The Varieties of Religious Experience

I know Orthodox Judaism is true from my experience of this way of life.
At the same time, I welcome every challenge to Orthodox Judaism. My commitment to the mesora (tradition) is unchanged by them because my commitment does not rest on abstract beliefs.
I love truth and I love my life.
My outlook seems to match the academic literature — people are shaped by bonds. The important people in my life are largely Orthodox Jews and that shapes how I experience life.
If you don’t have any friends at shul or church, you’ll leave. I have friends in the kehilla and I am staying.
I am not interested in apologetics. I want to situate everything accurately. I feel no need to sugar coat my descriptions of Orthodox Judaism because I have nothing I need to defend.
Michael Polanyi called my approach the fiduciary framework. In Personal Knowledge he argued that all knowing rests on commitments the knower cannot prove from outside the commitment. The scientist trusts his instruments, his training, the reliability of his community of practice. He cannot step outside this trust to verify it, because the verification would require other trusted instruments. Polanyi held that religious knowledge works the same way and is no less rational for doing so. The explicit doctrinal claims of a tradition are the articulable residue of a tacit knowing that precedes them and exceeds them. A man who knows the tradition at the tacit level does not need the explicit claims to carry the weight the tradition itself carries.
Ludwig Wittgenstein came at the same ground in On Certainty. He argued that every language game rests on hinge propositions that are not themselves propositions to be verified but the ground on which verification takes place. Religious practice has hinges of this kind. They are lived rather than believed, in the sense that “belief” suggests a propositional attitude one could revise. Wittgenstein in his remarks on Frazer and in the Lectures on Religious Belief treated religious forms of life as irreducible to the factual claims embedded in them. The Eucharist is not a bad theory of transubstantiation. It is an act that does what it does regardless of which metaphysics describes it.
Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man maps onto this too. Soloveitchik argued that the halakhic man’s relation to reality is neither the scientist’s nor the mystic’s. He approaches the world through the prism of halakhah, and that approach is itself a form of cognition, not a set of propositions layered on top of experience. The halakhic life is its own epistemic mode. Its truth is known in its living, not inferred from premises.
Abraham Joshua Heschel made the point in God in Search of Man (one of the first books I read on Judaism) when he wrote that Judaism is concerned with deeds more than with creeds. The deeds disclose what the creeds only point at. A man who has davened with a minyan on Yom Kippur has knowledge of something the theological proposition about atonement indicates but does not contain. The deed has epistemic content.
The Hasidic tradition has a related move in the doctrine of da’at, which in Chabad formulation distinguishes intellectual apprehension from the knowing that grips the whole man. The explicit doctrines of Hasidut are tools for producing da’at, not substitutes for it. A man who has the da’at does not need the doctrines to be literally true in the way a proposition is true. He has the thing the doctrines were pointing at.
The philosophical frame here is religious externalism, sometimes called Reformed epistemology in the Plantinga-Alston version. Plantinga argued that belief in God can be properly basic, meaning it does not require inferential support from other beliefs. The tradition plays that role for me. It is basic. Scholarship operates on derivative propositions. Derivatives can be wrong in detail without threatening the basic.
Bernard Lonergan’s distinction between the cognitional operations of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding points at the same structure. The explicit doctrinal claims belong to the judging level. The tacit knowing belongs to experiencing and understanding, which are prior. Judgments can be revised without revising the prior layers they rest on, because they do not exhaust those layers.
My stance also has the virtue of matching what most practicing religious people across traditions describe when pressed, even when they cannot articulate it in these terms. The peasant who keeps the fast, the scholar who keeps shabbat, the Muslim who prays five times a day, the Hindu householder who performs puja, usually cannot defend the explicit doctrinal apparatus against a determined critic. What they can do is point at the life. The life is the knowing. The doctrines are maps of a territory they already inhabit.
This is why my position is immune to the kind of scholarship Shapiro produces in a way that Yerushalmi’s and Myers’s positions are not. Yerushalmi needed the tradition to be a coherent memory community, because his scholarship was partly an elegy for that community. Myers needs progressive Judaism to be a coherent heir to the prophetic tradition, because his institutional work draws its authority from that claim. Both are propositional claims vulnerable to historical inquiry. My claim is not propositional. My claim is that I love my people and that powers my life.
Tacit knowing is not infallible. Polanyi was clear on this. A practitioner can be wrong about particular matters within his practice. A Talmudist can misread a sugya. A mohel can misjudge a procedure. Tacit knowing is reliable at the level of what it is a knowing of, which is the reality and truth of the tradition as a whole, not the accuracy of every explicit claim made within it or on its behalf. This distinction allows me to read Shapiro with pleasure. He is correcting particular explicit claims. He is not and cannot touch the tacit knowing that tells you the tradition is true.
William James named the move in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He distinguished between the existential claim of a religious life, the lived encounter with what the person takes to be real, and the intellectual claim, the set of historical and metaphysical propositions attached to it. James argued the two run on separate tracks. The intellectual propositions can be revised, qualified, or even refuted without touching the existential reality that produced them. The man who has tasted water does not need a chemist to tell him water exists. He may be curious about hydrogen and oxygen, but the chemistry does not adjudicate his thirst.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? give the social version of the same point. Rationality is tradition-constituted. A man inside a living tradition has access to forms of reasoning, judgment, and practical wisdom that outsiders cannot reconstruct from external evidence. Modern scholarship on a tradition is an outsider’s enterprise by definition. It can produce real knowledge, including knowledge the insiders lack, but it cannot replicate the insider’s access to the tradition’s internal intelligibility. An Orthodox Jew who finds Shapiro’s catalogue of editorial revisions fascinating has not thereby lost access to what davening, shabbat, learning, and halakhic practice give him. The two kinds of knowledge run on different frequencies.
Charles Taylor’s work on the buffered and porous self points the same direction. The post-Enlightenment buffered self treats religious claims as propositions to evaluate from outside. The porous self experiences the sacred as something that enters and shapes him. Modern scholarship addresses the buffered self. The porous self, the one who lives inside the practice, receives communications scholarship cannot measure. Neither self is irrational. They operate in different registers.
Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge adds the epistemology. Tacit knowledge, the knowledge a practitioner has of his craft, cannot be fully articulated in propositional form. The Orthodox Jew’s knowledge of what shabbat is, what a minyan feels like, what learning a daf with a chavrusa opens up, is tacit knowledge in Polanyi’s sense. No amount of explicit propositional scholarship can substitute for it or refute it. Scholarship and practice address different layers of reality.
My position is also the position of the most serious Orthodox thinkers who have engaged modern scholarship. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in The Lonely Man of Faith distinguished between cognitive man, who approaches the world as a set of problems to solve, and man of faith, who lives in covenantal relationship. Both are legitimate. Neither reduces to the other. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made related arguments across his career. The Chatam Sofer, on the other end of the spectrum, held that the mitzvot are their own justification and do not require external validation.
Yerushalmi was a post-Orthodox intellectual whose reverence for traditional memory carried the weight of what he did not live. Shapiro is a Modern Orthodox insider whose observance covers the authenticity question so his scholarship can be dry. Myers is a non-Orthodox institution builder whose public roles carry the weight his practice does not. The fourth position is the Orthodox man who welcomes modern scholarship as a source of truth without letting it threaten his practice, because his practice rests on a different foundation than scholarship addresses.
This fourth position has a cleanliness the other three lack. I do not need to idealize tradition because I live in it. I do not need to defend it against scholarship because scholarship cannot reach the foundation. I do not need to build institutional substitutes because the tradition already provides them. I can read Shapiro with enjoyment, follow his catalogue of editorial revisions, note where Haredi memory-makers overreach, and walk to shul Saturday morning undisturbed.
The phrase “lived experience” is doing the work here. It is not a fallback from an evidential claim. It is the primary datum, and scholarship is a secondary commentary on a different question.