One Law for the Lion and the Ox?
Can the Yoke of Torah Foster Freedom?
“Judaism. . . . is grounded in its awareness of and esteem for the individual.”
That statement caught me off guard last week as I reached the end of Rabbi Soloveitetchik’s famous treatise Halakhic Man. For months, I’d been working my way through the book during downtime at synagogue, between afternoon and evening services on Shabbat, during the repetition of the Amidah, while the president of the shul was speaking . . . .
It’s a tough book. Soloveitchik lands $10 words as frequently and compulsively as a Reno woman dropping quarters into a slot machine: “nomic,” “anti-nomic,” “ontological,” “teleological.” Frustrating stuff when you’re reading on Shabbat at the synagogue, and you can’t consult your phone, and there’s nary a dictionary to be found.
Diction-wise, though, this was not a tough sentence, but the idea required some working out.
Judaism is grounded in awareness and esteem of the individual?
You mean the religion where we all read word-for-word from the same prayerbook in a language that even the most devout practitioners don’t understand?1 You mean the religion in which the entire worldwide community reads in sync the Bible section by section every week, starting again from page one every year the day after Simchat Torah?2 You mean the religion where whole communities of men wear the same uniform day in and day out—black hat, black suit, white shirt?3 Where some sub-communities will throw rocks at you, if you don’t wear white socks?
As evidence for this bold statement, Soloveitchik cites the Talmud
“He who preserves a single life it is as though he preserved an entire world” [Sanhedrin 4:6]. Judaism seeks to fortify, strengthen, and ground the reality of the individual, to elevate him to exalted ontological4 heights. (134)
It seems a hard sell, but, to paraphrase a saying, Rabbi Sololveitchik’s mamala5 didn’t raise no schnooks. So it’s worth trying to make sense of the apparent contradiction6
It might help to review Soloveitchik’s basic thesis.
“The Rav,” who all but founded modern orthodoxy, distinguishes between three types of individuals: “homo religious,” “cognitive man,” and “halakhic man.” These are, respectively, those who seek to transcend the self and the physical world through ascetic practices, Romantic visions, and ecstasies; materialists who deny the spiritual altogether in favor of natural law; and Orthodox Jews who redeem the physical world through the study and application of Torah law.
Thus, for example, the homo religious might escape the temptations of gluttony through fasting, whereas the halachic man sanctifies food by keeping kosher and reciting the appropriate blessings. The homo religious may conquer lust through abstinence. The halakhic man turns sex into a sacrament by keeping it within marriage and the laws of sexual purity. The homo religious and his Romantic counterparts may abandon the degraded life of the embodied world altogether by focusing on the afterlife or by losing themselves in visionary ecstasies in which they empty their identity into some larger whole (e.g., “becoming one with nature”). The halakhic man moves minute by minute through the material world, enlivening every moment through the study and practice of Torah law.
The cognitive mannon the other hand, attempts a different sort of escape from the messiness of the real world by uncovering (and sometimes conconcting) universal, immutable laws of nature. He luxuriates in the purity of mathematics, the reliability of causality in physics. He dissects the body to discover the inescapable laws of biology, inheritance, and adaptation. Even in so-called “soft sciences,” like sociology and psychology, he seeks immutable law.7 The cognitive man’s ideal world is one in which free will is exposed as an illusion, and experts design systems through which we cannot help but choose the best options (though how we define “best” starts to get complicated).8
And yet, for all this, the halakhic man shares with homo religious a belief in a higher being, God, and with cognitive man a belief in inexorable law. How, then, is he more free? More of an individual?
The great Romantic poet William Blake once wrote, “One law for the Lion and the Ox is oppression.”
It’s an idea that has always made sense to me, though it seems to represent a critique of Biblical law.
Consider, for example, the rules of sex separation in Orthodox Judaism. We place a divider between men and women during prayer because we don’t want the guys to get distracted by lustful thoughts. But what if a guy is a lion rather than an ox with regard to his command over lust? What if he’s such a tzaddik, saint, that he can daven next to Taylor Swift without thinking about her gams? Or what if he’s just got super low T? Or is gay? Why can’t he hang out in the women’s section?
The simplest answer is that Judaism is, in fact, a communitarian religion, not an individualistic one, and we make rules that apply to the general population, not to exceptions. And we build fences around certain temptations or dangers to protect the weak, even if those fences hinder people who don’t need them. You and I might be smart enough not to get too close to the edge of the Grand Canyon, but we put barriers there any way to protect both the lion and ox.9
So, how can Soloveitchik claim Judaism is a religion grounded in the awareness of the individual?
And here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
First, Judaism anticipates Blake’s notion that one law for the lion and the ox is oppression.
“Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together,” Moses declares (Devarim 22:10), meaning you don’t yoke together a donkey and an ox. The donkey is weaker than the ox and will suffer under the yoke. And the ox is more single-minded than the donkey and will chafe at his partner’s being an ass.
Is then the rule of the donkey and an ox a paradoxical message to us that we must bear the yoke of Torah Law but somehow bear it individually? And, if so, how can that be?
How can any law, any yoke, grant us freedom?
Back in the early part of the twentieth century, free verse was all the rage.
What is “free verse?” Poetry without a predetermined rhyme or meter.
Poetic form, so the argument went, was too restrictive, too oppressive of the writer’s vision. Writers like Walt Whitman,10 Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the like were too expansive of spirit to be confined by the sonnet, iambic pentameter, or even end rhymes.
When asked about this trend in poetry, the great American poet Robert Frost explained that he preferred to work within traditional limitations. “Writing free verse,” he said, “is like playing handball with no wall or like playing tennis without a net.”
If we apply Frost’s game theory to Judaism, Soloveitchik’s claim makes much more sense.
Tennis without a net is freer. Remove the court lines, and it becomes even freer. Allow players to use balls of any type and size, and it becomes freer still. However, it also ceases to be tennis. And it ceases to provide players with a stable set of circumstances to develop their unique talents and abilities. It may even cease to be fun.
In Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watersson’s iconic kid invents Calvin Ball, a game in which you make up the rules as you go along. Sometimes, it’s played with a soccer ball, sometimes with croquet mallets. Calvin imposes “sing zones” and “no-sing zones.” “The only permanent rule in Calvin Ball,” he says, “is that you can’t play it the same way twice.”
It’s a fun idea and makes for hilarious encounters between a boy and his imaginary friend. But, despite the precedent for chaos set by the recent inclusion of break dancing, I think it will be a long while before the Olympics ever features Calvin Ball.
Why? Because nets, walls, rules, and boundaries provide a necessary holding space in which athletes can develop skills—and not only skills but expressions of individuality. No two tennis players play the same game. No two runners have the same stride. Even competitors in “sports” such as synchronized swimming must each occupy a unique place in the line and will express some individuality within the confines of choreography.
Judaism then uses fences, boundaries, rules, and values to prescribe a playing field in which we can find unique ways to express our individuality. And the playing field may promote an individuality that far exceeds what we can achieve if there are no limits, no boundaries, if all that we have are the boundaries of physics, math, and biology—or if we surrender our boundaries altogether in some ecstatic union with some abstract force.
Of course, some of these metaphors—life as a game, life as a literary form—break down when you consider that you don’t spend your entire existence on the tennis court or within the confines of a sonnet, whereas Judaism seems to ask that you do.
I suspect my analogies are weak, not Soloveithik’s reasoning. He finds something essentially creative in applying the Law, something inspired by and not unlike God’s creation of the universe. But I haven’t quite figured out how he gets there and remain, as is my wont, perplexed.
True story. A young woman I knew who had grown up frum, religious, who had been educated from kindergarten through high school in Orthodox Jewish schools, reported how one day she had left her siddur, prayerbook, at home and used the shul’s. The shul’s siddur had English translations on the opposing page of text as opposed to her prayerbook, which was entirely in Hebrew. As she was davening, praying, she said she’d occasionally glance at the English and think to herself, “Oh, that’s what the prayer says!” I told a rabbi this story. He said, “It happens to me sometimes too.”
I remember an old English teacher of mine who loved Tolkien, mocking nonetheless students who read LOTR over and over again. “You haven’t read Tolstoy,” he said, “and you’re going back to Mordor one more time?” I’ve grown to feel that way about the weekly parsha. I haven’t much studied the Talmud or Tanya or Mishna or Maimonides, but I’m going back with Joseph to Egypt one more time? And don’t get me started on Vayikra (Leviticus).
I once asked a yeshiva bochur student why they all wore black suits. “My suit isn’t black,” he said. And sure enough, when I looked closely, I saw it was dark blue. He was a rebel.
See what I mean? What the heck is an “ontological height?”
I swear, I don’t mean this politically.
One is tempted to say, “antinomy.”
See Issac Asimov’s Foundation series for an idea of what this might look like. In that series, Asimov imagines an evolution of sociology and mathematics, “psychohistory,” that enables its greatest practitioner, Hari Seldon, to predict and direct the future course of civilization millennia in advance.
See, for example, B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
And for all that, people still manage to fall to their deaths at a fairly regular rate.
A nineteenth-century practitioner of the art.
I appreciate your analogies, as a frum Jew who majored in English 46 years ago.
I would argue that the fences and the structure of Judaism, but even generally monotheism, are so essential to being human that people who don’t comply with traditional morality create their own morality as a polar opposite. In a world after Abraham shared monotheism, and Christianity spread the idea to so much of humanity, perhaps what passes for creative thought is a point by point rejection of Biblical morality, claiming to be random, but actually stating the exact opposite of Biblical verses every time they emerge with an innovative new perspective.
There’s a hole in the human psyche just the right size for religion and when we fill it with something else, that thing, whatever it is, morphs into something remarkably like religion: rituals, etc.
Judaism’s cheerleading of the individual, as I see it, is a historical answer to the pagan idea that the collective was worth more than the individual, not an ode to individualism, per se.
But there is recognition of people having different natures-Kind David was “admoni.” Red. There’s a concept in Jewish law about someone who is especially sensitive to hygiene, etc, as I understand it.
As far as separating men and women regardless of the individual leanings of each man being separated, like you say, perhaps it is more a statement about what it is to be human, and the role of fences, and a serious attitude towards that which is holy. Perhaps that is why separating men and women in a prayer situation, even when men and women mix together all day, still makes an impact. It sets a tone in our lives.