Joseph Soloveitchik Quotes on Nature
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Joseph Soloveitchik on the topic of nature, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“Halakhic man, well furnished with rules, judgments, and fundamental principles, draws near the world with an a priori relation. His approach begins with an ideal creation and concludes with a real one. To whom may he be compared? To a mathematician who fashions an ideal world and then uses it for the purpose of establishing a relationship between it and the real world. ... The essence of the Halakhah , which was received from God, consists in creating an ideal world and cognizing the relationship between that ideal world and our concrete environment.”
p. 19 -
“The physicist ... engages in complex and difficult calculations, involving the manipulating of ideal, mathematical quantities that, at first glance, are wholly lacking in the music of the living world and the beauty of the resplendent cosmos. It would seem as if there exists no relationship between these quantities and reality. Yet these ideal numbers that cannot be grasped by one's senses, these numbers that only are meaningful from within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence.”
p. 83 -
“As a result of scientific man's creativity there arises an ordered, illumined, determined world, imprinted with the stamp of creative intellect, of pure reason and clear cognition. From the midst of the order and lawfulness we hear a new song, the song of the creature to the Creator, the song of the cosmos to its Maker.”
pp. 83-84 -
“Not only the qualitative world bursts forth in song, but so does the quantitative.”
p. 84