Only a “whole” person, a spiritually mature Jew, can form covenant and overcome loneliness.
[T]o the man of faith, self-knowledge has one connotation only – to understand one’s place and role within the scheme of events and things willed and approved by G-d [at creation].This kind of self-knowledge may not always be pleasant or comforting. On the contrary, it might from time to time express itself in a painful appraisal of the difficulties which man of faith, caught in his paradoxical destiny, has to encounter, for knowledge at both planes, the scientific and the personal, is not always a eudaemonic experience (pp. 8-9).
After a trip to the dictionary stand I understood the Rav to be saying that learning about yourself, which in my case meant weaving my way through the maze of adolescence, wasn’t always going to produce happiness (eudaemonic). “However,” he exhorted me, “this unpleasant prospect should not deter us from our undertaking” (p.9). Go on, I heard him say, get on with it: grow up already.
These were the sentiments that left their impact on a teenage boy trying to make sense of life, G-d, and the universe – and attempting to envision for himself what he might become in the scheme of these ideas and the lifestyle they might mold. In this sense it can be said that The Lonely Man of Faith’s hero is actually the Man of Fidelity. The person who knows who he is, what community he belongs to, and the role he plays there; a person who is true to his authentic self.
To be absolutely clear, there were many factors encouraging and advising me during those formative years. Primarily they were human resources, rather than essays or books, that guided me – friends and advisers, and a particularly caring rabbi. But The Lonely Man of Faith presented ideas that were both a starting line and goal posts in my ongoing attempt for spiritual maturity. To my mind, this is the enduring message of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith for us all.