Exchange with Moshe Decter in Response to R. Lamm's Shiur (1992)
Dear Rabbi Lamm: This is my first opportunity to write you about your splendid lecture, on Jewish creativity, at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue. The elapsed time has, however, provided me some additional space to reflect on your thoughts, rather than to react immediately. Let me say, at the outset, how great was the pleasure for me to be present at what was, in essence, really an old-fashioned Jewish exercise – to witness the play of a subtle mind over ideas, and to observe the application of wide-ranging erudition to their development. Such a refreshing and satisfying experience is all too rare today, outside the four walls of a yeshiva, and unfortunately even within the bounds of synagogues, where rabbis prefer (or are only qualified) to give current events lectures rather than a שעור of one sort or another. The subject is important enough – indeed, crucial – and the depth of your analysis serious enough to warrant my raising several basic questions about your approach and your conclusions.First, your general philosophical assertion that creativity requires freedom, and its obverse — that creativity cannot flourish under authoritarian rule.This is an attractive proposition ; it has a certain esthetic intellectual appeal, especially to those of the democratic political persuasion. But history demonstrates it's a fallacy.Take, for example, the case of Russia in the past two centuries, under both Tsarist autocracy and Bolshevik totalitarianism. One can make a very strong case that the greatest artistic — or, literary — creativity arose during that period.Pushkin, at the beginning of that era; the plaiedes of Russian 19th century literature -- Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev. In the Soviet period alone, the three greatest poets of the Russian language (after Pushkin) --Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky (all Jews, ironically enough, deracinated Jews, essentially) flourished under Stalinist murderousness and Brezhnevist brutishness. One could go on and…
