DRAFT To have faith in faith: Barukh Rivkin and the reality of the imaginary By: Hayyim Rothman For lack of vision a people lose restraint (Proverbs 29:18) — I simplify it as follows: without vision, the folk is corrupted. Or still more simply: the folk wastes away (Rivkin 1945b). He was a mystic naturalist, a piously religious heretic, a socialist-communist, an anarchist-democrat, a liberal reactionary, a Yiddishist Hebraist, an assimilationist [national] chauvinist, a journalist, reporter, and seer; what wasn’t he? Does this mean that he was a man of contrasts? No, he was no man of contrasts, that is just how he was — a holistic person. Everyone is like this, only that most people can hold the duplicates and triplicates of their souls at bay, behind lock and key, while he — Rivkin — was careless in this sense. All of the animals in the human menagerie that is within each person escaped from him (Bordo-Rivkin and Gordin 1953, 76). I Biography Barukh Avraham Weinrebe (1883-1945) — better known by his pseudonym, Barukh Rivkin 1 — was born in Jekabpils (Jakobstadt), Latvia into a pious and poor family. 2 Like other Jewish children, he received a traditional education while also, later, attending the local gymnasium. Recognized by peers and teachers alike as a talented student, he was expected to become a gadol, a rabbi of renown (Bordo-Rivkin and Gordin 1953, 13-15). To this end, his parents planned for him to attend the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. In accord with the zeitgeist, however, Rivkin had more radical plans (Bordo-Rivkin and Gordin 1953, 13-16). His brother recalls a particularly telling remark from this period: “an idea can enchant men and nations, it can make revolutions and change society.” In pursuit of such ideas, Rivkin left Jekabpils for Riga after graduating from high school, sometime between 1899-1900. Rejecting the discipline that university study would entail — this is a trait that Rivkin evidently retained throughout life, as Alexander Mokdoni would later say of him, “his mind worked with great intensity, but without discipline, without systematicity, and without order. Ideas would pop out of, or explode from him. Limitless ideas, Jewish ideas, but disconnected and non-sequential (Bordo-Rivkin and Gordin 1953, 163)” — he evidently guided himself through a course of private study, eventually composing an (unpublished) philosophical treatise in German. While personally inclining toward “philosophical anarchism, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary party during this period 2 His father, Avraham Sheftl, worked as a foreman, his mother as a cigar-maker (Reisen 1926, 330). 1 The author, in fact, became so well-known as Rivkin that he often used his real name as a pseudonym. Rivkin’s other pseudonyms include: B.R., B. Sp-a (Baruch Spinoza), Aba Liliyen, B. Skutelsky (derived from his mother’s maiden name, Kutelsky) and, most prominently, Mark Toleroz. I suspect that the pseudonym “Rivkin” was taken from a character in Mendele Mokher Sforim’s The Wishing Ring. There, the character named Rivkin is a top student in a state-run rabbinical seminary — which is to say, a representative of the Russian Haskalah — who purports to synthesize traditional Jewish learning with secular knowledge. Though, as we shall observe, Barukh Rivkin had strongly negative opinions about Enlightenment rationalism, insofar as he ultimately sought something like this synthesis, he can be described as a type of maskil. It is not, therefore, far-fetched to suppose that he chose to appropriate this character to express this aim.