Abstract
This paper presents the idea of repentance as it emerges in the thought of Rabbi Isaac Hutner, one of the lesser-known Jewish philosophers of the modern era. After outlining R. Hutner's formative influences and spiritual biography, the paper moves on to analyze the sermons in his Pahad Yitzhak. Thorough this analysis, Hutner's conception of repentance is explored and is shown to bear a close affinity to both traditional Jewish modes of thought and to modern thinkers. R. Hutner views our world ("The world of Being") as an intermediary phase between two supertemporal conditions — the world of creation ("Becoming"), and the world to come. Repentance, foreign in its essence to the cyclical world of Being, draws upon the eternal nature of the past and the future alike, to form a spiritual, renovated world, subject to different laws. Repentance is thus a general existential condition, towards which man strives with a view to consciously experiencing his present as an innovation liberated from the repetitiveness of time. He is then raised to the point where din is revealed as the inner essence of hesed, and coercion as true freedom. Finally, the paper acknowledges the influence exerted on R. Hutner by R. Israel Salanter, founder of the Musar movement, and his disciple, Rabbi Nathan Tzvi Finkel, who headed one of the ideological schools of this developing movement and was R. Hutner's teacher.
Translated title of the contribution | Correction or Creation? The Idea of Repentance in the Thought of Rabbi Isaac Hutner |
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Original language | Hebrew |
Pages (from-to) | 95-122 |
Journal | Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah |
Volume | 44 |
State | Published - 2000 |