Rabbi Dr. Moshe Berger of Cleveland’s Siegal College of Judaic Studies recalls a Saturday-afternoon informal discussion in Brookline, Massachusetts, at which people were posing questions to Rabbi Soloveitchik. At one point, he remembers the Rav speaking of a class he had attended in Germany taught by Professor Martin Heidegger, widely regarded as the greatest German philosopher of the twentieth century. The Rav remembered Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson also attending the sessions, and his surprise at seeing the future Rebbe studying Tanya, the basic Chabad philosophic text, while Heidegger was lecturing.
When the lecture concluded, the Rav asked the future Rebbe why he bothered coming to the class if he was going to spend his time studying a Jewish text instead of listening to the professor. Thereupon the Rebbe proceeded to repeat with full comprehension the major points the professor had made. So impressed was the Rav that at the following lecture, he brought with him a volume of the Mishnah and started to study it. He discovered, however, that he became so caught up in the Mishnaic text that he could not absorb any of what Heidegger was saying, and when he tried to focus on the philosopher’s words, it was impossible for him to study the Mishnah. The Rav was obviously telling this story to underscore the Rebbe’s very unusual and impressive ability to simultaneously focus on different intellectual disciplines, a trait attested to by different people over the course of his life.
But implicit in this story, too, is another message, one known to all students of Heidegger and to those familiar with modern intellectual history. Just a few years later, Heidegger, a man of powerful intellect, became a Nazi. In April 1933, when he assumed the rectorship of Freiburg University, he declared at his inaugural address: “The Führer himself and alone is today and in the future German reality and its law.” Heidegger finished the speech with three “Heil Hitlers!” Several days later, on April 10, 1933 (by which time both Rabbis Soloveitchik and Schneerson had left Germany), Heidegger instructed his deans to dismiss all faculty members who professed the Jewish religion or were of Jewish background.
That great evil and stupidity can coexist in a person of immense intellectual capabilities is best illustrated by an incident recorded by the anti-Nazi philosopher Karl Jaspers. Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, Jaspers asked Heidegger, “How can a man as coarse as Hitler govern Germany?” Heidegger responded, “Culture is of no importance. Just look at his marvelous hands.” It is likely that the Rebbe’s deep disappointment with the moral quality of so many of “Hitler’s professors” (as pro-Nazi professors came to be known) was one factor that inclined him to want to protect his followers from exposure to the world of academia, particularly during their formative years. As was noted in a different context and, as the Rebbe wrote to Professor Velvel Greene, “For it was precisely the nation which had excelled itself in the exact sciences, the humanities, and even in philosophy and ethics, that turned out to be the most depraved nation in the world”.
[The Life And Times Of Rabbi MM Schneerson]
