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The Moment and the Future: Kierkegaard's Øieblikket and Soloveitchik's View of Repentance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2016

Daniel Herskowitz
Daniel Herskowitz*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
daniel.herskowitz@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article addresses the philosophical sources of Soloveitchik's unique account of time and repentance as presented particularly in the second part of Halakhic Man. In the past, thinkers such as Max Scheler, Hermann Cohen, and Henri Bergson have been suggested as sources of influence on Soloveitchik on this account. While the influence of these thinkers is undeniable, a fuller appreciation of the philosophical layers at play is still required. This article aims to show that the event of repentance in Soloveitchik's description is formulated in accordance with Kierkegaard's notion of Øieblikket (the moment), and to discuss the place of Heidegger in Soloveitchik's interpretation of repentance.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 87 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2016 

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References

1. Benedict Spinoza, “Of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions,” Proposition 54, Ethics IV, in Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 348.

2. Eliezer Goldman, “Teshuvah ve-zeman be-hagut ha-Rav Soloveitchik,” in ‘Emunah be-zemanim mishtanim, ed. Avi Sagi (Jerusalem: Sifriyat Ellner, 1996), 175–89.

3. Max Scheler, “Repentance and Rebirth,” in On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (London: SCM, 1960), 35–65. See also Pinchas H. Peli, On Repentance: In the Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Jerusalem: Oroth, 1980), 187–225; Peli, , “Repentant Man: A High Level in Rabbi Soloveitchik's Typology of Man,” Tradition 18, no. 2 (1979): 149Google Scholar, 159 n. 50; See also Yitzchak Blau, “Creative Repentance: On Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Concept of Teshuva,” in Exploring the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Marc D. Angel (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1997), 263–74.

4. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan, introduction by Leo Strauss (New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1972), in particular 178–215. See also Kaplan, Lawrence, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on Repentance,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 13, no. 1 (2004): 213–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nietzsche, it has been suggested, also plays a role in Soloveitchik's view. See Rynhold, Daniel and Harris, Michael J., “Modernity and Jewish Orthodoxy: Nietzsche and Soloveitchik on Life Affirmation, Asceticism, and Repentance,” Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 2 (2008): 283CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. See below.

6. For more on Cohen's influence on Soloveitchik, see Ravizky, Aviezer, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge: Between Maimonides and neo-Kantian Philosophy,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986): 157–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Kaplan, “Repentance,” 241.

8. Oppenheim, Michael, “Kierkegaard and Soloveitchik,” Judaism 31, no. 1 (1988): 29–40Google Scholar; David D. Possen, “J. B. Soloveitchik: Between Neo-Kantianism and Kierkegaardian Existentialism,” in Kierkegaard's Influence on Theology, tome 3, Catholic and Jewish Theology, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham, UK: Ashgate 2012), 189–209.

9. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 55.

10. Humbert, David, “Kierkegaard's Use of Plato in His Analysis of the Moment in Time,” Dionysus 83, no. 7 (1983): 149Google Scholar.

11. Kierkegaard, “Anxiety,” 89.

12. Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 821.

13. Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Western Philosophy (Farham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 13.

14. Johannes Climacus [Søren Kierkegaard], Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of Philosophy, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 18.

15. As Crites notes, the Danish word for the related concept “Repetition”—Gjentagelsen—insinuates a rebirth. See Stephen Crites, “‘The Blissful Security of the Moment’: Recollection, Repetition, and Eternal Recurrence in Fear and Trembling and Repetition,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993), 235.

16. Crites, “Blissful Security,” 16. Emphasis in original.

17. Kierkegaard draws here on a tradition rooted in Augustine's discussion of time in Confessions book 11.

18. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 307. Emphasis in original.

19. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 110.

20. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 113.

21. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 120; Soloveitchik, , “Sacred and Profane: Kodesh and Chol in World Perspectives,” Gesher 3, no. 1 (1966): 5–29Google Scholar; Soloveitchik, “Avelut Yeshana and Avelut Hadasha: Historical and Individual Mourning,” in Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering and the Human Condition, ed. David Shatz, Joel B. Wolowelsky and Reuven Ziegler (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 2003), 14–8.

22. Scheler, Repentance and Rebirth, 39.

23. Scheler, Repentance and Rebirth, 113.

24. I am in agreement with Goldman, who concluded that neither Bergson's notion of time as duration nor Scheler's view of memory can furnish a satisfactory philosophical background for Soloveitchik's approach on repentance.

25. See also Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 47–50.

26. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 118.

27. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 123.

28. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 118. Soloveitchik terms this mode of time kedushat zeman (holiness of time).

29. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 114.

30. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 114.

31. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 116–7.

32. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 116–7.

33. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 119.

34. Soloveitchik, “Sacred and Profane,” 17.

35. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 117–8.

36. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 188.

37. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 120.

38. Soloveitchik, “Avelut,” 14–8. See also Woolf, Jeffery R., “Time Awareness as a Source of Spirituality in the Thought of Rabbi Josef B. Soloveitchik,” Modern Judaism 32, no. 1 (2012): 54–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. Soloveitchik, Joseph B., “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition 2, no. 7 (1965): 42Google Scholar, 44.

40. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 1:2; 2:3. On Soloveitchik's critique of the Musar movement's emphasis on the past in their approach to repentance see Kaplan, “Repentance,” 30.

41. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:5.

42. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:5.

43. This position is also expressed in Soloveitchik, Joseph B., “Community,” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 15Google Scholar. See also Soloveitchik's lectures addressing the communal aspect of repentance in Peli, On Repentance, 107–37; Blidstein, Gerald, “On the Jewish People in the Writings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” Tradition 24, no. 2 (1989): 21–43Google Scholar.

44. Nietzsche too offers a certain version of an elevated, decisive moment essential to his idea of “Eternal Return” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), which he terms Augenblick. Although some resemblances exist, there is no direct connection between this and Kierkegaard's notion. See Ward, Augenblick, 35–68.

45. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 2008), 387. Emphasis in original. See also Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 292.

46. Kaplan, Lawrence, “The Religious Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Tradition 14, no. 2 (1973): 63Google Scholar n. 63.

47. Kaplan, “Repentance,” 240.

48. Peli, On Repentance, 33.

49. In any event, any purported appropriation of Heideggerian notions by Soloveitchik would pertain to the “ontic” level, distinct from Heidegger's “ontological” concerns. For a short discussion on Soloveitchik's critique of Heidegger, see Herskowitz, Daniel, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Endorsement and Critique of Volkish Thought,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14, no. 3 (2015): 373–390CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1999), 195.

51. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Eternal Duration and Temporal Compresence: The Influence of Ḥabad on Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” in The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience, Festschrift for Steven T. Katz on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 195–238.

52. Wolfson, “Eternal Duration,” 208–9.

53. Wolfson, “Eternal Duration,” 211. Wolfson mentions some—although not all—of Soloveitchik's explicit and implicit reactions and responses to Heidegger.

54. Heidegger explicitly mentions Kierkegaard in three footnotes in Being and Time. One is of particular interest here: “Kierkegaard is probably the one who has seen the existentiell phenomenon of the moment of vision with the most penetration; but this does not signify that he has been correspondingly successful in interpreting it existentially. He clings to the ordinary conception of time, and defines the ‘moment of vision’ with the help of ‘now’ and ‘eternity’. When Kierkegaard speaks of ‘temporality’, what he has in mind is man's ‘Being-in-time’. Time as within-time-ness knows only the ‘now’; it never knows a moment of vision. If, however, such a moment gets experienced in an existentiell manner, then a more primordial temporality has been presupposed, although existentially it has not been made explicit.” See Being and Time, 338/387 n. 2.

55. What emerges from an examination of these three versions of “the moment” is that Soloveitchik and Heidegger are at times in agreement on the exact issues in which they differ from Kierkegaard. See Daniel Herskowitz, “Authenticity, Repentance and the Second Coming: “The Moment” in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Soloveitchik,” The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning (forthcoming).