Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

Emil Fackenheim is not having a good century. Not only has his “614^th commandment” fallen spectacularly out of fashion, but a later—possibly even more significant—contribution is going curiously unappreciated and almost totally unanalyzed.

Earl Schwartz’s contribution to this journal on tz’dakah and tikkun olam did note Fackenheim’s unprecedented slipping of the term from its Lurianic moorings, but then wrote off To Mend the World (1982) as “highly abstract and politically pessimistic.” That seems most unfair. I would have chosen “inspiring and revolutionary” as more suitable adjectives. To Mend the World is a tremendous work with a central insistence on the practical and the nonabstract. And if it is not blithely cheery (it is after all a work of post-Holocaust thought), it is certainly rousing in its offer of authenticity and possibility in a world after Auschwitz.

I hope to offer a fuller treatment of To Mend the World in a future issue of this journal but would now encourage anyone, particularly anyone skeptical of the way the term “tikkun” has been over-used and abused in the last twenty years, to take the earliest opportunity to encounter Fackenheim’s first serious application of the term as a post-Lurianic phenomenon.

Rabbi Jeremy Gordon
London, England

To the Editor:

In the recent issue of the Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky provides a fascinating look into Modern Orthodoxy in his essay, “Good Neighbors— A Review Essay on the Edah Journal.” As one of the Orthodox voices he examines, I would like to clarify one key point that I believe he misses in his analysis. In summarizing my thoughts in reviewing Rabbi Steven Greenberg’s book, Wrestling with God, Rabbi Kalmanofsky writes, “. . . Orthodox Jews ask questions and receive responsa, analyze authoritative halakhic data, and behave accordingly” (p. 80). Kalmanofsky’s understanding of the Orthodox, traditional method of learning and ruling leaves out one important element of the process before “behave accordingly occurs,” and that is the dialectic which takes place between the traditional sources and the rabbi or scholar who is reading them. The knowledgeable person reading the limited number of authoritative sources enters their word with a potentially infinite number of values, of ideas and ideologies, of cultural genes inherited from parents, teachers, and the world around us. It is that dynamic, “the interpretive tradition” as Rabbi David Hartman calls it, that transforms the “act according to” something mysterious, unhinged, and part human, part Godly—especially when the student of halakhah believes that he or she is studying the Torah given by God at Sinai. The interpretation opens up infinite possibilities.

Rabbi Kalmanofsky falls into this box again when he writes, “. . . truly Orthodox Jews must . . . accept in advance a limited set of premises, and draw only those conclusions which those premises will bear” (p. 81). No! The premises are infinite, and the conclusions that those premises will bear are limitless. If Maimonides can declare that anthropomorphisms, so clearly laid out in the Torah and rabbinic literature, are merely metaphorical, and if Rav Aharon Soloveichik can declare that the Torah never meant for the death penalty to be anything but theoretical, then nothing is “clear” or “obvious” or limited in meaning in the entire tradition. There must be open argument about what the sources mean and there must be logic and proof to any argument, but at the end of the day, no one can say that any source will never be re-interpreted by a different scholar, in a different generation. The sources are divine and true; the interpretations, trying to understand such infinite wisdom, cannot but be infinite themselves.

One more point: In Psalm 119:92 the author declares, “Were it not for Your Torah being my toys [playthings], I would have perished in my suffering.” Torah study, figuring out what the halakhah or philosophical idea really is, needs to be fun, playful, and as creative as a young child playing with a new toy. So not only are we forced to be as creative as possible—without limits—in figuring out the meaning of the Torah...