No Exceptions! On Halakhic Man’s Political Theology

(On re-reading it in 2023)

Cognitive Man is a figure of the closed system, while Homo Religiosus is a figure of the exception [see the terminological note below]. This dichotomy is the basic structuring principle of the book, but it is also immediately restrained: Homo Religiosus desires only a limited exception, it is the exception of the law. The system is given of the world, and Homo Religiosus even finds it desirable, but there is a transcendent mystery which conditions it. Freedom initiates the law, and for Homo Religiosus it should be meditated on, even sought out. This is in contrast to the wild and unrestrained free subjectivity of the romantic subject who destroys the world (fn. 4, 64). Hence also the book’s discomfort with and opposition to both death and transcendence, which are ruptures in the closed system.

Halakhic Man, meanwhile, maintains the reality of the exception, but in an even more restrained form: creation and revelation (and the distinction between them is blurred). The exceptional decision, the miraculous moment of divine/judicial intervention did indeed occur, but in the past. The world exists, the law has been revealed, and now it is given for us to work with and apply. The book juxtaposes discussions of creation and revelation—of the relationship ship between God and the world and the relationship between God and the law—with astute political-theological intuitions.

In terms of dogmatic theology, cognitive man is a believer in the eternal cosmos, halakhic man is a deist, and homo religiosus is a traditional creationist who maintains the possibility of miracles. Subjective, violent man is an occasionalist. The affirmation of the will beyond the law is clearly related to existentialism and subjectivism, as per note 64. However, they are corruptive of this basic idea. For halakhic man, the pure will must remain walled-off in the moment before creation. Halakhic man sees the pure law as created and then essentially eternal. He’s not a legal positivist, though the law was at one moment posited. No one is qualified to create law, just God (in the past).

Similarly, the discussion of repentance-providence-prophecy as individuation defy any divine intervention in the world from outside the system, even though that’s exactly the conventional understanding of providence and prophecy. These last few chapters are about his trying to find the exception within the system, fusing the singular and the universal. This establishes halakhic man as both the exceptional figure capable of managing, developing, and imposing the law, without being separate from it.

Halakhic Man as the one who imposes the law and ensures that there are no exceptions to it emerges most clearly in I:XV, the last chapter of the first part of the book. It’s the book’s most explicitly sociopolitical chapter. It contains a refusal of political thinking and a critique of the Protestant private-public divide as taken up by Liberal Judaism.

However, the refusal of political thinking is not a refusal of political intervention! It is an assertion of halakhic categories and law even in the political arena. It’s an ideology of the halakhic state, or perhaps of a millet-style system. Either way, the key claim is that, if halakhic man was in charge of the state, it would not be an exception from halakhah. Halakhah would determine the state just as it determines everything else.

This necessarily runs into the problem of exile, which is a deep contradiction in the book. Is exile an exceptional state, which ought to be ended, perhaps as soon as possible? Or is it simply the nature of reality and Jewish life for halakhic man? The book vacillates on the topic, never affirming exile, but also downplaying the end of exile in numerous ways: It affirms theoretical learning over practical application of halakhah (even public, political halakah like appointing a king), but then also says that realizing halakhah in reality is halakhic man’s dream; it makes almost no mention of the land, and certainly none of Jewish political power; it always centers the individual who keeps halakhah rather than halakhah as a communal or collective way of life; etc. (For more on this, I highly recommend Dr. Yoel Finkelman’s “Religion and Public Life in the Thought of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Jewish Political Studies Review 13, No. 3 [2001].)

Terminological note:

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology opens with the famous line, “Sovereign is the one who decides upon the exception.” Sovereignty, he argued, meant the capacity to decide when the law must be suspended. Consequent upon this is a host of other issues, such as the creation of the state and the law more broadly. The sovereign, he said, is parallel to God—deciding the exception parallels doing a miracle and creating the state/law parallels creation.

One of his main targets in this polemical work was Hans Kelsen Neo-Kantian legal philosopher, who saw law as a closed system. Unsurprisingly, there is much resonance between Kelsen’s theories and the Neo-Kantian figure of Cognitive Man in Rav Soloveitchik’s monograph.

Some other research notes:

Both halakhic man and religious man are norm-oriented in contrast to cognitive man who is theory-oriented. The same split comes along with interest in transcendence. In all other areas, HM is more like CM than HR.

1:15 (final section of 1:12 in the Hebrew)

In addition to being the sociopolitical chapter, it is also the chapter always cited RE halakhic man caring about ethics and the widow, etc, but paying attention to the language makes it clear that ethics is meant to be “actualized” via halakhah, not via ethical action. Hence the example of ensuring that political lists of Jews conforms to halakhic standards and categories. If you trust or assume that halakhah does realize ethics, great; otherwise, less so.

2:1 Halakhic man is the katechon, the lone force holding back chaos (maintaining creation/the law).

2:3 The discussion of time, history, and freedom fits well with the Cold War emphasis on breaking free from historical, deterministic ways of thinking about society and the state. Feels a lot like Hannah Arendt’s political action, her understanding of the miracle as an uncaused action.

“Historical crimes, past aberrations, can, at times, descend upon dry bones like the life-giving dew of resurrection, to which world history so amply testifies.” (117) – what on earth is he talking about here??