The Future of Creativity in Halacha (1991)

Article on Am Hanivchar (2004)

The doctrine of am hanivchar – the election or chosenness of Israel – has been glorified and condemned, but mostly misunderstood, for the greater part of our history. Some have dismissed it with contempt and infamously compared it to the Nazi idea of the Herrenvolk, others have exaggerated its particularity as thoroughly genetic in nature; and yet others have diluted it to just about the point of making the notion both pointless and meaningless. Few other ikkarim, major principles of Judaism, have been subjected to such distortion. The comparison to the foul ideology of Aryan racial superiority is a vicious canard that has been with us since the Enlightenment, but ratcheted up since the appearance of mass antisemitism in the twentieth century. The non-ideological discomfort that some modern Jews feel is more of a social nature; “what will my non-Jewish neighbors think of us when they hear of this boast?” underlies a good deal of the embarrassment with the am hanivchar idea. And not far removed from this concern is its enfeeblement and eventual excision by many liberal-modernist Jewish groups. Equally fallacious, if somewhat less deplorable, is the interpretation of chosenness in some chareidi and other circles; namely, that Jews are religiously and spiritually superior to the rest of mankind and that this preeminence is genetically determined. Placing the concept on a biological basis is good for the collective ego but is poor scholarship and is untrue to our sacred texts. A critique of all these views will become explicit in the following paragraphs. The doctrine of election is accepted by all great Jewish thinkers but not necessarily to the same degree. Thus, for instance, Rambam and a number of other Sephardic scholars of the Middle Ages accepted it, but did not give it the prominence accorded it by other Jewish thinkers. Rambam does not include it in his Thirteen Principles of Faith, the Ani Ma’amins. Other prominent sages, from Yehudah Halevi to the Maharal t…

General Jewish Thought

חרות והכרחיות

הרקע של הדטרמיניזם בפילסופיה המערבית. תורת ההכרחיות ראשיתה בתחילה המחשבה המערבית. שלשה לבושים לה: יון העתיקה. דמוקריטוס: "כל הדברים מוכרחים – הדברים שהיו, שהווים, שיהיו." ימי הבינים. דטרמיניזם תיאולוגי, אשר בטויו הכי-חריף הנה צורת הגזירה האלקית. ההכריות התיאולוגית היא לא פחות חמורה מן ההכרחית הטבעית של היונים העתיקים או של העידן המודרני. המדע של גליליאו וניוטון. הובע ע"י לאפלאם: לו יצויר לרגע אחד שכל שיבין את כל הכחות המהווים והמחיים את הטבע, יכלול בנוסחה אחת את התנועות של כל הגופים שבעולם, מן הכי-גדולים עד לאטומים הכי-קטנים. לשכל שכזה ייגלה הכל, בלי ספק, והעתיד כמו העבר יהיה לנוכח עיניו.

General Jewish Thought