Three years after October 7th, the Jewish people stand before big questions. Will Israel find safety as its multi-front war ebbs and flows? Will all of Israeli society help shoulder the sustained military burden? Can Jewish communities continue to thrive in Western societies where connection to Zionism is increasingly presented as evil itself?
As we settle into shul for Rosh Hashanah, our tradition asks of us another set of big questions; more personal and existential. What is my role in life, and what have I achieved in the past year? What mistakes have I made, and how do I fix shortcomings? What do I pray for in this coming year?
Few Jewish texts speak to these national and personal questions as profoundly as Kol Dodi Dofek. A discourse by Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20th century grapples with Jewish themes in a way that is timely and timeless, national and individual, lofty and practical. Delivered at a Yom HaAtzmaut celebration in 1956, and constructed around a central column of the religious significance of the State of Israel, it is in fact a full edifice of Jewish thought. Kol Dodi Dofek engages with perennial religious questions; the capacity of man in a divine world, the meaning of suffering in Jewish thought, the role of the individual in the Jewish community. It is from these materials, hewn from Biblical stories and Jewish philosophy, that Rabbi Soloveitchik constructs his approach to the reborn Jewish state. The reader looking for inspiration in both public and private spheres will be able to find it in this essay.
70 years on, this edition of HaMizrachi reflects on the current meaning of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s ideas. Rabbi Soloveitchik spoke in the era of Nasser and Nehru, but his words are no less relevant in the era of Mojtaba and Mamdani. May we be able to heed the call of the Divine in our time, and may we be blessed for a good and sweet new year.
Rabbi Aron White is the Managing Editor of HaMizrachi magazine. He lives in Carmay HaNadiv, Kiryat Malachi, and serves as the Rabbi of Beit Knesset Tzameret Arnona in Yerushalayim.