What is the power of this work, which is written in a simple, straightforward style, and lacks any dramatic stories?
The sefer Sichos im Harav Shlomo Hoffman has sold 25,000 copies in Hebrew, and, under the title Secrets of the Soul: Conversations with Rav Shlomo Hoffman, another 6,000 copies in English. For those not familiar with the world of Torah publishing, in which publishers often print only 2,000 copies at a time, and sometimes only 1,000, these are very large numbers.
And that makes me feel upbeat. Because it shows that just as Klal Yisrael has an unerring sense of who its leaders are, so can it identify those rare seforim that help bring us to a new spiritual level.
A woman in Karmiel called Rabbi Meir Simcha Stein, who compiled the sefer based on many years of vaadim and personal meetings with Rav Hoffman ztz”l, to say that her no-longer-observant sister had picked up the sefer at her house one Shabbos and told her later, “If I had had this sefer when I was younger, I never would have left religious observance.”
A rosh yeshivah in one of Israel’s most prominent yeshivos told Rabbi Stein, “You ruined my Yom Kippur. I picked up the sefer to read for a few minutes before going to sleep on Erev Yom Kippur and could not put it down until I had finished it. That sleepless night left me weak all Yom Kippur.”
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