1. Review פ”א: Thwng of character – extremes – man – חסד נחכם. Both = דרך ה’ 2. Character Therapy: פ”ג ה”א – medical analogy. Need for “physician of the soul.” Function of teacher פ”ג ה”ב – therapeutic determism. 3. The Exceptions – פ”ג ה”ג a) Birnbaum omits: 1) גאוה, after Moses is ענו מאוז: ולפיכך צוו חכמים מאוד מאוד הוה שפל רוח ועוד אמרו שכל המגביה לבו כפר בעיקר

The following Citation comes from an article by Judge Learned Hand, published by the Massachusetts Bar Association in 1942.... This much I think I do know — that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish. What is the spirit of moderation? It is a temper which does not press a partisan advantage to its bitter end, which can understand and respect the other side, which feels a unity between all citizens -­real and not the factitious product of propaganda — which recognizes their common fate and their common aspirations -­in a word, which has faith in the sacredness of the individual. If you asked me how such a temper and such a faith are bred and fostered, I cannot answer. They are the last flowers of civilization, delicate and easily overrun by the weeds of our sinful human nature; we may even now be witnessing their uprooting and disappearance until in the progress of the ages their seeds can once more find some friendly soil. But I am satisfied that they must have the vigor within themselves to withstand the winds and weather of an indifferent and ruthless world; and that it is idle to seek shelter for them in a courtroom. Men must take that temper and that faith with them into the field, into the market place, into the factory, into the council-rooms, into their homes; they cannot be imposed; they must be lived.

Moderation is not identical with the mathematical mean. Adhering to the Golden Mean does not require the services of an ideological accountant. One who practices moderation by always locating himself equidistantly from both existing extremes is not being middle of the road – he is being muddle of the road. Moderation – or the middle of the road – implies a respect for all rational and reasonable opinions, a consideration of conflicting factors in every situation, an acceptance that theoretical consistency must yield to what William James called the stubborn and irreducible facts, and the humility to acknowledge that most of one's opinions and ideas are provisional and open to further exploration. Moreover, as the Rav pointed out many years ago in a famous lecture to the Rabbinical Council of America in Detroit, the “middle way” of Maimonides is a dynamic and not a static state – by which he meant that while the sum total of one’s decisions, dispositions, and ideas may be fairly equidistant from the extremes, each individual choice or idea must be judged on its own merits rather than on a mathematical model.Ask ChatGPT

There is another reason to be dissatisfied with the appellation, "Centrist Orthodoxy." That is, it fails to convey a sufficiently adequate notion of our ideological identity, because it assumes that all others veer to the extremes. Whereas, for instance, Lubavitche considers itself Centrist — it is regularly attacked by Satmar; the Agudah considers itself Centrist — it is the perennial prey of the Neturei Karta wing; and so on. I would much prefer our self-identification as, "Torah Umada," in the same way that the Hirschian Movement referred to itself as, "Torah and Derekh Eretz." Nevertheless, because "Torah Umada" has been used principally to define our attitude towards secular culture, and because we wish to identify with Orthodoxy no matter what the particular adjective, it is best that we remain with the name "Centrist Orthodoxy," despite all its shortcomings. (Note: Consider again whether, indeed, we should accept the name "Torah Umada" and use "Centrist Orthodoxy" as a sub-title or ancillary name.)Emphasize the critical confrontation with our environing culture. Hirsch was an admirer of German culture, and one can hardly fault him for failing to foresee the end product of that culture. After the Holocaust, no sane Jew -- or, indeed, non-Jew — can accept Western culture uncritically. Yet this is a far cry from the strong segregationism of so much of the Right-wing. With them, the dialogue with Western culture has been cut off almost completely; with assimilationists, it is not a dialogue but an embrace. What we affirm is a dialogue — open but critical, willing to learn, but unwilling to accept on faith.The Middle Way. Point out that in moving from "the middle way" in disposition to the middle way in doctrine, I must reaffirm the Rav's view that this is not merely an arithmetic proposition. While such an arithmetic mean can obtain with regard to disposition, with regard to doctrine and tenet . the sum total must be …

For Centrist Orthodoxy Book April 12, 1988 Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, page 265, Note 4, Fifth Edition, 1966) makes reference to the "paradox of tolerance," which admonishes us that tolerance of the intolerant leads to intolerance.

Set this in a broader philosophical perspective: The conflict between the demand of free will on the one hand and the demands of socialization on the other. Insofar as the individual is concerned, without free will there is no Torah, and the halakha regards coercive behavior as a denial of freedom. On the other hand, there can be no community without accepted norms of conduct, and the community must socialize individuals into accepting its basic principles both of theory and practice.If we go too far in the direction of freedom, we have destroyed society. If we tip the balance to society and community, we have robbed the individual of his freedom.Hence, what is necessary is an ongoing dialectic between both extremes, such that the basic integrity of a human being is preserved, allowing him to express his freedom, and provision is made for the orderly continuity of the society.Refer to the Gemora (Shabbat 88) that the Torah was not normative as long as it was forced upon us, and did not become authoritative until it was reaccepted in the days of Mordechai and Esther.

One of the most brilliant and underestimated rabbinic figures of the pre-World War II East European generation, Rabbi Joseph Engel, once said the following, in commenting on the well – known Midrash that וירא אלקים את כל אשר עשה והנה טוב מאוד – "טוב מאוד" זה המות – that this is a general principle of Torah: כי ענין המיתה הוא במאודיות – extremes, all "veryism," is deadly! (See his Otzrot Yosef, derush 8, p. 45.)He mentions two exceptions, both related to the term מאוד: humility and gratitude. The first is based on the dictum in Avot that מאוד מאוד הוי שפל רוח, and accords with one of the two exceptions cited by Maimonides (the other being גאוה). The second, gratitude, is based on the dictum: בכל מאודך, בכל מדה ומדה שהוא מודד לך הוי מודה לו.

The following material is abstracted (with my own comments in parentheses) from Marvin Fox's Interpreting Maimonides; Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), primarily chapter 5, entitled "The Doctrine of the Mean in Aristotle and Maimonides: A Comparative Study," pp.93-123.This is meant for further work on the law of the mean or "Modera- tionism" and, especially, in conjunction with my Hebrew article in the Belkin Memorial Volume on "The Sage and the Saint in Maimonides."Fox begins by showing that there are two exegetical schools concerning Maimonides' vision of the law of the mean: those who consider nothing but a rehash of the view of Aristotle, and those who deny that it bears any but the most remote and insignificant resemblance to Aristotle. Fox concludes the chapter by saying both are wrong. In his general theoretical formulation, Maimo- nides does indeed accept the structure of Aristotle, but in establishing the rationale for it and applying it to the particu- larities of the human situation, he is completely the Jew and departs from the Greek philosopher.Although the doctrine of the mean is one of the most popular of Aristotle's teachings, it widely misunderstood. Standard criti- cisms: the doctrine of the mean is nothing but Aristotle's adap- tation of an old Greek folk rule ("nothing to excess"); it is not at all a philosophical principle but rather a restatement of the common sense of the ages; it is merely an affirmation of the proprieties of social convention; it leaves the solution of every problem to "positive morality and positive law." Kant contemptu- ously dismissed it as tautological.Another objection cited by Fox (p. 97) is that it is lacking in an objective standard, and this is evident from the fact that the mean is not determined arithmetically and thus is not the same for all, but must be applied only with full cognizance of the pa…

What Maimonides said about the "middle way," is as relative today as it ever was, both in its original form and in its various other manifestations. The easiest thing is to go off to one of the extremes. The end of the spectrum, or towards the end of the spectrum, is where "nature" itself causes us to drift. Rarely does such drifting take us to a clearly defined middle of the road; that requires logical and thought-through steering. While it is true that some people will choose the path of moderation because they are afraid to make a choice — as between either of the two extremes — it is more often true that going to the extremes is a case of simple intellectual and existential weariness. It is simply too tiring and too demanding to fashion a way that preserves the basic integrity of ideals and yet is capable of being implemented in the rough and tumble of reality. The extremes offer tidiness at the expense of realism. They pick out one ideal, with all its meretricious appeal, and have little concern for how subsidiary ideals will be accommodated, or even how this ideal will be made to conform with reality or even marginally change that reality to conform to the ideal.

Many years ago, Rabbi Hyman Tuchman ע״ה commented to me that he wondered about a slight difference between the Christian and the Jewish expressions of aversion to Satan – which may or may not reflect deeper attitudes. Thus, Jesus says to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan” (Matthew 16:23), implying that Satan is a menace only when he is in front of a person. Whereas the prayer in Judaism is, as expressed in the hashkiveinu prayer of the daily ma’ariv service, v’haser Satan milfaneinu u-me’achareinu – “remove Satan from before us and behind us” – implying that Satan is a danger whether in front or in back of us. (The hashkiveinu blessing is already mentioned in the Talmud [Berakhot 4b] as an ordinance of the Sages which resonates with the theme of the previous geulah blessing – the two together thus comprise what the Talmud terms geulah arikhta, a “long redemption” blessing. Eliezer Levi [Yesodot ha-Tefillah, Tel Aviv 1952, p. 186] therefore argues that the hashkiveinu blessing is a later addition, appended to the geulah. Some much earlier authorities argue that the content of the blessing is ancient in provenance and articulates well with the redemption theme – thus implying a co-equal status for both blessings even chronologically [see Sefer ha-Eshkol, Hilkhot Tefillah u-Keri’at Shema, p. 17]. The particular expression v’haser Satan milfaneinu u-me’achareinu occasioned comment by a number of rabbinic writers, such as Abudrahm, R. Yaakov Zvi Mecklenburg in his commentary Iyun Tefillah, and R. Samson Raphael Hirsch – but none of them offers the explanation which follows.) Now, some forty or more years later, it occurs to me that the position of “Satan” relative to the human victim of his evil designs sheds light upon his function. In front of a person, the tempter misleads and misdirects him – into a life of sin and degradation. When Satan is behind one, he does not direct or misdirect him; he merely pushes him harder in the direction he is already going. Why is thi…