Students to Host Reading of “The Emergence of Ethical Man” with Dean Michael Berger

The Wilf Campus Tikvah Chapter will host a reading group to discuss “The Emergence of Ethical Man,” a posthumously published work by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. The group will be led by Dean Michael Berger of the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration, who helped edit the manuscript of the work after Rav Soloveitchik’s passing.

The Wilf Tikvah Campus Chapter, now in its third year at YU, is led by co-presidents Matthew Minsk (YC ‘26), Zvi Ginzberg (YC ‘27) and Nachshoni Rothenberg (YC ‘26), alongside student advisor and president emeritus Shai Kohn (YC ‘25). The group, an independent student-run initiative unaffiliated with the university, is part of the national Tikvah Fund network, which fosters engagement with Jewish, Western and American thought.

“At the end of last semester, we were discussing who we wanted to learn and I thought being in YU it would be worthwhile to do something of the Rav’s,” Minsk told The Commentator. “But a lot of us have read ‘Halakhic Man’ or ‘The Lonely Man of Faith,’ and I happened to know Rabbi Berger from Atlanta and that he had been involved with editing ‘The Emergence of Ethical Man’ so I thought it would be cool to learn about it from him.” 

Berger, who assumed his new role in October 2024, spent nearly 30 years as a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. He played a key role in bringing “The Emergence of Ethical Man” to publication, working with the manuscript that Rav Soloveitchik left largely completed before his passing.

This semester, the chapter will hold three meetings on “The Emergence of Ethical Man” — one student-led discussion on Feb. 16, followed by two sessions with Berger. Minsk told the Commentator they anticipate around 15 students at each meeting and hope to bring in additional speakers later in the semester.

The Tikvah Chapter has previously explored works by Cynthia Ozick, Michael Wyschogrod and S.Y. Agnon, featuring discussions with scholars such as Rabbis Yitzchak Blau, Mark Gottlieb and Jeffrey Saks. Last semester, the group examined themes of leisure and spirituality, reading selections from Josef Pieper’s “Leisure, the Basis of Culture” and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “The Sabbath.”

YU’s Beren Campus also hosts its own Tikvah Chapter. According to President Tamara Yeshurun (SCW ‘25), the group will be having several meetings this semester to watch a series on S.Y. Agnon, with free books and dinner included for students participating.

“‘Emergence’ is a wonderful and, relative to more famous writings, underrated text in which R. Yoshe Ber thinks about a question central both to Yiddishkeit & to us as people — what does it mean to be a human being? — and, in doing so, reads the beginning of Bereishis incisively and poignantly,” Ginzberg told The Commentator. “This reading group is an opportunity to think about this question in conversation, as it were, with him and together with friends.” 

Photo caption: Dean Michael Berger

Photo credit: Becky Stein Photography