This revolutionary work offers a powerful lens through which to read the writings of the pioneering 20th-century talmudist and Jewish philosopher, Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, the driving force behind American modern Orthodoxy.
Professor Bill Kolbrener of the English department at Bar-Ilan University portrays Soloveitchik as the “last rabbi”, the self-professed lonely survivor of his family’s illustrious tradition. Kolbrener deftly weaves literary tropes from his native discipline with complex midrashic themes, contemporary cultural references and psychoanalysis,
persuasively casting Soloveitchik as a man whose epistemology and hermeneutics are stirred by existential loss and loneliness.
Commanding an extraordinary range of sources — where else might Freud, Corinthians, Donne and Adam Phillips share a page in a book about an Orthodox rabbi? — the author ( who is a long-standing friend of mine) demonstrates that his transition from English professor to polymath is complete.
