Saul Lieberman and his Ketubah, Driving on Shabbat, an Unusual Marriage Practice, Girls born on Friday, and More

Marc B. Shapiro

For a long time, I have had an interest in Saul Lieberman. It has been almost twenty years since my book Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox appeared.[1] I have also dealt with Lieberman in many Seforim Blog posts. A few years ago, I did a series of eighteen classes on Lieberman on Torah in Motion. You can watch the classes on Youtube here or listen to the podcasts here. A letter from Lieberman that has recently come into my hands allows me to turn to Lieberman again. Yet before doing so, I must note at the same time that I was researching, writing, and teaching about Lieberman, Aviad Hacohen also published a number of works on Lieberman. His latest is a lengthy article on Lieberman and the Lithuanian Torah world that appeared in the recently published Rabbi David Golinkin Jubilee volume titled Shir ha-Ma’alot Le-David. It can be read here. In his article, Hacohen includes this nice photograph of Lieberman speaking with R. Aharon Lichtenstein.

We can also look forward to Hacohen’s forthcoming volume of Lieberman’s letters which will be vital for any future scholarship on Lieberman.

While Lieberman was always careful not to do anything that would be at odds with the Orthodox rabbis, there was one exception to this, and that was his ketubah. In order to help solve the Agunah problem, Lieberman proposed including in the ketubah a clause that the husband and wife authorize the beit din to award compensation if either party refuses to come to the beit din to halakhically end the marriage. For those married under Conservative auspices, the beit din mentioned in the ketubah would be the newly formed beit din of the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Theological Seminary.[2]

A lengthy letter from Lieberman to R. Isaac Herzog, dated November 22, 1954, was recently placed at auction, available here. I thank a student who purchased the letter and sent it to me, enabling me to see page 4 which is missing from the auction site. After this post appears, I will present the letter to a suitable archive for safekeeping. This letter is of great significance, as Lieberman explains what motivated him to develop his addition to the traditional ketubah. We are also given insight into how he viewed the Orthodox and Conservative rabbis. Those who wish can see the complete letter in one PDF here.

In the letter, Lieberman begins by saying that he had not written to R. Herzog—who was a very close friend[3]—because he did not want to create difficulties for R. Herzog by bringing him into the controversy swirling around his proposed ketubah. He explains that certain non-Orthodox rabbis had begun to perform marriages for women who were only divorced civilly. This led people to think that the obligation of a get was not a serious matter. Lieberman notes that in circumstances where the husband does not want to give a get, it is usually possible to convince him to do so. The problem is that these “menuvalim” demand so much money to issue the get, that the women are unable to pay this: ואין מי שיתבע את עלבון העלובות

Lieberman then turns to what in his time was a well-known agunah case. I do not wish to go into details but only mention that the woman involved was the famous Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, who after her experience became a critic of the Orthodox approach in Jewish marriage and divorce law. In Lawrence Grossman’s great new book, Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025, p. 204, he writes that Weiss-Rosmarin was “perhaps the first woman from an Orthodox background to publicly demand the wholesale revision of the system [of Jewish divorce law].” In Weiss-Rosmarin’s 1953 article, “Wanted: Equality for Jewish Women,”[4] and in her later article “The Agony of the Agunah,”[5] she called for batei din to assume the authority of issuing divorces instead of husbands. She further claimed that “Jewish law is male-made and inevitably the male prerogatives are protected at the expense of the rights of women. While Jewish law is chivalrous in certain areas, ‘chivalry’ is not enough for the modern woman.”[6] Because of her strong stand in the matter of agunah, Weiss-Rosmarin has even been called the “the first feminist Jew and the first Jewish feminist.”[7] You can read about her here.

Lieberman says that when he saw how the rabbis did not do anything to help Weiss-Rosmarin, that he came to the conclusion that he must do something. His answer to the agunah problem was his ketubah. If the beit din orders payments based on the ketubah, he believed that this would be upheld by the secular court. Lieberman states that originally he wanted the beit din that would be in charge of this to have: רבנים יראי שמים ובקיאים בדיני גיטין וקדושין. He even reveals that R. Abraham Price of Toronto agreed to serve on this beit din, which means that R. Price accepted the halakhic legitimacy of Lieberman’s ketubah. However, the Rabbinical Council of America threatened to put the Orthodox rabbis in herem if they joined Lieberman’s proposed beit din.[8] Lieberman adds that since the RCA did not allow for Orthodox rabbis to join this beit din, there was no longer any possibility that the beit din would be able to write gittin. Rather, its only role would be to compel the man who refused to give a get to do so. He tells R. Herzog that he reformulated the ketubah, so that any recognized beit din can compel the man to issue a divorce and also require monetary payments.

Lieberman adds that the Orthodox assertion that Conservative rabbis wish to involve themselve in matters of gittin is laughable. It is of interest how Lieberman distinguishes between Orthodox and Conservative rabbis, something that only comes across in the Hebrew words he uses for “rabbi”:

כל הצעקה של הרבנים שהרבייס הקונסרבטיביים רוצים להכנס לענייני גיטין היא מצחיקה

Lieberman continues that the Conservative rabbis have no need for the income they could get from doing gittin, and they can make more money from other things. They have not gotten involved in kashrut, which is less complicated than gittin and has much more money in it. Lieberman adds that the fact that the Conservative rabbis accepted his proposal is a very positive thing, since if any of them now perform a wedding before the woman has received a get, they will be expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly. All Conservative rabbis are therefore forced to explain to their communities that civil divorce is meaningless and the woman is still regarded as married.

Lieberman then tells about the “young rabbis” who were in an uproar about his proposal. By this he means the rabbis of the Rabbinical Council of America. He says that they were claiming that it is forbidden to alter any of the formulations used in the ketubah, and that this is based on the fact that it is also forbidden to alter the text of a get from what the Sages have decreed.[9] Lieberman notes that he did not pay them any mind, and was happy to let them show their ignorance in public. He adds that the RCA rabbis have now begun screaming that the beit din of the Conservative rabbis has permitted kohanim to marry divorced women and to drive to synagogue on Shabbat.[10] Lieberman says that this is completely false. To begin with, they do not have a beit din. What this apparently means is that the Conservative movement does not have a national beit din that could issue rulings for the movement. Lieberman adds that a number of Conservative rabbis, mostly his students, demanded that any rabbi who performs a wedding between a kohen and a divorced woman, or permits his congregants to drive on Shabbat, should be expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly. Yet at the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly this proposal was rejected.

Already in 1952 the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards permitted Conservative rabbis to perform weddings between kohanim and divorced women.[11] As for driving on Shabbat, the famous responsum that permitted driving to synagogue, and only to synagogue, on Shabbat, was authored by Rabbis Morris Adler, Jacob Agus, and Theodore Friedman. It was reprinted in Mordecai Waxman, ed., Tradition and Change: The Development of Conservative Judaism (New York, 1958). Here is part of the preface to the responsum from which you see background:

The responsum printed below is the collective effort of three men who prepared it for the approval of the Law Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly. It secured the support of a majority of the Law Committee and it was subsequently presented at a convention of the Rabbinical Assembly (1950). However, in conformity with the policy of the Assembly not to give approval to legal provisions which have not been unanimously approved by the Law Committee, it was not voted upon. It thus remains as the opinion of a group of men, but has no official status.[12]

Although the responsum did not have official status as a ruling of the Conservative Movement, because of the support it received on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards—the new name of the Law Committee beginning in 1948—it was regarded by the Conservative Movement as a halakhically acceptable option.[13] The way the Committee worked is that “a unanimous opinion is recorded as such and becomes binding upon every member of the Rabbinical Assembly. Where there is a difference of opinion, the opinion which dissents from the majority becomes a minority opinion, and the minority opinion also may be followed by the members of the Rabbinical Assembly.”[14]

In a 2023 article that appeared on the Rabbinical Assembly website here, it states that the responsum “was approved by the Law Committee,” which must mean “approved” as an acceptable option.

The halakhic position advocated by Adler, Agus, and Friedman is summed up in this paragraph from the responsum:

Refraining from the use of a motor vehicle is an important aid in the maintenance of the Sabbath spirit of repose. Such restraint aids, moreover, in keeping the members of the family together on the Sabbath. However, where a family resides beyond reasonable walking distance from the synagogue, the use of a motor vehicle for the purpose of synagogue attendance shall in no wise be construed as a violation of the Sabbath but, on the contrary, such attendance shall be deemed an expression of loyalty to our faith.[15]

Since we are dealing with a halakhic teshuvah, they also had to come up with a way to permit driving to synagogue that could be in line with halakhic sources. The way they did this was by asserting that driving a car is only a rabbinic prohibition. When it comes to the electricity that the car uses, that was not a difficult point to argue, but how could they assert that combustion of gasoline to produce power is also only a rabbinic prohibition? Their solution is to claim that burning is only a Torah-prohibited act when used for the purposes that the Sages recorded, such as cooking, heating, or lighting. “Burning for the sake of power was not included in this list” (p. 369). They also claim that any heat produced by the car’s combustion of gas is not intended or desired so it is a pesik reisha de-lo niha leh “which is permitted by the latest authorities” (p. 369). For good measure they add that the combustion is a melakhah she-einah tzerichah le-gufah according to the opinion of Tosafot, since the combustion is not for the purpose of burning but in order to cause the car to move.

After concluding that driving a car on Shabbat is only a rabbinic prohibition, they then claim that rabbinic prohibitions can be set aside when they prevent the fulfillment of a mitzvah, in this case the mitzvah being attendance at synagogue which is “indispensable to the preservation of the religious life of American Jewry.”[16] It is important to remember that the permission to drive on Shabbat was only for the purpose of attending synagogue. In 1961 Friedman clarified that the permission to drive on Shabbat was only intended to apply to the synagogue one normally attends, not to allow people to drive to a bar mitzvah at another synagogue. This outlook was affirmed in a statement adopted by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.[17]

It continues to amaze me that the majority of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, and no doubt the overwhelming majority of all Conservative rabbis, supported the Adler, Agus, and Friedman responsum. In the responsum it states: “To continue unmodified the traditional interdiction of riding on the Sabbath is tantamount to rendering attendance at the synagogue on the Sabbath physically impossible for an increasing number of our people.” This was always a foolish argument. In the 1950s there were plenty of Orthodox synagogues that had members who drove to synagogue on Shabbat. There were even Orthodox synagogues that left the parking lot open. But they never officially said that this was permissible. They just looked the other way, and many of the children of those who drove to synagogue became completely observant. In fact, over time, a number of those who drove to an Orthodox synagogue also became observant, precisely because they were never told that it was OK to drive on Shabbat and instead were given a religious goal—Shabbat observance—to strive for. This is the exact model today of Chabad synagogues.

In Rabbi Robert Gordis’ dissenting opinion from the majority of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, he wrote: “All experience teaches that the task of winning back the erring and the estranged, heartrendingly difficult as it is, is more often successfully achieved by traditional religion than by its non-traditional forms.”[18] Gordis also states: “To modify Jewish law in order to bring it into conformity with their [Sabbath violators’] way of life is tantamount to amending the Constitution of the United States so as to harmonize it with the viewpoint of an anarchist. . . . Had there been a large number of Elisha ben Abuyas or general Sabbath violators in their day, the Rabbis would not have consulted them as to how Sabbath observance should be conceived of.”[19]

Why couldn’t the Conservative movement simply ignore the fact that people in the synagogue had driven there on Shabbat instead of seeking to offer halakhic justification? Were they afraid that if congregants felt that the rabbi viewed them as sinning by driving to synagogue, that the congregants would be inclined to join a Reform temple where they wouldn’t be judged? Did they really think that people would stop coming to synagogue if they did not permit driving on Shabbat? The authors of the responsum were certainly aware that the people who drove to synagogue on Shabbat did not restrict themselves to only driving there, but they also drove throughout the Sabbath to wherever they wanted to go. So, what in the end did they think would be accomplished by this responsum? How did they not see that once the permission was granted, that even rabbis and cantors would avail themselves of it rather than moving within walking distance of their synagogues?[20] In 2003 Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, said that the decision to allow driving to the synagogue on Shabbat was a mistake,[21] but by this time, there were hardly any Conservative rabbis in the United States who would agree with him.[22]

Returning to Lieberman’s letter, he notes that “the rabbi from Boston,” by which he means R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, also attacked him—without mentioning Lieberman by name—regarding the proposed addition to the ketubah. This is interesting, as I am unaware of any public communication from the Rav in which he attacked Lieberman. However, in 1954 R. Emanuel Rackman, working “with the direction of” R. Soloveitchik, expressed opposition to the Lieberman Ketubah. Rackman would later claim that the Rav’s opposition was “mild” and that the Rav admitted that he would have been able to work out a mutually satisfactory version of the ketubah with Lieberman.[23] Also of note is that in 1959, R. Norman Lamm published a critique of the Lieberman Ketubah.[24] Knowing Lamm’s connection to R. Soloveitchik, it is hard to believe that he would have published this article without the Rav’s approval. It is noteworthy that at this point in the letter Lieberman also refers negatively to musmakhim of RIETS as רבייס.

Lieberman continues that he would never change a text established by the Sages, but there is no problem changing the ketubah’s language. He cites R. Simeon ben Zemah Duran that one is even allowed “to lie” in the ketubah (the quotation marks are found in the letter). The case of R. Duran is about a young woman who was not a virgin but they wrote “virgin” in the ketubah, and R. Duran says that there is no problem in doing this.[25][26]

Lieberman adds that the Rabbinical Council of America has an ally in their opposition to Lieberman’s ketubah, namely, Professor Mordechai Kaplan, who viewed Lieberman as more dangerous than all the Orthodox rabbis.

Lieberman concludes the main part of the letter that he is prepared to accept the ruling of a beit din in Israel. His condition is that the beit din be composed of R. Herzog, R. Isaac Zev Soloveitchik (the Brisker Rav), and a third rabbi that they would agree on. If they rule that his ketubah is forbidden, he will abandon it. Since the ketubah he prepared was for the Conservative movement, it mentioned that the parties have to come to the Conservative beit din. However, Lieberman says that one can insert the name of any beit din in the ketubah, “as longs as it is a beit din that does not accept bribery.”

The remainder of the letter contains comments on a Torah article of R. Herzog.

It is noteworthy that R. Herzog dealt with the Lieberman ketubah at a meeting of the Moetzet ha-Rabbanut ha-Rashit on March 10, 1955.[29]

In attendance at the meeting, representing the Rabbinical Council of America, were Rabbis David Hollander and Herschel Schacter. At the meeting, R. Herzog said that although Lieberman is a great Torah scholar, he is not a gadol ba-Torah that we are all obligated to listen to. He adds that he does not see Lieberman’s addition to the ketubah as halakhically problematic. However, he has strongly protested the notion that a Conservative beit din will have any involvement in this matter. In 1953 R. Herzog wrote to British Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie and mentioned that years before he had already suggested a proposal similar to that of Lieberman.

See also this 1953 letter to South Africa Chief Rabbi Louis I. Rabinowitz where he repeats what he told R. Brodie.

We see from both these letters that R. Herzog had no objection to Lieberman’s ketubah and even wondered if Lieberman’s proposal based on his own prior suggestion.[30]

Great Torah scholar that he was, the ability to stand up to voices on his right was not one of R. Herzog’s strengths. As such, it was not long before he was dragged into a strong condemnation of the Lieberman Ketubah. Here is how Amihai Radzyner sums up what happened:

It appears that Rabbi Herzog was not at all sure that the new clause in the ketubah posed a halakhic problem (unlike the Conservative rabbinical court issue) and therefore decided that the Rabbinate would discuss the matter further and consider issuing an official protest. Later, Rabbi Herzog formulated a relatively moderate objection, in which he expressed doubt regarding the halakhic claim that the new clause would inevitably lead to coerced (and thus invalid) divorce (גט מעושה). Herzog drafted a statement to this effect, which he sent to members of the Chief Rabbinate Council. The moderate nature of the statement did not please Rabbi Reuven Katz, who insisted that would “assist criminals, God forbid.” He demanded a stronger wording that would express solid opposition to this “serious matter.” His demands seem to have been heeded: the Rabbinate ultimately would issue a statement in which Rabbi Herzog would warn congregations in the U.S. of the grave danger posed by the Conservative ketubah, in accordance with the wishes of the American Orthodox leadership. This statement – an appeal to rabbis of the United States signed by Israel’s two Chief Rabbis – refers to the Conservative ketubah as the “defiant ketubah” (כתובה חוצפנית) and states that the amendment will not solve the problem of “chained women,” and also warns that the new language, in conjunction with the new rabbinical court, could lead to a rift within the Jewish people.[31]

Here is the statement of the Chief Rabbinate, which includes the attack on the Lieberman ketubah, that Radzyner refers to.

It would be great to see how R. Herzog explained to his good friend Lieberman why he was forced to issue the condemnation, complete with its derogatory description of the Lieberman Ketubah. Unfortunately, no such letter exists in the archive, but Lieberman well understood the pressures R. Herzog was under.

Here are some additional points relevant to my Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox.

1. Mesorat Moshe, vol. 3, p. 389: Someone asked R. Moshe Feinstein if you can rely on Lieberman’s Tosefta. R. Moshe replied that Lieberman is a religious Jew so there is no fear that he would alter the text of the Tosefta.

2. In September 2025 Legacy Judaica, see here, put this letter up for auction from R. Chaim Kanievsky.

He replies that there is no prohibition to use the works of Lieberman. Asked about purchasing works published by JTS, he replies that he does not know. See here where I published the letter from Lieberman recommending that R. Kanievsky receive the Rothschild Prize, and see also here.

See also R. Meir Mazuz, Makor Ne’eman, vol. 3, no. 1337, who permits use of Tosefta ki-Feshutah.

3. See Ha-Ma’yan64 (Tamuz 5784), p. 119 n. 27, that R. Amos Tabanchik reports that R. Elazer Shakh gave R. Noah Shimanovitz a copy of Tosefta ki-Feshutah as a present. Also of note is that the ArtScroll English translation of Mishnah, Kilayim 8:4 cites Tosefta ki-Feshutah.

4. In Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox, I mentioned that R. Shemaya Grunbaum, a Satmar hasid, published a letter from Lieberman in his book,Siyata di-Shemaya al Masekhet Shabbat (Jerusalem, 1970), pp. 159-160. He does not refer to Lieberman by name, but as “hakham ehad”. However, Lieberman’s identity is only slightly veiled, as R. Grunbaum leaves in the letter’s reference to Ha-Yerushalmi ki-Feshuto. He obviously intended that those “in the know” would recognize with whom he was corresponding.

After R. Grunbaum’s book appeared, he sent it to Lieberman and asked Lieberman to send him his recently published Sifrei Zuta/Talmudah shel Kesarin. R. Grunbaum also apologized that due to reasons beyond his control, he could not mention Lieberman by name and thus referred to him as “hakham ehad”.[32]

5. In Ha-Mashbir5 (2025), I published a few letters from Lieberman to Heschel. See here. In one of the letters, Lieberman offers some notes to Heschel’s Torah min ha-Shamayim. Here is Heschel’s reply to Lieberman’s letter.[33]

6. I am writing this right before Thanksgiving, so it reminded me that it is reported that Lieberman did not saytahanunon Thanksgiving. Shearith Israel in Manhattan also does not say tahanun on Thanksgiving. In fact, they say a partial Hallel, from הללו את ה’ כל גוים until the final הודו לה’ כי טוב.[34]

7. David Sarna reports that Lieberman did not accept the Manhattan eruv and that he would not allow a bat mitzvah girl to address the congregation at the JTS synagogue.[35]

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I want to call Seforim Blog readers’ attention to the wonderful Youtube channel of Kerem: Bein Torah le-Hokhmah here. The main feature is R. Yonason Marton’s daily daf yomi and other shiurim. While his shiurim are in Yiddish, the summaries available in the show notes on Youtube are in Hebrew. R. Marton’s shiurim are a unique combination of traditional lomdus and academic scholarship. In addition, Kerem has hosted numerous academic scholars whose videos are also on the Youtube channel. Kerem is a unique institution led by special people, and I wish it much success as it continues to grow.

Appendix

We routinely use the word “virgin” in the ketubah, together with the applicable monetary amount, unless the woman has been previously married. We even do so if the couple is living together. As mentioned, this is allowed because as long as the future husband knows the truth, it does not matter what is written in the ketubah. That this is the law has been affirmed in modern times by R. Moshe Feinstein[36] and many others. In fact, this is so well established that I think it is a “known truth” that before marriage the husband needs to know if his future wife is a virgin, and that the ketubah is invalid if he gets married without knowing the truth. Indeed, how could it be any different, as we see from Ketubot 11b that if the man marries a woman thinking she is a virgin and she is not, that it is a mekah taut?

It will therefore come as a surprise for many that this view is not accepted by all. For instance, R. Shalom Mordechai Schwadron[37] deals with a case of an orphan woman who not only was not a virgin, but who had a child out of wedlock. She later got engaged to a man who did not know about her past. R. Schwadron ruled that in the interests of peace they could write “virgin” in the ketubah and keep the husband in the dark. As for the incorrect monetary amount, R. Schwadron has a few suggestions on how to deal with this as well, including having the woman sign a document foregoing the extra ketubah money due a virgin. This document would have to be kept with the beit din as the husband would not be aware of it.

I think people will also be surprised by the following, not merely the ruling of R. Joseph Hayyim but the entire situation he describes, as it is so foreign from our experience. I apologize if what follows is a little too explicit, but everything comes directly from Rav Pealim, vol. 1, Even ha-Ezer, no. 2.[38] R. Joseph Hayyim describes the following case. A man betrothed a woman on the assumption that she was a virgin. At the time, her father, mother and all her relatives “knew” that she was a virgin. However, between the betrothal and the marriage her parents learned that she had been intimate a few times with another man.

The practice in Baghdad was that on the night of the wedding, after the bride and groom went into their room, female relatives of the bride and groom would sit outside the door. In addition, a few male relatives and friends of the groom would also be there. They were all waiting to see the dam betulim. After the husband finished his marital duty, he would get dressed, open the door, and leave.[39] The women would then come in to see the dam betulim. If they saw it, they would make the loud celebratory sound we have all heard from women from Arab countries, which is called zaghrouta. If they did not see the dam betulim, that meant the groom did not do his job properly, and he would come back to try again.[40]

In the particular case of the responsum, the parents of the woman came up with a trick to spare her embarrassment: The bride put blood on the sheet, but it was not her blood. However, someone who was close to the family of the bride knew the truth and was worried that the marriage was not halakhically binding. After all, the man married her under false pretenses as he thought she was a virgin, and so it was written in the ketubah.

R. Joseph Hayyim replies that the marriage is binding and the husband should not be told that he was fooled, as this will lead to great shame for the bride and her family. As for the matter of the ketubah, R. Joseph Hayyim says that the bride and her relatives must be told that in the event of her being able to collect the ketubah money, she can only claim that which a non-virgin is entitled to.

Both R. Schwadron and R. Joseph Hayyim are cited by R. Netanel Meoded in his own responsum where he concludes that one should not inform a man that the woman he is marrying, whom he thinks is a virgin, was sexually active before their engagement. See Mizrah Shemesh, vol. 2, no. 31.

R. Joel Roth, writing from a Conservative perspective, argues for removing the word betulta from the ketubah. See Roth, Hakol Kol Yaakov, ed. David Golinkin (Jerusalem, 2023), pp. 361ff.

Let me now turn to another strange thing. In previous centuries there was a belief among some that a girl who was born on Friday did not have betulim. Quite apart from the absurdity of the belief, the halakhic problem it would create is obvious, since as R. Abraham Zvi Klein notes, it would mean that with any woman whose birthday is unknown, there would be no ta’anat betulim because perhaps she was born on Friday. To this I would add, since there is no mention of this “medical” point in the Talmud or rishonim, it is shocking that anyone took it seriously. In R. Eliyahu Bar Shalom’s standard work, Mishpat ha-Ketubah,[42] he feels it necessary to write:

גם לנולדת ביום ששי יש כתובת בתולה ככל שאר הנישאות, אף שיש שמועה שאין לה בתולים

What is the origin of this belief? The first reference I found is in R. Isaac Lampronte of Ferrara’s (1679-1756) halakhic encyclopedia Pahad Yitzhak. R. Lampronte was also a doctor, so his recording of this medical legend is itself noteworthy.

In Pahad Yitzhak, s.v. na’arah, R. Lampronte mentions that in Italy the practice is that if a girl is born on Friday this fact is recorded, precisely in order to deal with the halakhic issue already mentioned. That is, if the husband will later assert that there was no dam betulim, this would not be regarded as a valid claim. R. Lampronte states that despite the Italian practice, he did not find any mention of the unique nature of girls born on Friday either in the Talmud or poskim, and that there is also no mention of it in scientific or medical works. He therefore claims that the assumption that girls born on Friday lack betulim should not be relied upon, as on the contrary, sometimes girls born on Friday indeed have belutim.

R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai, who lived in Italy, also mentions the belief that girls born on Friday lack betulim. He says that he was told about this from distinguished people in Italy and Amsterdam. He also cites from the then unpublished section of Pahad Yitzhak just mentioned. As with R. Lampronte, R. Azulai is surprised by this biological assumption, because if it is true, the Sages would have mentioned something about it.[43]

Many people have cited the Pahad Yitzhak and Hida, however, the story does not end there. There was another great rabbi in Italy, R. Daniel Tierni of Florence (died 1814), author of the commentary on the Shulhan Arukh, Ikarei ha-Dat (הד”ט – playing on the abbreviation of his name). In his commentary to Yoreh Deah 21:10, he tells us that he saw additions that R. Lampronte made to the Pahad Yitzhak. These additions have not appeared in print, so we must be grateful for what R. Tierni preserved. Here R. Lampronte states that the entire matter is a complete falsehood, sheker gamur.[44] Yet R. Tierni adds that everywhere in Italy where he has lived, they are careful to record in the communal record whenever a baby girl is born on Friday to avoid problems when she later gets married. He notes that the non-Jews also do this. As for why there are girls born on Friday who have betulim, he explains this through astrology, and suggests that it depends when on Friday they are born, since only certain hours on Friday are under the rule of Venus.

As late as 1902, R. Isaac Raphael Ashkenazi (1826-1908), the rav of Ancona, writes that the practice of his city is to record the girls who are born on Friday, and he thinks this is what other communities should do as well.[45]

Riddles

It has been a long time since I included a riddle, and I now have a bunch of books that I can give away to those who get the right answers. If you have the answers, email them to me at shapirom2 at scranton.edu

1. Where do we find that Shammai not only disagrees with Beit Shammai, but also agrees with Beit Hillel?

2. In the days of the tannaim a certain item was unquestionablymuktzeh. However, in the post-talmudic period, some hold that this item is no longermuktzeh. What item am I referring to? Provide the actual source in the Talmud and later authorities to justify your answer.

I asked ChatGPT this question but the answer it provided was phony, complete with a non-existent citation from R. Moshe Isserles. I am sure ChatGPT will provide other answers, and perhaps one of them might be correct

* * * * * *

[1] This book began as an invited lecture in memory of Lieberman sponsored the Union of Traditional Judaism. One of the organizers of the event was Rabbi Ronald Price. I mention this because R. Price is the author of the newly published book, Divrei Halev: Thoughts of Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni on the Weekly Torah Portion. Here is part of the book’s description on Amazon:

Divrei Halev is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Rabbi Ronald D. Price and his teacher, the world-renowned Talmudic scholar Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni, of blessed memory. Nearly every week from 2008 to 2012, Rav Halivni shared a thought with Rabbi Price on the weekly Torah portion, which the student faithfully recorded. Divrei Halev includes over two hundred brief divrei Torah spread across all fifty-four parashiyot.

I was one of those privileged to write a blurb for the book, together with Professors Gershon Bacon Reuven Kimelman, David Novak, and Dr. Elana Stein Hain. In the interests of space, my blurb was edited, so here is a good opportunity to record my unabridged blurb.

Rabbi Halivni’s greatest contribution was of course his groundbreaking talmudic scholarship. Yet anyone who had the pleasure of davening with Rabbi Halivni on Shabbat, as I did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, saw a different side of him, that of a rav of a kehillah, a spiritual leader, whose spoken word on Shabbat was able to both enlighten and inspire. Those of us who were able to experience this, and those who never had the opportunity, owe a great debt to Rabbi Ronald Price for bringing the words of our teacher to life.

Regarding Halivni, see also what I wrote here.

Let me now share another story about Halivni. On Erev Pesah 2001 or 2002 I was walking to shul on the Upper West Side and I saw Halivni coming down the street. I asked what brought him to my neighborhood, as I knew he did not live in the area. He told me that he wanted to find a minyan that said Hallel after maariv. I took him to Ohab Zedek and was told that they do not say maariv. We started out in search of another shul and came upon the Chabad minyan on the Upper West Side, where we davened. I remember being very impressed by two things at this minyan. First, that the Chabad rabbi and at least a couple of other Chabad attendees knew who Halivni was. Second, how they treated him with the greatest respect.

[2] Subsequent to publication of my Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox, Monique Susskind Goldberg discussed Lieberman’s Ketubah in id. and Diana Villa, Za’akat Dalot: Pitronot Hilkhati’yim le-Be’ayat ha-Agunot bi-Zemanenu (Jerusalem, 2006), pp. 104ff. On p. 112, she also discusses a proposed adjustment to the ketubah by R. She’ar Yashuv Cohen.

Whether the Lieberman Ketubah could be civilly enforced was at the center of the famous 1980s N.Y. case, Avitzur vs. Avitzur. See here and here. Contrary to all the naysayers, the court upheld the legitimacy of the Lieberman Ketubah from the standpoint of American law. The National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, an Orthodox organization, got involved with the case together with the Jewish Theological Seminary to support the plaintiff whose husband had refused to appear before the beth din of JTS and the Rabbinical Assembly in order to give her a get. Nathan Lewin told me that R. Moshe Sherer, the head of Agudat Israel, asked Lewin to become involved with the case. Even though it did not focus on the Orthodox community, Sherer—and the Agudah rabbinic leadership he must have consulted—thought it was important that the principle that the government could, in certain circumstances, require people to go to beit din be upheld.

[3] According to Chaim Herzog, Lieberman was his parents’ closest friend. See Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon Spiro, Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work (New York, 2005), p. 53. On this page, Schochet and Spiro write that “Lieberman enjoyed the respect of R. Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the av beit din of Jerusalem.” If one consults the source they offer for this sentence, Yitzhak Raphael’s eulogy for Lieberman in Sinai 93 (Nisan-Iyar 5783), p. 91, one finds that Raphael’s actually refers to R. Elyashiv’s grandfather, the kabbalist R. Solomon Elyashiv.

[4] Congress Weekly, Aug. 17, 1953, cited in Regina Stein, “The Boundaries of Gender: The Role of Gender Issues in Forming American Jewish Denominational Identity, 1913-1963” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1998), p. 319.

[5] Conservative Judaism 20 (Fall 1965), pp. 51-54.

[6] Stein, “The Boundaries of Gender, p. 320.

[7] See Naomi Salfati, “On Feminist Judaism, Jewish Feminism and the Advancement of Women’s Roles in Jewish Tradition” (unpublished master’s dissertation, Hebrew University, 2014), p. 16, available here. Salfati discusses Weiss-Rosmarin’s article, “The Unfreedom of Jewish Women,” which also deals with the “unfairness of Jewish marriage laws to divorced and abandoned women.”

Weiss-Rosmarin is also known for her book Judaism and Christianity The Differences. In Alan Brill’s newly published A Jewish Trinity: Contemporary Christian Theology through Jewish Eyes, Weiss-Rosmarin’s approach, which is the “standard” view Jews are taught, is specifically rejected throughout the book. In the very first paragraph of A Jewish Trinity, Brill writes: “For many Jews and Christians, Weiss-Rosmarin’s basic unbridgeable theological divide between the religions remains a truism. This book rejects Weiss-Rosmarin’s simple zero-sum declaration by asking whether the Jewish theological vision and the Christian theological vision are fundamentally irreconcilable, or can the positions be conceptually bridged.”

[8] In a December 3, 1954, statement, the RCA and the Rabbinical Alliance of America condemned the Lieberman ketubah, stating that it had “the gravest implications to the sanctity of Jewish family life and represents the most disastrous disavowal of the principles of Jewish law.” See Benjamin Steiner’s important article, “The Lieberman Clause Revisited,” American Jewish Archives 69 (2017), p. 54.

[9] For criticism of the Lieberman Ketubah from another angle, see R. Eliezer Waldenberg, Tzitz Eliezer, vol. 5, pp. 23ff., vol. 21, no. 62. See also R. Joseph Elijah Henkin, “Tikun o Harisah,” Ha-Pardes, Shevat 5755, pp. 20-22. R. Isaac Herzog responded to this article, see Tehukah le-Yisrael al Pi ha-Torah, vol. 3, pp. 208-209.

At a 1953 gathering of Conservative rabbis and JTS faculty, Lieberman discussed his proposal, which he referred to as a takkanah. He said as follows, clearly exasperated with the American Orthodox rabbinate.

I saw that some of you were accused of being frightened by the Orthodox rabbis. I want to tell you that I am not frightened by them at all.

I want, therefore, to give you a point of information. In truth, they were frightened, and I want you to know why they were frightened. They weren’t afraid that the בית דין would issue some תקנות. No, not at all. They were afraid that the בית דין will issue תקנות in accordance with the law.

As a matter of fact, one of the very important members of the Orthodox rabbis said so in so many words: If this בית דין of the Rabbinical Assembly will issue a תקנה, that will be תקנתו קלקתו. It will be a great misfortune because they will get authority and that is the reason why they oppose this. Many of them think that that בית דין will begin to move in this line, the movement can become strong and it will affect them.

Now about this תקנה. I would like to tell you that this תקנה has nothing to do with the בית דין that will be established—and I hope it will be established soon; but this I would like to see you adopt immediately because it has a tremendous practical value.

David Golinkin ed., Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement 1927-1970 (Jerusalem, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 810-811.

[10] These two points are mentioned by Rabbi Hollander at the meeting with the Moetzet Ha-Rabbanut ha-Rashit. See below. Hollander refers to Conservative rabbis permitting these matters, not a Conservative beit din.

[11] See here. The basis for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standard’s ruling was the responsum of Rabbis Ben Zion Bokser and Theodore Friedman published in Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement 1927-1970, vol. 3, pp. 1459-1462.

[12] Waxman, Tradition and Change, p. 351.

[13] Regarding the change of name from Law Committee to Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, see here.

It is of interest that in 1992 the Conservative movement in Israel, known as Masorti, issued a ruling forbidding travel to synagogue by car on Shabbat in Israel. See here. See also Rabbi David Golinkin’s responsum on this matter here.

[14] Formulation of Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal in Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement 1927-1970, vol. 3, p. 1464.

[15] Waxman, Tradition and Change, p. 361.

[16] Waxman, Tradition and Change, p. 370.

[17] Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement 1927-1970, vol. 3, pp. 1186-1188.

[18] Waxman, Tradition and Change, p. 390.

[19] Waxman, Tradition and Change, p. 390. See also ibid., pp. 392ff. for Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser’s rejection of the permission to drive on Shabbat

[20] For the recent debate of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards regarding use of an electric car on Shabbat, see here. In this article, Rabbi Danny Nevins is quoted: “Those who accept the 1950 CJLS minority position permitting people to drive to synagogue in a gas-powered car would be justified extending this permission to electric cars.” Yet as mentioned above, the 1950 CJLS position permitting people to drive to synagogue on Shabbat was the majority position, not the minority.

[21] See here.

[22] Regarding driving to synagogue on Shabbat, I think many will be surprised by some of the lenient views that have been expressed. Following this paragraph is a responsum from Kollel Eretz Hemdah’s Be-Mareh ha-Bazak, vol. 3, no. 38, in which they rule that it is permitted for a non-Jew to drive a Jew to synagogue on Shabbat if this is vital to keep the person connected to Judaism. They also state that this should not be done every week. According to what is stated at the beginning of the volume, all responsa published in the book were approved by R. Shaul Yisraeli.

R. J. Simcha Cohen suggested that for people who could not walk to synagogue in Century Village in West Palm Beach, that they could get on the bus that transports people along set routes within the community’s confines. This would only apply if the driver was not Jewish. See Cohen,Shabbat: The Right Way(Jerusalem, 2009), pp 181ff. He also includes R. Moshe Dovid Tendler’s letter opposing this leniency. R. Tendler writes: “The heter would destroy the sanctity of the Shabbos. It would be extended to other ‘good deeds’ like visiting parents, hospital patients, attending rallies and even earning money on Shabbos to pay yeshiva tuition.” R. Yosef Carmell, the head of Eretz Hemdah, also replied, and he followed the approach already approved by R. Yisraeli.

If the bus is clearly labeled as a ‘Shabbat bus,’ is announced as appropriate only for those too weak to walk on their own, and even then only to be used for transportation to and from shul, it could be positive, provided that someone familiar with the community feels it would be necessary. (One must, of course, verify that only non-Jewish drivers are used.) However, we would recommend monitoring public impression (not only before implementation but also after) so as to gauge whether people view this as either a religious farce or a sweeping abrogation of hilchot Shabbat (in which case the service should be discontinued).

We would also like to suggest the aforementioned ruling of Rav Yisrael, zt”l (Be-mareh ha-bazak IIII:38) of having the Shabbat bus run only occasionally (or perhaps alternate weeks, etc.) so as to stress that we are dealing with a she’at ha-dechak.

R. Carmell understood R. Cohen to be referring to a special Shabbat bus run by the Jewish community. But what he was referring to was the already existing bus that transports people, free of charge, to different places within Century Village.

Significantly, when asked by the community of Century Village, Boca Raton, R. Hershel Schachter gave his permission for people who can’t easily walk to take the communal bus to synagogue. See here.

See also R. Schachter, Nefesh ha-Rav, p. 233, that R. Soloveitchik opposed having a “Shabbat bus”. The Rav noted that although this could be justified halakhically, since driving to synagogue on Shabbat had become a symbol of the Reform and Conservative movements, this means that even driving to synagogue in a halakhically permissible manner is now forbidden.

R. Ben Zion Uziel earlier gave permission for Jews to use public transportation to go to synagogue, but only in a place where the majority of riders are non-Jewish. SeeMishpetei Uziel, vol. 1,Orah Hayyim, no. 9, Mahadura Tinyana, vol. 1, Orah Hayyim, no. 32.

At the end of his book, R. Cohen offers a different suggestion, namely, a rickshaw attached to a bicycle. He writes:

Accordingly, a rickshaw bicycle driven by a non-Jew would also not be prohibited because of the concern that he might repair the bicycle on Shabbat, since a Gentile may repair anything he wishes on Shabbat. . . Using all the methods mentioned above, one could arrange, well within the bounds of Halacha, for a bicycle rickshaw to transport Jews who are unable to walk to and from the synagogue on Shabbat. This would involve no Biblical violations at all.

In Hakirah 37 (2025), Avi Kadish published a memoir which describes how he became religious. He reports that R. Moshe Feinstein permitted him to ride to synagogue on Shabbat in the car driven by his father. This only happened twice, as Kadish’s father realized that his son was uncomfortable using the car. From then on, every Shabbat they walked the two hours fifteen minutes each way to synagogue. What makes R. Feinstein’s ruling so interesting, is that Kadish was over bar mitzvah age. (Kadish notes that R. Avraham Pam had also given such a ruling with regard to a katan.) Kadish publishes the following comment from R. Shabbetai Rapoport:

I see no halakhic novelty here. If your father was going to shul anyway, why should there be any reason to forbid you to go with him? Rav Moshe’s opinion was that there is no difference between partnership with a Sabbath violator and partnership with a gentile. The ḥumra that a passenger in a car causes more fuel to be burned is mentioned in his writing, but only as a ḥumra. Therefore, this ruling fits his halakhic methodology quite well. The [real] novelty is that he did not fear any criticism that might have arisen, and this is indeed characteristic and correct [of Rav Moshe].

I don’t understand R. Rapoport’s point. The novelty is that Kadish was receiving benefit from a melakhah done on Shabbat by a Jew.

R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach has an interesting pesak in Minhat Shlomo, Orah Hayyim, no. 3 (end). He rules that one who accepts Shabbat early is able to be driven by a non-Jew, and in a “tzorekh gadol” can also be driven by a Jew. He says that there is no ziluta de-Shabbat involved.

הואיל וליכא בכה”ג זילותא דשבתא שהרי אצל כולם עדיין הוא חול

R. Yitzhak Yosef states that for someone who drives to synagogue on Shabbat, it is better that he arrange to be taken by a non-Jew, unless this will lead to communal problems (e.g., others who are currently walking to synagogue might now feel that it is OK to have a non-Jew take them). Thus, he requires a local rav who knows the situation to make such a decision. SeeYalkut Yosef, Hilkhot Shabbat, vol. 5, p. 61.

Regarding using an autonomous taxi on Shabbat, see R. Eitan Kupietzky in Ha-Ma’yan, Tevet 5784, pp. 35-42. According to R. Aharon Goldberg, R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach’s grandson, R. Auerbach had no objection to use of a car on Shabbat if there are no halakhic violations with this car, and that this could actually enhance Shabbat observance. In response to the objection that use of such a car would destroy Shabbat as we know it, a concern that was at the center of the Hazon Ish’s approach to use of electricity on Shabbat, he replied:

ההלכה היא לא איך שנראה לנו, אלא אם זה מותר אז מותר!

See Aryeh Edrei and Amir Mashiah, “Arba Amot shel Halakhah: Ha-Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach,” in Binyamin Brown and Nissim Leon, eds. Ha-Gedolim (Jerusalem, 2017), pp. 720-721. Along these lines, a new pesak has recently appeared from R. Menachem Perl, the head of the Tzomet Institute. According to him, one can make use of an iRobot vacuum on Shabbat as long as it is activated before Shabbat. See here.

Because the world is changing so much when it comes to technology, I think that due to pressing circumstances the future will bring a number of lenient rulings regarding Shabbat. For example, the day is not far off when in major cities one will not be able to enter an apartment building, or even a private apartment in such a building, without using an electronic keypad or key card. It is hard to imagine that poskim will rule that Jews are not allowed to live in these buildings, as that would mean the end of Orthodox communities in many places.

[23] Stein, “The Boundaries of Gender,” pp. 331, 338.

[24] Norman Lamm, “Recent Additions to the Ketubah,” Tradition 2 (Fall, 1959), pp. 93-118.

[25] The case R. Duran discusses is of a girl who might not have even been twelve years old. She was kidnapped by non-Jews and brought to Tunis where she was redeemed (“bought”) by a Jewish man who proceeded to have sex with her. Another man then removed her from Tunis—he must have paid the first man—to bring her to her father. On the way he married her, and that is when the ketubah was written stating that the young woman was a virgin. By this time, she was checked by women and showed signs of physical maturity, and the halakhic significance of this is discussed by R. Duran. The fact that the girl was raped by her first “redeemer” is not even discussed as it is not relevant to the halakhic issue R. Duran focuses on.

In general, when one sees responsa that refer to sexual relations with young girls, one need not assume that we are dealing with a case of rape, as it is possible that the husband was also very young. See e.g., Teshuvot Hakhmei Tzarfat ve-Lotir, no. 14:

בועל בעילת מצוה ופורש בתנוקת מפני צחצוחי זיבה

See also ibid., no. 52.

[26] See Appendix.

[27] See Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox, p. 20, where I discuss Lieberman’s relationship with Kaplan, and that it seems that after the Agudas ha-Rabbonim put Kaplan in herem, Lieberman observed the herem. See also my earlier post here. See also here where I discuss the burning of Kaplan’s siddur and show that contrary to what has often been said, this was not sanctioned by Agudas ha-Rabbonim.

[28] Regarding Lieberman and the Brisker Rav, see the passage from R. Mordechai Elefant’s memoir I posted here.

[29] Israel State Archives, Chief Rabbinate files, 15796/2-גל, new file locator: 000ier0.

[30] The letters to Brodie and Rabinowitz are found in Israel State Archives, Herzog files 4255/11-פ, new file locator: 000bvq8. There is another letter to Brodie in Herzog, Tehukah, vol. 3, pp. 201-202. See also Herzog, Tehukah, vol. 3, p. 201, from a 1954 letter to Haim Cohn, where he again mentions Lieberman’s ketubah with reference to his own suggestion. This last reference and the manuscript letter to Brodie published here are mentioned in Amihai Radzyner, “Reform or Necessary Change: The Attempt to Translate the Ketubah into Hebrew and the Reactions to It,” Hebrew Union College Annual 93 (2022), p. 176 n. 111. However, he does not mention R. Herzog’s letter to Rabinowitz.

[31] Radzyner, “Reform or Necessary Change,” p. 176.

[32] This letter is found in the Saul Lieberman Archives, Arc. 76/6, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. I thank the Library for permission to publish this letter as well as the letter from Heschel to Lieberman below.

[33] This letter is found in the Saul Lieberman Archives, Arc. 76/6, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

[34] This was confirmed by Zachary Edinger, Ritual Director at Shearith Israel.

[35] Sarna, Growing up Conservadox, pp. 30, 32.

[36] Iggerot Moshe, Orah Hayyim, vol. 4, no. 118.

[37] Teshuvot Maharsham, vol. 7, no. 152.

[38] In some communities there was even a practice after the wedding night of a public recitation of a blessing known as birkat betulim. Maimonides, however, saw this as a disgraceful breach of modesty as well as a berakhah le-vatalah. See Ezra Brand’s post here.

[39] He would leave and not return to her, because the practice in Baghdad was that husband and wife did not sleep alone in the same room until after she had gone to the mikveh. This was also the practice in Djerba (it no longer is), and there is a source for this in the rishonim. See R. Meir Mazuz, Asaf ha-Mazkir, pp. 299-300.

Regarding the Baghdad practice described by R. Joseph Hayyim, see Ketubot 12a:

In Judea, at first they would appoint for them two groomsmen [shushvinin], one for him and one for her, in order to examine the groom and the bride at the time of their entry into the wedding canopy [and thereafter, to ensure that neither would engage in deception with regard to the presence or absence of blood from the rupture of the hymen]. . . . In Judea, at first the groomsmen would sleep in the house in which the groom and bride sleep, [in order to examine the sheet on which the marriage was consummated immediately following intercourse].

[40] See Tosafot, Kiddushin 12b. s.v. mishum, that according to R. Tam, this custom is to be regarded as peritzut.

דהיינו פריצותא לפי שצריך או עדי ביאה או עדי יחוד ודבר מכוער שמעמיד עדים על כך

[41] See Roth, Hakol Kol Yaakov, ed. David Golinkin (Jerusalem, 2023), pp. 361ff.

[42] Vol. 3, p. 124.

[43] Ayin Zokher, ma’arekhet bet, no. 3.

[44] See, similarly, R. Joshua Solomon Ardit, Hina ve-Hisda, vol. 1, p. 164a. I saw this reference in Zev Wolf Zicherman, Otzar Pelaot ha-Torah, vol. 3, p. 926.

[45] Va-Ya’an Yitzhak, Even ha-Ezer, no. 8.

Tracing the “Footsteps of the Messiah”: From Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor to Maamrei ha-Rayah

Aryeh Sklar

Longtime readers of Seforim Blog probably remember the leak in 2010 of Rav Kook’s Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor (“For the Perplexed of the Generation”) onto the internet,[1] and the publication of a censored version by Makhon ha-Rav Zvi Yehuda shortly thereafter.[2] This was a previously unseen work of Rav Kook, written during his time as a communal rabbi in Boisk, Latvia, around 1903-1904. It contains a fairly clear and thorough philosophical presentation of a pre-aliyah Rav Kook attempting to respond to the major issues of his day. Professor Marc Shapiro has spent considerable time in various posts on Seforim Blog examining the innovative and sometimes radical nature of this text, subsequently expanding upon these posts in his recently published book, Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook (2025).[3]

Now that my own English translation and annotation of Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor has been published,[4] I have started to research some of the issues and oddities that I discovered in the course of translating the work. In this essay, I wish to present the facts as I know them – with perhaps more questions than answers – regarding a strange bibliographical question about Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor:

Somehow, despite the fact that very few people had seen the contents of this work,[5] portions of it appeared in publication, both during Rav Kook’s life and after his death. None of these publications inform us that the origin is the notebook we know today as Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor.[6] So how did this come to be?

Many experts in Rav Kook have offered their opinion as to why neither Rav Kook nor his son Rav Zvi Yehuda ever published Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor. One position, that seems to be favored by certain “mainstream” students of Rav Zvi Yehuda, is that Rav Kook didn’t publish the book because he actually rejected some or many ideas therein, whether in terms of presentation or in terms of content, and thus, he had decided to put it in geniza, so to speak. But if it turns out that Rav Kook himself was preparing essays based on chapters of the book, that might change some perspectives.

The Bibliographical Problem

The earliest known appearance of material from Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor (from parts of chapters 45 and 46, to be exact) can be found in Rabbi Aryeh Leib Frumkin’s 1912 commentary on the Siddur, Ma’arkhei Lev, vol. 1, p. 156.[7] Frumkin quotes from Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor with minor modifications, introducing the material with “as written by our friend, the crown of our time, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, in his writings.” In his edition of Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor, Rabbi Shachar Rachmani suggests that Rav Kook must have shared at least portions of the manuscript with Rabbi Frumkin at some point in 1911, when Frumkin returned to the Land of Israel after being away for several decades.[8]

As an aside, Rachmani traces evidence of their close relationship in his edition but doesn’t mention that Rav Kook also provided an approbation to the book. Interestingly, this approbation was seemingly removed from the edition on Hebrewbooks.org (along with an acknowledgment of supporters and a beautiful blessing to his parents that appear on the same page).[9] The approbation appears like this:[10]

 

This is the only known publication of parts of Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor in Rav Kook’s lifetime. However, about half a century later, in 1960, an essay purported to be written by Rav Kook, entitled “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha” (“In the Footsteps of the Messiah”), appeared in the Hebrew journal Gevilin (nos. 12-13), on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rav Kook’s passing, with a note that the material was “given by Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriah.”

The essay contains various paragraphs from three different notebooks. The first half combines excerpts from two notebooks that would later be called “Rishon le-Yafo,” and “Acharon be-Boisk,” now published in Kevatzim mi-Ketav Yad Kodsho, vol. 1.[11] The second half derives from the notebook of Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor, specifically material from chapter 35 and 21 combined together (in that order). Eventually, this material was published in Maamrei ha-Rayah (to be discussed below).

Fascinatingly, we can now see that there are many discrepancies between what was originally written in Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor and what was published from those chapters in this essay called “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha.” (Even more interesting is how the material from the other notebooks has almost no changes.) How did Rabbi Neriah come to obtain and publish this material? And who made the many changes to the essay?

Many of these edits seem to tone out more controversial statements, but others seem to add clarity and even new details. Below is representative of the discrepancies to be found between both sources. In my translation of Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor, I added to the footnotes an extensive comparison between the two sources, naming the contrasting source “the Maamrei ha-Rayah version”:

Returning to the topic at hand, the question is, would Rabbi Neriah have been the one to take these notebooks and create a new essay, not only combining disparate topics together, but also changing the text itself in this manner?

Rabbi Shachar Rachmani suggests that Rabbi Neriah never had access to the notebook of Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor.[12] Professor Dov Schwartz had written that Rabbi Neriah told him that the essay Daat Elohim, published in Ikvei ha-Tzon in 1907, was originally included in Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor.[13] Rachmani contends that “this proposition demonstrates Rabbi Neriah never actually saw the work.” Since the notebook is extremely organized (a rarity for Rav Kook’s writings), with chapter numbers for each section and a clear ending chapter, there is no way for Rabbi Neriah to have erroneously believed that a separate essay was also included in the notebook unless he was speculating about a work he had not actually seen.[14]

Second, Rabbi Rachmani asserts (in a personal correspondence with me) that Rav Zvi Yehuda was careful regarding publishing his father’s writings at this time. Indeed, Rabbi Rachmani would know – he was one of the people who worked on Maamrei ha-Rayah. To Rachmani, Rabbi Neriah would never have been allowed by Rav Zvi Yehuda to create essays from various notebooks of Rav Kook and edit them according to his own sensitivities.

However, questions abound. When this material was eventually incorporated into Maamrei ha-Rayah, the editors divided Rabbi Neriah’s single essay into two separate pieces. The first one, the only part that actually contains references to “the footsteps of the Messiah,” and which comes from the notebook Rishon le-Yafo and Acharon be-Boisk, was seemingly re-titled Gargarim Hegyoniyim (“Kernels of Thoughts”). The second part – the material from Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor which lacks any reference to “the footsteps of the Messiah” – kept the title Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha. At the end of this second essay, the editors cite the source as “Gevilin, 1960,” without further information. Someone split these essays, and someone renamed them. Who could have done this?

The first question, of the split, is more easily answered. It appears that even when it was published in 1960, the editors of Gevilin as well as Rabbi Neriah understood that the two parts of the essay were really two separate essays, because after a few months, they published a standalone booklet of “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha” with the subtitle: “Two essays”:[15]

In 1975, a collection of essays from Rav Kook was published without notation of authorship.[16] It includes the two essays of “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha” as well:

In 1980, Rabbi Neriah published it as an appendix to his Mishnat ha-Rav, which was also a collection of articles by and about Rav Kook. It looks like this in the Table of Contents.

Later editions of Mishnat ha-Rav do not feature these essays, presumably because they had already been incorporated into Maamrei ha-Rayah.

The 1942 HaYesod Publication

It seems likely that either Rav Kook or his son created and divided these essays. But where? Otzar HaChochma has archives of the weekly newspaper HaYesod, which, as it turns out, features an essay from Rav Kook called “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha”![17] Indeed, it contained one half of the essay, only the material from “Rishon le-Yafo” and “Acharon be-Boisk.” The newspaper had added the following informative note before the essay: “In honor of the seventh anniversary of the passing of the great genius of Israel and his holiness, the genius Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, we are printing here sections from his essay that was published in the year 5666 (1906), and ‘their words are their remembrance.’”

Where did Rav Kook publish this essay in 1906? Rav Kook published very few essays that year (and Maamrei ha-Rayah misdates certain essays to 1906 when they were printed later).[18] Could they have meant that Rav Kook wrote it in 1906, not that he published it then? How would the editors have received the essay, then? And what does it mean that they were printing “sections” (keta’im) from his essay? Was there a fuller essay out there? Further searching found a very strange essay, published in HaBazeleth in March 1, 1906 (Adar 4, 5666):

The article, titled, “Diary of a Young Jerusalemite,” describes the anonymous author’s discovery of Rav Kook’s essay “Teudat Yisrael u-le-Umiyuto” (“The Mission of Israel and its Nationalism”), published in HaPeles in 1901, and his subsequent fascination (perhaps obsession is the right word) with all things Rav Kook. As part of his survey of Rav Kook’s philosophical writings until this point of 1906, he writes:

I have read his open letters, the first and the second, as well as his “Gargarim Hegyoniyim,” which was printed in the calendar for the Shaarei Torah religious school in Jaffa. These small gargarim (kernels) I am sure most readers did not notice, for to them they are small, yet the truth is that these thoughts are so great, vast, all encompassing, containing within these kernels ideas with material for many great books, yet his excellent style is so brief, understood by those who are used to an academic style. At the end of these gargarim is such a wonderful announcement – soon, his book Eder ha-Yekar would be forthcoming. This made me so happy. I said, “How do I have such great merit to see it, given that I have only read his essays, and I have never merited to see a full book of his.” Now I have received the book Eder ha-Yekar, which contains his glory both inside and out, and I have started to read it carefully (as such books ought to be read), and it has breathed in me a spirit of life and love…

Putting aside the interesting overly flattering article (and the question of who might have written it), the important information here is that Rav Kook had apparently published an essay called “Gargarim Hegyoniyim” around 1906 in a calendar published through “Shaarei Torah of Jaffa.” What is this calendar?

The Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi

Rav Kook arrived in May of 1904 already set to become the Chief Rabbi of Jaffa and the surrounding agricultural settlements. One of his major responsibilities was to head the “Shaarei Torah” of Jaffa, a fairly large religious school for children of the area. For years, as part of the school’s fundraising, the school had been sending out a yearly calendar called “Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi” which included a calendar (obviously), a picture of the teachers and the students of the school, information about the state of the institute, and letters of encouragement to donors to give toward the school in various languages and from various important individuals.

The name Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi may ring a bell for some knowledgeable readers of Rav Kook. When Rav Zvi Yehuda published what would become his father’s most famous work, Orot, in 1920, he appended an essay entitled, “The Great Call,” that first appeared, we are told there, in “Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi” in 1908:

(The original 1920 printing of Orot, https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH990012593690205171/NLI?)

Secondly, some people know of this calendar from the famous poems for each Jewish month that Rav Kook created for these calendars, from 1911 until 1914, titled Meged Yerachim (these were reprinted in Maamrei ha-Rayah, 499-501).

Lastly, those who have read Maamrei ha-Rayah might have seen that reprinted in Maamrei ha-Rayah (pages 295-301) are several essays of Rav Kook’s, and which we are informed (p. 272) were originally printed in the Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi of 1911-1914. Interestingly, these essays also have the title “Gargarim Hegyoniyim.” These essays, we have since found out with the printing of Kevatzim mi-Ketav Yad Kadsho, vol. 2, derive from a notebook called “Pinkas ha-Dappim 1,” written some time between 1904-1910. Thus, it turns out that Rav Kook had been publishing essays in these calendars from his notebooks, generally titling them “Gargarim Hegyoniyim.”

But what about the 1905-1906 calendar? It was not available in any library I could find. A Google search found, coincidentally, that the 1905-1906 Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi was available in an auction starting in a few short weeks from then, in October 2025. I reached out to the National Library of Israel in case they were interested in purchasing it. Through the helpful research of Shimon Kummer at the National Library, the library not only already had a copy of the 1905-1906 calendar, but also the 1904-1905 calendar. Unfortunately, they had no others for that decade. I had also reached out to the archivists at the Beit ha-Rav Kook, and with the help of Nechama Freedman at Beit ha-Rav Kook, I was able to locate another facsimile of the 1906 calendar, as well as the 1909-1910 calendar. Lastly, the auction ended in late October of this year, and my friend and cousin, Binny Lewis, purchased the calendar.[19] So I had a wealth of sources for the 1905-1906 calendar.

Let’s begin with the 1904-1905 calendar, the first to be printed after the arrival of Rav Kook to Jaffa. In this calendar, Rav Kook’s role is relegated to a short poem wishing readers a good new year, and merely being listed as the addressee for letters and donations regarding the school:[20]

Interestingly, Rav Kook is described in this calendar (as well as the 1905-1906 calendar) as “agreeing to become” the rabbi of Jaffa and the surrounding settlements:

(This particular image is from the 1905-1906 calendar)

Evidently, this had not yet been properly updated to Rav Kook’s present position. That said, in the 1905-1906 calendar, Rav Kook asserted more influence on the calendar, and published an essay called “Gargarim Hegyoniyim,” featuring the first half of what would be printed in Gevilin fifty-five years later under the title “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha,” and eventually its own essay in Maamrei ha-Rayah a few decades after that, under its original title, “Gargarim Hegyoniyim.”

Someone must have known what the right title should have been for Maamrei ha-Rayah (presumably Rabbi Zvi Yehuda). But who named it “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha” for HaYesod in 1942? And what happened to the second half, the part that comes from Le-Nevukhei ha-Dor? How did Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriah come to publish it together with this other, separate essay, in 1960, under the one title of “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha”?

I suspect that the calendars for 1906-1907 and 1908-1909 might hold more clues. If anyone is able to provide access to these calendars, we may be able to get to the bottom of this mystery. Nevertheless, we might speculate at this point how Rabbi Neriah obtained the material without ever seeing the original notebook. Perhaps, he received a copy of an already published or prepared essay from Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook, as Rabbi Rachmani suggested to me. Rabbi Neriah himself probably gave the full essay the name “Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha,” perhaps based on the printing in HaYesod in 1942, even though only the first half was printed there. It may be that he was unaware of the printing in the Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi of 1905-1906. Eventually, when it came to being printed in Maamrei ha-Rayah, Rav Zvi Yehuda or others with the knowledge of the true origin of these essays split them in two, with “Gargarim Hegyoniyim” returning to the essay as printed in Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi, while the essay with no name from the notebook of Le-Nevukhei ha-Dor took on the name from Rabbi Neriah’s printing in Gevilin.

Conclusions

Several significant points were made in the course of this article.

First, the many textual differences between Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha as published and the corresponding passages in Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor – sometimes involving entire added or removed sentences – seem to represent Rav Kook’s own revisions rather than editorial interventions by later hands. Rav Kook clearly saw the need to modify and clarify Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor after it had already been written, at least for a different, more Israel-oriented audience, than he had originally written for.

Second, this evidence should give pause to those who have assumed that any deviation from the Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor text in later publications necessarily represents censorship or editorial tampering. While such concerns are not unfounded given the documented history of editorial intervention in Rav Kook’s published works, the case of Be-Ikveta de-Meshicha demonstrates that Rav Kook himself may have been responsible for some of these changes.

Lastly, and most importantly, this discussion opens new questions about Rav Kook’s relationship to Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor. It is possible that Rav Kook himself was actively drawing upon and reworking material from Li-Nevukhei ha-Dor during his lifetime, even after apparently setting aside the complete work. This suggests that while he may have had reservations about publishing the book as a whole, whether because of financial reasons or due to concerns about its more controversial ideas, he saw value in extracting and adapting individual sections for other purposes. If so, there may be additional essays awaiting discovery that similarly derive from this work. The location of the other years of Luach Eretz ha-Tzvi remains a desideratum for future research, as it may contain the key to fully reconstructing this textual history.

Review of ‘After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World’, by Marc D. Herman

Reviewed by Eliyahu Krakowski

 

Dr. Marc Herman’s After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines shifting conceptions of Torah she-beʿal peh within the Judeo-Islamic world from the geonic period through the time of Maimonides.[1] Beginning with Rav Saadya Gaon and concluding with the Rambam, Herman traces a gradual reorientation away from the geonic understanding of Torah she-beʿal peh as wholly revealed toward the Maimonidean position, in which human interpretation plays a constitutive role in the formation of rabbinic law. Alongside his analysis of Jewish legal sources, Herman situates these developments within their broader intellectual environment, drawing careful parallels to contemporaneous trends in Islamic jurisprudence and legal theory. In tracing this shift, the book clarifies how medieval Jewish thinkers conceptualized the authority of Torah she-beʿal peh, and how those conceptions correspond to broader jurisprudential models current in the Islamic world.

But beyond its central thesis, the book assembles a substantial body of sources bearing on a range of foundational questions, including rabbinic authority, legal innovation, and the historical development of Torah she-beʿal peh. Many of the texts Herman discusses are drawn from recently published fragments or from manuscripts that remain unpublished, and several appear to have received little or no attention in prior scholarship. Rather than offering a comprehensive or conventional review, I will focus here on a selection of sources that I found particularly significant and that contribute to a more precise understanding of several of the issues under discussion. Because Herman’s treatment of these materials is often brief, expanding upon certain sources and arguments in greater detail is worthwhile.

1. Adding to Torah Prohibitions and the Tree of Knowledge 

The story of Adam and Eve contains an interesting example of what, depending on one’s perspective, can either be seen as a (very early) model of rabbinic legislation or as a problematic example of proto-bal tosif, the prohibition of adding to the Torah. When repeating God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, Eve apparently adds to the prohibition (Gen. 3:3): “But from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You may not eat from it and you may not touch it, lest you die.’” Every yeshiva student is familiar with Rashi’s interpretation:

“‘And you shall not touch it’ – she added to the command; therefore she came to detraction, as it is said: “Do not add to His words” (Proverbs 30:6).”

This, in turn, is based on the Gemara (Sanhedrin 29a):

“Hizkiyah said: From where is it derived that whoever adds, detracts? As it is stated: ‘God said: You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it.’”

However, according to Avot de-Rabbi Natan (version 1, 1:5), it appears that the added prohibition was in fact a prototypical seyag, a protective fence of the sort we are instructed to erect in order to safeguard the Torah:

“And make a fence for your words, just as the Holy One, blessed be He, made a fence for His words; and Adam the First made a fence for his words … What was the fence that Adam the First made for his words? As it says: ‘And the Lord God commanded … for on the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’ (Genesis 2:17). Adam the First did not wish to say to Eve exactly as the Holy One, blessed be He, had said to him; rather, he said to her thus, and he made a fence for his words beyond what the Holy One, blessed be He, had said to him: ‘But from the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden God said: You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, lest you die,’ for he wished to guard himself and Eve from the tree even through mere touching.”

In the context of Karaite critiques of rabbinic authority, this question took on heightened urgency. Herman (39-40) refers to Rav Saadya Gaon’s commentary on Genesis 3:1, which elaborates the positive reading found in Avot de-Rabbi Natan:

“The fifth question: On what basis did Eve say, ‘and you shall not touch it,’ when God did not say this to Adam?

The answer: After God said to Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, he instituted a safeguard for the matter and refrained even from touching it, so that if some mishap should occur in this regard, it would fall upon what he himself had added and not upon the essence of the prohibition. This is like an expert physician who wishes to distance a patient from eating meat and therefore also warns him against poultry, so that if he should treat the command lightly he will stumble with poultry and not with actual meat. On this basis our predecessors instructed us: ‘Make a fence for the Torah’ … and in all these cases, and others like them, we rely upon what the Torah itself prohibited as a matter of protection and fencing, as it is written: ‘He shall not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn astray’; and ‘silver and gold he shall not multiply for himself exceedingly, lest his heart grow haughty,’ and the like.”

Rav Saadya likens Adam’s added prohibition to the case of a patient who is forbidden to eat meat and whose physician therefore also prohibits poultry. As Herman observes, the analogy closely recalls the rabbinic prohibition of poultry with milk. Notably, in this instance Rav Saadya is prepared to treat the added restriction as Adam’s own enactment, a position that sits uneasily with his more general tendency to ground even rabbinic legislation in divine authority.

Elsewhere (80), Herman cites the eleventh century Andalusian commentator R. Yehuda Ibn Balaam who went a step further and “described the addition of a prohibition against touching the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:3) as the sound exertion of legal thinking (ijtihād).”[2] It seems that according to Ibn Balaam, in contrast to Rav Saadya, this is not merely a discretionary seyag but a logical extension of the law. In other words, according to Rav Saadya, the prohibition of touching the Tree of Knowledge would have been classified under the Rambam’s first shoresh in Sefer ha-Mitzvot, namely rabbinic enactments, whereas according to Ibn Balaam it would fall under the second shoresh, that of rabbinic derashot or derivations.[3]

2. Rabbinic Legislation and Adding to the Torah

Another obscure yet significant source cited by Herman bears on a question raised forcefully in Karaite polemics, namely, why rabbinic legislation does not itself constitute a violation of the biblical prohibition against adding to the Torah. Herman (27) points to Rav Saadya Gaon’s discussion in his work on the calendar, the Kitāb al-Tamyīz (Book of Distinction), where Saadya emphasizes that the prohibition of adding to revelation applies to “all that I have commanded you” (Deut. 4:2; 13:1), and not to “all that I have written for you.” On this view, rabbinic enactments cannot be considered impermissible additions, since they themselves form part of the revealed command structure. The relevant text survives only in an Arabic fragment published by Hartwig Hirschfeld in 1903.[4]

Herman (90) also cites R. Yehudah ha-Levi’s response to this challenge in the Kuzari (3:41). Ha-Levi explains that the biblical prohibition was directed at the masses, in order to prevent them from conjecturing, theorizing, and legislating on the basis of their own reasoning, as the Karaites did. Laws instituted by the Sanhedrin or by prophets, according to ha-Levi, are categorically excluded from the scope of this prohibition. Notably, Maimonides appears to adopt the opposite position. In his view, it is precisely authoritative figures such as prophets or the Sanhedrin who are capable of violating the prohibition of bal tosif.[5] But Maimonides’ formulation in Hilkhot Mamrim 2:9 (cited above, note 3) represents an even sharper rejection of Rav Saadya’s approach. According to the Rambam, bal tosif is violated precisely by collapsing the distinction between rabbinic legislation and divine command, thereby presenting the former as if it were itself part of the Torah. This could serve as a description of Rav Saadya’s enterprise. 

It is also noteworthy that figures operating within the Karaite orbit accepted the premise underlying the question, namely, that there exists a general prohibition against adding new laws to the Torah. By contrast, rabbinic authorities more distant from anti-Karaite polemics, such as Rashi, R. Yosef Albo, and the Maharal, rejected this premise altogether. On their account, bal tosif does not prohibit the introduction of new mitzvot, but rather the alteration of an existing mitzvah’s internal structure, such as adding a fifth passage to the tefillin. From this perspective, rabbinic legislation bears no relation to the prohibition of bal tosif at all.[6]

3. Hanukkah from Where in the Torah?

Rav Saadya Gaon’s discussion of Hanukkah provides a clear illustration of a broader geonic tendency: to anchor what might otherwise appear to be rabbinic innovations or postbiblical developments in biblical revelation itself. As Herman (29) notes:

“Saadia was anxious to uphold divine authority for Hanukkah, the formulations and structures of many prayers, court oaths, communal bans, the second day of festivals observed in the diaspora, and even one passage in a lament by Eliezer Qillir… Saadia adopted a variety of strategies to depict these practices as supported by divine revelation. Written revelation, he claimed, actually refers indirectly to legal institutions that might be considered postbiblical, such as the festival of Hanukkah, the observance of two days to mark some new lunar months, or the rules of the Jewish calendar.”

One of the sources Herman adduces in this context is a passage from the the recently recovered complete Sefer ha-Mitzvot of Rav Saadya, in which Rav Saadya seeks to ground the festival of Hanukkah in biblical prophecy:

“The tradition has established that there will be a day on which He will deliver us from the descendant of Amalek … and that when the Lord grants victory to the sons of Levi in their war against those who rise against them, that time shall be honored, as it is said: “Bless, O Lord, his valor, and accept the work of his hands; crush the loins of those who rise against him, and of those who hate him, that they rise no more” (Deut. 33:11). And we do not find that they fought anyone other than the Greeks.”[7]

This passage is particularly illuminating when read alongside Maimonides’ remarks in the first shoresh of his own Sefer ha-Mitzvot, where he sharply criticizes those who would count Hanukkah among the 613 commandments:

“I do not suppose that anyone would imagine, or that it would even occur to anyone’s mind, that it was said to Moses at Sinai that he should command us that, if at the end of our kingdom such-and-such should occur with the Greeks, we would then be obligated to light the Hanukkah lamp.”[8]

The position that Maimonides declares inconceivable is, in fact, precisely the one advanced by Rav Saadya. Because Maimonides elsewhere explicitly objects to the Behag’s enumeration, and because the Behag does count ner Hanukkah as a mitzvah, it has generally been assumed that Maimonides’ polemic here is directed against the Behag. The discovery of this passage, however, together with another like it in Rav Saadya’s writings, reveals that Maimonides’ criticism is not aimed at a merely theoretical justification for counting Hanukkah, but at Rav Saadya’s concrete attempt to ground the obligation in biblical revelation.[9] Herman (104) himself emphasizes this point, noting that:

“This was something of a pattern for Maimonides, who was reluctant to name Saadia even when strongly disagreeing with him. But it is hard, in fact, not to read Maimonides’s presentations of the Oral Torah as a pointed rebuttal of the views of the Egyptian-born gaon.”[10]

The same geonic impulse to locate Hanukkah within the orbit of biblical revelation appears elsewhere as well. In his discussion of the Torah center of Kairouan, Herman (67) observes that R. Nissim Gaon likewise adopted Rav Saadya’s position regarding the divine authority of Hanukkah, repeating a midrash according to which the festival had already been foretold to the biblical Aaron. This refers to the well-known passage cited by Nahmanides in his commentary on Behaʿalotekha (Num. 8:2):

“Why is the section of the Menorah juxtaposed with the dedication of the princes? When Aaron saw the dedication of the princes, his spirit sank, for neither he nor his tribe had participated in the dedication. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: ‘By your life, yours is greater than theirs, for you kindle and prepare the lamps morning and evening’ – this is the language of Rashi, citing an aggadic midrash… The intent of this aggadah is to expound a hint from the passage concerning the dedication of the lamps that would take place in the Second Temple through Aaron and his sons – that is, the Hasmonean High Priest and his sons. I found it stated in this very language in the Megillat Setarim of Rabbeinu Nissim, who cites this aggadah and says: ‘I saw in a midrash: once the twelve tribes had brought offerings and the tribe of Levi had not brought [any]… the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: ‘Speak to Aaron and say to him’ – there will be another dedication [hanukkah] involving the lighting of lamps in which I will perform miracles and deliverance for Israel, through your descendants. [This] dedication will be named for them, namely the Hanukkah of the sons of the Hasmoneans. Therefore this section was juxtaposed to the section of the dedication of the altar’.”

This is a celebrated passage in Nahmanides’ commentary, but when read against the background of geonic polemics and the geonic impulse to locate later rabbinic enactments within biblical revelation, it takes on a new significance. Herman draws attention in this connection to the landmark work of Yosef Ofer and Jonathan Jacobs on Nahmanides, which reconstructs the layered development of Nahmanides’ Torah commentary on the basis of authorial update lists and a comprehensive comparison of manuscript traditions. Ofer and Jacobs demonstrate that the passage attributing Hanukkah to Aaron through R. Nissim Gaon’s Megillat Setarim belongs to Nahmanides’ later additions, composed after his arrival in Eretz Yisrael, and that in earlier recensions of his commentary Nahmanides struggled to resolve the difficulties posed by this midrash.[11]

4. A Sage is Superior to a Prophet

Interpretations of the talmudic dictum hakham adif mi-navi, “a sage is superior to a prophet” (Bava Batra 12a), offer a revealing lens through which to assess medieval attitudes toward the relative status of divine revelation and human juridical creativity. In a substantial study published two decades ago, Alon Goshen-Gottstein traces the reception history of this dictum and concludes that it was largely ignored prior to the emergence of the Book of the Zohar.[12] Herman (81-82), however, draws attention to a significant pre-Zohar interpretation that appears to have gone largely unnoticed in this discussion, preserved in the commentary of R. Isaac Ibn Ghiyath, commonly known by his acronym רי״ץ גיאת, to Kohelet:

“Upon proper reflection, I have found that the sages of the Torah possess a superiority over the prophets. For the former draw forth [insights] from their intellectual inquiry and the illuminations of their intellect: they innovate new teachings from foundational principles and derive consequences from root concepts. The latter, by contrast, are guided only by prophecy and directed by prophetic vision alone. You already know what occurred with respect to what the prophet Nathan said to David, ‘Do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you’ (II Sam. 7:3) – and he was mistaken; whereas Solomon’s ruling in the case of the two women was successful. It is to this distinction that the saying refers: ‘A sage is superior to a prophet.’”[13]

As Herman observes, Ibn Ghiyath’s interpretation is “closer to that of the Qaraite Qirqisani – who had cited it to show that the ancient rabbis themselves admitted to ‘extracting’ new law – than to geonic-era apologetics.” In other words, this interpretation stands in contrast to the geonic claim that Torah she-beʿal peh is all revealed law, instead seeing the active process of building upon revelation by means of human wisdom as a higher achievement than the passive process of receiving prophetic instruction. This helps explain why this dictum received little attention in certain eras. In the context of anti-Karaite polemics, openly conceding the primacy of human legal creativity over prophecy was potentially destabilizing. Yet Herman does not emphasize the significance of Ibn Ghiyath’s comment in the history of the interpretation of this saying, noteworthy in its own right.[14]

5. Increasing Andalusian Independence

A recurring theme throughout Herman’s work is the growing independence of non-Iraqi scholars, such as R. Hananel, R. Shmuel ha-Nagid, the Rif, and R. Joseph Ibn Migash, from the authority of the Babylonian geonim. This is the intellectual world into which Maimonides was born. Herman (104-105) highlights one particularly telling instance in which Maimonides explicitly defends his Andalusian tradition against claims of Babylonian hegemony:

“[I]n a polemic against against Samuel ben ‘Eli…who claimed the title gaon, Maimonides provided a list of Andalusi “geonim” to support his view: Ibn Ghiyath, al-Baliya, al-Fasi, and Maimonides’s own father’s teacher, Ibn Migash. Maimonides asked: ‘Should one not heed the words of our geonim because they are not Babylonian [i.e., Iraqi]? Is it possible that locale is determinative [she-maqom gorem]?’ While these examples show a sense of continuity with the Andalusi tradition, Maimonidean innovations nevertheless abounded…”

Herman offers a nuanced account of the gradual emergence of Andalusian scholarly independence from geonic authority, culminating in Maimonides’ own complex stance toward the inherited geonic tradition.[15]

These few examples from this densely referenced work should suffice to illustrate the wealth of material contained within. Dr. Marc Herman’s After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World is distinguished by its meticulous research and careful presentation of sources, a quality that is especially welcome in the current scholarly landscape. In addition, by focusing on a specific historical era which has received relatively little scrutiny, Herman has brought to light a rich array of material which deserves the attention of anyone interested in the development of the concept of Torah sheb’eal peh.

[1] Full disclosure: the author of the book under review, Dr. Marc Herman, is a longtime friend to whom I often turn with questions regarding Maimonides’ Sefer ha-Mitzvot. References to his pages are given parenthetically in the text. Readers of The Seforim Blog may already be familiar with his work through his review in Marc Herman,  “Review of ‘Ha-Sefer ha-Kollel (Kitāb al-Hāwī)’, by Rabbi David ben Saʿadya al-Ger,” The Seforim Blog (4 September 2024), available here. My thanks to Seforim Blog editor Menachem Butler for his editorial review and comments.
[2] Herman cites Ibn Balaam’s comment from Maaravi Perez, “Another fragment from Kitāb al-Tarjīḥ by R. Yehuda Ibn Balaam: Genesis 2:11-4:9; 8:10-20,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 57 (1990-1991): 8 (Hebrew), available here; the fragment is also available via the remarkable alhatorah.org.
[3] For a discussion of the tension between seyag and bal tosif as it arises from the narrative of Adam and Eve, see R. Bezalel Naor, “Mitzvat Hashem Barah,” printed at the conclusion of his edition of the Rashba’s Maʾamar ʿal Yishmael, ed. Bezalel Naor (Spring Valley, NY: Orot, 2008), 87-91 (Hebrew). His discussion displays his characteristic breadth of learning, though he does not cite the sources later adduced by Herman; conversely, Herman does not refer to Naor’s treatment. Notably, the Hida (Ahavat David, derush 13) explicitly confronts the apparent contradiction between the position of the Gemara with that of Avot de-Rabbi Natan and proposes a reconciliation:

“The matter is straightforward: Adam the First certainly acted properly in making a fence. However, he should have said, “This is the command of the Lord, and I am making a fence with respect to touching,’ and in that case Eve would not have erred. It was from this aspect that the mishap emerged, and this is what is meant by the conclusion, ‘A person should not add to the words he hears’; that is, one should not attribute the addition to the original speaker.”

See also R. David Zvi Hoffmann’s commentary to Genesis 3:1, and R. Yaakov Kamenetsky, Emet le-Yaʿakov, Genesis 3:3, who develop the same distinction—between legitimate protective legislation and its improper attribution to divine command. R. Yaakov Kamenetsky articulates this concept pointedly in his commentary to Avot 2:5:

“The essential point is that one know that he is keeping this only as a fence, and not as an essential matter in its own right … for if this is not known, one may come to great stumbling blocks. It appears that Adam the First himself stumbled precisely in this matter in the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, and from this grew and developed the entire notion of sin and iniquity in the world, with the resulting consequence – death.”

Against this backdrop, R. Bezalel Naor draws attention to a difficult comment of the Moshav Zekenim. The Moshav Zekenim cites the following question of the tosafist R. Isaac [presumably Riʾ of Dampierre]:

“You shall not eat and you shall not touch”—from here [we learn that] whoever adds, detracts, for the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded only with respect to eating. And R. Isaac finds this difficult: perhaps she acted by way of distancing, as we find with respect to the nazirite… and this requires further investigation.”

Why, R. Naor asks, did the Moshav Zekenim not explain that the difficulty with this seyag lay specifically in its attribution to God Himself, as is made explicit in the aforementioned sources? One possible answer emerges from the Maharil’s account of asmakhta. See Maharil, Likkutim, no. 70 (quoted by R. Asher Weiss, Minhat Asher, Devarim, p. 37):

“Wherever it is stated [that something is] rabbinic and the verse is merely an asmakhta, this is its meaning: it is certainly a rabbinic enactment, and they went and examined and found for themselves a scriptural support, and they anchored their words to it in order to strengthen them—so that people would think it is of Torah origin and be stringent with it, and not come to treat the words of the Sages lightly and leniently. (In the Mekhon Yerushalayim edition there is another version: ‘in order to mislead them.’)”

According to the Maharil, the purpose of an asmakhta is precisely to cause people to attribute divine authority to a rabbinic enactment. This would also appear to be the most straightforward explanation of the Raʾavad’s gloss to Hilkhot Mamrim 2:9. Maimonides explains that the difference between prescribed rabbinic enactments and proscribed bal tosif lies in their attribution: 

“Since a court has authority to decree and prohibit something permitted, and its prohibition may stand for generations … what, then, is the meaning of the Torah’s warning ‘You shall not add to it nor detract from it’? That one should not add to the words of the Torah nor detract from them, and establish the matter permanently as Torah law.”

On this, Raʾavad comments: 

“All of this is mere wind, for anything they decreed and prohibited as a fence and safeguard for the Torah does not constitute adding, even if they established it for generations, treated it as Torah law, and anchored it to Scripture, as we find in many places where something is rabbinic and the verse is merely an asmakhta.”

Raʾavad apparently sees the existence of asmakhta as a refutation of Maimonides’ position. Cf. the Vilna Gaon’s comment in Aderet Eliyahu, Genesis 3:3, which offers another defense of Eve’s “fence.”
[4] Hartwig Hirschfeld, “The Arabic Portion of the Cairo Genizah at Cambridge (Third Article): Saadyah Fragments,” Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 16, no. 1 [old series] (October 1903): 103, available here.
[5] See my article in Eliyahu Krakowski, “Is a Prophet Authorized to Institute a Rabbinic Commandment? A Halakhic Clarification and Its Implications for Maimonidean Thought,” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought, vol. 12 (Fall 2011): 26-28 (Hebrew), available here, for a detailed analysis of Rambam’s position that the prohibition of bal tosif applies precisely to prophetic or judicial claims of divine authority. R. Asher Weiss formulates this point as a matter of halakhah le-maʿaseh in response to a question posed by his teacher, the Divrei Yatziv:

“My teacher and master, the holy rabbi, our master [Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam], wrote in Responsa Divrei Yatziv (Orah Hayyim §214) to comment on the formula le-shem yihud customarily recited by Hasidim prior to the counting of the ʿomer, in which it is said: “to fulfill the positive commandment of the counting of the ʿomer, as written in the Torah, etc.” This formulation implies that the obligation in question is a de-oraita commandment, and thus constitutes an addition to the commandments and a violation of bal tosif according to the view of Maimonides. For this reason, he adopted the practice of saying instead: “to fulfill the commandment of the counting of the ʿomer, and it is written in the Torah, etc.,” so that it should not be understood as a de-oraita commandment, but rather in a formulation that is also compatible with a rabbinic commandment… In my view, however, even though this observation has merit, as a matter of strict law there is no objection here, for several reasons. First, there is no prohibition involved except in the context of formal legal instruction issued by a court or by a sage rendering authoritative rulings to others; this has no application to a devotional prayer recited informally by each individual person…”

This represents the distinctively Maimonidean understanding of bal tosif, in marked contrast to the approach articulated by R. Yehuda ha-Levi.
[6] See Rashi to Deut. 4:2 and 13:1; Sefer ha-Ikkarim 3:14; Maharal, Beʾer ha-Golah, beʾer 1; cf. Nahmanides to Deut. 4:2. Notably, both sides in the Karaite-rabbinic controversy presupposed that bal tosif prohibits the introduction of new laws as such, even though this assumption was rejected by a number of rabbinic authorities operating at some remove from the immediate polemical context. A structurally analogous phenomenon, in which opposing camps converge upon a shared but historically secondary interpretation of a source, can be observed in the medieval debates over hokhmat yevanit. See Eliyahu Krakowski, “How Much Greek in ‘Greek Wisdom’? On the Meaning of Hokhmat Yevanit,” The Seforim Blog (27 December 2011), available here, where I argue that the identification of hokhmat yevanit with Greek philosophy represents a thirteenth-century polemical development rather than the original talmudic meaning, even though both sides in the controversy itself accepted this understanding.
[7] Rav Saadya Gaon, Sefer ha-Mitzvot (Kitāb al-Sharāʾiʿ), ed. and trans. Nissim Sabato (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 2019), 199 (Hebrew). My thanks to Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Brodt for obtaining a copy of this important work for me. The text is also available on alhatorah.org, and should not be confused with R. Yeruham Fishel Perla’s monumental commentary on Rav Saadya’s poetic Azharot.
[8] See, now, the newly-published edition of Maimonides, Sefer ha-Mitzvot, ed. R. Yitzhak Sheilat (Jerusalem, 2025), 39-40 (Hebrew). It is surprising that R. Sheilat, who serves as rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Birkat Moshe alongside R. Sabato, does not reference in this context Rav Saadya’s Sefer ha-Mitzvot.
[9] For an otherwise insightful discussion of this passage, see Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 111-116, who perceptively analyzes Maimonides’ objection to the enumeration of rabbinic enactments but does not identify Rav Saadya Gaon as the concrete target of the critique.
[10] In his notes to this passage in Rav Saadya Gaon’s Sefer ha-Mitzvot, R. Haim Sabato expresses caution as to whether Maimonides had Rav Saadya specifically in mind. However, Herman’s view is compelling. For a fuller treatment of whether Maimonides’ critique in Sefer ha-Mitzvot is aimed specifically at Rav Saadya Gaon, see R. Haim Sabato, “Did Maimonides Know Rav Saadya Gaon’s Complete Sefer ha-Mitzvot?” in Zvi Heber and Carmiel Cohen, eds., MiBirkat Moshe: Maimonidean Studies in Honor of Rabbi Nahum Eliezer Rabinovitch, vol. 2 (Maʿale-Adumim: Maʿaliyot, 2012), 757-763 (Hebrew), available here, and Marc D. Herman, “Systematizing God’s Law: Rabbanite Jurisprudence in the Islamic World from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016), 167-168, 301, available here.
[11] See Nahmanides’ Torah Commentary Addenda Written in the Land of Israel, eds. Yosef Ofer and Jonathan Jacobs (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College and the World Union of Jewish Studies, 2013), 430-432 (Hebrew).
[12] See Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “The Sage is Superior to the Prophet: The Conception of Torah through the Prism of this Proverb through the Ages,” in Howard Kreisel, ed., Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 2006), 37-78 (Hebrew), available here, who identifies two citations of this dictum in sources that predate the Sefer ha-Zohar, one in Hovot ha-Levavot and one in a work attributed to R. Avraham b. ha-Rambam, possibly by R. Nissim Gaon. The interpretations of R. Isaac Ibn Ghiyath and R. Joseph Ibn Migash discussed here, however, suggest that the paucity of earlier citations reflects not simple neglect but a reluctance to highlight texts that openly privilege human juridical creativity over prophetic transmission.
[13] This commentary is printed in R. Yosef Qafih, Hamesh Megillot, ed. Shimon Najar (Israel, 1970), 162-163 (Hebrew), where it is attributed to Rav Saadya Gaon; it is now also available online at alhatorah.org in R. Qafih’s translation. Another text overlooked by Goshen-Gottstein and cited by Herman (87) is the commentary of R. Joseph Ibn Migash (Riʾ Migash) preserved in Shitah Mekubetzet to Bava Batra 12a:

“‘Amemar said: A sage is superior to a prophet. Rav Ashi said: You may know this from the fact that a great scholar states a matter and it is then said that the law accords with [a tradition] given to Moses at Sinai’— and even though this scholar never heard this matter at all. Thus, [we see that] ‘the sage is superior to the prophet’: for the prophet says only what he has heard and what is placed in his mouth to say, whereas the sage can articulate what was said to Moses at Sinai even though he never heard it.”

[14] Elsewhere, however, Herman does highlight the significance of Ibn Ghiyath’s comment more explicitly. See Marc Herman, “Situating Maimonides’s Approach to the Oral Torah in Its Andalusian Context,” Jewish History, vol. 31, no. 1 (December 2017): 31-46, available here.
[15] This analysis bears indirectly on a debate I conducted in the pages of Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought with R. Shmuel Phillips concerning whether Maimonides adhered to a rigid, geonically derived methodology of talmudic interpretation that would have sharply limited the scope for post-talmudic harmonization or innovation. My contention in that exchange was that Maimonides engages in implicit synthesis and interpretive reconciliation of talmudic sources, even when such activity is not explicitly signaled in his formulations. The historical picture reconstructed by Herman strengthens the view of Maimonides as an independent thinker who was not constrained by geonic precedent, nor, in fact, by the precedent of his immediate Andalusian predecessors, making it difficult to sustain an account of Maimonides as merely transmitting talmudic conclusions through the mechanical application of geonic rules. See my article in Eliyahu Krakowski, “Talmud Oversimplified? A Partial Review of Talmud Reclaimed: An Ancient Text in the Modern Era by Shmuel Phillips,” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought, vol. 35 (Summer 2024): 129-145, available here, as well as the continued exchange in Shmuel Phillips, “Talmud Reclaimed and a Battle Over Methodologies of the Rishonim,” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought, vol. 36 (Winter 2025): 193-216, available here, and Eliyahu Krakowski, “Rejoinder: Reclaiming Talmudic Complexity,” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought, vol. 36 (Winter 2025): 217-229, available here.

 

A Conversation with Professor Benjamin Brown on the Publication of ‘Hasidic Leadership in Israel: Past and Present, Spirit and Matter’

By Moshe Shochat

This article presents an English translation of an insightful interview with Professor Benjamin Brown, conducted by Moshe Shochat for his blog, Sefarim ve-Kitvei Yad. Published online on July 26, 2025, and available here), the interview marks the occasion of Professor Brown’s newly published book, Hasidic Leadership in Israel: Past and Present, Spirit and Matter (Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute and Magnes Press, 2025; Hebrew). This translation appears at the Seforim Blog with the kind permission of both Moshe Shochat and Professor Benjamin Brown.

Professor Benjamin Brown is a full professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His scholarly output is astonishing, and he stands out particularly for his extensive research on Haredi society and the Hasidic movement. I would not exaggerate to say that he is currently the foremost scholar of Haredi society, just as Professor Menachem Friedman (1936-2020) was in his time. His new book – Hasidic Leadership in Israel: Past and Present, Spirit and Matter – is an exceptionally impressive study of the social and leadership structure of the Hasidic movement. In his book, he examines the Doctrine of the Tzaddik as it was formulated at the inception of the Hasidic movement in the generation of the Baal Shem Tov’s disciples, the transformations this doctrine underwent in subsequent generations, and especially during the movement’s rehabilitation in the Land of Israel from the time of World War II to the present day. I read the book carefully and enjoyed it immensely, but I was left with some open questions. Given my friendship with the author, I chose this time to deviate from the usual review format and sit down for an open conversation with the book’s creator. To my delight, Professor Brown accepted my proposal and dedicated his valuable time to my questions about the book.

Moshe Shochat: Professor Brown, hello. First, I’d like to extend my heartfelt congratulations on the publication of your remarkable new book. Would you like to introduce the book in a few words?

Professor Brown: Hello Moshe. Thank you for the congratulations! The book is called Hasidic Leadership in Israel, and it is precisely that. It deals with the status and perception of the Admorim (Rebbes) in late Hasidism, meaning Hasidism as it exists up to our present day. The book concludes with the COVID-19 crisis. This point does not symbolize an “end of an era,” but rather the time when the book was finalized and went to print. In the book, I seek to examine a changing and evolving perception of the “Tzaddik” and the Admorut (Rebbisteve, Rebbeship) in its very process of formation, or at least within its very recent history of formation. We are accustomed to tracing the doctrine of the Tzaddik from the inception of Hasidism or in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, there were interesting developments during these periods, and the book surveys at least some of them. But it becomes clear that even here in Israel, the perception of the Tzaddik continues to develop before our eyes in various forms and directions. To examine these developments, one must first and foremost follow the texts of the movement, as to a large extent we are dealing with a doctrine that Hasidism has always championed and given textual expression to throughout the generations. But in addition, one must follow the realization of the idea on the ground, following events that come and complement additional and more vivid angles of the conceptual perception. Therefore, at least the last part of the book contains a lot of politics and many events in Israeli public life and within the Hasidic communities themselves, which, although not conceptual, enrich the insights regarding the Admorim’s and Hasidim’s understanding of the essence of the Tzaddik’s role and the nature of the activity and content included in that role. In this direction, the book contributes its part to the long discussion on the development of the Tzaddik’s doctrine within the Hasidic movement throughout its generations.

Moshe Shochat: So, are all the dramas, conflicts, intrigues, and politics described in the book directly related to the question of the Tzaddik’s status? It seems that every issue in Hasidic society could be connected to the Tzaddik at its apex. What were the boundaries that guided you in choosing your topics?

Professor Brown: The first part of the book deals directly with the doctrine of the Tzaddik. Regarding the later parts of the book, which discuss the State of Israel in recent generations, I felt that all the topics were interconnected, and it was impossible to cut the story short. Therefore, I narrated the story in its full progression, hoping I ultimately succeeded in tying all the threads together. To this end, I included both summary paragraphs in each chapter and a general concluding chapter at the end of the book, aiming to demonstrate the internal connection among all these sections.

Ultimately, all the internal politics within Hasidic communities, the external politics between different Hasidic groups, and even the politics between Hasidic groups and state institutions, are all connected to the very essence of Hasidism. Therefore, when a Hasid ultimately looks at his Rebbe with reverence, today they view him differently than they did fifty years ago, and certainly before the Holocaust. Today, a Hasid reveres their Rebbe not just as a spiritual personality, a dispenser of abundance, a miracle worker, an educator, or one possessing divine inspiration, but also as a competent manager and a strong leader. Part of this strength is his ability to operate at a level that, in any other context, we would term political. The intention isn’t that all Admorim have become politicians or that their traditional roles have been marginalized. These roles are certainly present, but in a certain sense, politics has also become part of their spiritual function. In the Hasid’s consciousness, the figure of the “Tzaddik” has become imbued with a significantly higher proportion of political activity.

From these three levels – the internal, the external Hasidic or Haredi, and the external towards general society and national politics – everything ultimately converges to what I summarized in the final pages: what is perceived in the Hasid’s consciousness, and even in the consciousness of the Admorim themselves, when they contemplate Tzaddikism (or, in Hasidic parlance: Rebbisteve).

This aligns with the method of “indeliberate theology” that I’ve believed in for many years. This refers to a theological understanding that isn’t necessarily explicitly formulated as theology. I wouldn’t be overly presumptuous to extract theology from things that are not textual at all, such as the behavior of Admorim, concrete instructions, or things that don’t reflect profound conceptual depth. However, when I take the texts and construct new concepts from them, and concurrently substantiate this with descriptions of concrete actions, it helps us understand how, even without formulating the Tzaddik’s doctrine in new theological terms, a kind of new theology emerges before us. This is true even when its adherents don’t perceive it as new, and instead emphasize continuity over change.

I will later address “indeliberate theology” and the political connection, but first, I wish to conclude the discussion on the book’s boundaries. I chatted with a friend about your book and jokingly told him that in certain parts of the book, I felt like I was scrolling through the Twitter feed of Moshe Weisberg (a tweeter who extensively covers the courts of Rabbis and Admorim, often in a manner that appears grotesque and embarrassing). It seems to me that this feeling arose because, unlike your other books, the focus here is not on doctrines or the sociology of some obscure European history, but on the near present and the most beleaguered politics of Admorim’s courts that almost no one has heard of. What was the experience like to write “history” about last week’s gossip, and were there any fresh anecdotes you omitted because you felt they were “too much”?

I’ll start from the end. Well, the book certainly delves into small, even petty details, in a comprehensive and highly detailed manner. Since I present these matters as an illustration of the Tzaddik’s doctrine, I also require events that enrich the texts. The use of the word “gossip” is interesting. Perhaps I’ll share something in this context: The first conference where I participated as a lecturer was the Orthodoxy Research Conference at Givat Ram. By its nature, Orthodoxy research convenes scholars from various disciplines, and both historians and scholars of Jewish thought were present. In one of the open discussions, an interesting debate arose, where historians primarily stood against Jewish thought scholars. In summarizing the event, Professor Avi Ravitzky, one of the conference organizers, concluded that historians accuse Jewish thought scholars of dealing with “things in the air,” while Jewish thought scholars accuse historians of dealing with “gossip.” Indeed, we may sometimes feel that historical engagement is gossipy, but the engagement with that gossip has a purpose. Hasidism is not a philosophical system that one formulates at a writing desk or through abstract theoretical thought. In fact, no profound thought is like that, but certainly not thought that does not claim to be systematic, such as that of Hasidism. To forgo the “earthly” material is essentially to turn the discussion into a detached context, “things in the air.” On the other hand, I did not settle for gossip, and I endeavored to complete the picture with the help of texts that seek to formulate the concepts more consciously. It is possible that the balance was sometimes disturbed, but for my part, I aspired to achieve such a balance. The seemingly “low” engagement with “amnion and placenta” is akin to “cooks and confiture-makers for Torah,” meaning for the doctrine that I ultimately wish to reach and understand.

Fortunately, in dealing with the recent history of Haredi Judaism, there is an immense abundance of journalistic material that delves into minute details. This contrasts with the distant past, from which there is little journalism, especially non-Hasidic, and even when there is Hasidic journalism, it deals with specific and narrow aspects of the Admorim’s functions. In contrast, we have quite a bit of internal Hasidic literature, which deals with both stories and teachings. As a researcher, you utilize what is available to you, not what is not. Hasidic scholars of previous centuries would have been delighted to receive such an abundance of journalistic materials and field testimonies, but from those periods, such materials are scarce. Today the situation is different, and in my opinion, it should be leveraged effectively. Therefore, the first part of the book differs from the second, which deals with contemporary Hasidism.

Moshe Shochat: You mentioned at the beginning of the book a debate between Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. Buber argued that the fundamental sources for understanding the Hasidic movement are the stories, whereas Scholem contended that the most fundamental source is the Admorim’s (Rebbes’) teachings. In the case of the Tzaddik doctrine, do you state that everyone would agree the stories are primary?

Professor Brown: Certainly, there’s no basis to suggest that the Tzaddik’s doctrine hasn’t been discussed in Hasidic literature. It’s been a continuous topic. His spiritual role includes elevating and bringing down from the supernal worlds, bestowing abundance and blessing, education, study, ruach hakodesh, miracles, and more. All these aspects are exhaustively discussed in Hasidic philosophical literature as well. What wasn’t discussed, and this needs qualification by saying it wasn’t extensively discussed until roughly the mid-19th-century, is the “political theology” of the Tzaddik doctrine. That is, the political dimensions of the Tzaddik as a communal leader, an individual with authority, one entrusted with communal public affairs, beyond the spiritual roles I outlined. We glean these aspects more from story literature and from additional complementary sources.

Moshe Shochat: The absence of explicit sources led you to employ a term you coined previously – “indeliberate theology.” Recently, a philosophical book on the Haredi movement, written “from within,” briefly argued that your formulation is presumptuous, as it performs a theological psychologization of individuals who haven’t experienced the language of theology. Would you like to address this critique and perhaps, at this juncture, clarify something regarding the judgmental dimension present in or absent from this term?

Professor Brown: Yes. I believe the method of “indeliberate theology” isn’t my innovation; at most, I formulated it and gave it its name. This method has been applied by scholars of Jewish studies for many years, across generations, concerning numerous non-systematic thought systems, and particularly in the study of Hasidism. No one believes that the Baal Shem Tov created theology in the conventional, institutional sense of the word, not in the Christian sense, nor even in the medieval Jewish sense. When we discuss the Baal Shem Tov’s thought, we collect his sayings and attempt to construct from them ideas that cohere into a slightly more systematic theology. This is “indeliberate theology” in its solid and moderate approach. One could extend “indeliberate theology” to more extreme degrees, creating theology not just from isolated, scattered, and eclectic texts, but even from behaviors, actions, or practical directives. However, here we are treading on far less stable ground, much more perilous, and significantly further from the word “theology,” which principally refers to a conceptual framework. Therefore, I personally refrain from engaging with “indeliberate theology” using these latter tools, treating them at most as a complement to texts. Where texts are absent, we risk descending into psychologization or similar approaches that do not qualify as theology and generally open up significant avenues for speculation.

The book you are referring to is Menachem Nabet’s work, Haredim El Devaro (2025). His comment in the context of the book puzzles me, and I’ve already discussed it with him. In his book, he seeks to counter the excessive focus on the sociology of Haredi society and to engage more with theology, whose fundamental principle, in his view, is total devotion for Torah and the observance of mitzvot. He derives this conceptual framework from behaviors, life patterns, and emotions. In fact, it turns out that he himself applies the method of “indeliberate theology” in the extreme manner I mentioned. I emphasize that he does so correctly and convincingly, in my opinion; his arguments have significant value in scholarly thought. However, precisely in light of his own use of this method, his critique of the softer version of the method I employ strikes me as puzzling.

Moshe Shochat: Let me be a bit more direct. On the surface, you strive to remain “clean” of judgmentalism and personal opinions. Yet, in several places, you chose to include humorous anecdotes from Hasidim or their opponents that cast the institution of Hasidic leadership in a somewhat ludicrous light. For example, the jest that Esau was a rebbe, given that four hundred men followed him, he wore a “peltz” (a thick fur coat), and even wished to kill his brother… Similarly, you have often highlighted behavioral paradoxes, such as the contradiction between the principled and surprising statement of the Divrei Chaim that Admorut is not inherited like rabbinate but rather derives from the Tzaddik’s inherent stature, and his personal practice of bequeathing his position to all his sons, thereby fostering a dynasty where every male child became an Admor. As an author, you can choose what to present and how to guide the reader to the desired conclusions. Is a researcher capable of presenting research without personal opinion, or will their personal opinion inevitably influence the ordering of things and the selection of sources? Or, to rephrase, does your avoidance of direct judgmentalism stem from research considerations, or is it a personal choice, perhaps out of deference?

Professor Brown: That’s a good question. First, one must distinguish between research work in its essence and an ideological or polemical work. As far as research is concerned, I adhere to the conservative, solid view, which I believe most of my colleagues in the field of Jewish studies share. This view holds that a researcher inherently possesses a personal stance, and it is impossible for this stance not to influence their research, whether consciously or unconsciously. However, as a researcher, one must strive for their personal views to influence the work as minimally as possible. Even if complete separation between research and personal stance proves challenging, at least at the foundation of the conclusions, the researcher must be transparent and explicitly state that he is presenting his personal perspective. To the extent that this personal stance is expressed in a manner that does not distort the research or mislead the reader, it is legitimate, and even then, it is advisable for it to appear only in the margins. This is how I have endeavored to conduct myself in my research over the years, and the current study is no different in this regard.

Introducing humorous and even biting anecdotes about the institution of Admorut or the functioning of specific Admorim is not pertinent to this issue. Here, I return to the earlier questions. We are blessed that the Haredi public, in my view, possesses the best sense of humor among the various sectors in Israel, a sense of humor with deep historical roots. The ability to approach the institution of Admorut itself with humor, but even more so the way it is perceived by people – both by Hasidim and Admorim themselves, and by opponents – is an integral part of enriching the content and the feeling accompanying it. That is to say, truly understanding something involves not only grasping its literal text but also comprehending the emotional and experiential depth embedded within that text. Just as we quote fervent expressions of admiration that convey positive emotion, so too irony, sarcasm, and satire are part of understanding the phenomenon. We could not fully grasp the phenomenon of Admorut if we did not read the exaggerated expressions of admiration by Hasidim, but similarly, we would not understand it correctly if we refrained from reading the critiques and irony of the opponents, or even the satires of the Maskilim. If we were to draw only from one side, or disproportionately from one at the expense of the other, then we could indeed argue that there is a bias, and a bias is usually judgmental, leading the reader in the direction the author desires. To the extent that sources from all sides are utilized, including the irony expressed by each side, it becomes an integral part of a richer understanding of the subject text.

Moshe Shochat: A fascinating answer. I also want to note that in at least one place, you explicitly voiced an opinion against absolute judgmentalism and eloquently explained how one’s personal stance influences interpretation. In the book’s summary, you discussed the decentralized nature of the Hasidic movement, for better or worse, concluding: “If you ask a person their opinion on a particular society with many groups and streams, it is likely that their answer will be determined by their normative and emotional attitude towards it: if they love it, they will say there is pluralism, and if they hate it, they will say there is factionalism” (p. 357). I felt it was important to quote these words due to their significance in my eyes.

Professor Brown: Thank you! And there are many more examples of such nuanced phrasing. It’s always worthwhile to be sensitive to them…

Moshe Shochat: Well, we’ve discussed the framework and the question of personal stance in research so far. Now, I’d like to delve a bit into a more substantive point. In several places in your book, you wrote about unique turning points related to Hasidic leadership that occurred in twentieth-century Israel. However, I often felt that these changes weren’t fundamental but rather underwent rephrasing or sharpening in light of external developments – whether “from without,” confronting secular Jewish rule, or “from within,” confronting other Haredi groups that necessitated distinguishing clarification. I’ll start with an example where you did specifically clarify what you meant by “turning point.” You mentioned three Hasidic groups where the value of holiness (in the sense of sexual abstinence in married life) became a “trademark” only in twentieth-century Israel: Gur, Slonim, and Toldos Aharon. You noted that in all three, the foundations of holiness were already rooted in previous generations in Eastern Europe, yet a unique turning point occurred here in the Land. You cited three reasons for this transformation: the need for spiritual revival and the creation of renewed values as a substitute for the mysticism of the first generations; the modern and permissive challenge that elicited a reaction; and the need for these groups to rebuild themselves after the Holocaust and adopt distinctive group features by sharpening existing values. Can one even speak of an ideological turning point based on manifestations and expressions that suddenly appear in Israel against a backdrop of new circumstances?

Professor Brown: The answer is: Yes. Absolutely yes. Traditional societies, characterized by stability and deep commitment to tradition, do not tend to innovate ex nihilo. Every innovation within them is, in fact, “ex materia” (“yesh mi-yesh”) – a return to existing values from their broad cultural and religious reservoir. Even when they present the innovation as novel, it’s typically a revival of past ideas, adapted to current needs. Historically, we know that restoration is almost never an authentic return to the past, but rather a re-processing of it. When Ben-Gurion called for a return to the Bible, he wasn’t asking to live the Bible, but to use it as a foundation for building a modern identity. The same applies to Hasidism: the call to return to the Baal Shem Tov, heard at times, is not a demand for precise replication – no one believes that’s possible – but for the adoption of suitable elements from his legacy, within the context and adaptation to society in the modern era and its needs. In a traditionalist society, where a rich repository of texts, ideas, and norms exists, there’s no need to invent anything new. Innovation occurs through selection, emphasis, or the elevation of a particular value over another, or even just alongside another value that dominates that society. Such a change, even if minor, may be considered revolutionary in the society’s internal consciousness or from the perspective of the examining researcher.

The book does not argue for a comprehensive revolution in the Tzaddik doctrine, but rather points to movements of expansion to new extremes not seen in recent generations. We are witnessing the development of a more individualistic Admorut, both on the part of the spiritual leader (for instance, in the phenomenon of the mashpi’im) and on the part of the Hasid, who gains broader scope and freedom, alongside more authoritarian, centralized, and forceful tendencies. Some Admorim display independence in relation to tradition; some revert the doctrine to spiritual-heavenly patterns, as exemplified by the Amshinover Rebbe, or conversely, to political-earthly patterns, as seen in Gur and similar movements. These changes, even if not dramatic, are significant. They delineate the boundaries of possible renewal within a conservative society and indicate how the institution of the Tzaddik is stretched and reshaped in accordance with the spirit of the times.

Moshe Shochat: I generally accept your points, and yet I’ll clarify my intention with another example. In the summary of the chapter on “The Growth and Development Phase (1966–1994),” you wrote about a change that occurred in the Tzaddik’s doctrine during this period. Although the doctrine itself didn’t show change – meaning, Hasidic texts still discussed Tzaddikim and faith in Tzaddikim in formulations similar to those in Europe – in practice, the Admor’s role underwent a transformation. This included, among other things, the integration of Admorim into politics, both national/municipal and internal Haredi/Hasidic politics. As you rightly noted, this change is hardly reflected in the rebbes’ verter (Torah homilies). Let me put it this way: While an external observer might perceive the entry into politics as a fundamental change, as you know, you place great emphasis on self-consciousness. Is there not a case to give greater weight to the self-consciousness that views this change as circumstantial and “external,” merely an adapted lobbying channel, and therefore doesn’t address it on the ideological level? After all, there’s no doubt that in Haredi eyes, “politics for heavenly purpose” (politika tzorekh gavoha) is a fundamental concept, meaning that all worldly avenues are solely for the purpose of aiding a life of Torah and fear of Heaven.

Professor Brown: Your question essentially presupposes the well-known and familiar distinction between the core and the periphery, between goals and means, between content and framework, or any similar distinction one might choose. According to your argument, at the core level, Hasidism remained in the form it had before the Holocaust or before the establishment of the State of Israel, and only the periphery changed because the means needed to adapt to changing circumstances.

I am quite suspicious of this distinction. We’re dealing with human beings. People are living creatures. The need to change the means almost necessarily, both psychologically and socially, mandates a different perspective on the core, on the content. The lack of expression of this in the philosophical discourse stems, in part, from the fact that this discourse truly reflects consciousness less. It largely continues a current of thought that is, I would almost say, inert – a continuity that is pushed to remain the same, and doesn’t adequately reflect, at least in the discourse of the Admorim themselves, the changes that others, even those in their immediate surroundings, observe. It’s very difficult to dispute that, ultimately, more and more changes in the framework eventually permeate the content as well. Therefore, even if its verbal expression, the official theological expression, remains continuous, it doesn’t mean that no changes have occurred.

Moreover, ultimately, we do see the expression of changes in certain Torah teachings, for example, in those of the Klausenberger Rebbe, or in the writings of certain Hasidim who certainly give expression to things in a way that their forefathers did not. Not to mention what is discussed in the media or other means of expression. Ultimately, there is a change in the doctrine here, even if the formulations often, at least during the transition periods themselves, don’t reflect it.

Moshe Shochat: In the same vein, I want to press you from another angle, and here I connect to another important point you mentioned in your book. In the chapter on “The Doctrine of the Tzaddik” you outlined several circles of identity for the Hasidic Jew: the circle of Halakhah, to which you also connected the encompassing circle of Ashkenazi custom; the circle of Hasidic custom in the narrow sense (various practices related to the performance of mitzvot); the circle of Hasidic custom in the broad sense (practices not related to halakhic life but to the Hasidim’s relationship with the Rebbe and the community); and others. My understanding is that in the reality of our lives in Israeli politics, it would have been appropriate to add another circle – the circle of Haredism, within which Hasidim share common ground with the Litvish and Sephardic publics. The question of involvement in politics while maintaining a conscious distinction from the national idea is, in my view, the prominent expression of this circle (with varying degrees of distinction between Ashkenazim and Sephardim). Involvement in politics is a derivative of the Haredi circle, and according to this, it has no bearing on the Hasidic circle, and it certainly does not influence or is influenced by the doctrine of the Hasidic Tzaddik.

Professor Brown: You raise a very strong point here, and the truth is, I’m somewhat conflicted about it. First, I concede that I should have considered your argument and given it due thought. According to you, and I believe you’re correct, Haredism as a social circle, which encompasses Hasidim, Litvish Jews, and Sephardic Haredim, is undoubtedly a circle with existential identity significance for every Hasid. There are norms that can be defined as general Haredi norms, and it would have been appropriate to address this in the book.

The doubt that still arises for me regarding this matter is whether it truly constitutes a normative religious circle. When I speak of normative circles of a Hasid’s life, I’m referring to religious normative circles. In the context of this circle, we must ask: what would we define as fulfilling a religious ethos in the life of Haredi Judaism that isn’t specific to being a Hasid, Litvish, or Sephardic Jew? Perhaps certain stringencies in choosing kosher certifications, perhaps certain modesty norms, but even these vary from sector to sector. I find it difficult at this moment to pinpoint particular norms that would uniformly unite the entire Haredi public as such. While such norms do exist, generally, even these norms will be carried out in different ways across sectors. I would summarize: it’s challenging to find a universal Haredi ethos that is observed identically across all of Haredi society, without shades of difference between the particular ethoi of individual sectors within the broader Haredi society. Therefore, it is certainly a less sharply defined circle than the circles I delineated in the book.

Moshe Shochat: In the book’s conclusion, you presented the phenomenon of the “Mashpi’im” as a counterpoint to Hasidic involvement in politics, and as a more primordial, purer representation of the Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidism, devoid of politics and worldliness. In my view, every Hasidism begins as a “pure” movement; its expansion in the next stage inevitably leads to institutionalization, and institutionalization brings about economic and political necessities. An example you mentioned in the book but didn’t fully elaborate on is the Mashpia Rabbi Tzvi Meir Zilberberg. For approximately two decades, he operated as a completely “pure” Mashpia, even functioning within a Beis Midrash that wasn’t his own. However, in recent years, he began establishing institutions, building a community, and more. Naturally, he also became involved in fundraising and the institutionalization of a group with solidified rules. To the best of my knowledge, his political outlook tends towards zealotry (kanaut) and an avoidance of entering the political arena (if I recall correctly, he doesn’t have Israeli citizenship and is therefore “exempt” from concerning himself with setting an example regarding electoral participation). But this is merely a coincidental value choice, and I have no doubt that if he weren’t a zealot, he would also operate on the political level to secure state funding. If so, the phenomenon of the Mashpi’im isn’t a phenomenon fundamentally opposed to institutionalized Hasidism, but rather represents Hasidic groups in developmental stages that will also eventually undergo institutionalization.

Professor Brown: The institutionalization of Mashpi’im figures in Hasidism is a fascinating question. There’s a well-known dynamic: any young, fresh, and uninstitutionalized force that seeks to establish itself in reality and ensure its continuity eventually tends to become institutionalized. Even if formal institutions aren’t established in the current generation, the desire for inheritance and continuity in future generations will lead, almost inevitably, to some process of institutionalization.

Rabbi Tzvi Meir Zilberberg is an example of a figure who established institutions, yet there are other Mashpi’im who have not done so. Nevertheless, the very emergence of individuals who operate on the non-institutionalized spiritual plane, while being very careful to avoid involvement in internal-Hasidic and external-Hasidic politics, is a unique phenomenon. Their drawing power largely stems from this very distance. Even if they themselves ultimately become institutionalized, the mere existence of a mechanism that bypasses the traditional Admorut, allowing for the growth of new Mashpi’im, is a significant innovation. This mechanism provides the Hasid or spiritual seeker with a spiritual experience that is personal and non-institutionalized, suited to the needs of their generation. The very possibility of experiencing the spiritual in an unmediated way is of great value. There are also Mashpi’im who choose to avoid institutionalization almost entirely. They don’t aim to accumulate institutional baggage or to create formal continuity, maintaining a modest, non-institutional, and even non-regal character. This, too, represents an important innovation. Once the mechanism for producing leaders of this type exists, their eventual institutionalization doesn’t really matter, because if one becomes institutionalized, two or three who haven’t yet done so will emerge in their place, able to fulfill the spiritual yearning of the less institutionally inclined Hasid.

In my opinion, the phenomenon of the Mashpi’im warrants more in-depth research. Such research should examine the personalities of the prominent Mashpi’im in our generation, but also descend to the field level – to the Mashpi’im who are emerging, or those who operate with a lower profile. There is also scope to examine the dynamics among them, perhaps even internal connections between Mashpi’im. This is a phenomenon that could justify an entire book, perhaps not too extensive, but certainly an interesting one. It’s important for me to emphasize that I didn’t see myself as the one to complete this work. This is a broad phenomenon, which is still on the fringes of the Hasidic camp – important and interesting fringes, but still fringes. Therefore, I chose to grant it a relatively modest place, understanding that it would be incorrect to give it proportions that exceed its current status and thus present a misleading picture of its power. Nevertheless, I definitely commend anyone who chooses to delve into this topic and research it thoroughly and in detail.

Moshe Shochat: In the seventh chapter, you impressively analyzed five Hasidic texts from recent years. Alongside surprising texts that seek to take a step back and express reservations about the extremist Tzaddik doctrine, such as those by Rabbi Shaul Alter or “Kehal Hasidei Yerushalayim,” you also discussed some challenging texts. One of these is the text by the Rebbe of Vizhnitz–Merkaz, which speaks of the “holy method” – “shvantzunes” – that pushes the Tzaddik doctrine to an extreme and even dangerous peak. The second text is by one of the Mashgichim in Gur, offering a principled justification for the use of violence against deviants within the group as part of enforcing the Admor’s authority. These matters seem to speak for themselves. The current public discourse on these two dangerous manifestations views them as a kind of “sect,” even though it’s debatable whether these Hasidic groups meet the clear criteria for defining sects. Sociological research offers several possible definitions for a sect, and as is well known, The Israeli Center for Victims of Sects deals extensively with these questions. First, at the level of the book itself, was there a reason you refrained from mentioning this topic, even implicitly? And moving forward, should we expect to wake up one morning and find that more Hasidic groups have reached an extreme expression that resembles a sect? We know that concerning the examples I mentioned, outsiders, not just from Haredi society, are afraid to intervene, probably mainly for political reasons. In contrast, we are familiar with extreme cases of clear sects that law enforcement agencies have dealt with (for example, Berland Hasidim or the “Lev Tahor” sect, which you didn’t mention, likely because it doesn’t operate in Israel). Do you foresee any external intervention that will put an end to these phenomena?

Professor Brown: This is a difficult question. The question of the boundaries of a “sect” is a complex and volatile issue, not only politically but also at the purely analytical research level. There’s the well-known saying, “religion is a sect that succeeded” – a militant secularist statement, yet it contains a kernel of truth. Even non-religious groups, when they succeed, can evolve into a movement, and sometimes even a full-fledged society. Prior to that, they’re often perceived as marginal, semi-underground, bizarre groups, almost “sects” in a secular sense of the word. In the 18th-century, the Illuminati and the Freemasons were largely perceived as secular “sects.”

The term “sect” carries judgmental connotations, especially in Hebrew, and sometimes it also reflects criteria of success or failure. This complicates the discourse, as it intermingles value judgment with analytical description. In English, for instance, the common phrase used in the media, and sometimes in academia, to describe Hasidic groups is “Hasidic sect.” When I was a member of an international research group that authored the book Hasidism: A New History (2018), we discussed this issue and decided to avoid the use of “sect” as much as possible, preferring terms like “Hasidic groups” due to the negative connotations of the former. Ostensibly, any Hasidic group could be considered a sect, but we don’t wish to define it that way – both because of the judgmental aspect and due to questions of size and influence. Therefore, classifying groups as “sect or not sect” strikes me as an unproductive discussion, and at times, it even diverts the focus from the essential to the trivial. For this reason, I refrained from such a definition in my research.

Nevertheless, there is room for an internal discussion within the Hasidic discourse itself: What are the limits of legitimacy for the Tzaddik doctrine? When does it begin to undermine the internal logic of the Hasidic idiom itself? Berland, for example, was condemned even within the Hasidic camp, albeit with muted language. In contrast, Rabbi Mendele of Vizhnitz-Center is perceived as a legitimate phenomenon within that camp, and some seek to adopt certain aspects of his approach. It’s truly difficult to say when Hasidic society itself begins to worry that certain perceptions of Admorut cross the line. Beyond this, as part of Israeli society, one must also examine the impact of these phenomena on fundamental norms that society is willing to tolerate, and the point at which it chooses to confront them. When the phenomenon infringes upon social norms, as in the cases of Rabbi Berland or Lev Tahor, the state knew how to act, perhaps also because these were groups with limited political power. It took steps, sometimes risking confrontation. In other cases, it refrained from doing so. Therefore, the central question is twofold: what is the degree of dangerousness of the phenomenon, and what is the society’s willingness and capacity to confront it? These questions extend beyond the book’s objectives. They are more suited for position papers by social and political research institutes. While the book provides information that can enrich a discussion on the subject, the practical aspects and public policy are not part of the current research and do not align with its character.

Moshe Shochat: We cannot avoid mentioning current events, and I’ll do so briefly, focusing narrowly on the Tzaddik doctrine. These days, the Haredi parties have stirred a political uproar with their withdrawal from the government. Do you read the news differently in light of your research on Hasidic leadership? Does every political step taken by the Haredi parties, including, of course, the Hasidim, influence or is influenced by the Tzaddik doctrine?

Professor Brown: The short answer is: no. I do not read the news differently, because the political dynamics are familiar and well-known, and the book itself points them out. Politics is politics – a system of internal and external pressures. Admorim, being leaders, are also subject to such pressures. The Tzaddik doctrine is the foundation from which these processes emanate, and it develops through its application, but not every event directly affects it. Current events are mostly an expression of the power structures and dynamics that the Tzaddik doctrine itself has created. When observing them, there is no sense of dramatic novelty, but rather an identification of familiar processes that have already been analyzed in research. My writing aims to describe these dynamics, to view them as everyday political occurrences, a sequence of actions, but not every action is the direct realization of a specific doctrine. At certain points, sometimes even arbitrary ones, there is room to pause and examine the broader picture. It’s important to experience reality “in the small,” but also to know when to observe “in the large,” as the “large” does not change frequently. It accumulates gradually from the small events. Only after a period, a decade or two, does it become clear that a substantive change has occurred, one that warrants analysis, conceptualization, and the naming of a new phenomenon. It is then necessary to rise above the current daily reality and view it with a broader perspective.

The book aims to do this at a contemporary juncture, understanding that the process will continue into the future. In a few decades, perhaps even less, there will be a need for new analyses and further conceptualizations. These too will require a descent into the field, a deep observation of details, but without getting bogged down in them. There is a need to combine particular observation with a comprehensive outlook – to ascend to the “hilltop” and survey the broad picture, while creating general conceptualizations that will allow for a profound understanding of the processes.

Moshe Shochat: Having discussed your new book, it only remains to ask, with your permission, where you are headed after this book? Does your workbench hold another surprising book for us?

Professor Brown: Thank you for the question. My workbench is laden with future plans and research, and I hope, with God’s help, that I will succeed in realizing as many of them as possible. As of now, two central projects occupy me, both very different from each other and also different from the current book. I’ll just mention that the book you read is, in all likelihood, my last research for the foreseeable future in the field of Israeli Haredi Judaism. I have dealt with this topic over the years, mainly within the framework of the Israel Democracy Institute, and I am now setting it aside.

The first project I am engaged in belongs to the field of general philosophy; a field less known to the broader public as an area of my work, yet one that has accompanied me throughout my years. Alongside my work in Jewish studies, I have also extensively engaged with philosophy: I have read, taught, written, and even published two books in English. The first, Thoughts and Ways of Thinking: Source Theory and Its Applications, was published in London in 2017, and the second, The Foundations of Rational Metaphysics, was recently published in Munich. Both deal with complex and professional philosophical topics that are not related to Jewish studies. Many, even those who know me well, are unaware of their existence, as I am generally identified with Jewish studies research. But these fields are very central in my life, and no less important to me than Jewish studies research, even if I built my professional career in this area. The last book particularly excited me, as I worked on it for 16 years. It includes, in my opinion, important innovations in the field, even if they are technical and not popular topics. I am very happy with it, and I intend to continue to engage in general philosophy. However, the book I am currently working on is in a completely different direction.

The next book in philosophy will address more accessible topics, ones that may interest a broader readership than the previous two. It focuses on the historical and intellectual roots of critical theories in the social sciences and humanities in the Western world. Critical theories represent a broad family – ranging from the Frankfurt School, through post-structuralism, feminism, critical race theories, intersectionality, and more. These theories are the intellectual, academic, and theoretical engine of progressive movements and “woke” movements today. The book does not deal with them per se, but with their roots, from the 18th century until their maturation in the 20th century: how they emerged, what were their historical, social, and political circumstances, and what granted them the immense cultural and social power they possess today. I apply a critical method to them – not their own, but a different method – with the aim of understanding their ascent and the power they have accumulated. This is a topic that fascinates me greatly, and I am in the midst of working on it, hoping to complete it in the foreseeable future.

The second project is indeed related to the field of Jewish studies, and it focuses on the circle of the Baal Shem Tov. This deals with 18th-century Hasidism, not that of the 19th and 20th centuries, which I have addressed until now. I have already written two articles on the subject that were published in the journal Zion, and their expanded versions will form part of the book, alongside additional expansions. My goal is not only to research the figure of the Baal Shem Tov, who has already been the subject of rich scholarly inquiry, but also the members of his circle who have often remained underexamined in existing scholarship. I seek to illuminate their figures and examine the politics of early Hasidism. This politics includes spiritual disagreements over paths of divine service, but also personal tensions, diverse temperaments, and group power dynamics. It’s difficult to determine which precedes what – personal relationships or ideological differences – but it doesn’t really matter, as there are almost always correlations between them. I examine this phenomenon also through new sources that have not been recognized or have been somewhat neglected in existing research.

These are the two books on my desk. I move between them according to time and capacity, alongside the routine demands of academic work. Both occupy me, excite me, and with God’s help, I hope to make progress on them in the near future.

Moshe Shochat: Professor Brown, I thank you very much for the considerable time you dedicated to me. I wish you – and us, your readership – that you continue to produce more important and fascinating works as we have been privileged to receive so far.

Professor Brown: With pleasure. Thank you too for your profound reading and insightful discussion.

Jewish Communal Workers, Preacher’s Kid Syndrome, and Sefer Shmuel ^[1]
By Rabbi Akiva Males

This article is dedicated to the memory of HaRav Gedalia Dov Schwartz, zt”l, – whose 5^th Yahrtzeit was on Erev Chanukah, the 24^th of Kislev 5786 (2025). Rav Schwartz was an overflowing spring of Halachic guidance, wisdom, and practical rabbinic advice. I will always feel indebted to Rav Schwartz for the numerous times he graciously shared his vast knowledge — as well as his compassionate heart — with me.

______________________

. . . וכל מי שעוסקים בצרכי צבור באמונה, הקדוש ברוך הוא ישלם שכרם . . .

. . . and all those who faithfully occupy themselves with the community’s needs, may the Holy One, Blessed is He pay their reward . . . ^[2]

“Yichus [pedigree] is a lot like potatoes – often times, the best part is underground.” ^[3]

While great ancestry may sometimes provide a person with a head start in life, pedigree offers no guarantee of achieving greatness. We have observed this reality in the world around us, we know this fact from our study of Jewish history, and we certainly know this to be true from countless episodes in Tanach.

It is important to remember, however, that while a child may not have emulated the lofty character traits and/or achievements of his/her parents, those parents and their child-raising efforts are not necessarily at fault. After all, numerous factors (i.e. inborn nature, environment, etc.) play a role in shaping a child’s development. Unless there are clear indications of bad parenting, it would be foolish speculation (at best) or outright cruelty (at worst) to accuse parents of failing to properly raise their children.

If we agree not to automatically label friends and neighbors as bad parents based on how their child(ren) turned out, do our great ancestors — our role models found in Tanach — deserve any less? Of course, we ought to extend them the same courtesy. Hence, we should not assert that any of the great figures of Tanach were guilty of poor parenting without clear indications from the texts themselves, the teachings of our Mishnaic / Talmudic Sages, or the early Biblical commentaries that this was in fact the unfortunate case.

In the Book of Shmuel I, we sadly find two tragic cases where the sons of great Jewish leaders — Eli and Shmuel — did not live up to the hopes of their fathers or their people^[4]. While our Sages and the classic commentaries suggest interpretations which minimize the guilt of each leader’s sons^[5], it is clear nonetheless that the sons of Eli (the High Priest of the Tabernacle at Shiloh) as well as the sons of Shmuel (the great selfless prophet) abused the power of their respective offices and were therefore unworthy of leading the Jewish people.

Do Eli’s and Shmuel’s sons’ failures to live up to their fathers’ examples indicate poor parenting on the part of their fathers? Fortunately, there is at least one of our classical commentaries to offer us some direction.

Among the early Biblical commentaries, the explanations of Ralbag^[6] to Tanach are most unique. Aside from authoring a running commentary, Ralbag also provides us at regular intervals with what he refers to as the To’eliyos — the practical lessons to be learned from many Biblical episodes. Ralbag’s takeaway lessons offer a treasure trove of insights into human nature, the character traits which we aspire to attain, and a better understanding of the Mitzvos. Finally, Ralbag often utilizes his To’eliyos as a vehicle for explaining the Torah’s worldviews.

In two places in his To’eliyos to Shmuel I, Ralbag provides us with a great deal of insight into the sons of Eli and Shmuel — as well as their fathers’ roles in their unfortunate outcomes.

Ralbag #1

רלב”ג שמואל א פרק ז

העשרים ושלשה^[7] הוא להודיע כי לא היתה הסבה בחטא בני עלי הוא היות עלי בלתי משגיח בענינם ובלתי מיישיר אותם אל הטוב. וזה כי את פני עלי ובהשגחתו נתיסר שמואל לשרת את ה’. ועם כל זה לא הועילה הנהגת עלי להישיר בניו אל השלמות מצד רוע תכונתם.

To paraphrase Ralbag, the sins of Eli’s sons were not due to a lack parental oversight and/or an effort to steer them in the proper direction. After all, it was Eli’s oversight and guidance which brought Shmuel to properly serve G-d. Unfortunately, Eli’s efforts did not succeed in steering his own sons towards wholesomeness, for they were born with a propensity for wrongdoing.

In this To’eles, Ralbag relates several details about Eli and his sons:

A) Eli was an involved parent. He was משגיח בענינם — he looked after the affairs of his sons and tried to be מיישיר אותם אל הטוב — steer them in the right direction.

B) Eli’s parenting skills were successful in ensuring that Shmuel — his young charge and student — developed into the consummate servant of G-d we know him as.

C) Despite Eli’s valiant efforts as a parent, unfortunately, he was unsuccessful with his own sons. Why were Eli’s parenting skills effective with Shmuel but not with his own biological children?

רוע תכונתם — unlike Shmuel, Eli’s sons naturally possessed a propensity for wrongdoing.

The picture of Eli which emerges from this To’eles / lesson of Ralbag is that of an involved parent. Though he was successful in raising Shmuel, Eli saw no such success with his own sons. Why not? The fault was not Eli’s. With a natural disposition for wrongdoing, Eli’s sons had a handicap working against them which they failed to overcome.

On the surface, this To’eles of Ralbag, wherein Eli seems blameless for the failures of his sons, stands in sharp contrast to a second To’eles of Ralbag found just a bit later in Shmuel I.

Ralbag #2

Following Chapter 12 of Shmuel I, Ralbag records another To’eles which assesses Eli’s parenting efforts.^[8]

רלב”ג שמואל א פרק יב

הראשון הוא להודיע שראוי לשלם שידקדק בהנהגת בניו שתהיה באופן הראוי, ולא יקל מזה מפני רוב טרדותו בהנהגת העם. הלא תראה מה שקרה לשמואל בעבור שלא דקדק בהנהגת בניו שתהיה לפי הראוי. וזה, שזה היה סבה שסרה הממשלה מזרעו. ונמשך מזה ששאלו להם ישראל מלך, שהיה סבה בסוף לגלות ישראל מעל אדמתם, כמו שזכרנו. וכזה בעצמו קרה לעלי, מפני שלא דקדק בהנהגת בניו לפי הראוי. כי זה היה סבה שמתו בניו, וסרה מבי’ עלי בסוף הענין הכהונה הגדולה ונתנה לזרע פנחס בן אלעזר.

To paraphrase Ralbag, a wholesome person ought to be exacting in regard to his children’s conduct. One must not let communal responsibilities get in the way of his familial obligations. As an example, see what resulted from Shmuel’s not having been as exacting with his sons as he should have been. As a result, his children were not worthy of being leaders of the Jewish people. This led the people to request a King, which was the eventual cause of their exile from Israel. This is exactly what befell Eli — and it was all a result of his not having been as exacting with his sons as he should have been. This is why Eli’s sons died and the office of the High Priesthood was transferred to the offspring of Pinchas the son of Elazar.

In this To’eles / lesson, Ralbag teaches us that:

A) A truly good parent is one who is מדקדק בהנהגת בניו — exacting regarding his/her children’s conduct — despite the many communal responsibilities he/she may be tasked with.

B)  Unfortunately, Shmuel could have done better in this regard. As he was so occupied in his selfless work on behalf of the Jewish people, he neglected to be as exacting as he should have been with his own sons. Regrettably, Shmuel’s neglecting to properly involve himself in his sons’ lives eventually resulted in tragedy for the Jewish people. This sounds very much like what is referred to nowadays as “preacher’s kid syndrome” – which is “a situation in which the parents of a preacher’s kid are attuned to everyone’s problems but those of the kid.” ^[9]

C) Sadly, Eli preceded Shmuel in this very regard. He too was not as exacting with his sons as he should have been. Eli’s deficiency in this parental role had grave consequences for his immediate family.

The second To’eles of Ralbag clearly ascribes the failure of the sons of both Eli and Shmuel to some lack of parental involvement. On the surface, this second To’eles of Ralbag seems to contradict what he wrote about the diligent parenting efforts of Eli in the previously quoted To’eles. In that first comment, Ralbag had written that Eli’s sons failed in life as a result of their own deficiencies — not because of any lack in Eli’s parenting.

Can these two seemingly contradictory comments of Ralbag be reconciled?

I believe the following approach best resolves the apparent contradiction between Ralbag’s two Toeliyos involving the parenting efforts of Eli:

According to Ralbag, there are two different levels of parental involvement one can exercise when raising children:

1. Ralbag’s lower level of parental involvement is described as being – משגיח בענינם. Such a parent is by no means oblivious of what the child is up to. On the contrary, that parent keeps tabs on the child, monitors the child’s affairs, and maintains a certain level of involvement in the child’s life.^[10]
2. Ralbag’s higher level of parental involvement is described as being – מדקדק בהנהגת בניו. That parent is exacting and even more involved, taking a hands-on interest in the life of the child. Such a parent is not just a משגיח / observer looking in on the child’s life. This level of parental involvement connotes one who is actively involved in every aspect of the child’s conduct.

From Ralbag’s perspective, neither Eli nor Shmuel was an uninvolved father who gave no time to their sons and left their kids alone to raise themselves. They were fathers who were definitely involved in their sons’ lives. Their commitment in raising their sons, however, was simply limited to משגיח בענינם — general oversight, that is the lower level of parental involvement. Neither Eli nor Shmuel could claim to have been a father who was מדקדק בהנהגת בניהם. According to Ralbag, they just were not exacting with, or extremely involved in every aspect of their sons’ lives.

Thus, there is no contradiction between the two To’eliyos of Ralbag. In his first To’eles, Ralbag noted that Eli fulfilled the first level of his parental responsibilities vis-à-vis his sons — that of being משגיח בענינם. While that level of parental involvement may suffice when raising a child with a propensity for goodness — i.e. Shmuel — it is not the level of involvement needed when raising children with an inclination for wrongdoing — i.e. Eli’s own sons.

In his second To’eles, Ralbag stated that while one would be wrong to claim that both Eli and Shmuel completely ignored their parental responsibilities, neither of them was as fully involved of a father he should have been. Both Eli and Shmuel should have realized that in order to successfully raise their sons, each would need to be a father who was מדקדק בהנהגת בניו. Their sons’ inborn dispositions demanded a greater level of parental involvement from their fathers.^[11]

Why did Shmuel fail to be as exacting with his sons as he should have been? Ralbag clearly states that Shmuel erred due to his pre-occupation with being the consummate Jewish communal leader.^[12] While Shmuel never fully ignored his parental responsibilities, Ralbag learns that in his passion to selflessly address the very real needs and concerns of his people, unfortunately, Shmuel neglected to give his sons the full measure of parental involvement which — due to their dispositions — they so desperately required.^[13]

 

Conclusion

Having presented a working approach to reconcile two seemingly conflicting תועליות of Ralbag, it behooves us to conclude by emphasizing Ralbag’s crucial message.

In Koheles (2:14) we read: . . . הֶחָכָם עֵינָיו בְּרֹאשׁוֹ, וְהַכְּסִיל בַּחֹשֶׁךְ הוֹלֵךְ — The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness . . . Long before the Boy Scouts of America coined their motto, King Solomon taught how important it is to “Be Prepared”. In a similar vein, during World War II, Winston Churchill is credited as having stated: “He who fails to plan is planning to fail”.

In his To’eliyos cited above, Ralbag reminds us how crucial it is that every Jewish communal worker adopt a strategy for juggling his/her many responsibilities. Jewish communal workers must struggle with allocating their limited amounts of time, attention, and energies. Anyone involved in such work must be ever alert to ensure that the needs of his/her family are not overlooked in the process of nobly serving the needs of their community.

Is there any one proven formula to help a Jewish communal worker properly balance the very real and competing needs of one’s spouse, family, and community? Absolutely not — after all, the characteristics and circumstances of no two spouses, families, communities, or Jewish communal workers are perfectly alike.

There are, however, three crucial steps which I believe each Jewish communal worker should take when allocating his/her time, attention, and energies:

1. Communicate — One must truly know and understand their spouse, family, and community in order to correctly allocate the time and attention each requires. The only way to accomplish this is through frequent and meaningful communication.
2. Re-evaluate — As good a balance one may have achieved in the past, the needs of one’s spouse, family, and community constantly change. As such, it is wise for every Jewish communal worker to periodically reassess the formula he/she has created to meet the needs of those requiring his/her time, attention, and energies.
3. Pray — Ultimately, each and every Jewish communal worker is only human. As such, even one’s most thought-out plans to allocate his/her limited resources may have been made in error. Without G-d’s help, no Jewish communal worker can possibly hope to succeed in the balancing act he/she must perform. Once one has done his/her part in this process, the Jewish communal worker should sincerely ask G-d for His assistance as he/she strives to work on behalf of His people.

May the lives of Eli HaKohoen and Shmuel Hanavi serve as an inspiration — as well as a lesson — to all Jewish communal workers.^[14]

1. I am greatly indebted to my Rabbeim who introduced me to Ralbag’s commentary to Tanach during my years in Yeshiva; Rabbi Avrohom Semmel (Queens, NY) and Rabbi Yitzchok Shapiro (Boca Raton, FL) for their assistance (several years ago) with the sources cited in this article; and my father, Mr. U. Harold Males for his editorial assistance. ↑
2. From the pre-Mussaf prayer recited each Shabbos in synagogues around the world. ↑
3. A number of years ago, I heard that sharp remark from Rabbi Berel Wein, zt”l, during a Jewish history lecture. In a personal communication with Rabbi Wein regarding the origins of this adage, he told me that while he was not aware of a specific source, he believes it to be one of our people’s great Yiddish folk sayings. ↑
4. See Shmuel I, 2:12-22 and Shmuel I, 8:1-5. ↑
5. See for example the ideas mentioned in Rashi to Shmuel I, 2:22 and Radak to Shmuel I, 8:2. ↑
6. Ralbag (רלב”ג) is the acronym for Rabbi Levi ben Gershom — sometimes referred to by his Latinized name — Gersonides. Ralbag (1288-1344) lived in the region of Southern France known as Provence. In recent years, Ralbag’s commentaries on much of Tanach have been masterfully annotated and republished by Mossad Harav Kook in Jerusalem, Israel. ↑
7. In the standard Mikra’os Gedolos editions of Nach, this To’eles is listed as number 23 and can be found after Chapter 7 of Shmuel I. In the newer Mossad Harav Kook edition, however, it is listed as תועלת number 24. ↑
8. In all editions of Ralbag’s commentary this lesson is listed as number 1 in this group of To’eliyos. ↑
9. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher’s_kid ↑
10. According to Ralbag, this parent also makes efforts to be מיישיר אותם אל הטוב — to steer his/her children in the proper direction. ↑
11. Although he did not state so overtly, it seems clear that Ralbag understood Shmuel’s sons as having propensities for wrongdoing just like Eli’s sons did. Otherwise, the lower level of parental involvement, which Ralbag described as משגיח בענינם in his first To’eles would have sufficed for Shmuel’s sons. ↑
12. See Shmuel I 7:15-16 and Ralbag’s accompanying comments for an example of Shmuel’s devotion to serving his people in such a time-consuming and selfless fashion. ↑
13. Why did Eli fail to be as involved of a parent as he should have been? Ralbag does not address that question. Was Eli overly occupied with the needs of his people — like Shmuel — so that his sons’ needs were neglected? Or, perhaps Eli was not as busy with the needs of the Jewish people, but he just did not realize his sons had propensities for wrongdoing, and therefore required a higher level of parental involvement on his part? While one could certainly speculate, Ralbag does not seem to clearly address this point. ↑
14. Two additional comments of Ralbag concerning Dovid HaMelech are very relevant to this discussion. See Ralbag’s comments to Shmuel II 8:18 as well as To’eles #3 to Melachim I chapter 2. In both of those places, Ralbag introduces an even greater level of parental involvement which he called משגיח במוסר בניו – ensuring that one’s child is reprimanded and/or punished for his/her wrongdoings. This highest level of parenting goes beyond mere oversight, and is necessary when one’s child has stepped beyond the lines of acceptable behavior. According to Ralbag, had Dovid achieved that level of parental involvement, several of his sons might have turned out better. (It is important to note that unlike his treatment of Shmuel, Ralbag did not overtly attribute Dovid’s parental failings to his untiring efforts on behalf of the Jewish people.) ↑

 

Between Authority and Inquiry:

Beyond the Masthead of the Beys Yaakov Journal, 1923-1980 – Part 1

by Dan Rabinowitz

In December 1961, the Israeli edition of Beys Yaakov, the educational journal of the Agudath Israel–affiliated school system, published an article that sits uneasily with standard accounts of Agudath Israel’s twentieth-century intellectual posture.^[1] Issue 6 of its second year reprinted in full a study on the archaeological and halakhic problems surrounding the base of the Temple menorah.^[2] The identity of the author is therefore institutionally consequential. Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog served as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel at the head of a state-established rabbinate whose claim to centralized religious authority Agudath Israel did not recognize, locating binding rabbinic authority instead in its own Moetset Gedolei HaTorah.^[3] The unabridged publication of his work in an Agudah-affiliated journal thus draws attention to the editorial criteria and intellectual assumptions operative within Beys Yaakov. This decision was not anomalous. From its founding in interwar Poland through its postwar continuation in Israel, Beys Yaakov repeatedly engaged materials, methods, and voices that lay beyond the formal boundaries of Agudath Israel’s institutional authority.^[4] The journal maintained clear Orthodox commitments, but it did not construe those commitments as requiring insulation from external scholarship or the suppression of internal disagreement.

Examining Beys Yaakov between 1923 and 1980 permits a reconstruction of an Orthodox public discourse that does not conform to models centered on withdrawal or uniform ideological consolidation.^[5] Across decades and editorial regimes, the journal published women’s reflective writing, printed criticism of decisions taken by Agudath Israel’s own rabbinic leadership, and, in later years, employed scholarly analysis to interrogate elements of the modern State of Israel’s symbolic repertoire.^[6] These practices were not episodic but structural, pointing to a sustained editorial orientation in which intellectual engagement operated as a constitutive element of Orthodox self-definition rather than as a deviation from it. While recent scholarship has rightly emphasized Agudath Israel’s institutional boundary maintenance and political separatism, as well as the culturally mediating role of the Beys Yaakov movement, attention to the Beys Yaakov Journal redirects analysis from ideology and leadership to editorial practice as a central site of Orthodox intellectual life.^[7]

Polish Origins: Sara Schenirer and the Educational Crisis

Before World War I, Orthodox Jewish girls in much of Eastern Europe received little formal Jewish schooling.^[8] Although rabbinic attitudes toward women’s Torah study had varied across periods and locales, prevailing practice in Polish Orthodox communities restricted instruction largely to domestic settings and to the transmission of basic laws, customs, and religious dispositions.^[9]At the same time, access to secular schooling expanded steadily and was widely taken up. Girls often acquired fluency in Polish language and culture while lacking the textual and conceptual resources necessary to interpret or articulate their own religious tradition. By the interwar period, this asymmetry contributed to significant patterns of religious disengagement among Orthodox young women. Sara Schenirer understood this constellation of pressures from personal experience.

Born in 1883 into a Hasidic family in Kraków, Schenirer was exposed to modern culture while remaining committed to religious life. She concluded that Orthodox women required systematic Jewish education not as enrichment but as a condition of religious continuity. In her view, inherited modes of informal instruction no longer sufficed in a social environment shaped by compulsory schooling, expanding public culture, and women’s economic participation. Early efforts to address the problem through youth circles and informal study groups proved inadequate. In 1917, Schenirer therefore turned to formal education, beginning with a small class for girls in her apartment. The initiative expanded rapidly. By 1923, the Agudath Israel movement formally adopted the schools, recognizing both the scale of the educational crisis and the effectiveness of Schenirer’s response. What began as a local experiment thus became an institutional project with transnational reach.^[10]

Orthodox anxieties surrounding girls’ education crystallized around the erosion of communal control over women’s intellectual trajectories, particularly with respect to access to higher education. The emergence of Beys Yaakov must therefore be understood not only as an educational response to religious disengagement, but also as part of a broader effort to redirect female intellectual aspiration into institutionally supervised and religiously authorized forms.^[11]

From the outset, the Beys Yaakov system was conceived not merely as a network of schools but as a cultural intervention. It aimed to reshape how Orthodox girls understood their position within Jewish life, public society, and the transmission of religious knowledge. This ambition required not only curricula and classrooms but also a medium capable of addressing students beyond the school setting and articulating a shared intellectual and moral framework. That medium soon took the form of a journal.

Friedenson and the Power of Print

Eliezer Gershon Friedenson understood that the success of the Beys Yaakov project depended not only on the establishment of schools but on the creation of a discursive environment capable of sustaining religious commitment amid rapid social change. From his first encounter with Sara Schenirer in 1923, Friedenson recognized that girls’ education required a medium that could operate beyond the classroom, address readers as reflective subjects, and articulate a shared intellectual vocabulary for Orthodox womanhood. The Beys Yaakov Journal, first published in June 1923, was conceived to meet precisely this need.^[12] Recent scholarship has emphasized that the institutionalization of Beys Yaakov under Agudath Israel after 1923 marked a decisive transformation of the movement.^[13] This period coincided with the professionalization and rapid expansion of the school network under the direction of Dr. Leo (Samuel) Deutschländer, whose training and pedagogical outlook drew on German Neo-Orthodox models that emphasized professional instruction, curricular coherence, and engagement with general culture. It also marked the movement’s absorption into Agudath Israel’s organizational framework, without full capitulation to its separatist educational norms.^[14] Friedenson’s journal should be understood as part of this same process. It functioned as a centralizing instrument that helped standardize pedagogical assumptions, circulate ideological norms, and integrate disparate local initiatives into a coherent movement culture.^[15]

The Beys Yaakov journal’s masthead articulated its mission succinctly: an Orthodox periodical devoted to religious thought among Jewish women and girls and to the question of girls’ education in the spirit of Torah and tradition. Its choice of Yiddish situated the journal within established Orthodox linguistic practice while also enabling broad accessibility across regional and social boundaries.^[16] At the same time, its format, regular publication schedule, and thematic range reflected contemporary print culture rather than traditional rabbinic genres. Schenirer herself repeatedly underscored the journal’s importance, urging that it circulate “in every corner in which a heart beats,” a formulation that framed readership not as passive consumption but as emotional and moral participation in a shared undertaking. Naomi Seidman has characterized Beys Yaakov as a “revolution in the name of tradition,” in which innovation was articulated as preservation rather than rupture.^[17] The journal exemplified this logic. While anchored in Orthodox commitments, it systematically adopted literary and discursive forms – essays, poetry, autobiographical reflection, and historical narrative – that had little precedent in traditional frameworks of women’s religious instruction. These genres did not function merely as stylistic embellishments or pedagogical supplements; they reconfigured the educational encounter itself. By foregrounding narrative voice, affective experience, and historical self-placement, the journal addressed its readers as reflective subjects whose relationship to Jewish tradition was neither automatic nor self-evident, but required deliberate cultivation. In this way, Beys Yaakov treated Orthodox girls not simply as future wives and mothers charged with transmission, but as moral and intellectual agents whose commitment depended on sustained engagement, interpretation, and identification with the tradition they were being asked to inhabit.

From its earliest issues, the journal’s contents extended well beyond internal school news or institutional announcements, indicating that it was not conceived merely as an administrative organ of the school system. It published essays on Jewish women in history, profiles of literary and cultural figures, poetry, and original creative writing, genres that invited readers to situate themselves within broader historical and cultural narratives. Sara Schenirer’s own Torah commentaries appeared regularly and were incorporated into classroom instruction, further collapsing the distinction between pedagogical text and public religious discourse. In this way, the journal functioned simultaneously as a curricular supplement and an autonomous intellectual forum, shaping religious sensibility less through formal instruction or prescriptive norms than through sustained exposure, interpretive engagement, and processes of identification.

The journal’s use of literary, historical, and reflective genres was not an idiosyncratic editorial choice but emerged from the ideological landscape in which Beys Yaakov took shape. Interwar Orthodoxy in Poland was marked by unresolved tensions between Neo-Orthodox educational models, particularly Torah im derekh erets, and increasingly separatist ultra-Orthodox positions that emphasized cultural insulation. The Beys Yaakov movement developed at the intersection of these currents, selectively appropriating Neo-Orthodox pedagogical forms while operating under the institutional aegis of Agudath Israel.^[18] Although the school system ultimately aligned with Agudath Israel’s organizational framework, the journal retained elements of this hybrid inheritance. Its openness to cultural reference, historical inquiry, and literary expression parallels developments in other Orthodox women’s initiatives, most notably the Lithuanian Bet Jakob, which likewise employed periodicals to cultivate modern Orthodox female subjectivity within a religious framework rather than to enforce ideological retrenchment.

Friedenson’s achievement lay not simply in founding a journal, but in identifying print culture as a form of religious infrastructure capable of sustaining Orthodox life under modern conditions. The Beys Yaakov Journal did not merely disseminate information about the movement; it produced a shared intellectual space in which Orthodox women encountered tradition as an object of study, interpretation, and appropriation rather than as an unexamined inheritance. By habituating readers to engagement through narrative, reflection, and cultural reference, the journal established patterns of reading and response that later enabled it, under different editors and in changing historical contexts, to address contested questions, incorporate external scholarship, and even publish internal critique without relinquishing institutional loyalty or doctrinal commitment.

Surveying the Inner Lives of Orthodox Girls

One of the most consequential features of the Beys Yaakov journal was its adoption of empirical and introspective methods to inform educational practice. In 1926, for example, the editors published an “urgent appeal” arguing that effective religious education required systematic knowledge of students’ personalities, aspirations, and emotional lives.^[19] Rather than relying on teacher reports or ideological presuppositions, the journal solicited responses directly from its readership and published them verbatim, deferring editorial interpretation to subsequent issues.

The 1926 survey posed five questions:

1. What does the child want to be when they grow up?
2. Whom does the child love more, their father or their mother?
3. Which subjects does the child most enjoy studying (for example, languages or history)?
4. What does the child most enjoy reading?
5. In which language does the child prefer to read?

These questions reflect a distinct set of pedagogical assumptions. They treated future orientation, emotional preference, and cultural consumption as legitimate objects of educational inquiry rather than as private or extraneous matters. The first question acknowledged that girls might imagine futures extending beyond domestic roles. The second redirected attention from normative family hierarchy to affective relationships. The remaining questions presupposed familiarity with secular subjects, varied reading practices, and multilingual environments, thereby situating Orthodox girls within the broader cultural landscape of interwar Poland rather than insulating them from it.

A second survey, published in 1931, expanded both the scope and the stakes of this inquiry.^[20] It asked whether girls were satisfied with their education; what professions they hoped to pursue; whether they anticipated wage labor or exclusive domestic responsibility; how they related to nonreligious Jews, including within ideologically divided families; and whom they regarded as confidants, parents or peers. Additional questions addressed leisure practices and aesthetic interests, including music, art, and dance. Taken together, these questions treated social integration, emotional authority, and cultural participation as variables relevant to religious education.

Respondents were permitted to answer under their own names or under pseudonyms. The journal printed their responses in full,^[21] without prior selection or accompanying commentary. The range of answers was wide. Some affirmed conventional expectations, while others articulated positions that departed from them. One respondent endorsed women’s economic independence, arguing that “a woman must be concerned with her own destiny exactly as a man is.”^[22] Others reported greater trust in peers than in parents, explaining that “parents today don’t understand their children.”^[23] Several described attending concerts or cultivating artistic interests. The editor praised the responses as evidence of the respondents’ intelligence and noted that some articulated “brilliant ideas.” The editor explicitly rejected claims made in “a long letter” asserting that polls were meaningless and that social questions should not be discussed publicly. By contrast, the editor’s only regret was the limited number of responses received.^[24]

This procedure marked a significant departure from prevailing Orthodox educational discourse. Female students were addressed not as objects of instruction but as sources of knowledge about their own religious and social experience. Their voices were presented without mediation by teachers, administrators, or male authorities. The journal thus treated subjective experience as data relevant to institutional decision-making. Even in secular Yiddish educational and research circles, which acknowledged the importance of understanding Jewish youth, gender was rarely treated as an analytic category, and women’s experiences were largely subsumed under male norms.^[25] While comparable survey-based approaches to women’s lives would later become common in mid-twentieth-century social research, Beys Yaakov employed them within an Orthodox framework decades earlier, integrating empirical attention to women’s inner lives into a religious educational project rather than positioning such inquiry in opposition to it.

Challenging Authority: The Palestine Certificate Controversy

The journal’s willingness to engage contested questions extended beyond pedagogy to matters of institutional authority. This is evident in its response to the distribution of immigration certificates to Palestine in 1934. When Agudath Israel secured a limited allotment of certificates and allocated them exclusively to men, the Beys Yaakov journal devoted its front page to a critical response under the headline drawn from the biblical verse “Tenu La’anu Achuzah!” (“Grant Us Our Rightful Portion!”; Num. 27:4).^[26]

The significance of this intervention lies not only in its substance but in its institutional setting. The Beys Yaakov schools operated under Agudath Israel’s auspices, and the movement’s leadership exercised formal control over the journal’s publisher. Publishing a front-page critique of a policy associated with the Gerrer Rebbe, one of the central rabbinic authorities within Agudath Israel, placed the journal in direct tension with the leadership structures on which it depended. This episode contrasts sharply with the centralized and crisis-driven leadership culture described by Yossef Fund in his study of Agudath Israel during the Holocaust years.^[27]

The article, signed by Rochel Bas Tovim, likely a pseudonym,^[28] did not frame its claims in the language of contemporary feminist movements, which it explicitly rejected as incompatible with Judaism. Instead, it grounded its argument in canonical sources, invoking the biblical daughters of Tzelofchad, who appealed for inheritance rights within the framework of Torah law. The author contended that women’s exclusion from the allocation of certificates represented not a preservation of tradition but a departure from it, insofar as it denied women claims recognized within the scriptural tradition itself. The critique thus operated on two levels. Substantively, it challenged a concrete policy decision with immediate consequences for women’s lives. Formally, it modeled a mode of argument in which institutional authority could be questioned through textual reasoning rather than ideological opposition. The article neither denied rabbinic authority nor asserted autonomous rights external to halakhic discourse. Its challenge was internal, drawing on shared sources and categories to dispute the manner in which authority had been exercised.

This episode illustrates the journal’s broader editorial posture. It did not treat institutional loyalty as incompatible with critique, nor did it equate obedience with silence. By providing space for a reasoned challenge to Agudath Israel’s own leadership, framed entirely within traditional discourse, the Beys Yaakov Journal demonstrated that boundary crossing could occur not only in relation to secular culture or academic knowledge but also within Orthodoxy’s own structures of authority.

Israeli Resurrection: Moshe Prager and Postwar Transformation

The destruction of the Polish Beys Yaakov system during the Holocaust brought the journal’s original trajectory to an end. Eliezer Gershon Friedenson was murdered, and the institutional network that had sustained the movement in Eastern Europe ceased to exist. When the Beys Yaakov journal reappeared in Israel after the war, it did so under markedly different conditions and new editorial leadership. The journal was revived by Moshe Prager, a journalist and historian whose work focused on Orthodox life during the Shoah and its aftermath.^[29] Under Prager’s editorship, Beys Yaakov retained its formal affiliation with the movement while undergoing a redefinition of scope and audience. It no longer addressed girls and women exclusively. Men increasingly appeared among both contributors and intended readers, and the range of subjects expanded to include Holocaust memory, Orthodox historiography, and contemporary Israeli society. These shifts reflected both the altered demographic realities of postwar Orthodoxy and Prager’s own intellectual preoccupations.

At the same time, the journal’s engagement with sources and methods beyond Agudath Israel’s institutional boundaries became more explicit and systematic. Issues from this period regularly included discussions of secular scholarship, historical research, archaeology, and European culture. Such materials were not presented as authoritative in themselves but were framed through editorial commentary that situated them in relation to Orthodox commitments. The result was neither rejection nor uncritical adoption, but sustained engagement shaped by religious criteria. A review of surviving issues from Prager’s tenure indicates that this orientation was not confined to isolated contributions; rather, it structured the journal’s content across genres, including essays, book reviews, historical reflections, and responses to contemporary events. The editorial stance was consistent: readers were introduced to ideas and figures beyond the Agudah orbit, while the journal retained control over framing and evaluation.

Under Prager’s leadership, Beys Yaakov was thus transformed from a movement-centered educational periodical into a broader Orthodox intellectual forum, without severing its institutional ties or abandoning its religious orientation. Although the postwar journal differed markedly from its Polish predecessor in subject matter and audience, it continued to operate according to an editorial logic already present in the interwar period: engagement with the surrounding intellectual world as a component of Orthodox self-understanding rather than as a concession to external authority.

Art, Archaeology, and Cultural Engagement

The journal’s engagement with material beyond conventional religious genres extended to the domain of visual art, where aesthetic production was treated as a legitimate object of religious interpretation rather than as a neutral cultural sphere. In 1969, Beys Yaakov devoted an entire issue to Rembrandt on the three-hundredth anniversary of his death, placing one of his paintings on the cover and asserting the Jewish identity of the figure depicted.^[30] The editor described Rembrandt as among the hasidei ummot ha-olam and argued that his work captured the tzurah ha-Yehudit (Jewish character).^[31] This framing did not present Rembrandt as a canonical figure of European high culture to be admired at a distance, nor as an external influence to be resisted. Rather, the journal appropriated his work into a Jewish interpretive framework, reading it as part of a historical and religious conversation to which Orthodox readers could lay claim. In doing so, Beys Yaakov treated visual art not as a threat to religious integrity but as a site in which meaning could be evaluated, contested, and re-situated within Jewish historical consciousness.

Archaeology received similar treatment. In a public exchange with Yigael Yadin, Prager engaged archaeological scholarship directly, acknowledging findings that reinforced halakhic continuity while contesting Yadin’s symbolic and practical interpretation of Masada, particularly where it entailed the desacralization of the site and the normalization of Sabbath violation.^[32] These responses neither rejected archaeological inquiry nor deferred to it as an independent authority. Instead, archaeological evidence was incorporated selectively and evaluated in relation to textual tradition and halakhic categories.

Such treatments assumed an audience capable of engaging visual and historical material critically rather than passively. Cultural artifacts and scholarly claims were presented as objects of analysis and judgment, not as threats requiring avoidance. In this respect, the journal extended to art and archaeology the same editorial logic evident elsewhere: engagement framed by religious criteria, with interpretive authority retained by the journal rather than ceded to external disciplines.

The Herzog Article in Context

Read against the journal’s established editorial practice, the 1961 publication of Chief Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog’s article on the Temple menorah appears not as an exception but as a coherent extension of its editorial logic.^[33] Herzog’s training combined advanced rabbinic learning with formal academic methods, a mode of scholarship that Beys Yaakov had repeatedly presented to its readership as an object of analysis rather than emulation. The article was neither commissioned for the journal nor modified to conform to its institutional priorities. It was reproduced in full from an academic festschrift honoring Sally Mayer, an Italian Jewish communal leader, philanthropist, and Zionist activist rather than a rabbinic authority. The volume focused on Italian Jewish history and culture and brought together contributors from across denominational lines in recognition of civic and intellectual contribution rather than religious office.

The subject of Herzog’s study further clarifies its original placement. The menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome occupies a central position in the historical memory of Roman and Italian Jewry, standing at the intersection of archaeological evidence, rabbinic tradition, and the symbolic legacy of exile. Herzog addressed this object through close comparison of textual and material sources, treating their divergence as a problem for interpretation rather than as grounds for dismissal. Such an approach aligns with the commemorative orientation of the Mayer volume, which foregrounded Jewish cultural and historical life beyond rabbinic authority structures. By reprinting the article without alteration and preserving its original scholarly context, the Beys Yaakov Journal framed academic Jewish scholarship as a legitimate object of Orthodox engagement while retaining control over its evaluation.

Prager’s editorial handling of the article maintained its scholarly form without incorporating it into the journal’s institutional voice. The text was reproduced in full, without excerpting or interpretive gloss, and its original scholarly setting was left intact rather than explicitly affirmed or disavowed. In this way, academic Jewish scholarship was presented as material available for Orthodox consideration, while the institutional and ideological frameworks in which it had been produced were neither adopted nor contested.

Herzog’s study addressed a problem long recognized in both rabbinic and scholarly literature: the divergence between classical rabbinic descriptions of the Temple menorah and its representation on the Arch of Titus. The Roman relief depicts the menorah resting on a solid, multi-sided base adorned with ornamental motifs, whereas rabbinic sources describe a three-legged stand and explicitly exclude foreign imagery. Herzog did not resolve this discrepancy by dismissing the archaeological evidence as polemical, nor by subordinating it automatically to textual tradition. Instead, he treated the divergence itself as the object of analysis, placing halakhic sources and material evidence into direct comparison in order to account for their coexistence while preserving the distinct authority of each. This approach neither insulated tradition from external evidence nor deferred to archaeological reconstruction as determinative.

The article’s presentation was shaped as much by editorial framing as by its scholarly argument. The cover reproduced the menorah from the Arch of Titus beneath the caption “The Menorah, a Symbol of Jewish Eternity,” and the editors appended a subtitle that posed a pointed question: “Is the menorah, the symbol of the state, sacred?” These visual and textual elements placed Herzog’s study within a contemporary Israeli symbolic register, directing readers to consider its implications for modern political and religious meaning rather than treating it solely as a technical or antiquarian inquiry.

By 1961, the State of Israel had adopted the Arch of Titus menorah as its official emblem, reappropriating a Roman triumphal image associated with destruction and exile as a marker of national sovereignty. As Steven Fine has shown, this choice reflected a form of civic symbolism that drew on ancient material culture to construct a shared national iconography while bracketing explicit theological commitments.^[34] By foregrounding Herzog’s study under the subtitle “Is the menorah, the symbol of the state, sacred?”, the Beys Yaakov Journal explicitly juxtaposed this civic appropriation with rabbinic conceptions of the Temple menorah. What might otherwise have remained a discussion of archaeological form and halakhic sources was thereby reframed as an inquiry into the religious status of a state symbol. In doing so, the journal subjected Israel’s central emblem to halakhic and historical evaluation, engaging civil iconography as an object of scrutiny rather than affirmation and declining to concede interpretive authority over Jewish symbols to the secular state.^[35]

The journal further marked institutional boundaries through its use of honorifics. Chief Rabbi Herzog, who died in 1959, was designated ז״ל (zikhrono livrakha), the conventional formula for the deceased, rather than זצ״ל (zekher tzaddik livrakha), which in Orthodox usage signals recognized rabbinic authority. This choice acknowledged Herzog’s scholarly standing while withholding the modes of recognition through which the journal conferred religious authority, thereby separating the act of reprinting his article from any affirmation of the Chief Rabbinate he represented.^[36]

Considered together, the visual reproduction of the Arch of Titus menorah, the explicit questioning of state symbolism, and the calibrated use of honorific language make visible the journal’s editorial procedure. Beys Yaakov crossed cultural and institutional boundaries while retaining control over framing and evaluation. Attention to such devices is therefore necessary for understanding how the journal accommodated intellectual engagement without erasing its own institutional distinctions.

 

Conclusion

The history of the Beys Yaakov journal complicates historiographical models that describe twentieth-century Orthodoxy primarily in terms of withdrawal, boundary consolidation, or epistemic closure. Without minimizing Orthodox resistance to secularization or the expansion of separatist institutions, this study has identified a parallel mode of Orthodox self-articulation in which engagement with external knowledge, cultural forms, and even rival institutions functioned as a means of maintaining religious authority rather than undermining it. The journal did not treat engagement as a value in itself or as a concession to modernity, but as a regulated practice embedded within Orthodox commitments. Attention to editorial procedure, rather than ideological declaration alone, makes visible how Orthodoxy could preserve institutional coherence while remaining responsive to changing social and cultural conditions.

Across its Polish and Israeli phases, Beys Yaakov operated according to a consistent editorial logic that cut across differences of context, audience, and leadership. In interwar Poland, the journal treated the subjective experiences of Orthodox girls as legitimate sources of knowledge, employing surveys and verbatim publication to inform educational practice and to recalibrate assumptions about women’s religious lives. It provided space for critique of Agudath Israel’s own leadership while grounding dissent in canonical texts and shared interpretive categories. In postwar Israel, the journal incorporated academic scholarship, archaeology, European art, and historiography into its pages, neither excluding these domains nor conceding interpretive authority to them. The unabridged publication of Herzog’s study of the Temple menorah – framed through visual cues, honorific distinctions, and explicit questioning of state symbolism – represents the most explicit articulation of this approach: engagement that expanded the scope of inquiry while retaining Orthodox criteria of judgment.

These practices do not support an interpretation of Beys Yaakov as a covertly liberal or proto-modernizing institution. The journal consistently reaffirmed halakhic authority, institutional loyalty, and skepticism toward secular ideologies and state claims to religious legitimacy. Its significance lies instead in the forms of engagement it authorized: empirical attention to women’s lives, critique conducted within Orthodox institutional structures, and sustained interaction with scholarly and cultural materials under religious supervision. In this respect, the journal’s trajectory parallels patterns identified by Ada Gebel in her study of Agudath-affiliated workers’ institutions, even as it complicates the political narrative of Orthodox separatism emphasized by Daniel Mahla. More broadly, the case of Beys Yaakov underscores the importance of women’s education as a site of Orthodox intellectual experimentation. Positioned outside the structures of male rabbinic authority yet committed to religious continuity, the movement developed pedagogical and editorial practices unavailable within yeshiva contexts. Taken together, these findings call for a more differentiated account of Orthodox intellectual history – one attentive to genre, audience, and institutional location, and resistant to reducing diverse Orthodox responses to modernity to a single trajectory. Rather than asking whether Orthodoxy engaged modernity, the evidence points to a more precise question: under what institutional conditions, and through which mediating forms, was engagement understood as a means of sustaining tradition?

* I would like to thank Menachem Butler for his editorial assistance and plethora of sources.

1. See, inter alia, Daniel Mahla, Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion: From Prewar Europe to the State of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. chapters 1-3; and Yossef Fund, A Movement in Ruins: Agudat Israel’s Leadership Confronting the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008; Hebrew). For a contrasting emphasis on cultural mediation within the Beys Yaakov movement, see Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (London: Littman Library, 2019).
   For prior analyses of the Journal, see Joanna Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yakov Magazine in the Context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” in Andrzej Katny, Izabela Olszewska, Aleksandra Twardowska, eds., Ashkenazim and Sephardim: A European Perspective (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 127-154; Abraham Atkin, “The Beth Jacob Movement in Poland (1917-1939),” (PhD Dissertation, Yeshiva University, 1959), esp. 99-111; Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, passim.
   Nearly all extant issues of the Beys Yaakov Journal are accessible in digital reproduction. Issues published in interwar Poland are available through The Beys Yaakov Project at the University of Toronto, while postwar Israeli issues are available via Hebrewbooks.org. The availability of these materials in searchable digital format has enabled systematic analysis across decades of publication, including comparison of editorial practices, thematic emphases, and modes of engagement under differing institutional and historical conditions. On behalf of the readers of the Seforim blog, the author gratefully acknowledges the individuals and institutions whose efforts made these digital resources possible. ↑
2. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, “On the Form of the Menorah on the Arch of Titus: Is the Menorah, the Symbol of the State, Sacred?” Beys Yaakov, vol. 2, no. 6 (December 1961): 3 (Hebrew), reprinted from Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, “The Menorah of the Arch of Titus,” in Umberto Nahon, ed., Scritti in memoria di Sally Mayer (Jerusalem: Sally Mayer Foundation, 1956), 95-98 (Hebrew). ↑
3. On Herzog’s conception of the Chief Rabbinate as a centralized locus of religious and legal authority, and on the principled rejection of this claim by non-Zionist Orthodoxy, see Alexander Kaye, “Modernizing the Chief Rabbinate,” in The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 99-121, 205-211, who shows that Agudath Israel consistently refused to recognize the Chief Rabbinate – both in Mandatory Palestine and after 1948 – as a legitimate arbiter of binding rabbinic authority, maintaining instead that such authority resided in independent rabbinic councils, above all its own Moetset Gedolei HaTorah. For the broader political and institutional consequences of this stance within early Israeli Orthodoxy, see also Daniel Mahla, “Emerging Israeli Milieus,” in Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion: From Prewar Europe to the State of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 159-185, 252-259. ↑
4. For the interwar journal’s scope and editorial practices, see Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, esp. chap. 5. ↑
5. For historiographical models emphasizing Orthodox withdrawal, ideological consolidation, and boundary hardening in the modern period, see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York: NYU Press, 1993); Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. chaps. 1-2; and Daniel Mahla, Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion: From Prewar Europe to the State of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ↑
6. On women’s reflective writing and surveys, see below, “Surveying the Inner Lives of Orthodox Girls”; on critique of Agudath Israel’s leadership, see below, “Challenging Authority: The Palestine Certificate Controversy”; on engagement with state symbolism and scholarship, see below, “The Herzog Article in Context.” ↑
7. On Agudath Israel’s political separatism and institutional boundary maintenance, see Mahla, Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion. On the Beys Yaakov movement as a site of cultural mediation within Orthodoxy, see Seidman, Sarah Schenirer. For contrasting evidence of flexibility within Agudath-affiliated institutions, see Ada Gebel, The Agudat Yisrael Workers Movement in Eretz Israel, 1933-1939 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2017; Hebrew). ↑
8. Shaul Stampfer emphasizes the distinction between formal schooling and overall levels of education, cautioning against equating the relative absence of institutional frameworks for girls with intellectual illiteracy or lack of religious knowledge. See Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women,” in Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: Littman Library, 2014), 167-190. On the persistence of the stereotype of female educational deprivation and its historiographical consequences, see also Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004). ↑
9. On the history of the controversy over girls’ education, see Rachel Manekin, “Something Totally New: The Development of the Idea of Religious Education for Girls in the Modern Period,” Massekhet, vol. 2 (2004): 63-85 (Hebrew), available here; Rachel Manekin, “Torah Education for Girls in the Interwar Bais Yaakov School System: A Re-Examination,” Zion, vol. 88, no. 2 (2023): 219-262 (Hebrew), available here; and see also Rachel Manekin and Charles (Bezalel) Manekin, “The Hafetz Hayyim’s Statement on Teaching Torah to Girls in Likutei Halakhot: Literary and Historical Context,” The Seforim Blog (27 May 2020), available here. ↑
10. For a recent biography, see Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (London: Littman Library, 2019). ↑
11. Rachel Manekin, “From Anna Kluger to Sarah Schenirer: Women’s Education in Kraków and Its Discontents,” Jewish History, vol. 33, no. 1-2 (March 2020): 29-59, available here; and see also Rachel Manekin, “The Cracow Bais Yaakov Teachers’ Seminary and Sarah Schenirer: A View from a Seminarian’s Diary,” Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 112, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 546-588, available here. ↑
12. Friedenson self-published a single preliminary issue in June 1923, which included contributions by Sara Schenirer and Yehudah Leib Orlean; see Abraham Atkin, “The Beth Jacob Movement in Poland (1917-1939),” (PhD Dissertation, Yeshiva University, 1959), 100; Joanna Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yakov Magazine in the Context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” 133. The journal’s official publication, however, began with the issue of Tishrei 5684 (September 1923); see Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 111. ↑
13. See Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 111-112; Mahla, Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion. ↑
14. On the post-1923 institutional consolidation of Beys Yaakov under Agudath Israel, the central role of professional educators such as Leo (Samuel) Deutschländer, and the movement’s mediation between German Neo-Orthodox pedagogical models and the separatist educational norms of East European ultra-Orthodoxy, see Iris Brown (Hoizman), “At the Centre of Two Revolutions: Beit Ya’akov in Poland between Neo-Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy,” in François Guesnet, et al., eds., Jewish Religious Life in Poland since 1750 [=Polin, vol. 33] (London: Littman Library, 2021), 339-369, available here. ↑
15. See Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 112-204. ↑
16. See Joanna Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yakov Magazine in the Context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” 147-152; and Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 181-185. From issue 3 through 1929, the journal included a Polish-language supplement titled Wschód, which was later discontinued. On the factors contributing to the supplement’s demise, see Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism,” 133-134. A single additional Polish-language supplement appeared in 1936, devoted to combating rising antisemitism and addressing prevailing anti-Jewish stereotypes; see ibid., 134. ↑
17. For an extended analysis of the use of modern print culture, literary genres, and affective address in the formation of Orthodox female subjectivity within the Beys Yaakov movement, see Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (London: Littman Library, 2019). Seidman analyzes journals, letters, autobiographical writing, and didactic essays as media that positioned girls and women as interpretive and ethical agents, capable of reflection, identification, and disciplined self-understanding. A central element of her argument is that Beys Yaakov articulated pedagogical and institutional change through idioms of continuity, presenting new educational forms and media practices as legitimate extensions of inherited religious norms rather than as departures from them. This analytic framework is essential for understanding how the movement integrated print, emotional discourse, and modes of self-articulation into an Orthodox educational setting. ↑
18. On the educational and ideological legacies of Torah im derekh erets within Polish Orthodox women’s education, and the selective adaptation of Neo-Orthodox pedagogical forms within Agudath Israel-affiliated institutions, see Iris Brown (Hoizman), “At the Centre of Two Revolutions: Beit Ya’akov in Poland between Neo-Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy,” in François Guesnet, et al., eds., Jewish Religious Life in Poland since 1750 [=Polin, vol. 33] (London: Littman Library, 2021), 339-369, available here. On the role of journals and print culture in shaping Orthodox female identity, aspirations, and religious agency within Lithuanian Bet Jakob, see Tzipora Weinberg, “Toward a Modern Conception of Orthodox Womanhood: The Case of Lithuanian Bet Jakob,” in Marcin Wodziński, Shaul Stampfer, and Lara Lempertienė, eds., Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 146-174. ↑
19. Beys Yaakov, no. 3 (June 1926): 84-85 (Yiddish), available here. Seideman incorrectly references this issue as appearing in 1924. Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 122 and “Bibliography,” 409. ↑
20. Beys Yaakov, no. 77 (October 1931): 1 (Yiddish), available here. Despite the 1926 survey, Journal refers to the 1931 as the first. Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 122. ↑
21. Beys Yaakov, no. 81 (January 1932): 16-17 (Yiddish), available here; and Beys Yaakov, no. 83 (March 1932): 13 (Yiddish), available here. ↑
22. Beys Yaakov, no. 83 (March 1932): 13 (Yiddish), available here. ↑
23. Beys Yaakov, no. 81 (January 1932): 17 (Yiddish), available here. ↑
24. Beys Yaakov, no. 83 (March 1932): 13 (Yiddish), available here. ↑
25. See Gershon Bacon, “Woman? Youth? Jew? – The Search for Identity of Jewish Young Women in Interwar Poland,” in Judith Tydor Baumel and Tova Cohen, eds., Gender, Place and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experience (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 3-28, esp. 4, available here; Gershon Bacon, “The Missing 52 Percent: Research on Jewish Women in Interwar Poland and Its Implications for Holocaust Studies,” in Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 55-67, available here. As Bacon demonstrates, even pioneering secular Yiddish research initiatives, including the YIVO youth autobiography collections and Max Weinreich’s sociological studies, recognized the importance of understanding Jewish youth while largely treating male experience as normative and leaving women’s voices analytically unthematized. Women appear in these corpora primarily as raw material rather than as a category of inquiry in their own right. Against this backdrop, the Beys Yaakov journal’s solicitation and verbatim publication of girls’ self-reports represents an unusual case in which women’s subjective experience was not merely documented but operationalized within an institutional educational framework. ↑
26. Beys Yaakov, no. 120 (November 1934): 1 (Yiddish), available here. See Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 177-179. ↑
27. Yossef Fund, A Movement in Ruins: Agudat Israel’s Leadership Confronting the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008; Hebrew). ↑
28. See Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 178n90. ↑
29. Moshe Prager was a leading Orthodox journalist and historian whose work focused on the destruction of European Orthodoxy during the Shoah and the religious meaning of catastrophe in its aftermath. His writing combined documentary impulse with commemorative and theological reflection. For a collection of essays and memorial writings on the destruction of Polish Jewry and the spiritual legacy of Hasidic and yeshiva worlds, see Moshe Prager, Min ha-Meitzar Karati (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1959; Hebrew), especially the introductory essays on Orthodox Holocaust memory; and for a selection in English translation in Moshe Prager, Sparks of Glory (Jerusalem, 1974), 210-213; and for his role on the Orthodox press in interwar Poland, see Moshe Prager, “When Hasidism of Ger Became Newsmen,” in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 210-213, and for an account of Prager’s journalistic career and editorial leadership, see Tovia Preschel, “Profile of Moshe Prager,” The Jewish Press (21 April 1972): 41, translated and reprinted in Tovia Preschel, Ma’amarei Tovia, vol. 8 (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 2025), 528-530. ↑
30. Beys Yaakov, no. 117 (January 1969; Hebrew), available here. ↑
31. “Editor’s Note,” Beys Yaakov, no. 117 (January 1969): 2 (Hebrew). One article in the same issue concludes with a poem explicitly praising Rembrandt for capturing the depth and inwardness of the Jewish gaze (ibid., 17). This mode of Jewish cultural appropriation of Rembrandt belongs to a longer interpretive genealogy, ranging from nineteenth-century apologetic readings to late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century art-historical and museological reassessments. For recent synthetic treatments, see Mirjam Knotter and Gary Schwartz, eds., Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes: The Artist’s Meaning to Jews from His Time to Ours (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024); and the earlier demythologizing intervention in Mirjam Alexander-Knotter, Jasper Hillegers, and Edward van Voolen, The Jewish Rembrandt: The Myth Unravelled (Amsterdam: Jewish Historical Museum, 2006).An illuminating intermediate case appears in the work of the sculptor and novelist Avram Melnikoff (1892-1960), a former Jewish Legion officer and later a London-based portrait sculptor, whose writings offer a rare glimpse into an early Zionist-spiritual reception of Rembrandt. In a 1935 essay published in The London Jewish Chronicle following the death of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Melnikoff recounts a conversation that took place during Rav Kook’s wartime exile in London during World War I. The exchange was prompted by Melnikoff’s professional unease with the biblical prohibition against “graven images,” which he understood as having profoundly shaped the historical limits and possibilities of Jewish art. Melnikoff thus approached Rav Kook with a halakhic query as to whether rabbinic tradition permitted, under any conditions, the practice of sculpture by Jews. Rav Kook replied by citing a rabbinic principle according to which image-making is permitted when the work is deliberately imperfect or maimed. Melnikoff responded with irony, remarking that his own sculpture must therefore be kosher precisely because it fell so far short of perfection, a comment that, he recalls, elicited Rav Kook’s warm laughter. It is at this point that Melnikoff introduces Rembrandt. Rav Kook told him:
    

    “When I lived in London I used to visit the National Gallery, and my favourite pictures were those of Rembrandt. I really think that Rembrandt was a tzaddik. Do you know that when I first saw Rembrandt’s works, they reminded me of the legend about the creation of light? We are told that when God created light, it was so strong and pellucid that one could see from one end of the world to the other, but God was afraid that the wicked might abuse it. What did He do? He reserved that light for the righteous when the Messiah should come. But now and then there are great men who are blessed and privileged to see it. I think that Rembrandt was one of them, and the light in his pictures is the very light that was originally created by God Almighty.”

    This intuitive and homiletic reading of Rav Kook’s attitude toward art was subsequently taken up and given systematic halakhic and philosophical form by Rabbi David Avraham Spektor (1955-2013), a Dutch-born rabbi educated at Yeshivat Merkaz Harav and among the first religious-Zionist thinkers to treat art as a sustained field of halakhic inquiry. In Art in the Teachings of Rav Kook (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, Religious Education Administration, 2001; Hebrew), Spektor reconstructs Rav Kook’s scattered remarks on art, aesthetics, creativity, and imagination across responsa, letters, notebooks, and published essays, arguing that Rav Kook understood artistic creation as a legitimate and even necessary expression of the divine image in humanity, so long as it remained oriented toward spiritual elevation rather than aesthetic autonomy for its own sake. He further shows that Rav Kook did not regard art merely as a tolerated concession to modernity, but as a domain through which latent spiritual forces within the nation could be revealed and disciplined. This interpretive framework was later translated into practical halakhic categories in Rabbi David Avraham Spektor, Shuʾt Omanut: Responsa and Abridged Halakhic Rulings in the Fields of Art, Graphic Design, and Computers (Jerusalem: Erez, 2003; Hebrew), which addresses concrete questions concerning sculpture, figurative representation, theater, visual media, and digital technologies. Taken together, Rabbi Spektor’s works mark a decisive shift from Rav Kook’s lyrical and metaphysical idiom to a jurisprudential effort to normalize artistic production within halakhic discourse. For further discussion, see Dan Rabinowitz and Menachem Butler, “The Halakhic Status of Illustrated Sifrei Kodesh: History, Practice, and Methodology,” forthcoming at The Seforim Blog. ↑

32. See Moshe Prager, “What Is Masada: An Archaeological Site or a Symbol for the Jewish Tradition?” Beys Yaakov, no. 135-136 (February 1971): 7-10 (Hebrew), available here, a published open letter addressed to Prof. Yigael Yadin responding to his archaeological and public policies regarding Masada, including the operation of the cable car on Shabbat. Prager accepts the evidentiary value of Yadin’s archaeological discoveries – especially where they corroborate halakhic continuity – while rejecting the transformation of Masada into a desacralized national monument detached from religious norms. See also Haim Zalman Dimitrovsky, “Masada,” Conservative Judaism, vol. 22, no. 2 (Winter 1968): 36-47, available here; and Nachman Ben Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). ↑
33. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, “On the Form of the Menorah on the Arch of Titus: Is the Menorah, the Symbol of the State, Sacred?” Beys Yaakov, vol. 2, no. 6 (December 1961): 3 (Hebrew), reprinted from Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, “The Menorah of the Arch of Titus,” in Umberto Nahon, ed., Scritti in memoria di Sally Mayer (Jerusalem: Sally Mayer Foundation, 1956), 95-98 (Hebrew). ↑
34. On the emergence of the menorah as a central Zionist visual symbol, see Alec Mishory, Lo and Behold: Zionist Icons and Visual Symbols in Israeli Culture (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), 138-164 (Hebrew); and on the deliberations surrounding the adoption of the Arch of Titus menorah for the state emblem, see Alec Mishory, “The Menorah and the Olive Branches: The Design Process of the National Emblem of the State of Israel,” in Yael Israeli, ed., In the Light of the Menorah: Story of a Symbol (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1999), 16-23; and, more recently, for a longue-durée analysis of the menorah’s transformation from Temple object to Roman trophy to modern Israeli national symbol, see Steven Fine, The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). ↑
35. On the adoption of the Arch of Titus menorah as the emblem of the State of Israel and its role in the construction of Israeli civil iconography, see Steven Fine, “Creating a National Symbol,” in The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 134-162, 242, who situates the choice of the Arch menorah within a broader process of state formation, in which ancient material culture was redeployed to produce a shared civic symbol that could command wide consensus while bracketing explicit theological claims. He also documents contemporary aesthetic, cultural, and rabbinic objections to the emblem, including Herzog’s sustained critique of the menorah’s base and iconography, and analyzes the menorah’s function as a state symbol that invokes Jewish tradition while re-signifying it in secular-national terms. ↑
36. On the Chief Rabbinate as a contested locus of religious authority, and on Agudath Israel’s principled refusal to recognize its claims to centralized rabbinic legitimacy, see Alexander Kaye, “Modernizing the Chief Rabbinate,” in The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 99-121, 205-211. As Kaye shows, Agudath Israel consistently treated the Chief Rabbinate not merely as a rival institution but as an illegitimate reconfiguration of rabbinic authority grounded in state power rather than communal consent or halakhic hierarchy. The journal’s calibrated use of honorifics should be read against this background, as a micro-level editorial practice that registers non-recognition of the Rabbinate’s authority without polemical confrontation ↑