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date: 25 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter analyzes the ethical theories of Rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Joseph B. Soloeitchik, two luminaries in of twentieth-century Orthodoxy in Israel and the United States, respectively. Despite Kook's lean toward the mystical and Soloveitchik's tendency toward the rational, they nonetheless share in the perspective that ethics is central to proper Jewish living and theology. Whereas Kook views the moral impulse as already embedded in Jewish existence, Soloveitchik understands imitatio Dei as the central mechanism through which Jewish ethical behaviour comes into being.

Keywords: Jewish ethics, Orthodoxy, Judaism, mystical, rational, moral impulse, imitatio Dei, Jewish ethical behaviour

Lawrence Kaplan

Lawrence Kaplan is Professor of Rabbinics and Jewish Philosophy in the Department of Jewish Studies of McGill University, where he has taught since 1972. He received his B.A. from Yeshiva College, Rabbinical Ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological School of Yeshiva University, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Kaplan specializes in both medieval and modern Jewish thought and has published widely in both scholarly and popular journals. He is widely acknowledged as the leading translator of the Hebrew writings of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik and as one of the leading scholars of his thought. He is co-editor of The Thought of Moses Maimonides and R. Abraham Isaac Kook and Jewish Spirituality and is currently completing a monograph “Halakhah and Religious Experience in the Thought of R. Joseph Soloveitchik.” In 2005 he was a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies of Harvard University, and in 2011–2012 was a Fellow in the Tikvah Center of the New York University Law School.

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