come, just as Yeshua promised; and when the good news of the kingdom—being the unity of God—is proclaimed to all the nations, then the end will come.” Soloveitchik uses the unity doctrine as that which unites Judaism and Christianity and Jesus’ teaching as exemplifying this idea. His literal messianic vocation thus becomes, for him, beside the point.
In Mark 11:10, we read: Blessed is the coming kingdom of David our father [in the name of YHWH]! Hoshana in the heights! Soloveitchik uses the opportunity to render the kingdom of David outside its purely historical setting to suggest “whose goal is the triumph of divine unity.” In Mark 14:9, Amen, I say to you that wherever this good news is proclaimed throughout the world, what she has done will also be told as a memorial to her, Soloveitchik comments: “As a memorial to her—meaning: Everywhere that my name is mentioned with honor, for having proclaimed and spread the Gospel—the good news—of the unity of God in the world, the name of this woman will also be cited for praise.” The “good news” is never about Jesus as the Messiah but about the unity of the Creator that he preaches. In Matthew 4:23, Soloveitchik renders the good news of the kingdom as “the unity of the Creator.”
Passages that have sometimes been viewed as Jesus’ call for his followers to abandon their families to follow him have been rendered by Soloveitchik as teaching belief in divine unity as the ultimate sacrifice. For example, in Matthew 10:35, we read: For I have come to separate a man from his father and a daughter from her mother and a bride from her mother-in-law. Soloveitchik reads it to say: “I have come to separate—my goal is to teach you that every man must give up his life for the sake of the unity of the Creator. And this faith will cause separation between a son and his father, if the father does not believe in the unity of the Creator, for he will think his son a foreigner and an enemy.” Similarly, in Matthew 16:24: Yeshua said to his disciples, “A man who desires to follow me will disown himself, pick up his cross, and follow me”; Soloveitchik writes: “To follow me—he who wants to follow my teaching. The main principle of my teaching is that man should be prepared to give up his life for the sake of the faith in the unity of the Creator.” Soloveitchik situates Jesus’ main message as in accord with rabbinic teaching refracted through a Maimonidean lens. Spreading the belief in the unity of God is a prerequisite for the final redemption. Jesus, at times better than the rabbinic sages, fulfills that teaching. As such, his messianic role is Judaized.
On the resurrection of Jesus, Soloveitchik mirrors Maimonides in eliding resurrection with the immortality of the soul. Maimonides does this in his famous “Epistle on Resurrection” in a way that is intended to deflect the criticisms that he does not believe in resurrection from comments elsewhere in his writings (even as he lists resurrection as one of his Thirteen Principles of Faith).115 Because the resurrection of Jesus is such a contentious dimension of the New Testament for Jews (even as resurrection is embedded in prophetic and rabbinic Judaism and confided in Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles of Faith”), Soloveitchik largely deflects the issue by seeing it as Jesus’ call to the belief in the immortality of the soul, an idea that, while normative for Jews, is also not unproblematic, especially if it is presented as a substitute for resurrection.116 For example, in Matthew 16:21: From that time on, Yeshua began telling his disciples that he needed go to Yerushalayim and endure great suffering from the hands of the elders, the leading priests, and scholars, and that he would be killed, but would surely arise on the third day. Soloveitchik comments: “On the third day after my death. Then you will understand that the faith in the immortality of the soul that I instilled in your hearts is the truth.” Earlier in that same chapter (to Matthew 16:12), Soloveitchik claims that the Sadducees did not believe in “the immortality of the soul”—not, as is usually understood, that they did not believe in the resurrection (given the Sadducees’ Hellenistic bent, they may indeed have believed in the immortality of the soul). Resurrection is taken up in a lengthy comment that Soloveitchik makes to Matthew 22:23. It is worth citing his comment in full:
There is no resurrection of the dead—I have already written that the foundation of the belief in the resurrection of the dead comprises two principles: the first is that the dead will rise in the time that the Creator, blessed be his name, wills it; the second is the belief in the immortality of the soul, that is, that the spirit of man does not die when it is separated from the body but that it will remain immortal and forever enjoy the pleasantness of YHWH in accordance to the good deeds that it performed in this world. Both our Jewish and Christian brothers firmly believe in these two principles, for they are united in the foundations of the religion on which the Torah of Moshe rests. Only the Sadducees turned away from the path of the Torah and the commandments and refused to believe in these two principles. Therefore, they asked Yeshua “How will it be for the dead that rise if one woman had seven husbands?”
And in a comment to Mark 12:27, we read: “Let us repeat this, for it is an important and indisputable fact: in the dual belief of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, our Israelite brothers are in perfect accord with our Christian brothers.” Finally, on Mark 8:33, Soloveitchik is the most explicit when he writes:
There was absolutely nothing impossible about them seeing Yeshua after his death, and I cited, in the same place, that according to the Talmud, a sage distinctly revived his deceased colleague and conversed with him. Only his disciples were mistaken on the thought of Yeshua: he did not mean that he would actually resurrect physically, but that he would reappear in order to convince them, by this act, of the principle of the immortality of the soul. Read carefully my commentary in this spot, and you will then understand this passage. Petros, as well, in my opinion, was one of those who “doubted.” He believed that Yeshua spoke of a literal flesh and bone resurrection, and knowing the thing to be impossible in the temporal order, he accused him of announcing unbelievable things to them.
On Matthew 28:17, They saw him and bowed down to him, but there were some of them whose hearts were divided, Soloveitchik cites a passage from BT Mo’ed Qaṭan 28a about R. Naḥman appearing to Raba after his death.117 Soloveitchik thus claims that while Jesus may have appeared to his disciples three days after his death, it does not necessarily follow that he resurrected himself but rather that he appeared to them to teach them about the centrality of the immortality of the soul. Soloveitchik thus maintains two distinct but overlapping Jewish ideas: the bodily resurrection of the dead in the future end-time; and the immortality of the souls that is always operative. Jesus comes to teach his disciples about the immortality of the soul, not about his bodily resurrection (which his disciples believed, in any case). He concludes in his comment to Mark 12:27, “Let us repeat this, for it is an important and indisputable fact: in the dual belief of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, our Israelite brothers are in perfect accord with our Christian brothers.” Soloveitchik never, to my knowledge, relates to the more strident position on resurrection in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15:12–20: But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain…. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. More generally, Soloveitchik did not write a commentary to Paul’s epistles. However, he invokes Paul frequently in his commentaries to Mark and Matthew and almost always in a positive light. While Paul is often viewed as a main source of Christianity’s anti-Judaism in both Christian and Jewish historical-critical scholarship, Soloveitchik views Paul as a Pharisee through and through.118
The move to replace Jesus’ ostensible claim of bodily resurrection with the Maimonidean-infused idea of the immortality of the soul, an idea that is likely the product of medieval, not late antique, Judaism, illustrates Soloveitchik’s larger project of subverting the notion that Judaism and Christianity are categorically distinct and irreconcilable entities.
The Jewish Jesus and Anti-Semitism: The Overt Context of R. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Project
The final theme I want to examine is less endemic to Soloveitchik’s commentary per se and more about the context (Sitz im Leben)
