(Reprinted with per­mission from the au­thor. This article first appeared in Mosaic.)

Among this year’s re­cipients of the Israel Prize, the country’s high­est honor, is the eminent thinker and educa­tor Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. To those many Jews in Israel and elsewhere who are ac­quainted with or have been touched by his life and work, this award, to be conferred on May 6, Independence Day, will signify one of those rare instances when government com­mittees get things right.

In America, where he was raised and ed­ucated, Rabbi Lichtenstein’s name is bound to resonate much more faintly. Within the Orthodox community, it may be familiarly known that he is the leading sage of “modern” or “centrist” Orthodoxy; that he holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard; that he is clean-shaven; and that he is the son-in-law of Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993), the tow­ering figure widely regarded as the found­er of modern Orthodoxy. In other Jewish cir­cles, most will have never even heard of him. In mentioning his name a few years ago, the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg cited “Orthodox informants” to the effect that the rabbi was “quite the genius of Jewish law” and a “great dude of halachah.”

With this in mind, my goal here is less to summarize his achievement, a daunt­ing and ultimately futile task, than to of­fer a portrait of the man sufficient to moti­vate readers to learn more. (A place to begin might be the online bibliography of his myriad published essays, books, and lec­tures.)

Aharon Lichtenstein was born in Par­is in 1933. Eight years later, his family fled Vichy France to the United States on visas arranged by the courageous American dip­lomat Hiram Bingham, Jr. After brief stops in Baltimore, where the young boy was al­ready recognized as a prodigy of traditional learning, and then Chicago, they settled in New York in 1945. There he entered a yeshi­va before his bar mitzvah and subsequently went on to undergraduate studies and rab­binic ordination at Yeshiva University (YU). The following years, spent studying Eng­lish literature at Harvard, were crucial to the development of his particular strain of religious humanism; Boston also afforded the opportunity to study closely with his future father-in-law.

Upon returning to YU in a teach­ing capacity, Rabbi Lichtenstein over­saw the rabbinical school’s program for its most advanced students. Then, in 1971, he accepted an offer to join with Rabbi Yehuda Amital in heading a new yeshiva south of Jerusalem in the Etzion Bloc (in Hebrew,Gush Etzion, with Gush pronounced goosh as in “push”). He has been there ever since. Formally known as Yeshivat Har Etzion but universally called “the Gush,” the school represents his (and Rabbi Amital’s) vision for the role of the yeshiva as a unique educational institu­tion within Jewish society; it is perhaps his greatest legacy.

Increasing in stature and influence over the decades, the Gush and its satellite initiatives are famous for providing an open, intellectually curious, and non-dogmatic alternative to other Israeli yeshivas. This is no accident; having spent virtually his entire adult life within the yeshiva world, Rabbi Lichtenstein believes that, properly conceived and managed, these schools can be places not only for single-minded devotion to tal­mudic excellence but also for the develop­ment of moral character and leadership. In his holistic vision, the moral goal is not self-mas­tery or ascetic self-discipline (as in some ye­shivas of old) but, to the contrary, well-round­edness and other-directedness.

The same moral vision explains Rab­bi Lichtenstein’s readiness to cite sources outside the Jewish tradition that, even as they complement and support the unique­ly Jewish system of values and virtues, are reminders that immersion in Torah must not come at the expense of universal re­sponsibilities. The thinkers to whom he regularly returns—Matthew Arnold, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and F. H. Brad­ley, to name only a few—are precisely those who best articulate how to combine a life of devotion with fruitful engage­ment in the outside world, an alien and sometimes problematic reality.

Of course, this is not to say that mor­al and religious development takes prior­ity in his mind over his students’ intellec­tual growth and erudition. For one thing, he views the two spheres not as distinct but as interrelated. For another and more important thing, Rabbi Lichtenstein is staunchly within the Lithuanian rabbinic tradition that views Talmud study as the ultimate religious act, a merging of the minds of God and man.

As a talmudist, Rabbi Lichtenstein is a proponent of the “Brisker” method, for which his wife’s family is renowned. In this pedagogical approach, legal disputes or contradictions within the Talmud may be understood by analyzing the logical or “conceptual” underpinnings that account for the divergent rabbinic rulings un­der examination. In Rabbi Lichtenstein’s hands, the method has been further ab­stracted so that it can be employed at the very outset of any exercise in talmudic analysis.

Brisker-type interrogations thus be­come hermeneutical keys, to be tested in a variety of settings. Does a given rule require the attainment of a particular re­sult, or does it mandate a specific act? Is a particular rabbinic enactment an expan­sion of a biblical law, or a separate insti­tution? Does a speech-act hinge on the technical or the commonsense meaning of the words uttered? Taking the meta­phor of “key” questions still further, Rab­bi Lichtenstein has spoken of developing a “key ring”: the more keys on a student’s ring, the more talmudic “locks” can be opened, and the larger and more complex become the conceptual structures within which one assimilates talmudic data.

This mode of discourse can be dis­cerned in Rabbi Lichtenstein’s non-legal thinking as well. His treatment of “The Universal Duties of Mankind,” for exam­ple, begins with Genesis 2:15: “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it (l’ovdah) and to guard it (l’shomrah).” He then abstracts these two verbal charges as fundamental yet distinct and often competing catego­ries of mankind’s duties toward the world, to which the remainder of the essay is de­voted:

Here we have two distinct tasks. One, “l’shomrah,” is largely conservative, aimed at preserving nature. It means to guard the world, to watch it—and watching is essentially a static occupation, seeing to it that things do not change, that they re­main as they are. This is what Adam was expected to do, and part of our task in the world is indeed to guard that which we have been given: our natural envi­ronment, our social setting, our religious heritage. . .

At the same time, there is the task of “l’ovdah” (to cultivate it), which is essen­tially creative: to develop, to work, to in­novate.

I think that we would not be stretch­ing things too far if we were to under­stand that this mandate applies far be­yond that particular little corner of the Garden where Adam and Eve were placed. What we have here is a definition of how man is to be perceived in general.

This example also typifies another sali­ent feature of Rabbi Lichtenstein’s oeuvre: a frank acknowledgment of the tension and equivocation between competing claims. Numerous demands are made on one devoted to the path of Torah, de­mands that must be ordered within a hier­archy of values and then implemented in life. Neglect of even a trivial demand can denote failure to maintain proper balance, a flaw in one’s discharge of his duties. In an essay in this vein, Rabbi Lichtenstein articulates the desired ordering of study of Torah with the duty to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

Clearly, the resulting approach to life is itself very demanding. But it can also be characterized as both moderate and balanced: moderate not because it shuns extremes, but because it embraces competing extremes; balanced not because it stands on many legs at once but because it seeks a subtle equilibrium that will allow one to remain upright amid the swirl of external forces.

It is also an approach that countless students have found inspiring and life-changing. And that is because Rabbi Li­chtenstein, in addition to being its master exponent, is also its greatest role mod­el. Far from flamboyant or charismatic, he is shy and unpretentious to the point of sometimes seeming aloof. But that im­pression is deceptive: a video produced in honor of his 80th birthday includes foot­age in which he is pictured doing the dish­es, in a rowboat, playing with his children and grandchildren. The canonical stories about him do not recount his genius or er­udition but his humility: answering the ye­shiva’s public phone with a simple “Aar­on speaking,” or, after students in an army classroom have all fallen asleep, continu­ing an involved talmudic lecture so as to allow them to get some much-needed rest.

Such stories abound. They may help to ex­plain why, in the end, his many disciples can only describe him by speaking personally of what he has meant to them. And so I will now proceed to do. In recent years, the Orthodox spirit in Israel and the U.S. has suffered shock after shock. Leading and respected rabbis have been exposed as frauds, bigots, or ma­nipulators entangled in political jockeying for plum appointments. Other renowned figures have been revealed as racists, plagiarists, pro­tectors of sexual predators, abusers of power. Intellectual and moral lightweights have pro­moted themselves as Orthodoxy’s exponents and arbiters, influencers and opinion makers.

All this has had a traumatic effect. Eve­ry saint who turns out to be a sinner fur­ther erodes the bulwarks of religious com­mitment. Was it, we wonder, only ever thus? Were our revered rabbis and sages always so petty, self-absorbed, and power-hungry?

On May 10, 2013, among the 1,500-some students who gathered to celebrate Rab­bi Lichtenstein’s 80th birthday with him, I experienced a powerful restorative of my faith in God and in the Torah transmitted to us through the generations. To adapt a Shakespearean tag favored by Rabbi Li­chtenstein (though never to describe him­self), I was reminded that one figure doth bestride this phalanx of fallen saints and discredited chief rabbis like a colossus, his erudition fully matched by his humility and humanity, and by the harmonious bal­ance and wholesomeness of his life. Such multifaceted greatness is wholly unattain­able by me, but acquaintance with it helps me believe that such paragons of service to the Almighty have existed in the past and will continue to exist in the future.

This may seem a strange basis for faith. Can one’s faith in God and in the halachic tradition really be rooted in love and rever­ence for a human being? Is it appropriate for a fellow human to be treated as an ob­ject of reverence in the first place?

According to the Talmud (Pesahim 22b), the answer is yes: reverence for Torah scholars is indeed an extension of reverence for God, their greatness being a reflection and refraction of His. The same idea is developed in a 1996 article by Rabbi Lichtenstein himself.

The article is about his mentors, and he begins by quoting the first line of Matthew Arnold’s sonnet “To a Friend”: “Who prop, thou ask’st in these bad days, my mind?” About this formulation of Arnold’s he com­ments that, “In my case, at least, the critical factor is indeed ‘who’ rather than ‘what,’” and he proceeds to describe how three men—Rabbis Aharon Soloveichik, Yitzhak Hutner, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik—con­stitute, in part, the source and grounding of his faith in God and the Jewish tradi­tion.

As for my own feelings of gratitude to­ward Rabbi Lichtenstein, they are well ex­pressed in another passage in Arnold’s poem: “But be his/ My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul/ . . . saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”

The same feelings are expressed, most beautifully, in words of the Psalms (84:6) that in the original are clearly addressed to God. In singing them, Rabbi Lichten­stein’s students are altogether right to have in mind, as well, their peerless guide and mentor:

Ashrei adam oz lo bach –Fortunate the person who finds strength through you.

Elli Fischer lives in Israel. A writer and translator, he can be followed on Facebook and Twitter. From 1998– 2002, he studied for rabbinical ordination in Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein’s institutions.

By Elli Fischer