Some Memories of Reb Dovid Feinstein zt”l: Instead of a Hesped

By Jonathan Boyarin

Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University. His latest book is *Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side*, available here.

 

My Rosh Yeshiva, Reb Dovid Feinstein zt”l, was no longer with us on Friday just before Shabbes. This morning, Sunday, we watched online as an East Side Hatzoloh ambulance bearing his coffin waited for a crowd to clear so it could head up East Broadway following his outdoor eulogies. The ambulance lights flashed, almost surreal in the bright November sunshine, seeming at once reluctant to leave the neighborhood, warning of an emergency, and telling us it was already too late.

None of us will see him again, yet in the days and years to come the memories will circulate. I am so grateful that he permitted me to publish my impressions of him and of the Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem that he led for decades as successor to his father, Reb Moshe Feinstein. The book is new, and I am no longer a Lower East Side resident. Along with those who did eulogize him and asked mechila, forgiveness, from him on East Broadway this morning, I ask his forgiveness that I did not manage to bring it to him personally.

Those close to him, those who studied with him, referred to him as “Rebbi” or “the Rosh Yeshiva.” To help those who knew him to remember, and to offer some slight glimpse of his special personality to those who did not know him, I share here a few strokes of my sketch of him in that book, Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton University Press). And I speak of him in the present, as I do in the book, written and published in the sincere hope that I might continue to study with him for years to come. It was not to be.

Unlike the paradigmatic Hasidic leader, similarly addressed and referred to as “the Rebbe,” our Rebbi’s authority is if anything anti-charismatic and reserved. He has not striven to build a community of devoted followers, but rather serves the community as it happens to manifest itself and as it turns to him. One day I overheard my study partner Asher reply to someone: “That’s so not like Rebbi. Rebbi, if he sees someone doing something he disagrees with, he won’t say anything. But if you come to him and try to justify it, he’ll throw the book at you.”

During the week that the Lower East Side was without power after Hurricane Sandy, Elissa and I took refuge with cousins in Washington Heights, and were kindly invited to Shabbes meals at the homes of local residents there. Another guest at dinner that Friday night was a young man who clearly had a “yeshivish” background, and was working on a master’s degree in art history at Bard while working at the Cloisters. He told us had spent some time at MTJ during his high school years. In response to my comment about how remarkable it is to be in a small room with just about ten other guys listening to a shiur by one of the top halachic authorities of our generation, he told me he believed the Rosh Yeshiva had stayed on the Lower East Side precisely because he doesn’t want to be the object of mass veneration.

At least once I heard the Rebbi wonder aloud about the source of his own authority. One day we worked through a very long Tosafos (at Sotah 24) that took up the full hour of his Talmud shiur. The Rebbi introduced this text by saying, “Today we have a Tosafos that has nothing to do” with the ostensible topic of the passage in the Gemara to which it is attached as commentary. Rather, this discussion turned on the fundamental principle of Rabbinic Biblical interpretation that nothing is superfluous in the Torah—and that therefore, every seeming superfluity is available to teach us something not explicitly stated in the text. On the other hand, the Gemara will also sometimes claim that at certain points, rather than redundancies being available for interpretation, the Torah is merely “speaking in human language,” as people would in conversation.

As we studied the Tosafos, the Rosh Yeshiva several times worried the question of the seeming arbitrariness of the principle’s being applied sometimes and not others: “How do we know this one is dibra toyre, and that one is something we interpret? Because his Rebbi told him! But who told his Rebbi? So is it all ultimately halachos lemoshe misinai [laws orally dictated to Moses and not actually derivable from Scripture]? And if so, then are all of these cited verses just asmachtos [prooftexts for citation, but not the actual sources of the law]?”

He did not answer his own question, on this occasion—but he did on another. The Rebbi commented on a series of very general prooftexts presented (at Sotah 23b) for why certain rules pertain to male Kohanim and not to daughters of Kohanim, and certain rules pertain to men generally and not to women: “Don’t try to interpret the verses too closely—they’re very general. It’s all really halacha lemoshe misinai and the rabbis were just trying to convince the masses. You could spend five days trying to read it precisely, and you’d really be wasting your time. You should keep studying the text further instead.” Yet Asher had earlier that same morning quoted the Rebbi to almost the opposite effect: the Rebbi had once quoted the scholar known as Malbim, to the effect that if we really knew Hebrew grammar properly, we would understand why all of the prooftexts the Rabbis cite are compelling.

The Rosh Yeshiva is able to raise these issues, it appears to me, at least in part due to his conviction that we do know in fact what the halacha, the proper Jewish procedure, is, whether or not we are absolutely certain of its particular source in the text. Related to this conviction is his penchant for attempting to make sense of the Talmudic text, in the standard “Vilna edition,” as it is printed, before considering the various emendations that have been suggested over recent centuries and that are duly marked in that same edition. Thus, in a Tosafos as printed at Sotah 25b, the word “ve’ayno,” “and he does not” is left out in a quote from the Gemara elsewhere, so that the entire meaning of the quoted Gemara is obscured. While we were sitting in the library waiting for the Rebbi, several of us noted this. Someone said, “Should we tell the Rosh Yeshiva about it?”

Asher: “No, because maybe he’ll come up with a pshat (a way to make sense of the text as printed), and we would have missed it if we told him.”

In fact, the Rosh Yeshiva puzzled over it for a few seconds, then said, “maybe it’s a mistake.”

Perhaps the Rosh Yeshiva is willing to accept a certain degree of necessary misapprehension of the Rabbinic texts because of his conviction that the halacha for us is what we do. A different time, while ultimately acceding to an emendation, he insisted it was not necessary although it produced an assertion directly contrary to the text as it stands: “Okay, you can do like the Bach and take out the word ‘lo’ [not] here, and that makes it easier to interpret. But we could also interpret it the other way. It wouldn’t change the halacha, because we know what the halacha is, because the halacha is what we do.”

Such an assertion seems to reflect a striking confidence in the integrity of a tradition of halachic practice as handed down to us. The term here is minhag, as the authorized version of practice for a given community. Asher told me of someone who had studied at the famous Yeshiva Torah VoDaas in Brooklyn, who tried to dispute the Rebbi on a particular point of halacha. The disputant “brought a sefer [a printed authority] to show how the halacha should be, and the Rebbi shouted, ‘You’re going to start paskening [deciding the law] from seforim now? That’s not our minhag!’”

The Rebbi has time for moral dilemmas presented by the Talmud as well. The Gemara at Bava Kama 38a discusses whether Gentiles, who are not obligated to observe the vast majority of the commandments in the Torah, are nevertheless rewarded if they do observe those commandments. It concludes that they are indeed rewarded, but less than Jews—because “one who is commanded and does is superior to one who is not commanded and does.” The Rebbi explained that this is because of the anxiety attendant upon the obligation in anticipation: “Why does the one who is commanded get a greater reward? Because the thought, ‘I must do it,’ is weighing on my mind long before the obligation actually comes into force.” He reinforced this argument with the maxim lepum tsaarah scharah, “according to the suffering is the reward.”

Yisroel Ruven protested that this is unfair: if the suffering involved is the measure of the reward, then a Gentile who suffers for the sake of observing a commandment should be rewarded, even if he is not obligated.

The Rebbi responded by pointing to the analogous case of a Jewish woman who is not obligated to do a certain mitsvah, but does it anyway. He stated that “according to the suffering is the reward” applies to her, and concluded that perhaps indeed it should apply to a Gentile as well. This led to a brief mention of women who insist on putting on tefillin, against the usual Orthodox practice and sometimes in the face of mockery and protest. The Rebbi remarked: “Those people [women] who [put on tefillin] must be getting lots of reward, because look at all the grief they’re getting!”

Yet he was still troubled by Yisroel Ruven’s question: It’s hard to understand why a Gentile is not rewarded according to his suffering. He suggested that perhaps God makes sure that righteous gentiles who want to observe commandments don’t suffer for it, and thus they miss out on the corresponding rewards. And he conceded that perhaps those truly “compulsive” Gentiles who not only observe the commandments, but worry about them beforehand, are in fact rewarded commensurately.

“Yeah,” Yisroel Ruven commented when I reviewed this discussion with him after the shiur, “but he also said God wants it that way [with greater rewards for those who are commanded than for those who are not], so we’ll have to work it out ourselves.”

Several of the eulogies this morning addressed both the Rosh Yeshiva’s extraordinary focus on study and his commitment to the welfare of the community, a perennial tension in rabbinic culture. The end of the first chapter of Bava Kama (17a) deals with the question of the relative priorities of Torah study versus the active performance of commandments. The Rosh Yeshiva explained the meaning of the dictum that study is great because it leads to the performance of mitzvos. It’s not because when I study, I know how to do mitzvos; on the contrary, “The more I learn, the more I’m fartift [engrossed], the more I know I don’t know.” This, he suggested, will make me stand in greater awe of Heaven, and thus encourage me to follow the commandments more diligently.

But how much indeed can be conveyed in a brief sketch like this, or even in a whole book of memories? One day Asher, Hillel, and I understood the Gemara (at Bava Kama 21b on the bottom) the same way the Rebbi understood it in shiur, and our agreement that Tosafos’ explanation of the scenario the Gemara was discussing seemed to make the most sense was evidently in accord with the Rosh Yeshiva’s reading as well. I pointed this out to Asher, who replied, “Yeah, wasn’t that satisfying? Every now and then I see that I’m reading the Gemara the way the Rosh Yeshiva learns it. Somebody asked me once years ago why I go to the shiur, and I said it’s because I hope that if I stay long enough, sometimes I’ll learn the way he does. I’ll never really get there, but every year I get a little closer to how the Rebbi learns.”

May his memory bring us blessing.