In Aesop’s famed fable, the scurrying but overly confident hare loses in a race to the sluggish but determined tortoise. The moral of the tale, “slow but steady wins the race,” aptly describes the 18-year-long doctoral odyssey of Susan Weissman, public speaker, Tanach teacher, and mother of nine.
Weissman was one of two individuals to have received her doctorate in the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University under Dr. Haym Soloveitchik, the world-renowned historian and only son of the famous Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the first American Modern Orthodox rabbi, known as The Rav. After having completed her master’s degree at Revel, her BA at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women and having studied at Michlalah Jerusalem College for Women, Weissman began her doctoral studies in 1994, with four young children, one of them only two weeks old. Slightly less than two decades and five children later, she received her doctorate in medieval Jewish history, with a focus on the intellectual and cultural history of medieval Ashkenaz (Franco-Germanic Jewry). She now sits as the chair of Judaic Studies at Touro University’s Lander College for Women in New York.
It all started when Weissman was an undergraduate student at Stern College and walked into Soloveitchik’s class titled “The History of Halacha,” where she was “blown away by his methodology and profundity of his thought.”
“I didn’t just gain information from studying under him, I gained an entire set of skills—how to read halachic, ethical, and, really, any traditional text in a way that it imparts meaning about the author and his time period. Until I entered his class, I hadn’t learned a new skill in Jewish studies since fourth grade, when I learned to read Rashi.”
Susan Weissman
“I didn’t just gain information from studying under him, I gained an entire set of skills—how to read halachic, ethical, and, really, any traditional text in a way that it imparts meaning about the author and his time period. Until I entered his class, I hadn’t learned a new skill in Jewish studies since fourth grade, when I learned to read Rashi,” Weissman explains. Soloveitchik described his first impression of Weissman as having “nineteen ages in one young woman. She was exceptionally mature for her age. You weren’t dealing with a college student. She was outstanding in the class.”
Weissman went on to take all the classes he taught and became his prized pupil. When asked why she chose medieval Jewish history for her master’s level graduate studies, she responded simply, “because that’s what he taught.” She also became enchanted with the sui generis medieval Jewish religious-ethical work Sefer Hasidim, of which Soloveitchik was an expert. When the graduate school for Judaic Studies raised funding for a doctoral program, Soloveitchik called Weissman and asked her to join the program.
Soloveitchik’s doctoral classes were known to be intimidating and demanding. He concurs with this description: “People are capable of doing much more work. When you sense originality in a student, you have to draw it out.” Everything he produced was very thorough and well researched, and he expected the same from his students.
Soloveitchik credits his teaching style to his father, The Rav, who would constantly cross-examine the text and find what was missing or extra; to his great-grandfather, the Gra”ch, who would always pepper his father with questions; and his mentor, Jacob Katz, who never lectured but rather led class discussions.
“One always had to be prepared for class,” Weissman notes, as Soloveitchik would call on students at random to summarize the readings he assigned or to recite all the biographical information about any halachist under discussion for the day. If the student wasn’t properly prepared, Soloveitchik was known to pack up his things and walk out. Weissman’s former classmate, Rabbi Assaf Bednarsh, a teacher at Yeshiva University’s Gruss Kollel in Jerusalem, corroborated her perspective, describing his teaching method as follows: “If a student does 99%, you criticize them so that next time they do 100%. It was very tough. I don’t know how your mother made it.”
Because he was nervous about the feedback, the first time Bednarsh submitted a paper to Soloveitchik, he told him it was only a rough draft, even though he thought it was finished. After reading the paper, he responded that it was not even up to the level of a first draft.
He describes his first impression of Weissman, “When she first came in, none of us took her seriously. No female has ever survived his course, especially an ultra-Orthodox mother from Passaic. Obviously, we were proven wrong. She was always prepared.”
“When she first came in, none of us took her seriously. No female has ever survived his course, especially an ultra-Orthodox mother from Passaic. Obviously, we were proven wrong. She was always prepared.”
Rabbi Assaf Bednarsh
“She didn’t need a thesis director,” Soloveitchik adds. “She could write a thesis by herself.”
There were dozens of times when Weissman herself thought she couldn’t do it. “It wasn’t only the demanding nature of Soloveitchik’s classes that slowed me down or the exhaustive list of books I had to read; I simply couldn’t work on my dissertation full time like my male counterparts,” she explains. There were times when she had to take care of sick children by day, put them to bed, and then stay up all night writing to catch up. Then there were the hagim (holidays) and the continuous cooking and preparing that went along with them. She had to learn to juggle all her responsibilities without dropping a single one.
Weissman recalls Soloveitchik telling her, “You suffer from a time handicap.”
Yet despite his tough exterior, Soloveitchik called Weissman numerous times to reassure and motivate her. “I wouldn’t be wasting so much time on you if you weren’t talented,” he would say. What always kept her on course was the intellectual pursuit, coupled with an iron will and dogged determination.
“I loved the process, loved the reading, and the writing. It allowed me to develop myself personally and intellectually outside of being a mother. I loved my role in taking care of my family, but I also loved feeding my mind.”
As their professional relationship grew over the years, Soloveitchik went out of his way to help Weissman. “Her big virtue was not to ask for help. She didn’t call me at all. Three months passed, not a word. You’d think as a director, she would come to me for help,” Soloveitchik remarks jokingly, “So I used to call her.” He hand-picked her education, sending her to courses in Princeton and Colombia, allowed her access to large libraries of texts, and gave her one-on-one lectures when he felt her knowledge was lacking in a certain area. He even went so far as to give her his parking spot during the summers so she could be closer to the campus library.
After defending her thesis and obtaining her doctorate, Soloveitchik urged Weissman to publish her dissertation. In 2020, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, in conjunction with Liverpool University Press, published her book, Final Judgment and the Dead in Medieval Jewish Thought. Centered around ghost tales in Sefer Hasidim, the book discusses the great infiltration of Germano-Christian attitudes and customs surrounding the dead and the afterlife within medieval Ashkenazi culture in general and among the Hasidei Ashkenaz, an elitist group of religious reformers, in particular. She points to the tremendous disparity between the beliefs and practices regarding the dead and the afterlife that exists within rabbinic literature as compared with those she documents from the high Middle Ages, signaling a huge cultural shift.
Although Weissman values her intellectual journey, she describes it as having been very solitary. Teaching became her outlet of expression during those years, when she gave source-based Tanach lectures to the women of her community beginning in 1994 and continuing to this day. Since 2012, Weissman has been a professor at Touro University Lander’s College for Women, where she teaches classes such as Biblical Personalities, Biblical Themes, and Medieval and Modern Exegesis. She feels privileged “to have shared love of the Bible with others for the past 30 years.” She has also taught on the topic of Sefer Hasidim at Touro’s Graduate School for Jewish Studies. In addition to her formal teaching positions, Weissman has lectured on Tanach and on her research in America and Israel, and has been featured in several podcasts.
“I feel blessed to have had the good fortune to be able to divide my life along the lines of my three passions: family, Jewish history scholarship, and women’s Bible education,” she reflects. Weissman serves as an inspiration to her children, colleagues, and students and is an exemplary role model for young Jewish women today. ■
The Rav’s son
Haym Soloveitchik received his BA from Harvard and his MA and PhD from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He taught at Hebrew University, Yeshiva University and served as dean of the Bernard Revel Graduate School, where he taught graduate courses for over 30 years. He is known for his expertise in the historical development of Halacha and has published widely on diverse topics such as martyrdom, pawnbroking, and medieval wine production through the lens of medieval religious law and culture. Soloveitchik is known to many as Dr. Gra”ch after his great-grandfather for whom he is named, Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, who was known as the Gra”ch. Soloveitchik is the only son of the famous Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, known as The Rav. The Rav opened the first Jewish day school in America, Maimonides in Boston, authored prominent books such as Lonely Man of Faith and Halachic Man, and served as a teacher and leader to thousands. “No one could ever accuse him of wanting power or influence. He actively disliked it,” Soloveitchik relayed. “He just wanted to say his shiur.” Haym Soloveitchik would like to be remembered as “a teacher who gave so much of himself to his students and, with a different generosity, demanded so much of them.”
Did you know?
- All members of the Soloveitchik family are from the Tribe of Levi. Thus the surname “Soloveitchik” comes from the word for “nightingale” in Slavic languages. The family chose the name because singing was the ancient duty of the Levites in the Temple.
- The Soloveitchik dynasty began with Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, known as the Beis Halevi. The famous Brisker Derech teaching style is said to have begun with him.
- The Soloveitchik ancestry includes Simcha Rappaport, a descendant of Rashi; and Rav Chaim of Volozhin, famous student of the Vilna Gaon.
- Haym Soloveitchik believes that the most severe problem in the education system today is charging tuition for higher education. “College and graduate school should be free. Education is the only way to rise in the world.”