A Sabbath on Which our Lives Depend
The neighborhood has never looked better. Those fortunate to be uninfected with COVID-19 have been weeding and pruning, repainting and repairing. It is as if the pandemic has unleashed a compulsion to cross tasks off the to-do list. But as days pass, many of us find ourselves unsettled by anxious monotony, old routines upended by an invisible pathogen, unsure of what to do next. We fear for our well being and cannot fathom how to fashion new lives of meaning for the long term, in times of scarcity and confinement. We do know that our ability to do so may be key to our mental and our physical survival, and the survival of our neighbors.
“I turn my eyes to the mountains; from where will my help come?” (Psalms 121:1).[1] So writes the psalmist at a moment of alienation and anxiety perhaps not unlike our own. From where will our help come? I contend that we can find the meaning we seek in normative Jewish practices and ritual—halakha. My understanding of halakha is shaped by two of the great Jewish theologians of the last century, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993). Heschel and Soloveitchik were products of traditional Jewish communities very different from those of liberal American Jewry today, yet the practices they advocated, and attitude it entails, is especially relevant to our current predicament.
Heschel was a descendent of Polish Hasidic dynasties and Soloveitchik was the scion of one of Lithuania’s foremost anti-Hasidic factions. Despite these differing origins, their lives evinced a number of striking commonalities: both obtained doctorates in philosophy in Berlin. Both witnessed the annihilation of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. Both became architects of the reconstruction of post-WWII Jewish life in the US and both have much to teach us about the reconstruction of our Jewish lives now, in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.
Many of us are used to measuring day-to-day success as a function of material and professional productivity: How many meetings taken? How many emails composed? How much code written? How many tables served? “All this,” according to Heschel in his poetic masterpiece, The Sabbath, “goes on in man’s spatial surroundings.” We “labor for the sake of things of space,” he continues, and “As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time….”[2]
It goes without saying that the novel coronavirus has radically reduced the spatial horizons Heschel described. Those who spent their days traversing timezones and concrete canyons are now confined to home, always at a six-foot remove from neighbors, colleagues, friends and family. Formerly preoccupied with making, building, buying, transforming, producing—many of us are now prevented from doing most of the things that brought satisfaction, not to mention, remuneration. In the face of this radical reorientation, with its calamitous financial implications, if there were ever a time to turn one’s focus away from “the tyranny of things of space” to “the architecture of time,” now would be it.
In The Sabbath, Heschel urges each of us to reorient ourselves toward the “sanctification of time.” “We have fallen victims to the work of our hands,” Heschel wrote, “it is as if the forces we have conquered have conquered us.”[3] The antidote to this condition, Heschel argues, is the Sabbath, a day when we abstain from creative labor and fill our hours with reflection, prayer, eating and drinking. It is a countercultural practice, measuring our success not by novelty and productivity, but by regularity and stillness—reciting the same words and invoking the same symbols, week after week.
“COVID-19 has imposed a new kind of Sabbath, a Sabbath upon which our lives depend. In the face of this new reality, Heschel urges us to sanctify our hours, days and weeks through the art of ritual repetition. Our devotion to these simple activities and behaviors, the attention and awareness we lavish on them, creates meaning and sanctifies our days. ”
COVID-19 has imposed a new kind of Sabbath, a Sabbath upon which our lives depend. In the face of this new reality, Heschel urges us to sanctify our hours, days and weeks through the art of ritual repetition. Our devotion to these simple activities and behaviors, the attention and awareness we lavish on them, creates meaning and sanctifies our days.
Soloveitchik, in his masterpiece, Halakhic Man, dismissed both the exercise of human intellect and creative power for their own sake and the mind’s ability to transcend the world in mystic flights of imagination. Instead, Soloveitchik extolled the use of the intellect to fulfill the dictates of Jewish religious law—halakha. A person who lives by such a system, he writes, “resembles somewhat the mathematician.” Like a mathematician, she examines “empirical reality from the vantage point of the ideal reality” and uses “a priori categories and concepts” to determine her “relationship to the qualitative phenomena [she] encounter[s].”[4] Put another way, for Soloveitchik, the essential Jewish challenge is to fashion one’s life (always subject to the particularities of one situation and context) in accordance with the dictates of an external complex of values and practices.
This way of thinking, of course, runs contrary to our highly individualistic culture that valorizes material wealth and self-actualization above all else. But at a time of immense constraint, when material resources are more and more scarce, Soloveitchik’s guidance becomes more and more relevant. To preserve one’s humanity under such conditions means to measure one’s worth against a different, countercultural complex of values, one that does not tie dignity and meaning to material and professional success. In such circumstances, time-honored normative systems like halakha take on especial significance.
“The concept of halakha has been a stumbling block in Reform theology from the movement’s earliest days.”
The concept of halakha has been a stumbling block in Reform theology from the movement’s earliest days. To those schooled in Kantian philosophy which asserted that genuine ethical action must be the product of free choice, the commanding force of tradition took on a dubious, authoritarian cast. Further, early Reform thinkers tended to depict halakha as an inheritance of culturally backward and aesthetically unpleasant rituals whose proper performance led to endless debate and hairsplitting. Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), the movement’s first theologian, argued Judaism was a means to “the highest wisdom and the highest moral freedom” and that “many customs entered into [Judaism’s] religious thought and life which never sprouted from [this] idea”—in other words, the cultivation of one’s reason and ethics.[5]
Kaufmann Kohler (1843-1926), Geiger’s disciple and a leader of the American Reform movement at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote in the Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism (1885), “We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and to-day we accept as binding only the moral laws and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.”[6] While neither Kohler nor Geiger rejected halakha per se, they instilled in early Reform Judaism both a Kantian commitment to personal autonomy and a suspicion of religious ritual.
Geiger and Kohler, reared in traditional Jewish communities where halakhic adherence was the sin qua non of daily life, sought to liberate themselves from the overweening burden of external religious authority and from behaviors they found benighted. It perhaps goes without saying that by the later-twentieth century Geiger and Kohler’s revolution was achieved, at least partially, and the state of Jewish life worldwide had undergone a radical transformation: The vast majority of Jews no longer felt themselves bound by the dictates of halakha. These Jews were fully at home in secular societies that took the sovereignty of the individual as a given. And yet, most also found themselves apathetic to Judaism in general. Without the force of external halakhic authority, little bound Jewish communities together or impelled individual Jews to live out Jewish lives.
This is one reason why, toward the end of the twentieth century, a number of Reform scholars—Rachel Adler, Eugene Borowitz, Richard Levy, Mark Washofsky and Moshe Zemer—began to reassess halakha. They sought to reinterpret rituals long discarded and reevaluate the concept of external religious authority in light of post-modern values and sensibilities. The 1999 “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” initiated by Levy, enunciated this new approach: “We are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of mitzvot and to the fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community. Some of these mitzvot, sacred obligations, have long been observed by Reform Jews; others, both ancient and modern, demand renewed attention as the result of the unique context of our own times.”[7] Thus, the “Pittsburgh Principles,” as they are popularly known, inaugurated the Reform Movement’s reengagement with halakha but in Kantian, personalistic terms: Reform Jews committed to giving rejected customs “renewed attention,” so long as they “address us as individuals and as a community.”
Despite the work of the aforementioned scholars, considerable reticence remains among Reform Jews to take up the praxis of halakha and the mindset it entails. One reason for this lies in secularized Jews’ lasting discomfort with the apparent foreignness of some Jewish customs. But this reticence is also rooted in a mischaracterization of halakha that has become the norm in popular Jewish consciousness. This mischaracterization is evident in Soloveitchik’s writings too, and it is here he and I part company: In Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik depicted halakhic observance as all-or-nothing; he wrote of halakha with a direct article and a capital-H—“the Halakha.” Like the laws of Newtonian physics or the principles of Euclidean geometry, for Soloveitchik, halakha was a self-contained system that had to be adopted in total by the practitioner, if it was to make any sense.[8] This is a misnomer, however. Indeed, the literature of halakha is capacious and contradictory, not easily characterized or generalized. There is no one Halakha; in fact there are as many kinds of halakha as there are Jews who are themselves beholden to it.
“There is no one Halakha; in fact there are as many kinds of halakha as there are Jews who are themselves beholden to it.”
Rather than a totalizing legal system, I would suggest that halakha is better understood as a matrix of practices and, perhaps most importantly, a mental posture toward those practices. Soloveitchik is correct that halakha is a complex of “a priori categories and concepts” that creates a scaffold upon which a Jew builds her daily existence. However, in contrast to popularly held belief, to observe halakha does not require committing oneself to following the dictates of the early modern legal code, the Shulhan Arukh (1578-80) or those of any rabbi or decisor.[9] Rather, such books and people may (or may not) help an individual learn about the possibilities of Jewish practice. What is most important is one’s decision (note here the personalized terminology) to use (some, many, a few of) the practices within the halakha as yardstick against which one takes the measure of one’s existence. On the most basic level, accepting the authority of halakha means accepting the notion that Jewish tradition exercises some control over one’s behavior, and that one’s existence ought to be spent serving what is greater than the market or the self.
Here, Heschel’s counsel is especially illuminating. I would argue that the practices that are the most central in halakha are those that concern the “sanctification of time.” COVID-19 has made us all the more aware of time’s passage—its ferocious speed and its sluggishness—in these days of fear and isolation. As the psalmist writes, “Teach us to count our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart” (Psalms 90:12). Halakha—especially when it concerns the daily and monthly and yearly cycle of blessings; learning and teaching of Torah; care of the body; modes of communication and relationship—teaches us to “count our days rightly” and thereby helps us to “obtain a wise heart.” COVID-19 has taught us that what matters in life is not our ability to cross off items on our to-do list, but on our willing embrace of practices and rituals that do not so much restrict liberty as help us fashion meaning and purpose in the midst of upheaval and isolation.
[1] Here and hereafter, NJPS translation.
[2] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath and its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 4-5.
[3] Heschel, The Sabbath, 27.
[4] Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 23.
[5] Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History: In Two Parts, trans. Charles Newburgh (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1911) 211.
[6] “The Pittsburgh Platform” in W. Gunther Plaut, The Growth of Reform Judaism: American and European Sources(Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 54.
[7] “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism” in Plaut, Growth of Reform Judaism, 298.
[8] Heschel rejected this view and advocated a more personalized and emotional understanding of Jewish observance, see William Kolbrener, The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 22 and Michael Marmur, “In Search of Heschel,” Shofar 26, no. 1 (2007): 20-22.
[9] The process whereby the written word and individual decisors came to symbolize the totality of halakha is a long and complex one, see, for example, Elchanan Reiner, “The Ashkenazi Elite at the Beginning of the Modern Era: Manuscript Versus Printed Book” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewish History 10, edited by Gershon David Hundert (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 85-98.
