Letter 17: Reform
Rav Hirsch offers a nuanced, partially positive take on the impulse towards reform, and advocates for instead reforming Jews
Summary
Rav Hirsch comments that the focus of the last letter, emancipation, is relatively unimportant, as it relates to an externally imposed reality. The Jewish People have a job to do, whether or not the outside world allows for emancipation.
What is more important is the impulse to reforming Judaism that was being expressed in his time. How should we see that movement?
Surprisingly, Rav Hirsch does not simply denounce it as anti-halachic and therefore fundamentally pasul. Instead, he essentially echoes the line from the beginning of the Kuzari: “Your intentions are positive, but your actions are not.” Those pushing for changes to the prayer service, for example, or announcing that certain laws are no longer binding are responding to a widely-held feeling that certain parts of Judaism were no longer resonating with people.
Instead of ignoring those feelings and continuing to teach Judaism “as it has always been taught,” Rav Hirsch says that it is important to take note of the phenomenon. The “reform” impulse, he says, is a positive reaction to solving a real and important problem. He writes:
Do not be angry with anyone — respect all of them, for they sense a shortcoming; they desire the good as they conceive it; they have the best intentions for the welfare of their brethren.” If they have failed to recognize the good, to grasp the truth, it is not they who must chiefly bear the blame; the entire past must shoulder it with them. Therefore, respect their intention…
The response, though, is backwards: “But you may well grieve, indeed you may weep, when examining their actual endeavors.”
Rather than working on the Jews — rethinking educational strategies and encouraging more committed observance — the reformers of his time chose to advocate for reforming Judaism itself. And that, Rav Hirsch declares, is wrongheaded and counterproductive.
In a few places throughout his writing, including an essay in the Collected Writings for the month of Sivan and his commentary to the commandment to place a fence around Har Sinai, Rav Hirsch describes the unique nature of the Torah as an ideal system of law expressing Divine values and ideals brought down to the Jewish People. This is as opposed to the law codes and constitutions of all other nations, which emerged from the best and brightest of the nations themselves — for example, America’s Founding Fathers. As impressive as they may have been, they are by definition limited to their historical contexts, so it makes sense that updates and changes will be needed over time.
In the Torah’s case, though, as a Divine document, the response to failure or lack of fit is not updating the law code. Rather, it means renewed effort at reaching the heights of what the Jews were called to come. The best proof of this is the immediate aftermath of the Giving of the Torah — the Jews worshipping the Golden Calf, showing how far they currently were from even the most basic demands of the newly received Torah. For thousands of years, the Jews have been slowly rising towards the Torah’s demands, taking time to reach the top of Sinai once again.
The impulse to reform the Torah, rather than the Jews, represents lowering the Torah to meet the Jews were they are, rather than calling the Jews to continue on their journey up the mountain. That is the fatal flaw of modern reform.
The next letter, Letter 18 (content-wise, the last letter in this book; Letter 19 is more of a postscript) will lay out Rav Hirsch’s vision for what proper reform should look like — how to reform the Jews and guide them just a few more steps up Sinai, rather than reforming Judaism and corrupting the Torah in the process. It’s a long letter packed with important insights, so we’ll take it piece by piece.
Diving Deeper
Torah Im Derech Eretz
Remember that Rav Hirsch is just 28 years old when he publishes the 19 Letters, so it’s particularly fascinating to find ideas here that get further expression and elaboration as Rav Hirsch gets older and develops his thoughts in his Commentary to the Torah, Commentary to the Psalms, and Collected Writings.
In this letter, he writes the following (well, his original German is translated to say the following):
But “reform,” to us, spells this and this alone: the implementation of Judaism by Jews in our time, realization of the eternal ideal within the setting of our particular age and through use of the specific circumstances that it provides.
This sounds like a very early version of the motto that became a central part of Rav Hirsch’s legacy: Torah Im Derech Eretz, the belief that Torah has crucial insight and guidance that remains relevant to every conceivable era and social context. The Torah is the eternal ideal — Divine values and instruction for life — and our job is to bring those values to bear in whatever historical age we find ourselves living. Reform, then, simply means redoubled efforts at implementing TIDE.
Education
In the past, we’ve noted Rav Hirsch’s firm belief in the importance of education in this process, as well as the stories that indicate how he put this belief into practice. This letter has a number of references that bolster this claim:
“This means that we have to educate and elevate our generation toward the heights of the Torah, but not lower the Torah to the level of the times and reduce its lofty peaks to the shallowness of our life.”
“Look at the schools, the repositories of all our hopes for the future…” (followed by a full page criticizing the way schools are teaching Judaism)
The Inner Meaning of Jewish Law
One of Rav Hirsch’s chief criticisms of Judaism as it was being practiced in his time was that there was widespread ignorance regarding what he calls the “inner meaning” of the mitzvos. As he wrote about earlier (Letters 10–14), the mitzvos are meant to convey the ideas and ideals described by Letters 3–9, a comprehensive blueprint for life according to Divine values in an independent Jewish state, and adapted for life in exile. Instead, though, the mitzvos were taken as either essentially meaningless “ceremonial laws” (a term Rav Hirsch elsewhere admits that he hates) or claimed to be no longer binding due to lack of relevance. There are a couple of passages in this letter in which Rav Hirsch bemoans the lack of understanding that has caused the mitzvos to be totally misunderstood and calls for reform in exactly that area — a renewed understanding of the meaning of the mitzvos.
As we’ve said in the past, that was Rav Hirsch’s goal in writing Horeb, which actually came before the 19 Letters even though it was only published after — he needed something to give the teachers in his schools for them to teach from. The textbook he wrote opens each mitzvah with this “inner meaning” of Judaism (drawn from all the traditional sources he could track down for each mitzvah; his personal notes for the entry on bris milah even show numerous references to the Zohar, which he’ll say in Letter 18 he simply didn’t understand) and follows with selected halachos to encourage observance. I heard once that Horeb was the standard halachic text in Germany basically until the Holocaust — I would love to get confirmation on that, if anyone happens to know of a source.
For me, this was one of the first indications that I came across of the existence of something like “Halachic Worldviews,” which Rav Soloveitchik wrote about at the end of his book Halakhic Mind (and, to me, underlies Halakhic Man as well as serves as the solution to the tension between Adam I and Adam II in Lonely Man of Faith). My desire to spread this unique perspective on halachah shared by both thinkers led to publishing Halachic Worldviews.
Developing Love for Judaism
How do you develop a love for Judaism? Nowadays, I think most would tell you that the answer is through creating positive associations with Judaism — fun Jewish experiences, Shabbatonim and kumzitzes, and the like.
Rav Hirsch’s answer would likely be less popular — but I think its still true.
That is where we are deficient — in inner depth, in proper comprehension of the destiny and the teaching of of Judaism and, hence, in love for it. This comprehension, however, is the only counterbalance against temptations for within and without.
It’s impossible to love and appreciate something that you feel is imposed on you from without, without any understanding of what you are doing and why its important. Threatening people with Gehinnom for deviation might get you compliance, but it won’t get you love. Dance parties, Toameha with meat boards, and other “feel-good” associations with Judaism are nice, but they don’t build anything meaningful. A strong “why,” though, can bear almost any “how.”1
Attributed to Nietzsche.