Shubert Spero and “Doing” Philosophy

In TRADITION’s Fall 2021 issue, we published an essay penned by Rabbi Shubert Spero – a longtime contributor to our pages. In fact, this essay, his 26th in TRADITION, arrived 60 years after his first appearance in the journal and coincided with his 98th birthday. We took the opportunity to spend an afternoon chatting with Rabbi Spero in his Jerusalem apartment about this essay, “The Problematic Metaphors of Righteousness,” along with matters related to the philosophy of language and morality, and issues he has encountered over his long rabbinic and academic career in “doing philosophy” in the service of getting at the underlying questions which should animate contemporary Jewish life and practice. We also turned our attention to his thinking about Zionism and the state of the State of Israel.

Rabbi Dr. Shubert Spero served in the rabbinate for over 30 years in Cleveland prior to his Aliyah in 1983. In Israel he was the Irving Stone Professor of Jewish Thought at Bar-Ilan University, and has published widely on halakha, morality, the Holocaust, the thought of Rabbi Soloveitchik, Religious Zionism, and many other topics in numerous articles and books.

Visit the archives of TraditionOnline.org to read the open-access version of his most recent essay and all of his contributions to TRADITION.