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"The Need for Tradition: The Editor's Introduction to a New Journal" Tradition 1:1 (Fall 1958), 7-12.
"Yavneh Studies in Bereshit," Yavneh Studies in Parsashat HaShavua (Yavneh-The Religious Jewish Students Association, 1969), 1-4.
Read today, Norman Lamm's 1958 introductory essay for the inaugural issue of Tradition does not seem in any way radical. Instead, it appears as an elegant restatement of the ideas of what we call "centrist" or "modern" Orthodoxy. The themes are familiar: the need to respect tradition and our mesora; openness to contemporary culture and ideas; and the effort for synthesis in support of our tradition. Today, these are accepted arguments and points of view. But, placed in the context of its times, the late 1950s, his statement is at once bold, creative, and imaginative.
In re-reading the essay by which Rabbi Lamm introduced the new journal he was launching, it is important to consider the context and situation of the late 1950s and early 1960s when Tradition was founded as a "journal of orthodox Jewish thought." Surrounded as we are now by a surfeit of hard copy and on-line publications specifically addressed to the Modern Orthodox community in the United States and Israel, we tend to forget what the historic situation was. At the time, there was relatively little in print to satisfy the interests of a layperson with a solid secular education and with a simultaneous advanced interest in Jewish subjects. For the most part, such an audience hardly existed.
The appearance of a journal which would state in elegant and clear English the framework and goals of a traditional orientation (by whatever name it might be called, modern, centrist, or whatever) was in itself a remarkable achievement. The introduction penned by R. Lamm was an outstanding example of this new genre and should be marveled at even today.
The situation in the late 1950s was brought home to me (Kobrin) some years ago when a friend, himself a Conservative rabbi, casually remarked that when we were in college (we both graduated in 1954), there were virtually no English language books for the educated observant Haredi, Modern Orthodox, or Conservative layman. Impossible, I said, I'll look in my library at home. The result of my search proved him correct; I could...