Speaking to an Empty Shul: Torah, Crisis, and the Jurisprudence of Religious Leadership

Rabbi Yehuda Halpert, Speaking to an Empty Shul: Timeless Lessons from Unprecedented Times (Mosaica Press, 2025)

Reviewed by Michael J. Broyde

There are many books that emerged from COVID; few will matter ten years from now. Rabbi Yehuda Halpert’s Speaking to an Empty Shul: Timeless Lessons from Unprecedented Times is one that will.

At first glance, this is a familiar genre: a collection of derashot organized by the weekly parashah. But that description is incomplete. This is not merely a book of sermons; it is an extended exercise in applied Torah reasoning under conditions of radical uncertainty. Put differently, it is less a volume of homiletics and more a case study in how a posek of the pulpit thinks when the facts are unstable, the norms are not enduring, and the community is disoriented.

Halpert himself frames the project in dual terms: first, the obligation of l’hagdil Torah u’l’ha’adirah; and second, the desire to document the “spiritual and religious challenges” faced by a community during the pandemic.^[1] That dual framing—Torah as norm, experience as data—is both methodologically sound and intellectually ambitious. It is also what makes this book worthy of careful attention.

I. The Problem: A Community Without a Shul

The factual backdrop is by now familiar, but Halpert’s account reminds us of its immediacy. In March 2020, communal Jewish life in Bergen County effectively shut down: schools closed, synagogues locked, simachot postponed, aveilut curtailed.^[2] For a halakhic community, this was not merely inconvenient; it was destabilizing. Much of Jewish religious life is structured around physical presence—minyan, keri’at ha-Torah, shared ritual experience and more. Orthodox Judaism is a community and not just a faith. Isolated and individualized Judaism is not as intended.

This raises a deeper question: what becomes of religious life when its institutional framework is suspended? Or, more sharply: what does rabbinic leadership look like when one cannot assemble a community?

Halpert’s answer is both practical and conceptually rich. If one cannot gather people physically, one can still speak to them normatively. The sermon—distributed before Shabbat, read individually but experienced collectively—becomes a surrogate form of communal engagement. It is not tefillah b’tzibbur, but it is a meaningful form of limud b’tzibbur.

II. The Method: From Text to Norm to Application

What distinguishes this volume is not merely its content, but its method. The sermons consistently follow a recognizable structure:

• a textual or conceptual problem rooted in the parashah
• engagement with classical sources (Rishonim, Acharonim)
• application to contemporary circumstances

This is, in essence, the architecture of halakhic reasoning. The novelty lies in the instability of the facts: COVID is not a fixed case but a moving target. Each week presents new data, requiring recalibration.

A representative example appears early, in a sermon on Parashat Tetzaveh, where Halpert explores the role of physical touch in biblical ritual and then considers the emerging anxiety surrounding physical contact during the pandemic. The move is careful and disciplined. He does not claim that Torah “solves” the pandemic; rather, he uses Torah categories to think about it. This is hora’ah in its most modest and most authentic form.

This methodological restraint is one of the book’s great strengths. Much pandemic writing—religious and otherwise—tended toward overreach. Halpert avoids both facile theology and empty platitudes. He demonstrates that Torah remains authoritative, but that its application requires judgment, humility, and attentiveness to context.

III. Context as Text

One of the most important features of the book is its editorial structure. Halpert includes a timeline and a detailed chronology of community announcements.^[3] This is not ancillary material. It reflects a deeper methodological commitment: that sermons must be read in light of the circumstances that produced them.

In legal terms, Halpert has preserved not only the opinions but the record. The reader is invited to consider each derashah as a response to a particular moment, rather than as an abstract reflection.

Halpert is also appropriately attentive to the limitations of the written form. Citing Marc Saperstein’s observation that a sermon is akin to a musical performance, he acknowledges that text cannot fully capture the lived experience.^[4] His inclusion of QR codes linking to recorded sermons is a creative attempt to mitigate that gap. More importantly, it signals an intellectual honesty about genre. This is not the sermon as delivered; it is the sermon as reconstructed.

IV. Intellectual Honesty and Attribution

A particularly noteworthy aspect of the preface is Halpert’s discussion of attribution. He candidly acknowledges the difficulty of tracing ideas in sermon writing, where influences are constant and often diffuse.^[5] At the same time, he emphasizes the importance of giving credit wherever possible.

This is more than a technical concern. It reflects a deeper commitment to intellectual integrity within Torah discourse. The rabbinic principle—kol ha’omer davar b’shem omro mevi geulah la’olam—is not merely about citation; it is about fidelity to truth. In a genre where originality is often assumed but rarely scrutinized, Halpert’s transparency is both refreshing and commendable.

V. The Book as Historical Evidence

Beyond its immediate religious value, Speaking to an Empty Shul will likely serve as a valuable historical source. As scholars of Jewish preaching have noted, sermons provide a unique window into how communities interpret events as they unfold.^[6]

Halpert’s contribution is particularly useful because it preserves both the sermons and their context. It allows the reader to trace the evolution of communal consciousness: from initial shock, to adaptation, to a tentative return to normalcy. In this sense, the book functions as both Torah and testimony—a record not only of what was said, but of how it was meant.

VI. Limitations: Genre and Scope

No work of this type is without limitations, although here they are largely intrinsic.

First, the book is local. It reflects one community and one rabbinic voice. While many themes are broadly resonant, the work does not claim—and cannot offer—a comprehensive account of Orthodoxy’s response to COVID.

Second, the sermonic form is inherently univocal. It is designed to guide and inspire, not to catalogue disagreement. As such, the book presents a coherent narrative of communal response, but not necessarily the full range of internal tensions.

Third, the afterword raises an important question—whether the post-pandemic return to normalcy reflects resilience or missed opportunity—but stops short of offering a fully developed normative program. One might have welcomed more explicit le-ma’aseh conclusions. Yet there is also wisdom in restraint; not every question requires immediate resolution.

VII. Conclusion: Torah in a Time of Disruption

This is a serious and thoughtful book. It succeeds not because it offers dramatic theological claims, but because it models a way of thinking: careful, textually grounded, contextually aware, and modest in its conclusions.

There is a temptation, in times of crisis, to seek certainty or novelty. Halpert offers neither. Instead, he demonstrates that Torah endures not by ignoring new realities, nor by surrendering to them, but by engaging them—patiently, analytically, and with intellectual humility.

If one were to state the contribution of this book in a single sentence, it would be this: Speaking to an Empty Shul is a record of what it looks like when a rabbi treats a crisis not as an interruption of Torah, but as an occasion for its serious application.

And that, in truth, is the deeper lesson. The question is not whether the shul was empty. The question is whether Torah was still being spoken within it. Halpert’s answer—implicit on every page—is that Torah, properly understood, is never dependent on the fullness of the room. It depends only on the seriousness of the speaker and the willingness of the listener.

In an age that often confuses volume with depth, this is a quiet book. But it is precisely its quiet seriousness—its refusal to overstate, its commitment to careful reasoning—that gives it enduring value. One suspects that, years from now, when many louder works have faded, this one will still be read—not because it captured the drama of the moment, but because it captured something more elusive and more lasting: the disciplined voice of Torah thinking its way through uncertainty.

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Notes

1. Preface, “Why Publish These D’Rashos?” ↩
2. Preface (description of March 2020 shutdown)
   ↩
3. Table of Contents; Timeline and Chronology sections. ↩
4. Preface, citing Marc Saperstein. ↩
5. Preface, “A Word on Attribution and Citations” ↩
6. See generally Marc Saperstein, Agony in the Pulpit (2018), cited in Preface ↩

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