counter- reform 487
Yitzhak’s elder brother, Moshe, and his nephew, Joseph B. Soloveit-
chik, took the ethos of Agudat Israel to the United States, where they
became leading figures within American orthodoxy. Moshe had avoided
secular education like his father, but as head of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan
Theological Seminary in Yeshiva College in New York from 1929 he
was open to secular studies and brought the analytic approach to Tal-
mud study pioneered by his father to a new, and receptive, orthodox
community. The ‘Brisker method’, which involved the application of
abstract, conceptual analysis to the study of Talmud, was felt to encour-
age rigorous intellectual creativity without requiring a secular education.
It is thus a little surprising – and apparently due to the influence of his
mother – that the prodigiously gifted Joseph added a university education
to his mastery of Talmud study as taught by his grandfather, receiving a
doctorate in Berlin in 1932 for a thesis on the philosophy of Hermann
Cohen. It testimony to the abstract nature of the Kantian philosophy
espoused by Cohen that Cohen’s ideas, which had so strong an influence
on Reform Judaism in the first half of the twentieth century (see Chapter
17), could also attract such a pillar of modern orthodox thought.
The combination of philosophical sophistication with outstanding
talmudic knowledge and rhetorical gifts gave Joseph B. Soloveitchik an
unmatched authority in modern orthodox circles in America from the
1950s to his death in 1993. His philosophical writings on Judaism had
as a result a far greater influence within the Jewish community than
those of most other Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century. Like Isaac
Breuer, and unlike the other members of his family, Soloveitchik advo-
cated both the full participation of orthodox Jews in secular culture and
wider society and (eventually) support for Zionism, despite the secular
nature of the Israeli state. Called by many within modern orthodoxy
simply ‘the Rav’, Soloveitchik was the presiding authority overseeing
the ordination of orthodox rabbis through Yeshiva University, to which the
Elchanan Theological Seminary is affiliated, trying to equip them with
both a talmudic training in the style of European yeshivot and a sensi-
tivity to the needs of middle- class American life. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic
Man aims to show that ‘the man of halakhah’ combines the cognitive
drive of scientific man in search for knowledge in this world with the
religious yearning to recognize the divine presence through action. His
assertion that through the study and practice of halakhah the apparent
contradiction between reason and revelation can be overcome, with the
interior experience of such mitzvot as prayer, repentance, mourning and
ritual rejoicing built into the fabric of the mitzvot themselves in a