Introduction
The topic of interfaith dialogue has been one of the most contentious issues in Orthodox Jewish theology and public policy since the 1960s, when the National Council of Young Israel denounced Abraham Joshua Heschel's colloquy with Pope Paul VI.Footnote 1 The Orthodox-identifying Young Israel movement argued that Heschel's dialogue with the pope was something that “flagrantly violate[d] the decisions reached by unanimity of all organizations” and that it was “degrading” to Jews to have to witness the specter of its “spiritual leaders [who] lower themselves to beg” before the faith leader of another tradition.Footnote 2
In the same year, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik delivered a seminal address (later published in the influential Modern Orthodox journal Tradition as “Confrontation”) at the Rabbinical Council of America's mid-winter conference in which he argued that Jews may engage in interfaith dialogue—something many Catholics and Jews were being encouraged to do following Vatican IIFootnote 3—as long as the dialogue remained upon the plane of public policy and did not delve into the realm of theology. When engaging in such dialogue, Soloveitchik warned that “it is futile to try to find common denominators” between Judaism and Christianity, because each faith community expresses its faith in a unique way (in a “singular normative gesture”); because Judaism and Christianity have unbridgeable, incommensurate differences when it comes to their “standardization of practices, equalization of dogmatic certitudes”; and because each community is “unyielding in its eschatological expectations.” Each of these faith communities, writes Soloveitchik, “is as unique and enigmatic as the individual himself.”Footnote 4 Judaism and Christianity, Soloveitchik mandated, may only “face each other in the full knowledge of their distinctness and individuality."Footnote 5 Soloveitchik went on to stipulate that, though the two faiths share historical and cultural affinities, when it comes to the realm of faith, “the whole idea of a tradition of faiths and the continuum of revealed doctrines which are by their very nature incommensurate and related to different frames of reference is utterly absurd.”Footnote 6
Soloveitchik's stature as the leading exponent of Modern Orthodoxy of his day guaranteed that the stance he took in “Confrontation”—that “confrontation” (interfaith dialogue) “should occur not at a theological, but at a mundane level”Footnote 7— became the normative position in Modern Orthodoxy. In 1967, the rabbi of the Young Israel synagogue of Brookline, Massachusetts, declined to participate in a panel on Jewish-Catholic relations on the grounds that “the major Orthodox groups are following the policy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.”Footnote 8 Following suit, the Rabbinical Council of America, the foremost professional rabbinical association for Modern Orthodox rabbis in the United States, resolved that
any suggestion that the historical and meta-historical worth of a faith community be viewed against the backdrop of another faith, and the mere hint that a revision of basic historic attitudes is anticipated, are incongruous with the fundamentals of religious liberty and freedom of conscience and can only breed discord and suspicion. Such an approach is unacceptable to any self-respecting faith community….Footnote 9
Three years after his address, Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote an addendum to itFootnote 10 in which he recapitulated his position that “in the areas of universal concern, we welcome an exchange of ideas and impressions,” but “in the areas of faith, religious law, doctrine, and ritual,” Jews should be wary of an exchange of ideas and impressions: “Discussion will in no way enhance or hallow these emotions.”Footnote 11 What was implicit in his original address—which contained more philosophy than proscriptive policy—was made explicit in his addendum: “We are, therefore, opposed to any public debate, dialogue or symposium concerning the doctrinal, dogmatic or ritual aspects of our faith vis-à-vis ‘similar aspects of another faith community.’”Footnote 12 Theology, according to Orthodox policy, would be off-limits; dialogue concerning “the public world of humanitarian and cultural endeavors,” however, would be permissible, “desirable and even essential…. We are ready to discuss universal religious problems. We will resist any attempt to debate our private individual commitment.”Footnote 13
From Confrontation to Cooperation
Soloveitchik's stance, however, was not without its dissenters. Three years after Soloveitchik's address, his student Rabbi Dr. Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg published several of his lectures on Jewish-Christian relations. According to Greenberg, interfaith dialogue—even dialogue which delved into theology—was not only permissible but highly beneficial. Greenberg believed that interfaith dialogue that explored theology contained within it the potential—by increasing understanding and appreciation between the two faiths—to ameliorate hatred, increase cooperation, and lessen the possibility of future religious violence. If Christians, after the Holocaust, were doing teshuvah (repentance) by seeking to repair their relationships with Jews—and by seeking to better understand and appreciate Judaism—then shouldn't Judaism acknowledge this monumental step in religious history and meet Christianity at least halfway? Greenberg reaffirmed his commitment to interfaith dialogue in a 2015 statement, “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven: Toward a Partnership between Jews and Christians,” signed with nearly thirty other Orthodox rabbis.Footnote 14 According to some of the other more prominent Modern Orthodox rabbinic signatories, such as Shlomo Riskin and Eugene Korn, Soloveitchik's (as well as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein's) ban on interfaith dialogue is no longer applicable. “Jews have real enemies today,” said Korn, “but Christians are no longer among them.” Korn, moreover, stressed that interfaith dialogue did not violate Orthodox Jewish law.Footnote 15 Greenberg believed that “Confrontation” did not make its antitheological interfaith dialogue argument from the place of halakhah,Footnote 16 and Randi Rashkover has also noted that Soloveitchik's address did not refer to Jewish law, “for as David Novak says, ‘there are no specific halakhic impediments to serious talk with non-Jews.’”Footnote 17 According to Greenberg, Soloveitchik—in a private conversation— conceded to Greenberg's points and did not object to Greenberg's wish to engage in theological dialogue with Christians. “Personally,” writes Greenberg:
I had an overwhelming urge to say to him: But if you only had said openly what was really on your mind, then Jews could prepare properly for the dialogue. Now the Orthodox will interpret your view as stating that dialogue is not permitted, and the Jewish community will be even less capable of maintaining a high-quality conversation. However, I did not have the heart or courage to challenge him any more than I had.Footnote 18
Rabbi Greenberg, in a written message to me, elaborated upon his disagreement with Soloveitchik on the matter of Jewish-Christian dialogue and interfaith relations:
[Rabbi Soloveitchik and I] never discussed the relationship of Judaism and Christianity when I learned with him. I was struck by his connection with neo-Orthodox Protestant thinkers, as testified by his footnotes in Halakhic Man but we never talked about the issue; nor did he lecture/teach on this. By the time he came out with Confrontation, I was too deep into the dialogue to go back. Although I maintain that he was not that opposed to theological conversation with Christianity as the RCA and David Berger have interpreted him. This is described in For the Sake of Heaven and Earth. So I can’t say that he had much impact on me in this area. Although Soloveitchik did not have much influence—pro or con—on my attitude toward Christianity, the Rav's emphasis that Judaism was a world religion (implying a feeling of peer and facing common issues with Christianity) did influence me a lot.Footnote 19
The place of interfaith dialogue in Orthodox Judaism, and the matter of Orthodox stances to interfaith theology more generally, have been the subject of extensive discussion.Footnote 20 What this article offers, by contrast, is a reading of Soloveitchik's and Greenberg's stances on interfaith dialogue that situates them in a Jewish philosophical context and which can perhaps explain why they took the divergent stances they did. Certain scholars have argued that Soloveitchik's refusal to engage in Jewish-Christian theological dialogue must be understood historically;Footnote 21 others have argued that his “no” to such dialogue must be understood halakhically;Footnote 22 and still others have argued that Confrontation should be understood politicallyFootnote 23 and even psychologically.Footnote 24 This article builds upon the view that Soloveitchik's stance on interfaith dialogue must be understood philosophically,Footnote 25 and posits that in order for Soloveitchik's stance on interfaith dialogue to be fully understood, it should be studied bearing in mind the influence of Hermann Cohen upon Soloveitchik's religious philosophy. This article, which unveils new, yet-to-be-published materials demonstrating the direct influence of Franz Rosenzweig upon aspects of Greenberg's thought, further argues that Greenberg's epistemological pluralism and approach to interfaith dialogue bear striking similarities to the thought and theology of Rosenzweig,Footnote 26 and thus, in order for Greenberg's stance on interfaith dialogue—as well as his interfaith theology—to be completely grasped, his positions upon these theological matters must be studied with the awareness of Franz Rosenzweig's influence upon Greenberg's thought. The reading offered in this article of Cohen and Soloveitchik and of Rosenzweig and Greenberg does not purport to minimize the irreconcilable differences between these thinkers; nonetheless, it believes that the substantial resemblances—and, in the case of Rosenzweig and Greenberg, the direct influence—between the views of Christianity held by these pairs of figures are significant and suggest a reconsideration of the role of philosophy in the story of American Jewish theology.
Soloveitchik wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cohen's Logic of Pure Cognition (Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen, 1932, still untranslatedFootnote 27), studying Cohen as a neo-Kantian (Cohen was the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, the beginnings of which date to 1871, when Cohen published his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung [Kant 's Theory of Experience]) and offering a deep analysis of Cohen's epistemology, accompanied by a strong critique. Soloveitchik found tremendous support in Cohen's Logic of Pure Cognition for his own philosophy, and also found within its epistemic idealism a way of articulating the cognitive quality of halakhic life.Footnote 28 Soloveitchik's thought, however, is not Cohenian in all or even many respects. Tragedy has little place within Cohen's Judaism, which is a religion of hope. (Alan Mittleman has called Cohen the “predominant [Jewish] philosopher of hope.”Footnote 29) For Soloveitchik, however, Judaism—while being far removed from the ethos of fatalistic Greek tragedy—still contains important elements of tragedy; in “Confrontation,” he speaks of “the human tragic destiny” that unfolds when man becomes aware of “his inner incongruity and complete alienation from his environment.”Footnote 30 Soloveitchik was also much more at home with romanticFootnote 31 and existential modes of thought than was Cohen.Footnote 32 Existentialism pervades “Confrontation”; a statement such as “each human being believes both in an existential community, surrounded by friends, and in a state of existential loneliness and tension”Footnote 33 would be anathema to Cohen. Still, the overriding thrust of Soloveitchik's thought is Cohenian in its neo-Kantian idealism, in its desire to be less historical and more Platonic, in its sentiment that we can never truly be at home in the world,Footnote 34 and in its reverence for rationality.Footnote 35
Soloveitchik's Cohenianism is evident early on in “Confrontation,” when he speaks of the “new I-awareness,” the “self-discovery” of man, which comes about as a result of his discovery of a “non-I,” of God.Footnote 36 This is a recapitulation of Cohen's conception of the uniqueness of the human, which emerged, Cohen believes—and works in tandem with—human beings’ discovery of the one unique God. Soloveitchik, like Cohen, similarly valorizes the intellectual, rational aptitude of the human as the preeminent human faculty, believing that “the most miraculous of all human gestures [is] the cognitive.”Footnote 37
Most relevant for our purposes is Soloveitchik's Cohenianism in regard to his attitude toward Christianity. Though Cohen admired Protestantism, he only expresses his esteem for the faith insofar as he saw the Reformation as a step closer toward Judaism, becoming more Jewish than Catholicism ever was or ever could be. Cohen viewed Catholicism as pantheistic, and he believed that its sacramentalism was a species of superstitious, magical thinking inimical to the über-rationalist religion that is Judaism; in his view, Protestantism was a kind of Judaized Christianity.Footnote 38 (This is the sentiment Cohen aims to convey by writing that “Maimonides exemplifies the spirit of Protestantism in medieval Judaism”Footnote 39—that Maimonides's philosophy is akin to Protestantism—and vice versa—in its focus on ethicsFootnote 40 and in its spurning of sacramentalism and magical thinking. Cohen also favored Protestantism over Catholicism in part due to the latter's adherence to ritual and the former's abandonment of it.) Cohen otherwise did not think very highly of Christianity, and in parts of “Confrontation,” Soloveitchik revealed that neither did he. In the beginning of the essay, Soloveitchik gestures cordially toward Christianity, acknowledging its influence in shaping Western civilization.Footnote 41 But Soloveitchik later recapitulates the invidious rabbinic comparison of Christianity to the biblical personage Esau, writing that the Jewish representatives who take it upon themselves to meet with church officials “should be given instructions similar to those enunciated by our patriarch Jacob when he sent his agents to his brother Esau.”Footnote 42 Choosing still to understand Christianity as “the world of Esau,”Footnote 43 instead of as an offshoot—and part of—Jacob/Israel (as Greenberg does), evidences a spiteful, tit-for-tat interfaith theology: if you believe in supercessionism, we’ll believe that you’re as morally corrupt as the spiritually spurned Esau. Although Soloveitchik occasionally cites Christian theologians in his essays, an anti-Christian sentiment is unmistakable and pervasive in his writings, to such an extent that Lawrence Kaplan, the translator of the standard English edition of Soloveitchik's Halakhic Man, made sure in the very first page of his translator's preface to call attention to “the clearly anti-Christian thrust” of Soloveitchik's signature workFootnote 44—remarkably resonant of the clearly anti-Christian thrust of Hermann Cohen's religious philosophy.
A perusal of Halakhic Man bears out Kaplan's judgment.Footnote 45 How Soloveitchik's occasionally favorable-seeming citations of Christian theologians can be squared with his unfavorable view of Christianity has been a matter that has been noted and discussed in Soloveitchik scholarship.Footnote 46 Cohen too, in spite of his negative view of Christianity, also made use of Christian motifs in his works, as Michah Brumlik has observed.Footnote 47 Perhaps it can be suggested that Cohen and Soloveitchik, in spite of their unfavorable views of Christianity, resorted to Christian motifs and referred to Christian theologians in their writings simply because Christian motifs were so pervasive in European culture and Western collective consciousness and were thus ways through which Cohen realized he could make his brand of neo-Kantian Judaism understood—it was a way, as Brumlik puts it, for Cohen to show his fellow Germans “that the modern Kantian Israelites share the fundamental assumptions of modern Christianity.”Footnote 48 (Why it would be a positive for Cohen to demonstrate that modern Jews share the same assumptions as Christianity—a religion he mostly despised—is another, highly perplexing, matter; Brumlik acknowledges that the cost of Cohen defending Judaism through such a Christian lens was “the surrender of the theoretical autonomy of Judaism” and the ceding to Christianity of the prerogative of “determining the validity of prophetic ethics.”Footnote 49) In the case of Soloveitchik, the roster of Jewish thinkers who were writing seriously, systematically, and sophisticatedly about theology was considerably thin, and thus, in order to situate his own serious, sophisticated (if nonsystematic) theological writings within the context of serious theology of his time, all he had to work with were Christian theologians; serious, sophisticated Jewish theology, as it would develop after the Second World War, had yet to emerge fully when Soloveitchik was writing Halakhic Man and Lonely Man of Faith. Additionally, the Jewish thinkers who were beginning to delve seriously into theology during the early and middle part of the twentieth century—Mordecai Kaplan, Eugene Borowitz, Emil Fackenheim, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Richard Rubenstein—were all non-Orthodox theologians and thus “unsafe” for an Orthodox rabbi of the stature of Soloveitchik to cite. Why Orthodox thinkers to this day are more comfortable referring to Christian and other non-Jewish theologians than they are referring to non-Orthodox Jewish theologians is a complex topic touching upon matters of intradenominational politics and a tremendous reticence upon the part of Orthodox theologians to admit to shared affinities with non-Orthodox thinkers.Footnote 50 This topic, however, is one that requires greater analysis and is beyond the scope of this paper to address adequately.
Cohen believed that Judaism (at least prophetic Judaism) was at some level the manifestation of this neo-Kantian, universal religious ethic, which, if all persons were properly attuned to it, could be discovered and then practiced by all people.Footnote 51
Protestant Christianity was admirable in his eyes only insofar as it was a step closer to prophetic Judaism; Cohen, though, otherwise did not hold Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) in very high regard. The doctrine of the trinity was especially problematic for Cohen, who called it a “permissible pantheism,”Footnote 52 insofar as it contravened the core Cohenian principles of oneness (Einheit) and distinctiveness (Einzigkeit). Cohen strongly believed that it is the Jewish “Idea of God”—the pure, unadulterated conception of the one unique Jewish God—that “distinguishes Christian from Jewish monotheism.”Footnote 53 Andrea Poma has emphasized the importance of the uniqueness of God in Cohen's philosophy, stating that for Cohen this principle was one of Judaism's “two defining features” (the other being messianism) and its “special contribution to German culture.”Footnote 54 As Cohen himself writes, “In Judaism, God and man maintain their respective distinctiveness…. In contradistinction, both Christianity and pantheism teach that God does not remain God, and man does not remain man.”Footnote 55 For Cohen, pantheism is “the antithesis of Judaism and the philosophical error par excellence.Footnote 56
In light of the neo-Kantian, Cohenian spirit that animates much of Soloveitchik's religious philosophy,Footnote 57 and in light of the conspicuous resemblances between their respective attitudes toward Christianity, Soloveitchik's stance on interfaith dialogue, I would like to suggest, should be seen from within the context of the Cohenian currents that flowed around and within him, some of which—concerning Cohen's views of Christianity—may have seeped into his own thinking upon Christianity. This is not to suggest that Soloveitchik holds a theological stance for Cohenian reasons; Soloveitchik's views of Christianity likely stem from his orthodoxy, from his traditionalist, exclusionary, and unitary view of chosenness,Footnote 58 and from his agonistic mode of philosophizing (for Soloveitchik, there is always some kind of dialectical struggle that is occurring, or that should be occurring, in our minds). This is, though, to suggest, that the strong resemblance between Cohen's and Soloveitchik's views of Christianity, in combination with Cohen's impact upon Soloveitchik's general philosophy, the specific parallels between Cohen and Soloveitchik on theodical matters (Soloveitchik, Moshe Sokol has observed, appears to take a page out of Cohen's Religion of Reason in his insistence that the proper response to evil lies not in metaphysical speculation but in ethical actionFootnote 59), and Cohen's direct influence upon Soloveitchik in certain Jewish philosophical matters (Soloveitchik's views of immortality were “no doubt informed in part by those of Hermann Cohen,” as Daniel Rynhold and Michael Harris have notedFootnote 60), prompt us to view Soloveitchik's stance on interfaith dialogue through the prism of Soloveitchik's Cohenianism. Studying Soloveitchik's stance on interfaith dialogue through a Cohenian lens can thus help us understand why Soloveitchik maintained that any interfaith dialogue that veers into theology should be shunned: such dialogue carries with it the risk of the other faith—and, in the case of Christianity, a religion whose theological concepts flout the Judaic (and universally true) principle of oneness espoused so forcefully by Cohen—being “made to look equal” to Judaism. Soloveitchik, thus, objected vociferously to the possibility of Gleichschaltung Footnote 61(rendering equivalent) between Judaism and Christianity that interfaith dialogue (as well as interfaith services), in his mind, threatened to effectuateFootnote 62—a concern that Cohen, in his confirmed loathing of Christianity,Footnote 63 would have wholeheartedly shared. (This is not to suggest that Soloveitchik was appropriating Cohen; he might very well have been doing so. Though it may be tempting to attempt to make this case, there is insufficient evidence to argue convincingly for a direct influence and/or appropriation of Cohen in Soloveitchik's position on interfaith dialogue. There are, however, sufficiently striking parallels between Soloveitchik and Cohen to argue that Cohen's views on Christianity must be taken into account when considering Soloveitchik's position on interfaith dialogue.)
Much as Rosenzweig admired his mentor Cohen greatly—Rosenzweig celebrated the publication of Cohen's Religion der Vernunft, acclaiming it as a groundbreaking work in post-Hegelian Jewish thoughtFootnote 64 and penned the introduction to Cohen's Jüdische Schriften (1923)—but later parted ways with him on matters of interfaith theology and Jewish-Christian relations,Footnote 65 Greenberg broke with his beloved teacher Soloveitchik on matters concerning interfaith theology and Jewish-Christian relations as well. For Greenberg—as it is for RosenzweigFootnote 66—interfaith dialogue that ventures into the realm of theology is permissible. Greenberg maintains a Rosenzweigian approach toward Judaism and Christianity. According to Franz Rosenzweig—less a neo-Kantian than an existentialist, post Hegel mortuum antiphilosophical philosopher—there is no one true universal form of religion; both Judaism and Christianity are equally valid faiths. Rosenzweig may have been revolutionary for his being a Jewish thinker who held Christianity in such high regard—in fact, it is very likely that Rosenzweig was the first Jewish thinker of note to have, as Emil Fackenheim put it, given “recognition to the Christian covenant from a Jewish point of view”Footnote 67—but he did not greatly esteem other religions. Indeed, Rosenzweig held Christianity and Judaism to be at the top of a religious hierarchy, with other religions on a progressively downward-sliding scale. Greenberg, though—much more of a committed, genuine pluralist than Rosenzweig—maintains that all religions, not only Judaism and Christianity, can be legitimately valid paths to God.Footnote 68 And not only are they equally valid, but they are intimately involved with one another and must work together; Rosenzweig held that Christianity and Judaism need each other in order to bring redemption to the world. These two faiths must act as partners, Rosenzweig believed, because they each operate in two separate spheres: Judaism is an inward-looking religion that operates outside of history, in cyclical time—”aussherhalb einer kriegerischen Zeitlichkeit”Footnote 69—whereas Christianity is an outward-looking religion that operates within history, in linear time, within the messiness of geopolitics, statecraft, and world events. Rosenzweig, in asserting that Judaism and Christianity have different historical roles and different destinies, thus became the first Jewish thinker of note, as Emmanuel Levinas put it, to render “homage” to Judaism's fellow Abrahamic religion.Footnote 70
While it was Cohen's student Franz Rosenzweig who became the first modern Jewish thinker to articulate a conception of Jewish-Christian partnership, it should be noted that Cohen, in spite of his qualms about Christianity, was not entirely inimical to every possibility of partnership between the two faiths. In his 1869 essay Der Sabbat in seiner kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung (Shabbat in Its Cultural-Historical Meaning), Cohen proposed that the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths both be observed on Sunday, which he believed would “facilitate greater Jewish integration in German society and … spread the ethical and social meaning of the Sabbath more effectively throughout the wider culture.”Footnote 71 Though later in life Cohen had second thoughts concerning this radical proposal, that he proposed it suggests a nonnegligible current of proto-partnership sentiments in his attitude toward Jewish-Christian relations. Indeed, Poma adduces an essay written by Cohen in 1917—five years subsequent to his statement concerning his volte-face on the Sabbath suggestion—in which Cohen indicates that he “did not deny the original intentions behind this proposal.”Footnote 72
In the last part of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig articulated his vision of the Jewish and Christian division of labor: Judaism needs Christianity, according to Rosenzweig, in order to implement and actualize the ethics of the Bible in the real world. Christianity needs Judaism in order to be able to look to a model of a pure, uncorrupted biblical religion, untainted by the hurly-burly of world events and standing outside of history—a faith, in Levinas's terms, that is a “non-coincidence with its time”Footnote 73—in order to be reminded of the kind of faith that needs to be actualized within the chaos and corruption of geopolitics and within the flow of history.Footnote 74
According to Rosenzweig's “Star of Redemption” philosophical system, Christianity is the “rays” emanating out of “the eternal flame” of Judaism; the flame must be kept burning—it must be preserved and protected from the harmful winds of history that threaten to extinguish it—but it is up to the rays to ensure that the light from the flame reaches and transforms the rest of the world. The rays of Christianity that reach into history are therefore “good for the Jews,” writes Rosenzweig, because they allow the warmth of the eternal flame to be felt by all and allow the light of Judaism's star to illuminate the world.Footnote 75
Rosenzweig also articulated his vision of this Christian-Jewish partnership, and the terms it ideally should take, in a letter to Rudolph Ehrenberg:
The synagogue, which is immortal but stands with broken staff and bound eyes, must renounce all work in this world, and muster all her strength to preserve her life and keep herself untainted by life. And so she leaves the work in the world to the church and recognizes the church as the salvation for all heathens in all time.Footnote 76
An additional reason that a Jewish-Christian partnership is necessary, according to Rosenzweig, is because of—and due to—the two faiths’ shared biblical heritage. Christianity needs the Hebrew Bible, writes Rosenzweig, not only for theological reasons but for the purposes of statecraft, for its world-building and world-redeeming mission. It is specifically the Old Testament—a more “solid ground for building the world, and for building in the world,” rather than “the New Testament, which sees the world only in crisis”Footnote 77—that enables Christianity to carry on its work of bringing redemption and salvation to the world. At the same time, Judaism “needs” the New Testament, not in the sense that it needs it to be part of its own scripture, but it needs Christianity to have the New Testament as part of its own scripture so that Christianity, a religion of history, will be able to institute the biblical ethics of Judaism and Christianity within the chaotic, crisis-ridden world. Any attempt to transform Judaism into something this-worldly (Verdiesseitigung) contravenes the metahistorical, meta-terrestrial essence of Judaism and co-opts a secular, mundane role that should better be left for Christianity, the religion of history.Footnote 78
Even a cursory sampling of Greenberg's writing on Christianity, Judaism, and interfaith theology reveals that Greenberg's approach to interfaith theology and Jewish-Christian relations is remarkably continuous with that of Franz Rosenzweig. Similar to Rosenzweig, Greenberg believes that Judaism and Christianity are preeminently “religions of redemption”Footnote 79 tasked with improving the world for each generation so that it becomes progressively more suited for human flourishing, a place in which the infinite value of every single human life can be properly appreciated.
In response to my question to him of whether Rosenzweig influenced his stance on interfaith theology, Rabbi Greenberg wrote: “I had read Glatzer's account about [Rosenzweig], his teshuvah which came close to joining Christianity, etc. I was impressed and felt that Rosenzweig, Buber etc. were models for what I wanted to do, e.g., understand/interpret Jewish religion in a richer way, using the more sophisticated and penetrating Western approaches to bring out the richness in Judaism. I did not read heavier Rosenzweig material (like Star of Redemption) until later.”Footnote 80 Greenberg, though, took pains to note that his positive attitude toward Christianity—while rooted philosophically in Rosenzweig's thought—was shaped just as much, if not more so, by his own experience, through his interactions with Christians and his learning of their increasing awareness to abandon supercessionist theology in the wake of the Holocaust: “I came to [interfaith theology and Jewish-Christian dialogue] in response to the Holocaust, starting in 1961. I started and came to critique and get them to stop the hostility and supercessionism but got to know their chozrei b’teshuvah [penitents] vis-a-vis Judaism. They moved me and their religious life and vitality got me to rethink my attitude toward Christianity.”Footnote 81
It should be noted, though, that just as Soloveitchik is not Cohenian in many important respects, neither is Greenberg Rosenzweigian in all respects. The most salient difference between Rosenzweig and Greenberg, at least so far as Jewish-Christian interfaith theology is concerned, is that while Rosenzweig believes that Judaism is a religion that stands outside of history, Greenberg (writing as an explicitly post-Holocaust thinker), while acknowledging his debt to Rosenzweig in the area of Jewish-Christian dialogue, strongly maintains that Judaism—just as much as Christianity—is a religion of history, that strongly stands within history: “Both religions come to this affirmation about human fate out of central events in history…. The central events of both religions occur and affect humans in history…. Yet both religions ultimately have stood by the claim that redemption will be realized in actual human history.”Footnote 82 If anything, Greenberg sees Judaism as the more historically enmeshed religion:
It seemed all too obvious that Judaism was not outside the maelstrom of history. To my mind, Judaism was always charged with the task of journeying through history, showing the way for humanity toward tikun olam … the Jewish calling after the Shoah was to enter into history with both feet and strive to move the entire world toward redemption.Footnote 83
The Jewish religion, he writes, is “temporally and spatially rooted,” and is thus in need of the “universal, landless church” as a “corrective.”Footnote 84
Despite his disagreement with Rosenzweig concerning whether or not Judaism is a religion of history, Greenberg is in direct agreement with Rosenzweig on the matter of the need for these two “religions of redemption” to partner with each other in order to bring redemption to the world. Greenberg, like Rosenzweig, believes that both faiths have “respective roles” to play “in the strategy of redemption.”Footnote 85 There is a “divine strategy for redeeming the world” and a “divine will that Judaism and Christianity are together in the world,” acting as God's “human agents” to bring the world closer to redemption.Footnote 86 In this scheme of partnership, Christianity's role would be modeling for the world a “religious system that explores faith and ideology as central categories,” while Judaism specializes in “the dialectic of birth and choice, action and attitude,” and “places tremendous emphasis on human action and responsibility in the world.”Footnote 87 Islam and Buddhism, importantly, also have roles to play in this grand religious partnership.Footnote 88 (Greenberg does not mention Hinduism and several other world religions, but one presumes that he would also grant that these faiths also have important roles to play in the divine scheme to bring redemption to the world through human actors. One wonders as well whether he would grant, as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook did, that nonreligionists and even atheists have roles to play in this global redemptive work.)
The “ultimate testimony” of both Judaism and Christianity is “to affirm life and its ultimate redemption,” writes Greenberg.Footnote 89 And to this end, Judaism would be well served to become more appreciative of Christianity (just as Christianity has made greater strides toward a greater appreciation of, and reconciliation with, Judaism):
Let us ask ourselves whether it is possible for Judaism to have a more affirmative model of Christianity, one that appreciates Christian spiritual life in all its manifest power. If for no other reason, let this be done because if we take the other's spiritual life less seriously, we run the great risk of taking the biological life less seriously, too.Footnote 90
Toward this end, Greenberg states that Judaism should affirm that Jesus was not a “false” messiah, but a “failed” messiah:
The Rabbis confused a “failed” messiah (which is what Jesus was) and a false messiah. A false messiah is one who has the wrong values, i.e., one who would teach that death will triumph…. A failed messiah is one who has the right values and upholds the covenant, but does not attain the final goal….
Calling Jesus a failed messiah is in itself a term of irony. In the Jewish tradition, failure is a most ambiguous term. Abraham was a “failure.” … Moses was a “failure.” … Jeremiah was a “failure.” All these “failures” are at the heart of divine and Jewish achievements.Footnote 91
Greenberg, an advocate of “principled pluralism,”Footnote 92 is clearly no neo-KantianFootnote 93 and, like Rosenzweig—and unlike Soloveitchik (and apparently unlike Cohen as well)—staunchly affirms that Christianity and Judaism (as well as other faiths) are equally legitimate paths toward the divine: “Jews must develop the ability to recognize the full implications of the truth that the Lord has many messengers.”Footnote 94 For Rosenzweig, God needs Christianity to do God's work in the world; for Greenberg, God needs both Christianity and Judaism—the religions of redemption, the religions of life—to bring divine redemption to the world.
For Rosenzweig, Judaism and Christianity must be, and are, partners. Greenberg, following Rosenzweig's lead, felt comfortable to engage in dialogue with Christians—Judaism's partners—much as Rosenzweig felt privileged to engage in his own variety of interfaith dialogue in the letters he exchanged with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.Footnote 95 And Greenberg, with Rosenzweig as his theological guiding star, articulates a bold theology: “two covenants, one people”Footnote 96—a “dual covenant theology,” as Jon Levenson has termed it.Footnote 97 Though Greenberg's dual covenant theology plays off of Rosenzweig's, Greenberg's dual covenant theology is more egalitarian, allowing for the possibility that both Jews and Christians are equally chosen—that both faith communities can be called the people of Israel. Rosenzweig's dual covenant theology, however, is colored by a reverse-supercessionist view. While esteeming Christianity for “Judaizing the pagans,” Christianity for Rosenzweig is clearly the “daughter religion.”Footnote 98 And while believing that Christianity too offers a path to the divine, Rosenzweig nonetheless maintains that the Jewish covenant brings its adherents closer to God than the Christian covenant.Footnote 99
Greenberg, in developing a theology that demanded “a new conceptualization of the nature of absolute truth that would allow for the existence of two or more valid yet contradicting faiths,”Footnote 100 claimed that both Christians and Jews are “the people of God,”Footnote 101 and that anyone who affirms God's covenant with Abraham and his descendants—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—are “the people of Israel.”Footnote 102 Greenberg analogized this theological move to the turn from the “Newtonian universe, in which there is only one absolute center point, to an Einsteinian universe, in which many absolute center points exist.”Footnote 103 It was, perhaps, a Copernican revolution in Orthodox theology, a revolution whose implications are still being felt to this very day.
Greenberg, as aforementioned, follows Rosenzweig's lead in being the second consequential traditionally oriented thinker of the post-Enlightenment era (Rosenzweig was the first) to accord metaphysical significance to Christianity. However, as scholars such as Hilary Putnam have underscored—and as nearly any contemporary reader of Rosenzweig likely notices—one of Rosenzweig's most significant failures was that for all his tolerance, even esteem, of Christianity, unlike Greenberg, Rosenzweig did not extend this same esteem to other non-Jewish faiths. As Putnam observes, “The most unfortunate aspects of The Star of Redemption are, in fact, its polemical remarks about religions other than [Judaism and Christianity]—its scorn for Islam, for Hinduism, and so on.”Footnote 104 It is possible to apply Mary C. Boys's aforementioned observation about the differences between Soloveitchik's and Greenberg's views of Christians to Rosenzweig and attribute Rosenzweig's theological myopia to the product of Rosenzweig's only having lived among Jews and Christians but not among Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or members of other faiths. In any event, extending Rosenzweig's charitable view of Christians toward members of non-Christian faith communities, as well as toward secularists and atheists (in the vein of R. Abraham Isaac Kook)—all of whom, after all, according to Jewish and Christian scripture, are equally created in the image of God—is, needless to say, an ethical and theological desideratum.
Conclusion
The argument of this article has not been that Soloveitchik's views on interfaith dialogue were directly influenced by Cohen's views of Christianity; rather, this article has argued that the fact of Cohen's overall influence upon Soloveitchik's thought, in concert with the striking conceptual resemblance between these thinkers’ views of Christianity, must lead us to consider Soloveitchik's stance on interfaith dialogue through a Cohenian lens. This article has further argued that, due to the significant conceptual parallels between the views of Rosenzweig and Greenberg regarding Christianity, interfaith dialogue, and interfaith theology—as well as the evidence of the direct influence of Rosenzweig upon Greenberg—Greenberg's positions on interfaith dialogue and interfaith theology must be considered through a Rosenzweigian lens. Doing so—being fully cognizant of the significant conceptual resemblance between Cohen and Soloveitchik, of the significant conceptual parallels between Rosenzweig and Greenberg, and of Rosenzweig's direct influence upon Greenberg—not only will lead to a more complete understanding of the schism regarding interfaith dialogue within Orthodox Jewish theology, but also leads to a shift in our taxonomies of thinkers in the modern Jewish thought canon. The typical reading of modern Jewish thinkers situates them halakhically and theologically (that is, based upon where they stand on matters of Jewish legal observance—whether they are Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, or Reconstructionist—and where they stand on the doctrine of Sinaitic revelation). Thus, Reform and Reconstructionist theologians such as Eugene Borowitz, Mordecai Kaplan, and Emil Fackenheim are commonly grouped together, while Conservative theologians such as Richard Rubenstein and Neil Gillman and Orthodox theologians such as Joseph Soloveitchik, Michael Wyschogrod, David Hartman, and Irving Greenberg are typically studied together by dint of their denominational affiliations.Footnote 105 The reading of Soloveitchik and Greenberg offered in this article regarding their positions on interfaith dialogue, as well as the revelations disclosed here concerning the direct influence of Rosenzweig upon Greenberg, recommend that we reorient our taxonomy of modern Jewish thinkers away from only grouping them together halakhically and theologically and toward a taxonomy in which they would be also grouped together philosophically: toward a taxonomy of theologians wherein not only their positions on Jewish law and belief are significant but also wherein their positions on Kant and Hegel, Cohen and Rosenzweig are of consequence. (To paraphrase Ze’ev Levy,Footnote 106 although it would be misleading to speak of Kantian, Hegelian, or Schellengian schools of Jewish theology, since one can trace the influence of these philosophers, and others, on the work of their Jewish acolytes, studying modern Jewish theologians such as Soloveitchik and Greenberg through not only halakhic and denominational prisms but through a philosophical prism as well promises to bear enlightening intellectual fruits.) Under such a philosophically oriented taxonomy—a taxonomy in which denominational affiliation is of less consequence than philosophical affiliation—Soloveitchik and Greenberg would no longer necessarily be grouped together but would instead be grouped with, and studied with, the thinker (Cohen for Soloveitchik; Rosenzweig for Greenberg) with whom they most closely align philosophically. The full implications of such a reorientation in our taxonomy of modern Jewish theologians cannot at this moment be foreseen.
Despite the clear and pervasive presence of Cohenian themes in Soloveitchik's thought, there would be obstacles to be overcome in—and clear limitations to—a Cohen-Soloveitchik and Greenberg-Rosenzweig link. Greenberg, as noted, sharply departs from Rosenzweig on the question of whether Judaism is an historical or a metahistorical religion, with Greenberg resolutely taking the latter position. Additionally, a Cohen-Soloveitchik link would challenge the reading of Cohen as an assimilationist thinker who, as some have argued, “sacrifices the Jewish tradition on the altar of Kant.”Footnote 107 Cohen, who felt compelled to endorse interfaith marriages, wrote that “we Jews must acknowledge that the ideal of national assimilation must from generation to generation be more consciously striven for.”Footnote 108 Though passages such as these make it possible to construe Cohen as an assimilationist thinker (viz., one who believes that the optimal path for Judaism to take would be one wherein Judaism completely integrates itself within German Protestant culture, even at the cost of the possible disappearance of Judaism and the Jewish people), my belief—grounded in David Novak's reading of Cohen, as well as within Cohen's own writings on the subject—is that this is an errant reading of Cohen, and that he should be more aptly construed as an acculturationalist, and not an assimilationist, thinker (viz., a thinker who maintains that Jews should integrate themselves into their surrounding culture but should do so while never compromising their Jewish identity); Cohen, who argued strenuously for the uniqueness and universal significance of Judaism in his writings, never advocated for the melting of Judentum within the seething pot of Deutschtum. Though he did argue for the acceptance and full participation of Jews and Judaism within Christian culture, this acceptance and participation should be construed properly as acculturation, and never as assimilation. Cohen, as Novak has pointed out, always maintained that “Jewish singularity will never be aufgehoben into something more universal, not even ideally.”Footnote 109
This article does not attempt to argue, fully and conclusively, for a Cohen-Soloveitchik/Greenberg-Rosenzweig linkage upon each and every theological and philosophical matter; such an association would be not only untenuous but impossible to substantiate. The similarities between Cohen and Soloveitchik and between Rosenzweig and Greenberg should not be overstated; certain crucial theological (as well as Jewish legal jurisprudential) differences between Cohen and Soloveitchik (e.g., Cohen's construal of the essence of Judaism as its ethical monotheism versus Soloveitchik's pan-halakhism) and between Rosenzweig and Greenberg (e.g., their conflicting views on the doctrine of chosenness—Greenberg disagrees vigorously with Rosenzweig's conception of Jewish uniqueness as inhering in a biological Blutgemeinschaft) are conspicuous and irreconcilable. Nonetheless the conceptual (as well as certain biographical) parallels between these two pairs of teacher-student thinkers are striking; for example, much as Rosenzweig's bold new theological thinking constituted a marked departure from the post-Enlightenment religious thinking of his time, as well as a departure from the religious thinking of his master Cohen,Footnote 110 Greenberg's similarly bold (and occasionally controversial) Voluntary Covenant and Moment Faiths theologies were momentous departures from his teacher Soloveitchik's traditionalist Orthodox theology.Footnote 111 And, similar to Rosenzweig's choice to devote his life to interdenominational adult Jewish education—as seen most prominently in his founding of the Lehrhaus in Frankfurt—Greenberg, after stints in the rabbinate and academia, chose to devote his life to interdenominational Jewish adult education as seen most prominently in his founding of Clal—the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Other conceptual and biographical similarities between these pairs of thinkers—most significantly in the realm of interfaith theology and Jewish-Christian relations, as this article has discussed—abound. Accordingly, this article does aver that the conceptual parallels between the Cohen-Soloveitchik/ Rosenzweig-Greenberg double dyad—in consonance with the revelation of Rosenzweig's direct influence upon Greenberg—are significant enough to warrant a new reading of the Soloveitchik-Greenberg interfaith dialogue disagreement and a reorientation of the typical taxonomy of modern Jewish thinkers, a reorientation which this conclusion hazards to sketch.
What this Cohenian and Rosenzweigian reading of Soloveitchik's and Greenberg's positions on interfaith dialogue—and the animating principle of this article—does strongly suggest is that when we tell the story of Orthodox theology in the United States in the twentieth century, we have to make sure that we not only tell a halakhic and theological storyFootnote 112 but a philosophical story as well.
