“The Ecstasy of Deeds”

In “Heschel, Intuition, and the Halakhah”, Rabbi Marvin Fox takes issue with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s reliance on intuition as a basis for faith in God. The common objection to any intuition-based theory, R. Fox argues, “is that we have no reliable way to distinguish between those experiences which are genuine perceptions of a higher reality and experiences which are delusions or hallucinations.”

Perhaps more important, though, is R. Fox’s second objection. The kind of awe-inspiring, life-changing experiences that R. Heschel has in mind are limited to prophets and, at best, the great religious personalities of each generation. “A conception of religion which is rooted in such experiences automatically restricts the realm of faith to a small group of the spiritually elite.” Rather, R. Fox maintains, it is the performance of mitzvot, above all else, that can open the doors of faith to all.

R. Heschel offers three ways of achieving religious intuition. R. Fox paraphrases him as follows: “Man can come to a knowledge of God by sensing His presence in the world, . . . sensing His presence in the Bible . . . [and] sensing his presence in sacred deeds.” The problem with the first two, R. Fox points out (I think, correctly), is that they are only available to the already-believing individual (again, the spiritually elite).

If one looks at the world with the eyes of the spirit closed, he is likely to see nothing at all of religious significance. It is true that a man who already conceives of the world as a divine creation can see evidence of divinity throughout the realms of nature and history. However, the mind that finds in nature nothing but matter and motion and that sees man as only one more animal in the natural order is not likely to achieve religious insight through this route. To see the sublime, and the more than sublime, in the world one must look with the eyes of faith. There is no evidence that men can achieve that faith by inspecting the world.

The proposal that man can find God in the Bible involves a similar difficulty. The reader who approaches the Bible in the conviction that it is a divine book will have his religious awareness deepened and intensified by study of the sacred text.
. . .
Men who stand outside the world of the Bible will only be perplexed or enraged. . . . Having examined the very same pages, they often discover nothing more than a collection of superstitions and errors[,] . . . the work of relatively undeveloped primitive minds.

To be fair, R. Fox’s critique is a bit too strong. In a number of places, R. Heschel notes the unreliability of intuition and recommends that we ground our faith in the tradition of prophets and rabbis. But that tradition, as great as it is, cannot be a starting point. It too requires a kind of faith that may be lost on the uninitiated. R. Fox finds an answer to this problem in R. Heschel’s own words, and suggests that he should have stressed this point above all else.

[E]ven men who stand outside the world of faith may be able to discover God through the performance of sacred deeds. Presumably this is a way which is open to men who intellectual orientation closed their eyes to the presence of God in nature, in history, in the Bible. For no matter what they think or believe, they can act as if they believe: מתוך שלא לשמה בא לשמה. As Professor Heschel himself puts it, “A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a a leap of thought. He is asked to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does. . . . Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the hereness of God. Right living is a way to right thinking.”

As R. Fox points out, the idea of faith through Halakhah originates with Hazal.

The greatest Jewish sages . . . understood that Halakhah is more than a dry legal code and that halakhic study is more than intricate mental gymnastics. By way of Halakhah Judaism grasped in a clear and communicable form the profoundest religious insights . . . Jewish tradition has always taught that Halakhah is the only reliable way of finding God in life. In Halakhah Judaism bridges the gap between the man of rare spiritual genius and the rest of the people. The great religious insights, which are ordinarily restricted to men of prophetic sensitivity, are made available and real through Halakhah to every Jew in all the ordinary circumstances of his every-day life.
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[T]he talmudic discourse concerning “the ox which gored the cow” is not merely [a] discussion of certain technical problems in the law of damages. It is the Jewish way of concretizing the presence of God in the most mundane aspects of daily life. . . . This is the view of the world of Halakhah as an ideal world in which we meet God face to face. What seems impractical and irrelevant is shown in that world to be especially meaningful. What seems ugly and indelicate is transformed in that world to the highest level of beauty and refinement. In his life and in his study, the halakhic Jew renews continually the essence of his own being. Though he may have no great moments of mystical insight he is, nevertheless, always very close to God, for it is the objectification of divine reality in Halakhah that stands at the center of halakhic life. It is only in Halakhah that moments of genuine awareness are given a stable, intelligible, and communicable form.