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.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.