Halachic Worldviews

“From the sources of Halachah, a new worldview awaits formulation.”

With this one line, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik captured a powerful telos for talmud Torah: to shape our perspective on the world and its challenges, and to point us in the right direction to navigate them successfully. Properly understood, pesukim, sugyos, and psakim convey not just what to do to satisfy the demands of the halachic system, but how to think about everything we do in life. According to this view, Torah imparts the ideals and values that Hashem wants us to bring to bear on society; halachah affords us the opportunity to think about and reinforce those ideals and values through practice.

But while Rav Soloveitchik — and Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch before him — championed this perspective, there is still much work that needs to be done to apply it. This sefer attempts to reveal, in an accessible style, the power and beauty of this approach, tackling topics such as bris milah, berachos, beis k’nesses/beis midrash, hashavas aveidah, and the holidays of Sukkos and Pesach, to draw out “worldviews” from these “sources of Halachah.”