To the Editor:
For some time now I have been wondering about the preponderance of writers on religious existentialism in COMMENTARY’s pages. . . .
Among the many impossibilities of existentialism, one which is distinctly impossible to Jewish thought is expressed by Hans Schoeps in “How Live by Jewish Law Today” in January’s issue. The principle that man must realize his fallen state before he can come to God is indisputably Christian. Nevertheless Schoeps writes: “In the moment that man acknowledges his guilt the word of God has found its way to him. In discovering that God’s will and man’s wish are not the same, the primal wound of life is opened in him. . . .”
The foremost American exponent of existentialism, Will Herberg, has been more explicit. At a public meeting which I attended he proclaimed the doctrine of Original Sin as a basic tenet of existentialist theory. Not only is this concept completely foreign to Judaism but it is illogical as well. Christianity follows through in a logical manner and offers an expiatory means of overcoming Original Sin. But existentialism provides no reasonable system of extracting man from this dejected state and offers only a nonrational “leap” to ethereal spheres.
Franz Rosenzweig’s journey from near apostasy to near-Orthodoxy (“Discovery of the East European Jew,” January 1953) is truly amazing. Perhaps it is no less amazing that he should have brought along the thoroughly Christian and, from the Jewish point of view, utterly untenable theological position of the fallen state.
(Rabbi) Milton H. Elefant
B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation
University of Maine
Orono, Maine
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