For years, the basic outline of the Manhattan eruv controversy has been clear . What has been harder to pinpoint are the precise events and the sequence in which they unfolded. An eruv completed in 1905 had become inadequate as Manhattan’s infrastructure changed, and in the postwar period rabbis on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side returned to the question. By the early 1960s, those efforts produced two sharply conflicting outcomes: an operational eruv and, at the same

The Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, delivered a lecture on the parsha each Saturday night in Boston. Rabbi Lamm, who was then a rabbi in Springfield, MA, attended the Parshat Toldot lecture in 1957. Rabbi Lamm’s Hebrew reconstruction of the shiur is available on the Lamm Legacy website. I have added citations in parentheses. Although the shiur was delivered on Parashat Toldot, its themes are deeply relevant to Parshat Vayechi, which we read this week. In the shiur, the Ra

We know the standard dichotomies: Greece is associated with philosophy while Judaism emphasizes revelation, Greece with aesthetics and harmony while Judaism emphasizes holiness and covenant. These contrasts appear often in Jewish thought, but what stands out in Rabbi Lamm’s Chanukah sermons is how rarely he relies on them. During his rabbinate, before Torah uMadda became central to his public identity, he mostly set aside the philosophy-revelation dichotomy and only occasiona