“In July 1997,” writes the distinguished Swiss Jesuit Christian Rutishauer, “I was attending an Ulpan [Hebrew-language immersion course] at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During a break one day, I walked over to the Hecht Synagogue on the Mount Scopus campus. … By chance, I picked up a copy of Halakhic Man by the Rav [“the Rabbi,” as Soloveitchik is known to religious Jews]. … The name Soloveitchik did not ring a bell. Opening the book at random, I read a few chapters and became so fascinated by its outline of the Orthodox life ideal that I ‘kidnapped’ the book from the synagogue.”

Rutishauer, now the Provincial of his order in Switzerland, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the thought of Soloveitchik, who died in 1993 at the age of 92. An English translation of Rutishauer’s book, The Human Condition and the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, appeared in 2013. The title, as well as the unusual circumstance of a book-length treatise on an Orthodox rabbi by a Jesuit scholar, suggests that Soloveitchik had something to say of universal importance. That is all the more remarkable given that the ne plus ultra of Soloveitchik’s work was the refinement and practice of Jewish law, or Halakha, literally, “the way.”

I had my own Soloveitchik epiphany in 2009, just after I joined the masthead of First Things magazine. One of my first tasks was to edit Rabbi Shalom Carmy’s review of the English translation of Soloveitchik’s And from There You Shall Seek. I took a copy of the Rav’s book with me to dinner, and while reading his exegesis of the Song of Songs, fell off my chair, literally. The next Shabbat I reported to the nearest Orthodox synagogue and never looked back. After adopting Jewish practice in middle age, I can report that the difference in outlook is quite as striking as the shift to Technicolor when Dorothy steps out of her storm-tossed house. Judaism has a rich and fecund theology, but Jews think about it in spare moments, the way physicists think about the philosophy of science. Most of the time they simply practice physics, just as Jews practice Judaism, that is, the performance of commandments (mitzvot).

Soloveitchik taught Yeshiva University’s advanced seminar in Talmud for forty years and ordained 2,000 rabbis. He was an electrifying orator (one outstanding example is a 1975 lecture on Rosh Hashana and repentance, in Yiddish with English translation on Youtube, especially at the 12-minute mark). I can bear witness to his persuasiveness; posthumously he turned my life inside out. His students took careful notes and recorded his lectures, and these generated numerous publications, including a five-volume commentary on the Pentateuch.

He is best known to Christian audiences through his essay The Lonely Man of Faith, from lectures delivered to an interfaith audience at St. John’s Catholic Seminary in Massachusetts. But his first book, and in some ways still his most important, is Halakhic Man, which Lawrence J. Kaplan—then a graduate student—translated from Hebrew in 1983 under the Rav’s guidance. It is a difficult text that presumes a strong background in Kant, Hegel, and other philosophers. I put it down numerous times in frustration before making sense of it. Fortunately for today’s readers, Kaplan has provided an extended introduction and annotations which guide the reader through the challenging material, and open the Rav’s thinking to a broader English-speaking public.

To Soloveitchik, Judaism seeks to constitute sacred time and space. God calls man to create the world alongside him, as his partner, and the sanctification of the world is man’s task. Halakha is not—or should not be—the arid practice of legalism, but a means of importing holiness into everyday life. “Any religious ideology that soars upon the wings of … the angels on high and abhors mortal man … will … constrict itself to a narrow corner, relinquish the public domain, [and] give rise to ecclesiastical tyranny, religious autocracies, and charismatic personalities,” he warned.

The most challenging aspect of R. Soloveitchik’s presentation, Kaplan explains, is “the ‘central antinomy’ of his essay: the antinomy in halakhic man’s consciousness between this worldliness and otherworldliness.” Halakha employs the same cognitive methods as the scientist. But “Halakhic man, for Soloveitchik, is not just a ‘secular cognitive type unconcerned with transcendence.’ Rather, halakhic man’s consciousness is not only directed to the concrete this-worldly realm but, like that of homo religiosus, is directed toward a transcendent one. Homo religiosus, for Soloveitchik, is ‘intrigued by the mystery of existence,’ longs for a ‘refined and pure existence,’ and ‘passes beyond the realm of scientific experience and enters into a higher realm.'”

The Rav added:

God’s Torah has implanted in halakhic man’s consciousness both the idea of everlasting life and the desire for eternity. … His soul … thirsts for the living God, and those streams of yearning flow to the sea of transcendence, to “God who conceals himself in his dazzling hiddenness.”

The emotional surge of what the Rav called homo religiosus, “religious man,” the desire for mystical union with God, always contends with the precise and measured performance of the commandments that sanctify the world.

“Can halakhic man overcome this antinomy?” Kaplan asks. “Soloveitchik answers yes he can, thanks to the divine act of tzimtzum, to the divine contraction or self-limitation, to the divine descent into the realm of finitude. For divine contraction is a process that makes possible God’s presence in the world via the ‘lowering of transcendence into the midst of our turbid, course, material world. Therefore, halakhic man does not have to leave our concrete empirical realm and ascend to a transcendental one to meet God. … Rather, he can fulfill his religious longings while maintaining his resolute this-worldly consciousness.”

Divine self-contraction, or tzimtzum, resolves the divide between “a this-worldly consciousness, focusing on concrete empirical reality, and an otherworldly one, striving to reach supernal transcendent realms,” Kaplan explains. “It is only because Soloveitchik makes the theological claim that God limited, contracted Himself, “descended from transcendental infinity into concrete finitude,” that he is able to maintain that halakhic man’s consciousness is not divided but unified and coherent and the world he experiences is monistic, inasmuch as transcendence is to be found within the realm of concrete empirical reality.”

Rutishauer and other Christian writers identify tzimtzum with divine kenosis, that is, Jesus’ “self-emptying” of his divinity, as in Philippians 2:5–9. Clearly there is a parallelism: Christianity as well as Judaism confronts the paradox of finite man’s encounter with the infinite God. Both religions propose to resolve this paradox, although in radically different ways. The late Michael Wyschogrod liked to say that Judaism and Christianity both are incarnational religions, in that God’s Indwelling (Shekhinah) to the Jewish people, while Christianity assigns to a single Jew. But there is a fundamental difference: God’s self-contraction in Jewish terms is not the emptying of divinity, but rather its focus and concentration on this earth. Tzimtzum is first encountered in God’s presence in the Holy of Holies within the Tabernacle, a sanctity so overwhelming that it kills whoever approaches it improperly (Leviticus 16:2).

The constitution of sacred time by the mitzvot, Soloveitchik argues, shows how halakha resolves the antinomy between the cognitive acts of the Halakhist and homo religiosus’ longing for the transcendent. The mitzvot are how we project past and future—the revelation at Sinai and the final redemption of the world by the Messiah—into the present. Tzimtzum brings the Infinite into the finite world. A special case of finitizing the Infinite, and the most characteristic of Jewish practice, is to bring eternal time into the present moment.

There is a parallel to Augustine’s famous discussion of time, and also a difference. The past is gone, the future is not here, and the present is an imperceptibly small moment. So what is time? Our perception of past and future arises from expectation and memory, he wrote in Confessions XI: “It is not then future time that is long, for as yet it is not: but a long future, is ‘a long expectation of the future,’ nor is it time past, which now is not, that is long; but a long past is ‘a long memory of the past.’” The answer of Augustine’s contemporaries, the Sages of Jewish antiquity, was that man becomes God’s partner in the continuing work of creation by creating sacred time. Whoever recites the blessing on the eve of Shabbat (Genesis 2:1–3) “is considered as if he were a partner with God in the work of creation.”

Why should the recitation of the Shabbat blessing elevate man to the status of co-creator? In the rabbinic interpretation, God desisted from the work of creation “that he had been doing” not because He had perfected the world, but rather to leave the completion of the work to humankind. In turn, on Shabbat, Jews desist from work—defined as improving the material world—in acknowledgment that God is the senior partner in creation and the earth is the Lord’s. “Work” is defined by the activities that built the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (the rabbis derived thirty-nine types): God’s presence on earth is established by man’s work. “God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it,” but as Soloveitchik observes, the elongation of Shabbat to twenty-five hours implies that man sanctifies Shabbat along with God.

Time is not experienced; rather, it is constituted by action directed by the ethical will. The reliving of the past and the anticipation of the future imbue Jewish life with an infinite density of time-experience. St. Augustine dismissed the moment as evanescent and insubstantial. By contrast, the moment constituted by the mitzvot is rich with memory and expectation. The mitzvot fuse the past and future in the Jewish present. To Augustine, time is a paradox and eternity is an abstraction; to Jews, time is a construct of infinite richness, and eternity is built into the moment that the mitzvot made.

On Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, Soloveitchik wrote in Halakhic Man, the Jewish people

celebrate the anniversary of the creation of the world. This metaphysical act is still embedded in the nation’s consciousness, as they pray on that very day for the renewal of the cosmos. The infinite past enters into the present moment. The fleeting, evanescent moment is transformed into eternity. But the covenantal community, daughter Zion, continues thus her supplications before the King sitting in judgment: ‘Our God and God of our fathers, reign over the whole universe in Thy glory, be exalted over all the earth in Thy grandeur.’ … Not only the infinite past but also the infinite future, that future in which there gleams the reflection of eternity, also the splendor of the eschatological vision, arise out of the present moment, fleeting as a dream. Temporal life is adorned with the crown of eternity.

The tension between halakhic man, who determines and performs the commandments with the rigor of a mathematician, and homo religiosus, who seeks a transcendent union with the Divine, never finds complete resolution. “However,” Soloveitchik writes, “these opposing forces which struggle together in the religious consciousness of halakhic man are not of a destructive or disjunctive nature. Halakhic man is not some illegitimate, unstable hybrid. On the contrary, out of the contradictions and antinomies, there emerges a radiant, holy personality whose soul has been purified in the furnace and struggle and opposition and redeemed in the fires of the torments of spiritual disharmony to a degree unmatched by the universal homo religiosus.”

The Rav adds:

There is much truth to the fundamental contention set forth both by the dialectical philosophies of Heraclitus and Hegel with regards to the ongoing course of existence in general and the view of Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Otto with regards to the religious consciousness and its embodiment in the experience of homo religiosus—in particular, namely, that there is a creative power embedded within antithesis; conflict enriches experience, the negation is constructive, and contradiction deepens and expands the ultimate destiny of both man and the world.

In this respect, Soloveitchik, throughout his life, remained at odds with the prevailing complacency in a Jewish diaspora that in its unprecedented prosperity and complacency looked for a comfortable resolution. Not everyone wants to be “redeemed in the fires of the torments of spiritual disharmony.” Lord Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, rejected Soloveitchik’s presentation of an irresolvable but creative tension.

These excerpts provide only a bare outline of Soloveitchik’s essay, which reflects deep consideration of Western philosophical sources. As noted, his vision of creative tension draws explicitly on Hegel, a relationship I elaborated on in an essay for the Jewish journal Hakirah. The Rav spent six years at the University of Berlin (1926–32) and earned a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen. Although I had some passing acquaintance with the Rav’s philosophical sources, I had to re-learn them afresh to absorb the full import of his argument. In the end, the Rav taught me Western philosophy.

Jewish readers need no further motivation to revisit a seminal work by the past century’s most influential mind of Modern Orthodox Judaism, especially with Kaplan’s helpful supporting materials. Fr. Rutishauer says about his own motivation for studying the Rav’s work: “Soloveitchik introduced a uniquely Jewish approach to reality in the modern world, which is of interest to me as a Christian even though I am not supposed to, and do not want to, follow the Halakah. Catholicism, too, does not wish to turn religion into a subjective individualized exercise of piety, but, as postulated by Soloveitchik, wants it to be seen as an objective ‘truth’ that man has to adhere to and make the main guideline of his life.” Put more simply, Soloveitchik was one of the great religious thinkers of the twentieth century, and to read him is to encounter a luminous and bold intelligence. Kaplan has done a service for all people of faith in making this important work more accessible to the general reader.