Focusing on a speech given by the 20th-century sage in 1975, Jeffrey Woolf analyzes Soloveitchik’s understanding of the halakhic authority of tradition, and his response to those who would say that Jewish law must change to keep up with a changing world:

The Torah, [according to Soloveitchik], has its own methodological and axiological integrity. It stands on its own two feet, and does not need to be validated by any source outside of itself. It is by no means . . . static, but it is internally stable and consistent.

It was precisely this deeply held axiom that prompted Soloveitchik’s passionate reaction to [those] who maintained that the rulings [of the talmudic sages] were conditioned upon a specific historical reality [and thus lose their validity if that reality changes. For them], halakhah becomes eminently malleable and can be freely adapted according to the will (or whim) of the interpreter. Soloveitchik forthrightly condemned the subjugation of Judaism to external systems of values, coercing it to conform thereto in violation of its textual and interpretive tradition. . . ..

At the same time, Soloveitchik definitely did not advocate a blind, . . . fundamentalist stance toward the outside world and its culture. . . . [He believed] that one should courageously enlist the full panoply of Western culture for the explication and enhancement of Judaism. Judaism, in Soloveitchik’s model, creatively engages and interacts with other systems of thought and value. It is enriched and our appreciation of it is deepened by that interaction. It does not, however, subordinate itself to them, or make its validity contingent on them. . . .

This is not to suggest . . . that changes in social and historical circumstances do not affect halakhah. Obviously, they do. However, the interaction between them (and the pace of that interaction) is predicated upon the tools that tradition itself provides.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.