Friends on the Way: Jesuits Encounter Contemporary Judaism

The Goal of the Ignatian Exercises and Soloveitchik’ s Halakhic Spirituality

The Goal of the Ignatian Exercises and Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Spirituality Christian M. Rutishauser, S.J. 1. Remarks on Soloveitchik’s Intellectual Biography Christians are perhaps familiar with the life and spiritual thinking of Ignatius of Loyola, but only a few know Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik , the spiritual mentor of so-called modern Jewish Orthodoxy in the United States. Soloveitchik was born in Lithuania in 1903 and died in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1993. His biography reflects the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its struggle with religion, which had to find a new standpoint in a secular world. Furthermore, his life was spent between two poles: the rabbinic intellectual and European culture of his origin, on the one hand, and on the other, the modern and secular American culture, with its belief in science, in which he tried to establish an Orthodox rabbinic lifestyle. He is considered a transition figure in a double sense: he embodied the shift from European to American Jewry, and he tried to bridge the cultural change with which the twentieth century was impregnated. Three cities with their intellectual character left their mark on Soloveitchik ’s life: Brisk, Berlin, and Boston. Brisk: His grandfather was the founder of the Brisker Talmud School, with its highly rationalistic and formal hermeneutical method Ignatian Exercises and Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Spirituality / 39 and its openness to Maimonides’ Halakhic work Mishneh Torah. Being the heir of an intellectually trained rabbinic family, Soloveitchik had a disciplined, classical rabbinic upbringing. His mother, who was influenced by Russian authors, implanted an appreciation for literature in him. Berlin: The Berlin of the Weimar Republic was the second decisive stage in his biography. He was a young, sensitive, and eager student when he came into contact with the intellectual world of the German metropolis in the 1920s. He became involved with the latest developments of scientific and cultural life. But above all, he took part in the revival of Jewish culture and tradition that seemed evident in those years. He majored in philosophy and received a doctorate for his dissertation on Hermann Cohen, ‘‘Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen.’’ The neo-Kantianism he got to know there would serve him later in interpreting the Halakhah as a system of categories and tools in order to structure the world according to God’s will. And finally, Boston: Soloveitchik would become the builder of bridges between science and rabbinic studies in the United States, where he lived from 1932 to the end of his life. His dialectical way of thinking, which he was trained in through the study of the Talmud, unfolded itself in connecting the different worlds he lived in. As professor of Talmud and philosophy at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Yeshiva University in Manhattan, as well as rabbi and teacher in the field of adult education, he had only one goal: the implementation of a halakhic lifestyle in the different realms of modern secular and pluralistic society. At heart he was not just a scholar or a scientist but a charismatic figure who dedicated himself with all his vigor to establishing an Orthodox rabbinic community. The growing new Jewish-American community was to be deeply rooted in the genuine core of Judaism—the Halakhah—and at the same time be open and ready to participate in the life of American society, so quickly developing in his time. Soloveitchik perceived the contemporary successful growth of Liberal and Conservative Judaism 40 / Christian M. Rutishauser, S.J. as a ‘‘chumming up to the zeitgeist and a watering down of the true Jewish identity.’’1 This short summary of Soloveitchik’s biography and the goals for which he lived may have a familiar ring to Christians formed in Ignatian spirituality. Building up a religious community in dialogue with the larger society and operating by establishing a well-organized way of life are strategies similar to those of the Society of Jesus. More by intuition than by study, I recognized an affinity between Soloveitchik ’s way of thinking and living and a Jesuit approach to reality. Then, by mere accident, I took his book Halakhic Man from the shelves of the Hecht Synagogue at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and leafed through it on a boring summer afternoon. This short text was for me the beginning of an intensive research into his writings that...