Introduction
R. Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) and R. Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948–2020) were two of the Orthodox Jewish world’s leading lights. Both integrated Torah and secular thought in novel and ingenious ways while staying true to their respective religious contexts.[1]
Sacks acknowledged Soloveitchik as one of his “two great initial inspirations” and devoted several full essays to exploring Soloveitchik’s thought—in addition to the many times that he referenced Soloveitchik in his wider writings.[2] Tracing Sacks’s references to Soloveitchik, however, reveals significant tension between the two that few have addressed. Indeed, we shall see that the tension Sacks felt with Soloveitchik’s religious weltanschauung lasted for his entire career and can be traced from Sacks’s earliest publications through his untimely passing in 2020.[3]
Setting the Stage
In his 1993 eulogy for Soloveitchik, Sacks recounted the only two meetings they had.[4] His description of their first meeting is as follows:
The first meeting took place 15 years earlier, 25 years ago, in 1968 when I was a student. It took place in the corridors of Yeshiva University. The Rav was accustomed to sit and prepare his Gemara shiur or sit in with his talmidim as they prepared the Gemara shiur. And he said, ‘For you, I will come outside.’ I remember sitting on the bench with him just outside the room, in the corridor, for two hours, and in those two hours he taught me about halakhah.
… He was obliviously a ‘lonely man of faith’— yet when we started talking about halakhah, he started shokeling, he became animated, he put his arm around me, he was what Elie Wiesel calls ‘a soul on fire.’
And what he said was very simple and fundamental. Yet it had never been said before. He said, ‘In the past, Jewish philosophy—machashevet Yisrael—and halakhah were two different things. They were disconnected.’ ‘In truth,’ he said, ‘they are only one thing and that one thing is—halakhah. The only way you can think Jewishly and construct a Jewish philosophy, is out of halakhah.’ He gave me one example.
He said, ‘You have read Prof A. J. Heschel’s book called The Sabbath?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘It’s a beautiful book, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘What does he call Shabbat?—A sanctuary in time.’ He said, ‘This is an idea of a poet, it’s a lovely idea. But what is Shabbat? Shabbat,’ he said, ‘is lamed-tet melakhot, it is the 39 categories of work and their toladot ‘and it is out of that halakhah and not out of poetry that you have to construct a theory of Shabbat.’ That was his example.[5]
While the hesped was anything but a critique of Soloveitchik, it is worthwhile to make note of Sacks’s reference to Soloveitchik’s initial demeanor as a “lonely man of faith,” as well as his commitment to the fact that, no matter how “lovely” an idea the Heschelian sanctuary in time might be, one cannot appreciate Shabbat (or any subject) without first identifying and centralizing its halakhic core.[6] It is also informative to note Heschel’s 1945 response to Soloveitchik’s original essay Ish Ha-Halakhah (Halakhic Man):
Ish Ha-halakhah? [Halakhic Man?] Lo hayah v’lo nivra ella mashal hayah [There was never such a man; the phrase is used as a parable for purposes of comparison.] Soloveitchik’s study is brilliant, but is based upon the false notion that Judaism is a cold, logical affair with no room for piety… No, there never was such a typology in Judaism as the halakhic man. There was—and is—an Ish Torah [man of the Torah] who combines halakhah and aggadah, but that is another matter altogether. When I came to Berlin I was shocked to hear my fellow students talking about the problem of halakhah as a central issue. In Poland it had been a foreign expression to me. Halakhah is not an all-inclusive term, and to use it as such is to restrict Judaism. Torah is the more comprehensive word. Halakhah has very little to do with theology…
In Ish ha-halakhah [Halakhic Man] there is no room for the spontaneous, for raḥmanut [compassion]. The Jews in Alexandria mistakenly translated Torah as nomos, law. But the Targum translates it orayta or raḥmanut. True, without halakhah there can be no Judaism. But is halakhah everything? Halakhah is din Torah [the letter of the law]. According to the Talmud, Jerusalem was destroyed because they were judging only according to din torah, the letter of the law, and not lifnim mishurat hadin, beyond the letter of the law. The law is necessary but not sufficient.[7]
As we shall see, Heschel’s critique of Soloveitchik is not only a fascinating inversion of Soloveitchik’s perspective but also has much in common with the understanding of Soloveitchik’s approach that Sacks would later adopt.[8]
Tradition in an Untraditional Age: Sacks’s Early Critiques of Soloveitchik
Kaplan, in both his new preface to Halakhic Man as well as a 2023 lecture at Bar-Ilan University on this subject, calls attention to the fact that many of the essays collected in Sacks’s 1990 book Tradition in an Untraditional Age respond directly to the religious philosophy expressed in Halakhic Man. For example, in a 1985 essay republished in the volume, Sacks raised significant challenges to Soloveitchik:
It may be that, after all, philosophising does not bring out the best in the Jew. To adopt the philosopher’s stance, to stand back and reflect on one’s place in nature and history, cannot be comfortable to a member of Am Yisrael. That place, for us, is never secure. The unknowability of God and the threat of history make any philosophy of Judaism veer between the tragic and the ironic. Halakhic Man is no exception.
Our happiest moments come not in abstraction from life but in application to texts. R. Soloveitchik’s midrash [Sacks’s term for Soloveitchik’s published lectures] is perceptibly more resilient, less etched with despair, than his purer moments of philosophising. It is as if the parts of Judaism were more than the whole; as if the individual verses were more than the book; as if specific moments came to more than the religious life as a whole. In the detail of Judaism is joy; in the totality is pain… R. Soloveitchik, in his philosophical writings, has answered no questions, but he has done what a great Jewish thinker should. He has given a home to the previously unhoused: to the Jew in the modern world who experiences conflict, loneliness and the sharp unease of faith.[9]
It is worthwhile to read the above in light of Sacks’s introduction to Tradition in an Untraditional Age. The book’s subtitle, “Essays on Modern Jewish Thought,” is especially important here. Sacks drew a distinction between “Jewish philosophy” on the one hand and “Jewish thought” on the other. The former represented an attempt by medieval rabbinic authorities to systematize Judaism such that it could be in intelligent conversation (whether “harmonisation, synthesis, or opposition”) with the philosophy of the day. Sacks noted, however, that the medieval project was ultimately “an impressive but marginal achievement,” since the average Jew of the age was not well versed enough in philosophy to appreciate it.[10] Nowadays, there is “no longer a coherent and identifiable secular culture in relation to which Judaism might define its stance.”[11] Jewish philosophy, therefore, became a difficult (though not impossible) project to justify. Jewish thought, however, was a different story for Sacks:
Jewish thought does not aim at embracing the whole of Jewish tradition and the whole of contemporary culture in a comprehensive engagement with one another. But it does aim at a coherent statement of what it means to be a Jew at this particular juncture of history and civilisation. It goes beyond the vague cluster of symbols, motifs and metaphors that constitute the public rhetoric of Jewishness and asks searching questions. What do these symbols mean? Are they compatible with one another and with traditional Jewish self-understanding? Which Jewish values are enhanced, and which endangered, by a particular intellectual environment? Which, if a choice must be made between conflicting values, stands closer to the heart of the Jewish enterprise? It is questions such as these that have become pressing and perplexing in the last two centuries. It is these that, if they do not beget fully fledged philosophical systems, nonetheless give birth to a distinct and fascinating body of Jewish thought.[12]
Sacks, in other words, can be said to have rejected Soloveitchik as a Jewish philosopher—that is, he rejected Soloveitchik’s systematic approach to Judaism—while accepting him as a Jewish thinker with many valuable insights to offer in particular areas. This partial rejection of Soloveitchik’s philosophy is both due to Sacks’s general preference for Jewish thought as a more useful endeavor than Jewish philosophy and his view of Soloveitchik’s philosophy as particularly bleak when considered in its gestalt, albeit containing valuable moments.[13] With this distinction in mind, Sacks is able to engage with and adopt certain aspects of Soloveitchikian thought while rejecting others.
Elsewhere in Tradition in an Untraditional Age, in an essay entitled “Joseph B. Soloveitchik: Conflict and Creation,” Sacks wrote that Soloveitchik’s approach could be described as “a heroic-tragic one,” resulting in an “uncomfortable paradox”:
The man of faith can certainly engage with modern society and its modes of thought, provided that he has the courage for a double encounter with a dual identity. As majestic man he is part of the secular-human enterprise. As covenantal man he is heir to a faith tradition that cannot be translated into contemporary language, and to a set of emotional responses—defeat, helplessness, the heroism of failure—that are no longer common currency. He may be in, but not of, the modern world. Most Jews, he admits, are not prepared for this inner dialectic, and hence the tradition is no longer the religion of most Jews. A synthesis is possible between the two identities, but not within society as presently constituted. Orthodoxy and modernity are both friends and strangers to one another. In this uncomfortable paradox, the man of faith must live.[14]
Indeed, Sacks ultimately suggested moving beyond such uncomfortable Soloveitchikian dialectics entirely, stating that “those who wish to do in their generation what Hirsch, R. Kook, and R. Soloveitchik did in theirs have no option but to begin again at the beginning, in the meeting between contemporary culture and the biblical and rabbinic texts. Neither the dynamic of the new nor the status of the old are achieved without constant reinterpretation.”[15]
Kaplan traces Sacks’s dissatisfaction with Soloveitchik’s approach to an essay included in Tradition in an Untraditional Age but first published by Tradition in 1973 (the first essay the journal published on Soloveitchik and the first by Sacks in any publication), only five years after the initial meeting between the two thinkers. At just twenty-five years of age and identified simply as “a member of the faculty of Jews’ College in London, England,” Sacks presented a stunning corrective to The Lonely Man of Faith’s conclusion that “the Jew, as [Soloveitchik] conceives him, is (in the paradox of sacrifice) doomed to and at the same time blessed by an existence which is divided, alienated and lonely.”[16]
Sacks sought, “in contrast rather than disagreement,[17] to describe an alternative phenomenology of the Jewish self, one which arises equally naturally from the traditional sources, and one in which the divided self occupies a different and impermanent place” in which “alienation and loneliness are defective states, the consequence of sin, and that the religious man of any age transcends divisions, subsumes contrasts into harmonious emotion, and exists in unmediated closeness to God, the world and other Jews.”[18] This, to Sacks, was “the polar opposite from alienation and internal discord.”[19] At the end of the essay, Sacks emphasized that his and Soloveitchik’s interpretations stood parallel. He wrote, “At a time when loneliness is the condition of the estranged Jew, one reading offers empathy, the other, healing.”[20]
Kaplan notes that Sacks’s treatment of The Lonely Man of Faith in “Alienation and Loneliness” prefigured much of his later criticism of Halakhic Man as well as his general willingness “to take issue with the fundamental portrait of Halakhah that Soloveitchik draws.”[21] Sacks’s 1988 Tradition article, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Early Epistemology,” was also reprinted in Tradition in an Untraditional Age and further showcased his critique with a focus on The Halakhic Mind:
Soloveitchik makes an important point at the beginning and end of The Halakhic Mind. Judaism is timeless and autonomous. But how much of it can be expressed in the language of the world depends on where the world is at a given point of time. The pluralism of contemporary culture, which he was the first to recognise, was both a liberation and a privation. It liberated tradition from having to vindicate itself in alien terms. But it prised tradition from its moorings in the collective order and made it seem as just one system among many, either consciously chosen (the ba’al teshuvah phenomenon) or validated by an act of faith which is “aboriginal, exploding with elemental force” and eluding cognitive analysis. Soloveitchik’s genius and the poignancy of his intellectual development are both evidenced in this: that he was the first to explore the positive possibilities of the liberation, and the first to chart the tragic dimension of the privation.[22]
Sacks’s full opposition to Soloveitchik’s weltanschauung was even more clearly visible, as Kaplan points out, in the introduction he wrote for Tradition in an Untraditional Age:
In R. Soloveitchik’s work, halakhic Judaism comes as close as it will ever get to… a religion of subjectivity, loneliness, paradox and conflict. In The Hakakhic Mind, Judaism loses its ability to communicate with science and philosophy. In Halakhic Man, halakhah becomes a theoretical world akin to modern mathematics, not a code of law that creates communities. The tragic hero of “The Lonely Man of Faith” was already present in these works written twenty years before. Halakhic Man lives in the company of Hillel and R. Akiva, not in the real world of the contemporary Jewish community. He sees halakhah not as the discipline of resolving conflicts but as the celebration of conflicts which, if there is a resolution at all, it lies in the mystical depths of the soul, not in the world of action, human relationship and society. This is not halakhah as the premodern Jew understood it.[23]
Sacks continued, calling Rav Soloveitchik’s approach one of “premature despair” that “is as much to be resisted as its opposite, premature messianism.”[24] Thus we see a consistent and sustained critique of Soloveitchik’s approach to Halakhah in Sacks’s writings beginning as early as 1973 and continuing at least through the 1990 publication of Tradition in an Untraditional Age.
Kaplan does not extend his analysis of Sacks’s critique of Soloveitchik beyond the essays examined above. He noted in his 2023 lecture that Sacks’s later writings summarize Soloveitchik in a manner informed by his early critiques but do not advance a direct critique of the elder thinker. We shall see, however, that Sacks’s critique of Soloveitchik is maintained through the entirety of his career, far beyond this early juncture.
Sustained Tension
In 1991, Sacks questioned whether “in R. Soloveitchik’s imagery, to be a Jew is to be torn by ceaseless conflict?” His answer was that “Judaism is best understood not as a set of correct positions but as a set of axes of tension: between universalism and particularism, action and passivity, freedom and constraint, individual and community, equality and hierarchy, past and future, timelessness and responsiveness to time. It strives to maintain a balance between these opposing values. But there is… no universal point of equilibrium that can be prescribed in advance.”[25] It was only in 1992 that Sacks began his trend of summarizing, rather than criticizing, Soloveitchik’s approach.[26] In Crisis and Covenant, for example, Sacks wrote that Soloveitchik “had mapped the conflicts, creativity and will to freedom of the modern Jew onto the ancient territory of Jewish law,”[27] and that “no one hitherto had placed halakhah so firmly at the heart of Jewish thought. Soloveitchik’s success in marrying talmudic analysis with philosophical existentialism restored halakhah to the Jewish intellectual agenda.”[28] Earlier in the volume, Sacks also referenced Soloveitchik’s vision that “the halakhic personality refuses to be transformed by tragedy from subject to object.”[29]
Likewise, in 1993, Sacks addressed Soloveitchik’s essay entitled “Majesty and Humility”:
There will, surely, be moments when [a person of faith] faces a command to which he cannot assent. But then, like Abraham at the binding of Isaac, faith reigns. Man acknowledges his finitude in the presence of the Infinite. He experiences the ‘victory of defeat.’ Man, says Rabbi Soloveitchik, ‘defeats himself by accepting norms that the intellect cannot assimilate into its normative system.’ This is an idea almost impossible to make compelling to a modern sensibility, but it cannot be edited out of the tradition.[30]
Sacks is still at odds with Soloveitchik’s insistence on defeat at the hands of a heteronomous Halakhah. He accepted Halakhah as a system that obligates Jews, but he felt strongly that defeat and tension were the wrong emotional responses to that obligation. There are surely times when we must subject ourselves to the law—but, to paraphrase my teacher R. Dr. Samuel Lebens, Sacks didn’t believe those moments should be paradigmatic of religious life. Sacks did not attempt to directly refute or suggest alternatives to Soloveitchik’s formulation, though. He simply quoted it, noted the difficulty in making it compelling to his readers, and moved on, only somewhat lamenting that nothing could be done about its place within the Jewish tradition.
Interestingly, Sacks’s critique of Soloveitchik returned to the fore in 2010 with the Afterword he wrote for the 20th Anniversary Edition of R. Dr. Norman Lamm’s Torah U’Madda:
R. Joseph Soloveitchik has been the greatest Orthodox thinker in the last half century. More than any other figure of the past two centuries he has combined mastery of the rabbinic literature with encyclopedic knowledge of modern philosophy, theology, mathematics, and theoretical physics. There could be no more supreme exemplar of Torah and madda. Yet, other than a few passing references, R. Soloveitchik plays no part in Lamm’s analysis.
Rightly so. For no Jewish thinker has more acutely described the agonizing conflicts between traditional and modern consciousness. It was not always so. In his early works, Halakhic Man and The Halakhic Mind, R. Soloveitchik was more optimistic. To be sure, even then he did not believe in the kinds of synthesis entertained by Maimonides or Hirsch or Rav Kook. Rather, he believed that the differentiation and the fragmentation of modern culture opened up a space for halakhic Judaism to be understood in its own terms, without having to be reconciled with other branches of knowledge. But in his later writings—those that reflect his experience of contemporary America rather than the pre-war University of Berlin—he came to recognize the pervasive influence of secularization. His work took on a tragic-heroic tone.
Judaism is experienced as incessant conflict: thesis and antithesis without synthesis. To be heroic is to be defeated. To have faith is to be alone. The halakhic mind lives in the company of Hillel and R. Akiva and Rashi and Maimonides, not in the society of the present.[31]
Kaplan notes that “Sacks’ sharp reproach…—that Soloveitchik only views the Halakhah as a theoretical world and ignores its main function of creating communities—derives from Sacks’s own emphasis, found in all his writings, regarding Judaism’s critical role in creating communities precisely to counter modern alienation and loneliness.” Thus, as Kaplan understands it, “Sacks’s criticism is the other side of the coin of Sacks’s own discomfort with what he sees as Soloveitchik’s validation of loneliness, found in Sacks’s view not only in “The Lonely Man of Faith,” where it is clearly present, but even in Halakhic Man, where Sacks has to read loneliness into the text.”[32] In response, Kaplan makes the following case:
To this author, Sacks’s criticism glosses over Soloveitchik’s description of the Halakhah as a “cognitive-normative” approach to the world, Soloveitchik’s assertion that halakhic man’s “normative approach has priority from a teleological perspective over his ontological [cognitive] approach,” Soloveitchik’s stress on the importance of “actualizing the ideal halakhah in the very midst of the real world,” and, above all, Soloveitchik’s ringing declaration, “The actualization of the ideals of justice and righteousness is the pillar of fire which halakhic man follows, when he, as a rabbi and teacher in Israel, serves his community.”[33]
Kaplan admits, though, that “even had Sacks been confronted with these citations of Soloveitchik… though he might have modified the starkness of his criticism, he still would have maintained his fundamental point: that Soloveitchik overemphasizes the abstract, theoretical nature of the halakhah and downplays its practical role in creating communities.”[34]
Soloveitchik Redeemed
There is, however, significant reason to believe that Sacks, at least partially, resolved the tension that he felt toward Soloveitchik’s weltanschauung.
In a 2010 devar Torah on Parashat Vayera, Sacks noted Soloveitchik’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac “as demonstrating that we must not expect always to be victorious.” Sacks affirmed the correctness of Soloveitchik’s position and its place in Jewish tradition but, returning to the form of his earlier essays in Tradition in an Untraditional Age, moved on “to offer a quite different reading.” His reading was one in which “Torah ultimately seeks to abolish all relationships of dominance and submission. That is why it dislikes slavery and makes it, within Israel, a temporary condition rather than a permanent fate.” Sacks applied this idea—of dominance and submission being a temporary rather than permanent relationship with Halakhah—more directly to Soloveitchik a year later.
An important 2011 essay, written as the introduction to Koren’s Mesorat HaRav Siddur, significantly reframes how Sacks saw Soloveitchik—particularly in light of the recurring “Lonely Man of Faith” rhetoric that Kaplan draws attention to. In his essay titled “Rav Soloveitchik on Jewish Faith and Prayer,” Sacks brought together much of his previous writings about Soloveitchik. It began on a familiar note:
In [Soloveitchik’s] teachings and writings, we encounter terms not often found in Jewish thought before his time. He spoke of conflict, struggle and defeat; of the tragic destiny of the man (and woman) of faith whose soul is battered by storms within and incomprehension by the world outside. The person of faith is constantly in motion, tossed between rapture and despair, caught in an endless dialectic of thesis and antithesis without a mediating synthesis. The life of faith is simple only to the simple. Those who have ventured deeper know that it is rarely easy or harmonious.[35]
Prayer, however, is built on just such a phenomenological experience. As Sacks reflected, “We suffer when we know that things might be otherwise. We suffer from loneliness because we know of the possibility of relationship.”[36] It is for that reason that “prayer is essential to redemption, because it is our way of expressing the awareness that the world is not as it ought to be, and we must play a part in mending it.”[37] For Soloveitchik, Sacks wrote, prayer is “a dialogue, and therein lies its historical drama… In prayer, human beings speak to God. That is why prayer survived even when prophecy came to an end. The Jewish people continued the conversation even when, as it were, Heaven was silent. Tefilla is part of the unbroken dialogue between heaven and earth, born out of a profound reflex of the Jewish soul.”[38]
Prayer, in other words, is a natural result of seeing life through precisely the sort of dissatisfied Soloveitchikian lens that Sacks frequently criticized:
The religious life according to Rav Solveitchik is not comfortable, easy or serene. It is fraught with conflict: between intellect and passion, between human desire and the divine will, and between the two most profound aspects of our being, the knowledge that we are creative on the one hand, and on the other, created. We make and are made. Within that ceaseless dialectic we live and breathe and have our being. We may experience moments of grief, loss, loneliness and depression. No one was more candid about this than Rav Soloveitchik. But reaching out to that which is greater than us, greater than anything we can experience or know, we find God reaching out to us, and we feel as if we were being lifted out of the raging sea into the enfolding arms of the divine embrace.[39]
Sacks went on to compare Soloveitchik with our biblical prophets:
Seen in the full perspective of the history of Jewish thought, Rav Soloveitchik is a rare voice, closer in spirit to Moses or Jeremiah, Jonah or Job than to the thinkers of the Middle Ages. For it was the prophets of the biblical age who felt the full torment of the tension between life as it should be and as it is. Despite their closeness to God, they found no easy answers. There are no easy answers if we are to do justice to the complexity of life on earth between the womb and the grave.[40]
Within this mindset, the very Soloveitchikian worldview that is on the one hand a source of immense frustration becomes, on the other hand, a primary cause of prayer. It is in following Soloveitchik’s personal example that it all comes together:
What is remarkable about Rav Soloveitchik’s teachings is their candor and honesty. He tells us of moments when he felt bereft and alone, times when he fell to his knees and wept. He carries with him the full tragic consciousness of a Jew in the twentieth century, knowing how close his people came to total destruction. He knew too how facile are the attempts to reduce the human condition to a single dimension, finding harmony at the cost of freedom or certainty at the expense of the multi-faceted nature of truth as refracted through human understanding… The feeling of being at home is not always available to such creatures as we are, caught between earth and heaven.
And this ultimately is one of the sources of prayer. To pray is know [sic] our finitude and yet still have the confidence to speak to the One who spoke and brought the universe into being, the One who formed us in the womb and knows us more intimately than a parent knows his or her child. Prayer is the most intimate of all conversations. In it we hide nothing. We stand fully exposed in the sight of God with all our faults and failings, doubts and indecisions.[41]
Sacks concluded his essay by stating that “Rav Soloveitchik was, to quote the title of one of his most famous essays, a ‘lonely man of faith.’ Yet he knew that loneliness is where faith begins, not where it ends.”[42] Sacks, in other words, came to accept the plight of the lonely man of faith so long as his loneliness is only temporary.[43] Man may begin lonely but must use the prayers generated by that predicament to free himself from the experience and eventually transcend it. In going through that, we must come to understand that God “gave us freedom and forgiveness, the two intimately linked, because there is no freedom without failure, and no failure, genuinely acknowledged, that is not ultimately forgiven.”[44] Sacks thus embraced Soloveitchik’s phenomenology as the means toward an end rather than an end unto itself.[45]
In this understanding, even Sacks’s critique of the halakhic man being too at home with sages of the past becomes helpful rather than a hindrance:
Rav Soloveitchik often spoke of how he felt, when studying, that the great sages of the tradition, Hillel, Shammai, Abaye, Rava, Rashi, and Rambam, were there in the room with him as he tried to penetrate to the core of their arguments. So too are our ancestors present in prayer, that tapestry of words into which the Jews of many times and places wove their distinctive threads. When we pray, the generations of our forebears pray with us, and their voices and ours intertwine as they wend their way to heaven.
Torah and tefilla, learning and prayer, are the systole and diastole of the Jewish heart. In Torah, God speaks to us. In prayer, we speak to God. And in that sustained conversation lies the redemption of solitude. We may be lonely but we are not alone.[46]
Ultimately, through prayer, “the broken fragments of the human soul melt and are reshaped and made whole again. Such is the drama of the life of faith. In Rav Soloveitchik, in the twentieth century, it found its finest philosopher and poet.”[47]
Sacks thus came to recognize that it is precisely the existential loneliness and tension so well articulated by Soloveitchik that is able to fuel a meaningful relationship between Jews and the God we pray to. Soloveitchikian dialectics may not be ideal for philosophizing our day-to-day experience, but they are perfect for facilitating moments of genuine prayer. This may be why the opening paragraph of the essay included a line that says, “As if for the first time, we begin to understand why those who came before us did as they did, and we and the tradition are renewed.”[48] It may well be that Sacks’s own relationship with Soloveitchik was renewed by his decision to read the elder theologian’s dialectics in the context of prayer rather than philosophy—as a beginning rather than an end.
Conclusion
That Sacks continued to wrestle with Soloveitchik’s approach was evident in his 2018 interview on R. Efrem Goldberg’s Behind the Bima podcast. When asked for recommendations of “essential reading for a thinking, feeling person today,” The Lonely Man of Faith was first on the list. Consistent with his early writings, Sacks referred to it as “one voice… not the only voice because not everyone thought the man of faith should be lonely. I wrestle with that.” Sacks affirmed that, despite his continuing to wrestle with the perpetual loneliness of the man of faith in Soloveitchik’s writings, the book’s worth was in its demonstration of “a man wrestling with himself, and that’s terribly important.”[49] Soloveitchik thus remained, to Sacks, a necessary thinker to engage with at the beginning of one’s journey rather than a mindset to end up with. Soloveitchikian philosophizing has a place in prayer but not necessarily within the day-to-day life of the average Jew who wants to live in the world.
The question, then, is how successful Sacks’s alternative framework has been for his primary audience of Jews who wish to integrate Torah and hokhmah in serious ways. The consistent re-printing of his works, recent translations of many of those works into Hebrew,[50] and his standing as the Modern Orthodox community’s go-to commentary for siddurim, divrei Torah, and now humashim imply that his worldview has been well accepted—moreso than Soloveitchik’s—around the globe. This success would seem not to have been because Sacks followed in Soloveitchik’s footsteps but because he consciously rejected that path. He instead worked to cultivate a compelling alternative to the Soloveitchikian worldview throughout his impressive career, at most encompassing Soloveitchik’s religious phenomenology as a stepping stone toward a more integrated outlook.[51] Rabbis Sacks and Soloveitchik thus stand as two parallel giants to be looked up to by our community forevermore as we together walk the path of faith, perhaps lonely at times but never truly alone.
[1] When I was a teenager, my Hebrew school awarded me a prize that came with a copy of R. Sacks’s book The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (Schocken, 2012). Reading it inspired me to embrace religion further than I initially had. I was privileged to later meet R. Sacks for just a few moments when he delivered a talk at Rutgers University while I was studying there. I brought my copy of The Great Partnership to be signed. He asked what I wanted him to say, and I asked for a berakhah. With what I later discovered was his characteristic sense of humor, he wrote, “Dear Steve, BLESSINGS! – Jonathan Sacks.”
[2] The second initial inspiration is identified by Sacks as the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson. For a fascinating and thorough examination of Schneerson’s influence on Sacks, see Aryeh Solomon’s “The Chief Rabbi and the Rebbe: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Engagement with Habad Hasidism,” The Lehrhaus.
[3] Gabriel Slamovits was invaluable in helping me locate essays of particular importance to my argument and for offering substantive feedback on early versions of this essay. I also owe a debt of gratitude to R. Dr. Samuel Lebens for his incredibly thorough comments on an early draft of this essay and to Dr. Daniel Rynhold and R. Dr. Raphael Zarum for offering feedback as well. Thank you as well to the thinkers who participated in discussions on the social media post of mine that would eventually grow into this essay—R. Dr. Lawrence Kaplan, R. Alex Israel, and Dr. Tyron Goldschmidt. Finally, thanks as well to Chesky Kopel for editing this article on behalf of The Lehrhaus team as well as to Ashley Stern Mintz and Michael Bernstein for their thorough copyediting.
[4] The second meeting, described first, involved Soloveitchik’s attempt to recruit Sacks to be a synagogue rabbi in Brookline, Massachusetts. Had Sacks accepted, it would, no doubt, have significantly changed the course of his story as well as history.
[5] This story is also retold by Sacks in Tradition in an Untraditional Age: Essays on Modern Jewish Thought (Vallentine Mitchell, 1990), 272–274. In a Tradition Online article, Dr. Alan Jotkowitz reflected that, in this story, “R. Sacks paints a beautiful portrait of the elderly giant passing on his profound wisdom to an eager, young student who would evolve into the foremost expositor of our masora for our People and for the nations of the world. R. Sacks wrote that in his visit to American [sic] he sought out people who would help him cling to something beyond himself. For a generation of Jews seeking wisdom and values in a turbulent world, now bereft of our teacher, R. Sacks was the spiritual guide we sought out and clung to.”
[6] It should be noted that in his divrei Torah, Sacks has quoted Heschel’s idea of Shabbat as a sanctuary of time quite positively—and, indeed, in contrast to a more Halakhah-centric understanding of the day’s sanctity. See, for example, his essay on Parashat Ki Tissa 5769 (and 5777). A fuller study of the Heschelian influence on Sacks is forthcoming.
[7] Samuel H. Dresner, “Heschel and Halakhah: The Vital Center in Conservative Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 43 (1991): 25–26. Heschel’s criticism of Ish Ha-Halakhah is also summarized by Professor Lawrence Kaplan in his introduction to Halakhic Man: 40th Anniversary Edition (JPS, 2023), xi–xii.
[8] Sacks mentions in several places having met Heschel during the same 1968 trip to the United States on which he also met with Soloveitchik and Schneerson. Unfortunately, the details of that meeting were never discussed by Sacks in his writing, speeches, or interviews. Nevertheless, R. Dr. Samuel Lebens pointed out to me that Sacks frequently drew from Heschel’s ideas and imagery.
[9] Tradition in an Untraditional Age, 285–286. Reflecting on this book’s importance in Sacks’s overall canon, Dr. Daniel Rynhold wrote:
[I]ronically, it is in this book that we see Rabbi Sacks engaging in the very work that does engage Jewish philosophers. Here we find Rabbi Sacks as a critical reader of thinkers ranging from Samson Raphael Hirsch and Martin Buber to Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik. Rabbi Sacks’ masterful analyses of his chosen subjects are evidence that he could have followed his academic muse had he so chosen. Indeed, the first scholarly analysis of Soloveitchik’s thought to appear in the then leading journal of Modern Orthodoxy, Tradition, “Alienation and Faith,” appears here as written by Rabbi Sacks when he was twenty-five years old (!), assessed as recently as 2023 as “an acute, philosophical rigorous analysis” by the Soloveitchik scholar Professor Lawrence Kaplan in the 40th Anniversary edition of his translation of Halakhic Man. Additionally, in the chapter on Soloveitchik’s early epistemology—a review essay of The Halakhic Mind—Rabbi Sacks presents, in characteristically deft and highly readable terms, a penetrating analysis of Soloveitchik’s most difficult work, posing for the first time to my knowledge the critical questions that needed to be asked of it. But ultimately, this purely academic path, much as it could have been trodden, was “the path not taken.”
[10] Tradition in an Untraditional Age, xv. Furthermore, Sacks noted that Jewish thinkers can “no longer… philosophise on the basis of an agreed understanding of the central terms of Judaism,” since terms such as “revelation, command, tradition, interpretation, covenant, exile and redemption… have lost their traditional sense for liberal Jews on the one hand, secularists on the other. Even within Orthodoxy there are sharp differences of opinion between modernists and traditionalists, religious Zionists and those who deny religious significance to the state of Israel” (ibid., xvi).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., xvii.
[13] Thank you to Chesky Kopel for suggesting this phraseology.
[14] Ibid., 48–49.
[15] Ibid., 124.
[16] Ibid., 224.
[17] In his 2023 lecture, Kaplan suggested that this was “just a polite way of saying it’s offered in disagreement.”
[18] Tradition in an Untraditional Age, 225.
[19] Ibid., 233.
[20] Ibid., 245. Of course, Sacks was sure to consistently clarify that stating his alternative perspective was “not to formulate an opposition; simply to open another gate” (ibid.).
[21] Halakhic Man, xxxv–xxxvi.
[22] Tradition in an Untraditional Age, 301–302.
[23] Tradition in an Untraditional Age, xxii. He went on to note the lack of surprise that “R. Soloveitchik’s work, with its deep ambivalences, has given rise to two conflicting tendencies: one, a radicalism, evident in the work of such figures as Emanuel Rackman, David Hartman and Irving Greenberg, that pushes halakhic Judaism to its liberal limits and possibly beyond; the other, an ultra-conservatism that is deeply distrustful of contemporary culture” (ibid., xxiii).
[24] Ibid. Is this perhaps a reference to the legacy of Sacks’s other initial inspiration, R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson?
[25] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism (Maggid, 2023), 216.
[26] R. Dr. Samuel Lebens pointed out that this may be due to Sacks’s 1991 election as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, a role in which it would no longer be beneficial for Sacks to involve himself in direct debates with those he most admired.
[27] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought after the Holocaust (Maggid, 2023), 136.
[28] Ibid., 137.
[29] Ibid., 38.
[30] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity (Littman Library, 1993), 160.
[31] Rabbi Norman Lamm, Torah Umadda: The Encounter of Religious Learning and Worldly Knowledge in the Jewish Tradition (Maggid, 2010), 212.
[32] Halakhic Man, xxxvi.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid., xxxvii.
[35] Jonathan Sacks, The Koren Mesorat HaRav Siddur (Koren, 2011), xix. Sacks then pointed out that Soloveitchik himself was a prominent example of just this phenomenon:
He chose as the opening quotation of his first published work, Ish HaHalakha (Halakhic Man), a rabbinic comment about the biblical Joseph refusing the advances of Potiphar’s wife. The Talmud (Sota 36b) says, “At that moment the image of his father came to him and appeared before him in the window.” The continuation of the passage—not cited by Rav Soloveitchik—states that Joseph heard his father saying: “Your brothers will have their names inscribed on the stones of the ephod, and yours will be among them. Do you wish to have your name expunged from among theirs and be called an associate of harlots?” Rav Soloveitchik’s name was Joseph, and there can be no doubt as to his meaning. He was assuring the spirit of his father, who had recently died, that he would not be seduced by the “strange woman” of Western philosophy. Yet the quotation suggests the doubt and tension he felt. (ibid., xx–xxi)
Sacks wrote on the very next page that it “is this candor that makes Rav Soloveitchik’s work distinctive and of our time. The fundamental unity we sense in different ways in the great medieval thinkers like Judah HaLevi and Maimonides, is not available to us. They were religious people living in a religious age. We, by contrast, seek spirituality in a largely secular culture, honoring tradition in an untraditional and sometimes anti-traditional time” (ibid., xxii). I find it hard to believe that the similarity in wording to the title of Sacks’s book largely addressing Soloveitchik’s thought is coincidental. This is also an example of Sacks maintaining the distinction between the medieval philosophers and Soloveitchik, whom Sacks has treated instead as a “thinker.”
[36] Ibid., xxvi.
[37] Ibid., xxvi–xxvii. One of Sacks’s preferred illustrations of this imperfect world is the midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 39:1) in which the world is portrayed as a birah doleket, translated either as a “palace lit up” or a “palace in flames.” In his 2000 book A Letter in the Scroll (alternatively titled Radical Then, Radical Now), Sacks referred to the midrash as “a deeply enigmatic passage, so much so that distinguished Jewish thinkers in our time have often misunderstood it.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion (Free Press, 2000), 55. Sacks’s reading of that midrash in conversation with Heschel (whom Sacks claims misunderstood it) will be explored in a future article.
[38] The Koren Mesorat HaRav Siddur, xxxi–xxxii. Sacks’s language here seems to allude to and mirror Professor Louis Finkelstein’s famous line: “When I pray, I speak to God; when I study, God speaks to me.”
[39] Ibid., xxxii.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid., xxxii–xxxiii.
[42] Ibid., xxxiii.
[43] It should, of course, be noted that, contra Sacks’s words, Soloveitchik himself gave no indication of the man of faith’s loneliness being a temporary phenomenon.
[44] The Koren Mesorat HaRav Siddur, xxxiii.
[45] In a special edition of Tradition dedicated to the intellectual legacy of R. Sacks and released during the editing of this essay, Dr. Tanya White suggested that “R. Sacks describes the condition of modern man as a tension between being heir to a faith tradition that refuses to be translated into contemporary language, and concurrently being part of a secular-human enterprise that encourages advances in technology, science, and the arts as a way of elevating and dignifying human existence. But, unlike R. Soloveitchik, R. Sacks saw this as a tension that we are charged to resolve.” White utilizes many of the passages from a chapter of Tradition in an Untraditional Age cited above in support of her argument. I hope this piece serves to bolster her thesis. (Tanya White, Covenantal Theology in the Work of Rabbi Sacks,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 57:4–58:1 [Winter 2025–Spring 2026]: 232-233.)
[46] The Koren Mesorat HaRav Siddur, xxxiii–xxxiv.
[47] Ibid. Attentive readers ought to notice that Sacks’s formulations throughout the essay are more Heschelian than Soloveitchikian. Given that Soloveitchik would not have referred to himself as a poet, and that Sacks frequently referred to Heschel as such in contradistinction to Soloveitchik, it is hard to see this as a coincidence. One possibility might be that Sacks sought, whether consciously or unconsciously, to remake Soloveitchik as a thinker he could better appreciate on a personal level. My purely speculative understanding is that Sacks personally connected with the ideas of Heschel but was not comfortable consistently quoting them. Soloveitchik, on the other hand, was an unquestionably safe thinker to quote. Confirmation of this can perhaps be found in the following 1990 footnote by Sacks:
There appears to be an implicit criticism here [in The Lonely Man of Faith] of the stance adopted by A. J. Heschel (1907–1972), who had argued in The Sabbath that Judaism was a religion of time aiming at time’s sanctification whereas technical civilization represents man’s conquest of space. Halakhic Man, too, with its comparison between the halakhist and the modern theoretical mathematician, is set in counterpoint to Heschel’s romantic-nostalgic portrayal of Eastern European Jewry in The Earth is the Lord’s (The Earth is the Lord’s/The Sabbath, Meridian Books 1963). A detailed contrast between the two men, both leading theologians of the twentieth century, both heirs of famous dynasties (Heschel was a descendant of several outstanding Chassidic leaders: the Maggid of Mezeritch, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev and Abraham Joshua Heschel—after whom he was named—the Apter Rav), both deeply immersed in the Western philosophical tradition, might yield some fascinating results. The schools that they represent—for Soloveitchik, Lithuanian talmudism, for Heschel, Chassidism—were directly opposed in the nineteenth century, and some of the classic dichotomies persist in their work. Both in Germany, where he worked with Martin Buber in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus, and in America, where he taught at the Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, Heschel belonged outside the institutional framework of Orthodoxy, and his involvement with the civil rights movement and interfaith dialogue were outside American Orthodoxy’s central concerns. But the contrast between the two men lies along a different axis than a simple Orthodox/non-Orthodox rift. (Tradition in an Untraditional Age, 53n33)
Another way of framing this is that Sacks perhaps used this essay as a way of synthesizing the aspects of Soloveitchik’s worldview that he came to accept within his own (Heschelian-influenced) holistic worldview. The essay, understood in this way, is then less about Soloveitchik’s perspective on prayer than it is about Sacks finally coming to accept Soloveitchik’s weltanschauung into his own within the context of prayer.
[48] Ibid., xix.
[49] The only other book recommended by name was Heschel’s God in Search of Man. In the interview, Sacks referred to Heschel as a poet and Ish Ha-Aggadah, complementing Soloveitchik’s Ish Ha-Halakhah.
[50] Interestingly under the name “יונתן זקס” instead of his actual Hebrew name “יעקב צבי זקס.” This, for me, is one of contemporary Judaism’s greatest mysteries.
[51] Alternatively, one early reader of this piece suggested that Sacks’s acceptance over Soloveitchik’s could have been due to his form as much as his content. Sacks’s writing, especially after his appointment as Chief Rabbi, was in a popular intellectual style, far more readable and less severe in tone than that of the elder Rav.
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