Challenge and Continuity

One of the central roles of rabbinic leadership has been the ability to analyze the key issues of the day and provide an appropriate response. Great weight is given to both precedent and community tradition, as well the views of earlier rabbinic scholars. This work highlights a variety of rabbinic responses to critical issues presented by modernity and science, as well as examples of spiritual leadership in the course of the tragedy of the Holocaust. It also establishes the continuity of the methodological principles utilized in rabbinic response through a focus on the works of two of the greatest rabbinic scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Chatam Sofer and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein respectively.