The Caveman, Revisited - by Rabbi Dr. Zev Eleff

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 thinking on the cave was far from static. Over three decades, Rabbi Lamm returned to the story again and again, reshaping its meaning as both his audience and his own role evolved.

To see how his presentations shifted, let’s begin where Rabbi Lamm himself had started: with the Talmud.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s Cave

The story can be told in brief. The Talmud (Shabbat 33b) relates that the second century sage and his son, Rabbi Elazar, took refuge in a cave while they were wanted men—accused of scandalizing the Roman governor in control of Judaea. In hiding, Rabbi Shimon and his son studied Torah all day. Upon learning that the Caesar had died and that the decree against him had been lifted, Rabbi Shimon left the cave and, for the first time in twelve years, encountered everyday life. But Rabbi Shimon and his son—shaped by years of singular focus on Torah learning—were no longer calibrated to the earthly environment. Whatever they looked at went ablaze. A heavenly voice demanded Rabbi Shimon and his son halt, lest they destroy the world. The divine call immediately directed Rabbi Shimon to return to his cave for another year.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son reemerged twelve months later. At first disenchanted, the pair encountered an old Jewish man happily preparing for Shabbat. The old man was holding two sweet-smelling myrtle twigs, a reminder of the dual acts of “safekeeping” and “remembering” the Sabbath. The old man, in very plain, unassuming language, relayed to Rabbi Shimon that this was his tradition, likely received from parents and grandparents. In this man, Rabbi Shimon observed the joy that Jews take in the fulfillment of God’s commandments. With that, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son came to terms with the mundane world.

The First Sermon

The tale’s tension between spiritual withdrawal and worldly engagement spoke to Rabbi Lamm. He first took it up in May 1966, when, as associate rabbi of The Jewish Center in New York, he delivered his first sermon about the cave. Rabbi Lamm’s was a timely, seasonal discourse. The next day was Lag Ba-Omer. Legend has it that the father and son duo of the Mishnaic period emerged from their cave—back into the fraught “real” world—on that springtime holiday.

Rabbi Lamm was a master darshan, a very gifted preacher, and that 1966 sermon was no exception. In all probability, Rabbi Lamm’s listeners at The Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side responded positively to the lecture since, seven months later, Rabbi Lamm serialized it in written form as a five-part series in the congregation’s bulletin. This is how he concluded the published version:

But it is in this world, outside the caves and enclaves, in the world of business and the professions, of science and the schools—in this inhospitable and alien and difficult and spiteful atmosphere—where we shall indeed work out our eternal destiny! It is here where Judaism will stand or, Heaven forbid, fall. Assuredly, it is not always a serene world of quiet satisfaction. Often it is filled with frustration and disappointment and irritations of all kinds. But Judaism cannot grow in caves. It must have a whole world in which to flourish.

The sermon’s message resonated with Rabbi Lamm and his hopes for Orthodox Judaism in the postwar period. Narrow “caves and enclaves” were comforting, safe from the rages of the outside world. But caves were not the preferred spaces for religious people who aimed to impact the world.

Rabbi Lamm drew a parallel between Rabbi Shimon’s epoch and the rising generation of Orthodox Jews after World War II. The hero of the modern moment was neither the sage who “recognized the rot and the decay of their contemporary civilization”—and “hence preferred to retreat into their own enclave of Torah and piety”—or the younger, inexperienced graduates of “day schools and Yeshiva University.” Both required the direction of the simple, pious, old man who “challenge[s] them both to recall the glories that were and prepare for those that yet will be.”

The message spoke to the women and men in The Jewish Center pews. They were educated, middle class, and heartily identified with Rabbi Lamm’s notion of Modern Orthodoxy. His was a Modern Orthodox Judaism that balanced “tradition” and the promises and problems that pertain to “modernity.”

The Yeshiva World’s Cave

A year and a half later, in January 1968, Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, head of the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, wrote a carefully worded note to Rabbi Lamm. Back then, Rabbi Gifter enjoyed a warm relationship with Rabbi Lamm. He began his letter with the typical honorifics bestowed upon a rabbinic leader held in high esteem.

Rabbi Gifter was concerned with an article he had read in the Israeli press. A journalist had covered a talk Rabbi Lamm had delivered in Tel Aviv. In that lecture, Rabbi Lamm rehearsed the main points of his lesson learned from the Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai story. The journalist emphasized Rabbi Lamm’s commentary on the heavenly voice’s fear that Rabbi Shimon, without remediation, might end the world with his destructive gaze.

As reported, Rabbi Gifter worried that Rabbi Lamm had impugned Rabbi Shimon and, by implication, the cave-like, insular-learning “haredi rabbinate.” The upshot of the Talmud’s tale, he warned—as Rabbi Gifter’s students later recorded—could not possibly leave Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the wrong.

Rabbi Lamm was quick to respond. He confessed disappointment that the Hebrew article focused solely on criticism of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son, Rabbi Elazar. Yet, Rabbi Lamm did not deny his take on the tale. This second iteration, he explained, in some larger measure distinguished between two approaches to Orthodox life. “The world cannot be solely sustained by the ways of the spiritual elites,” he explained. Back then and at present, offered Rabbi Lamm, Judaism requires women and men who can translate and reconcile the Torah in practical, real world climes. The episode exposed the fault line between Lamm’s belief in Torah’s engagement with the world and the yeshiva world’s instinct to guard sanctity through separation.

Caves and Enclaves Revisited

In May 1997, Rabbi Lamm further modified his presentation of the story, sharpening the distinction he had begun to draw between two approaches to Orthodox life. Much had changed by then. About two decades earlier, Rabbi Lamm had been elected president of Yeshiva University. In that position, Rabbi Lamm’s public discourses represented more than his role as rabbi of The Jewish Center and as an important thought leader within American Orthodoxy. At the helm of YU, Rabbi Lamm spoke for the flagship of Modern Orthodox Judaism and a rabbinical school under constant scrutiny from his religious “left” and “right.”

The occasion for Rabbi Lamm’s address was the Yeshiva University Centennial Convocation. This time, Rabbi Lamm decoupled “caves” and “enclaves.” Thirty years prior, he had considered them the same. Both words signaled a kind of narrowness that the heavenly voice had cautioned Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Elazar against. Rabbi Lamm thought of YU as an “enclave.” An enclave, to him, was for likeminded people committed to the same central values. At the same time, an enclave is a porous, inclusive space that can nurture traditional wisdom and consider new ideas.

In this third incarnation, Rabbi Lamm’s hero was Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The old man and the heavenly voice convinced him that there was a middle ground between the insular cave and the wide open world. It was the curriculum of moderation that Rabbi Shimon mastered during his second, shorter stint in the cave:

We who study and teach at Yeshiva essentially live in a private community—a marvelous enclave, one of study and thought and research, of vibrant ideas and creative concepts and novel interpretations and spiritual growth, all on the very highest levels. But it is an enclave, not a cave; we are not hermetically sealed off from the world. Yes, the “cave experience” can be, and indeed is, a vital element in one’s Torah development….

But the cave is not the natural habitat of Torah; a “house of study’—a bet ha-midrash—is where Torah flourishes, not a “cave” of study. We do not and should not aspire to educate our students to live in caves once they have left the Yeshiva. We have and should have higher and more demanding standards than the rest of society and Jewish community, but not so high that we look upon them with withering contempt—“wherever they cast their eyes was burnt” —and not so demanding that others look upon us as out of reach and irrelevant.

Over three decades, Rabbi Lamm’s reading of the cave evolved from a warning against isolation into a vision of balance—an argument that true Torah life requires both the depth of the cave and the openness of the world.

The rest, of course, is history. Rabbi Lamm’s speech set off a wave of responses. Some from Lakewood, self-described “cavemen,” attacked him. Some censured Rabbi Lamm from podiums at the Agudath Israel convention while others critiqued from inside YU’s halls. Friends congratulated Rabbi Lamm while others advised him to strike a more conciliatory posture with America’s Yeshiva World.

I’d like to believe that amid all the commotion, Rabbi Lamm opened his Talmud and meditated on the passages describing Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s adventure. Invariably, it was in these texts that Rabbi Lamm read and reread to make meaning of a life of devoted leadership on behalf of the Jewish people. Over three decades, Rabbi Lamm’s reading of the cave had evolved from a warning against isolation into a vision of balance—an argument that true Torah life requires both the depth of the cave and the openness of the world.

Zev Eleff is president of Gratz College and professor of American Jewish history. He is the author or editor of 15 books, the most recent of which is The Greatest of All Time: A History of an American Obsession (Cambridge, 2025).