Interview with the Authors of “The Science Behind the Mishnah”

By: Eliezer Brodt

Introduction

Chazal teach that at ten years old, one is ready to learn Mishnah—the entry point into Torah She B’al Peh. Yet this might create a misleading impression that Mishnah is somehow elementary—mere “child’s play.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebbi Yehudah HaNasi composed the Mishnah for the great Tana’im and Amora’im themselves, not just for children. Those who venture even slightly beneath the surface discover that truly understanding even basic peshat in a Mishnah requires a vast amount of knowledge that should not be taken for granted.

Consider the very first mishnayos of Berachos, which discuss the times for Krias Shema. Even a curious child will begin to ask practical questions: How do these astronomical times actually work? What should we do when clouds obscure the sun and stars? How can calendars predict sof zman krias shema for next year with such accuracy?

The questions only multiply from there. When the first Mishnah mentions hekter chalavim (burning special fats), what precisely are these chalavim and how do they differ from ordinary fat? Without understanding the world around us, how can we possibly understand what the Mishnah is teaching?

Remember, too, that Berachos is relatively easy compared to what follows. The rest of Seder Zera’im plunges students knee-deep into the technicalities of horticulture and botany—subjects completely foreign to most modern learners.

This challenge isn’t new. For years, when Daf Yomi cycles reached Mesechta Chullin, many struggled or dropped out entirely. The problem was clear: having never experienced farm life, they lacked the basic understanding of animal anatomy required to follow the Gemaras about shechitah and treifos. Recognizing this need, Rav Yisroel Belsky ztz”l created a revolutionary solution, he conducted hands-on demonstrations where he methodically dissected animals, identifying each organ and explaining its halachic significance. These extraordinary sessions were videotaped, creating lasting visual aids that brought complex sugyos to life for thousands of talmidim. Through this innovative approach, the Gemara’s intricate discussions became accessible to all!

A remarkable new sefer, “The Science Behind the Mishnah,” now takes this approach to new heights. Written by Rabbis Jonathan Sassen and Joel Padowitz, two distinguished members of my shul, Beis Tefillah Yonah Avraham in Ramat Beit Shemesh, this extraordinary work illuminates the scientific foundations underlying the Mishnah. Their 318-page volume, published by Mosaica Press, is truly a masterpiece, combining gorgeous illustrations with clear explanations spanning physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science—all while methodically exploring the mishnayos of Mesechta Berachos.

The work has garnered enthusiastic endorsements from some of Eretz Yisroel’s leading English-speaking roshei yeshiva, including Rav Asher Weiss, Rav Yitzchak Berkovitz, Rav Shaya Karlinsky, and Rav Avishai David. In his eloquent haskama, Rav David writes, “Their exhaustive analysis of nature and its phenomena is breathtaking in its beauty and splendor…that can only generate a cascading, overflowing shevach v’hodaah to Hashem Yisborach.”

To explore this groundbreaking project more deeply, I sat down with the authors for an in-depth conversation about their vision, process, and the remarkable journey that produced this valuable new resource.

Following is an interview with the authors of the book:

Eliezer: How was this unique project “born”?

Joel: There was a long gestation period! I’ve been teaching Mishnah and Gemara to adults for over 20 years. I trust in the counsel of Chazal that all students—especially ba’alei teshuvah approaching Shas for the first time as adults—would benefit greatly from first mastering the basic principles of Torah She Ba’al Peh, before plowing through yet another blatt Gemara. While people are often drawn to Daf Yomi in search of yediyos, what they are looking for—whether or not they know it—is to understand principles that are more readily gleaned from learning Mishnah than from bekiyus Gemara.

One of the impediments to people learning Mishnah is that they find it a little dry. So, when I teach Mishnah, I try to also present background details of each case—whether historical, linguistic, or scientific—to make the content richer and more multidimensional. I’ve found that this supplementary information helps keep talmidim engaged in a way that almost nothing else can.

About 15 years ago, I moved to Ramat Beit Shemesh. Like most communities, there was no one teaching Mishnah to adults, so I started giving a daily shiur in my local shul. I started dreaming about collecting my little scientific supplements into a sefer that would systematically go through the entire Mishnah. One evening, after having been toying with the idea for a few years, I found myself on the way to a chasunah with my scientist friend Jonathan Sassen. I shared my idea with him. To my pleasant surprise, he told me he had been considering a similar project exploring the science behind Chumash!

Jonathan: I was looking for a way to give people the science background for a deeper appreciation of Hashem’s creation. Hashem put us together in the back of that car back in 2018, and a partnership was born! Right there in the car, we agreed to collaborate on what ultimately became this sefer.

Eliezer: Did either of you envision this project while learning with your children?

Jonathan: Actually, yes! On the advice of our Rav, HoRav Malinowitz ztz”l, I had been teaching a little “niflaos haBorei” to my children every shalosh seudos for many years, prior to that fateful car ride. Their lack of basic science education was very limiting in what we could talk about, which got me thinking about the need for accessible science materials in our community.

Joel: Funny, for me it was quite the opposite! My boys had to endure my enthusiasm for “background information” during their early Mishnah-learning years, much to their frustration. They would plead with me to “just stick to the point!” Clearly I’m not cut out to be a cheder rebbe!

But there’s a lovely irony here: as they’ve grown older and matured in their learning, they’ve come to appreciate my approach. It must have rubbed off on my girls too, as today one is studying to be an engineer and the other to be a biotechnologist. It was my children who ended up being my first reviewers, going through the book’s chapters one by one.

Eliezer: How did you two meet, and what led you to collaborate on this unusual project? It’s actually quite rare in the history of seforim for two authors to work together.

Joel: Jonathan and I met as members of the same shul, but the true force behind our collaboration was the shul’s late Rav, HaRav Chaim Zev Malinowitz ztz”l. He had been my rav, rebbe, and chavrusa for more than 10 years—in fact, I moved to Ramat Beit Shemesh specifically to be close to him. What made Rav Malinowitz such a powerful influence was that he was not only a towering talmid chacham but also a remarkably broad thinker. He understood that ba’alei teshuva could bring unique perspectives to Klal Yisroel.

I became frum when I was just seventeen, but Jonathan had come to Yiddishkeit as a mature, highly educated scientist. The Rav pushed each of us independently to use whatever gifts we had in service of Klal Yisroel. Without realizing it, he was actually pushing the two of us together to produce this work. It pains us deeply that now, five years after his petirah, he cannot have the nachas of seeing this sefer come to light.

Eliezer: You mentioned Rav Malinowitz’s influence. I think our readers should know more about him. Aside from being our shul’s rav, Hagaon HaRav Chaim Zev Malinowitz zt”l was a remarkable talmid chacham: he served as a dayan and rosh kollel in Monsey, was the general editor of ArtScroll’s Hebrew and English Shas as well as the Yerushalmi, and contributed to many of their other projects as well. How did his unique perspective influence this project?

Jonathan: Rav Malinowitz was truly exceptional. One of the concepts he frequently discussed was how deeply understanding science enhances our appreciation of Hashem’s creation rather than diminishing it. There’s a passage from the scientist Richard Feynman that beautifully captures this idea. Rav Malinowitz shared this quote publicly on more than one occasion, and it resonated deeply with us. Allow me to share it with you:

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

That perspective—that scientific understanding deepens rather than diminishes our appreciation of Hashem’s creation—is really at the heart of what we’re trying to accomplish with this sefer.

Eliezer: Let’s delve deeper into your individual backgrounds. What prepared each of you for this unique project?

Jonathan: I’ve been interested in anything to do with science since I was 10, if not before. I specialized in physics, chemistry and mathematics from age 17, and went on to earn a 1st class B.Sc. from Oxford University in Metallurgy and Material Science. After university, I studied at Shapell’s Darché Noam Yeshiva. Since 1987 I’ve been doing electrochemical research and development for an Israeli battery manufacturer. Almost 40 years later, I’m the Chief Technology Officer of that same company. Along the way I received semicha from Rabbi Shmuel Katz.

Joel: As a child, I was also very excited about science. I started taking college courses when I was 13 and later won gold at the US Science Olympiad. At 16, I was accepted to MIT where I hoped to become a physicist—but that never happened. I took a year to travel first, and that journey led me to Jerusalem and Torah learning at Aish HaTorah. After a couple years, Rav Noach [Weinberg ztz”l, the Rosh Yeshiva] paired me with Rav Malinowitz. When I got engaged to a girl from New York, Rav Malinowitz suggested Sha’ar HaTorah in Queens—where I joined your uncle Rav Shalom Spitz’s first-year shiur with boys a few years younger than me. After my wife graduated from Stern, we returned to Eretz Yisroel for some years in kollel, including three at the Jerusalem Kollel under Rav Yitzchak Berkovits. That led us to Aish HaTorah in London working with young professionals. We returned to Eretz Yisroel about 15 years ago, and—here’s a plot twist: I then went back to college, enrolling at Harvard as an undergraduate. It’s a story for a different time, but I mention it now because I honestly believe it’s a big part of the answer to your question: certain skills I learned there undeniably prepared me for this project.

Eliezer: What are your goals with this book?

Joel: I’ve got two basic goals. The first is to make Mishnah study more engaging by illuminating its scientific dimensions. But the second, and more important goal, is to help those who have spent their lives within the yeshiva system develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world around them. The Rambam in the very beginning of Mishneh Torah makes it clear that one of the primary paths to achieving Ahavas Hashem is appreciating the natural world Hashem created. While we all trust the Rambam and certainly take everything he says very seriously, in my experience this crucial point about developing Ahavas Hashem through understanding Hashem’s creation doesn’t receive the emphasis it deserves in our educational systems.

Jonathan: I actually have three. My primary goal is to give young people—and their parents—a tool to deepen their connection to Hashem through understanding His creation. Second, I’d like to give people a better understanding of the mishnayos themselves. Third, I hope we can give readers a bit of an appreciation for genuine science, which might help them avoid being misled by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories that unfortunately circulate all too often.

Eliezer: Who is the intended audience?

Jonathan: We wrote this for anyone who wants to understand the science behind Meseches Berachos—whether they’re learning the mishnayos themselves or are just curious about the science. We think it will be especially valuable in Charedi schools as part of their limudei chol curriculum.

Joel: That’s a question we came back to again and again. While anyone who learns Gemara could benefit greatly from our work, we initially thought people would primarily purchase it for their adolescent sons. What we’re finding is wonderful: parents buy it for their sons, but then everyone in the family ends up reading it. And that really makes our hearts sing, because who really is the “target audience” for the mitzvah of Ahavas Hashem? Every Jew!

Eliezer: What kind of research went into preparing this book?

Jonathan: Tons! We consulted with a highly knowledgeable Rav on all halachic matters. We worked with many science experts for subjects outside our expertise, particularly in the medical field. We looked at many school science books and online resources to understand the best teaching approaches. And we tested drafts with our older children to ensure everything was clear and engaging.

Joel: While a fair amount of research did go into the sefer, notwithstanding Jonathan’s modesty here, I think it is safe to say that the core scientific information was already in his head. Our research focused mainly on verifying and expanding the specific details needed for each topic. I also invested considerable thought and research into weaving relevant Torah content throughout almost every chapter, finding meaningful connections between the scientific principles and their Torah contexts.

Eliezer: How did you decide on the topics to cover in the book?

Jonathan: The sefer itself is structured as a peirush on Meseches Berachos, so we were anchored by the content of the mesechta. We started by asking ourselves, “What might a curious student ask about this Mishnah?” Aside from these relatively obvious questions, we also asked ourselves, “What ought students understand about this topic?” and tried to work that information in as well.

Eliezer: What was your process for working together? How did you divide the labor?

Joel: After we decided on the questions and topics we wanted to explore, Jonathan would write the first draft and identify potential illustrative images. He definitely deserves credit for the heavy lifting on the scientific side. I would then take his initial draft and edit it with a very heavy hand. My focus was twofold: crafting a presentation accessible to both school children and adults, and supplementing the scientific explanations with discussions of how these themes interconnect with halachic and hashkafic concepts.

This would kick off several rounds of back-and-forth until we both agreed on every aspect of the chapter. By the end, it would be impossible to credit any particular insight or topic to just one of us with certainty. When a text was nearing completion, Jonathan would commission custom images as needed, and we’d go through another round focusing on the visuals and captions.

Eliezer: How long did it take to write and publish the book?

Jonathan: We started the project in 2018 and submitted the manuscript to Mosaica in 2022. It took until late 2024 for us to get the book in hand—so that’s 6 years altogether.

Each step of the process took longer than we expected, especially since we had a nearly two-year pause during Corona when our kids were using our computers for Zoom classes all day! The writing process itself was complex because we worked on multiple chapters in parallel rather than sequentially. Each chapter went through multiple reviews—often requiring one expert for the scientific parts and another for the halachic aspects.

After we completed the manuscript, a great deal of time in those final two years went into the graphic elements such as layout and images. We also spent a lot of time producing the extensive glossary and cross-referencing system in the back of the book. Looking back, this additional time was well spent, as we have gotten endless positive feedback about how these additional elements really enhance the learning experience.

Eliezer: Which mentors or Rabbanim inspired or influenced this project?

Joel: Rav Malinowitz was truly a big part of the inspiration behind this sefer. His encouragement to use our individual gifts in service of Klal Yisroel ultimately led to this project, even if he wasn’t with us for most of the process.

Jonathan: Absolutely. Rav Malinowitz’s shiurim on Chovos Halevavos were particularly influential. I was also inspired by the writings of Rav Avigdor Miller and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

More generally, I’d say I was inspired to create this work after seeing the many excellent seforim out there on niflaos HaBorei. While these works are valuable, I felt that much more could be written on how deeply science illustrates Yichud Hashem if people had more background.

Unfortunately, I was also motivated by the pseudo-science that sometimes appears in frum books about science. I hoped that providing accurate scientific explanations within a Torah framework could help address this issue.

Eliezer: Did you seek advice from Rabbanim about how to approach potentially sensitive topics?

Jonathan: We hired Rav Eliezer Stahl to thoroughly check all halachic and hashkafic inyanim. He came highly recommended to us as an expert in this very role and to our minds he did a truly fantastic job.

Joel: Yes, he did. But in general, we did our very best to ensure that there was nothing controversial or even particularly sensitive in the sefer.

The truth is, we consulted with a number of rabbanim throughout the process. But all that said, if anyone finds fault with anything we wrote, we and we alone take full responsibility for it.

Eliezer: What is the future of this project? Do you plan to translate it into Hebrew or write additional volumes?

Joel: Yes, to both! Our immediate goal is to introduce this sefer into yeshiva day schools as part of their limudei chol curriculum. Our sefer is already used as a classroom resource for middle-school students in a number of yeshivas in the United States. We’ve also developed a comprehensive Teacher’s Guide for all chapters that provides useful tools to use the sefer in classrooms, including suggested curricula, lesson plans, printable vocabulary worksheets, quizzes with thorough answer keys, and other resources. We provide the Teacher’s Guide to schools free of charge. Recently we joined The Machon (A Torah-based institute for curriculum, serving yeshivos across North America with a digital platform) to write their science curriculum, partly using the resources in our sefer.

Jonathan: Right. Additionally, we intend to produce volumes on other mesechtos and have been working hard on the next volume, which will be on Meseches Shabbos. We hope this second volume will be publicly available within 24 months.

Eliezer: If you had to highlight four sections that showcase the unique strengths of the book, which would you choose?

Joel: Let me point to four sections that I think best illustrate what makes our sefer special:

First, at the very beginning we have our “Read This First” section, which has a brief but fairly comprehensive discussion on the Torah hashkafa relating to the study of natural sciences. In my opinion, this might be the most important part of the entire sefer, as it frames not just our book but provides guidance for how parents and teachers should approach this topic with their children and students.

Second, also before the main text begins, we present five sample curricula (physics, chemistry, general biology, human biology, and earth sciences) that could be taught as a science program using the book’s chapters. These demonstrate how our sefer truly synthesizes Torah and science throughout.

Third, Chapter 7, Halachic Hours (Berachos 4:1), exemplifies how we use visuals to clarify complex concepts. Everyone knows the days are longer in summer and shorter in winter, but few have an intuitive understanding of why. Through carefully designed diagrams, we help readers understand the physical processes that cause the timing of netz and shkiya to shift throughout the year. These aren’t mere illustrations – they’re teaching tools that make complex concepts intuitive.

Finally, Chapter 15, Bread and Nutrition (Berachos 6:1) is unique, because instead of opening with a scientific question about the Mishnah as we do in the other chapters, here we ask, “Why does bread get its own special blessing?” From there, we weave together hashkafic and halachic perspectives on nutrition before delving into detailed food chemistry and the science of macro- and micronutrients. It’s perhaps our longest chapter, and I believe it perfectly demonstrates how we integrate halachah, hashkafah, and technical science into a cohesive whole.

Jonathan: I think the greatest strength of this book is how it teaches fundamental science concepts within a kodesh framework. For instance:

Chapter 11, Wind and Air Pressure (Berachos 5:2), explains air pressure in the context of why we daven for wind and why Mashiv HaRuach truly belongs in the category of Gevuros Hashem.

Chapter 21, Incense and Our Sense of Smell (Berachos 6:6), explores how our sense of smell works on a molecular level within the context of explaining what incense is and how the ketores worked.

Chapter 26, The Color of Fire (Berachos 8:5), teaches about the connection between high temperatures and color while explaining the physical basis for the machlokes between Beis Hillel and Beis Shammai on the berachah over the havdalah candle.

Chapter 28, Meteors and Comets (Berachos 9:2), offers a primer on astronomy while teaching about the machlokes on what zikin are.

Eliezer: Thank you both for sharing your insights into your groundbreaking work.

“The Science Behind the Mishnah” truly offers a unique bridge between scientific understanding and Torah learning, enhancing both in the process. I encourage readers to explore this valuable sefer for themselves and their families. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or simply someone seeking to deepen your appreciation of both Torah and Hashem’s creation, this work offers something truly special. You can learn more at www.ScienceBehindTheMishnah.com

על הלכות בעל קרי בסידור בית יעקב

by: Gabriel Wasserman

R. Hayyim Soloveitchik’s Attitude Towards Girsaot

A Response to Dr. Marc Shapiro

Elisha Friedman

R. Hayyim Soloveitchik earned his towering stature in Jewish intellectual history for his revolutionary methodology of Talmudic analysis, but scholars have also noted another aspect of his insights, which is a disinterest, bordering on disregard, for textual veracity. In general, traditional Talmudists were not overly concerned with bibliographic issues and girsaot (textual variants), but even within this tradition R. Hayyim stands out as extreme. One of the most glaring, and by extension often quoted, examples of R. Hayyim using a faulty text is his analysis of the passage in Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Nizkei Mamon 4:4.

In a recent post, Dr. Marc Shapiro responded to my objection to this example. Dr. Shapiro’s clarification was helpful in elaborating on the proof from Nizkei Mamon, as well as documenting a number of scholars who have used it. The basic outlook of this school is that R. Hayyim is entirely removed from girsah considerations. In this post I will articulate an alternative approach to this issue, arguing that R. Hayyim does take girsah factors into consideration. In section one, I sketch Shapiro’s perspective (in my understanding) and the proof from Nizkei Mamon. In section two, I present an alternative reading. In section three, I conclude with some broader reflections on R. Hayyim’s attitude towards girsaot.

1. R. Hayyim’s Aversion to Girsaot

Traditional Talmudists, with some notable exceptions, generally ignored issues of girsah, preferring to focus on the content and logical flow of classical texts. In many ways this is the defining hallmark of traditional Talmudic scholarship, as opposed to other methods of study which concentrate on textual issues. One of the notable exceptions to this overall trend was Vilna Gaon. As an example, the mishna towards the end of tractate Avot (5:20) reads,

יהודה בן תימא אומר, הוי עז כנמר, וקל כנשר, ורץ כצבי, וגבור כארי, לעשות רצון אביך שבשמים. הוא היה אומר, עז פנים לגיהנם, ובשת פנים לגן עדן. יהי רצון מלפניך יי אלהינו שתבנה עירך במהרה בימינו ותן חלקנו בתורתך.

Yehuda ben Tema said: Be strong as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and brave as a lion, to do the will of your Father in Heaven. He would say: the brazen-faced [is destined] to Gehinom; the shame-faced to Gan Eden. May it be Your will, O Lord our God, that Your city be rebuilt speedily in our days and set our portion in the study of Your Torah

After two statements reflecting on the proper role of aggression in religious life, the mishna suddenly includes an out-of-place prayer for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. It seems clear there is a textual problem with this mishna, and surveying how traditional commentators approached it is illustrative.

Vilna Gaon offered an obvious textual emendation – that this prayer was erroneously copied here, but properly belongs four mishnayot later at the end of the tractate.[1] Meiri offers another textual solution, that originally this mishna was the conclusion of the tractate, so it ended with a prayer, and then subsequently additional statements were added on, but the prayer remained where it had been originally.[2]

Yet the majority of commentators, including Rambam, Bartenura and Tiferet Yisrael, avoid a textual solution. Some suggest a homiletical reason for the insertion of this prayer, based on the notion that God blessed the Jewish people with a lack of aggression. R. Akiva Eger in his commentary cites an interpretation from Radach (R. Dovid Hacohen of Corfu), who explains that since this mishna discusses the proper religious uses of aggression, therefore the mishna prays for the messianic times when we will no longer require any aggression.

This example illustrates the general reluctance of traditional commentators, with some exceptions such as Vilna Gaon, to resolve questions through textual solutions. It also points towards a possible reason for this: avoiding textual solutions generates greater religious and homiletical creativity. Since, in this instance, commentators avoided the textual solution, they were enabled to formulate homiletical insights.

There is no question that R. Hayyim Soloveitchik reflects this traditional hesitancy regarding textual solutions. When R. Hayyim confronts a difficulty, he prefers a conceptual answer over a textual resolution, even when the latter seems evidently correct. As an example, in Hilkhot Hametz u’Matzah 1:3, Rambam ruled that one who did not burn his hametz before Passover does not receive the punishment of lashes because it is a passive violation not active, “for he did not perform a deed” (מפני שלא עשה מעשה). R. Hayyim asks that this statement contradicts the Talmudic rationale exempting lashes (Pesachim 95a), which is that this is a prohibition which is attached to a positive mitzvah to destroy the hametz (לאו הניתק לעשה).

This question is problematic, since there is a seemingly obvious textual answer, namely, that Rambam had a well-attested variant girsah of that Talmudic passage, which omits the entire לאו הניתק לעשה rationale. In fact, in the standard Vilna Shas, this line appears in parentheses to indicate the alternative girsah! Yet instead of offering this obvious girsah solution, R. Hayyim prefers to develop his conceptual insight, which illustrates his general aversion to girsah answers.[3]

When studying R. Hayyim’s insights one can intuit that his avoidance of girsaot goes further than other leading Talmudists, his relentless focus on conceptual analysis seemingly leaves no room for girsaot (or other) concerns. But it can be difficult to express this insight in more precise language. It is particularly challenging because we have no programmatic statement from R. Hayyim as to his outlook on textual issues, as such scholars must try to recreate his attitude from his hiddushim.[4]

There is a scholarly formulation of this which contends that R. Hayyim avoids girsaot to the extent that he is even willing to cite and analyze faulty texts which were retracted by their very own authors. The explanation for this is that when it comes to religious texts R. Hayyim maintains an extreme theory of textual autonomy, that religious texts transcend the author who wrote it. I will cite Shapiro’s formulation of this idea,

On occasion, [traditionalists] even ignored the explanations Maimonides himself later gave for his halakhot… A different justification, with a more modern appeal, is quoted in the name of R. Naphtali Zvi Judah Berlin: “All the works of our teachers, the rishonim, until the era of Pnei Yehoshua, were written with ruah ha-kodesh, and obviously Maimonides’ Code is in this category. What Maimonides wrote in a responsum is Maimonides’ explanation of what he wrote in his Code, but there is still room for other explanations, for there are 70 facets to the Torah.” In fact, even after Maimonides wrote to the sages of Lunel – who had asked about a difficulty in the Mishneh Torah (Nizkei Mamon 4:4) – informing them that their text of this halakhah was mistaken, we still find R. Hayyim Soloveitchik and others offering analyses of the mistaken text!
Marc Shapiro, Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters, (University of Scranton, 2008), 54-5.

The primary evidence for this formulation derives from R. Hayyim’s comments in Hilkhot Nizkei Mamon, to which we proceed now. The printed editions of Mishneh Torah read,

When a person entrusts his animal to an unpaid watchman, a paid watchman, a renter or a borrower, these individuals assume the owner’s responsibilities. If the animal causes damages, the watchman is held liable. When does the above apply? When they did not guard the animal at all. If, however, they guarded the animal in an excellent manner, as they should, and it got loose and caused damage, the watchmen are not liable, and the owners are liable.

This was a problematic halakha because if the watchmen guarded it excellently no one should be liable. Rambam himself was asked this question as part of a series of questions posed to him on Mishneh Torah by the sages of Lunel. Rambam responded explicitly that this version was an error and instead it should read that the owners are liable in a case of inferior protection,

If, however, they guarded the animal in an excellent manner, as they should, and it got loose and caused damage, the watchmen are not liable. If the watchmen guarded the animal in an inferior manner, they are not liable if they are unpaid. Instead, the owners are liable, even if the animal kills a person. The watchman is liable if he is paid, a renter, or a borrower.

Rambam’s response was cited in Kesef Mishnah, which is printed on the side of the standard editions of Mishneh Torah, such that no reader could miss this retraction. Yet, R. Hayyim wrote two lengthy pieces on Nizkei Mamon, and in both he analyzes this passage using the erroneous text, without ever noting Rambam’s own emendation! This seems to be clear evidence that R. Hayyim disregards textual emendation, even when the text in question is clearly mistaken.

In his recent post Shapiro documents a scholarly consensus which has coalesced around this reading, including rabbis Eliyahu Soloveitchik, Yehoshua Inbal, Norman Solomon and most prominently, Baruch Shmuel Deutsch. This reading of R. Hayyim has widespread support because it is so striking that he is knowingly using a faulty text in his lengthy analysis of this topic. In fact, when I explained this essay in May 2023 as part of a series explaining Hiddushe Rabbenu Hayyim Halevi, I enthusiastically made the same point, influenced by the earlier scholarship, which you can hear at the beginning here.

But after processing the piece, I came to believe that a more careful reading of R. Hayyim shows that in fact he deftly avoids ascribing ideas to Rambam based on the faulty text, in recognition of Rambam’s own emendation. I then found that this view had already been exhaustively presented in 2007 by R. Avraham Lipschitz.[6] In the following section I will present Lipschitz’s approach, that R. Hayyim does not dismiss Rambam’s own emendation of his text, and more broadly that R. Hayyim is not as impervious to textual matters as the prevailing scholarship would indicate.

1. Re-Reading R. Hayyim

Twice in his comments, R. Hayyim refers to the erroneous version. First, in the opening paragraph in Nizkei Mamon 4:4, where R. Hayyim sets up the piece. In order to explain why R. Hayyim is not in fact basing his insights on the faulty text, let me sketch the broad purpose of this piece. The conceptual insight at the heart of this piece is the idea that when an animal damages something, while being watched by a watchman, the watchman’s financial liability is inherent to his responsibilities as a watchman, and not derivative from the owner’s liability.[7] In R. Hayyim’s framework, the paradigmatic case for this is when the damaging animal was a tam (new damager). When a tam damages, as opposed to a mu’ad (habitual damager), the owner does not pay from their own estate, only from the value of the animal itself. This creates a litmus test for R. Hayyim to explore the watchman’s liability, since there is no financial restitution outside the animal itself.

If we now work backwards to the opening paragraph, we can see that this insight is not dependent on the faulty girsah. In order for the piece to work R. Hayyim needs to establish two things: first, that this halakha is referring to a tam, as Maggid Mishneh in his commentary suggests, second, he needs to introduce the issue of a watchman’s liability, which Raavad in his glosses touches on. Now both Raavad and Maggid Mishneh had the faulty version of Mishneh Torah, so it seems reasonable that when presenting their approaches R. Hayyim sticks with the faulty version, which is a historically accurate reflection of these two commentators.

But as R. Hayyim progresses to his own analysis of this issue, it is no longer relevant which version of Mishneh Torah one uses. In both versions – the mistaken one and the corrected one – Rambam is discussing a tam, and rules that in some cases the owner is liable, while in others the watchman is. The juxtaposition of these two rulings sets up the premise of R. Hayyim’s piece, and it makes no difference whether owners are liable for excellent protection (erroneous version) or inferior protection (corrected version). Rambam’s girsah is incidental to R. Hayyim’s discussion, and as such this piece does not provide evidence for R. Hayyim’s attitude towards girsaot.

Let us move on to the second instance where R. Hayyim analyzes Rambam’s problematic text, in Nizkei Mamon 4:11. This is a much stronger proof than the first instance, since in this piece R. Hayyim cites the erroneous version to prove the point that Rambam sees the owner’s and watchman’s liability as mutually exclusive. R. Hayyim deduces this from the erroneous text, which states the watchman is exempt and the owner is liable, indicating that it is an either-or issue, i.e. only one party will be liable in any given case. He then proceeds to explain the faulty text further, and he does all this without acknowledging Rambam’s own retraction.

From this passage then we do seem to have proof for the extreme formulation of R. Hayyim’s approach to textual autonomy, and Hazon Ish in his glosses (as Shapiro notes in his post) certainly understands it this way. But I would note two counter points. First, Lipschitz counters that R. Hayyim is still not really relying on a faulty text, since his overall discussion is not dependent on this point. The conceptual idea in this piece is whether in a case where the first watchman gave the animal over to a second watchman, the first watchman is entirely removed from the situation, or even though he’s exempt he remains a relevant party. As part of this discussion, R. Hayyim is attempting to explain the related issue of the owner’s role in the situation, which brings him to the faulty text. But even without this digression, the overall piece can stand on its own. According to Lipschitz, this minimizes the implication of R. Hayyim using the faulty text.[8]

Second, I would add that if you follow the contours of R. Hayyim’s discussion, this step is deep into a discussion of Raavad’s glosses. One could argue that in this step he is explaining the debate from the viewpoint of Raavad, who never knew about Rambam’s retraction and had to try and make consistent sense of Rambam’s rulings. Although R. Hayyim does ascribe these ideas to Rambam, it is really Raavad’s strawman version of Rambam. Put differently, had the faulty text not been used by Raavad, R. Hayyim would not defend it.

Lipschitz’s approach (slightly) modifies the prevailing scholarly view that R. Hayyim is entirely impervious to textual emendations.[9] While it is clear that R. Hayyim is largely dismissive of textual issues, even he has his red lines, such as using a faulty text which the author himself corrected. Though, I will note, the broader difficulty of formulating precisely R. Hayyim’s attitude towards girsaot remains.

1. R. Hayyim’s Attitude Towards Texts

We have explored the debate between Shapiro and Lipschitz, over the extent of R. Hayyim’s disregard for girsaot, namely, whether he would build a hiddush on a retracted girsah. In this conclusion I reflect on the religious motivation for R. Hayyim’s cavalier attitude towards girsaot.

It is important to clarify that R. Hayyim’s opposition to emendations is not rooted in a reverence for the printed text, but rather in a reverence for texts which were used by Torah giants. In other words, if a mistaken girsah can be attributed to a Torah giant, R. Hayyim considers it valid, but if it has no traditional support amongst Torah sages, it is invalidated. For example, if someone were to discover an unknown girsah in the Cairo geniza, it would have little relevance for R. Hayyim. Likewise, a printed version, which was not endorsed by Torah giants, does not have standing in R. Hayyim’s outlook.

For this reason, R. Hayyim is willing to change the girsah at the end of his essay on Hilkhot Edut 21:9, because as he notes none of the commentators on Rambam are bothered by this question (אשר כן משמע מזה שלא העירו בזה המפרשים כלל), which seemingly indicates they had a different girsah. Since no leading Torah scholar can be said to endorse the printed version, R. Hayyim does not need to defend it.

But R. Hayyim is not entirely consistent in this approach, and in another parallel case he does not apply this logic. In Hilkhot Korban Pesah 6:2, Rambam rules that one who slaughters the Korban Pesah for the correct group, but intends to sprinkle the blood for the wrong group, the sacrifice is valid but this group does not fulfill their Pesah obligation. Not only does this ruling seem logically inconsistent – if it is a valid offering why does the group not fulfill their Pesah obligation? – it also seems to blatantly contradict the explicit Talmudic ruling that the group does fulfill their obligation. R. Hayyim’s opening paragraph suggests all sorts of girsah based solutions, except the most obvious one: that there is a misprint in Mishneh Torah.

Here too, the misprint theory could be supported by the fact that none of the classical commentators on Rambam address this question, indicating they had a corrected version. In fact, in a letter critiquing R. Hayyim’s approach, R. Chaim Mordechai Roller, cites this exact consideration as proof that it must be a misprint in Mishneh Torah, since none of the classical commentators raise the question.[10] R. Hayyim’s refusal to accept this girsah change seems to contradict his own logic in Hilkhot Edut.

Be that as it may, R. Hayyim’s attitude seems to be that we must defend any version of a text which was used by Torah giants. Presumably, and this is my own words, it is hard to accept that Torah giants use nonsensical texts, such that any problematic girsah they used must have a good explanation. There may be an additional element of Divine Providence, that we must assume God would not allow Torah giants to get tripped up by worthless texts, so there must be a profound meaning to explain it.

* * * * * *

Notes

[1] Vilna Gaon in his commentary to Avot (on mishna 20 and mishna 24):

טעות סופר כאן, וצריך לומר בסוף הפרק, כמו שכתבתי למטה

[2] This is one option Meiri proposes (in his commentary to mishna 20):

או אפשר שיהיה זה סיום המסכת אלא שנתוספו בה אח”כ דברים אחרים

See also R. Shmuel de Uceda’s related discussion in Midrash Shmuel (end of mishna 21 and beginning of mishna 22), and Tosafot Yom Tov (beginning of mishna 21), about the order of these ending mishnayot. Chanoch Albeck in his edition of the Mishna (Mossad Bialik, 1952) endorses Meiri’s suggestion.

[3] Elsewhere I have documented the nuances of R. Hayyim’s attitude towards girsaot in further detail, see כללי הגר”ח מבריסק בביאור הרמב”ם – ספריית אסיף, pp. 388-92.

[4] Avraham Lipschitz, “יחסם של אחרונים לתגליות נוסח”, סיני, גליון קמא, תשס”ח, עמ’ קג

suggests a possible formulation, pointing to one instance (which will be discussed below) where other traditional commentators explain Rambam’s faulty girsah, but at least pay homage to the girsah issue and note the corrected version, whereas R. Hayyim’s omission of any acknowledgement of the whole issue is more extreme:

לכאורה לפנינו מקרה ראשון של התעלמות גורפת מהמישור הפילולוגי ללא כל צורך בהצדקתה

[5] Marc Shapiro, Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters, (University of Scranton, 2008), 54-5.

[6] Avraham Lipschitz,

“יחסם של אחרונים לתגליות נוסח”, סיני, גליון קמא, תשס”ח, עמ’ פא-קו

which takes this halakha in Mishneh Torah as a test case for traditionalist attitudes towards girsaot. Lipschitz’s son, R. Uri Lipschitz, is a Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshivat Siach Yitzchak, founded by Rav Shagar.

[7] See R. Baruch Ber Lebowitz’s formulation of this in Birkat Shmuel, Bava Kamma, #7 & 8

[8] Ibid, pp. 103-4.

[9] Lipschitz sums up his conclusion (p. 103):

קיצור הדברים, טענתי היא שאין לגר”ח התנגדות עקרונית להשתמש בנוסחים חדשים, וודאי לא כאלה המוזכרים בכסף משנה, אלא שהקו המנחה אותו הוא הרעיון המרכזי אותו הוא בא לחדש, או הקושי המרכזי בו הוא עוסק

[10] Teshuvot Be’er Chaim Mordechai (3:12).

Wrestling with the Ketsot –

Review of ‘New Heavens: The Ketsot ha-Hoshen and the Rise of Lamdanut’, by Noam Samet

By Moshe Shochat

“…We also studied the Ketsot ha-Hoshen… The book was expensive, and my brother obtained a copy for consultation and decided to transcribe it in his fine handwriting. Only after prolonged arguments with me did my brother agree that we should first study it, and after each sugya and topic decide what was worth copying. We maintained this method throughout the two years we spent at Telz. Day after day we worked through the Ketsot ha-Hoshen, the Netivot ha-Mishpat, the novellae of R. Akiva Eiger, and several other books… My brother preserved the manuscript for many years; it was always for him a source of inner satisfaction and spiritual renewal, an occasion to resume his Talmud study…”^[1]

— Ben-Zion Dinur (1884-1973)

“All the devotion of a Telz alumnus to the Gemara and its sharp nosei kelim – the Shita Mekubbetset, the Penei Yehoshua, the Ketsot ha-Hoshen, the Shev Shma’ateta, and works of that kind – a devotion that persisted even after he had turned to heresy and Haskalah – derived from the wisdom residing in the act of study itself, from the logic that bores down to the roots of things, dismantling and rebuilding. The capacity to hold one’s own in learned discourse (kennen redn in lernen) – that is the entire Torah. Where that is present, everything is present. The person who possesses it faces nothing beyond his reach, since everything else is acquired through labor, and it is of no consequence whether it has yet been acquired or not.”^[2]

– Meir Shely (1893-1983)

These two descriptions fix the spirit of the Lithuanian yeshiva as it stood more than a century ago. But ask a yeshiva student today, and he will tell you that the hunger for the Ketsot ha-Hoshen – “Ketsoys” or “Ketseys” in Lithuanian-yeshiva pronunciation – has not abated, save for the fact that present-day students are no longer required to copy the book by hand, and copies circulate in abundance. But “why speak of others,” as the Simple Son asks in the Haggadah. Last Shabbat I found myself opening the Ketsot and paging through old notebooks from my yeshiva years – something I had not done in more than twenty years. I returned in my mind to the hours we spent wrestling with the lamdanut arguments of the Ketsot and the Netivot alongside the other commentators, and felt a sharp longing for an experience I have not had since. What accounts for the Ketsot’s hold? What historical and cultural situation produced it? What does it contain that has absorbed thousands of Torah students since it was first printed in Lvov some two hundred and thirty years ago?

It is this question that Rabbi Dr. Noam Samet sets out to answer in his newly-published book, New Heavens: The Ketsot ha-Hoshen and the Rise of Lamdanut.^[3] Samet is a rare combination of research scholar and rosh yeshiva, a pairing that serves him exceptionally well in the analysis of the Ketsot’s lamdanut character. Throughout the book his deep investment in the Ketsot’s teachings is evident – a product of serious yeshiva study – alongside the scholarly discipline to organize and properly conceptualize both the novelty of the Ketsot’s work and the intensity of engagement it has drawn from successive generations of students. He addresses this openly in explaining his chosen appellations for his subject: “Choosing the family name or an acronym-based designation (such as ‘Ra’al’ or ‘Heller’) immediately situates the writing in a somewhat distancing register, one I feel is inappropriate to my relationship with the material. I shall therefore permit myself, with the reader’s indulgence, to employ various designations freely – Ra’al, ‘baal Ketsot ha-Hoshen,’ or ‘the Ketsot’ – in the hope that the learned reader will understand that in all cases the reference is to R. Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller and his work Ketsot ha-Hoshen…”^[4] For the same reason, I shall follow suit in the review below.

R. Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller (1745-1812) was born and raised in Galicia. He served in the rabbinate of the small community of Rozhnyatov before moving to Stryi. In the year of that move, 1788, the first part of Ketsot ha-Hoshen was printed, accompanied by the Kuntres ha-Sefeikot composed by his elder brother R. Yehuda, later rabbi of Sighet. The second part appeared in 1796. Before going to press the book underwent extensive revision, with numerous passages excised for two principal reasons. First, upon discovering that R. Yonatan Eybeschütz had anticipated him in the Urim ve-Tummim, Heller deleted his own parallel formulations to avoid redundancy. Second, his brother R. Yehuda, who served as his editor, removed passages too heavily marked by the methods of pilpul and thus perhaps not qualifying as davar emet – a true statement. The accumulation of these revisions produced a curious phenomenon: a large proportion of the internal cross-references in the earliest editions are incorrect, reflecting the deletion of entire sections and the consequent displacement of section numbers.

According to Samet, these two editorial interventions together trace the intellectual coordinates within which the work positions itself. On one hand, the Ketsot regards itself as belonging to the nosei kelim literature of the Shulhan Arukh and thus as a natural successor to the Urim ve-Tummim. On the other hand, the removal of pilpul passages registers a methodological tension – between pilpul and halakhic ruling – that runs beneath the surface of the book.

A dedicated chapter in Samet’s study is devoted to the Ketsot’s celebrated introduction. “R. Aryeh Leib did us a service,” Samet writes, “by attaching to his work a searching introduction – a brief theological composition treating the hermeneutical tension, and in particular the gap between man’s finite capacity and the infinite divine Torah,”^[5] The introduction centers on a passage from the Zohar according to which, when a person originates a hiddush in Torah, that word of innovation ascends before God, who kisses it, and the one who originated it becomes a partner in the act of Creation. These words elevate the creative act of Torah scholarship despite the tension between innovation and received tradition. The Ketsot proceeds, drawing on rabbinic teaching, to show that the Torah scholar does not merely transmit tradition but acts creatively within it – “and this is the covenant and the wondrous love that He gave us the Oral Torah as an outright gift, and ‘from the wilderness, a gift’ – in accordance with the rulings of the sages.” This wondrous love finds abundant expression in the Ketsot itself, through repeated registers of pleasure and satisfaction, particularly when the author notes that his reasoning coincides with a position of the Rishonim.

The Ketsot adds a further observation: God’s Creation is perfect; human beings are limited and deficient, and their engagement with divine truth is, from an absolute standpoint, error. Yet it is precisely this “error” that is accepted before God, and that even sustains Creation at every moment – and this is what is new in the descent of the Torah to human beings. Samet reads in these words a polemic against the Haskalah critique then being directed at pilpul and hiddush for their supposed falsity. But a competing tendency was also at work within the beit midrash itself – one that placed the recovery of original truth at the top of its agenda and admitted no other pursuit. This was the approach of the Vilna Gaon, as described by his disciple R. Hayyim of Volozhin: the Gaon worked to strip away corruptions and recover “original” truth through philological and critical methods. Samet connects the Brisker school to this same tendency, with its use of abstract conceptual analysis to locate the foundational source of a law. In this view, the quality of a hiddush is expressed not in its formal elegance but in its clarity and internal truth. The Ketsot took the opposing position: hiddush is a distinctive power and a central purpose of Torah study. This does not license falsity or remove all constraints – the indispensable condition for legitimate Torah innovation is mastery of the Torah’s proper methods. The scholar who recognizes that his innovations continue, rather than sever, the interpretive tradition of the Rishonim is the one whose Torah qualifies as truth.

Certain sections of the Ketsot have won particular standing in the batei midrash and are studied and cited repeatedly – it is not unusual to hear scholars say, “this is the Ketsots in lamed-dalet” or “the well-known Ketsot in resh-mem-alef.” In most sections the Ketsot follows the interpretive path of the nosei kelim without distinctive departure; but the sections that secured the book’s authority in the batei midrash are those in which he broke from his predecessors and proposed new insights and conceptualizations that opened fresh avenues of halakhic thought. The author devotes one chapter to the Ketsot’s treatment of the laws of testimony (hilkhot edut) and another to five examples drawn from different areas. To avoid leaving this review guilty of bittul Torah, I will select one of the shorter and more accessible examples from the book, through which some of the aspects the author wishes to illuminate can be seen at work.

In Bava Batra 149a, the Talmud recounts the case of Issur the proselyte, who transferred his assets to his son – who does not inherit him under halakha, owing to Issur’s conversion – by means of an odita, that is, a declaration of acknowledgment (hoda’a). The Rishonim debated the legal character of this mode of acquisition at length. The Ketsot addresses it in sections 40 and 194, and takes the position that odita is a fully independent mode of acquisition operating on the same footing as any other: “It is a complete act of acquisition, in no way inferior to any other mode of acquisition, whether for monetary matters or for ritual prohibitions” (194:4). The acquisition takes effect when a person declares before witnesses that a certain object belongs not to him but to another – the intended transferee. That declaration itself transfers the object, even if both parties know that the admission does not correspond to fact. The Ketsot’s engagement with this mode of acquisition grows out of a discussion of transfer of ownership to a gentile – for example, the sale of a firstborn animal (bekhor) to exempt it from the relevant sanctity, or the sale of hametz. Under halakha, a gentile cannot acquire through all the modes available to a Jew; he cannot, for instance, acquire movables (metaltelin) through the payment of money alone. Some proposed kinyan agav (acquisition incidental to real property), but the Ketsot was not satisfied that this mode applies to a gentile – nor does every seller possess land, and meshikha (formal pulling) is impractical for large quantities of hametz. His proposed solution was kinyan odita, but the mechanics of this mode had not been adequately worked out by the Aharonim; some had in fact restricted it to deathbed declarations (shekiv mera), or confined it to monetary matters and excluded ritual prohibitions – making it very difficult to press into service for hametz sales. This practical problem drove the Ketsot to undertake a lamdanut analysis aimed at clarifying and sharpening the mechanisms through which the acquisition operates.

The analytical discussion of those mechanics is found in section 40. Its foundation is the sugya of Ketubot 101b, concerning one who says to his fellow “I am indebted to you for a maneh.” In R. Yohanan’s ruling – which was accepted as normative – that statement binds him. Rashi and Tosafot understood the case to involve a written document, which they took to be the source of the obligation. The Rif and Maimonides, however, held that the admission itself creates the obligation. The Ketsot explains that kinyan odita is operative here and functions even for movables and in the absence of a written document. In this he also resolves a contradiction in the Shulhan Arukh that I will not pursue here; what matters is that the nosei kelim who addressed the Shulhan Arukh’s ruling kept their discussion within the sugya at hand, while the Ketsot alone saw fit to move outward to the sugya of odita and establish its halakhic principles from the ground up. The principle he extracts is that odita operates specifically through having witnesses attest to a declaration of prior obligation – not through a present-tense act of transfer. A declaration formulated in those terms is itself the act of acquisition. From this he draws a further ruling: kinyan odita requires witnesses; an admission made privately, or even before witnesses without the declarant’s having said to them “atem edai” – “you are my witnesses” – produces no acquisition. This holds despite the general principle that “la ivre sahade ela le-shakkarei” – witnesses exist only for the dishonest – meaning that where there is no suspicion of falsehood, witnesses are ordinarily unnecessary. That principle governs modes of acquisition in which witnesses serve only to document a transaction that has already occurred independently; in kinyan odita, by contrast, the presence of witnesses is constitutive of the transaction itself.

The discussion then turns to the Ketsot’s standing relative to the Rishonim and the pilpul tradition. The Ketsot presents his innovation as a resolution of a difficulty raised by the Tosafists in Bava Metsia 46a: why money cannot be transferred by odita. His answer is the absence of witnesses. R. Yaakov of Lisa, author of the Netivot ha-Mishpat, objects sharply: if Tosafot themselves did not resolve the difficulty in this way, by what right does the Ketsot depart from them? The Ketsot responds in his Meshovev Netivot, holding his ground: in kinyan odita, “as long as one has not said ‘atem edai’ before witnesses, there is no odita here, and if there is no odita there is no acquisition.” He further supports his position with a proof from Ramban, then returns to Tosafot. Committed as he is to the literature of the Rishonim, he insists that his position does not necessarily contradict Tosafot: the reason Tosafot did not themselves answer that witnesses were absent is that the case involves a threshing floor – a place where people are routinely present – but as regards his underlying account of the odita mechanism, Tosafot would, he maintains, concur.

As Samet summarizes, the Ketsot ruled by independent reasoning (sevara) that kinyan odita operates only before witnesses, and was prepared to legislate accordingly even against the surface implication of Tosafot’s words. The Netivot’s objection exposes the substantive disagreement between them over the role of reasoned argument and the degree of independence the lamdan may exercise against the rulings of the Rishonim. The Ketsot is prepared to follow sevara even when doing so forces strained readings of earlier authorities. The lamdanut sequence illustrates a dense interplay of practical necessity and conceptual ambition: the need to solve the hametz sale problem drives the Ketsot to define and conceptualize odita as a fully independent mode of acquisition, reconstructing that category through a series of earlier sources that he rereads and renegotiates in lamdanut terms.

This is a brief and compressed sampling of the work the author unfolds in a substantial book. My review has concentrated on the beit-midrash dimensions, but the book also engages the historical and legal context in which Heller operated – the dissolution of Jewish communal self-governance and the transfer of juridical authority to the state – and a dedicated chapter treats “Naturalism, Nominalism, and Lamdanut,” examining legal theories that may have shaped the development of study methods within the beit midrash. The book is not easy reading; it demands sustained intellectual effort. Yeshiva students and alumni will find a rigorous new account of a work they know well, while the book is structured to be accessible also to readers outside that world who want a serious introduction to the tradition of lamdanut. No copyeditor’s name appears on the book, and professional language editing would have broadened its reach. That aside, I owe the author an acknowledgment of genuine debt for returning me, if only for a few hours, to a part of my life I had set down a long time ago.

This article presents an English translation of a Hebrew review published by Moshe Shochat at his blog, Sefarim ve-Kitvei Yad, which originally appeared May 20, 2026, and available here.

1. Ben-Zion Dinur, “Two Years at the Telz Yeshiva,” in Immanuel Etkes and Shlomo Tikochinski, eds., Yeshivot Lita: Pirkei Zikhronot (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2004), 250-251 (Hebrew). ↑
2. Meir Shely, “Shards of Telz,” in Immanuel Etkes and Shlomo Tikochinski, eds., Yeshivot Lita: Pirkei Zikhronot (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2004), 266 (Hebrew). ↑
3. Noam Samet, New Heavens: The Ketsot ha-Hoshen and the Rise of Lamdanut (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2026; Hebrew). ↑
4. Ibid., 17n9. ↑
5. Ibid., 121. ↑

Breaching the Walls of History

By Dan Rabinowitz

This essay first appeared in the Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2026) and is republished here. Its postscript appeared in the magazine’s Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Last December, on the eighth day of Hanukkah, the American haredi newspaper of record Yated Ne’eman published a long, impassioned article titled “Ufortzu Chomos Migdolai Vetimu Kol Hashmanim,” by Rabbi Michoel Sorotzkin. The Hebrew title is from the fifth stanza of the famous Hanukkah standard Maoz tzur, which many of us never get to: “They breached the walls of my towers and defiled all the oils.” That is to say, the Greeks (and their Hellenized Jewish allies) broke through the defenses of the holy Temple in Jerusalem, leaving, seemingly, all its oils polluted and unusable. One might have expected that such a headline would announce a discussion of, say, the closure of haredi yeshiva day schools in New York City, or the Israeli government’s attempts to draft haredim into the military, or, perhaps, the rampant antisemitism threatening European Jewry.

But Sorotzkin’s article addressed none of these very real challenges to haredi life. The breach he identified, the defilement requiring an elaborate polemic couched in apocalyptic language, was a brief mention I had made of the Brisker Rov’s visit to a library in Vilna, in an article I published in these pages last summer (“Golden Ledgers,” Summer 2025, and republished on the Seforim blog).

The Strashun Library of Vilna was the first Jewish public library; it admitted both male and female patrons and included secular as well as religious books (sifrei kodesh). The historical question at issue itself is trivial—in fact it isn’t really a question. Rabbi Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik, who was commonly known as Reb Velvel or the Brisker Rov, visited the Strashun Library with at least one, but almost certainly two, of his sons on October 1, 1940, and they checked out the books to read in its famous reading room that the library ledger lists them as checking out.

This is demonstrable beyond any remotely reasonable historical doubt. The interesting question is: Why was it so important to Sorotzkin, a prominent member of the haredi world, to tie himself up in speculative knots denying it not once but twice in one of that world’s leading newspapers? Before answering that question, I should explain how I came to write an article that breached the walls and defiled the oils, when what I was trying to do (if you’ll allow me to mix biblical metaphors) was pluck a brand from the fire.

I go to Vilna at least three times a year. Sometimes I stay at a hotel at the epicenter of the three main streets that formed the Jewish district; other times I stay near German Street where Mattityahu Strashun once lived. My mornings begin with a thirty-minute walk to Lithuania’s National Library. The route passes through streets that once hummed with Yiddish, past buildings that housed yeshivas and Jewish publishers, through spaces that sustained centuries of Jewish intellectual life before the Nazis destroyed it. My afternoons are spent walking those streets comparing what I’ve found in the archives against what I expected to find, evenings reviewing notes and planning the next day’s research. What I’m trying to do is reconstruct the ordinary moments that illuminate the extraordinary history of Jewish Vilna.

During these walks, I often run into tour groups gathered at one of the few plaques marking the place of Jews in the city’s history. Usually, it’s the plaque noting the line of demarcation where the Nazis established the Vilna Ghetto. This is the tours’ inevitable focus: the annihilation of the Jews. What preceded the destruction—the institutions of learning and publishing, the literary circles and research institutes, the daily life that made Vilna the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”—receives far less attention. There used to be a sign marking where the Great Synagogue complex, the architectural and spiritual center of Jewish Vilna for centuries, stood. That sign is gone now. What remains are markers of death and destruction; all the complexity of Jewish intellectual life before World War II gets compressed into a prelude to catastrophe.

Those of us who study prewar Jewish culture are trying, each in our own way, to reconstruct and understand the life that preceded the catastrophe. That’s how I came to write a book on the Strashun Library several years ago. It’s why I continue to research its workings and the vibrant world of which it and its patrons, including great rabbinic leaders like Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik and ordinary Jewish readers, were a part.

The Strashun Library opened in 1902 as the first Jewish public library, built from Mattityahu Strashun’s private collection of rare books and manuscripts. From its opening, it became central to Vilna’s intellectual ecosystem. Its reading rooms welcomed everyone: rabbis and historians, secular scholars and traditional students, men and women, those seeking Yiddish literature and those researching Jewish law. By the time it was shuttered in 1940, it held roughly fifty thousand volumes and served a public that spanned the full spectrum of Jewish life.

When I discovered the library’s checkout ledgers in the National Library of Lithuania archives in 2024, I realized that their spare entries allowed us to reconstruct the day-to-day life of the library: who used it, which books they read, and how it served different strata of Jewish society.

As the first step in a project to digitize and make the ledgers publicly available to other researchers, I spent four very full days scanning thousands of pages, each holding about fifty handwritten entries. As I worked, I browsed the names and tried to quickly register patterns in the data. One of the names that jumped out at me was “Yitzchok Soloveitchik,” who requested a collection of I. L. Peretz’s Hasidic stories, Khasidish. Could this be Rabbi Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik, the son of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, who founded the famous Brisker approach to talmudic study?

Yitzhak Ze’ev inherited and extended his father’s analytic method and later became one of the most uncompromising voices in Israeli haredi leadership, where he was known as the Brisker Rov. I knew that he and his family had been in Vilna at the time, because I’d found him listed among prominent rabbis in Vaad ha-yeshivos refugee housing records that show, yeshiva by yeshiva, where students, teachers, and refugees were staying. Nonetheless, it could have been another Yitzchok Soloveitchik. Then I looked more carefully at the same ledger page and saw another entry: a Raphael Soloveitchik had requested Maimonides’s Iggeret ha-shemad just a few lines above Yitzchok’s request for Peretz. Now it was clear. The Brisker Rov had a son named Raphael, and although Peretz’s short stories was a surprising choice for his father, the choice of Maimonides’s famous letter on persecution by the scion of a family fleeing persecution and famously devoted to Maimonides made perfect sense.

In short, the ledger documented that the Soloveitchiks had used the library just weeks before the Soviets would permanently close it, which is what I wrote, in passing, in my article. All that I thought I had documented in doing so was that the library served the rabbinic elite alongside ordinary Jews of all kinds, who were reading everything from talmudic commentaries to Yiddish translations of Tolstoy. But merely documenting a prewar Jewish world that was different than is generally imagined in haredi publications like Yated turned out to be an act of desecration.

Rabbi Sorotzkin’s first attack began by quoting the offending lines—or part of them at any rate—from my article: “On the afternoon of October 1, 1940, Reb Velvel came to the Strashun Library with his teenage son . . . His father’s reading for the day was more surprising: I. L. Peretz’s short stories about Hasidim.” (Sorotzkin’s ellipses will turn out to be doing a lot of work here.)

“With this passage,” Sorotzkin wrote, “Mr. Dan Rabinowitz does more than recount an archival curiosity. He stages a tableau.” He went on:

The Brisker Rov, Rav Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik, appears before us not as generations of talmidim knew him, but as a character in a modern morality play: seated calmly in the Strashun Library of Vilna, immersed in the ironic fiction of I. L. Peretz, surrounded by secular readers, students, men and women alike.

The effect is unmistakable. The reader is invited to marvel at the distance between the “real” man and the image preserved by Torah memory. Hagiography, we are told implicitly, has concealed a richer, more complex inner life—one now revealed by the cold honesty of a library ledger.

It is an elegant narrative. It is also an edifice built on sand. What we encounter here is not historical reconstruction, but a breach—peritzas geder—in the most basic disciplines of historical inference. And once the wall is breached, all the oil may be rendered impure.

Beyond the rhetoric of righteous indignation, Sorotzkin’s argument was simple: The Brisker Rov would never have entered a “mixed, open, modern” library because his “entire being recoiled from even the faintest rei’ach [whiff] of ideological modernity.” Therefore, someone else named Yitzchok Soloveitchik must have. And here Sorotzkin had a candidate:

The Vilna region was saturated with Soloveitchiks. . . . Among them appears a Yitzchok Soloveitchik, a timber merchant, a vald-socher [from Švenčionys]—precisely the kind of educated townsman who would frequent the Strashun Library and read Peretz.

There are just three problems with this line of argument—actually there are more than that, but let’s restrict ourselves to three for the moment:

a. The same ledgers that documented the visit of a “Yitzchok Soloveitchik” also recorded several visits by Rav Pinchas Hirschprung, who would later serve as chief rabbi of Montreal. Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, the preeminent Torah authority in Vilna, held special borrowing privileges at the library, and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, the renowned Chafetz Chaim, visited and signed the library’s VIP “Golden Book.” If such colleagues could visit the library, can Sorotzkin really be so certain that the Brisker Rov’s “entire being” would have prevented him from doing so?

b. Švenčionys is over eighty kilometers from Vilna, and we have no evidence this timber merchant traveled to Vilna in October 1940. Not to speak of the fact that neither Rabbi Sorotzkin nor I know anything about the reading habits of Jewish timber merchants in the area.

c. The ledger records two Soloveitchiks visiting the library on October 1, 1940. Are we to suppose that this other Yitzchok Soloveitchik also had a son named Raphael, who was also a deep Maimonidean?

This last problem—call it the “Zvei Soloveitchiks problem”—returns us to Rabbi Sorotzkin’s creative use of ellipses. When he quoted my offending lines about Reb Velvel, he elided Raphael—whom I mentioned in those sentences—right out of the picture and never acknowledged that he appeared in the ledger a few lines above his father.

Actually, unlike Sorotzkin’s conjectural Peretz-reading ironist timber merchant, the Brisker Rov had good reason to visit the Strashun Library. He was in the midst of a life-and-death halakhic controversy with his colleague Rav Aharon Kotler about whether refugees should try to flee to Eretz Yisrael or America. To support his position that they should not go to America because of the spiritual danger, the Brisker Rov turned to a passage he remembered from Maimonides’s Iggeret ha-shemad, which he wanted to quote verbatim.

Soloveitchik family memory confirms this. In a footnote to Shiurei Rabbeinu Meir ha-Levi, a collection of the Brisker Rov’s son, he is quoted as saying:

I recall that during the war years, Maran [the Brisker Rov] sought a copy of the letters from the Rambam, because he wanted to study Iggeret he-shemad, in which the Rambam has a lengthy discussion to explain the fundamental idea that a person acclimates to his surroundings and it is prohibited to live in a place which doesn’t allow one to fulfill the mitzvot properly. . . . Initially, however, he was unable to find a copy, and, in the end, he located one in the Strashun Library in Vilna. According to the library’s rules, one was not permitted to remove books from the building. And therefore his son R. Chaim copied it word for word for him.

The library ledger records Raphael as the borrower of Iggeret ha-shemad while the family testimony remembers Chaim as the copyist. Perhaps both brothers participated, or Raphael handled the checkout while Chaim copied the passage. Or perhaps the family misremembered which brother accompanied his father to the library. At any rate, there were at least two, and quite possibly three, Soloveitchiks at the Strashun Library on that day. And they were there precisely because the Brisker Rov took his obligations as a halakhic scholar and leader of Torah Jewry so seriously.

When I wrote to Yated Ne’eman to explain all this, the editors—to their credit—published my letter, but they did so alongside a reply from the unflappable Rabbi Sorotzkin. Sorotzkin not only blithely failed to acknowledge his errors of omission and commission but went on to a new and truly gobsmacking theory, titling his response “Veha’emes Vehashalom Ehavu” (Love truth and peace).

The entry for a “Yitzchok Soloveitchik” must, he now admits, refer to one of the famous Soloveitchiks rather than a random timber merchant from Švenčionys. Still, it couldn’t possibly be the Brisker Rov. So, who was it? Here I must quote Rabbi Sorotzkin at length to convey just how far he is willing to go to save Reb Velvel from having gone to a public library:

The presence of a ledger entry bearing the name “Yitzchok Soloveitchik” is taken to indicate the Brisker Rov himself, seated in the reading hall and borrowing secular literature. Yet there exists a far more coherent and internally consistent explanation, one that aligns with the testimony, the ledger itself, the halachic framework governing names and conduct, and the lived reality of the Brisker household.

According to this reading, it was the Brisker Rov’s son, Rav Chaim who entered the Strashun Library as the responsible emissary. Anyone familiar with the family dynamic knows that his keen intelligence, composure, and practical capability marked him as the natural choice for such a mission. His younger brother, Rav Rafael, accompanied him and formally requested the Iggeres HaShemad, which then had to be copied in full—a task of approximately 3,500 words, requiring a prolonged stay. Such an extended presence in a public institution would naturally invite scrutiny. To avoid unnecessary attention, it would have been prudent, even expected, to request an additional book, a routine borrowing that raised no eyebrows and normalized the time spent at the table.

Here the ledger entries themselves become illuminating rather than sensational. Immediately preceding the Soloveitchik entry, two patrons are recorded borrowing works by I. L. Peretz. . . . When Rav Chaim was offered titles by the same author, the specific work recorded — Chassidish — was accepted not as an ideological choice but as a convenient placeholder, a book taken to cover the duration required for copying the Iggeres. . . .

The use of the name “Yitzchok” in the ledger is likewise neither mysterious nor incriminating. Rav Chaim could not identify himself by his own well-known name without drawing attention, particularly given that the sefer of his grandfather, Rabbeinu Chaim Halevi, was already catalogued in that very library. Nor could he identify himself by his father’s full name. Halacha is explicit that one may not refer to one’s father by name, even after death, without alteration. . . . The use of the shortened form “Yitzchok” . . . would have satisfied both the halachic requirement and the practical need for discretion, without uttering an outright falsehood.

It is difficult to imagine anyone believing that a scholarly household in the midst of the “lived reality” of a desperate flight to safety from both the Soviets and the Nazis would strategize over the impossible “mission” of going to a library frequented by other pious Jews to copy a passage from Maimonides. And further, to think that they needed an elaborate cover story involving false names and phony book checkouts so that the Jewish librarians did not penetrate their cover (and what?—inform Rav Kotler about the killer prooftext from Maimonides?). The tradition has a term for such groundless theorizing, pilpul shel hevel, and it is a hallmark of the Brisker tradition to oppose it.

Sorotzkin closes his response on an extraordinary—and, one presumes, unconscious—note of chutzpah. “When suggestive narratives arise from thin evidentiary reeds,” he writes, “methodological restraint becomes not a courtesy but an obligation.” But perhaps I am being unfair, as George Orwell once remarked, “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”

Sorotzkin’s initial response characterized my work as “peritzas geder,” a breach of protective walls. But what did he think needed to be protected? Not the Brisker Rov’s actual stature or commitment. That he wanted to verify the exact wording of Maimonides’s Iggeret ha-shemad from the richest collection of sifrei kodesh in Eastern Europe to guide his thinking on the refugee crisis illuminates the rigor of his approach to unprecedented questions. What Sorotzkin needed to protect was rather a nostalgic fantasy: one in which the great sages (gedolim) of that generation never entered mixed public spaces, relied on secular institutions, or read fiction. But the infrastructure of Jewish life in places like Vilna was not neatly divided into “Torah” and “secular” categories, and gedolim and their students checked out books from the Strashun Library alongside maskilim, socialists, and ordinary Jews looking for something to read.

I go back to Vilna regularly to identify, amid the destruction and absence, what can be found to resurrect, contextualize, and enrich our understanding of the astounding Jewish culture of prewar Vilna. The Jews of this city—rabbis and students, traditionalists and modernists, Hebraists and Yiddishists—created institutions, filled libraries, published journals, founded schools and research institutes, and argued about everything.

The Brisker Rov spent an afternoon in the Strashun Library in October 1940 with his sons to obtain a text he desperately needed. While his sons diligently copied Maimonides’s text, he requested Peretz’s collection of Hasidic stories. I don’t know why and, of course, it doesn’t matter—only Sorotzkin and his more credulous readers would think that it does. But there is a plausible answer. It turns out that among Peretz’s Hasidic tales is the story “Between Two Mountains,” in which a fiercely strict and intellectual rosh yeshiva called “the Brisker Rov” is taught a lesson in humanism by a former student who has become a Hasidic rebbe. Might not the Brisker Rov have been simply curious to read about his fictional counterpart?

The Holocaust destroyed the Strashun Library and most of the Jewish world of which it was a part. The Soviets shuttered its reading room; the Nazis looted its collections; after the war, the building was destroyed. Yet, the few surviving Strashun Library ledgers reveal precious little moments in the lost history of Jewish intellectual life in Vilna. The final volume documents the last gasp of Eastern European Jewry, not only the local Jewish inhabitants but also the thousands of refugees like the Soloveitchiks who, fleeing Hitler and Stalin, briefly sought safety in Vilna.

It seems to me that what we, their descendants, owe them is to see their lives, at least in glimpses, as they were, even if it is through the entries of a humble library ledger. That is a history worth recovering, even when—especially when—it complicates what we thought we knew. Such complication is not desecration; on the contrary, it honors their memories.

Postscript

After writing this response to Rabbi Sorotzkin’s pilpul shel hagiografia, I continued to return to the 1940 ledger, which hasn’t been digitized yet. As I described above, Sorotzkin’s new, and equally implausible, claim was that Chaim Soloveitchik used his father’s name rather than his own, to avoid the commotion of being recognized as the grandson and namesake of the author of one of the library’s own seforim, and to escape the notice of the authorities. In fact, it turns out Chaim checked out books under his own name at least five times in September 1940.

The first entry was on September 6, 1940, weeks before his father and Rafael appear in the ledger together. He checked out the Iggeret ha-shemad twice, on September 12 and September 14. These are, undoubtedly, the visits to transcribe Maimonides’s text, as described in the family testimony recorded in Shiurei Rabbenu Meir HaLevi. Rafael’s borrowing of the same text on October 1, when he visited the library with his father, was probably to check his brother’s transcription against the source.

That September, Chaim also read the tenth-century grammarian Dunash ben Labrat, the letters of Sa’adia Gaon and Ramban, the Abudraham’s commentary on the siddur, Samuel David Luzzatto’s essays collected in Bet ha-otzar, and a run of midrashic works, several in modern critical editions such as those of Solomon Buber. This is not the reading of a man sent on an undercover mission to copy one text. It is, rather, the reading of a wide, curious, and learned mind, and the ledger records it without comment or apology.

Of course, this isn’t surprising. As I wrote above, many well-known rabbinic figures used the library without incident. What is surprising is the pseudo-pious lengths to which Sorotzkin went to deny that the Brisker Rov and his sons simply used the Strashun Library, a fact that the family itself had no qualms about memorializing. What the ledgers allow us to do is to see, in a reader’s own name and hand, what he read in one of the great libraries of his world.

The Strashun Library Ledger Project, which is digitizing and making the ledgers publicly available, is a collaboration between the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, the e-Lijah Lab at the University of Haifa, Yale University’s Jewish Studies Department and Library, the Fortunoff Video Archive, and Litvak SIG.

Book Week 2026 & Year in Review: Hebrew Publishing is Alive and Well

By: Eliezer Brodt

The following is a recap of the year in Hebrew Jewish publishing for 2026, highlighting unique and noteworthy titles while also marking the annual Book Week sales. As the list makes clear, despite the ongoing conflict and security challenges in Israel, Hebrew Jewish publishing has continued with remarkable vitality and productivity. This is a testament to the enduring commitment of authors, scholars, and publishers to the world of Jewish books and ideas. Among the highlights are critical academic editions of Rishonim from manuscript, alongside numerous other unique and important titles across a wide range of fields, including History, Piyut, and Halacha.

Each year, around Shavuos, begins Shavua HaSefer—Book Week—a ten-day celebration of books and publishing. Many publishers extend their sales for the entire month. Shavua HaSefer takes place across the country in malls, bookstores, and special venues set up exclusively for these sales. Some locations focus primarily on frum seforim, while others feature a wide range of general and secular publishers. Many publishers time the release of new titles specifically for this occasion.

As in previous years, my list may occasionally include an older title I recently discovered. Please note: I do not aim to present an exhaustive list of all new releases. I try to highlight works that I believe will be of broad interest.

For last year’s list, [see  here].

As this list shows Seforim & Books are still being published in full force.

If you’d like to get a taste of what Book Week is about, listen to this episode of my podcast Musings of a Book Collector, recorded back in 2023.

To receive PDFs of sale catalogs from Machon Yerushalayim and Ahavat Shalom, feel free to email me at: Eliezerbrodt@gmail.com.

Important: A book’s inclusion on the list does not necessarily mean it is currently on sale.

The second section below based on subjects, features books published over the past year on a wide range of topics. These are not necessarily part of Book Week sales and may be harder to find— but they are still worth noting.

Again, this is not a comprehensive list, nor is it intended to be.

The goal of these lists is threefold:

1. To help Seforim Blog readers discover significant recent publications in the world of seforim and Jewish scholarship.
2. To assist interested readers in purchasing these books. As in previous years, I am offering a book purchasing service (for a small fee), including assistance in locating current or past titles. For more information, email me at: Eliezerbrodt@gmail.com.
3. Part of the proceeds from this service will go toward supporting the ongoing efforts of the Seforim Blog.

English

Daniel Sperber, Indo-Judaic Parallels, Notes on Similar Motifs in Judaism and Hinduism, 192 pp.

R’ Bezalel Naor, The Project of Hasidism

R’ Sklar, Rav Kook’s Guide for Today’s Perplexed

R’ Ahron Notis, The Great Shiurim Debate, The History the Archaeology and the Lomdus

R’ Reit, Ushchat’tem Bazeh, The Chullin & Shechita Companion

Rabbi Rafael Dembovsky, Between Torah and Derech Eretz

Rabbi Yehoshua Kaganoff, Is Alternative Healing Kosher?