Over the past three decades, the writings of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, scion of a Lithuanian rabbinic dynasty and architect of Modern Orthodoxy in America, have produced a cottage industry of scholarly essays in traditional and academic journals and a series of important book-length studies. While some stress his rabbinic learning and others his philosophical acumen, in almost all of these studies, Soloveitchik is depicted as a quintessential defender of Orthodox Judaism. William Kolbrenner's The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition is different from anything that has preceded it. Kolbrenner, a scholar of English literature at Bar-Ilan University, offers us a psychoanalytic reading of Soloveitchik, the man and his work, largely through the lens of Freudian scholar Jonathan Lear. This reading yields a picture of Soloveitchik as not only distinct from the Orthodox framework in which he lived and thought, but also in many ways as a figure who subverts, or perhaps transcends, the very halakhic man he portrays in his famous essay by that name.

Most readers might already be scratching their heads. Not so fast. Psychoanalytic method anticipates precisely that kind of result. And as we know, such a method functions in a hermetic bubble; it only makes sense for one who has accepted a series of criteria that can never be empirically verified. Lear alludes to this when he writes, “Psychoanalytic interpretation can only be validated within the context of psychoanalytic therapy … psychoanalysis cannot be ‘objective science’” (86). Kolbrenner invites his readers to come along for the ride. And it is quite a ride.

Studies of Soloveitchik all navigate the messy relationship between tradition and modernity that stands at the center of his religious philosophy. Kolbrenner offers a novel lens through which we can examine this. He sets up the binary of mourning (rabbinic tradition) verses melancholia (Freud's notion of the modern) to navigate Soloveitchik's break with tradition—the former a central motif of the rabbinic sages, the latter the malaise of the modern as described by Freud. To borrow a phrase from the late British philosopher Gillian Rose, for the rabbis “mourning becomes the law” (25), mourning the destruction of the temple is the driving force behind the rabbinic project. Melancholy is of a different order. Mourning requires taking partial leave of the past, law being the act that Hilary Putnam calls the “good enough.” Law is the salve that makes loss bearable. Melancholy, on Freud's reading, has no resolution. Freud writes that mourning is when the world becomes poorer through loss; in melancholy it is the ego itself that suffers irreparable damage. Jonathan Lear suggests, “Melancholia is mourning directed inward” (108).

The first half of the book is a series of intricate and illuminating discussions about the law, certainty, truth, and loss in rabbinic tradition, where Soloveitchik is hardly mentioned. Kolbrenner begins the second section by suggesting that we understand Soloveitchik's intellectual project from a “primal scene” in his childhood that Soloveitchik relates in an autobiographical anecdote about the trauma he felt when he witnessed his father unable to solve a contradiction in Maimonides's Code of Law. The young child does not approach his stoic, unapproachable father (the model of masculinity Soloveitchik strives to overcome), but rather takes solace in the arms of his mother (the feminine he later embraces through his “Torah of the heart”), who assures him that perhaps one day he will be able to solve the problem. The nurturing female gesture doesn't quite console the crying child, yet it is the femininity of his mother that drives Soloveitchik to ultimately reject his father and, by doing so, distance himself from the tradition he represents, even as he continues to identify with it. Kolbrenner writes, “Soloveitchik's ‘melancholy’… has a double function. His self-professed melancholy serves him in the process of individuation in distinguishing himself from his father and other ‘halakhic men,’ while at the same time, as part of his Oedipal rivalry with his father, adumbrating a never fully articulated ambivalence about the law” (101).

Kolbrenner asks us in the second half of the book to consider the ways in which Soloveitchik's “primal scene” enables him, or drives him, to argue that the law does not solve the problem of loneliness, or loss. Kolbrenner writes, “The language of Torah, or halakha, never overcomes the sense of loss or the gap separating creature and creator; the ‘distance that separates man from the Creator is infinite’” (103). Kolbrenner argues that Soloveitchik's father, the masculine, asserts itself through “cognitive conquest,” the drive of filling loss with the law, while Soloveitchik himself, the mature version of the crying child, lives in a different universe where loss is irreparable, where the law does not solve his loneliness, where halakhic man simply does not work. He lives in modernity.

Soloveitchik still loves the law, but in an ambivalent way, and without the naiveté that it solves the central problem of the modern condition (melancholy). For Kolbrenner, Soloveitchik's famous opening salve in Lonely Man of Faith, “I am lonely” really means, “I am not my father,” even more strongly, “I am not halakhic man.” For Soloveitchik it is the loneliness in melancholy, and not the law, that brings him close to God. This is not a claim favoring Lonely Man of Faith’s homo religiosus over Halakhic Man's cognitive man. It is more nuanced than that. Kolbrenner writes, “The argument I have made here elicits that ambivalence not only through the family stories that have been marshalled to show the halakhic man in an ambivalent (even negative) light, nor because of the sometimes ambiguous status of the homo religiosus, but rather because of the resistance within the work itself to the halakhic norm” (132).

Soloveitchik called himself “the last rabbi of Brisk.” Kolbrenner takes this seriously. For him, though, it is not that Soloveitchik holds the torch but, in fact, extinguishes it. The great defender of Orthodoxy is depicted here as the one who teaches us that mourning (the law) cannot resolve melancholy (the modern). Halakhic man is thus a relic and not a model for the future.

This challenging, and subversive, reading of Soloveitchik should evoke serious debate about a figure who may have offered more than even he knew. Readers should not be deterred by its unconventionality and counterintuitive approach. Even outside its formal psychoanalytic frame, The Last Rabbi is a learned, compelling, and challenging read, not only about Soloveitchik's work, but about the person, and the struggles of being “the last rabbi.”