Letter to the Editor: Reassessing Belkin’s Approach to Torah Umadda
Dear Editor:
Doniel Weinreich’s recent opinion offers a compelling collection of quotations from former Yeshiva University President and RIETS Rosh Yeshiva Samuel Belkin, articulating a refined vision of Torah Umadda — not as curricular fusion, but as a spiritual synthesis cultivated “within the integrated personality.” His intervention aspires to correct portrayals of President Belkin’s philosophy, such as the often-cited line describing YU as “a yeshiva with a cafeteria and a dormitory in one building.” Yet even well-intentioned restorations can risk reducing a layered educational vision to a slogan. The deeper challenge lies in how institutional rhetoric, when quoted without reference to the historical and structural realities that produced it, can obscure the tensions and limitations that shaped the legacy of that vision.
Samuel Belkin’s presidency (1943–1975) spanned a transformative era in American Jewish history. He assumed the presidency at the height of the Holocaust — an event conspicuously absent from his investiture address — and served through the postwar decades that witnessed the mass upward mobility of American Jews, the entrenchment of suburban synagogue life and the professionalization of rabbinic leadership. Under his leadership, YU grew from a regional yeshiva-college into the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy. President Belkin sought to cultivate both rabbinic and lay leadership through a combination of religious commitment, academic excellence and civic engagement. Yet the ideal of Torah Umadda was never translated into a coherent educational system. The dual tracks of yeshiva and college operated in parallel, but seldom intersected. His rhetoric emphasized spiritual rather than structural synthesis, leaving the work of integration to individual students. In his inaugural address, Belkin argued that “the end of education should be the cultivation of intellectual and spiritual values,” and that the Torah’s moral vision could unify all knowledge. But this synthesis was internal and personal, not institutional. The university itself was not challenged to bridge Torah and secular studies, and this ambiguity enabled multiple, even conflicting, interpretations of Torah Umadda to emerge.
Within this ambiguity, the Belkin administrative team — his informal “kitchen cabinet” — played a key role. This group included Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, Rabbi Bernard Lander and future YU President Rabbi Norman Lamm — his ideological lieutenants from left, right and center — alongside trusted institutional figures such as Rabbi Jacob Rabinowitz, Rabbi David Mirsky and Rabbi Israel Miller, among others. While Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik was central to the intellectual and theological framework of Modern Orthodoxy, he was not part of Belkin’s immediate administrative circle. Instead, the “kitchen cabinet” translated his expansive and often abstract vision of Torah Umadda into concrete reality, shaping administrative policy, communal outreach, fundraising, and academic infrastructure. Lacking a shared institutional theology, Belkin’s broad conception of Torah Umadda left key structural questions unresolved, prompting his administrative team to pursue parallel — and occasionally competing — strategies.
Though he spoke of integration, he offered no concrete plan for merging the secular and sacred within Yeshiva University’s curriculum, emphasizing personal synthesis over structural design. This ambiguity fostered a mix of approaches to Torah Umadda and enabled divergent models of Modern Orthodoxy, particularly that of Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, to flourish. His advocacy for halakhic innovation in areas such as marriage, divorce and gender roles drew both support and sharp criticism, especially from more conservative rabbinic voices. The absence of a defined institutional theology under Belkin allowed Rackman’s vision to gain traction within Yeshiva University and beyond. As I recently argued in a co-authored article with Zev Eleff, Professor Bernard Lander’s founding of Touro College likewise emerged from the same ideological and institutional ecosystem shaped by the unresolved tensions of Torah Umadda in the Belkin era.
The conflict reached a boiling point in 1975 with the publication of Rackman’s essay, “Halakhah: Orthodox Approaches,” in which he sharply criticized the prevailing “analytical” and “no-risk” approaches to halakhic decision-making. He condemned the reluctance of contemporary poskim [halakhic decisors] to respond to modern realities as a form of moral failure, lamenting that “while on the one hand, their rigidity may conserve the tradition, on the other hand it is alienating thousands of Jews from the Law,” and accusing them of acting out of a “psychotic fear that all that is modern is taboo.” He called for courageous rabbis willing to revive the power of marriage annulment, warning that those who shun such risks “will avoid it like the plague.” Most pointedly, he charged that rabbinic inaction on family law was “multiplying bastardy all over the world.” These statements — bold and institutionally provocative — represented precisely the kind of theological and methodological stance Rav Soloveitchik would reject in the strongest possible terms.
Just weeks later — nearly fifty years ago — Rav Soloveitchik delivered his now-famous derashah at a Modern Orthodox rabbinic conclave, offering a sweeping response. Without naming Rackman, he issued not only a rebuttal, but a stark reassertion of halakhah’s epistemological autonomy and spiritual foundations. His address was both a theological credo and an institutional boundary marker. “The study of the Torah,” he declared, “is an ecstatic, metaphysical performance … an act of surrender. We surrender the everyday logic, or what I call the mercantile logic, and we embrace another logic — miSinai.” He insisted that talmud Torah was not simply an intellectual discipline or a tool of social repair, but a reenactment of kabbalat ol malchut Shamayim — an act of spiritual submission to a divine legal order. “We must not judge the chukim u’mishpatim [non-rational and rational commandments] in terms of a secular system of values,” he warned. “Such an attempt — be it historicism, be it psychologism, be it utilitarianism — undermines the very foundations of Torah u’masorah [Torah and tradition], and leads eventually to the most tragic consequences of assimilationism and nihilism.” And then, with rhetorical intensity, he concluded: “Let me ask you a question. Ribbono shel Olam — God Almighty — if you start modifying and reassessing the chazakos [presuppositions] upon which a multitude of halachos rest, you will destroy Yahadus [Judaism]! So instead of philosophizing, let us rather light a match and set fire to the House of Israel; we will get rid of all the problems!”
Rabbi Rackman, for his part, would go on to reference the episode — sometimes obliquely, sometimes explicitly — in his newspaper columns and public writings over the next three decades, including during his tenure as president and later chancellor of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Throughout, he continued to defend his halakhic vision as an authentic extension of Modern Orthodox tradition, not a rupture from it — even as his teacher, and the preeminent leader of Modern Orthodoxy, Rav Soloveitchik, fundamentally and publicly disagreed. Many of the left-leaning institutional innovations within Modern Orthodoxy over the past generation — including JOFA, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Yeshivat Maharat and the International Beit Din, among others — are developments that, at least in part, trace their philosophical lineage to Rackman’s model and extend the trajectory he helped set in motion.
Understanding the legacy of Torah Umadda requires moving beyond rhetoric and examining its institutional history — its aspirations, tensions and accommodations. Rather than treating it as a slogan or canonized ideal, we must attend to its lived implementation: the structures, debates and compromises that gave it shape. President Samuel Belkin remains a major visionary of twentieth-century American Judaism, but his ideological project invites not only admiration, but historical scrutiny. Its meaning lies not only in what it proclaimed — but even more so in what it produced.
Menachem Butler (YC ‘06) is the Program Fellow for Jewish Legal Studies, in the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. He served as the YUdaica editor of The Commentator during the 2004-2005 academic year and co-edited “My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories (2006).” He is currently writing a book on Yeshiva University’s leadership under President Samuel Belkin and how its administration shaped the ideological tensions of Modern Orthodoxy.
Photo Credit: Yeshiva University
Photo Caption: Samuel Belkin and Yitzhak Rabin at the Yeshiva University Commencement, June 13, 1968
