It is this appreciation of physical performance which leads Berkovits to argue that there is a value, albeit a diminished one, even in the performance of commandments by “rote,” without proper intention. The obligation of prayer offers an important case in point. Prayer is fundamentally a matter of devotion; through it, man expresses his most intimate thoughts and feelings to his creator. The intentions behind one’s prayer are, perhaps more so than in any other religious act, essential to its nature. Thus Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a leading Orthodox thinker of the Kantian tradition, insisted that intention constitutes the entirety and essence of prayer, whereas the physical recitation of prayers is merely “the technique of implementation of prayer and not prayer itself.”⁷² Heschel, too, was stating what appeared obvious to him when he wrote that “to pray with kavana (inner devotion) may be difficult; to pray without it is ludicrous.”⁷³ 

Yet by including prayer within a system of legal obligation, the halacha requires the Jew to pray at fixed times and in accordance with a fixed liturgy, with the result that many Jews often find themselves praying in the absence of proper intention. Seen solely from the perspective of the individual’s spiritual connection with God, such prayer may indeed be empty and meaningless. Yet from the standpoint of man’s material element, as Berkovits points out, the action is defensible, and even praiseworthy, because it both signifies and reinforces the body’s subjugation to the conscious decision to pray, even if the mind has not fully succeeded in following suit. As he writes:

Thus the halacha is, for Berkovits, not a set of seemingly arbitrary rules dictated by God and the rabbis, but rather a necessary response to man’s fundamental dualism—an approach to morality which views the body as no less significant than the mind, and which forms a part of a larger, normative Judaism spanning both the moral and legal realms. This is something which other Jewish philosophers have in some ways attempted. Both Buber and Heschel, for example, insist that their philosophies of Judaism address, in Buber’s words, “the whole man, body and spirit together.” For this reason we find them not infrequently making statements similar to those of Berkovits concerning the importance of the body’s involvement in moral actions.⁷⁵ Yet they fail to articulate any kind of method for preparing the body for moral action, under the assumption that where the mind determines to lead, the body will simply follow. Their moral teaching, it often seems, tacitly assumes that the human body is what the mind that inhabits it wishes it to be, rather than what it actually is.

The failure of so much of Western ethics to address the body as a moral question has a great deal to do with its emphasis on moral intention at the expense of the actual outcome of human actions. For if results are unimportant, then actions, however important, are so only insofar as they are a reflection of one’s intentions. Moral failings are necessarily perceived as failures of the conscious mind, and therefore the only redress is a further purification of intent. The inevitable result of this approach, however, is a disjunction between the demands of morality and the hopes of redemption: By detaching morality from consequences, these thinkers must also detach it from any reasoned hope that moral behavior will, in any clear way, bring about the betterment of mankind in history. If there is to be any causal link, no matter how distant, between morality and redemption—a basic tenet of Judaism which no major Jewish thinker has yet attempted to do without—then an intention-based morality must relegate it to the realm of the incomprehensible and obscure, and make of it a matter for faith alone; which is precisely what many of these thinkers, adopting a mystical approach to history, advocate.⁷⁶ If, however, as Berkovits argues, morality is in its essence meant to bring about an actual improvement in the affairs of mankind, then one must view outcomes as the principal target of moral behavior, and the body as a central challenge to morality, since it is the agent of all moral outcomes.

 

The Jewish moral tradition brings together three distinct elements: A system of law incorporating both moral and ritual obligations; a set of moral values emphasized in the teachings of the prophets and in the rabbinic tradition; and a vision of the improvement of man’s lot in history, which adherence to the Jewish normative system is meant to assist in bringing about. Because of the difficulty of maintaining a balance among all three elements—law, values, and vision—contemporary Jewish thinkers are often found attempting to escape the central role bequeathed to one or another of them by Jewish tradition. For some, traditional values such as kevod habriot, human dignity, are downplayed in the effort to transform the more concrete precepts of Jewish law into the central imperative of religion; among others, it is the law that is undermined in the pursuit of distilled moral values which, while possessing great appeal in their simplest form, frequently fall short in their ability to give clear guidance for moral action when confronted with the complexity of real life; and in many cases as well, the improvement of man’s condition within history is relegated to the status of a wishful, mystical outcome resulting from one’s devotion to either laws or ethical principles that are themselves derived without reference to their consequences in history, and so no longer seem to have any discernible purpose that reaches beyond the bounds of the subjective mind.

Of Jewish thinkers in the last century, it was Eliezer Berkovits who most successfully combined these diverse elements of the tradition, preserving for each a proper place within a balanced system of Jewish morality: For Berkovits, it is the values of Judaism which constitute its eternal moral fabric, which underlie the law and which dictate the extent of change in the law over time; it is the prophetic vision which establishes morality as a vehicle for the advancement of man, and thereby determines the consequentialist character of these values; and it is the law—as law, not merely as traditional practice—which is needed to address the fundamental problem of man’s corporeality, a problem that must be overcome if moral beliefs are to be translated reliably into moral outcomes. Taken together, these elements form a comprehensive approach to morality which seems to offer the possibility of a Judaism that is capable of holding fast before the tides of revolution, while at the same time safeguarding our humanity and offering us the hope of genuine improvement of our condition within history.

By incorporating all three elements into a single moral system, Berkovits poses a significant challenge to those Jewish thinkers who read the tradition as making compliance with halachic codes the sole test of religious behavior. No less important, however, is the challenge he poses towards those of the opposite inclination, who have for so long assailed Jewish law as a stumbling-block for moral behavior. For as the events of the past century demonstrate, all the mind’s moral principles may come to nought if the concrete society which they are supposed to benefit lacks the practical discipline necessary to put them into practice—and this is a discipline that only law can teach. The renewed interest in Jewish law in recent years seems to reflect a disillusionment with the dominant assumption of twentieth-century Jewish thought: The belief that the Jewish people can successfully offer a moral example to the world while denying its tradition of heteronomous law. Eliezer Berkovits offers all Jews a compelling theoretical basis for rejecting that assumption.

Thus Berkovits provides a coherent alternative to both of these reductionist approaches, by suggesting that morality is ultimately about neither adherence to law nor proper intent, and that neither may therefore be understood as absolute. While cogently arguing for the very real significance of each for the emergence of a moral society, Berkovits reminds us that this does not mean that one should, for the sake of conceptual simplicity, forget their contingent nature. Only a rediscovery of the idea that morality is inspired by, and ultimately subordinate to, a vision of the improvement of mankind—and a conscientious application of that vision to reality in the form of our moral understanding and practice—can permit morality to emerge as a factor in human history.

David Hazony is Senior Editor of Azure. He is the editor of a new anthology of Berkovits’ writings, Essential Essays on Judaism, to be published this year by Shalem Press.

 

1. Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1995), p. 92.

2. Cf. M. Herbert Danzger, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism (New Haven: Yale, 1989), pp. 24-26. See also Howard W. Polsky, “A Study of Orthodoxy in Milwaukee: Social Characteristics, Beliefs, and Observances,” in Marshall Sklare, ed., The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (New York: Free Press, 1958), pp. 325-335; and Sidney Goldstein and Calvin Goldschneider, “Jewish Religiosity: Ideological and Ritualistic Dimensions,” in Marshall Sklare, ed., The Jew in American Society (New York: Behrman House, 1974), pp. 203-221.

3. “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” adopted at the 1999 Pittsburgh Convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, available on the CCAR’s Internet site, www.ccarnet.org. According to the platform, Reform Jews “are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of mitzvot and to the fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community. Some of these mitzvot, sacred obligations, have long been observed by Reform Jews; others, both ancient and modern, demand renewed attention as the result of the unique context of our own times.” According to R. Richard Levy, one of the statement’s principal proponents, the use of the term mitzva is a deliberate break with the Reform movement’s past, reflecting a new consensus among Reform rabbis in favor of a more traditional approach to Jewish practice: “The Centenary Perspective [the Reform platform adopted in 1976] would not use the Hebrew word mitzva but only the English word ‘obligation,’ whereas most Reform rabbis and laypeople are trying nowadays to build more and more mitzvot into their lives.” According to Levy, “Reform Jews are much more willing today to rethink Jewish practices that have been taboo for a hundred years.” An earlier draft of the statement also called for a rediscovery of specific practices of kashrut and ritual immersion in a mikveh. Richard Levy, “Is It Time to Chart a New Course for Reform Judaism?” Reform Judaism, Winter 1998, pp. 10-22, 54.

4. On the Holocaust, cf. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973); Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Death Camps (New York: Sanhedrin, 1979). Berkovits’ essays on Jewish philosophers are collected in Eliezer Berkovits, Major Themes in Modern Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1974).

5. Menachem Friedman, “Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism,” in Harvey E. Goldberg, ed., Judaism Viewed from Within and from Without (Albany: suny, 1987), pp. 235-255.

6. Lawrence Kaplan, “The Hazon Ish: Haredi Critic of Traditional Orthodoxy,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The Uses of Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), pp. 145-173.

7. Cf. Michael K. Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in Wertheimer, Uses of Tradition, pp. 49f. This leveling effect may be seen as a response to the perceived threat of the non-Orthodox movements, whose allure may have been seen as particularly strong at a time when large, uprooted Jewish populations were coming ashore to a New World in which these movements had established a successful base; since the threat came from those who rejected the binding nature of halacha, many Orthodox leaders responded by making adherence to halacha per se, rather than a complex of traditional value judgments, the overriding value.

8. The most important account of the change is that of the historian Haym Soloveitchik, whose essay “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy” created a minor tempest in Orthodox circles when it first appeared. The essay was published in Tradition 28:4, Summer 1994, pp. 64-130. In addition to this as well as the sources cited above by Friedman, Kaplan, and Silber, see Menachem Friedman, “The Lost Kiddush Cup: Changes in Ashkenazic Haredi Culture—A Tradition in Crisis,” in Wertheimer, Uses of Tradition, pp. 175-186; Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 114-233.

9. Eliezer Berkovits, Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halacha (New York: Ktav, 1983). Not in Heaven appeared in an expanded form in Hebrew under the title Halacha: Its Power and Function (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1981).

10. Brachot 19b-20a; Jerusalem Brachot 3:1; Jerusalem Kilaim 9:1; cited in Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp.22-24, 120 n. 51.

11. Moed Katan 27a-27b; quoted in Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp. 23-24.

12. See Mishna Gitin 5:8, and the discussion in Gitin 59b. The Tosefta relates that “because of the ways of peace,” Jews are obligated to support the poor of the non-Jewish communities, to visit their sick, and to bury their dead “as one buries the dead among Jews.” Tosefta Gitin 3:18. Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp. 25-26.

13. Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp. 3-32.

14. The question of whether the cancellation of loans was still considered to have biblical status at the time of Hillel is debated in the Talmud. According to the opinion of Abaye, which was later accepted as halacha, Hillel acted under the assumption of the position of R. Yehuda Hanasi (who lived about two hundred years after Hillel), according to which the cancellation of loans no longer was considered a biblical commandment. This was somewhat difficult, since R. Yehuda Hanasi’s position was itself a minority opinion when he held it, and thus for Abaye’s claim to be historically accurate would require that the prozbul have been a matter of contention for at least two centuries, a dispute of which we would expect to have some record. For this reason, perhaps, Abaye’s position is disputed by Rava, who holds that Hillel was empowered to act even in contravention of a biblical institution. Gitin 36a-36b; see Rashi ad loc.

Two latter-day parallels to this are controversial, yet widely accepted: The heter iska, which enables Jewish-owned banks to lend and borrow money at interest despite a strict biblical prohibition on charging or paying interest; and the heter mechira, which allows Jewish farmers in Israel to circumvent the prohibition on farming during the sabbatical year by allowing them to temporarily transfer ownership of the land to non-Jews.

15. Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp. 21-22, 30-32.

16. Deuteronomy 6:18.

17. Eliezer Berkovits, Crisis and Faith (New York: Sanhedrin, 1976), pp. 91-92.

18. By “codes” I am referring to lists of rules such as those composed beginning in the medieval period. This is as opposed to works of the oral law which are not codes: The Talmud and its commentaries comprise a collection of discussions and disputes; in general, the study of Talmud in the yeshiva is frequently understood to be a separate subject of study from “halacha,” which focuses mostly on the legal rulings beginning with the Arba’a Turim and continuing through the centuries to our own day. While both subjects are considered crucial for the aspiring talmid hacham, it is the study of halacha which constitutes the immediate basis on which rabbis are to make their decisions.

19. Eliezer Berkovits, “The Concrete Situation and Halacha,” in Berkovits, Crisis and Faith, pp. 93-96. The essay originally appeared as part of an essay on the subject of conversion in Jewish law. Eliezer Berkovits, “Conversion ‘According to Halacha’—What Is It?” Judaism 23, 1974, pp. 467-478.

20. In his proposal for the creation of a new type of rabbinical education, Berkovits includes the study of codes of Jewish law, which he understood as binding in nature. Eliezer Berkovits, “A Contemporary Rabbinical School for Orthodox Jewry,” Tradition 12:2, Fall 1971, pp. 5-20.

21. Eliezer Berkovits, Towards Historic Judaism (Oxford: East and West Library, 1943), p. 109.

22. Louis Jacobs, for example, a leading thinker of the Conservative stream in Judaism, dedicates a chapter of his A Tree of Life to cataloguing instances in which the talmudic rabbis altered the import of the biblical law, in a discussion reminiscent of Berkovits’ opening chapters in Not in Heaven. Jacobs also writes that “Change is never engaged for its own sake, and there is a proper appreciation of the great caution that is required if continuity is to be preserved. But where halacha as it is at present practiced results in the kind of injustice that reasonable persons would see as detrimental to Judaism itself, frank avowal that there must be changes in the law is called for.” With the possible exception of Jacobs’ “reasonable persons” test, this is a statement with which Berkovits might wholeheartedly agree—even if they may disagree on how this would be carried out in practice. Louis Jacobs, A Tree of Life: Diversity, Flexibility, and Creativity in Jewish Law (London: Littman Library, 2000), pp. 34-41, 220-221. Other examples are: Moshe Zemer, Evolving Halacha: A Progressive Approach to Traditional Jewish Law (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 1999); Robert Gordis, The Dynamics of Judaism: A Study of Jewish Law (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1990). In all these cases, the demonstration of the evolution of halacha over time at the initiative of the rabbinic establishment is taken to be proof of halachic flexibility.

23. Jacobs, Tree of Life, p. 230. Jacobs’ A Tree of Life is a well-researched study on the flexibility of halacha in the face of many different types of considerations: Ethical, historical, philosophical. What is missing, however, is any effort to develop a theory which unites these extra-halachic factors—in other words, which can serve as the basis for a coherent theory governing the development of halacha. As such, A Tree of Life is typical of the historical school which he represents, and which Berkovits rejects.

24. Robert Gordis, “A Dynamic Halacha: Principles and Procedures of Jewish Law,” Judaism 28:3, Summer 1979, p. 265.

25. See, for example, Zemer, Evolving Halacha, pp. 44-57.

26. Megila 14a.

27. Berkovits, Not in Heaven, p. 19. The verses cited are Deuteronomy 6:18, Proverbs 3:17, and Proverbs 2:20. Cf. Zemer, Evolving Halacha, p. 49; Zemer cites only the first part of Berkovits’ statement, that halacha may not contradict “ethics,” but leaves out the continuation in which he describes the ethical principles as based within the Tora itself. For a more faithful representation of Berkovits’ position, see Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester, 1992), pp. 162-167.

28. On the status of women in halacha, see Eliezer Berkovits, Conditionality in Marriage and Divorce (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1966) [Hebrew]; Eliezer Berkovits, Jewish Women in Time and Tora (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1990); as well as the essay “The Status of Woman Within Judaism” in his book Crisis and Faith, pp. 97-122; also Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp. 32-45. On conversion, see Berkovits, “Conversion ‘According to Halacha’”; a version dealing only with conversion, without the discussion of the history of the oral law, appears in Crisis and Faith under the title “Conversion According to Halacha,” in Berkovits, Crisis and Faith, pp. 122-131; cf. Eliezer Berkovits, Unity in Judaism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1986).

29. Berkovits, Crisis and Faith, p. 121.

30. Eliezer Berkovits, Man and God: Studies in Biblical Theology (Detroit: Wayne State, 1969).

31. See, for example, Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant, p. 167. Sacks does not present a justification for his opinion.

32. Cf. Eliezer Berkovits, What Is the Talmud? (Berlin: Jüdischer Buch-Verlag, 1938), pp. 40-47. [German] An excellent example of an effort to explain the Sabbath prohibition on work with reference to the agadot of the tractate Shabbat is Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz, “Secret of the Sabbath,” Azure10, Winter 2001, pp. 85-117. A similar effort to describe prayer in light of both the halacha and agada is undertaken by Berkovits himself. Eliezer Berkovits, Prayer (New York: Yeshiva University, 1962).

Berkovits is not the only modern Jewish thinker to declare the essential nature of the agadic passages of the Talmud. However, usually this claim is made by those who do not accept the binding nature of the halacha, and therefore do not view the central purpose of the agada as contributing to the integrity of the system of halachic values, but to an overall understanding of Jewish morality independent of halacha. See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Noonday, 1996), pp. 336-337; there Heschel describes the agada as necessary for giving man his ultimate direction, whereas halacha provides a specific, non-legal norm.

33. “We do not learn out words of Tora [i.e., halacha] from words of the received [i.e., prophetic] tradition.” Baba Kama 2b; cf. Rashi ad loc., s.v. divrei kabala; Hagiga 10b; Nida 23a.

34. The rabbis decreed that biblical texts, but not apocryphal or post-biblical ones, had the status of “defiling the hands,” i.e., causing ritual impurity. The purpose of this seemingly counterintuitive law was more practical than symbolic: To prevent the storage of these texts together with the food of the Priests, which had to be eaten in purity, and thereby to protect the scrolls from the rodents which tended to roam in areas where food was stored. Nonetheless, a debate ensued over which of the biblical books defile the hands and which do not, a discussion clearly meant to establish the relative sanctity of the different books. Shabbat 13b; cf. Mishna Yadaim 3:4; Tosefta Yadaim 2:14; Megila 7a.

35. On Ezekiel, cf., inter alia, the extended discussion beginning in Hagiga 11b. On Esther, cf. Shabbat 88a.

36. Berkovits, Towards Historic Judaism, p. 102.

37. Mishna Rosh Hashana 2:5; Beitza 11b; Berkovits, Not in Heaven, p. 12.

38. “Because of the roads, because of the bridges, because of the ovens for roasting a paschal lamb, and because of the Jews who left their homes in Exile but have not arrived yet.” Sanhedrin 11a; Berkovits, Not in Heaven, pp. 12-13.

39. As Berkovits points out, there are even cases in which the word mishpat leans so heavily to the side of consequences that it cannot even be reasonably translated as “justice” at all, but rather as “deliverance”—as in the verse “The Eternal therefore judge, and give sentence between me and you, and see and plead my cause, and deliver me(v’yishp’teni) out of your hand.” I Samuel 24:16, quoted in Berkovits, Studies in Biblical Theology, pp. 232-233.

40. Berkovits, Studies in Biblical Theology, pp. 245-246.

41. Martin Buber, one of the outstanding examples of this approach, undertook an extensive study of Hasidic thought to demonstrate the religious truths inherent in the movement’s spiritual approach. Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joseph B. Soloveitchik used similar means to spell out the experience of the prophetic type (Heschel), or of the “halachic man” (Soloveitchik), a type whose perception of the world is seen through the prism of the law. Cf. Martin Buber’s many Hasidic works, notably Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), and Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. Maurice Friedman (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1988); Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962); Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halachic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983).

42. Buber, On Judaism, p. 87.

43. Buber, On Judaism, p. 114. Buber is aware of how difficult a goal this is. In his essay “The Holy Way,” Buber bemoans the difficulty of preserving the purity of the deed, and of creating a community based on unconditional deeds:

It is its [the deed’s] nature to point beyond itself. No matter how free its intention, how pure its manifestation, it is at the mercy of its own consequences; and even the most sublime deed, which does not waste so much as a glance at the lowlands of causality, is dragged into the mud as soon as it enters the world and becomes visible. And the deed concerned with the growth of the true community especially has everything lined up against it: The rigorism of the habitual traditionalists and the indolence of the slaves of the moment, yet equally a rash doctrinairism and irresponsible disputatiousness; miserly egotism and untractable vanity, yet also hysterical self-effacement and disoriented flurry; the cult of the so-called pure idea, hand in hand with the cult of so-called realpolitik. In addition, it is opposed by all the established forces that do not wish to be disturbed in the exercise of their power. All these forces rage in a clouded and beclouding whirlwind around the lonely and dedicated individual who boldly assumes the task of building a true community—and with what materials! There is no undefilable perfection here; everywhere the impure challenges the pure, dragging it down and distorting it; all about him gloating derision apprises the heroic victim of his futility, and the abyss pronounces its inexorable sentence on the dying to whom victory is denied. (Buber, On Judaism, p. 114)

44. “It is Judaism’s basic tenet,” Buber writes, “that the deed as an act of decision is an absolute value. On the surface it may seem that the deed is inescapably set into the unyielding structure of causality, whose rules determine its impact; in fact, however,… when it remembers its divine goal, when it extricates itself from all conditionality and walks by its own light—that is, the light of God—it is free and powerful….” Buber, On Judaism, p. 67.

45. Martin Buber, “Religion and Ethics,” in Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity, 1999), p. 95. An example of the slight but noticeable moderation of his position is found in an essay entitled “The Silent Question” (1952), where Buber allows that “inward truth must become real life, otherwise it does not remain truth. A drop of Messianic consummation must be mingled with every hour; otherwise the hour is godless, despite all piety and devoutness.” Yet even here, it is still not clear whether by “real life” he actually means actions taken in purity, or a consideration for their consequences. Buber, On Judaism,p. 209. Cf. Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, p. 99, where he asserts, in the context of the Hasidic concept of intentionality (kavana), that “there are no goals, only the goal. There is only one goal that does not lie, that becomes entangled in no new way, only one into which all ways flow, before which no byway can forever flee: Redemption.” [emphasis in original]

46. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), pp. 277-278.

47. Brachot 17a; cited in Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 309.

48. Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 308.

49. Cf. Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 311: “Deeds are outpourings, not the essence of the self. They may reflect or refine the self, but they remain the functions, not the substance of inner life. It is the inner life, however, which is our most urgent problem.” Cf. also Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 310: “A moral deed unwittingly done may be relevant to the world because of the aid it renders unto others. Yet a deed without devotion, for all its effects on the lives of others, will leave the life of the doer unaffected. The true goal for man is to be what he does. The worth of a religion is the worth of the individuals living in it. A mitzva, therefore, is not mere doing but an act that embraces both the doer and the deed. The means may be external, but the end is personal. Your deeds be pure, so that ye shall be holy.”

50. Heschel, God in Search of Man, pp. 337-338.

51. Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 283. A similar downplaying of the importance of consequences is evident in the thought of other Jewish writers of this tradition, such as the Orthodox thinker Joseph B. Soloveitchik. The entirety of Halachic Man is dedicated to the implications of the halachic norm from the individual’s own subjective perspective, rather than within the historical world. In some respects, Soloveitchik’s perspective is more extreme than even Buber’s, as when he declares that the “halachic man” is concerned more with the decision to undertake an action than with the carrying out of the action itself. Soloveitchik, Halachic Man, pp. 63-64. It is telling that of all the religious types articulated in Soloveitchik’s writings, the only one that is fully dedicated to a concern for the consequences of action is “Adam the first” from Lonely Man of Faith—a figure who is not considered by Soloveitchik to care for good or evil: “Adam the first is always an esthete, whether engaged in an intellectual or in an ethical performance. His conscience is energized not by the idea of the good, but by that of the beautiful. His mind is questing not for the true, but for the pleasant and functional, which are rooted in the esthetical, not the noetic-ethical, sphere.” Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 19.

52. Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man, and History: A Jewish Interpretation (New York: Jonathan David, 1959), p. 134.

53. Eliezer Berkovits, “Faith and Law,” in Berkovits, Major Themes, pp. 140-141.

54. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford, 1946), pp. 117f.

55. See Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 3; there Kant determines that “in the case of what is to be morally good, that it conforms to the moral law is not enough; it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.”

56. Put another way, the moral reasoning inherent in an ethic of responsibility calls into question another of the basic assumptions of ethical philosophy in the Kantian tradition: That all morality can or should be reduced to formulated rules of action. According to Kant, the aim of ethical thought is to make order out of our vague and conflicting values and intuitions by translating them into clear principles based in reason—in his words, to move “from popular [moral] philosophy, which goes no further than it can get by groping about with the help of examples, to metaphysics… which, inasmuch as it must survey the whole extent of rational knowledge of this kind, goes right up to ideas….”Kant, Grounding, p. 23; cf. Kant, Grounding, pp. 21f. In an ethic of responsibility, however, the flexibility and “impurity” of common-sense morality reflect not an insufficient degree of understanding, but the non-delineated nature of moral values that are geared toward advancing a state of affairs.

This is a crucial point in distinguishing between Berkovits’ moral approach and that of the “consequentialist” movement in ethical thought. Like Berkovits, consequentialists view consequences as crucial; however, they accept the Kantian approach which reduces morality to the effort to articulate a single, absolute formula for predetermining morality—as in the phrasing of Samuel Scheffler, who defines consequentialism as the belief that “the right act in any given situation is the one that will produce the best overall outcome, as judged from an impersonal standpoint which gives equal weight to the interests of everyone.” Samuel Scheffler, ed., Consequentialism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford, 1988), p. 1. While there are different schools of consequentialist thought, each offering its own formulations, what they all have in common is the Kantian reductionism of searching for a categorical imperative as the test of moral behavior. Such an effort is notably absent in Berkovits, as it is in Weber as well.

57. Berkovits singles out the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber as susceptible to this problem. Eliezer Berkovits, “The New Morality,” in Berkovits, Crisis and Faith, pp. 23-33; Eliezer Berkovits, “Martin Buber’s Religion of the Dialogue,” in Berkovits, Major Themes, pp. 68-137.

58. Obviously this does not exhaust the shades of Western ethical thought, and Berkovits himself cites three thinkers (Spinoza, Marx, and Bergson) who understood on some level the problem with ignoring the body. Eliezer Berkovits, Essential Essays on Judaism, ed. David Hazony (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2001), pp. 11-12, 19-20.

59. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 17-18.

60. One example appears in Genesis Raba 8:11: “R. Tafdai said in the name of R. Aha: The higher things (ha’elyonim) were created in the likeness and image of God, but cannot be fruitful and multiply; the lower things (hatahtonim) can be fruitful and multiply, but were not created in the likeness and image of God. Said the Holy One, ‘I will make him [i.e., man] in the likeness and image, with the higher things, and able to be fruitful and multiply, with the lower things.’ R. Tafdai further said in the name of R. Aha: Said the Holy One, ‘If I make him of the higher things, he will live and not die; if I make him of the lower things, he will die and not live. Therefore, I will make him from both the higher and the lower things. If he sin, he will die; if he does not sin, he will live.’” See also Genesis Raba 14:4. For additional sources, cf. Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of the Talmud (Cambridge: Harvard, 1979), pp. 221f.

61. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 18.

62. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 18.

63. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 19. In particular, Berkovits points to Aristotle, whose understanding of practical wisdom demands an appreciation of the ethical significance of emotions and appetites.

64. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 21.

65. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 13.

66. See note 60 above.

67. Cf., most notably, R. Jonah Gerondi’s thirteenth-century work The Gates of Repentance, as well as the writings of the musar movement of the late nineteenth century, which had a decisive influence on much of the Lithuanian yeshiva world. Berkovits’ description of Judaism foreshadowed in no small measure the emergence of the idea of “Carnal Israel,” a belief popularized by Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1993). The central theme of Boyarin’s argument is that whereas the ancient Greeks viewed man as essentially a soul and the body as its vessel, rabbinic Judaism assumed the reverse, that man is essentially a body animated by a soul. Berkovits does not go as far as Boyarin, instead placing the body on equal footing with the soul, or more accurately, pointing out their moral interdependence and their great differences in nature. Berkovits’ view fits better with the midrashic material cited in note 60 above.

68. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 21-22.

69. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 23-24.

70. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 24-25.

71. Berkovits, God, Man, and History, pp. 115-130. Cf. Berkovits, Essential Essays, pp. 26-38.

72. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man of Faith, p. 57; cf. Soloveitchik, Lonely Man of Faith, p. 74 n. 1.

73. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), p. 53; cited in Arnold Eisen, “Rereading Heschel on the Commandments,” Modern Judaism 9:1, February 1989, p. 20.

74. Berkovits, Essential Essays, p. 25. Berkovits cites a passage in the Talmud in which the automatic, habituated bowing which the body undertakes during the modim blessing in prayer, even in the absence of proper intention, should be a cause for our gratitude. Jerusalem Brachot 2:10.

75. Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, p. 151. Cf. Heschel: “The body without the spirit is a corpse; the spirit without the body is a ghost.” Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 341.

76. It is central to Buber’s neo-Hasidic approach that redemption is the result of man’s inner repair, reflected in the purification of his own intentions and its reflection in his relations with others, and that only through such repair will the world, somehow, be redeemed. Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, pp.98-108; Buber, On Judaism, pp. 83-87.