Again, speaking fifty years ago to issues that preoccupy us today, Rav Soloveitchik notes that secular Zionists sin against “the covenant of a sacred community and people that finds expression in the shared destiny of a sanctified life” (p. 84). We must rise “to the elevated station of a moral, religious community” from which we can draw “strength and sustenance, creative power and a renewed joy in an existence that is free and rejuvenated” (p. 85). Many of the social problems that plague Israeli society, especially the malaise of the young people, come from our missing the opportunity to create the “moral, religious community.”
An added bonus in this edition is the illustration on the front cover of Tobi Kahn’s Giro III. Kahn, whose paintings and other works have been exhibited at major museums, has the distinction of being both a noted artist and an observant Jew, combining Torah im derech eretz. Is the title of the illustration a hint at the girosol, also called the Jerusalem artichoke, a flower that turns to the sun? Was his painting chosen because Rav Soloveitchik turns to the center of the Jewish universe, the Torah?
ATID (Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions) has an analysis by Shoshanna Lockshin of how to useKol Dodi Dofek to teach the Holocaust and help students with questions of faith in a world of good and evil (see www.atid.org/journal/journal05/default.asp).
It will be interesting to see the symposium in a coming issue of Tradition giving readers’ reactions to Kol Dodi Dofek fifty years after its first appearance. Rav Soloveitchik’s novel approach to the problem of evil and his dialectical approach to secular Jewry continue to instruct us.