Changing Concepts of the Ultra-Orthodox Body Rabbi Avigdor Miller as a Test Case

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Changing Concepts of the Ultra-Orthodox Body: Rabbi Avigdor Miller as a Test Case

Yakir Englander, Religious Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60201, USA. E-mail:yakir1212englander@gmail.com. Profound thanks to my doctoral work mentors, Dr. Avinoam Rosenak and Dr. Orit Kamir, and to Dr. Henry Ralph Carse, who carefully read and responded, and translated this article from the Hebrew. The research was made possible under the generous auspices of a Fulbright-Rabin scholarship

In this article, I examine the entry of values perceived to be secular into Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought. These values are introduced in an unconscious manner, and thus may be traced only in light of the subsequent changes that occur in Ultra-Orthodox thinking itself. I examine this subject through the work of Rabbi Avigdor Miller on the concept of the body.Rabbi Miller, one of the twentieth century's most important spiritual mentors in the United States, was chosen because of the perceptible change in his thinking in the latter half of his teaching career, when we find external (i.e., secular)

values playing an increasingly central role. This led Rabbi Miller to alternative readings of classical Jewish concepts, and even to a call for significant changes in the manner of living a worthy Jewish life

CONCLUSION

This article opened with the assertion that Lithuanian Jewish Ultra-Orthodox thought internalized, indirectly, secular values, translating them into the language of the Jewish believer's life of Halakha. The fact that the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is, in the West, a tiny minority surrounded by secular majorities made the inroads of what they consider to be secular ideas into Ultra-Orthodox thought almost inevitable.
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Having said this, we note that such value-encounters, far from being fruitless, give rise to a unique cross-pollination. They bring to the surface issues that Ultra-Orthodox thinkers do not always find easy to grapple with, while creating uniquely acceptable translations of hitherto strange values.I have considered in this article how values perceived by Ultra-Orthodox Jews as secular, relating to experiences of the body, were incorporated into the thinking of Rabbi Miller. Rabbi Miller gradually internalizes the secular affirmation of the human body and of life in this world. Further, his description of the Jewish person rejects the very dichotomy between mind and body so basic to his own Ultra-Orthodox context, and bears more resemblance to secular-Western images of the body. For Miller, the worship of God must originate in a human person's natural experience of spontaneous self-awareness within the world, with special attention to sensory (physical) perceptions and to feelings
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Only from these beginnings can a person of faith move forward to the knowledge of the divine, and finally to the creation of religious experience.In forging his innovative theology, Rabbi Miller was constrained to come to terms both with subliminal secular influences and with classical ideas from the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish tradition that nourished him and within which he lived out his vocation as teacher. The fertile encounter of the Lithuanian Jewish Musar movement with values from outside its borders led Rabbi Miller to create a radical and personal theological translation of classical Jewish concepts, opening the way for a new form of Lithuanian traditional thought.