‘And How Can One Behold a Sefer Torah in Distress?’

On the Relationship between Rabbi Chaim Heller and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

by Aviad Hacohen and Menachem Butler

This article, published on the occasion of the anniversaries of the passing of Rabbi Chaim Heller (14 Nisan 5720) and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (18 Nisan 5753), may their memories be a blessing, reexamines their relationship through a newly published body of correspondence, situating their bond within the intellectual and material conditions of mid-twentieth-century American Orthodoxy.^[1] The letters document both a relationship of unusual personal and scholarly closeness and the economic precarity and institutional instability that affected even leading Torah scholars of the period.

One such document, written by R. Soloveitchik in 1942 at a moment of acute crisis, reads as follows:

“Your esteemed honor has surely heard that our friend, the great and mighty gaon, luminary of the Diaspora and its glory, the crown of Israel’s splendor, our teacher and master Rabbi Chaim Heller, may he live long, has fallen gravely and dangerously ill. To our joy, and to the joy of all who fear God, our prayers have been accepted, and the Healer of all flesh has sent recovery and healing to the great one of our generation. Yet he remains weak and requires exceptional care. I therefore request of your esteemed honor, as a friend of the aforementioned gaon, to exert yourself on his behalf in every possible way. The supervision of the illness has entailed great expense, and even now the outlay is considerable while there is no income – and how can one behold a Sefer Torah in distress? I am confident that your esteemed honor will do all that is necessary, secure a fitting sum, and deliver it to the gaon R. H. Heller, may he live long, or to the fund ‘For R. H.’ I thank him in advance for his efforts. Your admirer and one who honors you.”^[2]

In this letter, Soloveitchik addressed his friend Rabbi Simon (Abraham Yeshayahu) Dolgin,^[3] then rabbi of Congregation Beth Jacob in the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he would serve for more than three decades and build one of the most significant Orthodox communities on the American West Coast. Upon receiving the appeal, Dolgin promptly sent a contribution; it appears, however, that its amount did not meet Soloveitchik’s expectations.

In a subsequent letter of appeal sent to Rabbi Dolgin approximately one month later [=14 July 1942], R. Soloveitchik again wrote:

“I received your letter together with the check. To my great regret I cannot deliver it to our friend, the great gaon, the mighty shepherd, may he live long, for the sum is not commensurate with the honor and majesty of a gaon of Israel, a luminary of the Diaspora, who dispersed his wealth to the poor and destitute, and whose home was open wide to all who were embittered and broken in spirit. Woe unto us, that the rabbi of Israel stands in need of aid and assistance. I request of your esteemed honor – who, as I have heard, is among the friends of the aforementioned gaon – to do all that lies within your power and to send a proper and worthy sum.”

The letters published here for the first time provide a rare window into the distinctive relationship, a bond of unusual personal and intellectual intimacy, and the enduring ties that prevailed for decades between two of the leading Torah scholars in the United States in the twentieth century. At the same time, they illuminate the manifold hardships, including acute financial privation, humiliation, and disappointment, that rabbis of that period were compelled to endure as they sought even minimal means of livelihood with which to sustain their households. This fate did not spare even one of the foremost sages of the generation, R. Chaim Heller, who, in order to support his family, was compelled to piece together sporadic and temporary sources of income until he eventually attained, albeit only in relative terms, a measure of stability and a settled position that afforded him and his family a degree of economic security.^[4]

Beyond their intrinsic interest, these letters are of particular importance by virtue of the period in which they were written. They date to the years of the Second World War, from which very little of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s correspondence has survived.

Already in these early letters, the literary Hebrew of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik and his distinctive stylistic register stand out prominently.^[5] They attest both to the profound bond between the two scholars and to R. Soloveitchik’s sustained concern for the welfare of his colleague and intimate friend, R. Chaim Heller. Their connection began years earlier in Berlin.

R. Chaim Heller (1879-1960) was among the leading Torah scholars of the early twentieth century. Alongside his greatness in Torah, he was deeply engaged in the scholarly study of Talmudic literature and biblical translation.^[6] His work was characterized by a distinctive methodological orientation that sought to challenge the prevailing assumptions of modern biblical criticism through philological rigor grounded in the resources of the rabbinic tradition. In his introduction to On the Jerusalem Targum to the Torah (New York, 1921), R. Heller sharply criticized what he termed the “mechanical method” of comparing ancient translations in order to posit divergent textual recensions. Against this approach, he argued that the multitude of so-called “variants” in translations such as the Peshitta, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch do not reflect alternative Hebrew originals, but rather systematic exegetical practices. In his view, the translators did not render the biblical text literally, but interpreted and expanded it in light of traditions preserved in Hazal. This thesis enabled him simultaneously to undermine the conclusions of contemporary critics and to reaffirm the centrality and antiquity of the Oral Torah as an interpretive matrix for Scripture.^[7]

This distinctive synthesis of traditional learning and critical scholarship was already prefigured in the formative trajectory of his early life. Born in Białystok and raised in Warsaw, he was already in his youth known as “the prodigy of Warsaw.” From the age of ten he ceased studying with melammedim; he never attended a yeshiva and acquired his entire Talmudic learning independently, as an autodidact. He married the daughter of a wealthy member of the Łódź community, and in the home of his uncle in Warsaw encountered the leading sages of the generation, engaging them in rigorous dialectical discussion. Among them were R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, author of Beit ha-Levi; R. Isaac Elchanan Spektor of Kovno; and the Netziv of Volozhin. During these years he also formed especially close ties with R. Chaim Soloveitchik, his relative by marriage R. Eliyahu Feinstein of Pruzhany, and R. Eliyahu Chaim Meisel of Łódź. In later years, he received a doctoral degree from the University of Würzburg.

Following the death of Rabbi Malkiel Tzvi Tannenbaum, the community of Łomża was left without a rabbi, and its leaders resolved to appoint Rabbi Heller, already known as a sharp and penetrating scholar and a man of broad learning who held a doctoral degree. By that time he had published studies on the Septuagint and on Maimonides, which drew the respect of both rabbinic and academic circles. Yet after only a few months he resigned his post. Various explanations have been offered for his departure: some point to his reluctance to devote extensive time to communal responsibilities, which he regarded as bittul Torah, while R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik recounted that Rabbi Heller himself expressed concern that members of the congregation might pressure him to act against his convictions.

R. Heller soon left for Berlin, where, in 1922 he established the Beit Midrash ha-Elyon, an advanced institution for rabbinic training that drew a small but serious circle of students. Berlin at the time was a meeting ground of worlds, traditional learning and modern scholarship, and Heller moved between them with unusual authority. In R. Heller’s case, this was not merely a sociological juxtaposition but a fully integrated intellectual stance, in which Wissenschaft methods were appropriated and redirected in defense of the integrity of the Masoretic text and the authority of the Oral Torah.^[8] It was there that the young R. Soloveitchik spent several formative years. He was not formally enrolled in the institution, but he attended Heller’s lectures and was deeply influenced by them. What impressed him was not only R. Heller’s mastery of Torah and scholarship, but the range of his mind – the sense that he inhabited both disciplines fully, without strain or concession.

In 1929, R. Chaim Heller was appointed as a Visiting Professor of Bible at RIETS,^[9] and “for close to ten years Heller taught in New York while occasionally traveling to Berlin and elsewhere before settling in the United States.” More than a decade later, his name was even floated by Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung as a potential successor as Rosh Yeshiva of RIETS following the death of R. Moshe Soloveichik in 1941.^[10] A contemporaneous portrait of Heller’s intellectual profile appears in a 1930 article by R. Yerahmiel Elimelekh (Max J.) Wohlgelernter in the ha-Pardes journal, in which R. Heller is presented not merely as a scholar of unusual range, but as a figure who entered directly into confrontation with modern biblical criticism on its own terms, armed with philological expertise yet grounded in the authority of the rabbinic tradition. Against what R. Wohlgelernter characterizes as the “mechanical” methods of contemporary critics, R. Heller is depicted as demonstrating that the multiplicity of textual variants in ancient translations reflects interpretive practice rather than divergent textual recensions, thereby reasserting the integrity of the Masoretic text and the centrality of the Oral Torah as its interpretive matrix.^[11]

In 1937, several years after the rise of the Nazis to power and the intensification of anti-democratic measures directed especially against the Jews, R. Chaim Heller emigrated to the United States and settled in New York. That same year, R. Moshe Feinstein likewise arrived in New York. During this period, R. Heller renewed his connection with R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who had come to the United States some five years earlier at the urging of his father, R. Moshe, then Rosh Yeshiva of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In Boston, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik led his community with distinction and, alongside his teaching, increasingly assumed a position of broader intellectual and religious leadership, establishing himself as a central figure for a growing circle of students and adherents.^[12]

Despite this recognition of his intellectual stature, the conditions that Heller encountered upon his arrival in the United States were markedly different. Like many rabbis who fled Germany on the eve of the Second World War and arrived in the United States as refugees,^[13] R. Chaim Heller entered a professional landscape that was structurally inhospitable. The lingering effects of the Great Depression continued to constrain both the rabbinic and academic labor markets.^[14] Congregational positions, even in smaller and more remote communities, were typically occupied by long-established incumbents, while the few available posts offered only modest remuneration. Universities, for their part, were in a period of contraction, with limited hiring and little institutional appetite for figures whose scholarly profile did not align neatly with existing departmental frameworks. For a scholar of Heller’s unusually wide and interdisciplinary range, no obvious institutional niche presented itself.

In response, Heller adopted a peripatetic mode of intellectual livelihood. Lacking a stable appointment, he supported himself through public lectures, assembling an income that remained precarious and contingent. This required sustained mobility, persistence, and a readiness to engage even relatively small audiences. At one stage, this itinerant circuit took him as far as Los Angeles, a journey that, under the conditions of the time, entailed considerable logistical and physical demands, where he delivered a series of lectures in his areas of expertise. It was likely in the course of this visit that he first encountered Rabbi Dolgin.

The notice of R. Chaim Heller’s arrival in Los Angeles appeared in the Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1940.

It may be assumed that, in the wake of this visit, the relationship between the two was further strengthened. Expression of this is found in three letters written during those years by R. Chaim Heller to R. Dolgin, which are published here for the first time.

The first letter is dated 4 Nisan 5700 [= 12 April 1940], a short time, approximately three weeks, after R. Chaim Heller’s arrival in Los Angeles. It reads as follows:

“To the honorable Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Dolgin, may he live long: Your esteemed letter has reached me. Although Magnin^[15] caused considerable damage, it seems to me that his words made no impression upon ploni, notwithstanding the saying, ‘When a word cannot enter in its entirety, it enters in part.’^[16]

I have a conjecture as to whose soul spoke through Magnin, and whose finger was involved in undermining the matter there, but why should we speak of what has passed.

Since Your Honor requested of me “to forgive him for his errors,” I hereby note that, indeed, your entire letter was written well; however, two errors slipped from your pen: first, that you wrote also “concerning the matters of his נשיאתו (nesi’ato, ‘his presidency/bearing’) to Chicago,” whereas it should read נסיעתו (nesi‘ato, ‘his travel’); and second, that you wrote שגיאותי ושגיעותי (shegiyotai, ‘my errors’), and such a latter form does not exist.

I have drawn his attention to this out of my great affection for him,^[17] and your honor should take care to be precise in his writing. You also wrote to me that Mr. Sh. desires to discuss matters with Rabbi B. [Bernard Revel^[18]]; however, your honor knows that the latter has recently opposed me with full force, though I do not know the cause of his reversal,^[19] and I am uncertain whether your honor acted wisely in writing to him, for he and those associated with him may think that I prompted your honor to do so. I have been brief in all this, and I conclude with blessings of peace and all good to your honor, according to your will and the will of one who esteems and cherishes you, and who inquires after your welfare.

Chaim Heller”

In the margin of the letter, his wife added a brief greeting of her own: “I too inquire after his welfare. Miriam Heller.”

The second letter was written approximately two months later, on the eve of the festival of Shavuot, in which R. Chaim Heller gives expression to his frustration that promises made to him, apparently concerning the provision of a stable source of livelihood, had not been fulfilled. It reads as follows:

3 Sivan [5700] [9 June 1940]

To the honorable Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Dolgin, may God preserve and sustain him,

Your esteemed letter reached me with delay, as is the way of ordinary post, and I shall respond to all your inquiries: regarding the matter of the years [?], up to this day there is nothing whatsoever, and I had indeed waited and hoped for this, and accordingly set aside and abandoned other undertakings which I now lack greatly – very greatly.

I very much wished to meet with […], but in truth it was difficult for me to request this.

Concerning the attitude toward the war,^[20] it is certainly an obligation and a commandment, and I have much to elaborate on this matter. Books addressing this subject are not presently known to me, for I am entirely without books in my home; with God’s help, I shall set my mind to seeking them out.

I shall be brief this time. With blessings for long life, a joyous festival, and days of gladness always, in accordance with your will and the will of one who esteems and honors you, who inquires after your welfare and goodness.

Chaim Heller

[p.s.] My wife and daughters inquire after your welfare, and bless you with every good, selah.

The third letter was written approximately a year later, on the eve of Passover 5701. At that time, reports in the press in the Land of Israel^[21] indicated that R. Heller was about to receive a teaching appointment at Yeshiva University alongside his colleague R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Having grown accustomed to disappointment, R. Heller feared that this announcement amounted to no more than a “trial balloon” lacking any concrete foundation. This apprehension, together with his distress at both the substance and the tone of the report, found expression in a letter he addressed to R. Dolgin:

“12 Nisan 5701 [9 April 1941]

To the honorable Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Dolgin, may God preserve and sustain him,

After a long period of silence while confined to bed, I received your letter. Concerning the report that you read: to this day I have no connection whatsoever with the yeshiva.^[22] I have not spoken even a word – however slight^[23] – with any person, and I was selected entirely without my knowledge; indeed, I am far removed from accepting an appointment in such a manner. I immediately considered issuing a denial in the very newspaper that published the report, but many worthy individuals dissuaded me, on the grounds that matters might yet develop otherwise, and that the counsel of the Lord shall prevail.”

In this connection, he related to his friend his deliberations regarding an additional source of livelihood – delivering lectures to vacationers in the Catskill Mountains during the summer months:

“You surely recall that two years ago I was approached to deliver lectures, for remuneration, before rabbis and scholars, etc., during the summer season (be-idna de-qayta), in the vacation period; and now this matter has again been raised, and I am prepared to lecture for six weeks in one of the pleasant locales to which people travel.

The lectures would be held three times a week and would encompass a comprehensive and wide-ranging treatment of biblical scholarship and the Talmuds, such that ‘the ear would not be sated with hearing’.^[24] Over this period, the listener would gain far more than he would in a year or two at any college or seminary in the world. However, I require a highly energetic organizer who will undertake to arrange this enterprise properly. May your honor be blessed with all good and prosperity, and may you celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread with joy and delight.”

After several years in the United States, during which he lacked a stable source of livelihood, R. Chaim Heller secured a position on the teaching staff of Yeshiva University and served alongside his colleague R. Samuel Belkin, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and R. Moshe Shatzkes on the RIETS Ordination Board.^[25]

Yet, as emerges from a letter cited below, his salary conditions remained far from favorable. Efforts were made to improve them and, over time, met with a measure of success. The literary oeuvre of R. Chaim Heller is vast in scope. Yet, as R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik would later describe in his eulogy, what was published only represents only a minute fraction, “mere remnants of remnants,” of the breadth of his orally transmitted Torah. It should also be borne in mind that the overwhelming majority of his writings were composed prior to his arrival in the United States.

Among his works in the field of biblical scholarship, particular note should be taken of his studies on the textual tradition of the Bible and its various translations: his work on the Jerusalem Targum to the Torah (New York, 5681 [1921]); on the Samaritan Pentateuch (Berlin, 5684 [1924]); on the Septuagint in the Concordance Heikhal ha-Qodesh, with appended notes, commentaries, and investigations in biblical studies (New York, 5704 [1944]); and on the Peshitta, the Syriac translation of the Bible (transcribed into Hebrew script, with notes, glosses, and commentaries by Chaim Heller: Genesis, Berlin, 5687 [1927]; Exodus, Berlin, 5689 [1929]). He prepared a revised edition of the Peshitta to Exodus for publication but did not succeed in completing its printing prior to his death. Among his halakhic works, his annotated edition of Maimonides’ Sefer ha-Mitzvot (first edition, Piotrków, 5674 [1914]) is well known. A subsequent edition of this work was published by Mossad HaRav Kook in Jerusalem (5706 [1946]) – and has since appeared in numerous further editions – and for this work he was awarded the Rav Kook Prize in 5707 [1947]. His writings also include Hiqrei Halakhot, analytical investigations of legal rulings and issues in the section Hoshen Mishpat (vol. I, Berlin, 5684 [1924]; vol. II, Piotrków, 5692 [1932]); as well as studies on various topics in Maimonides and the halakhic decisors concerning the laws of lending and borrowing and their ancillary matters (Chicago, 5706 [1946]). In addition, he published, in jubilee and memorial volumes, several qontrasim that functioned as a kind of Masoret ha-Shas for the Jerusalem Talmud.^[26]

Even after R. Chaim Heller had joined the faculty of Yeshiva University, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik continued to seek ways to assist him, inter alia by working to secure an increase in his salary. Expression of this may be found in a brief letter that he wrote to R. Chaim Heller on 23 Sivan 5713 (5 June 1953), which is likewise published here for the first time:

Erev Shabbat, 22 Sivan 5713 [5 June 1953]

To my honored friend, the true gaon, luminary of the Diaspora, crown of Israel and its glory, pillar of halakhah and instruction, may he live long,

Greetings and blessings!

I departed New York on Thursday morning and arrived in Boston utterly exhausted. On the preceding Wednesday I met with Rabbi Rosenberg at a certain inn, and we resolved to add two thousand dollars annually^[27] to your honor’s salary. It seems to me that next month you will receive a check in accordance with the new scale. We trust in God that the matter will be brought to a good conclusion and that no obstacle will arise in connection with it. Naturally, the matter must remain in absolute confidence, and no one need be informed of it.

I conclude with abundant blessing and faithful affection,

Joseph Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik^[28]

This quiet intervention on Heller’s behalf was not an isolated act, but part of a sustained pattern of concern. In this connection, it is instructive to recall R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s characterization of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in his eulogy. Reflecting on his father-in-law’s own self-understanding, he writes:

“The personal self-conception that characterized the Rav, of blessed memory, with respect to his own functioning was bound up with educational–pedagogical activity, and this across multiple spheres. He would often remark that when he arrived in the World of Truth, and were he to be asked to specify by virtue of what he merited a share in the World to Come, he would indicate three points: (a) that he studied Torah with his children; (b) that he founded the Maimonides School in Boston; (c) that he was concerned, over an extended period, for the honor and welfare of a certain talmid hakham.”^[29]

This final point refers to R. Soloveitchik’s sustained and well-documented efforts on behalf of R. Chaim Heller. The depth of this personal concern was not confined to the private sphere, but found parallel expression in a sustained intellectual and institutional collaboration between the two. A further expression of their bond and cooperation is found in their joint letter of response to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who in 1958 approached them, among other “Sages of Israel,” to solicit their opinion on the question “Who is a Jew?” Although the inquiry was addressed to each of them separately, the two resolved to compose a joint reply. Thus they wrote, inter alia:

“We are indeed perplexed that the State of Israel now seeks to hew down our traditional branches and thereby smear the ancient glory of Israel which has long been sanctified through the spilt blood and sufferings of preceding generations. It is only because of these roots that we preserve our uniqueness as a holy people and that we are inextricably bound to the Holy Land. … Will the present State of Israel be built up by (maintaining a threat of) destruction to its very sanctity?”^[30]

The same bond found further expression in another brief letter issued by R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik some two years later, likewise published here for the first time. The occasion for its dispatch was the forthcoming wedding of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s daughter, Tova, to Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, his most distinguished student.

In September 1959, a small notice appeared in the “Announcements” column of The Commentator, the student newspaper of Yeshiva University, reporting the engagement of Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, a member of the class of 1953, to Tova Soloveitchik. It appeared alongside advertisements for driving instruction and for Barton’s confectionery (under OU supervision).^[31]

Approximately a month and a half later, in November 1959, the parents of the couple sent a formal invitation to family members and acquaintances. The Hebrew text was ornate, replete with distinctive idioms, and clearly bore the imprint of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s unique stylistic signature:

“To our friends in all their places of residence – may your peace flourish without end! We hereby inform you that Tova shall be betrothed and married to Aharon, with the grace of God, on the evening preceding the fourth day of the week, on the twenty-second day of the month of Kislev, in the year five thousand seven hundred and twenty from Creation, according to the reckoning we follow here in Boston, the city situated at the approaches of the sea. Pray assemble at six o’clock on that evening in the Dorothy Quincy Hall, in the John Hancock Building (355 Stuart Street), for the celebration of bride and groom, for the festive meal, and for the joy of a commandment. Rejoice with us in the joy of our offspring’s wedding day and in the gladness of our hearts. Joseph Dov HaLevi and Tonya Soloveitchik; Yechiel and Bluma Lichtenstein.”

By contrast, the English version was brief, formulated in a more formal and utilitarian manner. The period during which the invitations were sent was one of particular intensity in the Soloveitchik household. At that time, R. Soloveitchik received an informal invitation to put forward his candidacy for the position of Chief Rabbi of Israel^[32]; concurrently, he was engaged in intensive preparation for the major eulogy for his uncle, the Griz, R. Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik, later known as the discourse “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod.”^[33]

On account of the mention of his name as a candidate for the office of Chief Rabbi, an extensive journalistic interview with R. Soloveitchik was conducted in Yedioth Ahronoth.^[34] The interviewer, Elie Wiesel (later a Nobel laureate), reported that, following the Rav’s annual Teshuvah Derashah several months earlier, the Israeli consul general in New York had sent a telegram to Jerusalem declaring: “Here is the best candidate to replace Rabbi Herzog.”^[35] Wiesel asked R. Soloveitchik whether he would agree to assume the position if it were offered to him. R. Soloveitchik replied that no such offer had yet been made, but added in principle: “One does not decline an invitation that comes from the Land of Israel… When I receive it, if indeed it is sent, I shall consider it with utmost seriousness. I shall ask myself whether I am worthy of so exalted an office.” When Wiesel further inquired whether it was true that his uncle, R. Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik, had instructed him not to accept the position, R. Soloveitchik dismissed the report: “It is difficult to believe such rumors. In our family there is a tradition not to compose wills… perhaps because we fear death and its reality.”^[36]

In the course of the interview, R. Soloveitchik spoke with evident pride of the religious and spiritual revival among youth and young adults in America, yet added that talk of their immigration to the Land of Israel was, at most, “a beautiful dream.” He attributed the gap between the intensification of Jewish and religious consciousness and the reluctance to immigrate, inter alia, to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who, in his view, failed to appreciate the potential inherent in religion to draw youth to Israel and to demand sacrifice on its behalf. “In my view,” said the Rav, “Ben-Gurion is a religious Jew, though it is possible that he himself does not know this.” These remarks, whose precise formulation was itself questioned in contemporaneous discussion, elicited sharp criticism from several prominent figures within American Jewry. Among them was Moshe Meisels, editor of ha-Doar, who, in a pointed “open letter,” challenged both the claim that Israel had lost its ‘messianic’ hold on the Jewish imagination and the attribution of this development to deficiencies in the religious posture of the Israeli state.^[37] Questioning the very premise of R. Soloveitchik’s formulation, Meisels asked rhetorically whether it could truly be maintained that “the concept of Israel has lost its messianic content,” and whether the responsibility for such a development could plausibly be laid at the feet of the state. The Rav sought to respond, but was exceedingly occupied with the final polishing of the eulogy for his uncle, R. Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik, which he was to deliver within a matter of days.^[38]

Indeed, as the Yiddish adage has it, a mentsh trakht un Got lakht – man plans, and God laughs. Only a few days after the wedding invitations for his daughter and R. Aharon Lichtenstein had been dispatched, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik was diagnosed with colon cancer and was required to travel urgently to Boston to undergo life-saving surgery. R. Soloveitchik informed his family, including the bride and groom, on the night that he delivered the eulogy for his uncle. On the following day, he departed for Boston. The couple, of course, immediately announced the postponement of the wedding, and all prayed for the Rav’s recovery.

R. Soloveitchik himself, only fifty-seven years old at the time, confided to those close to him: “I suddenly ceased to be immortal; I became a mortal being.” In the nights preceding the operation, he undertook a profound reckoning of his life. In later years, he described something of his experience during those turbulent days:

“My existential awareness was an absolute one. Non-being did not enter into it. I would not sustain my gaze upon nihility. Whenever I started to think of death, my thoughts were dashed back and they returned to their ordinary objective, to life. When I looked upon my grandson, I always tried to think of him as if he were my contemporary. I believed that we would always do things and play together. Then sickness initiated me into the secret of non-being. I suddenly ceased to be immortal; I became a mortal being.

The night preceding my operation I prayed to God and beseeched him to spare me. I did not ask for too much. All I wanted was that he should make it possible for me to attend my daughter’s wedding, which was postponed on account of my illness – a very modest wish in comparison with my insane claims to life prior to my sickness. The fantastic flights of human foolishness and egocentrism were distant from me that night.

However, this ‘fall’ from the heights of an illusory immortality into the valley of finitude was the greatest achievement of the long hours of anxiety and uncertainty. Fundamentally, this change was not an act of falling but one of rising toward a new existential awareness which embraces both man’s tragedy and his glory, in all its ambivalence and paradoxality. I stopped perceiving myself in categories of eternity. When I recite my prayers, I ask God to grant me life in very modest terms.”^[39]

Further testimony to R. Soloveitchik’s state of mind during this period is found in a letter he sent to R. Reuven Katz, Chief Rabbi of Petah Tikvah. At its outset, the Rav explains that he had fallen gravely ill and been confined to bed, describing the experience in stark terms:

“Dark days, filled with anxiety, suffering, and silent loneliness, passed over me. My world was suddenly overturned. Yet the merit of my forefathers stood by me in the hour of wrath, and the Holy One, blessed be He, in His abundant mercy redeemed my soul in peace and did not allow me to die… Even now, as I begin to recover, I have not yet shaken off the physical weakness and the psychological dread that overcame me during those bitter and difficult hours of illness and suffering.”^[40]

He then turns to the question of the Chief Rabbinate, noting both the changed circumstances and his own unsuitability for the role:

“However, the recent developments concerning the Chief Rabbinate… have cast a new light upon the situation, and I doubt whether I would be able to engage in Torah study with peace of mind… There is compelling reason to assume that I would become entangled in all the convolutions of politics, a matter that is neither to my spirit nor to my desire… Therefore I am compelled to acknowledge that, under the present circumstances, I am not fit for this office. I am a teacher, and I have in my world nothing but the four cubits of halakhah. I do not wish to depart from them, even were I to be offered an entire kingdom.”

These remarks make clear that R. Soloveitchik’s refusal to consider candidacy for the position of Chief Rabbi was shaped both by the lingering effects of illness and by a principled resistance to political entanglement, together with a self-conception rooted in the life of Torah within “the four cubits of halakhah.”^[41]

As a result of his illness, R. Soloveitchik remained in Boston for approximately three months, during which he gradually recovered. In the course of this period, he merited to bring his daughter Tova and his son-in-law, R. Aharon Lichtenstein, under the wedding canopy. In consultation with the family, it was decided to postpone the wedding by only one month following the operation, and it was ultimately held on 26 Tevet 5720 (26 January 1960).^[42]

A week before the rescheduled wedding, still confined to his bed and not yet recovered from surgery, R. Soloveitchik insisted on writing to his close friend R. Chaim Heller. The letter, published here for the first time, was not written in his own hand. The script shows that he dictated it, most likely to his wife, and, in his weakened state, managed only to sign his name.

“To my honored friend, the gaon of Israel and its glory, luminary of the Diaspora and pillar of halakhah and instruction, may he live long; greetings and blessings! Although the physicians have forbidden me to engage in writing on account of my extreme weakness, I cannot refrain from writing this letter in order once again to extend a heartfelt invitation to your esteemed honor, to your esteemed wife, and to your distinguished daughter, may they live, to participate in the wedding of Tova and Aharon. Their presence on the day of our heart’s rejoicing will lend joy and splendor to the celebration. With great affection, Joseph Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik.”

His wife, Dr. Tonya Soloveitchik, appended a moving appeal of her own in Yiddish:^[43]

January 19, 1960

To the honorable and true gaon, R. Chaim Heller, to his esteemed wife, the rebbetzin, and to their refined daughter, may they live – greetings and blessings!

We had hoped that we would have the opportunity to visit you once more and to invite you personally to the wedding of our Tova. To our regret, however, my husband’s illness has altered our plans, and we have no possibility of coming to New York to do so.

What we are unable to do orally, we must now do in writing: we warmly invite you all to the wedding! Your presence will greatly enhance our joy.

I also wish once again to thank you for the friendship you have shown during my husband’s illness. Your good wishes and blessings gave us strength at a critical time.

With regards and respect,

Tonya Soloveitchik

In the end, R. Chaim Heller did not attend the wedding, apparently due to his frail health and the difficulty of traveling from New York to Boston. Within a few months, on the Fourteenth of Nisan 5720 (10 April 1960), the Eve of Passover, he returned his soul to his Creator.^[44] Although the constraints of time and the approaching festival precluded extended eulogies, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik flew from Boston to New York to attend the funeral, delivered brief words of farewell, recited kaddish at the funeral,^[45] and returned to Boston before the onset of Passover. The rabbinic journal ha-Pardes would later note that “his close friend and trusted associate, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik of Boston, eulogized him in moving words.”^[46] Although these remarks were long thought to have been lost, a partial and mediated record preserved in the Yiddish press makes it possible to recover something of their content:

“A visit to Rabbi Chaim Heller was in the nature of a pilgrimage… When I would arrive at the elevator of the building at 210 West 99th Street… I would experience a sensation as though a curtain had descended, separating between the sacred and the profane. The Temple comprised three divisions: the Holy of Holies, the Sanctuary, and the Courtyard. Rabbi Chaim embodied all three. He conducted himself within the Holy of Holies… his occupation was solely with Torah… The entirety of the Torah lay before him as an open book… Yet he also partook of the character of the Courtyard, engaged with the community of Israel as a whole… From him radiated both the light of immense knowledge and the simplicity of humanity.”^[47]

Even in this compressed form, the structure of the eulogy is already fully present: Heller is cast simultaneously as a figure of absolute immersion in Torah, of intellectual breadth, and of human accessibility, an integration that would find fuller expression in Soloveitchik’s later memorial address. Several weeks later, he returned to the task in a more formal setting, delivering a powerful and deeply moving eulogy at a memorial gathering at Yeshiva University.

As is well known, and in keeping with the characteristic reserve of the Lithuanian Torah greats, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik was generally sparing in his expressions of affection, esteem, and praise for fellow scholars, and rarely employed language of overt admiration. In the case of R. Chaim Heller, however, he departed from this pattern and bestowed upon him an exceptional and uncommon measure of appreciation, the like of which he appears to have granted to few, if any, other Torah scholars.

This finds expression in the great and moving eulogy that R. Soloveitchik delivered for R. Chaim Heller nine weeks after his passing, at a public gathering at Yeshiva University on June 13, 1960, which also included eulogies by the institution’s president, Dr. Samuel Belkin. R. Soloveitchik’s eulogy was published the following year on the occasion of the first yahrzeit under the title “Rabbi Chaim Heller: The ‘Shmuel ha-Katan’ of Our Generation,” and opened with the following words:

“Who was this man who departed from us in silence and with gracious humility? What was his stature, and what were his deeds? Who was R. Chaim, who held no public office and had no need for conventional titles – whose entire greatness was encapsulated in two simple words: ‘R. Chaim,’ greater than ‘Rabban’ was his name? Some years ago… when the president of this institution, Rabbi Samuel Belkin, introduced R. Chaim… he employed the following formulation: ‘R. Chaim belongs to that small company of men of virtue for whom we pray each day in the Amidah: for the righteous, for the pious, for the elders of Your people the House of Israel, and for the remnant of their scribes. R. Chaim,’ the rabbi continued, ‘is of the remnant of Israel’s scribes.’ In this utterance he encapsulated all that was singular and wondrous in the man. At the time, I was seated on the platform beside R. Chaim, and as I beheld him – entirely withdrawn, enclosed and self-contained, as though scorched by the gaze of the audience fixed upon him – his lips murmuring, ‘What does he want of me?,’ and the pained embarrassment of a solitary individual, thrust against his will into a bustling and clamorous crowd, spread across his face…”^[48]

R. Chaim Heller and R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik in New York, in the vicinity of Yeshiva University.

Notes

1. 1. A shorter, and non-annotated, version of this article appeared in Hebrew as Aviad Hacohen and Menachem Butler, “‘A Sefer Torah in Distress’,” Makor Rishon, Pesach Supplement, no. 1495 (1 April 2026): 10-11, 16 (Hebrew), available here.We are grateful to our friend Aaron R. Katz and to the Dolgin family for granting us access to letters sent by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Chaim Heller to the family patriarch, Rabbi Simon (Abraham Isaiah) Dolgin, of blessed memory. We thank Shulamith Z. Berger of the Yeshiva University Archives for providing photographs of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Chaim Heller. We are also grateful to Rabbi Moshe Dembitzer, author of several landmark biographical studies of Rabbi Chaim Heller, for sharing with us a forthcoming, as yet unpublished essay on Rabbi Soloveitchik’s graveside eulogy for Rabbi Heller. ↑
   2. The letter bears no date; however, the postmark on the envelope indicates that it was sent from Boston to Los Angeles on June 9, 1942. ↑
   3. On Rabbi Simon (Abraham Isaiah) Dolgin (1915-2004) and his extensive activities, see Jubilee Volume Minḥah Le-Ish: Presented to HaRav Simon A. Dolgin on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, ed. Itamar Warhaftig (Jerusalem: Ariel, 1990). Ordained at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Illinois, Dolgin assumed the rabbinate of Congregation Beth Jacob (later in Beverly Hills) in 1938 and served there for approximately thirty-two years, during which he transformed it into a prominent Orthodox community and developed a broad educational infrastructure, including the Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy. In 1971 he immigrated to Israel, where he served as rabbi of the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood and later as Director-General of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. On his correspondence with David Ben-Gurion, see On the Character of the State of Israel: Correspondence between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Simon (Abraham Isaiah) Dolgin, ed. Yitzhak Goldshlag (Jerusalem, 1973; Hebrew). ↑
   4. By way of comparison with the present, this phenomenon still finds occasional resonance in the lives of rabbis today. ↑
   5. On this point, see the remark of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, at the conclusion of his discussion of “The Rav as Eulogist” (forthcoming):“It is difficult for me to conclude without saying a word about the literary dimension of these eulogies. For all my admiration of the Rav’s Torah greatness, and of the content of these eulogies – which is, of course, primary – it is hard not to be left in astonishment at his literary and linguistic ability. We are speaking of a person who was not educated in the Hebrew language, and whose knowledge in this area was drawn from reading Haskalah literature. Let us recall: the Rav did not live in a Hebrew-speaking environment, nor did he speak Hebrew fluently. Yet the richness of his language is truly astounding. Were one to read these texts for this purpose alone, I have no doubt that he would be amply rewarded.” ↑
   6. On the most recent biography and intellectual profile of R. Chaim Heller, see the now substantial body of recent scholarship, which has significantly advanced our understanding of his life and work, see Moshe Dembitzer, “The Letters of Rav Chaim Heller,” Hitzei Giborim, vol. 9 (2016): 923-952 (Hebrew), which assembles and analyzes a wide corpus of correspondence and reconstructs key aspects of his personal and scholarly networks; Uriel Banner, “Towards a Profile of Rabbi Chaim Heller,” Asif, vol. 8 (2023): 720-766 (Hebrew), offering a synthetic biographical portrait grounded in both contemporary testimony and archival material; and Moshe Dembitzer, “‘To Show My People a New Type’: The Academic Chapter in the Life of Rabbi Chaim Heller,” Mekhilta, vol. 5 (February 2024): 365-382 (Hebrew), which reconstructs in detail his academic formation and intellectual program, particularly his engagement with philology and the Wissenschaft des Judentums milieu. ↑
   7. For earlier biographical and bibliographical information on Heller, see Jacob I. Dienstag, “Ein ha-Mitzvot: Bio-Bibliographical Lexicon of the Scholarship on Maimonides’ Sefer ha-Mitzvot,” Talpiyot, vol. 9, no. 3-4 [=Rabbi Chaim Heller Memorial Volume] (September 1970): 663-759, esp. 697-702 [#20] (Hebrew), available here, which underscores both his expertise in biblical translation and linguistics and his programmatic effort to defend the integrity of the Masoretic text. For a critical assessment of R. Heller’s methodology, see Marc B. Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884-1966 (Oxford: Littman Library, 1999), 169-171, who characterizes R. Heller’s work as driven by a dogmatic commitment to the integrity of the Masoretic text and questions the scholarly validity of his attempts to account for all textual variants within that framework. On the polemical reception of Heller’s work among contemporaries, especially R. Yehiel Jacob Weinberg and Paul Kahle, see ibid. On the reception of Heller’s halakhic method within the American-yeshiva world, see Mordechai Gifter, “Halakhic Studies in [Rav Chaim Heller’s] ‘Le-Hikrei Halakhot’,” Talpiyot, vol. 9, no. 3-4 [=Rabbi Chaim Heller Memorial Volume] (September 1970): 913-921 (Hebrew). Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, at the time Rosh Yeshiva of the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland and a former student of R. Chaim Heller at Yeshiva College/RIETS in the early 1930s (prior to his subsequent entry to the world of Telshe in Lithuania), presents the work as a sustained program of conceptual halakhic analysis, marked by rigorous coordination of the Rishonim. In contrast to the reading of both Professor Jacob I. Dienstag and Professor Marc B. Shapiro, it is in Rabbi Mordechai Gifter’s reading of R. Chaim Heller that there is a reflection of the work’s reception within advanced yeshiva circles as an instance of high-level lomdus rather than as an idiosyncratic or marginal enterprise. ↑
   8. See Moshe Dembitzer, “‘To Show My People a New Type’: The Academic Chapter in the Life of Rabbi Chaim Heller,” Mekhilta, vol. 5 (February 2024): 365-382 (Hebrew). ↑
   9. “To Join Yeshiva Faculty: Dr. Chaim Heller of Berlin Will Be Professor of Bible,” The New York Times (18 September 1929): 24. ↑
   10. Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 130-131, 275n21. See also “Rabbi Chaim Heller, Yeshiva U. Professor, Dead at 81,” Yeshiva University News (5 April 1960), 6-7; and Gilbert Klaperman, The Story of Yeshiva University: The First Jewish University in America (New York and London: Macmillan, 1969), 152 ↑
   11. See Yerahmiel Elimelekh (Max J.) Wohlgelernter, “Rabbi Chaim Heller: Prince of the Torah and Ruler over the Treasures of Knowledge,” ha-Pardes, vol. 4, no. 2 (May 1930): 26-30 (Hebrew); and for a later popular portrayal in the American context, see Aaron Rosmarin, “Reb Chaim Heller – One in Generations,” The Jewish Criterion, vol. 20, no. 104 (15 September 1944): 175-178. Special thanks to Shimon Steinmetz for pointing us to this article by Dr. Aaron Rosmarin. ↑
   12. See Seth Farber, “Reproach, Recognition and Respect: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Orthodoxy’s Mid-Century Attitude Toward Non-Orthodox Denominations,” American Jewish History, vol. 89, no. 2 (June 2001): 193-214; Seth Farber, “Immigrant Orthodoxy’s Last Stand: The Rise of Rabbi Soloveitchik to Rosh Yeshiva,” in Immanuel Etkes, ed., Yeshivot u-Batei Midrashot: Mordechai Breuer Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2006), 417-430 (Hebrew); Seth Farber, “Immigrant Orthodoxy’s Last Stand: The Appointment of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik as Rosh Yeshivah at RIETS and the Coming-of-Age of American Orthodoxy,” in Bentsi Cohen, ed., As a Perennial Spring: A Festschrift Honoring Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm (New York, 2013), 173-187; and earlier in Seth Farber, An American Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004). ↑
   13. See, for example, Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in Bertram W. Korn, ed., A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1976), 359-375; Michoel Zylberman, “Yeshiva’s Response to World War II and Revel’s Rescue of European Refugees,” The Commentator, vol. 69, no. 4 (16 November 2004): 22-23; and most recently, Cornelia Wilhelm, The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate: German Refugee Rabbis in the United States, 1933-2010 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024). ↑
   14. On the difficulties faced by immigrant rabbis in securing stable positions in the United States during the interwar and Depression years, including the need to obtain congregational contracts as a condition of entry and the scarcity of viable pulpits, see Jonathan D. Sarna and Zev Eleff, “The Immigration Clause that Transformed Orthodox Judaism in the United States,” American Jewish History, vol. 99, no. 3 (July 2017): 357-376. ↑
   15. Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin (1890-1984) was a prominent American Reform rabbi who served for decades as the spiritual leader of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, one of the most influential Reform congregations in the United States. ↑
   16. Bereshit Rabbah 56:4; that is, a statement containing lashon hara – if it does not enter in its entirety [into the heart of its recipient], at least part of it enters. ↑
   17. “Out of the abundance of my affection for him”; a common idiom found in the sources of Mishpat Ivri. ↑
   18. Yeshiva’s founding president Rabbi Bernard Revel passed away a few months later, on December 2, 1940, in the prime of his life, at the age of fifty-five (!). For a biography from more than a half-century ago, see Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, Bernard Revel: Builder of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972). See also Sidney B. Hoenig, “Rabbinics and Research: The Scholarship of Dr. Bernard Revel,” in Leon D. Stitskin, ed., Studies in Judaica in Honor of Dr. Samuel Belkin as Scholar and Educator (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1972), 401-467; Harvey Horowitz and William M. Kramer, “Stamp of Approval: Oklahoma Oilman and Rosh Ha-Yeshiva Bernard Revel,” Western States Jewish History, vol. 18, no. 3 (April 1986): 256-261; Jeffrey S. Gurock, “An Orthodox Conspiracy Theory: The Travis Family, Bernard Revel, and the Jewish Theological Seminary,” Modern Judaism, vol. 19, no. 3 (October 1999): 241-253; and Moses Mescheloff, “As I Knew Him: Memories of Rabbi Dr. Bernard Revel,” in Menachem Butler and Zev Nagel, eds., My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories (New York: Yashar Book, 2006), 76-80; and William L. Lee, “President Bernard Revel’s Triple Program: Inventing Jewish and Semitic Studies for the Original 1928-1929 Yeshiva College Curriculum,” in Hayyim Angel and Yitzchak Blau, eds., Rav Shalom Banayikh: Essays Presented to Rabbi Shalom Carmy by Friends and Students in Celebration of Forty Years of Teaching (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2012), 201-224. ↑
   19. This remark (dated 12 April 1940) may plausibly be connected to the negotiations then underway between Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Dr. Bernard Revel concerning the proposed affiliation of Heikhal Rabbeinu Haym ha-Levi, the Boston graduate-level yeshiva founded by Rabbi Soloveitchik in 1939, with RIETS and Yeshiva College. Following a period of negotiation, a formal memorandum of agreement was drafted in May 1940, envisioning the Heikhal as a New England branch of the New York institution, with coordinated academic governance and shared institutional interests. In this context, R. Chaim Heller’s reference to Dr. Revel’s sudden opposition might reflect tensions surrounding these negotiations and suggests that Heller was attempting to advocate on Rabbi Soloveitchik’s behalf before Dr. Revel. See Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Community, Covenant, and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, ed. Nathaniel Helfgot (Jersey City: Ktav Publishing House, 2005), 168-169 (no. 7, “Memorandum of Agreement Between RIETS, Yeshiva College and the Graduate-Level Yeshiva in Boston Opened by Rabbi Soloveitchik”); and Samuel Pardes, “Observations on Sukkot in Boston on the Occasion of Ha-Pardes’ Jubilee,” ha-Pardes, vol. 14, no. 8 (November 1940): 27-29 (Hebrew), who describes the rapid consolidation of Orthodox communal life in Boston under Soloveitchik’s leadership, including the central role of the Heikhal, thereby providing contemporaneous evidence for the institutional significance of the Boston enterprise. See also Menachem Genack, “Rabbi Nota Greenblatt, zt”l,” Jewish Action, vol. 83, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 67-68, who notes that during the six months in which Rabbi Greenblatt studied at Heikhal Rabbeinu Haym ha-Levi, Rabbi Soloveitchik “sat opposite the sole portrait in the room – that of ‘the Zeide, Reb Chaim’.” Although the proposed affiliation with RIETS and Yeshiva College ultimately did not materialize, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Boston enterprise continued to consolidate locally.As Maimonides School historian Seth Farber notes, on December 31, 1940, the Maimonides Educational Institute merged with Yeshivat Torat Israel and Heikhal Rabbeinu Haym ha-Levi, forming a unified institution soon relocated to a centrally situated campus serving the Orthodox communities of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. In 1962, reflecting shifting demographic patterns in Greater Boston, the Maimonides School relocated to Brookline under the leadership of Rabbi Soloveitchik and his wife, Dr. Tonya Soloveitchik, chair of the School Committee. See Seth Farber, An American Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 56. See also Seth Farber, “Reproach, Recognition and Respect: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Orthodoxy’s Mid-Century Attitude Toward Non-Orthodox Denominations,” American Jewish History, vol. 89, no. 2 (June 2001): 193-214; Seth Farber, “Immigrant Orthodoxy’s Last Stand: The Rise of Rabbi Soloveitchik to Rosh Yeshiva,” in Immanuel Etkes, ed., Yeshivot u-Batei Midrashot: Mordechai Breuer Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2006), 417-430 (Hebrew); Seth Farber, “Immigrant Orthodoxy’s Last Stand: The Appointment of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik as Rosh Yeshivah at RIETS and the Coming-of-Age of American Orthodoxy,” in Bentsi Cohen, ed., As a Perennial Spring: A Festschrift Honoring Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm (New York, 2013), 173-187; and Tovah Lichtenstein, “Mrs. Soloveitchik: A Biographical Sketch,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, vol. 55, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 95-112. ↑
   20. The letter was written in the midst of the Second World War. ↑
   21. “Leading Torah Sages Appointed Heads of Yeshivat Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan in New York: Rabbis Dr. Chaim Heller, Rabbi Yitzhak Rubinstein of Vilna, and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” ha-Tsofeh (4 April 1941): 1 (Hebrew). ↑
   22. This is a reference to the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. ↑
   23. An expression from Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature, in its fuller form: “ata qalila de-leit beih meshasha,” meaning a slight utterance devoid of substance. ↑
   24. See Ecclesiastes 1:8. ↑
   25. This photo appears in Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 2 (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1999), 216. ↑
   26. At the time, a rumor circulated that these booklets were composed as part of a commentary on the entire Jerusalem Talmud; if such a work existed, it has not come down to us. ↑
   27. $2,000 in June 1953 is equivalent to approximately $24,386.94 in present-day value, adjusted for inflation based on the U.S. Consumer Price Index. ↑
   28. This letter was made available to us, through the courtesy of the family of R. Chaim Heller, in August 2012. ↑
   29. See Aharon Lichtenstein, “Eulogy for Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” Mesorah Journal, vol. 9 (1994): 8-33, esp. 24 (Hebrew). ↑
   30. The letter was printed in English translation in Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Chaim Heller, Jewish Identity: Who Is A Jew?, ed. Baruch Litvin and Sidney B. Hoenig (New York: Feldheim, 1965), 116-117, and reprinted in a slightly different translation in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Community, Covenant, and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, ed. Nathaniel Helfgot (Jersey City: Ktav Publishing House, 2005), 168-169 (#27. “On the ‘Who is a Jew?’ Question [a]”). ↑
   31. The Commentator, vol. 50, no. 1 (24 September 1959): 4. See also Jesse Sodden, “A Jewish Ideal Realized on the American Scene (Interview with Stephen Klein),” The Jewish Forum, vol. 34, no. 6 (June 1951): 105-108; and Morris Freedman, “Orthodox Sweets for Heterodox New York: The Story of Barton’s,” Commentary Magazine, vol. 13, no. 5 (May 1952): 472-480. ↑
   32. On this episode, see Jeffrey Saks, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Israeli Chief Rabbinate: Biographical Notes (1959–1960),” Bekhol Derakheha DeAhu (BaDaD), no. 17 (September 2006): 45-67. For a detailed account of an earlier, unsuccessful candidacy and its broader implications, see Aviad Hacohen, “‘You May View the Land from a Distance, but You Shall Not Enter It’: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Candidacy for the Tel Aviv Chief Rabbinate and the Riddle of His Subsequent Refraining from Visiting Israel,” in Dov Schwartz, ed., Religious Zionism: History, Thought, Society, vol. 9 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2023), 153-222 (Hebrew). ↑
   33. See Gerald J. Blidstein, “Rabbi Dr. Soloveitchik Eulogizes Famed Uncle, The Brisker Rav,” The Commentator, vol. 50, no. 5 (17 December 1959): 1,3. The eulogy was later published as Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Mah Dodekh mi-Dod,” ha-Doar, vol. 43, no. 39 (27 September 1963): 752-759 (Hebrew), and reprinted in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Besod Hayahid Vehayahad, ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusalem: Orot, 1976), 191-253 (Hebrew). ↑
   34. Elie Wiesel, “‘The Immigration of Jewish Youth from the United States Is in the Nature of a Beautiful Dream’…: said Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who has been mentioned as a candidate for the position of Chief Rabbi of Israel, in a conversation,” Yedioth Ahronoth Sabbath Supplement (13 November 1959): 7 (Hebrew). ↑
   35. See Jeffrey Saks, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Israeli Chief Rabbinate: Biographical Notes (1959-1960),” Bekhol Derakheha DeAhu (BaDaD), no. 17 (September 2006): 45-67, esp. 50. ↑
   36. Elie Wiesel, “‘The Immigration of Jewish Youth from the United States Is in the Nature of a Beautiful Dream’…: said Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who has been mentioned as a candidate for the position of Chief Rabbi of Israel, in a conversation,” Yedioth Ahronoth Sabbath Supplement (13 November 1959): 7 (Hebrew). ↑
   37. See Moshe Meisels, “The State of Israel and the Land of Israel: A Sort of Open Letter to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,” ha-Doar, vol. 40, no. 5 (4 December 1959): 71 (Hebrew). ↑
   38. Gerald J. Blidstein, “Rabbi Dr. Soloveitchik Eulogizes Famed Uncle, The Brisker Rav,” The Commentator, vol. 50, no. 5 (17 December 1959): 1,3. ↑
   39. These reflections were published only decades later, in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Out of the Whirlwind: Essays on Mourning, Suffering and the Human Condition, eds. David Shatz, Joel B. Wolowelsky, and Reuven Ziegler (Hoboken, N.J: Ktav, 2003), 131-132. On this, see Dov Schwartz, “Finitude and Suffering: ‘Out of the Whirlwind’,” in From Phenomenology to Existentialism: The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 227-289. ↑
   40. Published in full in Marc B. Shapiro, “Letters from the Rav,” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought, vol. 32 (2022): 135-168, at 165-166 (Hebrew). An abridged version appeared in “Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik Refuses to Stand for the Office of Chief Rabbi of Israel [Letters to MK Haim-Moshe Shapira and Rabbi Reuven Katz],” ha-Doar, vo. 40, no. 19 (11 March 1960): 330 (Hebrew), and a partial English translation is found in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Community, Covenant, and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, ed. Nathaniel Helfgot (Jersey City: Ktav, 2005), 173-176 (no. 29, “Declining the Offer to Submit His Candidacy for the Position of Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel [a]”). ↑
   41. See also Menashe Unger, “What Disappointed Rabbi Soloveitchik in the Chief Rabbinate?” Tog-Morgen Journal (11 March 1960): 5 (Yiddish); Menashe Unger, “Rabbi Soloveitchik Reflects upon the Great Responsibilities of the Rabbinate,” Tog-Morgen Journal (14 March 1960): 5 (Yiddish); and Menashe Unger, “Conversation with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ‘The Rabbinate and that of the State Are Two Separate Domains’,” ha-Tsofeh Literary Supplement (18 March 1960): 3-4 (Hebrew). An edited translation appears in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Community, Covenant, and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, ed. Nathaniel Helfgot (Jersey City: Ktav Publishing House, 2005), 179-185 (no. 31, “On the Chief Rabbinate of Israel [c]”); ↑
   42. For the literary gift from Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg to the newlyweds, see Shaul Seidler-Feller, “‘Amru Lo HaKadosh Barukh Hu … Yodea Ani Kavanato shel Aharon Heikh Hayetah Le-Tovah’: On a Short Wedding Wish to the Lichtensteins from the Pen of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg,” The Seforim Blog (18 June 2015), available here. ↑
   43. Our thanks are extended to Dr. Vicki Shifris and Dr. Nathan Shifris for their assistance in translating the letter. ↑
   44. R. Chaim Heller passed away at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in Manhattan (now NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital). See “Rabbi Chaim Heller, Yeshiva U. Professor, Dead at 81,” Yeshiva University News (5 April 1960): 6-7. ↑
   45. See Aharon Benzion Shurin, “The Gaon Rabbi Chaim Heller Who Passed Away on the Eve of Passover,” Forverts (15 April 1960): 6 (Yiddish); and the testimony regarding the recitation of Kaddish attributed to Aharon Benzion Shurin’s brother, Rabbi Israel Shurin, in Hershel Schachter, Mi-Peninei ha-Rav (Jerusalem: Flatbush Beth Hamedrosh, 2005), 266 (Hebrew). ↑
   46. Samuel Pardes, “The Gaon Rabbi Chaim Heller,” ha-Pardes, vol. 34, no. 8 (May 1960): 40 (Hebrew). ↑
   47. We thank Rabbi Moshe Dembitzer for sharing an unpublished forthcoming essay on Rabbi Soloveitchik’s eulogy at Rabbi Heller’s graveside. The present English translation is based on a Hebrew rendering of the text in a forthcoming study by Moshe Dembitzer, “Words of Farewell at the Bier of Rabbi Chaim Heller,” and has been checked against the Yiddish original published by Hillel Seidman, “Rabbi Chaim Heller: His Genius in Torah and in Hokhmat Yisrael,” Tog-Morgen Journal (20 April 1960): 5 (Yiddish). See also Hillel Seidman, “The Combatant for the True Meaning of the Torah: After the Passing of Rabbi Chaim Heller,” ha-Doar, vol. 40, no. 23 (29 April 1960): 443 (Hebrew); and Hillel Seidman, “The Gaon Rabbi Chaim Heller: In His Halakhic Rulings and His Practices,” ha-Doar, vol. 40, no. 24 (6 May 1960): 460-461 (Hebrew). ↑
   48. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Rabbi Chaim Heller: The ‘Shmuel ha-Katan’ of Our Generation,” ha-Doar, vol. 41, no. 23 (21 April 1961): 400-405 (Hebrew), reprinted in Ohr ha-Mizrach, vol. 9. 1-2 (September 1961): 1-11 (Hebrew); and then republished under a new title in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Rabbi Chaim Heller,” Panim El Panim, no. 514-515 (2 April 1969): 20-25 (Hebrew); and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Profile of Rabbi Chaim Heller (On the Tenth Anniversary of his Passing — Eve of Passover, 5720),” Shana be-Shana (1970): 197-221 (Hebrew). It was later reprinted under the title “Peletat Sofreihem” (lit. “The Surviving Remnant of Their Scribes”) in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Besod Hayahid Vehayahad, ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusalem: Orot, 1976), 254-294 (Hebrew); and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha’arakha, ed. Moshe Krone (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1982), 137-162 (Hebrew). A translation of this essay appears in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “A Eulogy for R. Hayyim Heller” (trans. Shalom Carmy),” in Joseph Epstein, ed., Shiurei ha-Rav: A Conspectus of the Public Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1974), 46-65. ↑

    

Beyond the Masthead of the Beys Yaakov Journal, 1923-1980 – Part 2:
‘Abomination’ or Scandal? Mistranslation, Journalism, and the Halivni Controversy

By Dan Rabinowitz and Menachem Butler

In Part 1 of this study, it was argued^[1] that the Beys Yaakov Journal cannot be understood simply as an ideological mouthpiece of Agudath Israel, nor as an instrument of Orthodox withdrawal. Across decades, its editors repeatedly confronted intellectual challenges in public, publishing voices and materials that lay beyond the formal boundaries of Agudah authority and resisting the impulse toward protective silence. That does not mean it adopted liberal positions; rather, its conclusions fit squarely within the traditions of Ultra-Orthodox theology. The journal’s Orthodox commitments were genuine, but they were not understood to require insulation from controversy or the suppression of methodological dispute. In this second installment of “Beyond the Masthead of the Beys Yaakov Journal, 1923-1980,” the controversy surrounding Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni serves as an especially revealing test case for these dynamics.

Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni passed away on June 28, 2022. On July 17, the New York Times published a lengthy obituary under the headline and subheadline:

“David Weiss Halivni, Controversial Talmudic Scholar, Dies at 94. He was considered too radical by many Orthodox rabbis and too regressive by many Conservative Jewish leaders. But his work was widely praised.”^[2]

The framing is revealing. Halivni is positioned between two opposing camps, too radical for one and too regressive for the other. This symmetrical construction reduces a complex methodological dispute to a narrative of ideological extremity and obscures the substantive nature of Orthodox objections. The obituary further characterized Halivni’s scholarship as grounded in the “controversial idea” that the Talmud is “riddled with inconsistencies and incongruities” resulting from the vulnerabilities of largely oral transmission, “subject to the flaws resulting from fallible memories.” It reproduced Agudath Israel’s denunciation of his work as an “abomination,” accusing him of daring “to enter the domain of the holy” and to suggest that the transmitters of the Talmud altered the text unknowingly. At the same time, Halivni was quoted defending his position: “divine origin does not preclude critical study, since critical study seeks to purge the text of human error.”

Beyond this polemical exchange, the obituary devoted substantial attention to Halivni’s innovative approach to Talmudic study, illustrating it through an extended discussion of a sugya in Mo’ed Katan. What was “pioneering” about Halivni’s work, the obituary explained, was his effort to “burrow[…] deeply into the history of how the Talmud … came to be compiled,” and to argue that its transmission, “for generations, largely oral,” was inevitably “subject to the flaws resulting from fallible memories.” Halivni therefore sought to “restore the pristine state of the Talmud,” in one student’s formulation, by identifying “incorrect editorial surmises” and exposing moments in which later transmitters resorted to “forced readings” in order to reconcile contradictions. As the obituary emphasized, Halivni’s method aimed to “iron out the inconsistencies and gaps and restore logical coherence” by tracing a concept’s provenance and, where necessary, reconstructing earlier textual strata. This methodological claim entailed a far-reaching reassessment of traditional assumptions about the formation and internal coherence of the Talmud.^[3]

David Weiss Halivni (1927-2022) was born in Poljana Kobilecka in interwar Czechoslovakia and received rabbinic ordination in Sighet at the age of fifteen. Deported to Auschwitz in 1944, he survived the camps as the sole remaining member of his family.^[4] After immigrating to the United States in 1947, he combined advanced yeshiva learning with formal academic study, ultimately joining the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary and later Columbia University.^[5] In his later years he made aliyah and taught at Bar-Ilan University. Beginning in 1969, he published the first volume of his monumental Mekorot u-Mesorot,^[6] which developed a sustained program of source-critical Talmudic interpretation,^[7] aimed at distinguishing between tannaitic dicta and later amoraic and editorial strata.^[8] It was this methodological ambition, more than questions of biography or institutional affiliation, that made Halivni a focal point of Orthodox critique.

Such sustained engagement with technical Talmudic scholarship is unusual for The New York Times. Yet this was not the paper’s first encounter with Halivni’s work. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 1977, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy profile of Halivni by Israel Shenker under the title “A Life in the Talmud.”^[9] There, Shenker described Halivni as “a respected public enemy at the pinnacle of modern scholarship” and reported that “The ultra-Orthodox Israeli political party Agudath Israel called it an ‘abomination,’” citing an editorial in Beys Yaakov Journal. The juxtaposition of scholarly daring and religious denunciation supplied the dramatic architecture that the 2022 obituary would later reprise.

The New York Times narrative, however, is fundamentally flawed. It misidentifies the institutional character and editorial posture of the Beys Yaakov Journal, misconstrues the nature of its engagement with contested scholarship, and rests on a tendentious, if not deliberate, mistranslation of a pivotal passage. More importantly, it mislocates the center of Orthodox resistance to Halivni’s work. The critique in that article in Beys Yaakov Journal, and the journalistic distortions surrounding it, should not be mistaken for the principal arena of Orthodox opposition. The more consequential controversy unfolded within the American Modern Orthodox world, particularly at Yeshiva University and among its associated intellectual networks, circles far more familiar to the Times readership and far more central to the internal struggles of American Judaism during the period under review. As we will demonstrate in a subsequent installment of this series, it was there, rather than in Israeli party politics, that the most sustained and institutionally significant resistance to Halivni took shape.

Israel Shenker: A Scholar “Trapped in a Newsman’s Body”

To grasp the significance of Israel Shenker’s mischaracterization of the Beys Yaakov Journal, one must first understand Shenker himself. He was no ignorant sensationalist, no journalist stumbling blindly into a world he did not understand. On the contrary, he was widely (and aptly) described as “a scholar trapped in a newsman’s body.”^[10] Fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish and possessed of formidable erudition, Shenker moved comfortably among texts, languages, and learned worlds that lay beyond the reach of most reporters.

That independence was visible early. While enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, Shenker reportedly completed his degree without attending classes, preferring to work alone in the library and appearing only for examinations. As his niece later recalled, he “did not attend classes because he did not need to,” a habit that remained a defining feature of his intellectual life: self-directed, book-centered, and impatient with institutional mediation.^[11]

Across several decades at The New York Times, Shenker profiled an extraordinary range of cultural and intellectual figures. Yet the range was not random. He gravitated toward individuals who combined mastery with eccentricity, authority with paradox: Groucho Marx,^[12] whose comic persona masked a sharp literary intelligence; Jorge Luis Borges,^[13] blind yet hyper-lucid; Noam Chomsky,^[14] the dissident linguist who destabilized both politics and grammar; Vladimir Nabokov,^[15] the aristocratic stylist and relentless classifier; Pablo Picasso,^[16] whose genius lay in permanent disruption. Alongside them appeared scientists and system-builders such as Isaac Asimov, polymaths of prodigious output and explanatory ambition.^[17]

Shenker brought the same sensibility to Jewish intellectual life. He wrote about scholars such as Uriel Simon,^[18] Salo Wittmayer Baron,^[19] and Solomon Zeitlin,^[20] figures whose authority derived not from popular appeal but from textual mastery and historical depth. He became one of the Times’ principal correspondents on Jewish culture, though with telling selectivity: the Jewish Theological Seminary consistently dominated his institutional coverage,^[21] while nearly every other yeshiva or rabbinical seminary in New York went largely unremarked^[22]; the Second Avenue Deli became his emblem of Jewish urban life,^[23] while nearly every other Jewish restaurant remained invisible.^[24] Shenker’s choices reveal a consistent pattern: he favored sites and figures that condensed Jewish meaning into legible symbols.^[25]

Much of his Jewish writing was light in tone but not trivial. He reported on a snobbish kosher hotel in England^[26]; obscure and declining Jewish communities^[27]; the phenomenon of “miraculous” pareve cheesecake^[28]; the Twerski rabbinic dynasty^[29] and other Hasidic groups^[30]; itinerant soferim repairing pesul Torah scrolls^[31]; Hebrew book publishing^[32]; dreydl manufacturers^[33]; the economics of yarmulkes and skullcaps^[34]; the professional culture of kosher certification and supervision^[35]; and prayer groups on El Al flights so numerous they gathered at the rear of the plane and disrupted its altitude.^[36] These were not throwaway curiosities. They were chosen because they dramatized ingenuity, adaptation, and excess.

Other pieces were more substantial. Shenker produced one of the most comprehensive journalistic profiles of Isaac Bashevis Singer,^[37] wrote with open admiration about Harry Austryn Wolfson, the legendary Harvard scholar of Jewish philosophy,^[38] and reported sympathetically on the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s public call for kindness on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.^[39] He covered Holocaust conferences, theological debates, Jewish cultural institutions, and scholarly gatherings with genuine seriousness.^[40] Many of these essays were later revised and collected in his 1985 volume Coat of Many Colors, a book that stands as the fullest expression of his intellectual commitments.^[41]

Shenker’s first sustained engagement with talmudic scholarship came in 1971, with a profile of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz,^[42] then deeply immersed in producing a new edition of the Talmud.^[43] The article was largely respectful, yet it included a pointed dismissal attributed to Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, belittling Steinsaltz’s achievement.^[44] The move is revealing. Even where admiration was warranted, Shenker could not resist inserting institutional tension, foregrounding controversy where extended methodological explanation might have sufficed.

That instinct became even more pronounced in Shenker’s 1975 feature, “Responsa: The Law as Seen by Rabbis for 1,000 Years,” based on interviews with Rabbi Moshe and Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof.^[45] The pairing itself was astute, recognizing responsa as a transdenominational genre spanning Orthodox and Reform authority. Yet the article in The New York Times was framed by a prominent callout box – “A Responsum Sampler” – that juxtaposed grave contemporary questions, such as homosexuality and women wearing pants, with deliberately quirky cases,^[46] including ritual slaughter under hypnosis^[47] and a woman who swallowed a fly.^[48] Responsa appeared less as a discipline of burdened responsibility than as a theater of ingenuity and oddity. The irony is that Rabbi Feinstein explicitly rejected such a portrayal. “You can’t wake up in the morning and decide you’re an expert on answers,” he insisted, stressing that authority emerges only through long recognition of sound judgment. More pointedly, he framed pesak as religious accountability: “A rabbi who replies to people’s questions works harder than a doctor dealing with a case of life and death. The doctor is responsible only to his patient, but the rabbi is responsible to God.” This ethic of burdened responsibility, articulated in the interview itself, stands in tension with the broader journalistic framing. Rabbi Feinstein articulated the same conception programmatically in the introduction to the first volume of Iggerot Moshe,^[49] where he repeatedly describes his rulings not as demonstrations of mastery but as obligations imposed by circumstance. His responsa, he writes, emerge from “darkness,” composed only because he felt compelled to give instruction; the decisor must rule according to “what his eyes see and what appears true to him,” even amid doubt and fear of error. Authority, in this account, lies not in brilliance or certainty but in the willingness to assume responsibility for guidance. This was an ethic that closely parallels his insistence in the Times interview that “the rabbi is responsible to God,” not to ingenuity or acclaim. ^[50]

Shenker was plainly fascinated by the genre; he devoted nearly thirty pages to responsa literature in Coat of Many Colors. Whether the emphasis on eccentricity reflected his own priorities or editorial intervention is difficult to determine. Shenker’s own reflections offer some guidance. In a 1986 profile, he described himself as writing “as a reporter more than anything else,” insisting that he was “not interested in arguing any ideas of [his] own.”^[51] Baruch Halpern’s account is especially suggestive. A leading scholar of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel, he explains that when Shenker worked for Time in postwar Europe, managing its Paris bureau, Shenker deliberately forwent by-lines out of a “corporatist sense of mission,” valuing collective authorship over individual credit.^[52] Only later, at The New York Times, did Shenker embrace what Halpern memorably termed “that sacred by-line,” situating his career within a broader shift toward intellectual individuation.^[53]

Shenker openly admired religious intellect even while identifying as a nonbeliever. He spoke candidly of his fascination with rabbinic literature – not for its piety, but for what he called “the determination to find excuses for impossible things.” Talmud and responsa were, in his words, “endlessly fascinating.” This posture, respectful yet detached, drawn to paradox rather than normativity, helps explain both his genuine engagement with Jewish learning and his recurrent tendency to foreground eccentricity or scandal at the expense of internal meaning.^[54]

That stance was reflected not only in Shenker’s writing but also in the manner in which he chose to live. In his later years he withdrew from institutional journalism altogether and settled in rural Scotland, where his wife Mary, born into the Sagman family of Glasgow, had familial roots. There he described himself as a solitary reader moving from library to library, drawn to places that functioned as what he called “intellectual hospices.”^[55] Writing in 1985 about a residential library in Wales founded by William Gladstone, Shenker offered an implicit self-portrait: a scholar without a pulpit, a journalist without a platform, committed less to intervention than to observation, and to books rather than communities. From that deliberately marginal and proudly nonconfessional vantage point, Judaism appeared not as a living system governed by internal norms, but as a repository of endlessly fascinating textual ingenuity. This orientation is also visible in Shenker’s books. Beyond Coat of Many Colors, Shenker published a series of substantial monographs that further attest to the breadth and seriousness of his intellectual interests, including studies of lexicography and the history of language,^[56] literary travel^[57] and eighteenth-century intellectual culture,^[58] and contemporary Jewish and Israeli public life.^[59]

Seen against this background, Shenker’s treatment of David Weiss Halivni cannot plausibly be dismissed as a product of ignorance or linguistic incapacity. He possessed the philological competence to read the Hebrew of the Beys Yaakov Journal accurately and the cultural literacy to recognize the specifically Orthodox stakes of Halivni’s project. The resulting mischaracterization was therefore interpretive rather than inadvertent: a reframing of a bounded intramural methodological dispute in the idiom of public scandal. In this instance, Shenker’s erudition did not guard against distortion but conferred authority upon it.

To see why this reframing proved so consequential requires closer attention to the article itself and to the broader Orthodox debate over the academic study of the Talmud in which it intervened. Only within that broader context does the inadequacy of the binary framework later imposed upon Halivni come into focus. In a subsequent installment of this series, we will examine specific episodes in his life, consider his distinctive approach to Talmudic study, and then turn to the controversy it provoked. His trajectory across worlds often presumed to be mutually exclusive, including the traditional yeshiva culture of Eastern Europe, the postwar Orthodox institutions of America, and the emerging academic study of rabbinic literature, forms an essential backdrop to that debate.

The 1969 Beys Yaakov Journal Article: Engaging the Challenge

In early 1969, the Beys Yaakov Journal published “A Cry of Alarm Concerning the New School of ‘Talmud Critics’!”^[60] by “Harav Yitzhak M. Shmueli” (almost certainly a pseudonym).^[61] The article appeared in issue no. 116, shortly after the publication of the first volume of Halivni’s Mekorot u-Mesorot (1969).^[62] It was not a reflexive polemic or an immediate rebuttal, but a considered response to a scholarly methodology that had already begun to exert influence within academic and semi-academic Jewish discourse.^[63] Shmueli’s article reflects the Journal’s longstanding editorial posture: the intellectual challenges of modernity, particularly those circulating in print and academic venues, cannot be met with silence or denial. Rather than ignoring them, the Beys Yaakov Journal insisted on direct and public engagement.^[64]

The article offers a sweeping critique of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and its Talmudic scholarship, with Halivni serving as the central exemplar. After briefly dismissing academic biblical criticism as a spent and methodologically compromised enterprise, Shmueli turns to what he presents as a more urgent danger: the emergence of academic Talmudic criticism within the Jewish Theological Seminary. He notes that Mekorot u-Mesorot bears the subtitle Biʾurim Talmudiyim and explicitly links this nomenclature to the Biʾur associated with Moses Mendelssohn, whom he identifies, in conventional Orthodox polemic, as a progenitor of German Reform Judaism.^[65] The terminological parallel is presented as symptomatic rather than incidental.

Shmueli’s extended polemic against biblical criticism should be read less as his operative argument than as a genealogical warning. By tracing “Ḥokhmat Yisrael” back to German biblical criticism and Wissenschaft des Judentums, he establishes a historical cautionary tale rather than mounting a detailed refutation.^[66] Once the discussion turns to Talmud, however, the tone shifts markedly: denunciatory generalizations give way to named books, cited introductions, concrete methodological claims, and extended quotation of traditional authorities. The rhetorical genealogy sets the stage; the argument itself unfolds as a focused dispute over the limits of legitimate Talmudic method.

Beyond an Internal Scholarly Debate

Shmueli’s concern, however, was not confined to an intramural scholarly dispute that might otherwise have remained limited to a narrow academic readership. The urgency, he argued, arose from Halivni’s entry into the broader intellectual public. In 1963, Halivni authored the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry “Source Criticism,” appended to the encyclopedia’s discussion of the “Talmud.” There he did not merely note philological problems in passing, but presented “source criticism” as a discrete scholarly method whose central task was to distinguish between the original statements of rabbinic authorities and the forms those statements assumed through oral transmission. A paragraph from that Britannica entry was later reprinted on the inside cover of Mekorot u-Mesorot: Seder Nashim (1969) under the heading, “From the author’s statement in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” It reads:

“Source criticism seeks to differentiate between the original statements as they were enunciated by their authors and the forms they took as a consequence of being orally transmitted; that is, between the sources and their later traditions. It is not to be confused with the kind of analysis – frequently carried out by the rabbis or the Talmud – which merely traces the historical sources of a given passage without judging whether or not the passage faithfully reflects these sources. Source criticism claims that the transmission of the Talmud was not, and perhaps could not have been, verbatim, and that the text became altered in transmission, with the result that many statements in the Talmud have not come down in their original form. Instead, what survives is the form assumed in the last phase of transmissional development. While such a study is pertinent to most ancient texts, it is particularly relevant to the Talmud, which primarily consists of quotations and their interpretations.”^[67]

On Halivni’s account, talmudic transmission “was not, and perhaps could not have been, verbatim,” with the result that many passages survive only in the form assumed in the final phase of transmissional development. The Talmud, he argued in that encyclopedia entry, is therefore particularly susceptible to such analysis, since it largely consists of quotations and interpretive strata. By articulating this claim in the idiom of general textual criticism and situating it within a major English-language reference work addressed to a broad, non-confessional readership, Halivni effectively relocated questions of talmudic authority from the internal norms of the beit midrash to the evaluative jurisdiction of modern academic scholarship. What might otherwise have remained an internal scholarly controversy was thus recast as a public representation of the Talmud within a wider intellectual culture.

It is precisely this public and methodological self-positioning that made the volume contentious. By placing the critical premise at the threshold of the book, Halivni indicated that the issue at stake was not merely philological refinement but the conceptual framework within which the Talmud itself would be understood. The decision to reproduce this paragraph prominently on the inside cover of Mekorot u-Mesorot was therefore more than bibliographic notice. It framed the book from the outset as an intervention in the academic discourse of textual criticism and positioned its central thesis as a methodological claim rather than an incidental observation. Before encountering Halivni’s detailed readings, the reader is confronted with a declaration about the nature of talmudic transmission and the legitimacy of critical reconstruction. In this sense, the reprinted Britannica passage functions as a programmatic preface, signaling that the project’s claims about the Talmud’s layered development are not ancillary but foundational.

This concern about public legitimation was not new. Long before the appearance of Halivni’s Mekorot u-Mesorot, Orthodox critics had already accused JTS, particularly under Finkelstein, of attempting to translate rabbinic tradition into a civic idiom aimed at American elites, a trajectory that would later culminate in highly visible episodes such as the Seminary’s 1957 convocation attended by Chief Justice Earl Warren.^[68] This dynamic can already be seen by the early 1930s, such critiques had evolved from responses to discrete initiatives into a sustained indictment of Finkelstein’s leadership. In a widely circulated Yiddish pamphlet responding to the accumulated controversy surrounding the Seminary,^[69] Dr. Aaron Rosmarin retrospectively gathered earlier charges, first voiced in The Jewish Forum,^[70] Der Tog,^[71] and The Jewish Spectator ,^[72] into a comprehensive critique of what he presented as a coherent institutional strategy: the deliberate public repositioning of JTS through interfaith initiatives and universalist ethical rhetoric, designed to render Judaism intelligible and respectable to Christian and civic authorities while eroding the internal boundaries of rabbinic tradition.^[73] Read in this longer perspective, the anxieties later articulated by Shmueli in the late 1960s appear not as episodic reactions to a single event, but as the continuation of an established polemical grammar through which the Seminary had long been contested within Haredi and Orthodox circles.

Yet the controversy did not unfold solely in the register of political denunciation or institutional suspicion. It also took the form of an internal methodological dispute over the norms of Talmudic scholarship.

Substantive Scholarship, Not Political Condemnation

Shmueli did not confine his critique to rhetorical denunciation. The article prominently featured, in a separate callout box at the top center of the page, the complete four-paragraph letter of the Ḥazon Ish addressing the use of manuscripts and textual emendation in Talmudic interpretation.^[74] Given the Ḥazon Ish’s stature as one of the most authoritative scholars of his generation, his methodological positions were widely regarded as normative and were adopted, explicitly or implicitly, by many traditional Orthodox rabbis and scholars. Crucially, the Ḥazon Ish does not reject manuscript evidence as such; rather, he rejects its elevation into a corrective authority over the received text as transmitted and interpreted through the classical rabbinic canon. By foregrounding the Ḥazon Ish’s objections instead of invoking partisan rhetoric or institutional polemic, Shmueli cast the controversy as a serious methodological dispute internal to the discipline of Talmud study.
The letter reads in full:

“To interpret a sugya and to emend the Gemara on the basis of the ‘Munich’ manuscript – does this mean that all the sages of the generation, from the time of the Rishonim until now, all failed to apprehend the truth, because a single scribe erred and added material to the Gemara of his own accord, thereby causing all the sages to stumble?

I am not of them nor of their multitude. The manuscripts that were in the hands of the early authorities of blessed memory – they gave their lives for them, and the providence of the Blessed One, that the Torah not be forgotten from Israel, hovered over them. And when they began to print the Gemara, the sages of the generation gave their lives for its refinement and correction. And even if, at times, one may benefit from manuscripts to cleanse corruptions that arise over the course of time, with regard to a matter that issued from the hands of all our masters without any hesitation – Heaven forbid to disturb it.

Consider this yourself. When there are three manuscripts before us and two agree, we follow the two and set aside the one. And who can say to us that the ‘Munich’ manuscript is not from that one that was nullified by the majority in its own time? And who can say that it was not known to those lacking precision? In any case, it is null and void, like a broken potsherd, in the face of the received version.

And because a scribe erred and omitted a few words, as scribes are wont to err – shall we build towers? Perhaps indeed it is so, that the scribe omitted them and it is not from the sages, but when we rely on the tradition, the Torah of Rashi and Tosafot and all the sages – certainly this is the Torah. And I have almost never seen any benefit in arriving at the truth through variant readings uncovered from the genizot. Rather, they are all a benefit for distorting judgment and perverting the truth. It would have been fitting to consign them to burial, for the loss outweighs the gain.”

By reproducing this letter in full, Shmueli makes clear that his opposition to Halivni’s methodology rests on principled epistemological and methodological grounds rather than on ideological reflex. The Ḥazon Ish’s critique does not deny the existence of manuscript variation or the occasional value of textual witnesses; rather, it rejects the privileging of isolated manuscripts over the cumulative authority of the received tradition as transmitted and interpreted through generations of rabbinic scholarship.^[75]
Crucially, Shmueli explicitly acknowledges that multiplicity, difficulty, and textual variation are intrinsic features of Torah she-baʿal peʿh. He concedes that variant readings and unresolved tensions have always belonged to the tradition, and he invokes major figures such as the Ḥatam Sofer and R. Israel Salanter to underscore that truth in Torah does not reside in surface simplicity. This concession sharply distinguishes his position from any naïve textual absolutism. What he rejects is not complexity itself, but the elevation of conjectural reconstruction into a corrective authority over the received text and its interpretive canon. In this way, Shmueli situates his argument squarely within a substantive Talmudic debate. He contends that even academically rigorous methods, supported by extensive philological evidence, remain subject to serious internal critique from within the Orthodox scholarly tradition itself. The article therefore represents intellectual engagement rather than political denunciation or fundamentalist rejection.

A full reading of Shmueli’s article makes clear that his deepest concern is not the existence of critical hypotheses as such, but their translation into public authority. Again and again, the danger he identifies lies in institutional legitimation: a book published by a major Israeli press, authored by a faculty member of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and disseminated to a broad readership through venues such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For Shmueli, the methodological question becomes urgent precisely at the point where speculative reconstruction threatens to become normative representation. The issue, in other words, is not academic experimentation behind closed doors, but the public pedagogy of Judaism to Jews and non-Jews alike.

Acknowledging Lieberman’s Authenticity

One of the most revealing features of Shmueli’s polemic is his careful distinction between Halivni and Saul Lieberman. Despite the breadth and intensity of his critique of the JTS approach, he is markedly restrained in his treatment of Lieberman. This restraint is deliberate. Lieberman’s Orthodox credentials were exceptionally strong and widely recognized across multiple sectors of the Orthodox world.^[76] Upon his arrival in Palestine in 1928, he was appointed director of Machon Harry Fischel, a flagship Orthodox research institute devoted to advanced talmudic and halakhic scholarship, an appointment facilitated by leading rabbinic figures, including R. Isser Zalman Meltzer and R. Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook.^[77] At the same time, Lieberman pursued rigorous academic training at the Hebrew University under Prof. Jacob Nahum Epstein, the foremost architect of modern academic Talmud. Far from disqualifying him, this dual formation reflects the still-open willingness of segments of the Orthodox rabbinic elite in the interwar period to recognize exceptional Torah mastery even when pursued through unconventional scholarly frameworks.^[78]

This standing remained intact even as Lieberman later contemplated accepting a position at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Before doing so, he consulted major Orthodox authorities, among them R. Isser Zalman Meltzer and R. Yaakov Moshe Charlap. Their responses ranged from principled refusal to issue a ruling to cautious, conditional acquiescence, but none denied Lieberman’s stature as a preeminent talmid ḥakham.^[79] As Marc B. Shapiro has shown, Lieberman’s move to JTS did not erase his reputation within elite Orthodox circles; rather, it exposed unresolved tensions within Orthodoxy itself concerning the boundaries between institutional affiliation, scholarly method, and personal halakhic authority.^[80] Lieberman thus occupied a liminal position: fully embedded in the Lithuanian rabbinic elite, deeply shaped by its intellectual ethos, yet operating at the outer limits of what Orthodoxy could comfortably accommodate.

It is precisely this status that explains Shmueli’s careful tone. To indict Lieberman directly would have required confronting not a marginal figure but a scholar whose legitimacy had been affirmed – explicitly or tacitly – by many of Orthodoxy’s leading authorities. Shmueli’s restraint therefore reflects less an endorsement of Lieberman’s methodology than an acknowledgment of the exceptional difficulty of dislodging a figure whose authority derived not from institutional politics alone, but from recognized and formidable Torah greatness. Shmueli’s own rhetoric reflects this distinction with care. He refers to Lieberman explicitly as a “renowned scholar, erudite in Torah she-baʿal peh,” even as he directs his most sustained and forceful criticism toward Halivni and the methodological program embodied in Mekorot u-Mesorot. This differentiation is significant. It underscores the Beys Yaakov Journal’s capacity for discriminating judgment rather than indiscriminate rejection of academic scholarship.

This, despite the fact that Lieberman’s earliest major work, Al ha-Yerushalmi, had already exemplified a disciplined form of textual criticism, drawing on manuscripts, parallel traditions, and internal philological analysis to clarify and correct the text of the Jerusalem Talmud. This could easily have provided fodder for Shmueli, yet he remained silent regarding Lieberman’s method. Recently published letters show that even the Ḥazon Ish engaged Lieberman seriously on these questions. Their correspondence reveals a principled disagreement over method, particularly regarding emendations grounded in manuscript evidence, while also demonstrating that such philological argumentation could be treated as a legitimate subject of rabbinic dispute rather than dismissed outright as heresy. Of course, since this correspondence had not yet been published, it cannot explain Shmueli’s silence on Lieberman’s approach.^[81]

This nuance is essential for understanding the Beys Yaakov article’s invocation of the Ḥazon Ish. Lieberman is not cast as a theological threat or ideological provocateur, but as a formidable talmid ḥakham whose methods, though troubling to some, remained bounded within an elite scholarly discourse. Halivni, by contrast, is portrayed as extending those methods in a more expansive and publicly consequential direction, one that, in Shmueli’s view, exceeded the implicit safeguards that had contained earlier forms of academic intervention. The result is a portrait of Orthodox engagement with academic Talmud that is internally differentiated, historically self-aware, and intellectually serious, far removed from caricatures of reflexive or indiscriminate rejection.

That differentiation, however, depended upon the boundaries of scholarly containment. It held only so long as the debate remained internal to a learned community. Nowhere does Shmueli’s anxiety emerge more sharply than in his discussion of Halivni’s contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.^[82] Written in English for a general readership unfamiliar with the internal conventions of Talmudic study, Halivni’s article marks, in Shmueli’s view, the point at which an intramural scholarly debate enters the public register. At that point, silence becomes irresponsible. What is at stake is no longer a disputed method within a learned guild, but the public representation of the Talmud itself: its authority, coherence, and standing before a wider audience.

Yet the subsequent reception of the controversy would hinge less on Shmueli’s carefully drawn distinctions than on the interpretation of a single line in the Beys Yaakov article itself.

The Mistranslation That Changed Everything

After developing its substantive critique, the Beys Yaakov article closes with a pointed rhetorical question:

!?האפשר לשתוק נוכח שערוריה נוראה מעין זו

The phrase is best rendered: “Is it possible to remain silent in the face of such a terrible scandal?”

Here we arrive at Shenker’s most consequential error. Shenker isolated the noun שערוריה (sha’aruriyah) and translated it as “abomination.” This was not a neutral lexical choice, but a serious mistranslation with far-reaching interpretive consequences.

In classical and rabbinic Hebrew, as well as in modern Hebrew, שערוריה denotes a scandal or public outrage, an event or claim that provokes alarm, indignation, and moral disquiet. Rooted in the semantic field of סער and סערה, it evokes turbulence and upheaval, suggesting commotion and protest rather than ritual pollution or theological deviance.^[83] The term therefore belongs to the register of public scandal and polemical critique, not to the technical vocabulary of halakhic or theological condemnation. It conveys gravity, even urgency, but it does not imply that the object in question lies beyond the bounds of religious legitimacy. By contrast, Biblical and rabbinic Hebrew possess precise and well-established terms for “abomination,” most prominently תועבה (toʿevah) and the ש־ק־ץ family (שקץ, sheqets; שיקץ, shiqets). These terms function as technical markers of religious repugnance and exclusion.^[84] תועבה denotes what is abhorrent before God, a term reserved for practices that are religiously intolerable, most prominently idolatry and acts explicitly proscribed as violations of the divine order. שקץ, by contrast, marks what is ritually defiling and categorically repugnant, designating objects or acts that are not merely objectionable but intrinsically contaminating within the cultic and halakhic system. In such usage, these terms do not merely register protest or indignation. They function as categorical markers of religious illegitimacy, designating acts or objects as intrinsically defiling and wholly intolerable within the normative order of divine law.

An Orthodox polemicist seeking to convey that level of categorical condemnation would almost certainly have employed one of these terms. Shmueli does not. His diction is emphatic but restrained, signaling moral alarm and scholarly urgency rather than theological excommunication. Translating שערוריה as “abomination” imputes to the article a category of judgment absent from the Hebrew. The difference is not rhetorical but semantic: the mistranslation shifts the text from protest to proscription, from scandal to heresy. One is reminded of the rabbinic topos of qotzo shel yod, the barely perceptible stroke of the yod (understood by Rashi as its right leg and by Rabbeinu Tam as its curved crown) whose alteration can overturn an entire halakhic construction.^[85] Shenker’s substitution performed precisely such a transformation. There is no plausible pathway by which the language of “abomination” could have entered the public narrative surrounding Halivni other than through this mistranslation. In doing so, it recast an argument urging engagement with a grave scholarly challenge as a declaration of religious intolerance and obscured the article’s actual posture, which was not to brand Halivni’s work as heretical but to insist that a development of profound intellectual and communal consequence cannot responsibly be met with silence.

The consequences of this lexical substitution extended far beyond Shenker’s 1977 profile. Once “abomination” entered the New York Times archive as the purported Orthodox verdict on Halivni, it became available for repetition as journalistic fact. Thus, when the Times published its 2022 obituary of Halivni, it reproduced Shenker’s framing and relied on the same source. The obituary’s headline, casting Halivni as a “controversial” scholar rejected by “many Orthodox rabbis,” thus rested in part on a mistranslation that had already transformed a bounded Hebrew critique of scholarly method into a sweeping theological denunciation. In this way, a single erroneous word became the pivot of a durable public narrative.

The Effect of Sensationalism

Israel Shenker’s mistranslation did not merely distort a phrase; it altered the character of the intellectual activity in which the Beys Yaakov Journal was engaged. The original article undertook a demanding and careful task: it presented a sophisticated academic methodology to an Orthodox readership, explained why that methodology posed serious difficulties within the traditional epistemology of Talmudic study, marshaled substantive scholarly objections, above all the position of the Ḥazon Ish, acknowledged internal differentiation within Orthodoxy, and articulated strong disagreement grounded in textual and methodological analysis. By rendering the article’s culminating language as invoking an “abomination,” Shenker recast sustained scholarly critique as fundamentalist denunciation, collapsing methodological dispute into theological outrage and substituting caricature for argument.

This inversion is especially consequential in light of the documented record of the Beys Yaakov Journal of reflective engagement with modernity, both in its prewar Polish incarnation^[86] and in its postwar Israeli continuation.^[87] Beys Yaakov was not a polemical broadsheet but an educational and intellectual forum that repeatedly confronted modern scholarship rather than retreating from it. Shenker’s portrayal effaced that history and compounded the distortion by mischaracterizing the journal as “an official publication” of Agudath Israel. It was not. Published by the “Central Beys Yaakov of Israel” and later by the “Bais Yaakov Women’s College,” the journal functioned as an educational organ aligned with Agudah but not as a party instrument. The distinction is substantive. Educational journals cultivate explanation and debate; party organs enforce discipline.

The encounter with Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni was therefore neither a reflexive ban nor an eruption of obscurantism, but a serious internal reckoning with a scholarly development understood to carry public and pedagogical consequences. The episode demonstrates how readily Orthodox intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century has been recast through external narratives that confuse methodological dispute with theological denunciation. To understand the controversy properly requires moving beyond journalistic distortion to the jurisprudential problem Halivni’s scholarship forced into view. The debate was not about temperament or piety, but about first principles: whether historical reconstruction can be insulated from normativity; whether halakhic authority rests on procedural continuity or on claims of historical transparency; and whether Orthodox institutions possess mechanisms capable of absorbing critical candor without destabilizing the structures of authority they seek to preserve. It is to that institutional and conceptual terrain that we now turn.

[to be continued…]

Appendix 1: Yitzhak M. Shmueli, “A Cry of Alarm Concerning the New School of ‘Talmud Critics’!” Beys Yaakov, vol. 10, no. 4 [#116] (1969): 4-5 (Hebrew), available here:

Yitzhak M. Shmueli,

“A Cry of Alarm Concerning the New School of “Talmud Critics”!

Beys Yaakov, vol. 10, no. 4 [#116] (1969): 4-5 (Hebrew)

I.

“Ḥokhmat Yisrael” – that enterprise which was founded and ardently desired at the initiative of the various exponents of “Reform,” in all its forms – there is no falsehood and distortion more dreadful than it. This “root that bears gall and wormwood” – its earliest growth began in Germany, and there it affixed to itself the flattering yet deceptive name: “Wissenschaft des Judentums” (“the Science of Judaism,” in a literal translation from German). Within the bosom of this poisoned “science” arose all the movements of assimilation and derision away from Judaism. Generations of upright Jews fell into this trap. Many – far, far too many – this very “Ḥokhmat Yisrael” led all the way to the gates of apostasy, Heaven forfend.

All the venomous “wisdom” of the founders and disseminators of this “science” concerning “Judaism” in fact drew its sustenance from the sources of malice inherent in German, gentile “Biblical Criticism.” There were German scholars who regarded themselves as immense experts in the knowledge of the “East” (“Orientalistics,” in the foreign tongue), and, being afflicted with hatred of Israel, jealousy and the impulse of enmity toward the Book of Books burned within them. From this was born their aspiration “to criticize the Bible” in the most bizarre forms. And the matter is well known to the discerning. Several of the Christian researchers in Germany, foremost among them the orientalist Wellhausen – notorious for his attacks and his arrogant “discoveries” against the integrity and originality of the Bible – in fact founded the modern school of “Biblical Criticism.” And to our shame, even a few scholars from among our brethren, the Children of Israel, adhered to this path, taking hold of the seeds of self-directed malice, and lent their hand and their strength to the expansion and dissemination of this poisonous “science,” whose very point of departure was permeated with hatred of Israel.

This is neither the place nor the proper hour to display publicly all the falsehoods and malicious distortions that have accumulated around this discipline of “Biblical Criticism,” which, from the moment Jews too began to engage in it, cloaked itself in the new guise of “Ḥokhmat Yisrael.”

The historical truth is that this entire “science” known as “Biblical Criticism” has long since been exposed as false – and of all the mountains of nonsense and all the towers of lies that were heaped up and constructed by the celebrated “Biblical critics,” there remains no longer one stone upon another, one brick upon another, most evidently so. Indeed, it is precisely the scientific discoveries of the most recent period – and first and foremost the discovery of the “hidden scrolls” – that have decisively demolished the foundations of this deceptive “science.”

From time to time, modern Israeli archaeologists burst forth in cries of astonishment: Behold and see, to what degree everything found in the Holy Scriptures is precise!

And the historical truth is being clarified from every perspective. For these “Biblical critics,” not a few of whom are in fact complete ignoramuses regarding the Torah of Israel as a Torah of life and as the Torah of eternity, are accustomed to “correcting” the books of the Bible in accordance with whatever arises from their most confused and wildly unrestrained imagination. And suddenly, from ancient caves, hidden scrolls are found dating from nearly two thousand years ago, and everything written within those original and authentic scrolls – which renowned scholars examine and scrutinize – contradicts and refutes those sophistic vapidities and heaps of nonsense that were crowned with the title “Biblical science.”

And beyond this, the archaeologists engaged in excavations at historical sites in the Land also have something to say. And they demonstrate – as, for example, the Israeli archaeologist Dr. Moshe Kochavi recently demonstrated, who organized and directed the excavations in the Negev and in the Judean Mountains:

“The geographical record in Scripture has been proven by the discoveries in our excavations to be an exceptionally precise and reliable measure! In the Book of Joshua, chapter 15, there is found a detailed delineation of the boundaries of the tribe of the sons of Judah, their cities and their settlements, and all the discoveries made by our archaeological unit, which encompassed approximately twenty-five sites from the period of the kings of Judah, definitively confirmed that the entire division into districts – in the wilderness, in the hill-country, in the lowland, and in the Negev – is completely accurate; it accords with the standards demanded by every rigorous modern geographer!”

Ḥazal already said: “Yehudah ve-‘od la-qera” – that is, is there any further need whatsoever to confirm what is written in the Torah? In this generation, therefore, the whole-hearted faithful of Israel – loyal to the Torah and continuers of the heritage of Judaism – can, for their part, dispense with all those “authoritative confirmations” as well as the “scientific corroborations” of those “rigorous modern geographers.” But those great “sages” of Biblical Criticism – what answer can they possibly offer in the face of all the archaeological discoveries?

II.

And behold, there has emerged the newest fashion of “Talmud Criticism,” as a link integrated into the chain of distortions of “Ḥokhmat Yisrael” – which contains no “wisdom,” and whose association with “Israel” is exceedingly dubious.

It is a sacred obligation to raise a mighty voice of protest against the new “school” of the pretentious “Talmud critics,” who are liable to mislead pure souls among the Children of Israel. It is a double obligation to sound the alarm and to warn, since the dangerous initiative to harm – Heaven forbid – the foundational sources of the Oral Torah has now issued forth from a group of scholars concentrated around the “Schechter Seminary” in New York, whose official name is the “Jewish Theological Seminary,” and which is known as the “spiritual center” of the Conservative (“traditionalist”) movement in America.

As the first swallow heralding the emergence of the new method, there has now appeared, published by “Dvir” in Tel Aviv, a book entitled Sources and Traditions – Explanations in the Talmud. Its author, David Halivni, presents himself as an “expert in Talmudic research” who grew up within the walls of the “Schechter Seminary” in New York, in the company of Professor Louis Finkelstein, head of the Seminary, and Professor Saul Lieberman, the Seminary’s chief scholarly authority.

A public alarm must be sounded regarding the dangerous and destructive tendency of these “Talmudic explanations,” for of itself there surfaces the characteristic comparison with that famous “commentary” on the Torah by Moses Mendelssohn, the founding father of Reform in Germany! And if one extends this historical comparison further, the author of this “Talmudic research” likewise employs an innocent formulation and continually lifts his eyes heavenward…

“‘Blessed is the Omnipresent’ – thus opens the book’s ‘Preface’ – ‘who has merited me to see in print my explanations… May it be His will that just as He has merited me to see in print my explanations on the Order of Nashim, so may He merit me to see in print my explanations on the other orders and other books.’”

As it appears, the destructive hand is raised openly, and the plan is rather broad: to attack all the orders of the Shas and the other sources of Ḥazal, by means of that rusted and poison-saturated weapon called “Sources and Traditions”…

In the author’s scientific idiom this is called “textual truth,” since he strives to demonstrate that the Talmud is supposedly filled and replete with “inaccuracies,” “changes in sources,” “deviations from the simple interpretation,” and the like – claims and arguments that were habitual upon the tongues of all the “Biblical critics.”

From the words of the “Introduction” it is plainly evident that the author knows the truth, and merely intends to rebel against it! He himself writes that variations in textual versions, together with the difficulties bound up with them, have long since become part of the traditions… and indeed, one who has grown accustomed to this – precisely in this he perceives the distinctiveness of the Torah, and that its very diversity is its superior virtue…

The author even knows how to cite the words and opinions of the great Torah authorities, the giants of spirit of the later generations, such as the Ḥatam Sofer or Rabbi Israel Salanter, who explained that the essence of the distinctiveness of the Oral Torah lies precisely in this: that not everything appears revealed and simple at first glance…

This was the considered view of the author of the Ḥatam Sofer (in his novellae to tractate Ketubbot):

“The forced explanations (the resolutions offered to account for the difficulties arising in the comparison of the words of Ḥazal) – most of them are true… however, the rationalizations and inventions – most of them are false, and they are what cover over the face of truth.”

And Rabbi Israel Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement, stated this explicitly (in the introduction to his work Tevunah):

“What is truth? Truth does not live by simplicity alone, for simplicity is but one branch among the ways of proof; and for the most part the cherished difficulties stand ready to wage war against simplicity and to dislodge it…”

And despite all this, the arrogant audacity of a young scholar such as he has not been satisfied – a man who presents himself as a survivor of the Holocaust and as a remnant of the Auschwitz camp – to the point that he dared to approach the holy and to voice such a venomous and destructive notion, as though “the tannaim who transmitted the baraitot and dicta” altered much and did not even sense the alterations… whereas this “new star” from the Talmudic factory of the “Schechter Seminary” knows how to decipher “the truth in its truest sense” and to “correct” very many passages in the Talmud, by inserting “corruptions” and “errors” into the accepted and sanctified text!

Is it possible to remain silent in the face of such a terrible scandal?

III.

The source of a great danger has been exposed – one that is public-spiritual in character, and not merely literary-scholarly. We have no dispute with the author of this “collection of explanations,” who, notwithstanding everything, is himself compelled to concede that this is in essence not a new invention of his own, and that there have already been such researchers within the domain of “Ḥokhmat Yisrael” who attempted to “explicate” the sugyot of the Shas by a textual “critical method”…

The gravity of the danger is inherent in this fact: that it is an “official product” of the “Schechter Seminary,” and consequently it will be recognized and accepted as a “scientific discovery,” and perhaps even as a “scientific challenge” on the part of the Conservative movement in America.

Several years ago, the heads of the “Schechter Seminary” in America made numerous efforts to confer upon themselves a name and standing as a “Talmudic” research institution. Above all, they relied upon the personality of Professor Saul Lieberman, a renowned scholar and master of knowledge in the disciplines of the Oral Torah. It was not difficult to grasp that the spiritual leadership of the Conservative movement could not remain indifferent to the mighty historical phenomenon that became apparent in America with the establishment and flourishing of several advanced yeshivot for Torah study and rabbinic instruction. The “rabbis” of the Conservatives were truly alarmed by the rise of the power and influence of Haredi Judaism (Orthodox Judaism) in America, and they sought to demonstrate that among them too a “spiritual revival” was taking place, and that they too intended to return and to revivify the connection with the heritage of Judaism.

In accordance with the manner of the Conservatives and of all varieties of Reform, who are oriented primarily outward and whose chief concern is to find favor in the eyes of the gentiles, so they then arranged (some years ago) a grand celebration “in honor of the Talmud,” to which the Chief Justice of the Supreme Federal Court in Washington, Earl Warren, was invited. And the great surprise of the celebration was that the Chief Justice of the highest judges in America delivered an enthusiastic address concerning “the ethics of the Talmud,” and set forth several of the principles of Talmudic ethics as a model and exemplar of justice and uprightness!

The speech of the Chief Justice was not an isolated occurrence in America, where in recent times interest in the sources of Judaism has grown. Thanks to authoritative English translations, Christian scholars obtained some access to the treasures of the Talmud. One scholar, an expert in international law, a gentile from birth, published in the pages of an important scholarly journal a special study on the “spirit of true democracy” which he discovered in the Talmud.

And it is an interesting matter that the scholar paid attention there to that foundational principle in halakhic clarification in the Talmud: that “these and those are the words of the Living God.” The expert in international law translated this into his own terms, as an expression of democracy and freedom of expression – that one does not silence the “minority opinion” and does not disregard the rational arguments of the “opposing side,” but rather grants (as is done in the Talmud!) full right even to the minority opinion to explain its outlook. Even after the ruling has been decided on the basis of the majority view – which precisely accords with formal democracy – the “Talmudic sage” continues to voice and present his opinion upon the pages of the Talmud!

In various forms and through various channels, some of the perspectives of the Talmud began to penetrate American society. The growth in the number of yeshiva students in America – many of whom are regarded as authoritative experts in the domains of modern science – transmitted many of the moral principles of the Oral Torah into the broader world.

Until there arose a young “Talmudic researcher,” among the trainees of the “Schechter Seminary,” and proclaimed from every possible platform that fidelity to the text of the Talmud is doubtful, and that one must begin “Talmudic criticism”…

This matter did not suffice with the preparation of the anthology of “Sources and Traditions,” whose entire purpose is to obscure the sources and to undermine the traditions, but he even offered his “merchandise” (apparently upon the recommendation of the heads of the “Schechter Seminary”) to the editorial board of the world-renowned Encyclopaedia Britannica.

From his pen emerged the article “Source Criticism,” appended to the entry “Talmud” in volume 21 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What is the entire tendency of this article – particularly when it appears in English and is directed to the general public and to scholars for whom both the sources of the Talmud and the spirit of the Talmud are foreign – what can it lead to? Destructive views such as these: “that one should not lose one’s reason because of the analyses of the sages of the Talmud, who were not precise in the historical sources.” Both absolute ignorance is embedded in them, and an evil spirit of slander and self-degradation drips from them!

IV.

This figure did not emerge merely to testify concerning himself; rather, he also serves to testify concerning the entire “Schechter Seminary.” And the matter exceeds the limited framework of “literary activity” in the domain of “Talmud Criticism.” The “Schechter Seminary” embodies the “fortress of spirit” of the Conservative movement in America – and not only in America.

In recent years, the “Conservative” leaders have revealed an aspiration for “conquest,” and they seek precisely to transform themselves into a “global spiritual movement.” Concurrently, part of their leadership issues “public declarations,” as though their entire purpose is “to preserve and to draw from the sources of Judaism.”

It is indeed true that the great Torah authorities in America, foremost among them the Gaon Rabbi Aharon Kotler, of blessed memory, related from the outset with great suspicion to all “signs of rapprochement” on the part of the Conservatives, since, according to da‘at Torah, even their “tendencies” bear a pronounced character of Reform. The great Torah authorities in America therefore warned that rabbinic organizations in the United States should not blur the “dividing line” between the Jewish communities and the Conservative associations. A fierce spiritual campaign was waged on this matter in the public consciousness of American Jewry. And now one sees plainly what may be expected even from the learned “masters of sources” within the Schechter Seminary.

Appendix 2: Menashe Unger, “A Survivor of Auschwitz Creates a New Method in Talmudic Interpretation,” Der Tog (10 March 1969): 5-8 (Yiddish)

Menashe Unger,

“A Survivor of Auschwitz Creates a New Method in Talmudic Interpretation”

Der Tog (10 March 1969): 5-8 (Yiddish)

Dr. David Halivni Weiss, a survivor of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz, has developed a new method in the study of the Talmud, a method that has aroused wide and serious interest.

In an earlier article we described how the fifteen-year-old Eliyahu David Weiss Halivni was sent to the death camp at Auschwitz already possessing rabbinic ordination; how, under conditions of mortal danger, he studied Gemara together with fellow Jews in Auschwitz and in other death camps; and how, after liberation, he arrived in America. At the age of eighteen he began studying at the Rabbi Chaim Berlin Yeshiva, where he again received rabbinic ordination, this time from Rabbi Moshe Binyamin Tomashov. He later pursued studies at New York University and at the Jewish Theological Seminary, under the guidance of the eminent scholar Rabbi Professor Saul Lieberman. He ultimately became professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at Columbia University.

His book has now appeared: Mekorot u-Mesorot: Biʾurim ba-Talmud (Sources and Traditions: Explanations in the Talmud), on the Order Nashim, published by Dvir in Tel Aviv. The volume comprises 728 pages, with an introduction of nineteen pages. The book has made a powerful impression in the world of Talmudic scholarship.

What constitutes the new method of Rabbi David Halivni Weiss?

Rabbi Halivni Weiss first emphasizes that more than four hundred Tannaim and more than three thousand Amoraim lived under widely differing historical and social conditions over a period of approximately six hundred years. It is therefore understandable that at times an Amora did not fully comprehend a teaching of a Tanna transmitted to him. There were Tannaim who possessed extraordinary memories and transmitted the teachings of earlier authorities in the academies. Yet even when their memory was exceptional, they were not always able to convey the precise wording exactly as the original Tanna had formulated it. As a result, discrepancies arose, and the Amoraim were compelled to discuss these matters in the academies in order to reconcile the transmitted teachings.

The Amoraim even leveled accusations against such Tannaim, declaring: “The Tannaim are destroyers of the world” (Sotah 22a), because they failed to transmit the halakhah of the Mishnah exactly as the earliest Tanna had stated it. Accordingly, one must strive to return to the original formulation of the halakhah, or to the original statement of the earliest Tanna.

How is this accomplished? By making systematic use of variant manuscripts of the Talmud, Midrash Halakhah, the Tosefta, and the interpretations of many early authorities that have been discovered in recent times in various libraries. We know that Rabbi Judah the Prince, the redactor of the Mishnah, himself sometimes transmitted a halakhah according to his own conceptual framework, and not exactly as the Tanna had originally stated it, in order to render it more intelligible.

To clarify this approach, we will offer one example, drawn from the first Mishnah in Tractate Berakhot. The Mishnah opens: “From when does one recite the Shema in the evening?” It states that from the time the priests enter to eat their terumah one may recite the Shema until the end of the first watch, according to Rabbi Eliezer. The Sages say until midnight, and Rabban Gamliel says “until the rise of dawn.” However, in Avot de-Rabbi Natan it is stated that Rabban Gamliel says “until the rooster crows.”

This raises a difficulty: why did Rabbi, the redactor of the Mishnah, transmit Rabban Gamliel’s opinion as “until the rise of dawn,” whereas Avot de-Rabbi Natan reports it as “until the rooster crows”? One might assume that these refer to the same point in time, that the crowing of the rooster coincides with the appearance of the morning star. Yet from the Tosefta in Tractate Taʿanit (1:6) we see that these two temporal markers are not identical.

The discussion there concerns a fast that begins in the morning, as distinct from fasts such as the Ninth of Av, which begin in the evening. A dispute is recorded between Rabbi and Rabbi Eliezer ben Rabbi Shimon. Rabbi maintains that one may eat “until the rise of dawn,” meaning until the appearance of the morning star, which is still considered night, whereas Rabbi Eliezer ben Rabbi Shimon rules “until the rooster crows.” From this it is evident that the two times are not the same.

Rabbi Halivni Weiss therefore concludes that Rabban Gamliel originally stated only that one may recite the Shema “throughout the entire night,” without specifying any precise endpoint. The later Tannaim then debated how long the measure of “the entire night” extended. Since Rabbi held that night ends with the rise of dawn, and since Avot de-Rabbi Natan indicates that he indeed held this position, Rabbi incorporated into the Mishnah the formulation that Rabban Gamliel says “until the rise of dawn.” In Avot de-Rabbi Natan, however, both views were preserved: Rabbi’s position, “until the rise of dawn,” and that of Rabbi Eliezer ben Rabbi Shimon, “until the rooster crows,” because the redactor of Avot de-Rabbi Natan apparently accepted the latter view and therefore recorded both.

A similar phenomenon appears in the text of the Passover Haggadah, where it states: “They would recount the exodus from Egypt all that night,” without specifying an endpoint. By contrast, the Tosefta at the end of Tractate Pesahim states: “They recount the exodus from Egypt until the rooster crows.”

Rabbi David Halivni Weiss has thus developed a method that may be described, in a certain sense, as Talmudic textual criticism, but in a positive and constructive manner. Already the Netziv writes in his Haʿamek Sheʾelah (Sheʾiltah 136, section 1) that “it is the way of the Talmud to reinterpret the Mishnah so as not to uproot the halakhic ruling.” That is, the Sages did not wish the accepted halakhah to stand in contradiction to an explicit Mishnah, and where necessary they even corrected the wording of the Mishnah so that it would conform to the accepted halakhah.

Rabbi Halivni Weiss presents a striking illustration from Tractate Taʿanit (26b). The Mishnah there states that on three occasions during the year the priests raise their hands in blessing four times a day, and it enumerates Shaharit, Musaf, Minhah, and the closing of the Temple gates. These occasions are fast days, Maʿamadot, and Yom Kippur. The Gemara asks: is there a Musaf prayer on a fast day? It answers: “Something is missing, and this is how it should read: On three occasions during the year the priests raise their hands whenever they pray.” We thus see that the Gemara itself emended the Mishnah.

Why did the Amoraim do this? Rabbi Halivni Weiss explains that Musaf was recited only on a communal fast. In Babylonia there was never a communal fast, as the Gemara itself notes, because only the Nasi could proclaim such a fast, and Babylonia lacked a Nasi, unlike the Land of Israel. In the Land of Israel, communal fasts did exist, but after the abolition of the Nasiate in the year 425 they ceased there as well. In the Mishnaic period, however, Rabbi correctly included Musaf among the prayers recited on such days.

Later Amoraim, who lived in Babylonia and knew no communal fasts even in the Land of Israel, were perplexed by the Mishnah’s implication that Musaf was recited on a fast day. In order to harmonize the Mishnah with the accepted halakhah, they therefore emended its wording and inserted the phrase “whenever they pray.”

Rabbi David Halivni Weiss places primary emphasis on the textual foundations of the Mishnah and the Gemara. He demonstrates, on the basis of early sources, that there existed variant versions of the Mishnah, such as the Mishnah of Rabbi Meir and the Mishnah of Rabbi Akiva, which differed in wording.

As an example, he points to the opening Mishnah in Tractate Kiddushin: “A woman is acquired in three ways: by money, by document, and by intercourse.” The Gemara in Kiddushin (9a) asks: “By document, how?” and answers that if a man writes, “You are betrothed to me,” the woman is betrothed. Rabbi Halivni Weiss asks how the formulation “your daughter” enters the discussion, when the Mishnah speaks of a woman. He explains that this baraita originally referred not to Kiddushin but to Ketubbot, chapter four, where the Mishnah states that a father has rights over his daughter’s betrothal by money or by document. The redactor of the Gemara in Kiddushin apparently possessed such a version and connected the baraita to the Mishnah in Kiddushin because it was the closest relevant context.

This, then, is the path of study of Professor David Halivni Weiss. He proceeds through all the tractates of the Order Nashim, Yevamot, Ketubbot, Nedarim, Nazir, Sotah, Gittin, and Kiddushin, offering on every folio his elucidations and explanations, thereby clarifying many passages that have long remained obscure. At times a single incisive observation resolves a complex Talmudic difficulty and causes an entire accumulation of questions, which scholars had struggled to answer, to fall away.

Rabbi David Halivni Weiss is an outstanding disciple of the eminent Rabbi Professor Saul Lieberman, who takes great pride in his student. Professor Rabbi David Halivni Weiss is the youngest professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is engaged in a monumental scholarly undertaking that will be appreciated by all the leading Torah scholars of the generation. Having published his major work on the Order Nashim, he is already preparing a commentary on the Order Moʿed, with the aim of completing a comprehensive work on the entire Talmud.

Rabbi David Halivni Weiss emerged from the valley of death as a fragile child, a living remnant who endured the years of torment in the death camps while preserving his Jewish identity. He has remained a deeply observant Jew, meticulous in every detail of halakhic observance. Through his new method he has conferred a great benefit upon the world of Torah scholarship with his work Mekorot u-Mesorot, which will surely be highly esteemed by all students of Torah throughout the world.

Appendix 3: The 1957 Warren Convocation and the Circulation of Talmudic Self-Incrimination Discourse

Shmueli notes in his article in the Beys Yaakov Journal the wider efforts of JTS to translate talmudic discourse into a public idiom of modern legal and ethical relevance, and specifically a visit by Chief Justice Earl Warren.^[88] During the 1950s, under the leadership of JTS Chancellor Louis Finkelstein, the Seminary promoted what it termed an “ethics of the Talmud,” presented as a normative program rather than antiquarian scholarship. Finkelstein described this enterprise as a kind of “fifth Shulḥan Arukh,” positioning the Talmud as a source of authoritative guidance for contemporary life.

The scope and aims of this project are documented in a substantial exchange between Finkelstein and Saul Lieberman in the mid-1950s.^[89] In a detailed letter dated July 22, 1955, Finkelstein outlined his ambition to develop what he explicitly termed a “fifth Shulḥan Arukh,” by which he meant a systematic exposition of rabbinic ethics derived from the talmudic corpus. The letter makes clear that the two had discussed the matter repeatedly and that Finkelstein regarded Lieberman as indispensable to its realization. He credited Lieberman not only for scholarly guidance but for shaping his understanding of the ethical dimensions of rabbinic literature, remarking that he sought to render “Professor Lieberman as an institution” into a durable intellectual framework. Lieberman’s reply articulates a distinctive conception of legal-ethical obligation. Jewish law, he argued, establishes only the minimal standards necessary for social existence; genuine ethical responsibility begins beyond that threshold. Ethical expectations vary according to intellectual and moral stature. Conduct that might be considered blameless in an ordinary individual could be ethically culpable in a scholar. Rabbinic literature, he maintained, preserves numerous episodes illustrating such graduated responsibility, and only a sustained analytical study of the entire corpus could yield a systematic code of rabbinic ethics. He wrote:

“I might have stated to you my position on Jewish law and legal ethics. I believe that they are only the minimum without which no society can exist. The real legal ethics begin beyond this minimum. Each individual is legally bound by an ethical system conditioned to his individual character, temperament and general stature. A certain behavior on the part of an ordinary man may rightly be considered blameless under the circumstances, but the same behavior on the part of a learned man should be considered ethically criminal. In between the ignorant small man and the learned great man there are numerous gradations of ethical principles which correspondingly should guide the individual according to his status. Rabbinic literature abounds in episodes which highly illuminate the particular ethical principles with which we are concerned. The general idea is that none is exempt from the moral duty to aspire for perfection, thus raising the standards of the ethical principles required by the law for the particular individual.”^[90]

This initiative took institutional form in September 1957 with the inauguration of the Lehman Institute of Ethics,^[91] marked by a scholarly convocation on “Law as a Moral Force,”^[92] attended by Chief Justice Earl Warren and described by one speaker as graced by the presence of “the most beloved citizen of our land.”^[93]

Contemporary coverage makes clear that the convocation was designed not only as an internal scholarly gathering but as a publicized civic event. Reporting on the occasion, The New York Times noted that Warren had “enrolled” at the Seminary for a three-day convocation held over the weekend of September 13-14, 1957, devoted to Jewish law and its relevance to contemporary legal problems, and described both his participation in scholarly discussions and his attendance at Sabbath eve services. Finkelstein was quoted as framing the event as a gesture of civic-cultural deference: the Seminary, he declared, sought to honor Warren by sharing with him “our most treasured possession – the Talmud and its teaching.”^[94] The report further translated rabbinic jurisprudence into American legal idiom, describing the Mishnah’s interpretive authority as “analogous to a Supreme Court decision,” and noting that Saul Lieberman’s Friday night lecture addressed procedural doctrines, especially self-incrimination and double jeopardy, that resonated directly with American constitutional discourse.^[95] A contemporaneous Jewish Telegraphic Agency report similarly quoted Warren as remarking that several American constitutional safeguards, including those against self-incrimination and double jeopardy, appeared to derive from talmudic law. While noting that protection against self-incrimination was “perhaps not as sacred now as in ancient times,” Warren nonetheless affirmed its continuing place within American jurisprudence.^[96] The episode illustrates the dynamic that Shmueli sought to resist: talmudic law presented as a moral-jurisprudential resource whose public legitimacy is ratified through elite American recognition.

According to Louis Finkelstein’s later recollection, Warren was so struck by Lieberman’s lecture that, despite an understanding that he would not speak publicly, he insisted on addressing the assembled audience. Warren reportedly expressed astonishment that such teachings were “almost a secret,” asking how it was that “nobody knows about it.” Public attention followed quickly. Finkelstein recalled that former President Harry S. Truman, then visiting New York, read the New York Times account of the event and declared, “If it is good enough for him, it is good enough for me,” before arriving at the Seminary together with Judge Samuel Rosenman, himself not merely a jurist but a leading Democratic insider and former presidential adviser closely associated with Roosevelt and Truman. Shmueli’s polemic thus draws upon a real and widely publicized episode in which the Talmud was presented to prominent representatives of the American political and legal establishment as a jurisprudential and ethical resource.^[97]

Although the text of Lieberman’s lecture, “Law as a Moral Force in Rabbinic Literature,”^[98] has not been preserved (and no recording was made, as it was delivered on the Sabbath eve), the intellectual aims of the convocation inaugurating the Herbert H. Lehman Institute of Ethics are articulated with unusual clarity in the published preface to Professor Shalom Spiegel’s address, Amos versus Amaziah.^[99]

The conclave was explicitly convened to explore the moral dimensions of law as articulated in ancient Hebrew sources and to assess their relevance to contemporary legal and civic problems. Chief Justice Earl Warren and former President Harry S. Truman were among the featured participants, and Warren was quoted as remarking on the “sense of humility” that follows from recognizing that “most of the good things that we find in our law and in our own institutions come from the wisdom of men of other ages.” Spiegel’s address, identified in the prefatory material as one of the principal lectures of the weekend, framed prophetic confrontation and biblical justice through the idiom of constitutional adjudication and judicial review; Truman reportedly described it as “one of the best [lectures] I have ever heard in my life.”^[100] In this respect, Spiegel’s published address offers a reliable index of the conceptual register within which Lieberman’s now-lost lecture was heard.

The episode circulated widely beyond the English-language press. Coverage in the Yiddish press highlighted the unusual image of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court sitting in the Seminary, wearing a yarmulke and studying Talmud together with Finkelstein and Lieberman.^[101] It was largely through this reportage that the episode entered the retrospective memory of circles associated with Yeshiva University. Decades later, Rabbi Hershel Schachter recalled in writing that R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik reacted sharply to Yiddish newspaper accounts of Lieberman’s talmudic exposition, particularly the suggestion that repentance could nullify liability to punishment in an earthly court, a claim difficult to reconcile with Makkot 13b. He reportedly dismissed such reports as devarim betelim (‘idle talk’) and invoked the Ra’avad’s critique of Maimonides.^[102]

Samuel J. Levine has recently suggested that Chief Justice Warren’s later invocation of Jewish law in Miranda v. Arizona (1966) may be traced to his widely reported 1957 visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary. According to Levine, the JTS encounter helped prepare the conceptual ground for Miranda, as contemporary accounts of the visit already portrayed Jewish law as an antecedent to Anglo-American constitutional protections, particularly in the area of self-incrimination.^[103] That framework, however, was already in circulation at least a year earlier and cannot be attributed solely to the 1957 Seminary visit.

Newly available correspondence complicates any linear account of influence running from Warren’s 1957 visit to the Seminary to Miranda (1966). In early 1956, Rabbi Norman Lamm, then a pulpit rabbi in Springfield, Massachusetts, published in Judaism a substantial essay written at the height of public controversy over the Fifth Amendment, explicitly framing ein adam mesim atzmo rasha (“no man can render himself legally wicked”) as the halakhic analogue of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination.^[104] Far from offering a casual comparison, Lamm argued that halakhah went beyond the Fifth Amendment by rendering all criminal confessions inadmissible, even if voluntarily offered.^[105] This was the argument Warren would later cite in his majority opinion.

On March 19, 1956, more than a year before Warren’s appearance at the Seminary, Justice William O. Douglas wrote to Lamm that he had read the essay and found it “uncommonly suggestive,” praising its “penetrating analysis.”^[106] The letter demonstrates that Lamm’s comparative formulation had already circulated within the Court at the moment of its publication, independently of the later public staging of the JTS symposium. Although the precise circumstances under which Warren first encountered the essay remain unknown, Douglas’s correspondence establishes that the argument had entered the Court’s intellectual orbit well before the 1957 visit.^[107]

Contemporary Jewish press coverage of Miranda indicates that Warren’s footnote was promptly read in genealogical terms. An editorial in the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, titled “Grandpappy of the Fifth Amendment,” presented the decision as evidence that “the ancient Talmudic law” lay at the root of modern constitutional protections. Citing Lamm’s formulation of ein adam mesim atzmo rasha, it described the Talmud as the “great, great, great grandpappy” of the Fifth Amendment and treated the Court’s ruling as a contemporary reaffirmation of an ancient legal principle.^[108] Similarly, the St. Louis Jewish Light interpreted Warren’s reference to “ancient times” as an acknowledgment of Lamm’s 1956 formulation, stressing that halakhah not only anticipated but surpassed the Fifth Amendment in stringency.^[109] In both instances, a comparative footnote was taken as evidence of a historical lineage linking Jewish jurisprudence to American constitutional doctrine.

The JTS episode should therefore be understood not as the origin of Warren’s engagement with Jewish law, but as a conspicuous public moment that consolidated and legitimated a line of juridical reflection already underway.

This pattern of influence and circulation is also visible, albeit indirectly, in the later secondary literature produced within the Seminary’s own intellectual milieu. Aaron Kirschenbaum, whose Self-Incrimination in Jewish Law emerged from the JTS faculty orbit,^[110] neither mentions Warren’s widely publicized 1957 visit to the Seminary nor notes Warren’s later reliance on Norman Lamm’s 1956 essay in his majority opinion in Miranda v. Arizona. He does, however, call attention to Warren’s use of other secondary legal scholarship.^[111] The omission is striking, since Enker and Elsen themselves cite Lamm’s essay on the halakhic analogue to the Fifth Amendment,^[112] thereby situating Lamm’s argument squarely within the very body of legal literature on which Warren drew.

Indeed, Kirschenbaum explicitly situates his own engagement with self-incrimination in the political and legal climate of the early 1950s. Reflecting on his years at JTS, he recalls how he and his fellow students felt an almost compulsive need to render Moses, Hazal, and Maimonides “relevant,” reading classical sources through the selective lens of modern rights discourse. Under the pressures of the McCarthy era, he writes, congressional investigations and compelled testimony rendered the constitutional privilege of silence a matter of urgent moral significance. The formula “I refuse to answer… because my response would constitute self-incrimination” became, for him, not merely a legalism but a moral idiom. It was precisely this Fifth Amendment protection, he explains, that “captivated” him and first drew him into the surrounding legal literature.^[113]

Whatever the precise channels through which Jewish legal analogies entered American constitutional discourse, the Lehman Institute convocation represented a highly visible attempt to stage talmudic law as a public moral resource within elite American civic culture, and it was precisely this institutional posture that drew Orthodox critique. Yet the controversy surrounding the Lehman Institute and the 1957 Warren convocation was not without precedent. From the mid-1930s onward, Louis Finkelstein’s efforts to reposition the Jewish Theological Seminary as a locus of public moral and cultural authority had already provoked sustained criticism from Orthodox and right-wing observers, who viewed such initiatives as compromising rabbinic integrity in pursuit of external validation. Programs aimed at engaging Christian intellectuals or framing Judaism in universal ethical terms were repeatedly denounced in the Orthodox and Yiddish press as apologetic accommodation, and at times as missionary entanglement. Figures such as Aaron Rosmarin cast these projects as oriented less toward the cultivation of internal rabbinic tradition than toward securing legitimacy before non-Jewish audiences and American cultural elites.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, individuals are occasionally referred to by surname alone, in keeping with established scholarly convention. This practice is adopted solely for stylistic consistency and carries no implication of disrespect. ↑
2. Joseph Berger, “Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, Scholar Devoted to the Talmud, Dies at 94,” The New York Times (18 July 2022): A17. ↑
3. Ibid. ↑
4. See David Weiss Halivni, The Book and The Sword: A Life of Learning In The Shadow of Destruction (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1996); and Netiʻot Ledavid: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni, eds. Yaakov Elman, Ephraim Bezalel Halivni, and Zvi Arie Steinfeld (Jerusalem: Orhot Press, 2004). ↑
5. For the fullest methodological exposition of his theory of Talmudic redaction, see David Weiss Halivni, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, trans. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also H.A. Alexander, “David Halivni and Shamma Friedman: Conflicting Trends in Talmud Criticism,” Conservative Judaism, vol. 39, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 45-57; Ari Bergmann, Halevy, Halivni and the Oral Formation of the Babylonian Talmud (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014) and Ari Bergmann, The Formation of the Talmud: Scholarship and Politics in Yitzhak Isaac Halevy’s Dorot Harishonim (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021); and earlier in Irwin H. Haut, The Talmud as Law or Literature: An Analysis of David W. Halivni’s ‘Mekorot Umasorot’ (New York, Bet Sha’ar Press, 1982). A fuller treatment of Halivni’s method and its reception will be presented in subsequent essays in this series. ↑
6. For the subsequent editions in this series, see David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Seder Nashim (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1969; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Seder Moed, from Yoma to Hagiga (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1975; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Shabbat (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1982; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Eruvin-Pesahim (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1982; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Seder Nashim, second edition (Toronto: Otsereinu, 1992; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Bava Kamma (Toronto: Otsereinu, 1993; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Bava Metzia (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2002; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Introduction to ‘Mekorot u-Masorot’, first edition (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2009; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Introduction to ‘Mekorot u-Masorot’, second edition (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2012; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Sanhedrin, Shavu’ot, Makot, Avodah Zarah, Horayot (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2012; Hebrew); David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Masorot: Zevahim-Menahot (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2023; Hebrew); and see David Weiss Halivni, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, ed. and trans. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↑
7. David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Mesorot: Seder Nashim (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1969; Hebrew). ↑
8. A comprehensive bibliographical listing of Halivni’s writings, including digitized scans, is available on the Academia.edu page (here) curated by Menachem Butler in collaboration with Professor Halivni’s family. ↑
9. Israel Shenker, “A Life in the Talmud,” The New York Times Magazine (11 September 1977): 44-45, 74-82, available here. ↑
10. Margalit Fox, “Israel Shenker, 82, a Reporter With the Instincts of a Scholar,” The New York Times (17 June 2007): 23. ↑
11. Ibid. ↑
12. Israel Shenker, “Groucho, at 81, Discusses Favorite Topic- Women,” The New York Times (4 May 1972): 50; Israel Shenker, “Groucho Marx Uses Room Service to Press Suit,” The New York Times (5 June 1975): 40. ↑
13. Israel Shenker, “Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight,” The New York Times (6 April 1971): 48. ↑
14. Israel Shenker, “Former Chomsky Disciples Hurl Harsh Words at the Master,” The New York Times (10 September 1972): 70. ↑
15. Israel Shenker, “The Old Magician at Home,” The New York Times Book Review (9 January 1972): 2. ↑
16. Israel Shenker, “Picasso, 90 Today, Assayed By Critic, Curator, 3 Artists,” The New York Times (25 October 1971): 42. ↑
17. Israel Shenker, “Asimov, ‘on Fire to Explain,’ Writes 100th Book – About Himself,” The New York Times (18 October 1969): 35; Israel Shenker, “I.B. Singer As Traveler,” The New York Times (13 March 1983): 66-70. ↑
18. Israel Shenker, “A Religious Zionist Urges Compromise on Occupied Lands,” The New York Times (15 June 1978): 12. For contemporaneous coverage of the Oz V’Shalom movement – founded in response to Gush Emunim – see “Orthodox Group in Israel Forming Peace Movement to Oppose Gush Emunim,” The Jewish Week (11 June 1978): 24. ↑
19. Israel Shenker, “Professor, 80, Looks to Volume 18 of Jewish History,” The New York Times (26 May 1975): 31. ↑
20. Israel Shenker, “Solomon Zeitlin, Long a Professor of History and Rabbinics, Dies,” The New York Times (30 December 1976): 26. ↑
21. Israel Shenker, “Shabuoth Group Sifts Gossamer Threads of Torah, Particularly the Ten Commandments,” The New York Times (24 May 1969): 25; Israel Shenker, “Rabbi Gives Views on Birth Control: Cites Jewish Law and Bible on Marital Ethics,” The New York Times (30 November 1969): 50; Israel Shenker, “Rabbi Finkelstein to Retire; Joy of Study Undiminished,” The New York Times (28 September 1971): 41; Israel Shenker, “Two Are Named as Heads of the Jewish Theological Seminary,” The New York Times (28 October 1971): 43; Israel Shenker, “Rabbi to Give Nixon a Kingly Blessing,” The New York Times (19 January 1973): 16; Israel Shenker, “Adele Ginzberg, at 90, Says, ‘So What?’,” The New York Times (16 May 1976): 50; Israel Shenker, “Japanese Christian Is Awarded A Doctorate by Jewish Seminary,” The New York Times (31 May 1977): 33. ↑
22. See also Shenker’s profile of Rabbi Benjamin Kamenetzky, son of the renowned Torah scholar Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, who fielded religious inquiries through a public telephone ‘Hot Line to the Rabbi’, in Israel Shenker, “On Wednesday, the Rabbis Answered the Phones,” The New York Times (19 May 1978): B1. ↑
23. See also Israel Shenker, “Deli Waiters Turn Polite for the 4th,” The New York Times (5 July 1969): 38; Israel Shenker, “Delicatessen Puts Clock Back 20 Years,” The New York Times (12 March 1974): 41; Israel Shenker, “For Customers Over 65, The Food Is Half-Price,” The New York Times (25 September 1974): 46; and Israel Shenker, “In Delis, 2d Ave. Is a Palace,” The New York Times (22 April 1977): C19. ↑
24. There were, of course, rare exceptions. See, for example, Israel Shenker, “Knishes and Latkes, Yes! But Chicken Wellington?” The New York Times (10 March 1971): 45; Israel Shenker, “Taste for Business Builds Brooklyn Knish Empire,” The New York Times (9 May 1971): 80; and Israel Shenker, “They Sing in Praise of Matzoh Brei,” The New York Times (19 November 1973): 44. ↑
25. Including, for example, Israel Shenker, “Ideological Labels Changing Along With the Label-Makers,” The New York Times (12 November 1970): 45,48; Israel Shenker, “Man and Machine Match Minds at M.I.T.: 5th Conference on Artificial Intelligence Seeks Ways to Smarter Computers,” The New York Times (27 August 1977): 8; Israel Shenker, “Lowell’s Sacco-Vanzetti Papers Are Opened After 50 Years,” The New York Times (10 December 1977): 12; Israel Shenker, “Freiheit Editor’s 75th Birthday Party Is in a Class by Itself: ‘Preserving the Language’,” The New York Times (12 February 1978), 48; Israel Shenker, “Webster, Noah (1758-1843): A Clearly Defined Reputation,” The New York Times (14 April 1978): B1, B5. ↑
26. Israel Shenker, “Behind the Scenes at the Savoy,” The New York Times (23 June 1985): 19, 36. ↑
27. Israel Shenker, “Lonely Sea Gate’s Streets Still Belong to Its People,” The New York Times (2 January 1972): A6; Israel Shenker, “Despair Fills Lower East Side Synagogues,” The New York Times (19 March 1974): 4; Israel Shenker, “What’s Nu? Bagel-and-Bus Tours of Jewish New York,” The New York Times (5 May 1976): 89. ↑
28. Israel Shenker, “The Miraculous Cheeseless Cheesecake: The Cheesecake Without Cheese,” The New York Times (5 July 1978): C1, C7. ↑
29. Israel Shenker, “The Twerski Tradition: 10 Generations of Rabbis in the Family,” The New York Times (23 July 1978): 38. See also Edward Reichman and Menachem Butler, “The Medical Training and Yet Another (Previously Unknown) Legacy of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, zt”l,” The Seforim Blog (2 February 2021), available here. ↑
30. Israel Shenker, “Hasidic Group Marks Its 100th Year,” The New York Times (2 June 1971): 46; Israel Shenker, “Hasidic Feat: Simple as Aleph, Beth, Gimel,” The New York Times (3 November 1977): A18. ↑
31. Israel Shenker, “Brooklyn Brothers Use Scribes’ Ancient Art in Torah Repairs,” The New York Times (27 July 1977): B1. ↑
32. Israel Shenker, “It’s Onward and Uptown For Hebrew Publishing,” The New York Times (1 August 1976): 40. ↑
33. Israel Shenker, “Dreydl Makers in City Preparing for What’s a Dreydl? You Shouldn’t Ask,” The New York Times (28 September 1970): 45; and Israel Shenker, “C.C.N.Y’s President Loses Dreydl Crown in Spin-Off,” The New York Times (7 December 1972): 106. ↑
34. Israel Shenker, “Brides and Bar Mitzvahs Bring a Rush on Yarmulkes,” The New York Times (20 June 1977): 31 ↑
35. Israel Shenker, “The Day the Waldorf Went Kosher,” The New York Times (23 Dec 1977); 20; and Israel Shenker, “With Them, It’s Always Strictly Kosher,” The New York Times (15 April 1979): 32-33, 36-38, 40, 42. ↑
36. Israel Shenker, “On El Al, They’d Rather Walk: It’s Up and Down the Aisles, Even at Meal Times,” The New York Times (15 November 1968): 93. ↑
37. Israel Shenker, “Isaac Singer’s Perspective on God and Man,” The New York Times (23 October 1968): 49, 94; Israel Shenker, “A Bit of Reality by I.B. Singer and Son,” The New York Times (17 April 1970): 44; and Israel Shenker, “The Man Who Talked Back to God: Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-91,” The New York Times Book Review (11 August 1991): 11. ↑
38. Israel Shenker, “Harvard’s Resident Sage Marks 85th Birthday Today,” The New York Times (2 November 1972): 45, 86, available here. He later wrote Wolfson’s obituary in Israel Shenker, “Harry Wolfson, 86, Philosopher of Religion at Harvard, is Dead,” The New York Times (21 September 1974): 32, available here. For another contemporaneous tribute, see Mark Jay Mirsky, “Our Greatest Sage: Elegy for Harry Wolfson,” The Village Voice (13 January 1975): 39-41, available here. ↑
39. Israel Shenker, “Lubavitch Rabbi Marks His 70th Year With Call for ‘Kindness’,” The New York Times (27 March 1972): 39. ↑
40. Israel Shenker, “Israeli Historian Denies Jews Yielded to the Nazis ‘Like Sheep’,” The New York Times (6 May 1970): 2; Israel Shenker, “How Yiddish Survives At 2 New York Schools,” The New York Times (16 January 1974): 68; Israel Shenker, “An Awesome Reliving of Auschwitz Unfolds at St. John’s,” The New York Times (4 June 1974): 39; Israel Shenker, “The Holocaust: Did God Want It?” The New York Times (6 June 1974): 38; Israel Shenker, “The Holocaust Was ‘Radical Counter-Testimony’ to Religion,” The New York Times (9 June 1974): E5; Israel Shenker, “Scholars at Holocaust Conference Here Seek Answers to the Unanswerable,” The New York Times (4 March 1975): 13; Israel Shenker, “Jewish Cultural Arts: The Big Debate,” The New York Times (13 January 1976): 42; Israel Shenker, “Diverse Views Given on U.S. Jewish Experience,” The New York Times (22 March 1976): 55; and Israel Shenker, “Conference Ponders Who’s a Jew and Why,” The New York Times (26 May 1976): 18; ↑
41. Israel Shenker, Coat of Many Colors: Pages from Jewish Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985). ↑
42. Israel Shenker, “Israeli Scholar Preparing New Edition of Talmud,” The New York Times (19 September 1971): 78. ↑
43. And on the controversy two decades later on Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’ edition of the Talmud, see Haim Shapiro, “Talmudist Continues Down Path of Peace,” The Jewish Week (25 August 1989): 2, 31; Leon Wieseltier, “Unlocking the Rabbis’ Secrets: Review of ‘The Talmud’, by Adin Steinsaltz,” The New York Times Book Review (17 December 1989): 3, 31; Haim Shapiro, “Moving Up The Charts: Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s English Translation of the Talmud is Becoming A Surprisingly Hot Seller Abroad,” The Jerusalem Post Magazine (9 March 1990): 7-8; Jonathan Sacks, “Steinsaltz the Polymath,” The London Jewish Chronicle (2 March 1990): 27; Jacob Neusner, “Letter – Steinsaltz’s Say-So,” The Forward (7 December 1990): 6; Jacob Neusner, “Along with the Sizzle, Plenty of Beef: Review of ‘The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, vol. 1: Tractate Bava Metzia. Part 1’, by Adin Steinsaltz,” in Jacob Neusner, ed., Approaches to Ancient Judaism: New Series, vol. 2 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 57-65; Emanuel Rackman, “Carved in Stone: Some Powerful Rabbis Won’t Accept New Talmud Interpretations,” The Jewish Week (22 February 1991): 31; and Chaim Rapoport, “On Publishing the Talmud in Translation and With New Commentaries,” Ohr Yisroel, vol. 13, no. 2 (December 2007): 53-88 (Hebrew). ↑
44. Israel Shenker, “Israeli Scholar Preparing New Edition of Talmud,” The New York Times (19 September 1971): 78. Professor Louis Finkelstein held a very different view on another aid to Talmudic study, a concordance of the Talmud. In that instance, he praised the work describing it as “important as the Dead Sea Scrolls,” because “except for the rare scholar” it was nearly impossible to identify parallel, and potentially related, Talmudic terms. Perhaps JTS sponsorship of the concordance may account for the different treatments of the two works. See Harry Gilroy, “Index to Talmud is Reported Half Finished,” The New York Times (1 April 1968): 42. As well, JTS was involved in the publication of the El Am Talmud. See Moses Eskolosky, “New Key to Talmud’s Treasure Trove,” The United Synagogue Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (July 1965): 14-17; and Elie Wiesel, “A Proposal on How to Learn Talmud with Children,” Forverts (22 September 1967): 2, 5 (Yiddish). ↑
45. Israel Shenker, “Responsa: The Law as Seen by Rabbis for 1,000 Years,” The New York Times (5 May 1975): 33, 61. ↑
46. Israel Shenker, “Hats Are Off to Kremlinologists, an Endangered Species in Era of Détente,” The New York Times (20 September 1974): 41, 77. ↑
47. Israel Shenker, “When a Patient’s Dreams Put Him to Sleep, He May Defy Analysis,” The New York Times (17 December 1976): 29. ↑
48. Israel Shenker, Coat of Many Colors: Pages from Jewish Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 74. ↑
49. Moshe Feinstein, “Introduction,” in Iggerot Moshe, vol. 1 (New York: New York: Noble Book Press Corp., 1959), 3-4 (Hebrew). ↑
50. See also Tovia Preschel, “Profile of Rav Moshe Feinstein,” The Jewish Press (27 July 1962): 3; Emanuel Rackman, “Halachic Progress: Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s Igrot Moshe on Even ha-Ezer,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, vol. 13, no. 3 (Summer 1964): 365-373; Aaron Kirschenbaum, “Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s Responsa: A Major Halachic Event,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, vol. 15, no. 3 (Summer 1966): 364-373, available here; “Orthodox Jewish Leader Points To A Remedy For Today’s Many Problems,” The American Examiner (16 April 1970): 1-2; Marvin Schick, “Rabbi Moshe Feinstein: A Genius in Learning, Service and Loving Kindness,” The Long Island Jewish World (17 April 1986): 6-7; Harel Gordin, “Torah Sage of America: Rabbi Moses Feinstein,” in Benjamin Brown and Nissim Leon, eds., The Gedolim: Leaders Who Shaped the Israeli Haredi Jewry (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2017), 430-455 (Hebrew); and Aviad Hacohen, “Everything Is according to the American Custom: A New Custom for a New Country,” in Joseph Isaac Lifshitz, Naomi Feuchtwanger-Sarig, Simha Goldin, Jean Baumgarten, and Hasia Diner, eds., Minhagim: Custom and Practice in Jewish Life (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 235-324, available here. ↑
51. Ira Wolfman, “Israel Shenker, A Jewish Writer, Sweet and Sour,” The Long Island Jewish World (24 July 1986): 16. ↑
52. Baruch Halpern, From Gods to God: The Dynamics of Iron Age Cosmologies (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 7. ↑
53. Margalit Fox, “Israel Shenker, 82, a Reporter With the Instincts of a Scholar,” The New York Times (17 June 2007): 23. ↑
54. Ira Wolfman, “Israel Shenker, A Jewish Writer, Sweet and Sour,” The Long Island Jewish World (24 July 1986): 16. ↑
55. Israel Shenker, “In Wales, A Bookworm’s Holiday,” The New York Times (2 June 1985): 32. ↑
56. Israel Shenker, Words and Their Masters (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974); Israel Shenker, Harmless Drudges: Wizards of Language: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Bronxville: Barnhardt, 1979). ↑
57. Israel Shenker, Following Tocqueville through Joyce’s Dublin (New York: Random House, 1972). ↑
58. Israel Shenker, In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). ↑
59. Israel Shenker and Mary Shenker, As Good as Golda: The Warmth and Wisdom of Israel’s Prime Minister (New York: Random House, 1970). ↑
60. Yitzhak M. Shmueli, “A Cry of Alarm Concerning the New School of ‘Talmud Critics’!” Beys Yaakov, vol. 10, no. 4 [#116] (1969): 4-5 (Hebrew), available here, with translation in Appendix 1 below. ↑
61. See Shmuel Ashkenazi, Iggeret Shmuel, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 2021), 404 (Hebrew), who subjects another article by “Rabbi Yitzhak M. Shmueli” to sustained critique, describing it as a conspiratorial construction lacking evidentiary support. Through close examination of manuscripts, historical context, and philological detail, Ashkenazi argues that Shmueli’s claim of deliberate textual manipulation for anti-Hasidic purposes is unsupported and rests on conjecture rather than demonstrable proof; see ibid., 401–404. The episode is instructive insofar as it illustrates a broader feature of Shmueli’s polemical style. Apart from this case, Shmueli published only a small number of additional essays on the same figure, most of which are similarly rhetorical and accusatory in tone rather than analytically substantiated; see Beys Yaakov, nos. 113–114 (September 1968): 28-30, 36 (Hebrew); and Beys Yaakov, nos. 160–161 (May 1973): 4-6 (Hebrew). ↑
62. David Weiss Halivni, Mekorot u-Mesorot: Seder Nashim (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1969; Hebrew). ↑
63. Yitzhak M. Shmueli’s article against Halivni in Beys Yaakov constitutes an explicit counter-intervention to the laudatory presentation of David Weiss Halivni’s work published days earlier in Menashe Unger, “A Survivor of Auschwitz Creates a New Method in Talmudic Interpretation,” Der Tog (10 March 1969): 5-8 (Yiddish), translated below in Appendix 2. Unger’s review introduced Mekorot u-Mesorot to a broad Yiddish-reading public, highlighting Halivni’s Holocaust biography, his punctilious Orthodox observance, and, above all, his standing as a distinguished disciple of Professor Saul Lieberman. Framed in these terms, the article suggested that Halivni’s method warranted acceptance within Orthodox circles, treating Lieberman’s imprimatur and Halivni’s personal piety as sufficient markers of legitimacy. It is precisely this public strategy of legitimation, rather than the mere circulation of a scholarly monograph, that the Beys Yaakov article appears designed to contest. ↑
64. See, for example, the Dan Rabinowitz, “Between Authority and Inquiry: Beyond the Masthead of the Beys Yaakov Journal, 1923-1980 – Part 1,” The Seforim Blog (22 December 2025), available here. ↑
65. On this motif, see Zev Eleff and Menachem Butler, “Moses Mendelssohn and the Orthodox Mind,” The Lehrhaus (9 January 2017), available here; see, now, Yoav Schaefer, “Haskalah in Berlin: Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and the Foundations of Reform Judaism,” in Stanley M. Davids and Leah Hochman, eds., Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought (New York: CCAR Press, 2023), 147-164. ↑
66. For a more differentiated historical account of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its complex relationship to modern biblical criticism, see Edward Breuer and Hanan Gafni, “Jewish Biblical Scholarship between Tradition and Innovation,” in Magne Sæbø, ed., Hebrew Bible-Old Testament, The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 3: From Modernism to Post-Modernism (The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 262-303.These studies present a more differentiated genealogy than the schematic lineage invoked by Shmueli. ↑
67. David Weiss Halivni, “Talmud: Source Criticism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 21 (1963): 645, available here. ↑
68. For documentation of the 1957 Lehman Institute convocation inaugurating the Lehman Institute of Ethics, including Chief Justice Warren’s participation, contemporaneous press coverage, later recollections, and the subsequent circulation of talmudic self-incrimination discourse within Supreme Court circles, see Appendix 3 (“The 1957 Warren Convocation and the Circulation of Talmudic Self-Incrimination Discourse”). ↑
69. Aaron Rosmarin, An Answer (To the Polemic surrounding the Jewish Theological Seminary) (New York: 1943; Yiddish). ↑
70. Aaron Rosmarin, “Whither the Jewish Theological Seminary?” The Jewish Forum, vol. 17, no. 8 (September 1934): 239-246; Aaron Rosmarin, “Whither the Jewish Theological Seminary?” The Jewish Forum, vol. 17, no. 10 (November 1934): 315-319; Aaron Rosmarin, “Whither the Jewish Theological Seminary?” The Jewish Forum, vol. 18, no. 1 (January 1935): 6-8. ↑
71. Aaron Rosmarin, “‘Hold-up’ on Sukkot,” Der Tog (28 September 1934): 9 (Yiddish). ↑
72. Aaron Rosmarin, “American Jewry Awake,” The Jewish Spectator, vol. 4, no. 1 (November 1938): 18-21; Aaron Rosmarin, “Editorial: Missionaries in a Rabbinical Seminary,” The Jewish Spectator, vol. 7, no. 2 (December 1941): 4-5; Aaron Rosmarin, “Is The Jewish Theological Seminary of America Becoming A Den of Missionaries?” The Jewish Spectator, vol. 7, no. 3 (January 1942): 13-16; Aaron Rosmarin, “Editorial: ‘Honors’ for Dr. Finkelstein,” The Jewish Spectator, vol. 13, no. 2 (December 1947): 5; Louis Feinberg and Aaron Rosmarin, “Post-Scripts to the Finkelstein Controversy,” The Jewish Spectator, vol. 13, no. 4 (February 1948): 29-30. ↑
73. Dr. Aaron Rosmarin’s polemical posture is further complicated by the later fact that he refused to grant his wife a gett, a biographical episode that bears directly on the themes of halakhic coercion and moral accountability that animate his broader critique of rabbinic authority. See Marc B. Shapiro, “Saul Lieberman and his Ketubah, Driving on Shabbat, an Unusual Marriage Practice, Girls born on Friday, and More,” The Seforim Blog (28 January 2026), available here, and the forthcoming essay by Aviad Hacohen and Menachem Butler, “Trude Weiss-Rosmarin as a Philosopher of Halakhic Accountability: The Agunah Crisis and the Lieberman Clause in Postwar America,” which situates Weiss-Rosmarin’s polemic against rabbinic institutional impotence within the longer history of Orthodox–Conservative conflict over authority, jurisdiction, and moral responsibility in Jewish divorce law. Although Rosmarin’s anti-JTS campaign spanned more than a decade and generated a substantial polemical corpus across Yiddish and English venues, it has not yet been reconstructed systematically as an object of intellectual or institutional history; a full study of his sustained polemic against the Seminary remains a scholarly desideratum. ↑
74. For extended discussion of the Ḥazon Ish’s approach to manuscripts and textual emendation, see Moshe Bleich, “The Role of Manuscripts in Halakhic Decision-Making: Hazon Ish, His Precursors and Contemporaries,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 22-55; Benjamin Brown, “The Method of Study of the Ḥazon Ish in Contrast to the Approach of Critical Scholarship,” in The Ḥazon Ish: Halakhist, Believer and Leader of the Haredi Revolution (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011), 384-397 (Hebrew); and Hannah Kehat, “Fortifying the Status of Torah in the Thought of the Ḥazon Ish,” in Aviad Hacohen, Yitzchak Avi Roness, and Menachem Butler, eds., Milḥemet Mitzvah, vol. 2: Religious Leadership and Halakhic Responsibility in the Military Service Debate (Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, 2025), 157-241. ↑
75. The Ḥazon Ish’s position will be analyzed in greater detail in our forthcoming article at The Seforim Blog. ↑
76. See David Golinkin, “Was Professor Saul Lieberman ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Conservative’?” The Seforim Blog (2 December 2014), available here; and Tuvia Preschel, “R. Saul Lieberman and His Scholarly Work,” in Ma’amarei Tuvia: Reshimot u-Ma’amarim, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 2017), 155-56. Preschel’s study remains, to date, the most reliable biographical treatment of Lieberman, albeit partial. By contrast, Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon J. Spiro, Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005), authored by two of Lieberman’s students, fails to do justice to either the man or his scholarship. Despite its publication by an academic press, the volume is largely hagiographic in character, relying heavily on unverified anecdotes and making little effort to reconcile these with the historical record. The authors’ uncritical devotion to Lieberman results in significant apologetic distortion, aimed at rehabilitating his standing among his students and within segments of the Orthodox world. For a more balanced and methodologically rigorous analysis of Lieberman’s complex relationship with Orthodox Judaism, see Marc B. Shapiro, Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2007).A comprehensive critical biography of Lieberman and a full assessment of his scholarly legacy remain a desideratum. For now, see the Festschriften for Saul Lieberman in ha-Doar, vol. 43, no. 23 (5 April 1963; Hebrew); Researches in Talmudic Literature in Honor of the Eightieth Birthday of Saul Lieberman (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1983), (Hebrew); Saul Lieberman Memorial Volume (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 1983; Hebrew); Saul Lieberman Memorial Volume, ed. Shamma Friedman (New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005; Hebrew); Saul Lieberman (1898-1983): Talmudic Scholar, ed. Meir Lubetski (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), and see also Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon Spiro, Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005), and Marc B. Shapiro, Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2007).Professor Aviad Hacohen is at work on a biography of Professor Saul Lieberman; for now, 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. ↑
77. 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); and 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), among other sources. ↑
78. Aviad Hacohen, “‘A Lithuanian Mind in Its Lithuanian Essence, From Volozhin to Jerusalem’: Rabbi Shaul Lieberman’s Intellectual Kinship with the Legacy of Lithuanian Torah and Its Bearers,” in Martin S. Cohen, ed., Shir Ha-Ma’alot L’David: Essays in Jewish Studies in Honor of Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin (Jerusalem: Machon Schechter, 2025), 101-139, available here. ↑
79. Saul Lieberman, “Letter to S.A. HaLevi and the editors of ha-Pardes,” in Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, Kitvei ha-Gaon Rabbi Yehiel Ya’akov Weinberg, vol. 2, ed. Marc B. Shapiro (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2003), 449-450 (Hebrew). ↑
80. Marc B. Shapiro, Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2006), esp. chs. 2-4. ↑
81. 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). ↑
82. David Weiss Halivni, “Talmud: Source Criticism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 21 (1963): 645, available here. ↑
83. See Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1994), s.v. סער, סערה; cf. modern Hebrew dictionaries, s.v. שערוריה, which define the term as scandal, public outrage, or moral tumult. ↑
84. Koehler and Baumgartner, Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon, s.v. תועבה (denoting what is religiously abhorrent, especially in contexts of idolatry or forbidden practice); s.v. שקץ (a detestable or ritually impure object, frequently in cultic contexts). ↑
85. See b. Menahot 29a, Rashi and Tosafot ad loc., s.v. Qotzo shel yod. For the modern afterlife of this rabbinic proverb, see Ben-Ami Feingold, “Kotzo Shel Yod: The Anatomy of a Satire,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, vol. 2 (1983): 73-103 (Hebrew); and Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 125-128. ↑
86. See Yossef Fund, A Banner for Youngsters: The Agudat Israel Children’s Press (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2021), 67-71 (Hebrew). ↑
87. See Yossef Fund, Separation or Participation? Agudat Israel Confronting Zionism and the State of Israel (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2009; Hebrew); and Yossef Fund, Assemble Youngsters of Yehuda!: The Youth Movements of Agudat Israel (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2023; Hebrew). ↑
88. For a foundational analysis of the internal intellectual dialectic at JTS, between an elite philological-textual tradition and a more publicly engaged mode of scholarship oriented toward translating rabbinic learning into contemporary civic and ethical discourse, and for an account that explicitly situates Finkelstein’s mid-century initiatives within that institutional tension, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “Two Traditions of Seminary Scholarship,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 2: Beyond the Academy (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 54-80. ↑
89. See Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon Spiro, Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005), 197-199. ↑
90. Letter quoted in Ibid., 197-198. ↑
91. Harvey E. Goldberg, “Becoming History: Perspectives on the Seminary Faculty at Mid‑Century,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 1: The Making of an Institution of Jewish Higher Learning (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 355-437, esp. 371. ↑
92. Louis Finkelstein, “Earl Warren’s Inquiry into Talmudic Law,” in Earl Warren: The Chief Justiceship (Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California, 1977), 1-24, esp. 4-5, recalling Warren’s weekend at JTS and describing Saul Lieberman’s lecture on the talmudic prohibition of self-incrimination and its relevance to Anglo-American constitutional protections. ↑
93. For the address delivered by the event’s principal patron, emphasizing the civic and moral framing of the convocation, see Simon H. Rifkind, “The Law as a Moral Force,” The Reconstructionist, vol. 23, no. 13 (1 November 1957): 8-12; reprinted in full, including the complete opening remarks, in Simon H. Rifkind, One Man’s Word: Selected Works of Simon H. Rifkind, vol. 1, eds. Adam Bellow and William Keens (New York: Keens Co., 1986), 367-374. Rifkind opened: “The annual convocations of this institution of higher learning are always grand occasions. To this convocation, however, I should like to attribute special virtues. First, because it is graced by the presence of the Chief Justice of the United States, who is also the most beloved citizen of our land. Second, because of its theme, since it is dedicated to the concept of the ‘law as a moral force.’ I feel obliged to recite the traditional prayer of gratitude. She-heḥeyanu ve-kiyyemanu ve-higgiʿanu la-zeman ha-zeh.” ↑
94. Richard Amper, “Warren Studies Talmudic Law Here,” The New York Times (14 September 1957): 1, 10, reporting that Chief Justice Earl Warren “enrolled” at the Jewish Theological Seminary for a three-day program on Jewish law and its contemporary relevance, including lectures by Louis Finkelstein and Saul Lieberman and Warren’s attendance at Sabbath services. ↑
95. Ibid.; and see Harvey E. Goldberg, “Becoming History: Perspectives on the Seminary Faculty at Mid‑Century,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 1: The Making of an Institution of Jewish Higher Learning (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 355-437, esp. 371-372. ↑
96. “Truman, Chief Justice Warren Attend Jewish Seminary Lectures,” JTA Daily New Bulletin, vol. 24, no. 178 (16 September 1957): 4. ↑
97. For contextual discussion of the Warren-JTS episode as part of a broader mid-century encounter between American legal culture and Jewish studies, see Shira Billet, “Harry S. Truman’s Bible and Earl Warren’s Talmud: A Forgotten Story in the Encounter between American Law and Jewish Studies,” Dine Israel, vol. 38 (2024): 11*-36*, available here. ↑
98. The title of this lecture was noted in “To Discuss Moral Force,” New Jersey Jewish News (13 September 1957): 2, available here. ↑
99. Shalom Spiegel, Amos versus Amaziah: Address Delivered at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America Weekend Convocation on “Law as a Moral Force,” September 14, 1957 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1957). ↑
100. See also Harry S. Truman’s letter to Louis Finkelstein, Sept. 17, 1957, as found in the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in which Truman wrote that he had long known Amos 7 “word for word” and added: “I wish you would tell that able and distinguished rabbi [Shalom Spiegel] that I have never had a more pleasant experience than listening to his lecture.” This letter is quoted in Shira Billet, “Harry S. Truman’s Bible and Earl Warren’s Talmud: A Forgotten Story in the Encounter between American Law and Jewish Studies,” Dine Israel, vol. 38 (2024): 11*-36*, esp. 12*n9, available here. ↑
101. “Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Studies Gemara at the Jewish Theological Seminary,” Der Tog (15 September 1957): 1-2 (Yiddish). ↑
102. See Hershel Schachter, MiPninei HaRav (Jerusalem: Flatbush Beth Hamedrosh, 2001), 223 (Hebrew), and then further in Hershel Schachter, “In a Court of Law, a Person Cannot Render Himself an Evildoer,” in Eretz ha-Tzvi (New York: The Michael Scharf Publication Trust of Yeshiva University Press, 1992), 237-240 (Hebrew). In an essay at The Seforim Blog, Yaacov Sasson notes that Lieberman’s reported explanation is difficult to square with Makkot 13b, which states explicitly that repentance does not absolve one from liability to capital punishment administered by an earthly court. He suggests a possible distinction between repentance prior to gmar din and repentance after sentencing, but stresses that such a harmonization is strained, departs from the plain sense of the sugya, and sits uneasily with the dominant trajectory of later halakhic interpretation. See Yaacov Sasson, “Gems from Rav Herzog’s Archive (Part 1 of 2): Giyus, Professor Lieberman and More,” The Seforim Blog (23 May 2018), available here. ↑
103. Newton M. Roemer, “Chief Justice Warren Studies Talmud,” New Jersey State Bar Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1957): 15. ↑
104. Norman Lamm, “The Fifth Amendment and Its Equivalent in the Halakha,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter 1956): 53-59. ↑
105. Rabbi Norman Lamm’s engagement with Fifth Amendment discourse predates his 1956 essay and can already be traced in his public sermonic rhetoric during the height of McCarthy-era investigations. In 1954, the Springfield Union reported on a Sabbath sermon delivered by Lamm on the occasion of Albert Einstein’s seventy-fifth birthday, in which he praised Einstein’s resistance to Senator Joseph McCarthy and explicitly invoked the Fifth Amendment as a constitutional idiom of principled restraint under political pressure. The report describes Lamm’s interpretation of Einstein’s guarded response to congressional inquiry (“probably he was wrong”) as a lesson in the moral and civic meaning of the privilege against self-incrimination. See “Einstein’s Courage in Challenge to ‘Demagogue’ McCarthy Hailed,” Springfield Union (13 March 1954): 23. ↑
106. William O. Douglas to Norman Lamm, “Letter from Justice Douglas about Article on the Fifth Amendment and Halacha,” (19 March 1956), The Lamm Legacy, available here. ↑
107. Alan M. Dershowitz, Chutzpah (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 365 n.4, points that both Miranda v. Arizona, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 1619 n.27 (1966), and Garrity v. New Jersey, 87 S. Ct. 616, 627 n.5 (1967), cited Rabbi Norman Lamm’s article. In each instance the reference appears in a comparative-law footnote and serves an illustrative rather than doctrinal function. The citations demonstrate that Lamm’s argument was known to members of the Court and regarded as jurisprudentially suggestive, but they do not, standing alone, establish that halakhic doctrine exerted a determinative influence on the Court’s constitutional analysis. ↑
108. “Editorial: Grandpappy of the Fifth Amendment,” Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (5 August 1966): 6. ↑
109. “Editorial: Jewish Law Revisited,” St. Louis Jewish Light (3 August 1966): 4. ↑
110. Aaron Kirschenbaum, Self-Incrimination in Jewish Law (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1970). ↑
111. Specifically, to Arnold N. Enker and Sheldon H. Elsen, “Counsel for the Suspect: Massiah v. United States and Escobedo v. Illinois,” Minnesota Law Review, vol. 49, no. 1 (November 1964): 47-91. ↑
112. Ibid., 67n66, they cite Norman Lamm, “The Fifth Amendment and Its Equivalent in the Halakha,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter 1956): 53-59. See the retrospective in Samuel J. Levine, “Rabbi Lamm, the Fifth Amendment, and Comparative Jewish Law,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, vol. 53, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 146-154. ↑
113. Yet his autobiographical account of those same years, when he was at JTS, makes no reference to Earl Warren’s 1957 visit, an omission that bears directly on the interpretive frame through which his work might otherwise plausibly be read. Aaron Kirschenbaum, Self-Incrimination in Jewish Law (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1970), which emerged from the Seminary’s intellectual orbit, could easily be situated within the narrative of Warren’s celebrated encounter with rabbinic jurisprudence. Kirschenbaum himself, however, locates the origins of his interest elsewhere: in the political and legal pressures of the McCarthy era and in the contemporaneous moral salience of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. See Aaron Kirschenbaum, Autobiography (Tel Aviv: Olam Hadash, 2014), esp. 92 (Hebrew). ↑

An Unpublished 1966 Memorandum
from Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan Answers Questions on Jewish Theology

Marc B. Shapiro and Menachem Butler

Professor Marc B. Shapiro holds the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton, and is the author of many books on Jewish history and theology. He is a frequent contributor at the Seforim blog.

Mr. Menachem Butler is Program Fellow for Jewish Legal Studies at The Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. He is an Editor at Tablet Magazine and a Co-Editor at the Seforim Blog.

Over the last ten years Professor Alan Brill has written a series of blogposts, as well as a recent scholarly article on the perennially interesting, yet historically mysterious, rabbinic theologian, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (1934-1983).[1] It was from these posts that many have learned about what Kaplan was doing before he burst onto the wider Jewish literary scene in the early 1970s through his writings and public lectures. He passed away in 1983 at the age of 48.[2]

Rabbi Aryeh (Leonard M.) Kaplan was born in the Bronx in 1934, and studied at Mesivta Torah Vodaath in New York, and at the Mirrer Yeshiva in New York and in Jerusalem. In 1953, 20-year-old Aryeh Kaplan joined the group of students assembled by Rabbi Simcha Wasserman under the guidance of Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky to establish a yeshiva in Los Angeles,[3] and three years later in 1956 received his rabbinic ordination (Yoreh Yoreh, Yadin Yadin) from Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel of the Mirrer Yeshiva of Jerusalem, and from the Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel. After receiving his ordination, Aryeh Kaplan began his undergraduate studies and, in 1961, earned a B.A. in physics from the University of Louisville, and two years later, an M.S. degree in Physics from the University of Maryland, in 1963. While studying towards his undergraduate degree, Aryeh Kaplan taught elementary school at the pluralistic Eliahu Academy in Louisville, and corresponded with Rabbi Moshe Feinstein about some of the challenges that he encountered.[4] He then worked for four years as a Nuclear Physicist at the National Bureau of Statistics in Washington DC.

In February 1965, Rabbi Kaplan and his wife and their two small children moved to Mason City, Iowa, where he was invited to serve as a pulpit rabbi at Adas Israel Synagogue, a non-Orthodox congregation with forty member families. It would be his first pulpit. He remained at that pulpit until July 1966. During his time in Mason City, Rabbi Kaplan and his wife were very active in all aspects of their synagogue activities. Rabbi Kaplan led services and delivered a sermon each week at the Friday Night Service at Adas Israel Synagogue, hosted a Talmud Torah and taught about Jewish tradition to the youth in the community. He was a member of the National Conference on Christians and Jews, and regularly hosted visiting religious groups to the synagogue and participated in interfaith meetings and on panels alongside religious leaders of other faiths. In all of his delivered remarks, Rabbi Kaplan would type out each sermon prior to its delivery and maintain copies of these addresses within his personal archives; to date, these sermons have not yet been published.

It was during Rabbi Kaplan’s time in Mason City that he authored a fascinating eleven-page-typescript memorandum, dated February 22, 1966, that, thanks to the research discovery of Menachem Butler, we are privileged to share with the readers of The Seforim Blog in the Appendix to this essay.[5]

Kaplan was responding to questions sent out by the B’nai B’rith Adult Jewish Education bureau in Washington DC on matters of basic Jewish theology.[6] We see from the letter that like many other rabbis who were serving in frontier communities, Kaplan maintained a camaraderie with those among the non-Jewish clergy. He was even a member of the “Ministerial Association,” and together with his wife was “founder and chairman of the local chapter of Ministerial Wives.” As one who often hosted non-Jewish groups at the synagogue, Kaplan was well equipped to place Jewish concepts and practices within a context that would make sense for Christians, and this is clearly seen in how he formulates his answers in the letter.

Although Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s memorandum is self-explanatory, there are a few points of theological interest that are worth calling attention to:

1. Right at the beginning, Kaplan notes that Jews have no official dogmas, and that in many cases Jewish opinions vary widely.

2. Kaplan states unequivocally that Maimonides does not believe in a literal resurrection. In support of this statement he cites Guide 2:27. If all we had were the Commentary on the Mishnah and the Guide, it would make sense to assume that when Maimonides refers to the Resurrection of the Dead that he intends immortality, not literal resurrection. Even the Mishneh Torah can be read this way, and Rabad, in his note on Hilkhot Teshuvah 8:2, criticizes Maimonides in this regard: “The words of this man appear to me to be similar to one who says that there is no resurrection for bodies, but only for souls.” Furthermore, in Hilkhot Teshuvah 3:6, in speaking of the heretics who have no share in the World to Come, Maimonides writes: והכופרים בתחית המתים וביאת הגואל, “Those who deny the Resurrection and the coming of the [messianic] redeemer.” Throughout his works Maimonides is clear that the ultimate reward is the spiritual World to Come. So how could he not mention among the heretics those who deny the World to Come, and only mention those who deny the Resurrection? It appeared obvious to many that when Maimonides wrote “resurrection of the dead” what he really meant is the spiritual “World to Come.”

As noted, if the works mentioned in the previous paragraph were all we had, then one would have good reason to conclude that for Maimonides resurrection of the dead means nothing other than the World to Come. Yet it is precisely because people came to this interpretation that Maimonides wrote his famous Letter on Resurrection in which he states emphatically that he indeed believes in a literal resurrection of the dead, after which the dead will die again and enjoy the spiritual World to Come. It is true that some have not been convinced by the Letter on Resurrection and see it as an apologetic letter that does not give us Maimonides’ true view, but such an approach means that one is accepting a significant level of esotericism in interpreting Maimonides, as we are not now concerned with a passage here or there but with an entire letter that one must assume was only written for the masses. Since Kaplan ignores what Maimonides says in his Letter on Resurrection, I think we must conclude that, at least when he wrote this letter, he did not regard it as reflecting Maimonides’ authentic view.[7] In Kaplan’s later works, there is no hint of such an approach to Maimonides.[8]

3. In discussing Jesus, Kaplan writes: “In this light, we can even regard the miracles ascribed to Jesus to be true, without undermining our own faith, since his message was not to the Jews at all.”[9]

APPENDIX:

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: Response to “Questions Christians Ask Jews” (1966)

[INSERT IMAGES 1-13]

Notes:

[1] See Alan Brill, “Aryeh Kaplan’s Quest for the Lost Jewish Traditions of Science, Psychology and Prophecy,” in Brian Ogren, ed., Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 211-232, available here. See also Tzvi Langermann, “‘Sefer Yesira,’ the Story of a Text in Search of Commentary,” Tablet Magazine (18 October 2017), available here.

[2] A complete biographical portrait of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan remains a scholarly desideratum.

For appreciations of his writings, see “Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: A Tribute,” in The Aryeh Kaplan Reader: The Gift He Left Behind (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1983), 13-17; Pinchas Stolper, “Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan z”l: An Appreciation,” Ten Da’at, vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 8-9; Baruch Rabinowitz, “Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of Aryeh Kaplan, Part 1,” Ten Da’at, vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 9-10; Baruch Rabinowitz, “Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of Aryeh Kaplan, Part 2,” Ten Da’at, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 21-22; and Pinchas Stolper, “Preface,” in Aryeh Kaplan, Immortality, Resurrection, and the Age of the Universe: A Kabbalistic View (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1993), ix-xi, among other writings.

[3] See Nosson Scherman, “Rabbi Mendel Weinbach zt”l and The Malbim,” in A Memorial Tribute to Rabbi Mendel Weinbach, zt”l (Jerusalem: Ohr Sameyach, 2014), 13-14, available here; as well as Nissan Wolpin, “The Yeshiva Comes to Melrose,” The Jewish Horizon (March 1954): 16-17.

[4] See responsum by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein as published in Shu”t Iggerot Moshe, Orah Hayyim, vol. 1 (New York: Noble Book Press, 1959), 159 (no. 98), dated 13 July 1955.

Discovery of additional correspondences between Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan during those years would be of great scholarly interest and of immense historical value.

[5] Menachem Butler is also preparing for publication the typescript text of a sermon (“If This Springs From G*D…”) that Rabbi Kaplan delivered the previous month in January 1966, and where he reveals details about a conversation that he had with Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Project and father of the Atom Bomb.

[6] Menachem Butler writes two interesting details that, though beyond the narrow scope of this essay, are nonetheless of historical worthiness to consider when reading this memorandum:

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s memorandum of February 1966 was written several months *prior* to the famous symposium of “The State of Jewish Belief:” hosted by Commentary in August 1966, and republished shortly-thereafter under the different title The Condition of Jewish Belief: A Symposium Compiled by the Editors of Commentary Magazine (New York: Macmillan, 1966), and reprinted more than two decades later in The Condition of Jewish Belief (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1988). One wonders how Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan might have responded to the five questions sent by Commentary to 38 rabbis and scholars from around North America.

Returning to questions submitted by B’nai B’rith, it should be noted that the 21 questions were composed by Rabbi Morris Adler on behalf of the B’nai B’rith Adult Jewish Education bureau, a commission that he chaired from 1963-1966, and that he was murdered several weeks after the memorandum was submitted by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. It is for this reason that I believe that these responses had not been published.

The circumstances of Rabbi Adler’s assassination are that a gunman shot him multiple times during Shabbat morning services in front of hundreds of his congregants at his synagogue in Michigan. Rabbi Adler passed away from his wounds sustained in the attack nearly a month later. For a brief bibliographical portrait, see Pamela S. Nadell, Conservative Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 31-32; and for a full book-length account of the episode, see T.V. LoCicero, Murder in the Synagogue (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970), as well as his followup volume in T.V. LoCicero, Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue (New York: TLC Media, 2012), available to be ordered here.

[7] For brief discussion, see Isaiah Sonne, “A Scrutiny of the Charges of Forgery against Maimonides’ ‘Letter on Resurrection’,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 21 (1952): 101-117; see also Jacob I. Dienstag, “Maimonides’ ‘Treatise on Resurrection’ – A Bibliography of Editions, Translations, and Studies, Revised Edition,” in Jacob I. Dienstag, ed., Eschatology in Maimonidean Thought: Messianism, Resurrection, and the World to Come (New York: Ktav, 1983), 226-241, available here.

[8] See Aryeh Kaplan, Maimonides’ Principles: Fundamentals of Jewish Faith (New York: National Conference of Synagogue Youth, 1984), Aryeh Kaplan, Immortality, Resurrection, and the Age of the Universe: A Kabbalistic View (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1993), among other publications.

[9] The notion that in the past non-Jews have performed miracles much like the Jewish prophets needs further analysis, which Marc B. Shapiro will attempt in his forthcoming book on Rav Kook. As well, in Toledot Yeshu Jesus is described as performing miracles, but this is explained by Jesus having made use of God’s holy name.

The Medical Training and
Yet Another (Previously Unknown) Legacy
of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, zt”l

by Edward Reichman and Menachem Butler

Rabbi Dr. Edward Reichman is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Professor in the Division of Education and Bioethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He writes and lectures widely in the field of Jewish medical ethics.

Mr. Menachem Butler is Program Fellow for Jewish Legal Studies at The Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. He is an Editor at Tablet Magazine and a Co-Editor at the Seforim Blog.

On erev Shabbat Shira last week, in the course of a typically wide-ranging conversation between the authors of this article, Menachem mentioned that unfortunately Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski was critically ill. As hashgachah would have it, Menachem had happened upon a little-known precious work from 1997, entitled Sefer Ye’omar le-Yaakov u-le-Yisrael, compiled by Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski and comprised of letters written to him by Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, zt”l (1899-1985), known as the Steipler Gaon and author of the multi-volume work Kehillot Yaakov.[1]

Scion of prominent Hasidic dynasties and related to the current Rebbes of Bobov, Karlin, Klausenberg, Talner, and Skver, Abraham J. Twerski was born in Milwaukee in 1930 to Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Twerski and his wife Devorah Leah (née Halberstam), where he attended public school as a child.[2] After he received his rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago, he began to serve as an assistant rabbi in his father’s congregation in Milwaukee in the 1950s, as Aaron Katz described in his 2015 profile of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski (“The Wisdom of Peanuts”) at Tablet Magazine. He married Goldie (née Flusberg) in March 1952; and starting that summer, directed the Hebrew School at his father’s congregation Beth Jehudah, as well as officiated religious lifecycle events in his father’s community in Milwaukee. However, as he would later reflect in an interview “after I had practiced as a rabbi for a number of years, I felt I was not fulfilled in my work and — after consultation with the Steipler Gaon — I went to medical school to become a psychiatrist.”

Abraham J. Twerski wrote to the Steipler Gaon and expressed concerns about the propriety of attending medical school as an Orthodox Jew. He would regularly visit Rav Kanievsky at his home in Bnei Brak and corresponded with him by mail, maintaining an ongoing relationship with him until the Steipler’s passing in 1985. That year, a volume of collection of letters entitled Karyana de-Igarta was published, and included, for the first time, two letters that the Steipler Gaon had sent some thirty years earlier to a young Abraham J. Twerski in Milwaukee, who was then seeking his advice regarding his career choice.

The first letter was written at the end of the Summer of 1955 by a twenty-four-year-old Abraham J. Twerski and in this letter the Steipler Gaon addresses the value of making one’s livelihood through a non-rabbinic profession. As to the specific profession, he adds that medicine may be a preferred choice, as it is a mitzvah to learn, and additionally, excluded from the ban on secular knowledge of the Rashba.[3] However, this is on the proviso that the education is provided by proper teachers and in an environment conducive to Torah observance. As this is clearly not the case in a modern university, he offers some general guidelines, culled from the seforim hakedoshim, if not to guarantee, at least to enhance the chances of success: 1) kove’a itim – learn in-depth at least two hours daily; 2) recite all tefillos with a minyan; 3) regular mikva immersion; 4) meticulous Shabbat observance; and 5) a daily musar seder.[4]

The second question Abraham J. Twerski posed, the following year, was more specific to his situation. He inquired whether it was preferrable for him to be a rabbi in a largely non-observant community (he was serving as an assistant rabbi to his father in Milwaukee at that time), which would involve immersion in an irreligious environment with potential negative impact on the Jewish education of his children; or should he choose a medical career, which would allow him to remain in an environment of Torah observance.

Suffice it say, the Steipler Gaon’s tone in this letter is less than supportive of a career in medicine than its predecessor. His written response is unequivocal, “the rabbinate is much preferred” (adifa yoter viyoter). He lists no less than five reasons not to become a physician, relating to the challenges in maintaining Torah observance and modesty, as well as the time commitment, which would preclude Torah study. He adds on a personal note that given his estimation of the exceptional talents of the young Rabbi Twerski, the latter would likely become a highly successful and sought-after physician. As such, he would find no rest from those constantly “knocking on his door” and seeking his consultation. He was particularly concerned about what would happen to his Torah learning and observance in such a case.[5]

Notwithstanding the serious concerns expressed by the Steipler Gaon, and perhaps now better informed of the potential pitfalls, Abraham J. Twerski proceeded to pursue his medical education, as he wrote, “I went to medical school with the Steipler’s blessing and continued an ongoing relationship with him for years.”[6] Their fathers both grew up as friends in Hornsteipel, “and spent their boyhood years together and were on first name terms,” reminisced Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski many years later in a biographical memoir of his Hasidic ancestors.[7]

However, several years into his studies at Marquette University’s medical school, Abraham J. Twerski could no longer afford the tuition.[8] His assistance would come from a most unlikely source, as he would later describe in an interview with the Pittsburgh Quarterly:[9]

By that time, I had several children, so my dad and some members of the congregation helped me to pay for school. I applied for a scholarship through a foundation, but it didn’t come through, so in my third year, I fell two trimesters behind on tuition. One day, I called my wife at lunch as always, and she asked, “What would you do if you had $4,000?” I said, “I’m too busy to talk about fantasies.” She said, “But you really do have $4,000!” I said, “From where?” She said, “From Danny Thomas.” “Who’s Danny Thomas?” She said, “The TV star.” Then she read me an article from The Chicago Sun. Local officials had told Mr. Thomas about a young rabbi who was struggling to get through medical school. Thomas asked, “How much does your rabbi need?” They said, “Four thousand dollars.” He said, “Tell your rabbi he’s got it.”[10] So, I did my internship in general medicine, went to the University of Pittsburgh Psychiatric Institute for three years, and then worked two more years for a state hospital.

While the Steipler Gaon’s assessment of the success of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s medical career was prophetic, his concerns about Torah observance and learning, at least for Dr. Twerski, would turn out to be unfounded. Upon his graduation from medical school several years later, Time Magazine (June 15, 1959) published a brief article about him entitled “Rabbi in White.” It is worth reprinting in its entirety:

Abraham Joshua Twerski, 28, graduated from medical school this week. It was no mean feat, for Twerski is a Jewish rabbi like his father, two uncles, father-in-law, two older brothers and (when they finish their studies) two younger twin brothers. And to keep the Torah as an Orthodox Jew for six years of studies in Milwaukee’s Roman Catholic Marquette University was something like running a sack race, an egg race and an army obstacle course at the same time.

First there was the problem of keeping his religion from growing rusty: he rose each day at 5:30am, put in an hour’s study of the Talmud before early service at Milwaukee’s Beth Jehuda Synagogue, where he is assistant rabbi. Medical school classes began at 8am, and here real complications set in. His full black beard was a sanitary problem in surgery, requiring special snood-like surgical masks. His tallith katan, a small prayer shawl worn by many Orthodox Jews under their shirts, had to be made of cotton instead of wool – which might set off a static spark and ignite the anesthetic in an operating room.

Lectures on Saturday.[11] Religious holidays sometimes required months of advance planning. The nine-day Feast of Tabernacles, for instance, with four days when work is forbidden, fell during a series of lectures before a make-or-break exam in pathology. Abe, as students and professors call him, met the situation by studying by himself all the preceding summer, put himself so far ahead of his class that he could afford to miss the lectures. “I hated like heck to miss them,” he explains, “but I creamed that exam.”

When lectures came on Saturdays – during which Orthodox Jews are forbidden to work, ride in a vehicle or talk on the phone – Abe would have a friend put a sheet of carbon paper under his lecture notes and hope he remembered to use a ballpoint pen. Sabbath restrictions begin on Friday night, just before sundown, and on occasion Fridays only a lucky break in the traffic has saved him from having to abandon his 1952 De Soto and walk the rest of the way home. On Saturdays Abe was not on duty, but sometimes, to follow up on one of the cases he had been observing, he would leave his car in the garage and walk five miles to the hospital and back.

Work on Tishah Be’ab. Abe brought his own kosher food to school every day and ate it in the student lounge, where he also said his midday prayers in a corner, surrounded by chattering fellow students. Hospital duty during the 24-hour fast without food and water at Tishah Be’ab (commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.) Dr. Twerski describes as “murder,” and the last six years have left him hollow-eyed and slightly sallow.[12] But he is eagerly looking forward to the next stage: a year of internship in Milwaukee’s Mount Sinai Hospital, followed by a three-year residency in psychiatry.

“Psychiatric training was the motivation for my going into medicine,” he says. “I felt I could be a better adviser to my people and more help to them with their problems.”

The Time Magazine profile of Abraham J. Twerski included just one photograph (wearing “a snood for surgery” over his yarmulke), but members of the Twerski family have shared in recent years nearly a dozen of the other photographs that were taken by George P. Koshollek Jr., a local photographer with The Milwaukee Journal, and later deposited in the LIFE Photo Archive. The following are two photographs of newly-minted physician Abraham J. Twerski, together with his philanthropic patron who supported his medical school studies, the comedian Danny Thomas:

Upon his 1959 graduation from Marquette University Medical School, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski left his pulpit in Milwaukee and moved with his family to Pittsburgh, where he completed his psychiatric training at the University of Pittsburgh’s Western Psychiatric Institute four years later, and was then named clinical director of the Department of Psychiatry at St. Francis General Hospital in Pittsburgh, supervised by Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, where he advanced his expertise for treating addiction. In 1972, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski founded the Gateway Rehabilitation Center with the Sisters of St. Francis.[13]

Returning to our pre-Shabbat conversation, Menachem suggested that perhaps it might be appropriate for us to study through the 1997 volume of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, Sefer Ye’omar le-Yaakov u-le-Yisrael – one of his only Hebrew-language books of more than his eighty-authored volumes published over the past half-century – as a merit for Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s complete recovery. Menachem further asked if I would perhaps identify any medically related material that might be significant or previously unknown. Before Shabbat, I identified one particular letter, the final one in the book, which was of medical relevance, and I printed it out for learning, with Rabbi Twerski in mind. The topic: the obligation to prolong the life of a critically ill patient.

Just two days after our conversation, we read of the tragic passing of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, whose passing took place on Sunday, Chai Shvat 5781 (January 31, 2021). The nature of the letter from the Steipler Gaon to Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, and its heretofore unknown origins, compels us to write this brief note l’zecher nishmato (in honor of his memory) and to add yet an additional item to his legacy.

Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s astonishing accomplishments, known to the Jewish community worldwide, are primarily in the fields of mental health, self-esteem, and addiction medicine.[14] We will leave it those with expertise in these areas to recall and recount his manifold contributions, including his voluminous literary output.[15] Here we note a contribution, which though indirect, may be on par with respect to its Jewish communal impact as those more widely known.

The Letter

In the introduction to this 230-page-work, Sefer Ye’omar le-Yaakov u-le-Yisrael, published in 1997 by the Kollel Bais Yitzchok on Bartlett Street in Pittsburgh (and with an effusive approbation from Rav Chaim Kanievsky, son of the Steipler Gaon), Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski recounts his unique connection to Rav Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, the Steipler Gaon. It stemmed back to the city in present-day Ukraine called Hornsteipel, to which they both trace their roots.[16] Rav Kanievsky had lived there in his youth and the appellation “the Steipler” is derived from the name of the town. Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, though born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is a direct descendant of Rebbe Yaakov Yisrael Twerski of Cherkas, the founder of the Hornsteipel Hasidic dynasty, which originated in that city.[17] His father was named Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Twerski and was known both as the Hornsteipler Rebbe, and as the Milwaukee Rebbe.[18]

The last letter of this volume presents a medical halakhic query Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski posed to the Steipler Gaon in the Summer of 1973 about his ailing father. “May a son administer an injection to his ill father?” Despite the fact that Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski was a physician, and injections were part of his clinical scope of practice, he was acutely aware of the potential halakhic ramification of something as simple as an injection. An injection may cause bodily injury, and it is Biblically prohibited for a son to cause a wound to his father.[19] Rav Kanievsky answered that it would be permitted as long as there are no other options: “On the matter of delivering an injection to one’s father, as it may cause a wound, the law is found in Yoreh De’ah #241:3, that when no one else is available, it is permitted … .”[20]

It appears however that between the sending of the query and the completion of the response, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s father passed away, as Rav Kanievsky offers condolences: “Behold, I who am bereft of good deeds [an allusion to the introduction to the High Holiday Musaf prayer recited by the chazzan] join in your great sorrow upon the passing of the honorable, great rabbi of the Hornsteipel dynasty. May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, and may his memory be a blessing for eternity.”[21]

It is the following paragraph, which includes a general comment about end-of-life issues, to which we draw your attention:

“Regarding the principle that one should do everything possible to prolong the life of the ill patient [even if he is in a terminal state (chayei sha’ah)]. In truth I also heard such a notion in my youth, and I do not know if this derives from a ‘bar samcha’ (authoritative source). In my opinion, this requires serious analysis…”

As I [ER] read these words, they were familiar to me. This letter appears in the Steipler Gaon’s collection of letters entitled Karyana de-Igarta,[22] though the questioner is not identified. It is only from this work of their correspondences that we learn that Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski is the author of the query!

It is not a lengthy halakhic analysis. In fact, the Steipler Gaon goes on to cite only two sources. The citations relate to the passage in Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah #339 regarding the treatment of a ‘gosses’, one whose death is imminent. Yet this pronouncement of Rav Kanievsky’s on the approach to the patient at the end of life may possibly be his most cited reference on any medical halakhic topic. Moreover, it is one of the more frequently cited sources in contemporary halakhic discussions on the end of life.

In the Modern era, with the likes of respirators and antibiotics, we now have the ability to prolong life to an extent not imaginable in the past. Must we utilize the entire armamentarium of medicine to prolong life in every circumstance, despite any associated suffering? There are some, such as Rav Eliezer Waldenberg, zt”l, who would answer in the affirmative.[23] Others, like Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, allow for circumstances to refrain from aggressive care.[24] This debate has been the substance of halakhic discussions on end-of-life care in our generation.[25]

For someone of the stature of Rav Kanievsky’s to write that the notion to prolong life in all circumstances and at all costs may not derive from a “bar samcha” (authoritative source) is nothing short of revelational. This statement has guided many a rabbinic authority in their general approach to the treatment of the patient at the end-of-life and has certainly been part of the thought process of countless practical halakhic decisions.

It appears that this noteworthy contribution of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, zt”l to medical halakhic discourse, albeit indirect, has gone largely unnoticed. He is not only to be credited for his legendary contributions to broadening the possibilities of mental health in the Jewish community and beyond,[26] but he is also responsible for eliciting this letter of Rav Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, which has informed and guided halakhic-decision-making at the ‘end-of-life’ in the Modern era.

Sadly, we now invoke the same sentiment that the Steipler Gaon expressed above about the loss of another great rabbinic leader and member of the Hornsteipler dynasty:

May his memory be a blessing for eternity.

Notes:

[1] See Marc B. Shapiro, “The Tamim: Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky (‘The Steipler’),” in Benjamin Brown and Nissim Leon, eds., The Gedolim: Leaders Who Shaped the Israeli Haredi Jewry (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2017), 663-674 (Hebrew). A full biographical treatise on The Steipler Gaon along the lines of the magisterial scholarly work of The Hazon Ish, in Benjamin Brown, The Hazon Ish: Halakhist, Believer and Leader of the Haredi Revolution (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2011; Hebrew) remains a scholarly desideratum.
[2] In a December 25, 2020 email to Menachem Butler, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski clarified some important details of an anecdote from when he participated in the Christmas play at his Milwaukee public school in his childhood. He wrote here:

That’s not quite the way it was. The week after the play, my mother called the teacher, to meet her. The teacher said, ‘I knew that Mrs. Twerski would reprimand me for putting Abraham in the Xmas play. But all she wanted to know was whether Abraham was self-conscious because he was shorter than the other children.’ I said, ‘I thought you were going to reprimand me for putting Abraham in the Xmas play.’ Mrs. Twerski said ‘If what we have given him at home is not enough to prevent an effect of a Xmas play, then we have failed completely.’

[3] For an overview of the controversy, see David Berger, “Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” in Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 21-116, esp. 70-78. See also Joseph Shatzmiller, “Between Abba Mari and Rashba: The Negotiations That Preceded the Ban of Barcelona (1303-1305),” Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel, vol. 3 (1973): 121-137 (Hebrew); David Horwitz, “The Role of Philosophy and Kabbalah in the Works of Rashba,” (unpublished MA thesis, Yeshiva University, 1986); David Horwitz, “Rashba’s Attitude Towards Science and Its Limits,” Torah u-Madda Journal, vol. 3 (1991-1992): 52-81; and Marc Saperstein, “The Conflict over the Ban on Philosophical Study, 1305: A Political Perspective,” in Leadership and Conflict: Tensions in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History and Culture (Oxford: Littman Library, 2014), 94-112.
[4] Avraham Yeshaya Kanievsky, Karyana de-Igarta: Letters of Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, vol. 1 (Bnei Brak: privately published, 1985), 101-103, no. 86 (Hebrew), dated August 31, 1955.
[5] Avraham Yeshaya Kanievsky, Karyana de-Igarta: Letters of Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, vol. 1 (Bnei Brak: privately published, 1985), 72-74, no. 66 (Hebrew), dated April 5, 1956.
[6] Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, “Who is Honored? He Who Honors Others” (Pirkei Avos 4:1) at TorahWeb.org.
[7] See Abraham J. Twerski, The Zeide Reb Motele: The Life of the Tzaddik Reb Mordechai Dov of Hornosteipel (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 2002), 11.

In 1965, Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski visited Bnei Brak and requested that he be permitted to take a photograph of Rav Kanievsky. After sharing a story about how Rav Meir Shapiro of Lublin convinced Rav Joseph Rosen, the Rogatchover Gaon, to allow him to take a photograph so that future generations would know what “a true Jew should look like,” the Steipler consented to a photograph to be taken.
[8] Financial difficulties for Jewish medical students are certainly not a new phenomenon. Indeed precisely four hundred years before Rabbi Twerski’s financial woes, in 1658, Chayim Palacco, another rabbi training as a physician in the University of Padua Medical School petitioned the Jewish community of Padua for assistance in paying his medical school tuition. The request, the only one of its kind in the archival records, was granted. See Daniel Carpi, “II Rabbino Chayim Polacco, Alias Vital Felix Montalto da Lublino, Dottore in Filosofia e Medicina a Padova (1658),” Quaderni per la Storia dell’ Universita di Padova, vol. 34 (2001): 351-352.

[9] Jeff Sewald, “Abraham J. Twerski, Psychiatrist and Rabbi: The Psychiatrist and Rabbi in His Own Words,” Pittsburgh Quarterly (Winter 2008), available here.

[10] For further details, see “Catholic Danny Thomas to Help Rabbi Become Doctor,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (27 June 1958): 1 and 3.

[11] The medical student Judah Gonzago, who trained in Rome in the early 1700s, recounts how one of his final (oral) exams was on Rosh Hashana. He recalls how he left the synagogue after the shacharit (morning) service and returned in time to hear the blowing of the shofar. His other trials and tribulations are reminiscent of those of Rabbi Dr. Twerski, though reflect a different historical reality. Though not a rabbi, Gonzago taught Torah in the local Jewish school. See Abraham Berliner, “Memoirs of a Roman Ghetto Youth,” Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, vol. 7 (1904): 110-132 (German), of which excerpts are summarized and translated in Harry Friedenwald, “The Jews and the Old Universities,” in Harry Friedenwald, ed., The Jews and Medicine: Essays, vol. 1 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1944), 221-240.
[12] How Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski navigated medical school while simultaneously maintaining meticulous religious observance, not to mention finding time for Torah learning, is truly exceptional. It reflects the challenges that every religious Jew faces in pursuing a medical education. These challenges have existed throughout history, though they have evolved over time. See Edward Reichman, “From Maimonides the Physician to the Physician at Maimonides Medical Center: The Training of the Jewish Medical Student throughout the Ages,” Verapo Yerape: The Journal of Torah and Medicine of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, vol. 3 (2011): 1-25; Edward Reichman, “The Yeshiva Medical School: The Evolution of Educational Programs Combining Jewish Studies and Medical Training,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, vol. 51, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 41-56. See also Edward Reichman, “The History of the Jewish Medical Student Dissertation: An Evolving Jewish Tradition,” in Jerry Karp and Matthew Schaikewitz, eds., Sacred Training: A Halakhic Guidebook for Medical Students and Residents (New York: Amud Press, 2018), xvii-xxxvii.
[13] See Abraham J. Twerski, The Rabbi & the Nuns: The Inside Story of a Rabbi’s Therapeutic Work With the Sisters of St. Francis (Brooklyn: Mekor Press, 2013).

On his appointment to this position in August 1965, Sister Mary Adele announced: “The addition of Dr. Twerski to our staff is another important move toward our goal of making complete, comprehensive mental health care and treatment available to all the people of the community.” The following month, both Sister Mary Adele and Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski rejected the suggestion that his appointment embodies any aspect of the ecumenical movement, and she told The Pittsburgh Press: “The appointment came at an opportune time to fit into the spirit… but it was accidental.” See “St. Francis Ecumenical Movement? Rabbi, Catholic Hospital Team Up In Psychiatry: Mental Ward on the Move,” The Pittsburgh Press (26 September 1965): 11
[14] Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s contributions also extend to the sphere of music. A noted composer of Hasidic melodies (and also of musical grammen that he composed to be delivered at celebratory occasions, such as weddings and sheva brachot), one of his best-known (although often unattributed) compositions is “Hoshia Es Amecha,” which he composed more than six decades ago on the occasion of his brother’s wedding, and set to the words from Tehillim 28:9. The song is often chanted on Simchat Torah following each of the hakkafot in the synagogue, and has become a helpful tune to count the minyan-members ahead of starting prayer services. His story of the song’s composition is recorded here. At his request, there were no eulogies delivered at his funeral. Instead, he requested that his family sing “Hoshia Es Amecha,” which he had once described as his “ticket to Gan Eden…because people dance with it.” See the video of the funeral march here.
[15] For example, see Andrew R. Heinze, “The Americanization of Mussar: Abraham Twerski’s Twelve Steps,” Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Life & Thought, vol. 48, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 450-469.
[16] For the geographic map of the Hasidic dynasties that emerged from Hornsteipel, see Marcin Wodziński, Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 159,162.
[17] See his book-length tribute to Reb Motele, the father of Rebbe Yaakov Yisrael Twerski of Cherkas ancestor, see Abraham J. Twerski, The Zeide Reb Motele: The Life of the Tzaddik Reb Mordechai Dov of Hornosteipel (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 2002).
[18] See Israel Shenker, “The Twerski Tradition: 10 Generations of Rabbis in the Family,” The New York Times (23 July 1978): 38, which includes a photo of Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael and Devorah Leah Twerski, with their children and their spouses at a family wedding in 1958.

Peter Leo, “He Defies Melting Pot Tradition,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (4 September 1978): 15:

Anita Srikameswaran, “Stories That Give People A Lift,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (24 September 1997): B2,B7

[19] For treatise on the topic of providing medical care to one’s parent, see Avraham Yaakov Goldmintz, Chen Moshe (Jerusalem: privately published, 2002; Hebrew), available here.
[20] Abraham J. Twerski, Sefer Ye’omar le-Yaakov u-le-Yisrael (Pittsburgh: Kollel Bais Yitzchok, 1997), 177 (no. 86) (Hebrew), dated August 27, 1973.
[21] Grand Rebbe Yaakov Yisrael Twerski passed away on August 7, 1973.
[22] Avraham Yeshaya Kanievsky, Karyana de-Igarta: Letters of Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, vol. 1 (Bnei Brak: privately published, 1985), 201, no. 190 (Hebrew)
[23] Alan Jotkowitz, “The Intersection of Halakhah and Science in Medical Ethics: The Approach of Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg,” Hakirah, vol. 19 (2015): 91-115.
[24] See Moshe Dovid Tendler, Responsa of Rav Moshe Feinstein, vol. 1: Care of the Critically Ill (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1996). See also Daniel Sinclair, “Autonomy in Matters of Life and Death and the Withdrawel of Life-Support in the Responsa of Rabbi Moses Feinstein,” Jewish Law Association, vol. 23 (2012): 231-245; and Alan Jotkowitz, “Death as Implacable Enemy – Or Welcome Friend in the Theology and Halakhic Decision Making of Rabbis Moshe Feinstein, Eliezer Waldenberg, and Haim David Halevy,” in Kenneth Collins, Edward Reichman, and Avraham Steinberg, eds., In the Pathway of Maimonides: Festschrift on the Eightieth Birthday of Dr. Fred Rosner (Haifa: Maimonides Research Institute, 2016), 73-99.
[25] For a comprehensive review of the halakhic issues at the end of life – well beyond the scope of this brief essay – see, most recently, Avraham Steinberg, Ha-Refuah ka-Halakhah, vol. 6: The Laws of the Sick, the Physician, and Medicine (Jerusalem: privately published, 2017), 338-388 (section 10) (Hebrew).
[26] See, for example, his books in Abraham J. Twerski, Let Us Make Man: Self Esteem Through Jewishness (Brooklyn: Traditional Press, 1987); Abraham J. Twerski, The Shame Borne in Silence: Spouse Abuse in the Jewish Community (Pittsburgh: Mirkov Publications, 1996); Abraham J. Twerski, Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1997); Yisrael N. Levitz and Abraham J. Twerski, eds., A Practical Guide to Rabbinic Counseling (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2005), and his dozens of other works published over the past half-century, including more than fifty works at the catalog of ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications.