From Masculine Ontology to Feminine Ethics: Joseph Soloveitchik and the Drive Toward the Ethical

In 1825, in the State Papers Office in London, a long and idiosyncratic tract on Christian Theology—written in Latin, with the title De Doctrina Christiana—was discovered. Previously unknown, the work was among the state papers collected by Oliver Cromwell’s Foreign Minister, John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost.¹ For scholars, the posthumous “publication” of the work has become an opportunity for reassessing Milton’s major poetic works, and also for considering the development of Milton’s theological ideas. In a distant but parallel case, Joseph Soloveitchik is a figure whose major works were not all published when first written, and have been steadily published since his death. In the past two decades, thanks to a consortium of both family members and students, his works continue to be published, adding depth and nuance to his scholarly reputation.²

In my book, The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition, I argue for a split between Soloveitchik’s representation of Talmudic hermeneutics and ethics.³ Where Soloveitchik, I argue, conceives of a timeless tradition of Talmudic interpreters with models of cognition and hermeneutics based upon conquest, his ethical works, particularly essays written in the late nineteen-fifties (collected in Out of the Whirlwind), have a this-worldly orientation and presuppose a conception of multiple agencies, and the toleration of different perspectives.⁴ I suggest that for Soloveitchik, the authenticity of the ethical personality, his conception and adaptation of the ethical norm, became for him a means of his self-fashioning, allowing for a form of individuation unavailable to him in a Brisk tradition of halakhic men.⁵ In the appropriation and transformation of the Brisk conception of hiddush, [novel interpretation], taken out of the study-hall into the realm of the self, Soloveitchik elaborates the possibilities for individuation, sometimes even at odds with the interpretive tradition of halakha.

A set of new works published under the title Halakhic Morality: Essays on Ethics and Mesorah, includes lectures composed between 1950 and 1953, and provides additional material for the exploration of Soloveitchik’s ethical world-view, especially as it contrasts with his conception of mesorah, or tradition.⁶ These essays in some ways have their foundation in Soloveitchik’s earlier encounter with Rambam’s Guide, also recently published from student lecture notes.⁷ More sustained than already published arguments about ethics written between 1957 and 1960, these newly published works show Soloveitchik elaborating an ethical perspective—associated with emotion and consciousness of multiple agencies, both absent from his conception of the hermeneutic tradition of halakha.⁸ In the essays collected in Halakhic Morality in particular, Soloveitchik presents a conflict between an affiliation with an “ontic tradition”—associated with a cold and impersonal conception of the masculine—and a more particularistic form of ethics, inflected by an emotional realm associated with the feminine—allowing for love and individuation.

The arc created through these works of the 1950s shows Soloveitchik revising and refining an ethical conception that leads away from the “ontic” realm associated with the hermeneutic tradition towards the here-and-now recognition of the other. Part of that recognition entails a re-conception of the ethical self—from one articulated in relationship to Rambam’s Guide, of a self expansive and expanding, to a self contracting, even self-limiting, from the late fifties onwards. Further, where Soloveitchik shows himself in his work from the early fifties to privilege the ontic relationship between scholars in a nearly anonymous tradition, by the late fifties, culminating years later in the argument of The Lonely Man of Faith, Soloveitchik acknowledges the integrity of separate agents joined in their ethical mission, indeed in love and friendship. Indeed, only in the latter work, with the injection of the feminine into the ethical realm, does Soloveitchik articulate an ethics of full reciprocity and sympathy.

Ontic halakah

In the introduction to the essays on Pirke Avot in Halakhic Morality, Soloveitchik represents the “Halakhic system” as “basically constant and unalterable” which only “very seldom” takes “cognizance of the flux of events and the kaleidoscopic metamorphoses of the environs” (Morality...