Dear Rabbi Dr. Lamm,

I just picked up my copy of “Seventy Faces“ at the RIETS office this morning, and have been looking through it in the hours since. I would like to share with you how much I am enjoying it. The argument throughout is reasoned, and yet personal; the voice academic, and yet impassioned. And it strikes me that this is the essential timbre of the rabbinic voice, which harmonizes the strains of the beis midrash and of the outside world. It is, in the best sense, the voice of drush (about which you write so beautifully and with such affection); because the best drush is not simply a good vort; it is, rather, the combined product of study and experience. Perhaps that is why students – whose fund of experience is still small – have difficulty appreciating it.

Wishing you all the best,

I remain, appreciatively,

Eli Shulman