Rabbi Soloveitchik believed, as he wrote in 1944, that “religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs and torments.”4 Turmoil and sacrifice, not comfort and placidity, are, by divine edict, the hallmarks of authentic religious life. How true that is of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s lonely man.
