yitzhak concerning a seudat reshut (any meal not mandated as a mitzvah) in b. Pesa ù . 49a; b. 'Abot 6:4, which recommends a life of physical deprivation focused on the study of the Torah; the statement of R. Judah HaNasi in Avot de-Rabbi Natan ch. 28 that the pleasures of the world to come are granted only to one who rejects the pleasures of this world. Ancient Judaism also included some ascetic groups at the margins, e.g., the Essenes and the Therapeutae. Asceticism is also a major theme in the writings of Philo. A frequently cited scholarly debate concerning asceticism in rabbinic Judaism is that between Yitzhak Fritz Baer, Israel Among the Nations (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1955) chs. 2–3, and Ephraim E. Urbach, “Ascesis and Suffering in Talmudic and Midrashic Sources,” (Hebrew) in Yitzhak F. Baer Jubilee Volume (ed. Salo W. Baron, Ben Zion Dinur, Samuel Ettinger and Israel Halpern; Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel, 1960) 48–68. As Fraade has pointed out (Steven D. Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” in Jewish Spirituality from the Bible through the Middle Ages [ed. Arthur Green; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986] 253–88), Baer and Urbach base their respective analyses on very different understandings of asceticism. It is Urbach's article that is more germane to the present discussion.

63 For examples of ascetic statements in the writings of other medieval Jewish thinkers whose ideas, like R. Bahya's, were influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Sufism, see Moshe Z. Sokol, “Attitudes Toward Pleasure in Jewish Thought: A Typological Proposal,” in Reverence, Righteousness and Rahamanut: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung (ed. Jacob J. Schacter; Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1992) 297.

64 See above, n. 34, for Soloveitchik's opposition to the Musar movement's negative stance towards this world.

65 See Sokol, “Attitudes Toward Pleasure in Jewish Thought,” 295–96. For a more detailed discussion, and references to the scholarly literature, concerning many of the ascetic trends mentioned in this paragraph, especially mithnagdic asceticism, see Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim, ch. 4.

66 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (trans. S. Pines; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) part 2: chapter 36, page 371. Maimonides repeats his citation of Aristotle's disdain for the sense of touch in several other places in the Guide: see 2:40, 384; 3:8, 432; and 3:49, 608. See also Maimonides's ascetic first rationale for circumcision at 3:49, 609, and his remarks concerning eating, drinking and sex at 3:8, 434.

67 Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De'ot, 3:1. The translation is our own.

68 In his Introduction to his translation of the Guide (lxii), Pines writes of Maimonides that “qua philosopher, though not qua teacher of the halakhah, he favored asceticism.” Isadore Twersky, (Introduction to the Code of Maimonides [Mishneh Torah] [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980] 464–65) endorses this judgement and adds instructively: “Halakhah, which is antiascetic, imposes certain inescapable constraints, but what we are dealing with is divergent emphasis rather than contradiction.” However, even when writing in halakhic mode, Maimonides sometimes gives expression to ascetic sentiments: see, e.g., Maimonides's characterisation of the body at the end of Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva, 8:2. Significantly, despite the ambivalence of the Maimonidean texts, Aharon Lichtenstein has recently noted that Soloveitchik attempts to enlist Maimonides as a supporter of anti-asceticism. See Aharon Lichtenstein, “Of Marriage: Relationship and Relations,” Tradition 39 (2005) 7–35, at 30.

69 The translation is ours, from the Hebrew edition of Maimonides's introductions to his commentary to the Mishna, Hakdamot LePerush HaMishna (ed. Mordekhai D. Rabinowitz; Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1961) 176. For a detailed and nuanced discussion of Maimonides's views on asceticism, particularly in the Mishneh Torah and the Eight Chapters, see Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, 459–68.

70 GM 2, §22.

71 For more on Sha'arei Teshuvah's influence see Israel Ta-Shma, “Hasidut Ashkenaz bi-Sefarad: Rabbeinu Yonah Gerondi – ha-ish u-fo'olo,” (Hebrew) in Galut ahar golah: mehkarim be-toledot Yisra'el muggashim le-Professor Hayim Bainart li-melot lo shiv'im shanah (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1988) 165–94, esp. 182–84.

72 For example, repentance is given foundational status when listed as one of the seven things created before the creation of the world (b. Pesa ù 54a); there appears to be an assumption that talmidei hakhamim repented every night for any sins committed (b. Ber. 19a); and the greatness of repentance is explicated at some length at b. Yoma 86a–b, where it is said to heal the world and bring near the redemption, to mention just two of many functions presented there. As Urbach writes, the rabbis extol repentance with “extravagant praise”; Ephraim Urbach, “Redemption and Repentance in Talmudic Judaism,” in Collected Writings in Jewish Studies (ed. Robert Brody and Moshe D. Herr; Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999) 264–80, at 278.

73 R. Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi, The Gates of Repentance (trans. Shraga Silverstein; Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1967) Gate 1: chapter 13, page 21. Hereafter ST, followed by Gate, chapter, and page numbers.

74 ST 1:16, 23–24.

75 ST 2:4, 77.

76 ST 1:37, 51. Bahya also advises that “fear of God's speedy punishment” is a condition of remorse, together with the “weeping, wailing and crying” that R. Jonah discusses under the conditions of sorrow and worry. See Bahya Ben Joseph Ibn Pakuda, The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart (trans. Menahem Mansoor; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) 335–36.

77 ST 2:17, 99.

78 ST 2:17, 103.

79 ST 2:25, 113.

80 Pinchas Peli, On Repentance: The Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984) 93. Hereafter OR, followed by page number.

81 Lawrence Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on Repentance,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 13 (2004) 213–58, at 241. We are grateful to Professor Kaplan for allowing us to see this article prior to publication. Pinchas Peli has also written that Soloveitchik's Repentant Man “may be legitimately viewed as inhabiting the highest rung of [Soloveitchik's] typological ladder”; see Pinchas Peli, “Repentant Man—A High Level in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Typology of Man,” repr. in Exploring the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (ed. Marc D. Angel; Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1997) 229–59, at 230. Our selective presentation is geared towards the particular argument of this paper; further analysis of Soloveitchik's view can be found in these two articles.

82 The year following HM's original publication in Hebrew in 1944 saw the appearance of similar brief reflections on repentance in the original SP.

83 HM, 110.

84 Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” 258. Kaplan usefully tabulates the various different concepts and categories in order to draw the connections that exist among them at 223.

85 OR, 50.

86 HM, 112.

87 HM, 113.

88 Bahya, Book of Directions of the Duties of the Heart, 329. The central role of grace is explicit in Bahya's discussion.

89 WP §136.

90 HM, 114.

91 HM, 109.

92 SP, 30.

93 Soloveitchik's term. See HM, 112.

94 OR, 52.

95 OR, 64.

96 OR, 184–86.

97 SP, 28. Blau, who points out Soloveitchik's debt to Max Scheler, similarly notes how “the Schelerian understanding of repentance shifts the focus from God's activity to that of man.” Yitzchak Blau, “Creative Repentance: On Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Concept of Teshuvah,” repr. in Exploring the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (ed. Marc D. Angel; Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1997) 263–74, at 270.

98 OR, 239.

99 OR, 52–53

100 Worthy of note, and deserving of further analysis, is Soloveitchik's definition of the feelings of disgust at one's sin as aesthetic in nature rather than moral or religious: “The feeling generated by sin is not a moral sensation; the moral sense in man is not such a powerful force . . . the feeling of sin which drags a person to repentance is an aesthetic sensation” (OR, 197). Soloveitchik's attitude towards the aesthetic is complex and ambivalent, and in an interesting article, Zachary Braiterman has argued for an aesthetic appreciation of mitzvah that can be drawn from Soloveitchik's writings. Braiterman characterizes his interpretation as a misreading, but one for which Soloveitchik himself provides the basis. In our opinion, Soloveitchik's writings on repentance provide further support for such a picture and perhaps even indicate that it is less of a misreading than Braiterman thinks. See Zachary Braiterman, “Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant's Mitzvah-Aesthetic,” AJS Review 25 (2000/2001) 1–24.

101 OR, 202. This is said in relation to what Soloveitchik terms emotional rather than intellectual repentance. Though in this case Soloveitchik himself does not adjudge their relative status in the repentance hierarchy (see OR, 206), and notably this pairing is missing from Kaplan's table, for Peli it is emotional repentance, identified as repentance out of love, that is the greater, with intellectual repentance categorized as repentance out of fear (Peli, “Repentant Man,” 235–27). Nonetheless, during the discussion of intellectual repentance we are told that the intellect agrees that sin is attractive and therefore leads to a “strenuous battle of the will” (OR, 206). It appears that Peli's general summation cited below in the main text is therefore apt for both forms of repentance.

102 OR, 14.

103 GS §341.

104 Though some saw the light of day inWP §1053–1067.

105 For examples of such views, see Arthur Danto, “The Eternal Recurrence,” in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. Robert Solomon; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973) 316–21; Ivan Soll, “Reflections on Recurrence,” in ibid., 322–42; Arnold Zuboff, “Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence,” in ibid., 343–57; Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); and Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, ch. 5. Neither Magnus nor Nehamas accept such a reading though.

106 GS §341.

107 This response of indifference is made by Soll as a critique of Nietzsche's position (Soll, “Reflections on Recurrence,” 339), and by Higgins as an argument for her non-literal reading of the doctrine (Higgins, Reading Zarathustra, 163–64). See also Alan White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) ch. 5.

108 Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative, 142.

109 See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, ch. 5.

110 See Santaniello, Nietzsche, God and the Jews, 83 and White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, ch. 6.

111 See Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) ch. 6.

112 OR, 89.

113 Z 2, §20.

114 Z 1, §6.

115 See Blau, “Creative Repentance” and Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Solo-veitchik.”

116 HM, 114.

117 SP, 27.

118 This is precisely the sort of Christian doctrine that is the object of Nietzsche's critique according to Higgins, who gives an excellent summary of the view in which sin “indelibly marks [the sinner] as one who deserves punishment . . . except for God's mercy, the sins we commit would doom us to eternal torture in hell.” Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, 167.

119 Z 1, §6.

120 OR, 250. It is interesting that despite his very different approach to repentance, Bahya actually also privileges repentance out of “man's strong understanding of his Lord” over repentance “when a man realizes God's trials and His severe punishment.” See Bahya, Book of Directions of the Duties of the Heart, 339–40.

121 Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 153.

122 GM 1, §13.

123 Z 3, §12.

124 b. Yoma 86b.

125 OR, 261. Similarly, “He strives to convert his sin into a spiritual springboard for increased inspiration and evaluation” (SP, 28).

126 HM, 115.

127 Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 163.

128 And is also, according the Kaplan, one of the underlying reasons for certain differences between Soloveitchik's view of repentance and that of Cohen. See Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” 246–47.

129 Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, 188.

130 Z 2, §20.

131 White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, 88.

132 Z 3, §2.

133 Z 3, §2.

134 HM, 115.

135 Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, 177.

136 HM, 114. According to Kaplan, it is in this future orientation that Soloveitchik differs from Scheler, for whom recalling the past itself is the method of transformation. See Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” 236ff.

137 This, White argues, is the essential idea of eternal return, leading him, as if quoting Soloveitchik, to argue that it is a vision of “resurrection as self creation” (White, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, 100). White's reading is actually startling in its similarity to Soloveitchik's view of repentance.

138 Z 2, §20.

139 See Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim.

140 It is no surprise, therefore, that some of Soloveitchik's intellectual heirs have taken these life-affirming themes rather further than Soloveitchik himself would have been prepared to countenance. David Hartman, for example writes, “I am grateful that the secular spirit of the modern world has made the medieval option of fear and punishment spiritually irrelevant. . .. I never saw Judaism as necessarily weakened by the modern emphasis on the significance of the present or by people's indifference to or distaste for the terrifying descriptions of divine retribution awaiting the sinner.” David Hartman, A Living Covenant (New York: The Free Press, 1985) 302.

141 Z, Prologue, §6.