On Monday, one of the great Torah sages in the world, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, died in Israel at the age of 81. Last year, Rabbi Lichtenstein won his country’s highest honor: the Israel prize. Born in Paris in 1933, Lichtenstein was raised in America after his family fled the Nazis in 1941 only through the tremendous effort by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham Jr. who was posthumously honored with the Medal of valor by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Lichtenstein grew up in Baltimore, then Chicago, then New York in 1945. He had been recognized for his exceptional acuity of mind even as a small child. After receiving his rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University, he attended Harvard University, where he studied English literature, an action that led him to love the works of Matthew Arnold, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and F. H. Bradley. While in Boston, he studied with his future father-in-law, the protean Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, widely regarded as the founder of Modern Orthodox Judaism. After his stint in Boston, he moved to a new yeshiva south of Jerusalem, in Gush Etzion, where he remained for the rest of his life.

As Elli Fischer, a former rabbinical student of the rabbi’s, wrote of him last year when he was about to receive the Israel Prize:

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.

Fischer also noted 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."

Thus the rabbi evoked the time-honored image of the Jew as someone who must study Torah in order to live by its precepts, and yet also know how to defend himself from those who would seek his destruction.

Fischer noted that Lichtenstein was “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.”