Freeing Ourselves from Kant’s Dichotomy

If Reform Judaism is to thrive, then what has emerged as its most distinctive feature—the place of personal autonomy—needs to be recalibrated. Personal choice needs to shift from being Reform’s central principle to being a starting point. Of course, the ultimate authority in religious life lies with the self. But what do we do with that? If we understand idolatry as the worship of one aspect to the exclusion of the whole,¹ we have arrived at a moment where we in the Reform Movement have turned personal autonomy into an idol. We have isolated one aspect of contemporary Jewish life from all the other values that need to live alongside of it.

Dr. Eugene Borowitz’s notion of the “autonomous Jewish self” was among the most in-depth and rigorous attempts to reign in unbridled autonomy within the Reform Movement. And yet, in the almost three decades since the publishing of Renewing the Covenant, rabbinic authority has continued to wane, Reform responsa and Reform guides to religious practice are less frequently consulted and cited, and the blatant disregard for the five vectors in volved in covenantal decision-making obvious.²

Perhaps one of the factors that has allowed personal autonomy to move from being a value to being the central value in liberal Judaism is the sharp dichotomy that is perpetuated between autonomy and heteronomy. I have explored this dichotomy in other contexts,³ but in brief, these terms play a central role in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant argued that an individual is subject to the law, because one is considered as having made the law for oneself. Autonomy is, for Kant, “property of the will which it gives a law to itself.”⁴ Autonomy is the belief that the only just laws are those that are determined by the self. In contrast, law that is imposed by a source beyond the self is called heteronomy, and this source could be, in the political realm, a non-democratic ruler, or in the religious realm, the most traditional conceptualization of a commanding God.

Kant’s import for the history of modern Jewish thought and Re form Judaism is significant. We still tend to see the divide between autonomy and heteronomy as starkly as Kant did almost two centuries ago, and it tends to define how Reform Jews understand Jewish observance: either one believes that God commanded a particular mitzvah, or one doesn’t; either the entire Torah was spoken to Moses on Mount Sinai, or it wasn’t. I have encountered many Reform Jews who cannot perceive an observant Jewish life in any other way than as coercive heteronomy, a kind of heteronomy that impedes innate human autonomy, and thereby the dignity and worth of each individual. But such a stark way of thinking about human freedom and obligation, ritual and mitzvah, precludes a more nuanced (and urgently needed) approach.

One of the first Jewish modern thinkers to offer an alternative to the Kantian dichotomy of autonomy and heteronomy was Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Rosenzweig’s creative contribution to this discussion distinguishes between the notion of “law” (Gesetz) and “commandment” (Gebot). Law denotes a body of precepts and regulations with which to organize a life under God’s sovereignty. As Benny Kraut explains, for Rosenzweig, “Commandment signifies the Divine call in which one feels the immediate presence of God.”⁵ God’s authority behind law is such that one has to discern it for oneself. God calls out to us in the voice of mitzvot and the response to a divine command is acceptance, not obedience.

For Reform Jews seeking to understand the concept of mitzvah beyond Kant’s stark dichotomy, Rosenzweig offers one path:

Whatever can and must be done is not yet deed, whatever can and must be commanded is not yet commandment. Law [Gesetz] must again become commandment [Gebot] which seeks to be transformed into deed at the very moment it is heard. It must regain that living reality [Heutigkeit] in which all great Jewish periods have sensed the guarantee for its eternity. Like teaching, it must consciously start where its content stops being content and becomes inner power, our own inner power. Inner power which From

in turn is added to the substance of the law. . . . The deed is created at the boundary of the merely do-able, where the voice of the commandment causes the spark to leap from “I must” to “I can.” The Law is built on such commandments, and only on them.⁶

Judaism, Rosenzweig teaches, is the manifestation of our acceptance of God’s “living reality” through our deeds—mitzvot. Judaism is neither an identitarian category nor an abstract affirmation of theological propositions.

The early Rabbis themselves embraced a nuanced understand ing of the interplay between commandment and the self. For ex ample, the Rabbis offered a profound and bold reading of the To rah’s description of what it means that the law is “engraved on the tablets” (Exodus 32:16), or more evocatively, “written in stone:”

“Engraved on the tablets.” What is the meaning of charut (en graved)? This was discussed by Rabbi Judah, Rabbi Jeremiah, and the Sages. Rabbi Judah said: Do not read it as charut (“en graved”), but rather as cheirut (“freedom”). Rabbi Nechemiah ex plained that it means “free from the Angel of Death.” The Sages explained that it means “free from suffering.”⁷

What at first glance seems to be the polar opposite of freedom— the law literally written in stone—is, in fact, the very basis of freedom. The mitzvot also allow us to transcend our mortality by committing our lives to a system that will outlive us, and to a God who is eternal. Commandment and freedom are not po larities. Rather, freedom expresses itself most fully through the opportunity to hear and live the commandments. It is as though the ancient Rabbis anticipated the project of post-modernity in undermining this overly rigid dichotomy between personal choice and an outside commanding presence, paving the way for a healthy dialectic between ourselves and our textual tradition to emerge. Such dialectic tension will create an impetus for deep thought, for serious and engaging study, and for creating environments that use liberalism as a way into deeper Jewish engage ment rather than out of it.

If heteronomy does not necessarily impede autonomy but can in fact coexist with it and lead to it in some cases, we might also be gin to redefine our understanding of autonomy. Freedom, as Isaiah Berlin famously taught, is not merely non-interference.⁸ Autonomy is actualized when we act, do, fulfill. Jonathan Sacks, explicitly re calling Berlin, expressed this when he wrote:

Freedom begins with exodus but it reaches its fulfillment in the acceptance of a code of conduct, the Torah, freely offered by God, freely accepted by the people. . . . In one of the most influential political essays of the twentieth century, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the late Sir Isaiah Berlin made a distinction between what he called “negative” and “positive” freedom. Negative freedom means freedom from coercion and constraint. It is the ability to do what I want. Positive freedom is freedom to: to act in my own best interests, or in accordance with my “true” self, or some other fundamental purpose.⁹

Reform Judaism, therefore, has understood personal autonomy in the negative sense, as characterized by Berlin, and mitzvot, generally, as something that impinges on that freedom. But we might also perceive mitzvot in the positive sense as well, a means to, in Sacks’s words, “act in my own best interests, or in accordance with my ‘true’ self, or some other fundamental purpose.” Instead of denigrating the observant life as one of oppressive constraint, I propose Reform Judaism adopt a theology that sees mitzvot as the embodiment of our positive freedom.

Reform Judaism in the twenty-first century can no longer afford to have “personal choice” as its core principle. Rather, personal autonomy must be seen for what it is—a given, a simple fact of modernity (or post-modernity), and a starting point for the various commitments we choose to make. We do not wish (nor is it possible!) to eliminate personal choice, but other critical Jewish values must exist alongside of it. Then, we need to create communities where Reform Jews can choose to feel commanded, Reform environments that encourage both ritual and ethical observance, and that are as open to experiencing what Rosenzweig calls “the immediate presence of God” as they currently are to welcoming the stranger.

Notes

1. “Idolatry in the context of the image of organic unity is the wor ship of an aspect—the separation of a part from its unity and the worship of that separated part,” Moshe Halbertal and Avishai
From CCAR Journal – Winter 2024
42 CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly
FREEING OURSELVES FRON KANT’S DICHOTOMY
Margalit, Idolatry, trans. A N. Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 1992), 201.
2. “Covenant involves all five of these vectors: God, the Jewish peo ple today, the Jewish tradition, the Jewish living living toward ‘the messiah,’ and the single selves who are involved in all of this,” Eugene B. Borowitz, Judaism After Modernity (New York: Univer sity Press of America; 1999), 212.
3. See Leon A. Morris, “In Defense of Surrender in Liberal Jewish Life,” Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas (Spring 2023), 20-29.] 4. Kant, Immanuel. The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics. United Kingdom, D. Appleton-Century, 1938, section II, 59.
5. Benny Kraut, “The Approach to Jewish Law of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig,” in Tradition (Winter-Spring 1972), 58. 6. Franz Rosenzweig, “The Builders” in On Jewish Learning (Madi son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 85–86.
7. Sh’mot Rabbah 41 (translation mine).
8. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1969).
9. Jonathan Sacks, “The Omer and the Politics of Torah” in The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 68.