Catholic Show Called Abundent Life

Halakha and Beyond: A Response to Rabbi Gil Student

, Gil Student attacks my essay in particular, “Living and Dreaming with God,” as purportedly lacking in traditional content. He implies that I am at once ignorant of, and indifferent to, traditional Jewish theological sources. But his treatment of my essay only reveals his own confusions and his indulgence in ungenerous, caricatured readings. Student correctly notes that my essay begins with a discussion of the centrality of gratitude in Jewish piety and theology, but he then adds, oddly, that I “fail to locate the obligation for this gratitude which others attribute to Natural Law” [sic]. Student’s footnote refers the reader to a sichah given by R. Chaim Shmuelevitz, Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir, in 1972, in which the latter speaks of a “propensity to gratitude [that is] firmly rooted in human nature.” Student does not evince any awareness that natural law is a technical term in philosophy, nor does he seem to know that R. Shmuelevitz’ passing remark is not self-evidently an instance thereof. Be that as it may, Student seems to think that a sichah by a twentieth-century Haredi Rosh Yeshiva is somehow intrinsically authoritative and thus sufficient to refute what I’ve written (which, as I shall show, has abundant precedent in the history of Jewish thought). Strange, at any rate, that an ostensible defender of tradition dismisses me for not engaging with a twentieth-century chiddush Well, yes, to some extent. As do I, by the way. But the whole point of my essay is to argue that obedience is not enough, and that HaKadosh Barukh Hu requires much more of us than mere obedience; He actually demands that we engage in the process of self-cultivation (or, in Rav Soloveitchik’s terms, self-creation) to work on our middot such that we become true b’nai Torah rather than mere obedient servants. My emphasis was and is that the highest form of self-cultivation according to Chazal is the attempt to become a ba’al chesed.