488 A History of Judaism
productive dialectical tension, has been immensely appealing to those
orthodox Jews attempting to combine observance of the command-
ments with a full integration into contemporary western civilization.
Soloveitchik depicted life according to the halakhah, devoted to human
productivity, Torah study and repentance, as one of freedom and intel-
lectual creativity, while claiming that the required submission to the
inscrutable will of God is inevitable to all who acknowledge the reality
of the human condition. The sophistication of his arguments has, at the
very least, provided reassurance to those modern orthodox Jews keen to
present, to themselves and to others, their lives of mitzvot observance as
rationally justified in terms of western values. A similar role has been
played in more recent times by other modern orthodox theologians
such as the former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks.^12
A major task for Soloveitchik was to equip modern orthodox Jews
with a reliable guide for living in a western consumer society without
breaching the norms of halakhah. His authority was supplemented by
that of Moshe Feinstein, who had fled from his post as a rabbi in
Belorussia to the United States in 1936 to take up a position as head of
a yeshivah in the Lower East Side in New York. In this post, which he
held until his death fifty years later, Feinstein issued a stream of responses
to queries about the correct religious approach to science, technology
and politics and to the gentile world full of consumer goods in which
American Jews found themselves, as in this ruling about correct behav-
iour at the time of Christian holidays:
It is in itself reprehensible to make a vacation time when they are celebrat-
ing their foreign worship – they who have troubled and embittered the
nation of Israel for nearly two thousand years and still their hand is
outstretched ... In our country, because of the abundant blessing which
God, may He be blessed, has bestowed, there is a great desire and appetite
for the enjoyments of this world in all the pleasant experiences which they
call ‘good time’, which is also a matter which greatly corrupts a man. It
makes him used to desiring things for which there is no need and destroys
his character until he becomes an evil beast. At the beginning he seeks [to
satisfy] his lusts with some permitted thing ... and when it is impossible
[to obtain this] he will not refrain even from the forbidden.^13
Soloveitchik and Feinstein laid out the pattern for an ideal orthodox
life for diaspora Jews in the modern world, but the communal rabbis who
have tried to put that pattern into operation know that many in their
congregations ignore what they are told to do. Ever since the rise of