Prologue to "The Horizontal Society"

Coleridge, 1895, Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Ay! and what then?
The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.
Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid.
For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel’s.
(located thanks to QuoteInvestigator)

Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (#126-127)
This axiom disposes at once of the proud claims of the Chaldeans, Scythians, Egyptians, Chinese, to have been the first founders of the humanity of the ancient world. But Flavius Josephus the Jew purges his nation [of this vain boast] by that magnanimous confession that we have heard above: namely, that the Hebrews had lived cut off from all the gentiles. And sacred history assures us that the world is almost young in contrast to the antiquity with which it was credited by the Chaldeans, Scythians, Egyptians, and in our own day by the Chinese. This is a great proof of the truth of sacred history.
To this conceit of the nations there may be added that of the scholars, who will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world.
- tr. by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch

Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (#1111)
But providence, through the order of civil things discussed in this work, makes itself clearly felt by us in these three feelings: the first, marvel; the second, veneration, hitherto felt by all the learned for the matchless wisdom of the ancients; and the third, the ardent desire with which they burned to seek and attain it. These are in fact three lights of divine providence, which aroused in them the aforesaid three beautiful and just sentiments, which were later perverted by the conceit of scholars along with that of nations (which we set forth among our first axioms [125, 127] and have sought throughout this work to discredit). Their true meaning is that all the learned should admire, venerate and desire to unite themselves to the infinite wisdom of God.

Heschel, The Earth is the Lord’s (pp. 105-7)
In the spiritual confusion of the past hundred years, many of us overlooked the incomparable beauty of our old, poor homes. We compared our fathers and grandfathers, our scholars and rabbis, with Russian or German intellectuals. We preached in the name of the twentieth century, measured the merits of Berditshev and Ger with the standards of Paris and Heidelberg. Dazzled by the lights of the metropolis, we lost at times the inner sight. The luminous visions that for so many generations shone in the little candles were extinguished for some of us.
In the last decades, there has developed a longing for an accord between the present and the past. The antithesis of the Haskalah had gradually begun to change into a synthesis. Gradually the inner beauty of the old life and the emptiness of present-day civilization have been disclosed. But the time has been too short and the will too weak. Clarity and solidarity have been lacking not only in spiritual but also in political matters. When confronted with a world of misery and indifference, our will and our vision proved inadequate. In our zeal to change, in our passion to advance, we ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had kindled. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, wisdom for information, prayers for sermons, tradition for fashion.
In the elementary textbooks of Hebrew in use a quarter of a century ago, there was a story of a schoolboy who would be in great distress every morning, having forgotten where he put away his clothes and books before he went to bed. One evening he arrived at an answer to his problem. He wrote on a slip of paper: "The suit is on the chair, the hat is in the closet, the books on the desk, the shoes under the chair, and I am in bed." Next morning he began to collect his things together. They were all in their places. When he came to the last item on the list, he went to look for himself in bed - but his search was in vain.
A world has vanished. All that remains is a sanctuary hidden in the realm of spirit. We of this generation are still holding the key. Unless we remember, unless we unlock it, the holiness of ages will remain a secret of God. We of this generation are still holding the key - the key to the sanctuary which is also the shelter of our own deserted souls. If we mislay the key, we shall elude ourselves.
In this hour we, the living, are "the people of Israel." The tasks, begun by the patriarchs and prophets and continued by their descendants, are now entrusted to us. We are either the last Jews or those who will hand over the entire past to generations to come. We will either forfeit or enrich the legacy of ages.
Judaism today is the least known religion. Its rare splendor has been so frequently adjusted to the trivialities of changing opinions that what is left is commonplace. There are only few who still perceive the vanishing niggun of its perennial yearning.

Neusner, Rabbis, But No Torah (Chronicles Magazine, May 2000)
When the religion of Judaism speaks in its contemporary modulations—whether Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or integrationist-Orthodoxy—we should hear many voices. But instead we hear one: the voice of left-liberal politics. With the exception of self-segregated Orthodoxy, most (though, happily, not all) rabbis preach a secular doctrine of leftwing orthodoxy. That is puzzling, because the Torah—Scripture (the "Old Testament") and the Mishnah, Talmuds, and Midrash that record the oral revelation of Sinai—presents a remarkably conservative vision of the social order. "Judaism" favors gay rights—except in the Torah. "Judaism" favors "a woman's right to choose," even at the very end of term—except in the law of the Torah, which deems the fetus to have a soul at a specific point in the pregnancy. "Judaism" opposes the death penalty—except in the Torah. Compose a list of liberal shibboleths, and I will cite, chapter and verse, rabbinical sermons and the resolutions of their associations that identify them as "Judaism." And that is not to mention secular Jews and their organizations.
What explains the gap between the teachings of the Torah and the position of its contemporary masters, the rabbinate of today? The failure of the rabbinical schools to set forth a coherent intellectual structure and system resting on Torah learning has produced a generation of rabbis with little or no Torah to teach. By "Torah," I speak of a basic philosophy—a core theology—that guides the everyday encounter with the crises of life, both public and private, and that accords with the revelation by God to Moses at Mount Sinai. In general, rabbis do not refer back to a common body of learning that marks them as rabbis—not professors, not social workers, not community administrators, not ethnic cheerleaders, nor any of the myriad roles rabbis define for themselves by reason of the intellectual bankruptcy of the rabbinate.
The exceptions today, and they are not few, prove the rule. But in prior generations, one could look to Reform and Conservative rabbis as well as to synagogue- Orthodox rabbis for a distinctively rabbinical message. Prior generations made the effort, at least, to deliver a religions message, and if they took a political position, it was in dialogue with the Torah. Today, they do not even try. The American rabbinate once took for granted that a rabbi is someone who knows specific things and believes them. These specific things always included Scripture as mediated by the rabbis of the Mishnah, Talmuds, and Midrash compilations, as well as the body of received exegesis of Scripture produced by Rabbinic Judaism from antiquity to our own time. Rabbinic discourse reflected two things. The first was sheer knowledge of "the Tradition," which was defined as Scripture and Talmud, broadly construed. The second was something harder to identify but just as palpable: a certain attitude of mind, a philosophy, a theology, formed in dialogue with Scripture and Talmud. Given the contents of the Torah, this attitude reflected conservative values.
Reconstructionist rabbis are an easy target, since their seminary includes in its faculty so few heavyweight scholars. And Reform rabbis, with their investment in Jewish ethnicity, political liberalism, Israelism, and holocaustism, as well as their frequent substitution of personality for intellectual perspicacity, scarcely care about Torah learning. If the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College sets the low water mark for scholarly inconsequence, how many important books have come from the entire faculty of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New York City, and Jerusalem? The intellectually rigorous work of Eugene Borowitz does not stand entirely alone over the past ten years from that faculty, but it also does not occupy a crowded platform.
How the JTSA has fallen! I studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1954 through 1960, abandoning my Reform upbringing to get what I then conceived to be a better Jewish education in Conservative Judaism than I believed I could get in the Reform seminary. It was a difficult venture, but worth the anguish because of the galaxy of intellectual and scholarly superstars Louis Finkelstein had assembled. (He would replace them with mediocrities in the next generation, many of them JTSA alumni, who would find their way into the academy and out of Jewish-sponsored institutions entirely.) One need not reach the stratospheric level of an Abraham J. Heschel or a Mordecai Kaplan or a Shalom Spiegel to serve as an intellectual model for generations of young rabbis. Even second-rank players such as Saul Lieberman and Moshe Zucker and Judah Goldin and Chaini Zalman Dimitrovsky made an impact. Today's JTSA faculty has no Heschel. I consulted the faculty listing on its website, and I was astonished by the low scholarly aspirations of most, though not all, of that mostly mediocre collection of never-wases-pretending-to-be-has-beens (a phrase someone once used of the Boston Hebrew College of a prior generation).
Ah, but what of Orthodox rabbis? Surely, they bring to the Jewish community a deep knowledge of the sources of Judaism? That intuitive judgment is both right and wrong. Yeshiva-Orthodoxy, segregated in its educational world, with its emphasis on Talmud study and on Torah learning, produces large numbers of young men who have encountered the Talmud and know this and that. When I meet such young men and ask them what they are studying, I am usually puzzled by their low educational ambitions. This is summed up by an admittedly extreme case. When I was lecturing in Moscow last year, I was introduced to a young man who told me he was studying Talmud in some yeshiva in that city. I asked, "What chapter?" He didn't know. "What tractate?" He still didn't know! "Well, what did you study this morning, what Mishnah rule?" He was not sure. I said, "Could it have been . . . ?" Ah, yes, that's it!
But there are universities and then there are universities, and the same is so in the yeshiva world. While the alumni of the best of them exhibit certain intellectual deficiencies—they find it difficult to construct a lucid, logical proposition and argument but are very good at lowbrow exegesis of words and phrases—yeshiva-Orthodoxy does meet the expectation that a rabbi will base his teaching on the Torah. I have never heard of a rosh yeshiva (a professor) of a reputable yeshiva lacking substantial mastery of the texts, their theology, or law. And they live by the ideals of what they learn, or try to.
But in the pulpit-Orthodox rabbinate, that part of Orthodoxy that is integrationist and that chooses to address the world of Judaism, the situation hardly proves more promising than the Reform, Conservative, or Reconstructionist rabbinate. A kippah on the head of an Orthodox rabbi does not guarantee Torah inside. More to the point, while the Orthodox rabbinate knows things, it is rare that such rabbis can make a coherent and compelling case for the Torah, viewed as the source of culture and sensibility of the holy community of Israel, God's people.
Writing in the Jerusalem Report, Ze'ev Chafets recentiv challenged the intellectuals of Judaism to answer a simple and reasonable question: "What's it good for?" We in the academic humanities have to answer that question every day. Our students ask it, because we are not training them to get good-paying jobs when they graduate but educating them for a long life of the intellect. No one takes the question as effrontery or interprets it as an attack on the fields of philosophy, literature, history, or the academic study of religion. We answer that question not only by what we say but by what we do in the classroom every day. But responding to Chafets, Berel Wein, writing in the Jerusalem Post of October 29, 1999, saw his question as an attack on the Talmud. How does he respond to Chafets' question?
"It was and is the study of the Torah, above all else, that has preserved the Jewish people to this day. The impractical, uneconomical, otherworldly study of Torah is the main force that has kept the Jewish people alive, vibrant, creative, and stubborn to the core."
Alas—the argument from ethnicity once more! Rabbi Wein does not argue about the merits of what is studied, only about the results. But such an appeal to the practical consequence the socially desirable result of keeping Jews Jewish—surely validates studying many things, not just the Talmud. If Jewish education were devoted to the holocaust, or if it consisted of constant pilgrimages to the state of Israel, the same result might occur—or perhaps even a more satisfactory one, since an appeal to emotions (holocaustism) or the experience of ethnic loyalty (Israelism) demands much less than is required by an appeal to intellect. It is easier to face than to think, and emotions always trump reason, except among the educated few. Rabbi Wein's incapacity to formulate a compelling answer out of the Torah for the value of studying the Torah exemplifies the intellectual limitations of integrationist Orthodoxy—the Orthodoxy that reads, in English, the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Report and chooses to engage with the rest of Jewry.
With significant exceptions, in integrationist-Orthodoxy, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Jewish-Renewal/New Age Judaisms, we find rabbis without Torah. That represents the failure of a generation of rabbinical seminary professors. The chain of tradition is as strong as its weakest link.

Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots (p.155 n.45)
This posture is evident even among some of the most lucid thinkers of our time. See Edmund Husserl, ''Philosophy and the Crisis of the European Man,'' in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1965), p. 171, where he stated that in other cultures knowledge of the world ''is and remains mythico-practical in its logical connections, and it is a mistake for someone brought up in the scientific modes of thought initiated in Greece and progressively developed in modem times to speak of Indian and Chinese philosophy'' (see translator's note). He similarly dismissed the view that ''the science of the Greeks, is not, after all, distinctive of them .... Today we possess all sorts of studies on Indian, Chinese, and other philosophies, studies that place these philosophies on the same level with Greek philosophy. ... Still, one must not allow intentional depths to be covered over by what is merely morphological common and be blind to the most essential differences of principle'' (p. 164). Whereas other cultures try (in vain, one presumes) ''constantly to Europeanize themselves ... if we understand ourselves properly, we will never, for example, Indianize ourselves" (p. 157). We are told that ''The spiritual telos of European Man ... lies in infinity ... " (p. 158). At the same time, Husserl recognized that ''the European nations'' - who are the exclusive possessors of "Philosophy'' - happen to be ''sick; Europe itself, they say, is in critical condition'' (p. 150). Pathetically, the ''cure'' which he prescribed - "to elevate mankind [read: the European man] through universal scientific reason," etc., ''and thus transform it into a radically new humanity [probably: non-Indianized, etc.]" (p. 16g) - stems from monolingualism: the very sources that produced the ''crisis'' in the first place.

Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of European Man
In this lecture I will venture an attempt to awaken new interest in the oft-treated theme of the European crisis by developing the philosophico-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European man.1 In so far as in thus developing the topic I bring out the essential function that philosophy and its ramifications in our sciences have to perform in this process, the European crisis will also be given added clarification....

...The preceding reflections proper to a science of the spirit provide us with the right attitude for grasping and handling our theme of spiritual Europe as a problem belonging purely to science of the spirit, first of all from the point of view of spirit's history. As has already been stated in the introductory remarks, in following this path we should reveal an extraordinary teleology, which is, so to speak, innate only in our Europe. This, moreover, is most intimately connected with the eruption (or the invasion) of philosophy and of its ramifications, the sciences, in the ancient Greek spirit. We already suspect that there will be question of clarifying the profoundest reasons for the origin of fatal naturalism, or - and this is of equal importance - of modern dualism in interpreting the world. Ultimately the proper sense of European man's crisis should thereby come to light.
We may ask, 'How is the spiritual image of Europe to be characterized?' This does not mean Europe geographically, as it appears on maps, as though European man were to be in this way confined to the circle of those who live together in this territory. In the spiritual sense it is clear that to Europe belong the English dominions, the United States, etc., but not, however, the Eskimos or Indians of the country fairs, or the Gypsies, who are constantly wandering about Europe. Clearly the title Europe designates the unity of a spiritual life and a creative activity - with all its aims, interests, cares and troubles, with its plans, its establishments, its institutions. Therein individual human beings work in a variety of societies, on different levels, in families, races,12 nations, all intimately joined together in spirit and, as I said, in the unity of one spiritual image. This should stamp on persons, groups, and all their cultural accomplishments an all-unifying character....
...In this process consistent, penetrating observation reveals new, characteristic compositions and distinctions. No matter how inimical the European nations may be toward each other, still they have a special inner affinity of spirit that permeates all of them and transcends their national differences. It is a sort of fraternal relationship that gives us the consciousness of being at home in this circle. This becomes immediately evident as soon as, for example, we penetrate sympathetically into the historical process of India, with its many peoples and cultural forms. In this circle there is again the unity of a family-like relationship, but one that is strange to us. On the other hand, Indians find us strangers and find only in each other their fellows. Still, this essential distinction between fellowship and strangeness, which is relativized on many levels and is a basic category of all historicity, cannot suffice. Historical humanity does not always divide itself in the same way according to this category. We get a hint of that right in our own Europe. Therein lies something unique, which all other human groups, too, feel with regard to us, something that apart from all considerations of expediency, becomes a motivation for them - despite their determination to retain their spiritual autonomy - constantly to Europeanize themselves, whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, will never, for example, Indianize ourselves. I mean we feel (and with all its vagueness this feeling is correct) that in our European humanity there is an innate entelechy that thoroughly controls the changes in the European image and gives to it the sense of a development in the direction of an ideal image of life and of being, as moving toward an eternal pole. It is not as though there were question here of one of those known orientations that give to the physical realm of organic beings its character - not a question, therefore, of something like biological development in stages from seminal form up to maturity followed by ageing and dying out. There is essentially no zoology of peoples. They are spiritual unities. They have not, and above all the supernationality Europe has not, a mature from that has been or can be reached, no form of regular repetition. From the point of view of soul, humanity has never been a finished product, nor will it be, nor can it ever repeat itself.16 The spiritual telos of European Man, in which is included the particular telos of separate nations and of individual human beings, lies in infinity; it is an infinite idea, toward which in secret the collective spiritual becoming, so to speak, strives. Just as in the development it becomes a conscious telos, so too it becomes necessarily practical as a goal of the will, and thereby is introduced a new, a higher stage of development that is guided by norms, by normative ideas....
...Substantially, though in a somewhat sketchy fashion, we have now described the historical movement that makes understandable how, beginning with a few Greek exceptions, a transformation of human existence and of man's entire cultural life could be set in motion, beginning in Greece and its nearest neighbors. Moreover, now it is also discernible how, following upon this, a supernationality of a completely new kind could arise. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual form of Europe. It is now no longer a number of different nations bordering on each other, influencing each other only by commercial competition and war. Rather a new spirit stemming from philosophy and the sciences based on it, a spirit of free criticism providing norms for infinite tasks, dominates man, creating new, infinite ideals. These are ideals for individual men of each nation and for the nations themselves. Ultimately, however, the expanding synthesis of nations too has its infinite ideals, wherein each of these nations, by the very fact that it strives to accomplish its own ideal task in the spirit of infinity, contributes its best to the community of nations. In this give and take the supernational totality with its graded structure of societies grows apace, filled with the spirit of one all-inclusive task, infinite in the variety of its branches yet unique in its infinity. In this total society with its ideal orientation, philosophy itself retains the role of guide, which is its special infinite task.42 Philosophy has the role of a free and universal theoretical disposition that embraces at once all ideals and the one overall ideal - in short, the universe of all norms. Philosophy has constantly to exercise through European man its role of leadership for the whole of mankind....
...I have said that the course of philosophy goes through a period of naïveté. This, then, is the place for a critique of the so renowned irrationalism, or it is the place to uncover the naïveté of that rationalism that passes as genuine philosophical rationality, and that admittedly is characteristic of philosophy in the whole modern period since the Renaissance, looking upon itself as the real and hence universal rationalism. Now, as they begin, all the sciences, even those whose beginnings go back to ancient times, are unavoidably caught up in this naïveté. To put it more exactly, the most general title for this naïveté is objectivism, which is given a structure in the various types of naturalism, wherein the spirit is naturalized. Old and new philosophies were and remain naïvely objectivistic. It is only right, however, to add that German idealism, beginning with Kant, was passionately concerned with overcoming the naïveté that had already become very sensitive. Still, it was incapable of really attaining to the level of superior reflectiveness that is decisive for the new image of philosophy and of European man....
- tr. by Quentin Lauer