A Glimpse into the Whirlwind: The Younger Generation's Relationship to the Rav

Who is this man who darkens his thoughts, with words lacking understanding? Gird up thy loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you shall tell me. Where were you when I set the foundations of the world? Speak, if you know wisdom. . . . (Job 38:2-4)

God's thunderous rebuke of Job buffets me as I set down my meager thoughts concerning the tenth yahrzeit of the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Where were you, God would demand, when the Rav mesmerized thousands, old and young, at his annual yarzheit shiurim? Can I recount the simultaneous wonder and dread that I experienced when sitting in his daily shiur? Can I report even a single private encounter, when, even though I grew up in Boston, the Rav and I first shared the same roof only at his funeral? After two weeks of memorial lectures from distinguished disciples and esteemed family members, adding my perspective smacks of unbounded pretension.

Precisely for this reason, however, I must proceed. For our generation, the one "that did not know Joseph," has also met the Rav. Through the medium of a bereaved Modern Orthodox community, through teachers, and through texts, we have constructed a relationship all our own. It is this relationship, and the struggle to imbue it with meaning, that this column seeks to depict.

We have attended countless memorial lectures, containing canonical chiddushei torah and classic biographical vignettes. For myself and fellow Bostonians, our encounter with the Rav began during the formative years. Approximately a year after the Rav's passing, the Boston community sponsored a series of memorial lectures by Dr. Shatz surveying the Rav's philosophy. My classmates and I attended, out of a sense of obligation to this great man's legacy, never pausing to consider whether a fourteen-year-old should contort his mind with words like "dialectic," "existential," or "phenomenology." While others joined the "Rav shiur" circuit later in life, such as at yeshivot in Israel or here at Yeshiva University, they find these memorial expressions no less ubiquitous.

We have stood by bemusedly as would-be revisionists and traditionalists have wrangled over the Rav's legacy. Much ink has been spilled in our most prestigious journals trying to pinpoint the Rav's "real" position on women's tefillah groups (see Tradition, 1998-9). We have cringed as left-leaning students of the Rav excised sections of "Confrontation," and, on the opposite pole, as respected authorities in the YU world dismissed the Rav's support of coeducation at Maimonides as a concession to "the least of two evils." I will never forget the day when my coed talmud class learned of this latter controversy, in which our teacher, with a gravity that I could not then comprehend, informed us that the Boston community had inherited a different tradition. More recently, even without attending every one of these memorial shiurim, I have already heard four clarifications of the Rav's true position on da'as Torah.

Despite our saturation with the Rav's legacy, most of us have resigned ourselves to the conclusion that we will never fully understand the man behind it. Our relationship with the natural world and its Creator serves as an analogy. When we first behold the combustion of oxygen and hydrogen into water, or observe bacteria teeming under the microscope, we exult, with the psalmist, "The heavens tell of the glory of God, and of his handiwork reports the firmament!" (19:2). Yet were God to challenge us from the whirlwind to translate our experiential data into metaphysical understanding, we, like Job, would fall silent. Similarly, breathtaking as the stories and chiddushei torah can be, they cannot substitute for direct knowledge. And while Job can at least console himself, in response to God's prolonged rebuke, "I had only heard of You by hearsay; but now my eye has seen You" (42:5), we will never be able to report such a close experience.

How can we transcend our distance to cull together a portrait of this singular man? Perhaps the Bible's second great whirlwind provides the answer. "And it came to pass when the Lord lifted Elijah to the heavens in a whirlwind" (Kings II 2:1). The passage of Elijah's ascent, cited by so many of the Rav's eulogizers, opens the way towards understanding by our generation. The Rav's students imagined themselves as Elisha, the master's close disciple, walking and talking together with him during those final moments (See, for example, Rabbi Lamm's outstanding eulogy, in Tradition 1993:1). Let me suggest, however, that our generation can identify with another, often overlooked, personality in the story -- the bnei haneviim, the young prophets.

The young prophets lacked the spiritual development to behold Elijah's fiery rising. After Elijah had disappeared, they insisted on searching for him for three days in the surrounding countryside, incapable of conceiving that he really had ascended to heaven alive. Yet this much they immediately comprehended, upon seeing Elisha miraculously split the Jordan River: "the spirit of Elijah has rested upon Elisha" (2:15).

Our generation never knew the Rav's leadership, spiritual depth, or clarity of thought. But this much is evident to us all: the spirit of the Rav has rested upon his students. And, considering the breadth of the students that he raised, from Rabbi David Hartman to Rabbi Chaim Illson in Israel, from Rabbi Shalom Carmy to Rabbi Herschel Schachter here at Yeshiva, and everyone in between, including my teachers Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and Rabbi Norman Lamm -- what an extraordinary and eclectic spirit that must have been. By drawing close to many of the Rav's students, we too can "glimpse into the whirlwind" and better appreciate his greatness.

Yet our knowledge of Elijah is not confined to word-of-mouth -- and neither should our knowledge of the Rav. Ultimately, we know of Elijah because we read the book of Kings. And we must know the Rav through studying his own writings.