What Is Torah Im Derech Eretz? A Reader's Guide
This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group. https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM Somewhere between the Jew who retreats from the world and the Jew who is absorbed by it, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch staked out a third position — and built a civilization around it. The phrase he planted like a flag over his Frankfurt congregation in the middle of the nineteenth century was Torah im Derech Eretz: Torah together with the way of the land. It sounds deceptively simple. It has been misunderstood, dismissed, and argued over in almost every direction ever since. The phrase itself is ancient. It appears in the Mishnah in Tractate Avot, and Hirsch's commentary on that passage remains the most concise statement of his philosophy. But the idea radiates outward through everything he wrote — through his Torah commentary, through Horeb, through his essays and sermons — so that the entire corpus functions as a single, integrated vision of Jewish life. No part of it can be set ...

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