The Community of the Many: The Anti-Majoritarian Democratic Society of Rav Soloveitchik’s “Confrontation”

Art by Rabbi Zac Kamenetz

Rav Soloveitchik’s yartzheit was last week, and a handful of people asked me if I was going to post something for it. I told them honestly that I didn’t have anything in mind to post, that there was nothing in his writings that felt particularly apt or urgent at the moment. So, of course, the last few days I have had a line from “Confrontation” stuck in my head.

The essay is known as his take on interfaith dialogue—and it is that—but it is much more than that as well. Here, I just want to talk about one phrase: “The community of the many.”

“The community of the many” appears throughout the second half of the essay, contrasted with “the community of the few.” Rav Soloveitchik is referring to Christianity and Judaism, respectively, but he’s also saying a lot more than that. He is intentionally speaking broadly, laying out principles for his vision of society even beyond the immediate interfaith questions to which he was responding.

In this context, he makes the following remark, the line that I’ve been thinking about:

I hope and pray that our friends in the community of the many will sustain their liberal convictions and humanitarian ideals by articulating their position on the right of the community of the few to live, create, and worship God in its own way, in freedom and with dignity. (“Confrontation,” Tradition 6, No. 2 [1964], 25)

Rav Soloveitchik’s vision of society is of a broadly liberal public sphere populated by religious or values-based communities. He is deeply worried about totalitarian governments or societies which would force all cultures in their territory into uniformity. Part of “Confrontation” is a call for all of the communities which populate the public sphere to be allowed to live their own independent communal lives with their own values and practices, even if they all think the other communities should and will eventually disappear. As long as they don’t try to make that happen in practice, hoping for it is just fine, and even legitimate.

This is the context for his remarks about “the community of the many.” “The community of the many” threatens to upset the liberal public sphere he has in mind. It creates a majority community with both political and cultural dominance. He doesn’t suggest undoing this community, somehow making it no longer the majority—that much he seems to accept, even if he doesn’t think it ideal. Instead, he insists that the majority community must restrain itself. It could override the unique culture of a minority group, and it is exactly because it could that it must work hard to ensure that it doesn’t. The “community of the few” has a “right” to “live, create, and worship God in its own way, in freedom and with dignity,” and the community of the many has a responsibility to respect it.

His vision of the liberal public sphere is therefore anti-majoritarian. He doesn’t deny that societies will have majority groups and minority groups, he just denies that this dynamic should give majority groups any more power or cultural privileges than any other group. In contrast with this, Soloveitchik wants to see a society which is “consonant with religious democracy and liberalism” (23). The consent of the majority is an important part of liberal, democratic social orders, but it is not sufficient. Majoritarian democracies can become illiberal, denying fully citizenship or citizen privileges (like voting) to anyone from outside the core group. The German word for when the Nazi regime tried to unify all of German culture under its banner and in its image is Gleichschaltung, and Rav Soloveitchik invokes it on multiple occasions, including in discussions about interfaith dialogue (Community, Covenant and Commitment, 114).

This is the message of the line I’ve cited above, which is spoken to his Jewish audience but which gestures with some degree of hope toward liberal-minded Christians. This liberalism would not necessarily be manifest in their Christianity, however, but in their politics of the public sphere. This is a public sphere which makes as much room as possible for different cultural communities to pursue their own ways of life.

Importantly, he isn’t addressing the state or any political organizations, but to individual Christians and Christian communities: “I hope and pray that our friends in the community of the many will sustain their liberal convictions and humanitarian ideals…” “Confrontation” focuses not on questions of policy and law but of society and hopes that Christians will treat Jews and Jewish communities well, giving them (us) space to believe in and live according to Judaism in peace.

The Question of Israel

The idea that “Confrontation” repeatedly refers to the American/Western Christian “Community of the Many” as part of its context suggests that perhaps, in Israel where “the community of the many” is Jewish, perhaps Rav Soloveitchik’s prescription would be different. At least one interpreter, Deborah Weissman, has gestured in this direction.

Personally, I am more interested in what it means for Jews in Israel, as the community of the many, to read Rav Soloveitchik’s call for the majority to make space for the minority and to allow the minority a thriving cultural and religious life. I hear here not just Soloveitchik’s discomfort with—perhaps even rage against—Christian proselytizing, but also his concerns about cultural domination and state violence. I hear his concerns about what will happen when the Jews suddenly have power after centuries without it:

“There may be a society of individuals, each of them kind, good, hospitable and sensitive in his private life, willing to extend a helping hand and so forth, who as a state, as a group, as a community, are collectively wicked, cruel and insensitive. The individual in isolation doesn’t commit any crimes, but the society, the state, the empire, is endlessly guilty… Until recently the Jewish people acted like individuals. They had no collective instruments with which to implement decisions; they had no statehood. As individuals, Jews were kind and compassionate, incapable of murder or bloodshed. The crime rate was low in Jewish communities; hospitality was on the highest level. I pray that as a state we act the same way, that we not defile our name in the framework of the state, the group, the collective. I wish that the pages of our history as a state would be as clean as the annals of the Jewish people for the past nineteen hundred years, when we were a stateless nation.” (Blessings and Thanksgiving, 109–110)

(A similar quote, from a recorded shiur, went viral a few years ago, and a transcription of it can be found here: https://realiajudaica.blogspot.com/2020/04/rabbi-joseph-b-soloveitchik-on-jewish.html)

Rav Soloveitchik’s “hope and prayer,” his gesture toward liberal Christians, therefore echoes loudly toward us: Will we stand up for the rights of non-Jews to practice their own religions and cultures?