Author Description

Ḥakirah is honored to present lectures given approximately 70 years ago by Ha-Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, zt”l on the opening verses of the Torah. In the five lectures presented here as the first of three installments, the Rav’s focus is on the question raised by the Amora Rav Yitzḥak as to why the Torah dwells on the story of creation and what philosophical truths we are to learn from it. Further delving into the Rav’s philosophical works is a review essay on Nietzsche, Soloveitchik and Contemporary Jewish Philosophy. The reviewer argues that “R. Soloveitchik took secular philosophy as a foil rather than as a foun-dation for his own hashkafa, which was deeply rooted in Jewish sources.”While the Rav’s work was often dedicated to harmonizing Torah hashkafa and halakha, in our Jewish Thought section we deal with two other twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who emphasized one above the other and who consequently are considered on the fringes of Orthodoxy. In an “Introduction to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Philosophy” we see that for Heschel the values and philosophy of Judaism overshadowed the importance of halakha. On the other hand, in “Sanctifying Our Choices: The Solution to the Paradox of Orthodoxy,” an essay on the thought of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, we see that his thinking was the reverse, that all emphasis should be placed on halakha.The thought of another famous thinker who dealt with the challenges of modernity is explored in “Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Jews in a Non-Jewish World,” which features the first English language translation of a book review by Rav Hirsch where he expounds about the appreciation Jews can get about Judaism itself from reading works that deal with Christian life. And in “The Life and Work of Dr. Menachem Mendel Yehudah Leib Sergei: A Torah U-Madda Titan in the Early Twentieth Century” we are introduced to and inspired by a unique but overlooked Jewish physician “who combines Torah, fear of G-d, and wisdom in an extraordinar