Wayward Children?

At a basketball game held annually at Brandeis University’s gym between the nondenominational Gann Academy and the Modern Orthodox Maimonides School, I happened to see Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. With genuine pride, the Maimonides students had made their school’s founder into their mascot: There he was with his squared-off white beard and round glasses on a game poster. When I asked a nearby elementary student if he knew whose picture was on the poster, he wasn’t sure: “Is it Rambam?” using the familiar Hebrew acronym for Maimonides.

Considering the decades-long ideological battles over Rabbi Soloveitchik’s legacy, there was something sweet about his transformation into a mascot. Soloveitchik was arguably, perhaps inarguably, the most influential Modern Orthodox rabbi in the twentieth century. Born in 1903, he immigrated to America in 1932 and settled in Boston, where he cofounded the Maimonides School with his wife in 1937. From 1941 to 1985, he was the leading rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University, where he ordained thousands of rabbis.

His intellectual legacy of combining “Torah and Madda” (the latter being secular knowledge) was contested after he retired from public leadership in the 1980s and again immediately after his death in 1993. A leading student eulogized him, saying that he “never saw the Rav”—as he is still best known in Modern Orthodox circles—“read a secular book.” It is not unlikely that a student who only saw Rav Soloveitchik in the beit midrash and delivering his weekly shiur didn’t catch him reading Kant or Kierkegaard. However, in addition to being an heir to a great Torah dynasty—he was the grandson of Chaim Soloveitchik, “the Brisker,” who founded modern analytic Talmud study—Soloveitchik studied at universities in Warsaw and Berlin and completed a doctoral dissertation in 1932 on Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian theory of knowledge. He was fully conversant with Western philosophy, deeply interested in science, and clearly influenced by his close reading of modern secular and non–Orthodox Jewish writers. In his few published works, he quoted easily and extensively from non-Jewish sources. Rabbi Norman Lamm, the longtime president of Yeshiva University and the only student to earn both ordination and a doctorate under Soloveitchik, also eulogized him and cautioned “against any revisionism” of such a “highly complicated, profound, broad-minded personality.” Many have claimed to be close students of Soloveitchik, but few have heeded Rabbi Lamm’s warning.

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, the longtime rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion and Soloveitchik’s son-in-law, once described his father-in-law as “a sui generis sage,” but ultimately more of Brisk than of Berlin. Another one of Soloveitchik’s prominent students, Rabbi David Hartman, described his teacher as “fundamentally a rosh yeshiva, an eminent talmudist.” In that same lecture, he described his erstwhile rival Lichtenstein as “an eminent talmudist in his own right who is his student, possibly his best student.” His implication being, perhaps, that Lichtenstein was the Rav’s best talmudic student but maybe not his best philosophical student.

It is the latter sort of disciple in whom Daniel Ross Goodman is interested in Soloveitchik’s Children—not his son-in-law the rosh yeshiva; nor his other son-in-law, the Harvard medievalist Isadore Twersky; nor his son, Haym Soloveitchik, the eminent historian of halakha; nor either of his distinguished daughters, Tovah Lichtenstein and Atarah Twersky. Goodman’s book is instead about three rabbis who attempted to follow and extend their master’s philosophical-theological path: David Hartman, Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, and Jonathan Sacks. In calling them “children,” Goodman plays with the rabbinic aphorism that when “one teaches another’s child Torah,” then “it is as if he birthed him” (Sanhedrin 19b).

Of the three, only Hartman studied directly under Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University, where Soloveitchik encouraged him to pursue advanced training in philosophy at Fordham, a Jesuit university. Greenberg studied with Soloveitchik during his PhD studies in American history at Harvard after he had already been ordained at the Novardok Yeshiva in Brooklyn. Sacks had a formative encounter with Soloveitchik in 1968 when visiting the United States as a university student, but he went on to study at Jews’ College and Etz Chaim Yeshiva in London and studied analytic philosophy (a very different tradition than the one in which Soloveitchik trained) under Bernard Williams at Cambridge before eventually earning a PhD at King’s College.

The category of discipleship here seems rather elastic. At this rate, anyone who ever attended a Soloveitchik lecture might qualify for the family reunion. Nonetheless, Goodman, who is a journalist and novelist as well as a rabbi-scholar, does a good, accessible job of demonstrating Soloveitchik’s intellectual and spiritual impact on these three undeniably important figures. Goodman says that these three thinkers were “grounded in Orthodox theological precedent,” which is what qualifies them as legitimate Orthodox theologians. The irony is that although Goodman regards Soloveitchik’s teachings as precedent-setting, the Rav himself was unprecedented.

Goodman’s main interest is in post-Holocaust theology and interfaith dialogue, about which Soloveitchik wrote a famous essay, “Confrontation,” which was widely understood as unambiguously rejecting if not prohibiting such dialogue when it touched anything beyond common civic concerns. Rabbi Sacks, who served as the chief rabbi of Great Britain, might be said to have largely followed the Rav’s lead here. At the risk of oversimplification, Hartman and especially Greenberg, whose dialogue with Christian thinkers became crucial to his theological development, did not.

Goodman tries hard not to declare a favorite among the children but strongly implies that of the three, Greenberg stands out as Soloveitchik’s true theological heir. Notwithstanding Greenberg’s genuine admiration for Soloveitchik—he taught and continues to teach Soloveitchik’s thought—the two had completely different theological points of departure. Soloveitchik was a neo-Kantian who thought of halakha as a pure discipline like math or theoretical physics. “Halakhic thinking operates according to a pathway all its own,” Soloveitchik wrote. “It is independent of external factors and of human responses to them.” And a genuine Jewish philosophy—a successful attempt “to know Judaism out of itself,” as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch once put it—could only be derived from this essentially unchanging halakha.

By contrast, Greenberg’s theology, as most fully articulated in his recent The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism, argues for a deeply historicized religion in which our relationship with God evolves. Greenberg’s theology of the covenant develops through what he calls “great eras” that have “oriented the Jewish way in the light of” major historical events. Rather than a timeless halakha, these historical encounters lead to a transformation “of the categories that themselves are used to judge and to incorporate religious responses.”

What seems like divine withdrawal from human history is, for Greenberg, evidence of an ever-maturing relationship between God and humanity. He writes:

God is now totally hidden in natural laws and material processes. Today, God makes more miracles than ever, but only through human agency—our unlocking the miraculous powers in physical and biological matter that only we can exercise by understanding and utilizing nature’s laws.

One cannot doubt the importance of Greenberg’s encounter with Soloveitchik, which Goodman documents with dozens of footnoted interviews and personal communications, but their ultimate approaches and conclusions were fundamentally divergent, if not opposed.

David Hartman was closest to Soloveitchik in using exclusively rabbinic sources to construct a Jewish philosophy, but, like Greenberg, he ultimately concluded that after the Holocaust, the covenant had become voluntary. He also recognized that his teacher would have considered his own approach “heretical, transgressing basic theological precepts.” As Aharon Lichtenstein wrote, “The absolutely binding character of the covenant, after the Holocaust no less than before was the linchpin of [Soloveitchik’s] life and thought.”

In “Confrontation,” Soloveitchik stressed the importance of theological boundaries and his opposition “to any public debate, dialogue or symposium concerning” faith, though he encouraged “cooperation with the members of other faith communities in all fields of constructive human endeavor.” The historical context here is crucial. According to Soloveitchik family testimony, Soloveitchik told Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel—who would have an audience with Pope Paul VI during the Vatican II discussions—“ir zeit unser shaliah” (you are our representative). One way to understand this is that he trusted extraordinary individuals to engage in such dialogues while maintaining public opposition for his broader community of students.

When Heschel reviewed a draft Vatican declaration that still affirmed the Christian mission to Jews, he declared he would “choose Auschwitz” over conversion. Meeting with Pope Paul VI on Yom Kippur eve in 1964, Heschel provided an eighteen-page memorandum that successfully persuaded him to remove references to converting Jews from “Nostra Aetate.” Greenberg’s initial foray into interfaith dialogue followed in Heschel’s footsteps. As he recalls in For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: “I swept down on the dialogue like an avenging angel, demanding that Christians cease spreading evil and demeaning images of my faith.”

A letter Soloveitchik wrote to Greenberg makes their divergence clear:

I have never demanded conformity or compliance even from my children. I spoke in the first person, namely if I were invited I would not accept. I did not instruct nor did I try to convince you. Since you have made up your mind in accordance with your own view, all I can say to you is aleh v’hatzlach, go and may God be with you.

This response reflects Soloveitchik’s humility and respect for intellectual independence but stops short of endorsement, as, perhaps, did his remark to Heschel. Yet Goodman interprets this letter as evidence of continuity rather than divergence, claiming that “what appears . . . to be a break with his rebbe . . . was in fact a course of action . . . with permission from Soloveitchik.” This seems to stretch the plain meaning of Soloveitchik’s words.

Jonathan Sacks presents the most complex case in the book. Goodman presents him as a liberal, a pluralist, and a proponent of interfaith dialogue, but Sacks’s relationship with Soloveitchik differed significantly from the others. In his first published essay, Sacks rejected Soloveitchik’s teachings in “The Lonely Man of Faith” outright: “Alienation and loneliness are defective states,” Sacks wrote. “Loneliness is the condition of sin.” Sacks once called Soloveitchik “the greatest Jewish thinker of the twentieth century” but also noted: “I know of no other Jewish writer who speaks of death so often—and in very strange ways.”

Sacks’s geographical distance from America enabled both his candid disagreements with Soloveitchik and, eventually and somewhat paradoxically, his extraordinary American popularity. As chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, Sacks articulated Jewish values to the widest possible audiences, drawing extensively from non-Jewish sources in a much more accessible and forthright way than Soloveitchik had.

After his tenure, Sacks suggested that the “Modern Orthodox” label had become too narrow, though he remained a far more influential, indeed central figure in that world than either Greenberg or Hartman, and his focus on interfaith dialogue was certainly closer to the strictures of “Confrontation” than Greenberg’s.

Goodman writes that the “consensus today in the modern Orthodox community” is “that interfaith dialogue is permissible.” This is, at best, doubtful and closely related to his underestimation of Hartman and Greenberg’s theological radicalism. Still, his book prompts critical reflection on the nature of Rav Soloveitchik’s intellectual legacy and the evolving landscape of Jewish theology—even if, like that Maimonides student’s guess about the poster, it may not quite capture the figure at the center of the story.