This year, April 9 was—on both the Hebrew and the Gregorian calendars—the 30th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the most outstanding thinkers, and Orthodox spiritual leaders, of postwar American Jewry. Jeffrey Saks reflects on the legacy of this great teacher, whom he refers to, as is convention, as “the Rav,” the rabbi par excellence.

Arriving at my own commitment to Jewish life and observance during those twilight years when he was no longer on the public stage yet omnipresent in American Modern Orthodoxy, much of who I became as a religious person was shaped by the Rav’s Torah and thought as filtered through his students and his writing. If, as C.S. Lewis was purported to have said, “we read to know we are not alone,” I read the Rav to know that I was not alone in my loneliness.

Among the most important lessons that I took away from those years was, first, the idea that we have nothing to fear. Torah (or perhaps in the Rav’s term, halakhah, broadly defined) would be more than capable of grappling with whatever challenge may arise in my adolescent (and later more mature) mind; and even when the answers are not always readily apparent, I could take comfort in the idea that others before me had thought about the problem, continued to think about it, and, in the paraphrase of some Yiddish expression I could not then have known, it would not prove fatal.

Second, and more significantly, the Rav’s model created a permission structure for faith. It offered the promise that motivated by love and not fear, my decisions leading in one direction did not mean severing ties with the world, family, and a version of my own self. The Rav’s message allowed me entrée to the covenantal community knowing that I could remain “at home,” and even be called back to the majestic realm; it bound the two sides and selves together with the “connective ivy” of the halakhah. It is my belief that the power and impact of the Rav’s teachings, in these ways and other future directions that we may scarcely be able to imagine today, will continue to vivify Jewish life and learning for many, many generations to come.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.