Samson Raphael Hirsch

CHAPTER 29
Samson Raphael Hirsch
Harry Lesser
Blessed be God, who in His wisdom created Kant.
Samson (ben) Raphael Hirsch (1808–88, chief rabbi of Oldenburg) was one of the main
defenders of Orthodoxy in Germany in the nineteenth century. He took very seriously the
critique provided by Reformers, and argued that on the contrary there was no need for a
Isaac Breuer (grandson of Hirsch)1
reform of religion, only of the Jews who constituted it. He opposed the separation of
Orthodox and Reform Judaism, but came reluctantly to regard it as inevitable. Although
he was a staunch defender of Orthodoxy he was by no means an enemy of secular
subjects as part of the education of Jews, and also advocated the use of Hebrew as a
means of communication between Jews in the Diaspora. In many ways he is the founder
of that form of Orthodoxy which seeks to reconcile the letter of the law with the
possibility of living a modern life, and as such he has been very influential.
The first question to be considered is whether it is appropriate to regard Hirsch as a
philosopher. Certainly he was not a theologian: his concern was with Torah, with law and
observance, and “nothing could be more senseless…than to call the Torah ‘theology’”
(quoted in Grunfeld’s introduction, 1962, p. xlix). Indeed, Hirsch has, either implicitly or
explicitly, five arguments against either trying to do theology or regarding Torah study as
theological. These are first, that theology as a systematic science is, like any other
transcendent metaphysics, impossible; second, that human thoughts about God are
necessarily vastly inferior to divinely revealed legislation; third, that theology, unlike
Torah, has no relevance to our practical duty; fourth, that the way to come to know God
is to study his thoughts, not human thoughts; fifth, that to call Torah “theology” would
imply that it was the province of study of a special group of theologians, rather than
being “the common property of every cottage and every palace in Israel” (ibid.).
Nor was Hirsch essentially a religious apologist. His principal work, Horeb, is an
exposition of the commandments and the reasons for them, not a justification; and the
divine origin of the written and oral Torah is presupposed, not argued for. It is true that
one of Hirsch’s main aims was to combat secularism and Reform Judaism, and that he
thought that a proper exposition would convince any unprejudiced person that authentic
Judaism without Torah was a contradiction in terms. It is also true, as we shall see, that,
though he thought it senseless to try to produce evidence of the Torah’s divine origin, he
had nevertheless philosophical reasons for believing in it. But essentially, Hirsch’s work
is an explanation of what Judaism is, of what the duties of a Jew are, in the belief that
anyone who properly understands this will inevitably at least try to perform them: and
explanation, even with this intention, is still explanation rather than apologetics.
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643
Again, Hirsch is not simply a moralist. His primary concern is practical; but then
ethics has normally been regarded by philosophers as a practical subject—the contrary
view can be found, and was popular with some mid-twentieth-century analytic
philosophers, but it is a minority view. Moreover, he is concerned not just to give a
systematic account of a Jew’s duties and the reasons for them but also to explain the
reasons by using not only all the resources of the biblical text and of Jewish tradition but
also the resources of philosophy. And philosophy is used not, as a moralist might use it,
as a source of arguments that sound convincing, but as a systematic understanding of the
nature of law, ethics, and religious revelation.
This understanding derives very largely from Kant, though Hirsch disagrees with Kant
at certain critical points. Essentially, Hirsch was convinced of the truth of two things, that
the Torah is divine in origin and that the supreme end of ethics and politics should be the
moral and intellectual development of the whole human race. Hence, unlike those
orthodox thinkers who were disposed to damn the Enlightenment and all its works, he
saw the values of Judaism and of the Enlightenment as being the same. Consequently, if
Kant is taken to be the supreme Enlightenment philosopher, it is appropriate to expound
Judaism within a Kantian framework. Hirsch had probably three reasons for thinking this:
he believed that Kant’s philosophy was largely true, he believed that it provided a way of
making Judaism accessible to the thinking people of his day, and he believed that it could
be used to combat some of the major intellectual and moral errors of the time. That he
thought this about Kant’s moral philosophy is not surprising. It may seem more
remarkable that he valued the critical epistemology so highly. There were various reasons
for this, some expressed by his grandson Breuer in the passage from which the opening
quotation is taken (Horeb, pp. xxiv-xxv). First, while the shift from other-worldly to thisworldly preoccupations, which began with the Renaissance and continued with the
Enlightenment, was seen by Hirsch and Breuer as being in itself thoroughly desirable, it
contained the great danger of producing a quite unwarranted confidence in the power of
the human intellect. Kant’s demonstration of the limits to what we can know, of the
impossibility of transcendent metaphysics and of having any knowledge of things-inthemselves, was seen as a healthy corrective to this intellectual pride.
More precisely, we may say that, if Kant is right, we can have no knowledge of
anything beyond human experience. This has three important consequences. First,
speculative theology, as we have noted already, is impossible. This was a welcome
conclusion for Hirsch, since for him religion is about action, not speculation. Second, we
can have no knowledge of what the natural world is like in itself, as opposed to how it
appears to human experience: hence materialism, or the view that the world of nature and
science is the only world, and the only reality is physical reality—one of the main
challenges to any religious view—is as “metaphysical” and unprovable as anything in
theology. Third, no religious or moral principles can be logically derived from the
existence of the physical world or from the qualities it exhibits to our experience.
This all comes from Kant’s critical philosophy. From his moral philosophy comes the
conclusion that when reason is used practically, that is to discover and act on truths of
morality, it can have a knowledge of things-in-themselves which is impossible when it
operates purely theoretically. Hence we reach the interesting conclusion that the only
possible religious revelation to beings such as us would be moral revelation, that is
something like the giving of the Torah—so far from the moral and religious being
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644
different, and having to be brought together, as some have thought, the only intelligible
kind of religious insight is a moral one. (Hirsch does not say this explicitly, but seems to
presuppose it.)
But Kant’s conception of moral revelation is very different from Hirsch’s (supposing
either were to use the expression). The difference relates both to the nature of morality
and the nature of revelation. For Kant morality is essentially the fulfillment of duties to
oneself and to other people, which is to be done from the motive of duty. The point of the
moral life lies in the production, as far as is possible, of a combination of human
perfection and happiness (Kant, Introduction to Part 2 of the Metaphysics of Morals). But
the performance of a duty does not relate to this as means to an end, but rather as part to
whole: the carrying out of each of one’s various moral duties is already part of the end
itself, not something that leads to it.
As regards knowing what one’s duties are, reason alone, according to Kant, is
sufficient for this, if used properly. Hence a moral revelation could tell us only what we
know already or at least were capable of knowing: it might be psychologically effective
in making us more ready to do our duty but could not be strictly necessary. Indeed, the
only way of knowing that it was a genuine revelation would be by checking its context
against our existing moral knowledge—Kant says as much in the Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals 408, though as a Christian he speaks of the example of Jesus
rather than the revelation of Sinai: “Even the Holy One of the Gospel must be compared
with our ideal of moral perfection before He is recognized as such.”
With much of this Hirsch was in sympathy. Kant’s assertion (Metaphysics of Morals
386) that “Man has a duty of striving to raise himself from the crude state of his nature,
from his animality, and to realize ever more fully in himself the humanity by which he
alone is capable of setting ends” has many parallels in Hirsch’s work: indeed he sees
God’s plan for humanity (humanity, not Israel alone) as the development from the
physical and animal to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual, and the Torah as the way of
bringing this about. But there are important differences. First, the distinction between
duties to oneself and duties to others is not really present in Hirsch. There are certainly
duties that concern what we owe to other people, whether those be duties of justice
(mishpatim) or love (mitzvot), and other duties which essentially concern ourselves, such
as the cultivation of the right thoughts and feelings about God, Torah, and our fellow
creatures, the duties that Hirsch calls Toroth because of their fundamental importance.
But all these are to be performed by a person, not simply as an individual, but as a Jew
and a human being, a Mensch-Jisroel (Horeb, section 1, chapter 1, paragraph 4, and many
other places).
For Hirsch morality and intellectual advance are essentially a communal enterprise.
Any moral achievement, or morally right action, both furthers this end and is part of it.
Moreover, the agent belongs to various communities, each part of a wider one. In his
Commentary on Exodus, quoted by Grunfeld (1962, p. xlvi), Hirsch distinguishes
between Judaism and religion as ordinarily understood. Ordinarily, one can distinguish
between religious and secular communities: churches, etc. are formed by God, but
nations and peoples are independent of Him. But, for Judaism, “God founds not a church
but a nation; a whole national life is to form itself on Him.” Connected with this is the
concern of the Torah not only with the inward experience but equally, or more, with
outward action: the Torah is addressed “to man 0 in his totality,” and “unlike ‘religion,’
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645
the Torah is not the thought of man, but the thought of God” (Hirsch, “The Festival of
Revelation and the Uniqueness of the Torah,” 1962, p. xlvii).
Interestingly, Hirsch is here agreeing with Kant’s view, expressed in Religion within
the Limits of Reason Alone, that Judaism is not a religion (though Kant confined his
comments to the Judaism of the Old Testament). He does so for the same reason as Kant:
both take Protestant Christianity as the archetype of a religion, and both observe that
Judaism, with its primary emphasis on communal action rather than individual
experience, is something very different. But for Kant this makes it something inferior to
“religion,” for Hirsch something very much better.
Kant and Hirsch differ in their view both of morality and of the relation between God
and humanity. For Kant both essentially involve the individual and their duties (which of
course include duties to others), and religion involves, in essence, only the “inner”
individual—outwardly, religion involves of necessity only moral duties, and anything
else, whether worship, ritual, or observance, exists only to promote the right inner
attitude, and is otherwise undesirable. For Hirsch both are addressed to the individual as a
member of a community, as a member of the human race, and ultimately as part of the
world-order: one might suggest, despite Hegel’s ignorance of and contempt for Judaism,
that Hirsch’s approach is here Hegelian rather than Kantian. It may be noted that, though
this approach of Hirsch’s is essentially Jewish, and obviously derives from his Judaism, it
is logically independent of it: a secular humanist could make an analogous criticism of
Kant, and take a view of morality that is communitarian rather than individualist.
This conception of morality has the consequence that a number of distinctions made
by philosophers and religious writers no longer apply, or else apply in a new way. I
mentioned above that Hirsch does not really have a distinction, as Kant does, between
duties to oneself and duties to other people, since all one’s duties are performed as a
Mensch and, if one is a Jew, as a Mensch-Jisroel. Hence there are no duties only to
oneself: first, because anything one does may affect one’s fellow Jews, one’s fellow
human beings, and the whole world-order, and second, and more strongly, because in any
case anything done by part of the world-order is done by the whole. Thus in condemning
revenge (Horeb, section 89), Hirsch quotes with approval the sages’ comment “If your
left hand wounds the right hand, shall the right hand out of revenge wound the left
hand?” and adds “Are we not all members of one entity…limbs of one body?” Also, on
suicide he says (section 62), in contrast to Kant, “Is it not self-deception to think that
suicide is a crime only against God and yourself, and not also a crime against your
fellow-creatures?…do you not deprive the world of its justified demands when you
destroy your existence here?”
We should also note that Hirsch has rejected Kant’s view that, since God needs
nothing from us, we have no duties towards him, so that religious duties are really duties
to ourselves. For Hirsch God does need humanity, and this is explained in his
Commentary on Genesis 9:26–7: “At the moment that God made the fulfilment of His
Will on earth dependent on the free decision of Man, He said to them…‘bless Me…bless
my work, the achievement of which on earth I have laid in your hands’.” If the world can
be made as God wishes it to be only by human activity, that activity, when as it should
be, actually benefits God: hence, Hirsch points out, we do not only promise and thank
God but actively bless him. One could indeed say that, though the emphasis varies, all
our duties are both to God, ourselves, our fellow humans, and the world as a whole.
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646
In this respect, there is no fundamental difference between what is required from
humans in general and what is required from Jews in particular. Different communities
have different duties, but, since they all have the aim of promoting spiritual and ethical
advance, one cannot say that some duties are moral and therefore universally binding and
others merely the ritual requirements of one particular group. Rather, for Hirsch, there is
an overall divine plan, involving not only humanity but also all of nature: human beings
are special in that they can choose whether or not to obey, and Jews have a special task
among human beings, but in all cases there is a divine law to be obeyed and a
contribution to the overall plan: “the great purpose of God is only then fulfilled when
each one joyfully and faithfully carries out the law and the calling that God has appointed
for him, and in such fulfilment makes his contribution to the whole” (Commentary on
Genesis 1:11). Grunfeld amplifies the point, but is no doubt faithful to Hirsch, when he
comments “each plant and each animal, every man and every nation, have their peculiar
task, which is to bring to perfection…their particular kind of created entity” (Hirsch
1962, 2:579).
From this follows Hirsch’s insistence that the commandments of Torah cannot be
divided into moral and ceremonial. It is true that he regards the purpose of some laws as
obvious, and of others as harder to understand; and it is also true that he makes extensive
and detailed use of symbolism in his explanation of the various laws. But his use of
symbolism is very different from the way it was used by the non-Orthodox, and even
from some of the ways it has been used by “Orthodox,” thinkers. Admittedly, Hirsch
shares with all mainstream Jewish thinkers the views that all theories of the purposes of
the mitzvot are mere human speculation, which may be right or wrong, and that the
mitzvot must in any case be obeyed whether one has found a good reason for them or not.
But he differs both from the thoroughgoing rationalists and from the more radical
mystics. He differs from the mystics in seeing nothing “sacramental” in the performance
of mitzvot, nothing that has cosmic effects other than those on the minds of the
participants and witnesses: admittedly, if Grunfeld is right (Hirsch 1962, p. lxxiv), this
view of mitzvot as mystery rites was held, even among the mystics, only by a few
essentially heretical groups. He differs from the rationalists, first, in regarding all the
details of the mitzvot as being significant, so that his symbolism is much more
thoroughgoing and worked out in detail. Second, the performance of a symbolic act does
not only have a pedagogic effect, of reminding those who perform or watch of their
duties or of events in Jewish history or of the relation between God and humanity: it is
also in itself, if done in the proper frame of mind, a way of advancing spiritually and
intellectually, valuable in itself as well as for its effects. One might say that, whereas for
Kant the point of prayer lay in its production of moral improvement, for Hirsch to pray is
to improve morally and spiritually. Hence—though Hirsch does not quite put it this
way—every mitzvah is a moral duty.
One may summarize Hirsch’s position so far as follows. He agrees with Kant that
transcendent metaphysics and speculative theology are impossible, that knowledge of the
physical world as it is in itself is impossible, that morality cannot be inferred from a study
of the natural world, and that human reason is able in the practical, that is, moral, sphere,
to obtain a knowledge of things-in-themselves that is otherwise impossible. He also
agrees that morality can be expressed in imperatives, in instructions as to what to do and
what not to do, that the aim of moral behavior is human happiness and human intellectual
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647
and spiritual advance, and that right actions performed for the right motive are valuable
in themselves, as being part of the end, independent of their consequences.
But Kant viewed ethics as being addressed to people as individuals, as consisting of
universal principles (with their application to specific circumstances), and as operating
only with regard to human nature: cruelty to animals, for Kant, is wrong only because it
leads to cruelty to people. In contrast, Hirsch sees ethics as addressed to people as
members of a national community, members of the human race, and members of the
cosmic order. Hence it must include instructions on how to treat non-human nature, both
living and inanimate, and also, if necessary, special obligations for particular
communities, to aid their particular development and contribution. One could say that, for
Kant, only rational nature is of intrinsic value, and only the development of such nature is
good in itself, whereas, for Hirsch, everything that exists is of value, should be helped to
develop, and makes its own contribution to the whole. Moreover, when this is done by
free human agency, this actually benefits God as well as the created universe, by
furthering his purposes.
Even more importantly, whereas Kant saw ethics as requiring moral autonomy and
“self-legislation,” and the human mind as capable of working out for itself which
principles can rationally be given in self-legislation, Hirsch sees us as needing a moral
revelation from outside. For if we are imperfect morally, and need to develop—as Kant
certainly holds—we must be incapable of working out an entire correct morality for
ourselves. From all this three things follow, which are implicit throughout Hirsch’s
philosophy. First, any religious revelation would have to be a practical one, concerned
essentially with how we should live: it could not be theological or metaphysical. Second,
we need such a revelation in order to live properly, and cannot do this only through our
own resources. Third, any such revelation would have to be addressed to a particular
community, and to include laws specifically for that community, as well as more
universal laws.
In other words, Hirsch has argued, by implication, that if God exists and if he has
revealed himself, then the revelation would have to be something like the Torah as we
have it: if Torah contains many things which are surprising and many things that relate to
Jewish life rather than universal human life, that is exactly what one should expect. For
only by developing as a distinctive community can a group contribute to the development
of humanity as a whole: Jews do not need to throw off their distinctiveness and join the
human race (as, at the time, many Germans and some Jews were maintaining), but
contribute to human advance precisely by developing the distinctive Jewish life to the
full. Hence, for a Jew the way to serve the Enlightenment, and the way to play a “worldhistorical” role, lies precisely in the study and practice of Jewish tradition.
But this argument could show only that Torah might be divinely inspired, not that it
actually is. Indeed, Hirsch says in a passage quoted by Grunfeld (Hirsch 1962, p. 1) that
the only ground for this belief is our trust in tradition; and he points out that Jewish oral
tradition has to be self-validating: “it refuses any documentation by the written Torah,
which, after all, is only handed down by the oral tradition and presupposes it
everywhere.” As to why we should accept tradition, Hirsch makes two points, one in this
passage and one in the Commentary on Exodus 19:4. In the Commentary he points out
that tradition begins with two historical events, the Exodus from Egypt and the lawgiving
on Sinai, which were “experienced simultaneously by so many hundreds of thousands of
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648
people,” so that if one accepts the tradition one is accepting the direct experience, that is,
the knowledge of, and not merely belief in, God and the revelation of his law. Second, he
argues in effect that the survival of this tradition is at least strong evidence of its truth: the
implication is that so many generations could hardly have continued being so totally
convinced of the truth of something false.
It also has to be said that Hirsch was not an apologist, doing his best to prove to the
unbeliever that they were wrong—an enterprise he thought in any case impossible. His
philosophical aims would seem to have been, first, to show the plausibility of believing
that Judaism was a divine revelation (presumably hoping that unbelievers could then
convert themselves); second to show that Judaism was totally compatible with everything
true in Kant and the Enlightenment, and indeed constituted the only way a Jew could
properly put Enlightenment values into practice; third, to expound Torah in detail in a
way that showed how all the mitzvot, and not only the ones obviously concerned with
justice to fellow humans, promoted these values, and in this way simultaneously to
promote commitment to Torah in theory and practice and understanding of it. The third
of these occupies by far the largest part of Horeb.
This, interestingly, suggests another argument for the divine origin of Torah, which
Hirsch might have used, and which may be there implicitly. Although he thinks we need
a moral revelation, Hirsch was, it seems, enough of a Kantian to believe that we are
capable, by the use of reason in its practical function, of recognizing such a revelation as
being morally true, and therefore of divine rather than human origin. Hence to display the
moral message of Torah in detail, and show how it goes beyond what we could think out
for ourselves, is in fact to demonstrate its divine provenance. This might suggest that
Hirsch’s work has typically a double function: on the one hand, he assumes the validity
of Jewish tradition, and works out the consequences of this; on the other, he is in effect
constantly seeking to show us how the consequences, when worked out in detail,
demonstrate the tradition’s validity.
One might, indeed, rather surprisingly, see Hirsch as a particularly
thoroughgoing religious philosopher, who is prepared to think
philosophically all the time rather than using philosophy up to a point. He
was able to do this, while holding emphatically that Jewish tradition must
be interpreted entirely in its own terms and not subjected to any alien test,
because he was thinking ethically rather than metaphysically, and because
he found it possible to express the aims of Torah in terms derived from the
moral philosophy of his time. Hence he could assume the truth of Torah as
an ethical revelation, expound it in detail, and show how the detail
confirmed the assumption. The philosophy he used for this was largely
Kantian; but, while he accepted Kant’s critical epistemology and most of
his moral philosophy, he totally rejected the idea of “moral autonomy,”
and he added a conception of self-fulfillment in a community that has
more in common with Aristotle and Hegel. Students of Hirsch will of
course decide for themselves how successful he was; but there is no doubt
that his influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism
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649
has been very great. It is hard to find a better example of religious
humanism, of “enlightened” Orthodoxy, than Samson Raphael Hirsch.
NOTES
The philosophy of Hirsch is to be found in particular in Horeb, published in 1837, when
he was already chief rabbi of Oldenburg, and subtitled “Essays on Israel’s duties in the
Diaspora, written mainly for Israel’s thinking young men and women.” (A two-volume
edition in English, translated by Dayan Dr I.Grunfeld, was published by the Soncino
Press in 1962: my debt to Dr Grunfeld’s masterly introductory essay is very great.)
Hirsch’s philosophy is also to be found in Nineteen Letters on Judaism (1836) and in his
Commentary on the Pentateuch and Haftoroth (1867, English translation in 7 vols, by
Isaac Levy (New York: Judaica Press, 1967).
1 Quoted by I.Grunfeld in Hirsch 1962, p. xxiv.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts
Hirsch, S.R. (1959a) Judaism Eternal, translated by I.Grunfeld (London:
Soncino) [selected essays; also includes a complete bibliography].
——(1959b) Nineteen Letters on Judaism, translated by B.Drachman,
revised by J.Breuer (New York: Feldheim).
——(1962) Horeb, translated by I.Grunfeld, vols 1 and 2 (London:
Soncino).
——(1967) Commentary on the Pentateuch and Haftoroth, translated by
I.Levy (New York: Judaica).
Kant, I. (1956) Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, translated by
H.J.Paton as The Moral Law, 3rd ed. (London: Hutchinson).
——(1960) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York:
Harper & Row).
——(1964) The Metaphysics of Morals, part 2, translated by M.J.Gregor
as The Doctrine of Virtue (New York: Harper & Row).
——(1969) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated
L.W.Beck, with critical essays edited by R.P.Wolff as Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Bobbs-Merrill).
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Studies
Grunfeld, I. (1958) Three Generations: The Influence of Samson Raphael
Hirsch on Jewish Life and Thought (London: no publisher).
——(1962) Introduction to Hirsch 1962.
Rosenheim, J. (1951) Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Cultural Ideal and Our
Own Times (London: Shapiro, Vallentine).