There is a powerful passage that really touches to the heart of everything I write about in this blog from R’Samson Raphael Hirsch. It is a response that he penned to Zecharia Frankel’s scholastic writings. I cite it here in full and will be posting further on the topic:
“Frankel makes a distinction between dogma and scholarship and by making this distinction he deals the deathblow to that which he calls dogma. There can be only one truth. That is true by the standards of dogma must be true also according the standards of dogma must be true also according to the standards of scholarship, and conversely, that which scholarship has exposed as falsehoold and delusion cannot be resurrected by doga as truth. If the results of scholarly research have convinced me that the halacha is the comparatively recent creation of the human mind, then no doga can make me revere halacha as an ancient divinely uttered dictate and allow it to rule every aspect of my life.
…. Jewish thought knows no such distinction between faith and science which assigns faith to the heavenly spheres and science to the earth. The “dogmatic” element is not hold in one’s vest pocket ready for presentation to the celestial gatekeeper, if the necessary, as a ticket to heaven, while “science” which shapes the intellect of man and is planted on another sort of soil, is nurtured from wellsprings of quite a different source. Jewish “dogma” does not teach mysteries which logic cannot follow, which have no common language with reason and to which reason cannot address itself.
Those concepts which the Jewish “faith” offers as the basis of Judaism are facts, historical realities founded on the living, lucid experiences of a whole nation. These facts are not presented for “believing” but so serve the most vigorous and vital development of theoretical knowledge and practical action. The true science of Judaism is to perceive the world, mankind and Israel in these terms and true Jewish life is to translate these perceptions into living reality.
[Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Collected Writing V, p 312, Quoted in the Artscroll biography of R’Samson Raphael Hirsch p 260]