Finding Common Grounds in Dewey Exploring the Real Differences between Humanism and Orthodoxy

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Finding Common Grounds in DeweyExploring the
Real Differences between Humanism and Orthodoxy

• by Craig A. Cunningham and Tamar Friedman
• For the John Dewey Society/AERA Annual Meeting,
  April 2001, Seattle

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Agenda

• What is Orthodox Judaism
• What is Deweyan Humanism
• Some case studies in Modern Orthodoxy School
  Administration
• Appreciating common ground
• The educative value of traditions

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• Oxford English Dictionary
• Orthodoxy the quality or character of being
  orthodox belief in or agreement with what is, or
  is currently held to be, right, esp. in religious
  matters
• Orthodox holding correct, or currently accepted
  opinions, esp. on matters of religious belief
  not independent-minded, conventional

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• All of the things which traditional religionists
  prize and which they connect exclusively with
  their own conception of God can be had equally
  well in the ordinary course of human experience
  in our relations to the natural world and to one
  another as human beings related in the family,
  friendship, industry, art, science, and
  citizenship (LW 9 224).

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• A philosophy of experience will not try to cover
  up the fact of inevitable modification, and will
  make no attempt to set fixed limits to the extent
  of changes that are to occur (LW 5 271).

6

• Humanism also accepts a plurality of meanings and
  goods, seeking the full participation of all our
  powers in the endeavor to wrest from each
  changing situation of experience its own full and
  unique meaning (LW 5 272)

7

• Deweys humanism does not reject the relevance of
  religious experience or even of religion as a
  social institution, but it certainly exacts a
  surrender of that supernaturalism and fixed dogma
  and rigid institutionalism with which
  Christianity has been historically associated
  (LW 5 273)

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• Nothing is more immediate and seemingly sure of
  itself than inveterate prejudice. The morals of a
  class, clique, or race when brought into contact
  with those of other races and peoples, are
  usually so sure of the rectitude of their own
  judgments of good and bad that they are narrow
  and give rise to misunderstanding and hostility.
  A judgment which is adequate under ordinary
  circumstance may go far astray under changed
  conditions. (LW 7 267-68)

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• The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a
  conflict between allegiance to this method and
  allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of
  belief so fixed in advance that it can never be
  modified. The method of intelligence is open and
  public. The doctrinal method is limited and
  private (LW 9 27).

10

• A moral law, like a law in physics, is not
  something to swear by and stick to at all
  hazards it is a formula of the way to respond
  when specified conditions present themselves. Its
  soundness and pertinence are testing by what
  happens when it is acted upon (LW 4 222).
• No past decision nor old principle can ever be
  wholly relied upon to justify a course of action
  (MW 12 179).

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• the progressive secularization of the interests
  of life has not been attended by increasing
  degeneration (LW 9 46) in moral behavior.

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• Giti Bendheim
• While Halakha or Jewish law is generally
  conservative in nature, the strength of the
  halachic system has been its combination of
  reason, firmness, and flexibility. Through the
  ages, rabbis have interpreted Halakha by applying
  precedent to the conditions that existed in their
  lifetimes. http//www.womenandorthodoxy.org/ctddo
  c.html)

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• Deweys notion that intelligence is the
  application of the funded experience of the
  past (MW 12 238), developed and matured in the
  light of the needs and deficiencies of the
  present, and employed as aims and methods of
  specific reconstruction, and tested by success or
  failure in accomplishing this task of
  readjustment (MW 12 134)

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• Whilewe cannot actually prevent change from
  occurring we can and do regard it as evil. We
  strive to retain action in ditches already dug.
  We regard novelties as dangerous, experiments as
  illicit and deviations as forbidden. Fixed and
  separate ends reflect a project of our own fixed
  and non-interacting compartmental habits. We see
  only consequences which correspond to our
  habitual courses. (MW 14 159)

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• a dreary exile from our true home in the ideal,
  or a temporary period of troubled probation to be
  followed by a period of unending attainment and
  peace (MW 14 160).

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• the zealously devout (LW 4 245) type who is to
  be pitied, for the degree to which he is
  affected by unavowed impulsestimidity, which
  makes him sic cling to authority, conceit which
  moves him to be himself the authority who speaks
  in the name of authority, possessive impulse
  which fears to risk acquisition in new
  adventures (MW 14 162-63).

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• fixed ends upon one side and fixed
  principlesthat is authoritative ruleson the
  other as props for a feeling of safety, the
  refuge of the timid and the means by which the
  bold prey upon the timid (MW 14 163).

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• Rabbi Saul J. Berman The Haredi experiment
  starts with the assumption that the two worlds
  are so radically opposed that the only way to
  safeguard the Orthodox worldview is to maximize
  separateness. This required the development of a
  vision in which the ideal life is led entirely
  within the confines of the Orthodox community -
  men in kollelim institutions of Torah study,
  women at home, children in schools that reflect
  the desired uniformity of religious behavior.
  When economic conditions require adult departure
  from safe ground, the deviant experience should
  be minimized in time, in degree of intersection
  with the external world, and should not be rated
  any value for itself.

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• Rabbi Saul J. Berman, continued
• This approach further urges maximum separation
  from the external culturenegating of general
  knowledge except as a neutral tool distancing
  from cultural currents such as democracy and
  equality avoiding the mechanisms of transmission
  of the cultural values of the non-Haredi world
  and generally maintaining an attitude of
  spiritual superiority toward outsiders of any
  sort.

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• The Modern Orthodox experiment begins with the
  assumption that Orthodoxy can preserve its
  integrity and passion, and even be enriched, by
  its intersection with modernity, and that the
  interaction will allow Orthodoxy to bring to the
  broader world a clearer vision of the grandeur of
  Torah. On the other hand, this approach does not
  deny that there are areas of powerful
  inconsistency and conflict between Torah and
  modern culture that need to be filtered out in
  order to preserve the integrity of halakha It
  welcomes the opportunities created by modern
  society to be productive citizens engaged in the
  Divine work of transforming the world to benefit
  humanity. (Rabbi Saul J. Berman, The Ideology of
  Modern Orthodoxy, http//www.Shma.com online
  magazine, February 2001)

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• We who now live are parts of a humanity that
  extends into the remote past, a humanity that has
  interacted with nature. The things in
  civilization most prized are not of ourselves.
  They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings
  of the continuous human community in which we are
  a link. Ours is the responsibility of
  conserving, transmitting, rectifying and
  expanding the heritage of values we have received
  that those who come after us may receive it more
  solid and secure, more widely accessible and more
  generously shared than we have received it.

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• that above the inquiring, patient, ever-learning
  and tentative method of science there exists some
  organ or faculty which reveals ultimate and
  immutable truths, and that apart from the truths
  thus obtained there is no sure foundation for
  morals and for a humane order of society. (LW
  1558)

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• What is required is that every individual
  shall have opportunities to employ his own powers
  in activities that have meaning (Democracy and
  Education MW 9179)

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• If Talmud is to be taught at all, and taught it
  must, certainly in our contexts, then it needs to
  be taught seriously, to assure that indeed it is
  understood and absorbed with the seriousness and
  with the earnestness, with the exhilaration, with
  the excitement, the passion that is coming to it.
  But secondly, not only respect for Torah
  requires this of us, but respect for women as
  well. Respect for their abilities, their
  commitment, for their potential which is inherent
  within them, if you want to mobilize this force
  for themselves and for the good of the community.
  We need to develop within that individual, an
  infusion of knowledge, sensitivity, and above
  all, that spirituality which links, which bonds
  the world of spirit to the world of action
  (During an address to teachers in girls schools
  in Jerusalem 1996 quoted on Lookjed listserve,
  1999)

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• Tolerance is thus not just an attitude of
  good-humored indifference. It is positive
  willingness to permit reflection and inquiry to
  go on in the faith that the truly right will be
  rendered more secure through questioning and
  discussion, while things which have endured
  merely from custom will be amended or done away
  with. (LW 7232)

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• Experiences in order to be educative must lead
  out into an expanding world of subject matter, a
  subject-matter of facts or information and of
  ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the
  educator views teaching and learning as a
  continuous process of reconstruction of
  experience. (Experience and Education, 1938 LW
  13 59)

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• What is required is that every individual shall
  have opportunities to employ his own powers in
  activities that have meaning. Mind, individual
  method, originality (these are convertible terms)
  signify the quality of purposive or directed
  action Democracy and Education, MW 9179

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• Men live in a community in virtue of the things
  which they have in common and communication is
  the way in which they come to possess things in
  common. What they must have in common in order to
  form a community or society are aims, beliefs,
  aspirations, knowledge--a common
  understanding--like-mindedness as the
  sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed
  physically from one to another, like bricks they
  cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by
  dividing it into physical pieces. The
  communication which ensures participation in a
  common understanding is one which secures similar
  emotional and intellectual dispositions--like
  ways of responding to expectations and
  requirements. (Democracy and Education, 1916 MW
  97

29

• "A moral law, like a law in physics, is not
  something to swear by and stick to at all
  hazards it is a formula of the way to respond
  when specified conditions present themselves" (p.
  222)

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• A significant change that would issue from
  carrying over experimental method from physics to
  man concerns the import of standards, principles,
  rules. With the transfer, these, and all tenets
  and creeds about good and goods, would be
  recognized to be hypotheses. Instead of being
  rigidly fixed, they would be treated as
  intellectual instruments to be tested and
  confirmed-- and altered--through consequences
  effected by acting upon them. They would lose
  all sense of finality--the ulterior source of
  dogmatism (LW 4 221).

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• In the absence of actual certainty, in the midst
  of a precarious and hazardous world, men
  cultivated all sorts of things that would give
  them a feeling of certainty... And it is possible
  that the cultivation of this feeling gave man
  courage and confidence and enabled him to carry
  the burdens of life more successfully (LW 4
  26-27).

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• As long as knowledge in general is thought to be
  the work of a special agent, whether soul,
  consciousness, intellect or a knower in general,
  there is a logical propulsion towards postulating
  a special agent for knowledge of moral
  distinctions (MW 14 129).

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Orthodoxys anti-humanistic tendencies

• Traditional non-egalitarian ways of life that
  reinforce traditional beliefs about what is
  proper for men and women
• A system of anti-democratic social control
• A reluctance to allow for experimentation by
  action by young people in their quest for
  deciding what is right and wrong for them
• An elaborate system of justification in which
  traditional beliefs are sustained through
  generations not so much explicitly or consciously
  but by their embodiment in social habits such as
  story-telling and ritual.

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The educative value of traditions

• Coherent presentation of long-standing principles
  of belief and practice
• Social rewards for conformity to communal values
• Emphasis on inquiry within the tradition
• Justifications for resisting cultural
  assimilation
• Limiting inquiry to ideas not actions

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• the intentional endeavor to discover specific
  connections between something which we do and the
  consequences which result, so that the two become
  continuous. Their isolation, and consequently
  their purely arbitrary going together, is
  canceled a unified developing situation takes
  place. The occurrence is now understood it is
  explained it is reasonable, as we say, that the
  thing should happen as it does. Thinking is thus
  equivalent to an explicit rendering of the
  intelligent element in our experience. It makes
  it possible to act with an end in view. It is the
  condition of our having aims. (Democracy and
  Education, 1916 MW 9152-53)

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• Conventional morals conceal from view the
  uncertainty which attends decisions as to what is
  good in a concrete case, and covers up the
  problematic nature of what is right and
  obligatory. There are still those who think they
  are in possession of codes and principles which
  settle finally and automatically the right and
  wrong of, say, divorce, the extent to which
  legislation should go in deciding what
  individuals shall eat, drink, wear, etc. Wars
  waged in the alleged interest of religion...prove
  the practical danger of carrying theoretical
  dogmatism into action. (LW 7 316-17).

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Tamar Friedman and Rabbi Richard Friedman, 30th
anniversary