Over the past twenty-five years, the presidency of Yeshiva University has been a mighty pulpit from which Dr. Norman Lamm has addressed many of the critical issues that have faced world Jewry and confronted Modern Orthodoxy. As spokesman for the institution that he leads, the movement he champions, and the Jewish people he loves, Dr. Lamm has fearlessly addressed such issues as the possibilities for faith and real religious commitment in the modern world: unity within a fragmented and contentious Jewish community, morality within a libertine contemporary society, and the prospect for Zionism and Israel within the world of nations. He has defined the parameters and structured the vision of Modern Orthodoxy as a vibrant and attractive religious phenomenon that combines fidelity to Jewish tradition while embracing the modern world of knowledge and culture, with tolerance for all Jews and civility toward all humankind. This is the definitive work on modern orthodoxy.

Norman Lamm is president of Yeshiva University and Jakob and Erna Michael professor of Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University

Chapter One

MODERN

ORTHODOXY

This first chapter of the book begins with the "Fallen Giant" who has had such a powerful influence on Modern Orthodoxy--although I do not recall if he ever used the term as such. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, reverently called "The Rav" (The Rabbi), was a seminal thinker, a master teacher, and an eloquent lecturer. It is his spirit and his teachings--both direct and indirect--that have inspired much if not all of this volume.

    The five articles following represent my thinking on Modern Orthodoxy over the course of three decades, from 1966 to 1997.

    If the reader is perplexed by my use of the terms "Modern Orthodoxy" and "Centrist Orthodoxy," the confusion is justified. The former term has been is use for some time, to distinguish it from the Haredi or more reclusive branch of Orthodoxy (often referred to as "Ultra-Orthodox" or "Fervently Orthodox"; I prefer the Hebrew term Haredi because it is not pejorative and is the one used by the Haredim to identify themselves). For a while, I rejected the title because I considered the adjective "modern" as objectionable; it appeared as if we were boasting of our modernity when, indeed, we were hardly uncritical of it even though we stand for engaging it openly and forthrightly. I therefore introduced the term "Centrist" Orthodoxy, intending not a mathematical mean between two extremes, but those who follow Maimonides' principle of moderation (see "Some Comments on Centrist Orthodoxy" in this chapter.) However, this did not prove to be an inspired decision; most people assumed it meant we were situating ourselves mid-way between Reform and the Satmarer group. Nothing, of course, could be more wrong-headed. I have therefore reverted to the term Modern Orthodoxy. I assure the reader that there was and is no difference in my mind between the two, and I apologize to the sociologists and other pundits for having wasted their time and intellectual effort as they labored to define the differences between the two.

~1~

A FALLEN GIANT

The Rav

"A prince and giant has fallen this day in Israel"

--Samuel II, 3:38

Surely, such a prince and such a giant, who became a legend in his own lifetime, deserves an appropriate eulogy.

    I therefore begin with a confession: I feel uncomfortable and totally inadequate in the role of one delivering a eulogy for my rebbe , the Rav. Only one person could possibly have done justice to this task, and that is--the Rav himself; everyone and anyone else remains a maspid she'lo ke'halakhah --"one who eulogizes without authorization." Nevertheless, we owe it to him to try our best. And so I ask your--and his--forgiveness at the very outset.

* * *

The rav departed from us on the exact same day that, 17 years ago, we lost Dr. Samuel Belkin z.l. , the late President of Yeshiva University, and the Rav eulogized him from this very podium on the day that he himself would be interred, erev the last days of Pesach. He referred to him then in the words of the Haggadah, as arami oved , a "wandering Aramean," and paraphrased that as a "wandering Litvak," who as a youngster was forced from his native town and took the wanderer's staff to these shores all by himself.

* * *

Unlike Dr. Belkin, the Rav was not a wandering Aramean. He was not orphaned at an early age. On the contrary, he had the advantage of a stable, aristocratic home, of encouraging and even doting parents. He was heir, at birth, to a distinguished lineage--the bet ha-Rav , that of R. Moshe, R. Hayyim Brisker, the Bet Halevi , the Netziv, back to R. Hayyim Volozhiner.

    His genius was recognized while he was still in the crib. At age 6, his father had hired a melamed to come to the house to teach him. The tutor was a Lubavitcher Hasid who taught him Tanya without asking leave of his parents. He learned it so well, that his Mitnagdic father was shocked and fired the melamed ... (His affection for Habad, however, would remain with him to the end.) He then became a disciple of his own father--demanding, challenging, and critical, yet approving and proud.

    At the age of 10 he presented his father with his written Torah chiddushim . His father was so impressed that he showed it to his father, R. Hayyim Brisker, who was so impressed that he sent it to his dayyan , R. Simcha Zelig. And, of course, he prophesied greatness for his precocious grandson.

    The Rav's development continued unimpeded, and fulfilled and exceeded the hopes of father and grandfather.

* * *

The former Chief Rabbi of Israel Rabbi Avraham Shapira, told me the following story to which he was a personal witness.

    When the Rav came to visit Israel the one and only time during his life, in 1935, it was the last year of the life of the elder Rav Kook. The Rav spoke at several places--at Mercaz Harav, at the Harry Fischel Institute, and at several other yeshivot. At every sheur that he gave, Rav Kook's son, R. Zvi Yehuda, attended and listened attentively.

    When Rabbi Shapira asked R. Zvi Yehuda why he was doing so, he answered as follows: His father received Rabbi Soloveitchik and they "talked in learning." When Rabbi Soloveitchik left, the elder Rav Kook told his son that the experience of speaking with the young Rabbi Soloveitchik reminded him of his earliest years when he was a student at the Yeshiva of Volozhin, during the time that Rabbi Soloveitchik's grandfather, Reb Hayyim Soloveitchik, first started to give sheurim . I believe, Rav Kook said, that the power of genius of the grandfather now resides with the grandson--and therefore, he said to his son, you should not miss a single sheur by Reb Yoshe Ber Soloveitchik.

* * *

But if, unlike Dr. Belkin, the Rav was not a wandering Aramean, then we may say of him that he embodied another passage in the Hagadah: "Know full well that your seed shall be a stranger in a land not their own" (Gen. 15:13), that Avraham's children will be strangers in another land. He was not a "wandering Aramean" but a "lonely Abrahamite," a lonely Litvak, and this loneliness was one of the most painful and enduring characteristics of his inner life. This giant who was at home in every discipline, a master of an astounding variety of branches of wisdom, familiar with almost every significant area of human intellectual creativity, felt, ultimately, like a stranger dwelling in another's land. He somehow did not fit into any of the conventional categories. His genius was such that the loneliness attendant upon it could not be avoided--a fact which caused him no end of emotional anguish, yet gave us the gift of his phenomenal, creative originality. He was both destined and condemned to greatness and its consequences.

* * *

This sense of loneliness, isolation, and differentness had a number of different sources, all of which reinforced each other. One of them was emotional and began quite early in his life. The Rav poignantly describes (in his Uvikashtem Misham ) his early experiences of fear of the world and of social detachment, his feelings of being mocked and rejected and friendless. The only friend he had was--the (12th century) Rambam and, as he grew older, all the other giants of the Talmudic tradition whom he encountered in his learning. The Rav identifies this as more than imagination and fantasy but as a profound experience--the experience of the tradition of the Oral Law. Yet, the sense of social loneliness and emotional solitude was not dissipated.

    Indeed, that was the way he was brought up: he was taught to hide his emotions. He was never kissed by his father. He had no real friends in his childhood or youth and no truly intimate comrades in his adulthood.

* * *

This sense of alienation was not only a psychological and social factor in the various roles the Rav played in life; it was also central to his whole conception of life. His most characteristic form of analysis in his philosophic essays and oral discourses was the setting up of typological conflicts, of theoretical antitheses: Adam I and Adam II; Ish ha-Halakhah and Ish ha-Elohim ; the covenant of fate and the covenant of destiny; majesty and humility ... And, ultimately, conflict and dissonance make not only for dynamism but also for alienation and loneliness.

    This philosophical approach stems from two sources. One was his attempt, probably developed in his days in Berlin, to defend Judaism from the encroachments of a self-confident and aggressive natural science and equally arrogant then-modern philosophy. To counter them, he adopted the Neo-Kantian view in which there is a distinct chasm that separates the natural order of objectivity, quantification, and determinism (at least on a macro scale), from the internal human realm of the subjective, qualitative, and passionate where freedom reigns.

    The second source is, I believe, the hashkafah of his Mitnagdic forbear, R. Hayyim Volozhiner, who saw the world and all existence as multi-layered and plural, as reflected in the Halakhah with its multiple judgments as in the Mishna of Ten Degrees of Sanctity, as against the Hasidic view of a monistic and unified world, one which blurred distinctions and sought to overcome contraries.

    Thus, for instance, Rav Kook, strongly influenced by the Hasidic side of his lineage, saw underlying unity beyond all phenomena of fragmentation and opposition, while the Rav's view was anything but harmonistic. He saw not wholeness but conflict, chaos, and confrontation in the very warp and woof of life. Man was constantly beset by a torn soul and a shattered spirit, by painful paradoxes, bedeviled by dualities, and each day was forced to make choices, often fateful ones, in the confrontation of savage contraries, of the jarring clash of claims and counterclaims in both conception and conduct.

    Both these sources--the neo-Kantian and the thought of R. Hayyim Volozhin--see fundamental disunity and a fractionation of experience in the world.

* * *

Such a vision of contradiction and incongruity leads inexorably to anxiety and tension and restlessness, to a denial of existential comfort and spiritual security. It results in loneliness --the Rav truly was "The Lonely Man of Faith"--and this philosophically articulated loneliness with its depth crises becomes enduring and especially poignant when superimposed on a natural tendency to solitude and feelings of being a stranger in a foreign land.

    Yet, paradoxically, in practice he made strenuous efforts to overcome these dichotomies, to heal the wounds of the sundering of experience and even of existence itself, to achieve the unity of man with himself, with nature, with society, and with the divine Master of the Universe--even though he knew that such attempts were ultimately doomed to frustration. Hence, his efforts to bridge the worlds of emotion and reason, of Halakhah and Agadah, of Hasidism and Mitnagedism. Perhaps the very attempt to achieve unity and wholeness reflected his penchant for peace--a goal he valued and cherished--although he knew that in reality disharmony and the pain of inexorable conflict and contradiction controlled.

* * *

Thus, for instance, in the area of Jewish thought, where his fertile mind reigned supreme, he was a stranger amongst those who worked in Jewish philosophy. For he came to it from another world--one of greatness in Torah and mastery of Halakhah as well as the classics of both general and Jewish philosophy; and his assumptions and aspirations and insights were derived from the Halakhah, rather than seeing Halakhah as irrelevant to Jewish philosophy. Hence, for example, the Rav's reconciliation of the differing viewpoints of Maimonides and Nahmanides as regards the obligation to pray, whether its source was rabbinic or in Torah law, became the source of his teaching on the "depth crisis" of everyday life. Amongst such Jewish thinkers, he remained a ger , a stranger and alien in a foreign land. The Rav was a lonely Litvak.

* * *

Similarly, he was a master darshan endowed with a richness of homiletic ingenuity combined with charismatic rhetorical prowess and stellar oratory--undoubtedly the greatest darshan of our, or even several generations. Yet he had no peer, no companion, no friend even in this area. The kind of derush that even the best of them practiced was not his home, not his way. He could be as ingenious--and more so--than the cleverest of them, with a sense of timing and drama that was astounding, but his uniqueness lay in his synthesis of both Halakhah and Jewish thought in homiletic guise rather than the conventional derush . Here too he was a ger , and the world of the other baalei derush was for him "a land not their own." It was not his home.

* * *

Even in Halakhah, where he was our generation's undisputed master, he still was a stranger in a foreign land. Other great scholars were also gifted thinkers capable of incisive insights, but he alone--in addition to his cognitive supremacy, his dazzling halakhic definitions, and his brilliant formulations--had a broader scope by virtue of his wider knowledge and his exposure to other modes of reasoning, which helped him in his halakhic creativity, so that he was singular amongst the giants of Halakhah of our time. Thus, his quality as a "lonely Litvak" expressed itself as well in his defiance of convention in dress and demeanor. He simply refused to conform to standards imposed from without, whether intellectually or in the form of stylistic niceties.

* * *

How did the Rav as a "lonely man of faith" overcome these bouts of loneliness, given his conception of dialectic and conflict as inscribed in human nature and existence itself?

    First of all, his early emotional and social loneliness became bearable when he found fulfillment in his domestic life. Anyone who was privileged to visit with him and the late Rebbitzen in their home in Roxbury could tell immediately that for the Rav, his home was a haven--and a heaven. Do we not recall the bitter tears he shed at his eulogy for her?

    The second way, in response to his existential loneliness, was spiritual. This man whose goal was never mere peace or happiness but truth, was able to assuage his feelings of being a stranger in a foreign land by his deep and unshakable faith. The "lonely Abrahamite" knew not only the anguish of alienation inflicted upon Abraham's children, but he also knew the secret of our ancient forefather--that of "You found his heart faithful to You" (Neh. 9:8): a faithful heart, a heart of faith.

* * *

How does faith overcome the loneliness of the stranger, the alien, the ger? Perhaps by understanding that none is more lonely, so to speak, than the One Who Is Without Peer Himself! Man's loneliness and Israel's loneliness as "a nation which dwells alone" (Nu. 23:9) are both reflections of the divine loneliness. Even as He is One, the unsurpassably and ineffably One, so is He incomparably alone--He has no peer (Dt. 4:35); and does not such absolute and transcendent aloneness imply, from a human perspective, unparalleled and unimaginable loneliness?

    The Almighty reaches out to His human creatures, seeking, as it were, the spiritual companionship of humans: the commandment of loving God can be understood by the talmudic dictum that "the Holy One, blessed be He, desires the prayers of the righteous"; and man eases his own pitiful terrestrial solitude by linking his loneliness to the majestic loneliness of the Divine. So does loneliness join loneliness, and out of this encounter is born the divine-human companionship, nourished by divine grace and human faith. Bonds of friendship are created, as man gratefully acknowledges God as "my Beloved," and God regards the lonely Abrahamite as "Abraham My Friend."

* * *

Such exultation came to the Rav during prayer. During these precious moments and hours, suffused with the purest faith, the Rav found both the truth and the peace to which he devoted his life, as his riven soul was healed and unified. Recall his moving description, in his article "Majesty and Humility" (in Tradition , v. 17 [1978], p.33), of his experience of prayer when his late wife, o.b.m, lay dying in the hospital. Reread so many other of his famous essays where he bares his soul and reveals the depths and heights of his pure faith as expressed in prayer and the companionship of the Master of the Universe.

    Here did the Rav, in his most intimate and private moments, reveal the true dimensions of his spiritual Gestalt by dint of his profound faith. He was no longer a stranger, no longer an alien, no longer the lonely Litvak.

* * *

Finally, he was able to abolish or at least moderate both forms of his loneliness intellectually--and that, in a paradoxical manner: He found peace and tranquility--on the battlefield of Halakhah during his sheurim here at Yeshiva! Often, the Sages speak of halakhic debate as the "give and take" of Halakhah, massa umattan , which is also the term for--business. It is a negotiation in the coin of ideas. But often they speak of a rougher kind of dialogue, as halakhic contention, esek ba-Halakhah , which refers not to a commercial analogy, but to strife, battles, as in Gen. 26:20, "they contended with him," referring to a struggle over the wells. That was the Rav's kind of sheur! That is what I think of when I recite the daily blessing, la-asok be'divrei Torah , "to engage in the study of Torah" ... Engaged in a war of wits with his own students, parrying ideas and interpretations, entering the fray between Rashi and Tosafot, between Rambam and Ramban--and Ramban with the Baal Hamaor--and trying to resolve their differences in a manner typical of the Brisker derekh which he inherited and then modified and perfected, he found his peace and his companionship.

* * *

Permit me to relate a story that throws light on other aspects of the Rav's character. It was my second year in his sheur , and I was intimidated and in awe of him as was every other talmid --that is, almost everyone else. There was one student, the youngest and one of the brightest, who was clearly the least frightened or awed. The Rav had been developing one line of thought for two or three weeks, when this talmid casually said, "But Rebbe , the Hiddushei Ha-Ran says such-and-such which contradicts your whole argument." The Rav was stunned, held his head in his hands for three agonizingly long minutes while all of us were silent, then pulled out a sheaf of papers from his breast pocket, crossed out page after page, said that we should forget everything he had said, and announced that the sheur was over and he would see us the next day.

* * *

I learned two things from this remarkable episode. First, we were overwhelmed by his astounding intellectual honesty. With his mind, he could easily have wormed his way out of the dilemma, manipulated a text here and an argument there, maybe insulted an obstreperous student, and rescued his theory and his ego. But the Rav did nothing of the sort! He taught, by example, that the overarching goal of all Torah study is the search for Truth. That search for Truth was the essence of his activity in Torah, and we witnessed it in action. He encouraged independent thinking by his pupils as a way to ensure his own search for the truth of Torah. The Rav was authoritative, but not authoritarian. No "musar shmuess"--no lecture in ethics--could have so successfully inculcated in us respect for the truth at all costs.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SEVENTY FACES by Norman Lamm. Copyright © 2002 by Norman Lamm. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.