Perhaps, if my mother hadn’t recently given me the last book my father was reading before he was niftar, I would have had a different take on the word “rav.” My father’s death was years ago, so inheriting the book was joyous, sacred, a bridge between worlds. The book was Halachic Man, its author, Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik, a Torah giant known to very many simply as “the Rav.”
I didn’t open the sefer right away. I shelved it for future perusal, knowing that when the time was right, it would call to me, and a few weeks later that call came in the form of an email with the word prompt “Rav.” Only then did I open the sefer to the page with the tattered bookmark, the last words my father read before joining his rebbe in the beis medrash shel ma’ala.
“Halachic man’s future,” says the Rav “does not terminate with the end of his own individual future at the moment of death but extends into the future of the people as a whole.” The bookmark was a pause, not an ending; a compass, a tether, a sentinel; a father’s invitation to turn the page and keep on reading.