Ethical Theories of Abraham Isaac Kook and Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Abstract This chapter analyzes the ethical theories of Rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Joseph B. Soloeitchik, two luminaries in of twentieth-century Orthodoxy in Israel and the United States, respectively. Despite Kook's lean toward the mystical and Soloveitchik's tendency toward the rational, they nonetheless share in the perspective that ethics is central to proper Jewish living and theology. Whereas Kook views the moral impulse as already embedded in Jewish existence, Soloveitchik understands imitatio Dei as the central mechanism through which Jewish ethical behaviour comes into being.