R. Lamm and the Founding of TRADITION

This essay appears on the occasion of the launch of the Lamm Legacy Library, a dramatic expansion of the earlier site that held only about 800 sermons. It now offers more than 4,700 additional items from Rabbi Norman Lamm’s personal archive—essays, correspondences, and other materials, including many about the founding of TRADITION. Together these documents collect much of what Rabbi Lamm preserved in his personal archive into one place, providing a rare window on the project that took shape in our Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought.

In mid-century America, Orthodoxy was widely dismissed as a fading curiosity. The Conservative movement’s booming synagogues and popular Ramah camps projected vitality. By contrast, for many suburban Jews, Orthodoxy seemed like slavish adherence to outmoded forms of religion—a quaint, Old World relic. Being a “normal” American Jew meant joining a large Conservative or Reform congregation, not clinging to Yiddish-accented Orthodoxy.

Rabbi Norman Lamm, then a young rabbi at Kehilath Kodimoh in Springfield, MA, believed that this perception could be changed only if Orthodoxy found a credible, modern voice. In his sermons he warned against “this national mistake that democracy means sameness.” He called Aleinu “a fiery protest against blind conformism.” His 1958 Rosh Hashana sermon “The Courage to Be Yourself”—one of his last before leaving Kodimoh for Manhattan’s The Jewish Center—urged his congregants to “risk being different and unpopular” and for Kodimoh to “remain true to itself and not change its character simply because it is not stylish elsewhere.” This insistence on principled difference became the animating force behind the project that would become TRADITION.

That same concern animated his 1967 programmatic essay “The Voice of Torah in the Battle of Ideas.” Rabbi Lamm lamented that in an age obsessed with communication, “the Voice of Torah today is kol beli dibbur—a voice without words.” Orthodoxy, he wrote, had “not yet developed clear guidelines, not yet formulated convincing approaches, not yet spoken lucidly to the cardinal issues of our century.” He was “dispirited and vexed by our apparent unwillingness to engage in the Battle of Ideas” but “optimistic as to the ultimate outcome” if Orthodox thinkers would search Torah viewpoints and communicate them effectively.

TRADITION 1:1 (Fall 1958)

What’s in a Name?

The earliest surviving memo about the journal—written by Rabbi Lamm to the “Editorial Staff of the R.C.A. Quarterly”—alludes to the journal’s mission. He urged Professor Marvin Fox and Rabbis Bernard Lander, Israel Klavan, and Emanuel Rackman: “Please indicate to me your preference as to name for the journal…. At our last meeting we narrowed it down to the following: Tradition, The Traditionalist, Ideas, Reflector…. We have to get this thing off the ground once and for all.”

The memo does not indicate why each name appealed to the group, but the list may hint at different postures toward the American Jewish scene. “The Traditionalist” suggested a defensive stance, defining Orthodoxy by its practitioners rather than its mission. “Ideas” gestured toward modern intellectual life but risked abstraction and detachment from Torah. “Reflector” captured the goal of explaining Orthodoxy to itself but also carried a passive tone, exactly the opposite of the conviction the new journal sought to project.

Only TRADITION, then—as Rabbi Lamm would go on to explain in his 1958 introduction to the journal’s maiden issue—fused fidelity to the past with a forward-looking act of transmission. Its Latin and Hebrew roots, tradere and masora, mean “to hand down, to transmit, to bequeath.” “The focus of Tradition is, then, the future and not the past.” Choosing that name signaled that the journal would not be a sectarian newsletter or an exercise in apologetics but a confident act of handing Torah over to the next generation in a contemporary idiom.

Its subtitle—“A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought”—reinforced the same themes. It made no pretense of neutrality, but its content would be rigorous, serious, and contemporary. In an era when Conservative Judaism’s strength made Orthodoxy seem culturally marginal and Orthodox rabbis rarely preached or published in proper English, Rabbi Lamm wanted TRADITION to prove that Orthodoxy could think, write, and lead at the highest level.

Building a New Forum

Rabbi Lamm tried first to get Yeshiva University to sponsor the journal. When that didn’t materialize, he persuaded the Rabbinical Council of America to take it on. He solicited articles from distinguished figures such as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Dr. Samuel Belkin, R. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, and R. Eliezer Berkovits.

At the same time, he was sketching out not only funding, a mission, and contributors but also content. In a 1963 letter to Rabbi Walter Wurzburger, his successor as editor and a close colleague, he floated the idea of a TRADITION symposium on Yom Tov sheni shel galuyot. This proposal was a direct response to recent Conservative leniency and was meant to show how Orthodox halakha could address contemporary controversies with scholarly rigor. It signaled to readers that TRADITION would not shy away from hot-button issues or remain purely theoretical, but would bring the halakhic tradition into conversation with real-life challenges facing American Jewry.

Rabbi Lamm also refused to rely on open calls for papers. “I made it my business…to approach people who had never written before, or those who had begun to show some semblance of talent, and to encourage them,” he recalled in a 1967 letter to R. Elkanah Schwartz, an editor of the Union of Orthodox Congregations in America’s Jewish Life magazine (later rebranded as the Orthodox Union and Jewish Action, respectively). That recruiting drive, begun while he was still in Springfield, helped create a pipeline of Anglo-Orthodox writers who would populate the journal’s pages for its first decade and more.

Words, Scarce and Sacred

Underlying all of this was a theology of communication. In his sermon “Words—Scarce and Sacred,” Rabbi Lamm traced the Jewish reverence for language back to Jacob’s “voice” and Onkelos’ rendering of the human soul as a “speaking spirit.” Israel’s power, he argued, lay not in numbers or armies but in words. Yet words must be “passed through the fire of the soul” before being spoken; they must be few, choice, and holy. This ethic of language illuminates the care he invested in the literary quality of TRADITION.

He also drew on the example of his teacher, Rabbi Soloveitchik. The Rav modeled exactly what Rabbi Lamm was trying to achieve: uncompromising halakhic and theological depth expressed in sophisticated and elegant English, engaging the doubts and aspirations of modern Jews. His later writings on the “battle of ideas” echo Rabbi Soloveitchik’s insistence that the covenantal community must address contemporary man’s questions in a language he can understand—precisely what Rabbi Lamm urged in “The Voice of Torah in the Battle of Ideas” when he called for “analysis, understanding, intelligent persuasion, ethical example, and—yes!—sympathy with and respect for opponents” instead of “condemnation, denunciation, and issurim.”

Rabbi Lamm closed his first editor’s introduction with a citation from Rabbi David Kimhi (commentary on Proverbs 22:9), who explains that true blessing comes when one gives not just materially but “be-khol ha-lev”—with the whole heart, gladly and without expectation. By invoking Radak, Rabbi Lamm signaled that TRADITION was to be an act of wholehearted spiritual and intellectual generosity, not a perfunctory duty. In giving his own whole heart to its creation, he built a platform that would transmit the masora with rigor and urgency, ensuring that the “voice of Torah” would speak with clarity, conviction, and dignity to the modern Jewish mind.

• Lamm Legacy Library
• TRADITION’s Rabbi Norman Lamm Memorial Volume (Summer 2021)
• Rabbi Lamm’s essays in the TRADITION archive
• Zev Eleff, “The Tradition of the Fox and the Lamm,” TraditionOnline (June 2020)

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Sinensky is Director of the Lamm Legacy Project, and Director of Judaic Studies at Main Line Classical Academy. He is co-editor of TRADITION’s upcoming special volume, The Intellectual Legacy of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.