Home › Forums › Decaffeinated Coffee › Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik — A Godol B’Kiruv › Reply To: Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik — A Godol B’Kiruv
Agree with Daas. RJBS indeed cared about all Jews in US and otherwise. He planned YU Rabanut curriculum in order to mass produce rabbis who would be able to serve multitudes of small communities in US. Still, this description (as others at other threads) seem to simply quote some sources that argue with RJBS without trying to understand him.
1) He does not call this “kiruv”. He calls these people “American Jews” and takes them as they are and looks prospectively that many of them are or soon will be college-educated. He describes how he was sitting thru hours talking to such young people, noticing that neither reform clergy, nor aguda rabbis would be able to address their questions.
2) he is not suggesting “lite” movement, he is always quoting and using his grandfather as an ideal. He defines the difference in the following way: agudah is trying to ignore the world around them. He says – if we claim that we have Truth from Hashem, we should not be hiding in caves, but rather learn to address problems of modernity.
Now, looking back at almost a century of this disagreement – agudah definitely had tremendous success in saving people from assimilation and growing large communities. Definitely, many from those communities would have likely assimilated without agudah approach. RJBS’s approach worked well for some people, but probably not so well for others. At the same time, it attracted a lot of people who would not ever understand agudah (or as RJBS put it – agudah will not be able to answer their questions). But, on the main question – are we actually representing Hashem’s Truth, RJBS seems to be on target – Jews always addressed the world events of their times. It is hard to imagine that Hashem lead the world thru so many developments during last several hundreds years, and he really wants Yidden to ignore all these events and continue reviewing laws of roman avodah zorah without addressing the modern forms.