Forty Years Later: The Rav’s Opening Shiur at the Stern College for Women Beit Midrash - thelehrhaus

https://nesherhagadol.blogspot.com/2020/10/43-years-later-ravs-opening-shiur-at.html


Forty Years Later: The Rav’s Opening Shiur at the Stern College for Women Beit Midrash

By Saul Berman
- October 9, 2017 All credit goes to him and to thelehrhaus.com

In late 1976, Dr. Haym Soloveitchik and I met to discuss Jewish Studies at Stern College for Women. Dr. Soloveitchik told me that he never understood why Talmud was not being more systematically taught at Stern College. He had been raised with the impression that it was natural for women to study Talmud. As a child, Dr. Soloveitchik had studied with his father, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, together with his older sisters, Atarah and Tovah. When he began, at the age of ten, studying Talmud with the Rav, Dr. Soloveitchik joined as a junior participant in their class. The same culture was manifest at Maimonides School in Boston, which his father and mother, Dr. Tonya Soloveitchik, had founded, and where boys and girls studied Talmud in the same classes.

By this time, many of Stern’s Jewish Studies courses made use of Mishnah, Talmud, and its commentaries. The undergraduate women used these texts, engaging with them as primary sources to study Jewish Law, Jewish History, and Biblical Exegesis. Yet, Stern College did not make room in the schedule for its students to acquire the skills to develop competence in independent text study. This is how the movement to introduce intensive Talmud study at Stern College was born.

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Biography of Tonya Soloveitchik by Tovah Lichtenstein

 https://www.etzion.org.il/sites/default/files/2023-04/Lichtenstein0095-0112.pdf

My father was known to his talmidim as the Rav. My mother was known as Mrs. Soloveitchik. Many times, when my father was invited to deliver a lecture, he would say, “I will talk to Mrs. Soloveitchik.” We children knew that was his way of saying no. He never spoke to her about the invitation nor did he speak. Very few of my father’s talmidim knew my mother. My father commuted to the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), at Yeshiva University in New York, from our home in Boston and she seldom travelled with him. It was only after the children had grown up and gone their own way that my mother began accompanying my father to New York. Despite her seeming anonymity, my mother was well known in Boston where she was the Chair of the School Committee of the Maimonides Educational Institute (later called Maimonides School), which had been founded by my father in 1937. The School Committee made curricular and policy decisions and was involved in the everyday functioning of the school at the micro level. The school committee ran the school, and Mrs. Soloveitchik was the driving force of the committee.

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At the Moriah shul in Manhattan, talking about Israel

 

The inner harmony of teshuvah

 

Of Perspective and Paradox: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Analysis of Holiness Kol Hamevaser

 In the opening of his famous essay “Sacred and Profane,”[1] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik writes, “In the same fashion that kodesh and hol form the spiritual framework of our halakha, so do the kodesh and hol determine the dichotomy of living experience into sacred and profane… This dualism has often been misapprehended. The halakhic conception of the essence of hol and kodesh is… diametrically opposed to universally accepted formulation in the circles of religious liberalism, Jewish as well as non-Jewish.”[2] By explicitly attributing great significance to the role of kodesh in one’s religious perspective, and through provocatively claiming that the halakhic approach to kodesh conflicts with the common religious approach, Rabbi Soloveitchik beckons the reader to investigate the essential topic of the nature of kodesh and hol. In addition to the aforementioned essay,[3] the Rav analyzes the topic in other contexts, including in his major work Halakhic Man, where he uses the halakhic understanding of kedushah as a critical distinction between halakhic man and homo religiosus.[4] In order to both understand and appreciate the novelty of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s approach to holiness, it is necessary to understand both its philosophical and theological background. It is also important to examine the consequences of his opinions as expounded in his other writings and through the works of his students. This analysis will demonstrate how his understanding of holiness is both novel and very much consistent with a number of other critical elements of his broader philosophy of Judaism.

The Rav’s Approach

In Halakhic Man, the first of his book-length publications, the Rav sought to define the characteristics of a complex ideal type, the halakhic man. In order to do so, the Rav contrasts him with two other ideal types: “cognitive man” and “homo religiosus.” Cognitive man is a scientist solely focused on the physical world. Similar to the ideal type of “Adam the First” depicted in Lonely Man of Faith, cognitive man seeks to intellectually conquer and master the physical world. In contrast, the homo religiosus is otherworldly, attributing significance only to a spiritual world. He is a religious figure, engaged in the mystical and esoteric in hope of transcending the physical world. He seeks not to conquer nature but to encounter the mystery found therein. The homo religiosus is also often not emotionally...

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