It is widely taken for granted that Samson Raphael Hirschs insistence upon the eternal validity of the Sinaitic Revelation clashes head-on with any doctrine which acknowledges the legitimacy of progress in the realm of religious truth. Hirsch categorically rejected the thesis of Reform theologians who adapted to their needs the Hegelian conception that the spirit of the time represents the Revelation of the Absolute in the historic process. He, therefore, vigorously protested against the then so fashionable doctrine of progressive revelation which stipulated that the norms of the Torah be evaluated in terms of their compatibility with the ethos of a given age, which, according to Hegel, functions as the medium of divine Revelation. As a champion of Orthodoxy, he ridiculed the suggestion that Judaism accommodate itself to the value-system of a specific historic era. For Hirsch there was no doubt that the binding authority of the Torah derived from an eternally valid act of divine Revelation. Hence, its norms were impervious to the vicissitudes besetting the world of time and change.
Polemics against those who regard the spirit of the time as a factor to be reckoned with in the the determination of religious norms recur throughout his voluminous writings. He bitterly objects to the relativization of religious truth which results from the Reform thesis that the content and meaning of divine Revelation is not static but is modified by historic developments. For Hirsch such an extreme historicism represents the height of absurdity, because it fails to take account of basic postulate of Judaism the acceptance of the Sinaitic Revelation as a Supernatural event sui generis that must be conceived as an incursion of eternity into the realm of time and space rather than a link in the causal nexus between historic phenomena.
It therefore is hardly surprising that the repeated emphasis upon the immutable nature of the Torah as the very essence of Judaism gave rise to the impression that the historic process was divested by him of all intrinsic religious significance and meaning. As Professor Rotenstreich put it, the Hirschian approach reflects a tendency to withdraw the essence of Judaism from the historic process, posing it as incontrovertibly as divinely revealed, eternal statute. Rotenstreich equated the emphasis upon the centrality of an immutable and eternally valid divine law with the adoption of a radical a-historical stance. He therefore alleges that, according to Hirsch, the inner life of the Jew remains untouched by the historic process. An Orthodox Jew prays, as it were, outside the world in which he lives and returns to the world to which his prayers do not pertain. Similarly, Yitzchak Breuer, Hirschs grandson, constantly harped upon the a-historical character of the Jewish people, whose arena is in meta-history rather than history. He never tired of pointing out that Judaism relates to eternity rather than time, because the Sinaitic Revelation constitutes an incursion of eternity into the spatio-temporal world. That a great-grandson of Hirsch chose Timeless Torah4 as the title of an anthology of Hirschs writings is further evidence of the extent to which a-historism was perceived to be the hall-mark of his ideology.
