[Avodah] RYBS at Cross-Current

[Ben Bradley via Avodah]

> TUM advocates studying "the two mountains" or "the two
> magisteria"--two different spheres of knowledge, two separate domains,
> each with its own ethical and intellectual rules. TUM over the decades
> has produced a veritable army of people with bifurcated minds, while
> TIDE produces integrated Torah personalities.

Seems to me that the ideology of TUM is far more due to the views of R
Norman Lamm than to RYBS. In fact I don't know that RYBS ever presented
his views on the relationship between Torah and limmudei chol in any
broad or systematic way. I am not an expert on RYBS though so please
correct me if I'm wrong. R Lamm's long presidency and the eloquence
of his speeches and writings was, I think hugely influential, and he
made his TUM ideology a cornerstone. The term TUM originates with him,
as do the terms Modern Orthodoxy and Centrist Orthdoxy, which shows the
penetrance of his thinking into mainstream parlance.

So as much as I agree with Mrs Katz's criticism of TUM, I think the
blame is not with RYBS.

I disagree with Mrs Katz that the style of RYBS's writings result in
ambiguity as to his meaning and that this is the cause of the diversity
of his talmidim's views. Any given essay that I've read seems quite
clear in its intent. It's more that he seems to have expressed himself
in different ways at different times and to different groups of people,
causing divergent perpectives as to his views. Prof Lawrance Kaplan has
in fact documented a few cases of blatant contradiction in his expressed
views, I don't have the precise details to hand but I'm sure someone does.

Ben Bradley