Liberal democracy is on the defensive around the world, and articulating religious visions for it is more urgent than ever. This three-session course examines how three twentieth-century Orthodox rabbis — Moshe Feinstein, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Jonathan Sacks — thought about the liberal state, democratic self-governance, and civil society. Each approached the question from a different vantage point: Feinstein as a halakhic decisor ruling for an immigrant community, Soloveitchik as a theologian of community and dignity, Sacks as a public theologian addressing a whole society. Reading them alongside contemporary interpreters such as Shira Wolosky and Tanya White, we will ask what their different visions of liberalism have in common, and what they each have to teach us in a century that has stopped taking democracy for granted.
Levi Morrow received semikhah from the Shehebar Sephardic Center in Jerusalem and is a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he is researching Rav Soloveitchik’s political theology.
He wrote his MA in Jewish Philosophy on Rav Shagar at Tel Aviv University, and he is the translator of Living Time: Festival Discourses for the Present Age, a collection of Rav Shagar’s holiday derashot recently published by Maggid Books.
Levi teaches Jewish philosophy in Jerusalem, where he lives with his wife and their three kids.
