Q&A: On the Value of the Religious Experience
On the Value of the Religious Experience
Question
Hello Rabbi, I have a question about religious experience.
Let me preface by saying that I am not talking about experience as a human need, where a person finds “experience” in religion as a personal need. That sounds to me completely worthless — just satisfying needs.
I am talking about cultivating a religious experience almost as a halakhic command. That is, imagine two Jews who observe every detail of Jewish law, major and minor alike. But the first Jew observes it only as an order. He has no sense of cleaving to God, and no identification with it. He does it only like a soldier.
By contrast, the second person, besides also being a soldier, has an additional second layer in which observance of Jewish law is done מתוך identification, out of cleaving to God, and out of religious experience.
Now, which of the two people is more complete, or even more ideally religious? It seems to me that here you would agree that the second person is greater, that in his case the experience begins from something real and not just from random fluff.
So now I will present my simple question: why? Why is the second person really perceived by us as more complete and more religious? It seems to me that one can answer this in two ways:
First, cleaving to God itself is a kind of halakhic clause. That is, there is a commandment to love God, and the second person’s love is apparently stronger and more powerful. According to this answer, the second person’s advantage over the first remains within the halakhic realm. Love has no fixed measure, and the more you love God, the more you are fulfilling Jewish law.
But perhaps one can answer further: even if we assume that both people fulfill the commandment of love of God to the same degree, according to Jewish law, the second still has an advantage over the first. Why? Because he is more connected to God. True, this is not Jewish law. It is simply self-evident. It is obvious that someone whose whole life is conducted around the Creator is more elevated. It is simple reasoning.
I hope I managed to explain my thinking here. I would be glad to hear your opinion, and I would appreciate it if you could elaborate a bit on what you think about this.
Thanks for everything!
Answer
I think you did manage to explain it. Except that the discussion doesn’t really get off the ground, because I do not agree with the starting assumption. The second person is not necessarily greater.
Discussion on Answer
I definitely have written about it — in responsa and in columns as well. You can search the site. There was a column devoted to experience not long ago, and in the past I also dealt with the Brisker experience.
Let’s ask it differently:
In the parable of the child who asks forgiveness only because of reason, as opposed to the second child who asks only because of emotion — clearly the first is preferable. But if there is someone who asks forgiveness both because of emotion and because of reason, is he not more “complete” in some sense? There is some intuition that he is, that there is value in that wholeness.
And if that is true, then is a person who is whole in his love of the Holy One, blessed be He, also from the experiential side, not worthy of greater appreciation? You can distinguish and say that according to the Torah there is no such intuition, unlike in the case of the child; or say that even with the child you do not see any value in it; or accept that indeed there is such a value.
I’ll reread the columns, but I don’t remember you really addressing this exact question and explaining your view.
To me he does not seem more complete. Rather, in a healthy person, the existence of emotion expresses a greater internalization of reason — that is, emotion is a sign, not a cause. But if there is a person in whom the emotional dimension does not exist, or is simply undeveloped, then that expression will not be created in him, and there is no flaw in that at all.
All right, interesting. I think this is one of the foundation stones of the Hasidic-Lithuanian dispute.
In the Hasidic view, there is value in harnessing emotion too for the sake of the divine ideal. Indeed, not like those who mistakenly think this is because emotion is a measure or worth something in itself — here you are right that emotion is not a value, as you have written in your columns over and over. The assumption is that there is value in bringing God into every place in the world. If you like: “to make Him a dwelling place in the lower realms.” In the Hasidic view, there is value in having divine truth penetrate even emotion. It is really a law regarding God, not a law regarding emotion.
Indeed, it seems that the Lithuanian view does not see value in this. A person should observe Jewish law and immerse himself in Torah study, and no more than that. There is no point in bringing God into every nook and cranny. And you, as a dyed-in-the-wool Lithuanian, are true to your method…
Well, interesting.
Wow, that’s quite a novel point. It seems to me that there is a common assumption that the second person is greater; it feels like an axiomatic intuition. I think the concept of a “tzaddik” has been understood that way in Jewish history. In any case, have you written about this in the past? I think this is an extremely important principle and worth expanding on.