Rabbi Lamm is best known as a leading Jewish thinker and the longtime president of Yeshiva University, but he was also an accomplished talmudic scholar. He studied Talmud for many years with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Yehoshua Baumol, author of two-volume work Emek Halakha, until the latter’s death in 1948. He subsequently studied for several years under Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik at YU. Despite the considerable demands of his rabbinic and administrative career, Rabbi

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