Joseph Soloveitchik as Weimar Intellectual and Prophetic Ethicist

Abstract:This article is an effort to advance the way Joseph Soloveitchik is read, in large part by way of (re)situating his work within its original, though not only, context: Before Soloveitchik was a leading figure of post-World-War-II Orthodox Judaism in America, he was a Berlin-trained, Weimar-era European philosopher, and his work is decisively animated, I show, by his concerns as the latter. I focus in particular on Soloveitchik's The Halakhic Mind, a work that has been predominantly read as a methodological intervention addressed to philosophers of religion in general and practitioners of Jewish thought in particular. The standard reading is not wrong. It is, however, critically incomplete, in that it elides one of the project's most fundamental concerns: to save European humanity from itself—or, following shortly after World War II, to set European humanity aright as prophylactic security against further civilizational catastrophe. Second, on the standard reading The Halakhic Mind is a fundamentally neo-Kantian project. This characterization is misleadingly incomplete: The work does indeed insist on a strong neo-Kantian constraint on the spiritual program it promotes, but that program is deeply and explicitly phenomenological and existentialist rather than neo-Kantian in character. Finally, studies of Soloveitchik's thought simply have not lent attention to Soloveitchik's distinctively prophetic, as opposed to legal, ethics of social responsibility. It is the practice of prophecy, understood as a human universal, which emerges as Soloveitchik's principal prescription for confronting the philosophically decisive threat of mass-societal evil.