Something Dark Unfolded in Jerusalem This Week

They don't make Orthodox rabbis like Aharon Lichtenstein anymore. A polymath born in 1933, he received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University and a doctorate from Harvard, and set out to bridge traditional Judaism with modern life and culture. Lichtenstein moved to Israel in 1971, where he spent the next four decades educating students in his religious humanistic tradition and preaching political and territorial compromise with Israel's Palestinian neighbors. He drew upon his vast Jewish legal erudition to defend the Israeli government's right to evacuate settlements and cede land for peace, condemned anti-Arab violence, and rebuked rabbis who eulogized the notorious Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein. In 1995, the co-head of Lichtenstein's yeshiva, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Yehuda Amital, even served as a minister in Israel's government to lend religious support to the Oslo Accords.