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“To See Life Steadily and See It Whole”: Rav Aharon Lichtenstein and the Holistic Integrity of Religious Life

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“To See Life Steadily and See It Whole”: Rav Aharon Lichtenstein and the Holistic Integrity of Religious Life “To See Life Steadily and See it Whole”: Rav Aharon Lichtenstein and the Holistic Integrity of Religious Life 01.24.18 Thought of R. Aharon Lichtenstein Shlomo Zuckier Matthew Arnold and Integrity 1. Matthew Arnold, “To a Friend” Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind? He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men, Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen, And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind. d Much he, whose friendship I not long since won, That halting slave, who in Nicopolis Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his d My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; d Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage, Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child. 2. “Centrist Orthodoxy: A Spiritual Accounting,” By His Light, 229-230 If I were pressed to encapsulate what I learned in graduate school, my answer would be: the complexity of experience. “The rest is commentary; go and study.” With respect to the whole range of points enumerated above, I say again that my life experience, in the States or in Eretz Yisrael, within the public or the private sphere, has only sharpened my awareness of the importance of these qualities. These elements—particularly the last—constitute, if you will, Centrist virtues. Centrism is as much a temper as an ideology, as much a mode of sensibility as a lifestyle. It is of its very essence to shy away from simplistic and one-sided approaches, of its very fabric to strive to encompass and encounter reality in its complexity and, with that encounter, to seek the unity which transcends the diversity. If confronted by the question posed in Arnold’s sonnet “To a Friend”—“Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad days, my mind?”—I imagine none of us would give his reply: . But be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole; The mellow glory of the Attic stage, [email protected] Thought of RAL Class #2 Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child. We do not have that kind of relationship to Sophocles. But we do, we ought, share the overriding desire to see life steadily and see it whole. And it is indeed true that, to that end, Sophocles, among others, is helpful. I am in no way intimating that that vision of life cannot be attained otherwise, or that one cannot be a yerei Shamayim or a talmid chakham without it. I am generally opposed to positing a single mold as the sole model for avodat Hashem, and I submit that, were it up to me, one could receive rabbinic ordination from Yeshivat Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan even if, like R. Akiva Eiger, he did not have a B.A. What is Integrity? 3. “Integrity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy What is it to be a person of integrity? Ordinary discourse about integrity involves two fundamental intuitions: first, that integrity is primarily a formal relation one has to oneself, or between parts or aspects of one's self; and second, that integrity is connected in an important way to acting morally, in other words, there are some substantive or normative constraints on what it is to act with integrity. On the self-integration view of integrity, integrity is a matter of persons integrating various parts of their personality into a harmonious, intact whole. Understood in this way, the integrity of persons is analogous to the integrity of things: integrity is primarily a matter of keeping the self intact and uncorrupted. The self-integration view of integrity makes integrity a formal relation to the self. What is a formal relation to the self? One answer is that a formal relation can be attributed to a person without evaluating the relation's components. Strength of will is probably a formal relation one has to oneself. Very roughly, we might say that a display of strength of will is a particular relation between a person's intention and corresponding action: it is a matter of acting on an intention given serious obstacles to the action. This is a formal relation to the self in the sense we are after because we don't need to evaluate the appropriateness, value, justice, practical wisdom, and so on, either of the intention or corresponding action in order to identify the whole thing as a case of strength of will. We might think that all displays of strength of will are valuable, so we might have certain pro-attitudes to an action simply because it is an attempt to fulfill an intention in the face of serious obstacles. Yet we don't need to make this evaluation in order to attribute a display of strength of will to someone. All we need to do is inspect the correspondence of intention and action given the difficulty of acting on the intention. We don't need to evaluate whether the intention is directed at anything worthwhile, for example. John Bigelow and Robert Pargetter (2007) argue that strength of will is the core of integrity (and that alternative conceptions of integrity tend to confuse integrity with authenticity). The self-integration account of integrity takes this formal characterization of integrity a step further. Self-integration is an achievement rather than a quality or disposition such as strength of will — though strength of will is likely to be an important quality in those who achieve self-integration. Self- integration still represents a formal account of integrity. In attributing self-integration to a person we are making no evaluative judgement of the states that are integrated within the person. 4. Reuven Ziegler, By His Light, Preface, vii-viii The advocacy of a theocentric life – and specifically one that, despite its focus on the single goal of serving God, nevertheless recognizes multiple paths and entails multiple demands – is a hallmark of Rabbi Lichtenstein’s thought. Indeed, it characterizes Rabbi Lichtenstein’s life; anyone who knows him can attest that he is a living exemplar of the ideals set forth in this book. [email protected] Thought of RAL Class #2 Beyond the actual positions espoused, these presentations are noteworthy for their methodology: the recognition of complexity, the openness to a plurality of approaches, the eschewing of simplistic black-and- white positions, the attempt to view issues in a broad perspective (“to see life steadily and see it whole,” in a phrase much beloved of Rabbi Lichtenstein), the bringing to bear of a wide range of thought and experience on the problems addressed, and the sensitivity to nuance. The result is a treatment that, while passionate in aspiration, is nevertheless balanced and moderate in judgement. 5. “Determining Objectives in Religious Growth,” By His Light, pp. 86-7 The question of whether to strive for the achievement of a kind of Renaissance ideal, the “man for all seasons,” or to try to master a given area intensively – not only in theory, but in practice – confronts us at both a public and a private level. Perhaps part of what makes the choice sometimes difficult is the fact that the public and private interests very often diverge. If you want to regard this issue from a purely personal perspective, whereby the spiritual interest of the individual alone is to be our guide, then I suppose that our intuitive response – at least, my own – is towards the Renaissance ideal, whereby a person is not limited to working in one particular area, but is a complete oved Hashem (servant of God) – “In all your ways, know Him.” A person is thereby enriched; there is a fructifying reciprocation between various aspects of his spiritual existence. He does not live as a fragmented being. He is not only able, as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, “to see life steadily and see it whole,” but to live it steadily and live it whole. On the other hand, if we regard the public interest, then surely there is a great deal to be said for specialization. If a person is very much at home in a given area, then when a problem comes up within his particular area, he is able to cope with it in a way that a person who has a more general perspective and a broader field of vision cannot. The specialist obviously can do much better from a public standpoint than can the generalist. Therefore, we are often confronted by the question of the extent to which we want to emphasize the public or the private element. This is not to say that the public interest always militates for specialization, and the private one for a broader vision. Surely, on the one hand, the public interest too requires that people who deal with central and basic issues have a somewhat broader horizon and more general perspective. Public issues dealing with our civil existence must not simply be left to technocrats, who narrowly master a small area but lack the ability to relate it properly and sensitively to other areas. This consideration has been at the heart of the British tradition, whereby civil servants have been specialists, but those who make the more general decisions on the cabinet level have had broader training. The familiar comment, “War is too important to be left to generals,” is likewise important in many other areas of public life.
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