One thing that can be said about Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, considered by many to be the father of the Modern Orthodox movement, is that his legacy is nothing if not controversial. The arguments that surround his contributions to American Orthodox Judaism still rage, even 15 years after the rabbi’s death. It was with this in mind that Ethan Isenberg, a budding filmmaker, decided to create a documentary about the man known to his followers as “The Rav.”
“I had several purposes. One was, at a basic level, to describe the life and legacy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, to give people an insight into his biography,” Isenberg said. “The second goal was harder to realize, in the context of documentary film…. I also wanted to give people a context to what was going on in the Jewish community in America at the time.”
What emerged was Lonely Man of Faith, which speaks to people who knew and studied with Rabbi Soloveitchik as well as photographs and excerpts of his writings. Two heavyweights of the Jewish stage, Tovah Feldshuh and Theodore Bikel, serve as narrator and the voice of the Rav, respectively.
Creating the documentary was a challenge for several reasons.
“I needed it to be relevant to those who had already read about Rabbi Soloveitchik,” said Isenberg. But he had to ensure that those who didn’t know much, if anything, about the rabbi — the majority of Jews outside of the Orthodox movement — would find the film accessible as well.
Lonely Man of Faith is being presented on Sun., Nov. 23 by a consortium of local Orthodox schools and synagogues, led by Seattle Hebrew Academy.
Rivy Poupko Kletenik, SHA’s head of school, is a student of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s teachings, and said that the film presents what she sees as the defining role model of “American centrist Orthodoxy.”
“He is someone who I think is a living inspiration to anyone who is trying to balance and navigate the different forces in this world, as in philosophy, rationalism, modernity, Torah, tradition,” Kletenik said. Soloveitchik was “a model for each one of us that you can at once value and be schooled in the great works of the secular world while still living in the world of Torah.”
Joseph Soloveitchik studied in Poland and received his doctorate in philosophy in Berlin, and eventually landed in Boston. This was the 1930s and ‘40s, when the majority of American Jewish children attended public school and the Orthodox community was small and increasingly cloistered from the rest of society.
Rabbi Soloveitchik, who had grown up in Lithuania and was a part of a long-lasting dynasty of Rabbis Soloveitchik, started the Maimonides School, which eventually taught boys and girls in the same classroom and introduced secular studies alongside Torah and Talmud.
While highly unusual in those days, Isenberg said it wasn’t necessarily pioneering. Still, the Rav was something of an enigma.
“I start out the entire film with a quote with somebody who compares him to a rock star,” Isenberg said. “He was like this great figure you encounter, you’re like, “˜Wow, I can’t believe I’m in his presence.’”
But Isenberg said he had second thoughts about using the quote, because at the same time, Soloveitchik was also very accessible. “That was one of the paradoxes, or contradictions about Rabbi Soloveitchik himself, was this sort of dual personality.”
These contradictions manifested themselves in many different ways, and they are what made him such a popular as well as controversial figure.
“He didn’t necessarily try to impress upon people the importance of getting a general education and a Jewish education…and the importance of being in both worlds,” Isenberg said. “For many people he was more the person who was the living example of that. The fact that somebody was able to do this with integrity and intellectual breadth was inspiring to me, as well as to many other people.
“People who are Modern Orthodox recognize that it’s a very hard line to walk.”
Rabbi Soloveitchik was known as a great orator, who could speak in packed rooms for three hours, his listeners sitting on the edges of their seats for the duration.
“He wasn’t a preacher,” Isenberg said. “He didn’t believe in trying to coerce, to change people’s minds. He did believe in inspiring people with examples and with educating them. He wouldn’t tell people what to do. That wasn’t at all the kind of person he was, which I think is also something that I found attractive about him.”
Isenberg faced several struggles in making the film: Finding material, for one.
Rabbi Soloveitchik served as the head of the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University in New York, which had a large collection of photographs of the Rav, as did the Maimonides School. But the Soloveitchik family and other private parties with their own images of the Rav were more reluctant to hand anything over.
“I was well aware that many of his students and family members would be suspicious of me. They would want to know who I am,” Isenberg said. “I had to be very careful at letting people know that I didn’t come in with an agenda, and that I had people that they could trust that were helping me with this film.”
Among those helping him was Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, director of the foundation that bears Rabbi Soloveitchik’s name, which opened several doors for Isenberg.
What really added dimension to the film was the addition of video, almost at the last minute. A man who had bought a video camera before they were even widely available had taken footage of a dozen of the Rav’s talks, but then done nothing with it.
“He wanted to preserve Rabbi Soloveitchik,” Isenberg said. “He was very prescient where others are not.”
Other interested parties had attempted to obtain the videos from this man, but to no avail. It was through a chance meeting between the two that the man offered Isenberg the footage.
“I just basically lucked out,” he said.
Finding published works also proved difficult. Only later in life did the Rav actually start putting his thoughts to paper.
“He believed that the printed word was so concrete that he was very reluctant to put anything into print,” Isenberg said, “which is part of what drove people crazy.”
The documentary itself takes its title from Rabbi Soloveitchik’s seminal work, The Lonely Man of Faith, a publication that still inspires discussion today. The theme of loneliness only emerged as a central point of the film while Isenberg was still conducting subject interviews. Soloveitchik was clear that loneliness was something more than just not having friends, Isenberg believes.
“For him I think it’s on…an existential level to be able to identify with the other person,” he said. “I think he thinks that every person is lonely, every person is worlds apart from the next person, and they never fully communicate to the other person who you are.”
Where Soloveitchik’s students talked about their mentor’s loneliness at the philosophical or theoretical level, Isenberg believes there was a degree of emotional loneliness as well.
Though he founded a school that has served as a model for so many Orthodox day schools, he rarely interacted with the children and actually had trouble relating to younger people. His relationship with his father was also devoid of emotion.
“He said, “˜My father never kissed me,’” Isenberg said.
That many of followers placed him on a higher plane may not have made things easier, either.
“The danger of that is that you turn into somebody that you can’t relate to,” Isenberg said.
That the Rav is considered the father of the Modern Orthodox movement is paradoxical in not only that he apparently disdained the term, but those who consider him to have liberalized the Orthodox movement often find they don’t have the sources to back those claims. Where he went beyond most of his peers was in his tolerance of other movements as Jewish, though that didn’t necessarily translate to acceptance.
“He wasn’t willing to write them off as not being Jews, but he thought that on another level, on a theological level, that there are major distinctions between Orthodoxy and other movements,” Isenberg said. “He didn’t believe that Reform Judaism or Conservative Judaism was a legitimate approach based on the connection he had to Jewish law.”
And that is the source of his popularity and his controversy: He was willing to allow gray areas in which his students could answer questions for themselves, yet he would not let those answers stray outside of the framework of Jewish law.
“There was gray room to maneuver around. You look up the sources and you come to your own conclusion,” Isenberg said.
Understanding the Rav
