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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

Many readers will know of the “caveman controversy”—the uproar that followed Rabbi Norman Lamm’s 1997 Yeshiva University Centennial address  invoking Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s cave to describe competing visions of Orthodox Judaism. The episode highlighted one of Rabbi Lamm’s lifelong preoccupations, namely, how Torah should live in tension with the modern world. The recently launched online Lamm Library , which preserves how Rabbi Lamm drew on the tale, reveals that his think

The launch of a new website dedicated to the legacy of Rabbi Dr Norman Lamm (1927–2020) invites us to recall the deep and sometimes unexpected bonds between this American rabbinic giant and the Jewish community of Britain. For decades, Rabbi Lamm – longtime president and chancellor of Yeshiva University, pulpit rabbi and prolific thinker – was a familiar and respected figure across the Atlantic, his name surfacing in communal conversations at pivotal moments, his friendships

Conversation on the Launch of the Rabbi Norman Lamm Archives Q: What inspired the creation of the Rabbi Norman Lamm Archives, and why now? A: Rabbi Lamm kept almost everything. When we began, we realized the sermons were just the tip of the iceberg – his personal collection held over 200,000 pages of material. We decided to start with 5,500 sermons, essays, and letters, which was more than enough to launch, while knowing there’s still so much more waiting to be explored. Th

In mid-century America, Orthodoxy was widely dismissed as a fading curiosity. The Conservative movement’s booming synagogues and popular Ramah camps projected vitality. By contrast, for many suburban Jews, Orthodoxy seemed like slavish adherence to outmoded forms of religion—a quaint, Old World relic. Being a “normal” American Jew meant joining a large Conservative or Reform congregation, not clinging to Yiddish-accented Orthodoxy. Rabbi Norman Lamm, then a young rabbi at Keh