Letter 20 - On Tolerance, Part 1

 

RAV KOOK’S LETTERS

By Rav Tamir Granot

 

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Mazal tov to Rav Tamir and Avivit Granot on the birth of a daughter, Chana Simcha.
She-tizku le-gadla le-Torah, le-chuppa, u-le-ma'asim tovim!

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Lecture #2: On Tolerance - Letter 20

 

I. Background

 

The Addressee

 

            This letter is a response to questions raised by R. Moshe Seidel in a letter to Rav Kook. R. Seidel was one of Rav Kook’s closest disciples and he often asked Rav Kook philosophic and ideological questions. Several of the most significant philosophical letters were written as answers to his questions. In this letter, Rav Kook addresses him, as usual, with many terms of endearment and with a great showing of love.

 

            Here is some biographical information about R. Seidel:

 

Seidel, Moshe (From The Encyclopedia of Religious Zionism)

Born in Kierkels, a town in Lithuania near Courland, 7 Adar, 5646 (1886) – Died in Yerushalayim, 25 Kislev, 5731 (1970).

He obtained a Jewish education at the Telshe Yeshiva. Studied be-chavruta at various points with Rav Kook, R. Elchanan Wasserman, and R. Avraham Eliyahu Kaplan.

After studying in yeshiva, he left in 5665 to study in Germany. In 5667, he went to Switzerland, where he completed his doctorate at the University of Berne. He worked in the United States from 5673 until 5691 teaching Tanakh and Hebrew at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and he was superintendent of Jewish schools in Baltimore.

In 5691, he immigrated to Eretz Yisrael, and for twenty-two years he administrated the Mizrachi Women’s Teachers Seminary in Yerushalayim.

He published studies of Scripture and language in Hebrew and foreign-language outlets starting in 5671. Some of these were gathered into a collection called Chikrei Lashon. In 5722, for his seventy-fifth birthday, a festschrift called Sefer Zeidel, which included biblical and linguistic studies from various scholars, as well as a thirty-entry bibliography of his own writings, appeared. These were all collected into Chikrei Lashon, published by Mossad Ha-Rav Kook in 5746.

He dealt extensively with the parallels between different biblical books and introduced many novellae in his writings.

 

The Time and Setting of the Letter

 

            This is one of the first letters in the collections. It is dated 10 Nissan, 5665 (1905), just a few months after Rav Kook’s arrival in Yaffo to serve as the rabbi of the town and its surroundings.

 

            The progression of events that preceded the writing of the letter is interesting and important in and of itself, so I will expand on it a bit.

 

            The issue begins with an essay published by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in his periodical Ha-Hashkafa, which was the continuation of his polemic about the Uganda Proposal that Herzl had raised at the Zionist Congress two years earlier (1903). Ben Yehuda was one of the greatest proponents of the proposal, whose main principle, as may be recalled, was the (at least temporary) settlement of Jews in the remote British colony of Uganda, since settlement in Eretz Yisrael was unrealistic. When explaining his support for the proposal, Ben Yehuda wrote the following: “My interest in the Land of Israel is not for its sake, for the sake of the Land, but for their sake, for the sake of the people…” In the heat of his debate with the “Zionists of Zion” faction – who, as their name indicates, completely rejected the proposal and claimed that it ignores the entire Jewish past – Ben Yehuda wrote:

 

One other claim… the Zionists of Zion claim about the Ugandists that they… turn their backs on our entire past. There is much hypocrisy in this claim. Let us have no illusions… we have all turned our backs on our past, and that is our praise and our glory (Ha-Hashkafa, No. 48, 5665).

 

            This sentence incurred the wrath of Rav Kook, and he published an open letter against Ben Yehuda’s words, which he saw as blasphemous. The letter was formulated as a letter to young Jews in their defense against the charge that Ben Yehuda leveled at them. Many copies of the letter were published and even posted on city streets. Rav Kook came out against the generalizations used by Ben Yehuda and, of course, primarily against the claim of abandoning the past.[1] In his letter, Rav Kook contended that the different paths taken by the different Jewish movements are all connected to tradition and to the living soul of Judaism. He recalls the fact that there were even Mizrachi members who supported the Uganda proposal and, in contrast, many non-observant Jews vehemently opposed it. Since he dealt with views that opposed his own and even ideas that exceeded what he viewed as tolerable (the words of Ben Yehuda), Rav Kook added the following sentence:

 

Despite my love of learning and teaching the fundamentals of our thought, far be it from me to demand authority over anyone’s opinions; nowadays it is unacceptable.

 

The full open letter was published in Iggerot Ha-RAY’H (I:18), and it is recommended that you read it in its original.[2]

 

            The aforementioned sentence caused R. Seidel to question whether this is a le-khatchila position (“din Torah” in his words) or if it stems from a recognition of the current reality in which there is no religious leadership with coercive power in the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael. From this, Rav Kook goes on to discuss tolerance in general, its limits, and its special expression in context of the Jewish People.

 

            From a broader perspective, it seems that the question emerged in the wake of the unique situation that arose with the expansion of the Yishuv and the arrival of Rav Kook to Yaffo as the rabbi of the surrounding settlements. The Eda Chareidit in Yerushalayim never had to address the question of tolerance in the sense that it is being discussed here; from the outset, it adopted a strategy of separatism and did not maintain any meaningful relationship with those settlements. As such, it never had any claim to authority or sovereignty. Jewish existence in the Diaspora could raise these questions only on the personal or communal level, and the attitude toward a deviant or heretic was addressed in the framework of their damage to communal unity or the sensitivities of individuals within it. The new situation that was created along with the development of the Yishuv and, no less than it, the dream of establishing national sovereignty raised the question of tolerance to the national-political plane: What is the attitude of the present rabbinic authority (assuming it has any power) – or what should the attitude of a Jewish national government be – to those who express negative opinions from the religious, ethical, or national perspective? Must there be a censor, and should there be punishment in cases of clear deviation on the ideological or normative plane?

 

Thoughts before Reading

 

            Note that at issue here is not pluralism in the sense of relating to a multiplicity of truths as such, but to freedom of thought as a political problem. Pluralism as a philosophical stance addresses the possibility of the existence of different and sometimes contradictory truths simultaneously, as well as our intellectual relationship with that multiplicity of ideas. Tolerance is a problem of real human relationships, and it pertains both to the relationships between different ideological communities and to the relationship between the social majority and smaller ideological communities. On the political level, the question is posed to the government and its authority to silence certain opinions or even to punish those who espouse them. Pluralism will be addressed in a different lecture. Of course, there can be a link between a person’s being pluralistic and his actually having a positive attitude toward other opinions and, vice versa, between the negation of pluralism and opposition to free opinion in the state; however, this link is not one-to-one, as will be explained in our discussion below.

 

            The question of tolerance is one of the central questions addressed by modern political philosophy, and it is sufficient to mention the classic works of Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, who are but three of many. Is the model of liberal democracy, which defends freedom of thought, possible from the perspective of authentic Judaism?

 

            The question of the Jewish or halakhic stance cannot, in this case, have a simple answer, for two main reasons:

 

1.    We have barely any philosophical or halakhic literature from the era when Jews had political sovereignty. Thus, issues pertaining to political life are addressed briefly and without connection to actual reality. Sometimes, they are not even addressed at all.

2.    The idea of freedom of thought as a political ideal is fundamentally modern. Even if we could point out Jewish or even general ancient sources that move in that direction, they are only sporadic examples that do not express any broad movement. Additionally, ancient social structures were far more homogeneous. Although the manner in which Chazal dealt with the Sadducee ideology or the early Christian heresy, for example, can be instructive for these purposes, the gap remains great.

 

(Translated by Elli Fischer)

 

You are now welcome to read the explained and annotated letter.[3] Next week, please God, the lecture on the main topics that appear in the letter will appear.

 

            The following translation is taken, with slight variations, from Rav A.Y. Kook: Selected Letters, translated by Tzvi Feldman (Maaleh Adumim, 1986).  The Virtual Beit Midrash thanks Rabbi Feldman and Ma’aliot Press for their kind permission to use this translation.  The translations of letters 44, 89, 90, 91 and 140 (in the continuation of this course) are also taken from Rabbi Feldman’s work.  The footnotes are my own (T.G.) and not those of Rabbi Feldman.