Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik הרב יוסף דוב סולובייצ'יק
leader of American Modern Orthodoxy, philosopher and rosh yeshiva
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik was born in 5663 in Pruzhany, into the family that gave Jewry the Brisk method of Talmud study — the precise analysis of legal concepts developed by his grandfather Rav Chaim of Brisk. He received that inheritance whole, and added a doctorate in philosophy from Berlin, on Hermann Cohen.
In 5692 he came to America, became rabbi of Boston and soon head of the Talmud faculty at Yeshiva University in New York. For half a century he gave the shiur through which thousands of American congregational rabbis passed; they called him simply «the Rav».
His essays became classics. «Halakhic Man» portrays a person who meets the world through the category of law. «The Lonely Man of Faith» reads the two Adams of Genesis — the conqueror of the world and the seeker of covenant — and the loneliness inseparable from faith in modernity.
He supported religious Zionism and participation in shared Jewish causes, but forbade theological dialogue with Christianity while permitting cooperation on social questions.