Halakhic Man

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.”  Genesis 1:26  NASB

Image/ likeness – We have probably investigated this verse nearly forty times.  Each time we find something deeper.  We’ve noticed that “image” and “likeness” are actions, not states of being.  We’ve commented on the impact of “rule” to an audience of ex-slaves.  We teased apart ṣelem and dĕmût, showing why both words are necessary.  We noted the sense of order in contrast to Egyptian cosmic chaos.  We looked at the ontological and ethical differences between doing and being.  But all of that was really a preface to the insights of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s seminal work, Halakhic Man, “a sweeping defense of the validity and excitement of pursuing a religiously observant life in the modern world.”[1]

Why is Soloveitchik’s work so fundamental?  Soloveitchik illuminates the difference between religious Man and observant Man, and the difference could not be greater.  Homo religiosus (religious Man) is first distinguished from “cognitive” Man.  The desire of cognitive man “is to uncover the secret of the world and to unravel the problems of existence.”[2]  This is what we might call “the empirical, scientific approach.”  It is characterized by “necessity and lawfulness,” i.e., the laws of nature that govern the way the world works.  “Cognitive man does not tolerate any obscurity, any oblique allusions and undeciphered secrets in existence.  He desires to establish fixed principles”[3] that determine the cosmic order.

“Cognition, for him, consists in discovering the secret, solving the riddle, hidden, buried deep in reality, precisely through the cognition of the scientific order and pattern of the world.  In a word, the act of cognitive man is one of revelation and disclosure.”[4]

We are more than familiar with this approach, essential to the Greco-Roman view of the world.  Hopefully we realize that some of religion’s greatest champions were, in fact, cognitive men.  Newton, Galileo, and Kepler all attempted to incorporate biblical order into their scientific theories.  Exegetes like Luther, Calvin, and more contemporaneously, Erickson, Geisler, and Grudem all sought to close the gaps, to explain the Bible in quasi-scientific, logical models upholding God’s laws of the cosmos as rational and understandable.

In opposition to this paradigm, homo religiosus (religious Man) “is intrigued by the mystery of existence . . . and wants to emphasize that mystery. . . Homo religiosus, like cognitive man, seeks the lawful and the ordered, the fixed and the necessary.  But . . . the revelation of the law and comprehension of the order and interconnectedness of existence only intensifies and deepens the question and problem . . . the concept of lawfulness is in itself the deepest of mysteries.”[5]

Two figures immediately come to mind: Heidegger, who noted that the fundamental question of philosophy is “Why is there something rather than nothing at all?” and Heschel, for whom all the interconnectedness of existence leads only to awe, to standing in the face of mystery.

We have contrasted the Greco-Roman, pre-scientific worldview with the Hebraic worldview, but perhaps there is at least one common thread between these two, that is, the observation of lawfulness.  For the West, this leads to Soloveitchik’s “cognitive man,” a man who no longer looks for nor expects revelation in order to make sense of the world.  For cognitive man, the cosmos is a closed box.  All that is necessary to understand it is the discovery of the laws that govern it.  Religious figures who are actually cognitive men use the same principle to examine the Bible.  In their case, the common aphorism, “the Bible is interpreted by the Bible itself,” becomes the ruling principle prohibiting examination of the text through “outside” sources.  Cognitive man seeks certainty, uniformity, and necessity, and it doesn’t matter what the subject happens to be.  We are right to contrast this view with the ancient Semitic worldview, but now Soloveitchik offers another insight.  Homo religious is ultimately a variation of cognitive man, not a different paradigm.  “Cognition, according to the world view of the man of God, consists in the discovery of the wonderous and miraculous quality of the very laws of nature themselves.”[6]

“The riddle of riddles is the very nature of the law itself.  In a word, the cognitive act of homo religious is one of concealment and hiding.”[7]  Soloveitchik’s choice of vocabulary is precisely what we find in Heidegger and Heschel.

How does Halakhic Man differ from these two?  Like cognitive Man, he approaches the cosmos with reason, but unlike cognitive Man, he comes to experience with an a priori relationship to the cosmos, that is, he carries Torah in his hands.  His relationship to the world is not based on some rationally constructed model like pure mathematics.  His relationship to the world is grounded in the Torah paradigm.  It is Torah that provides the framework for his approach to life, a framework that is revealed to him, not discovered or created by him.  Like homo religiosus, he embraces the wonder of existence, but unlike homo religiosus, he does not seek union with a supernatural realm.  He is not concerned with the “other world,” heaven, or the divine realm because, for him, the obligations and rewards of Torah all happen here, in this world, in this life.  He has a fixed relationship with the divine because he embraces God’s divinely given revelation, but his focus and devotion is to the practice of that revelation on earth, his true home.  He is not waiting for heaven.  He is not striving for escape to a utopian second life.  Death is not an entrance to a better place.  Torah works in this world and his role is to make Torah the ubiquitous norm here.

Perhaps Soloveitchik’s insight helps us reorient the roles we play.  Perhaps it helps us step away from the idea of exiting life in order to truly live.  Perhaps we will understand the greatest task we face is fulfilling the prime directive: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule . . .”

Topical Index:  Torah, Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik, homo religiosus, Genesis 1:26

[1] Time Magazine, cited on the cover of the book.

[2] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, (JPS, 1983), p. 5.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 6.

[5] Ibid., p. 7.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 8.