Torah Personalities

In honor of the yahrtzeits of Rabbis Jonathan Sacks and Abraham Joshua Heschel, we present Steven Gotlib's study of Rabbi Sacks's complicated engagement with the scholarship and religious worldview of Rabbi Heschel.

The Haredi community in Israel and its institutions have resisted army service and other forms of societal integration since the founding of the State. As the controversy over drafting Haredi citizens continues to feature in headlines, Nathaniel Helfgot revisits a well-known but underexplored episode in early Israeli history: the meeting and correspondence between Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, known as the Hazon Ish.

In honor of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s fifth yahrtzeit, we present Steven Gotlib's study of Rabbi Sacks's longstanding criticism of the religious worldview of Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Sarah's conspicuous absence from the dramatic Akeidah narrative is the subject of both traditional and scholarly interpretation. Michael Wolff offers an approach through the lens of gender roles.

The death of Nadav and Avihu is difficult to explain, perhaps even impossible to approach through the medium of language. In a composition crossing the boundaries of original drashah, Breslov thought, poetry, visual art, and historical fiction, Akiva Weisinger renders the tragedy of Nadav and Avihu as a reflection of the Vacated Space beyond human language.

The masters of hasidut and psychoanalysis both arrived at a counterintuitive understanding of human nature, according to which narcissism is a reflection of self-hate rather than self-love. Admiel Kosman traces this idea as it appears in the works of Erich Fromm, the Rebbe of Warka, and Martin Buber, focusing on the commandment to love one's neighbor as a behaviorist correction.

Drawing upon the teachings of the Piaseczner Rebbe, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and others, Yiscah Smith proposes a model for reimagining contemporary Jewish leadership on both the communal and personal levels.

The biblical figure of Esther is often interpreted by traditional and modern commentators as a heroine of active leadership. Naama Sadan offers a novel perspective, according to which Esther confronts national crisis in female-coded ways, triumphing and saving her people through internally-focused activism.

In honor of Yud Shevat, The Lehrhaus presents an excerpt from Eli Rubin’s forthcoming book Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism. Rubin explores the theological meaning of an influential series of discourses by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn.

Steven Gotlib reviews the magnum opus of legendary Jewish thinker Yitz Greenberg, considering ways in which Greenberg’s newest synthesis of his ideas bring him back into conversation with the Modern Orthodox community.