Rav Yitzchok Hutner and the Meaning of Hanukkah

The complex question of determining God’s will in our own pedestrian times was of particular moment in some sections of urban Polish Hasidism, especially in the early 19th-century thought of Przysucha, Kotzk, Izbica, and Lublin. In these circles it was combined with the question of the worth of the individual and the question of the authenticity of individual perceptions. The combination of these elements is particularly marked in the work of one of the most creative Orthodox thinkers of the 20th century, whose work is only now beginning to get the attention it deserves: Rav Yitzchok Hutner, the long-time dean of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin (1906-1980).

Born in Warsaw to a Hasidic mother and a non-Hasidic father, Hutner grew up with a balance of Lithuanian learning and Hasidic “soul,” especially as represented by his maternal uncle, a Kotzker Hasid. His extraordinary abilities were recognized as a child—he was known as the “Warshawer illuy (genius)”—and age 15, young even in the hothouse of Eastern European Jewry, he was recruited for the great Slobodka Musar yeshiva founded by Rav Noson Tzvi Finkel (1849-1927), whose watchword was gadlut ha-adam, “the greatness of man.” Rav Finkel, known as “the Elder of Slobodka,” instilled in his charges a doctrine of greatness, a positive view of humanity as a whole, and of human life, filled with pleasures both intellectual and physical, and especially of humanity’s role in the world God created, emphasizing the Talmudic teaching that one must hold that “the world was created for my sake.”

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