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This issue of Ḥakirah opens with the second installment of the 1947 lectures on Bereshit by Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, ztz”l, where the Rav deals with issues that his more recent students and his many followers never heard him discuss. In this selection, he compares the approaches of traditional philosophy with that of Kabbalah in dealing with the problem of creation ex nihilo and touches upon the mathematical problems of infinity. The Rav concluded his 1944 essay The Halakhic Mind (although not published until 1986) with the line, “Out of the sources of Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.” In an essay inspired by these “Genesis” lectures, “The Rav’s Uncompleted Grand Design,” the author challenges Rav Soloveitchik’s modern-day students to take up what he considers the Rav’s unfinished work: “The unification of Jewish thought with frontier issues in mathematics … would bind the mystical speculation of Jewish thinkers to the fundaments of modern scientific thought, and incorporate the foundational thinking of Maimonides.” In the midst of the ongoing turmoil triggered by the Covid pandemic and by social unrest, students of the Torah look be-yond present conditions. Indeed, at a time when a revolution is being launched against the Western “world order” that was partly based on Judaism, it is important to explore what the Rav meant by “a new world view.” The present conditions are nothing new to history in general. There is much we can learn from past pandemics. In an article titled “Rabbinic Literature on Contagion and Disease and How It Relates to Covid-19,” we see that pandemics have long been a part of Jewish life and that “almost all questions arising from pandemics have been dealt with by poskim of previous generations. As our 21st-century plague has made clear … no nation is guaranteed sanctuary.” In a second article in our special Covid-19 section, “Triage During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Halakhic Perspective,” we see how poskim of the past dealt wit