From Masculine Ontology to Feminine Ethics

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

Hermeneutics · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Toleration · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy

• U-Vikashtem Mi-Sham

  M S Berger•Modern Judaism - A Journal of…•1998

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