Review: Avishai David presents Rav Soloveitchik's lectures on the Weekly Torah Readings

Discourses of Rav Yosef Dov Halevi Soloveitchik on the Weekly Parashah by Rabbi Avishai David

This book is a thoroughly rabbinic treat.

It is written by Avishai David, a prominent rabbi who heads a Yeshiva in Israel. It is about the lectures on the weekly torah readings of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a great gadol of the past generation whose charismatic Torah teachings mesmerized his followers. Rav Soloveitchik was also our teacher when we studied at Yeshiva University.

The Rav draws liberally on the teachings of the ancient rabbis and advances his own insights into the biblical texts.

And the final rabbinic ingredient to this rabbinic feast of a book is the source of publication, the rabbinical authorities at the Orthodox Union who published the book in conjunction with Yeshiva Torat Shraga and the exceptionally gifted Urim Publications of Jerusalem and New York.

The Rav was a man of great dignity and propriety and would have been proud to see the professional manner in which his teachings have been brought together in this volume. It is a handsomely set and bound book, tightly edited and written in impeccable English, with the right level of style for the content that it conveys.

The book brilliantly represents the Rav's Torah as he presented it. This means that it will be a great gift to those of his followers who thirst to hear and read his concepts as they were given over.

And this is the pièce de résistance of the rabbinic feast encompassed in this volume. It will serve future generations as the template or palette for rabbis who wish to use the Rav's content as the springboard from which to develop their own commentaries and as the raw materials for those who elect to build their own structures out of the basic original ideas of Rav Soloveitchik as represented in this book.

We commend the book highly to individuals and to libraries.