Modern or Radical Orthodoxy? Revisiting Nefesh ha-Hayyim

Modern or Radical Orthodoxy? Revisiting Nefesh ha-Hayyim

This paper evaluates the prospects for a fundamental critique of modernity out of the sources of Judaism. Radical Orthodoxy is a movement that rejects the intellectual presuppositions of modernity on the basis of post-modern philosophy and Christian theology. After exploring how Joseph Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, the ideological basis for Modern Orthodoxy, does not resist but rather participates in the existential and cognitive discourse of modernity, it returns to its predecessor, Hayyim of Volozhin’s Nefesh ha-Hayyim, in search of an alternative. It examines the critical potential of this ‘theology for an anti-theological movement’ especially as expressed in its early chapters which develop a kabbalistic ontology of the human being and Torah. It explains how the structure of Nefesh ha-Hayyim’s argument attenuates that potential, enabling positions like Soloveitchik’s, and then assesses whether other outcomes are possible.