David Assaf – A Farewell to Eitam Henkin

A Farewell to Eitam Henkin
by David Assaf
Professor David Assaf is the Sir Isaac Wolfson Chair of Jewish Studies, the Chair of the Department of Jewish History, and the Director of the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations, at Tel-Aviv University.
A Hebrew version of this essay appeared at the Oneg Shabbat blog (6 October 2015) (http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2015/10/blog-post.html), and was translated by Daniel Tabak of New York, with permission of Professor David Assaf.
This is his first contribution to the Seforim blog.
Eitam Henkin (1984-2015), who was cruelly murdered with his wife Na’ama on the third day of Hol Ha-Mo‘ed Sukkot (1 October 2015), was my student.
            Anyone who has read news about him in print media or on websites, which refer to him with the title “Rabbi,” may have gotten the impression that Eitam Henkin was just another rabbi, filling some rabbinic post or teaching Talmud in a kollel. While it is true that Eitam received ordination from the Chief Rabbinate, he did not at all view himself as a “rabbi,” and serving in a rabbinic post or supporting himself from one did not cross his mind. His studies for ordination (2007-2011) constituted a natural, intellectual outgrowth of his yeshiva studies; they formed part and parcel of a curiosity and erudition from which he was never satisfied. Eitam regarded himself first and foremost as an incipient academic scholar, who was training himself, through a deliberate but sure process of scholarly maturation, to become a social historian of the Jews of Eastern Europe. This was his greatest passion: it burned within him and moved him, and he devoted his career to it. Were it not for the evil hand that squeezed the gun’s trigger and took his young life, the world of Jewish studies undoubtedly would have had an outstanding, venerable scholar.
I spent that bitter and frenzied night outside the country.The terrible news reached me in the dead of night, hitting me hard like a sledgehammer. In my hotel room in Chernovich, Ukraine, so far from home, my thoughts wandered ceaselessly to those moments of sheer terror that Eitam and Na‘ama had to face, to the horror that unfolded before the eyes of the four children who saw their parents executed, and to the incomprehensible loss of someone with whom I had spoken just the other day and had developed plans, someone on whom I had pinned such high hopes. There was a man—look, he is no more . . .
The next day, I stood with my colleagues in Chernovich, near the house of Eliezer Steinbarg (1880-1932), a Yiddish author and poet mostly famous for his parables. In a shaky voice I read for them the fine parable about the bayonet and the needle—in the Hebrew translation of Hananiah Reichman—dedicating it to the memory of Eitam and his wife, who in those very moments were being laid to rest in Jerusalem.
The Bayonet and the Needle
A man (a Tom, a Dick, or some such epithet)
comes from the wars with a rifle and a bayonet,
and in a drawer he puts them prone,
where a thin little needle has lain alone.
“Now there’s a needle hugely made,”
the little needle ponders as it sees the blade.
“Out of iron or of tin, no doubt, it sews metal britches,
and quickly too, with Goliath stitches,
for a Gog Magog perhaps, or any big-time giant.”
But the bayonet is thoughtfully defiant.
“Hey, look! A bayonet! A little midget!
How come the town’s not all a-fidget
crowding round this tiny pup?
What a funny sight! I’ve to tease this bird!
Come, don’t be modest, pal! Is the rumor true? I heard
you’re a hot one. When you get mad the jig is up.
With one pierce, folks say, you do in seven flies!”
The needle cries, “Untruths and lies!
By the Torah’s coverlet I swear
that I pierce linen, linen only…It’s a sort of ware…”
“Ho ho,” the rifle fires off around of laughter.
“Ho ho ho! Stabs linen! It’s linen he’s after!”
“You expect me, then, to stitch through
tin?” the needle asks. “Ah, I feel if I like you
were bigger…”
“Oh, my barrel’s bursting,” roars the rifle. “My trigger—
it’s tripping! Oh me! Can’t take this sort of gaff.”
“Pardon me,” the needle says.“I meant no harm therein.
What then do you do? You don’t stitch linen, don’t stitch tin?”
“People! We stab people!” says the bayonet.
But now the needle starts to laugh,
and it may still be laughing yet.
With ha and hee and ho ho ho.
“When I pierce linen, one stitch, and then another, lo—’
I make a shirt, a sleeve, a dress, a hem.
But people you can pierce forever, what will you create from them?”
Eitam was a wunderkind. I first met him in 2007. At the time he was an avrekh meshi (by his own definition), a fine young yeshiva fellow,all of twenty-three years old. He was a student at Yeshivat Nir in Kiryat Arba, with a long list of publications in Torah journals already trailing him. He contacted me via e-mail, and after a few exchanges I invited him to meet. He came. We spoke at length, and I have cared about him ever since. From his articles and our many conversations I discerned right away that he had that certain je ne sais quoi. He had those qualities, the personality, and the capability—elusive, unquantifiable, and indefinable—of someone meant to be a historian, and a good historian at that.
          I did not have to press especially hard to convince him that his place—his destiny—did not lie between the walls of the yeshiva, and that he should not squander his talents on the niceties of halakha. He needed to enroll in university and train himself professionally for what truly interested him, for what he truly loved: critical historical scholarship.
          Eitam went on to register for studies at the Open University, and within three years(2009-2012), together with the completion of his studies at the yeshiva, he earned his bachelor’s degree with honors.Immediately afterwards he signed up for a master’s degree in Jewish history at Tel-Aviv University, and under my supervision completed an exemplary thesis in 2013 titled “From Hibbat Zion to Anti-Zionism: Changes in East-European Orthodoxy – Rabbi David Friedman of Karlin (1828-1915) as a Case Study.”
          Eitam, hailing from a world of traditional yeshiva study that is poles apart from the academic world, slid into his university studies effortlessly. He rapidly internalized academic discourse, with its patterns of thinking and writing, and began to taste the distinct savors of that world. To take one example, in July 2014 he participated in an academic conference—his very first—for early doctoral students,both Israeli and Polish, that took place in Wrocław, Poland. There he delivered (another first) a lecture in English, and got deep satisfaction from meeting other similarly-aged scholars working on topics that overlapped with his own. I asked him quite often whether as an observant Jew he found it difficult to study at the especially open and “secular” Tel-Aviv campus. He answered in the negative, saying that he never felt any difficulty whatsoever.
          I was deeply fond of him and respected him. I loved his easygoing and optimistic personality, his simple humility, the smile permanently spread across his face. I loved his positive approach to everything, and especially loved his sarcastic humor, his ability to laugh at himself, at his world, at the settlers (so far as I could sense he was very moderate and distant from political or messianic fervor), at the Orthodox world in which he lived, and at the ultra-Orthodox world that was his object of study. He was a man after my own heart, and I have the sense that the feeling was mutual. When I told him one time that I was prepared to be his adviser because I was a stickler for always having at least one doctoral student who was a religious settler, so as to avoid being criticized for being closed-minded and intolerant, he responded with a grin…
          More than my affection for him, I respected him for his vast knowledge, ability to learn, persistence, thoroughness, diligence, efficiency, original and critical manner of thinking, excellent writing style, ability to learn from one and all, and generosity in sharing his knowledge with everyone. In my heart of hearts I felt satisfaction and pride at having nabbed such a student.
          Immediately after finishing his master’s degree, Eitam registered for doctoral studies. 2014 was dedicated to fleshing out a topic and writing a proposal. Eitam was particularly interested in the status of the rabbinate in Jewish Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century, and he collected a tremendously broad trove of material, sorted on note cards and his computer, on innumerable rabbis who served in many small towns. He endeavored to describe the social status of this unique class in order to get at the social types that comprised it in the towns and cities. In the end, however, for various reasons that I will not spell out here, we decided in unison to abandon the topic and search for another. I suggested that he write a critical biography of the Hafetz Hayyim , Rabbi Israel Meir Hakohen of Radin (1839-1933), the most venerated personality in the Haredi world of the twentieth century and, practically speaking, until today. (Just two weeks ago I wrote a blog post describing my own recent visit to Radin, wherein I quoted things from Eitam. Who could have imagined then what would happen a short time later?) Eitam was reticent at first. “What new things can possibly be said about the Hafetz Hayyim?” he asked skeptically, but as more time passed and he deepened his research he became convinced that it was in fact a suitable topic. As was his wont, he immersed himself in the topic and after a short time wrote a magnificent proposal. At the end of March 2015 his proposal was accepted to write a doctorate under my guidance, whose topic would be “Rabbi Israel Meir Hakohen (Hafetz Hayyim): A Biography.”
          A short time later I proposed Eitam as a nominee of Tel-Aviv University for a Nathan Rotenstreich scholarship, which is the most prestigious scholarship granted today to doctoral students in Israeli universities, and, needless to say, it is competitive. Of course, as I predicted, Eitam won it. He responded to the news with characteristic restraint, but his joy could not be contained. It was obvious when I gave him the news that he was the happiest man alive.In order to receive the Rotenstreich Scholarship, students must free themselves from all other pursuits and devote themselves solely to scholarship and completion of the doctorate within three years. Eitam promised to do so, and he undoubtedly would have made good on that promise. He would have received the first payment in November 2015. Now, tragically, we have all lost out on this tremendous opportunity.
          One could goon and on singing Eitam’s praises, and presumably others will yet do so. I feel satisfied by including a letter of recommendation that I wrote about him to my colleagues on the Rotenstreich Scholarship Committee. Recommenders typically tend to exaggerate in praising their nominees, but let heaven and earth be my witness that in this case I meant every single word that I wrote.
            May his memory be blessed.
[1] Eliezer Shtaynbarg, The Jewish Book of Fables: Selected Works, edited, translated from the Yiddish, and with an introduction by Curt Leviant, illustrated by Dana Craft (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 20-23.
*          *          *          *
                                                                                                12 Nissan 5775 – 1 April 2015
RE: Recommendation for Mr. Eitam Henkin for the Rotenstreich Scholarship (22nd Cycle)
            I hereby warmly recommend, as it is customarily said, that my student Mr. Eitam Henkin be chosen as a nominee of the faculty and university for a Rotenstreich Scholarship for years 5776-5778..
            Henkin, who completed his Master’s studies at Tel-Aviv University with honors, and whose proposal was just now approved as a PhD candidate, is not the usual student of our institution, and would that there were many more of his caliber. One could say that I brought him to us with my own two hands, and I have invested significant time and much energy convincing him to register for academic studies so that at the end of the day he could write his doctorate under my guidance.
          Henkin is what people call a “yeshiva student,” and he has spent his adult life in national-religious Torah institutions, wherein he acquired his comprehensive Torah knowledge, assimilated analytic methodology, and even received rabbinic ordination. As a scion of a sprawling, pedigreed family of rabbis and scholars, he has also revealed within himself an indomitable inclination to diverge from the typical path of Torah and invest a serious amount of his energy in historical scholarship. Naturally, Henkin gravitates toward studies of the religious lives and worlds of rabbis, yeshiva deans, and spiritual trends among Eastern European Jews in the modern period. His enormous curiosity, creative thinking, and natural propensity for study and research with which he has been endowed, as well his impressive self-discipline and independence, assisted him in mastering broad fields of knowledge through his own abilities and without the help of experts. The scope of his knowledge of Jewish history more generally, and of the Jews of Eastern Europe more specifically, including familiarity with the scholarly literature in every language, is cause for astonishment.
          What is more, Henkin has already managed to publish twenty scholarly articles (!) and even a book (To Take Root: Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Jewish National Fund [Jerusalem, 2012], co-authored with Rabbi Avraham Wasserman, but in practice the research and writing were wholly Eitam’s). Most of them deal with varied perspectives on the spiritual and religious lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. It may be true that these articles were published in Torah-academic journals, which we often refer to—not always with justification—as “not peer-reviewed,” but I can attest that the articles in question are scholarly in every sense; they could undoubtedly be published in recognized academic journals. I do not know many doctoral students whose baseline is as high and impressive as that of Eitam Henkin.
          Given that I see in Henkin a promising and very talented scholar, I have placed high hopes in the results of the research he has taken upon himself for his doctorate under my guidance: the writing of a critical biography on one of the most authoritative personalities—one could say without hesitation the most “iconic”—of the Haredi world of the last century, Israel Meir Hakohen of Radin, better known by his appellation (based on his famous book) “the Hafetz Hayyim.” We are speaking of a personality who lived relatively close to us in time (so there exists a relative abundance of sources), yet remains concealed under a thick cover of Orthodox hagiography. One cannot exaggerate the enormous influence of the Hafetz Hayyim on the halakhic formation, atmosphere, and lifestyle of the contemporary Haredi world, with all its factions and movements, and especially what is referred to as the “Litvish” world. Nevertheless, to this day no significant study exists that places this complex personality—with the stages of his life, his multifarious writings, communal activities, and the process of his “sanctification” after his death—against the background of his time and place from an academic, critical perspective that brings to bear various scholarly methodologies.
          Henkin’s doctoral proposal was approved literally a few days ago,and I am convinced that he will embark upon the process of research and writing with intense momentum, keeping pace with the timetable expected of him for completion of the doctorate.
          At this stage of his life, as he intends to dedicate all of his energy and time to academic studies, Henkin must struggle with providing for his household (he has four small children). He supports himself from part-time jobs of editing, writing, and teaching, but his heart is in scholarship and the great challenge that stands before him in writing his doctorate.
          Granting Eitam Henkin the Rotenstreich Scholarship would benefit him and the Scholarship. Not only would it enable him to free himself from the yoke of those minor, annoying jobs and dedicate all his time to scholarship, but it would also demonstrate the university’s recognition of his status as an outstanding student. I try to exercise restraint and minimize usage of a description like “outstanding,”and I certainly do not bestow it upon all of my students; Henkin, however, deserves it. The scholarship would assist him, without a doubt, in realizing his scholarly capabilities through writing a most important doctorate, which would add a sorely needed and lacking layer to our knowledge of the world of Torah, the rabbinate, and Jewish life in Eastern Europe of the preceding generations. As for my part, as Eitam’s adviser I obligate myself to furnish the matching amount of the scholarship from the research budgets at my disposal.
           
            Warm regards,
                       
            Professor David Assaf
            Department of Jewish History
            Head of the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations
            Sir Isaac Wolfson Chair of Jewish Studies
*          *          *          *
In my archive I found a document that Eitam wrote (in Hebrew) for me in preparation for his submission for the Rotenstreich scholarship. He described himself with humility and good humor:
Scholarly “Autobiography”
by Eitam Henkin

            My name is Eitam Henkin. I was born in 5744 (1984) and raised in Religious Zionist Institutions. I studied in a hesder yeshiva and served in the Golani Brigade as an infantryman and squad leader.I married during my army service. After being discharged, I began to study in a kollel in order to receive ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (which I completed in 5771, 2011). At the same time, I began independent writing and research in the field of history out of a personal interest for this field that I have had as far back as I can remember (some describe this as “being bitten by the bug of history,” but with me perhaps we may be talking about a congenital predisposition).

            As things go, the fields of interest that I began to research fell within the boundaries closest to the world in which I was ensconced: the rabbinate and rabbis. I published my first articles in 5767-5768 (2007-2008) in an annual journal published (under my editorship) at the hesder yeshiva in which I studied. After about a year, I began publishing articles in outside publications linked to Religious Zionism, such as Akdamot and Ha-Ma’ayan.

            At the same time, I began to make my way into the world of academia. In the wake of an article I wrote about Rabbi Baruch Epstein’s memoirs Mekor Barukh and his attitude to Hasidism, I reached out (in 5767, 2007) to Prof. David Assaf for advice on aspects of the article, and on Prof. Assaf’s initiative the conversation turned into a meeting in which I was introduced to the possibility of entering the world of the professional historian, after which I took my first steps on my academic path.

            I pursued my bachelor’s degree in history at the Open University—a path that proved quite practical given my other activities, and after completing it (with honors) I registered for a master’s degree in the department of Jewish history at Tel-Aviv University, where I finished (in 5773, 2013) my thesis titled “‘From Hibbat Zion to Anti-Zionism: Changes in East-European Orthodoxy – Rabbi David Friedman of Karlin (1828-1915) as a Case Study,” which I wrote under the supervision of Prof. Assaf and which received a grade of 95. I subsequently signed up for doctoral studies, and very recently my doctoral proposal was accepted, with the topic “Rabbi Israel Meir Hakohen of Radin (Hafetz Hayyim): A Biography,” also under the supervision of Prof. Assaf.

            In tandem with my progress in academic studies (which have moved from being a side interest to being front and center in my life, even if not the only thing), I continued my historical research and writing independently, publishing articles in various journals, although they were not peer-reviewed. To this day, I have published in this manner over twenty articles on Jewish history, in which my research interest has focused on two fixed pieces: Jewish society in Imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, which has been primary and central, and within that more specifically the Orthodox segment of the population and rabbinic circles; and the second piece is the life and times of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook.

            My aforementioned thesis and the doctoral work I have begun relate to the first piece. Also connected is the critical biography that I wrote on my own (before and during my first years of academic study) on Rabbi Yehiel Mikhl Halevi Epstein, author of the Arukh Ha-Shulhan, a biography that was accepted for publication by the academic press of Touro College in the United States and which is to appear in print over the coming year.

            Related to the second piece, aside from many articles, is my latest book, which I co-authored with Rabbi Avraham Wasserman by his invitation, titled To Take Root: Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Jewish National Fund. It was published in 5772 (2012) with the support and funding of the Jewish National Fund.

            Parallel to my academic studies and scholarly publications, these days I also serve out of personal interest as the section editor for historical articles in the journal Asif, put out by the Union of Hesder Yeshivot (continuing my build-up of editorial experience via additional projects in preceding years). Similarly, from 5770 (2010) on I have given lectures on the history of halakha at Midreshet Nishmat in Jerusalem. This year I am a doctoral fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum. It should be self-evident, however, that I expect to concentrate my main interest and scholarly efforts in the coming years on my doctoral work on the Hafetz Hayyim.



The Man who Tried to Put it All Together: A Hesped for Rav Kook on His Eightieth Yahrzeit

The Man who Tried to Put it All Together: 
A Hesped for Rav Kook on His Eightieth Yahrzeit 
By Yehudah Mirsky 

Yehudah Mirsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University, and the author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press), available here (link).  

This is his first contribution to the Seforim Blog. 

Jerusalem of the 1930s was boiled in fury. The inevitability of bitter conflict with the Arabs of Palestine had become too clear to deny, while the fighting among Jews, if not quite as violent, was bitter and unmistakable. How to deal with the Arabs, how to deal with the British, how to bring new immigrants and, once they were there, sustain them, how to deal with Hitler’s shadow looming large over Europe – and how to deal with Zionism’s revolution not only against centuries of Jewish politics, but centuries more of Jewish religion and history. The arguments were as heated as the stakes were high. 
All the more striking it was that on Monday, September 2, 1935, the fourth day of Elul 5695, some fifteen thousand people, amounting to one third of Jewish Jerusalem and nearly five percent of Jewish Palestine, religious and secular alike, joined by foreign diplomats, scholars, day laborers and rabbis, came out to follow the coffin of Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, dead at age seventy. The procession wound from his yeshiva near Zion Square, in three columns through the Old City, to his freshly dug grave on the Mount of Olives, as thousands more watched from the rooftops. 
The night before, just a few hours after his passing, the Nineteenth Zionist Congress, meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland, had held a memorial service of its own. Menachem Ussishkin, president of the Jewish National Fund responsible for land-purchases in Palestine and incoming President of the Zionist Executive, had long been Rav Kook’s chief interlocutor in the Zionist leadership, navigating between the movement’s relentlessly secularizing thrust, and the rabbi’s dogged insistence that the movement was bound to be the very vehicle of spiritual rebirth, for Jews and the world. Ussishkin said the rabbi had told him the building modern-day Palestine, its roads, factories and farms was nothing less than rebuilding the Temple – and that now, as then, all the ranks were meant to work together, the secular, itself charged with divine energy, being the indispensable foundation of the sacred. 
Ussishkin was followed by Meir Berlin, leader of the perpetually-embattled Religious Zionist movement, the Mizrachi (whose Hebraized name would later garnish Israel’s religious university, Bar-Ilan). Rav Kook, Berlin said, “loved the Jewish people the way only a father can love his children. Nobody is left after him who will love his nation that fiercely…He understood his people, the situation of the generation, and its life conditions, and that is why he forgave them everything.” There was a lot to forgive. 
Berlin and Rav Kook went back a very long way, longer than the former’s own lifetime. In the fall of 1884, then aged nineteen, Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook had become a student and disciple of Berlin’s father, Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, known as “The Netziv,” dean of the great yeshiva of Volozhin. The yeshiva teemed with prodigies, future rabbis and future revolutionaries, among whom young Kook stood out, for an unfamiliar mix, appealing to some, off-putting to others, of intellectual prowess, intense piety, and lyric sensibility. 
In the early years of his career, begun in a tiny Lithuanian shtetl, Kook was drawn to Maimonidean rationalism. With time, and intense grief at the death of his first wife, he turned inward, undertook deep introspection and extensive study of Kabbalah, on his own and with Rav Shalom Elyashiv (grandfather of the recently departed Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv). Alongside his command of Talmud and halakha, he mastered an extraordinary range of Jewish mystical, philosophical and other texts, read widely in the rich Hebrew and Yiddish periodical literature of the day, and became an autodidact of contemporary philosophy. In a departure from rabbinic conventions, he made serious study of the non-halakhic portions of the Talmud, the Aggadah and all its divergent voices. 

“There are those who erroneously think that world peace will only come from a common character of opinions and qualities. But no – true peace will come to the world precisely by multiplication of all the opinions and perspectives… all facets of the larger truth… peace (is) the unification of all opposites. But there must be opposites, so that there be those who labor and that which will be unified… Hence peace is the name of God, who is the master of all the forces, omnipotent and gathering them all.” (Eyn Ayah to Massekhet Berakhot, vol. 2, pp. 397-398, 9:361, on BT Berakhot 64a.) 

In another, marking his burgeoning conviction that God is to be found in the stormy recesses of one’s own inner life, he began to keep a spiritual diary. 
In the summer of 1904 Kook moved to Palestine after accepting an offer to become the rabbi of Jaffa and the surrounding colonies, effectively becoming rabbi of the New Yishuv (Jewish collective). The year of his arrival marked the beginning of the Second Aliyah, the migration wave that brought a small but influential cadre of young intellectuals and revolutionaries who left an outsized mark on the political and cultural development of the New Yishuv. The combined effect of his encounters with their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Jewish people and for the ethical universalism of Socialism, with the vibrancy of the New Yishuv and sheer embodied-ness of the land was electrifying. In public, he became the leading rabbinic champion of the New Yishuv, and thus the target of traditionalist attacks. In private, as time went by he wrote more and more furiously and extensively in his diaries, lost in a torrent of thought as he began to train the dialectical worldview which he had developed to understand the complex mix of his own soul and the ideological debates of Eastern Europe onto larger historical patterns. His thinking also became explicitly Messianic. 
Thus in his reading, and in a move which astonished and enraged many of his Rabbinic peers, the rebelliousness of the pioneers was neither accidental, nor evil, but in fact nothing less than part of God’s plan to restore to Judaism a vitality and universal spirit worn thin in centuries of exile. The young rebels against tradition in the name of Jewish nationalism and social justice were nothing less than the bearers of a new revelation. 
In a major essay of 1912, Li-Mahalakh Ha-Ideiot be-Yisrael, (“The Progression of Ideals in Israel,”) he presented a philosophy of Jewish history structured along series of mirroring, theses and antitheses, whose collective synthesis is redemption: The vital, collective, bodily Judaism of the Bible followed by its antithesis, the subdued, individualized, spiritualized,Judaism of Exile, all to be synthesized in the fullness of redemption. 
The Land of Israel was central to his reflections. 

“The holiness within nature is the holiness of the Land of Israel, and the Shekhinah that went down into exile with Israel (BT Megillah 29a) is the ability to preserve holiness in opposition to nature. But the holiness that combats nature is not complete holiness, it must be absorbed in its higher essence to the higher holiness, which is the holiness in nature itself, which is the foundation of the restoration and tikun olam… And the holiness in exile will be joined to the holiness of the land, and the synagogues and batei midrash of Bavel will be reestablished in the Land of Israel.” (Ibid; and Shemonah Kevatzim 2: 326-327, Orot pp. 77-78). 

Here and throughout he was reinterpreting a rich skein of Kabbalistic thought, in which the divine presence, the Shekhinah, as the Oral Torah, is Knesset Yisrael, the sacred community of Israel, and thus the Land, are all ultimately as one, constituting, as Sefirat Malkhut the very meeting point of God and the world. The “Ideals” under discussion in his 1912 essay were not only the Ideals of Western philosophy and the moral, spiritual and aesthetic ideas driving all human yearning, but also, and more deeply, the Sefirot, the nodal points of divine energy that in Kabbalistic teaching are the deep structure of all of Being, and, animated as it is with divine energy, its endless Becoming. 
The outbreak of World War One caught Rav Kook in Germany, where he’d hoped to attend a rabbinic conference and mollify some of his peers’ fierce opposition to the Jewish national revival. He spent the war years in Switzerland and then England, in horrified witness to the great civilizational suicide. 
The world crisis and slaughter were redeemed for him by the Balfour Declaration, which he took as electrifying confirmation of his messianic reading of world events. As always, the national was for him complemented by the universal, and in the midst of the war, in the pages of his diaries, he reached some of the farthest heights of his universalism: 

“There is one who sings the song of his self, …And there is one who sings the song of the nation, who cleaves with gentle love to Knesset Yisrael as a whole, and sings her song with her, grieves for her sorrows and delights in her hopes…And there is one whose soul expands further beyond the bound of Israel, to sing the song of man…And there is one whose spirit expands and ascends even higher, to the point of unity with all creation, with all creatures and all worlds, and sings with them all…And there is one who ascends above all these songs in a single union, and all sound their voices…The song of the self, of the nation, of man, of the world – all come together within him at every time, in every hour. And this perfection in all its fullness ascends and becomes a sacred song, God’s song, Israel’s song…a simple song, doubled, tripled, fourfold, the Song of Songs of Shlomo (Cant. 1:1), (as the Midrash says) The King to Whom Peace, belongs.” (Midrash Shir Ha-Shirim Rabbah, 3:1(6), Vilna ed.) (Shemonah Kevatzim, 7:112, Orot Ha-Kodesh, vol. 2, pp. 444-445). 

On his return to Palestine be became, first, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, and in 1921, the co-founder, with his Sephardi colleague Yaacov Meir, of the Chief Rabbinate. What was for the British an extension of established colonial policy of delegating religious services and some legal jurisdiction to local religious authorities was for him an opening to institutions that would gradually reshape the law into a new Torah for a redeemed Eretz Yisrael. He hoped to create institutions that would move the historical progression forward, creating the halakha and institutions to guide the great changes to come. 
The reality was more complicated. That which made him the obvious choice to head the Rabbinate and indispensable to the burgeoning project of building the Jewish national home – his mix of erudition and piety, his engagements with modern thought and culture, a deeply conciliatory personality and a theology and historical perspective to make that conciliation the basis of a new philosophy – his ability to square seemingly incommensurate circles, left him out of the political mix and unable to make headway on his most prized projects, the new Rabbinate and bringing the Zionist movement into deep dialogue with Judaism. 
It all came to a head in 1933 with the murder of the general secretary of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party, Chaim Arlosoroff. Suspicion fell on Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, who had been doing rhetorical and sometimes physical battle with Mapai over its willingness to negotiate Jewish immigration with Hitler, and several were arrested. Rav Kook himself had never affiliated with a party, or even formally joined the Zionist movement as such. But once convinced of the Revisionists’ innocence, Rav Kook threw himself and all his stature into their defense. The accused were exonerated, but his ties to the Left were irrevocably broken. 
The ultra-Orthodox, for their part, throughout his Jerusalem years, saw him as their gravest foe and attacked him relentlessly, even while on his deathbed, and after. 
The ensuing decades saw growing interest in Rav Kook’s teachings and their significance. The thousands of pages of his diaries were edited and published, in different series, by his disciple “ha-Rav ha-Nazir,” David Cohen (see here) and by Rav Kook’s son, Zvi Yehudah. 
The latter eventually assumed the deanship of his father’s yeshiva, renamed Mercaz Ha-Rav, and in the late 1960s and early ‘70s became spiritual leader of the new vanguard of Religious Zionists. 
When in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 religious Zionists decided to capture the flag and lay hold, not only of the hilltops of Judea and Samaria but of the Zionist movement as a whole, they were taking the religious language that Labor Zionism had made into a functional tool for a political program and re-infuse it with its classical religious meaning. And they did so, with the conceptual tools provided them by Zvi Yehudah, in his interpretation of his father. 
The central question for Zvi Yehudah, his own successors, and for his and their critics within Religious Zionism, (most notably Rav Yehudah Amital) was what his father would have said, and how his ideas ought to be interpreted. It’s hard to think of another Jewish theologian whose legacy has been as consequential as AvrahamYitzhak ha-Kohen Kook. 
Those arguments continue in present-day Israel, where new volumes by and about Rav Kook, academic, sectarian and popular, continue to be published at a dizzying pace year after year. The publication in recent years of his diaries in their original form has heightened interest in him, while showing the depth of his immersion in Kabbalah, and the depths he was plumbing in his own complicated soul. He simultaneously embraced both universalism and particularism with rare vehemence. He saw genuine revelation in the spiritual life of all peoples, and in the very body of Israel, whose unique collective vocation was the salvation of mankind. He affirmed both pragmatism and utopia, or in his terms, sagacity and prophecy. The common thread to this entire way of thinking is the dialectic, a principled appreciation of complexity, and the ways in which precisely that complexity, that coincidence of opposites, is that which gives birth, slowly, to whatever it is that we can know of truth. 
The last day of his life was the third day of Elul, sixteen years to the day since his arrival, after the Great War, in Jerusalem. He had been ailing with cancer for months and gone to the then-suburb of Kiryat Moshe. In his last days he’d received a number of visitors, including a disciple of the Rebbe of Munkacs, come to query Rav Kook’s support for the Zionists, and the young rabbi and theologian, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who was visiting from America on what would be his only visit to the Land of Israel (see here). And, after asking his physician how long he had left to live, did his best to read through the Mishna, Bible and Bahya ibn Paquda’s eleventh-century classic, Duties of the Heart, one last time. 
On the first day of Elul, the penitential month, Ha-Nazir had brought him the elegantly designed title page of the theological compendium he’d wrought out of the spiritual diaries, to be entitled, “Light of the Holy,” Orot Ha-Kodesh. Rav Kook wept and asked that on the title page he be referred to simply as “Rav” and nothing more. He was surrounded by treasured rabbinic colleagues – Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, Rav Yechiel Michel Tukachinsky, Rav Aryeh Levine – and Ha-Nazir stood in the courtyard downstairs, his face buried in a tree. At the very end, Rav Kook’s lips were moving. His disciple and soul-mate, Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlap leaned over him, and heard him say, “Even now, my hope in God doesn’t falter.” 
Rav Kook turned his face to the wall as the attending physician rinsed the blood from his body, and once his visitors re-entered the room, he faced them all once again. They began to say the Shema together, and he joined them on the final word, “Echad / one.”


Rav Ovadia Yosef, ZT”L

Dear Seforim Blog readers,
This past Monday an era ended. As many prominent rabbonim mentioned, during the levaya of Rav Ovadia Yosef, there was the era of Tannaim, the era of Amoraim, Geonim, Rishonim, Achronim and the era of Rav Ovadia Meor Yisroel. Each one of us merited living in his generation. He was the Moshe Rabbeinu of our generation (Sukkah 39a), not merely in personal greatness but characteristically as well. He acquired the Torah reaching great heights, nevertheless descended from his league and set it before the nation – the young and the old, the learned and the uninformed. With all his responsibilities, he was attentive to the nations needs. Moshe Rabbeinu merited having the Torah ascribed to him by sacrificing his life for it (Mechiltah, 17); Rav Ovadia devoted his last energy for its flourishing.
The void left by the passing of Rav Ovadia ob”m is felt throughout the Jewish nation. Eulogies throughout the world are being given illustrating the nation’s emotions. In Israel, one yeshiva has even been collaborating with a well known radio channel in arranging for the completion of Talmud Bavli every day of the shiva. It connects the masses and furthers Rav Ovadia’s mission: spreading Torah. Our Torah is great but so is our nation. By uniting as one, no feat is too great for us. Over time, that is essentially how Rav Ovadia grew to be who he came to be and that was how he spread the Torah. Page after page, sefer after sefer. A shiur in this neighborhood and ashiur in that country. The establishment of Jewish schools in different countries for our brethren lacking Jewish identity. Responsa upon responsa he aided the nation in coping with all the various circumstances we faced. It is how he produced such significant seforim, and it is how he systematically rebuilt Sephardic Jewry and impacted World Jewry. His love for each individual, the tears shed for every Jewish child, soldier or aguna all served as the life lesson we sought. Let us all exercise our unique potential and devote some time, however minimal, and begin to reflect his life’s mission.
A study initiative of Talmud Bavli and Mishnayot is ongoing in the Diaspora. An uplifting siyum will be held on the shloshim (November 5, 2013, אור לב’ כסלו) in the Tri-state area, in memory of Rav Ovadia. An updated list of available masechtot and perakimcan be viewed here. Anyone wishing to partake in this project or to request additional (sub)divisions not listed can email requests directly to SiyumforRavOY74@gmail.com. Due to the disproportionate requests for particular materials (dafim, perakim, masechtot) all divisions will be reserved upon first-come first-serve basis. A second cycle will begin once the first is completed.


“Rabbi David Hoffmann, ZL” by Eliezer M. Lipschuetz – A Translation

Rabbi David Hoffmann, ZL
By Eliezer M. Lipschuetz
Introduction, Translation, and Notes by David S. Zinberg
David S. Zinberg blogs at Realia Judaica.

Introduction

Rabbi Dr. David Zvi Hoffmann was a unique figure in the history of both German Jewish Orthodoxy and academic Jewish Studies.[1] He was widely regarded by contemporaries as an unequaled master of Halakha and Wissenschaft, and as a major leader in both communities. The biographical essay below by Eliezer Meir Lipschuetz, translated from Hebrew, was attached to the Hebrew translation (by Eliezer Barishansky) of Re’ayot Makhri’ot Neged Velhoizen, Hoffmann’s critique of the Documentary Hypothesis (Jerusalem, 1928 and available on HebrewBooks.org). Hoffmann’s original version, Die Wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese, was published in Berlin in 1904 (available on archive.org). Carla Sulzbach’s English translation, an MA thesis titled David Zvi Hoffmann’s . . . main arguments against the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, can be downloaded here.

Lipschuetz’s brief but rich portrait is notable for its first-hand account of Hoffmann, as a scholar, teacher, writer, and as a pious Jew. While clearly enamored of his subject, Lipschuetz expresses some gentle criticism of Hoffmann. He laments the fact that Hoffmann wrote in German rather than Hebrew, and harshly criticizes the general neglect of Hebrew by both Wissenschaft and German Orthodox writers. Lipschuetz also faults Hoffman for not proposing an alternative theory to the Documentary Hypothesis to reconcile inconsistencies in the Torah, even if Hoffmann successfully – in Lipschuetz’s estimation – negated the theory by demolishing its assumptions. Following the latter critique, Lipschuetz offers a somewhat tentative defense of Hoffmann.
For a brief biography of Lipschuetz, see the entry here in David Tidhar’s Entziklopedia Le-Halutze Ha-Yishuv U-Vonav.

The translation is non-literal, but I have tried to preserve the tone and style of the original. Where Lipschuetz’s Hebrew terminology adds value to the translation, I include it in square brackets. Common dates have been added alongside, or substituted for, Hebrew dates. In the notes, I include links to online versions of works cited.
__________

The story of his life – the properly developed life of a Torah scholar – was not eventful. His birthplace, Jewish Hungary, was unique; she experienced a late spiritual awakening, and for generations lacked any great Torah scholar or spiritual leader. But from the very moment her Torah began to shine, she was granted a short-lived daybreak full of light and vitality. She influenced much of the Diaspora, in many fields of study, both within and beyond the Jewish domain. He was born in the community of Verbó (Nitra province) in Hungary,[2] on 1 Kislev 5604 (November 24, 1843). His father was a local religious arbitrator [dayan]. He received the standard cheder education, though it included personal attention and supervision. From the time of Rabbi Moses Sofer, Hungary was blessed with yeshivot whose curricula differed from those of Lithuanian yeshivot. Even as a young man, he earned a reputation as a Talmudic prodigy [ilui]. He studied at the yeshivot of Verbó and Pupa[3] and later at the yeshiva of that generation’s most prominent rabbi [gadol ha-dor], Rabbi Moses Schick, in Sankta Georgen[4] near Pressburg,[5] where he was his teacher’s absolute favorite.

Around this time, a notable event took place in Hungary: Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, a German Torah scholar who served as rabbi of Eisenstadt, founded a yeshiva for both Torah and secular studies during a period of extremist agitation. The two opposing camps had separated angrily, and the Jewish community was split in two. At this inopportune time, the life of this yeshiva was cut short, as was the residence of its founder in Eisenstadt, due to the shrill protests of the ultra-conservative camp. It was feared that an extremist war would be waged against Rabbi Hildesheimer or, even worse, that he would mount a counter-offensive against the Torah leadership. Purity and Torah were in danger of becoming apostasy; alas, such is the power of communal dissension. He escaped the place of expected misfortune and returned to his native Germany where he became a rabbi and innovative leader of the Orthodox community.

Rabbi Hoffmann was Rabbi Hildesheimer’s student at his yeshiva in Eisenstadt and when his teacher departed, he did as well, arriving at the Pressburg Yeshiva, the central yeshiva in Hungary. Later, he studied at the University of Vienna and from there moved to Germany where he taught at the preparatory school of the Jewish Teachers Institute at Höchberg, near Würzburg. There, he was a colleague of Rabbi Seligman Baer Bamberger, another German Orthodox rabbi, whose goal was to safeguard the light of Torah within daily life. Rabbi Bamberger was a old-school scholar; he was mild mannered in ideological controversies and viewed the Jewish community as single entity which should not easily be split.

In 1875 [sic], Rabbi Hoffmann composed a dissertation, A Biography of Mar Shmuel,[6] and received a doctorate from the University of Tübingen.[7] He then married a woman from a prominent family, who survived him, and was invited by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch to teach at the high school he had founded. This was the first modern school for Orthodox students. Rabbi Hirsch fought the battle for Torah with the weapons of modern Enlightenment. He strove to consciously combine Enlightenment and Jewish ideology, but he viewed himself as a wartime general, and was inclined to separate and confine the Orthodox community. Rabbi Hoffmann served for a number of years as a teacher in Rabbi Hirsch’s school, and was close to him. After only a short time, Rabbi Hoffmann became closely connected with three of the spiritual leaders of the new Orthodox movement in Germany. At that time, Orthodox Judaism was aroused to defend itself, to establish relations with the new culture, and to create a Torah lifestyle within a foreign society. These three great leaders, though they had different personalities and goals, stood at the vanguard of the movement, to organize and dig in the troops. Rabbi Seligman Baer Bamberger continued to support earlier developments, disapproved of separatism, and strove to preserve an ideal of perfection untarnished by current fads. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch understood the full extent of the battle; he felt obligated to pursue total, uncompromising Enlightenment, and a Judaism that included full intellectual awareness. He established an ideological basis for Judaism, founded on intellect, and created a rationalist system based on principles of faith. He considered his age one of creating boundaries and he preferred separatism. Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer believed that his mission was to advance the scientific understanding of Judaism and to preserve its image in the eyes of science. He desired that Torah should never be forgotten in Israel, and although he too believed at the time in the need for separation, he maintained his sense of responsibility towards the wider community. The leadership of German Orthodoxy succeeded, then and forever, to create the type of Jew who combines within himself involvement in daily life [derekh eretz] and the fear of God, and to create a modern Orthodox lifestyle, including an Orthodox literature and science, though not on a large scale. These were transitional years, and immersion in transitional conflicts did not cause Rabbi Hoffmann mental anguish or psychological trauma; “he came and he left in peace.”[8] He was close with all three leaders at a formative period of his life; he was influenced by all three, but his approach was primarily that of his original teacher, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer. Together, they set themselves a goal, and worked towards it jointly throughout their entire lives.

When Rabbi Hildesheimer founded the Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin, as a center of Torah and Science in our time, he called on his student to teach Talmud. Rabbi Hoffmann taught Talmud and halakhic works [posekim] at that institution for forty-eight years. After the founder’s passing, he was appointed Rector of the Rabbinical Seminary (1899). The government and the University granted him the title of Professor (1918) and through old age he never left the Beit Midrash; he taught Talmud and posekim to the students and held a class on Talmud for lay members of the community.

Those who knew him while he was still alive know that his personality was as great as his Torah. One would have to return to the medieval period to witness such a persona among the German or French Hasidim. He was a man with no sense of his own greatness. He exuded humility and everything about him was simplicity. His words, in writing and in speech, were always to the point; he never spoke extravagantly, or used ornate speech, or showed off his knowledge. Truth was the expression of his personality. A measure of spirituality, piety, and modesty resided within his diminutive, silent frame, which was crowned by a brilliant mind. This is exactly how he appeared to me just weeks before his passing. He had attained a sort of calm, an equanimity, contentment, and clarity, which bestowed on him a peaceful beauty. He was always willing to serve even the most minor student; he was never indignant and no one could insult him. This man, who was as diligent in religious observance as one of the ancient righteous [tzadikim ha-rishonim], was shy by nature and humble before God and man. His integrity guided his relationships, without making him bitter or prickly. He had a sense of humor, was pleasant with everyone he met, and could even poke fun occasionally without ever hurting a soul. While his teacher Rabbi Hildesheimer was an activist, he was a “dweller in tents,” inclined to quiet research and study.

As much as he rarely left the “four cubits of Halakha,” he was not removed from daily life. He was well versed in the ways of the world and sensitive to life’s problems. There was no human or Jewish issue with which he was unfamiliar. Although not a political person, he participated in the movements of our people, joined in Orthodox undertakings, and had an appreciation for activism and political movements. In spirit, he was close to Mizrahi, but was an executive member of Agudath Israel, a member of the Aguda’s Council of Torah Sages, and a president of the Orthodox rabbinic association.[9] (The latter group was ideologically close to the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary and was not radically secessionist. There is another rabbinical association based in Frankfurt[10] which is completely secessionist, and yet another general union[11] for rabbis of all camps). He valued equally the undertakings of all those loyal to Torah, and did not exclude even those Jews who rejected separatism. In general, it was not his nature to stand apart, create divisions, or engage in weeding out opponents. He was a true pursuer of peace [rodef shalom]; he endeavored to abstain from conflict and was not combative in matters of Torah. He debated, but would not attack or behave triumphantly. The very essence of his being was peace [hotamo hayya ha-shalom].

His German style is clear and simple, without excessive use of flowery expressions. It is the fine language of a scientist, suitable for scientific material; there is gentleness in such simplicity. His Hebrew style is rabbinic, and it too is not weighed down by flowery expression (though occasionally it does show the influence of Haskalah writing). But his Hebrew style is plodding, apparently unable to express modern ideas. Hebrew’s major effort in recent times has been the adaptation of the language to modern concepts, the expansion of word usages, and the substitution of archaic usages with modern ones. He never acquired this level of Hebrew (though we should not think that he opposed the recent effort towards linguistic adaptation). He did not write much in Hebrew. For the most part, he wrote in Hebrew only when he composed halakhic responsa, notes, and a handful of commentaries. For the sake of being recognized by Gentile scholars, Wissenschaft Des Judentums sacrificed Hebrew on the altar of foreign language. German Orthodoxy committed a comparable sin by abandoning Hebrew in order to level the playing field between Orthodox Judaism and Liberal Judaism. It is a pity that Rabbi Hoffmann’s works were written in a foreign tongue, and were thus destined to have limited influence or value.[12] In any language, his ideas are properly organized and clearly stated, the ordering and contents are lucid and plain, and there is no strain or drag in his writing. His method is to offer a theory, accompanied by evidence, in a convincing and logical manner.

Rabbi Hoffmann had an extensive, multi-faceted grasp of European learning. He knew classical languages thoroughly, studied Semitic languages, and mastered several European languages. His knowledge spanned the entire range of Enlightenment learning and science.

He was also a great Torah scholar [gadol ba-Torah], without equal in Germany. We tend to measure a gadol by both erudition and intellect. Rabbi Hoffmann was great in both senses, in the sense of the term as used by elite Torah scholars [lamdanim]. His erudition covered all areas of Torah learning. Unlike those modern scholars who consider the Talmud a subject for antiquarian study, he studied the early and late Talmud commentaries. Talmud was not only fit for historical research; it was a living subject that had never died, whose past could only be explained by its continuity through the ages. He would clarify and simplify, and remove later embellishments. During the course of his teaching and his analysis, complexities became clear. He disliked artificial Talmudic sophistry [pilpul shel hidud],[13] but valued Talmudic analysis based on true notions [pilpul shel emet], which he practiced his entire life. He taught Torah publicly throughout his life; his teaching style was plain and clear. He would explain the topic under discussion in the simplest manner, and those who understood him realized that there was a thesis underlying this simplicity that could resolve halakhic disputes, determine the correct interpretation, and might even refute the opinion of an early or late Talmudic authority. Most scholars who teach Talmud disregard fundamental, introductory principles, relying on previously acquired knowledge; Rabbi Hoffmann did not. He would explain fundamental ideas that could be easily understood. These included synthetic words, popular expressions, halakhic issues, archeology, Talmudic methodology, the structure of Talmudic passages, and their textual context. He would explain all of these matters logically and lucidly.

His responsa[14] were published posthumously; others edited them for publication. He never intended to publicize them[15] and most were products of their time [le-tzorekh sha’a]. For decades, critical issues and complex questions from every corner of Germany were sent to him, by laymen as well as rabbis, who considered themselves his disciples and relied completely on his wisdom. Sometimes, a village rabbi would be confounded by a halakhic question and would travel that day to Berlin to consult with his teacher, or else send a telegram, or write a letter with his halakhic query. He was like the Great Sanhedrin for all German Jewry. Most questions were on contemporary matters that remain of practical interest. Essentially, these were questions on the Jew’s relationship to daily phenomena and technology: Issues related to manufacturing and commerce; social and communal matters; prayer and synagogue practices; questions on electricity and the telephone pertaining to Sabbath law; attending non-Jewish schools on the Sabbath; business arrangements with non-Jewish partners with regard to the Sabbath; laws pertaining to medication on Passover; the question of an Orthodox rabbi presiding over a Liberal congregation; the law on taking an oath bare-headed; shaving for medical reasons; Torah education for girls (he permitted it); women’s suffrage. In his responsa, he determined the halakha in a straightforward manner, by reference to the early and late authorities; he categorized their positions, and arrived at a halakhic decision. There were times when he utilized modern science or critical methods to clarify Talmudic issues. He may cite the writings of natural scientists, quote the opinion of medical experts, refer to scientific works, and then reply with his halakhic ruling. He only rarely engaged in the lengthy give-and-take of halakhic argumentation. For the most part, he simply cited his sources and outlined his halakhic ruling. He did not hesitate to reference halakhic abridgements, which most great Torah scholars normally ignore. In this transitional period, circumstances required setting patterns of daily life and social norms for Judaism within the modern world which, willy nilly, impacted the Jew. An important creation of German Orthodoxy was this model of modern life within which the Orthodox Jew could live without conflict. Rabbi Hoffmann was involved in all of these questions. He helped establish Halakha’s attitude to modern life and set parameters for permitted and prohibited behavior. Some of the questions he was asked by laymen display a real integrity that bring honor to the questioner.

The secular courts regularly consulted with him to clarify points of Jewish Law. He was often called as an expert witness in court at infamous trials, i.e., trials of anti-Semites. These events affected him deeply. When the survival of the German Empire hung in the balance,[16] I heard him say that this was divine punishment, measure for measure, for the monarchy’s lack of intervention in the trial of Fritsch,[17] who blasphemed against Heaven. As he said this, his voice shook with emotion. As a result of such trials, he composed his work on the Shulhan Arukh (first edition, 1885; second edition, 1895),[18] in which he outlined the role of posekim in our tradition – even though Rabbi Joseph Karo [ha-Mehaber] is the normative posek – and he clarified many details of the laws pertaining to Gentiles. Based on first editions of printed works, he explained the halakhic distinctions between Christians and other Gentiles. This work contains much detailed knowledge and explanations derived from his deep understanding.

The Wissenschaft establishment considered him one of its architects. Wissenschaft is primarily concerned with reconstituting the past from literary remnants, employing an historical-philological method, and embracing all aspects of Judaism. It is conservative by nature. Its originators held traditional beliefs but, over time, it became fundamentally antagonistic to Orthodox Judaism. The Orthodox were distressed over the inability of this heritage to strengthen tradition. The goal of Rabbi Hoffman and his teacher Rabbi Hildesheimer was to fortify the borders of Wissenschaft so that it could not harm tradition, and so that traditional ideology would not be harmed by Wissenschaft scholarship. They were determined to analyze the sources using the scientific method, and were confident that the Torah could not be damaged by true science. He demanded extreme caution, both from himself and from others. Whenever he discovered a conflict between scholarship and Torah he suspected that the conflict stemmed from a lack of precision, from flawed science or from superficial disregard of the sources. He was not narrowly constrained within his field; all of Jewish scholarship and all fields of Torah study were within his purview. Aside from the books he wrote, he published numerous articles. He stood constant guard, responding to every scientific discovery in his fields from the standpoint of both scientific criticism and traditional ideology. The truth of tradition was part of his consciousness. There was no boundary between his Talmudic analyses and his scientific research. He did not employ two methodologies, even if he was a master of two methodologies. He might clarify a halakha using textual variants or historical considerations, and he would employ all the tools of a Torah scholar to confirm details of critical study. For the benefit of critical scholarship, he made available a vast quantity of Talmudic and rabbinic material previously inaccessible to scholars.

In his book The First Mishna (1882, and translated into Hebrew by Dr. Samuel Greenberg),[19] he cast new light on the history of the Oral Law, and laid a foundation for the new field of Mishna criticism. Previously, most scholars believed that prior to our Holy Teacher, Rabbi Judah the Prince, there were only scattered, disorganized, and disjointed halakhot, until Rabbi Judah compiled them. It was considered groundbreaking when someone tried to show that compilations of halakhot were available in the Beit Midrash in Rabbi Akiva’s day. Had this issue come up earlier, many scholars may have hesitated to address it; but the question with its full implications had not yet arisen. Rabbi Hoffmann came forward and proved – with proofs withstanding critical evaluation – that at the time of the elders of the Shamai and Hillel schools there existed a First Mishna, fully complied and having a fixed text. Major mishnayot and basic halakhot in our Mishna derive from the First Mishna, and the very expression mishna rishona found in the sources is not only meant in contrast to a late Mishna on a particular halakha, but that this was the title of a compilation of halakhot used in the Beit Midrash during this period. He adduced proofs from mishnayot which, he showed, were from the Second Temple period; from common terminology; from the internal arrangement of the halakhot; and, primarily, from Tannaitic disputes. He believed that for the most part, these disputes were based on disagreements about the original wording and interpretation of the First Mishna, and that the relationship of the later Tannaim to the First Mishna was like that of the Amoraim to the Mishna as a whole. From the time the First Mishna was compiled, it was subject to much editing and came out in several revisions, comprising layer upon layer, until it was finalized in Rabbi Judah’s time. He then attempted to determine, by precise criticism, the makeup of the First Mishna, using internal signs as well as statements of Amoraim who were familiar with the Tannaitic world (though he did not employ enough of the latter method).
As examples he used Tractate Avot, in which he identified three revisions, and chapters in Pesahim and Yoma in which he identified multiple layers. He believed that mishnayot containing halakhic midrash were the oldest. He was of the opinion that prior to the compilation of the Mishna, the Soferim and the Tannaim studied the Oral Law in the format of halakhic midrash, accompanying Scripture. Associated with each verse they transmitted any relevant halakha, accepted interpretation, popular custom, and contemporary statute. These were attached to the biblical words and verses. The Soferim and early Tannaim proceeded from one verse to the next, interpreting each word, and associating halakhot with each and every letter. Mishnayot surviving from this early midrash are embedded in our Mishna, a clear sign that they derive from the First Mishna. Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevy[20] succeeded him and followed his method (without mentioning his name[21]), though he disagreed with some of the details of Rabbi Hoffmann’s thesis. Rabbi Halevy dated the compilation of the First Mishna (which he termed the “Foundational Mishna” [yesod ha-mishna]) earlier, to the period of the late Soferim, the last members of the Great Assembly. This theory is reasonable, but must be considered speculative, while Rabbi Hoffmann’s dating is supported by evidence and can withstand serious critical appraisal. Still, one should not dismiss Rabbi Halevy’s opinion as mere reasonable speculation. One may criticize Rabbi Hoffmann for underemphasizing the notion of gradual, anonymous, literary evolution, which could account for the Mishna’s creation from an historical perspective. Rabbi Halevy also disagreed with Rabbi Hoffmann’s view – a view shared by Rabbi Zechariah Frankel – that halakhic midrash preceded the Mishna. Rabbi Halevy took the opposite position, that the apodictic Mishnayot preceded halakhic midrash, and that the latter defined and restricted the apodictic halakhot. I believe that Rabbi Halevy was unsuccessful in shaking the foundations of Rabbi Hoffmann’s thesis. I believe one must distinguish between the midrash of the Soferim – which derives Halakha from Scripture, and for each new question applies exegesis to Scripture as an halakhic source – and the midrash of the Tannaim, which attempts to support and define previously compiled halakhot.[22] In one fell swoop, Rabbi Hoffmann illuminated the entire process of the Mishna’s creation, explicated the Tannaitic period, and laid the foundation for the field of scientific criticism of the Mishna, a field whose future is bright. This discipline does not damage traditional belief. On the contrary, it pushes back the date of the Oral Law’s compilation, and thus bolsters the antiquity of tradition.

There is obvious scientific value to his book An Introduction to Halakhic Midrashim (Berlin, 1887),[23] in which he defined the evolutionary pathways of halakhic midrash. He discovered two trends or styles within halakhic midrash: One of the school of Rabbi Akiva and the other of Rabbi Ishmael. He identified the signs by which one may distinguish between these two schools: Variations in exegetical style; differences in the names of Tannaim cited; differences in linguistic expression and exegetical structure. He demonstrated that there were once two parallel sets of halakhic midrashim on four books of the Pentateuch, written according to each method. His thesis was validated when it helped discover remnants of Tannaitic midrash. He published these in edited and annotated versions:

1. “On a Mekhilta to Deuteronomy,” in Shai la-Moreh (Berlin, 1890)[24]
2. Likutei Batar Likute mi-Mekhilta le-Sefer Devarim (Berlin, 1897)[25]
3. Midrash Tannaim al Sefer Devarim (Berlin, 1908)[26]
4. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon al Sefer Shemot (Frankfurt, 1905)[27]
5. Midrash ha-Gadol al Sefer Shemot, two volumes (Berlin, 1913-1921)[28]

Two of these books[29] were published by the author in complete form; their conclusions are straightforward and they are clear and well-organized. When I discussed these two books with him, he admitted that with respect to his ideas, he was preceded by Rabbi Israel Lewy of Breslau, in the latter’s books The Mishna of Abba Shaul[30] and Mekhilta De-Rabbi Shimon.[31] However, it must be noted that Rabbi Lewy – an unequaled scholar – wrote obliquely, whereas Rabbi Hoffmann constructed fully developed systems. Rabbi Hoffmann also translated and wrote a commentary on Mishna Nezikin and began work on Taharot. [32] He calmly expressed doubt about completing the commentary on Taharot in his lifetime. Although the translation was intended mainly for laypeople, the commentary includes notes and explanations of lasting value, especially on Taharot.

Scattered among his articles and responsa are studies on Talmudic philology and Jewish History. He was among the first to use the Samaritan Aramaic translation of the Bible for linguistic study of the Mishna and Talmud. He made emendations to the Talmud; interpreted obscure passages; attempted to reconcile conflicting chronologies; researched the history of the Sanhedrin; resolved difficulties in the writings of Josephus; utilized Jewish Hellenistic literature to explain Talmudic passages; analyzed etymologies of loanwords from Greek and Latin; tried his hand at comparing Hebrew and Aramaic to other Semitic languages; interpreted difficult chapters in Tractate Midot; elucidated Talmudic archeology; wrote commentaries on liturgy and piyyutim; and, he founded a scholarly journal which he edited for several years (1876-1893), the Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.[33] He achieved his self-imposed goal: To study Judaism by the scientific-critical method, and to bring respectability to scholarship that is loyal to tradition. His spoke with equanimity and conducted himself with humility. No opponent could act presumptuously toward him, and no one could cast doubt on his commitment to scientific scholarship.

In the end, he crossed over the boundary he had originally set for himself, and engaged in biblical studies. At most rabbinical seminaries in the West, there was no study of the Written Law except for some instruction on medieval commentaries. Wissenschaft scholars did not study Bible out of fear of taking a stand on fundamental principles concerning the Torah. They did not have the courage to challenge the prevailing opinions of Gentile scholars. Chumash was studied at two Berlin seminaries – at Maybaum’s Liberal seminary,[34] and also at the Orthodox seminary founded by Rabbi Hildesheimer – since both academies recognized the challenges posed by modern biblical studies, and each had its own unique approach to Torah study. Teaching Chumash at the seminary led him to study exegesis and to analyze the conclusions of biblical criticism. He then wrote his book against Wellhausen, the most prominent biblical critic, The Principle Arguments Against Wellhausen [Re’ayot Makhr’iot Neged Velhoizen],[35] published in 1904, in which he sanctified God’s name by his critique of criticism. He critically assessed the proofs employed by criticism, and highlighted the flaws in its arguments. In this way he attempted to destroy Wellhausen’s structure, removing each level, brick by brick. He especially fought the Documentary Hypothesis, refuting its assumption of multiple textual layers. He revealed its artificiality and its lack of foundation, as well as its internal inconsistencies, using proofs based on the methods and principles of the critics themselves. He refuted their proofs for the existence of separate biblical source-documents, based on the notion of distinctive terminology, by listing parallels between expressions used in the Prophets and in the Torah, thus negating the belief that the Prophets were unaware of sections of the Torah. He cited ironclad evidence regarding internal connections between the sources, showing how they were indeed parallel according to the critics’ own methodology.

After this fundamental work, he devoted himself to publishing his commentaries on Leviticus[36] and Deuteronomy.[37] Here he battled the destructive criticism on behalf of Scripture, using every available scientific and deductive weapon. At the same time, by citing a vast quantity of Talmudic and rabbinic material, he demonstrated the contribution of the Oral Law to understanding the simple meaning of Scripture. From one chapter to the next, he pursued critical theory, contradicted each of its conclusions, and made sense of the verses.

He also made an effort, in which he was preceded by several Jewish scholars (Rabbis Naftali H. Wesseley, Meir L. Malbim, J. Z. Mecklenberg), to demonstrate the unity of the Written and Oral Laws, both in the long introduction to Leviticus and within the commentary. He investigated the division and ordering of biblical paragraphs [parshiyot], and even addressed matters of philosophy and the rational justification of the commandments [ta’ame ha-mitzvot]. One might consider his commentary the “Orthodox version” of scientific exegesis. Before his time, Orthodox Judaism was resigned not to respond to criticism, choosing silence instead. He blazed a new path which, however, is not suited for the general public. It is a pity that he did not write his commentaries in Hebrew, but we can rejoice at the fact that his fundamental work against Wellhausen has now been translated.

One might fault him for responding to biblical criticism by negation only; for demonstrating the emptiness of the critics’ proofs but not offering a positive resolution to the problems they raise; for not confronting speculation with certitude; for not proposing a positive theory to resolve inconsistencies in the Torah. It is possible that he intended only to negate, and left the positive response to faith and tradition.[38]

Six years ago today, on 19 Marheshvan 5682 (November 20, 1921), he passed away at the age of 78. At the time, we all felt that he had no replacement, and that the generation had been orphaned. He was accorded much honor by his students and by all of German Orthodoxy; an honor that cultured people confer on their teachers; an honor that brings honor to those who give it.

There is no replacement for a giant, but there is comfort in his teaching.

May his soul be bound in the bond of life.

19 Marheshvan 5688 (November 14, 1927)
[1] For an introductory bibliography on Hoffmann, see the note here on a Seforim Blog post by Dr. Shnayer Leiman. The following sources can be found online on archive.org: Marx, Essays in Jewish Biography; Ginzberg, Students, Scholars and Saints.
[2] Today: Vrbové, Slovakia
[3] Today: Pápa, Hungary
[4] Today: Svätý Jur, Slovakia
[5] Today: Bratislava, Slovakia
[6] Mar Samuel, Rector der jüdischen Akademie zu Nehardea in Babylonien (Leipzig, 1873); available on Google Books.
[7] The dating of Hoffmann’s doctorate to 1875 is either a mistake or a typographical error, as the date on the published version of Mar Samuel (see previous note) is 1873. In Essays in Jewish Biography, p. 204 (see note 1), Alexander Marx dates Hoffman’s doctoral diploma to December 17, 1870.
[8] A reference to Rabbi Akiva’s return from the pardes (“orchard”) of secret mystical learning, free of physical, psychological, or religious injury; cf. Hagiga 13a. Hayyim Tchernowitz (Rav Tzair) uses the same expression with regard to Hoffmann in his biographical essay; cf. “R. David Zvi Hoffmann: Le-Partzufo Haruhani,” Ha-Tekufah, v. 13 (1922), p. 479.
[9] Vereinigung Traditionell-Gezetzestreuer Rabbiner
[10] Verband Orthodoxer Rabbiner. Thanks go to Dr. Marc B. Shapiro for this identification.
[11] Allgemeiner Rabbiner Verband in Deutschland. On the history of these organizations, see Matthias Morgenstern, From Frankfurt to Jerusalem: Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Leiden, 2002) pp. 38ff.
[12] Lipschuetz echoes Hoffmann’s own fear about the legacy of his German writings (see his introduction to Melamed Le-Ho’il and see note 15). Nearly a century later, we can state that Hoffmann’s major German works have had and will continue to have lasting influence, as nearly all of his published monographs have appeared in Hebrew translation. His commentary on Exodus was recently published in Hebrew from a German manuscript (trans. Asher Wasserteil, Jerusalem, 2010).
[13] Hoffmann appears to have changed his attitude to this type of pipul in his later years. In his introduction to Melamed Le-Ho’il (p. 2), he states that pilpul designed to sharpen the minds of students, even if it disregards logic, is more desirable in Germany than it once was. Since Torah scholarship and appreciation for Torah scholars has waned, pilpul shel harifut may help endear Torah learning to students. Hoffmann makes this point to justify the inclusion of his own pipul-style writings in Melamed Le-Ho’il.
[14] Melamed Le-Ho’il (Frankfurt, 1926); available on HebrewBooks.org.
[15] Melamed Le-Ho’il was edited by Hoffmann’s son Moses and published posthumously in 1926. But there is evidence to suggest that Hoffmann wished to publish the manuscript in some form; see Moses Hoffmann’s testimony here in his introduction to the printed version: וידוע למקורביו כי היה בדעתו בימי זקנותו להוציאם לאור הדפוס. In his own introduction to the manuscript, the senior Hoffmann expresses the hope that his children and his students benefit from its contents. He also states clearly his desire that Melamed Le-Ho’il becomes part of his permanent legacy – ויהיה לי לזכרון לדור אחרון – compared to his German writings which, he says, may soon be forgotten.
[16] Presumably near or at the conclusion of World War I.
[17] Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), German anti-Semitic writer and publisher. See Richard S. Levy, Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, v. 1 (Santa Barbara, 2005), pp. 249ff; link here.
[18] Der Schulchan-Aruch und die Rabbinen über das Verhältniss der Juden zu Andersgläubigen (Berlin, 1885); available on Google Books.
[19] Die erste Mischna und die Controversen der Tannaim (Berlin, 1882); Hebrew translation, Ha-Mishna Ha-Rishona U-Felugta De-Tanna’ei (trans. Samuel Greenberg, Berlin, 1914); available on HebrewBooks.org.
[20] Yitzhak Isaac Halevy Rabinowitz (1847-1914), author of Dorot Ha-Rishonim (Frankfurt, 1906ff.); available on HebrewBooks.org.
[21] Tchernowitz (p. 485) makes the same accusation against Halevy.
[22] I.e., Hoffmann was correct in saying that the earliest midrash, of the Soferim, was written as an interpretive layer attached directly to Scripture, and that it preceded the compilation of the First Mishna. However, Tannaitic midrash was indeed written as a subsequent elaboration of the First Mishna.
[23] Zur Einleitung in die halachischen Midraschim
[24] “Uber eine Mekhilta zu Deuteronomium,” in Jubelschrift zum Siebzigsten Geburgstag des Dr. Israel Hildesheimer (Shai la-Moreh) p. 83ff.; available on Google Books.
[25] Available on archive.org.
[26] Available on HebrewBooks.org.
[27] Available on HebrewBooks.org.
[28] Available on HebrewBooks.org, here (v. 1) and here (v. 2).
[29] Presumably nos. 3 and 4.
[30] Uber Einige Fragmente aus der Mischna des Abba Saul (Berlin, 1876).
[31] Ein Wort über die Mechilta des R. Simon(Breslau, 1889); available on Google Books.
[32] Mishnayot : Shishah Sidre Mishnah Be-Nikud Ha-Otiyot Uve-Haʻataḳah Ashkenazit (Berlin, 1893-1897).
[33] Began publication in 1874 as Magazin für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, edited by Abraham Berliner. From 1876, was renamed and published under the joint editorship of Berliner and Hoffmann.
[34] Siegmund Maybaum (1844-1919), lecturer at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.
[35] Original version, Die Wichtigsten Instanzen Gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese (Berlin, 1904); available on archive.org. Hebrew translation by Eliezer Barishansky (Jerusalem, 1928); available on HebrewBooks.org.
[36] Original version, Das Buch Leviticus (Berlin, 1905-1906); available on Google Books, here (v. 1) and here (v. 2). Hebrew version, Sefer Vayikra (trans. Zvi Har-Sheffer and Aharon Lieberman, Jerusalem, 1976).
[37] Original version, Das Buch Deuteronomium (Berlin, 1913-1922). Hebrew version, Sefer Devarim (trans. Zvi Har-Sheffer, Tel Aviv, 1961); available on the Daat website. Hoffmann’s commentary on Genesis, Sefer Bereshit, was published in Hebrew from a German manuscript (trans. Asher Wasserteil, Bnei Brak, 1969) and is available on Daat.
[38] Tchernowitz (pp. 489ff.) makes the same observation regarding Hoffmann’s sole focus on negating Wellhausen and offers a similar, though more vigorous, defense of Hoffmann. He says that “negating the negation” [shelilat ha-shelila] was sufficient for his purpose, since the burden of proof lies on one who questions the traditional view of the Torah. He adds that many had tried, but failed, in their attempt to prove the traditional view. Thus, the negative approach was preferable, by which Hoffmann could show that science does not contradict tradition. Moreover, Tchernowitz says, Hoffmann’s main objective was to show that the Documentary Hypothesis, though widespread, was merely a belief – and an unsupportable one at that – lacking scientific merit.


Dovid Bashevkin – Perpetual Prophecy: An Intellectual Tribute to Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin on his 110th Yahrzeit

Perpetual Prophecy:
An Intellectual Tribute to Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin on his 110th Yahrzeit
by Dovid Bashevkin
Reb Zadok ha-Kohen Rabinowitz of Lublin (hereafter: “Reb Zadok”) was born in 1823 into a noted rabbinic family. From a young age, we are told, he displayed signs of astonishing genius.[1] While many of these stories are questionable, it is evident that by the time he celebrated his bar mitzvah he was extremely thoroughly familiar with the standard rabbinic corpus and could navigate it easily.[2] By the time he turned twenty he had already written several works on Talmudic law and showed his interest in matters historical. From studying his earlier works it becomes abundantly clear that even prior to his later Hasidic transformation he was quite an original thinker. Though many of his works are in the form of traditional rabbinic writing, there is much that is truly striking, both in terms of the topics which he broached, which included historiography, chronology,[3] and astronomy, and the manner in which they were discussed. From an early age he was quite fond of amalgamating the normally distinct worlds of legal Talmudic discussion and aggadah.
During the mid-twentieth-century, Reb Zadok’s thought was first taught in America by R. Shraga Feivel Mendowitz, who gave classes on his works during his tenure as administrator and Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshivas Torah V’Daas.[4] The works of Reb Zadok also deeply influenced the works of R. Eliyahu Dessler,[5] R. Gedaliah Shor,[6] and R. Yitzchak Hutner.[7] These roshei yeshiva brought Reb Zadok’s works to American yeshivot. Often unknown to those studying the works of these aforementioned rabbis, some of who rarely, if at all, cite Reb Zadok by name, the thought and influence of Reb Zadok is manifest in their work. It is fair to say that the resurgence of the study of what has become known as “mahshava” in contemporary yeshivot truly owes a great deal of credit to the works of Reb Zadok.
The academic study of Reb Zadok is surely in debt to Prof. Yaakov Elman, who brought the thought of Reb Zadok to the English speaking academic world in a series of articles published over the past twenty-five years.[8] His analysis of many of the central themes simultaneously charted new grounds in Hasidic scholarship and remain the standard from which subsequent scholarship on Reb Zadok is measured.[9]
Recently, Reb Zadok has begun to receive much deserved attention from the academic community. Historians, theologians, and sociologists have begun to explore the works of “The Kohen,” as he is often referred to colloquially, for his timeless and penetrating approach to Jewish thought. On the occasion of Reb Zadok’s 110th yahrzeit, a brief history of Reb Zadok’s thought, as expounded in the last few generations and a never-before-published original essay (“The World as a Book: Religious Polemic, Hasidei Ashkenaz, and the Thought of Reb Zadok”), is presented for the readers of the Seforim blog.
The turning point in Reb Zadok’s life was his divorce from his first wife. At the age of twenty-one, after getting married in his mid-teens, he decided to seek a divorce. The reasons for his insistence on a divorce are not clear, though it seems that Reb Zadok was led to believe that his wife had not maintained the level of piety that was required for him, as a Rav and Kohen. His wife, however, refused to accept a bill of divorce, forcing Reb Zadok to travel as an itinerant scholar throughout Europe in order to obtain a heter meah rabbanan.[10] Of the many rabbinic personalities he met during the trip, it was R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica who would completely transform Reb Zadok’s life.[11]
After his encounter with the Rebbe of Izbica, Reb Zadok decided to begin living as a Hasid. Though such a transition, as pointed out by Alan Brill, was certainly not as dramatic as it would have been several generations earlier, when the Hasidic-Mitnaggedic feud was in its fullest thrust, the cultural change was still quite significant. Reb Zadok spent nearly a decade at the court of R. Leiner after which he left to remarry and settle near Lublin. His second marriage, sadly, did not produce any children. For the remainder of his life, Reb Zadok remained immersed in study and contemplation from which he produced volumes of writings, none of which were published in his lifetime. He spent thirty-four years, from 1854 until 1888, in seclusion. It was only during the final thirteen years of his life, following the death of his dear friend R. Leible Eiger (who had succeeded R. Leiner after his death in 1854), that Reb Zadok functioned as a traditional Hasidic Rebbe.[12] On the ninth of Elul (Monday, 3 September 1900), in the seventy-seventh year of his life, Reb Zadok passed away.
Reb Zadok incorporated his own life struggles and frustrations into his own work. Over the course of his life there were two struggles that loomed large: his divorce and subsequent wandering through Europe, and his childlessness. Regarding the former, it is difficult to find even an allusion to the emotional toll which this difficulty took on Reb Zadok’s life. However with regard to the latter, it is quite clear that his childlessness was a major theme in his works. The title of Reb Zadok’s sermon collection, Pri Tzadik, is an allusion to his own perception of his children (referred to Rabbinic literature as pri [“fruits] of an individual) being the Torah teachings imparted to his students.[13] Additionally, Reb Zadok dedicated an entire work, entitled Poked Akarim (“The Visiting of the Barren”), first printed in 1922, for this theme to be made apparent.
The only source of directly autobiographical information from Reb Zadok is his fascinating work, Divrei Halomot (“The Message of Dreams”), first printed in 1903, of his own documentation of his dreams. The dreams, which are dated starting in 1845 and end in 1883, are mostly theological or Talmudic in nature, but many autobiographical insights can be gleaned from them as well.[14] Particularly, as been noted by several scholars, the third dream recorded, dated 1843, has provided particularly rich insight into Reb Zadok’s self-perception:
“I dreamt a dream [when I was present in Izbica] in which certain ideas were reveled to me from the roots of my soul. And among the ideas which were told to me is that the generation of Messiah will consist of those souls of the Generation of the Wilderness… whom are in turn comprised of the souls of the Flood… and they (the Generations of the Flood) corrupted their ways and sinned in what is known in rabbinic works as the sin of youth[15]… and the rectification of this is in the Generation of the Wilderness for which is was called ‘the kindness of youth.’ As it is written “I have remembered for you the kindness of my youth.” (Jeremiah 2:2).”[16]
Undoubtedly, this text, described by Reb Zadok himself as “the roots of my soul,” is the most authoritative presentation of Reb Zadok’s self-image in his extant writings. While its interpretation is ambiguous, the thrust of the dream is the powerful religious energy which is present even in sins and the potential to channel such energy into positive direction, ultimately resulting in the redemption. Why this relates to “the root” Reb Zadok’s soul is less clear. What emerges from this dream is THE central role the Hasidic idea of “descent in order to elevate” played in Reb Zadok’s life, where in his methodology, as articulated by Yaakov Elman, “the great Lurianic drama of cosmic catastrophe and slow rebuilding takes on a decided epistemologic cast.” This “cosmic drama,” which Reb Zadok brilliantly presents through his mastery of halakha, aggada, and the unfolding of Jewish History, was just as evident in the story of his life.
While the following appendix is, of course, not an exhaustive presentation of Reb Zadok’s thought, the following brief essay should serve as a call for scholars from across academic disciplines to carefully re-consider Reb Zadok’s contribution to modern intellectual thought.
Appendix:
The World as a Book:
Religious Polemic, Hasidei Ashkenaz, and the Thought of Reb Zadok
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this is our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything
-William Shakespeare (As You Like It, Act II, 1.14-17)
Mainstream Orthodox Jewish religious thought views the Bible as the exclusive representation of God’s will. Certainly, experiential reality may serve as testimony to His will or may inspire others to follow His will, however the arbiter of what His will precisely is, is restricted to the domain of the Bible. This view is clearly reflected in the oft-cited formulation of the Zohar that “God looked into the Torah and created the world.”[17] The all encompassing will of God is clearly represented in the statement by the Torah, while “the world” is merely an expression of its truth. The world is not given any independent status as a prophet of sorts for the word of God.
Yet, a second model exists. Reb Zadok cites that he has heard from his master, “That God created a book, and that is the world, and the commentary (on the book), and that is that Torah. For the Torah is akin to a commentary of God’s possessions.”[18] This analogy clearly places a greater focus on the world as a repository for Godly revelation. While the Torah clearly functions as a means of deciphering for the revelatory code of the world, it still remains to be seen within this analogy if the world can relate the will of God without the expository aid of the Torah. Moreover, does this analogy leave room for the possibility that the World may contain truths that do not even exist within the Torah? In order to understand the broader implications of this analogy, this essay will explore its origins and counterparts predating Reb Zadok and its specific influence on his general theology.
The notion that the word of God is revealed in two books, the Bible and the “Book of Nature,” dates back to beginning of the Common Era.[19] Throughout the centuries this idea was developed by many thinkers, each of whom expanded and evolved the scope and nature of the implications of this concept. While discussing its relationship to the Hasidei Ashkenaz, which will be discussed later, Haym Soloveitchik has argued that the analogy of the world as a book played an essential role in medieval thought:
“This implicit doctrine of dual revelation bears a familial resemblance to the common idea of the ‘book of creatures,’ which, in one form or another, shaped the entire medieval perception of the outside world and, as it also underlay most of its art, found expression in every frontal, portal, and stained-glass window of the cathedrals of the time. The doctrine taught that God has declared Himself in two manifestations: in the Holy Scriptures and in the Book of Nature. The world of sense is what it appears to be – a structure of physical objects – but it is at the same time a mirror and mystical typology of the attributes of the Creator Himself.”[20]
Following the humanistic revolution and the Renaissance the notion of the “Book of Nature” lost its prominence in Christian theology. The advances of science and humanistic thinking forced Christians to focus on other ideas to further their own theological agenda.[21]
Overall it seems there are two primary themes that can be culled from the vast array of presentations this analogy has taken in Christian thought relate to its objective and its substance. Firstly, in regards to its objective, the analogy served an important polemical role in the Church’s battles with the Cathar heresy which maintained that a “radical dualism of evil matter and divine spirit” existed in the world. Cathar dogma was founded upon the notion that two Gods existed, one evil who was the creator of matter, and one good, who controlled the world of spirituality.[22]
This approach is innovative for two reasons. By definition, proposing that God has revealed Himself outside the explicit prophetic revelation of Scriptures is novel to a normally prophetically based religion. Yet Christian theologians were uniquely innovative in that they actively pursued God’s implicit revelation in nature in its most basic sense, namely, flora and fauna. While other theologians were content with the first innovation, it was a markedly Christian exercise to search for Gods message in the pedals of roses and the contours of a nut.[23]
Eventually, with the advent of the scientific revolution, the Church and its sacrosanct “Book of Nature” faced tremendous controversy. The Galileo affair managed to shift the astronomical view of our universe and consequently redefine the essence of the Book of nature.
In response to a letter from his student Castelli, who informed him of the concerns of the Grand Duchess Christina regarding the relationship between religious dogma and Copernican theory, Galileo wrote her a short essay entitled “Letter to the Grand Duchess.” It was in these letters, to his student Castelli in 1613 (“Letter to Castelli”) and to the Grand Duchess in 1615, that Galileo began to release the shackles restricting the Book of Nature to the Domain of the Book of Scriptures. Later, in 1623 Galileo finally made it abundantly clear in which domain the Book of Nature resided.[24] He wrote:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”[25]
The sacred Book of Nature, which had for so long served as theological tool of the Church was now beginning to lose its authority. Galileo was careful not to deny the authority of the Book of Scriptures; it was with the interpretive framework of the Book of Nature that he took issue. Criticizing the Church’s claim as the exclusive authority in the Book of Nature’s interpretation, he felt the church had overstepped its boundaries in so narrowly defining the scope of legitimate interpretation. In his opinion the Church believed that, “Theology is the queen of all the sciences and hence must not in any way lower herself to accommodate the principles of other less dignified disciplines subordinated to her; rather, there others must submit to her as to a supreme empress and change and revise their conclusions in accordance with theological rules and decrees.”[26] Galileo did not seek to delegitimize the Church’s claim to truth in the Book of Scriptures; he just wanted that the Book of Nature be approached and understood on its own terms as a concurrent source of truth, rather than a truth subordinate to the truth of the Church.
Scholars have pointed out that it was not Galileo’s intention to engage in religious polemic, and he was, in fact, quite hesitant to respond to the Duchess, due to his concern that his innovative ideas would shake her faith. Most notably, Galileo never published the letter, a testament to his honest intentions to simply allay the Duchess’s theological concerns. However the letter did eventually circulate locally and found its way into the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome, eventually setting the stage for Galileo’s trial of 1633 and the placement of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus on the banned Index of the Church.[27]
Ultimately Galileo’s presentation of the parallel truths of the Book of Nature and the Book of Scriptures did not help mitigate the attacks of his persecutors. As described by Biagioli, “The book of nature, therefore, was a Trojan horse: it seemed to pay homage to the theologians and their regime of truth, but it would have restricted their authority if they allowed it through their gates.” The Church did not allow itself to be fooled.
Emerging from this entire affair is a new chapter in the evolution of the interpretive framework of the Book or Nature. No longer was nature a hermeneutical resource for theological pontification, now it had a life and a message of its own, independent from theological dogma.
As the “Book of the Nature” received serious attention in the world of Christian theology, it also managed to infiltrate the medieval world Hasidei Ashkenaz. In a pioneering study, Haym Soloveitchik presented the primary text of the Hasidei Ashkenaz as Sefer Hasidim and explained that “underlying much of Sefer Hasidim, is the idea that the will of God, the rezon ha-Bore has not been cabined or confined within the overt dictates of the Torah, written or oral.”[28] The author of Sefer Hasidim seemed convinced that a vast body of unexpressed commandments exists outside of the explicit ruling of the Torah. Soloveitchik suggested that such an assumption is derived from “the vast disparity between Biblical and Rabbinic norms, and the testimony of God’s actions (both His wrath and His favor) in the Bible and in daily experience, [which] stand witness to the operation in history of standards of judgment other than those articulated in the Torah.”[29] Indeed, the introduction to Sefer Hasidim makes this goal quite clear:
“[This book] is written for those who fear God and are mindful of His name. There is a hasid whose heart desires, out of love for his Creator, to do His will, but he is unaware of all these things-which thing to avoid and how to execute profoundly the wish of the Creator. For this reason the Sefer Hasidim was written so that all who fear God and those returning to their Creator with an undivided heart may read it and know and understand what is incumbent upon them to do and what they must avoid.”[30]
Perhaps this statement may not at first glance seem relevant to the previous discussion, but it underlying assumption is extremely important to the general notion of the Book of Nature. Heretofore in Jewish theology it was generally assumed that all of God’s commandments were explicit either in the Written Law or the Oral Law which was simultaneously handed to Moses on Sinai. Generations following the canonization of the Talmud viewed it is the final authority on Jewish law not only in terms of deciding existing law but also in determining which laws even existed. Those within the Hasidei Ashkenaz were revolutionary in the sense that they suggested that the Law as revealed through the existing Torah was incomplete and an independent set of directives could be derived implicitly that had not been previously expounded in the Bible or Talmud.
To be sure, as Soloveitchik is quick to point out, the notion of a separate implicit revelation played significantly different roles in Hasidic thought and Christian theology. The differences, as presented by Soloveitchik, were as follows:
“The Hasidic doctrine dealt with Divine imperatives, the Christian one with Divine attributes; the former asserted deductions of new truths, the latter symbolic reflections of known ones. They share, however, one common assumption: outside the binding, canonized corpus, a ‘larger scripture,’ as it were, exists which can yield up religious truths upon proper inspection.”
Regardless of Soloveitchik’s distinction, the innovation of the Hasidei Ashkenaz serves as a powerful precedent in Jewish theology for extra-Biblical revelation. Reb Zadok employs the analogy of “The Book” in several different places and contexts.
As previously mentioned, in Reb Zadok’s first work after becoming joining the Hasidic ranks of Izbica, he presents the following:
“Every day there are innovations in Torah, for God recreated every day his works of the world, and the works of the world (maaseh bereishit) is through the Torah as cited in the beginning of Bereishit Rabbah,[31] and logically the recreation of the world as well is though the Torah. And it is for this reason that after the blessing [of the Shema] ‘Yotzer ha-Meorot,’ which relates to the recognition of the recreation of the world every day, [the Rabbis] established a second blessing which functions as a blessing on the Torah as explained in [TB] Berahot 11b (i.e. ‘Ahava Rabba’). One requests (to God) to know the innovations of the Torah which are through the recreation of the world. And as I have heard, that God created a book, and that is the world (olam),[32] and the commentary (on the book), and that is that Torah. For the Torah is akin to a commentary of God’s possessions.”[33]
As is typical of much of Reb Zadok’s writings in Tzidkat ha-Tzadik, he is quite brief and does not go onto lengthy expositions as found in his later writings. In this passage it is seems clear that he is following traditional Jewish thought in ascribing precedence to the book of God (i.e. the Torah) over the book of Nature. His citation of the classical passage in Midrash Rabbah, aside from lending traditional pedigree to his thought,[34] clearly articulated the traditional Jewish view that the world is an outgrowth of the Torah and not vice versa. After establishing this traditional premise, Reb Zadok proceeded to present an atypical understanding of the relationship between the Torah and the world, namely, that the World is a book while the Torah is mere commentary. Certainly it seems fair to presume that a commentary is ancillary to the book to which it is attached; therefore this relationship must be more carefully examined and defined in the context of broader Jewish thought and the full scope of Reb Zadok’s writings.
In his work Mahshavot Harutz, Reb Zadok returns to and elaborates upon the usages of the book analogy.[35] In this essay, he proposed that the essence of all existence in this world is comprised of the letters of the Torah. Similar to his previously cited comments, he once again invokes the oft-quoted passage in Bereishit Rabbah that the Torah is the blueprint of the world. However in this passage he elaborates much further upon the concept of the world as a book and its relationship to the Torah.
Reb Zadok began the essay by citing the Talmudic passage that on Rosh Hashanah “three books are opened”: The book of the righteous, the book of the wicked, and the book of the ambivalent. Each of these books, in Reb Zadok’s thematic archetype, corresponds to a different expression of spiritual existence. The book of the righteous corresponds to the objective truth contained in the Written Torah, which in effect corresponds to the world of writing. The book of the ambivalent corresponds to the Oral Law thus representing the world of speech. While the Book of the wicked, corresponding to the implicit essence of spirituality, which is the only vestige of spiritual connectivity which remains for the wicked, this, says Reb Zadok, is the world of thought. Such a presentation is counterintuitive, for it posits that the highest expression of truth is found in the Book of the Wicked. Yet, it is precisely the transcendental nature of this concealed element of Godliness which demands that it be referred to as “The Book of the Wicked;” for the only remaining grasp which the wicked have into the world of spirituality exists within this book.
Though Reb Zadok expands his tripartite correspondence, what is crucial for our discussion is his explanation as to why the Talmud ascribes the description of “writing” to all three books, even the book of thought. He writes:
“And the language of writing is relevant in all (three books). For all of them are called books…and also on the book of thought its writing is the physical world which is a remnant of the letters of thought which are faintly recognizable through their (i.e. the wicked) actions. And so I have received that this entire world is a book which God created. And it appears to me that as a child I saw such a formulation in the work Me’or Einayim[36] which cited the formulation in a gentile work of pedagogy. Seemingly, it was found there a slight parallel of this idea that all of the creations of the world are the forms of the letters which God inscribed in his book, the worlds. The Torah is the commentary on that book and adorns the world with truth for within the Torah the letters of thought are explicitly manifest, as opposed to in the World which only presents vestige and a remnant. And through the Torah we are able to understand the hints of the remnants and recognize that within the worldly actions contain the thoughts of God. Nevertheless, one must bear in mind, that all worldly actions and creations of the world are a Book unto themselves on which the letters of God’s thoughts are inscribed through great concealment. There is no creation which is not marked for a specific purpose in the mind of God.”[37]
In this remarkable passage, Reb Zadok presents more clearly his understanding of the relationship between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scriptures. Reb Zadok believed that the experiential world functioned as a means of revelation, though the cryptic revelatory language of the world is chiefly deciphered though the explanation of the Torah. Yet all of the experiences of the world are infused with spiritual and theological significance through which God’s glory can be revealed. It is clear from the passage that “The Book of Nature” in Reb Zadok’s thought it not restricted to mere flora and fauna, but encompasses more broadly the entire experiential world. Whether such experiential revelation can ever occur without the aegis of the Torah still remains to be seen.
Another point worthy of note in this passage is Reb Zadok’s willingness to cite a Gentile work which obscurely alludes to his idea. In fact, citing the controversial work Me’or Einayim, is in itself quite noteworthy bearing in mind the scathing criticism the work endured in previous generations. Certainly such citations should be seen in light of Reb Zadok’s general open mindedness to scholarly inquiry, particularly historical studies,[38] and his nuanced attitude toward gentile wisdom, all of which have been previously noted by scholars.[39] Ironically, this controversial citation may very well be justified based on the import of the very idea he is citing it for, namely, that all of creation, even gentiles, are passages in the God’s grand book: The World.
Reb Zadok’s view of the “Book of Nature” contrasts strongly to the Christian conception. Whereas Christians took a markedly literal approach to the theological messages of nature, in Reb Zadok’s works such messages are restricted to experiential sentiments and personal directives. Reb Zadok’s avoidance of homiletical deductions from nature’s structure sidesteps the potentially officious theological implications of the Book of Nature which arose for the Church during the time of Galileo.
Reb Zadok’s conception of the revelatory consequences of the “Book of Nature” appears in his novel understanding of the “bat kol” (trans: heavenly voice). Departing from the more traditional description of the bat kol,[40] which understood the phenomena quite literally, Reb Zadok proposed a new approach (which seems to be theologically rooted in his aforementioned conception of “The Book of Nature”):
“And our Rabbis have revealed to us stories which discuss the bat kol, which is defined as listening to the voices of everyday people who are discussing daily matters and do have other intentions. Rather one listener is able to be informed, through their words, what is required of him… Namely, God articulates the will of his voice through regular people. Even though they have their own intentions when they speak and the directives do not seem to emanate from God with intention and clarity, rather His will relates to us implicitly…For example when God wishes good it is manifest personally in each of his creations according to their conception of good. The Jewish people relate according to their conception of good, gentiles relate each according to their own conception…and so it is with all creations according to their own conception. And therefore it is nearly impossible to define what is the implicit will that God intends to impart since it is manifest through different being, each with their own conceptions and notions of that message.”[41]
Undoubtedly, Reb Zadok maintains that there are vital messages contained in the Book of Nature. However, the implicit revelatory message through which the Book of Nature operates often obfuscates our ability to properly decipher its contents. The Torah contains God’s explicit spoken word, while Nature, or more precisely experiential life, only relates implicitly God unarticulated will. Yet all of Nature remains, as Reb Zadok often quotes from his Hasidic predecessor R. Simha Bunim of Przysucha, “a means of acquiring God.”[42]
Indeed, Reb Zadok allowed for the actual interpretation of Natures message, yet only by those properly initiated to the methods of interpreting bat kol, as demonstrated in a widely-told story:
“As is well known in the name of Zusia of blessed memory that he was once walking along the road and it chanced upon him that a Gentile wagon driver, who was transporting hay, fell over. The man requested help, to which he responded, ‘I cannot.’ The Gentile said to him, “You can, but you just do not want to.” Regarding this Rebbe Zusia said to himself that it must be an allusion to the fallen hey (referring to the fifth letter in the Hebrew alphabet) represented in God’s name. It has fallen and it is in my power to pick it up, I just don’t want to. And so it is with all occurrences that chance upon a person, for all worldly events are really spiritual allusions.”[43]
Reb Zadok believed that the everyday experiences of life are in truth lessons which provide spiritual guidance. Often these experiences can compel one to reexamine or develop a novel approach to Torah scholarship. As Reb Zadok relates in several places, the Talmud classic presentation of a legal opinion, “A’leiba d’man d’amar,” derives from the leiv, the experiential heart, of each scholar.[44] Yet unlike to the Christian conception, which allowed viewed the Book of Scriptures and the Book of Nature as competing voices, Reb Zadok only considers the Book of the World on matters which have not yet been clearly articulated in the Torah. Though the prophetic gates of the Book of Scriptures have closed, God continues to speak.

Dovid Bashevkin studied for several years at Yeshivat Shaalavim and at Ner Israel Rabbinical College, and is completing his rabbinic ordination at RIETS (Yeshiva University), and holds an MA in Jewish philosophy the Bernard Revel Graduate School (Yeshiva University), where he focused on Polish Hasidut and the writings of Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin and studied with Prof. Yaakov Elman. The article was written on the occasion of the sixth yahrzeit, on 2 Ellul, of his grandmother, Zlata Golda bas Gershon Binyamin ha-Levi a”h. The author would like to offer a tremendous thanks to his mentor, Prof. Yaakov Elman, who continuously offers selflessly of his time, energy, and much saged advice to an ever inquiring and searching student, and under whose guidance this essay was privileged to have been written. Special thanks, as well, is extended to a very dear and longtime-friend, the ever patient and indefatigable Menachem Butler, for his assistance in many of the nuances of this essay, and to the editors (and readers) of the Seforim blog for their gracious consideration of this essay. Of course, any errors contained in this essay are the responsibility of the author, and he can be reached here (dovidbash@yahoo.com).
[1] For some astounding tales of genius and piety from Reb Zadok’s youth, of which include recitation of a blessing on his mother’s milk and the ability to count how many leaves were on a tree, see Abraham Isaac Rabinovitch, Malachei Elyon (Jerusalem: Otzar HaSippurim, 1966), 19 (Hebrew). For more general information on Reb Zadok’s life, though mostly hagiographic, see ibid. 18-32; see also Shlomo Zalman Sheragaʼi and Avraham Bick, be-Heikhal Izbica-Lublin (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1977; Hebrew) which includes some fascinating, though almost certainly apocryphal, tales about Reb Zadok’s initial meeting with R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner. Also see the more recent work, Sefer ha-Kohen (Bnei Brak: Mekhon Shem Olam, 2004), 11-24 (Hebrew).
[2] The sermon delivered at his bar mitzvah has been subsequently published in Collected Writings of Reb Zadok of Lublin, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Mekor ha-Seforim, 2001), Meishev Tzedek, 69-78 (Hebrew), and bears the mark of a mature and erudite scholar. Additionally see Reb Zadok, Or Zaruah, 53, which contains some remarks he wrote at the age of thirteen.
[3] See Reb Zadok, Kuntres Zikeron la-Rishonim printed in Sinai 21 (Nisan, 1947) and Kuntres Shemot ba-Aretz which discuss, respectively, the history and chronology of the prophets and the post-Talmudic sages. Reb Zadok himself dates Zikeron la-Rishonim as being written in 5597 (1837), thus placing this astounding work under the pen of a thirteen year old!
[4] This was reported to me by several students who attended these classes. See, as well, Aharon Suraski, Sheluha de-Rahmana (New York: Feldheim 1992), 126. I am especially grateful to Prof. Shnayer Z. Leiman for his assistance in locating this source.
[5] For example see Mikhtav me-Eliyahu, vol. 3 (Bnei Brak: Committee for the Publication of the Writings of E.L. Dessler, 1964), 277-278 (Hebrew).
[6] For example see Or Gedalyahu: Sihot u’Mamarim ‘al Mo’adim (Brooklyn, 1981), esp. the talks on Hanukkah.
[7] R. Hutner’s relationship with Reb Zadok’s work is particularly mysterious. Nowhere in Pahad Yitzhak does R. Hutner mention Reb Zadok explicitly by name, though those familiar with Reb Zadok’s work can sense his influence throughout. The only explicit reference to Reb Zadok can be found in an introductory letter to the publication of work Alfasi Zuta, later republished in his collected letters #80, where R. Hutner cites a passage from Reb Zadok’s Sefer Zichronot, one of his lesser studied works, explaining the permissibility to learn the works of the students of the R. Yisrael Sarug, despite the ban imposed by R. Hayyim Vital on learning Kabbalah of the Arizal from any sources other than his own. R. Hutner’s citation of this obscure passage in R. Zadok’s works definitely betrays his intimate familiarity with his works. Why Reb Zadok is never cited by name in Pahad Yitzhak is a matter which must be considered and see Steven S. Schwarzschild, “An Introduction to the Thought of R. Isaac Hutner,” Modern Judaism 5:3 (October 1985): 235-277, who discussed some of the influences of Reb Zadok’s Rebbe, R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica on the thought of R. Hutner, and noted (in 264n27) that “R. Hutner occasionally cites R. Zadok, in a heavily chassidic, messianic context: cf. e.g. ‘This Week’s Biblical Lesson’ (Yiddish), Algemeiner Journal, Dec. 23, 1977, p. 5, col. 5,” and see also Yaakov Elman, “R. Zadok Hakohen on the History of Halakah,” Tradition 21:4 (Fall 1985): 20-22 (“Addendum”). Surprisingly, the recent exhaustive and important work by Shlomo Kasirer, “Repentance in the Thought of R. Isaac Hutner,” (PhD dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2009; Hebrew) does not consider the influence of Reb Zadok on R. Hutner.
[8] Shai Hadari should certainly be given due credit for his Hebrew works on Reb Zadok, the first academic presentation of R. Zadok’s works, in Shai Hadari, “Roshei Hodashim be-Mishnei R. Zadok ha-Kohen,” Sinai 56:1-2 (1965): 84-99 (Hebrew); idem, “Purim be-Mishnato shel R. Zadok ha-Kohen mi-Lublin,” Sinai 46:6 (1960): 333-369 (Hebrew); idem, “Shir Shel Yom,” Sinai 53:1-6 (1963): 75-91 (Hebrew). In addition, an excellent biographical portrait can be found in Alan Brill, Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2002), 15-51, though (to date) the most comprehensive analysis of Reb Zadok’s overall works and thought remains Amira Liwer, “Oral Torah in the Writings of Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 2006; Hebrew), and see, as well, her earlier work in Amira Liwer, “Paradoxical Themes in the Writings of Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” (MA thesis, Touro College, 1992; Hebrew). Those interested in comparative theology would certainly enjoy Chaim Hirsch, Ahavat Tzedek (Jerusalem, 2002; Hebrew), which compares the thought of Reb Zadok to that of R. Kook. In a similar vein, see Bezalel Naor, “Zedonot Na’aseh ki-Zekhuyot be-Mishnato shel ha-Rav Kook,” Sinai 97 (1983): 78-87 (Hebrew); and see also idem, “Hashpat Nefesh ha-Hayyim al Reb Zadok ha-Kohein mi-Lublin,” Sinai 104 (1989): 186-188 (Hebrew). Much can be learned from the overlap and nuanced differences of these innovative thinkers. For a comprehensive bibliography of Reb Zadok’s works, and secondary works discussing Reb Zadok’s life and scholarship, see Gershon Kitsis, ed., Me’at Latzadik (Jerusalem: Beis Publications, 2000; Hebrew), and Alan Brill, Thinking God, 378-390 (Appendix I).
[9] See Yaakov Elman, “R. Zadok Hakohen on the History of Halakah,” Tradition 21:4 (Fall 1985): 1-26; idem, “Reb Zadok Hakohen of Lublin on Prophecy in the Halakhic Process,” Jewish Law Association Studies 1 (1985): 1-16; idem, “The History of Gentile Wisdom According to R. Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 3:1 (1993): 153-187; idem, “Progressive Derash and Retrospective Peshat: Nonhalakhic Considerations in Talmud Torah,” in Shalom Carmy, ed., Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah: Contributions and Limitations (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), 227-87; and idem, “The Rebirth of Omnisignificant Biblical Exegesis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Jewish Studies Internet Journal 2 (2003): 199-249.
[10] A heter meah rabbanan is a document signed by one hundred rabbis which allows one to take a second wife in the event that the current wife refuses to willingly accept a divorce. The specific Halakhic details of this document, while fascinating, are beyond the scope of this paper. For more on the issues surrounding this document see “Herem de-Rabbeinu Gershom,” Encyclopedia Talmudit, vol. 17, cols. 378-454, esp. 447-452 (Hebrew).
[11] See Alan Brill, Thinking God, 24, for an impressive list of some of the personalities encountered during his travels. Notably, Reb Zadok is mentioned in R. Joseph Shaul Nathenson’s Shoel u-Meshiv 6th ed., no. 54.
R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner, originally a student of R. Simcha Bunim of Prysucha, and afterwards of R. Menachem Mendal of Kotzk, famously departed Koztk in 1840 to establish his own Hasidic court. For more details on the life of R. Leiner and the reasons for his schism with R. Menachem Mendel, see Morris M. Fairstein, All is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teaching of Rabbi Mordechai Joseph Liener of Izbica (New York, 1989), and, more recently, in idem, “Kotsk-Izbica Dispute: Theological or Personal?” Kabbalah 17 (2008): 75-79. A more detailed discussion of Izbica’s radical philosophy of determinism and sin can be found in Aviezer Cohen, “Self-Consciousness in Mei haa-Shiloah As the Nexus Between God and Man” (PhD dissertation, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2006; Hebrew), and Aviezer Cohen, “Capability as a Criterion for Observance and Non-Observance of the Mitzvot: Religious Existentialism in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig and Rabbi Mordechai Leiner of Izbica,” in Haviva Pedaya and Ephraim Meir, eds., Judaism, Topics, Fragments, Faces, Identities: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Rivka (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2007), 525-575 (Hebrew). See also the important work by Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), and Don Seeman, “Martyrdom, Emotion and the Work of Ritual in R. Mordecai Joseph Leiner’s Mei ha-Shiloah,” AJS Review 27:2 (November 2003): 253-280.
[12] R. Leible Eiger was the grandson of the pre-eminent Rav, R. Akiva Eiger and the son of R. Shlomo Eiger, a major rabbinic figure in his own right. Similar to Reb Zadok, he also left his Lithuanian upbringing for the world of Hasidut. Initially he began as a student of R. Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, the Rebbe of Kotzk, however he left in 1840 with the court of R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner to Izbica. Reb Zadok’s and R. Leible’s similar life trajectories made them natural friends and they remained as such their entire lives. For more on the life of R. Leible, see the three volume work Yehudah leKasho (Tel Aviv, 1999) and for a letter from Reb Zadok to R. Leible, responding to the former’s legal query regarding the laws of circumcision, see Collected Writings of Reb Zadok of Lublin, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: Mekor ha-Seforim, 2001), Levushei Tzedakah, 34-35 (Hebrew). R. Leible’s works, Torat Emet and Imrei Emet, have not received any attention in the academic community and a complete study on the intellectual oeuvre remains a scholarly desideratum.
[13] See Elchanan Dov’s biographical sketch appended to Reb Zadok, Otzar ha-Melekh (Bnei Brak: Yahadut, 1968), 3, who cited Midrash Tanhuma, Noah 3, which reads: “When a person leaves the world without children he is pained and tearful. God says to him: Why are you crying? Because you did not grow any fruits in this world? There is a fruit more beautiful than children…the Torah of which it is written, ‘The fruits of the Righteous is the Tree of Life.’”
[14] See the important study by Martin Ritter, “Scholarship as a Priestly Craft: Harry A. Wolfson on Tradition in a Secular Age,” in Klaus Herrmann, Margarete Schlüter, and Giuseppe Veltri, eds., Jewish Studies Between the Disciplines: Papers in honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 435-455, who has noted that “only by a careful reconstruction of the scholar’s complete writings is [the reader] able to discover the speculative underlying dimension that is often inter-woven with dry and long-winded interpretations. For later generations it thus remains a complex challenge to reconstruct the ideas of those polymaths from their vast publications, correspondence, and papers” (436). The same methodological inquiry, suggested Ritter, could be extended to Henry Corbin, Étienne Gilson, Erwin R. Goodenough, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss, and one would not be incorrect to also include Reb Zadok, and R. Nahman of Bratslav, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, among others.
[15] This is a rabbinic euphemism for the sin of wasting seed, about which see Shilo Pachter, “Shmirat ha-Berit: The History of the Prohibition of Wasting Seed,” (PhD dissertation, Bar Ilan University, 2006), esp. 247-255, for a discussion of Reb Zadok. Recently, Reb Zadok’s theology has been used to formulate an appropriate response to the growing issue of sexual impropriety within the Modern Orthodox community, as discussed in Jennie Rosenfeld, “Talmudic Re-Readings: Toward a Modern Orthodox Sexual Ethic,” (PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 2008), esp. 73-123 (“Nineteenth Century Polish Hasidism’s Radical Ethics: R. Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izbica and R. Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin”), and though her interpretations and applications are often questionable, the discussion is nonetheless fascinating. For an additional perspective, listen to the lecture by R. Mayer Twersky and Dr. David Pelcovitz, “Maintaining Kedusha in an Overexposed Society,” YUTorah.org, delivered on 8 February 2009, available here (http://tinyurl.com/274omzd).
[16] See Alan Brill, Thinking God, 27.
[17] Zohar, vol. 2, 161a.
[18] This comment is prefaced with “sha’mati” (trans: I have heard) indicating, as all of his comments which such prefaces, that he heard this from his Rebbe, R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica. For more on the phrase “I have heard” in the writings of Reb Zadok and its relationship to the similar “I have received” found in his works, see Amira Liwer, “Oral Torah in the Writings of Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 2006), 426-428 (Hebrew). Yaakov Elman, “The Rebirth of Omnisignificant Biblical Exegesis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Jewish Studies Internet Journal 2 (2003), 224n62, cites the comments of Mei ha-Shiloah on TB Nedarim (22b) as a source for Reb Zadok’s words. However, Liwer points out, 373n26, that the aforementioned source in Mei ha-Shiloah does not present the analogy of the world as a book, but rather relates that the Torah incorporates all of the knowledge of the world. Liwer does, however, cite two sources in Mei ha-Shiloah which refer to the Jewish people as a book, which, as will be discussed later, seems to be the essential point and source of Reb Zadok’s comments.
[19] For a detailed history of this concept see E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 304, who cites an early Babylonian reference to stars as “the writing of the sky.” See also Ilse N. Bulhof, The Language of Science: A Study of the Relationship between Literature and Science in the Perspective of a Hermeneutical Ontology. With a Case Study of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (Leiden: Brill, 1992), passim, and C.J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 204.
[20] Haym Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in the Sefer Hasidim,” AJS Review 1 (1976): 315-16.
[21] For a more detailed discussion of the interaction of science and nature in Christian theology, see David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
[22] See Per Binde, “Nature in Roman Catholic Tradition,” Anthropological Quarterly 74:1 (January 2001): 15-27. In regards to its substance, the analogy has a markedly literalist tone to its message. Nature was not simply a product of God’s handiwork, but His spiritual message can be deciphered from within Nature to inspire man. Émile Mâle cites a gross example of literalism from Adam of Victor who, while contemplating a nut, remarked, “What is a nut if not the image of Jesus? The green and fleshy sheath is His flesh, His humanity. The wood of the shell is the wood of the Cross on which that flesh suffered. But the kernel of the nut from which men gain nourishment is His hidden divinity.” See Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1953), 30, citing Adam of St. Victor, Sequentia. Patrol, cxcvi, col. 1433. Mâle also noted other literalist interpretations of the spiritual message within nature such as Peter of Mora musing on the roses of a pedal and Hugh of St. Victor thoughts of the dove.
[23] This is not to say that such ruminations do not appear in Jewish theology. Certainly, reflections on the significance of the structure of nature are only to be found scattered in Jewish thought (see for example TB Eiruvin 100b). However the centrality and seriousness of this discipline is entirely absent and on whole the practice altogether disappeared following the redaction of the Talmud.
[24] See Mario Biagioli, “Stress in the Book of Nature: the Supplemental Logic of Galileo’s Realism,” MLN 118:3 (April 2003): 557-585, for a detailed analysis of evolution of the Book of Nature in Galileo’s thought.
[25] Galileo, “The Assayer (1623),” in Stillman Drake, trans., Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 238.
[26] Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess (1615),” in Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 99.
[27] For more details on the affair, see Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
[28] Haym Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim,” 313.
[29] Ibid., 314.
[30] “Introduction,” in Judah Wistinetzki, ed., Sefer Hasidim (Berlin: M’kize Nirdamim, 1891), trans. Soloveitchik, in ibid., 312. For a related article on the background of Sefer Hasidim, see Ivan G. Marcus, “The Recensions and Structure of Sefer Hasidim,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978): 131-153; and on the early 152 sections of Sefer Hasidim (dubbed “Sefer Hasidim I”), see Haym Soloveitchik, “Piety, Pietism and German Pietism: ‘Sefer Hasidim I’ and the Influence of Hasidei Ashkenaz,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92:3-4 (January-April 2002): 455-493. See, as well, the recent symposium about Sefer Hasidim that appeared in Jewish Quarterly Review 96:1 (Winter 2006).
[31] Most likely this is referring to the first passage in the introduction to Bereishit Rabbah which, based on Proverbs 8:30, refers to Torah as an instrument of a craftsman used in order to fashion the world.
[32] Our translation of the word “olam” as “the world” is important as it clearly varies from the Christian concept of “The Book of Nature.”
[33] Tzidkat ha-Tzadik 216.
[34] Reb Zadok truly made an art out of finding traditional textual support for otherwise innovative ideas. His expertise in this area was twofold. Firstly the very act of finding sources for ideas which were genuinely innovative and oftentimes radical. Secondly his command of such a wide ranch of sources allowed him to ‘create’ fascinating connections between texts which were seemingly unrelated. Oftentimes he would find support for Kabbalistic idea in Halakhic texts. For a more detailed discussion regarding Reb Zadok’s methods of interpretation, see Amira Liwer, “Oral Torah in the Writings of Reb Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, 2006), especially 379-382 (Hebrew).
[35] Mahshavot Harutz #11.
[36] Written by Azariah de’ Rossi (1513-1578). For more on the thought of Azariah de Rossi and the work Me’or Einayim, see Lester A. Segal, Historical Consciousness and Religious Tradition in Azariah de’ Rossi’s Me’or ‘Einayim (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), Giuseppe Veltri, “The Humanist Sense of History and the Jewish Idea of Tradition: Azaria de’ Rossi’s Critique of Philo Alexandrinus,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2:4 (1995): 372-393, the very important scholarly contribution in Azariah de Rossi, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Joanna Weinberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), as well as Giuseppe Veltri, “Conceptions of History: Azariah de’ Rossi,” in Renaissance Philosophy in Jewish Garb: Foundations and Challenges in Jewish Thought on the Eve of Modernity (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2009), 73-96.
[37] Mahshavot Harutz ibid.
[38] See the work of Reb Zadok, “Kuntres Zikeron la-Rishonim,” published many years later in Sinai 21 (Nisan, 1947) and Kutres Shemot ba-Aretz which discuss, respectively, the history and chronology of the prophets and the post-Talmudic sages. For further discussion regarding Reb Zadok’s iconoclastic approach to historical study and scholarly analysis see Gershon Kitsis, ed., Me’at Latzadik (Jerusalem: Beis Publications, 2000), 255-268 (Hebrew).
[39] For a detailed analysis of Reb Zadok’s innovative approach towards Gentile wisdom, see Yaakov Elman, “The History of Gentile Wisdom According to R. Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 3:1 (1993): 153-187.
[40] About “bat kol,” see Encyclopedia Talmudit, vol. 5, cols. 1-4 (Hebrew). See also Aspaklarya, vol. 4 (Jeruslaem: Hotzat Aspaklarya, 1998), 381-385 (Hebrew).
[41] Dover Tzedek #111.
[42] Reb Zadok cites this statement of R. Simcha Bunim, which is a Hasidic reinterpretation of Psalms 104:24, in several places. For some examples see Tzidkat ha-Tzadik #232, Mahshavot Harutz, ibid. Reb Zadok was deeply influenced by the thought of Przysucha and in many ways his thought is built upon the foundation built by Przysucha. Though Reb Zadok personally never studied under R. Simcha Bunim, his Hasidic master, R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica, was initially a student of R. Simcha Bunim. Thought much has been written about the influence of Izbica on Reb Zadok’s thought, sadly, the effects of Przysucha have been generally neglected by the scholarly community. For more on the life of R. Simcha Bunim of Przysucha, see the very important work by Michael Rosen, The Quest for Authenticity: The Thought of Reb Simhah Bunim (Jerusalem: Urim Publication, 2008), and see the earlier article by Alan Brill, “Grandeur and Humility in the Writings of R. Simha Bunim of Przysucha,” in Yaakov Elman and Jeffrey S. Gurock, eds., Hazon Nahum: Studies in Jewish Law, Thought, and History Presented to Dr. Norman Lamm on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1997), 419-448.
[43] Pri Tzadik Nassoh #13. See also Pri Zadik Balak #2. This approach, that the experiential life of man serves as a repository for God’s messages, can also be found in other Jewish thinkers, most notably R. Nahman of Bratslav (in, for example, Likkutei Moharan 54:2). For more on the intriguing relationship between Reb Zadok and R. Nachman’s writings, see my unpublished essay “Between Bratslav and Lublin,” written as a graduate seminar paper for Prof. Jonathan Dauber at the Bernard Revel Graduate School (Yeshiva University).
[44] See Likkutei Amarim #7, Divrei Halomot #23, and Pri Tzadik, Naso #5.


Barukh Dayan Ha-Emet: Rabbi Dr. Noah Rosenbloom

For those who have not seen the obituary notice in the New York Times (Aug 14, 2007; B6), the Seforim blog records the passing of Rabbi Dr. Noah Rosenbloom, a pulpit rabbi for over fifty years and longtime faculty member at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women.

He was the author of Luzzatto’s Ethico-Psychological Interpretation of Judaism: A Study in the Religious Philosophy of Samuel David Luzzatto (New York: Yeshiva University, 1965); Tradition in an Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976); Malbim: Exegesis, Philosophy, Science and Mysticism in the Writings of Rabbi Meir Lebush Malbim (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1988), among other scholarly articles and books.

Noah Rosenbloom received his rabbinic ordination from RIETS and his graduate dissertations were entitled: “The God-Ideas of the Leading Hebrew Poets During the Period 1933-1948” (PhD, New York University, 1958) and “The ‘Taz’ and Its Author: A Study of the Life and Work of Rabbi David Halevi, author of the ‘Turei Zahav'” (DHL, Yeshiva University, 1948).