Thousands of students and disciples gathered in Boston on Sunday to pay respect to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the central intellectual and religious figure behind American Orthodox Judaism.
Soloveitchik, 90, died of heart failure April 8, at the end of the third day of Passover.
A master of the worlds of Jewish law and Jewish thought, he was almost universally referred to as “the Rav,” the rabbi and teacher par excellence.
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The Rav's daughter Atarah passed away recently. I met her in Boston and corresponded with her a bit. She was very gracious to me. I was very impressed by her. She was a very intelligent and unpretentious woman. Article from Arutz Sheva:
Dr. Atarah Twersky, the widow of Professor Isadore Twersky, daughter of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, passed away on Friday afternoon at 90.
Dr. Twersky was the sister of Dr. Tovah Lichtenstein, YU Professor of Jewish History Dr. Haym Soloveitchik, and mother of RIETS (Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary) Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Mayer Twersky, Tzipporah Rosenblatt, and Rabbi Moshe Twersky, who was murdered in his synagogue in Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist in 2014.
The funeral in the US will take place on Saturday evening at 8:15 PM at JFK Airport: EL AL Cargo,123 North Hangar Road Jamaica, New York.
The funeral in Israel will take place Sunday at the Jerusalem Municipal Funeral Parlor (Shamgar) 2 hours after the arrival of LY 008, scheduled to arrive at 5:10 PM.
Mystical philosophers long for immersion in the silence of absolute unity. The Greek philosopher Plotinus and all those who followed him were filled with such secret longings. But Judaism’s goal is not the same as that of the mystics with their via negativa, or negative way. The latter aspired to overcome the variety and uniqueness of man’s personality, recommending the negation of people’s variegated mental and physical existence for the sake of attaining pure, simple unity with no objective content. In denying the ontic independence of human beings, they came to deny their essence as well. They therefore recommended the via purgativa (method of elimination), which leads to unio mystica (mystic unification). The individual must empty out the content of his variegated life and freeze into a focal eternal point, lacking all dimension and context, and confine himself to the One.
But Judaism, directed by the Halakha says, “This is not the way.” First of all, one cannot speak of man uniting with God, but only of man cleaving to God. Second, man does not cleave to God by denying his actual essence, but, on the contrary, by affirming his own essence. The actual, multicolored human personality becomes closer to God when the individual lives his own variegated original life, filled with goals, initiative, and activity, without imagining some prideful insolent independence. Then and only then does the personality begin to have a divine existence. Judaism insists that destroying man’s uniqueness and originality does not bring man closer to God, as the mystics imagined. Man’s road to God does not wind among faraway hidden places – in which man concentrates on a mysterious pyre in which his individuality goes up in flames – but, rather, among the spaces of real being, filled with movement and transformation. (Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, And From There You Shall Seek, MeOtzar HaRav, pp. 87-88)
The Rav Thinking Aloud, p. 69
