While this series will mainly be published on Substack, we thought that this entry would be better published in the closed forum of Discourse rather than the public forum of Substack.
Rabbi Dr. Moshe Miller: How I Came to Know Rav Hirsch
As an elementary school boy enrolled in a local cheder-style yeshiva, my rebbe’im often espoused the most venomous hatred of all non-Jewish people in the world: the evil “goyim”. They viewed non-Jews through a caricatured prism that does not reflect either Torah or reality. Even then, before my bar mitzvah, I could not understand how it could be possible that G-d created a world with billions (that’s with a b) of human beings, all of whom serve no positive purpose: they are here to bother us and then be punished for doing so; when moshiach comes, many of them will be killed, and the rest will become our slaves. One rebbi even told me (knowing my sensitivity, but not really getting it) that he is quite enlightened, as when he was driving in a well-known Jewish neighborhood and stopped at a traffic light, his young son told him to run over the goyim who were crossing the street. The rebbi told his son that we cannot do that (at least not now).
My own parents, whom HaShem should bless with long and healthy years, always taught me that HaShem created ALL humans in His image, and that they all have enormous value and potential. Therefore, they should all be treated with respect. I was also taught by my parents how racism (prejudice against specific groups of “goyim”) is wrong. I should stress that my mother, loy"t, is from a family of Holocaust survivors, so she wasn’t naive about the horrors that wicked non-Jews can perpetrate against our people.
There was a clear disconnect between my rebbe’im’s version of Judaism and that of my parents. But while my parents expressed their humanism matter-of-factly, I wanted to know what Judaic sources said about this matter. While I found a variety of different ideas in seforim I could get my hands on, it was when I first picked up three of Rav Hirsch’s seforim (The Nineteen Letters [see esp. Letters 7, 8, 15, and 16], The Hirsch Siddur [see esp pp.13, 208-15, 427, 446, 466-67], and the Hirsch Hagaddah [see esp pp. 258-265]) that my universalist outlook was confirmed as being the authentic Torah view. Here was a Gadol, revered throughout the Torah world, writing that we must bear love in our hearts for our non-Jewish brethren; that the Jewish people was chosen to serve as spiritual guides of mankind, whose physical and spiritual welfare must therefore concern us; that the Pesach story of liberation from slavery has universal implications, including for black slaves in America who also sought freedom. These ideas were precisely what my parents (who are what would be described as black hat/right-wing Orthodox, not at all Modern Orthodox) had been teaching me but without citing any particular rabbis.
My experience in yeshiva almost caused a crisis of faith. I never really doubted that HaShem gave our ancestors the entire Torah at Har Sinai after miraculously redeeming them from Egypt. I never for a moment thought that any other religion could be more reliable (c"v) than Judaism, nor did secularism seem appealing. The non-Orthodox movements seemed to distort so much that is essential in Torah. So, I was left in a bind: accept that Orthodox Judaism presents the one path that is absolutely Emes, yet to do so required that I have disdain for all of humanity? That is what I heard in yeshiva. The solution presented itself to me in Rav Hirsch’s writings.
Perusing them, especially Horeb and his Chumash commentary, in greater depth in my high school years, I came to realize that it was not merely his humanistic view of non-Jewish human beings that appealed to me: it was the ENTIRE system of his thought! Here was a worldview that was completely internally consistent, intellectually rigorous, and expressed by a Gadol whom Charedi rabbis like Rav Shach, Rav Elyashiv, and so many others, declared to be a huge Gaon and Tzadik! Surely, I couldn’t go wrong here. After all, Rav Shach wrote in his “haskamah” to Shemesh Marpei that Rav Hirsch’s words in the realm of Torah thought need no haskamah. True, many of those who declared themselves his admirers did not seem to even attempt to follow his views, but that is a story for a different time. At least my ninth-grade Charedi rebbi spoke both of the need to respect the Tzelem Elokim in every human being, regardless of religion or skin color, and cited Rav Hirsch’s seforim on occasion!
Thus, b"H, began a lifetime of study of Rav Hirsch’s writings, and the authorship of an MA Thesis, doctoral dissertation, and an academic book treating Rav Hirsch, the latter two dedicated specifically to his view of humanity and non-Judaic religions.