"Why Are There Unethical Rabbis?": Another Tribute to Rabbi Norman Lamm and His YU Pedophiles
David Shasha
The Tradition of the Lamm and the Fox
By: Zev Eleff
Sometime during the summer of 2005, Rabbi Norman Lamm dialed my family’s home line. My father answered it and handed me the phone. I had prepared for this moment. A few days earlier, I had called his office to request an interview with R. Lamm on behalf of the Yeshiva College student newspaper. His longtime assistant, Gladys Cherny, noticed the nervousness in my voice. She offered to call ahead before patching me through to R. Lamm. That would provide me with ample time to compose myself. I thanked her for that courtesy, confessing that I had recently fumbled through initial encounters with other prominent Modern Orthodox figures, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and Rabbi Hershel Schachter. I was determined to get it right this time around. Gladys laughed and reassured me once again.
The strategy did not work. Gladys wasn’t on the other line. R. Lamm called directly from his home. It was a Sunday morning and R. Lamm wanted, so he claimed, to get a head start on his workweek schedule. The real reason was that another matter had come up which conflicted with my scheduled interview. R. Lamm had agreed to my meeting and was determined to keep his commitment. Sunday morning was his only available timeslot.
The conversation carried on, much better than I had originally feared. R. Lamm was very personable. His candor made it near-impossible to suffer discomfort in his presence. Gladys reminded me of this exchange a couple dozen times as I visited with R. Lamm as an undergraduate. She rehearsed it one final occasion before my exit interview with R. Lamm when I completed rabbinical ordination. In response, I explained to Gladys that it was the “idea” of R. Lamm that had overawed me.
This is because R. Lamm’s legacy is multivalent. Since he passed away on May 31, R. Lamm’s family and disciples have marveled at his scholarly breadth. For instance, R. Lamm wrote a pivotal book on Mitnagdim and followed that up with an award-winning tome in Hasidism. He published traditional talmudic novellae and a lengthy dissertation on the theological implications of extraterrestrial life. He authored the most well-used manual on family purity and the most oft-cited eulogy for Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. He wrote the most essential essays on Modern Orthodox Judaism and then, deciding to rebrand, furnished the formative piece on Centrist Orthodoxy.
The linchpin of Rabbi Lamm’s oeuvre was Torah scholarship. He had declared his position in unequivocal terms as a sophomore at Yeshiva College. “The leaders of a religion and nation cannot be built by a heterogeneous mixture of Latin, basketball and Varsity shows,” he had written in in the student newspaper in November 1946, “with a dash, here and there, of the teachings of the basic doctrines and spirit of that religion.” The undergraduate Norman Lamm described traditional Torah learning as the “heart of Orthodoxy.”
Each memoirist points to R. Lamm’s creativity and self-discipline, qualities that held him in very good stead as rabbi of The Jewish Center in Manhattan and president of Yeshiva University. These attributes also figured prominently in his other endeavors as a leader and writer. One of R. Lamm’s first initiatives was an idea for a journal for “Jewish Thought.” He ended up calling that publication Tradition.
Launched in 1958, Tradition benefited from R. Lamm’s originality. More important, however, was his resolve. The correspondence included in the Marvin Fox Papers at Brandeis University reveals much about R. Lamm’s determination, that self-discipline that many others have pointed out in their descriptions and memories of Rabbi Norman Lamm.
Orthodox leaders started several journals during the 1950s. They were motivated by the earlier initiatives by American Jewish elites such as Rabbis Robert Gordis and Samuel Dresner of the Conservative movement. The Orthodox reckoned that such projects were useful to help jumpstart a renaissance amid allegations that their community was stuck in a rut, mired in, what sociologist Marshall Sklare described as, institutional and intellectual “decay.”
The most ambitious attempt to cultivate a class of Orthodox public intellectuals was the brainchild of R. Norman Lamm and Prof. Marvin Fox. Prof. Fox was an important Jewish philosopher, first at Ohio State and then at Brandeis. He was a leading scholar of Maimonides, long before Jewish studies was fashionable in academe. Both men shared a vision of elevating Jewish ideas through mentoring young scholars and writing in an accessible manner for general readers.
Their bond moved the effort along. The Rabbinical Council of America agreed to house the publication and provide some financial support. The RCA made it clear to the determined editors that it was up to them to get the journal off the ground, to “win the active cooperation of the truly creative minds in orthodox Jewish circles.”
Many years later, R. Lamm recalled much of the same. As the spiritual leader of Congregation Kodimah in Springfield, Massachusetts, he operated near R. Dresner of Congregational Beth El. In 1955, R. Dresner had led a successful effort to revive the short-lived journal, Conservative Judaism. R. Dresner and other Conservative leaders leveraged a religiously pluralistic spirit in the 1950s which, to combat the “secularists” in charge of the Soviet Union, embraced sophisticated thinking on so-called Judeo-Christian values.
This and other intellectual enterprises animated R. Lamm. “We Orthodox had nothing but Jewish Life [an Orthodox Union magazine], which had no essential gravitas, and was not a serious intellectual journal,” wrote R. Lamm in an unpublished memoir. “It was an embarrassing situation. I mentioned it to the late Rabbi Solomon Sharfman, who was then President of the Rabbinical Council of America. He immediately appointed me chairman of the RCA Publications Committee—a tried and tested method of getting a pesky young trouble-maker off your back—and instructed me to remedy the situation as best as I could expecting, of course, that nothing would come of the issue.”
The lack of support portended the challenge of recasting Orthodox Judaism in a 1950s American religious milieu. R. Lamm continued forward, despite the incredulousness. In December 1956, R. Lamm enlisted Rabbis Emanuel Rackman, Bernard Lander, and Marvin Fox to serve on the editorial team. Each member sported dual “Rabbi-Dr.” credentials, apart from R. Lamm who would later earn his Ph.D. from Yeshiva University in 1966. There was, however, an important distinction between the founders and the editors they aimed to recruit. R. Lamm was in his late-20s and Prof. Fox was thirty-two years old. The other two men were a half-generation older and far more professionally established.
The two scholars did not know one another before embarking on the journal, at least not well. They started out addressing one another formally as “Rabbi Lamm” and “Professor Fox.” But by the end of the preserved correspondence they were “Norm” and “Marv,” coordinating vacations with one another and concluding their long letters with updates on their young families. The warmth and comradery shared by the two is evident at the end of a long memo written to Prof. Fox in November 1958, shortly after the appearance of the first issue of Tradition: “Excuse the verbosity. Whenever I’m tired, overworked, and tense, and find myself at a typewriter writing to a friend, I let go like a yenta to a shecheiniste.”
R. Lamm’s and Prof. Fox’s youthful spirit augured well for their determined effort to deny the naysayers. Yet, it also presented several problems for their initiative. First, the pair lacked the credibility among the Orthodox to mobilize a movement. Early on, R. Lamm told Prof. Fox that “you are the only other real editor I have. The others just have titles.” He urged Prof. Fox to remain with him, understanding that the editorial labor was significant and committee cooperation would be good to maintain a certain level of rigor. Or, as R. Lamm put it: “I don’t like one-man journals.”
On some occasions, R. Lamm was prepared to resign: “Marv, I’m sorry I ever took this damned job as Editor,” he confessed. “There just isn’t enough talent around, and I haven’t got enough time to do all this work. Besides which, yourself of course excluded, I have no one on the Editorial Committee.”
The pair also encountered a shortage of interested writers. Both believed that Orthodox Judaism possessed worthy scholars and presumed that a periodical was all that was needed to attract their attention. Several Orthodox thinkers—Prof. Alexander Altmann, for instance—had found a hospitable home in the earliest volumes of Judaism and did not feel overly compelled to supply R. Lamm’s more narrowly-targeting Orthodox journal with his publications.
The material, then, was sparse. The duo rejected several manuscripts because of the “inferior literary quality of the articles.” For one of the accepted submissions, R. Lamm complained that “insofar as footnotes are concerned, each and every one needs checking. In reviewing references to Rambam and Talmud only, I found I had to correct 3 of every 4!”
It was apparent to the team of editors that the most significant author they could draft to write for Tradition would be Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. In April 1957, their letters testify to a tag-team effort to prod the Rav to submit a manuscript, and that he had “given them his official permission to start ‘nudging’ him for his own contribution.” Their efforts paid off, but only in time and during the tenure of R. Lamm’s successor. Ultimately Tradition would serve as the home for some of R. Soloveitchik’s most important English essays, the most significant, of course, being “Confrontation” and “The Lonely Man of Faith.”
Compiling the first installment was an exasperating chore. Owing to this, R. Lamm wrote to Prof. Fox and the other members of the editorial board: “You are aware, no doubt, of one of our main problems: dearth of good writers who have something to say. Because of this fact, we must rely on our Editorial Committee to contribute articles and reviews as well as their editorial advice and work.”
Making matters worse, the journal’s sponsors were reluctant to provide long-term investments. The financial limitations and dearth of substantive submissions meant that the journal first appeared semiannually rather than quarterly, as it does now. Throughout the earliest stages, R. Lamm struggled to win over the cynics among the RCA. “They’re saying we’ll never do it,” he wrote to Prof. Fox. “I tell you that with God’s help we will. But, to get it done before the millennium is over, some action is required. Hence, action.”
The appearance of the first issue in the autumn of 1958 did not totally mollify the concerns of the doubters. “After much wrangling, Yeshiva University agreed to sponsor the journal for half or more of its expenses,” R. Lamm reported, “but that YU’s name would not appear as the cosponsor—at least not for the present.”
The editors persevered because of their friendship—R. Lamm compared their bond to the biblical David and Jonathan—and a sense of youthfulness that helped forge a singular vision. They also relied on a formula that appeared to benefit other faith groups. Their work aimed to cultivate a circle of “orthodox intellectuals” but aspired to remain accessible to a broader readership. By this, R. Lamm meant that he would not be “bothered by the lack of footnotes. There is no law,” he continued, “that every article we publish must be completely documented and annotated. We are not issuing a scientific or academic journal.”
Notwithstanding these challenges, the strategy worked. The appearance of the first issue “must have made a good impression,” surmised R. Lamm. He reported that Yeshiva president “Dr. Belkin, originally the great pessimist who wouldn’t associate Yeshiva’s name with a probable failure, has now let it be known that he ‘would not object’ to announcing Yeshiva’s co-sponsorship.”
The tone of articles in the four years of Lamm’s editorship were marked by a sophistication of topic and research and an accessible form of written expression. The editors solicited articles that matched the tenor of the times. These included “Secular Civilization at an Impasse,” “Jewish Ethics and Self-Psychology,” “Koheleth and the Modern Temper” and “The American and the Jew.”
R. Lamm’s several contributions redounded to the self-confidence of the burgeoning group of young tradition-touting elites. The contemporary stylings of the journal also led the editors in search of ample doses of polemic, mostly to unseat Conservative Judaism as the best positioned religious movement to negotiate Jewish tradition and modern life. R. Lamm, by then associate rabbi of The Jewish Center, penned lengthy articles in opposition to mixed seating in the synagogue and changes to the traditional religious marriage contract. Moreover, by naming the journal Tradition, for example—also under consideration were names like Traditionalist, Ideas, Reflector and Moriah—R. Lamm had in mind a “sacred task of reinterpreting to our fellow Jews the divinely given Tradition.”
The opposition returned the theological volley. For example, Rabbi Morris Adler of the well-heeled Conservative-affiliated Shaarey Zedek in Detroit railed against R. Lamm and his journal, claiming in the pages of the Jewish Spectator that the inaugural issue had demonstrated the “wrong way” and an altogether lack of “honesty and integrity [extended] to those who seek to reinterpret the tradition.” The criticism emboldened the Orthodox editors. R. Lamm welcomed the “all-out-attack,” believing that he was duty-bound to turn away his religious opposition.
R. Lamm remained at the helm until 1962 when he passed the reins to Rabbi Walter Wurzburger. R. Lamm continued to publish articles in Tradition—typically less polemical than his early contributions—and endured as a guiding force for rigorous Orthodox-styled scholarship.
In fact, he reused his 1950s formula—to develop talented scholars and provide readable substantive material for laypeople—three decades later. It was by and large a top-down approach, to empower thought-leaders to expand their scope and identify the necessary vehicles to reach the broader public. As president of Yeshiva University, he conceived the Orthodox Forum to “mobilize the most creative talents of our community to provide thoughtful and comprehensive direction to those who look to us for leadership.”
By then, R. Lamm was far more sanguine about the state of “Orthodox Jewish Thought.” Much credit is owed to R. Lamm’s and Prof. Fox’s uncanny determination, the hallmark for a vision to propel an unforecasted Orthodox comeback in American Jewish life.
Zev Eleff is chief academic officer of Hebrew Theological College and associate professor of Jewish history at Touro College.
From Tradition online, February 4, 2021, re-posted to Mosaic magazine
Why Are There Unethical Rabbis?
By: Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz
“Prohibition certainly was not the finest hour for America's Orthodox rabbis.” With this understatement, Hannah Sprecher sums up a disturbing chapter in American history. The Volstead Act, which implemented the 18th Amendment, took effect on February 1, 1920. It prohibited the production, transport, and sale of intoxicating beverages, but made an exception for the manufacture, possession, and sale of wine for religious purposes when supervised by a “Rabbi, Minister or Priest.”
This opened the door to a great deal of corruption, because any synagogue could provide its members with up to ten gallons of wine a year. Suddenly, many synagogues started to sell enormous amounts of wine. By 1925, in New York alone, the amount of wine distributed for sacramental purposes reached 1.8 million gallons, three times the amount sold just three years earlier. There were highly publicized raids, like one on the Menorah Wine Company on Manhattan's Lower East Side in March 1921, in which $250,000 worth of wine was seized. Newspaper headlines included “Jewish Rabbis Reap Fabulous Sums by Flouting Dry Law,” and “Big Illicit Pools Selling Sacramental Wine.” Anti- Semites went on the attack, with Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent claiming that “Bootlegging is a 95 per cent controlled Jewish industry in which a certain class of rabbis have been active.” The misdeeds of clergy and congregations shocked many Jews. Louis Marshall, the President of the American Jewish Committee, is said to have admitted privately that “the percentage of Jews engaged in illegitimate bootlegging, including quite a number of rabbis, was shamefully large, and reflected discredit on the Jews.”
How can Rabbis act unethically? How do we explain otherwise religiously pious people who are dishonest and deceitful? Many argue that ethics itself is grounded in religion. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that without faith, humanity is like an “orchestra without a conductor, (that will)....lose the habits that shape and drive the moral order.” We expect that the righteous will do what is right, and that religion will be a blessing to society.
This expectation is far from obvious. It is quite possible for a single-minded focus on God to lead the man of faith to ignore humanity. Faith makes exceptional demands, and compared to them, man seems inconsequential. John Henry Newman, the influential 19th century Catholic theologian wrote: "The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse." If God is all that matters, then our interest in man is an afterthought.
Judaism takes a different point of view. The Talmud tells the story about a potential convert who approaches Hillel, and asks to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel said the entire Torah can be found within the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself”; everything else is the commentary on that verse. Hillel is not offering a pithy response. He is articulating a vision that sees ethics at the foundation of our relationship with God. And I believe that this is the most profound message of the Ten Commandments: authentic faith must lead one to ethical behavior.
The Ten Commandments have a clear structure; first come the commandments between God and man, followed by the commandments between man and man. It also goes from violations that are more significant to those that are less significant; “You shall not murder” comes before “You shall not covet.” Taken together, these two structural elements unlock the message of the Ten Commandments: Your faith must be so deep that you encounter God everywhere in creation, especially in your interactions with other people, because man is created in the image of God. This faith must lead you to treat other people ethically, respect their property rights, and go so far that you will not even covet another person’s goods.
The Ten Commandments are a ladder of faith, with each commandment allowing us to further realize our faith within this world. By respecting humanity all the way to the point of not coveting, one completes the mission implicit in the commandment of “I am the Lord your God.” Ethics is not only the obvious outcome of faith, but actually the ultimate expression of a belief that sees God within the creation of man.
Not everyone understands this. Many fail to make the jump from believing in God to honoring those created in God’s image. The Talmud talks about the “chasid shoteh,” “the pious fool,” who can't be bothered to save a drowning child because he doesn’t want to remove his tefillin. How can there be unethical rabbis? Because there are always those who think that their service of God ends by wearing a pair of tefillin and can’t hear the cries of their fellow man. Tragically, their cruel foolishness makes a mockery of the Torah.
But I would be remiss if I left the subject here. The religious, yet unethical, garner headlines, but there are so many who quietly make a Kiddush Hashem on a regular basis, motivated by their faith. One such anecdote which particularly inspired me is about Yishai, who was at the time a 17-year-old volunteer for Magen David Adom. On Saturday night, March 9, 2002, Yishai was in Jerusalem. At 10:30 p.m., a suicide bomber blew himself up, and Yishai ran to the scene. Barbara Sofer, a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, describes what happened next:
He leaned over one young person, but there was no breath. Another young woman was lying nearby. He saw her flinch. Blood gushed from her leg. Like many emergency crew volunteers, he usually carried a tourniquet. Not that Shabbat. But he did have something he could use. Yishai was wearing tzitzit, a small tallit with fringes. He stripped off his white shirt and removed the garment. Together with a man named Yaron, he turned the tzitzit into a tourniquet. Wrapped tight around the young woman's leg, the cotton turned red. Minutes later, the ambulances arrived....
Across town, orthopedic surgeon Moshe Lifschitz rushed the young woman into the operating theater. Her bones were shattered and her femoral artery was torn in two places. He found the tzitzit, tied like a tourniquet around her leg. Whoever did this was thinking fast, he realized…. Jerusalem really is a small town... (and) I tracked down the surgeon.
"So, Yishai saved her leg?" I ask him.
"No," he answers. "I saved her leg. Yishai saved her life."
There can be no better use for a pair of tzitzit, because true faith always leads us to a love of man. And that is the entire Torah while standing on one foot.
From Kehilath Jarvanka e-mail newsletter, February 4, 2021
From Norman Lamm to Matis Weinberg: The Tikvah Fund Loves Pedophilia!
In their weekly Shabbat e-mail, Tikvah posted an item from Rabbi Mark Gottlieb that proudly included the “insights of Rabbi Matis Weinberg”:
For many of Judaism's classical commentators, the tale of the spies is a story of slander and its ramifications. Rabbi Mark Gottlieb draws on the insights of Rabbi Matis Weinberg and philosophers Herder and Wittgenstein to shed light on the nature of the spies' derogatory speech, and apply those insights to 21st-century America's current moment of cultural upheaval.
Here is the complete podcast:
Weinberg was credibly accused of sexually abusing his male students, as Gary Rosenblatt reported back in 2003:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/panel-to-hear-charges-against-prominent-rabbi/
It created an upheaval in the Orthodox Jewish community:
https://jewishjournal.com/community/8152/
The case was settled before the truth could be made known to the public:
In 2006 the Jewish Survivors website went a step further and bitterly questioned whether Weinberg’s books were still “Kosher”:
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2006/01/are-books-written-by-rabbi-matis.html
The issue remains a festering wound in Orthodox circles.
It is good to know that it is not an issue in Tikvahworld.
But Anti-Zionism is:
https://tikvahfund.org/library/podcast-einat-wilf-on-the-wests-indulgence-of-palestinian-delusions/
As is PC culture:
https://tikvahfund.org/library/podcast-gary-saul-morson-on-leninthink/
It all comes together in the following list of programs in their series “The Future of College: A Jewish Townhall” which features all the usual suspects – and a few more!
And this of course brings us to the late Rabbi Norman Lamm:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/obituaries/Norman-Lamm-Dead.html
Here is the latest of many YU tributes to the man:
https://yeshivauniversity.wufoo.com/forms/in-tribute/
I was honestly not going to do anything special on Lamm, having already prepared a bunch of articles for SHU 963, but which I now include in this special post.
Gottlieb’s mention of Matis Weinberg kind of forced my hand, as can be gleaned from The New York Times obituary:
In an emotional letter announcing his retirement, Rabbi Lamm apologized for not responding more assertively when former students of Yeshiva University High School for Boys accused the two rabbis of having abused them in the 1970s and ’80s. Rabbi Lamm had quietly forced the two men out but had done nothing to prevent them from working elsewhere.
That obituary was thankfully forthcoming when it came to Lamm’s Ratzinger-like behavior in protecting the pedophile monsters in his employ.
But, as we can see, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik was not nearly as forthcoming in that regard:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/meir-soloveichik/the-genius-of-norman-lamm/
Soloveichik praised the pedophile-enabler to the hilt as both genius and visionary:
One Yom Kippur, a young rabbi in a prominent New York synagogue delivered a sermon titled “Divine Silence or Human Static?” His inspiration was a rabbinic statement that “every day, a divine voice issues forth from Sinai.” The question, this rabbi reflected, was obvious: If the voice of God continues to thunder forth, why is it not heard? His answer was that if we do not hear God in today’s day and age, it is not because God is not speaking, but because “we are too busy talking.” We are too involved in so many other things that are inconsequential and meaningless. Our society is too wordy, we are drowned in the verbosity of our mass media of communication. Words come to us not in sentences, but in veritable torrents, from mass media.”
One can easily imagine these words being spoken today as a description of the digital age. Yet they were said in 1965 by Norman Lamm, who passed away at the end of May. Lamm ultimately became the president of Yeshiva University, saved that institution from bankruptcy, and propounded in writings and rhetoric its affiliated philosophy of Modern, or Centrist, Orthodoxy. He is without question one of the most significant figures in American Judaism in the past half century. In the face of this legacy, it is easy to miss that, prior to assuming leadership of Yeshiva, Norman Lamm was the greatest composer of sermons in the English-speaking rabbinic world.
Ditto his grandson Ari Lamm, whose article also cited those sermons, but did so in a way that falsely turned the YU pedophile-enabler into a Civil Rights Liberal:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/norman-lamm-engage-the-world
The Neo-Con grandson actually had the CHUTZPAH to cite David Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass:
If that strikes you as a rabbi’s wishful thinking, take a moment and study the long and still ongoing struggle for freedom and rights in this country. In the entire history of our nation, we have not achieved a single victory in the fight against racism that hasn’t depended upon the values and stories of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps America’s foremost theologian of liberty, drew extensively upon the Hebrew biblical tradition, especially in his famous Second Inaugural Address. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight referred to the legendary black orator as a “prophet of freedom,” noting “Douglass’ deep grounding in the Bible, especially the Old Testament.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s public addresses are saturated through and through with learned references to the great Hebrew prophets, from Isaiah and Ezekiel, to Amos and Zechariah. Barack Obama’s repeated references during the 2008 presidential campaign to “the Joshua generation” are incomprehensible without an understanding of the Hebrew scriptures. It is true, as Haifa University’s Eran Shalev documents, that white abolitionists in America’s antebellum period evinced an increasing tendency to invoke the Christian Bible as well. But this “further spotlights the one group that did not take the privileged American majority’s lead in preferring the New Testament to the Old: black Americans, enslaved and free, would remain committed to the Hebrew Bible throughout the antebellum period and beyond.”
Given where the YU community stands on Trump and Race at the present moment, the citation is deeply misleading:
https://www.thejewishstar.com/stories/yu-told-donald-trumps-o,17952?
Indeed, both David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt are closely allied to the institution:
Whatever the political angle on Lamm, the end result is depressingly the same:
By the time I finished reading, it was long past midnight. I had read through dozens, maybe hundreds of sermons, luxuriating in the sound of my grandfather’s poetic, prophetic voice. Yes, I was still completely heartbroken. But I found that I could stand a little straighter. In a world and at a time that feels so broken, I began to feel a surge of hope. My grandfather may have departed this world for the next, but he left his wisdom behind for us. He instructed us to listen with an open heart to the perspectives of others; he charged us to bring the Torah out into the world around us; and he cautioned us never to forget our Jewish self-respect when we engage with society.
Lamm the poet!
Lamm the prophet!
Unfortunately, Lamm represented the reactionary Orthodox side of White Jewish Supremacy, and ultimately had no interest in “the perspective of others”:
https://www.academia.edu/40402302/Yitz_Greenberg_and_Modern_Orthodoxy_The_Road_Not_Taken_Sampler_
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg had his issues with YU, which Lamm did not help resolve:
The key to understanding the problem can be seen in the following article:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/yitz-greenbergs-lonely-road/
As Eugene Korn writes of Greenberg:
He learned the values of tolerance, generosity of spirit and commitment to Torah early in life from his learned Orthodox European father. However, as the rabbi began his professional career, Orthodoxy started moving in an opposite direction from his pluralism and intellectual openness. In the 1960s his progressive vision was still within the pale of Yeshiva University, but was later rejected by Centrist Orthodoxy, which today finds more currency in the fervently Orthodox (charedi) camp. The rabbi’s program for a true integration of Torah and modernity, and his acceptance of Jewish pluralism, became the road not taken. In his essay, he acknowledges that this marginalization has been painful.
As Greenberg admits:
[Aharon] Lichtenstein’s Commentator article and the way it was used confirmed that he and the emerging centrist leadership would not support the exploration of
these dangerous issues. In the ’70’s and ’80s, this rightward shift took on the form of systematically excluding people like Hartman and me from the conversation. My views became off limits, and Yeshiva University students and centrist
laymen heard only those from the right and never from the left. Modern
Orthodox leadership went along with this exclusion, sometimes at the behest
of the right and sometimes in anticipatory compliance with the right’s growing
dominance of community policy. Modern Orthodox institutional leadership
folded and/or drifted, as American Modern Orthodoxy moved steadily toward
the Haredi position in most areas of rabbinical adjudication, education, and
community policy.
Norman Lamm, whether it was with pedophiles or with maverick YU professors, always took the party line and did not make waves.
His job was to keep YU and Modern Orthodoxy afloat in a sea of what they perceived to be hostility coming from the Ultra-Orthodox as well as from the larger secular world.
The shameful outpouring of praise for Lamm reflects the twisted values of White Jewish Supremacy, which are translated by Tikvah into Neo-Conservative dogmas.
The lesson of all this is that you cannot question the Neo-Con YU dogmas, but you can molest children with impunity.
And that is a legacy worth remembering.
David Shasha
From SHU 964, September 16, 2020
For my original tribute to Rabbi Lamm in full: