HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY IN THE THOUGHT OF ELIEZER BERKOVITS Thesis submitted for the degree of “Doctor of Philosophy” by DAVID HAZONY Submitted to the Senate of the Hebrew University July, 2011 1 This work was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Warren Zev Harvey Prof. Aviezer Ravitzky 2 HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY IN THE THOUGHT OF ELIEZER BERKOVITS Contents INTRODUCTION 1 Berkovits’ Life 4 Berkovits’ Methodology and Aims 7 The Present Study 22 Influences on His Thought 30 PART 1: MORALITY AND LAW 40 Introduction: Jewish Law in a Modern World 40 I. Values in Halacha 44 II. Consequences vs. Intentions 63 III. Body vs. Spirit 80 Conclusions 94 PART 2: HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY AND JEWISH NATIONHOOD 98 Introduction: Zionism in Jewish Religious Thinking 98 I. Collective Identity in Judaism 104 II. National Sovereignty 115 III. The Implications of Exile 133 Conclusions 143 PART 3: THEODICY AND RESPONSIBILITY 146 Introduction: Evil in the Shadow of the Holocaust 146 I. The Holocaust in Theological-Historical Perspective 161 II. History as Man’s Responsibility 166 III. The Silence of God 187 Conclusions 217 CONCLUSION 223 BIBLIOGRAPHY 230 3 אחריות אנושית בהגותו של אליעזר ברקוביץ חיבור לשם קבלת תואר דוק טור מאת דוד חזוני הוגש לסנט האוניברסיטה העברית , בירושלים יולי 2011 4 HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY IN THE THOUGHT OF ELIEZER BERKOVITS David Hazony INTRODUCTION With the hindsight of nearly two decades, we can today look back to the early 1990s as the end of an era in modern Jewish thought. With the passage of thinkers like Joseph Solovietchik, Emanuel Levinas, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, followed by Emil Fackenheim in 2003, the great wave of European- born Jewish philosophers whose work began a century ago and reached its peak in the middle of the twentieth century, has come to a close. Inspired in large part by the dramatic flowering of general European philosophy in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, and by unparalleled developments in fields of research bearing clear philosophical implications such as quantum physics, sociology, linguistics, and psychology, Jewish philosophy experienced a renaissance unlike anything since the medieval period. Every new area of exploration, it seemed, was joined by Jewish-born thinkers who took leading roles not only in pure philosophy itself—think of names like Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig 1 Wittgenstein, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Claude Levi-Strauss, or Walter Benjamin—but also in a philosophically inspired exploration of the sources of Judaism, which is more properly called “Jewish philosophy.” Writers like Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mordecai Kaplan, and later, Leibowitz, Fackenheim, and Soloveitchik didn’t just add a philosophical element to their Jewish writings; they offered, each in his own way, engagements with modernity that literally reshaped Judaism itself, inspiring new religious movements, sharpening and deepening existing ones, and giving bold and creative new voice to the Jewish religious spirit. One of the most fascinating, if least studied, of these figures was Eliezer Berkovits (1908-1992). Over the course of his life, Berkovits wrote no fewer than nineteen books and hundreds of essays, grappling with the entire gamut of Jewish philosophical questions, as well as a wide array of topics affecting Jewish life of his time: Assimilation, the rabbinate, the Holocaust, Zionism, the status of women in Judaism; the emergence of the Eastern- influenced, drug-experimenting counterculture of the 1960s; anti-Semitism in Christian European thought and in modern historiography; and the failure of Israeli utopian movements such as the kibbutzim. He also did battle directly with major Jewish philosophers whom he considered to have distorted Jewish tradition’s central truths, including major critical essays on Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Heschel, and Kaplan. 2 Yet the core of his writings comprised a series of works that were neither critiques nor social commentary, so much as constructive efforts to articulate the essence of Judaism. His longest work, Man and God: Studies in Biblical Theology (1969), takes key biblical terms such as “the name of God,” “justice,” and “holiness,” and tries to construct a philosophical definition and resonance to each of them. His Faith after the Holocaust , while addressing both the historical causes of anti-Semitism and the arguments for the death of God coming from the radical theologians, is at its heart an effort to resolve the profound questions of theodicy that date back at least to the time of the Talmud. In Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halacha (1983), he attempts to construct a philosophy of Jewish law that describes it not just as a set of rituals but an expression of deeper social values and mutual concern. One of his first published works, Towards Historic Judaism , attempts to critique the “breach between Torah and Life” that in his view began already in medieval times, and calls for a new approach to Judaism as deeply engaged with culture, politics, and questions of society. And at the core of this constructive effort lies a relatively brief, singular work, with the unassuming title of God, Man, and History , in which Berkovits attempts to present a comprehensive Jewish philosophy that begins from first principles and goes on to cover his essential thoughts about Judaism’s approach to theology, morality, and nationhood. 3 While each of these was written in some sense as a response to developments that became especially acute in his lifetime, all of them reflect a fervent desire on Berkovits’ part to construct a whole philosophy of Judaism, a coherent and developed affirmation of something very important that, in his view, had been lost not only among Jewish philosophers, but also among the Orthodox rabbinate in which he grew up, and throughout the Jewish world. The central aim of this dissertation will be to examine this constructive effort, to explore and critique it, and offer a preliminary evaluation as to whether Berkovits does not, as a result, deserve a far more central place in the pantheon of modern Jewish philosophy. Berkovits’ Life Eliezer Berkovits was born in the bustling Jewish community of Oradea, Transylvania (now Romania) in 1908. The Jewish community, described by one source as “the most active both commercially and culturally in the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” 1 hosted major synagogues of both Orthodox and Neolog (Reform) varieties, and doubtless gave Berkovits early exposure to a variety of Jewish religious expressions. He received his Orthodox rabbinical training at the yeshiva of Pressburg and, beginning in the 1 “Uncovering and Documenting Jewish Art and Architecture in Western Romania.” Center for Jewish Art. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Summer 1998. Retrieved 2007-03-05. Cited in Wikipedia, “Oradea,” accessed March 28, 2010. 4 1930s, at the “Hildesheimer” Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin, where he also functioned as a congregational rabbi. During his Berlin period, he also studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, earning a Ph.D. After escaping Germany in 1939, Berkovits served as a communal rabbi in Leeds (where his riveting wartime sermons were captured in the book Between Yesterday and Tomorrow ), Sydney, and Boston before assuming the chair of the philosophy department at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago in 1958, where he taught until 1975. In Chicago he also helped found, and served as the unofficial rabbi of, the Or Torah synagogue in Skokie, Illinois. In 1975, at the age of 67, Berkovits relocated to Jerusalem, where he lived and worked until his death in 1992. One of the features of Berkovits’ life that sets him apart from most modern Jewish philosophers was the impact of his extensive rabbinic training in forming, and formulating, his philosophy. Given the creative impulse and religious passion that drove much of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy, it is surprising to note how few prominent Jewish thinkers actually were educated in a traditional rabbinic setting. While the areas of Jewish literature and poetry benefited greatly from the exposure of some of its key figures to the world of the Eastern-European-style yeshiva (think of S.Y. Agnon, Chaim Nahman Bialik, Chaim Grade, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Chaim Potok), Jewish philosophy was written mostly without such direct exposure. Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Fackenheim, Borowitz, and others—none of them were 5 raised within the tradition of classic rabbinic study. Indeed, with a few exceptions, it is fair to say that Jewish philosophy emerged in the twentieth century to a surprising degree in the absence of intimate acquaintance with classic rabbinic thought. For his part, Berkovits (like Soloveitchik) spent his entire career not only surrounding himself with rabbinic texts and holding positions in rabbinic academies and Orthodox pulpits, but gaining from the influence of, and continued exposure to, classic rabbinic tradition. This lends his writings a certain intimate Jewish authoritativeness, comprehensiveness, and above all accessibility to a wide variety of rabbinic sources of all ages, that is often missing in the efforts of other modern Jewish philosophers to give a modern rendering to the deepest themes of classic Jewish tradition. At the same time, a word about the language of his writings may also shed some light on his aims. Though he was raised in a world that spoke Hungarian, Romanian, and later Yiddish, his published works were written in the vernacular language of his primary audiences in the countries in which he lived: His first published work, What is the Talmud? written during his Berlin period, was written in German, as was his doctoral dissertation; his philosophical and social-criticism books were written in English, including Towards Historic Judaism which appeared just four years after his emigration to England; his three yeshiva-targeted works of halachic scholarship were written in a rabbinic-laden Hebrew, and his one book about Israeli society (Crisis of Judaism in the Jewish State ; 1987), was written in modern Hebrew after 6 his immigration to Israel.