Sublime

Rabbi Soloveitchik speaks with a passion of the modern “man of faith” who feels a dialectical tension between the pull of the covenantal community and the socioethical responsibilities of modern life. Interaction, and not withdrawal, is the creative response.

In the aggadic realm, differing views can be legitimate; but in the halakhic realm, communal cohesion requires a single, normative view. God delights in both of these scenarios, and fittingly it is Elijah who tells how God acts and feels about each of them.

God’s larger dream: a world in which human dignity is real, and the presence of God is manifest.

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.

for Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it.

If I had to capture the core of my Jewish experience, it would be this: Eighteen people sitting around a Shabbat dinner table, all of them talking at once, all of them following all eighteen conversations that are simultaneously crossing the table, all of them correcting the eighteen wrong things that other people have just said.

For Jonas, Diaspora is not a matter of geography; it is a matter of existential distance from life lived truly. In rabbinic parlance, one might say that we are no longer capable of observing God’s will completely.

Many religious people think that concessions to human limitations are incompatible with divine law. An eternal truth should not be qualified by socioeconomic realities or cultural norms. Halacha’s pragmatism bespeaks a different understanding of Judaism.