A Hypothesis About Pachad Yitzchak

Why does R. Hutner avoid using chassidish sources?

I remember being very surprised when I saw it mentioned that Pachad Yitzchak never quotes any chassidish sources. “That can’t be! He very obviously knows Rav Tzadok, at least!” I said. Then I went to check the indexes of the volumes of Pachad Yitzchak. Absolutely nothing. He will go so far as to quote famous statements of chassidic schools of thought without attribution, (notably Izhbitz’s “Everything is in the hands of heaven even the fear of heaven”, though its to criticize the statement). He quotes pretty much exclusively from standard books and works of a Lithuanian Mussar Yeshiva (like Slobodka, where he went). This is genuinely puzzling behavior, because R. Hutner did actually come from a family with chassidic background (it is often said his uncle was a Kotzker).

Previously I have understood this as R. Hutner’s sensitivity to questioning of his frum bona fides, which reached levels approaching paranoia. The most famous example of which is him removing a picture of Rav Kook from his sukkah after the yeshivish community and dati leumi community had a fight about drafting women into the IDF. The thinking goes is that using any chassidish sources would have undermined his authority as Lithuanian Rosh Yeshiva, and thus he avoided quoting them explicitly. This may have been part of his decisionmaking, but was it the whole of it? Was there still such animosity between Misnadgim and Chassidim that a Rosh Yeshiva like R. Hutner could not quote any chassidic sources? I honestly and genuinely do not know, but I do find it a little hard to believe that R. Hutner, even with his heightened sensitivity, could not have ever quoted from a chassidish source even once.

So here’s my hypothesis. I think R. Hutner was trying to create a Lithuanian Chassidus, a Chassidus for Misnadgim, out of the sources of the Lithuanian yeshivish world. In other words, he wanted to create the same kind of vibrant, creative mix of exegesis, philosophy, and ethical instruction that typifies the chassidic drasha, especially when given in the context of celebration of a holiday rather than analysis of a particular sugya or parsha.