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Soloveitchik Lite
Moshe Sokolow
 (Erwin A. Albert/From `The Rav') |
(January 31, 2000)The great Talmudist and teacher Joseph Soloveitchik wanted to be remembered by what he wrote, not what he said. But a new anthology of his lectures and lessons presents the Rav more as raconteur than rabbinical giant.
The title "The Rav" (literally: the Master), attests to the status of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993) as the preeminent teacher of those Jews in both the United States and Israel who are known as the modern Orthodox. His mastery of both traditional Talmudic-halakhic scholarship and modern philosophy, a pedagogy that engaged students intellectually and spiritually, and a felicitous style of both oral and literary presentation made the Rav a byword in Orthodox Jewish law and lore for more than half a century.
Upon his arrival in the United States from Berlin, in 1932, Soloveitchik assumed the title of chief rabbi of Boston, where he also founded the Maimonides Day School, whose K-12 coeducational curriculum (girls and boys even study Talmud together there) he personally oversaw. In his more than 40-year tenure as rosh yeshivah (rab-binical dean) of Yeshiva Univer-sity�s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in New York, it ordained more rabbis than any other comparable institution in modern times. Soloveitchik�s intellectual attainments include 40 years of daily shi�urim (classes) and frequent public lectures, whose audiences included rabbinical students, ordained rabbis, educators, social workers, mental health workers and just plain balabatim (lay people), drawn by his consummate homiletic skills. A typical drashah (lecture) would combine the elucidation of a complex halakhic problem with the clarification of an abstract philosophical concept delivered in a fluent, idiomatic English, or an even more fluent Yiddish that bordered, frequently, on the lyrical.
A hereditary perfectionist - scion of a rabbinical dynasty notorious for its literary reticence - Rabbi Soloveitchik published relatively little in his lifetime because he believed that posterity would judge him on the basis of what he had written. His halakhic contributions are largely posthumous collections edited by his students. His philosophical discourses, however, appeared in his lifetime either as books or as monographs in Tradition magazine. His many public lectures have been published, largely in Hebrew translation, with the best known English collection being "Reflections of the Rav."
Soloveitchik appears, now, to have been wrong: He is being judged more on account of what he said than what he wrote, and more than that - on what he is reported, often on no greater authority than "selected reliable secondary sources," to have said.
Rabbi Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff, a devoted disciple of the Master, spent innumerable hours auditing tape recordings of the Rav�s public lectures, transcribing and editing them for publication. (The location and disposition of other recordings is presently in litigation.) He also interviewed many of the Rav�s students for their notes and recollections of his classroom shi�urim. The result, "The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik," is an anthology of insights that the Rav shared at various times over half a century on subjects spanning the gamut from the mundane to the arcane. In the process, however, the stature of the Master is considerably foreshortened. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, rosh yeshivah of Har Etzion, outside Jerusalem, son-in-law of the Rav and acknowledged heir to his mantle of mastery, has begged that the Rav not be placed upon a procrustean bed, his persona elongated or contracted to suit editorial or polemical purposes. In the present work, however, the exercise of a kind of narrative reductionism cuts him down to almost Lilliputian dimensions: always engaging, but rarely profound.
Even the incorporated biography oversimplifies the Rav�s intellectual enterprise. Imagine! The grandson of the awesome Rabbi Chaim of Brisk and descendant of the legendary Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin abandons - albeit temporarily - the four cubits of the halakhah to study philosophy at the University of Berlin, yet we are told nothing of his motivations, aspirations, expectations or reservations. What of his teacher, Julius Guttman, or his fellow Jewish students of those years (1926-1932), who included Nehama and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Shlomo Dov Goitein, Erich Fromm, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Leo Strauss? Did he make their acquaintance? Did they engage in dialogue? In disputation? Did he never betray misgivings about the years he spent studying philosophy? The book jacket describes the Rav as "totally at home in the Western world," and extols him for having "forged a harmonious existence between Brisk and contemporary culture." But this ostensible harmony is belied by a citation of the Rav�s own reference to the study of philosophy as "a dialogue with the serpent."
Perhaps the fault lies with the selection; perhaps it is an ineluctable result of preparing what is little more than a hagiography. The upshot is the same: The Rav appears in these volumes as a storyteller par excellence, but not as the seminal thinker who produced the monograph, "The Lonely Man of Faith," or the books, "Halakhic Man" and "The Halakhic Mind," and hardly as the quintessential protagonist of the "Brisker derekh," the finely honed and razor-sharp Talmudic methodology pioneered by his grandfather Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, advanced by his father, Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, and called after the city of Brisk (Brest-Litovsk), Lithuania, whose rabbinate they served. Like the Rav�s stories, this new collection merely sheds light; it offers slight warmth, however, and betrays little of its protagonist�s intellectual fervor.
The mantle of raconteur this book drapes about the Rav ill suits his broad intellectual shoulders. Was the Rav merely a misnagdischer maggid, a Lithuanian purveyor of tales of moral and social rectitude, and little else? He most assuredly was not. The enthusiasm his modern Orthodox disciples display for the stories he told, as opposed to the philosophical ideas he developed and lessons he taught, is disappointing. Their reliance upon what he is reported to have said, rather than what he actually wrote, is disconcerting.
It is reminiscent, in fact, of a most perceptive portrait of contemporary Orthodoxy painted recently by Haym Soloveitchik, son of the Rav and professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. In the past, Dr. Soloveitchik explains, religious behavior was patterned after communal rabbinical role models; in the present, it is dictated by works of academic scholarship. The former, tempered by an understanding of the social and intellectual constraints under which their constituents labored, tended toward leniency. The latter, anchored more in abstract theory than in popular practice, incline toward stringency. By establishing standards removed from religious reality, they sin against both history and themselves.
In light of the penchant of contemporary Orthodoxy to validate its religious experience by reference to the printed word rather than the historical deed, the present work begs the question: Has modern Orthodoxy recast the Rav in an intellectually downsized image that is, increasingly, its own?
In his 1993 book, "A People Divided," Jack Wertheimer, a historian of American Judaism, interprets the fact that the modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America called upon ArtScroll (Mesorah) Publications to produce its new Siddur as underscoring modern Orthodoxy�s weakness. He notes: "There is no small irony in the fact that the RCA thus commissioned its opponents in the Orthodox world - traditionalists who do not accept the legitimacy of modern Orthodox rabbis - to provide its official prayer book." To Wertheimer�s example of the prayer book, we may now add the ArtScroll English translation of the Tanakh, the ArtScroll edition of Humash and Rashi, the ArtScroll Talmud - a sine qua non of daf yomi study groups throughout the Anglo-Orthodox world - and the ArtScroll "Stone" edition of the Humash which has become a fixture even in Lincoln Square, one of the most modern of Orthodox synagogues. These are the symptoms of either an intellectual bankruptcy or a systemic failure of institutional will.
Rakeffet�s work will allow posterity to see the Rav as a personality, and will help the many rabbis of today who punctuate their remarks with "as my rebbe, Rav Soloveitchik, said ..." to pepper their sermons with humanistic appeal. But, if the gargantuan intellectual achievements of the Rav are to have sustained impact, if they are to endure as the philosophical infrastructure of modern Orthodoxy, then they must be collated, refined and recorded in a systematic fashion. Only then will they become the bedrock of the worldview shaping modern Orthodox educational institutions and synagogues.
Is modern Orthodoxy up to the task?
Moshe Sokolow is associate professor of Bible and director of the Educational Services Program at Yeshiva University.
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