Wrestling with the Ketsot –

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

By Moshe Shochat

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

— Ben-Zion Dinur (1884-1973)

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

– Meir Shely (1893-1983)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“‘I Do Not Understand a Single Word of What I Wrote in My Book’: Rav Kook, Saul Lieberman, and a Literary Mishlo’aḥ Manot Exchange”

By Aviad Hacohen

The festival of Purim, with its customs and traditions, has long constituted a broad and fertile field for a vast body of research, folklore, and ritual practice associated with the “Jewish carnival.”^[1] The drinking of wine, the wearing of costumes (which have no foundation in early sources and, in the view of many scholars, were influenced by the Venetian carnival),^[2] the use of noisemakers for the purpose of “blotting out Amalek,”^[3] and the practice of mishlo’aḥ manot have all added layers of joy and exuberance to the festival, at times reaching the point of genuine revelry and even debauchery,^[4] and giving rise in certain historical contexts to acts of mockery, hostility, and ritualized violence that have attracted sustained scholarly attention.^[5]

Two of the day’s commandments explicitly mentioned in the Scroll of Esther are “the sending of portions, each man to his fellow, and gifts to the poor.”^[6] Whereas the giving of charity to the poor assumed a more or less uniform form, the “sending of portions” became a platform for no small measure of creativity. Already in the Talmud,^[7] it is related that the amora Rabbi Yehudah Nesi’ah (the grandson of the tanna Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi)^[8] sent his colleague Rabbi Hoshaya an especially splendid mishlo’aḥ manot, consisting of choice veal and an entire jug of wine.

To this day, one may observe throughout Israel, particularly in Haredi concentrations, especially elaborate mishlo’aḥ manot, laden with assorted and varied food items, accompanied by ornate trays and crackling cellophane wrapping. Alongside the traditional commandment, in recent decades in particular, a rich vein of humor has developed portraying the familiar bottle of wine and dry cake as completing an entire “circuit” within the community, passed from hand to hand as a repeatedly re-gifted mishlo’aḥ manot, until it ultimately returns to its original sender.^[9] In light of this reality, many today prefer to refrain from preparing an individualized mishlo’aḥ manot, much of whose content is ultimately discarded after the festival, and instead opt for a standardized communal mishlo’aḥ manot distributed collectively to members of the community. The funds thereby saved, rather than being expended on redundant food items and decorative packaging, are redirected toward a range of charitable and benevolent causes.

These contemporary developments, however, merely underscore a broader point: the commandment of mishlo’aḥ manot has long been characterized by considerable elasticity in both form and practice. Indeed, halakhic literature contains an extensive discussion concerning the question of how one may properly discharge one’s obligation with respect to this commandment. One of the more intriguing debates in this context concerns whether one may fulfill the obligation of mishlo’aḥ manot not through edible “portions,” but rather through “words of Torah,” by sending a book, each person to his fellow. There is, in fact, no small body of testimony regarding sages of Israel, such as Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz and Rabbi Yehudah Aszod, who sent, as “mishlo’aḥ manot, each person to his fellow,” their own Torah novellae or scholarly compositions.^[10]

This halakhic discussion is not merely theoretical. In the course of my research on Rabbi Professor Saul Lieberman (1898-1982),^[11] I encountered a striking modern resonance of precisely this idea, one that illuminates the enduring cultural and intellectual valences of mishlo’aḥ manot beyond its strictly culinary expression. Although he arrived in Jerusalem at a relatively late age, being about twenty-nine, Lieberman quickly became integrated into Jerusalem’s intellectual milieu. As a member of the first cohort of students at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus (which had been founded only a few years earlier), he listened with great thirst to the teachings of the leading scholars in Jewish Studies and in classical studies, among them his teacher and master Professor Yaakov Naḥum Epstein,^[12] Professor Shmuel Klein, and Professor Moshe Schwabe,^[13] one of the foremost scholars of classical culture.

Alongside his academic studies, he soon acquired a reputation as an exceptionally great Torah scholar, for whom no secret of rabbinic literature was lo anīs lei, that is, nothing lay beyond him and nothing escaped his grasp. For many hours he would labor diligently over his learning, memorizing Mishnayot and Talmud – Bavli and Yerushalmi – by heart,^[14] and within a few years he produced several exemplary works, such as On the Yerushalmi (1929) and The Talmud of Caesarea (1931), which to this day are regarded as foundational texts in the scholarly study of rabbinic literature.^[15]

Upon the completion of his studies, Lieberman began teaching in the Talmud preparatory program of the Institute of Jewish Studies, while simultaneously devoting himself to the composition of The Yerushalmi According to Its Plain Meaning (Ha-Yerushalmi Ke-Peshuto) (1935), intended as a comprehensive commentary on the entire Jerusalem Talmud.

On the personal plane, life did not treat him kindly. A short time after his arrival in the Land of Israel, he was bereaved of his youthful wife, Rachel née Rabinowitz, daughter of the rabbi of Pinsk and a descendant of a distinguished rabbinic dynasty. Some time later, he married his second wife, Judith, likewise of illustrious lineage in her own right, the daughter of Rabbi Meir Berlin (later, Bar-Ilan), leader of the Mizrachi movement, and granddaughter of the Netziv of Volozhin. She accompanied him faithfully until the end of her days. The couple did not merit children, and Lieberman immersed himself in his learning.^[16]

In the course of these years he became integrated into the “circle of Jerusalem sages,” forming close friendships with many of its members, among them the writer S.Y. Agnon^[17]; the scholar Gershom Scholem^[18]; the bookseller and proprietor of the Darom publishing house, Michl Rabinowitz; the educator Eliezer Meir Lifshitz; and the merchant and cultural patron Shlomo Zalman Schocken,^[19] who in those days founded the Institute for the Study of Medieval Hebrew Poetry.^[20]

One figure with whom Lieberman developed an especially close relationship was the Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, Rav Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook. Rav Kook was revered by many members of the Yishuv, among them Berl Katznelson and S.Y. Agnon, and even by self-described “heretics” such as Gershom Scholem and Justice Haim Cohn, who in his youth studied Torah for a year in Rav Kook’s yeshiva together with his cousin, the journalist Azriel Carlebach.^[21]

Despite the age gap between them (Rav Kook was twenty-seven years older than Lieberman), the two formed an exceptionally close bond, so much so that Rav Kook, despite being heavily burdened with unceasing rabbinic and public responsibilities, agreed to reserve a fixed hour each day to study in ḥavruta with Saul Lieberman the Tur on Ḥoshen Mishpat, together with Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Beit Yosef.^[22]

Like many others, Lieberman, who would later come to be recognized as the greatest scholar of the Talmud in the twentieth century, continued to revere Rav Kook until his final days, and on more than one occasion cited his teachings. Thus, for example, in a letter dated 29 December 1981 to his younger colleague, Professor Ephraim E. Urbach, Lieberman opens with the following sentence:

“You wrote to me that ‘you were ill,’ and I was reminded of the words of Rav Kook, of blessed memory, who said: I prefer to hear ‘I was ill’ rather than ‘I was wealthy’….”^[23]

According to a widespread Jerusalem legend, Lieberman and Rav Kook stipulated that they would not cancel their daily study session for any amount of money in the world, and that should either of them violate this condition, he would be required to pay a substantial “fine” to his counterpart. For Lieberman, whose daily schedule was relatively free, fulfilling this condition was easy. For Rav Kook, who in those days was already in poor health and burdened to exhaustion with the needs of the public, fulfilling it was far more difficult, almost impossible.

And indeed, on one such day Rav Kook was compelled to cancel the study session after being invited to serve as sandek at the circumcision of the child of one of Jerusalem’s notable residents. Lieberman, of course, did not forget the matter,^[24] and resolved to vindicate the affront at an appropriate time.

In the late afternoon of the “Purim of the unwalled cities,” the fourteenth of Adar 5695 (1935), when Rav Kook was preoccupied with the final preparations for the reading of the Megillah that night in Jerusalem and with organizing the charity funds of matanot la-evyonim to be distributed the following day (for in Jerusalem Purim is celebrated on the fifteenth of Adar), Lieberman appeared unexpectedly at his home and demanded payment of the “fine”: one hour of study in exchange for the hour that had been cancelled several months earlier.

Rav Kook, who recognized the justice of the claim, had little choice. He set aside all his affairs, and the two sat and studied together for a full hour.

Thus far the story, which circulated in Jerusalem for many years. I confess that for a long time I regarded it as no more than a charming “urban legend,” one of those anecdotes that naturally crystallize around towering figures, depicting them not only in their greatness in Torah but also, in the manner of the early sages, as men of wit who knew how to tease one another with affectionate irony.

The story took root, and its echoes may be found in various books as well, albeit in an imprecise form, such as in the writings of Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neria on Rav Kook.^[25] The source material for Rabbi Neria’s account is preserved in his personal archive, now housed in the National Library of Israel, and includes a remarkable series of recollections that Lieberman shared with him in the summer of 1979.^[26]

To my astonishment, however, two concrete pieces of evidence that have come to light in recent years in the course of my research on Lieberman do more than merely gesture toward the plausibility of the account. They substantially corroborate it. The first emerged many years ago in the main library of Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav – a library endowed in the name of Markus Cohn, the father of Arthur Cohn, the eminent Hollywood producer who passed away only recently.^[27]

On the first volume of The Yerushalmi According to Its Plain Meaning (Ha-Yerushalmi Ke-Peshuto) (also the last, for Lieberman ultimately decided to abandon his projected commentary on the Yerushalmi and to turn instead to the Tosefta, on which he produced his monumental Tosefta Ke-Peshutah), there appears a dedication that Lieberman wrote to Rav Kook, composed, as was customary, in rabbinic idiom and in abbreviations:

“In honor of our master, the rabbi of the Land of Israel and of all the Diaspora, the Gaon Rav A.I.H. Kook, may he live a long and good life, with feelings of admiration and respect, from the author.”

Attention should be paid to the date on which these words were written. The work was published in 5695 (1935). Lieberman signed his introduction at the beginning of that year, on Sunday, 7 Tishrei 5695, between Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, corresponding to 16 September 1934.

Obviously, the printing also took a certain period, probably a few months.

Greater precision can be established regarding the date of publication. A notice announcing the appearance of Ha-Yerushalmi Ke-Peshuto was printed on the front page of Kol Yisrael, the organ of Agudat Israel in Jerusalem (edited by Rabbi Moshe Blau), on 8 Kislev 5695 (15 November 1934). The advertisement’s conspicuous placement on the newspaper’s front page indicates that the volume had only recently emerged from the press and was then being introduced to the reading public. It therefore provides a reliable terminus post quem for any presentation of the work to Rav Kook.

Lieberman therefore could not have presented the book to Rav Kook before that date. The possible window is accordingly narrow: from mid-November 1934 until the onset of Rav Kook’s final illness around Passover 5695 (April 1935). It is thus plausible that Lieberman brought the newly printed volume to him on the eve of Purim of that year, perhaps as mishlo’aḥ manot, or shortly beforehand, and that Rav Kook, in return, presented him with a copy of Rosh Milin bearing the distinctive Purim dedication.

Rav Kook passed away in Elul of that year. Approximately six months earlier, around Passover, he had contracted his final illness and was already confined to his deathbed in a state of severe suffering. Consequently, even had Lieberman wished to do so, he could only have presented him with the work during the brief period at the beginning of that year, from the book’s publication until Passover.

The second surprise came to my attention several years ago, when a friend sent me a photograph of the title page of Rav Kook’s small and enigmatic kabbalistic work, a copy of which was in his possession.

The work, Rosh Milin, on the Hebrew letters, was written in 1917, during Rav Kook’s exile in London in the course of the First World War.^[28] Thus did Rav Kook write, in the affectionate dedication he inscribed to his young colleague and ḥavruta:

“A gift of true love to the chosen of my heart, Rabbi Saul Lieberman, may he live a long and good life. Abraham Isaac, the small [i.e., the humble one]. Purim of the unwalled cities, 5695 [1935].”

Anyone familiar with the dedications and expressions of esteem that Rav Kook addressed to various individuals, including leading Torah scholars, will recognize that the phrase he wrote to Lieberman, “true love to the chosen of my heart,” is striking in its exceptional character.

Incidentally, Gershom Scholem later related that, despite his expertise in Kabbalah, he did not succeed in understanding Rosh Milin. He further added – “on the testimony of trustworthy informants,” by which he meant his close friend Saul Lieberman (and he even recorded the remark in his personal copy of the book, now preserved in the National Library of Israel) – that Rav Kook himself told Lieberman:

“Regarding this book, the author [i.e., Rav Kook] said to my friend Saul Lieberman, shortly before his death – when he presented him with a copy as a gift – that he now does not understand a single word of what he wrote in it, even though at the time of writing he fully grasped the meaning and intent of the matters.”^[29]

Although Lieberman was as far removed from engagement with Kabbalah as east is from west, he once gave memorable expression to this distance when asked to introduce a lecture by his close friend Gershom Scholem. Lieberman opened his remarks with an immortal quip about Scholem’s field of research, Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism: “Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense may be a science….”^[30] Nevertheless, Rav Kook chose, of all his writings, to present Lieberman with this particular book as a gift, perhaps so that it might serve as a kind of “amulet,” or perhaps as an act of Purim mischief on the part of the aged rabbi; we cannot know.

The unusual date recorded in the dedication, “Purim of the unwalled cities, 5695,” suggests that the booklet was presented to Lieberman on that very occasion, when, according to the account, he chose to collect the aged Rav Kook’s “debt” during their joint study session, perhaps their last, on Purim of that year.

It is entirely plausible that on that occasion Lieberman brought Rav Kook his newly published work, The Yerushalmi According to Its Plain Meaning, and that in return Rav Kook presented him with mishlo’aḥ manot in the form of his small and enigmatic book.

Thus the Jerusalem legend seems to acquire flesh and sinew, and what once appeared to be no more than a charming anecdote may in fact preserve a genuine historical memory: a literary mishlo’aḥ manot exchanged between two towering figures, in which Torah, affection, and Purim playfulness were delicately intertwined.

Appendix A: Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neria’s Archival Notes on Saul Lieberman’s Recollections of Rav Kook (Summer 1979)

The following translation is based on Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neria’s handwritten notes preserved in his personal archive, currently housed in the National Library of Israel (Jerusalem). The notes record a conversation held during Summer 1979 in which Rabbi Professor Saul Lieberman recounted a series of episodes relating to Rav Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook and the influence that Rav Kook exerted upon him. The material corresponds in its essentials to passages later published by Rabbi Neria, but the archival version preserves additional details and a more expansive formulation of Lieberman’s testimony.

Rabbi Neria was accustomed to preserving every scrap of paper containing substantive content that passed through his hands. Alongside newspaper clippings in which several articles about Lieberman appeared, Rabbi Neria preserved the remarks he heard directly from him in the summer of 5739 (1979). According to his account, Lieberman requested that he telephone him in the early morning (“from eight o’clock onward I disconnect the telephone, lock the door, and engage in my Talmudic study without interruptions”), and he did so.

Lieberman told Rabbi Neria that his first visit to Rav Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook took place on the night of Shavuot:

“I heard that he was teaching Sefer ha-Mitzvot [i.e., Maimonides’ Book of the Commandments]. I came and sat down by the table. In the course of the study I made a remark, and the Rav answered me briefly. Later I made another remark, and again I received a brief reply. When I remarked upon his words a third time, the Rav turned to me and said: ‘Come in to me tomorrow.’ When I came after the festival, the Rav received me with great warmth, asked about my family, and it emerged that he knew several rabbis among my relatives. After a Torah conversation, he asked that I come to him frequently, and thus I did. On the way to the Rav’s visit to the Gerrer Rebbe (to R. Neḥemyah’le [??]), the Rav delayed at my apartment and became engrossed in a halakhic give-and-take concerning a matter I was then studying. I would come and present my novellae before him, ask about what had been difficult for me, and the like. His warm attitude toward me greatly encouraged me. He had a mystical influence upon me, even though I am far from mysticism. I had ‘tests,’ and he influenced me to remain in the study of Torah.”

Lieberman recounted to Rabbi Neria one such “test.” According to his account, a dispute arose between Rabbi Fishman [i.e., R. Yehudah Leib Maimon] and Bank Mizraḥi. The parties decided to submit to arbitration before attorney Mordechai Eliash. Lieberman represented Rabbi Fishman, whereas the bank was represented by attorney Mordechai Levanon. Rav Kook summoned Lieberman and instructed him to cease representing him in the arbitration:

“You have acquired a reputation for involving yourself in arbitration, and that will draw you away from your learning.”

Rabbi Neria further adds and cites in Lieberman’s name words of admiration and reverence for Rav Kook:

“Not only did his greatness in Torah exert influence – and he knew the entirety of Torah – but his entire personality. Matters of the people of Israel and the Land of Israel were not for him merely pathetic rhetoric; rather, they overflowed from his depths, from his hidden world, and there was something mystical in it. This was a figure overflowing with light, and his light would penetrate in its own ways… The Rav was an artist. Not merely a man with poetic sensibility, but truly an artist. In his writing there is a sacred grandeur. His words are like the tones of the shofar’s sound. The ease of his writing is astonishing, yet it is the result of abundant knowledge. They once told of a certain wealthy man who marveled at the request of a great painter to receive an enormous sum of money for a sketch he drew within ten minutes. ‘Not so,’ replied the painter; ‘I labored sixty years in order to attain an ability to draw in such a manner.’”

According to Rabbi Neria, Lieberman told him that he was occupied with printing Ḥasdei David, the commentary of R. David Pardo on the Tosefta, and that through printing his own work on Seder Ṭohorot he repaid his debt…

In this context Lieberman added:

“I also must repay a debt to the Rav [i.e., Kook]. He greatly encouraged me in the study of the Jerusalem Talmud. Several times I presented before him my Torah insights in elucidating difficult passages in the Jerusalem Talmud, and he took great pleasure in them.”

In response to Rabbi Neria’s question, “Was the Rav [i.e., Kook] as proficient in the Jerusalem Talmud as in the Babylonian?” Lieberman replied:

“The Rav was proficient in everything: Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, Tosefta and Midrashim, Rishonim and decisors. The Rav was the only one who encompassed the entirety of Torah, and this influenced his encompassing vision. The Rav’s vast scope contributed greatly to the richness of his personality. This was also the greatness of the Netziv, who knew the whole of Torah. I am deeply impressed by the Netziv. So too was R. Meir Simḥah [of Dvinsk, author of Or Sameaḥ].”

In this connection, Rabbi Neria cited words written by Rav Kook:

“The originality of the ‘ever-strengthening spring’ and the ‘river that does not cease’ (Avot, beginning of ch. 6) is the primary aspiration of one who engages in Torah for its own sake, which comes from divine cleaving. The inner spiritual bond with that which is all, the source of all, and beyond all. The desire filled with purity, which steadily intensifies to absorb the distilled essence of the supernal sap within the supernal realms—these are they who always seek the ennobled renewal in its vigorous force” (Iggerot ha-Ra’ayah, vol. 3, p. 4).

(“The Rav’s [i.e., Kook’s] vast scope contributed greatly to the richness of his personality. His opponents fought against him because they recognized his power, because they knew his greatness.”) According to Rabbi Neria, Lieberman described the Rav’s words as expressing a “sacred grandeur.”

Rabbi Neria further relates, in Lieberman’s name, that in the summer of 5690 (1930) Rabbi Moshe Ostrovsky came to the apartment where Rav Kook was staying in Kiryat Moshe in order to pressure him to agree to the compromise proposal then being circulated, according to which the people of Israel would relinquish part of their rights in the Land of Israel, including at the Western Wall. Lieberman was present. The visitor wished that he leave the room so that he could speak with Rav Kook privately; however, Rav Kook detained Lieberman and instructed him to continue sitting there.

Years later, after the passing of Rav Kook, Rabbi Neria heard at a memorial gathering held in the Jewish Agency building that Rav Kook had told Rabbi Ostrovsky:

“The people of Israel has not empowered any person to relinquish the Western Wall. If we relinquish it, the Holy One, blessed be He, will not wish to restore it to us.”

Rabbi Neria testifies that while he lived in Jerusalem in the 1930s, Rabbi Professor Saul Lieberman would customarily pray on the High Holy Days together with the students of Yeshivat Merkaz ha-Rav, who had established their place of prayer at Yeshivat Etz Ḥayyim in the Maḥaneh Yehudah neighborhood.

Among other matters, Rabbi Neria wrote down what he heard from Lieberman regarding his shared study with Rav Kook, and according to what is stated there. The accounts found in Rabbi Neria’s handwritten notes correspond in their essentials to what he later presented in his book.

Alongside them, I found in this archive and in additional archives details concerning Lieberman’s involvement, at the request of his friend (and relative) Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, wife of the late President Yitzḥak Ben-Zvi, in the establishment of a yeshivat hesder in Peki’in. Within this framework he approached Rabbi M. Z. Neria and asked him to assist in realizing the idea in practice. Concerning this episode I intend to write, God willing, elsewhere.

Notes

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my friend and colleague Mr. Menachem Butler, who devoted considerable effort to translating and editing this article into English. I am also grateful for his valuable contributions, including bibliographical references and precise citations.

1. See Harold Fisch, “Reading and Carnival: On the Semiotics of Purim,” Poetics Today, vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 55-74. ↑
2. See, for example Yaakov Shmuel Spiegel, “Cross Dressing for Special Occasions,” in Joseph R. Hacker, Yosef Kaplan, and B.Z. Kedar, eds., Rishonim ve-Aharonim, From Sages to Savants: Studies Presented to Avraham Grossman (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2010), 329-352 (Hebrew), available here; and Gedalia Oberlander, “The Custom of Disguising Oneself on Purim,” Or Yisrael, vol. 2, no. 3 [#7] (April 1997):125-131 (Hebrew), available here; Moshe Leib Halberstadt, “Costumes on Purim and at Various Events,” Yerushatenu, vol. 5 (2011): 169-175 (Hebrew). ↑
3. See Shamma Friedman, “Erasing Haman,” Leshonenu, vol. 61, no. 3 (June 1998): 259-263 (Hebrew), available here; Daniel Sperber, “Destroying the Name of Haman,” Shana be-Shana, vol. 32 (2001): 203-211 (Hebrew), available here; and Daniel Sperber, How To Strike Haman (Jerusalem: The Wolfson Museum of Jewish Art, 2002; Hebrew), available here. For a comprehensive survey of the halakhic and historical sources concerning this custom, see Eliezer Brodt, “The Pros and Cons of Making Noise When Haman’s Name is Mentioned: A Historical Perspective (updated),” The Seforim Blog (22 March 2016), available here. ↑
4. See Dan Rabinowitz, “Purim, Mixed Dancing, and Kill Joys,” The Seforim Blog (6 March 2006), available here. ↑
5. See Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). ↑
6. Esther 9:22. ↑
7. Megillah 7a. ↑
8. See Alan Appelbaum, “Why the Rabbis of the Yerushalmi Called R. Judah Nesiah ‘a Great Man’?” Journal of Ancient Judaism, vol. 3, no. 3 (December 2012): 339-365. ↑
9. One can hardly help but wonder how long it will be before a kunṭres devoted to the halakhic parameters of re-gifting mishlo’aḥ manot appears, if indeed one has not already been published, systematically treating such questions as whether the initial recipient must effect a formal kinyan; whether the mitzvah requires that the gift be given mi-shelo (“from one’s own”); the respective roles of the giver’s kavvanah and the recipient’s awareness; the permissibility of re-gifting absent the donor’s consent (da‘at ba‘alim); whether the obligation may be discharged through an intermediary (shaliaḥ); whether one may fulfill the mitzvah with an item received earlier that same day; and whether a package that circulates through multiple hands constitutes mishlo’aḥ manot at all, or merely an elaborate exercise in communal redistribution, together with the host of subsidiary questions such a case inevitably generates. ↑
10. For more on this practice, see Meir Wunder, “Books as Mishlo’aḥ Manot,” Moriah, vol. 5, no. 5-6 [#53-54] (November 1973 – January 1974): 83-86 (Hebrew); and Tovia Preschel, “Mishlo’aḥ Manot of Books from Authors,” ha-Doar, vol. 53, no. 19 (8 March 1974): 295 (Hebrew). ↑
11. I am currently at work on a biography of Professor Saul Lieberman; for now, my earlier writings on him, see Aviad Hacohen, “Two Scholars Who Were in Our City: Correspondence between Saul Lieberman and Jacob David Abramsky,” ha-Tsofeh Literary Supplement (21 April 1984): 5 (Hebrew), available here; Aviad Hacohen, “Schlemiel, Schlimazel, and Nebbich: Letters from Saul Lieberman to Gershom and Fania Scholem,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (25 April 2000): H1 (Hebrew) , available here; Aviad Hacohen, “The Tannah from New York: A Selection of Professor Saul Lieberman’s Letters,” Jewish Studies, no. 42 (2003): 289-301 (Hebrew), available here; Aviad Hacohen, “Six Days and Seven Gates: Between Israeli President Izhak Navon and Professor Rabbi Saul Lieberman,” Oneg Shabbat (9 June 2023), available here; Aviad Hacohen, “Lieberman Kifshuto: Personal Letters Revealing the Sensitive and Playful Side of a Talmudic Genius, On the 40th Yahrzeit of Professor Saul Lieberman,” Makor Rishon, Sabbath Supplement, no. 1338: Parashat Tzav (31 March 2023): 8-11 (Hebrew), available here; Aviad Hacohen, “The Generation Did Not Appropriately and Duly Appreciate Mr. Schocken [Eulogy by Rabbi Prof. Saul Lieberman for Shlomo Zalman Schocken, March 1960],” Haaretz Literary Supplement (28 April 2024): 1 (Hebrew), available here; Aviad Hacohen, “The Story of the Rabbi Who Rejected the Maxim: ‘Torah Scholars Increase Peace in the World’,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (25 May 2023): 8 (Hebrew), available here; and Aviad Hacohen, “‘A Lithuanian Mind in Its Lithuanian Essence, From Volozhin to Jerusalem’: R. Shaul Lieberman’s Intellectual Kinship with the Legacy of Lithuanian Torah & Its Bearers,” in Martin S. Cohen, ed., Essays in Jewish Studies in Honor of Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin (Jerusalem: Schechter, 2025), 101-139 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
12. See Shmuel Glick and Menachem Katz, “‘A Threefold Cord’: On Saul Lieberman and His Relationship with the Hazon Ish and Jacob Nahum Epstein,” in Shmuel Glick, Evelyn M. Cohen, Angelo M. Piattelli, et al., eds., Meḥevah le-Menaḥem: Studies in Honor of Menahem Hayyim Schmelzer (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2019), 269-289 (Hebrew). ↑
13. See Saul Lieberman, “Ten Words,” in Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav, 1974), [1-20], where Lieberman refers explicitly to “my teacher, Prof. Moshe Schwabe, of blessed memory,” and describes Schwabe’s long-standing aspiration to produce a new dictionary of Greek and Latin loanwords in rabbinic literature. For the subsequent realization of this lexicographical program in systematic form, see Daniel Sperber, A Dictionary of Greek and Latin Legal Terms in Rabbinic Literature (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1984); Daniel Sperber, My Rabbinic Loanwords Card Index of More Than a Half-Century: A Companion Volume to Professor Samuel Krauss’ Griechische und Lateinische Lehnwörter im Talmud, Midrasch und Targum, ed. Menachem Butler (Cambridge, MA: Shikey Press, 2022), esp. the introduction, available here, where Sperber describes the work as the product of “more than fifty-years of collection and research,” originally conceived as an annotated continuation of Krauss’s Lehnwörter, and acknowledges Lieberman’s personal role in encouraging his philological work, noting that Lieberman “adopted me as his disciple in this field.” Sperber also reproduces a letter of approbation from Lieberman dated 19 Shevat 5738 (27 January 1978), praising Sperber’s “objective evaluation of Krauss’s volume” and commending the “great progress” reflected in his conclusions. ↑
14. A fine “real-time” description of his path during those years appears in a letter written at the time by his father-in-law, Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, leader of the Mizrachi movement. Writing to his son Tuvia (a chemist and later the first Director-General of Bar-Ilan University) on 25 Marḥeshvan 5694 (5 November 1933), Bar-Ilan remarked“…And so, my dear, everything I have found here: outwardly nothing has changed in our home, but inwardly part of our apartment has been transformed into a beit midrash. For our Shaul sits and engages in Torah and scholarship with remarkable diligence. Your small room has been turned into a library, for Shaul has many books – among them items of precious value – and there he labors over them, if I am not mistaken, some ten hours a day and at night. Apart from those hours in which he teaches at the Teachers’ Seminary and at the university – only twice a week – he sits “over Torah and avodah.” He is engaged in writing a great book [this refers to Ha-Yerushalmi Kifshuto, published in 5695 (1935)], which, upon its completion and publication, will, it seems to me, renew a momentum among Talmudic circles and scholars of Israel with respect to the Jerusalem Talmud. Shaul is great – loftier than I had known – “full and overflowing” in an excellent measure; his knowledge is astonishing and his intellect clear, and beyond this he is an outstandingly diligent scholar. I do not know whether he will persist in his diligence, for it is possible that only on account of his literary work does he not divert his mind from his studies, but at present he continues his work with diligence and industriousness…” ↑
15. See, recently, Moshe Assis, Saul Lieberman’s Marginalia on Talmud Yerushalmi (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2022; Hebrew). ↑
16. On Judith Berlin Lieberman’s lineage, intellectual formation, and educational career, see Judith Berlin Lieberman, Autobiography and Reflections, eds. Menachem Butler and Abraham Lieberman (Cambridge, MA: Shikey Press, 2022), available here. See especially the autobiographical memoir (pp. 20-38) and the introductory essay by her nephew Hillel Halkin (pp. 15-19). ↑
17. See Aviad Hacohen, “‘Honey and Milk Are Under His Tongue, Yet Beneath It Burns a Blazing Fire’: On the Relationship between S.Y. Agnon and Saul Lieberman,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (6 October 2023): 7 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
18. See Aviad Hacohen, “Schlemiel, Schlimazel, and Nebbich – Letters from Saul Lieberman to Gershom and Fania Scholem,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (25 April 2000): H1 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
19. See Aviad Hacohen, “The Generation Did Not Appropriately and Duly Appreciate Mr. Schocken [Eulogy by Rabbi Prof. Saul Lieberman for Shlomo Zalman Schocken, March 1960],” Haaretz Literary Supplement (28 April 2024): 1 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
20. See, for example, Menahem Zulay, “The Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (31 October 1947): 9 (Hebrew); and A.M. Habermann, “Salman Schocken and The Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry: On His Fifth Anniversary of His Death,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (17 July 1964): 13 (Hebrew). ↑
21. See Aviad Hacohen, “If every Sabbath were like Yom Kippur: An Interview with Haim Cohn,” Meimad, no. 17 (August 1999): 12-15 (Hebrew), available here; and Aviad Hacohen, “Apikores with Divine Grace – Review of ‘Being Jewish: Culture, Law, Religion, State’, by Haim Cohn,” ha-Tsofeh Literary Supplement (27 April 2007): 10, 13 (Hebrew), available here; and see also Azriel Carlebach, “The Rav Renowned for Halakhic Expertise,” Maariv Literary Supplement (19 February 1956): 4 (Hebrew), and Haim Cohn, “The Yeshiva of Rav Kook,” in Haim Cohn, A Personal Introduction: Autobiography, ed. Michal Smoira-Cohn (Kinneret: Dvir, 2005), 96-102 (Hebrew). ↑
22. Ari (Yitzchak) Chwat, “Rabbi Kook’s Connections with Prof. Rabbi Saul Lieberman as a Model for His Attitude Towards Critical Torah Research,” Tzohar, vol. 35 (2009): 59-66 (Hebrew), is especially important for situating the Rav Kook-Lieberman relationship within the broader question of Rav Kook’s principled openness to rigorous philological and historical methods in Torah study, and for treating Lieberman as a case study for the category Rav Kook termed ḥokhmat yisrael be-qedushatah. For further development of this concept, see Ari (Yitzchak) Chwat, “‘Hokhmat Yisrael in Its Holiness’: Rav Kook’s Vision for True Critical-Scientific Study,” Talelei Orot, vol. 13 (2007): 943-976 (Hebrew). ↑
23. The letter, preserved in the Professor Ephraim E. Urbach Archive at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, is scheduled for publication in my forthcoming volume, Pirkei Shaul, which, God willing, is expected to appear in the coming year. ↑
24. Many stories concerning Lieberman’s extraordinary powers of memory circulated among people already during his lifetime. One of the sages of Jerusalem, who sought to clarify the difference between Lieberman and other great Torah scholars endowed with remarkable mnemonic ability, described it as follows: “So-and-so, the gaon, knows the entire Talmud by heart. Say to him a particular word, and he will immediately tell you where it appears throughout the whole of the Talmud. Lieberman is greater than he: he can tell you with certainty that a particular word does not appear anywhere in the entire Talmud…” ↑
25. See Moshe Tzvi Neria, “From the Testimony of Rabbi Saul Lieberman,” in Likkutei ha-Ra’ayah, ed. Moshe Tzvi Neria, vol. 2 (Kefar ha-Ro’eh: 1990), 336–341 (Hebrew), which preserves a version of the Rosh Milin anecdote attributed to Lieberman (based on an interview conducted by Neria in Summer 1981), though without the later bibliographic framing and transmission history found in Scholem’s formulation. Neria’s presentation should also be situated within his broader editorial enterprise of collecting and disseminating Rav Kook-related reminiscences for a wide Hebrew readership, both in his books and in his ha-Tsofeh newspaper columns in the Religious Zionist press. ↑
26. For a translated excerpt from Rabbi Neria’s handwritten archival notes recording his 1979 conversation with Saul Lieberman, see Appendix A below. ↑
27. See Yair Sheleg, “King Arthur: Members of the Family of Arthur Cohn, Who Passed Away Last Week, Recount His Scrupulous Observance of the Sabbath Even on the Most Prestigious Stages, and His Profound Love for the State of Israel, Expressed Not Only Through Generous Donations,” Makor Rishon, Sabbath Supplement: Parashat Vayigash (25 December 2025; Hebrew), available here. ↑
28. See Aaron Ahrend, “About Rav Kook’s ‘Rosh Millin’,” Da’at, no. 27 (Summer 1991): 73-85 (Hebrew), available here; and Aaron Ahrend, “Further on Rav Kook’s ‘Rosh Millin’,” Sinai, vol. 110 (June – July 1992): 190-192 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
29. Zvi Leshem, “‘He Does Not Understand a Single Word of What He Wrote’: Gershom Scholem and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook – A Story of a Marginal Note,” Ha-Safranim, Blog of the National Library of Israel (19 August 2019), available here and here.Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neria transmitted these remarks in the name of Saul Lieberman himself. See Moshe Tzvi Neria, “From the Testimony of Rabbi Saul Lieberman,” in Likkutei ha-Ra’ayah, ed. Moshe Tzvi Neria, vol. 2 (Kefar ha-Ro’eh: 1990), 339 (Hebrew). On the affinity between the Rav Kook and Saul Lieberman, see ibid., pp. 92, 337-341, 369. From there also in Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon J. Spiro, Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005), 52-53, 101. ↑
30. See Daniel Abrams, “Defining Modern Academic Scholarship: Gershom Scholem and the Establishment of a New Discipline,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 9 (2000): 267-302, esp. 268n1, where he writes:“Lieberman’s statement has been circulating as an oral tradition amongst scholars and students of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The only printed reference to it I have found is offered by Joseph Dan in his “The Revelation of the Secret of the World: The Beginning of Jewish Mysticism in Late Antiquity” (Brown University Program in Judaic Studies, Occasional Paper Number 2, Providence 1992, p. 3): “We all know that mysticism is nonsense, but the history of mysticism is a science.” See however Lieberman’s article “How much Greek in Jewish Palestine,” Biblical and Other Studies, ed. A. Altmann, Cambridge, Mass. 1962, p. 135 [reprinted in Texts and Studies, New York 1974, p. 22), Lieberman offered the following formulation: “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is a very important science. In certain respects it is more revealing than the history of sciences based on reason.” (see also Mortimer Ostow, Ultimate Intimacy; the Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism, London 1995, p. 362) Lieberman apparently regretted his statement and wrote an appendix for Scholem’s Jewish Gnosticism based on these lectures.” ↑

Disenchantment with Zionism?

Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz on the Qibyā Raid

Warren Zev Harvey^[1]

The infamous Qibyā reprisal raid (peʿulat tagmul), led by Major Ariel Sharon, later to become Israel’s Prime Minister, was the first military operation for which the young State of Israel was severely condemned by the UN, major nations, and the world Jewish community. It was carried out on the night of October 14, 1953, in response to many terror attacks by Arab fidāʾiyūn who had infiltrated Israel from Jordan, from the vicinity of the village of Qibyā. In particular, the raid was carried out in response to an attack on the town of Yehud, in which Sultana (Suzanne) Kanias, her three-year-old daughter Shoshana, and her one-and-a-half-year-old son Benny were murdered. Her thirteen-year-old son, Yitzhak, was seriously wounded, and died three years later. The raid was officially named “Operation Shoshana.”

When they saw the Israeli soldiers approaching, most of the men of Qibyā fled, and the village was conquered easily. The Israelis blew up more than 40 buildings, killing 69 residents, mostly women and children.

In the wake of the Qibyā raid, many leading Jewish personages in both Israel and the Diaspora wrote responses to it, probing its ethical and political dimensions.^[2]

Among those responding were two of the foremost Maimonidean philosophers of the 20^th century, Leon Roth (1896-1963) and Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), both renowned professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Roth’s response (“The Moral Issue”) appeared as a Letter to the Editor in The Jewish Chronicle (London) on 4 December 1953.^[3] Leibowitz’s response (“After Qibyā”) appeared in the Israeli biweekly Beterem on 15 December 1953 and 15 January 1954. Roth’s intervention came near the close of a sustained Anglo-Jewish debate (October 23 – December 11, 1953), initiated by The Jewish Chronicle’s editorial “Right Is Might.”^[4] Participants in this debate included Norman Bentwich (twice),^[5] Selig Brodetsky, Abraham Cohen (twice), Albert Montefiore Hyamson, Harry Samuels, Ernst Akiba Simon,^[6] Sefton David Temkin, and Robert Weltsch. Leibowitz’s response, by contrast, inaugurated a long Israeli debate (December 15 – March 15), whose participants included Rabbi Benjamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldman / Hatalmi), Yuval Elitzur (twice), Amitai Etzioni, Pepita Haezraḥi (twice), Eliezer Schweid, and Ernst Akiba Simon (twice).

Leon Roth, known in Hebrew as Ḥayyim Yehudah Roth (ח״י רות, Ḥerut = Freedom), was born in London and educated at Oxford.^[7] He was the older brother of the historian Cecil Roth.^[8] During World War I, he served as a lieutenant in the Jewish Legion of the British Army. He co-founded the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1928 together with Samuel Hugo Bergmann, and became its first Aḥad Haʿam Professor.^[9] He later served as Rector of the University (1940-1945) and Dean of Humanities (1949-1951). He was the author of many lucidly argued works in English and Hebrew on Greek, medieval, and modern philosophy, including Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides (1924) and Judaism: A Portrait (1960).^[10] In July 1951, at the age of fifty-five, he resigned his chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and returned to England,^[11] despite efforts by the University and senior figures in the Israeli government to persuade him to remain.^[12] He died suddenly of a heart attack on 2 April 1963 while visiting Wellington, New Zealand, where he is buried.^[13]

Yeshayahu Leibowitz was born in Riga and studied chemistry and medicine at Berlin and Basle. He was the older brother of the Bible scholar, Neḥamah Leibowitz. He moved to Jerusalem in 1935, and taught biochemistry, organic chemistry, and neurophysiology at the Hebrew University. During Israel’s War of Independence, he served as a platoon commander in the Haganah. A selection of his trenchant Hebrew essays on Jewish philosophy appeared in English translation under the title, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (1992). He was fifty years old when he wrote his response to the Qibyā raid, an intervention that marked the beginning of his long and influential engagement with the tensions between political sovereignty, religious commitment, and moral responsibility.

In his response to the raid, Roth asked two main questions: (1) Do we as Jews today have an obligation to traditional Jewish values? (2) What manner of human beings could have carried out the Qibyā raid? In his response to the raid, Leibowitz, in effect, engaged with Roth’s two questions, and gave thought-provoking replies. Although Leibowitz did not mention Roth, it seems clear that he had read his response and was in conversation with it – at least with regard to the second installment (January 15), if not also with regard to the first one (December 15).

Roth’s Response

Whereas the debate in the Jewish Chronicle had focused on whether Diaspora Jews should publicly criticize the Israelis, Leon Roth was interested in a different question. His concern, rather, was Judaism itself. “The problem,” he wrote, “is whether…Judaism…can acquiesce in this incident.” The Qibyā raid, he continued, “is the type of action which we have been accustomed to say that Judaism taught the world to condemn and from which Jewry itself has so often suffered.” If we do not censure the Israeli raid, we hypocritically deny our own sacred values and our own past. Roth asked: “Shall we still be able to say that we demand one law for all and that we do not do to others what we do not wish others to do to us? That the lex talionis is not Jewish; that we abhor the spilling of blood, even of animals; that we are commanded in the Pentateuch to care for the non-Jew (‘love the stranger’), as was noted by the rabbis of another day, thirty-six times?… Dare we repeat the old commonplace of which we were once so proud that Jewish courts were so careful to avoid the shedding of blood that they disallowed all circumstantial evidence and in practice all but abolished the death penalty?” In other words, if we abandon our Jewish values, can we still consider ourselves Jews?

This was Roth’s first question. Do we as Jews today have an obligation to traditional Jewish values? However, he also had a second question, namely: What manner of human beings could have carried out the Qibyā raid?

Roth phrased his second question as follows: “The real tragedy is…for the Israelis… What manner of men are these who could contrive this action, or what persons could carry it out? And what manner of men are those who, arrogantly dismissing the moral issue, bemuse themselves and us with their Realpolitik?” If the conduct of the Israelis was not Jewish, then what was it?

Roth left his two questions unanswered. It was up to Leibowitz to answer them.

Leibowitz’s Response

Like Roth, Leibowitz begins his response to the Qibyā raid by raising the question of our relationship today as Jews to our traditional values. However, he does not speak simply about “Jews,” but Jews in the State of Israel. The “true religious and moral significance” of our Jewish political independence, he argued, is that it is “a test” or “a trial” (Hebrew: nissayon, like the nisyonot of Abraham) of our traditional values. In the Diaspora, Leibowitz explained with wry irony, we enjoyed “spiritual benefits from conditions of exile, foreign rule, and political impotence.” We spoke well about morality, but our morality “was never tested.” Diaspora existence (Hebrew: galut) “was a form of escapism.” True, we did not engage in mass murder, but we did not have an army to do so. We did not have the power to be moral. We could suffer for our values, but could not act on their behalf. “Now we are being tested.”

The notion that morality presupposes power is of course Nietzschean. But not only Nietzschean. The distinguished Israeli philosopher of education, Ernst Akiba Simon, who was the only personage who participated in the debates on Qibyā in both the Jewish Chronicle and Beterem, called Leibowitz’s attention to a relevant passage in Rabbi Judah Halevi’s philosophic dialogue, The Kuzari, I, 113-114.^[14] In that passage, Halevi’s rabbinic protagonist boasts to the King of the Khazars that the Christians and the Muslims are engaged in terrible wars, but we Jews are virtuous, meek, and do not kill anyone. The King immediately retorts: “Your humility is not by choice! As soon as you have a moment of triumph, you’ll kill too [idhā aṣabtum ẓafra, qataltum]!”^[15]

Again like Roth, Leibowitz distinguishes between our traditional values and Realpolitik. It is possible to find a moral justification for the Qibyā raid, but “we shouldn’t try to do so,” because it was an atrocity (zevaʿah). He compared the Qibyā raid to the raid on the city of Shechem by Jacob’s sons (Genesis 34).^[16] The sons gave a moral justification for their act, saying: “Should one deal with our sister as with a harlot?!” (ibid., v. 31). Nonetheless, Jacob cursed the act, saying: “Simeon and Levi…weapons of violence their kinship… Cursed be their anger… I will scatter them” (ibid., 49:5-7). There are acts, insisted Leibowitz, that may be morally or politically justifiable, but are accursed. He concluded his response to the Qibyā raid with the chilling words: “We may find ourselves erecting our Third Commonwealth upon the curse of Jacob our Father.”

Leibowitz also engaged with Roth’s second question, “What manner of men are these who could contrive this action,” carry it out, or defend it?^[17] In his own response, Leibowitz asks: “From where have these youths come who felt no inhibition…to perform the atrocity?” Leibowitz, unlike Roth, gives an explicit answer. He replies: “They were nurtured on the values of a Zionist education… Their conduct is among the consequences of applying the religious category of holiness [Hebrew: qedushah] to social, national, and political interests… The concept of holiness – which is absolute and beyond all categories of human thought and evaluation – is transferred to the profane. From a religious standpoint only God is holy, and only His imperative is absolute. All human values…are profane… Country, state, and nation… are never holy… They are always subject to criticism.” The moment secular Zionist education transformed the old religious categories, like “holiness,” into social, national, or political categories, it created a generation of Israelis who did not have the ability to criticize their government. They held the State and its policies to be sacred. The secularization of religious concepts is accordingly dangerous and can be fatal. Leibowitz never tired of preaching: Only God and His commandments are “holy” or absolute. The orders of David Ben-Gurion or Ariel Sharon should always be subject to criticism. It was, according to Leibowitz, the secularizing Zionist education that made possible the atrocity of Qibyā.

Disenchantment with Zionism?

Both Roth and Leibowitz devoted decades to the creation of a renewed Hebrew culture in Zion. In the years before the proclamation of the State of Israel, both lectured and wrote extensively on questions of government, citizenship, and education with an eye to preparing Palestinian Jews for independence. Yet both were controversial personalities, who were at times accused of anti-Zionism and even treason. When in 1947 Roth advocated the extension of the British Mandate in Palestine, he was widely denounced as a traitor.^[18] Roth had argued that the required conditions for Jewish independence had not yet been achieved, and the premature proclamation of the Jewish State would necessarily lead to a bloody war with the Arabs whose end could not be foreseen. Similarly, when in the 1980s Leibowitz advised young Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the occupied territories,^[19] he was widely denounced as a traitor.

Did Roth or Leibowitz ever become disenchanted with Zionism?

Roth left Israel in the summer of 1951. His abrupt departure (Hebrew: yeridah) was related to his disappointment with the nationalistic policies of the newly proclaimed State, in particular the discrimination against its Arab citizens. However, he never stated that he was disenchanted with cultural Zionism.

After his departure from Israel, Roth lectured throughout the world on the subject of Judaism, emphasizing its ethical and universalist dimensions. In his classic 1960 book, Judaism: A Portrait, he does not discuss Zionism at all. He avoids the subject entirely.^[20] However, he does discuss the Land of Israel. Although he criticizes Rabbi Judah Halevi’s version of Judaism, which he characterizes as “a mystical and geographical nationalism,”^[21] he stresses that when Halevi himself, like the rabbinic protagonist of his Kuzari, ascended to the Land of Israel, he did so ultimately because of a “moral ideal,” that is, “he journeyed to the Holy Land in order to live the life of holiness.”^[22] Roth himself, while rejecting “mystical,” “geographical,” and Realpolitikal Zionism, remained faithful to the Zionism of his youth, a Zionism based on moral idealism and holiness. The Land of Israel, he wrote, “is the land where Judaism was begotten and flourished, and where its holy men, under the influence of the divine spirit, lived the life of holiness.”^[23] Nonetheless, he chose to conclude his Judaism: A Portrait with a paean to Jewish universalism: “As God is found everywhere, so man can live everywhere. He can survive even in the inside of a whale. And just as God can put man there, so from there can man seek for God, and so too can God find man [Jonah 2:1-11]. ‘Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations’ [Psalms 90:1].”^[24] Not Jerusalem, not London, but the Lord is our dwelling place.

As for Leibowitz, he was very often asked if he had become disappointed with Zionism, and he always gave the same answer. No, he replied, all his expectations for Zionism have been fulfilled. He never expected Zionism to solve our moral or religious problems. Zionism, for him, was simply a program to achieve Jewish political independence in the Land of Israel.^[25] “We were fed up being ruled by the gentiles,” he used to say. Zionism, as he understood it, was intended to provide a political arena in which individual Jews could struggle for their own diverse values and aspirations. It was intended to provide only the arena, not the values and aspirations.

Leibowitz may never have become disappointed in Zionism, but there were, I believe, three times when he became disappointed in Israelis.

The first disappointment came right at the beginning of the State. In the years preceding its proclamation, Leibowitz had called upon the Palestinian rabbinic authorities to prepare Jewish law for the governance of a modern state (hilkhot medinah). He entreated them to enact bold halakhic rulings concerning government, technology, and economics, subjects which had understandably been neglected in the Diaspora. However, after the establishment of the State, it became quite clear that neither the rabbis nor the religious public were desirous of enacting such rulings. This lack of a will for halakhic initiative on the part of religious Israelis profoundly disappointed him.

The second disappointment was the Qibyā raid. Leibowitz became disappointed in the secular (or secularizing) Zionist education, but still believed that those Israeli youth who were educated in the religious Zionist schools were immune to the distorted nationalism that he had perceived among the perpetrators of the Qibyā raid.

The third disappointment came after the Six-Day War with the radicalization of the Religious Zionist public. This was surely Leibowitz’s greatest disappointment. The religious Zionist youth, reared on torah u-mitzvot, who he had thought should be immune to aberrant nationalism, had now become the most nationalistic and least critical of all sectors in Israeli society. This was a hard blow that left Leibowitz staggered and reeling for the rest of his life.

Qibyā and Us

Written more than seventy years ago, the responses of Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz to the Qibyā raid confront difficult existential questions which remain pertinent in today’s Israel and for today’s Zionism. The admonitions of those two maverick Maimonideans have not lost their relevance. Far from it, they have become more urgent.

Appendix 1

Reproduced here is the original page featuring Leon Roth’s Letter to the Editor (“Professor Roth on the Moral Issue”), The Jewish Chronicle (December 4, 1953): 21.

Appendix 2:

Reproduced here is the full exchange of correspondence between Leon Roth and Sir Leon Simon following Roth’s public remarks in the United States in June 1947 opposing the proposed partition of Palestine. The documents include Simon’s letter conveying the protest of the American Zionist Emergency Council, Roth’s reply rejecting the accusations, and related communications. The texts are reproduced here in full, without alteration, from Jan Katzew, “Leon Roth – His Life and Thought: The Place of Ethics in Jewish Education” (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997), Appendix, pp. 355-358.

Appendix 3

Reproduced here is Leibowitz’s original article “After Qibyā,” Beterem, no. 189 (15 December 1953): 7 (Hebrew).

Appendix 4

Reproduced here is Leibowitz’s follow-up article, “Letter – Commentaries on Qibyā,” Beterem, no. 191 (15 January 54): 21 (Hebrew).^[26]

Appendix 5:

Reproduced here is the Hebrew text of “After Qibyā” as it appears in Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s 1954 book Torah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh. Passages reproduced from the original Beterem article of 15 December 1953 (see above, Appendix 3) are printed in plain font. Material drawn from the follow-up article in Beterem of 15 January 1954 (see above, Appendix 4), written in reply to Pepita Haezraḥi, appears in bold. Material first added in Torah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh is underlined.

The original December 15 text was copied in Torah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh with only minor changes; e.g., “emet, lefanim nahagnu” instead of “emet, anaḥnu nahagnu”; or “maʿaseh zevaʿah shel hereg” instead of “maʿaseh yeʾush shel hereg.”

The material deriving from the January 15 article was incorporated in it with many stylistic changes; e.g. “ha-problematikah ha-musarit ha-maḥridah” instead of “ha-problematikah ha-musarit ha-gedolah”; or the placement of “ha-hadgamah, etc.,” before “maʿaseh Shekhem, etc.,” instead of vice versa. It will be noted that Leibowitz’s well-known criticism of the secularization of religious concepts seems to have had its origin in his reply to Pepita Haezraḥi. His remarks about “tzur yisraʾel” repeat an urban legend. In point of fact, the dictum mentioning tzur yisraʾel was included already in the early draft of the Declaration of Independence by Mordecai Beham and Harry Davidowitz, written around April 22, 1948.^[27]

The controversial paragraph on the Jerusalem “tzaddiqim,” added in Torah u-Mitzvot ba-Zeman ha-Zeh, illustrates the chasm in those days between Leibowitz and the Hebrew University “peace camp,” which consisted of famed professors like Samuel Hugo Bergmann, Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Akiba Simon.” Roth also was not usually considered to be one of the members of that camp. See Bergmann’s article cited above, note 7.

The final sentence originally read: “al naqim et beytenu,” etc., which is stronger, simpler, and less preachy than the revised version.

After Qibyā

The text was also translated by the philosopher Eliezer Goldman on the basis of later versions, while taking into consideration the earlier ones, as published in Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 185-190, 277.

Appendix 6

Halakhic Engagements with the Qibyā Raid and the Renewal of the Laws of War

By Menachem Butler

The present appendix situates the halakhic discussion of the Qibyā raid within the context of recent scholarly efforts to recover, contextualize, and critically assess Jewish legal discourse on sovereignty, military service, and war in the State of Israel. It does not seek to adjudicate the halakhic permissibility of Qibyā, but rather to map the emergence, structure, and internal tensions of the halakhic discourse the episode generated.

Among the more recent of these scholarly efforts is the Milḥemet Mitzvah series, edited by Aviad Hacohen, Yitzchak Avi Roness, and myself. This multi-volume project is devoted to the halakhic, historical, and ideological foundations of military obligation in modern Israel, bringing together newly translated primary sources alongside contemporary scholarship in order to reconstruct the formative debates through which categories such as milḥemet mitzvah, collective obligation, and the relationship between Torah study and national defense were rearticulated under conditions of Jewish statehood.^[28] A forthcoming volume in the Milḥemet Mitzvah series will extend this inquiry to the Qibyā raid and its halakhic aftermath, situating the episode within the longer arc of post-1948 Jewish legal reflection on war, retaliation, and civilian harm. Whereas the volumes published to date focus primarily on the War of Independence and its immediate halakhic reverberations, the events of October 1953 mark a subsequent – and in many respects decisive – moment in the development of modern halakhic thought on warfare. The halakhic debates of 1948 were largely oriented toward questions of obligation, authority, and participation in collective defense; Qibyā, by contrast, compelled a direct confrontation with issues that had previously remained largely implicit, including the legitimacy of retaliatory violence, the halakhic status of civilian populations, and the reconciliation of inherited legal norms with the operational realities of modern warfare.

At the center of the halakhic discourse on Qibyā stands Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli’s extended responsum, which quickly became the unavoidable point of reference for subsequent Religious Zionist engagement with the episode and, more broadly, with questions of war, responsibility, and state violence.^[29] Written in close proximity to the events of 1953, it constitutes one of the earliest systematic attempts to evaluate Qibyā through halakhic reasoning rather than through moral intuition or political necessity. Its enduring influence lies not only in its substantive conclusions, but in the methodological seriousness with which it applies classical legal sources to a modern military operation involving civilian casualties. As the literature surveyed here demonstrates, the responsum quickly assumed a canonical role, shaping subsequent Religious Zionist halakhic treatments of military force and the limits of legitimate violence under conditions of Jewish sovereignty.

Beyond ethical, philosophical, or political reactions, Qibyā also generated a sustained halakhic discourse that sought to situate the events within inherited legal categories while testing their elasticity in the face of modern military power. This body of writing reflects neither straightforward apologetics nor wholesale repudiation, but a concerted effort to articulate norms of legitimacy and restraint within a legal tradition long shaped by political powerlessness. Rabbi Yisraeli’s responsum first appeared in Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah, a journal founded in the early years of the State of Israel by leading figures within the Religious Zionist movement to confront, in a systematic halakhic register, the unprecedented challenges posed by Jewish sovereignty.^[30] Conceived as a forum for the renewal of hilkhot medinah – of the laws of statehood – the journal brought together senior rabbinic authorities from Israel and the Diaspora to deliberate questions of governance, security, agriculture, economics, and public authority that had long remained underdeveloped in the absence of Jewish sovereignty. Under Rabbi Yisraeli’s editorial leadership, Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah rejected both apologetics and abstract theorization, insisting instead on rigorous engagement with concrete realities and on the integration of classical halakhic mastery with intimate knowledge of contemporary conditions.

The programmatic ambitions of Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah were articulated with unusual clarity by Rabbi Yisraeli himself in a contemporaneous interview reflecting on the aims and methods of the forum he edited.^[31] From the outset, he rejected the assumption – prevalent even among committed religious thinkers – that “the laws of state and society do not exist at all within the Torah,” insisting instead that Jewish law is capable of sustaining “ordinary political life” without recourse to miracles or messianic suspension. Against both those who regarded the state as a theological aberration and those who treated halakhah as relevant only to the private sphere, Rabbi Yisraeli framed the task of the forum as reconstructive rather than apologetic: to recover areas of halakhah long relegated to the category of “law for the messianic era” and to clarify them through sustained engagement with classical sources and contemporary realities alike. It was precisely this commitment – to determining positions “not on the basis of moral agitation or political excitement alone, but on the basis of solid halakhic sources” – that governed the inclusion of the Qibyā raid among the journal’s most urgent and controversial subjects. Read against this backdrop, Rabbi Yisraeli’s responsum on Qibyā emerges not as an exceptional intervention prompted by political pressure, but as a paradigmatic test case within the programmatic framework of Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah, oriented toward collective responsibility and the exercise of coercive power by a Jewish state. Published as “The Qibyā Incident in Light of Halakhah,”^[32] the responsum exemplifies the journal’s ambition to subject even the most morally fraught acts of state violence to sustained halakhic scrutiny rather than rhetorical evasion. In this capacity, it functions as the foundational text for the halakhic discussion of Qibyā and as a formative intervention in the development of Religious Zionist legal thought on war and sovereignty.

A crucial caveat is therefore in order. The halakhic engagement with Qibyā examined here unfolded largely in advance of, and largely independent from, the broader moral reckoning with the operation in Israeli public discourse. As Efrat Seckbach has shown, Qibyā was framed for decades within Israeli collective memory as a tragic, defensive, or even necessary act, and only much later came to be stabilized as a paradigmatic moral transgression.^[33] The early rabbinic and halakhic discussions surveyed in this appendix thus did not emerge in response to sustained public condemnation, nor were they shaped by a settled moral consensus regarding the operation’s illegitimacy. Rather, they developed within a discursive environment in which the moral meaning of Qibyā remained fluid, contested, and largely underdetermined in the public sphere. This temporal and discursive disjunction is analytically significant: it cautions against retrojecting later ethical judgments onto early halakhic reasoning and underscores that these responsa were formulated in a context where halakhic analysis functioned not as post hoc legitimation, but as an initial site of normative articulation under conditions of unresolved moral uncertainty.

Unlike Professor Leon Roth’s moral indictment or Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s theological warning, Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli’s intervention is deliberately juridical: it insists that Qibyā be evaluated as a matter of halakhic classification rather than moral expression or prophetic protest. He opens his analysis by sharply delimiting the scope of halakhic categories traditionally invoked to justify violence outside the context of war. He examines, and ultimately rejects, the applicability of rodef, judicial punishment, and collective liability, emphasizing that none can justify the foreseeable killing of non-combatants, especially children. This refusal to rely on expansive constructions of culpability constitutes an important boundary-setting move and signals resistance to dissolving halakhic distinctions under the pressure of political exigency.

Having rejected these alternatives, Rabbi Yisraeli treats milḥamah as the sole halakhic category within which the events of Qibyā can be assessed. War, in his account, is governed by norms distinct from those that regulate interpersonal violence or judicial punishment: it is structured by collective agency and strategic necessity rather than individualized culpability. On the basis of classical discussions of siege warfare and national defense, he argues that halakhah does not require absolute differentiation between combatants and civilians where such distinctions cannot be operationally maintained. Yet this claim is narrowly framed. Civilian harm is neither trivialized nor treated as halakhically neutral, and Qibyā is not presented as unproblematic. Instead, the operation is situated within ezrat Yisrael miyad tzar – assistance to Israel against an enemy threat – understood as a form of defensive war oriented toward deterrence and protection. This classification permits halakhic authorization of the operation while leaving intact a residue of moral unease that resists full juridical resolution.

The most consequential element of the responsum lies in Rabbi Yisraeli’s treatment of milḥemet mitzvah. He rejects the claim that defensive war is obligatory solely by virtue of pikuaḥ nefesh, noting that halakhah does not, as a rule, require one to endanger one’s life for the sake of others. To address this problem, he recasts defensive war as a binding collective obligation, grounded not in emergency rescue but in biblical models of national preservation and reprisal. In doing so, he relocates the normative basis of military action from individual ethical calculus to communal responsibility, thereby providing a conceptual structure that would prove influential for later halakhic discussions of warfare. Yet the responsum does not resolve its own tensions. Rabbi Yisraeli repeatedly signals unease and declines to subsume Qibyā under familiar categories of punishment or self-defense. The argument moves between legal authorization and acknowledged moral disquiet, registering the pressure placed on inherited halakhic frameworks by the conditions of modern, state-sponsored violence.

Subsequent halakhic and scholarly treatments of Qibyā have largely proceeded from Rabbi Yisraeli’s responsum.^[34] These later authors have extended, modified, or even contest his conclusions, but they all have done so within the conceptual framework he set in place.^[35] The responsum thus operates less as a conclusive ruling than as a point of orientation, shaping the terms in which questions of halakhic authorization and the moral burdens of sovereignty would thereafter be posed.

The reception of Rabbi Yisraeli’s responsum has been mapped most systematically by Professor Gerald J. Blidstein,^[36] who reconstructs the emergence of a post-Qibyā discourse in which Rabbi Yisraeli’s analysis furnished later decisors with a conceptual grammar for addressing civilian harm within the logic of war. By relocating the discussion from individualized self-defense to the framework of collective warfare, the responsum made it possible to engage questions of civilian casualties without negating civilian status – a shift that both constrained and expanded the scope of permissible violence. Blidstein devotes particular attention to the post-Qibyā expansion of rodef. Whereas classical halakhah construes the rodef narrowly, later writers increasingly attribute derivative responsibility to civilian populations through functional analogies that blur the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. What concerns Blidstein is not merely the expansion itself, but the manner in which it proceeds: descriptive claims about the realities of modern warfare are allowed to perform normative work without explicit halakhic argument. This slippage between descriptive realism and legal authorization constitutes the central ethical risk identified in Blidstein’s essay. Modern warfare undoubtedly challenges classical distinctions, but difficulty alone does not license their abandonment. When empirical claims dictate legal conclusions, halakhah risks mirroring military practice rather than governing it; Qibyā thus becomes emblematic of the moral hazards confronting halakhic reasoning under conditions of sovereignty.^[37]

A wider historical and jurisprudential framing is offered by Professor Arye Edrei, who situates Qibyā within a longue durée narrative of halakhic reactivation. In his account, Jewish law entered modernity with the laws of war largely dormant, and the advent of sovereignty transformed war from an abstract category into an unavoidable halakhic reality.^[38] Within this framework, Qibyā marks a shift from questions of the obligation to wage war (jus ad bellum) to questions of how war is to be conducted (jus in bello).^[39] Rabbi Yisraeli’s responsum exemplifies this shift through its methodological boldness: classical categories are not merely applied but reconfigured in order to address deterrence, civilian entanglement, and asymmetric warfare. Edrei emphasizes the ambivalence of this renewal – necessary for halakhic relevance yet destabilizing long-standing assumptions about civilian immunity and proportionality. He further traces the interpretive trajectory from Qibyā to later conflicts, particularly Lebanon, showing how early interpretive decisions acquired precedential force. While acknowledging internal pluralism and critique, Edrei argues that sovereignty established a shared framework in which war became central to halakhic self-understanding, thereby exposing halakhic discourse to the pressures inherent in regulating state violence.

The internal complexity of Rabbi Yisraeli’s position is examined by his disciple, Rav Prof. Neria Guttel, who situates the Qibyā responsum within Rabbi Yisraeli’s broader intellectual biography and his sustained involvement in the institutions of Religious Zionism.^[40] Rav Guttel opens with a polemical claim: Rabbi Yisraeli has been remembered within the movement through what he describes as a “rather flat, highly plastic, and one-dimensional image,” whereas his actual halakhic posture was “far more complex.” This mischaracterization, Rav Guttel argues, obscures the disciplined character of Rabbi Yisraeli’s legal reasoning.^[41] In the case of Qibyā, his refusal to extend the categories of rodef or collective punishment is presented not as moral hesitation but as fidelity to halakhic boundaries that resist ideological inflation. At the same time, Rabbi Yisraeli’s decision to legitimate the operation within the framework of war reflects his acceptance of what Rav Guttel elsewhere describes as the inescapable responsibilities generated by sovereignty and institutional participation. For Rav Guttel, this combination of legal authorization and acknowledged discomfort belongs to a broader pattern of rebuke issued from within loyalty rather than from withdrawal. The responsum thus exemplifies a mode of halakhic engagement that neither sanctifies state violence nor dissociates itself from it, and Rav Guttel cautions that later readings which extract permissive conclusions while neglecting this internal tension risk reproducing precisely the flattening of Rabbi Yisraeli’s thought that his essay seeks to correct.^[42]

A more narrowly focused doctrinal analysis is offered by Yitzchak Avi Roness, who examines Rabbi Yisraeli’s reconceptualization of milḥemet mitzvah. Challenging the grounding of defensive war in pikuaḥ nefesh, Roness argues that Rabbi Yisraeli instead relocates it within a theory of collective obligation rooted in national preservation.^[43] This move expands the halakhic space for legitimating military action while simultaneously exposing the ideological dimensions of interpretive choice. Roness further shows how this reconceptualization is operationalized in Qibyā, where retaliatory action is legitimated as part of an ongoing defensive war rather than as an immediate act of rescue; while enhancing doctrinal coherence and halakhic relevance, the shift weakens the internal tools available for critique, increasing reliance on strategic judgment and assessments of national interest.

Taken together, this body of halakhic literature demonstrates that the moral and political unease elicited by Qibyā was neither external to Jewish legal thought nor resolved outside it, but was internalized, debated, and reformulated within halakhic categories themselves. Far from functioning merely as a vehicle of retrospective legitimation, halakhic discourse became a sustained arena of normative contestation, in which inherited legal frameworks were pressed to account for the realities of sovereign violence, retaliation, and civilian harm. Readers approaching Qibyā primarily through ethical theory or political critique may therefore profit from attending to these halakhic engagements, not as exercises in doctrinal closure, but as serious and often unsettled attempts to articulate responsibility, restraint, and moral remainder within a legal tradition newly compelled to confront the burdens of political power.

Appendix 7

Ariel Sharon on the Qibyā Operation:

A Contemporaneous Record of the 1965 Eshkol-Sharon Meeting

By Menachem Butler

The following is an annotated English translation of an Historical Document from the 1965 meeting between Levi Eshkol and Ariel Sharon, as recorded contemporaneously by Eshkol and published by Arnon Lamfrom and Ze’ev Elron.^[44]

A revealing retrospective window onto the logic of Qibyā is provided by this document. Speaking twelve years after the operation, amid a bitter intra-Zionist political struggle, Sharon rejected the claim that Qibyā marked a departure from prior practice, maintaining instead that most earlier reprisal actions had likewise targeted civilians and that the later distinction between military and civilian objects was largely retrospective. The novelty of Qibyā, in his account, lay not in intent but in its successful outcome: the seizure of an entire village, the large-scale demolition of houses, and the operation’s deterrent impact on the Arab population, its achievement of security, and its “restoration of honor to the IDF. Civilian deaths are acknowledged but minimized: he was aware of no more than a dozen men killed in the conquest of the village, but unaware of the deaths of the many women, children, and others who were hiding silently in the houses. Read against the contemporaneous responses of Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, this document does not resolve the moral problem of Qibyā so much as confirm its depth, exemplifying – without euphemism – the subordination of ethical language to state power, deterrence, and prestige that Roth feared Judaism could not survive and that Leibowitz denounced as the sacralization of the profane.

Historical Document

Ariel Sharon came on the initiative and with the knowledge of the Chief of Staff [Yitzhak Rabin].

He wishes to set matters on their factual truth. Ben-Gurion’s declaration concerning Qibyā motivates him.

I [Sharon] carried out the act and reported it. This group [Rafi] is capable of anything. The tendency is not a matter concerning Pinhas Lavon. The matter is directed against civilian objects, to bind the government’s hands from action. On the other hand, there is a feeling that we are not responding [today] sufficiently and adequately. The public expects action. Ben-Gurion’s intention is [on the one hand] to bind [the government], and [on the other hand] in order to cause the government to fail.

At a house gathering in Nazareth, [Shimon] Peres said that the army and the paratroopers [–]. He spoke of their contributions [operations?] and also related many military secrets. This is not fair.

And now to the matter of Qibyā. Ben-Gurion says that in his time operations were carried out against military objects, and that Pinhas Lavon is responsible for the operation against civilian objects. He [Sharon] examined and found that this is not correct and not true. Moshe Dayan also scoffs. It is true that in that period [before the establishment of Unit 101 in the summer of 1953] these operations simply did not succeed. There was an operation against Sharafat [Sharfaṭ] near Jerusalem, 7.2.1951. The mukhtar’s house and additional houses were blown up. On 8.2.1951, in Dir Bṭut [Balut], an attack on civilians that did not succeed.

25.9.1951, an attack on a-Ṣafi – Dead Sea, did not succeed, although five civilians were killed.

6.1.1952, three attacks: I. Beit Jala, II. Beit Furiq, III. Idna – Beit Govrin.

23.1.1953, two attacks on Falama near Qalqilya.

18.5.1953 [19.5.1953], operations against the village of Husan near the approaches [Mavo] of Beitar. An operation against Far‘un near Tulkarm. An operation near Midya near Ben Shemen. And against Bedouin civilians in the south along the Beersheba–Hebron road.

Almost all the operations were not carried out properly. Most of the operations in those days were carried out against civilians. Both Tawfiq [1960] and Nuqeib [1962] were also operations against civilians.

Precisely against military objects did operations begin in the days of Pinhas Lavon: the raid on the Legion camp at ‘Azzun – [east of] Qalqilya, after the murder of a Jew in Ra‘anana, end of June 1954. The aggressive operation against an Egyptian position near Kissufim.

Ariel [Sharon] was wounded there.

A third operation – the kidnapping of Legion personnel at Beit ‘Ur al-Tahta, Lower Beit Horon, near Latrun. Another operation against the police station at Tzurif in January 1955 was not carried out; we were turned back en route because of new information. In the days of Pinhas Lavon there was strict insistence on meticulous execution. He himself received reprimands for deviation. There was a severe prohibition on using fire in houses prior to inspection with flashlights.

And now Qibyā.

He, Ariel, planned and was responsible for the execution. He was on site. He led the men. He checked the houses, gave instructions what to blow up. There were [?] five names there. The order was no different from other orders: to blow up the maximum number of houses and to strike men, exactly as in all orders for previous operations. The difference was that this time the operation succeeded, and incidentally it had a first-degree impact on the Arabs, as well as on the IDF – which had almost previously lost its prestige – and also on the Arabs. The Arabs were not accustomed to large and successful operations on our part. They had become accustomed to the IDF coming and blowing up some house at the edge of the village. This time the IDF came, took control of the village. There was a deathly silence in the village. There were 10–12 fatalities, all during the occupation and penetration action. This was reported already in the morning [after the operation].

But 40–50 [people] were blown up in houses. Apparently some of the inhabitants hid in the houses; we did not see them. In one case, an explosives officer heard the crying of a child after he had already ignited the fuse. He endangered himself, jumped into the house, and took the girl out. After that, no people were seen.

I was summoned to Ben-Gurion three or four days later in Jerusalem. I reported on the operation. He was satisfied with the operation and said: “It is not important what the world will say. What is important is what the Arabs in the region will think.” The conversation ended.

A month before he resigned – his final resignation – he summoned me and asked whether perhaps I remember who gave the order in the Qibyā operation. I answered that I do not remember who gave the order; I remember to whom I reported the operation. He, Ben-Gurion, said: “I was ashamed of that operation.” And Ariel said: “I do not know what your view of it is today. I will remind you of what you said to me then.” I repeated his words and explained to him how the operation was carried out. Ben-Gurion did not retract his words and said that he had been ashamed at the time.

In any event, Ben-Gurion knows the truth and heard the description from me, and the things that he, Ben-Gurion, said then [thus!], 1963. He was also angered to hear my words.

And further: all along, the situation and the manner of searching for a way against Pinhas Lavon influenced me [Sharon]. Moshe Dayan also mocks the way and the method of theirs [of the Rafi people] to seek means to blacken Pinhas Lavon.

1. This article is based on a talk given at the Limmud Festival, Birmingham UK, December 2025. A Hebrew version appeared in Yashar, 21 January 2026, available here. See also my more extensive discussion: Warren Zev Harvey, “After Qibyā: Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Leon Roth, and Neḥamah Leibowitz,” in Aviezer Ravitzky, ed., Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Between Conservatism and Radicalism: Reflections on His Philosophy (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2007), 354-365 (Hebrew), available here. I thank Mr. Menachem Butler for providing links to various relevant materials, adding much historical and bibliographical information to the notes, and authoring the important Appendices 6 and 7. ↑
2. See Efrat Seckbach, “The Qibyā Operation in Israeli Public Memory, 1953-1985,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, no. 27 (2017): 274-301 (Hebrew), available here, who documents that the dominant Israeli public opinion initially tended to see the operation as justified, minimized civilian casualties, and avoided moral evaluation, but from the mid-1970s onward, in the wake of the Yom Kippur and Lebanon Wars, Qibyā came to be remembered as a paradigmatic moral transgression.On the halakhic dimensions of the Qibyā raid, including contemporary rabbinic responses and their later reception, see Appendix 6, by Menachem Butler, “Halakhic Engagements with the Qibyā Raid and the Renewal of the Laws of War.” ↑
3. Leon Roth, “Letter – Professor Roth on the Moral Issue,” The Jewish Chronicle (4 December 1953): 21, reprinted in Raphael Loewe, “Note,” in Leon Roth, Is There a Jewish Philosophy? Rethinking Fundamentals (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), xviii-xx, available here. See also below, Appendix 1. The British discussion of the Qibyā raid was exacerbated by the intervention of Dr. Cyril Garbett, Archbishop of York: “Archbishop Accuses Israel: ‘Cruel Massacre’ of Arab Villagers,” The Jewish Chronicle (13 November 1953). The Board of Deputies of British Jews issued an immediate reply, rejecting his censure as “provocative and one-sided” (ibid.). ↑
4. “Right Is Might,” The Jewish Chronicle (October 23, 1953): 16. David F. Kessler was the Chronicle’s managing director and John Maurice Shaftesley its editor. On the editorial’s contemporary reception, see David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 206, who shows it was widely regarded as an important moral statement. It was praised by Ernst Akiba Simon and Selig Brodetsky, and endorsed by Rabbi Leo Baeck who personally congratulated Kessler. It was sharply criticized by the Israeli Embassy in London, although Ambassador Eliahu Elath later conceded to Kessler that the criticism had been warranted. ↑
5. In his first intervention (“Israel Border Conflict – The Deputies’ Statement, 23 October 1953), Bentwich repudiated an apologetic statement issued by the Board of Deputies in response to the Foreign Office’s censure of Israel, and he criticized the Qibyā action as “a shocking indefensible act which violates the fundamental ethic of Judaism.” In his second intervention (“Professor Bentwich’s Reply,” 27 November 1953), he responded directly to Rabbi Abraham Cohen, President of the Board of Deputies. He rejected his claim (20 November 1953) that condemnation of the reprisal raid was permissible only for those who could swear they themselves would not retaliate in a similar situation, and he insisted that he himself would oppose the Qibyā action “in any circumstances.” Roth’s December 4 letter continued Bentwich’s criticism of Cohen’s opinion that although the Qibyā action was morally wrong, Jews should not hasten to condemn it. ↑
6. Simon, Professor of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was in England in October 1953 on a lecture tour under the auspices of the Leeds Zionist Association and the Zionist Federation. In his lectures Simon emphasized the tension between Jewish moral consciousness and political existence, warning that “Israel will not solve your educational problem – you must solve it yourself,” and calling for “a new equilibrium between Jewish consciousness and Jewish existence.” See “Needs of Jewish Education: Professor Simon’s Lectures,” The Jewish Chronicle (October 9, 1953): 5. ↑
7. See Raphael Loewe, “Memoir about Leon Roth,” in Raphael Loewe, ed., Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism – In Memory of Leon Roth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 1-11, available here. ↑
8. See Irene Roth, Cecil Roth, Historian Without Tears: A Memoir (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1982), 114, for an anecdote from Irene and Cecil Roth’s 1935 visit to Palestine. When in Safed, Cecil Roth mentioned to “an elderly man clad in a long silk caftan” that he had a brother in Jerusalem named Leon: “[T]he man grew excited. ‘Do you mean Professor Leon Roth, the philosopher?’ he said in surprise. ‘How is it possible that you did not say so at once? To have such an eminent scholar in one’s family and not to proclaim it from the housetops – this I cannot understand.’ Then he continued, ‘I, too, am something of a philosopher. I have published a number of pamphlets on the subject.’ Cecil had never heard of these pamphlets, but he was amazed at the fact that their author, a complete stranger and seemingly far removed from western Jewish thought, should know of his family.” See also Cecil Roth, “Types Seen in Palestine,” Opinion: A Journal of Jewish Life and Letters 5, no. 12 (October 1935): 13-15; and idem, “Jerusalem, Paradise of Ethnologist,” The Palestine Post (30 April 1935), reporting a visit to his brother in Jerusalem. ↑
9. See Samuel Hugo Bergmann, “On the Figure of Prof. H. Y. Roth,” Haaretz Literary Supplement (12 April 1963): 3 (Hebrew); and Neve Gordon and Gabriel Motzkin, “Between Universalism and Particularism: The Origins of the Philosophy Department at the Hebrew University and the Zionist Project,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (2003): 99-122; and see also Tal Meir Giladi, “Jerusalem Divided: The Hebrew University’s Philosophy Department Between Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel,” in Yfaat Weiss and Uzi Rebhun, eds., The History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Nation-State and Higher Education (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2024), 767-798 (Hebrew). See soon Niv Perelsztejn, “The Genesis of Israeli Philosophy, 1917-1967: Cross-cultural Dialogue or Academic Isolation” (Ph.D. dissertation, Haifa University, to be submitted in Spring 2026). ↑
10. For a list of his publications, see Raphael Loewe, “Bibliography of the Writings of Leon (Hebraice Hayyim Yehudah) Roth,” in Raphael Loewe, ed., Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism – In Memory of Leon Roth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 523-536, available here. ↑
11. The Israeli press framed Roth’s departure as an expression of disillusionment with the policies of the State and the University. See, e.g. “Prof. Roth Returns – Disillusioned – to England,” Maariv (15 March 1951): 4 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
12. Loewe reports that Roth’s resignation was met with resistance not only by the University but also by senior figures in the Israeli establishment, who regarded him as a major national asset and sought to retain him through offers of high office. Proposals were made that he assume the presidency of the University or, alternatively, enter the government as Minister of Education; but “he was not to be dissuaded,” and in July 1951 he returned to England. See Loewe, “Memoir about Leon Roth,” 1-11, esp. 5, available here. ↑
13. A photograph of his tombstone, taken by Mr. Menachem Butler during an Aseret Yemei Teshuvah visit to Karori Cemetery in Wellington, New Zealand, on Sunday, 23 September 2012, as part of his High Holiday tour of New Zealand, has been published in David Assaf, “A Book Dedication: ‘I Will Go and Return to My First Husband’ – A Farewell Gift from Ḥayyim Yehudah Roth,” The OnegShabbat Blog (11 March 2012), available here. (Note: the post was originally published in March 2012 and has been updated periodically in subsequent years, including the addition of the tombstone photograph.) ↑
14. Ernst Akiba Simon, “Letter – After Qibyā and Rabbi Judah Halevi,” Beterem, no. 190 (1 January 1954): 21 (Hebrew). ↑
15. Warren Zev Harvey, “Judah Halevi on War and Morality,” in Aviad Hacohen and Menachem Butler, eds., Praying for the Defenders of Our Destiny: The Mi Sheberach for IDF Soldiers (Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, 2023), 317-318, available here. ↑
16. See Elliott Horowitz, “Genesis 34 and the Legacies of Biblical Violence,” in Andrew R. Murphy, ed., ‪The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence (Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 163-182, available here. ↑
17. The discussion of Roth’s second question does not appear in Leibowitz’s original article of 15 December 1953, but was introduced only in his follow-up piece of 15 January 1954, and was written in explicit response to Pepita Haezraḥi, “Thoughts on Humilitas,” Beterem, no. 190 (1 January 1954): 9-11 (Hebrew); see below, Appendix 4. Since Leibowitz’s discussion appeared a full six weeks after Roth’s letter in the Jewish Chronicle, there is no reason to doubt that he was influenced by it. The length and thoughtfulness of Leibowitz’s reply to Dr. Haezraḥi reveals the great respect he had for the independent-minded young philosopher, then 32. ↑
18. Nearly three decades ago, my student Rabbi Dr. Jan Katzew documented the controversy that erupted in 1947 around Leon Roth’s public opposition to the proposed partition of Palestine. While on a visit to the United States on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Roth was quoted in “Professor Gives Some Opinions on Palestine,” Los Angeles Times (3 June 1947): 4, arguing that partition was impracticable and warning that it would leave “two sore spots that will eventually lead to violence.” His remarks, made less than six months before the United Nations vote on partition, provoked heated reactions from American Zionist leaders, who accused him of anti-Zionist agitation. In a letter of protest, Sir Leon (Arie) Simon, then Chair of the University’s Executive Council and later its President, cited a telegram from the American Zionist Emergency Council charging that “Professor Leon Roth of Hebrew University is now in America … making political statements gravely prejudicial to the Jewish cause.” Roth rejected the accusation as “untrue to fact, slanderous and damaging,” insisting on his right, “after twenty years’ fruitful work in Jerusalem,” to criticize prevailing policies. See Jan Katzew, “Leon Roth – His Life and Thought: The Place of Ethics in Jewish Education” (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997), 72-74; the full exchange between Roth and Simon is reproduced below in Appendix 2 (from Katzew’s appendix, pp. 355-358). ↑
19. See Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 241-248. ↑
20. When taken to task by Shubert Spero for omitting reference to the State of Israel and Zionism, Roth responded: “I fancy that the reviewer has fallen into the conventional confusion between the ‘Land of Israel’ and the ‘State of Israel.’ The State of Israel has worries which neither I nor your reviewer can, or has the right to try to, solve; but are they, all or in part, connected with Judaism? In any case would it not be wiser for us to try and make up our minds first what Judaism is and only afterwards…what our attitude to the new State is to be?” See Leon Roth, “Communications – Are There Authoritative Beliefs?” [Response to Shubert Spero], Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 5, no. 1 (Fall 1962), 123-124, available here. After forsaking the State of Israel in 1951, Roth devoted his final years to trying to clarify what Judaism is. ↑
21. Leon Roth, Judaism: A Portrait (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 104. ↑
22. Ibid., 107. ↑
23. Ibid., 107. ↑
24. Ibid., 230-231. ↑
25. See, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, pp. 191-192. ↑
26. In this article, Leibowitz responded to Pepita Haezraḥi, “Thoughts on Humilitas,” Beterem, no. 190 (1 January 1954): 9-11 (Hebrew); and Rabbi Benjamin, “The Plain Sense Is Not Sufficient…,” ibid., 11 (Hebrew). ↑
27. See Warren Zev Harvey, “Theopolitical Notes on Israel’s Declaration of Independence,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 56 (2021): 338-346, available here. ↑
28. Milhemet Mitzvah, vol. 1: Halakhic Foundations, Religious Authority, and Military Service in Israel’s War of Independence, eds. Aviad Hacohen, Yitzchak Avi Roness, and Menachem Butler (Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, 2025), available here; and Milhemet Mitzvah, vol. 2: Religious Leadership and Halakhic Responsibility in the Military Service Debate, eds. Aviad Hacohen, Yitzchak Avi Roness, and Menachem Butler (Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, 2025), available here. ↑
29. See Neria Guttel, “Missing from the Book – Review of War in Light of Halakhah,” in Aviad Hacohen, Yitzchak Avi Roness, and Menachem Butler, eds., Milhemet Mitzvah, vol. 2: Religious Leadership and Halakhic Responsibility in the Military Service Debate (Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, 2025), 318-328, who offers a detailed analysis of the systematic marginalization of Religious Zionist halakhic treatments of war in the Encyclopedia Talmudit and the editors’ deliberate preference for citing ḥaredi authorities while excluding Religious Zionist halakhic thinkers. ↑
30. See Aharon Kampinsky, “Torah Publications,” in Rabbinism and Politics in Religious Zionism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024), 37-52, on the establishment of Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah as a halakhic forum for questions of sovereignty, governance, security, and agriculture in the early years of the State of Israel; see also Asher Cohen and Aharon Kampinsky, “Religious Leadership in Israel’s Religious Zionism: The Case of the Board of Rabbis,” Jewish Political Studies Review 18, nos. 3-4 (Autumn 2006): 119-140. ↑
31. “Creators on Their Works – Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli: Editor and Reviewer,” ha-Tsofeh Literary Supplement (7 January 1955): 5-6 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
32. Shaul Yisraeli, “The Qibyā Incident in Light of Halakhah,” Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah, nos. 5-6 (1953-1954): 71-113 (Hebrew), available here, and later revised and expanded as “Military Actions for the Protection of the State,” in ʿAmud ha-Yemini (Tel-Aviv-Jaffa: Moreshet, 1966), 162-199 (Hebrew). ↑
33. See Efrat Seckbach, “The Qibyā Operation in Israeli Public Memory, 1953-1985” (cited above, n. 2). Her otherwise comprehensive study does not engage the contemporaneous halakhic discussions of Qibyā, treating them neither as part of Israeli public discourse nor as relevant to the formation of public memory. This omission accords with her focus on secular political, cultural, and media arenas, but it also underscores the extent to which halakhic discourse operated in a largely parallel register, marginal to the sites in which Israeli collective memory of Qibyā was shaped. The absence of halakhic material from this historiography thus reinforces the claim that early rabbinic and halakhic engagements with Qibyā unfolded independently of the later moral reckoning traced here. ↑
34. See Michael J. Broyde, “Just Wars, Just Battles, and Just Conduct in Jewish Law: Jewish Law Is Not a Suicide Pact!,” in Lawrence H. Schiffman and Joel B. Wolowelsky, eds., War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2004), 1-43, available here, who treats Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli’s responsum on the Qibyā incident as the earliest sustained modern halakhic engagement with civilian harm in asymmetric warfare and traces its subsequent elaboration in the pages of Teḥumin. In his reading, Rabbi Yisraeli’s argument is taken to permit the targeting of civilians who materially assist hostile operations through a widened application of the rodef doctrine, extending even to indirect or expressive forms of support. This analysis reflects a later stage in the reception of Yisraeli’s responsum, in which its categories are preserved but pressed beyond the narrower limits they bear in the original text. ↑
35. See also Aviad Hacohen, “Ethics and War: A Select Bibliography,” in Eli Bloom, ed., Arakhim be-Mivhan Milhamah: Values in the Test of War – A Symposium in Memory of Ram Mizrachi (Jerusalem: Moreshet, 1985), 252-256 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
36. Gerald J. Blidstein, “The Treatment of Hostile Civilian Populations: The Contemporary Halakhic Discussion in Israel,” Israel Studies 1, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 27-45, available here; and Gerald J. Blidstein, “The Ethical and Legal Status of Hostile Civilian Populations in Contemporary Halakhic Thought,” State, Government, and International Relations, vols. 41-42 (1997): 155-170 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
37. See also his related articles in Gerald J. Blidstein, “The Massacre at Shechem, Collective Punishment, and Contemporary Halakhic Thought,” Et Ha-Da’at 1 (1997): 48-55 (Hebrew), available here; Gerald J. Blidstein, “The Ethics of Warfare Revisited,” Me’orot Journal 6, no. 2 (2008): 2-5, available here; and Gerald J. Blidstein, “The Case of Shechem: Maimonides’ Normative Reading,” in Daphne Barak-Erez and Gidon Sapir, eds., Essays in Honour of Izhak Englard (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2010), 375-387 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
38. Arye Edrei, “From Qibyā to Beirut: The Renewal of the Jewish Laws of War in the State of Israel,” in Yossi Goldstein, ed., Yosef Daʿat: Studies in Modern Jewish History in Honor of Yosef Salmon (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2010), 95-127 (Hebrew). An earlier version appeared in Arye Edrei, “Law, Interpretation, and Ideology: The Renewal of the Jewish Laws of War in the State of Israel,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (October 2006): 187-227, available here. ↑
39. See Suzanne Last Stone, “The Jewish Law of War: The Turn to International Law and Ethics,” in Sohail H. Hashmi, eds., Just Wars, Holy Wars, and Jihads: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Encounters and Exchanges (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 342-363. ↑
40. See Neria Guttel, “‘He Whom One Loves, He Rebukes’: The Complexity of Rav Shaul Yisraeli’s Attitude toward the Personalities, Institutions, and Philosophy of Religious Zionism,” in Yishai Arnon, Yehuda Friedlander, and Dov Schwartz, eds., Studies in Religious Zionism: Developments and Changes (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012), 145-167 (Hebrew), available here. ↑
41. See also Neria Guttel, “The Rabbinate and the State,” ha-Tsofeh Literary Supplement (22 June 2001): 11-12 (Hebrew). ↑
42. See further Neria Guttel, “Combat in an Area Dense with Civilian Population,” Teḥumin, no. 23 (2003): 18-31 (Hebrew), expanded and published in Neria Guttel, “Combat in an Area Dense with Civilian Population,” in Eyal Karim, ed., Ha-Milhamah ba-Terror (Kiryat Arba: ha-Makhon le-Rabanei Yishuvim, 2006), 43-105 (Hebrew), available here. Although not concerned with the Qibyā responsum as such, the article addresses the same operational problems that first emerged there and illustrates how later halakhic discussion of civilian harm can press earlier categories toward more permissive conclusions while leaving aside the hesitations and limits that shape Rabbi Yisraeli’s original analysis. ↑
43. Yitzchak Avi Roness, “Halakhah, Ideology and Interpretation: Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli on the Status of Defensive War,” Jewish Law Association 10 (2010): 184-195, available here. ↑
44. Arnon Lamfrom and Ze’ev Elron, “Historical Document: Meeting of Levi Eshkol and Ariel Sharon Concerning the Qibyā Operation – Jerusalem, 3 September 1965,” Yesodot, no. 6 (2024): 269-282 (Hebrew), available here; and see also Ariel Sharon, “The Operation That Restored the IDF’s Honor,” Yediot Ahronoth (18 October 1992): 8-9, 11 (Hebrew), available here, which retrospectively casts the operation as a necessary assertion of deterrence that successfully restored the IDF’s military standing, but gives little attention to the operation’s legal or moral ambiguity. ↑

 

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]

* * * * * * * *

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.

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.