Rav Hutner and Hermann Cohen

Aryeh Sklar

“Concealed (Re-)Creation”

Pahad Yitzhak Rosh Hashanah as a Commentary to the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen

Steven Schwarzschild, premier student and interpreter of German philosopher Hermann Cohen in the last generation, was also fascinated by the thought of R. Isaac Hutner. Though R. Hutner would normally not be associated with such German philosophy as represented by Hermann Cohen, Schwarzschild in fact was amazed to find that the religious man of Ocean Parkway would deal with the general issues being dealt with in general philosophy of the time. R. Simcha Krauss recalls that he had made sure that R. Hutner and Schwarzschild would meet. That “shidduch” (Krauss’ word) between R. Hutner and Schwarzschild lead to Schwarzschild writing several essays attempting to “unpack” R. Hutner’s influences, especially the background of Ishbitz in Rav Hutner’s discourses encompassing the holidays of Judaism, Pahad Yitzhak. Indeed, R. Hutner seems to have agreed that there were unseen Hassidic influences in his writings, and R. Krauss reports that R. Hutner was quite appreciative of these essays. As Krauss writes in the Jewish Action (Spring 2002), Letter to the Editor, that after one of the articles was published:

Rav Hutner later informed me that he was truly satisfied with Schwarzschild’s translation, and that he was amazed at Professor Schwarzschild’s perceptive reading of these ma’amarim and that, indeed, he had accurately identified the sources of the Ishbitz influence.

R. Hutner certainly felt that Schwarzschild was a “perceptive reader” of his thinking. But how far would this trust in his interpretation go? It indeed becomes interesting when Schwarzschild pursues other possible areas of influence, further out than the Hassidic schools of Ishbitz and Gur - such as that of Hermann Cohen. Was he correct in his assessment of the influence of Cohen on R. Hutner?

Schwarzschild’s argument towards this thesis was by first establishing that Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian school of thought (known as the Marburg school) had tremendous influence on many leaders of the 19th century. And, a lesser-known fact was Cohen’s influence on Jewish leaders in particular. Schwarzschild points to three examples, in an article that in part explores this influence (including his attempt to connect Emmanuel Levinas’ thought to R. Hutner), writing:

Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik published his dissertation at the University of Berlin on Das reine Denken und die Seinsbestimmung bei Hermann Cohen, Berlin, 1932. The late Leo Rosenzweig published his dissertation, prepared in Berlin, at the Sorbonne as La restauration de l'a priori par Hermann Cohen,  Paris 1927. David Biale has recently made it helpfully clear how the basic structure of Cohen's philosophic system also determined the thrust of Gershom Scholem's research in the history of Kabbalah, which he had launched at about that time, in the company of "Eastern Jews that he sought out."

These influential Jewish figures, excelling in academic study of Judaism, found Hermann Cohen’s school of thought a compelling conception in which to apply Jewish religious ideas. For Schwarzschild, R. Hutner would be not be immune to such trends of thought. Schwarzschild writes there:

R. Hutner studied at the University of Berlin between 1929 and 1931. At that time there was a large number of Jews from Eastern Europe, especially from formerly Russian Lithuania, who had gathered in Berlin and who combined their high traditional Jewish learning with philosophical (and other) studies in the German academic tradition… It is likely that also R. Hutner was familiarizing himself with and being significantly influenced by Cohen at that time. Certainly a number of grand doctrines of Judaism occupy precisely analogous places of centrality in Cohen's and R. Hutner's systems...

The question resurges: Would R. Hutner agree that Cohen’s thought “significantly influenced” him, as Schwarzschild puts it? As stated, he was in the right place at the right time for Cohen’s work to be available to him. Although to be fair, as Professor Elman has pointed out to me, he attended lectures as a non-matriculated student, which is different. Thus, he may not have been involved in those studies. On the other hand, Professor Elman also reports that R. Hutner claimed that “Kant was better in the original,” to a student studying an introduction to Kant’s philosophy. If his interest in Kant’s philosophy transferred to interest in new developments in that philosophy, it would be probable he would look to Cohen’s neo-Kantian school. But even so, connecting interest in Kant and actual influence from Cohen is a proverbial “hard sell.”

The stronger claim toward connection is if one can find actual matching concepts between the two figures. Luckily, Schwarzschild believes he has found them, predominantly demonstrating this in comparing their congruent thoughts on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Both Cohen and R. Hutner, argues Schwarzschild, conceive of purity, and moral good, as stemming from some world other than the physical world, and influencing this world of realia on Yom Kippur. Indeed, the Kantian conception as morality as an imperative that is drawn from an impulse beyond consciousness can be found in both. More significant for our purposes, Schwarzschild sees two main influences from Cohen on R. Hutner’s conception of Yom Kippur.

Firstly, that “Divine forgiveness, as best instantiated on the Day of Atonement, is God's ‘correlative’ response to human self-moralization.” That is, there is a centrality to the Divine being involved in granting forgiveness on Yom Kippur. Schwarzschild declares, “This is… also a correct statement of R. Hutner's theology of repentance. Secondly, both deal with the same puzzle, specifically how past acts can be undone through repentance if the past in actuality cannot be undone. Cohen posits a “halakhic” statement that they are treated from a legal point of view as if they are guiltless, since they are transferred from purposeful actions (mezid) to unpurposeful actions (sh’gagah), which exists as a halakhic paradigm. R. Hutner sees the essence of the day itself as bringing God to declare the deed null and void, and are therefore made metaphysically in fact undone. Though they answer it in differing ways, Schwarzschild posits that there is a kernel of comparison between them. As Schwarzschild writes:

[I]n the first place, since also R. Hutner insists on the ethical function of both "repentance" and "purification," this difference carries really no actionable, functional, weight, and, in the second place, the final result is certainly the same: for Cohen as for R. Hutner, a theological move-with the former the application of the sh'gagah-conceptualization, with the latter the imposition of grace on the believing and practicing Jew-makes the sinner "as pure as the angels" on this occasion.

Thus, Schwarzschild attempts to demonstrate a major area of influence on R. Hutner from Hermann Cohen. But one will quibble with this as a demonstration. How close is this, really, to each other? Firstly, the involvement of God in the atonement process of Yom Kippur is hardly a unique concept to Cohen and R. Hutner. Secondly, though they grapple with similar problems, and perhaps offer solutions that are congruent with each other, this is hardly a point of connection fierce enough to feel confident in a comparison. The problem of forgiveness for things done in the past is a common theme, and spawns the well-known phrase, “Forgive and forget.”

Thus, it should be obvious to the reader that at least at this stage of scholarship on R. Hutner, there is a tendentious quality of these attempts to confer influence of Hermann Cohen on R. Hutner. Instead, this essay argues that R. Hutner seems certainly aware of salient ideas about God, man, and repentance, in Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason, as his own formulation matches too closely to be merely coincidentally related. That said, we will contend that he not only made use of those ideas, but, more so, he responds to them, finding areas of Hermann Cohen’s thought lacking and religiously unfounded. By examining the two essays of R. Hutner bookending Pahad Yitzhak, Rosh Hashanah, we will find that there are implicit conceptual responses to Hermann Cohen.

In the first maamar to Pahad Yitzhak, Rosh Hashanah, R. Hutner questions the connection between Rosh Hashanah and Psalms’ description (in rabbinic interpretation) of the holiday as (Psalms 81:4) “b’kese leyom chageinu,” - “at the hiddenness of the day of our holiday,” indicating some kind of hiddenness or concealment as a description of the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. What is the relationship between Rosh Hashanah and concealment?

R. Hutner relates this to a statement in the Midrash, which becomes a recurring theme in several other essays. Genesis Rabbah 9:1 quotes Rabbi Levi as saying that the first six days of Genesis are contained in  Proverbs 25:2’s “The honor of God is to conceal a matter,” and the seventh day is referred to by its continuation, “the honor of kings is to search out a matter.” He notes that concealment is somehow better than revelation, since concealment is “the honor of God,” while revelation is merely “the honor of kings.” His explanation of this is that concealment is wrapped up in the act of becoming, while revelation is in the state of being. If God’s creating is concealed, then that is reality coming into being, while God’s creation is reality as it is. Apparently, the better and more glorious work is in the state of pre-creation, of the state of coming into being. We emphasize the importance of this passage by translating R. Hutner’s words below (emphasis mine):

Out of the statement of Rabbi Levi, it is clarified for us that the division between the two types of honor of heaven is the dividing line between becoming and being. Meaning from “In the beginning” to “And He completed the heaven and the earth”, is the source for the process of becoming, and from then on is the description of the behavior within being.

Thus, God’s process of creation is called, “becoming,” while “being” is once things are already in existence. As R. Hutner is wont to do, he creates an analogy between God creating the world through revelation and concealment, and man’s creation of  himself - inferring that man as well is meant to do this kind of creation in both the revealed and the concealed. R. Hutner posits that just as God’s kindness caused the creation of the world, man can only bring forth his concealed world to the revealed through kindness, “hesed.” That is, God created the world through hesed (“olam hesed yibaneh”), so too man is meant to build his inner world through hesed. This, writes R. Hutner, is the work of Rosh Hashanah. It is not only, “yom harat olam,” a celebration of the creation of the world, but a holiday devoted to the (re-)creation of the self.

We must note that R. Hutner employs a terminology that uses creation as a metaphor between “becoming” and “being.” For R. Hutner, the first six days of creation were states of becoming, since full existence had not yet occurred. Only with the creation of man, and therefore full existence, could there be “being.” If God creates, thus causing “becoming” to turn to “being” through the kindness of creation, so too man is asked to turn his own “becoming” into “being” through his moral aptitude.

This distinction, between “”becoming” and “being”, as it relates to God, man, and morality, bears a striking resemblance to Hermann Cohen’s terms of being and becoming from Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. There, Cohen argues that Judaism’s monotheistic God implies that God is not just only one, but unique and completely incomparable to His creation. Cohen thus puts God in a different category of existence, that God cannot exist in the same way things exist. Cohen puts it:

Only God is being. There is no unity that would be an identity between God and the world, no unity between world and being. The world is appearance....Moses asks by what name he should name God to the Israelites, and God answers: I am the One that is. I am the One, that can be named in  no other way than by, “I am.” Thereby is expressed the thought that no other being may affirm about itself this connection with being.

The world is in a constant state of “becoming,” of process, declares Cohen, but God is in the category of “being.” To Cohen, because man is created out of this concept of becoming, he too has a moral prerogative. This is because ethics is the act of trying to bridge “being” and “becoming,” which are contradictory terms, what Cohen calls, “correlation.” Cohen’s view is summarized adeptly by Samuel Hugo Bergman (emphasis mine):

Being and becoming belong together. They are correlative to each other; one requires the other logically. "Becoming," - the finite, created world which is constantly in process and change - cannot exist unless it is contained and originates in "being" which gives it power and significance. But being also cannot exist without becoming. For God's being has no meaning without creation through which He manifests Himself. Creation is the logical consequence of God's unique being. There is no mankind without God, but there can also be no God without mankind… Thus man has a share in the work of creation by virtue of his correlation with God. Man's specific creative responsibility is the establishment of the one, Messianic mankind. A united mankind cannot be the product of nature; nature created "man" but not "mankind.” … Man's task, however, is to transform this natural relationship into an ethical relationship, natural man into fellow-man (Mitmensch) . Man's creation by nature is to be completed by a second act of creation, man's re-creation of himself.

It seems much too much a coincidence for the distinctions between “being” and “becoming”, as it relates to God, creation, man, and morality, to be within the thought of both R. Hutner and Hermann Cohen accidentally. But, while one can see the relationship between these ideas, there are important differences of which to make note. Firstly, R. Hutner speaks not of God always being and man always becoming, but that man himself can indeed have being, through the moral act that results in re-creation. For Hermann Cohen, man is never quite able to transfer from becoming to being, since he lacks the uniqueness that God alone (by definition) possesses. R. Hutner, however, posits the very real act of re-creation stemming from the great act that hesed represents.

As a result of this, we can pinpoint a stark difference between Cohen and R. Hutner - their views of man’s capabilities or self-worth. To Cohen, man can never achieve what the divine can. God is completely off-limits to him. Indeed, Cohen writes, “Morality… depends on one fundamental idea: that nature, that man himself, has no original worth, no worth of his own. If nature and man should be able to attain any worth at all, it could only be derived from the unique worth of God’s being.” That is, that man can never achieve being - his only worth is attempting to become being.

On the other hand, R. Hutner sees man as an imitation of the divine, in that just like God could create and then actually have creation, so too man can create and actually have his re-creation of the self. Instead of agreeing with Cohen’s argument, R. Hutner seems to have upended it and diametrically oppose its conclusions, through the same assumptions of being and becoming. The concealed aspect of the process of re-creation through moral acts (in him becoming) is, to R. Hutner, on an actual higher level as described as “the honor of God,” than the revealed status of actually being. This upends the notion that being, as found in God, is better than the push to become.

There is indeed another example of R. Hutner using similar terms as Cohen, while disagreeing and responding to them, in Pahad Yitzhak Rosh Hashanah. In fact, R. Hutner seems to (intentionally or not) bookend Pahad Yitzhak, Rosh Hashanah, with responses to Hermann Cohen’s philosophy. We have just referred to his first maamar. His very last in the book also refers to the concealed and the revealed, but through the prism of repentance. It is here we can again see the relationship between being and becoming, and an inherent building upon and responding to of the concepts of repentance in Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason.

We look to the last chapter of the book, Kuntres Reshimot 3, where we find more about this dialectic of the revealed and concealed. Already, one can see the concept of moral good as connected to R. Hutner’s “being” and “becoming” as related to re-creation. However, here, R. Hutner goes one step further - that the very act of repentance is an exercise in the process of being and becoming, bringing the concealed into the revealed (and indeed, vice versa). In this last chapter, R. Hutner describes the process of confession that garners atonement. In doing so, he discusses the difference between the revealed and the concealed, which he also describes as the outer life of the world and the inner life of man. He calls them, “two boundaries” and “two separate areas… which has something the other one doesn’t.” How so?

While a person’s actions are revealed, his thoughts and wills are hidden. However, he says, sometimes they approach and conflict with each other. Sometimes one’s actions are against one’s will. Repentance works by separating and aligning one’s external actions with one’s internal will, through the expression of the mouth. The mouth turns the internal will outward. This had indeed come up in the first maamar. There, R. Hutner deals with the concept of “convocating holiness,” the obligation of having holidays be “mikra’ei kodesh.” How can one do this for Rosh Hashanah, which as we said before, is “b’kese leyom chageinu,” a “concealed” holiday conflicting with the concept of the revealed? He answers in that first maamar that there must be a way to declare something holy in a hidden way - the forming of the self. Now, in relation to this last maamar of the book, he speaks of confession, where he sees the act of talking as the transferring agent of thoughts, which are hidden, to a revealed state. He says the mouth is, in fact, the middle and means between hidden and revealed, between thought and action.

By declaring it against one’s (true) will, by revealing the will, which is normally concealed, one succeeds in achieving atonement. What the court truly cares about is one’s will, not as much regarding his actions, he says. He writes, the paradox of this declaration is that, internally, “the will burns to separate itself from the will of yesterday, while in the world of the revealed, he continues to be tied to the same body and limbs of yesterday.” Confession, he says, is a bridge between the concealed and the revealed, where they touch. Indeed, the centrality of confession in atonement and repentance is well-founded in Jewish sources. What is innovative here is the concept of confession as a re-creation and revelation of the concealed. Confession makes a man anew. From within a body that sinned through action, a new will is formed.

So too, Hermann Cohen’s discussion of repentance and confession is closely connected. Cohen states, “Liberation from sin has to become the goal, and only through the attainment of this goal will the new I be begotten.... Liberation [from sin] is necessary for the transformation of the individual into the I.” The individual lacks a moral identity without the liberation caused by confession. How does confession change a person? Cohen continues:

“The confession of sin is the penance, which the sinner takes upon himself. This confession with all the agony and distress, with all the overwhelming remorse which borders on despair is the beginning of the execution of punishment which the sinner must impose upon himself, if God is to liberate him…. This self-knowledge of sin is a transitional point for engendering the I, but is not the conclusion. The conclusion is the atonement that depends on the consciousness of liberation from guilt.”

In other words, in order for the will to be liberated from yesterday’s sinful immoral identity, it must confess, create itself through the knowledge of its atonement. Through guilt, it can separate and become anew. Confession then, Cohen writes, “is the step toward action, which in turn proceeds in two steps: in the casting away of sins and in the new creation,” referring to the “I” of the individual.

Again, we can see that R. Hutner responds to this idea in Hermann Cohen based on the nature and capabilities of man as he is. Both thinkers agree that confession creates a new conception of the self, a new reality of a person freed from the past. Both thinkers agree that this is the fundamental point of repentance. But R. Hutner and Hermann Cohen view the inner life of man in a completely different light. Hermann Cohen sees man as ultimately sinful, and never being able to break away from this, must embrace it, realize his imperfection, and rely on God’s assistance for the forgiveness of it. Only then can the new “I” take hold, which is guilt-free. This should not be mistaken for Christianity’s original sin; rather the imperfect being is in constant recreation and expiation, of “becoming.” To Cohen, man’s confession plays this role. For R. Hutner, however, man is ultimately good, was always good. Confession doesn’t embrace man’s evil and recreate it, but takes the concealed good and brings it to the fore, replacing where the external evil had manifested.

To conclude, we have seen that Schwarzschild saw in R. Hutner the influences of Hermann Cohen, and we have seen that insofar as R. Hutner knew of Cohen’s ideas, he did not accept their conclusions. Instead, he responded implicitly to them. We saw this in the bookending maamarot of R. Huter’s Pahad Yitzhak on Rosh Hashanah. The first, in dealing with “being” and “becoming”, responded to the idea that man’s self-worth is only in attempting to turn “becoming” into “being.” R. Hutner believed that being is certainly within man’s reach through morality. Similarly, in the last maamar, R. Hutner responds to Cohen’s idea of confession as an embracing of the imperfection of man, and this is man’s re-creation. Instead, R. Hutner considers confession a bringing to the fore the inner will that is ultimately good, and this is indeed within his reach to do. Through these examples we have seen similar, but sharp diversions, in the thought of R. Hutner and Hermann Cohen.