Pathways to Their Hearts: Torah Perspectives on the Individual

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Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch (1928-2020) was one of the supreme rabbinic scholars of our time, a bold and expert decisor of Jewish law, a talmudic scholar with vast knowledge and the ability to find new depth and beauty in ancient texts, and a philosophical exegete who was able to draw deep inferences about the human condition from biblical and rabbinic sources. Pathways to Their Hearts is a synthesis of the philosophical positions Rabbi Rabinovitch had developed over the course of many decades on matters related to the life of the individual. There are chapters on free will and the human condition, the way the Torah's commands interact with moral change, the tension between law and the purposes of law, the difference between religious and secular ethics, the importance of intellectual independence, and the nature of halakhic decision-making. There is a fascinating comparison between scientific method and the search for the reasons for the commandments, and a powerful chapter on the relationship between Torah and science. The view that Torah and science are opposed, argues Rabbi Rabinovitch, was imported into Judaism from non-Jewish sources. This outstanding work - vast in scope, monumental in scholarship - represents the distilled wisdom of one of the great Jewish minds of our generation.