The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
Philosophies of Judaism, Agus undertook the task of explicating and criticizing the work of the great German Jewish thinkers Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber—Cohen and Rosenzweig being little known in America at the time—as well as the radical theology of Mordecai Kaplan. Among this group of seminal thinkers, Agus was attracted most especially to the work of Franz Rosenzweig: “The spirit which permeates his work perforce escapes analysis. And that spirit is great and bright, glowing with the fire of God” (209). In particular, Agus was drawn to Rosenzweigs nonliteral, nonpropositional theory of revelation, which, he argued, “will be found to accord with an enlightened view of tradition and with the ways of thinking of the earnestly critical modern mind” (350). Cohen he found too abstract, his conception of God too distant from “the pattern of religious emotion” (126). Buber, whom Agus saw as a mystic, according to the criteria of mystical experience set out by William James,1 is criticized for his subjectivism—“Devotion uncontrolled by reason is a greater danger to society than selfishness, history proves abundantly. We find this truth scrawled all over the story of mankind, in letters of fire and blood” (276)—and for his rejection of rational, objective criteria in religious and ethical matters:
Those of us, however, who are constrained to judge the value of these “inner calls” by external standards, may well feel uneasy at the total absence of the rational element in the decision advocated by Buber. If only we were certain that the call came from God! But, what if Satan should intervene instead! How are we to tell the voice of the “Eternal Thou” from that of the “demonic Thou?” (Is not Hitler, too, a mystic?)
Alternatively, Kaplan, though described as a rationalist and a pragmatist, is found wanting because of internal contradictions within the structure of his thought, the inability “to develop [his] own conception of God to the point where it could serve as the basis of a life of religion” (315), and an excessive nationalism that, if not carefully counterpoised by “a deep conviction in the reality of the universal value of ethics” (322), could lead to disastrous consequences.
But interestingly, beyond the systematic differences among his four subjects and his individual criticisms of their work, Agus found a common core in all of them. As distinctively Jewish thinkers, all were said to recognize that
the moral law appears in consciousness as an absolute command, spurning all selfish and unworthy motives. It can only be understood on its own face value, as an objective law of action, deriving from the structure of reality. An essential part of ethical experience is the feeling that there is an outside source to our judgments of right and wrong, that the stamp of validity attaches to our apprehensions of the rightness and wrongness of things.
This conviction is not only common to the philosophers discussed in this book; it constitutes the main vantage point of their respective philosophies. While they express this fluid intuition in radically different ways, they agree in founding their systems of thought upon it. (330)
This conviction was also Agus:
The intuition of the objective validity of ethical values must be taken into consideration. In moments of intense moral fervor, we feel that rightness and wrongness are eternally fixed in the scheme of things; that it is not our own personal dictates and impulses that are the source of ethical feeling; that the sense of authority attaching to our ethical judgment is not derived either from the opinions of other men or from the unconscious influence of society; that the things we call “good” and “bad” are similarly designated by the Eternal One, Who stands outside of us and yet dwells within us, speaking through our mouths in moments of great, ethical exaltation.
This intuition is the basis of my philosophy and religion. I believe it, not only because on many occasions it has come to me with dazzling clarity, but, far more because this insight has been shared by the great thinkers of humanity, in particular, by the religious geniuses of Israel. (340–41)
All his later philosophical reflections are predicated on this religio-ethical premise.
Agus’ second book, Banner of Jerusalem: The Life, Times and Thought of Abraham Isaac Kuk (1946), intended as a complement to Modern Philosophies of Judaism, on its face dealt with a surprising subject for Agus, given his modernizing sympathies, his reservations about nationalism—including certain formulations of Zionism—and his often severe criticisms of cabala; for Rav Kook (Kuk) (b. 1865; d. 1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of modern Palestine (1919—1935), was, vis-à-vis halakah, a traditional rabbinical figure, an ardent religious Zionist, and the most original and creative cabalist of the twentieth century. Yet Agus, who shared much in the way of biography with R. Kook, was drawn to Kook’s profound spirituality, his intense religious passion, his concern for all Jews, his support of the rebirth of all types of Jewish life in the renewed land of Israel, his unwaveringly religious Zionism, his mystical embrace of all things as part of the divine life, his respect for the religious potential of all men. Kook, for example, had written that
it was indeed proper that the whole content of holiness should have reference to humanity in general, for the perception of holiness is universal and the content of holiness, the bond between man and God, is independent of any nationality. This universal content would, in that event, have appeared for Jews in a special Jewish garment, but the wave of moral perversion that set in later in world history caused the elements of holiness to be forgotten among all men. And a new creation was made in Israel. . . . Nevertheless, there are still titans of the spirit who find the cosmic element in the root of Adam’s soul, which still throbs in the heart of mankind generally.2
Agus also was drawn to Kook’s intense effort “to meet the manifold challenges of modernism thru [sic] the deepening of piety and the inclusion therein of the new and aggressive values” (Banner, 20) and to what Agus described in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of Banner of Jerusalem (retitled High Priest of Rebirth) as Kook’s “generous, outgoing humanism” (High Priest, ix):
The ritual of Judaism is designed to replenish the mystical springs of idealism in human society. Loyalty to Israel, [Kook] taught, was wholly in accord with unalloyed faithfulness to humanism, since Israel was “the ideal essence of humanity.” With all his intense nationalism, he never allowed himself to forget that the ultimate justification of nationalism consisted in the good that it might bring to the whole race of mankind. (High Priest, 240)
It is also most probable that Agus was drawn to R. Kook because he saw in various of R. Kook’s halakic enactments a prototype for his own halakic reforms. Thus, for example, one feels the passion in Agus’ reprise of Kook’s creative stand on the question of the observance of sh’mittah (the biblical law that in the seventh year the land should not be cultivated or worked) in the fledgling agricultural settlements of the renewed Jewish community in Palestine. R. Kook, developing an earlier ruling, allowed for sale of the land to a gentile as a way of circumventing the strict rule that agricultural work cease during the “sabbatical year of the land.” Despite intense opposition from many in the Orthodox community, Kook held firm, and his ruling was adopted by most of the religious agricultural settlements. Here is R. Agus’ description of R. Kook’s moral courage during and after this religious crisis:
Aware of the undeserved abuse heaped upon him by many who sought to make partisan, political capital out of the affair, but, certain of the rightness of his position, he did not permit even a drop of rancor to enter his mind. As soon as the storm of controversy subsided, the Jewish world in Palestine and abroad recognized in him, not only a great Talmudic scholar, but one of the gentle saints in Israel. Almost despite himself, he became a central figure in world Jewry, the symbol of brave and adventurous leadership in Orthodox Judaism and the hero for thousands of young yeshivah students in every part of the globe. Those who maintained that Orthodox Judaism was not rigid and petrified, hopelessly caught in the paralyzing grip of ancient law and doctrine, were able to point to the rabbi of Jaffa as proof of the pliancy, adaptability and courage of genuine Orthodox leadership. (High Priest, 83)
For Agus, this type of religious leadership was required more generally