VIII     

HAVING ARRIVED AT this point, we begin to see the lines of the destiny of the man of faith converge. The man of faith, as we explained previously, is lonely because of his being himself exclusively and not having a comrade, a “duplicate I.” The man of faith, we further brought out, finds redemption in the covenantal faith community by dovetailing his accidental existence with the necessary infinite existence of the Great True Real Self. There, we pointed out, homo absconditus turns into homo revelatus vis-á-vis God and man as well.

However, the element of the tragic is not fully eliminated from the destiny of the man of faith even after joining the covenantal community. We said at the very beginning of this essay that the loneliness of the man of faith is an integral part of his destiny from which he can never be completely liberated. The dialectical awareness, the steady oscillating between the majestic natural community and the covenantal faith community renders the act of complete redemption unrealizable. The man of faith, in his continuous movement between the pole of natural majesty and that of covenantal humility, is prevented from totally immersing in the immediate covenantal awareness of the redeeming presence, knowability, and involvement of God in the community of man. From time to time the man of faith is thrown into the majestic community where the colloquy as well as the covenantal consciousness are swept away. He suddenly finds himself revolving around the cosmic center, now and then catching a glimpse of the Creator who hides behind the boundless drama of creation. To be sure, this alternation of cosmic and covenantal involvement is not one of “light and shade,” enhanced activity and fatigue, as the mystics are accustomed to call their alternating experiences, but represents two kinds of creative and spontaneous activity, both willed and sanctioned by God.* Let us not forget that the majestic community is willed by God as much as the covenantal faith community. He wants man to engage in the pursuit of majesty-dignity as well as redemptiveness. He summoned man to retreat from peripheral, hard-won positions of vantage and power to the center of the faith experience. He also commanded man to advance from the covenantal center to the cosmic periphery and recapture the positions he gave up a while ago. He authorized man to quest for “sovereignty”; He also told man to surrender and be totally committed. He enabled man to interpret the world in functional, empirical “how” categories to explain, for instance, the sequence of phenomena in terms of transeunt, mechanical causality and a quantified-spatialized, basically (if not for the law of entropy) reversible time, suitable to the human majestic role. Simultaneously, He also requires of man to forget his functional and bold approach, to stand in humility and dread before the mysterium magnum surrounding him, to interpret the world in categories of purposive activity instead of those of mechanical facticity, and to substitute time, wedded to eternity, stretching from archē to eschatos, for uniform, measured clock-time.

On the one hand, the Bible commands man, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might,” a performance of which only covenantal man is capable since he alone possesses the talent for complete concentration upon and immersion in the focus without being distracted by peripheral interests, anxieties, and problems. On the other hand, the same Bible which just enjoined man to withdraw from the periphery to the center commands him to return to the majestic community which, preoccupied with peripheral interests, anxieties, and problems, builds, plants, harvests, regulates rivers, heals the sick, participates in state affairs, is imaginative in dreaming, bold in planning, daring in undertaking and is out to “conquer” the world. With what simplicity, not paying the least attention to the staggering dialectic implied in such an approach, the Bible speaks of an existence this-worldly centered—“When thou buildest a new home; when thou cuttest down thine harvest; when thou comest into thy neighbor’s vineyard”—yet theo-oriented and unqualifiedly committed to an eternal purpose! If one would inquire of me about the teleology of the Halakhah, I would tell him that it manifests itself exactly in the paradoxical yet magnificent dialectic which underlies the Halakhic gesture. When man gives himself to the covenantal community the Halakhah reminds him that he is also wanted and needed in another community, the cosmic-majestic, and when it comes across man while he is involved in the creative enterprise of the majestic community, it does not let him forget that he is a covenantal being who will never find self-fulfillment outside of the covenant and that God awaits his return to the covenantal community.* I would also add, in reply to such a question, that many a time I have the distinct impression that the Halakhah considered the steady oscillating of the man of faith between majesty and covenant not as a dialectical but rather as a complementary movement. The majestic gesture of the man of faith, I am inclined to think, is looked upon by the Halakhah not as contradictory to the covenantal encounter but rather as the reflex action which is caused by this encounter when man feels the gentle touch of God’s hand upon his shoulder and the covenantal invitation to join God is extended to him. I am prompted to draw this remarkable inference from the fact that the Halakhah has a monistic approach to reality and has unreservedly rejected any kind of dualism. The Halakhah believes that there is only one world—not divisible into secular and hallowed sectors— which can either plunge into ugliness and hatefulness, or be roused to meaningful, redeeming activity, gathering up all latent powers into a state of holiness. Accordingly, the task of covenantal man is to be engaged not in dialectical surging forward and retreating, but in uniting the two communities into one community where man is both the creative, free agent, and the obedient servant of God. Notwithstanding the huge disparity between these two communities, which expresses itself in the typological oppositions and conflicts described previously, the Halakhah sees in the ethico-moral norm a uniting force. The norm which originates in the covenantal community addresses itself almost exclusively to the majestic community where its realization takes place. To use a metaphor, I would say that the norm in the opinion of the Halakhah is the tentacle by which the covenant, like the ivy, attaches itself to and spreads over the world of majesty.1

THE BIBLICAL DIALECTIC stems from the fact that Adam the first, majestic man of dominion and success, and Adam the second, the lonely man of faith, obedience, and defeat, are not two different people locked in an external confrontation as an “I” opposite a “thou,” but one person who is involved in self-confrontation. “I,” Adam the first, confront the “I,” Adam the second. In every one of us abide two personae—the creative, majestic Adam the first, and the submissive, humble Adam the second. As we portrayed them typologically, their views are not commensurate; their methods are different, their modes of thinking, distinct, the categories in which they interpret themselves and their environment, incongruous. Yet, no matter how far-reaching the cleavage, each of us must willy-nilly identify himself with the whole of an all-inclusive human personality, charged with responsibility as both a majestic and a covenantal being. God created two Adams and sanctioned both. Rejection of either aspect of humanity would be tantamount to an act of disapproval of the divine scheme of creation which was approved by God as being very good. As a matter of fact, men of faith have accepted Adam the first a long time ago. Notwithstanding the fact that Adam the second is the bearer of a unique commitment, he remains also a man of majesty who is inspired by the joyous spirit of creativity and constructive adventure.*

SINCE THE DIALECTICAL role has been assigned to man by God, it is God who wants the man of faith to oscillate between the faith community and the community of majesty, between being confronted by God in the cosmos and the intimate, immediate apprehension of God through the covenant, and who therefore willed that complete human redemption be unattainable.

Had God placed Adam in the majestic community only, then Adam would, as it was stated before, never be aware of existential loneliness. The sole problem would then be that of aloneness—one that majestic Adam could resolve. Had God, vice versa, thrust Adam into the covenantal community exclusively, then he would be beset by the passional experience of existential loneliness and also provided with the means of finding redemption from this experience through his covenantal relation to God and to his fellow man. However, God, in His inscrutable wisdom, has decreed differently. Man discovers his loneliness in the covenantal community, and before he is given a chance to climb up to the high level of a complete covenantal, revealed existence, dedicated in faith to God and in sympathy to man, man of faith is pushed into a new community where he is told to lead an expanded surface existence rather than a covenantal, concentrated in-depth existence. Because of this onward movement from center to center, man does not feel at home in any community. He is commanded to move on before he manages to strike roots in either of these communities and so the ontological loneliness of man of faith persists. Verily, “A straying Aramean was my father.”*

* Man’s dialectical seesawing between the cosmic and the covenantal experience of God is reflected in the benediction formula in which we address God in both the second and third person. See Nachmanides, Exodus 15:26, and R. Shlomo b. Aderet, Responsa, V, 52. To be sure, the mingling of grammatical persons is quite normal in Hebrew syntax. In this case, however, our medieval scholars attributed particular philosophical significance to the change.

* Not only Halakhic teleology but also positive Halakhic thinking is dialectical. The latter follows the rules of an N-valued logic rather than those of a two-valued logic. Positive Halakhah has never honored the sacrosanct classical principle of the excluded middle or that of contradiction. Quite often it has predicated of x that it is neither a nor b or that it is both a and b at the same time.

It is worth mentioning that it took scientific thinking a very long time to make the discovery that the complex cosmic occurrence does not lend itself to a two-valued logical interpretation. [The role of multivalued logic in Halakhah is discussed by Rabbi Soloveitchik in The Halakhic Mind (New York: Free Press, 1986).]

1.Vide Berakhot 35b; Shabbat 33b. Maimonides distinguishes between two kinds of dialectic: (1) the constant oscillating between the majestic and the covenantal community; (2) the simultaneous involvement in both communities, which is the highest form of dialectical existence and which, according to Maimonides, only Moses and the Patriarchs achieved. See Yesode ha-Torah VII, 6: “Hence it may be inferred that all prophets when the prophetic power left them returned to their tents, that they attended to the satisfaction of their physical needs. Moses, our teacher, never went back to his former tent. He, accordingly, permanently separated himself from his wife, and abstained from similar gratifications. His mind was closely attached to the Rock of the Universe.…” This, however, is not to be interpreted as if Moses had abandoned the majestic community. After all, Moses dedicated his life to the fashioning of a majestic-covenantal community bent on conquest and political-economic normalcy on the one hand, and the realization of the covenantal kerygma on the other.

Maimonides is more explicit in the Moreh, III, 51 where he portrays the routine of the Patriarchs who, like Moses, achieved the highest form of dialectical existence and resided in both communities concurrently. “The Patriarchs likewise attained this degree of perfection.…When we therefore find them also engaged in ruling others, in increasing their property and endeavoring to obtain possession of wealth and honor, we see in this fact a proof that when they were occupied in these things their bodily limbs were at work while their heart and mind never moved away from the name of God.…” In other words, the Patriarchs were builders of society, sociable and gregarious. They made friends with whom they participated in the majestic endeavor. However, axiologically, they valued only one involvement: their covenantal friendship with God. The perfect dialectic expresses itself in a plurality of creative gestures and, at the same time, in axiological monoideism.

The concluding paragraphs of Hilkhot Shemitah Ve-Yovel should be interpreted in a similar vein. Cf. Nefesh ha-Chayyim, II, 11.

The unqualified acceptance of the world of majesty by the Halakhah expresses itself in its natural and inevitable involvement in every sector of human majestic endeavor. There is not a single theoretical or technological discovery, from new psychological insights into the human personality to man’s attempts to reach out among the planets, with which the Halakhah is not concerned. New Halakhic problems arise with every new scientific discovery. As a matter of fact, at present, in order to render precise Halakhic decisions in many fields of human endeavor, one must possess, besides excellent Halakhic training, a good working knowledge in those secular fields in which the problem occurs.

This acceptance, easily proven in regard to the total majestic gesture, is most pronounced in the Halakhah’s relationship to scientific medicine and the art of healing. The latter has always been considered by the Halakhah as a great and noble occupation. Unlike other faith communities, the Halakhic community has never been troubled by the problem of human interference, on the part of the physician and patient, with God’s will. On the contrary, argues the Halakhah, God wants man to fight evil bravely and to mobilize all his intellectual and technological ingenuity in order to defeat it. The conquest of disease is the sacred duty of the man of majesty, and he must not shirk it. From the Biblical phrase “Only he shall pay for the loss of his time and shall cause him to be thoroughly healed” (Exodus 21:18), through the Talmudic period in which scientific medicine was considered authoritative in situations in which the saving of a human life, , requires the suspension of the religious law, to the Judeo-Spanish tradition of combining Halakhic scholarship with medical skill, the Halakhah remained steadfast in its loyalty to scientific medicine. It has never ceased to emphasize the duty of the sick person to consult a competent physician. The statement quoted in both the Tur and Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, , “And if he refrains [from consulting a physician], it is as if he shed his own blood,” which can be traced indirectly to a Talmudic passage, is a cornerstone of Halakhic thinking. Vide Yoma 82a, 82b, 83a; Kiddushin 82a; Rashi sub ; Bava Kamma 85a, Tosafot sub ; Tur Yoreh Deah 336; Bayit-Chadash sub . See also Pesachim 56a, Rashi and Maimonides’ Commentary.

Nachmanides’ observation in Leviticus 26:11 refers to an ideal state of the covenantal community enjoying unlimited divine grace and has no application, therefore, to the imperfect state of affairs of the ordinary world.

The passage in II Chronicles 16:12: “yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to physicians” referred to priest-doctors who employed pagan rites and magic in order to “heal” the sick.

The doctrine of faith in God’s charity, , is not to be equated with the folly of the mystical doctrine of quietism, which in its extreme form exempts man from his duty of attending to his own needs and lets him wait in “holy” idleness and indifference for God’s intervention. This kind of repose is wholly contrary to the repose which the Halakhah recommends: the one which follows human effort and remedial action. Man must first use his own skill and try to help himself as much as possible. Then, and only then, man may find repose and quietude in God and be confident that his effort and action will be crowned with success. The initiative, says the Halakhah, belongs to man; the successful realization, to God.

Certainly, “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it,” but if those who labor stop building, there will be no house. The Lord wants man to undertake the task which He, in His infinite grace, completes.

* I hardly believe that any responsible man of faith, who is verily interested in the destiny of his community and wants to see it thriving and vibrant, would recommend now the philosophy of contemptus saeculi. I believe that even within the classical medieval tradition the monastic-ascetic approach was just an undercurrent and that the philosophers and moralists moving with the mainstream of religious thought preached the doctrine of human optimism and activism.

* Jewish eschatology beholds the great vision of a united majestic-covenantal community in which all oppositions will be reconciled and absolute harmony will prevail. When Zechariah proclaimed “the Lord shall be King over all the earth; on that day the Lord shall be one and His name one,” he referred not to the unity of God, which is absolute and perfect even now, but to the future unity of creation, which is currently torn asunder by inner contradictions. On that distant day the dialectical process will come to a close and man of faith as well as majestic man will achieve full redemption in a united world.