28 Feb 2011

The (Inexpressible) Faith of a Child

A Sub-section of my essay: Misunderstanding in Good Faith: Confronting Rav Soloveitchik’s Position on Interfaith Dialogue”

According to Soloveitchik, the God-man relationship expresses itself in the triad of private experience, objective norms and judgements, and concrete acts in the external world. Although all aspects of our religious life are correlated with one another, it is the subjective relationship with God that is the essence of faith, and our desire to interpret the world in light of that relationship. Our childlike emotional connection is in many ways an aboriginal response to spiritual reality. Commenting on Likkutei Torah’s approach to the symbolism of Matzah, representing the boundless and unqualified trust bnei Yisrael put in G-d on the night of redemption, he says approvingly:

“It is the naive approach of the child, a commitment based not on a rationally explicable reason, but on an inner, intuitive, emotional, inexpressible experience” (FF 63)

This pre-rational faith defies objective analysis, is inseparable from our experience of the world and will give rise to experiencing various contradictory states (e.g. G-d’s remoteness and immanence). Nonetheless, for Soloveitchik, it is this experience that forms the existential background of all religion.

This is hardly what we might expect of Halakhic Man who prides himself on his exoteric and adult religion! Indeed, in the drash above, hametz represents the fully grown individual who interprets his experience within the categories of a sensitive intellect. Yet, whilst these show “homo theoreticus in his full glory and majesty”, they “can never bring man into the presence of G-d” (FF 65.) The religious person, unlike the scientist, cannot ignore the qualitative aspects of reality and work wholly in concepts and abstractions. The reason is that the norms and concrete acts- the very things halakha conceptualises- result from the spirit trying to objectify itself in the outside world. As a result, for the religious mind, “the world he knows is identical to the world he experiences”. It is through entering into the ideal world of Halakha that a Jew can claim full flourishing of his cognitive, creative personality but it cannot lose its connection to the experience that gives it living content.

Soloveitchik perceived his inability to communicate to his students the link between halakha and subjective religiosity, to be his greatest failing:

They lack the experiential component of religion, and simply substitute obscurantism for it.... How can I convey experiences to my students? I simply do not know how... My students are my products as far as lomdus is concerned. They follow my method of learning... However, when it comes to my philosophical experiential viewpoint, I am somehow persona non grata. My ideas are too radical for them.

Evidently, the lack he felt in his own students, was one that he felt in culture at large and amongst those of all faith communities. A certain loneliness, and inability to communicate religious experience, comes from the nature of faith itself. Yet, contemporary man exacerbates this problem by “searching not for a faith in its singularity and otherness”. They are committed members of religious communities but deny as superfluous, the defeat, withdrawal and sacrifice involved in genuine faith. They don’t appreciate that one can never fully translate it into terms that those not of their faith can understand:

Each faith community is engaged in a singular normative gesture reflecting the numinous nature of the act of faith itself, and it is futile to try to find common denominators

To deny this feature, in the terms of Confrontation, is to eschew the ‘double confrontation’ in favour of a ‘single confrontation’. Unless we say that our faiths are singular, we diminish the grandeur of both.