I have discussed a number of times the Seridei Aish's assertion that the Musar Movement was a frum haskala. The clearest exposition of this idea, however, is found in the following analysis excerpted from the writings of Rabbi Dr. Hillel Goldberg. There is much more and it is worth while reading his conjectures on the matter. As he acknowledges there is very little documentary evidence or oral traditions describing what Rav Salanter was doing in Europe and what his actual plans were to revitalize European Jewry.
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Rabbi Hillel Goldberg (Between Berlin and Slobodka - Rav Yisroel Salanter chapter III):
It is critical to distinguish between Rabbi Israel’s opposition to Haskala (“Enlightenment”) as it was constituted in Jewish circles in Vilna and Kovno and his attitude toward it in principle. The modernization of East European Jewery went through a pronounced assimilatory phase in the 1840s and 1850s, according to which Jewish lanagues and customs were not to be complemented but replaced by Russian language, religion or culture. Lithuanian Haskalah seemed particularly dangerous to Rabbi Israel since its emphasis on secular study, not in tandem with but in opposition to Talmud study, could be especially compelling in a cultural environment readily inclined to use of the mind. The Musar Movement, with its emphasis on knowing and transforming the psyche, was an attempt to ground the Lithuanian inclination to intellection solidly in the will, such that the respective allure of secular and religious study would be unevenly matched. On the one side would be the cultural and economic advantages of secular study. On the other side would be the integrated religious personality. His commitment to talmudic study and custom would encompass but also reach below his intellect into what Rabbi Israel conceived to be the more powerful, determinative unconscious, or will, able to resist an allure that, whatever its intrinsic merits, entailed the abandonment of Jewish study, custom, and community.
Rabbi Israel’s estimate of the intrinsic merits of Haskalah was clouded by his fierce opposition to it in Vilna and Kovno, yet a positive estimate contributed to his early successes there. In a traditional society breaking down, the endeavor to preserve it has a better chance of success if some of the corrosive forces acting on it can be accepted as consonant, on a profound level, with the tradition that, on the manifest level, they attack. It was the differentiated vision of this kind that Rabbi Israel’s seemingly blind opposition to Haskalah was masked, for Rabbi Israel sought to raise to the consciousness of traditional Lithuanian Jewry certain tendencies of Haskalah that bathed in light forgotten segments of tradition, while staunchly attacking Haskalah generally on account of its assimilatory impulse. Haskalah’s humanistic stress on individual development and its pungent critique of ethical laxity in the community – these were precisely the segments of tradition that Rabbi Israel’s own Musar studies had irradiated and that he worked to propagate. And yet, Haskalah, notwithstanding its merits, could not be countenanced.
It was the explosion of this unstable tension that took Rabbi Israel’s fourth oscillation – between working with masses and working with an elite – to extremity: leaving Eastern Europe altogether. The positive evaluation of Haskalah, even if only partial, could not forever be hidden if it was precisely the Musar teachings of Rabbi Israel that dovetailed with the positive aspects of Haskalah. And yet, Haskalah could not be praised – and yet, it was increasingly victorious in the struggle for Lithuanina Jewry, so its positive elements could not wisely be hidden.A vicious circel – especially since any praise of Haskalah would destroy Rabbi Israel’s credibility in the Orthodox rabbincal community. Impasse.
A way out was to turn to a culture in which individual elements of Haskalah could be praised against a background on which the essential failure of Haskalah could be presumed. Rabbi Israel explained his unexpected decision to remain in Western Europe (to which he had traveled temporarily in 1857 for medical treatment) with a parable.
When horses panic on a mountaintop and begin to gallop downhill, they cannot be restrained. Whoever tries to halt them will endanger his life; the horses will surely trample him. Once the horses have reached level ground, however, it is possible to bridle them, to bring them under control. So it is with rejuvenation of Judaism. In Russia, the large Jewish communities gallop on a downward spiritual slope; it is impossible to bring them to order. But the German communities have been on level ground for some time; it is possible to halt them, to restore them.
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