CHAPTER 3 Return along the Way of Repentance Zangedô and T’shuva Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall become like fleece. —Isaiah 1:18 We began with the problem of historical irrationality. Irrationality causes suffering— suffering for lack of understanding the origins of the disparity between ideal and actual in history. We suffer a paralyzed condition before the unexplained, perhaps even inexplicable. Historical crisis brings into relief the vast gap between our understanding of the human condition and the realities of human being. Faced with the atrocities of world history, we are speechless. Our initial impulse is to elect philosophy to elucidate irrationality in historical reality. The philosophical mind, operating in the mode of logical analysis, attempts to explain that of which common intuition suffers ignorance. Yet, there is, alas, a dimension of human experience to which the otherwise far-reaching grasp of rational sciences is not privy; and philosophy is not enough to account for the contradictory extremes of historical human experience. Any dialectic which tries to take into account all extremes rationally, ultimately fails to live up to the demands of dialectics. An authentic philosophical dialectic has not been produced in the West. Despite the ingenuity of its many traditions, philosophy in the classical West still cowers before the formidable contradictions of historical existence. In order to facilitate our comparison of Tanabe and Soloveitchik we have traced a movement from history, through philosophy and ultimately, as we will embark upon below, to religion. The unique logic of religious life is singularly equipped to handle the philosophical antinomies which result from historical irrationality and seem to be, within the framework of formal logic, irresolvable. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe will claim that religious man, unlike man-philosopher, operates according to an alternative logic very well suited to dealing with contradiction and irrationality. To illustrate the logic of the religious standpoint, there are numerous aspects of religious thought and life we might discuss. Why concentrate on the problem of repentance? What particularly relevant contradiction does this bring into relief and to what vital resolution of that contradiction does the question of repentance orient us? Why not pick prayer, meditation, ritual, or discuss love of the divine or the sublime in religious life? The issue of repentance is for us particularly important, firstly, because it includes and addresses, to some extent or another, a great many other themes in religious life. For Soloveitchik and Tanabe, repentance is a core element of virtually all aspects of religious experience. To some measure, in all facets of religious life, the religious individual experiences repentance as a category or mode of religious existence. Secondly, repentance is only partially a cognitive act. It necessarily implies moving beyond what is philosophically tenable—necessitating consideration of vital yet non-rational data. In Tanabe’s language, it is a meta-noia, a movement beyond knowing. For Soloveitchik, it is a mesirat nefesh, a sacrificial act that requires personal withdrawal, an admittance of the self’s weakness, and ultimately a transformation of the self from sinner to sage by virtue of divine mediation. For both it requires recognition of and submission to what philosophy, which is synonymous with the self-affirming self, cannot achieve. Repentance as an act poses a great religious contradiction. Philosophically, we expressed this contradiction as the incommensurability of the Absolute and the relative. In religion, the same problem is expressed more concretely, (or more mythologically, depending on one’s orientation) as the inconceivability of the encounter between the sinner and God. How does an infinite, perfect God who is wondrous in all His ways, unbounded and uncontainable, meet the finite human sinner who is mortal and suffers from innumerable limitations? Where might such an encounter take place? How is this in so many ways diseased human existence even possible, in light of the omnipresence of the divine? How can perfection tolerate, let alone commune with, imperfection?[1] Repentance as a category of religious action and inquiry seeks to answer precisely these questions. It challenges without reservation the most compelling sort of contradiction—that between sinner and sage, wicked and wise, man and God. Complete reconciliation of these extremes is impossible. Self-identity between man and God is not an option for man in the religious universe. On the other hand, it is equally inconceivable that the gap dividing imperfection and perfection is so great that no relationship exists between the two. The contradiction between them must somehow be maintained while it is at the same time resolved. One who realizes the irreversible and grave nature of his sins, but wants to live despite them, must ask— how can I and my past, without being obliterated and vanishing, be redeemed? Tanabe sin * coincidentia oppositorum * transformation sin Tanabe asserts that religion differs from philosophy in that “religious thought is by nature the opposite of philosophy, which begins from a critique of doctrine and makes self-witness the main thing.”[2] Philosophy is a critique of tradition and therefore must categorically question all that it inherits or towards which it turns its attention. Religion is also a critique but it differs from philosophy in its object of criticism—religion critiques thoroughly something philosophy plainly cannot, i.e., the self. The philosophical critique of the philosophical self, as we saw, can lead to religion insofar as it facilitates a death of the self being critiqued. But once intensive self-evaluation begins, along with it ensues the radical negation of the self, the end of philosophy and entry into the realm of the religious. What does religion discover in its critique of the self that philosophy cannot? The recognition of sin is the abysmal depth to which religion is able to descend in its critique of the self, but which philosophy will never grasp. Sin makes no sense as a philosophical category. Its character is self-accusatory and self-deprecatory. It actually requires the negation of the self, that the self place its own existence—its very capacity to comment on itself—in grave danger. Understanding the character of sin is the first step in understanding the gesture of repentance, for the activity of the latter maintains as its purpose the eradication, or transformation of the former. Sin as Tanabe interprets it exists because we live in what Shin Buddhism calls the time of mappô, the so-called “latter days of the law,” the days so far removed from the teachings of the last Buddha Gautama that the dharma, the true teachings of the Buddha, have fallen disastrously into decline. Because of its historical nature, there is no way at all to diminish this situational sin in which we are currently entangled. With each passing moment, our predicament worsens and becomes more lamentable. Phenomenologically, the story of sin is more complicated. Tanabe proposes that we experience sin on several different levels. These level are expressed in the nineteenth, twentieth and eighteenth Vows of Amida Buddha.[3] The Buddha Amida, according to Shin Buddhist soteriology, is the future Buddha, the Buddha who currently stands at the threshold of salvation but refuses to take the final step for the sake of saving all suffering sentient beings. In his total devotion toward this end, he makes a series of vows aimed at saving different sorts of current aspirants toward enlightenment. The first of these, the nineteenth, is the vow to save all sentient beings who perform virtuous deeds. Here sin can be understood in terms of its opposite—appropriate ethical action. According to this vow, he who lives the ethical ideal is guaranteed salvation. Thus, the first moral failure—the first sin—is failure to live according to such an ideal. We are first sinners in that we are unable to do what is right.[4] Amida’s twentieth vow is to save all those who even aspire sincerely to do good and be saved. This is the “Vow Assuring the Aspirant” of his salvation. Here also sin can be understood in terms of its opposite. Whereas in the nineteenth vow the sinner could not act in accordance with moral principles, the fault of the sinner of the twentieth vow is somewhat less concrete. He fails not only to do what is right, but also even to want to do what is right—perhaps even to want to be saved. In the age of mappô, the latter days of the law, not only the prospect of ethical action, but also the sincerity of intention in action, even in conceiving of one’s own salvation, is a problem. We are sinners in that we also are unable even to want what is good.[5] In the final and so-called Primal Vow, the eighteenth vow, Amida pledges himself to save all those who say nembutsu, the calling of the Buddha’s name with sincere faith. “If, after I have attained Buddhahood, the sentient beings in the ten quarters who have Sincere Mind … to be Born in my country, should not be Born, even with ten utterances (of the Nembutsu), may I not attain Perfect Enlight­enment.”[6] Here the aspirant arrives at the final declaration of his wholly sinful nature—nothing of his own devising can procure his salvation, and only utter reliance on the saving grace of Other-power can save him. The utter resignation of the aspirant in the eighteenth vow constitutes the basic beginnings of the act of repentance. Both the ethical and volitional dimensions to sin, that is, the inability both to do or even to want to do good, cause the penitential resignation of the aspirant. Shinran’s religious genius, according to Tanabe, is his emphasis not only on sin’s ethical nature, but also on its existential-somatic or volitional character. “Even though I can understand intellectually that the self’s true countenance is none other than the Buddha himself, I cannot witness to this out of my own experience.” [7] We have only intimations of reality’s true nature. So utterly absent is the Absolute from our lives that it exists for us as only a remnant of an idea long forgotten. We are sinful for the purity we cannot even fathom, much less achieve. We cannot feel even the true sincerity of aspiration. What we do know to some degree is the extent to which we are ignorant of our sinful condition. Here Tanabe compares himself to Socrates, who begins with the irony of “the knowledge of ignorance.” Socrates’ confession of ignorance mediates his acquisition of true wisdom.[8] It is a necessary first step. Similarly, Tanabe’s aspirant who desires purity so ardently begins by acknowledging that the only thing pure about him is his recognition that not even a trace of purity abides in his being. It is vital to Tanabe’s religious and philosophical thought that sin, as it exists both ethically and volitionally, never be eradicated from our understanding of the human condition. In accordance with both his and Soloveitchik’s desire for a true dialectics in the West, Tanabe insists that both extremes of the dialectical spectrum must maintain their singular integrity. For the sinner this means that repentance must allow somehow for the purification of the aspirant even in his sinful state. Tanabe ultimately needs a logic that defies rational explanation, a logic which allows me to be both sinner and saved at once. Indeed, the ultimate religious dialectic for Tanabe would declare the sinner saved precisely because he is sinner, and for that reason only—a situation in which the greater the gravity of the sin, the more certain the salvation of the sinner. Man is redeemed not despite his sinful nature, but because of it. Thus, the greatest imaginable source of negation becomes the exclusive catalyst by virtue of which man may participate in the greatest imaginable act of affirmation.[9] Tanabe turns to the possibility of repentance because he suspects that only therein is such a paradoxical logic possible. The heights attained by the repentance of zange are predicated upon the severity of the sin which provokes it. In this sense it is literally the most “fool-proof” of religious gestures—not only can the greatest fool perform it adequately, but in fact repentance is in a sense meant specifically for those least capable of doing it.[10] Repentance exists for the incapable, for those who otherwise are unable to abide by ethical ideals, for sinners. One who is not able to repent with heartfelt sincerity, who is arrogant and sinful—it is for him specifically that a way of repentance exists and he more than anyone is meant to repent most spectacularly, not despite his inabilities but just because of them. “These very defects themselves give rise to the zange that helps us penetrate them and see through them for what they are.”[11] Even to criticize the life or idea of repentance, i.e., the religious life, from a secular perspective, Tanabe says, would be to further fuel the desperate need for it.[12] Criticism points to fault and the necessity of overcoming the limited self. It therefore helps the individual being criticized to hearken to the call of what might rectify him. This formulation of the logic of sin in repentance is consistent with the integrity of Tanabe’s philosophical thought as articulated earlier. It is sin itself which affords a place for Divine Perfection in the world. Tanabe’s true dialectics posits the Absolute in the mediation of the relative. Divine Perfection as affirmation in no way precedes the negation of sin, by the same dialectical logic that prevents unity from taking priority to opposition in dialectics.[13] The moment of affirmation of the eternal Absolute must be simultaneous exactly with the moment of the negation of the mortal sinner. Sin is redeemed, according to Tanabe’s absolute dialectics as well as to Soloveitchik’s philosophy of repentance, not through perfection’s eradication of impurity, or the destruction of evil by good. The redemption of sin cannot be affirmation simply negating negation en toto, for each affirmation itself is yet incomplete and suffers an aberration or rupture in its own being. No such unadulterated pure affirmation is known to man such that exists so free of imperfection that it might be used to annihilate sin in this world. Perhaps in times closer to those during which Gautama Buddha taught the true dharma such things were possible. But in the time of the latter days of the law, mappô, the expiation of sins and the purification of the sinner begin only negatively in the action of self- negation. Repentance, to wit, does not begin when the good proceeds to condemn the evil, for no such unstained good exists that it is not itself sullied somehow by the far reaching expanse of evil and imperfection. Repentance, if it comes at all, comes when the sinner condemns himself and casts himself away to die. In the sinner’s recognition of his own sin he comes to understand his deeply corrupted nature in a movement of self-negation. Yet this same gesture of recognizing and abdicating the sinful self is the act of repentance and restores the sinner to life. What exactly occurs in repentance to make this happen? Why should the negation of the self become the only way that the self might be affirmed and exalted again? What is the nature of the dynamic taking place? Tanabe answers that it is the fact that the self consciousness of inauthentic existence belongs to authentic existence that allows negative awareness to be the basis of self-transformation. “It is utterly important to realize that it is not the subject of evil but the subject of goodness that comes to the awareness of the structure of evil.”[14] Though the sinner is so limited that he may not be able to use any side of himself to eradicate the sin, his very awareness of sin as sin demarcates the starting point of his penitential journey. As finite being, the essence of the sinner, even before he repents, is being-as- negation. Then, in his open negation of himself in the penitential action of zange the sinner negates, as it were, his own sinful being-as-negation. As the negation of negation, the sinner’s repentance, which begins in his self-awareness of his sinful state, becomes an affirmation. Tanabe is able to suggest the possible unity of the opposites of sinner and saint, therefore, through the mediation of negation.[15] This Tanabe identifies as the negative determination of the whole in finite being.[16] Of course, this journey from negation to affirmation is not wholly the finite being’s own. His realization cannot originate in himself alone. He is a sinner and suffers from the exceedingly rotten core of a sinner. Though only a slight step toward his ultimate salvific goal, even the realization of his sinful nature as the beginning of his penitential journey is initiated by Other-power, and not by self-power. Only the sinner can fathom what it means to “live by grace,” because even his first baby step toward transformation begins not within himself but from a source of purity outside of his sinful self. Yet, such an understanding—the very fact that the sinner in his deep vulnerability realizes his sinfulness—means that somewhere ‘in him’ abides the mind not of a sinner but of a saint. On the other hand, yet again however, whatever that saint in the sinner understands of grace depends wholly on the perversion of the sinner within the man. The more one is a sinner the better he understands what it means to live by grace. Tanabe resolves this paradox by interpreting the origin of the sinner’s supernal wisdom to be outside the sinner, given to him by the grace of Other-power.[17] Sin, as the assertion of the self’s power over and against Other-power, serves as a mediator, as a relative absolute allowing for the open acceptance of grace by the sinner from the Other-power against which he rebels. The self is assured salvation by means of that which most threatens its selfhood. The grave misgiving of the sinner about his soul’s fate because of his sin becomes the guarantor of his salvation in repentance. It is only by virtue of this sin that he might be grateful for what the divine has granted him. “The power urging us to forsake ourselves is at the same time the power that reaffirms our once negated being.”[18] What forsakes us also saves us. “Repentance of such sin, the metanoetical awareness of the accumulation of sins, is the true mediating force between our being and the activity of the absolute.”[19] The pain of negation in the historical shortcoming and the insincerity of the fragmented sinful being become the basis for the joy of affirmation in the gratitude for salvation of the penitent in his rebirth. About the suffering sentient beings who are destined to be saved by the Buddha’s Great Compassion Shinran says, “without being made to sunder their great passions, they are brought quickly to the realization of great nirvana.”[20] Tanabe understands this to mean that, evil becomes the cause for the finite being’s connection to the Compassionate One’s Being. The evil of the sin is able to do this without diminishing one iota; on the contrary, it increases more and more. Sin is viewed from the perspective of unbounded gratitude for the path of repentance toward the love of the Buddha which it opens up for the aspirant. As negation itself, sin is never threatened by negation; it indeed draws its source of strength to look toward the possibility of salvation precisely from the lowliness of the sinful condition.[21] Thus, what was impossible through self-power because of the intractability of sin, becomes possible through gratitude in the surrender to Other-power, even by virtue of that very irreversible sinfulness.[22] coincidentia oppositorum The evil of sin is transformed into bliss through gratitude. The greater the gap grows, the more violent the rupture between divine and human, saintly and sinful, the greater the gratitude of the sinner for the vow of salvation Amida makes on his behalf.[23] This is how Tanabe posits the coincidence of the opposites of human and divine, the meeting point of the finite and infinite.[24] The ethical self becomes the manifestation of the Absolute in its confession of inability and powerlessness. Without ceasing to be ordinary and ignorant, man is allowed an inroad to the sublime life of the saintly through the confession of his sinfulness. Repentance enables finite beings “to participate in nirvana without being released from bondage to worldly passions.”[25] The Buddhist image of the lotus in the fire, surrounded yet unconsumed by its flames, Tanabe tells us, portrays ideally the condition of the sinner who is at the same time the saint. The dialectical identification of sinner and saint, infinite and finite, Buddha and sentient being which occurs in the penitential act can be understood in terms of the true meaning of the bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism.[26] The Buddha Amida is at present not actually a Buddha. He stands on the brink of salvation, at the veritable threshold of Buddhahood, but does not enter for the sake of the myriad suffering sentient beings. He reenters the stream of suffering, not as a Buddha, but still to some extent as a suffering sentient being. His is not an insincere sacrifice, a superficial re-immersion into the world of the blind and ignorant that is actually aware of itself as true wisdom simply costumed in the thin veils of suffering and desire. He, to some degree, takes upon himself again the yoke of blindness and ignorance, becoming again that from which he worked so hard to liberate himself, for the sake of the suffering many, so that he might be amongst them again to work for their salvation. Having truly become blind again to the nature of ultimate truth, he has to some extent even forgotten his sacrifice and lives as others live, as a suffering sentient being. He is like each of us. Due to his interpenetrating and omnipresent nature, he, in fact, is each one of us as we make our ways blindly through the world. In this sense, all sentient beings, whether they are partially awakened or completely blind, are Buddhas who have sacrificed their salvation for each other’s sake. All acts of the self on behalf of itself are just reaffirmations of each individual’ s bodhisattva vow to become an ignorant being again so as to save the myriads of sufferers from their otherwise bleak doom. That is, all acts of self-power, of the suffering sentient being still immersed in ignorance, become acts of Other-power, of the benevolent bodhisattva who, working for the salvation of all mankind, remains and continually chooses to remain immersed in ignorance and sin.[27] The mediated self-identity of Other-power and self-power in Tanabe’s thought is also expressed in terms of notions of ôsô and gensô. Ôsô, going forth to the Pure Land from samsara, is the movement of the relative, suffering sentient being who repents and moves forward toward his salvation thereby. Gensô is the correspondent movement of the bodhisattva who returns from the Pure Land in order to attend to the salvation of other sentient beings. “The mediating character of gensô is none other than the metanoetic conversion that takes place in ôsô.”[28] The movement of the sinful being as he aspires toward salvation is simultaneous with and actually self-identical to the movement of the saintly bodhisattva who returns to save the latter. The hand that reaches to take is the same hand that extends itself in the giving. The more the aspirant progresses toward Buddhahood, the more he becomes the bodhisattva who is thrown back into the world of the suffering sentient beings in order to save them. Here, the presence of one thing signifies its opposite. “The Buddha’s coming to himself … is at the same time his going out to the relative world.”[29] The more highly exalted one becomes, the more deeply immersed in sin he wishes to be, so that in becoming sinful he may descend to the deepest depths of hell to save the huddled masses who otherwise live at the lowest levels without access to the Buddha’s Great Compassion. In the coincidence of gensô and ôsô we witness how the relative and Absolute come into relief only in terms of each other.[30] Finite sentient being is the essential element in the expression of Amida Buddha’s Great Compassion, in his continual transformation from bodhisattva to Buddha.[31] Without the finite sinner, Amida would have nobody to whom he might offer his Compassion. The drive to self-affirmation is allowed to exist provisionally, but without foreseeable end, for the sake of the transformation it affects in Amida to love the finite being and save him from his own sinfulness.[32] Likewise, the independence of the relative is allowed for its own sake—for the sake of its own repentance and aspiration to the Absolute. Tanabe says that “selfhood is realized as the functioning of an ego allowed by God to work independently of God.”[33] But we must ask why God would make such a sacrifice to begin with and allow for the independence of the self. The independence of relative being is maintained as hôben, or the provisional being of skillful means to a divine end. As “empty being,” finite man is restored through, or rather for the sake of self-negation. Without such empty being the Absolute would itself be incapable of performing the act of Great Compassion.[34] That is, without the other, there is nobody for whom to be compassionate. As Soloveitchik expresses it, kindness cannot exist in a vacuum, for by its very nature it requires the interaction of beings independent of each other.[35] The Absolute itself suffers the fate of the particular by creating relative absolutes and thereby depriving itself of solitary, i.e. - absolute, existence. The Absolute allows for the independent existence of empty-beings and thereby relativizes and negates itself. It condescends to the relative for the sake of the relative. “It is necessary for the Absolute … to assimilate to them [relative beings] and to elevate them to [the level of] the absolute good by descending down into the place of the mediative movement…”[36] The self-negation of the Absolute is an act of love and compassion. However, this act of self-negation is not only for the sake of the relative. It follows necessarily that the Absolute, because it is Absolute, must embark upon this act. That is, the Absolute relativizes itself simultaneously for the sake of the relative, finite being, as well as for its own sake. The Absolute negates itself for itself in the sense that it cannot exist as Absolute and absolutely Compassionate without the mediation of relative beings for whom to be Compassionate. Authentic dialectics makes the existence of a primordial Absolute prior to relative being an impossibility. Partially, what allows the Absolute its self-identity as Absolute is the particular sort of negative relationship it shares with relative being. Its own self-negation is also its self-formation—it is born as it dies. In this sense, the self-negation of the Absolute for the sake of the relative mirrors directly the self- negation of the relative in repentance for the sake of mediating the Absolute. That is to say, the Absolute also performs something like zange, in a sense repenting its absoluteness and in so doing allows for the independent existence of relative being. The Buddha becomes a sentient being. Yet the relative being, in its own sinful state, must also repent and aspire to Buddhahood. So closely are the repentance of the Buddha as he becomes a sentient being and the repentance of sentient beings as they become Buddhas intertwined that they in fact become indistinguishable. The self-sacrifice, or zange, of the bodhisattva and his descent into the world of relative being is an expression of love.[37] Its voluntary self-negation is also its compassionate activity.[38] As such, the repentance of self-negation becomes a compassionate expression of affirmation.[39] Because it is an affirmation-qua- negation, we can say it is only an indirect affirmation. In Tanabe’s religious universe, generally and in particular with regard to the question of repentance, one never encounters the Absolute directly. Because the finite being experiences God indirectly and negatively, Tanabe says that “God exists without existing, and without being as direct being, becomes the absolute negative ground for all existing beings.”[40] The character of man’s encounter with the divine as negation makes divinity synonymous with Nothingness for Tanabe. Nothingness, or Absolute Nothingness alludes to the absolutely indirect and negative character of man’s encounter with the divine. It takes place in an act of repentance as the finite self’s negation of its own negative being. God when experienced is only indirectly experienced. Man’s relationship to God as it is depicted in much of the history of Christian theological thought, according to Tanabe, is vertically oriented. In metanoetics no such vertical relationship is possible. That is, no beam of light streams forth from heaven to enter man’s heart. The so-called private, personal experience of the divine, one which exists only between man-subject and the divine Absolute in an intensely individual encounter, is a formal impossibility for Tanabe. The Absolute cannot be placed next to or even above the relative, or relate to the relative as “one” relates to an “other.”[41] The Absolute, if it were to directly encounter the relative would simply become another relative. In such an encounter the being of the Absolute depends on its relative positioning in terms of the relative—either next to, above or below—and thus itself is relativized. In metanoetics no such relativization of the Absolute takes place, for in the metanoetical encounter man knows divinity only dialectically, never unilaterally. In zange the divine is known only obliquely. Man’s encounter with the divine must be mediated, thus enabling the Absolute to maintain its integrity as Absolute. If the encounter between Absolute and relative is mediated, what mediates this encounter? If man’s immediate experience of God is vertical—a connection or beam of light running from man to God, from below to above—the mediated experience of God can be described as horizontal. What does it mean to know the Absolute horizontally? Horizontally, man encounters God through his direct, immediate relationships with his fellow man. Only the transforming action of the individual in society can mediate freedom and the presence of the divine.[42] The interaction of the relative and the relative also mediates each relative’s encounter with the Absolute.[43] “The absolute tariki [Other-power] manifests itself in horizontal relationships between relative beings.”[44] Without the horizontal mediation of the Absolute in the mutual interaction of relative beings, the Absolute has no place in finite human life. Expressed concretely, this means that the love of God is realized in the love of men. For Tanabe, “God reveals himself in the fraternity of human beings,” precisely because “the love of God is realized in the love of men and the mutual love of human beings.”[45] The ideal expression of religious subjectivity, therefore, comes in the formation of the so-called “existential community,” in which God is mediated by human action in the realm of the ethico-social.[46] The mediation of God in the existential community is also for Tanabe an expression of Absolute Nothingness in that it is only through the self-negating penitential act of relative beings that such a community can be formed.[47] Because self-negation is the hallmark of Absolute Nothingness, which is synonymous with the horizontal, that is, indirect manifestation of the love of God in the existential community, people never cease being sinners though the love of God is in their midst. Indeed, it is only as sinners that they may negate themselves in a gesture of humility and afford a place for the divine in their lives. By this logic, says Tanabe, a believer may “attain the merit of nirvana while not stopping the human passions.”[48] The self- negation of the opposites of Absolute and relative in love allows for the former to approach, even identify with the latter in its sinful state.[49] Thus, through the model of the penitential community, Tanabe can propose tekitaiaizoku—the logic of antagonistic unity, according to which the Buddhist world of blind passions called samsara is equivalent to the realm of enlightenment and liberation known as nirvana, an authentically dialectical unity of opposites. The logic by which one extreme not only can exist alongside its opposite, but according to which one extreme indeed signifies its opposite, Tanabe believes, is true dialectics. Here sin necessarily means salvation, death necessarily means rebirth.[50] Through the incomprehensible power of salvation into which the Great Compassion is poured we are redeemed from evil passion and lusts (bonnô) without their being extinguished. Since grave sin and the tendency toward it still remain in zange, fear, gratitude, and blasphemy flow together and penetrate one another. It is here that a mediatory relationship is set up among metanoesis, salvation and sin, a circular process wherein the blasphemy and sin of honganbokori[51] can be transformed through metanoetical mediation, into a moment of salvation without the tendency to sin having been extinguished. Even the betrayal and profound sin of honganbokori are transformed into salvation through the mediation of metanoesis. Whatever passions, lust, and sin exist, they are all converted into salvation by metanoesis without being extinguished.[52] As the necessary condition for repentance, gratitude and divine love, evil is redeemed without being erased. “Metanoetics opens a way to salvation for ordinary people … Negation is converted into affirmation without being simply eliminated.”[53] Here what at first appears evil and unsurpassably bad, short of self- identifying with good, is made simultaneous with it in the mediatory act of repentance. In the words of Zendô, who writes a commentary on the Meditation Sutra, “The darkness of my own ignorance lights up for me the Great Compassion of the Buddha’s mind; my own inability testifies to my rebirth in the nembutsu.”[54] In the singular logic of the transformation of absolute mediation in zange, darkness becomes the sole medium for sparking light.[55] Or as Shinran phrases it in the Tannishô: “Even a good person attains birth in the Pure Land, how much more so an evil person.”[56] In search of something that maintains unity of opposites on paradoxical grounds— “a unity that leaves contradictions just as they are”—Tanabe arrives at the standpoint of repentance.[57] Based on the logic of negation, that is, on the ground of Absolute Nothingness, the formulation of this unity is a neither/nor.[58] What affirmation is allowed the self abides only in the self’s freedom to negate itself. [59] This contrasts with Soloveitchik’s proposed method of reaching the same desired end of true dialectics. Soloveitchik’s is a both/and logic which proposes unity in the simultaneous affirmation of both thesis and anti-thesis, instead of in their mutual negation. Soloveitchik’s standpoint of Being is antithetical to Tanabe’s Nothingness. This does not however mean that Tanabe’s is a philosophy of death and Soloveitchik’s a philosophy of life. Both embrace affirmation. Both, as we shall see below, emphasize the importance of mediation in the encounter between human and divine. They differ radically, however, when it comes to understanding the nature of that mediation. Mediation as a category is, however, the essence of each thinker’s conception of man’s encounter with God in the penitential act. Absolute knowledge for relative beings (philosophers) can only be affirmed negatively, as a keen awareness of our radically limited being. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe maintain this position. The virtue of repentance subsists in its dialectical nature—its profundity is directly proportional to our awareness of our own sinfulness when we practice it. Philosophy, our thinkers claim, has never been able to aspire to such a thorough dialectic. Merging with the Absolute can take place only insofar as we understand how other, how alien we are to the Absolute. The Absolute has a perfect knowledge of our finitude. Though we also fail even in knowing how sinful we are, we can in some sense make the contents of the self- consciousness of the Absolute identical with those of our own self-consciousness by coming to an awareness of our ignorant natures, performing zange and confessing our radical evil. In this way the self negation of our penitential act turns into an affirmation at the outermost limit of its negation, and resurrects the relative that … died behind the negation to serve as a mediator of the absolute without ceasing to be relative … as ‘empty being’ that … has life in its very death. [60] Philosophy’s dependence on and attachment to the relative’s finite powers will not allow it to attain such dialectical heights. The self-assertion of philosophy is not ultimately viable as a mode of being because according to Tanabe, finite man’s primary mode of engagement in the world during repentance is “being as upâya.” “Relative beings… move toward nothingness and … return to the world to serve as a means of enlightenment and salvation for others.”[61] Ignorant man cannot begin his religious transformation on the sublime plane of divine inspiration and self-assertion. The transformation of zange always begins in the relative world of history, and thus the world of crisis, negation, and sin. The beings and social institutions of that world serve as the medium through which the Absolute is realized.[62] The Great Compassion of the Buddha means nothing without relative beings for whom that Compassion is meant. “Tathâgata cannot exercise his absoluteness apart from his descent to save relative sentient beings.”[63] The independence granted the relative being, by means of which it ultimately sins, is given for the sake of facilitating the realization of its utter dependence on the Absolute in the action of repentance. In this sense, the independence of the relative, while absolutely necessary for the manifestation of the Absolute, is a false, or simply provisional independence because it depends on the Absolute granting it for its own sake. transformation If man comes to truth indirectly by way of negation, our potential for realizing the ultimate is commensurate with our distance from it.[64] “Metanoetics is as strong as we are weak,” says Tanabe.[65] The weaker man is, the more distant he is from his ideal state, the greater also his gratitude toward the Absolute for allowing him even to realize, however partially, his own sinfulness and begin the act of repentance. What self- power and self-determination cannot achieve in sinful being, gratitude can. Man is forgiven his sins, without the sins actually being eradicated, through gratitude toward Other-power and love toward his fellow man. What is the nature of this man who has been forgiven his sins and who approaches the divine in negating himself? He who has repented, who has died and been reborn, what is the nature of his selfhood? How does such a man live? What is the status of the relative self in repentance? Death and rebirth in metanoetics is not simply a return to the world of relative being for Tanabe—the world to which the penitent individual “returns” is not the same as the one which he left in his ascent toward the Absolute. Repentance is a conversion, both of the individual and the world in which he abides.[66] The original rupture and irrationality that is “world” for the individual before he performs zange becomes the basis for a higher stage of purification. The self, resurrected “from the ashes of the fire on which the old self has been consumed,”[67] makes its own defeat the basis for a greater victory. In zange “the ego is given up once and for all, but his initial negation is then transformed into new life.”[68] That is not to say that the initiatory sin and disjuncture that precipitates repentance is in some way extinguished. Tanabe’s conception of repentance is dialectical, which, to him, means that “opposition is … retained to the end.” Rather, instead of eradicating the opposition, the penitent individual submits to it. Indeed he dies before it, entirely negating his selfhood. Reciprocally, “death is turned about into an affirmation of new life, surpassing the opposition.”[69] As such, sin is not so much overcome, as it is redeemed, or perhaps we might say (as will be similar to Soloveitchik’s position) as it is elevated.[70] Though it is in some ways a future directed movement, synonymous with a rebirth which looks hopefully toward the horizon, temporally repentance is essentially backward oriented. It looks first to the past, toward the desire of reversing an irreversible yesterday, of somehow redeeming it. Through a creative element in the process of repentance, the sinner transforms past into future.[71] All visions of possible futures originate in desires to somehow reform the past; indeed, future aspirations really aspire to the past. “Rebirth in the future is already contained in the past as a destination.”[72] Past in metanoetics expresses the central motif of regret. Though no more salient in the conversion process than desire for rebirth in the Pure Land, which is the characteristic modality of future, regret of the past and transformation of the past makes future aspirations possible. Thus past for Tanabe is much more than simply memory. It is the source of possibility. Repentance for Tanabe signifies a death-and-rebirth of the self, a transformation predicated necessarily on evil toward good, and an orientation to the past for the sake of the future. It is also by its nature continual. Never a “once and for all” attainment, the encounter with the divine in the penitential gesture must be mediated continuously lest repentance become a one time event instead of a mode of being. Self- abandonment, the self’s utter and complete death unto itself, must be a continual action, a relentless self-transformation through negation.[73] The sinful self regenerates itself only to destroy itself again and again. The moment even the slightest attainment is achieved in the penitential transformation, remnants of the sinful ego arise to gleam proudly over what it believes to be the self’s accomplishments and must in turn be vanquished. So inexorable is the radical evil of the human self, even when that self is diligently occupied in the pursuit of all that is worthy, that it “forever trails the concrete nembutsu of Other-power like a shadow.” [74] Even complete repentance destroys itself. The opportunistic self capitalizes on the greatness of the merit it thinks it has attained especially when its repentance is perfect, and therefore cancels out the very merit it gained by demonstrating its ingratitude and arrogance. Yet despite the inherent impossibility of perfect repentance, the finite self is left with no other recourse before the divine but to repent—thus making the action of zange of necessity continuous and continually repetitive. Soloveitchik sin * self-assertion and divine withdrawal * elevation sin Soloveitchik approaches the problem of sin on two separate planes, one practical, the other, volitional/epistemological. Sin explains the “agonizing gap between knowing and doing what is right,” on the one hand, and, on the other, man’s inability to appreciate what is right, to know it is right to the fullest extent possible or even to want it because it is right.[75] As I have presented him above, Tanabe operates under similar categories. Practically, or ethically, sinfulness for Tanabe is man’s inability to do what is right; volitionally, it is his inability even to aspire sincerely toward the good. Tanabe in this latter aspect of sin identifies not an epistemological problem but a volitional problem. True, he admits, man will never know how sinful a condition he really exists in, but more importantly, he can never bring himself to genuinely will himself to want to exit such a lamentable predicament. Soloveitchik, when focusing on the epistemological dimension of sin, emphasizes something more akin to a cognitive rather than a volitional problem—he points to our inability to fathom to what extent we are blessed in our blessings or even to what extent we are cursed in our various human defects and limitations. Thus, to sin is both to commit ethically unspeakable acts, as well as to forget or never fully understand the reality of the human condition as it exists in all its varied extremes. As an analogy to illustrate the latter, more ambiguous category of sin, Soloveitchik compares the sinner who repents to the mourner. The mourner embodies thoroughly a particular and particularly “tragic flaw inherent in the nature of man from which no one can escape.”[76] What is this obscure personality defect? Soloveitchik speaks here of the human inability to fully appreciate the people we love and cherish most as long as they are alive, well and with us. It is only after those most dear to us leave that we begin to lament all that we could have done while they were alive. Entering what Soloveitchik calls the darkness and hopelessness of the “would that I could” signifies the onset of mourning, of true and genuine lament for people not fully appreciated when they were alive. Man-sinner suffers from a similar sort of forgetfulness with regard both to his own once pure condition, which dies in sin, and also with regard to God whom he loses when he enters the dejection of sin. Though sustained by God, nourished by the sustenance He provides, and as recipients of His graces, we are also in continual amnesia and fail to remember the immediacy of His presence. This is itself a tragic shortcoming. Even if we abide by all His commandments and do all He demands from us, even then our appreciation of His awesome compassion is grossly inadequate, just as even those who showed the utmost honor to their parents and who esteemed their teachers and were dedicated to their husband or wife … must suffer the burden of feeling … guilt for not having done what they could while their loved ones were still alive.[77] How much more lamentable indeed is our condition when we do sin, and verily banish God from our midst by making what was once holy unholy. We mourn our rejection of Him as we might mourn the passing of a parent with whom we exchanged only bitter words when last we were together. The sense of irreversibility, of utter loss, of baseness and ugliness becomes a bitter scent that pervades the air and a mood of despair descends upon us like a dark sky.[78] Man bemoans both the absence of God and the irreparable damage he has inflicted upon his own once pristine self. Whereas Tanabe calls the action of repentance itself a death, for Soloveitchik death is present already in the act of sin as such. Sin is a death of the unblemished self. The morrow after the passing of one who was close to us is not unlike the morrow after sin. In both cases we yearn for the one lost to us—in the first case our longing is for another, and in the second it is for a part of ourselves. The nausea which ensues on this classical “morning after” sickens us to no end.[79] There seems to be no respite for the sinner who has discovered the utter negativity of his sinful condition. Thus, man according to Soloveitchik suffers from both an epistemological condition of sin that is unintentional and leads to estrangement from the divine, as well as the sin of ethical iniquity that is freely chosen and results in death.[80] Sin, in the sense of ethical transgression, is a somewhat less lamentable tragedy. It at least may be atoned for, and does not carry with it as serious a mood of melancholy or depression. Transgression of ethical norms is best expressed as et, one of the Hebrew terms often translated into English as “sin.” et literally means “missing the target,” having done something off the mark.[81] Man’s obligation, according to Soloveitchik’s reading of the canon of Jewish sources, is to scrutinize himself, discover where he has stepped off the path and correct what wrongs he can.[82] With regard to the particular transgressions of ethical sin, this is in many cases a possibility. The sin of stealing, for instance, can be in a sense “reversed” by restoring stolen property. But what can compensate for the continuous epistemological condition of ingratitude and unawareness that is also sin? Can the sinner in this case, who suffers precisely because he cannot know to what extent he sins, have any recourse beyond lamentation of his spiritually sick condition? It is important to note the urgency, and deep sense of spiritual estrangement with which these questions leave the sinner. The soul afflicted by their incessant and demanding cries to be answered suffers without relief. Such is the condition of the sinner, according to Soloveitchik—he endures a spiritual pathology, a sickness of the soul leading to a seemingly eternal separation from God and a feeling of solitude that penetrates to his marrow. Not only a condition of moral wretchedness, sin is also displeasing aesthetically.[83] Soloveitchik dwells on the sheer ugliness of sin, how it brings out so shamelessly what is lowest in man, leaving him metaphysically devoid of all redeeming qualities, or at least redeeming qualities enough to uplift him. Better had I who have fallen not been born, cries the sinner, for my own diseased existence is intolerable and I am sullied beyond hope of restoration. What Soloveitchik calls the “ontological” status of man undergoes a change once he has sinned. By “ontological” Soloveitchik here means that the sinner has acquired a new character status. In the terms of Jewish legal discourse, in some cases this means that the sinner is no longer even a credible witness.[84] He has been deprived of whatever qualified him as trustworthy or valid. To some extent, he has left the realm of the living, compromised what makes him human and forfeited all rights to reliability he may have enjoyed. Most disturbingly, man-sinner has driven away the shekhina, the divine presence, from his midst. Sin is the nullification of what divine being abides in man and the most direct expression of its negation. This means that not only has the divine presence exited man’s domain—indeed the divine has itself been damaged, harmed, wounded. Man, who God allows to stand before Him in all His majesty and glory, has inflicted harm on “Divinity itself” by perverting insensitively He who has trusted him and made Himself vulnerable to him.[85] As a result of man’s impudence and utter insensitivity to the harm his sin inflicts upon the divine, both man and God are sent into galut, exile, alienated from each other, scattered and banished to the most remote corners of the self, for man, and the universe, for God. “Exile means the absence of a home and the sinner is someone who has lost his way from home.”[86] What the possibility of repentance promises is the great Jewish messianic dream—an “ingathering of exiles.” Borrowing from the mystical philosophy of Chabad Chasidism as formulated by the second rabbinal leader (rebbe) of Lubavitch in his work entitled the Gates of Repentance,[87] Soloveitchik speaks of the ingathering of the fragments of the disparate soul in t’shuva, repentance. He pinpoints this movement as the essence of repentance. A necessary parallel to the repentance “on high” which will take place when all Jews are gathered from the four corners of the earth and united in the Promised Land, the return of the soul from the exile of its own spiritual confusion of sin is a repentance “on low.” What makes the sinner’s condition so regrettable, so much the object of lament, is actually its paradoxical condition. Soloveitchik suggests that the sinner, though he sees himself as beyond rehabilitation, is also as keenly aware of his former greatness and irrationally longs for it once more. The reintegration of his fragmented personality becomes his fantastic dream. Only in the recognition of his former purity can he appreciate the altogether pitiable state of his current deplorable condition.[88] The sinner’s self-accusation is predicated upon his visceral memory of what was once his justified self-affirmation. The sudden awakening the sinner has while in the midst of his iniquity, the sobering moment in his debauched intoxication, depends directly upon his shock at his own condition. The idea that one like himself, who once stood so magnificently upon the mountain of purity, can have fallen so pitifully into the abysmal valley of defilement fills him with awe, shame, and disbelief. Even as a sinner, man remains a dialectical being for Soloveitchik. He cannot concede, as Tanabe seems to, the utter debasement of man as existing apart from his genuine exaltation. What is, nevertheless, congruous in both Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s thought is the way in which both depict the expressive, passional lament of the sinner. Both further agree with the proposal that this lament is the first step on the path of repentance. Man-sinner, says Soloveitchik, moves from silence to tza’akah, or inarticulate cry, to t’fila, or formal prayer in his expression of the pain he experiences while in the condition of deep need in which sin leaves him.[89] Prayer emerges from utter wretchedness, from the Ecclesiastical despair of “All is vanity … all things toil to weariness … and there is nothing new under the sun.”[90] Man is a sinner, and his penitential lamentation must be commensurate with the misery of his sinful state. Sin is a spiritual pathology. The roots of this disease run deep into man- sinner’s spiritual substance, deep into the core of his metaphysical self, sparing no corner its venomous presence. It is true that remnants of his previous exaltation still exist within him. But the job of reviving what has died or been rendered unconscious in man seems so formidable a task that its achievement appears to be no more than a very distant dream. Man reaches an impasse. Again, an insurmountable contradiction looms over us, and plagues us with threats to vanquish our very existence. What is to be made of this negative element in man’s being, so polarly opposed to what is triumphant and divine in him? What can man do outside of submit to his own unhappy demise? Soloveitchik alludes to an answer to this question first exegetically from the tradition of Jewish religious texts and then conceptually from his own original adaptations of philosophical ideas hinted at in Jewish sources. We will try to do the same, and begin briefly to introduce Soloveitchik’s philosophy of repentance by offering for consideration his explanation from the exegetical tradition.[91] Soloveitchik explains that the Jewish people are entitled to the city of Jerusalem only on account of the inherent k’dusha, holiness of the city. Jews may lay no claim on a Jerusalem devoid of its holiness. In this context, Soloveitchik explains that the opposite of k’dusha is orba, desolation. They are two mutually exclusive categories. They oppose and contradict each other. Where there is the wholesomeness, orderliness and perspective of k’dusha, there cannot be also the desolation, debris, and chaos of orba. Jerusalem without its holiness is a desolate city, and as such belongs with no certainty to the Jewish people. Or so, Soloveitchik states, one strand of the tradition has always viewed the issue. The actual claim that the desolation of orba and the order of k’dusha are incompatible comes from a verse in a passage from the book of Leviticus. The passage from the Penanteuch reads, “And I will make your cities a waste … and I will make your sanctuaries into desolation and I will bring the land into desolation and your enemies, that will dwell thereof, will be astonished.”[92] This passage lends itself to two possible interpretations. The first, as well as the one the tradition has accepted most favorably, would read the passage as meaning that k’dusha, or sanctity will be terminated since waste and holiness, desolation and greatness are mutually exclusive. “By destroying the physical sanctuaries I will destroy [also] the idea of k’dusha which hovers over them,” God seems to be saying. Soloveitchik suggests that we might interpret the passage in an entirely different light. It might in fact be that God is saying “I will physically destroy your hallowed houses [but] nevertheless they will remain holy in spite of everything.” It might be that God here declares to man the utter indestructibility and intractability of the holiness that dwells in the city by pointing out that even when it is physically destroyed it will still remain completely sacrosanct. Thus the astonishment of “your enemies”—they will see the physical destruction of the sanctuary but sense its holiness nevertheless and be astonished that the two can coexist. Notice that this interpretation would not entail diminishing completely the difference or even the opposition between the desolation of orba and the holiness of k’dusha. According to Soloveitchik’s reading, a further distinction is drawn between spiritual and physical destruction which allows for the possibility that both the former and the latter can exist simultaneously without conflict. The sanctuary might be physically destroyed but retain its spiritual sanctity. Which interpretation—Soloveitchik’s more unusual version, or the tradition’s otherwise more common one—is correct? To answer this question, Soloveitchik calls on the third mishna in the third chapter of the tractate Megilla in the Talmud. In one section of the tractate the question of whether or not the laws of a bet k’nesset, house of assembly, apply to a bet k’ nesset that has been destroyed or consumed by fire. The mishna answers unequivocally yes: all those laws which apply to a physically undamaged bet k’ nesset apply also to one that has been so damaged; “for it says,” relates the mishna, “Even though they are desolate … the holiness does not disappear.” Applying this idea to our present case, the sanctity of the city of Jerusalem, established eternally (according to Maimonides) by King Solomon dwells in the city undiminished by Jerusalem’s physical desolation. Using the principle developed from this particular exegetical idea, Soloveitchik extrapolates more generally that “God abides in splendor and in grandeur, in the vast stretches of the universe as well as in the desolation, loneliness, [and] bleakness of the bet hara’a, the house of evil.” The two images of the city—one desolate and the other exalted—are reconcilable with one another, for God is not absent anywhere, and abides everywhere, even in what seems to be desolation. Similarly, Soloveitchik argues, what is desolate in man cannot vanquish the presence of the eternal within him, which remains unaffected by the threat of nihility because it exists in a class all its own.[93] self-assertion and divine withdrawal Above we alluded to the beginnings of an authentically stubborn difference between Soloveitchik and Tanabe’s conceptions of sin. The latter sees sin as a negation through and through. Through the “negation of negation” in gratitude, repentance and humility affect an oblique yet crucial affirmation. But the character of this affirmation is entirely negative. In his conception of sin’s dialectical predication on greatness, Soloveitchik hints at an affirmation of the individual that is not understood primarily in terms of his self-negation. Though it influences man’s move toward repentance and his desire again for purity and holiness, sin itself is not synonymous with that move. Though the relationship between negation and affirmation of the self is, from Soloveitchik’s standpoint, one of extraordinary intimacy, as it is for Tanabe, the qualities of affirmation and negation do not seem to reach the level of interpenetration and indistinguishability for Soloveitchik as they do for Tanabe. For Tanabe, as we saw, ôsô or ascension to the Pure Land, is experienced as simultaneous with and indistinguishable from gensô or descent into the world of blind passions. Thus, for Tanabe, in a sense, Buddha is sentient being. Soloveitchik, who comes from a tradition that has emphasized God’s transcendent qualities does not allow for the same kind of simultaneity or self- identity, however oblique, between human and divine.[94] Sticking instinctively to a motif characteristic of Judaic thought—that which assigns sacrosanct importance to drawing distinctions and maintaining difference (not necessarily, however, at the cost of forfeiting an awareness of interdependence)— Soloveitchik will not allow any one category to collapse into another. Each aspect of man—man-sinner and man-exalted—maintains its own singular origin in a realm related to but not somehow self-identical with its opposite.[95] Tanabe too does not allow for a self-identity of opposites and insists on the utter incommensurability of contradictories. In so doing, he remains loyal to both his Pure Land Buddhist and Neo-Kantian origins. Yet, he has a tendency to speak more directly to the way in which opposites so intimately mediate each the other that they seem to interpenetrate one another. Though he often focuses on difference and separateness, one could argue that he never completely relinquishes the Mahayana Buddhist insistence on the total manifestation of ultimate reality in the immediate world. There is an equally great tradition of dissolving distinctions, dichotomies and dualities in the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy from which Tanabe draws, as there is a tradition of creating and exponentially increasing them in Soloveitchik’s world of Talmudic scholarship. The conflict of these larger religious universes may be responsible for the apparent disparity, or we can say incongruity of Soloveitchik and Tanabe’s thoughts on sin. The willing self according to Soloveitchik plays an integral, irreducible role in effecting the transformation of repentance. Judaism (and especially in contrast to Christianity) Soloveitchik points out, “has always held that it lies within man’s power to renew himself, to be born and redirect the course of his life.”[96] As a master of creation and potential executor of social justice, man is partnered with God in the quest to rectify the disordered and violent state of the world. In fact, “everything depends on man’s will.”[97] Though it sounds almost antithetical to the idea of repentance as submission of the self as we have presented it thus far, the will of man is in one sense for Soloveitchik a supremely-powerful agent in religious life in general and in repentance in particular.[98] What allows the man of repentance such certainty in self-assertion? Soloveitchik answers that it is by virtue of the Halakhah and its ideal nature that man is allowed to reenter the world to transform it by means of his own will. With a mastery of the Halakhah, man approaches the real world with an a priori ideal of what it should be according to the tradition of Judaic sources. With these “images of the world which he bears in the deep recesses of his personality,” man proceeds to compare reality to ideal existence and attempts, to whatever extent possible, to make the former conform to the latter.[99] No category of existing thing is excluded from the far- reaching expanse of the Halakhah. Each object in nature or potential condition of man-subject falls into some legal category, and can somehow or another be understood in terms of a normative ideal. The Halakhah deals with every possible detail in the realm of the living and the dead. Since “objectification reaches its highest expression in the Halakhah,”[100] there is nothing unrepresented, neither in the realm of normative ethical action nor even in the realm of human emotion, [101] according to Soloveitchik, within the permutations of legal constructs in the Halakhah. The complete and true universe is the Halakhik universe. In this light, reality is only an anomaly in the ongoing process of actualizing Halakhah.[102] Ideal Halakhah is made actual through the initiative of man, through his determination and resolution to make it real. Like a theoretical scientist who does not care if his ideal constructs do not match up with reality, Soloveitchik’s halakhic man disregards the apparent impracticability or impossibility of his desired object of realization.[103] He is a man almost intoxicated with the force of his own determination to subordinate the actual and imperfect world to the ideal order of the Halakhah.[104] Halakhic man is an utter master of his ideal universe, so much so that even God is beholden to him, by the covenant He shares with him, to adhere in the holiness he embodies when His decrees are fulfilled in the study and practice of the Halakhah.[105] In this somewhat hyperbolic fashion, Soloveitchik describes the way in which Judaism urges man to charge forward Halakhically in his own repentance.[106] The Halakhah gives him recourse to change himself, an apparently definite way to respond to the call to repent when it rings out. The Halakhah prescribes a method by which the divine presence might reenter the world of the sinner and purify him again. How can the Halakhah do this? To answer this question Soloveitchik turns to the mystical concept of tzimtzum, or divine self-contraction. Though this term has a largely mystical interpretation, as first introduced by the Lurianic school of Kabbalistic thought in the twelfth century and later developed by the first Rebbe of the Chabad tradition of Chasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Soloveitchik presents here the halakhic dimension to the mystery of divine self-contraction. According to this standpoint, through the requirements of the Halakhah, infinity can “be contained in the finitude of ‘twenty boards in the north and twenty in the south and eight in the west,’”[107] that go into the construction of the divine tabernacle in the holiest of holies of the Temple in Jerusalem. Through the Halakhah, which “firmly established and clearly delimited laws, statutes, and measures for each and every commandment,”[108] what is essentially utterly immeasurable—that is, the holiness of the divine presence and the power of the divine will—delimits itself into particular precepts and quantified measures. Just as in the world of science where cognitive man turns his sense perceptions of qualities into equations measuring quantities, so too does the divine Absolute subject itself to the self-limiting process of transforming His infinity into a finite, particular order in the Halakhah. “Halakhic man craves to bring down the divine presence and holiness into the midst of space and time, into the midst of the finite, earthly existence.”[109] By realizing God’s statutes and ordinances in this world, man-sinner has recourse to redeem himself and make the divine presence descend to him. The Halakhah is the normative, exoteric expression of God’s will; but it is up to man to implement it using his own will. The result is that both man and God are redeemed and exalted through it.[110] The Halakhah is an intermediary between man and the divine. Its completely externalized, legalistic, objective nature makes it accessible and exoteric. Each individual Jew has direct access to the Halakhah. The halakhic man is not dependent upon anyone’s will or subjectivity besides his own. The Halakhah gives him the tools to implement the Creator’s will. He therefore enjoys a certain measure of confidence, a certain surety in his actions. Because of his confidence, halakhic man “is characterized by an almost festive dignity.”[111] He is possessed of a special kind of spiritual power, a sureness which outstrips fear. He is unconfused about the nature of his task and not at all skeptical of the importance of its undertaking—he seeks to redeem himself and the world in which he lives by means of the mediation of the Halakhah. This is, however, only one side of the dialectic. Repentance, though it is a volitional movement of assertion, requires also that man withdraw in a gesture of negation. Repentance means to retreat. To advance is not a cathartic act, but withdrawal is always for the sake of self-purification.[112] Surrender to a higher, more perfect will becomes the basis for the creation of a transformed self. Man-victor, who often “needs only to reach out and grab everything his heart has anxiously desired,” must in repentance recoil and relinquish his desires for the sake of absolution. [113] If the man of self-assertion can be compared to the triumphant Jacob who wrestles with the divine antagonist in the book of Genesis and defeats him, then the man of self-negation and withdrawal is like the defeated Moses who in the final of his Five Books must resign himself to the fate of never being able to see the land for the sake of which he suffered so long. Man in the mode of mesirat nefesh, self-sacrifice returns to God through humility and despair.[114] By virtue of the vast discrepancy between the pure, anointed man of God he could be, and the lowly desolate man he has become, man is afforded great knowledge of his own finitude. This sort of knowledge, comparable to Socrates’ notion that ultimate wisdom comes in knowing the despair of ignorance, is man’s point of entry into the penitential continuum. When the ideal cannot be met, and man’s failure dramatically overshadows his success, the only certain, pure knowledge he has is the knowledge of his own finitude in relation to God. Here Soloveitchik agrees with Tanabe’s proposal, that man’s self-negation must become the starting point for his self-regeneration. Though Soloveitchik makes clear that the movement of withdrawal applies only to failed man and not to man-triumphant, he emphasizes that all men at some time or another face defeat. Even if only on their deathbeds, all men must suffer the incapacitating reality of sin and finitude, and cry out like the psalmist “Out of the depths, I call unto Thee, O Lord.”[115] To be defeated is not an anomalous condition. All living beings must endure failure and live in crisis to some degree. What Judaism teaches, claims Soloveitchik, is just how to “accept failure and not get lost, to be defeated and not be disintegrated, how to be crushed and not be overcome by black despair and resignation.”[116] By prescribing when self- assertion, on the one hand, and withdrawal, on the other, is appropriate—when to seize and when to desist—the Halakhah guides the penitent individual along the path of return to religious purity. To explain more thoroughly the meaning of withdrawal and self-sacrifice in repentance Soloveitchik again invokes sod hatzimtzum, the mystery of divine self- restriction. Above we saw Soloveitchik’s halakhic appropriation of this mystical concept. Soloveitchik does not, however, leave the mysterious aspect of tzimtzum, or, as it is often translated, divine self-containment, undeveloped. To the mystic, tzimtzum is the act of withdrawal on the part of the divine that made creation itself possible. Creation of a finite world, logically speaking, is an impossibility if one assumes the existence of an infinite God. To add a finite world to a Being who exists infinitely is an absurd proposition. Infinity plus finitude always equals infinity. There is no “room” for finitude in infinity. If God is all-encompassing, all-inclusive, and unlimited, how can God create a universe that is separate from Himself and, unlike God, is finite, dies and operates within the confines of space and time? This being a conceptual impossibility, the mystics say that God metaphorically “retreats” in order to make room for the finite world. He steps aside and recoils for the sake of this world and from His love for it. Without this recoil, this self-sacrifice of God for the existence of the finite world, no universe could indeed exist. On the one hand, tzimtzum conceals a part of God—i.e., it seems to compromise His exclusive being. On the other hand, it discloses His will and love by making possible the existence of man. Timstzum is a dialectic act of concealment and disclosure. Were God only to conceal Himself in all His aspects from man, man would be completely severed from the source of all existence. Were He only to disclose His being in all its glory, then all the world would be overwhelmed and revert to chaos and void.[117] Tanabe’s suggestion that the Absolute exists in a self-sacrificial relation to the relative, allowing for the manifestation of Great Compassion, parellels Soloveitchik who says that the “Creation of the world is a sacrificial act on the part of the Almighty.”[118] God gave something of Himself so that there might be light for an other; by creating something with even relative independence, He to some extent challenged His own absolute dominion. “Before the universe came into existence, God was one [and] his name was one. By creating a world in general, and by creating many in particular, God … surrendered His aloneness … to the world.” [119] God allowed the finite physical world to share what was hitherto exclusively in His domain alone—being. Something else was allowed entry into the realm of existence, which, prior to creation, contained nothing but God. “God had to withdraw and contract Himself in order to let a world be born out of nothingness.” [120] And thus the divine withdrawal responsible for the creation of the world becomes also the vehicle by which divine love is expressed. From the viewpoint of logic, creation is a nonsensical act. The existence of the world is an absurdity because logic will not allow finitude to exist beside infinity. Without this absurdity, however, no world would have come into existence. Why did God take upon Himself the sacrificial burden of such an absurdity? Similar to the sacrificial act of the bodhisattva, who postpones his own enlightenment to reenter the realm of suffering sentient beings, God according to Soloveitchik, undertakes the burden of self-restriction for the sake of His creatures. God sacrificed His own inclusivity, His own “consuming infinity” for the sake of the world, that it might emerge and abide alongside Him. Creation of the world, being the first act God directs toward the other, becomes also the first act of divine kindness. But more important than why God chooses the act of withdrawal to affect the creation of the world, says Soloveitchik, is what man must do based on the reality of tzimtzum. If man is created, as it were, b’tzelem elokim, in the “image of God,” and imitatio Dei is a primary motif in Judaic thought, as Soloveitchik will want to claim, then the human being, a relative absolute being, must also perform an act of self-limitation. Man must sacrifice his share of the infinite, his seemingly absolute self—not only to allow for the existence of his own creations but to allow for the existence of the human other and the community of others. Without the existential recognition of the other, which means essentially an admonition of man’s own finitude and a withdrawal of the self’s absolute presence, no community is possible. For the Jew, every moment of communal existence is a chastening but revelatory moment. “This recognition is … a sacrificial act, since the mere admission that a Thou exists in addition to the I, is tantamount to tzimtzum, self-limitation and self- contraction.”[121] Thus Jews are required by the Halakhah to return greetings to those who have extended them—in some cases even during the most sublime moments of prayer, when in communion with God.[122] “If the Holy One, Blessed Be He willed a world to rise from nihility to disorder to bestow His love upon this world, then lonely man should affirm the existence of somebody else in order to have the opportunity of giving love.”[123] God, “the Master of creation, of the great cosmic drama, of the innumerable galaxies and uncharted plains of the universe,” allows man being by virtue of humilitas Dei, “humbles Himself to commune with the individual and abide in the tents of the poor and oppressed.”[124] Man must in turn do the same for his fellow. Here we have hinted at several key similarities between Soloveitchik and Tanabe. As was made explicit above, Tanabe’s conceptions of the Absolute self-sacrifice which allows for the existence of relative beings, as well as the bodhisattva’s self- sacrifice in his descent to save sentient beings from their own suffering, mirror Soloveitchik’s appropriation of the mystical idea of divine self-contraction. On both accounts the Absolute imposes upon itself irrational restrictions for the sake of the relative out of love and Great Compassion for the relative. For both Tanabe and Soloveitchik irrational divine self-limitation is the source of relative being and the expression of God’s love. It is also the self-negation in this action that is the model for repentance for man—for Tanabe because the bodhisattva becomes indistinguishable from the sentient being in the salvific act and for Soloveitchik because Judaism grounds man’s morality in the obligation to imitate the divine, particularly the traits of divine humility and divine self-restriction. A second similarity only hinted at above is the assertion that man’s encounter with God is more horizontal than vertical. This similarity points to the extreme importance of action in the world, and the love of man for his fellow, as a medium for the presence of the divine in man’s life. “Duty to man, basically, is service to God,”[125] says Soloveitchik in defiance of the notion that God is approached only directly in a personalistic, mystical or otherwise solitary realm. For Soloveitchik, divinity descends to man, as for Tanabe, only through the horizontal encounter of the relative and the relative. In order to aspire to a transcendental Absolute, man must concern himself with the particularities of the finite world. In fact, the search for the transcendental is simultaneous with the encounter with the finite; man approaches the infinity of the former through the minutiae of the latter. “By loving the parent, one loves God.” [126] The idea of a covenental community itself implies that somehow in order to meet God man must also meet his fellow man.[127] In fact, man’s meeting with God takes place simultaneously with his meeting with the human other. In the encounter of man and his fellow, each relative being mediates the presence of the sacrosanct for the other and for the community as a whole. Just as God lets go of his loneliness to create the community of relative beings, so must the community of relative beings, each one as an individual, emerge from solitude to create an abode in which God might dwell among them.[128] The overlap we find here in the thought of Tanabe and Soloveitchik with regard to the horizontal, communal, and ethical nature of man’s encounter with the divine is really a specific instance of an overwhelming concern on the part of both men for the idea of mediation in the relationship between God and man. For Tanabe, this means that no direct encounter of relative and Absolute is possible. The suggestion of such an encounter is ipso facto an impossibility. No authentic dialectic would tolerate such a manifestly illogical meeting. Absolute meets relative only obliquely, in such a way that the relative might glimpse the Absolute through the action of self-negation but never through the affirmation of self-identity. Concretely, this means that the Absolute resides in and only in the interaction of man and man in the species—the mediation of Absolute and relative just is the negative action of the relative being when it acknowledges the other relative being to form community. Though Soloveitchik speaks at length of the indispensability of the ethical- existential community, and the self-negation of man for his fellow in that community as an agent for the mediation of the divine presence, this is not the only or primary mediatory moment in Judaism according to Soloveitchik. The community for Soloveitchik is not just any community, nor even is it just any community that is also characterized by the attribute of mutual love. It is foremost a covenental community, which understands itself through a text by which it was linked to God millennia ago. The covenant (as well as the sacred tradition of the interpretation of that covenant) becomes the object which mediates man’s encounter with the divine. Talmud torah, study of Torah, becomes the primary mode of mediation between man and God. For Tanabe, mediation happens without an agent of mediation, without an object-mediator. Soloveitchik’s community, on the other hand, cannot exist without the covenant which forms it continuously. Only when Adam absconditus and Eve absconditus turn their minds to a common object of study and self-understanding is communion with God as well as with each other possible at all. Soloveitchik again borrows from the tradition of so-called rational mysticism in Chabad Chasidism to explain this textually and cognitively mediated encounter between man and the divine. Again citing Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the philosophy of Chabad Chasidism, Soloveitchik emphasizes that when a person knows and comprehends with his intellect … a verdict in accordance with the law as it is set out in the Mishna, Gemara, or Posekim, he has thus comprehended, grasped and encompassed with his intellect the will and wisdom of the Holy One blessed be He.[129] The Holy One’s wisdom is described as being “clothed in the laws that have been set out for us,” and can be in turn “clothed in the soul” as well through study and cognitive appropriation of these statutes and ordinances.[130] Soloveitchik asserts that man meets God in the cognitive realm of Halakhah. “The primary approach to God is the ideal-normative-theoretical relationship.…”[131] Here ‘cognitive’ does not imply limitation to the intellectual realm. It also intimates a metaphysical coincidence of man and God via the mutual apprehension of a common object of knowledge. The conception of man’s meeting with God mediated by talmud torah, the study of Torah, is both a complex one and has solid support in the Jewish textual tradition, dating back to the thought of Maimonides. Maimonides explains the unity of subject and object in the act of apprehension. During the act of cognition, the I-knower and the object-known merge into one entity—this is adut hamaskil v’hamuskal, the unity of the knower and the known.[132] “It is clear that whenever intellect exists in actu, it is identical with the intellectually cognized thing.”[133] By “intellect in actu,” Maimonides means an intellect actually engaged in the act of apprehension versus one that might have the potential to so engage an object but is at the present moment not fulfilling that potential. Man’s knowledge of objects is only imperfect, for he can never know all aspects of any given object completely. Therefore, he identifies only with those objects, and those aspects of objects, with which he is actively engaged. In this sense, there is always something potential or not yet actualized about human knowledge. This fact does not preclude humans from knowing, it simply precludes the possibility that their knowledge of any one thing can be exhaustive. God’s knowledge, on the other hand, is inexhaustible and infinite. He is the ultimate knower; there is no limit not only to what He can know but also to what He does know. Thus, because a subject-knower in a sense is identical to the object-known, God is everything that He knows. Hu hayodea v’hu hayadua, He is the knower and He is the known, says Maimonides. Most particularly, this means that God’s Torah, the source of divine revelation and of which He has perfect knowledge, is identical to God Himself. Torah as the object of talmud torah, the study of Torah, becomes the object which mediates man’s encounter with God. Any subject A who studies Torah appropriates it as an object of knowledge, and thus to some extent becomes Torah, proportionate to the degree of the perfection of his knowledge. Subject-knower B also may merge with Torah through learning its words. By association, A and B, using Torah as a mediator, may commune with one another, perhaps we might even say identify partially with each other. If knower B is man and knower A is God, then, talmud torah becomes the medium through which finite humans obliquely approach the divine—the common object of knowledge in their mutual cognition. The notion of hester panim, or the hiding of the divine face, implies, as does the Buddhist notion of mappô, or the world during the era of the decline of the law, that the divine cannot be approached directly. Both explain the seeming absence of God in terms of the sinful condition of humankind, that such a flawed or limited condition necessitates a certain distance from the Absolute. Restoring relations between finite and infinite requires that man somehow redeem himself to be able to approach God again. Yet the intractability of history, its stubborn persistence, makes it impossible to undo a thing once it has been done, to simply live as though evil did not and does not exist. Yet direct involvement with God requires that such a thing be possible. A mediated encounter with God, one through which man approaches the divine with a sort of oblique subtlety, is thus required. For both Maimonides (and Soloveitchik,) and Tanabe, God may be known only negatively, and thus indirectly. For the former figure and his contemporary exegitor, the danger of ascribing knowledge of God’s positive attributes to man is that even flawed man’s notion of perfection fails utterly to capture the Omniscient One’s true Perfection. “He knows with a knowledge that is not like our knowledge,” says Maimonides of the Creator.[134] Maimonides’ famous corollary to this rule amounts basically to an assertion that God also exists with an existence that is not like our existence. Radically stated, this means that “God does not exist—the way we exist.”[135] Or, to use Soloveitchik’s rhetorical formulation of the same principle, “If you say God exists and you want to subsume our categories of existence—it is a wrong statement.”[136] That man can have an intimation of what God’s existence might be like, however, is conceded by Soloveitchik. Man might glimpse that knowledge negatively—God is lonely, He is singular and unique. Man might know of God all attributes which basically tell us nothing other than that whatever it may be, God’s essence is unto Himself alone, mysterious and too particular to be easily apprehended by man. Yet man, made in the image of God, also knows loneliness and singularity, and thus identifies with God negatively in this way. “The flight of the lonely to the Lonely One,” is the adaptation of the Plotinian aphorism which Soloveitchik uses to describe this negative identification of man and God.[137] Both in their mutual solitude, and their mutual desire to escape from that solitude, man and God find a negative basis for meaningful knowledge of each other. United because of a seemingly coincidentally shared negative attribute—the distress of solitude—man and God may have authentic communion without the discrepancy between them, between finite and infinite, sinner and redeemer diminishing in the least. On the contrary, the gap estranging man from God, exacerbating the loneliness of each in relation to the other, seems only to strengthen the foundation of their negative unity. Precisely the same logic is what allows Tanabe to suggest that the very sin of the sinner guarantees his salvation. The sinner, so distant from the Absolute, may only approach the Absolute through gratitude and self-negation in repentance. However worse a sinner he is, so much the greater also is his action of self-negation and so much the greater his gratitude. Thus the very darkness of his sin turns into the source for the light of his salvation. Man-sinner, penitential man, according to Soloveitchik, arrives at a similar standpoint. From within the depths of his despair, he calls out to God in the words of the psalmist, “Also darkness before you is not darkness and night is bright as day and darkness and light are one.”[138] He is like Tanabe’s man of repentance, who exclaims in the words of Zendô “The darkness of my own ignorance lights up for me the Great Compassion of the Buddha’s mind; my own inability testifies to my rebirth in the nembutsu.”[139] Somehow for Soloveitchik and Tanabe, and in both cases by virtue of a dialectical mediation, darkness becomes the basis for light, sin the source of a more exalted proximity to God. elevation Tanabe sees the negation of sin as the basis for an affirmation in the absolute negation of repentance—i.e., the negation (denouncing) of negation (sin) in repentance becomes the source of the affirmation of the penitential self. As such, sin is indispensable for religious man in his quest to approach the Absolute, for it is negatively through his denunciation of the sinner-self that man finds his single inroad to divine greatness. The desperation-exaltation dialectic is similarly paradoxical according to Soloveitchik, who emphasizes that the further one is from purity, the further along that same person is on the way to achieving purity again through repentance. “On Rosh Hashana [the Jewish new year] … a new calendar year begins, and with every passing day one gets farther away from the starting point… But every passing day is also a return … [to] the Rosh Hashana of the next year.” Each step away from God is a step back in His direction as well. Homiletically and scripturally, the distance of sin has long shared a place alongside the return of repentance and the promise of redemption. As narrated in the Torah, this is the prophecy that, “In your distress when all these things come upon you … you will return to the Lord your God.”[140] The precise nature of that relationship is one of inverse proportion—the greater the distance from God in sin, the closer our proximity to Him in the return. To explain what happens in the process of transformation in repentance—how exactly that transformation from impoverished distance from God to fiery proximity to Him—occurs according to Judaism, Soloveitchik uses the language of elevation. Originating from the mystical and Chasidic traditions, the concept of elevation as a paradigm for repentance aligns nicely with Soloveitchik’s insistence on the possibility that the sinner may become a saint through the complex mediation of halakhic norms. What happens when the sinner is edified explains the necessity of sin in the first place—for the sinner is not simply restored to a status he once had but lost through the course of history. The sinner is actually elevated beyond what he once was and, by virtue of his having sinned, becomes something greater that he had been before. Soloveitchik invokes the idea that man is rewarded in accordance with what he has suffered, and in fact “elevates” the sin of his fragmented self, using it to his advantage ultimately, as it becomes the basis for his later exaltation.[141] The deep split of the soul prior to its being united may, at times, raise a man to a rank of perfection, which for sheer brilliance and beauty is unequaled by any level attained by the simple whole personality who has never been tried by the pangs of spiritual discord.[142] This ideal is embodied, for instance, in the figure of Job, for when Job surrendered himself to God after having suffered and sinned “the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.[143] Accordingly, to paraphrase a Talmudic adage, the true tzaddik, righteous man, is not he who never falls, but he who falls seven times and gets up an eighth time as well. Only the sinner, and only by virtue of his having sinned, can come to embody true sainthood. Religious man needs the downward movement of sin, which coils in like a spring, to propel him to greater heights than he would be able to attain from just launching from flat land. The goal of repentance is “to convert sin into a spiritual springboard for increased inspiration and evaluation.”[144] Comparable to Tanabe’s negation of negation, the movement of repentance does not seek to oppose affirmation to negation, fight good in order to eradicate evil, but rather to manipulate the evil and use it to further advance the causes of the good. The messianic task, says Soloveitchik, “is not to annihilate evil but to transform evil into goodness, sin into sanctity, hatred into love.”[145] Rather than destroy negative forces altogether, the man of repentance sublimates the energy, and indeed the substance of the sin, directing it toward loftier ends. “The very same hunger and zest which drove him to do evil and sin can be utilized to do good and observe the precepts.”[146] Thus the sinner may have access to stores of power and energy for having sinned that his unflawed fellow may not. “To the heights of the penitents even the completely righteous cannot ascend.”[147] Only from the suffering inherent in sin, from the abrogation of reality it effects, can the affirmation of repentance, the new reality inaugurated by the return, burst forth. [148] Thus, says the Talmud in the tractate Berakhot, “a man must pronounce a blessing over evil just as he pronounces a blessing over good.”[149] For it is from such suffering, according to Soloveitchik, and only therefrom, that his moral character is refined.[150] The Lord experienced from afar, says Soloveitchik, is dearer and more intriguing to his creatures. Distance mediates a more penetrating engagement. Man faced with the challenge of the secular world lives within a contradictory universe where the contrast of secular and sacred reaffirms and brings into clearer focus his commitment to the latter.[151] Man’s affection for his own beloved pure soul burns more deeply when he is uncertain as to whether he will be able to retain it or not. By giving the religious subject a means of elevation, repentance allows for the persistence of contradiction in his life—even requires the existence of contradiction so that the lower might aspire to the higher—but also gives him a way of understanding and responding to its insistent cries for resolution. Repentance is hakatuv hashlishi, the “third harmonizing verse,” which allows for the internal reconciliation of he who confesses in despair, “what is man, that Thou are mindful of him,” but who also declares in jubilance that, “Thou has made him [man] but a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honor.”[152] The process of emerging from the world of the first verse in the psalm, and entering the second, without erasing also the disparity between man and God disparaged in the first verse, is the essence of repentance. Accordingly, the logic of elevation dictates that nothing abides in the world that cannot be redeemed, by virtue of its very nature—whether it is evil or good. Indeed, what is more evil, may in turn deliver greater good for the intensity of its focus in one direction may become the basis for an uncommon drive in the opposite direction. To apply Shinran’s addage to Soloveitchik’s thought it would seem that “Even a good person,” is close to God, “how much more so an evil person.” The difference, we should note, between what Shinran actually says about the certainty of rebirth for the evil in the Pure Land and what Soloveitchik proposes in his assertion that the evil may attain heights to which the perfectly righteous cannot aspire, lies in that Soloveitchik means more to emphasize the possibility of that transformation through a self-initiated repentance, not necessarily its certainty simply by virtue of the sin. That is, for Soloveitchik, sin and the suffering of sin are indispensable for one who wishes to attain the greatest spiritual heights. Sin alone, however, guarantees nothing; nor should a person pursue sin itself, even for the sake of salvation in the long run. Though Tanabe (and Shinran) concur with Soloveitchik in some senses,[153] not wholly dismissing a role for human initiative in redeeming sin, they do emphasize the efficacy of sin itself as an agent for affecting transformation and repentance. Tanabe relies less on the role of the human will in securing that transformation. This difference granted, Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s standpoints with regard to the potential greatness of the sinner in comparison with the perfectly righteous individual reflect a formal as well as substantive similarity in their thought. The highest existence is a dialectical existence.[154] Here both Soloveitchik and Tanabe seem to agree. The trees of great contradiction bear rich and colorful fruit unmatched by fruit from the trees of other, more tranquil gardens. The treasures of the Torah were unfit for angels. The tempestuous world of internally fragmented man to whom these treasures were given was also unfit for angels. No angel was a slave that he needed God to free him; no angel works that he needs to rest on the Sabbath; angels know no jealousy that they should be honored for not stealing; nor do they cohabit that they might be ordered not to commit adultery. Only man, who exists as both slave and freeman can receive the Holy Book of God and its moral instructions.[155] For only man knows the worlds of both good and evil that he can choose to desist from seeking one and instead pursue the other. Further, it is only man who has been a slave who can fathom what true freedom might be, only the sinner who lives in the midst of the most intense contradictions who can fathom also the intensity and harmony of true purity. It is the lofty challenge of turning a slave people into a free people—a total sinner into a pure saint—which both embodies repentance itself and provides the authentically dialectical conditions for the attainment and expression of holiness in utter transformation. [156] So complete is the transformation of t’shuva, repentance, for Soloveitchik, that he compares it to a conversion. Man-sinner becomes man-creator and re-forms himself.[157] As Tanabe also requires, the sinner must die to himself, and in that death, in the words of Soloveitchik, is sanctified with a new identity. This “complete breaking away” is represented symbolically in the taking of a new name, both for the penitent and the convert.[158] From the molten flesh of man within the churning caldron that is the torment of repentance, a new individual is cast. Even contracts signed by the man of sin in the past are nullified after his repentance—or rather the party involved is considered as though deceased for the “individual has ceased to be the author of his own deeds,” and has come to live as though having extinguished, and been created anew.[159] The story of severance with the past is only one dimension of the relationship man- sinner shares with his reborn self. T’shuva means literally a return. In common parlance the verb is used to indicate that one is returning, as in returning home or returning to a place one has just left.[160] There is a notion that in repentance the Jew becomes who he really is, returning to his true personality.[161] Thus, inherent in the idea of repentance is the notion of repetition—both in the sense of returning home from exile, back to one’s native land from the hardship and alienation of being in a foreign land, and in the sense of returning to the place of sin, to the exact same scenario, but resisting temptation the second (or third, or fourth) time around. “Who is a penitent? Rabbi Yehuda said: ‘One who had the opportunity to commit the same transgression again and again and refrained.”[162] Penitent man does not simply blot out a sinful past. By re-encountering it, returning to it, and rectifying it, he transforms it. A man who repents only when he is fifty or sixty years old, can he simply eliminate his former self, a significant part of his identity? Somehow the sin of his former self must be connected to the righteousness of his newborn self in a way that reduces neither the lowness of the former nor the purity of the latter. Severance and continuity are dialectically and paradoxically intertwined in repentance—in such a way that the energy of sin, the vigor and greed with which man-sinner executed the deed, may be used for the sake of attaining the greatest good for repentant-man in his struggle.[163] The character of the sinner must somehow be re-integrated into the character of the saint so as to make more powerful the righteousness of the latter, just as, when incense was burned at the Tabernacle during the days of the Holy Temple, quantities of both the bitter and sweet smelling incense were burned together, for a small measure of the former intensifies the pungency of the latter. “This is the incense of the Day of Atonement,” say the Sages, a mixture of galbinum and odoriferous spices: Why is it necessary to adulterate the odoriferous spices with foul-smelling galbinum? So as to demonstrate that it is possible to take something evil and mix it with good spices and, as a result, not only does the galbinum not detract from the sweet smell of the incense, but this mixture of good and bad actually enhances and augments its fragrance.[164] To demonstrate the salvific potential of negation is a very subtle and profound religious gesture. To say “sin reveals to man the beauty of good,” or “there are new values available to man from the springboard of sin,” is to address the primordial theological question—namely, why do we suffer? Tanabe’s philosophy and Soloveitchik’s unique approach to the problem of suffering and sin emphasize the intractability of the negative element in religious self-understanding, its demanding and self-consuming nature, as well as its highly contradictory and problematic character. Both choose creative ways to integrate the problem into the larger philosophical paradigms to which they are committed. Both also choose to make the sufferer, the one who suffers moment to moment from sin—my sin—a very immediate character whose radical finitude, not despite itself, but indeed because of its very limited nature, paves the path to lofty prospects of spiritual greatness. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]. This is admittedly a highly Christianized formulation of the problem of repentance. Continual emphasis on the disparity between man and God is a motif more prevalent in Protestant theology than in Judaism, Pure Land Buddhism or even Catholicism. The formulation of the problem of repentance as such, we will see below, will be somewhat altered to fit more particularly the specific traditions to which Tanabe and Soloveitchik pledge their loyalties. But in the meantime, this particular version of the problem of repentance illustrates very well the way in which radical contradiction can become a central issue in religious life, perhaps in ways not as clearly articulated in our historical or philosophical studies above. We should note, of course, that the particular notion of sin upon which our discussion of repentance is predicated here is also not wholly antithetical to the Jewish tradition as such. In Ezekiel as well as in many writings of the so-called “prophets,” or in the Yom Kippur liturgy, a picture of man-sinner is presented strikingly similar to the one described in this section. [2]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 238. [3]. The Vows are enumerated here in accordance with the order Shinran enumerates them in his Kyôgyôshinshô. The reason why their order is non- sequential can be found in the meaning of the Vows. Unfortunately, exploring any more deeply the ramifications of this particular ordering would far exceed the scope of this paper. [4]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 201. [5]. Ibid., p. 202. [6]. Tanabe Hajime quoting Shinran’s Kyôgyôshinshô. Ibid., p. 202. [7]. Ibid., p. 170. [8]. Ibid., p. 16. [9]. Ibid., p. 228. [10]. Ibid., p. 125. [11]. Ibid., p. 128. [12]. Ibid., p. 3. [13]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 74. [14]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 152. [15]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 22. [16]. Ibid., p. 66. [17]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 5. Tanabe’s use of terms like “sin” and “grace” might seem to suggest that his reading of Christianity heavily influenced his understanding of Shin Buddhism. It is important to note, however, that while Tanabe is certainly very well versed in the language of Christian theology by the time he writes Philosophy as Metanoetics, it is not until later that he begins a thorough study of Christianity and identifies philosophically with its doctrine. [18]. Ibid., p. 5. [19]. Ibid., p. 6. [20]. Tanabe Hajime quoting Shinran’s Kyôgyôshinshô, Ibid., p. 258. [21]. Ibid., p. 257. [22]. Ibid., p. 238. [23]. Ibid., p. 25. [24]. Although we speak here of a kind of “coincidentia oppositorum” of human and infinite, it is important to note that we do not mean a complete dissolution of the relative world of form into the formless world of the infinite. For Tanabe, the finite subject never apprehends or identifies with the Absolute directly. He can fathom the boundless Absolute only negatively, in the mediation of Absolute Nothingness. The problem of Absolute Nothingness in the finite’s encounter with the infinite is pursued below. [25]. Ibid., p. 190. [26]. This is not a comparison Tanabe makes explicitly, but may aid our understanding of his conception of repentance. [27]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 210. [28]. Ibid., p. 220. [29]. Ibid., p. 210. [30]. Ibid., p. 236. [31]. Ibid., p. 211. [32]. Ibid., p. 27. [33]. Ibid., p. 137. [34]. Ibid., p. 214. [35]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Parashat Truma,” (taped lecture). [36]. Tanabe Hajime, cited by Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 88. [37]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 83. [38]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 175. [39]. Ibid., p. 88. [40]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 73. [41]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, pp. 234–35. [42]. Ibid., p. 278. [43]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 43. [44]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 7. [45]. Tanabe Hajime, The Demonstratio of Christianity, p. 133. It may seem odd that Tanabe, who we have claimed is a Buddhist thinker, here resorts to the language of “God.” By the time Tanabe is writing the Demonstratio of Christianity, he has made a significant turn toward Western Christian traditions, interested in what he believed was its strong social ethic. As he becomes more immersed in reading the gospels, he also adopts the theological terminology of Christianity. Tanabe has a tendency to appropriate both in substance and in style his objects of study. [46]. Ibid., pp. 133, 194. [47]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 55. [48]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, p. 280. Here Tanabe cites a text quoted by Shinran that can be traced back to Donran’s Oojôronchû. [49]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 102. [50]. Johannes Laube, “The meaning of gyô (practice) according to the Buddhist theologian Shinran and the philosopher Tanabe,” p. 109. [51]. This is the sin of “assurance of one’s own salvation and pride in one’s trust in the vow of Amida Buddha.” Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 12. [52]. Ibid., p. 15. [53]. Ibid., p. 16. [54]. Ibid., p. 252. [55]. Ibid., p. 189. [56]. Shinran, Tannishô, p. 8. [57]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 57, 132. [58]. Ibid., p. 133. [59]. Tanabe Hajime, The Demonstratio of Christianity, p. 129. [60]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 271. [61]. Ibid., p. 22. [62]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 98. [63]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 274. [64]. Ibid., p. 125. [65]. Ibid., p. lix. [66]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, p. 285. See also Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 260. [67]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 107. [68]. Ibid., p. 197. [69]. Ibid., p. 133. [70]. Ibid., p. 49. Soloveitchik’s appropriation of the mystical concept of elevation will be more seriously explored below. [71]. Ibid., p. 211. [72]. Ibid., p. 241. [73]. Ibid., p. 47. [74]. Ibid., p. 205. [75]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 6. [76]. Ibid., p. 257. [77]. Ibid., p. 257. [78]. Ibid., p. 149. [79]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Shiurei Harav, p. 73. [80]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 152-3. [81]. Ibid., p. 63. [82]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 107. [83]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 21. [84]. Ibid., p. 51. [85]. Ibid., p. 82 [86]. Ibid., p. 306. [87]. Sha’arei Hat’shuva. [88]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Shiurei Harav, p. 89. [89]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Redemption,” p. 65. [90]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 85. Soloveitchik citing Ecclesiastes (1: 1-9). [91]. The following exegesis is adapted from Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Relationship between sedras and haftoras—sefer v’yikra,” (taped lecture). All citations in the next three pages which are not footnoted refer to this tape. [92]. Leviticus (26:31–32). [93]. The importance of the above explanation is that it hints at the kind of assumptions and the methodology Soloveitchik uses ultimately to resolve the problem of sin with the possibility of repentance. We will explore these assumptions and that methodology with greater care below. [94]. It is, of course, crucial to emphasize that Tanabe is insistent on the impossibility of a self-identity of Buddha and sentient being in the immediate self- consciousness of the latter. He will not tolerate any logic that allows for Nishida’s “self-identity of absolute contradictories.” He does, however, clearly acknowledge the indeterminacy of the distinction between Amida’s identity and that of relative man. [95]. This topic is further pursued below. [96]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 182. [97]. Ibid., p. 240. [98]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 76. [99]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 17. [100]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 85. [101]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 78. [102]. Ibid., p. 28. [103]. Ibid., p. 29. [104]. Ibid., p. 63. [105]. Ibid., p. 78. [106]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Man and the Judaic Approach to Man” (taped lecture). [107]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 47. [108]. Ibid., p. 55. [109]. Ibid., p. 41. [110]. Ibid., p. 71. [111]. Ibid., p. 76. [112]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Interpretation of aggada—Sanhedrin 7,” tape #2 (taped lecture). [113]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Catharsis,” p. 44. [114]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 245–247. [115]. Psalms (130:1). [116]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “K’dusha v’malkhus” [sanctity and majesty], (taped lecture). [117]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 151. [118]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “K’dushas hayom” [the sanctity of the day], (taped lecture). [119]. Ibid. [120]. Ibid. [121]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Community,” p. 15. [122]. For instance, Soloveitchik points out that sometimes Jews are even required by the Halakhah to extend greetings to people during the recitation of the sh’ma prayer. See Talmud Bavli, tractate Berakhot 13a. [123]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Community,” p. 16. [124]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #3, (taped lecture). [125]. Ibid. [126]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Marriage,” (taped lecture). [127]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 45. [128]. Ibid., p. 60. [129]. Rabbi Shneur Zalman, Tanya, p. 19. [130]. Ibid. [131].  Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 87. [132]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Shurei Harav, p. 92, and “Dual Aspects of Man” (taped lecture). Soloveitchik also speaks of adut haohev v’haahuv, the unity of the lover and the beloved. He even suggests that this emotional bond to Torah might surpass in importance and intensity the intellectual bond which we explore here. [133]. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, p. 164. [134]. Ibid., p. 144. [135]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions” tape #2, (taped lecture). Soloveitchik is quoting Maimonides. [136]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #2, (taped lecture). [137]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #2, (taped lecture). Plotinus speaks of the “flight of the lonely to the lonely.” [138]. Psalms (139:12). [139]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 252. [140]. Soloveitchik citing Deuteronomy (30:1–2). The implication is “when these curses come upon you.” [Emphasis added.] [141]. The idea that man is rewarded in accordance with what he has suffered may be found in Avot (5:25). [142]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 4. [143]. Job (42:10) in Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 64. Soloveitchik believes Job’s sin was his unconcern for the welfare of anyone outside his immediate circle. That is why, says Soloveitchik, we are told that Job is blessed again by God only directly after he prays for his friends. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “K’dusha v’malkhus” (taped lecture). [144]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kodesh and Chol,” p. 25. [145]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 168. [146]. Ibid., p. 262. [147]. Talmud Bavli: Tractate Berakhot 34b. [148]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 56. [149]. Talmud Bavli; Tractate Berakhot 65a. [150]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 189. [151]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kodesh and Chol,” p. 26. [152]. Psalms (8:4), (8:6). Soloveitchik makes this point in Halakhic Man, p. 68. The idea of a “third verse” that reconciles two contradictory passages is codified as the last of Rabbi Yishmael’s “Thirteen Principles” by which the Torah is elucidated. (See the introduction to Sifra.) [153]. For instance, Tanabe would agree that seeking out sin for the purpose of transcending it and attaining spiritual heights through repentance is a deluded and destructive proposition. [154]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 88. [155]. Talmud Bavli; Tractate on Shabbat 88b-89a. Soloveitchik makes this point in Halakhic Man, p. 33. [156]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Leadership,” (taped lecture). [157]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 218. [158]. Ibid., p. 57. [159]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Redemption,” p. 63. [160]. It is also interesting to note that the word t’shuva also means “response,” as in a response to a question. [161]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Redemption,”p. 69. [162]. Talmud Bavli; Tractate on Yoma 86b. [163]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 256. [164]. Ibid., p. 264.