{"id":186728,"date":"2026-05-08T07:19:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T15:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=186728"},"modified":"2026-05-08T12:00:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T20:00:02","slug":"when-history-becomes-revelation-goren-freyer-and-the-historicist-problem-in-modern-orthodox-halakha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=186728","title":{"rendered":"When History Becomes Revelation: Goren, Freyer, and the Historicist Problem in Modern Orthodox Halakha"},"content":{"rendered":"

R. Shlomo Goren<\/a> (1917\u20131994) developed a theology of history<\/a> that placed the State of Israel within a redemptive historical narrative he treated as halakhically operative. The wars of 1948 and 1967 are not merely military events to be processed by inherited halakha. They are events through which divine providence speaks, and the speech generates new halakhic obligations. Goren writes pesak for the IDF<\/a>, for the state, for sovereign control of holy sites<\/a>, for women in military service, for the calendar of the new Jewish polity. Each of these is halakhic innovation. Each is justified by the claim that the sovereign Jewish polity<\/a> is an event in salvation history that obligates new juridical responses. Goren is doing two things at once. He is producing the halakha a sovereign Jewish state requires, and he is interpreting the state as messianically significant.
\nThe two operations need to be separated. A sovereign Jewish state generates halakhic problems that no exilic posek prepared for. The army needs rules. The Knesset needs rules. The Supreme Court needs rules. Sovereignty over non-Jews needs rules. The civil calendar interacting with the religious calendar needs rules. None of this requires messianic interpretation to be true. It is a social fact about a community that moved from minority status under foreign sovereigns to majority status under its own sovereignty after eighteen centuries. The halakhic rupture follows from the political rupture. No theology of history is needed to license the halakhic adjustments. The adjustments are forced by the new conditions.
\nYeshayahu Leibowitz<\/a> (1903\u20131994) saw this. He spent his life arguing that Jewish sovereignty in 1948 had no theological significance. The state was a political instrument of the Jewish people, no more. It generated halakhic questions because it generated new social conditions. It did not generate redemptive significance because it was a state, not a sign of God’s hand in history. Leibowitz produced halakhic and political analysis without the messianic upper deck. The cost was that he could not mobilize Jewish history as a source of religious meaning. The benefit was that his position was philosophically clean and immune to the falsification problems that beset every theology of history.
\nGoren chose differently. He kept the messianic upper deck. The new halakha he produced was not a response to new conditions. It was a response to redemptive conditions. The IDF was not an army. It was the army of incipient redemption. Jerusalem in 1967 was not a recovered city. It was a sign. This is where the parallel with Hans Freyer<\/a> (1887\u20131969) becomes clear.
\nFreyer is the canonical case of the modern intellectual who lost confidence in inherited religious foundations and tried to place his faith in History instead. Jerry Z. Muller’s<\/a> (b. 1954) The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism<\/a> documented this trajectory. Freyer grew up as a faithful Protestant who then lost his faith at university and turned into a German conservative revolutionary who believed that Volk and Reich were vehicles through which History was speaking. He saw historical events as carrying revelatory weight. Weltgeschichte<\/em>, world history, was a text to be read for its meaning. He committed to National Socialism on this basis. When the History he believed in delivered Auschwitz and Stalingrad, Freyer did not abandon his historicism. He deradicalized it. His later Weltgeschichte Europas<\/em> (World History of Europe, 1948) and Schwelle der Zeiten<\/em> (Threshold of the Ages, 1965) maintained the basic move: history has direction, history can be understood, the intellectual’s task is to discern the direction and align with it. The content changed. The structure did not. Muller’s title catches the point. Freyer’s god failed, but the god he had reached for was History, and Freyer never gave up on that god.
\nGoren’s structure is the same. History has direction. The direction can be discerned. Halakhic and political action should align with the discerned direction. The content is different from Freyer’s. Goren reads history as moving toward Jewish redemption rather than toward Volk redemption. The structural move is identical. Place faith in History as a meaning-bearing process that reveals itself to those equipped to read it. Treat the events of one’s lifetime as bearing revelatory weight. Generate normative claims from one’s reading of historical direction.
\nThe genre is much wider than Freyer. The classic nineteenth-century German pattern moved from Hegel to Marx to the historical school of jurisprudence to the diplomatic historians to Dilthey to Troeltsch. Wilhelm Dilthey<\/a> (1833\u20131911) and Ernst Troeltsch<\/a> (1865\u20131923) are the canonical figures of historicist crisis. They saw what Christianity had become once historicized. They saw the impossibility of treating any normative content as transhistorically valid once you accepted that all content was historically situated. Troeltsch in particular spent his career trying to find a way to preserve Christian normativity within historicist premises and never succeeded to his own satisfaction. Karl L\u00f6with<\/a> (1897\u20131973) showed in Meaning in History<\/a> (1949) that the modern philosophies of history were all secularized eschatologies. Hegel, Marx, Comte, the progressivists, the Marxists. Each had taken the Christian theology of history, evacuated the supernatural, and substituted an immanent historical process. L\u00f6with’s point was that the substitution was unstable. The eschatological structure required a transcendent vantage point that immanent historicism could not supply. The whole edifice was self-undermining.
\nLeo Strauss<\/a> (1899\u20131973) made the same point<\/a> from a different angle in Natural Right and History<\/a>. Historicism rests on the implicit claim of a vantage point that historicism explicitly forbids. To say that all earlier thinkers were historically conditioned is to claim that we have escaped the historical situation that conditioned them. But why are we exempt? We are not. Our claim to understand history is itself a historical product. The position is structurally unstable.
\nDavid N. Myers<\/a> (b. 1960) described this Continental crisis in the field of Jewish thought at the fin de si\u00e8cle<\/a> in his book Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought<\/a>. Myers documented the figures who saw the problem and tried to address it within a Jewish framework. Yitzhak Breuer (1883\u20131946), the Agudah ideologue, attempted a meta-historical theology in which the halakhic Jew lived above history while the world lived inside it. Yitzhak Baer (1888\u20131980) oscillated between historicism and meta-history, sometimes arguing that Jewish history revealed divine purpose. Nathan Birnbaum, Franz Rosenzweig, and several others made parallel attempts. None of them produced a stable solution. Myers’s book is honest about this. He documents the attempts. He does not claim any of them succeeded.
\nGoren’s theology of history sits within this genre but at a much lower level of theoretical reflection than the figures Myers studies. Goren did not engage Troeltsch. He did not engage Strauss. He did not engage L\u00f6with. He did not engage Yitzhak Breuer’s attempt to develop a meta-historical halakhic position. He did not engage Leibowitz’s anti-historicist alternative. He worked within religious Zionism’s tacit confidence that history was unfolding redemptively, and he produced halakha on that confidence. The confidence was not theoretically defended. It was assumed.
\nThis is naive historicism because Goren did not interrogate his own historicist premises. He claimed to understand history’s direction without addressing the question of how a historically situated thinker can know history’s direction. He treated specific events as bearing transhistorical meaning without asking how the meaning could be transhistorical if the events were historical. He committed to a redemptive reading of 1948 and 1967 without specifying what would falsify the reading. The procedure is the procedure of religious historicism, and religious historicism is structurally identical to the secular historicism Strauss critiqued. Goren cannot answer Strauss’s challenge.
\nThe same naivete operates in Hollander’s analysis at a more sophisticated level of vocabulary. Hollander uses the academic-sociological language that descends from the historicist tradition. He treats halakhic development as historically situated. He frames the Sperber controversy<\/a> as expressing structural tensions internal to modern religious life. He uses Weber. He uses what amounts to a Bourdieusian apparatus when he discusses authority and legitimacy. All of this vocabulary is the vocabulary of post-historicist sociology. None of it is interrogated for its own historical situatedness. Hollander does not ask whether his sociological description of the controversy is a coalitional move within the controversy. He does not ask whether Weber’s typology is the right typology for this case or simply a typology he learned in graduate school. He does not ask whether his structural-tension framing is a historically conditioned framing produced by the academic-religious institutions that pay him.
\nStrauss’s critique applies. Hollander claims a vantage point his own theoretical resources forbid. He cannot be neutral observer of the controversy because he is participant in it. He cannot describe the historical conditions that produced Sperber without describing the historical conditions that produced his own description, and he does not do the second. The vocabulary of historicist sociology lets him sound rigorous while exempting himself from rigor.
\nSperber’s framework explicitly historicizes halakha. Halakha responds to changing historical conditions. The community’s spirit at any given historical moment becomes halakhically relevant. Historical scholarship becomes a halakhic input. This is not Goren’s messianic historicism but it shares the structural commitment. History is the medium through which halakhic truth manifests. The posek’s task is to read history correctly and respond to it. Sperber differs from Goren in that he does not commit to a messianic reading. He simply commits to historical responsiveness. The structure is more modest but the historicist commitment is the same. The same Strauss critique applies.
\nHow can a normative Orthodox Jew be a historicist? The honest answer is that he cannot (unless he grounds his belief in the divine authorship of Torah in a leap of faith based on his lived experience<\/a>). The two commitments cannibalize each other. Three responses are available, and none is stable.
\nThe first response is the Leibowitz response. Refuse historicism wholesale. Treat halakha as a closed normative system that responds to new circumstances by analogy and casuistic extension, without imputing meaning to historical events. The state of Israel generates halakhic problems. The events of 1967 do not generate halakhic obligations. History is the field of action, not the source of normativity. Leibowitz held this position with intellectual honesty. The cost is that one cannot mobilize Jewish history as a source of religious meaning. Many religious Jews find this cost unbearable. The benefit is that Strauss cannot touch the position.
\nThe second response is the Yitzhak Breuer response. Develop a meta-historical theology in which history serves a redemptive plan whose meaning is fixed by the supernatural framework rather than discovered by the historian. The historian reads events. The Torah Jew reads the Torah. The two readings can coexist because they operate on different planes. The cost is that the meta-historical framework cannot be revised by history. If history delivers something incompatible with the framework, the framework declares the history not yet complete. The framework is unfalsifiable. This protects it from refutation but cuts it off from genuine engagement with what history does. Strauss can touch this position only obliquely, because the position concedes that historicism does not reach revelation.
\nThe third response is the Goren-Sperber response. Treat history as the medium of revelation. Read events as carrying meaning. Generate normative claims from the readings. The cost is what Strauss diagnosed. The position is self-undermining. The reader of history cannot stand outside history. The meaning he reads is his own historical situation projected back as transcendent significance. The position works as long as one does not interrogate it. The interrogation dissolves it.
\nModern Orthodoxy as an institutional formation has avoided choosing among these options by compartmentalizing. Different domains operate under different premises. The synagogue operates as if revelation is fixed. The university operates as if all texts are historical. The yeshiva operates as if the chain of mesorah is continuous. The history department operates as if the chain has internal ruptures the participants did not notice. The Modern Orthodox Jew lives across these compartments without integrating them. The compartmentalization is functional for many people. It is not philosophically stable. The point at which the compartments leak into each other is the point at which the crisis Sperber’s project produces becomes acute.
\nGoren and Hollander both display the compartmentalization. Goren did not philosophically defend his theology of history because he did not need to. Religious Zionism provided the institutional cover. The IDF provided employment. The Chief Rabbinate provided authority. The compartments held. Hollander does not philosophically defend his historicist sociology because he does not need to. The university provides the cover. The journal provides the venue. The disciplinary networks provide validation. The compartments hold.<\/p>\n

Claims of “understanding history” are naive. They flow from the unexamined confidence that one’s reading of historical direction is more than one’s reading. Goren read 1948 and 1967 as redemptive because he had been formed in religious Zionism. Freyer read the early thirties as the awakening of Volk because he had been formed in German conservative revolutionary circles. Both believed their readings were objective discernments of historical direction. Both readings turned out to be heavily conditioned by the formation that produced them. Strauss saw this. L\u00f6with saw this. Myers documented Jewish thinkers who saw it. The discipline of historical self-awareness is the discipline of recognizing that one’s reading of history is not history’s own reading.
\nGoren did not have this discipline. Hollander has the vocabulary of the discipline without the practice. Sperber has the institutional position to require the discipline of his readers but does not require it of himself.
\nFreyer believed History was unfolding toward German national-conservative redemption. History delivered something else. Freyer deradicalized but did not abandon his historicism. He revised the content of what History was doing while keeping the structure of historicist faith. Goren believed History was unfolding toward Jewish redemption. So far the unfolding has been ambiguous. The state exists. It has not delivered the messianic age. The Temple has not been rebuilt. The ingathering is incomplete. Many Jews remain secular. Religious Zionism has fragmented. The settler movement has produced moral crises that earlier religious Zionists did not anticipate. If the unfolding continues to disappoint, what becomes of Goren’s reading? The honest historicist position is that the reading must be revised. The religious-historicist tendency is to deny the disappointment, defer the messianic timeline, or reinterpret the events. None of these is intellectually stable.
\nSperber reads contemporary moral consciousness as containing latent dimensions of Torah that modern conditions are disclosing. What if contemporary moral consciousness changes direction? What if the next generation finds Sperber’s particular humane principles insufficient or excessive? What if the spirit of the community becomes something Sperber would not endorse? The position requires that the historical direction continue to confirm Sperber’s reading. If it stops confirming the reading, the reading must be revised, which means the prior pesak must be revised, which means halakha becomes nakedly history-dependent. The supposed recovery of Torah’s authentic spirit collapses into historical contingency. Sperber’s framework gives him no resource to resist this collapse, because his framework is what made the collapse possible.
\nThis is the unsolved problem at the center of all three projects. Goren never solved it. Hollander does not address it. Sperber does not address it. They proceed as if their reading of history is more secure than the structure of historicism allows. They proceed because the institutional incentives reward their proceeding. They proceed because the alternatives are intellectually demanding and emotionally costly. The problem remains. Strauss’s question still waits for an answer. L\u00f6with’s question still waits for an answer. Myers documented the Jewish thinkers who tried to answer and recorded that none succeeded. Goren did not try. Hollander does not try. Sperber does not try. The trying is what the next generation of Modern Orthodox thinkers will have to do, if Modern Orthodoxy is to remain intellectually honest at the level its own conditions require.
\nThe deradicalization of German conservatism that Muller chronicles in Freyer is the pattern by which a believer in History responds when History betrays him. He does not become a Leibowitz, refusing the whole game. He does not become a Yitzhak Breuer, putting his faith above history. He revises his reading and continues. The continuity is the deepest commitment. Freyer’s deepest commitment was not to Volk or Reich or even to Germany. His deepest commitment was to the proposition that History has meaning and that the intellectual can read it. Everything else was negotiable. This is the commitment Goren shared. This is the commitment Sperber shares. This is the commitment Hollander operates under without naming. The commitment is not Jewish. It is German. It came into Jewish thought through the German universities where the major figures of academic Jewish studies were trained. Myers’s book documents the importation. The importation has not been undone. Modern Orthodox academic halakha is a Jewish dialect of late German historicism, and the historicism does the structural work even when the Jewish content is sincere. To name this is not to dismiss it. It is to ask whether anyone in the Modern Orthodox world is willing to ask, of his own deepest commitments, whether he holds them because they are true or because the German universities of the late nineteenth century made them the conditions of intellectual respectability.
\nThat is the question Goren did not ask. That is the question Hollander does not ask. That is the question Sperber does not ask. The question is not going away.
\nI give my answer here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R. Shlomo Goren (1917\u20131994) developed a theology of history that placed the State of Israel within a redemptive historical narrative he treated as halakhically operative. The wars of 1948 and 1967 are not merely military events to be processed by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43092,43117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hans-freyer","category-r-shlomo-goren"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t