No other major movement in American Jewish life has been as dependent on one person as Modern Orthodoxy was on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. He bestrode that world like a colossus for almost half a century before illness forced his withdrawal from public life in the mid-1980s. He passed away in 1993, at the age of 90.
Soloveitchik ordained more than 2,000 rabbis at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, devised Orthodox public policy as chairman of the Halakhah Commission of the Rabbinical Council of America and laid out a vision of non-messianist Orthodox Zionism as honorary president of the Religious Zionists of America. His complex amalgam of ideas, set forth at standing room only lectures and, beginning in the 1960s, in an accelerating stream of publications, melded the conceptual talmudic analysis developed by his family over generations with a philosophical and cultural sophistication honed at the University of Berlin, and a shrewd understanding of the realities of American Jewish life, which he gleaned as a pulpit rabbi in Boston.
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