The Kotzker Rebbe
This week we marked the 157th yahrzeit of one of the most fascinating and forbidding figures in Jewish tradition, R. Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, the Kotzker rebbe [1787-1859]. He is best known in our circles of American Jews through Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings, especially Passion for Truth, Heschel’s final book, comparing Kotzk with the Danish Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.