Joseph B. Soloveitchik > Quotes

“I will speak that I may find relief”; for there is a redemptive quality for an agitated mind in the spoken word, and a tormented soul finds peace in confessing.”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith

“Who knows what kind of loneliness is more agonizing: the one which befalls man when he casts his glance at the mute cosmos, at its dark spaces and monotonous drama, or the one that besets man exchanging glances with his fellow man in silence?”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith

“The student of Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he once experienced. By learning Torah, man returns to his own self.”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik

“The way of every Jew to God must not differ from the trail along which Abraham moved toward his destiny, which had to be blazed through the wilderness of a brute and nonsensical existence. The experience is attained at the cost of doubts and a restless life, searching and examining, striving and pursuing—and not finding; of frustrating efforts and almost hopeless waiting; of grappling with oneself and with everybody else; of exploring a starlit and moonlit sky and watching the majesty of sun-sets and sunrises, the beauty of birth and also the ugliness of death and destruction; of trying to penetrate behind the mechanical surface of the cosmic occurrence and failing to discover any intelligible order in this drama; of winning and losing and yet surging forward again; of conquering, giving up and reaching out again; of being able to put on a repeat performance of something which I had and lost; of asking questions and not finding answers; of ascending the high mount like Moses and falling back into the abyss, shattering everything one has received, and yet pulling oneself out of the depths of misery and trying to climb up the mountain again with two new stone tablets.”
― Joseph B Soloveitchik

“The companionship which Adam the second is seeking is not to be found in the de-personalized regimentation of the army, in the automatic coordination of the assembly line, or in the activity of the institutionalized, soulless political community. His quest is for a new kind of fellowship, which one finds in the existential community. There, not only hands are joined, but experiences as well; there, one hears not only the rhythmic sound of the production line, but also the rhythmic beat of hearts starved for existential companionship and all-embracing sympathy and experiencing the grandeur of the faith commitment; there, one lonely soul finds another soul tormented by loneliness and solitude yet unqualifiedly committed.”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith

“The essence of the Torah is intellectual creativity.”
― Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik

“The Biblical account of the original sin is the story of man of faith who realizes suddenly that faith can be utilized for the acquisition of majesty and glory and who, instead of fostering a covenantal community, prefers to organize a political utilitarian community exploiting the sincerity and unqualified commitment of the crowd for non-covenantal, worldly purposes. The history of organized religion is replete with instances of desecration of the covenant.”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith

“As a rule, in times of joy and elation, one finds God's footsteps in the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos, in its vastness and its stupendous dynamics. When man is drunk with life, when he feels that living is a dignified affair, then man beholds God in infinity. In moments of ecstasy God addresses Himself to man through the twinkling stars and the roar of the endlessly distant heavens:
ברכי נפשי את ד’, ד’ אלקים, גדלת מאד, הוד והדר לבשת
"O Lord my God Thou are very great, Thou are clothed with glory and majesty."
In such moments, Majestas Dei, which not even the vast universe is large enough to accommodate, addresses itself to happy man.
However, with the arrival of the dark night of the soul, in moments of agony and black despair, when living becomes ugly and absurd; plainly nauseating, when man loses his sense of beauty and majesty, God addresses him, not from infinity but from the infinitesimal, not from the vast stretches of the universe but from a single spot in the darkness which surrounds suffering man, from within the black despair itself...
God, in those moments, appeared not as the exalted, majestic King, but rather as a humble, close friend, brother, father: in such moments of black despair, He was not far from me; He was right there in the dark room; I felt His warm hand, כביכול. on my shoulder, I hugged His knees, כביכול. He was with me in the narrow confines of a small room, taking up no space at all. God's abiding in a fenced-in finite locus manifests His humility and love for man. In such moments Humilitas Dei, which resides in the humblest and tiniest of places, addresses itself to man.”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik

“The efficacy of prayer consists in a cognitive-spiritual catharsis, which purifies man of the most hideous untruth and deception, namely, the pretension that he belongs to himself and that he is his own lord.”
― Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Morality: Essays on Ethics and Masorah

“Neither ritual decisions nor political leadership constitutes the main task of halakhic man. Far from it. The actualization of the ideals of justice and righteousness is that pillar of fire which halakhic man follows, when he, as a rabbi and teacher in Israel, serves his community.”
― Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik

“Cognitive man prefers thought to speech, logic to statements. He is neither a rhetorician nor a master of the fine phrase. Language for him is not an end in itself, but only a means for the formulation of thought. When cognitive man uses language, he takes particular care not to multiply needlessly words or phrases. Too much is as bad as too little. If anyth ing, his language is overflowing with ideas. Every sentence expresses a thought, every phrase a concept. If an idea can be expressed in three words, he will not use four. Additional words do not serve to clarify or elucidate a particular matter but only to obscure it. Cognitive man takes particular care that there should exist a precise correlation between each word and the kernel of cognitive content contained within it. He does not fling about terms and phrases as a substitute for thought and reflection. The thought matures and ripens, and only then can the words come. The thinking logos precedes the speaking logos.”
― Joseph B Soloveitchik