Yarzheit 18th Tishrei
Chicago's Torah giant, Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, dies at 84
When Ella Shurin Soloveichik, the wife of renowned Torah scholar Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, died two months ago, he told other family members that he felt as if half his soul had left him. So it was not entirely surprising that, after overcoming a debilitating stroke he suffered 18 years ago and continuing in his life's work, teaching Torah, up until the very end, Rabbi Soloveichik himself died Friday, Oct. 4 after suffering a heart attack. He was 84.
Rabbi Soloveichik, the descendent of one of Europe's leading rabbinic dynasties, was the founder and head of Yeshivas Brisk in Chicago and one of the world's foremost Talmudic scholars and authorities on Jewish law. He taught Torah for 58 years, the last 34 in Chicago. Aside from his awe- inspiring scholarship, he was known for being a humble, kind man, yet one with an iron will: although the stroke he suffered in 1983 left him partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair, he continued his duties as rosh yeshiva (head) of Yeshivas Brisk and flew to New York every week to teach a Talmud class at Yeshiva University.
Rabbi Soloveichik was born in Khaslavichy in western Russia in 1918 into a rabbinic dynasty going back nine generations. His father, Moshe, was the chief rabbi of his town and a renowned scholar; his older brother, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik, known simply as "the Rav" and considered the 20th century's leading rabbinic scholar, headed Yeshiva University in New York. Ahron Soloveichik's early teaching came from such Torah giants as the Chofetz Chaim, the Imrei Emmes and Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner.
The Soloveichik family moved first to Poland, then, in 1930, to the United States. Young Ahron Soloveichik graduated from Yeshiva College and received his rabbinic ordination, but found that he was having a hard time getting a job in New York. So he went to New York University Law School and graduated with a law degree in 1946. He spent the next 20 years teaching at yeshivas in New York.
In 1966, he came to Chicago to head the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, a post he held until 1974, when he left to start Yeshivas Brisk. His wife Ella, a writer and teacher, was his partner in this endeavor, as well as in raising the couple's six children.
Rabbi Soloveichik wrote two books in English, "Logic of the Heart, Logic of the Mind" and "The Warmth and the Light," as well as numerous Hebrew volumes.
It was as an interpreter of Jewish law that Rabbi Soloveichik gained his greatest fame. "His scholarship was incredible," Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, director of Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois, said. "He was able to take his vast Torah knowledge and apply it to modern-day questions. He was also a leader-someone who was not afraid to take stands on issues and to make his stands known to the public."
Indeed, those stands-always firmly rooted in Torah knowledge-were sometimes controversial. He was the only Orthodox rabbi in the country to oppose the Vietnam War, maintaining that fighting to save the world from Communism was a fallacious goal.
He also differed from many of his peers in ruling that, based on Torah, brain death was not sufficient to certify that a person is dead. He was an outspoken opponent of the Oslo peace process, but he was also one of the few Orthodox rabbis in the world who blamed some in the Orthodox community for creating a climate of incitement that led to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
But it may have been as a teacher that Rabbi Soloveichik had his greatest influence, especially on Chicago's Jewish community. One of his former students, Rabbi Ephraim Kletenik, called him "a master teacher who not only taught Torah to his students but who also inspired his students, was a role model, the guiding force in their lives." Rabbi Kletenik, who studied with Rabbi Soloveichik for seven years and has known him for more than 35, is a rebbe and general studies principal at Yeshiva Tiferes Tzvi, a Chicago boys elementary school.
"He was very devoted to his students and very kind," Kletenik said. "He was also tremendously honest and selfless. He made his decisions based on what was right or wrong, not what would gain him the most popularity."
When Kletenik's father became ill, he recalled, it was Rabbi Soloveichik, without the knowledge of Kletenik's family, who made it a point to keep in contact with the hospital. When the sick man's condition worsened, Rabbi Soloveichik appeared at the hospital room at 4 in the morning to be with the family and help with funeral arrangements.
Rabbi Avrohom Levin, the head of Telshe Yeshiva in Chicago, called Rabbi Soloveichik, whom he considered his best friend, "a source of inspiration for all the rosh yeshivas and the rabbis in the Chicago community.
"He inspired us all with his dedication to studying and teaching, even in extremely difficult circumstances," he said.
Rabbi Moshe Francis, head of the Chicago Community Kollel, called Rabbi Soloveichik "a person of tremendous principles. He would sacrifice anything for his principles," he said. "Many times during his lifetime, he took stands on positions at great personal sacrifice. He was fearless-whatever pressure people exerted on him, he wouldn't deviate from what he perceived to be the truth."
He said that Rabbi Soloveichik was also a role model to others in the community for overcoming his physical adversity through his "reservoir of inner strength."
"Sometimes I would be near him and I would hear him moaning because of the great pain he felt, but he wouldn't let it get in the way," Francis said. "He would continue with his normal activities."
Francis said he also greatly admired Rebbetzin Ella Soloveichik. "The two of them had such a wonderful relationship," he said. "They gave so much respect and honor to each other. They were both role models of what a husband and wife relationship should be."
Rabbi Asher Lopatin, spiritual leader of Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel Congregation in Chicago, knew and studied with Rabbi Soloveichik from the time Lopatin was in high school. The younger man remained so close to his teacher that he would consult him on a weekly basis on various matters of Jewish law and interpretation, he said.
"He was my posek, my authority," Lopatin said. "I don't know who I'll look to now." He said that one of Rabbi Soloveichik's greatest strengths was that he was able to come up with rulings that were firmly rooted in Jewish law but that "worked" for the modern world.
"It wasn't that he was pandering, he never pandered or compromised," he said. "It's just that from the deepest place, he had a sensitivity for living in a complex world." Rabbi Soloveichik, he said, was a visionary whose rulings were far ahead of his times. For instance, he was ruling on matters concerning stem cells nearly a decade ago, he said.
"His practical skills, for me, were as brilliant as his theoretical learning," Lopatin said. "He had a feel, an intuition for this world. His rulings can make a huge difference in people's lives. It was an amazing experience to be around him, to hear him give a ruling. He always gave them with such passion. Everything he did, he really did with passion. Even after the stroke, he was a very passionate lecturer."
Lopatin described Rabbi Soloveichik as "a big patriot, very pro-American, a Hubert Humphrey-type liberal. He always voted Democratic."
"His legacy will live on," Lopatin said. "His teachings will help us for decades, for centuries." He added that Rabbi Soloveichik's legacy will live on a more tangible way as well, through his sons and grandsons, some of whom "will be the leaders of the next generation."
Rabbi Soloveichik is survived by six children. His four sons, all rabbis, are Moshe and Eliyahu of Chicago and Yosef and Chaim of Israel. His daughters, Rochel Marcus of Toronto and Tova Seigal of Newton, Mass., are both married to rabbis. He is also survived by two sisters in Jerusalem, almost 40 grandchildren and seven great- grandchildren. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
HaRav Aharon Soloveitchik ZT"L • 1917-2001
by Dr. David Luchins
Rav Aharon HaLevi Soloveitchik was the youngest of Rav Moshe and Pesha Soloveitchik's children. Born in Khaslavichy, Russia on May Day 1917, he was an extraordinary link between the Torah of Brisk and Lita and the contemporary complexity of American and Israeli life. Tutored in Talmud by Rav Yitzchak Hutner, zt"l, taught English Literature by Rav Avigdor Miller, zt"l, nurtured in his grandfather Reb Chaim's derech by his father and "Rebbi Muvhak", Rav Moshe, zt"l, and an honors' graduate of New York University School of Law, he defied easy descriptions and simplistic stereotyping.
For almost half a century, Rav Aharon's clarity of vision inspired and shaped the Torah world in a fashion that was uniquely his. From Vietnam to Biafra, from civil rights to apartheid, from peace process to religious pluralism, he was rarely reticent and rarely equivocal. Blessed with an exceptional mind and a compassionate heart, he had an unmatched gift for addressing contemporary issues through the timeless prism of Torah Hashkafa.
To walk into a shiur of Rav Aharon was to be propelled into a unique world where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Pitt the Elder might be summoned to help make a point. But proof - all proof - always came from the sources of our Tradition. Even after a debilitating stroke robbed him of physical vigor, his mental capacity and analytical skills were still a wonder to behold.
But Rav Aharon was far far more than an accomplished Talmud Chacham and Darshan par excellence. He was at the very cutting edge of those who helped elucidate how Orthodox Jews should deal with the last half century's two great gifts to Klal Yisrael: American democracy and Medinat Yisrael.
On issue after issue, Rav Aharon was the defining voice of Torah reason in a world grown far more confusing.
"It is not just that Rav Aharon is the only Rosh Yeshiva that speaks about Biafra", his lifelong friend Rav Mordechai Gifter, zt"l, once explained. "It's that he is the only Rosh Yeshiva who ever heard of Biafra."
In the summer of '75, Rav Aharon visited NCSY's Camp West in Big Bear, California. He spoke for hours to the teenagers, several of whom spoke of their personal problems practicing Yiddishkeit in not fully observant homes. After the last teenager left the room the Rosh Yeshiva began to cry. When the author asked him what was wrong he said "their courage, their strength - I don't know if I could be as brave as they are."
Looking back at the Rosh Yeshiva's life, our eyes filled with tears, we can only say the same about his courage, his strength, his bravery, his example.
Y'HIY ZICHRO BARUCH
Dr. Luchins is a Senior Vice President of the Orthodox Union, Senior Guest Lecturer at the OU Israel Center, and a longtime close talmid of Rav Aharon zt"l.
Chicago's Torah giant: Rabbi Aharon Soloveichik
By Elli Wohlgelernter
Reprinted with permission from the Jerusalem Post
If Ahron Soloveichik were a baseball player, he would be Lou Gehrig to his brother’s Babe Ruth.
As great as Gehrig was, he was forever overshadowed by his teammate, the biggest star of them all known simply as “The Babe.” So, too, has Soloveichik, the dean of Yeshivas Brisk in Chicago - and one of the world’s foremost Talmudic scholars and authorities on Jewish law - been forever overshadowed by his older brother, Yosef Ber, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik, the rabbinic star of the 20th century, known simply as “The Rav.”
To Soloveichik, it means nothing.
“I didn’t care,” he says simply. “Why should I care? I only cared that I should be “noah lamakom” and “noah labriot” (appreciated by G-d and appreciated by people).”
It is not false modesty. Rav Ahron, as he is known, comes from a place where fame had no value whatsoever, an aristocratic world of Talmudists that doesn’t really exist anymore. It was Europe, before the war, when hundreds, if not thousands, of Torah “giants” walked the shtetl, true scholars, who put in the time and effort to master the breath and depth of the Holy Books. It was a time when a holiday like Simchat Torah celebrated not just the essence of the Jewish people, but the nobility that epitomized what living a Torah life was all about.
It was there, as a boy not yet bar mitzvah and with the benefit of being a Soloveichik, that Reb Ahron was privileged to see many of Europe’s gedolim (giants), as revered rabbis are called: The Chofetz Chaim; the Imrei Emmes; Yitzhak Hutner; Menachem Zember; and his own father, Moshe Soloveichik. He saw the life, and he learned the lesson: It is not how famous you are, but what you know, and how you act. For 58 years, Soloveichik has been teaching Torah, the last 34 in Chicago. It was there that this writer first encountered him at the age of 13, as a high school freshman at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie. Like any headmaster, his mere presence had the power to intimidate; and the most feared day of the year was when he visited classrooms for the annual Talmud exam.
He was also a powerful and passionate speaker, and when he entered the study hall - 350 students standing to attention in unison, a hallmark of total respect for a Torah scholar - you knew you were in for a fiery 90 minutes of exegesis, homiletics, and the occasional political commentary as well.
It was the late 1960s, and the Vietnam War was pitting America’s youth who opposed the war against the establishment. Orthodox yeshivot are by nature conservative, but Soloveichik, viewing the conflict through the prism of Torah as he does everything else, was one of the first - and only - Orthodox rabbis to come out against the war. Fighting to save the world from Communism was a fallacious argument, he maintained.
“It was bloodshed,” he says. “To fight on the side of South Vietnam to save the world? If South Vietnam took over, it would have been fascist. Hitler himself was against communism.”
His opposition to the war has placed him on a State Department black list, Soloveichik says. Then, as an aside, he takes a swipe at President Lyndon Johnson, who mobilized for the war. “He was responsible for all the hippies, nippies, yippies.”
Political correctness is of no concern to Soloveichik, nor does he shy away from taking a public stand on practically any issue:
The question of when a person is considered dead, for example. Soloveichik has ruled that brain death is not sufficient to certify a person dead since, according to his interpretation of halachah, a heartbeat is one of the hallmarks of a living human being. Consequently, no organs can be taken from merely brain-dead victims. This view stands in opposition not only to the medical profession in the West, but also to the halachic ruling of the renowned Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.
Most notably, perhaps, has been his opposition to the peace process, at its inception and at stages all the way along, regardless of whom has been prime minister. When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Soloveichik was one of the three leaders of the International Rabbinical Coalition for Israel, an organization of 3,000 rabbis worldwide founded to oppose the signing based on Jewish law.
In 1995, when settlers were planning to block roads leading from Nablus to Kalkilya and Tulkarm on Shabbat, to disrupt planned celebrations marking IDF redeployment, Soloveichik faxed an opinion to the organizers saying: “The question is whether it is permitted to desecrate Shabbat in order to stop PLO delegations from coming on Shabbat to uproot settlements. The answer is that it is a big mitzvah to do on Shabbat everything possible to prevent the dangers expected from removing settlements.”
He drew the line, however, at whether halachah permitted the assassination of Israeli leaders who “betray Jews to non- Jews.” (One rabbi - basing his position on Maimonides - had maintained that the intention of Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres to hand over Jewish land and property to the enemy, meant they should be killed before they could perform the deed.)
“We cannot use violence, even verbal violence” against the Rabin government and other Jews, Soloveichik had insisted. He also criticized the rabbi, saying that although he is devoted to Israel, “because of his devotion, he did not control himself and he used certain language that should not be used by anyone, certainly not by a rabbi.”
And Soloveichik was the only prominent Orthodox rabbi in the world to blame some in the Orthodox community for inciting Rabin assassin Yigal Amir to act as he did. “They did not teach that shfichat damim (the spilling of blood) is the most terrible thing.”
Indeed, Soloveichik even accepted personal blame for not having done more to make that clear, noting that when one yeshiva student wrote to him to ask him if assassinating Rabin was the halachic thing to do, Soloveichik dismissed the letter as the work of a nut. After the assassination, Soloveichik said he regretted he did not reply and set the student straight.
As for Amir, Soloveichik thinks “he should stay in prison until he is rehabilitated.”
Aaron Soloveichik was born in Khaslavichy in western Russia on May Day, 1917, although his birth certificate says 1918. It was a charade perpetrated by an uncle, in order to fool Mother Russia.
“My uncle made a deliberate mistake. I wouldn’t have been allowed to leave Russia, because they reserved the babies (born) on the day of the revolution to be the pioneers in the revolution. So he deliberately put down 1918.”
Soloveichik was the youngest of six children born to Moshe, the chief rabbi of the town. The family was known throughout Europe, a rabbinic dynasty that the Encyclopedia Judaica charts across nine generations. The pressure was on him to “be a Soloveichik.”
After Khaslavichy, the family moved to Poland. There his father - whom Soloveichik called his only hero - occupied a succession of rabbinic positions, not all of them lucrative. At one point, when Moshe Soloveichik was between jobs, the family found itself very poor.
“Every Friday, I had to borrow money for my mother to make Shabbos. To whom did I go? To Rav Warhaftig, the father of Zerah Warhaftig. He, too, was a big gadol, he was a talmid (student) of the Brisker rav (Soloveichik’s grandfather). We owed him about 5,000 zlotys - at that time, the purchasing power of a zloty was like a dollar, maybe more. My father came to America, in 1929, and within half a year, he sent him all the money.”
When Moshe left Poland to teach at Yeshiva University, he left the family behind until he was able to send for them.
They waited for visas for a year, mostly in Warsaw, the “Jewish capital” of Europe - coined for its 400,000 Jewish inhabitants, as many then as there are in Jerusalem today. It was in a Gerer shteible there - the address he still remembers - that Soloveichik, under the tutelage of Rav Hutner, was bar mitzvahed, without his father present.
Two months later, on July 31, 1930, he arrived with his family on Ellis Island.
The family lived in Washington Heights in Manhattan, and from their window, they watched the construction of the George Washington Bridge and its dedication in 1931, complete with music, marches, and speeches.
“I saw Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his crutches speak, and then he fell down - he lifted up his hand, and he fell down. Then he stood up and continued. I saw it from our window of the 6th floor.”
Soloveichik went to Yeshiva High School, “but I wanted to graduate in three years instead of four, so at night I took some courses at George Washington High School. I wanted to get through early and learn. And then I went to Yeshiva College, and got smicha (rabbinic ordination).”
He was 25 years old, and ready to conquer the world. He was also ready to continue the Soloveichik tradition, generation following generation of rabbis and teachers and Torah scholars. Except for one thing.
“No one gave me a job,” he says, his voice faintly revealing the slight he still feels. “No one. I wanted to become the rebbe of the eighth grade of Reb Moshe Soloveichik (an elementary school named for his father, three blocks from Yeshiva University). No one. They all opposed me. They said I can’t relate to American students - “he might be a lamdan (learned person), ok, so what? There are many lamdanim,” he says, now chuckling.
Faced with the possibility of no income, Soloveichik went to New York University Law School, from which he graduated in 1946. He subsequently taught at Mesifta Tiferet Yerushalayim under Reb Moshe Feinstein; Mesivta Haim Berlin under Hutner, which was then located in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which meant getting up at 5 a.m. to take a subway and trolley commute; and then the rabbinic school of Yeshiva University, where he also lectured on Jewish philosophy and ethical values.
In 1966, Soloveichik was offered the position of Rosh HaYeshiva at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, which he headed until 1974, leaving to start his own Yeshivas Brisk, now located in West Rogers Park.
However, it was the stroke he suffered on May 29, 1983, that “wrought a spiritual metamorphosis in my whole weltanschauung, my outlook on life and the world,” he wrote in one of his books in a chapter entitled “A Glimpse at Eternity from a Hospital Dungeon.”
“Until last Sunday evening,” he writes, “my belief in the existence of a soul extraneous to the body is not only based upon a religious orientation, but is something that I am perceiving through my physical senses as a biological sensation.
“As a result of the numbness wrought by the stroke in the left side of my body, I am under the impact of a sensation that the left side of my body is completely detached from me and that I am only the carrier of my left leg, of my left arm, of my left shoulder, etc. I know that this sounds irrational.”
While he can now understand a little more of the difference between body and soul, Soloveichik is still unable to answer some of life’s other imponderables. Like the Holocaust, for instance.
Soloveichik writes that he was once invited to the home of an art connoisseur, and as he approached the paintings to get a better look, his host said, “Rabbi, you can’t appreciate the painting unless you are at a distance of five feet.” If a human work needs that distance, he noted, how much more so the master creation of the Cosmic Artist.
“As Almighty G-d passes through the avenues of time, we can only see the back, but the punim (face) not,” he says, in the Ashkenazi accent characteristic of the American yeshiva world. “But yimas hamashiach, (in the Messianic age) and after yimas hamashiach, after the tchias hamasim, (resurrection of the dead) we’ll see the purpose of all these tragedies.”
Is that the only answer?
We don’t understand it. That’s all.”
Today at age 83, Soloveichik is, physically, a sad sight, prisoner of a wheelchair from the stroke suffered 17 years ago. As in the case of baseball great Lou Gehrig - whose disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, attacked his body without dampening his spirit - Soloveichik draws no pity, only more admiration. He has not let a mere trifle like a stroke slow him down: Wheelchair and all, he still boards a plane from Chicago once a week, every week, to deliver a Talmud class at Yeshiva University in New York. Moreover, while one would hardly blame him if he felt like complaining to G-d over his situation, Soloveichik would have none of it.
“Chas v’shalom (G-d forbid),” he says, his voice displaying annoyance at the mere suggestion. “I accept everything with love. Chas v’shalom.” Furthermore, he adds, “retroactively it turned out to be a source very fruitful for me, because until the stroke, I didn’t publish any seforim (books), and now I have three sifrei halachah (books on Jewish law), and I have two English books: “Logic of the Heart, Logic of the Mind,” and “The Warmth and the Light.”
Clearly, though his body is weak, his mind is still sharp, which allows him to laugh at those who think otherwise. Like the tale told of the time a few years ago, when he was still able to walk, albeit slowly. Soloveichik was taking a taxi and had forgotten the address where he was headed. The cabbie called a policeman, who attempted to ascertain the mental faculty of the passenger.
“Can you tell me the name of the first president?” the cop asked. Not missing a beat, Soloveichik proceeded to recite the names of all 41.
While the names of presidents might not be all important in a field such as his, Soloveichik is a firm believer in yeshiva students getting a full secular education, if for no other reason then to help in their Torah learning. It is a position that puts him at odds with many in the ultra-Orthodox world who shun such deviation from Torah learning. Not that he cares.
“How can you understand kiddush hachodesh and zimanim (the time for blessing of the new moon)? How can you pasken a shayla (decide a halachic decision) in food chemistry without knowing the science of whether it is animal derivative or vegetable derivative? How can you paskin a shayla in pikuach nefesh (saving a life?) without the knowledge, a modicum of knowledge, of biology? It (Torah learning) has to be with derech hateva (a knowledge of physical nature).”
These are lessons he has passed on to his six children - including four sons all of whom are rabbis - almost 40 grandchildren, and three great- grandchildren. Two of his sons are rabbis in Chicago: Moshe, rabbi of Beth Sholom Ahavas Achim in Hollywood Park; and Eliyahu, associate Rosh HaYeshiva at Yeshivas Brisk; and two are rabbis in Israel: Yosef, head of Yeshivat Brisk in Jerusalem’s Old City (which has a Web site, www.realbrisk.com, where Ahron’s lectures can be heard), and Haim, a yeshiva rebbe and congregational rabbi in Beit Shemesh.
Soloveichik cannot be defined as either haredi or Modern Orthodox - “I’m old fashioned” - but asked to define his calling, he gives the time-honored response in the tradition of the great rabbinic scholars of Europe: “To be a proud Jew, and be involved in Torah, and gemilas chasadim (acts of loving- kindness), in ahavas Yisrael (love of Jews), and ahavas habris (love of all people).”
In the world of Torah scholars, Ahron Soloveichik, despite his life of modesty, is a true hall of famer.
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