In the Spring 2026 issue of The Jewish Review of Books, Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg objects that he has been unaccountably denied the status of disciple of the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in the course of Seth Winberg’s review of Soloveitchik’s Children, University of Alabama, 2023, by Daniel R. Goodman. Rabbi Winberg entitled the review, “Wayward Children.”
Greenberg reasons:
One of Goodman’s greatest contributions lies in his pointing out that even when the disciples conflict with Soloveitchik, they are, often, applying Soloveitchik’s ideas and paradigms—although they are going beyond Soloveitchik’s own application. Thus they show his influence even where they diverge. For example, I apply Soloveitchik’s concept of tzelem elokim to greater egalitarianism for women. I take Soloveitchik’s teaching of the telos of halakha (the creation of worlds and the Jewish people’s eschatological vision) and apply it to legitimate halakhic change. David Hartman draws on Soloveitchik’s view of the development of prayer as a model for an activist, bold halakhic approach rather than on Soloveitchik’s other theme of prayer as the expression of human submission and insignificance in the face of an all-powerful God.
Greenberg continues: Winberg misreads Goodman’s affirmation of Soloveitchik’s influence on his disciples’ departures as a claim that Soloveitchik approves of our departures or that we disciples feel we have Soloveitchik’s tacit blessing even when we depart from his stands…The issues facing Modern Orthodoxy (such as feminism, LGBTQ, halakhic change, etc.) have radicalized, and the denial of a hearing to the independent disciples means that the community cannot deal effectively with these issues—except by yielding to the haredi position. As a result, Modern Orthodoxy of the Soloveitchik kind has been in retreat…Winberg’s review strengthens the small circle’s self-perception as keepers of the pure flame but reduces Soloveitchik’s present and future status as a seminal Jewish religious thinker in the twentieth century, not just a spokesman for Modern Orthodoxy.
Here’s where I would like to weigh-in:
Rabbi Greenberg gently admonishes Rabbi Winberg for aggressively policing the boundary of Soloveitchik’s tradition, narrowly circumscribing who should count as one of its bearers, and denying disciple status to even obvious candidates like Greenberg. Without taking anything away from this picture, I’d like to enter an additional concern as well. The so-called humanities, besieged as they are in the contemporary university, are inadvertently taken down a notch by Winberg’s perspective. For it turns out that Goodman is practicing the history of ideas at a high level, and doing so in the tradition of academic superstar Richard Wolin, author of Heidegger’s Children, Princeton University Press, 2015. In books like Goodman’s and Wolin’s, ideas matter: they travel between teacher and student, earlier generation and later, and they animate arguments where something is truly at stake. This is a way of thinking about tradition, disciples, and ideas we should want to protect from conservatively-motivated constraints, like the ones Winberg has proposed.
Here’s how I expressed my sympathies in the pages of The Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2026.
The Rav’s Legacy
I have been reflecting on Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of tradition now for more than forty years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever come across an example more germane to the rehabilitation of tradition, MacIntyre’s project in After Virtue, than in the exchange of letters between Rabbis Seth Winberg and Yitz Greenberg (Letters, Spring 2026) about how to picture Rabbi Soloveitchik’s students and disciples in the ongoing narration of his legacy.
MacIntyre defines tradition as a “historically extended, socially embodied argument” about the priorities and purposes of the way of life its adherents share. What is novel here? Argument—genuine conflict—is the beating heart of tradition on this view.
In the case Winberg puts before JRB readers, in his review of Daniel Ross Goodman’s Soloveitchik’s Children (“Wayward Children?” Winter 2026), a discursive field of argument truly does unfurl before us, encompassing the centrality of halakha and aggadah respectively, the permissibility and wisdom of interreligious dialogue, and much else.
We also note that the Rav’s tradition is as “extended” in time as it is “embodied” in institutions: extended from the time of the Rav’s encounter with Jewish Berlin circa 1926 and socially embodied in the life of Torah Umadda institutions from the Hochschule and the Hildesheimer houses in Berlin to the famed Maimonides School of Boston; from the hallowed streets of Washington Heights to the Beit Midrash of RIETS. In a more comprehensive historical accounting of the Rav’s tradition, a deeper background would count as well: Brisk on the one hand, and Breslau on the other, and poised in between, Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Frankfurt and his Kehal Adath Jeshurun.
It is a cramped view of tradition—battered, bruised, and on the defensive—that cannot acknowledge that talented rabbis and leaders of the caliber of Sacks, Hartman, and Greenberg, have been significant players in an argument inside a recognizable society of men, sharing a common culture, about the priorities and purposes of their shared enterprise: Jewish life. It seems clear that with this group, even after the Rav was gone, their argument proceeded, under his watchful gaze.
Neither “approval” nor “influence” are quite the right words for what happens between teachers and their students and disciples in a healthy tradition, but for a tradition suffering from one too many insults and injuries, “policing” the way students of a particularly creative figure in the tradition are accredited sounds just about right. “Yea, they do no unrighteousness; they walk in His ways.”
Avi Bernstein-Nahar
avi@thenewjewishacademy.org
THE NEW JEWISH ACADEMY
~a center for teacher training and human sciences research~
Visiting Scholar, NEJS, Brandeis University