Yitzchok Hutner - Methodology

Methodology

His methodology and style was complex, controversial, and difficult to pigeonhole. While placing great emphasis on intellectually penetrating Talmudic study and analysis, emotionally he veered towards the Hasidic-style, and more-so than his Lithuanian-style colleagues reared as "misnagdim" could tolerate.

Hillel Goldberg writes that Hutner became a fierce critic of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic group and the "personality cult built up around" its Rebbe Schneerson. Nevertheless, he corresponded regularly with Schneerson over the years, seeking his views on a variety of halakhic, chassidic and kabbalistic subjects, and occasionally seeking his blessing. He also had several private audiences with Schneerson, during which they conversed for lengthy periods of time.

He reportedly forbade his students from attending any lectures given by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik while at the same time appointing Soloveitchik's younger brother, whom he had tutored in Warsaw, Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik (later to head his own yeshiva in Skokie near Chicago, Illinois) as head of his own Yeshivas Rabbi Chaim Berlin. Ahron Soloveichik completed a Doctorate in law at New York University at the same time that he lectured in Hutner's Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin.

In the 1950s, he established a school for post-graduate married scholars to continue their in-depth Talmudical studies. This was a kollel, (a post graduate division), the Kollel Gur Aryeh, one of the first of its kind in America. Many of his students became prominent educational, outreach, and pulpit rabbis. He stayed in touch with them and was intimately involved in major communal policy decision-making as he worked through his network of students in positions of leadership, and won over to his cause people who came to meet with him.