Yisroel Besser shares the backstory of the Reb Dovid Feinstein book 

Photos: Mattis Goldberg, AEGedolim, ArtScroll/Mesorah

When I was asked to write a biography of Rav Dovid Feinstein ztz”l, I thought I knew how the process would unfold.

It’s not the first time I was charged with the biography of a gadol, and not the second, but it  might as well have been — because in the past, most of the subjects were more defined. There was a story to tell, and all it needed was someone to retell it. Pretty simple stuff, really; a bit of interviewing, gathering, and assembling.

Reb Dovid, however, had no definition, and no defined role. In what was likely the shortest hesped in the history of the American Torah world, at his levayah on the 19th of Cheshvan, 2020, his friend Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky said that Reb Dovid was an “oisnam fuhn a mentsch. What that means is he was very special, kulo tov… he was a min bifnei atzmo, an entirely unique being; there was no one like him.”

If anyone else would have said that, you’d have assumed he was struggling to find the right words for some vague concept he doesn’t quite have a handle on. But Reb Shmuel chooses his words well and knows what he wants to convey.

Proof of this is that nearly a year after the levayah, I went to interview the Philadelphia Rosh Yeshivah and hear his personal impressions of Reb Dovid, and he said, “At the levayah, I already said, he was a ‘min bifnei atzmo.’ ”

Reb Shmuel meant exactly what he had said.

Reb Dovid was a rosh yeshivah and a posek with a worldwide following. He was a good, good friend to his talmidim, a devoted neighbor to the locals — and to his extended family, he was the loving uncle who shows up on time to simchahs and sits there enjoying the sight of generations united.

And he was also an East Sider and also a Feinstein.

Somehow, even as this family’s interpretations of halachah provided the basis for many of the customs and mores of America’s postwar Torah community, they maintained over the past half-century their privacy, their peaceful silence, their mystique.

It was the mystique that made this book so unique.