In a recent post at the Seforim blog, while reviewing R. Ovadiah Yosef’s recent work, Chazon Ovadia, I wrote as follows:

“R’ Ovadiah Yosef is world famous for his unbelievable memory, resulting in a tremendous bekius. I once joked that he must have had someone develop a computer program and attach it to his brain to help him retain so much information and recall it at all times.”

To this, one anonymous commenter wrote as follows:

“Actually, there is a (unconfirmed) shmu’a that R. Ovadya partook of the Jewish mythological memory-booster known as Balzar. It is mentioned in different sources as being very dangerous, but granted one survives, it leaves the one who ingested it with a superlative memory. (The Sefer Hakanah refers to this when it says: “chazor chazor, v’al titz’tarech l’balzar”). The Chida is said to have accidentaly ingested it as a child, and fortunately came away with only a few paralyzed fingers — and a great memory. I recently heard a “ma’aseh nora” regarding someone who recently attempted to track this (grass?) down and how min hashamayim he was stopped. Very scary.”

I would like to thank this anonymous commentator for giving me a great excuse to discuss this interesting topic of baladhur, the topic of the post below, which will elaborate on the anonymous above. I would like to explain some possibilities of what this baladhur is, whether or not it’s dangerous to use, and list various gedolim who have actually used it. I will be tracing this through early Jewish and Arabic works – some rather rare and unknown – and I will, as well, provide the background to the authors of those works.

Recent Notes On Hebrew Pronunciation

By Rabbi Avi Grossman

Edited by Mr. Jonathan Grossman 

Many of the ideas discussed in this article were in my notebook for some time, and just as I was getting around to preparing them for publication, my prolific colleague Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein sent a copy of Professor Geoffrey Khan’s The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew to me. After reading it and briefly corresponding with the author, I concluded that it was time to release this article. Professor Khan invites the yeshiva world to read his book, available for free at this link, and to check out his website. Full disclosure: although Prof. Khan’s research is enlightening, not only do I not agree with or endorse everything he claims, I do not believe that certain points are admissible as halachic sources in the Bet Midrash. 

With regards to the details of halachic pronunciation, I have already released my own book wherein I try to show how the rishonim would pronounce Tiberian Hebrew, and I direct readers to Rabbi Bar Hayim’s videos on the subject. Rabbi Bar Hayim follows the views of Rabbi Benzion Cohen. All of us are attempting to recreate something that we cannot really know, and for now, we still have to debate the fine details. I seriously doubt that the Masoretes spoke a ritual Hebrew that sounded exactly the way any of us describes it. 

Before getting into the nitty gritty of Prof. Khan’s arguments, I would like to introduce some basic ideas that can be gleaned from an elementary, comparative study of Arabic.

A few years ago I took some classes in modern spoken Arabic, which I hoped would help me begin to read Maimonides’s original writings. Aside from helping me realize how there is so much I have to learn about that language, it helped me learn more about Biblical Hebrew. Fifteen years ago, when I started working on what would become my aforementioned book about Masoretic Hebrew, I wondered about certain missing consonants. Thankfully, those and many other questions I had have been somewhat answered, and I now wish to present some of my own findings. I realize that for some, these may not be so novel, but my intention is to bring them to the attention of those in the yeshiva world who, for whatever reason, would enjoy learning about this but will not come across these issues in their regular courses of study.

Concerning the Consonants:

Arabic has only a cursive form, unlike our Hebrew which has had over the course of time many forms, including the common, Assyrian block form and the various cursive forms, which thanks to the advent of modern-Hebrew education has become much more standardized. Also, many letters have up to four forms: the isolated (stand-alone) form, the initial form, which the letter takes at the beginning of the word or in the middle of the word when the previous letter is cursively non-connective, the medial form, and the final form. For some letters, there is significant overlap. See a chart here, for instance. 

The Arabic letter alif is basically the Hebrew alef, but it is used much more often as a mater lectionis, the Latin translation of the Hebrew אם קריאה. (See below.) 

The Arabic equivalent of bet, ba, is always strong, meaning that in most forms of Arabic there is no letter that represents the weak bet sound, that of V, while the Arabic equivalent of pei, fa, is always weak, and never strong.This means that in most forms of Arabic there is no letter that represents the strong pei sound, that of P. Thus, many native Arabic speakers have a hard time pronouncing foreign words that have the P or V sounds. Today, in Israel at least, the solution is to use the stop, B, to also represent the P, thus giving us words like بيانو, biano, for piano, while the V sound is a variant of the fa, ف, and sometimes it is marked with three dots on top instead of one to indicate the V. Consequently, Israelis who pronounce their surnames that begin with vav in the standard, European-influenced accent, e.g. Vaynshtain instead of Weinstein, have the Arabs spell their names with a variant of fa. 

Unlike in Hebrew, the diacritical dots you find above and below certain Arabic letters are not vocalizations but rather critical components of the letters. It seems that early on the diacritics were used to distinguish between alternate sounds created by single letters, like the dagesh qal is and was used to distinguish between sounds made by single letters, while other letters originally had unique forms, but evolved into identical forms, and the diacritics were introduced in order to preserve the distinctions. The initial and medial forms of the Arabic letters ba, nun, ya (the equivalent of the Hebrew yod), and ta (the equivalent of the Hebrew tau) are orthographically identical and distinguished by the diacritics, the ba with one dot below, the ya with two; the nun with one above, and the ta with two, even though in all of the earlier Semitic alphabets, the equivalent consonants had distinct forms. This has made Arabic very receptive to new letters: it is very easy to modify an already existing letter form by adding anywhere from one to three dots as a superscript or subscript. In Hebrew, we still have not completely assimilated new consonantal symbols into new letters (the ג׳, ץ׳, ז׳, etc.), and the typical method of representing them looks out of place in context. 

Gimmel: In many languages, the hard G sound has been assimilated to a soft one, and this is as true in Arabic as it is with certain English words. However, the Arabic jim is not always pronounced like a J, which, as I pointed out in my book, is a combination of the D sound followed by a voiced shin (SH) sound, or the voiced equivalent of the CH sound achieved by clustering the T and SH sounds. Rather, jim makes the voiced shin sound (the G in massage) on its own. Also, the jim is still pronounced like a hard G in some countries, such as Egypt. 

Dal is the Arabic equivalent of our dalet, and it, like our dalet, has a weak, fricative counterpart, the dhal, (as in “the”), although unlike Hebrew, in which the weakness or strongness of the bet, gimmel, dalet, kaf, pei, or tau (the “beged kefet” letters) depends on the form of the word, and one set of rules governs all of these letters, in Arabic it seems that dal and dhal no longer have such a relationship, and as above, are now considered separate letters. 

The Arabic waw serves the same purposes as our vav. More on that soon. 

Het has its equivalent in the Arabic ha, while the sound of our kaf’s weak counterpart, khaf, appears in Arabic as a variation of the ha, pronounced kha, and the latter is represented by writing the former with an additional upper dot: ح and خ, respectively, while the one with a lower dot, ج, is the aforementioned jim. This seems to indicate that the weak sound of the khaf that distinguishes our Hebrew so much from English is a historical latecomer, and that while we first made it a variation of kaf, the Arabs made it a variation of het, and indeed, since in most Jewish circles the het is pronounced (incorrectly) as a khaf, perhaps the Arabs were just anticipating us. Many academics claim that the sound migrated; even in Hebrew the sound of the khaf was made by the het in certain words, but later, when all hets were pronounced alike, the sound was given to the weak kaf. This would explain why, for instance, certain proper nouns have been historically transliterated unusually. E.g., Jericho, Rachel, etc.

The Arabic counterpart of tet is the ta, but unlike our Hebrew tet which has no voiced counterpart, like tau has dalet and samech has zayin, the Arabic ta does have a voiced counterpart, the dad, ض, which is the D in words like Ramadan. Just like English transliterations of Hebrew commonly lose the distinction between tau and tet, they also lose the distinction between dal and dad, and in many systems used to teach Arabic to Hebrew speakers, they simplify the dad and tell them that just like they always pronounce the tet like a tau, they can pronounce the dad like a dal.

The Arabic counterpart of the yod is ya, and it pretty much behaves like the yod, but has traditionally been used as a mater lectionis even more than yod has. For example, many transliterations of Hebrew into Arabic not only use the ya to represent the Hebrew tzeirei, they even use the ya to represent the segol in open, accented syllables.

I was asked concerning the yod in second-person-possessive male suffixes, as in, for example בנֶיךָ ba-NE-cha: if the yod is not meant to be pronounced as part of the segol vowel, why is it even there? My proposed answer is that it is there to distinguish the singular from the plural, along the lines of the silent yod in the third person counterparts of those nouns, for example in בנָיו ba-NAW, which most never even get around to wondering why we do not pronounce as ba-NAYW. I believe that the yod in words such as בניו may have once been pronounced, and this explains the suffix’s relationship to its Aramaic counterpart, וֹהִיx or וֹיx. In essence, the two languages present the combined sound of the low vowel with the two semivowels, just that in Hebrew the Y sound preceded that of the W, whereas in Aramaic the W sound preceded the Y. Similarly, up until the common era, decisors would represent the western sound of “OW” (as in “brown” and Ashkenazi surnames with “baum” in them) in Yiddish and Yiddish-influenced written Hebrew as וֹי, “oy,” despite the inaccuracy. In any event, the silent yod in the plural possessive suffix is a critical indicator of the plural state, even more so than the potential vav of the holam in words like אבֹתֶיך  and עֹלֹתֵיכם. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of these words are written in the Torah with the yod and not the vav, and even when there is no need for a possessive or constructive suffix, the vav of the (generally) feminine plural suffix is usually omitted. Rather, the holam is usually written plene when the vav (or the yod that it replaces) is part of the root of the word. Thus, there is always a vav after the first tau in the word Torah (of the root yod-reish-silent hei) and its derivatives, but more often than not there is no vav after the reish indicating the plural of Torah.)

Sometimes, at the end of words, the alif is in the form of a ya minus the two lower dots that  distinguish the ya from the ta, ba and nun. Such an alif is called an alif maqsura (a “shortened alif”), and is often used in place of the ya that was part of the root word. See below for how this may relate to the phenomenon of the equivalency of yod and silent hei as the third letter of many Hebrew roots.

The Arabic counterpart of kaf, ka, is always strong. This would remind us of the instances in which the suffix khaf in Hebrew is strong, as in ארוממךָּ, although in spoken Arabic, what was once the sound of qamatz/patah after the suffix ka has now been placed before the kaf, such as in possessives that end with the sound “ak” instead of “ka.”  Similarly, the possessive suffix is pronounced “kha” in Hebrew, while in Aramaic it is pronounced as “akh.” 

The Arabic counterpart to lamed, lam, is often orthographically combined with the alif that precedes it or comes after it. Certain Hebrew printers would use a combined letter for alef and lamed; I do not know who learned from whom (no pun intended), or if it is just a coincidence. 

Samech has no true Arabic counterpart because the Arabic sin corresponds to both the Hebrew sin and samech. Considering how the samech–sin redundancy in other Semitic languages predates the Arabic’s language’s evolution, this is understandable. Yiddish also has this phenomenon: in native Yiddish words, only samech is used to represent the S sound, and the sin is only used for words that have their source in semitic languages. Rav Mazuz recently pointed out that in Rashi-era French, not only did the samech and sin sound like an S, but the shin also did, and this is why when Rashi invokes French, the shin is usually used for the S sound. 

Ayin exists also in Arabic, although orthographic variants thereof, specifically the addition of a diacritic dot above, changes the ayin to a ghayn. (I would have expected the aforementioned jim to therefore to be an orthographic variant of this letter instead of the ha.) Many have pointed out that early Greek translations of personal nouns such as ra’am, ‘amora and ‘aza have used the progenitor of the latin G, and this would indicate that Hebrew once had a similar dual use for the ayn symbol, and as Professor Khan has shown me, the jim was once actually the equivalent of a hard G, and still is in some places, so it would be a natural and eventual variant of the ghayn. 

Pei’s equivalent is the fa. It has this weak form, and never a strong form. As I wrote above, modern Israeli Arabic uses a new variant of the ba, but with three lower dots, to represent the P sound. 

The tzadi has the Arabic sad. Further, the sad has a voiced counterpart, ظـ, ẓāʾ, the most recently developed letter in the Arabic language, and the sad and tet are already variants of each other, with the ta being a sad with a vertical line. Strangely, the voiced counterpart of the ta is a sad with an extra dot, ضـ, while the voiced counterpart of the sad, the ẓāʾ, is a ta with a dot. I would have done the opposite. Years ago I wondered why Hebrew did not have these letters. I now realize that they are just too inconvenient, or else we could also expect to see the fricative forms of both the tet and the dad in Arabic. Thus, Arabic developed and maintained letters to represent many of the consonantal sounds that were either lost by spoken dialects of Hebrew, or were never present in Hebrew. Considering that the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet is considered sacrosanct by the Hebrews, and that even the weak sounds from the six beged kefet letters did not earn their own letters, I do not believe we will see new Hebrew letters to represent these sounds any time soon, although the sound of the jim (represented in Modern Hebrew by ג׳) and the modern English CH (represented by צ׳), for instance, are today ubiquitous. I was prompted to think about this by my daughter, who, in second grade, was mindful enough to point out that her version of the Alphabet had both bet and vet, but Ashrei, as printed in her siddur, only had a verse for bet.

Modern Hebrew tutorials for spoken Arabic use the samech to represent the Arabic sad, because the samech is much closer to the way sad should be pronounced than the way the Modern Hebrew tzadi is, although on some street signs, proper nouns with sad’s are rendered with tzadi in Hebrew, e.g. the town of Musmus in the Galilee is מוצמוץ, which delighted my daughter. Also, the ubiquitous condiment hummus, although spelled חומוס in modern Hebrew, should be spelled חֻמֻץ to accurately reflect its Arabic spelling. There are even some families here in Israel that do not eat chickpeas on Passover not because they are legumes but because back in the old country, the word was too similar to חמץ, “leaven.”

Quf: Many people know that the Hebrew quf should be pronounced like the true Arabic quf, what the speech professionals call the voiceless uvular stop, or, to the rest of us, the sound made by pressing the tongue farther back in the mouth, but like the quf in Modern Hebrew, the Arabic quf has also suffered from neglect. In some places it is pronounced like a hard G, while in others it is pronounced like a K, as we do, and sometimes, especially in local dialects, it is not pronounced at all, and is basically treated like an alif. For example, local speakers refer to Jerusalem as al-uds instead of al-quds, and even al-uds often comes out as il-uts, all of the previous with a short vowel sound. Or the imperative of stand up is um instead of qum, and daqiqeh, minutes, becomes da’i’eh. 

Reish: The Arabic sign for reish is the zayn with an additional dot on top, which may indicate the closeness of the two sounds. According to Sefer Yetzira, the reish is produced by the teeth, just like the zayin and samech.  

Shin and sin are one symbol, with the shin having three dots on top. They both even resemble the Assyrian shin: س ش. The extra tails do not appear mid word.

Tau: Both the strong and weak tau have Arabic counterparts, the ta and tha, respectively, with the former with two dots, the latter with three. As we mentioned, the strength of the Hebrew beged kefet letters depends on a letter’s position in a given word, while in Arabic that is not the case. 

More interestingly, the ta has a common silent form, called “ta marbuta,” literally, a “sad ta,” that appears as the feminine suffix roughly equivalent to the qamatz-silent-hei suffix in Hebrew. Interestingly enough, this ta marbuta is silent, like our hei, and is even written as a ha but distinguished by the characteristic two dots on top, just like a ta. That is, orthographically it is a combination of ha and ta. Just like the Hebrew hei suffix becomes an actual tau in various construct states, the ta marbuta becomes an actual ta in construct states. For example, the Arabic word for automobile is sayara, while “his car” is sayarato. When we consider Hebrew, we often think of the silent hei as converting to tau in construct forms, whereas from this point of view, the tau can be considered the default letter, and the hei that exists in isolated forms is the simplified form. This explains, for instance, why we encounter words like zimrath as in עזי וזמרת י-ה and aqereth in מושיבי עקרת הבית are spelled with the tau although they are not in the construct state. (Hat tip: Rabbi Yedidya Naveh of Koren Publishers.)

This is reminiscent of the phenomenon in Hebrew that in certain roots, the final silent hei become a tau in certain conjugations, e.g. ראה is ראתה in the feminine, while in other conjugations it becomes a yod, e.g., as in ראיתי and ראינו. Had an alef been in those roots, it would have stayed in both types of conjugations: the feminine of ברא is ברָאת, and the first persons are בראתי and בראנו.

Concerning the possessive suffixes, in spoken Arabic the male form is as in Hebrew, an O sound, but it is written with a silent ha, reminiscent of uncommon instances where the mater lectionis is also hei for the holam, as in שלמֹה, שילֹה, אהלֹה, and סֻכֹּה. Whereas in Hebrew, the female possessive suffix is usually qamatz-nonsilent (mappiq) hei, and this is mostly overlooked in spoken Hebrew. I know of no one, (not even the usual professionals who otherwise pronounce things properly) who actually tries to pronounce the mappiq hei in conversation. The equivalent suffix in spoken Arabic is much easier to say, as it is written as ha-alif, and is pronounced as “ha.”

The lack of a local Arabic equivalent to the hard G sound made by gimmel has led to some interesting inconsistencies regarding how to spell Ben Gurion, which comes up often considering all the places named after him. Some spell his name with a jim, others with a ghayn, and others with the new, hard-G gim, the aforementioned jim but with three dots instead of one. The first version enjoys the precedent that the Hebrew gimmel has been represented by the Arabic jim, and it is up to the reader to know that historically both were pronounced as G, while the second version enjoys the precedent that foreign words with a hard G have been represented with a ghayn because vocally it is is closest to the hard-G sound. For example, in Arabic a gorilla is called a ghorilla. Indeed, in this case they would be pronouncing “Gurion” with a form of gimmel, just the weak form. I have noticed that, especially around the eponymous airport, all three Arabic spellings of Gurion are commonplace.

Otherwise, many Israeli street signs can be seen as the work of vigilant trolls, who mock the way most Jews pronounce the tzadi, vav, tet, and quf incorrectly. For example, the signs pointing to my town, Kochav Yaakov-Tel Zion, appear as they should in Hebrew, כוכב יעקב – תל ציון, but in Arabic they are rendered as كوخاڤ ياكوڤ تل تسيون, which, represented in Hebrew characters, is כּוכאבֿ יאכּובֿ תל תשיון. That is, although the Biblical name of Jacob has a well-known classical rendering in Arabic, because the Jews pronounce the ayin and quf as alef and kaf respectively, they are rendered as such, and the same with the tzadi of Zion, rendered ts because that is how it is pronounced. Similarly, place names with tet are transliterated with the counterpart of tau, ta, because that is how it is incorrectly pronounced. An example: טירת צבי, Tirat Zvi, is rendered by the Arabic equivalent of תיראת תשבֿי. Lastly, פתח תקוה is (thankfully) transliterated into formal English as Petah Tiqwa, but in Arabic it is   ‎بتاح تكفا, or in Hebrew characters, פּתאח תכּבֿא, although it would have been more egregious had they rendered the first word as פתאך.

The Vowels

The Arabic counterpart of the dagesh hazaq is the shadda, a small W or shin-like symbol written above the letter indicating its gemination. The counterpart of the sh’wa nah (silent sh’wa) indicating that the consonant closes the previous syllable is the sukkun, which appears as a small circle above the letter in question.  

As a general rule, the major vowels are represented with their plene spellings, while the minor vowels are defective, and the ya represents what sound like the Hebrew tzeirei and hiriq, while the waw represents the holam and shuruq sounds. However, there is more ambiguity with regard to the representations of the minor vowels: there is one vowel superscript symbol that represents the short patah sound, and not coincidentally it is called fat-ha, while a single waw-like superscript is used to represent both the equivalents of the qamatz qatan and qubbus, and a single subscript dash represents the equivalents of the short segol and hiriq. Surprisingly, accented, segols in open syllables are transliterated into Arabic also as plene. For example, Petah Tiqwa, above, is sometimes spelled with a yod after the pei equivalent, פיתאח. And, along those lines, many of the counterparts of the qamataz gadol are represented by an additional alןf, as are patahs in open-accented syllables. Thus, names like Ibrahim (Abraham) and Binyamin are written with alif’s after the reish and ya respectively, and in Israel place names with the words sha’ar and har are represented by the Arabic equivalents of האר and שאער. This far more liberal use of the alif to represent the presence of vowels is also characteristic of Yiddish, in which the alef has completely transformed from a mater lectionis into a vowel-letter, although I would be very grateful if someone could enlighten me as to why in Yiddish, our ancestors chose to represent the segol with the ayin. I cannot fathom even a tenuous connection between that particular vowel and the consonant.

Concerning mater lectionis it must be noted that although in many of the languages under discussion they are silent place holders that do not affect the pronunciation, once upon a time they did. It is not due to some arbitrary decision or convenience that the prophets chose to represent the holam and shuruq sounds, for example, with a waw. Rather, it is because the vav and yod once were, and often should still be, a natural, necessary, and logical component of the vowels’ pronunciations, and as I wrote about in my book, the true hiriq and shuruq sounds cannot be articulated without the natural semivowels that complete them, and when they are followed by guttural letters that necessitate the additional patah g’nuva, or the epenthetic in Prof. Khan’s jargon, the semivowel is even geminated. 

Plural suffixes: Instead of im, יםx, in Arabic, as in Aramaic, “in” is often used. In feminine forms, instead of oth, ותx,  ات, which is the equivalent of אתx, is used. However, many nouns have a unique plural form that does not employ a suffix or any set rule of new vowel structure.

…

And now for the nitty-gritty of Prof. Khan’s book. The second volume of Khan’s work is a translation of the Hidāyat al-Qāri, which was written by a prominent grammarian, and it and other Karaite works and documents make up a significant portion of his sources. Although there may be that which we can learn from both Karaite and Samaritan sources, they can hardly be considered by traditional Jews to be sources for anything halacha l’ma’aseh. For example, the notion that the shuruq form of vav hahibbur before labial letters is pronounced as “wu,” and not “u,” is very hard for me to believe, especially because it contradicts most modes of pronunciation among world Jewry, and makes one wonder why such a vav would not therefore be considered a complete syllable unto itself. As I wrote about last time, an analysis of the trop indicates that the Masoretes did not not count the prefix vav as a syllable even when it was pronounced as a shuruq. If they had been pronouncing such a vav as “wu”, it would count as a full syllable, especially if it preceded a letter with a sh’wa. I believe that even the Karaites and Samaritans themselves do not pronounce it that way anymore, if they ever did. R’ Schachter likes to relate a story about a conversation between Rabbi Soloveitchik and Rabbi Saul Lieberman, in which the former was dismissive of certain medieval sources, because just like today when we have pseudo-scholars who write halachic nonsense, they also had such things back then. Just because you can find that Karaites distinguished between the mobile and silent sh’was using different criteria from ours, we should do as they do?!

I would also like an explanation as to why, considering the mountain of proof that the vav was and should be pronounced like a W and not like a V, he recommends that it be pronounced as a V in certain instances. It is inconsistent in theory as well as in practice. However, it is interesting to note that historically Jews in Palestine began to assimilate the vav into a V sound around the same time that speakers of Greek began to assimilate the sound. Although I am happy to let people speak however they may like, I would strongly recommend against this and another common phoneme, namely the Modern Hebrew pronunciation of reish. Both made it into Modern Hebrew via Yiddish, and both make Modern Hebrew sound unpleasantly Germanic. For example, the word aquarium is both pleasant and easy to pronounce, and sounds like a fun place to visit with children, while ak-VA-ghi-um is jarring, hard to pronounce, and sounds sinister. If most can pronounce the vav and reish properly, they should try to do so. For those who may ask, I spell the name of the letter v-a-v in order to distinguish it from the Aarabic waw, although I believe that it makes the W sound. 

Prof. Khan’s take on orthoepy on page 101 fits with my point here that the Sifrei Emet have a higher tendency toward conjunctive cantillation marks than the rest of the books of the Bible. Along similar lines, you will find that in the majority of the biblical books, the non-Emet books, the lower level disjunctives, which therefore also occur earlier in a particular half of a verse, tend to be musical flourishes, and not unsurprisingly, can have many more conjunctive words (i.e., words marked with conjunctive trops) preceding them. For example, silluq and ethnah have at most one conjunctive word connected by either a mercha or munah, respectively, and the second-level disjunctives like tip’ha and zaqef have at most two conjunctives, while the pazer and t’lisha g’dola often have four or five conjunctives, and even up to seven at my last count. (Often, a string of connective words form one adjectival phrase beginning with asher, that or who, even if that phrase itself has many parts of speech.) Jacobson has already pointed out that there are no disjunctives lower than these, and therefore, even at preceding words where we would expect disjunctives, we find conjunctives. There is thus a proportional relationship between musicality and connectivity. 

A recurring argument is that when the Karaite transliterations into Arabic omit mater lectionis, the indication is a short vowel in the original Hebrew. I disagree, because we see that the farther back we go in Biblical Hebrew, fewer and fewer long vowels, especially qamatz and holam, are in the plene form. Incidentally, some have asked me for rules of thumb as to when the holam is plene or deficient. I have two of them: 1. In post-biblical Hebrew, the accented holam of segolate nouns is deficient (e.g., חֹדֶש, עֹשֶק, אֹכֶל, etc.) while in participles, the holam is unaccented and written in the plene form (e.g., אוֹכל, עוֹשֶק, etc.). In Biblical Hebrew, the older the book, the less likely these participles are to have the vav. 2. In the Torah and the earlier biblical books, the holam is often deficient when it is part of a plural suffix. Those words in which it is written plene, e.g., in בנות, are the exceptions. However, when the vav is part of the root, it usually is written, for example when the root of the word is yod-reish-(silent) hei and the conjugation is in the hif’il, which is why the word תורה and its variants are written in the plene form. 

Pg. 113. I used to joke that the common Ashkenazi practice of distinguishing between qamatz and patah and tzeirei-segol was an enactment of the biennial convention of Ashkenazic Jewry, for if you were to claim that qamatz and patah used to sound the same, and tzeirei-segol sounded the same, why do Ashkenazim distinguish between? However, Prof. Khan seems to say that it was apparently the case, and we are left looking for an explanation as to how our ancestors figured out the difference in theory and adopted it in practice. 

The argument on page 409 regarding epenthetic vowels fits with the argument I made previously about the pronunciation of ohela.

Pg. 428: Yaamdu. I believe that Prof. Khan and I are making similar proposals, except that he is using much more advanced terminology. 

Pg. 450: As per the brilliant and indispensable treatise on cantillation found in the classic Tiqqun Mishor, I believe that it is much easier to explain the vocalization of the word מה (ma) with the rules governing the hei hay’dia, the definite article. The atei merahiq (dehiq) explanation may account for the dagesh in the first letter of the second word, but it does not account for the variety of possible vowels: segol, qamatz, patah, etc. that parallels that of the hei hayedia and that can be explained using the general principles of vowel shifts. 

Pg. 509. Is the masoretic hyphen supposed to be called a מַקֵּף or מַקָּף? I can entertain either, just like the exact vowelization (and names for that matter) of the words we use for the vowels are also pretty dynamic, and the same can be said of the trop. 

Pg. 519: Prof. Khan does not find any lengthening of the vowel in the syllable marked by the metiga of the zaqef gadol, nor of the geresh of the ravia mugrash. As I wrote earlier, I am of the belief that these particular symbols are quite arbitrary, and their placement is less about accentage, etc., and more about distinguishing them from similar symbols, and explains why trop like the dehi and t’lisha gedola are always marked on the first syllables even if those syllables are not accented. 

Pg. 524: Concerning the verb להניח, Prof. Khan offers that the forms which have the dagesh are not reflective of a different root altogether, but rather are a convention to create a distinctive meaning. The forms with the weak nun imply “to give rest,” while the forms with the strong nun imply placement. It would thus seem logical that the blessing on laying t’fillin should be להַנּיח תפלין and not להָניח תפלין. However, most siddurim follow the Shulhan Aruch’s ruling (Orah Hayim 25:7) to use the latter formulation, and indeed, the Mishna B’rura there explains that the weaker form implies placement, while it is the strong form that implies handing over. However, in the original source in the Beth Yosef, it is mentioned that there is no actual difference in meaning between the two forms, but the weak form is preferred because it is the one used in the verse (Ezekiel 44:30), להָניח ברכה, “to place a blessing within your house.” The Vilna Gaon seems to endorse this view. 

The following is from a letter I wrote to the publishers of the Makbili edition of the Mishneh Torah:

במהדורתכם, בהלכות תפילין, פרק ד׳, כל פעם שמדובר על מעשה הנחת תפילין וברכתה, הנו״ן דגושה והתנועה לפניה או חיריק חסר או פתח, ושתיהן תנועות קלות, וזה למרות דעת השולחן ערוך וכמה אחחרונים שצ״ל נו״ן רפה והתנועה לפניה או קמץ או צירה, ושתיהן תנועות גדולות. לדעת מרן הבית יוסף, זה בגלל שהנחת תפילין שורשו נו״ח, ומעשה ההנחה הוא בבנין הפעיל, לעומת הנחה בנו״ן דגושה, שהיא באה משורש אחר ומשמעותה לשון עזיבה

?האם דעתו של הרמב״ם מפורשת שכן צריכים להגות ״הנחה״, או האם יש לכם סיבה אחרת בשיטת הניקוד

In short, they decided to vowelize l’haniah t’fillin, the blessing on laying t’fillin, with a dagesh in the nun, l’hanniah t’fillin. This is in contrast to most known opinions, including that of the Shulhan Aruch. Whose opinion were they following, bearing in mind that Maimonides himself did not actually state anything in regards to the matter and his own editions of the Mishneh Torah were not vowelized?

The editor answered that

:זוהי תמצית תשובת ד”ר יחיאל קארה, עורך המשנה של המהדורה לענייני ניקוד

במהדורתנו ניקדנו על פי המסורת התימנית, וכן הוא גם בכ”י קאופמן של המשנה. אכן במקרא אפשר שיש מקום להבחין בין “והניח לכם מכל אויביכם” ב-נ’ פשוטה לעומת “והניחם שם” ב-נ’ דגושה, כהבדלה בין נתינת מנוחה לבין שימה, אך הדבר אינו מוחלט, ובכל מקרה מדובר במה שמכונה “פועל עלול”, שבו יש תנועה בין הגזרות השונות. וראה גם במילון אבן שושן, שמביא את שתי הצורות בלא להבחין ביניהן

Or in short, that there is a Yemenite tradition that it should be that way. Indeed, one Yemenite rabbi showed me some Yemenite codes that explicitly record the practice.

A few years ago, I found what may be the source for the Yemenite/Maimonidean tradition.  According to the Shulhan Aruch, the three-letter root of l’haniah is nun–yod (or waw)-heth. Thus, all the letters of the root are present in that conjugation, and thus do not require any letter to be geminated in order to compensate. However, In The Guide for the Perplexed, 1:67, Maimonides wrote (Friedlander translation):

Our Sages, and some of the Commentators, took, however, nuaḥ in its primary sense “to rest,” but as a transitive form (hif’il), explaining the phrase thus: “and he gave rest to the world on the seventh day,” i.e., no further act of creation took place on that day.

It is possible that the word wayyanaḥ is derived either from yanaḥ, a verb of the class pe-yod, or naḥah, a verb of the class lamed-he, and has this meaning: “he established” or “he governed” the Universe in accordance with the properties it possessed on the seventh day”; that is to say, while on each of the six days events took place contrary to the natural laws now in operation throughout the Universe, on the seventh day the Universe was merely upheld and left in the condition in which it continues to exist. Our explanation is not impaired by the fact that the form of the word deviates from the rules of verbs of these two classes: for there are frequent exceptions to the rules of conjugations, and especially of the weak verbs: and any interpretation which removes such a source of error must not be abandoned because of certain grammatical rules. We know that we are ignorant of the sacred language, and that grammatical rules only apply to the majority of cases.

Thus, it seems that in the form l’hanniah, the yod of the beginning of the shoresh has been left out, necessitating the dagesh in the second letter of the root, the nun. However, Maimonides acknowledges the apparent difficulty: usually, when the first letter of a root is yod, verbs in the hiph’il conjugation are vowelized with a full holam after the prefix, for example להוציא from יצא and להושיב from ישב, and even להוליך from הלך, which does not even have a yod. 

Pg. 599-600: The discussion reminds me of my epiphany concerning the Vilna Gaon’s pronunciation of זֵכר. The difficulty native speakers have when trying to distinguish between sets of similar sounds is very frustrating, especially when they attempt to add their own vowelizations. I tell Israeli schoolteachers that it is not even worth it for them to try, because when it comes to qamatz-patah and segol-tzeirei, they will always get it wrong. 

Finally, Prof. Khan is not alone in advocating that the sh’wa na’ of Tiberian Hebrew be pronounced basically like a hataf patah. Support for this position comes from written testimony that describes it as such. However, I do not accept this. It seems to me today, linguists discuss dozens of types of vowels, and spoken English, for example, utilizes dozens of vowel sounds, but in the medieval period, they used to only discuss three, and then five, different vowel qualities. It makes sense that to them, the sh’wa would have to fit into one of those descriptive categories even if we now have the tools to be more specific. Further, if the sh’wa was supposed to sound like a hataf patah in the majority of cases, why did the Msaoretes choose the sign of the sh’wa, which half the time is used to mark a letter that closes a syllable, and not the hataf patah, which they had already created to mark specific sh’wa’s? Also, it would be a practice that contradicts the living custom of most of Jewry, and would require a thoroughly novel explanation as to why the pronunciation of the vav hahibbbur changes before words that begin with a letter vowelized with sh’wa. However, I also believe that a sh’wa should not be pronounced identically to the short I sound as is common in most places today. The best description of the sound that I can offer today is the sound in the word “the,” as in “I went to the store.”

…

Concerning Vav Hahippuch

As opposed to the conjunctive vav, the vav hahippuch generally turns a past-tense verb into future tense, and a future-tense verb into past tense. Many thus believe that the hippuch, inversing, refers to the tense. But, the vav hahippuch inverses a lot more:

The accentage: In most past-tense verbs converted to future, the accent is shifted from the middle syllable, if that is its position, to the last syllable. E.g. a-HAV-ta is “you loved,” whereas w’A-hav-Ta is “you shall love”. (Most speakers of Hebrew are unaware that the past-tense second person plural verbs are accented on the last syllable: אהבתם is ahav-TEM, and not aHAV-tem, and when marked with the vav hahippuch stay accented as such.) Notable exceptions occur in verbs with yod/silent hei as the last letter of the root. E.g., w’a-SI-tha, “you shall make,” is accented on its middle syllable even though it is future tense. Once again it is verbs of this category that are the major exception; last time I pointed out that the singular masculine past-tense conjugations of these verbs do not follow the rule of athei merahiq. In the case of a future-tense verb made past, the accent is shifted from the last syllable to an earlier one. (e.g., ya-QUM becomes way-YA-qom, and yo-MAR becomes way-YO-mer).  

The syntax: Standard form would be subject-verb-object. When vav-hahippuch is utilized, the order is verb-subject-etc.. This is the usual form used throughout the Bible when describing events, and usually in chronological order. When I teach about vav hahipppuch, this is the first indication: Does the verb start the sentence or clause instead of the subject? If yes, then you most likely have vav hahippuch.

Lastly, the vocalization is changed, at least from future to past. Instead of simply being marked with a sh’wa, or whatever would have taken the sh’wa’s place based under other considerations (e.g., becoming a shuruq before labial letters), the vav hahippuch is vowelized with either a patah before the future-prefix tau, yod, or nun, or a qamatz before the future prefix alef, which cannot receive a dagesh. Thus, when you have a vav hahippuch before a first-person singular pi’el verb like avaqqesh, which starts with an alef vocalized with a hataf patah, the vav hahippuch will be marked with a qamatz. There are two practical applications with regard to the meaning: If the vav preceding such a verb was not a vav hahippuch, it would be marked with an ordinary patah and the verb is in standard future-tense form, and therefore the reader must distinguish between the two. If he does not, he should be corrected, and normally, the vocalization of the vav hahippuch actually matters.  However, the vocalization of the vav hahibbur, which can prefix all parts of speech, is not critical, i.e., whether one pronounces it with a sh’wa, or any vowel, or as a shuruq, does not affect the meaning and intent. Because vav hahippuch only prefixes verbs, any time a vav prefixes anything but a verb, I would not correct the reader if he pronounces it with the wrong vowel. For example, if one were to read וגדולה as vig-do-LA  instead of ug-do-LA, or ושמעון as wa-shim-’ON instead of w’shim-’ON.

As far as I can tell, classical Aramaic has no vav hahippuch, and perhaps others can weigh in on whether such a form exists in other semitic languages.  

Once one is familiar with the style of the vav hahippuch, he will notice that certain verses (or parts of verses) actually follow standard syntax: The subject will precede the verb, which will be in the correct tense. In such cases, the subject may be preceded by a vav hahibbur, and the overall indication will be that the information expressed is that which had happened previously. I.e., such a style of syntax indicates the past perfect. Some examples:

Genesis 4:1: והאדם ידע את חוה אשתו, “The man had known his wife, Eve.” Many scholars have pointed out that this indicates that Eve had at least conceived her first children before Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, with the Midrash even describing Cain’s birth the day Adam and Eve were created.

Genesis 14:1: עָשׂוּ מִלְחָמָה אֶת-בֶּרַע מֶלֶךְ סְדֹם, “They had made war against Bera, King of Sodom, etc.” As is evident from the subsequent verses, the initial war preceded the events of the running narrative by some fourteen years.

Genesis 18:17: וַה׳ אָמָר הַמְכַסֶּה אֲנִי מֵאַבְרָהָם אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי עֹשֶׂה “And the Lord had said, would I conceal from Abraham that which I am doing?” That is, God had already decided, so to speak, that He would inform Abraham of the judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah. 

If you read II Samuel 2, it seems that Abner crowned Ishbosheth in the aftermath of Saul’s death, shortly before or right around the time David was crowned king of Judah, and considering that the verse describes how Ishbosheth’s kingdom gradually expanded as more tribes accepted him, it seems to me that it took David five and a half years after Ishbosheth’s death to then be accepted as king over all of Israel, and in support of the Ttosafists’ classical position against that of  Rashi’s (Sanhedrin 20a) , it took some time before Ishboshesh was accepted  by all of the tribes, but the five years of no kingdom seem to have been after his death, as the tribes came around to accepting David as king.  

A nay bintl briv:

Personal Reminiscences of Rabbi Israel Meir ha-Kohen from the Yiddish Republic of Letters

Shaul Seidler-Feller

Editor’s note: The present post is part one of a two-part essay. Part two can be found here.

Introduction

Beginning on January 20, 1906, Abraham (Abe) Cahan (1860–1951), the legendary founder and longtime editor of the Yiddish-language Forverts newspaper in New York, published a regular agony uncle column famously entitled A bintl briv (A Bundle of Letters; often Romanized A Bintel Brief).[1] Herein he reproduced missives sent to the daily by its largely Eastern European immigrant readership seeking advice on a range of personal issues, followed by his wise, insightful counsel.[2] While today this once-immensely-popular feature may have quietly evanesced into the mists of Yiddish journalistic history,[3] it is my intention here to revive it, if only briefly and in altered form, via transcription, translation, and discussion of two letters penned to the distinguished Forverts columnist Rabbi Aaron B. Shurin.

Shurin, born in Riteve (present-day Rietavas, Lithuania) on the second day of Rosh Hashanah 5673 (September 13, 1912)[4] to his parents Rabbi Moses and Ruth, learned in his youth at the heder and yeshivah of Riteve (the latter founded by his father) and spent the years 1928–1936 at the yeshivot of Ponevezh (present-day Panevėžys, Lithuania) and Telz (present-day Telšiai, Lithuania).[5] In 1936, he joined the rest of his family in the Holy Land, to which it had immigrated the previous year, and soon thereafter he continued his studies at the yeshivot of Hebron (as transplanted to Jerusalem) and Petah Tikva, as well as at the 1938 Summer Seminar in Tel Aviv under Prof. Yehuda Even Shmuel (Kaufman; 1886–1976).[6] The following year (1939), he received yoreh yoreh and yadin yadin semikhot from Rabbis Meir Stolewitz (1870–1949), Isser Zalman Meltzer (1870–1953), Reuven Katz (1880–1963), and Isaac ha-Levi Herzog (1888–1959) and in 1940 moved again, this time to New York, to which his father had relocated circa 1937.[7] At that point, he began studying at Yeshiva College and Columbia University, and in 1941–1942 he simultaneously taught Bible and Hebrew language and literature in YC; he would later go on to occupy a position on the Judaic studies faculty at Stern College for Women for many years (1949–1956 and 1966–2001).[8]

In the years that followed, in addition to teaching at YU, Shurin served as cofounder and vice president of Poalei Agudath Israel (1941–1947), rabbi of two synagogues (Beth Hacknesseth Anshei Slutsk at 34 Pike Street in Manhattan [1941–1945] and Toras Moshe Jewish Center at 4314 Tenth Avenue in Brooklyn [1945–1947]), and principal of a day school (Talmud Torah Hechodosh at 146 Stockton Street in Brooklyn [1949–1953]), among several other leadership positions.[9] However, it is his sixty-two-plus-year career at the Forverts on which I wish to focus here. Already in his youth, as a talmid in Telz and then in Israel, he began writing articles and studies for various Hebrew and Yiddish publications, and when he came to America (to quote him directly), “Anywhere I could write, I did […] I enjoyed it, and I compiled a portfolio of articles on a wide range of subjects. One day, a friend said to me, ‘You should write for the Forward.’ I laughed.”[10] At the time, the Forverts was by far the most widely read Jewish newspaper, with a daily circulation of over 100,000 copies, and was avowedly secular in orientation, even publishing on Shabbat and yom tov (although it was respectful of the religious).[11] Nevertheless, despite these challenges to a young, aspiring Orthodox journalist, Shurin took the idea of working at the Forverts to the famed historian and bibliophile Chaim Lieberman (1892–1991) who, after reading a sample of his work, recommended him to Harry Lang (1888–1970), a managing editor at the paper, and shortly thereafter editor Hillel (Harry) Rogoff (1882–1971) hired him.[12] From 1944 to 1983, Shurin wrote approximately two columns per week; when the Forverts became a weekly in the latter year, he, too, switched to one column per week until his retirement in 2007.[13]

For the most part, Shurin’s Forverts articles focused on religious topics, Jewish education, social-political issues in Israel (particularly those concerning the Orthodox parties), and the lives of great Jewish historical figures.[14] The aforementioned letters written to Shurin were sent in response to two of these columns, separated by eight years. His son David was kind enough to transfer them to Seforim Blog editor Eliezer Brodt (who then e-mailed scans to me) and to give full permission for their publication and translation below.[15]

First Letter

In honor of the sesquicentennial of what some consider the birth year of Rabbi Israel Meir ha-Kohen, the world-renowned Hafets Hayyim,[16] Shurin published an article in the Forverts treating the most important aspects of this great leader’s biography, focusing on his legendarily superlative piety, as well as his literary, educational, and political activities on behalf of European Jewry.[17] Not long thereafter, he received the following letter:

שיקאַגאָ, 1/31/88

!זייער געערטער הרב שורין

אייער אינטערעסאַנטער אַרטיקל וועגן חפץ חיים האָט מיר
דערמאָנט אַ פּאַסירונג אין מיין היים-שטאָט ווילנע מיט זעכציק
.יאָר צוריק, ווען איך בּין געווען אַ קינד פון קוים פינף יאָר
מיין זיידע האָט געהאַט דעם גרויסן זכות צו זיין אַ פריינט
פון חפץ חיים, ווי אויך זיין דאָקטאָר. ווען דער חפץ חיים
.פלעגט קומען קיין ווילנע פלעגט ער אונדז שטענדיק בּאַזוכן
אַ פּלימעניצע פון חפץ חיים האָט געוואוינט ״נעקסט דאָר״ פון
.אונדז און ער פלעגט נאַטירלעך איר אויך בּאַזוכן

איינמאָל ווען דער חפץ חיים איז געקומען צו אונדז אין הויז
אַריין איז מיין זיידע פּונקט ניט געווען אין דער היים, ער איז
.געווען בּיי אַ קראַנקן. מיין פאָטער איז אויך געווען בּיי אַ פּאַציענט
מיין זיידע און מיין פאָטער האָבּן געהאַט אַ געמיינזאַמע פּראַקטיק
און מיר האָבּן אויך געוואוינט צוזאַמען. מיין מוטער האָט גלייך
געוואָלט עמיצן שיקן רופן דעם זיידן, אָבער דער חפץ חיים
האָט געזאָגט, אַז ער וועט בּעסער וואַרטן בּיז דער זיידע וועט
צוריק קומען. ער האָט ווייזט אויס ניט געוואָלט דער זיידע זאָל
זיך איילן בּיים בּאַהאַנדלען דעם קראַנקן. ער איז געזעסן
אין אַ גרויסן לעדערנעם פאָטעל אין וואַרטע-צימער און ניט
אין די אינעווייניקסטע צימערן, ווייל דאָס וואָלט געמיינט צו
זיין אַליין מיט די פרויען, מיין בּאָבּע און מיין מוטער. דאָס איז
געווען אין 1927 און ער איז שוין געווען א זקן. מיין מוטער

2

האָט מיר געהייסן אַריינגיין אין וואַרטע-זאַל און בּעטן דעם
חפץ חיים ער זאָל מיר בּענטשן. איך בּין געווען אַ קליין מיידעלע
פון פינף יאָר און איך האָבּ זיך געשעמט, האָבּ איך צוערשט
זיך בּאַהאַלטן הינטער אַ דיקער סאַמעטענער פּאָרטיערע וואָס
איז געהאַנגען איבּער דער טיר. איך האָבּ געקוקט אויף אים
פון הינטערן פאָרהאַנג און געזען אַ פנים פון בּלויז
גוטסקייט, האָבּ איך זיך אָנגענומען מיט מוט און בּין
פּאמעלינקערהייט צוגעגאַנגען צו אים. איך האָבּ ניט געזאָגט
קיין וואָרט נאָר בּלויז געקוקט אויף אים און געוואַרט. דער חפץ חיים
האָט מיר דערזען און פאַרשטאַנען. מיט אַ לייכטן שמייכל האָט ער
.אַרויפגעלייגט די האַנט אויף מיין קאָפּ און מיר געבּענטשט
איך האָבּ געשפּירט ווי אַ גרויסע וואַרעמקייט און גוטסקייט
שטראָמט פון אים און איך האָבּ געפילט אַ גרויסע ליבּשאַפט
צו דעם צדיק, ווי נאָר אַ קינד קען פילן, ניט מיטן פאַרשטאַנד
.נאָר מיטן האַרץ

בּיז היינטיקן טאָג גלויבּ איך אַז אין זכות פון זיין ברכה
.בּין איך איבּערגעקומען היטלערס לאַגערן

איך דאַנק אייך געערטער הרב שורין פאַר דעם
פאַרגעניגן וואָס איר פאַרשאַפט אייערע לייענער מיט אייערע
אַרטיקלען און איך ווינטש אייך איר זאָלט זוכה זיין צו
.דערפרייען אונדז מיט אייער שרייבּן נאָך פאַר לאנגע, לאַנגע יאָרן

,מיט אכטונג
.בּעטי דיִקמאַן
1930 W LOYOLA 618

Chicago, 1/31/88

To the highly esteemed Rabbi Shurin!

Your interesting article about the Hafets Hayyim reminded me of a story that took place in my hometown of Vilna sixty years ago, when I was a child barely five years of age. My grandfather was very fortunate to be a friend of the Hafets Hayyim, as well as his physician. When the Hafets Hayyim would come to Vilna, he would always visit us. A niece of his lived next door, and he would also, naturally, go to see her.

One time when the Hafets Hayyim came to our house, my grandfather, as luck would have it, was not home; he was tending to someone ill. My father, too, was with a patient. My grandfather and father had a shared practice, and we also all lived together. My mother immediately suggested sending someone to call for my grandfather, but the Hafets Hayyim said that he preferred to wait until my grandfather returned. He evidently did not want my grandfather to rush his treatment of the sick person. He sat down in a large leather armchair in the foyer,[18] not in the innermost rooms, because that would have meant being secluded with the women – my grandmother and mother. This was in 1927, when he was already an elderly man. My mother

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told me to go to the hallway[19] and ask the Hafets Hayyim to bless me. I was a small, shy girl of five years, so I initially hid behind a thick velvet portiere hanging over the door. But when I peered at him from behind the curtain and saw a face of pure goodness, I mustered up my courage and slowly approached him. I did not say a word; I just looked at him and waited. The Hafets Hayyim caught sight of me and understood. With an easy smile, he lay his hand on my head and blessed me. I sensed a great warmth and goodness streaming forth from him and felt much love for this righteous man, as only a child can – not with the mind but with the heart.

To this day, I believe that it is on account of his blessing that I survived Hitler’s camps.

I thank you, esteemed R. Shurin, for the joy that you bring to your readers with your columns and wish you the good fortune to continue delighting us with your writing for many, many years to come.

Respectfully,
Betty Dickman
1930 W Loyola 618

On April 14, 1997, Donna Puccini interviewed Betty Dickman about her experiences during the Holocaust on behalf of what is today the USC Shoah Foundation’s Institute for Visual History and Education.[20] From that conversation we learn that Dickman was born Isabella Margolin on April 9, 1922 in Vilna – then part of Poland and called Wilno but today known as Vilnius, Lithuania – as the only child of her parents, Mones (1893–1941) and Henya (1894–1943) Margolin. As already noted in the letter, her maternal grandparents, Chaim and Rose Bruk, lived together with them, and both her grandfather and father were physicians, while her grandmother and mother stayed home with their Polish maid.[21] Chaim Bruk was a prominent member of the Vilna Jewish community who sat on the board of directors of the Tiferes Bachurim Society (at 6 Niemiecka [present-day Vokiečių] Street),[22] helped to found the city’s Miszmeres Chojlim charitable hospital (at 5 Kijowska [present-day Kauno] Street),[23]  and served as gabbai of Zalkin’s (formerly Zemel’s) kloyz (at 2 Rudnicka [present-day Rūdninkų] Street),[24] which was located right next door to the family’s apartment building at 4 Rudnicka Street.[25] According to Dickman, when he passed away in 1936 at the age of 70, all the stores lining the streets through which the funeral procession passed were closed, and “there must have been about twenty-five thousand [!] people at that funeral.”

Aside from its value as a firsthand account of the profoundly human, down-to-earth, and kindhearted character of the Hafets Hayyim, this letter also touches on, and complicates our understanding of, at least three aspects of his biography and religious worldview.[26] First and foremost is his attitude toward medicine. The Hafets Hayyim was famous for his pure, unshakable faith in God,[27] relying on Him to heal the sick even when traditional medical interventions had not been attempted.[28] However, a number of incidents recorded by the Hafets Hayyim’s biographers point to a willingness to, and even insistence on the importance of, consult(ation) with physicians about health-related issues.[29] While I have so far not succeeded in corroborating the letter’s claim that Bruk served as the Hafets Hayyim’s personal doctor,[30] it is evident that both certain members of the Hafets Hayyim’s family and he himself had recourse to medical professionals at various stages of their lives[31] – a point that comes through clearly in Dickman’s writing.

Another interesting aspect of this story concerns the Hafets Hayyim’s willingness to bless the young girl. Though many petitioned him to pray on their behalf or offer them a blessing,[32] the Hafets Hayyim often refused on principle to do so, noting that God makes Himself equally available to every Jew, no matter his status in the community, and that He would actually prefer to hear directly from His children than from an intermediary.[33] The fact that he made an exception in this case, while certainly not unheard-of,[34] is nevertheless noteworthy, and it deepens our appreciation of his paternal conduct with this shy little girl.

Finally, attention should be directed toward the Hafets Hayyim’s halakhic stance on yihud. While most posekim assume that secluding oneself with a married woman whose husband is in town (ba‘alah ba-ir) is permissible even ab initio,[35] the letter reports that the Hafets Hayyim would not allow himself to sit together with Mrs. Bruk and Mrs. Margolin even though their husbands were not far away.[36] Interestingly, this humra, which is based on Rashi’s understanding of a passage in the Talmud,[37] seemingly contradicts the Hafets Hayyim’s own ruling on the matter in his Sefer nidhei yisra’el, intended for Jews who had immigrated to America.[38] It would thus appear that we have here an instance in which the Hafets Hayyim’s personal practice reflected a higher degree of stringency regarding halakhah than he required of others.[39]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

* I wish at the outset to express my gratitude to Eliezer Brodt for furnishing me with the opportunity to compose this essay and for his patience during its long gestation. Additional thanks go to his fellow editors at the Seforim Blog, particularly the incomparable Menachem Butler, whose bibliographical reach seems unlimited. Finally, I am indebted to my friends Eliyahu Krakowski, Daniel Tabak, and Shlomo Zuckier for their corrections and comments to an earlier draft of this piece that, taken together, improved it considerably.

[1] On the inception of A bintl briv, see Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, vol. 4 (New York: Forward Association, 1928), 471-478. See also “Treasures From the Forverts’ Archive – Chapter #3. A Bintel Brief (1)” (watch at about 1:13) (accessed August 19, 2019). For the historical background behind, and contemporary influences upon, this feature, see Steven Cassedy, “A Bintel brief: The Russian Émigré Intellectual Meets the American Mass Media,” East European Jewish Affairs 34,1 (2004): 104-120.
[2] After two to three years, Cahan tells us, his many other responsibilities at the paper did not allow him to continue answering the letters personally, so that he had to ask other members of his staff to compose the responses (Bleter, 483).
[3] The most recent column, published in a dedicated corner of The Jewish Daily Forward website called The Bintel Brief, is dated May 24, 2010 (accessed August 19, 2019). Anthologies of selected letters in English translation have appeared as Isaac Metzker (ed.), A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, trans. Diana Shalet Levy with Bella S. Metzker (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), and Isaac Metzker (ed.), A Bintel Brief: Letters to the Jewish Daily Forward[,] 1950–1980, trans. Bella S. Metzker and Diana Shalet Levy (New York: The Viking Press, 1981). More recently, some of these missives have been adapted into graphic novel form by Liana Finck as A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York (New York: Ecco, 2014).
[4] Anon., “About the Author,” in Aaron B. Shurin, Moadim Lesimcha: Insights[,] Explanations and Stories on the Jewish Holidays (Brooklyn: Aaron B. Shurin, 2006), xi-xx, at p. xi. Some sources date his birth to 1913 or even 1914, but these are clearly mistaken given that when he died on 24 Sivan 5772 (June 14, 2012), he was just a few months shy of his one-hundredth birthday. See, e.g., David Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah la-halutsei ha-yishuv u-bonav: demuyyot u-temunot, vol. 10 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyyat Rishonim, 1959), 3474-3475, at p. 3474, translated/adapted somewhat inaccurately and laconically in Alter Levite, Dina Porat, and Roni Stauber (eds.), A Yizkor Book to Riteve: A Jewish Shtetl in Lithuania (Cape Town: The Kaplan-Kushlick Foundation, 2000), 105-106, at p. 105; Elias Schulman, Leksikon fun forverts shrayber zint 1897, ed. Simon Weber (New York: Forward Association, 1987), 90-91, at p. 90; Berl Kagan, Yidishe shtet, shtetlekh un dorfishe yishuvim in lite biz 1918: historish-biografishe skitses (New York: Berl Kagan, 1991), 556-557, at p. 556; and Alex Mindlin, “A Religious Voice in a Secular Forest,” The New York Times (November 28, 2004). I thank Chana Pollack, Archivist at The Jewish Daily Forward, for sending me a copy of the Leksikon for my personal use.

As an aside, and since I know that the Seforim Blog has a special interest in issues surrounding plagiarism, one can find (mild) examples of this phenomenon in the announcement of Shurin’s passing published by Casriel Bauman, “A Legend in His Time: Rabbi Aharon Ben Zion Shurin z”l,” Matzav.com (June 14, 2012) (accessed August 19, 2019) – subsequently reprinted with minor modifications in the Queens Jewish Link 1,12 (June 28, 2012): 89 – which fails to cite both Tidhar’s encyclopedia entry and the New York Times interview as its sources.
[5] Anon., “About the Author,” xi; see also Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3474. For photographs of Shurin (at that point still going by the original family name, Mishuris) and his friends taken in Telz on 3 Adar II 5695 (March 8, 1935), see the following Ebay listings: 1, 2 (accessed August 19, 2019). For a recent photograph of the dilapidated yeshivah building in Telz, taken by Richard Schofield as part of his photo essay Back to Shul (Vilnius: International Centre for Litvak Photography, 2018), see here (accessed August 19, 2019).
[6] Anon., “About the Author,” xi-xii; see also Anon., “Totse’ot ha-behinot be-seminar ha-kayits mi-ta‘am ha-v[a‘ad] ha-l[e’ummi],” Ha-tsofeh 3,318 (January 13, 1939): 1. (Cf. the 1940 United States Census record for Manhattan [accessed June 21, 2019], according to which Aaron, like the rest of his family, was living in “Tel-a-Viv” as of April 1, 1935. This seems unlikely given the date inscribed on the photographs mentioned in the previous note.) According to Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3474, Shurin also attended a gymnasium at night while learning at the Lomzher yeshivah in Petah Tikva.
[7] Anon., “About the Author,” xii; see also Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3474-3475, and the announcement of his move to America in Ha-mashkif 2,244 (January 25, 1940): 4. His younger brother, Rabbi Israel Shurin (1918–2007), followed a very similar educational path. See the biographical sketch published originally in Yated Neeman with contributions from Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky and Sharon Katz, entitled “Rav Yisroel Shurin, z”l: A Revered Rav and a Link to a Lithuanian Past” (accessed August 19, 2019).
[8] Anon., “About the Author,” xii. See also Anon., Columbia University in the City of New York: Supplement to the Directory Number, 1945 (New York: New York, 1945), 45; Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3474; the 1967 volume of Stern’s yearbook, Kochaviah, 35 (where he is referred to as “Arthur,” rather than “Aaron,” Shurin); and YU Review: The Magazine of Yeshiva University (Fall 2005): 30. (For the record, the latest Kochaviah yearbook in which I was able to locate Shurin on the faculty pages was the 1997 volume [p. 21]; he did not appear there in the 1998 and 2000 editions, and neither the YU Archives nor Stern’s Hedi Steinberg Library held copies of the 1999 and 2001 volumes at the time I visited them [if indeed those editions were ever actually published]. I thank Shulamith Z. Berger, Curator of Special Collections and Hebraica-Judaica, for allowing me to examine the Archives’ holdings.) As noted by Tidhar and others, Shurin edited the Hebrew section of Eidenu (New York: Students of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, 1942), a volume dedicated to the memory of YU President Rabbi Dr. Bernard Revel (1885–1940).
[9] Anon., “About the Author,” xii; see also Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3474. For some of his other organizational affiliations, see Anon., “About the Author,” xviii. See also lots 169, 170, 191, 198, 200, 205, 210, and 211 from a Kestenbaum & Company auction held on April 7, 2016, which included letters written to Shurin and his father-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Dov-Ber Rivkin (1892–1976), by some of the leading lights of the Jewish world at the time (accessed August 19, 2019). It is interesting to note that Rabbis Eliezer Silver (1882–1968) and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) both apparently read Shurin’s columns in the Forverts.
[10] Quoted in Yisroel Besser, “Defending the Past in the Pages of the Forward: Rabbi Aaron Benzion Shurin’s Six Decades of Journalism,” Mishpacha (May 26, 2010): 26-33, at p. 29. For more on Shurin’s writing outside of the context of his work for the Forverts, including his many rabbinic publications, see Anon., “About the Author,” xiv-xvii, and Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3474-3475.

Relatedly, Israel Mizrahi notes that Shurin’s personal library of approximately two thousand volumes “included many classics as well as obscure works from the last century as well as a very strong showing of newspapers, from the 19th century through the WWII period, with many bound volumes of rare newspapers present.” See “Recent Acquisitions at Mizrahi Bookstore, the libraries of Aaron Ben-Zion Shurin […],” Musings of a Jewish Bookseller (March 29, 2016) (accessed August 19, 2019). One of his books, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s Ad eimatai dibberu ivrit? (New York: Kadimah, 1919), comprised lot 3 of Winner’s Auctions’ July 19, 2016 sale (accessed August 19, 2019).
[11] Gennady Estraikh and Zalman Newfield, “Grandfathers against Bar Mitzvahs: Secular Immigrant Jews Confront Religion in 1940s America,” Zutot 9 (2012): 73-84, at p. 74; see also Gennady Estraikh, “A Mid-Twentieth-Century Quest for Jewish Authenticity: The Yiddish Daily Forverts’ Warming to Religion,” in Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (eds.), Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 111-134, at pp. 111-112. On the occasion of the Forverts’ eightieth anniversary, Shurin himself would reflect that “the Forverts has […] been very friendly to the yeshivah world throughout the years that I have been a collaborator on the Forverts editorial staff.” See Aaron B. Shurin, “Idish lebn in amerike,” Forverts (April 24, 1977): B8, B24, at p. B24.

In his interview with The New York Times, Shurin asserts that the Forverts had a quarter million readers at the time he was hired, but Estraikh and Newfield write that that number was accurate for the 1920s, not the 1940s.
[12] Besser, “Defending,” 30, explains the decision to bring an Orthodox rabbi onboard by noting that “times were changing and the Forward management perceived that they had to provide their Orthodox readership – which was immense – with a column geared to their needs, coverage and perspective of the issues that concerned them.” Similarly, Mindlin of the Times writes that “[Shurin’s] hiring reflected the feeling of the founding editor, Abraham Cahan, that the newspaper needed to speak to the religious Jews who flooded the United States in the 30’s and 40’s.” Indeed, according to Estraikh and Newfield, “Grandfathers,” 75 n. 8, based on an article published in the Forverts in February 1956, “[b]y the mid-1950s, secular readers already belonged to the minority of the Forverts audience.” See also Estraikh, “A Mid-Twentieth-Century Quest,” passim, but esp. pp. 121-122, as well as the comments cited by S. Daniel, editor of Ha-tsofeh, in an article translated as “Faithful Servant” in Shurin, Moadim Lesimcha, xxi-xxiv.
[13] Shurin’s first column appeared as A.B. Rutzon, “‘Mizrakhi’ un ‘agudes yisroel’ – vegn vos zey krigen zikh,” Forverts (November 5, 1944): B3 (Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3475, notes that A.B. Rutzon was one of Shurin’s pseudonyms, a reference to his mother’s name, Ruth). The last article of his that I was able to identify was published April 20, 2007; see the table of contents of that issue here (accessed August 19, 2019). See also Anon., “About the Author,” xv.

Interestingly, Schulman, Leksikon, 90-91, writes that Shurin also managed the Fun folk tsu(m) folk (From People to People) readers’ correspondence section of the paper, although I did not find other references to this point. Also interesting, and curious, is the fact that although Shurin’s passing was mourned at the Kave shtibl and in Der moment (accessed August 19, 2019), I could find no article online in either the Forverts or the Forward reporting his death.
[14] See Anon., “About the Author,” xv; Tidhar, Entsiklopedyah, 3475; and Schulman, Leksikon, 90.
[15] I attempted to be faithful to the originals in transcribing these letters, without adjusting or correcting such features as orthography, vocalization, or punctuation.
[16] We know that he was born 11 Shevat, but the exact year is disputed, with varying accounts claiming it was either 5588 (1828), 5589 (1829), 5593 (1833), 5595 (1835), 5598 (1838), or 5599 (1839). For some of the literature on this issue, see Moses M. Yoshor, He-hafets hayyim: hayyav u-po‘olo, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Netsah, 1958), 25 with n. 1; Nathan Kamenetsky, Making of a Godol: A Study of Episodes in the Lives of Great Torah Personalities: Improved Edition, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Jerusalem: P.P. Publishers, 2004), 1106-1108 (Notes and Excursuses 5.1 (2) / Excursus B); and [Dan Rabinowitz], “Chofetz Hayyim[:] His Death, the New York Times and Research Tools,” Seforim Blog (October 31, 2006) (accessed August 19, 2019).
[17] Aaron B. Shurin, “Der ‘khofets khayim’, tsu zayn 150 yorikn geboyrn-yor,” Forverts (January 29, 1988): 13, 27. See also Shurin’s earlier, Hebrew-language reflection on the Hafets Hayyim’s life and works: “He-‘hafets hayyim’ – rabban shel yisra’el,” in Keshet gibborim: demuyyot ba-ofek ha-yehudi shel dor aharon, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1964), 115-121.
[18] The original Yiddish here reads varte-tsimer, lit., “waiting room”; I take this to refer to the foyer of the home.
[19] The original Yiddish here reads varte-zal, lit., “waiting hall”; I take this to refer to the hallway off the foyer.
[20] The Institute website can be found here, and Dickman’s interview can be found either on the Visual History Archive Online site here or on YouTube here (accessed August 19, 2019).
[21] For three slightly different dappei-ed (pages of testimony) filed by Dickman with Yad Vashem about her father, see 1, 2, and 3; for two she filed about her mother, see 1 and 2; and for two she filed about her grandmother Rose, see 1 and 2 (accessed August 19, 2019).
[22] According to Shemaryahu (Shmerele) Szarafan, “Di religyeze vilne,” in Aaron Isaac Grodzenski (ed.), Vilner almanakh (Vilna: Ovnt Kuryer, 1939; repr. Brooklyn: Moriah Offset Co., 1992), cols. 321-332, at col. 324, the Tiferes Bachurim Society was founded in 1902 by the young Rabbi Jechiel ha-Levi Sruelow (1879–1946) to combat the radical, anti-religious forces on the Jewish street by teaching young workers and craftsmen Torah and Talmud at night and on Shabbat and yom tov, when they had free time. Chaim Bruk was one of the people who did much to ensure the society’s financial security; he is pictured, together with Szarafan, Sruelow, and other members of the board of directors, in Leyzer Ran (ed.), Jerusalem of Lithuania: Illustrated and Documented, vol. 1 (New York: Vilno Album Committee, 1974), 261, and here (accessed August 19, 2019). See also Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, Sergey Kravtsov, Vladimir Levin et al. (eds.), “Appendix: Synagogues, Batei Midrash and Kloyzn in Vilnius,” in Synagogues in Lithuania: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2012), 281-353, at pp. 303-304 (no. 12), and Yisrael Rozenson, “‘Ba‘avur tse‘irim kemo gam le-ovedim u-le-ozerim ba-hanuyyot’: al ha-mif‘al ha-hinnukhi ‘tif’eret bahurim’ be-vilnah,” Hagut: mehkarim ba-hagut ha-hinnukh ha-yehudi 10 (2014): 15-72, esp. p. 44. The society eventually moved into the former kloyz of the Lubavitcher Hasidim located in the Vilna shulhoyf (synagogue courtyard); see no. 12 in the diagram of the shulhoyf available here (accessed August 19, 2019).
[23] A. Karabtshinski, “Mishmeres-khoylim,” in Grodzenski, Vilner almanakh, cols. 319-320, reports that the society after which the hospital was named was founded by Rabbi Bezalel Altshuler in 1890 as a branch of Vilna’s general charity fund and that the hospital itself was built in 1913. Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania, 161, by contrast, writes that the hospital building dedication took place in 1912. See also the photograph of the 1910 cornerstone-laying ceremony on that same page (161) in which, according to Dickman’s interview (watch at approx. 2:49:15), Bruk is pictured on the far right wearing a straw hat and holding a cane. For a photograph of the hospital building before the outbreak of World War II, see here (accessed August 19, 2019).
[24] See Cohen-Mushlin et al., “Appendix,” 317-318 (no. 60). For a photograph of Chaim Bruk praying in the kloyz circa 1935, see Dickman’s interview (watch at approx. 2:50:11); he is pictured on the far right in the first row.
[25] For maps of prewar/wartime Jewish Vilna, see Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania, insert (in Yiddish), and here (in Polish) (accessed August 19, 2019). For a modern map of Vilna with Jewish sites (including ghetto borders) overlaid, see here (make sure to click “Explore on your own”) (accessed August 19, 2019). Most of the addresses mentioned above can be found in the vicinity of the two Vilna ghetto locations. For a photograph of a 3-D model of the Vilna ghettos created illegally by Jewish artists in 1943, see Leyzer Ran and Leybl Koriski (eds.), Bleter vegn vilne: zamlbukh (Łódź: Farband fun Vilner Yidn in Poyln, 1947; also available through the New York Public Library Yizkor Book online portal [accessed August 19, 2019]), after p. 52. Finally, for photographs of wartime and present-day Rudnicka/Rūdninkų Street, see here (accessed August 19, 2019).
[26] A definitive academic study of R. Israel Meir ha-Kohen’s life and legacy remains a scholarly desideratum. Rabbi Eitam Henkin, who, together with his wife Naama, was cruelly murdered in October 2015 by Palestinian terrorists, had made a major bid to fill the void by submitting a doctoral proposal on the topic to Tel Aviv University. Henkin’s mentor, Prof. David Assaf, posted the proposal online shortly after his death, both as a memorial for this up-and-coming scholar, whose life and brilliant career were cut all too short, and for the benefit of future researchers: “Sheloshim le-retsah eitam henkin: tokhnit ha-mehkar al ‘he-hafets hayyim’,” Oneg shabbat (October 30, 2015) (accessed August 19, 2019). The most recent attempt of which I am aware to critically assess, albeit partially, the work of the Hafets Hayyim was penned by Benjamin Brown, “Ha-‘ba‘al bayit’: r. yisra’el me’ir ha-kohen, he-‘hafets hayyim’,” in Benjamin Brown and Nissim Leon (eds.), Ha-‘gdoylim’: ishim she-itsevu et penei ha-yahadut ha-haredit be-yisra’el (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute; Magnes Press, 2017), 105-151.

The most extensive research on the Hafets Hayyim’s life conducted outside the academic sphere is that by Rabbi Moses M. Yoshor (1896–1978), a student and eventual personal secretary of this great Torah sage. For the history of Yoshor’s various biographical studies of his revered teacher, see his The Chafetz Chaim: The Life and Works of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan of Radin, trans. Charles Wengrov (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1984), xv-xviii, xxvii-xxviii, as well as the unpaginated translator’s note and note on the author in the frontmatter.
[27] On the Hafets Hayyim as one of the main Lithuanian representatives of a phenomenon Benjamin Brown has termed “the return of ‘pure faith’” within the Jewish tradition, see his “Shuvah shel ‘ha-emunah ha-temimah’: tefisat ha-emunah ha-haredit u-tsemihatah ba-me’ah ha-19,” in Moshe Halbertal, David Kurzweil, and Avi Sagi (eds.), Al ha-emunah: iyyunim be-mussag ha-emunah u-be-toledotav ba-massoret ha-yehudit (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005), 403-443, 669-683, at pp. 433-436, as well as idem, “Ha-‘ba‘al bayit’,” 143-146.
[28] See the account of his son, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Poupko (ca. 1860–1938), in Mikhtevei ha-rav hafets hayyim z[ekher] ts[addik] l[i-berakhah]: korot hayyav, derakhav, nimmukav ve-sihotav, 1^st ed. (Warsaw: B. Liebeskind, 1937), 12 (third pagination): “My mother, of blessed memory, told me in my youth that during my upbringing they almost never consulted with doctors. If one of us fell ill, my father advised [my mother] to distribute a pood of bread to the poor, while he ascended to the attic and prayed, and the sickness departed” (par. 26; subsequently quoted in David Falk, Sefer ha-boteah ba-H[ashem] hesed yesovevennu [Jerusalem: n.p., 2010], 92, 250-251). In two other places, Poupko quotes his father as extolling the value of physical suffering in this world as a means of reaching the next world (ibid., 13 [third pagination; pars. 28-29]); see also ibid., 22 (first pagination). Moses M. Yoshor, Saint and Sage (Hafetz Hayim) (New York: Hafetz Hayim Yeshivah Society, 1937), 135, writes that the Hafets Hayyim refused to heed the advice of his physicians when he trekked approximately eighty kilometers from Radin (present-day Radun’, Belarus) to Vilna in early 1932, toward the end of his life, in order to attend a rabbinical conference.
[29] Several sources treat the Hafets Hayyim’s concern for others’ (particularly his students’) physical well-being: Moses M. Yoshor, He-hafets hayyim: hayyav u-po‘olo, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Netsah, 1959), 717; ibid., vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Netsah, 1961), 846-847, 918; and Aryeh Leib Poupko, Mikhtevei ha-rav hafets hayyim z[ekher] ts[addik] l[i-berakhah], ed. S. Artsi, 2 vols. (Bnei Brak: n.p., 1986), 2:107. In addition, in his magnum opus, Mishnah berurah, the Hafets Hayyim discusses situations in which a doctor’s opinion is accorded halakhic significance, e.g., in the determination of whether someone should fast on Yom Kippur (see his comments to Joseph Caro, Shulhan arukh, Orah hayyim 618).
[30] Strangely, I could not find mention of either Bruk or his son-in-law Mones Margolin in the essays about Vilna doctors by A.J. Goldschmidt and Zemach Shabad in Ephim H. Jeshurin (ed.), Vilne: a zamelbukh gevidmet der shtot vilne (New York: Wilner Branch 367, Workmen’s Circle, 1935), 377-437, 725-736.
[31] In his youth, while in yeshivah, the Hafets Hayyim suffered from a condition that interfered with his learning and was instructed by his doctors to take a break from his studies for a year, which he did (Poupko, Mikhtevei, 1^st ed., 5 [first pagination]). On his consultation with physicians to heal his son Abraham (1869–1891), see ibid., 39 (first pagination); to heal his first wife Frieda (née Epstein), see ibid., 91 (first pagination); and to heal himself, see ibid., 19 (third pagination; par. 46). In the latter connection, see also Yoshor, He-hafets hayyim, 1:66, 3:1058, as well as Dov Katz, Rabbi yisra’el me’ir ha-kohen[,] ba‘al “hafets hayyim”: toledotav, ishiyyuto ve-shittato (Tel Aviv: Avraham Zioni, 1961), 24, 97-98.

Interestingly, Yoshor, He-hafets hayyim, 1:35-36 n. 4, also reports the following ma‘aseh li-setor: Solomon ha-Kohen (1830–1905), a friend of the Hafets Hayyim who grew up in Vilna, became sick between the ages of 13 and 17, and so the doctors instructed him to take a break from learning. He apparently replied that it would be better for him to die from limmud torah than from bittul torah, continued his studies unabated, and was healed. When the Hafets Hayyim would tell this story, he would grow very emotional and repeat his friend’s words several times. Then again, see ibid., 1:343.

As regards Chaim Bruk, a number of sources mention visits by a physician brought in specially from Vilna to treat the Hafets Hayyim, but none of them names him, and it could very well be that different doctors were called upon on different occasions; for instance, we know from Yoshor, He-hafets hayyim, 3:1058, that the Hafets Hayyim would sometimes be treated by Dr. Zemach Shabad (1864–1935). See Poupko, Mikhtevei, 1^st ed., 19 (third pagination); Moses M. Yoshor, Dos lebn un shafen fun khofets khayim, 1^st ed., vol. 2 (New York: Moses M. Yoshor, 1937), 481; idem, Saint and Sage, 97; and idem, He-hafets hayyim, 2:614, 624.
[32] See Anon., “Saintly ‘Chofetz Chaim’ Dead; Spiritual Head of World Jewry a Legend in Lifetime; over 100,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (September 15, 1933); (with slight differences:) Anon., “Chofetz Chaim, 105, Is Dead in Poland,” The New York Times (September 16, 1933): 13; and Yoshor, Saint and Sage, 65.
[33] See Poupko, Mikhtevei, 1^st ed., 120 (third pagination; par. 34), 75-76 (fourth pagination; par. 4); Yoshor, Saint and Sage, 131, 175; idem, Dos lebn, 403, 525; and Dov Katz, Tenu‘at ha-musar: toledoteha[,] isheha ve-shittoteha, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Avraham Zioni, 1967), 88-89.

Given all of this, it is most surprising, in my opinion, to find the following recorded by the Hafets Hayyim’s son: “Once, when he took ill, he sought to walk to the grave of the ga’on Rabbi Elijah in Vilna and to ask him to arouse heavenly mercy on his behalf, in the merit” of the Haggahot ha-gera that he had printed on Torat kohanim, together with his explanations (vols. 1–2; Piotrków: Mordechai Zederbaum, 1911). See Poupko, Mikhtevei, 1^st ed., 43 (third pagination; par. 83).
[34] In fact, numerous sources testify to the Hafets Hayyim deviating at times from this policy. See Yoshor, Saint and Sage, 97, 108, 256; idem, Dos lebn, 363, 574, 610; Poupko, Mikhtevei, ed. S. Artsi, 2:100-101; and especially Anon., Sefer me’ir einei yisra’el, pt. 2, vol. 2 (Bnei Brak: Ma‘arekhet “Me’ir Einei Yisra’el,” 1999), ch. 28 (pp. 815-868), entitled “The Righteous Man Decrees – The Power of the Hafets Hayyim’s Blessings.” Indeed, even after he published a notice in the Vilna-based Dos vort newspaper in 1925 (not 1927, as some have claimed) requesting that people no longer come to him for blessings due to his weakened state, he would nevertheless warmly greet those who disregarded this plea and grant them their wish. For the text of the announcement, see Poupko, Mikhtevei, 1^st ed., 77 (second pagination; no. 32). See also Yoshor, Dos lebn, 464-465, and Katz, Rabbi, 107-108.
[35] See, e.g., the comments of Tosafot to bKiddushin 81a, s.v. ba‘alah ba-ir ein hosheshin lah mi-shum yihud; David Ibn Zimra, Sh[e’elot] u-t[eshuvot] ha-radbaz, vol. 3 (Warsaw: Mordechai Kalinberg; Josefov: Solomon Zetser, 1882), 18a-b (no. 919 [no. 481]); and Solomon Luria, Yam shel shelomoh mi-massekhet kiddushin (Szczecin: n.p., 1861), 44a (ch. 4, par. 22). This would seem to be the simple read of Moses Maimonides, Mishneh torah, Hilkhot issurei bi’ah 22:1, and of Joseph Caro, Shulhan arukh, Even ha-ezer 22:8, as well.
[36] Of course, the issue of the husbands’ proximity was not the only halakhically relevant factor in this case. For instance, the Hafets Hayyim’s standing in the Jewish world, his location in the apartment relative to where the women were, his elderliness, and the presence of the young Isabella could all have been brought to bear on the question of the permissibility of yihud in this situation. For a summary of some of the discussion, see Eliezer Judah Waldenberg, Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot tsits eli‘ezer, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1961), 183-190, 228-231 (no. 40, chs. 7-8, 22).
[37] See Rashi to bKiddushin 81a, s.v. ba‘alah ba-ir ein hosheshin lah mi-shum yihud. Several prominent aharonim (following the aforementioned comments of Tosafot ad loc.) interpreted Rashi’s words as prohibiting yihud even when a woman’s husband is in the area. Probably most famously, Rabbi Joel Sirkes (1561–1640) ruled in accordance with this stringent interpretation of Rashi in his Bayit hadash commentary on Jacob ben Asher, Arba‘ah turim, Even ha-ezer 22, s.v. ishah she-ba‘alah ba-ir. Interestingly, Waldenberg, by contrast, read Rashi in a lenient light (and cited others who did so as well); see Sefer she’elot u-teshuvot tsits eli‘ezer, 6:176-177 (no. 40, ch. 4).
[38] See Israel Meir ha-Kohen, Sefer nidhei yisra’el (Warsaw: Meir Jehiel Halter and Meir Eisenstadt, 1893), 62 (ch. 24, par. 6), quoting the Shulhan arukh essentially verbatim. I thank my friend, Jonathan Ziring, for this and a number of the above yihud-related references. If I have missed a relevant citation of the Hafets Hayyim’s own work, I would love to know about it; please message me about this or any other issue with this blogpost here.
[39] As a couple of friends rightly pointed out to me, what impelled the Hafets Hayyim to avoid joining the women in “the innermost rooms” of the apartment may not have been specific  halakhic considerations but rather a more general sense of propriety. The interpretation of his behavior as reflecting a reluctance to be “secluded” (aleyn in the original) with the women despite his advanced age relies on the perceptions of someone who was five years old at the time and who may not have appreciated the complexity of the Hafets Hayyim’s thought process.

One historical question raised by the letter for which I have not yet found a satisfying answer concerns the identity of the niece who lived next door to the Bruks and Margolins in Vilna and whom the Hafets Hayyim would regularly visit when he came to town. Some of the basic information on his family tree can be gleaned from Poupko, Mikhtevei, 1^st ed., 2-3 (first pagination), who informs us that the Hafets Hayyim had a number of half-siblings. See also Binyamin of Petah Tikva, “He-hafets hayyim u-mishpahto,” Toladot ve-shorashim – atsei mishpahah (January 14, 2011) (accessed August 19, 2019) for a more extensive discussion of the Hafets Hayyim’s relations. More research into the various branches of his family is required.

Wrestling with the Ketsot –

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

By Moshe Shochat

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

— Ben-Zion Dinur (1884-1973)

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

– Meir Shely (1893-1983)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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