Between Kant and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Isaac Breuer's Philosophy of Judaism (review)

150 SHOFAR honest attempt to come to terms with the past and to pave the way for genuine Polish-Jewish dialogue, for a sense, as one writer puts it, of "PolishJewish moral equilibrium." Antony Polonsky and his collaborators on this volume are to be commended for making the beginnings of this process available to an English-speaking public. Solon Beinfeld Washington University, St. Louis Between Kant and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Isaac Breuer's Philosophy of Judaism, by Alan L. Mittleman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 227 pp. $44.50 (c); $14.95 (p). I began to read this book with skepticism, asking myself whether we could seriously speak of Isaac Breuer's work as a philosophy, but then the question of what is a philosophy emerged: is it a search for values, for the purpose of human existence, for the meaning of moral autonomy, for the consequence for human life in the presence of God? With these questions, I continued to read Mittleman's study of Breuer's thought, and I realized we have a serious philosopher before us whose accomplishments have long been forgotten and whose works are yet to be translated-a sad commentary on our religious community. Mittleman has made us aware that figures like Samson Raphael Hirsch, Isaac Breuer, Abraham Isaac Kook, can no longer be left on the roadside as we journey into the world of nineteenth- and twentieth -century moral and religious thought. Isaac Breuer (1883-1946) was a grandson of S. R. Hirsch and studied in the school his grandfather established in Frankfurt. On the one hand, there was the Yeshivah, on the other the University: 1902, Giessen, followed by Strasbourg, Marburg, Berlin, and finally Strasbourg, where he completed his doctorate in law in 1921. Kant became the central figure of studies. Mittleman notes that "Kant emerged for him as the premier philosopher of the conditio humana. In Kant, Breuer found a lifelong source of nourishment, as well as an object of critical opposition" (p. 12). From the depths of his Kant studies arose the contradictions that would determine the course of his philosophical and theological thinking for the years to come. Kant was the philosopher of the autonomous expression of the moral law. Man was challenged to know, to find within himself the source of knowledge and morality. With the Enlightenment, the God of revelation had taken refuge in a retreating church and in the last vestiges of orthodox thought. "Dare to know" had become the motto of the new age. The work of Descartes had found its liberation and fulfillment in Kant. What would it mean to affirm again the Volume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 151 Word of God in a world dominated by the Word of Man? It was this question that challenged Isaac Breuer, and it is a question that we all have difficulty putting aside.· Mittleman states the problem for Breuer in these terms: "For Breuer, the law that human beings must will to achieve freedom comes from God. The extranatural origin of this law, which ex hypothesi is beyond the competence of reason or will to discover, casts additional light on the tragic failure of philosophy and on the stark contrast between reason and Torah.... In Breuer's view, Kant's moral theory was an effort to impose a law upon the world-in-itself' (p. 68). The contradiction between faith in revelation and. faith in reason was fIxed. Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte took up the Kantian effort to give reason the power to consume faith, although in his late philosophy , Schelling realized that there could be no reconciliation between faith and reason. The clearest statement of this opposition of faith and reason came from Hirsch and Breuer. It was at Sinai that the Revelation was given and from this fact of faith, there could be no philosophical discussion. From this fact philosophy had to seek its beginning. It needed to explain the consequences of the truth of the Revelation. "Kant was unable to reach beyond the mere formal requirements for a law of freedom because he had not stood at the foot of Sinai. ... He has arrived at the idea of...