A year after his passing, Rav Dovid Soloveitchik's memories live in print 

Photos: Mishpacha archives

Although Rav Meshulem Dovid Halevi Soloveitchik ztz”l lived on Amos Street in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood, his mind remained in a faraway Eastern European town. Reb Dovid, the Torah world’s senior rosh yeshivah who passed away on 18 Shevat last year at the age of 99, was the link between the past and the future: He lived in the alleyways of Jerusalem, but his spirit was still on Listovksa Street in Brisk.

During one of his shiurim, Reb Dovid related to his talmidim a certain chiddush from his father, the Brisker Rav, and then he sighed.  “I remember that when my father gave this over at the time, we literally danced with joy,” he said. “But now, when I say that same shtickel, I see toite peinimer (dead faces).”

He went on to explain: “If you have an undecipherable sugya because everything is dark before your eyes, then when it becomes clear and the questions are answered, you see a great light, and then of course you dance. But today, when you ask a question, you don’t even feel the darkness, and therefore, after the answer, it doesn’t become lichtig. So what is there to dance about?”

“I don’t have complaints to the ‘oilem’ in our time, because I come from another world,” Reb Dovid told a talmid on another occasion.

Yet generations of talmidim attest to the fact that Rav Meshulam Dovid Soloveitchik’s presence was a joyous place to be, and bochurim who flocked to him retained their close connection even years after they married and had families of their own, often living across the world. Because in the precision and punctiliousness of Brisk, the zeal for dinim and the near-tangible fear of Heaven, Reb Dovid revealed the pulsating core of life running through halachah.  This was the way in the joyous house of his father, the Brisker Rav, as well — the joy of toil, the joy of accomplishment, and the joy of living the truth.

For Reb Dovid, the memories of Brisk, which he’d left when fleeing the Germans, weren’t simple nostalgia, but rather a blueprint for a Torah environment, and there was something to learn from every single detail, says Rav Shimon Yosef Meller, the acclaimed biographer of the Brisker dynasty.

Reb Dovid’s memories of the town of Brisk remained crystal clear even in his old age. Rav Meller recounts how he once traveled to Belarus in an effort to save part of the Jewish cemetery from demolition. Before his trip, he met with Reb Dovid Soloveitchik to ask if the Rosh Yeshivah remembered anything about the grave of the Beis Halevi, his great grandfather. To Rav Meller’s surprise, Reb Dovid dictated a series of flawless, detailed directions to the grave — nearly eight decades after his departure from Brisk.

Reb Dovid was suffused with the reverence for his forebears and considered every one of their words a treasure, every anecdote priceless. When Rav Meller was preparing his multivolume biography of Rav Chaim Soloveitchik, he discovered that he had a plethora of stories about Rav Chaim’s acts of chesed alone, and was concerned that those stories would detract from the image of Rav Chaim as a master Torah scholar. Reb Dovid Solovetichik, however, had a different view of his venerated grandfather. “Every story that isn’t published is a shame,” he told Rav Meller.