[1] Schacter holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages from Harvard University and received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva Torah Vodaas in 1973.
[5] His 1997 book, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy and American Judaism, was about the "complicated relationship" between Mordecai Kaplan, an Orthodox rabbi who left that movement to found Reconstructionist Judaism.
[4] Before leaving Orthodoxy, Kaplan had been Rabbi of the Jewish Center (Manhattan), the congregation that Schacter would later lead.
[2] Under his leadership, the congregation more than tripled in size, with new members attracted by "the intellectual seriousness of the rabbi's sermons and lectures.
[4][2] In 2000, he moved to Massachusetts where he became dean of the Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik Institute in Brookline,[2][7][8] a position he held until 2005, when he left to become Senior Scholar and University Professor at Yeshiva University's new Center for the Jewish Future (initially called the Center for the Jewish People).