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Much of this shiur is based on Heshey Zelcer and Meir Zelcer’s article in Hakirah, A Note on the Original Title for
“The Halakhic Mind”. They point out that Rav Soloveitchik, in a 1939 letter, mentioned an essay entitiled “The Neo-Kantian conception of
subjectivity and objectification of the act and its application to the analysis of the ta‘amei ha-mitzvot problem”. There is no record of an essay with that name. They are writing a book about Soloveitchik’s The Halakhic mind and claim that this title would be a perfectly accurate, if wordy, title for that book. I unfortunately don’t own Rav Soloveitchik’s actual book, so my understanding of what he said is second hand.
The Mechilta cited by Rashi on the first pasuk of this week’s parasha is the source of a famous phrase:
The Sfas Emes is struck by the idea that Moshe didn’t want to tell the people the טעמי המצוות. It’s not that he didn’t want to; it’s that he didn’t feel it was necessary:
If there are טעמי המצוות, logical reasons for the commandments, how does that connect to the פנימיות? Rav Soloveitchik would say that we are misunderstanding the concept of טעמי המצוות. But explaining that takes some philosophizing. According to people who are much smarter than I am, Rav Soloveitchik’s philosophy was based on “neo-Kantianism”.
Rav Soloveitchik wrote his PhD dissertation on Hermann Cohen, a prominent neo-Kantian, who, as I understand him, emphasized that our “knowledge” of the real world consists of our sensations of that world, and the structure that our own minds place on those sensations. “Objects” exist only in our minds. It is that structure that the neo-Kantians try to study. For Rav Soloveitchik, that structure was the halacha.
What does that have to do with טעמי המצוות?
The Sfas Emes expresses a similar thought (without the nineteenth century philosophical jargon) based on the most famous line in this week’s parasha:
And that, I think, is what Rashi means by כְּשֻׁלְחָן הֶעָרוּךְ וּמוּכָן לֶאֱכֹל (the מוּכָן לֶאֱכֹל is not in the original Machilta). לַהֲבִינָם טַעֲמֵי הַדָּבָר doesn’t mean lecturing about the logical bases of the commandments, it means giving us the opportunity לֶאֱכֹל, to internalize the mitzvot to the point that it changes the very way we think, the way we see the nature of the world. That is Rav Soloveitchik’s “Halachic Mind”.