Joseph Soloveitchik 1903 – 1993

Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was a Russian-born American Orthodox Jewish philosopher and rabbi, the long-time head of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, and the most influential exponent of Modern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. The Lonely Man of Faith reread the two creation accounts of Genesis as the philosophical anthropology of Adam the Majestic, who masters the world, and Adam the Covenantal, who lives in fellowship with God and other persons, in irreducible tension within every modern human being. Halakhic Man defended the dignity and intellectual depth of the life of the practicing Jewish jurist as a distinctive philosophical type.

Joseph Baer Soloveitchik was born in Pruzhany in eastern Poland in February 1903 into the Brisker rabbinic dynasty: his grandfather Chaim of Brisk and his father Moshe had reformed Lithuanian Talmudic learning by their rigorous conceptual method. He was educated at home in Talmud and in 1925 went to the University of Berlin, where he completed his doctorate in 1932 with a dissertation on Hermann Cohen's epistemology. He emigrated to the United States in 1932 and from 1941 succeeded his father as Rosh Yeshiva of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York, where he taught Talmud and Jewish thought for more than four decades and ordained some two thousand rabbis.

His major works are Halakhic Man (Ish ha-Halakhah, 1944), the long essay The Lonely Man of Faith (1965), The Halakhic Mind (1986), and the posthumously published And from There You Shall Seek, Worship of the Heart, Out of the Whirlwind, and The Emergence of Ethical Man.

Soloveitchik combined the analytical Brisker method of Talmudic study with a Kantian and Husserlian philosophical idiom. Halakhic Man portrayed the master of Jewish law as a creative subject who imposes the ideal forms of halakha on the world, and The Lonely Man of Faith contrasted the majestic Adam I of natural mastery with the covenantal Adam II of redemptive loneliness. He was the principal twentieth-century thinker of American Modern Orthodox Judaism. He died in Boston in April 1993.