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Chaim I Waxman, Daniel Ross Goodman, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 44, Issue 3, October 2024, Pages 298–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjae018
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When I first saw the title of this book, I thought it referred either to Rav Soloveitchik’s biological children or to his closest Talmud students, such as Rav Aharon Lichtenstein who had studied in his Talmud classes and beyond (and was his son-in-law). After all, Rav Soloveitchik, who was widely known as “the Rav,” thought of himself, and was thought of by most of his closest students, primarily in terms of his incisive talmudic knowledge, the brilliance of his halachic analyses, and his oratorical skills in passionately and forcefully delivering his lectures/shiurim as a talmudist and halachic authority. When I read the Preface, I saw that Goodman himself is aware of this bifurcation between those who approach Rav Soloveitchik’s thought from a traditional Jewish religious perspective and those who approach it from an academic scholarly perspective, and he pleads with both sides to be patient and understanding of the book’s “dual nature,” of being one which has an approach rooted in academic research in religious thought, theology and philosophy, among others, and yet, being also a book of Jewish thought that analyzes the ideas of thinkers in light of traditional Jewish thinking.
