R. Soloveitchik was a traditional talmudic master who devoted his life to teaching Talmud and to offering penetrating analyses of talmudic texts. At the same time, his religious thought was nurtured by more than one tradition. The attempt to locate him in only one tradition is a shortsighted distortion of his complex religious thought and personality. The inability to appreciate that a religious thinker may inhabit and be nurtured by distinct and often opposing religious frames of reference was also responsible for the mistaken attempt at establishing either the Guide for the Perplexed or the Mishneh Torah as the true expression of Maimonides’ thinking. When you study giants of the spirit such as Maimonides or R. Soloveitchik, you witness the intellectual honesty and courage of talmudists firmly anchored in the halakhic tradition who allowed their intellectual and religious sensibilities to be influenced by frameworks of knowledge and experience independent of their particular Judaic halakhic traditions.
Those who simplify R. Soloveitchik’s thought without appreciating its rich and multifaceted nature fail to do justice to the conflicting frameworks to which he was committed. His anthropocentric halakhic passion and his theocentric understanding of what it means to stand in the presence of God express the different theological traditions that nurtured his religious worldview.
Maimonides’ references to Aristotle and Islamic philosophers were not motivated by pragmatic apologetic reasons but represented his sincere religious convictions and love for God. Similarly, it is deeply mistaken to assume that R. Soloveitchik’s references to Western philosophers and theologians were meant to impress secular Jewish youth by dressing the halakhic tradition in sophisticated intellectual Western garb. The portrayal of R. Soloveitchik as a traditional Westernized Orthodox apologist does injustice to the authentic religious struggle reflected in his writings. It is not easy to harmonize an anthropocentric tradition mediated by mitzvah and Talmud Torah with a theocentric passion nurtured by the experiential dimensions of standing in the presence of God.
David Hartman – Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik p.211
The Sea Is Not Full 