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The Vilna Gaon, Part 1: How Modern Was He?

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The Vilna Gaon, Part 1 How Modern Was He?
by Marc B. Shapiro
Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, 2013)
Eliyahu Stern has set for himself a daunting task and argues his case with conviction. He intends to correct a widespread assumption shared not only by the general public, but by the scholarly community as well. According to this narrative, the Vilna Gaon (hereafter the Gaon) should not be seen as a traditionalist defender of the past, but actually a modern Jew and one who helped usher in the modern era in Jewish history. In Stern’s words, “I [have] come to believe that [Jacob] Katz’s and [Michael K.] Silber’s notion of tradition and traditionalism fails to explain the experience of the overwhelming majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eastern European Jews who did not spend their days either combating the Western European secular pursuit of science, philosophy and mathematics or holding onto the same political and social structures of their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ancestors. Katz and Silber might have been right about [R. Moses] Sofer. . . . But figures such as the Gaon of Vilna or Hayyim of Volozhin (the Gaon’s student and Sofer’s contemporary), who did not express hostility toward modernity, elude their grasp” (p. 7).
This is quite a claim, and it would be a major revision of the historical picture if Stern could prove the point. Stern also argues that the Gaon’s notes to the sixteenth-century legal code Shulhan Arukh were influential in Jews moving away from a “code-based learning culture supported by the kehilah” (p. 11).[1]

By focusing on Talmud study for its own sake rather than for the sake of determining the halakhah, a paradigm shift occurred in which commentary replaced code. This occurred at the very time that the yeshiva took the place of the kehilah, as seen in the establishment of the Volozhin yeshiva by the Gaon’s disciple, R. Hayyim. Thus, the hierarchy of religious authority was restructured, which leads to what Stern refers to as “religious privatization” (p. 11). As he sees it, “The Volozhin yeshiva was founded not in opposition to the cultural and intellectual upheavals of the nineteenth century. It was itself built on the most modern of assumptions, the separation of public and private spheres” (p. 141). Stern even makes the bold claim that in certain respects the Gaon was more modern than Mendelssohn, arguing that “it was the Gaon’s hermeneutic idealism that called into question the canons of rabbinic authority, while Mendelssohn tirelessly defended the historical legitimacy of the rabbinic tradition to German-speaking audiences” (p. 64). In seeking to turn the Gaon into a more modern Jew, one who is not, as standard scholarship assumes, an opponent of philosophy, Stern even argues that the Gaon did not believe in “demons, magic, [and] charms” (p. 129).[2]
After mentioning that the Gaon is embodied in the Jewish residents of Tel Aviv and New York, who live as though they are majorities, Stern concludes his book with this striking assertion: “From the birth of the State of Israel, to the Jews’ involvement in radical anti-statist modern political movements, to the creation of a robust vibrant Jewish life in the United States, Jewish modernity derives much of its intellectual dynamism, social confidence, and political assertiveness from an astonishing source: the brilliant writings and untamed personality of Elijah ben Solomon” (p. 171).
As with all revisionist theses there is bound to be reluctance to accept a new paradigm. The successful revisionist thesis is the one able to withstand the initial skepticism. Does Stern’s thesis fall into this category? Despite his enthusiastic and tempting arguments, I am not convinced. Reading the book, I could not help wonder if, for example, drawing contrasts with the thought of Leibniz offers any real insight into the thought of the Gaon. We know that the Gaon was fearless in emending rabbinic texts, but for Stern, “Elijah’s emendation project addresses the charge that Leibnizian idealism leaves no room for the possibility of progress, redemption, and critique. . . .  Elijah embroidered the theological concept of evil around the idea of textual error” (p. 61). Isn’t this reading too much into what the Gaon had in mind? Why does the approach of the Gaon have to be given such theological weight that Stern can conclude that “emendation is the path toward redemption and a restored original harmony” (p. 62)?[3]

In another example of his revisionist approach, Stern argues that the Gaon did not oppose philosophy. Rather, “Elijah’s problem with Maimonides revolves around issues of linguistics, interpretation, and hermeneutics and not whether it is permissible to read secular philosophy” (p. 130). As noted already, Stern also assumes that the Gaon did not really believe in “demons, magic, charms and other irrational objects” (p. 129). There is no question in my mind that Stern is in error here. Because the Gaon was a traditional Jew, whose approach to the classical rabbinic texts was not influenced by rationalist philosophy, this is precisely why he believed in demons, magic, and charms. The only reason to reject these things, as did Maimonides, is because one is influenced by rationalist thought.
I see no evidence that the Gaon was influenced in any substantial way by such knowledge, and his occasional use of Aristotelian terminology does not by itself indicate real influence. Furthermore, everything in his writings leads one to believe that when it came to the occult his mental universe was no different than the great rabbis of his time and subsequent to him, for whom demons did indeed exist. In his famous attack on Maimonides, found in his comment to Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 179:13, he specifically mentioned the efficacy of magic, and contrary to Stern this is to be taken literally.[4]

In fact, a few notes later, 179:26-28, which are not mentioned by Stern, the Gaon again wrote about demons, mentioned that one is permitted to consult with them if it is not the Sabbath, and cited talmudic and midrashic texts that show humans interacting with demons.[5] The Gaon’s position in this matter does not need to be explained. Pretty much every traditional Jew in his day believed in demons, and he did as well. It is Maimonides’ opinion that is not traditional.
Stern leaves it as an open question whether the Vilna Gaon called philosophy “accursed” (p. 245). This is obviously an important issue, since if Stern is correct that the Gaon was not really opposed to philosophy, one would not expect him to use the word “accursed.” Yet there is no doubt that the Gaon did indeed use this word. It appears in the first printing of the Gaon’s commentary to the Shulhan Arukh, and its authenticity was attested to by R. Samuel Luria who examined that actual manuscript. Only later was the word removed by the publisher. Contrary to what Stern states, Samuel Joseph Fuenn, Matisyahu Strashun, and Hillel-Noah Maggid Steinschneider do not claim that later editors put in this phrase. The one to make this assertion was R. Zvi Hirsch Katzenellenbogen, and he was hardly a neutral observer.[6]

Several other issues emerge in the book. Stern quotes Aliyot Eliyahu as stating that before the age of thirteen the Gaon was “studying books on engineering for half an hour a day” (p. 38). I am not sure why Stern mentions anything about “thirteen,” as the text is explicit that he was around eight years old. Furthermore, the text says nothing about “engineering.” Rather, it states that the Gaon studied astronomy (tekhunah).

Stern writes that the Gaon “rejected outright” the Shulhan Arukh (p. 60). This is a strange statement being that the Gaon wrote a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh. Furthermore, this commentary was designed to show the earlier rabbinic sources upon which the Shulhan Arukh‘s laws were based. It is true that there are many times when the Gaon disagreed with the Shulhan Arukh. However, what is significant with the Gaon is precisely that he accepted the Shulhan Arukh. He had the stature to reject it had he chosen, and to write his own code, yet he did the exact opposite. By attaching his notes to the Shulhan Arukh he was affirming the work. He personally did not need the Shulhan Arukh and would decide halakhah from the Talmud and rishonim. But when the Shulhan Arukh decided the halakhah correctly, he was content to show the sources for the law, meaning that the work had value and that is why he affirmed it.[7]

Contrary to Stern (pp. 77-78), there is no evidence that the Gaon was influenced by Elijah Levita and the Gaon never mentioned him. When the Gaon wrote that the Masorah disagreed with the Talmud, he was referring to how to spell certain words, and this formulation comes from the Tosafists. He was not in any way identifying with Levita’s notion that the Hebrew vowels originated in post-talmudic times, and was certainly not addressing “the veracity of the cantillations of the Bible” (p. 78). When the Gaon’s son cited Levita, he was also not referring to his view of the vowels, only of the spelling of words.
I do not know what Stern means by “following Nachmanides, the Gaon argues that the book of Deuteronomy was written later than the other four books of the Bible” (p. 80). Quite apart from Nahmanides, this position is found in Gittin 60a, where one view is that the Torah was given “scroll by scroll.” Also on p. 80, Stern states that “the Gaon, in contrast, builds on the historical position laid down by Ibn Ezra that the last verses, though inspired by Moses, were actually ‘arranged’ by Joshua.” This has nothing to do with Ibn Ezra as the Talmud already contains the view that the last verses were written by Joshua (saying nothing about being “inspired” by Moses. [Ibn Ezra also says nothing about the last verses being “inspired” by Moses])
On page 133, Stern quotes a passage from the introduction to R. Judah Epstein’s Minhat Yehudah (Warsaw, 1877) where he writes of “thousands who came to study and the miracle it would take for one to emerge with any teaching ability.” In the Hebrew the final words are “yatza le-hora’ah.” This has nothing to do with teaching but refers to the ability to decide halakhic questions. The expression originates in Kohelet Rabbah 7:49.
Finally, he writes that “when the Volozhin yeshiva opened its doors in 1802, it was the first time that young men from all economic and social backgrounds were afforded the opportunity to study” (p. 150, see also p. 162). I know of no evidence to support this assertion. Both before the Volozhin yeshiva’s opening and after, opportunities for study were limited to those who could afford to support a child away from home, and give up the income he would bring in for the family.
Even though I am not convinced by Stern’s thesis, there is no doubt that this book is filled with learning and insight and has understandably created a good deal of excitement. To appreciate Stern’s efforts and ingenuity, one must read very carefully, and this reading will be rewarded in many ways.
******
The review you have just read (with the exception of notes 1-5, 7, and one sentence in brackets) appeared on the H-Judaic listserv on July 19, 2013. In the review I was limited in terms of space and I also could not use Hebrew. So let me now add some additional points and corrections that could not be included in the original. Before doing so I want to stress that I enjoyed Stern’s book a great deal, and I also learnt much from it. The Gaon’s scholarship is so wide-ranging that anyone who attempts such a daunting task as to write on him must be commended.[8]

Stern should also feel gratified that so many people have chosen to use their precious time to write about his book, even if they disagree with him.
Stern’s first chapter, which puts the Gaon and Vilna in historical perspective, was particularly interesting to me. How many people, for instance, are aware of the following (p. 70): “The roughly 5,500 Jews in and around Vilna (Wojewoda) made up nearly 30 percent of the population, and the 3,500 to 4,000 Jews living within Vilna proper formed an overwhelming majority of the local population.”
I strongly recommend that people read the book, if only to see how the talented author attempts to create a completely new perspective on the Gaon. Almost every page of Stern’s book raises issues that I can comment on, and I could easily have written a hundred page post. I agree with much in the book, and can cite sources in support of a number of points Stern makes. Yet this does not change the fact that I was not convinced by his major arguments. Rather than cite all the things I agree with, let me offer some more comments correcting errors, or offering different interpretations, as well as some tangential observations.
P. 14. Stern tells us that the Gaon’s mother was from Slutzk, and on p. 181 he cites a source that supposedly claims that the Gaon was also born in Slutzk. Yet this is incorrect. The town referred to is not Slutzk but סעלץ. This is the shtetl Selets (or Selcz) around 150 kilometers south-east of Brisk.[9]

This information is also found in the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on the Gaon. There is another Selets in Belorussia, some eight hundred kilometers away,[10] but this is not the town associated with the Gaon. There is no actual proof that the Gaon was born in Selets, but that was the tradition of the town.[11]
P. 15. Stern records how the Gaon wanted to study medicine but was discouraged by his father who wanted his son to devote himself to Torah study. I don’t know if this has any relationship to the Gaon’s unusual (but not unique) view in opposition to using doctors as opposed to turning to God. According to one report, the Gaon only had this view when it came to internal medical problems, but not external ones (e.g., a burn).[12]
P. 17. Stern mentions the report by R. Samuel Luria that the Gaon travelled throughout Europe to find rabbinic manuscripts. Among the legends of these travels is one recorded in the name of R. Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld, quoting R. Joshua Leib Diskin, that when the Gaon visited the Munich library and saw the famous manuscript of the Talmud, he said that he would give all the money in the world in order to put it in genizah, because this Talmud was only R. Ashi’s first version (and thus of no authority). This story appears in Menahem Mendel Gerlitz’s Mara de-Ar’a Yisrael (Jerusalem, 1969), vol. 1, p. 57 n. 49. I can’t say whether or not R. Sonnenfeld ever made this comment (and Gerlitz’s book in general is quite unreliable). What I can say is that the story never happened as described for the simple reason that the manuscript only arrived in Munich in 1806, as noted by R. Raphael Rabbinovicz in the introduction to Dikdukei Soferim, vol. 1, p. 35.[13]
P. 44. “He [the Gaon] and his students reinterpreted a strand of kabbalah developed by Abraham Abulafia. . . . Elijah’s circle borrowed heavily from his ideas regarding the mathematical underpinnings of the world.” Unfortunately, this influence is never sufficiently explained and there is confusion about an important text. Thus, Stern writes:
As Menachem Mendel of Shklov wrote, “The word cheshbon [calculus] comes from the word machshava [thought] and this [calculus] is the first form that emerges from the essence of thought.”[14]
To begin with, I don’t know why cheshbon should be translated as “calculus.” I assume it means mathematics.[15]  But that is a minor point, as the general meaning of the passage is clear and R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov tells us that this approach was shared by the Gaon. The more important point, however, is that the sentence quoted as having been stated by R. Menahem Mendel was not stated by him at all. R. Menahem Mendel tells us explicitly that the sentence comes from an early book, one that predates R. Isaac Luria. What we learn from Moshe Idel is that this is actually a quotation from Abulafia.[16] Yet this information does not appear in Stern’s book, even though it would have strengthened his case.
Stern also states: “Elijah’s son Avraham approvingly cites the much-maligned Abulafia, and bestows the honorific “z”l” (the Hebrew acronym for “may his memory be blessed”) on the controversial medieval thinker.”
Here is the page in R. Avraham’s Rav Pealim.

Unfortunately, Stern must have read too quickly and instead of וז”ל [= וזה לשונו] he read the abbreviation as ז”ל, or perhaps he mistakenly connected the ז”ל on the previous line to ר’ אברהם הרואה
Pp. 44ff. Stern argues that according to the Gaon, matter existed eternally and the world was created from this eternal matter. If this was the case, it would be quite significant. Yet I believe that Stern misunderstands what the Gaon is saying. Stern himself quotes the Gaon as explaining that creation means “created from that which exists above.” As I see it, what this means is that matter “found” in the Divine was brought into the world, e.g., through emanation. But this is not the same as speaking of eternal matter, even eternal matter that is lacking form, as these exist apart from God.
With regard to the Gaon and creation, see also R. David Luria’s commentary to Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 51 n. 17, where he cites a manuscript comment of the Gaon that the world is eternally created. This same viewpoint is shared by R. Hayyim of Volozhin, Nefesh ha-Hayyim ch. 13. I don’t see how this can be reconciled with the Gaon’s comment at the beginning of Aderet Eliyahu that time itself is a creation, and he further speaks of an actual moment of the world’s creation:
בראשית: ב’ הוא ב’ הזמניי. כמו ביום. מפני שהזמן עצמו נברא והב’ מורה על עת הבריאה שהיה בחלק הראשון מהזמן הנברא
If matter is eternal, as Stern claims, or even eternally created, then time is also eternal. But this is clearly not what the Gaon says in the text just quoted.
P. 80. Stern notes that the Gaon’s interpretation of the Mishnah was not bound to how the Talmud explained matters. This is correct, and many people have written on the matter. I mention this only to call attention to the comments of the great genius, R. Meshulam Roth, in his Kol Mevasser, vol. 2, pp. 120-121, 128-129, who felt constrained to argue against this notion. I think it will be obvious to readers that R. Roth’s interpretations of the Gaon are based on his own dogmatic assumption, which he states explicitly, that it is unacceptable to interpret the Mishnah in a way that diverges from the talmudic interpretation.

P. 97. Stern writes:

Contrast Elijah’s vision with the picture of intimacy expressed by Rabbi Pinchas of Korzec (1726-1791): “Prayer is like intercourse with the Divine Presence. At the beginning of intercourse there are motions. Similarly, there is a need for motion in prayer. One should move when beginning to pray. Later on, one can stand without moving, attached to the Divine Presence with a powerful bond. As a result of the motions alone one can attain dvekut.”
In the note the source for this quotation is given as Likutim Yekarim, 18, and the bibliography tells us that the edition used is Lemberg, 1792 (the first edition). Yet there is some confusion here. R. Pinchas of Koretz indeed wrote a book entitled Likutim Yekarim, but the book where the passage cited comes from is another Likutim Yekarim, one that records the teachings of other early Hasidic teachers. Here is the title page.

Furthermore, the reader looking at page 18 in the first edition of (the correct) Likutim Yekarim will not find anything, as the text is on page 1a. In the 1974 edition the text is found in section 18, but as far as I can tell, these sections were only added in this edition.[17]
Here is the relevant page from the first edition, and the comment referred to is in the last paragraph. The last sentence of the translation quoted above (“As a result . . .”) is not an accurate rendering of the Hebrew sentence that begins מכח מה שמנענע

P. 102: “While it is doubtful that Elijah endorsed or defended Eibeschuetz’s or Luzzatto’s Sabbatian tendencies, he never publicly condemned their works.” Instead of the word “doubtful,” which leaves some room for question, the sentence should say that “it is certain that Elijah never endorsed or defended . . .” I leave aside for now the question of why Stern is so certain that Luzzatto had Sabbatian tendencies, and simply note that the Gaon would have rejected such an assumption in the strongest terms. The Eibeschuetz case is more complicated,[18] but I don’t understand how “Eibeschuetz’s Sabbatian proclivities were revealed when his son Wolff was unmasked as a closet Sabbatian” (p. 99). Since when do the actions of a son determine the stance of a father?
Let us now return to the issue of the Gaon’s view of philosophy, which was mentioned earlier in this post, and when I refer to philosophy I have in mind rationalism. Stern, p. 129, argues that the Gaon was not opposed to philosophy and as evidence for this proposition notes that the Gaon uses Aristotelian terms, cites the Guide once in his Aderet Eliyahu, and procured a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics. He then writes, “This evidence has led some to suggest that Elijah objected to a materialistic or epicurean lifestyle often associated with philosophy, but not to philosophy’s heuristic value.”
While I think that Stern is indeed correct that the Gaon saw heuristic value in philosophy, I was still quite surprised when I read this sentence, since I had never heard of anyone who argued that the Gaon’s only concern with philosophy was the materialistic lifestyle associated with it. When I looked in Stern’s note (p. 246 n. 55) it didn’t help. This is what appears in the note:
See Moshe Philip, ed., Sefer Mishlei im Biur ha-Gra (Petach Tikvah: 2001), 441 and Eliyahu Stern, “Philosophy and Dissimulation in Elijah of Vilna’s Writings and Legacy,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie (forthcoming). On Elijah reading Aristotle, see his letter to Rabbi Shaul of Amsterdam recorded in Tzvi ha-Levi Horowitz, Kitvei ha-Geonim (Warsaw: 1938 [should be 1928]), 3-10.
I don’t know what is intended by the first reference, as there is a typo since the volume does not contain 441 pages. Stern’s forthcoming article can only be discussed when it appears in print, but the book under review does not give any reference to others who argued that the Gaon had no substantive opposition to philosophy. Also, contrary to what Stern states here, the Gaon did not write to R. Saul of Amsterdam asking him to send him the Ethics. The letter Stern refers to was actually written by the Gaon’s brother, R. Yissakhar Ber.[19]

See Kitvei ha-Geonim, p. 4a. On p. 44, Stern states that the letter was written by both the Gaon and his brother. This, I think, is closer to the truth. I say this because the Gaon’s brother requested לקנות בשבילנו ולשלוח לנו, although this could also just be the writing style he used. However, there are lots of reasons why people read books, and this alone does not mean that one is positively inclined to a subject. The greatest of all Jewish philosophers, Maimonides, tells us that he read all the works of Sabian idolatry that he could get his hands on (Guide 3:29). It would also be more significant if instead of the Ethics, the book requested of R. Saul of Amsterdam was Aristotle’s Metaphysics. But I don’t want to make too much of this, since I am convinced by Stern that the Gaon saw some value with philosophy. But contrary to Stern, I would add that the Gaon also saw great dangers in philosophy.
In the note directly following the one just referred to, Stern concludes based upon the introduction of R. Menahem Mendel of Shklov to the Gaon’s commentary to Avot and R. Israel of Shklov’s introduction to his Peat ha-Shulhan that “Elijah was secretly positively inclined to the study of philosophy.” He again refers to his forthcoming article where he develops this point. As mentioned already, discussion of this article must wait until it appears in print. In the meantime, however, it is difficult to accept this point without a clear articulation of what exactly Stern means by “study of philosophy”, since in R. Israel of Shklov’s introduction to Peat ha-Shulhan he writes as follows:
ועל חכמת הפילוסופי’ אמר [הגר”א] שלמד אותה לתכליתה ולא הוציא ממנה רק ב’ דברים טובים . . . והשאר צריך להשליכה החוצה.
R. Israel of Shklov also notes that the Gaon knew חכמת הכישוף which contradicts Stern’s statement that according to the Gaon “references to demons, magic, charms, and other irrational objects and ideas cannot be ignored—though not per se because he thinks they actually exist.” (p. 129).
See also Ma’aseh Rav (Jerusalem, 1906), Siah Eliyahu, p. 21b (no. 61(, which states that the Gaon would not study R. Bahya Ibn Paquda’s philosophically based Sha’ar ha-Yihud (in the Hovot ha-Levavot):
והי’ מחבב הגר”א ז”ל ס’ מנורת המאור וס’ חובת הלבבות זולת שער היחוד ובמקום שער היחוד הי’ אומר שילמדו בס’ הכוזרי הראשון שהוא קדוש וטהור ועיקרי אמונת ישראל ותורה תלוין בו.
There is another passage that is relevant, but as far as I know has not been cited in any of the scholarly discussions about the Gaon and philosophy. R. Hillel Rivlin, Kol ha-Tor (Bnei Brak, 1969), ch. 5:2, quotes the Gaon as saying the following about philosophy, and you can’t get any clearer than this:
את חכמת הפילוסיפיה למדה לתכליתה ולא מצא בה כי אם דברים אחדים שמקורם לוקח מחז”ל ועל השאר אמר, שאין בה לא הגיון ולא צדק ומיוסדת על אפיקורסות אווילית.

As mentioned, you can’t get any clearer than this, but I realize that this is not the Gaon speaking but rather a student, so it is possible to argue that he, and also R. Israel of Shklov, didn’t properly portray their teacher.
The passage that creates so many problems for Stern’s thesis is found in the Gaon’s commentary to Yoreh Deah 179:13. In this text, the Gaon famously attacks Maimonides for being led astray by “accursed philosophy.”

Stern argues that the Gaon does not oppose the study of (even rationalist) philosophy per se. Rather, his opposition is directed at how “a philosophical approach may ignore linguistic nuance” (p. 129). I think this is very unlikely, and it appears to me that Stern is trying to force his interpretation into the words of the Gaon when the more likely, and natural, interpretation is that the Gaon indeed opposes the study of (rationalist) philosophy.[20] (On p. 130 Stern claims that the Gaon was not opposed to the study of “secular philosophy” which is an even more far-reaching claim.) Beyond what the Gaon writes in his comment on the Shulhan Arukh, there is the way he writes it, which unfortunately is not reflected in Stern’s translation. Here is how Stern renders the first part of the text:

All those who came after Maimonides differed [because they did not use his rational allegorical interpretive technique]. For many times we find magical incantations mentioned in the Talmud. Maimonides and philosophers claimed that such magical writings and incantations, and devils, are all false. However, he [Maimonides] was already reprimanded for such an interpretation. For we have found many accounts in the Talmud about magical incantations and writings. . . . Philosophy is mistaken in a majority of cases when it interprets the Talmud in a superficial manner and destroys the sensus literalis of the text. But one should not think that I in any way, Heaven forbid, actually believe in them or in what they stand for.
In this comment the Gaon writes:

והוא נמשך אחר הפלוסופיא הארורה         .
This means that Maimonides “followed after the accursed philosophy.” However, Stern mistakenly translates these words: “Maimonides and philosophers claimed.”
Later in his comment the Gaon writes:

והפלסופיא הטתו ברוב לקחה לפרש הגמרא הכל בדרך הלציי
Stern translates this as “Philosophy is mistaken in a majority of cases when it interprets the Talmud in a superficial manner.” This too is a incorrect translation. What the Gaon is saying is that philosophy misled Maimonides to falsely explain the Talmud. So again, we see the great dangers of philosophy, and how it was able to lead astray even Maimonides. (There is nothing in the Gaon’s comment about “a majority of cases”). The final words quoted from the Gaon, בדרך הלציי, do not mean “superficial manner.” They mean “in a figurative sense.”
What can we say about the Gaon and Maimonides’ Guide? Although I hadn’t investigated the matter properly, for awhile I thought that the Gaon didn’t study the Guide in a serious manner. Anyone who reads Stern will see that this is incorrect. In fact, the Guide was even studied in Vilna during the Gaon’s time. The following passage from Aliyot Eliyahu (Vilna, 1892), p. 13a, should have been cited in the text by Stern as exhibit no. 1, as it is a strong piece of evidence in support of his position. For some reason, it is only summarized in a note (p. 246 n. 58):
וסיפר לי הרב כו’ הישיש מ’ ישראל גארדאן רב בווילנא (אשר היה מכיר היטב את הגאון נ”ע ודירתו היה בחומת אביו וקודם פטירתו היה דר הגאון בחצר בהכנ”ס) אשר היה נכנס ויוצא כפעם בפעם בבית הגאון נ”ע ושמע פ”א אשר בא הרב ר’ טרייטיל ז”ל לפני הגאון והרעיש על אשר ראו עיניו שאנשים קבעו למודם בבהמ”ד בספר מורה נבוכים וביקש שהגאון ימחה בידם והגאון השיבו בחרי אף ואמר ומי יעיז לדבר נגד כבוד הרמב”ם וספרו אשר מי יתנני ואהיה עמו במחיצתו בגן עדן.
There is no question that this report complicates the picture and shows that the Gaon’s view of the Guide was more complex than often portrayed. We see from it that unlike others, the Gaon, despite his strong criticism of Maimonides and general opposition to rationalist philosophy, nevertheless believed that the Guide had value and qualified scholars should not be prevented from studying it. 
After quoting this passage in Aliyot Eliyahu, R. Shlomo Korah adds, “There is a story about someone who asked his rebbe if it is permitted to study the Guide. He replied, ‘The Rambam permits it —הרמב”ם מתיר ”.[21]
Alan Brill has also made the case that the Gaon saw value in philosophy and calls attention to the fact that in a text attributed to the Gaon, there is a summary of a section of the Guide. See his “Auxiliary to Hokhmah: The Writings of the Vilna Gaon and Philosophical Terminology, in Moshe Hallamish, et al., eds., Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho (Ramat Gan, 2003), p. 10. This shows that philosophy has value, as I too acknowledge, but this has nothing to do with rationalism, which the Gaon strongly opposed.

It is also worth noting that R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady, in responding to the reported theological objections that the Gaon expressed about early hasidut, wrote as follows[22]:

ומי יתן ידעתיו ואנחהו ואערכה לפניו משפטינו להסיר מעלינו כל תלונותיו וטענותיו הפילוסיפיות אשר הלך בעקבותיהם, לפי דברי תלמידיו הנ”ל, לחקור אלקות בשכל אנושי
In other words, and this is really ironic, R. Shneur Zalman assumes that Gaon was led astray by philosophy and that explains his objections![23]

The reason I had my mistaken assumption that the Gaon didn’t study the Guide in any significant way was because the Gaon didn’t refer to it in his commentary to the Shulhan Arukh, even when he had the opportunity, such as in his note to Yoreh Deah 179:13. Another place where he could have referred to the Guide is in the very first halakhah in Orah Hayyim. R. Moses Isserles is quoting from Maimonides’ Guide, and rather than refer the reader to this, the Gaon offers sources for the Rama’s formulation from rabbinic literature. Yet even before reading Stern’s book I should have seen that the Rama in Darkhei Moshe tells us that he is quoting the Guide, and one should assume that the Gaon saw this text.
This is how R. Isserles begins the Darkhei Moshe (and he begins the Shulhan Arukh similarly):
כתב הרמב”ם בספר מורה הנבוכים חלק ג’ פרק נב שמיד שאדם ניעור משנתו בבוקר מיד יחשוב בלבו לפני מי הוא שוכב וידע שהמלך מלכי המלכים הקב”ה יתעלה חופף עליו שנאמר (ישעיה ו, ג) ) מלא כל הארץ כבודו.
R. Isserles quotes Maimonides as saying that as soon as you wake up in the morning you should think about God. Yet if you look at Guide 3:52 that he is quoting you find something interesting. Here is the passage in Ibn Tibbon’s translation (which is what the Rama used).
מי שיבחר בשלמות האנושי ושיהיה איש הא-להים באמת יעור משינתו וידע שהמלך הגדול המחופף עליו והדבק עמו תמיד הוא גדול מכל מלך בשר ודם ואילו היה דוד ושלמה, והמלך ההוא הדבק המחופף הוא השכל השופע עלינו שהוא הדבוק אשר בינינו ובין הש”י . . . וכבר ידעת הזהירם מלכת בקומה זקופה, משום מלא כל הארץ כבודו.
Where does the Rama get his formulation that as soon as one awakes – מיד שאדם ניעור משנתו – he should think of God? It comes from Maimonides’ words we just read: יעור משינתו. As pointed out by Raphael Speyer,[24] it seems that the Rama simply misunderstood what Maimonides (in Ibn Tibbon’s translation) was saying. The words יעיר משינתו have nothing to do with awakening from sleep in any literal sense. Rather, the expression simply refers to people who are figuratively awakening from their slumber and can now recognize God’s presence. Therefore, there was no need for the Rama in seeking to make his point to include anything about getting up in the morning.
In the Datche’s editor’s response to Speyer, he pointed out another problem with the Rama’s formulation. While the Rama writes of  מלך מלכי המלכים הקב”ה יתעלה חופף עליו, this is not what Maimonides says. According to Maimonides, “this king who cleaves to him and accompanies him is the intellect that overflows toward us and is the bond between us and Him, may He be exalted.” In other words, Maimonides is speaking about the Active Intellect yet the Rama turns this into God Himself. It is because of things like this that Yeshayahu Leibowitz was led to declare that the Rama “didn’t understand philosophy and didn’t understand the Guide of the Perplexed.” He also referred to the Rama’s Torat ha-Olah as a work of “pseudo-philosophy.”[25]

This might seem like an unfair statement, and I am sure that Yonah Ben Sasson would reject it,[26] but consider the following. No one could be regarded as a rabbinic scholar if all he studied was the Mishneh Torah, without examining the talmudic passages upon which the Mishneh Torah is based. In fact, I think all would agree that one can’t really understand the Mishneh Torah without knowing the talmudic sources. By the same token, one can’t really understand the Guide without knowing the Aristotelian sources upon which so much of Maimonides’ words are based. Yet the Rama tells us, in his famous letter to R. Solomon Luria,[27] that he never actually studied Aristotle and his only knowledge of him comes from Maimonides’ Guide and other Jewish sources.
כי אף שהבאתי מקצת דברי אריסטו מעידני עלי שמים וארץ שכל ימי לא עסקתי בשום ספר מספריו רק מה שעסקתי בספר המורה שיגעתי בו ומצאתי ת”ל [תהלה לא-ל] ושאר ספרי הטבע כשער השמים וכדומיהין, שחברו חז”ל ומהם כתבתי מה שכתבתי מדברי אריסטו.
Interestingly, I found one place, Torat ha-Olah 3:47, where the Rama speaks very disrespectfully of Maimonides’ philosophical knowledge, referring to it as foolishness.

ואין לך סכלות חכמתו גדולה מזה
Nevertheless, the Gaon placed the Rama together with Maimonides in his other sharp criticism of the latter[28]:

אבל לא ראו את הפרדס, לא הוא [הרמ”א] ולא הרמב”ם


To be continued
* * * *

Information about my summer trips to Spain, Central Europe, and Italy will be available soon. Anyone interested should check out the Torah in Motion website. Marc Glickman, one of the participants on last year’s tour to Central Europe, described it as follows: “It was great to meet Marc and he was a fantastic guide. The trip was like a living Seforim Blog post (I follow his posts religiously).” Thank you Marc!

Also for those interested, I will be speaking on R. Ovadiah Yosef at Ohab Zedek in NYC on December 17 at 8:15pm. 

[1] Regarding how influential the Gaon was on Lithuanian rabbinic scholarship, see Gil Perl, The Pillar of Volozhin: Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin and the World of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Torah Scholarship (Boston, 2012), pp. 127ff. Perl disputes with Immanuel Etkes and Shaul Stampfer who have argued that the Gaon’s influence has been exaggerated. In terms of the Gaon’s influence on Jewish practice, R. Yaakov Kamenetsky claimed that there were only two places in Lithuania that followed the Gaon’s minhagim, and one of these places was the Gaon’s beit midrash/synagogue (kloiz) in Vilna. See R. Yehoshua Geldzahler, Kodshei Yehoshua (Jerusalem, 1999), vol. 5, p. 1758 (Geldzahler forgot the second place mentioned by R. Kamenetsky.) See also Nathan Kamenetsky, Making of a Godol (Jerusalem, 2002), vol. 1, p. 655.
[2] “In Elijah’s view, references to demons, magic, charms, and other irrational objects and ideas cannot be ignored—though not per se because he thinks they actually exist. (Elijah’s admirer Menashe Illya [1767-1831] recalled ‘that according to his memory,’ Elijah actually ‘criticized those who interpreted Midrash according its [!] literal sense when the Midrash went against reason.’) Elijah’s criticism against Maimonides was based on the belief that one cannot simply deny or gloss over the anti-rational elements that consistently appear in rabbinic literature. Either they belong in the text or they do not; if they do belong, they must be explained. By not including or explaining them, Elijah contends, Maimonides and ‘philosophers’ fail to take seriously the very words and signs that make up the rabbinic tradition.”
[3] In R. Isaac Herzog’s letter about the authority of the Zohar, published by me in Milin Havivin 5 (2010-2011), he quotes R. Abba Werner as saying the following about the Gaon (p. 16):
שהגר”א בבאורו על הזוהר הוא המבקר היותר קשה על הטקסט של הזוהר
R. Mordechai Friedman called my attention to R. Hanokh Ehrentreu, Iyunim be-Divrei Hazal u-ve-Leshonam (Jerusalem, 1978), pp. 184ff., where Ehrentreu prefers a textual emendation of R. Wolf Heidenheim over the emendation suggested by the Gaon. Since I will be dealing with R. Chaim Kanievsky in the next installment, let me mention that he has a tradition that R. Hayyim of Volozhin stated that one of the Gaon’s emendations was mistaken: הגר”א טעה. See R. Hayyim Shalom Segal, Berurei Hayyim (Bnei Brak, 2004), vol. 3, p. 924.
[4] In Aderet Eliyahu to Nahum 3:4, the Gaon writes:
בשלשה דברים ישחית איש את רעהו  . . .  בכשפים: במיני קטורת ממשיכים כחות העליונות אשר מקושרים בלבות בני אדם
[5] See also Aderet Eliyahu to Numbers 23:22 and Hosea 2:20 for other discussions of demons. In Yahel Or (Vilna, 1882), p. 38b (second numbering), the Gaon writes:
 ואמרו כי אמן של שדים נעמי [צ”ל נעמה] הולידה אותן מהנפילים לכן חציין מצד אביהן דומה למלה”ש ומצד אמן לב”א

[6] See Samuel Joseph Fuenn, Kiryah Ne’emanah  (Vilna, 1860), p. 160. In Stern’s book the page number is mistakenly given as p. 169.
[7] Regarding the Gaon and the Shulhan Arukh, see R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer, Menuhat Shalom (Jerusalem, 2003), vol. 11, pp. 51-52, who shows that because the Gaon did not have access to the early editions of the work, he mistakenly assumed that a word stated by R. Joseph Karo really belonged to R. Moses Isserles. Although there is no question that Sofer is correct, since we are dealing with the Gaon, here is how Sofer prefaces his correction (which also includes the claim that a reference offered by the Gaon is incorrect).
אמנם עם שאיני כדאי כלל וכלל, עפר יעקב, אומר אני אחר נטילת הרשות, שדברי קדשו של רבינו הגדול הגר”א ז”ל, שגבו ממני, ובאפיסותי לא זכיתי להבין דברות קדשו של הגר”א ז”ל.

[8] Regarding the Gaon, many interesting articles appear in Yeshurun 5 (1999) and 6 (1999). R. Dovid Yitzchaki’s contribution, “Havanat Divrei ha-Gra al Da’at Omram,” Yeshurun 5, pp. 502-537, is of particular value. Jacob Israel Dienstag’s bibliography of writings by and about the Gaon is still worth consulting. See Talpiot 4 (1949), pp. 269-356.
[9] See here.
[10] See here.
[11] See Ha-Levanon, Sep. 18, 1872, p. 26.
[12] See R. Moshe Zuriel, Otzrot ha-Gra (Bnei Brak, 2000),  pp. 242f.
[13] See R. Yaakov Wreschner, Seder Yaakov (Jerusalem, 2010), vol. 1, p. 35 (first pagination).
[14] Derekh ha-Kodesh (Jerusalem, 1999), p. 4.
[15] Stern himself translates it as “math” on p. 198 n. 19. Regarding mathematics, in the next post (or maybe the one after) I will defend Stern’s reading of a passage in opposition to the critique of Bezalel Naor here.
[16] See Idel, “Bein ha-Kabbalah ha-Nevuit le-Kabalat R. Menahem Mendel mi-Shklov,” in Moshe Halamish, et  al., eds., Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho (Ramat Gan, 2003), p. 174-175.
[17] The text were are discussing is also found in Tzava’at ha-Rivash (Brooklyn, 1998), p. 28 no. 68.
[18] See Sid Z. Leiman, “When a Rabbi is Accused of Heresy: The Stance of the Vilna Gaon in the Emden-Eibschuetz Controversy,” in Ezra Fleischer, et al., eds. Meah Shearim: Studies in Medieval Jewish Spiritual Life in Memory of Isadore Twersky (Jerusalem, 2001), pp. 251-263.
[19] The Gaon had five brothers. See Chaim Freedman, Eliyahu’s Branches (Teaneck, 1997), p. 12.
[20] Let us not forget that the Gaon claimed to have had visions of Jacob and Elijah. This comes from a text written by the Gaon and recorded by R. Hayyim of Volozhin in his introduction to the Gaon’s commentary to Sifre de-Tzeniuta. R. Hayyim also reports that the Gaon said that before he was thirteen years old he started to make a golem, before he concluded that Heaven did not want him to continue. The Gaon further told R. Hayyim that he was visited by R. Shimon Ben Yohai and R. Isaac Luria. All of these things are not characteristic of one with a positive attitude towards philosophy.
[21] Sefat Melekh, vol. 1 (commentary to Mishneh Torah, Sefer ha-Mada [Bnei Brak, 1998], p. 53. R. Korah, Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Bnei Brak, is one of the few Yemenites (are there any others?) who studied under R. Aaron Kotler. See his recollections at the beginning of his Haggadah shel Pesah (2003).
[22] David Zvi Hillman, ed., Iggerot Ba’al ha-Tanya u-Venei Doro (Jerusalem, 1953), p. 97.
[23] See R. Matisyahu Strashun, Mivhar Ketavim (Jerusalem, 1969), p. 125 n. 1.
[24] Datche 55 (17 Av 5769), p. 6.
[25] See his Sihot al Pirkei Ta’amei ha-Mitzvot (Jerusalem, 2003), pp. 723-724.
[26] See his Mishnato ha-Iyunit shel Ha-Rama (Jerusalem, 1984).
[27] She’elot u-Teshuvot ha-Rama, ed. Siev (Jerusalem, 1971), no. 7.
[28] Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 246:18.


Lawrence Kaplan’s review of Eliyahu Stern, The Genius

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Eliyahu Stern’s recent book on the Vilna Gaon has generated a lot of discussion. The Seforim Blog is happy to present Lawrence Kaplan’s review of the work which will be followed up by a three-part post by Marc Shapiro

Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press 2013, pp. xiv+322.*
My father, of blessed memory, was an Orthodox Jew of Lithuanian descent, a “Litvak.” Though he was a businessman all his life, he, like many traditional Litvaks, always kept up his study of classical Jewish texts, both biblical and rabbinic. I remember how often on a Sabbath, whether during a lull in the services or at one of the Sabbath meals, he would introduce an observation on the Scriptural portion of week with “The Gaon says,” literally, “the Genius says.” What followed was always a very acute and original textual insight. Of course, we all knew, without his having to tell us, to whom he was referring. Given my father’s Lithuanian background, he could have had in mind only one Gaon, one Genius: Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (1720-1797), better known as the Vilna Gaon.
            In this regard my father was not unique. As Eliyahu Stern states at the beginning of his important and ambitious study, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism:
For two centuries Elijah has been known simply by the name “Genius,” or “Gaon.” His biographers claim that “one like him appears
every thousand years.”… By the time of his death… he had written commentaries on a wider range of Jewish literature than any writer in history…. His originality, command of sources, and clarity of thought… establish him as the equal of… religious and intellectual giants such as Aquinas and Averroes. (1)
Not surprisingly, not very long after the Gaon’s death traditionalist scholars began writing biographies extolling his piety and, even more so, his brilliance, an enterprise that continues until today.  Despite their hagiographic nature and often strongly ideological bent, these biographies are often serious attempts, granted from within a traditional perspective, to document the Gaon’s life and works and paint his personality, and, if used selectively and critically, they can be of great value to academic historians. Thus, to take a very recent example, R. Dov Eliakh’s 1300 (!) page, three volume biography from 2002, Ha-Gaon[1]  clearly has a Haredi ideological agenda, doing its best to distance the Gaon from, heaven forbid, any “enlightenment” tendencies, and further waging a fierce campaign against all the ”distortions”
that the dastardly “enlighteners” perpetrated on the Gaon and his disciples.[2] Yet this biography, ironically enough, has been condemned in certain extremist Haredi  circles for displaying its own enlightenment tendencies, perhaps alluding to its very full (and useful) documentation and its ”sin” of every now and then referencing academic articles and even worse identifying their authors![3]
            Primarily, however, traditionalist scholars undertook to preserve and disseminate the Gaon’s vast intellectual legacy by transcribing, editing, publishing, and commenting on his works.  Here one must state that while no one will deny the Gaon’s “originality [and] command of sources,” for Stern to speak of his “clarity of thought” is misleading.  While a few of his works, like his Commentary on Proverbs, are full and clear, most of his  writings, as scholars have noted and Stern himself concedes, are exceptionally concise and concentrated, often consisting entirely of learned but obscure allusions and references, the relevance of which can be  deciphered  only by exceptionally knowledgeable readers.[4] Indeed, many of his “commentaries” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, but simply glosses and annotations entered by the Gaon into the margins of the texts in his rabbinic library. Most of his works were not prepared for publication; many were dictated in oral form to his students and exist in varying recensions. At times the Gaon’s original manuscripts are missing, and the accuracy of the printed texts prepared from them is not certain.  The magnitude of this on-going effort cannot be overstated, and even today the job is far from completed.[5]
            In contrast to traditionalist scholars, academic scholars until fairly recently focused, by and large, only on selected aspects of the Gaon’s personality and legacy. They examined the famous and exceptionally fierce  campaign which he, together with the Vilna community leaders, waged against the new spiritual pietistic Hasidic movement; took note of his interest in a broad range of secular disciplines, to be sure, only as ancillaries to the study of the Torah, and asked to what extent he could be seen as a forerunner of the East European Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment); and finally posed the question as to what extent his views regarding the interplay between piety (yirah) and study of the Torah anticipated those of the mid-nineteenth century ethical-pietistic “mussar” movement. In all these instances the scholarly interest was not so much in the Gaon per se, but in his relationship to either contemporaneous or subsequent religious movements.[6]
            Over the past two decades, however, scholars have sought to extend these rather limited horizons and take stock of the broader contours of the Gaon’s intellectual legacy. Important attempts have been made to probe the Gaon’s original Kabbalistic thought; show how, despite his presumed anti-philosophical stance,  he drew upon the medieval Jewish philosophy in forming his world view; examine his hermeneutics and the connected issue of how he conceived of the relationship between the plain-sense meaning of the biblical text and its rabbinic interpretation; and finally assess his immense more strictly Talmudic legacy, looking at his many innovative and unconventional legal rulings and interpretations of rabbinic texts.[7]
            Stern’s The Genius both synthesizes and builds upon this recent scholarship, and is the first attempt to undertake an intellectual biography and cultural profile of the Gaon, placing him firmly within the concrete social and political reality of the Vilna of his day and taking into full account his dizzyingly wide ranging and varied intellectual and literary activity. Of particular interest is the colourful, warts and all, personal portrait that Stern paints of the Gaon, examining the connections between the Gaon’s eccentric, highly reclusive and ascetic lifestyle—for example, he limited his sleep to two hours a day and almost ruthlessly cut all emotional ties with his immediate family—and his genius, or to be more precise the connections drawn between these two facets of his personality by his disciples. As Edmund Morris notes[8] when speaking of the slightly later Beethoven, a genius’ admirers expect him to be unlike ordinary men and wholly devoted his calling—music for Beethoven, rabbinic learning for the Gaon. If Beethoven’s admiring patrons viewed him, to cite Morris, as an ”undisciplined freak”—and all the greater for that—the Gaon’s admiring students appeared to have viewed him as a highly disciplined, indeed, over-disciplined, one—and,
again, all the greater for that.
            Yet, as the book’s subtitle, Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism, indicates, Stern has an even bolder agenda. For in addition to limning the Gaon’s life, thought, and personality, Stern in his book’s Introduction and Conclusion advances a novel thesis regarding the nature of modern Judaism and the role of the Gaon in its making, seeking to unsettle the binary opposition generally drawn between tradition and modernity.
            For Stern, modernity is not “just a movement based on… liberal philosophical principles,” but “a condition characterized [among other
things] by democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion… that restructured all aspects of European thought and life in diverse and often contradictory ways,” (8) and that in the case of Judaism “gave rise to [both] the Haskalah and institutions such as the Yeshiva” (8).  It is in this light Stern maintains that we should understand the historical significance of Gaon’s great work on Jewish law, his Bi’ur
or commentary on Joseph Karo’s sixteenth century code of law, the Shulhan Arukh. Here, to sharpen Stern’s analysis, we may point to an instructive paradox. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, thanks to the primacy of the Shulhan Arukh, the study of the Talmud was neglected and scholars focused their attention on codes of law. The Bi’ur might seem to fit into that pattern, but in actuality it served to subvert the Shulhan Arukh’s authority. For by tracing in great and unprecedented detail the source of the Shulhan Arukh’s rulings back the Talmud and its classic commentaries and then by often challenging those rulings in light of those sources the Bi’ur spurred a return to Talmudic study.
            Stern suggestively, if perhaps a bit mechanically, links the move, sparked by the Gaon, from study of Codes to study of the Talmud to the decline of the kehilah, the Jewish community, and the rise of more privatized forms of traditional Judaism. As long as a kehilah possessed the power, granted to it by the local non-Jewish authorities, to govern itself by Jewish law, study of the codes, which served as guides to practical communal legal decision making, occupied center stage. With the kehilah’s decline, study of the Talmud for its own sake emerged as the highest form of religious worship and pushed the study of the codes to the margins.  Thus, Stern notes, the Yeshiva of Volozhin, founded in 1803 by the Gaon’s leading disciple, R. Hayyim of Volozhin, which served as the primary center of Talmud study in Eastern Europe through the nineteenth century, was a new type of Yeshiva that “functioned independently of any communal governing structure, and …recruited students and funds from across European Jewry” (138). Moreover, this detaching of Talmudic study “from practical code-oriented learning” encouraged “an ethos of innovation, originality, and brilliance” (139) where intellectual battles were won by “pedagogic persuasion and not coercion” (140).
            This perception of the Volozhin Yeshiva as exemplifying the rise of a more privatized and democratic form of religion thus connects directly with Stern’s broader thesis that the modern condition manifested itself in both “enlightened” and “traditional” forms of nineteenth century Judaism, despite their apparent opposition. This analysis is very suggestive, but open to two objections.
            First, while the Gaon certainly played an important role in the move from the study of Codes to study of the Talmud, Stern exaggerates the extent of that role.  It would appear that Stern rather uncritically relies on the understandably hyperbolic claims made by the Gaon’s students, who credited him with almost singlehandedly reviving the study of Talmud in traditional circles. In truth, however, the Gaon’s approach appears to be a part of a broader return to Talmudic study in the eighteenth century, which occurred for reasons we cannot enter into here, as exemplified by, among others, his slightly older central European rabbinic contemporary Rabbi Jacob Joshua Falk (1680-1755) and, in particular, by his Lithuanian contemporary R. Aryeh Leib Ginzburg (1695-1785), both of whom, unlike the Gaon, actually wrote full scale commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, as Yisrael Ta-Shma has noted, Falk’s commentary, the famed Pnei Yehoshua, with its penetrating questions but often not entirely satisfactory answers, spurred a whole spate of commentaries on the Talmud, seeking to provide their own answers to Falk’s questions.[9] And, as Ta-Shma has further noted, Ginzburg’s equally famed writings, the Turei Even, Gevurot ha-Ari, and, in particular, the Sha‘agat Aryeh, with their rejection of pilpul, independent approach, amazing control of the far-flung reaches of classic halakhic literature, and very close attention to the peshat of the Talmudic text, resemble in many ways the Gaon’s approach to the Talmud.[10]
            Indeed, Stern admits that “it is puzzling that Elijah composed a commentary on the Shulhan ‘Arukh but not on the Talmud itself” (131). His suggestion “that in the eighteenth century it was much easier to purchase a set of Karo’s code than to acquire a full set of Talmud” (131) is painfully weak, as Stern himself appears to realize. After all, if such a consideration did not deter Rabbis Falk and Ginzberg from writing their commentaries, it is hard to imagine it deterring the even more independent minded Gaon. Moreover, the Gaon wrote full scale commentaries on recondite sections of the relatively neglected Palestinian Talmud and on other obscure works of rabbinic literature despite
their relative inaccessibility.
              Perhaps the key here is the Gaon’s daring and its limits. Rabbi Falk in his commentary deferred to and simply expounded the interpretations of the Rishonim, the classical medieval Talmudic commentators. Even the more independent minded Rabbi Ginzberg, who often rejected views of the Aharonim, even those of the classical commentators on the Shulhan Arukh, never directly rejected those of the Rishonim. The Gaon, by contrast, felt free to reject the Rishonim’s views, despite their great standing.  Still, it was one thing for him to offer original and unconventional explanations of the Palestinian Talmud, where there was not an authoritative tradition of commentary, or even to reject the Rishonim’s explanations of the Babylonian Talmud and offer explanations of his own in the course of his Commentary on the Shulhan ‘Arukh, where his dissent might not be that visible. But a full scale commentary on the Babylonian Talmud would have required that the Gaon, who was unwilling to compromise “his own understanding,”[11] take issue much more openly with the explanations of the Rishonim and present his own exceptionally bold and innovative interpretations.  That might have been too bold a move even for the Gaon, given the conservatism of the Jewish community of his day. This would also explain why the Gaon, despite his son’s, R. Abraham’s urgings, never wrote his own Code of Law.  Again, it was one thing to undermine the Shulhan ‘Arukh’s rulings in course of a commentary, another to simply set the Shulhan ‘Arukh’s rulings aside and directly offer competing rulings in a new code of law.[12]
            Second, even if we grant Stern’s point that the Volozhin Yeshiva exemplifies the rise of a more privatized and democratic form of religion that manifested itself in both “enlightened” and “traditional” forms of nineteenth century Judaism, he underplays the difference
it makes whether that privatization and democratization are harnessed in the service of greater acculturation and individual autonomy, as in the case of the Haskalah, or greater insularity and ideological intolerance, as in the case of many Lithuanian Yeshivas. It is striking that while in the book’s text Stern lauds “the freedom and individuation” of Talmudic study in the Yeshivas, in a lengthy endnote he concedes that
“for all the lively debate … bouncing off the [Yeshiva] walls, these walls were soundproof, blocking out those with radically different and conflicting opinions” (264, n. 80).[13]
            More problematic, Stern’s thesis that the Gaon’s activity and image contributed  to the privatization of Judaism and the democratization of rabbinic knowledge leads him to skew his portrait  of the Gaon, exaggerating both his radicalism and modernity. Thus, for
example, the reader never gets a full sense from Stern of the depth of the Gaon’s involvement in Kabbalah nor learns, except in passing, of the sheer number of major commentaries he authored on Kabbalistic literature. Perhaps Stern deemed such a discussion too technical for the general reader,[14] but one inevitably gets the feeling that this minimizing of the Gaon’s Kabbalistic side fits into the modern picture Stern is drawing.
            A fairly mild example of Stern’s modernizing portrait of the Gaon may be found in Chapter 2, ”Elijah’s Worldview,” the book’s most technical chapter. Here Stern, building on the scholarship of Alan Brill,[15]  seeks to show how the Gaon drew upon Greek and medieval Jewish philosophic sources, Kabbalistic texts, and even, indirectly, the eighteenth century German idealistic tradition in constructing his view of God, creation, and nature. The chapter’s centrepiece is an extended comparison of the worldviews of the Gaon and Leibniz. To be sure, Stern concedes, the Gaon never read any of Leibniz’s works; indeed he most probably did not know any language other than Hebrew. Still, he notes, the Gaon was influenced by the work Tekhunot Ha-Shamayyim, written by Raphael Halevi of Hannover, a leading student of Leibniz, as well as by the writings of Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto “who read and appropriated Leibniz’s ideas on theodicy” (38).  More significant, “Elijah, Luzzatto, and Leibniz were working with an overlapping set of Kabbalistic and philosophical texts, ideas, and questions that pervaded eighteenth century European intellectual life” (38). Stern’s comparison, while suggestive and forcefully argued, is not entirely
convincing. He argues that both “Leibniz’s and Elijah’s views converge around the … idea that knowledge can be represented in mathematical terms.”[16]  This contention that the Gaon, like Leibniz, believed “that knowledge can be represented in mathematical terms” rests primarily, however, on Stern’s vocalization of a key word from the Gaon’s commentary on the Sifra de-Tzeniuta (196-198, note 19), a vocalization Stern puts forward in opposition to that of Elliot Wolfson, the leading scholar of Kabbalah in North America. However, R. Bezalel Naor, the noted rabbinic scholar of Kabbalah and editor of the Gaon’s commentary on the Sifra de-Tzeniuta, in a review of The Genius supports Wolfson’s vocalization of the text.[17] This is a highly technical matter, and I do not deem myself qualified to adjudicate this dispute, but at the very least it must be said that Stern is building a very imposing edifice on a very slender base.
            Even if we grant Stern his vocalization, nevertheless, as he himself admits, at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphysics are not so much abstract mathematical points, but monads, which are living, self-contained substances. Here Leibniz, as has often been noted, seems to be in large measure inspired, if only negatively, by Spinoza, and his theory of monads appears to be an attempt to adopt Spinozistic premises while avoiding Spinozistic conclusions. Of course, there is no evidence that the Gaon was aware of Spinoza, whose name, indeed, does not appear in Stern’s book. Thus, while it is true that “Elijah … and Leibniz were working with an overlapping set of Kabbalistic and philosophical texts, ideas, and questions that pervaded eighteenth century European intellectual life,” they were also working with non-overlapping sets of “texts, ideas, and questions.” By focusing on the overlapping issues and scanting the broader and differing contexts within which the Gaon and Leibniz worked, Stern, even granting his mathematical comparison, ends up giving a somewhat unbalanced picture of the metaphysical systems of both these thinkers.  Stern concludes his chapter with a bold, if rather speculative, suggestion that one may draw a link between the Gaon’s highly abstract theological ideas and his daring emendations of rabbinic texts, which, in Stern’s view, should be seen as part of “his broader philosophic project of restoring the rational pre-established harmony of a world confused by unnecessary human error and evil” (56-57). Perhaps.
            Chapter 3, “Elijah and the Enlightenment,” advances the book’s most startling and revisionist claim. Generally, Stern notes, the Gaon’s contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn is portrayed as the founder of modern Judaism, while the Gaon is depicted as the defender of rabbinic or traditional Judaism. Stern, however, as part of his effort to unsettle the binary opposition between tradition and modernity, argues that in certain respects the Gaon was a more radical figure than Mendelssohn. Thus, while Mendelssohn maintained that rabbinic interpretations of the legal passages in Scripture were to be identified with the plain-sense meaning of the text, the Gaon interpreted the plain-sense meaning of the text independently of rabbinic interpretations, which were seen as belonging to another level of Scripture. Stern argues that this difference reflects a greater level of self-confidence on the Gaon’s part, as “the intellectual leader of a majority Jewish culture” (71) than on Mendelssohn’s, living as he did in “Berlin, a cosmopolitan city with a tiny Jewish minority” (64), where rabbinic Judaism and particularly rabbinic law were under attack in Christian academic quarters. Stern, I believe, accords too much weight here to matters to matters of demography. Rather, contra Stern, I support the regnant view that this hermeneutical difference reflects, in large measure, the Gaon’s insularity from as opposed to Mendelssohn’s greater openness and sensitivity to their respective surrounding cultures, deriving, in turn, from the presence of a “beckoning bourgeoisie,” to use Gershon Hundert’s phrase,[18] in Berlin and the absence of one in Vilna.
            Even more problematic, Stern’s contrasting portraits of the Gaon and Mendelssohn serve to exaggerate the Gaon’s modernity, while minimizing Mendelssohn’s. Stern begins his chapter, “Elijah and the Enlightenment” with the arresting claim that while ”Elijah believed that Judaism and Jewish texts expressed universal values, Mendelsohn, Leibnitz’s best known Jewish follower … highlighted the social and political limitations of idealism” (63). Really? What of the Gaon’s view (to cite Stern himself) that ”Jew and Gentile do not share the same deity” (109)? And what of his view (something Stern omits to point out) that Jewish souls, as the Kabbalah maintains, differ essentially from non-Jewish souls?[19] Regarding Mendelsohn, Stern himself acknowledges that he believed that philosophy (and we would add Jewish belief) “[are] something universal and cannot contradict natural reason” (79). Furthermore (again something Stern neglects to tell us), Mendelssohn’s criticisms of German idealism flowed from its being in his view not universal enough, still retaining the traces, as in Leibnitz’ affirmation of eternal damnation, of its Christian theological origins. All this is apart from the Gaon’s ready use of the ban to suppress the nascent Hasidic movement, as contrasted with Mendelssohn’s call upon both Church (including Synagogue) and State to renounce any coercion in matters of religious belief.
            A final example of Stern’s skewed perspective is his depiction of the Gaon’s view about the nature and authority of the rabbinic tradition. Stern on the same page (64) first asserts that the “the Gaon called into question the canons of rabbinic authority” and then that
he “challenged the rabbinic tradition.” Both assertions lack any foundation. True, for the Gaon the rabbinic interpretations of the legal passages of biblical text are to be distinguished from their plain-sense meaning, but, as he clearly states on many occasions—and here, incidentally, he is following in Maimonides’ footsteps—their authority is based on their being divinely revealed “laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai,” and after the fact they can all be derived, via the principle of Scriptural omnisignificance, from seemingly minor and trivial superfluities or gaps in the biblical text.  Given this clearly stated view, Stern’s contention that for the Gaon “rabbinic authority is not derived from the rabbis’ connection to the biblical text itself, but rather is based on the fact that the Torah was given to human beings to interpret” (76) cannot be sustained.[20]
            Stern seeks support for his view by referring to a justifiably famous comment of the Gaon to Lev. 6:2. He writes:
The Gaon explains how the [literal sense] of the biblical text allows a [high] priest to enter the [Holy of Holies] whenever he pleases. (According to the rabbis of the Talmud the high priest could only enter once a year.) The Gaon makes a simple but critical historical distinction: during the time of Scripture, biblical law permitted Aaron to go in when he pleased; his access to the [holy of holies] was restricted only later in history when the law changed.  (81)
This is seriously confused. The distinction the Gaon draws in his comment is not between the literal sense of the biblical text and a differing rabbinic view, but between two units of the biblical text itself. Leviticus 16:1-28, the Gaon maintains basing himself on a rabbinic observation in Leviticus Rabbah 21:7,[21] refers just to Aaron, who is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies any time he wishes as long as he performs the ritual outlined in that section. Lev. 16:29-34, on the other hand, refers to all high priests subsequent to Aaron, who are allowed to enter the Holy of Holies only if they perform the requisite ritual and only once a year on Yom Kippur. This accounts for the fact that Yom Kippur is not mentioned in verses 1-28 as well as for the emphasis in verses 16:29 and 34 that this law is “for all time” and the otherwise inexplicable emphasis in 16:34 that this ritual is to be performed only “once a year.” Aside from brilliantly illuminating the biblical text, the Gaon’s analysis also allows him to deftly and convincingly resolve some long standing rabbinic conundrums, such as the rabbinic debate over the
function of the “ram for a burn offering” and the puzzling rabbinic assertion that Lev.16:23 is out of place.[22]
            That Stern misconstrues the Gaon’s observation is particularly unfortunate, since its proper explication would have offered readers a wonderful example of the Gaon’s exegetical genius. This leads to another weakness of Stern’s book. Stern repeatedly and rightly stresses the Gaon’s exegetical originality and incisiveness, but the all too few examples he brings do not, at least in my view, substantiate his claim. There is never any “aha” moment where readers of the book will exclaim ”Wow! This is brilliant; this true genius.” Stern points to the Gaon’s deletion of a passage from a classic rabbinic text on the grounds of its superfluity (55). But while it may take daring to deem a passage inauthentic because it is redundant, it does not require any particular genius to do so. There are many not overly technical examples that Stern could and should have brought where the Gaon’s textual emendations bring light and clarity to what had previously appeared to be a textual and conceptual muddle—say his brilliant transposition in Tosefta Terumot, 7:20 of ”outside” (“mi-be-hutz”) and “inside” (mi-bifnim”)[23] Similarly, there are not overly technical examples of the Gaon’s brilliantly original  interpretations of halakhic texts that Stern could and should have brought—say the Gaon’s famous and oft-cited interpretation of Mishnah Berakhot 4:1 regarding the meaning of the word “keva” in the Mishnaic statement that the evening service has no “keva”.[24]
            In a related, if somewhat different vein, Stern’s scanting the Gaon’s Kabbalistic side deprives him of the opportunity to show the reader how the Gaon often uses Kabbalah to brilliantly explain and illuminate a rabbinic Aggadah. From a critical-historical perspective, of course, such explanations cannot be accepted, since the Kabbalistic concepts the Gaon uses are, as established by historical scholarship, much later than the rabbinic material he is explaining; nevertheless, at times his comments (say his famous explanation of the debate in Bava Batra 15a and Menachot 30a regarding who wrote the last eight verses of the Torah[25]) are so ingenious and so elegantly and powerfully resolve multiple problems in the rabbinic text being explicated that even the critical reader, almost against his or her own better judgment, begins to wonder “Perhaps this is the meaning of the rabbinic text after all!”
            Finally the book is missing a bibliographical chapter, briefly describing the Gaon’s major works, their publishing history, and the problems involved in their editing. Some of this can be found scattered throughout the book, but that is no substitute for a systematic presentation. Such a chapter by detailing the multiple editions of many of the Gaon’s writing and the differences between them would have sensitized the readers to the difficulties in reconstructing his worldview.[26] It would also have driven home the amazing range of the Gaon‘s literary activity. Above all, it might have provided the reader with a deeper understanding of the nature and sheer reach of the Gaon’s literary project. Aside from his commentary on the Shulhan Arukh that, in many ways, is the odd-man out, the Gaon in his writings sought to explicate the totality of biblical and rabbinic literature. But, for him, rabbinic literature includes the liturgy, all of classical rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, Halakhic and Aggadic midrashim (including Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer), the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, and even such historical rabbinic works as Seder Olam Rabbah, all of which for him constitute the exoteric branch of rabbinic literature, as well as such classic Kabbalistic works as the Zohar, Tikkunei Zohar, Raya Mehemna,  Midrash ha-Ne‘elam, Sefer Yetzira, Sifra
de-Tznuiuta, and Sefer ha-Bahir, all of which for him constitute the esoteric branch of rabbinic literature. In this respect Stern’s speaking of the Gaon’s “mastery of the entire canon of rabbinic and Kabbalistic literature” (20) is, without further explanation, somewhat misleading, for in the Gaon’s view these were two branches of rabbinic literature, and his goal was to show that, if properly explicated, both branches not only were they not contradictory, but, more, formed a unified whole, rooted in and deriving from biblical literature. This explains why the Gaon, as seen above, never hesitated to use Kabbalistic concepts to explicate aggadic texts and, perhaps even more important, why, he maintained that, if understood properly, there was no contradiction between the halakhic rulings found in the Zohar and those found in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. Again, the ambition and boldness of this project are breath taking, and, if anywhere, it is here that we find “his broader philosophic project of restoring the rational pre-established harmony of a world confused by unnecessary human error and evil.”
            In sum: Stern’s The Gaon is a pioneering work about an intellectual titan that opens up many important avenues for further research, but I remain unconvinced by its modernizing portrait of the Gaon. Above all, while I am certain that anyone who finishes reading The Gaon with, say, the Appassionata Sonata or Eroica Symphony playing in the background will understand and appreciate Beethoven’s genius, I am not at all certain that, for all Stern’s learning and insight, she will understand and appreciate in what way the Gaon was a genius.
*A considerably briefer and more popular version of this review, “Was the Gaon a Genius?” appeared in Tablet Magazine,
April 3, 2013.
[1] Dov Eliakh, Ha-Gaon, 3 Volumes. Jerusalem: Moreshet ha-Yeshivot, 2002.
[2] Eliakh, Ha-Gaon, pp. 594-639, 1293-1308.
[3]  See ”The Ban on the Book ‘Ha-Gaon,’” Tradition-Seforim Blog, March 27, 2006, and the references there.
[4] Perhaps, however, one mght distinguish between clarity of thought and clarity of presentation.
[5] See Otzar Sifrei ha-Gra (Thesaurus of the Books of the Vilna Gaon), Yeshayahu Vinograd, Jerusalem: Kerem Eliyahu, 2003. This massive work of over 400 pages, a “detailed and annotated bibliography of books by and about the Gaon and Hasid R. Elijah…of Vilna,” should give the reader some idea of the immensity of the task. For a small but important and illustrative example of what remains  to be done, see Yedidya Ha-Levy Frankel, “The Original Manuscript of the Gaon’s Commentary  to the Palestinian Talmud Zera‘im” (in Hebrew), Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho, eds. M. Hallamish, Y. Rivlin, and R. Schuchat (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan, 2003), pp. 29-61.
[7] The most recent and finest example of this approach is Immanuel Etkes, The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and his Image, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffery Green, Berkeley: University of California, 2002. (The Hebrew original was published in 1998.)
[7] Representative studies illustrating this new approach may be found in the volume, Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho, above, n. 5.
[8]  Edmund Morris, Beethoven: The Universal Composer (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), pp. 130-133.
[9] See Yisrael Ta-Shma, “Some Observations on the Work ‘Pnei Yehoshua’ and its Author” (in Hebrew), Studies on the History of the Jews of Ashkenaz Presented to Eric Zimmer, eds. G. Bacon, D. Sperber, and A. Grossman (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2008), pp. 277-285.
[10] See Ta-Shma, “The Vilna Gaon and the author of ‘Sha’agat Aryeh,’ the ‘Pnei Yehoshua,’ and the book ‘Tziyon le-Nefesh Chayah’: On the History of New Currents in Rabbinic Literature on the Eve of the Enlightenment” (in Hebrew), Sidra 15 (1999), pp. 181-191. Stern includes this article in his bibliography, but, surprisingly, never refers to Rabbis Falk and Ginzburg.
[11] See R. Abraham b. Elijah’s “Preface” to the Biur ha-Gra on the Shulhan ‘Arukh: Orah Hayyim, cited in Stern, p. 131,
[12] Eliakh, Ha-Gaon, pp. 702-704, cites R. Zvi Hirsch Farber’s suggestion that, to the contrary, the Gaon was convinced that if he wrote a new Shulhan Arukh it would succeed in displacing the old one.  He therefore desisted from writing one “out of his great respect” for Rabbis Karo and Isserles. This suggestion, in my view, is more of a tribute to R. Farber’s piety than to his historical judgment.
[13] In the same note Stern further states “In the early modern period Eastern European rabbinic Jews had been forced to work within the confines of a Jewish  corporate structure, their internal differences notwithstanding…. While pre-modern Eastern European Jewish life was far from ’tolerant,’ it forced extreme elements of the Jewish community to work with one another…. Though a plethora of different ideological voices could be heard within the yeshiva, the new learning institution severely curtailed the range of acceptable positions and practices tolerated by the lay-led early modern corporate structure.” This is very well said, though undercutting the rather rosy picture of the Yeshiva Stern paints in the body of his book. It must be noted, however, that Stern’s basic point here  was often made by the eminent historian of modern Judaism, Jacob Katz, contrasting the early modern corporate Jewish community not so much to the Yeshiva but to the more homogeneously Orthodox Jewish communities of the modern period.  It is unfortunate that Stern all too often uses Katz as a foil for his own revisionist views and does not sufficiently acknowledge the debt he owes to Katz’s pioneering and incisive—if, of course, debatable—theories.
[14] See “Interview with Eliyahu Stern,” Alan Brill: The Book of Doctrines and Opinions, Dec. 20, 2012.
[15] Alan Brill, “Auxiliary to Hokhmah: The Writings of the Vilna Gaon and Philosophical Terminology, Ha-Gra u-Veit Midrasho (above, note 5), pp. 9-37.
[16] In a famous passage from Halakhic Man, Rabbi Soloveitchik writes: “Not for naught did the Gaon of Vilna tell the translator of Euclid’s geometry into Hebrew [R. Barukh of Shklov] that ‘to the degree that a man is lacking in the wisdom of mathematics [hokhmat ha-matematikah], he will lack a hundred fold in the wisdom of the Torah.’ This statement is not just a pretty rhetorical conceit testifying to the Gaon’s broadmindedness, but a firmly established truth of halakhic epistemology.” See R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), p. 57.   In truth, however, R. Soloveitchik’s quote is not exact.  What the Gaon actually said was “to the degree that a man is lacking in the other branches of wisdom [shearei he-hokhmot], he will lack a hundred fold in the wisdom of the Torah,” and consequently his statement, contra R. Soloveitchik, should be seen precisely as “a pretty rhetorical conceit testifying to the Gaon’s broadmindedness.” At the same time, in light of Stern’s demonstration regarding the centrality of mathematics in
the Gaon’s conception of the universe, R. Soloveitchik’s claim regarding the Gaon’s overall world–view, if not regarding this particular statement, may not be that far off from the truth!
[17 Bezalel Naor, “Book Review: The Genius,” Orot Blog, March 4, 2013. The review actually just consists of Naor’s posting a letter he wrote to Wolfson the day before, agreeing with and defending the latter’s view on this issue.
[18] Gershon Hundert, “(Re)defining Modernity in Jewish History,” eds. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman, Rethinking European Jewish History (Oxford: Littman Library, 2009), pp. 139-140; cited in Stern, p. 69.
[19] See the Gaon’s commentary on Isaiah 8:4. “The root of the souls of the nations of the world differs from root of the souls of the Jewish people, for their [nations of the world’s] souls derive from the [demonic] other side.” See Eliakh,   The Gaon, p.1178, which reproduces two copies of the Horodna-Vilna 1820 edition of the Gaon’s Commentary on Nakh: one with the passage intact; the other where the passage is—understandably!—inked out by the censor.
[20] Stern appears to attribute to the Gaon a view approaching that of Nahmanides, though, as noted in my text, his position is much closer to that of Maimonides. But to discuss this with the fullness it deserves would take us beyond the confines of this review essay.
[21] “Whenever he wishes to enter, he can enter, but only if he performs this ritual.” For further analysis, see Leviticus Rabbah, edited by Mordecai Margulies, Vol.2 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1993), p. 484, note 2.
[22]  See Sefer Aderet Eliyahu: Kitzur Torat Kohanim (Tel-Aviv, 1954), p. 38; and Zikhron Eliyahu (Benei Brak, 1991), pp. 12-15 (part two). For a full discussion, see R. Mordecai Breuer, “Seder Avodat Yom ha-Kippurim,” Pirkei Mo‘adot, Vol.2 (Jerusalem: Horev, 1986), pp. 512-516.
[23] For some representative modern discussions of Tosefta Terumot, 7:20 and the conundrums it poses, see R. Prof. Saul Lieberman, Tosefta ki-Feshutah, Zer‘aim, Vol.1 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), pp.420-423; the exchange between Prof. Samuel Atlas and R. Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg in the latter’s Seridei Esh, Vol. 3 (Jerusalem, 1977), #78 (pp. 197-201); David Daube, Collaboration with Tyranny in Rabbinic Law, Oxford University Press, 1965; Elijah J. Schochet, A Responsum on Surrender: Translation and Analysis, published as an Appendix to The Bach: Rabbi Joel Sirkes, His Life, Works, and Teachings (New York, 2006), pp. 325-413; and Aharon Enker, “Tzorech: Dehiyyat Nefesh Mipnei Nefashot,” in ‘Ikkarim Be-Mishpat ha-Pelili ha-‘Ivri (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2007), pp. 389-448. I hope to show on another occasion that the Gaon’s brilliant emendation of the Tosefta is thoroughly convincing and justified, despite its rejection by both Professors Lieberman and Atlas.
This example also sheds light on the issue as to whether the Gaon in emending a text believed that he was restoring it to its original historical form which had been effaced as a result of the vagaries and errors of copyists, or to cite Stern, whether he believed that he was “refining the text according to what … the text ideally ought to look like” (55). From Stern’s comment it appears he believes the latter to be the case. But it is one thing to say that the Gaon believed that a superfluous passage, even if it was historically part of the original text, ought to be deleted in the name of an ideal principle of maximum conciseness—a principle dear to the Gaon’s heart, quite another to say that the Gaon believed that a passage that, in his view, made no sense was historically part of the original text.
[24] For a full discussion of the Gaon’s explanation and the reactions it aroused, see Hannan Gafni, Peshutah shel Mishnah: ‘Iyyunim be-Heker Sifrut Hazal be-‘Et ha-Hadashah (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2012), pp. 70-72. Another well-known and not overly technical example Stern might have brought is the Gaon’s explanation of Mishnah Bava Metsi‘a 1:1, cited and made famous by R. Israel Lipschutz in his Mishnah commentary, Tiferet Yisrael. See Gafni, p. 59, note 2, and the sources he cites there. In truth, if anywhere, it is here that the Gaon, though I tend to doubt it, “called into question the canons of rabbinic authority” and “challenged the rabbinic tradition.”
[25] See Zikhron Eliyahu (above, n. 22), pp. 20-22 (part two). But see Yaakov S. Spiegel, ‘Amudim be-Toldot  ha-Sefer ha-Ivri: Hagahot u-Magihim (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1996), p. 390, n.26.  Stern, p. 223, n.100, appears to allude to this comment of the Gaon, but from his very brief, almost cryptic, remarks it is impossible to discern the point the Gaon is making.
[26 Alan Brill, “Auxiliary to Hokhmah” (above, n. 15).

 

 

 



New Seforim

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New seforim
By: Eliezer Brodt
This is a list of new seforim and books I have seen around recently. Some of the titles are brand new others are a bit older. Due to lack of time I cannot comment properly on each and every work. I hope you enjoy!
  1. סידור רב עמרם גאון, מכון ירושלים, חלק ג סי’ נו-קג, תפילות חול.
  2. מרדכי, שבת, על פי כ”י, מכון ירושלים, רצג עמודים
  3. ר”י מלוניל על מגילה, יבמות, כתובת, מכון תלמוד הישראלי
  4. האמונות והדעות לרבנו סעדיה גאון, עם ביאור דרך אמונה לר’ דוד הנזיר, חלק א, שצב עמודים, כולל מבוא ופתיחה כללית לרס”ג.
  5. לוי חן לר’ לוי בן אברהם, מעשה מרכבה, מכ”י, ההדיר והוסיף מבוא והערות חיים קרייסל, האיגוד למדעי היהדות, 330 עמודים , [כרך שלישי מתוך החיבור] [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים].
  6. פירוש השר דון יצחק אברבנאל על מסכת אבות, ע”י אורן גולן ור’ משה צוריאל, כולל הקדמה ומפתחות 422 עמודים.
  7. חידושי מהר”ל מפארג, שבת, על פי כ”י ודפוס ראשון, מכון ירושלים
  8. חידושי מהר”ל מפארג, עירובין, על פי כ”י ודפוס ראשון, מכון ירושלים
  9. ר’ בנימין סלניק, בעל שו”ת משאת בנימין, על ה’ הדלקות נרות, נדה, חלה. חיבר באידיש ועכשיו תרגמו לעברית, זכרון אהרן, 271 עמודים.
 I will hopefully review this work shortly.
  1. ר’ חיים עובדיה, [תלמיד רבינו אליהו המזרחי], באר מים חיים, עץ חיים בעניני סעודה וברכת המזון, מקור חיים ביאור סדר קריאת שמע שעל המטה, כולל מבוא וחידושים על הש”ס מכ”י, שב עמודים.
  2. שרידי תשובות מחכמי האמפריה הענת’מאנית, ב’ חלקים, מהדיר שמואל גליק, [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים].
  3. ר’ אלחנן חפץ מפוזנא, קרית חנה על מסכת אבות, נדפס לראשונה בפראג שע”ב, כולל מבוא, מ”מ תיקונים הארות והערות ע”י ר’ שלום דזשייקאב, קע+ מ עמודים [מצוין].
  4. ספרי ר’ נתן נטע הנובר, שערי ציון טעמי סוכה על פי דפוס ראשון ושני, תשע”ב עם מבוא.
  5. ר’ עמנואל חי ריקי, חזה ציון, תהלים, ב’ חלקים
  6. ר’ יוסף חיים בן סאמון, שו”ת עדות ביהוסף, דפוס חדש
  7. ר’ יעקב עמדין, עץ אבות על מסכת אבות, [דפוס יפה], רב + 30 עמודים, כולל פ’ על מסכת אבות לר’ צבי הירש ברלין ופרקי אבות ע”פ סידור בית תפילה לר’ זלמן הענא.
  8. ר’ דוד אופנהיים, יד דוד על התורה וספרו ילקוט דוד, מכתב יד, מכון בית אהרן וישראל, רעג עמודים
  9. אבן שלמה, גר”א, רעח עמודים
  10. הגדה של פסח עם פירוש הגר”א, עם תיקוני גירסא מדפוסים קדמונים בוספת מראה מקומות מקורות וביאורים, ע”י ר’ חנן נובל, קפב +צח עמודים
  11. ר’ שלמה חעלמא, שלחן עצי שטים, על ה’ שבת, יום טוב וחול המועד, דפוס יפה עם מאות הערות מאת ר’ צבי קראוס, תרע עמודים  [מצוין, ניתן לקבל דוגמא]
  12. ביאורי הרמ”מ משקלאוו על ספר הפליאה, מכון הגר”א, קנג עמודים + פקסמיליה של הכ”י
  13. ר’ שמשון נחמני, תולדות שמשון על מסכת אבות [בעל זרע אברהם] עם גבורת שמשון כולל שו”ת, תפילות, שירים קינות ואגרות מכ”י, [וגם מכתבים בינו והאור החיים הקדוש] [מצוין], שס +קכו עמודים.
  14. שו”ת מגידות לבעל פרי מגדים, כרך חדש מכ”י.
  15. ר’ יעקב מליסא, בעל נתיבות המשפט, נחלת יעקב אמת ליעקב דרשות מהר”י מליסא, על פי כ”י, מכון ירושלים, תקפד עמודים
  16. דרשות המגיד מהוראדנא, ר’ אריה לייב בערשטיין, מכ”י, מכון שובי נפשי, שלז עמודים
  17. ר’ חיים סופר, בעל המחנה חיים, תהלים עם פירוש שערי חיים, כולל המון הוספות, השלמות ותקינוים, תתקצח עמודים
  18. ר’ מרדכי רוזנבלאט, הדרת מרדכי על התורה, מכ”י, בראשית, מכון משנת ר’ אהרן, תקי עמודים [מצוין].
  19. ר’ מלכיאל טננבוים, דברי מלכיאל, חלק ח, חידושים והערות על מסכתות הש”ס והדרנים לסיומי מסכתות, [מופיע לראשונה מתוך כ”י] מוסד רב קוק, ש עמודים
  20. שו”ת פנים מאירית, חלק א [ב’ חלקים] עוז והדר
  21. ר’ יעקב צמח, זר זהב על שלחן ערוך או”ח, עד סימן רמא, נדפס לראשונה מכתב יד, תמו עמודים
Although it’s about time this important work was printed it’s a shame the editor did not include any sort of introduction of the importance of this work.
  1. חידושי הגאון מסוסנוביץ, ר’ שלמה שטענצל, בית שלמה, מכתב יד, קהלת שלמה [נדפס לראשונה בתרצ”ב], אוסף חשוב,  רמד + קנה עמודים
  2. ר’ צבי הירש שלעז, סימן כד, פירושים וביאורים לבאר הפסוקים בסימן כד שבחומש בראשית, אודות כדה של רבקה אמנו ונישואיה ליצחק אבינו ע”י אליעזר עבד אברהם עם מ”מ והערות של המו”ל ר’ משה היבנר, קנד עמודים
  3. ר’ יוסף חיים בעל ספר בן איש חי, שו”ת תורה לשמה, מכתב יד קדשו,  כולל הערות ומבוא מקיף על הספר, מכון אהבת שלום, תרפח עמודים.
This work is beautifully produced. They do a great job of proving that the Ben Ish Chai wrote this work. I am not sure why they do not add the proofs based on the computer programs of Professor Moshe Koppel. One question not dealt with in this fancy introduction is why the Ben Ish Chai wrote, the work in such a manner.
  1. ר’ יוסף אליהו הענקין, שו”ת גבורות אליהו, א, על שו”ע, אורח חיים, שעג עמודים [מצוין], [ניתן לקבל דוגמא]
  2. חומש דברים עם פירוש מעט צרי על תרגום אונקלוס
  3. ר’ חיים שמואלביץ, שיחות מוסר-חכמת חיים, שנת תשי”ז-תשכ”ט, שכ עמודים.
  4. ר’ חיים קניבסקי, טעמא דקרא, הוצאת חמישית, תכז עמודים
  5. ר’ עובדיה יוסף, חזון עובדיה, תרומות ומעשרות, שיח עמודים
  6. ר’ אפרים דוב לנדא, זכר דבר
  7. ר’ אורי טיגר, דרכה של תורה, הלכות מלמדים ותלמוד תורה [כעין משנה ברורה], קע עמודים
  8. ר’ חיים לרפלד, קונטרס דרך תורה, שו”ת מר’ חיים קניבסקי בעניני מצות תלמוד תורה, קלה עמודים
  9. ר’ ישראל גרינבוים, לאוקמי גירסא, חגיגה, תיקונים והוספות ברש”י עם הערות, מח עמודים
  10. ר’ יצחק שילת, במסילה העולה, סוטה
  11. ר’ יצחק שילת במסילה העולה, גיטין
  12. ר’ ישראל רוטנברג קהל ישראל, פירוש על שו”ע אהע”ז, הל’ פו”ר ואישות, [כעין משנה ברורה] רנד עמודים
  13. ר’ אברהם טטרואשילי, דלתי תשובה, על הלכות תשובה להרמב”ם, שה עמודים [כעין משנה ברורה].
  14. ר’ דוד אריה מורגנשטרן, פתחי דעת, הלכות נדה, [הלכות נדה לפרטיהן עם מקורות הדינים והכרעות הפוקסקים, ובו נתבררו בהרחבה צדדי המציאות וההלכה בנידונים רבים], 397 עמודים.
 Worth noting is the introduction of this work where the author, Rabbi Morgenstern one of Rav Elyahsiv’s main students, talks about being careful about relying on the Pesakyim quoted in the name of R Elyahsiv in various recent works.  
  1. ר’ מיכל זילבר, בים דרך, מאמרי עולם חלק ב, תו עמודים
  2. ר’ מנחם גיאת, חוקת עולם, אוצר דיני ובחוקותיהם לא תלכו, תקלו עמודים [אוסף חשוב]
  3. ר’ מנחם שלנגר, אהבת איתן, עבודת האמונה והבטחון, ביאור עיקרי האמונה בהנהגת ה’ ,349 עמודים
  4. ר’ שמשון מאוסטרופוליא, ניצוצי שמשוןזיו שדי, [מפי כתבו בספריו הנדפסים ובכתבי יד] נאסף ע”י ר’ אברהם בומבך, [תוספת מרובה ממהדורות קודמות], רצח + נט +מו עמודים
  5. אנציקלופדיה תלמודית כרך לא [כלים-כפה]
  6. ר’ מרדכי גיפטר, שמחת מרדכי, קובץ מאמרים וחידשי תורה, תפט עמודים
  7. ר’ פנחס הירשפרונג, ניצוצי אש פנחס, רלד עמודים
  8. ר’ ישראל דרדק, האלולים קודש לה’,  אסיפת דינים ומנהגים לחודש אלול ימי הרחמים והרצון, שיג עמודים.
  9. הליכות אבן ישראל, מתורת רבינו ר’ ישראל יעקב פישר, מועדים, פסח-תשעה באב, תמט עמודים
  10. ר’ אברהם גנחובסקי, בר אלמוגים, בעניני ברכות,  תתקכא עמודים [!]
  11. כל המתאבל עליה הלכות בין המצרים, ר’ יוסף מרדכי פאק, תרלא עמודים [ערוכים על הסדר החל במקורות חז”ל דרך ראשונים ואחרונים עד פסקי זמנינו].
  12. אוצר מנהגי עדן, ר’ משה מנחם, מנהגי תימן, שכו עמודים + מפתחות 27 עמודים
  13. ר’ מרדכי ויס, מעינם של אבות על מנהגי מצבות, קסד עמודים
  14. קונטרס ישועות יוסף, שיחות ומאמרים מאת הגה”ח רבי יוסף ציינווירט זצללה”ה [כולל צואה שלו], נו עמודים.
  15. ר’ יצחק דרזי, שבות יצחק, בגדרי מעשה ופסיק רישיה בטכנולוגיות החדשות,
  16. ר’ משה טוביאס, עשה לך רב, הלכה ואקטואליה לבית היהודי, רסז עמודים
  17. כתבוני לדורות, קובץ אגרות וכתבים ממרן הגאון רבי יוסף של’ אלישיב זי”ע, שמה עמודים
  18. קובץ הערות על התורה והמועדים ממרן הגאון רבי יוסף של’ אלישיב זי”ע, 443 עמודים
  19. קובץ הלכות, פסקי מורנו הגאון רבי שמואל קמנצקי, חג הסוכות, תלב עמודים
  20. קובץ הלכות, פסקי מורנו הגאון רבי שמואל קמנצקי, ימים נוראים, תקיט עמודים
  21. ר’ משה הררי, קונטרס קדושת השבת, הלכות חמשל בשבת וביום טוב, ב’ חלקים
  22. ר’ שמואל אויערבאך, אהל רחל, מועדים, רנח עמודים
  23. אגרות וכתבים ממרן רבינו המשגיח, רבי שלמה וולבה, חלק שני, שעה עמודים [מלא חומר מעניין]
  24. יום ההולדות ומשמעותו, מקורות, הליכות והנהגות סגולת היום ומעלתו, קפג עמודים
  25. ר’ משה קראסנער, קונטרוס סוד ליראיו, לבאר וללבן ענין יצירת דברים מן היפוטש וענין שינוי הטבעים על פי דברי חז”ל כמבואר בש”ס ובדברי רבותינו ראשונים ואחרונים, פד עמודים
  26. ר’ שלמה אבינר, נר באישון לילה, אמונות תפלות לאור התורה והמדע, 460 עמודים
  27. ר’ משה יגודיוב, ור’ נתן הירש, משיבת נפש, ענייני קירוב רחוקים באספקלריית חז”ל ובמשנת רבותינו הראשונים והאחרונים, תסד עמודים
  28. ר’ שמעון ללוש, נשמע קולם, קבלה והלכה, קלח עמודים. This work is a defense of R’ Ovadiah Yosef Shitos on the subject.
  29. ר’ יצחק שלזינגר, מאורות יצחק, פנינים ומאמרים בתורה מוסר והלכה [כולל חומר על קורות העיתים ולימד היסטוריה במבט של תורה], תקיא עמודים
  30. מחזור ווילנא, כתר מלכות, ראש השנה, מהדורה שניה
  31. הליכות המועדים, הלכות ארבעה מינים, עם תמונות, עוז והדר, רנג עמודים
  32. אוצר מפרשי ההושענות, מיוסד ומבואר על פי מקראות ומדרשי חז”ל ליקוט מקיף של ביאורים ופירושים מתוך ספרי ראשונים ואחרונים, מכון ירושלים, 608 עמודים [ניתן לקבל דוגמא]
  33. ר’ שמואל כהן, קונטרס כרחם אב, בעניין יחס האב העמל בתורה לחינוך בני ביתו, לפרנסתם למשחק עמהם ועזרתו בבית, קב עמודים
ירחונים
  1. מוריה [ניתן לקבל תוכן]
  2. אור ישראל גליון סז
  3. קובץ עץ חיים גליון יט
  4. קובץ עץ חיים גליון כ
  5. קובץ היכל הבעש”ט, גליון לה
  6. ירושתנו ספר שביעי, [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים].
  7. ישורון גליון כח [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים].
  8. ישורון גליון כט [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים].
  9. המעין גליון 206
  10. המעין גליון 207
  11. קובץ אסיפת חכמים, קובץ יב –באיאן
  12. עלי ספר כג
  13. סידרא,  כז-כח
  14. גנזי קדם ט
מחקר וכדומה
  1. תוספות רמב”ן לפירושו לתורה, שנכתבו בארץ ישראל, יוסף עופר יהונתן יעקבס, 718 עמודים. [ראה כאן]
  2. גנזי יהודה, אוסף גנזים מגדולי הדורות במאות שנים האחרונות רובם רואין עתה אור הדפוס בפעם הראשונה, כולל מבוא מקיף על כל הכ”י מאת ר’ יחיאל גולדהבר, 323 עמודים [מצוין].
  3. ספר הודו, ד, שני חלקים, מכתבים של חלפון הסוחר עם המשורר ר’ יהודה הלוי, כולל ניתוח חשוב של כל המכתבים מאת מרדכי עקיבא פרידמן [מצוין], מכון יד בן צבי.
  4. אמנון בזק, עד היום הזה, ידיעות ספרים, שאלות יסוד בלימוד תנ”ך [מלא חומר חשוב],  470 עמודים.
  5. היא שיחתי, על דרך לימוד התנ”ך, ישיבות הר עציון והוצאת קורן, 264 עמודים [מלא חומר מעניין].
  6. תמיר גרנות אמונה ואדם לנוכח השואה, ב’ חלקים, [ראה כאן] ישובות הר עציון.
  7. ר’ מרדכי פגרמנסקי, תולדותיו, 592 עמודים. [מצוין] A must for any Telzer.
  8. ר’ מרדכי בלזר, רבי איצלה מפטרבורג, הליכותיו בקודש ומשנתו של גאון התורה חכם המסור מרק רבי יצחק בלאזר זצוקללה”ה, 736 עמודים.  I did not have time to read much of this book but I must say the pictures are beautiful.
  9. תרביץ שנה פא תשע”ג, ליעקב מנחה היא שלוחה, קובץ מאמרים מוגש לפרופסור יעקב זוסמן, 470 עמודים, [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים]. [מצוין]
  10. מתרדמת הגנזים לארון ספרים, מאה וחמישים שנה למקיצי נרדמים,  נדפסה במאה וחמישים עותקים,  62 עמודים [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים]
  11. ר’ יצחק גיבלטר, יסודר יסרני, על מסירות נפש בקיום התורה בגטו קונבנה [כולל חומר על הריגת ר’ אלחנן וסרמן הי”ד,  דבר אברהם, ור’ אברהם גרודז’ינסקי ועוד], 675 עמודים, [ניתן לקבל דוגמא].
  12. אור יקרות, קשרי הידידות בין רבי שלמה אלישוב זצ”ל, מחבר הספר לשם שבו ואחלמה ומרן הראי”ה קוק, 105 עמודים
  13. ר’ צבי ויספיש, גדולה שמושה, עובדות משקידתו והתמדות המופלאגה של מו”ר מרן רבנו יוסף שלו’ אלישיב זיע”א, תשט עמודים
  14. השקדן, חלק ג, הפסק והמנהיג, על ר’ אלישיב זצ”ל תשמ”א-תשע”ג, 286 עמודים
  15. שמא יהודה פרידמן, לתורם של תנאים, אסופות מחקרים מתודולוגיים ועיוניים, ביאליק, 534 עמודים [מצוין], [ניתן לקבל תוכן העניינים].
  16. ר’ יואל משה סלומון פועלו ותולדותיו, תקצח-תרעג [על פתח תקוה], 525 עמודים
  17. ר’ אהרן רבינוביץ, רינת האמונה, האמונה התורנית והשתקפותה במדע הפסיכולוגיה, מוסד רב קוק 211 עמודים
  18. מפנקסו של עבד המלך, רשימות ורשמים מפנקסיו וכתביו של ר’ שמואל הומינר, שנג עמודים
If you are interested in seeing how the custom to go to the Kotel for Birchat Kohanim on Chol Ha-moed started see pp.54-59 of this work.
  1. אברהם אופיר שמש, חומרי מרפא בספרות היהודית של ימי הביניים והעת החדשה, פרמקולוגיה, היסטוריה והלכה [מצוין], הוצאת בר אילן,  655 עמודים.
  2. סדר עולם, שני חלקים, מהדורה פירוש ומבוא חיים מיליקובסקי, הוצאת יד יצחק בן צבי
  3. שירי שיש, כתובות מבתי החיים של פדובה 1529-1862 דוד מלכיאל, הוצאת יד יצחק בן צבי
  4. אורי ארליך, תפילת העמידה, נוסחי היסדורים בגניזה הקהירית שורשיהם ותולדותיהם, [מצוין] 387 עמודים,  הוצאת יד יצחק בן צבי
  5. רוני רייך, מקוואות טהרה בתקופות הבית השני המשנה ותלמוד, הוצאת יד יצחק בן צבי
  6. אלישה קימרון, מגילות מדבר יהודה, כרך שני החיבורים העבריים, הוצאת יד יצחק בן צבי
  7. כחלום יעוף וכדיבוק יאחז, על חלומות ודיבוקים בישראל ובעמים, מגנס
  8. סדקים על אחדות ההפכים הפוליטי ותלמידי הרב קוק, אבינועם רוזנק, רסלינג, 217 עמודים
  9. גוף ומיניות בשיח ציוני דתי החדש- יקיר אנגלנדר ואבי שגיא, הרטמןכתר, 267 עמודים
  11. החידות הקיום, פר’ משה טרופ, תורה ואבולוציה, 264 עמודים
  12. יוסף דן, תולדות תורת הסוד העברית, ט, 535 עמודים, מרכז זלמן שזר
  13. בינו שנות דור דור חלק ד, [ניתן לקבל דוגמה]
  14. הפיוט כצוהר תרבותי, חביבה פדיה, קיבוץ המאוחד [הרבה חומר על פיוטי אריז”ל ור’ ישראל נגארה]
  15. איגרת רב שרירא גאון, מישור, שסח עמודים, [עם מבוא ותרגום לעברית]
  16. אוריאל רפפורט, בית חשמונאי, עם ישראל בארץ ישראל בימי החשמונאים, יד יצחק בן צבי, 499 עמודים.
  17. פאס וערים אחרים במרקו, בר אילן.
  18. נובהרדוק ב’ חלקים תולדות הסבא מנובהרדוק וישיבות בית יוסף על אדמת פולין וליטא ובתפוצות
  19. קונטרס ספרים וסופרים ילקוט לשונות של חיבה ושבח על ספרים ועל מחבריהם אשר נאמרו ונכתבו על ידי גדולי ישראל, צב עמודים.
  20. הרב שלמה גורן, בעוז ותעצומות, אוטוביוגרפיה, בעריכת אבי רט, ידיעות ספרים, 366 עמודים
  21. גשר לעולם מופלא, מדי דברי בו ר’ אפרים לונדנר, בנועם שיחו על פולין שלפני השואה, רטו עמודים
  22. ר’ משה לוונטהל, שררה שהיא עבדות, סוגיות ברבנות הקהילה, 760 עמודים [ראה כאן]
  23. נר המערבי, תולדות חייו של מרן האור החיים הקדוש, תקצו עמודים
  24. יואל פלורסהיים, פירושי הרמב”ן לירושלמי, מבוא, מוסד הרב קוק, שסח עמודים
  25. ארץ ומלואה, חלק ב, מחקרים בתולדות קהילת ארם צובה (חלב) ותרבותה, מכון בן צבי, 250+ 62 עמודים.
One article of Interest in this collection is from Zvi Zohar called “And Artscroll created Aleppo in its Image: Aleppo as an Ultra- Orthodox community in the Book Aleppo City of Scholars.” An earlier version of this appeared here.
English
  1. Haym Soloveitchik, Collected Essays, I, Littman Library, 336 pp.  
  2. Jeremy Brown, New Heavens and a New Earth, The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought, Oxford Press, 394 pp.
  3. Sara Offenberg, Illuminated Piety: Pietistic Texts and Images in The North French Hebrew Miscellany, Cherub Press
  4. Aramaic Bowl Spells, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls, Volume one. Shaul Shaked, James Ford and Siam Bhayro, Brill books, 368 pp.
  5. Avrohom Reit, Zeh Kaporosi, The Custom of Kaporos, History Meaning and Minhag, Mosaica Press, 163 pp.
  6. Memoirs by Esther Carlebach, Lost not forgotten,  255 pp.
  7. Hakirah, 15
  8. Yitzhak Meitlis, Excavating the Bible, New Archaeological Evidence for the Historical Reliability of Scripture, 397 pp.
  9. Rabbi Pesach Falk,,  The laws of Shabbos, 1, 443 pp.
  10. Rabbi Dovid Braunfeld, Dvar Yom, An in-depth Explanation of the Luach based on Achronim, Earlier and Present day minhagim and Astronomical facts, Israel Book Shop, 472 pp.
  11. Rabbi Moshe Walter, The Making of a Halachic Decision, Menucha Publishers, 231 pp.
  12. Rabbi Warburg, Rabbinic Authority, The vision and the Reality, Urim Press 341 pp.
  13. Rabbi Yosef Kushner, Commerce and Shabbos, The laws of Shabbos as they apply to today’s High tech Business world, Feldheim, 352 pp. + 78 pp.
  14. Rabbi Francis Rabbi Glenner, The Laws of Eruv, Israel Book Shop 353 pp.
  15. Rabbi Elozor Reich, A treasure of Letters, A yeshiva Bochur’s Fascinating Firsthand description of the World of Torah and Chassidus in Eretz Yisroel in the Early 1950’s. Israel Book Shop 199 pp. [See here and here]
  16. Moses Maimonides and his practice of Medicine, Edited by Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kotteck and Fred Rosner.
  17. Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s, A Divine Madness, Defense of Hashem in the Matter of the Holocaust, 273 pp.

Of course there is much to say about this work but I saw an interesting comment in his nephew and student Rabbi Yisroel Milller’s work, In Search of Torah Wisdom in his chapter on Remembering the Holocaust (p. 391). ” Does anyone today suggest that the Holocaust came about because of the sins of European Jewry? And if there are Talmidei Chachamim who do so suggest can you imagine the reaction if a Holocaust memorial was set aside with that theme?”


ביקורת ספרים: מסורת התורה שבעל פה, הרב פרופ’ שלמה זלמן הבלין

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ביקורת ספרים: מסורת התורה שבעל פה, הרב פרופ’ שלמה זלמן הבלין
מאת: רב צעיר
הספר “מסורת התורה שבעל פה – יסודותיה, עקרונותיה והגדרותיה” שהוציא לאור לפני כשנה הרב פרופ’ שלמה זלמן הבלין, בהוצאת מכללת אורות-ישראל, עוסק בהיבטים שונים של אחד הנושאים שמעסיקים ביותר את חיי היהודי המאמין, התורה שבעל פה. הספר מכיל חמישה עשר פרקים, חמשה מתוכם רואים אור לראשונה בספר זה, והעשרה הנותרים ראו אור בכתבי עת שונים במהלך השנים. בתור לקט כזה, הספר אינו אחיד. ישנם פרקים הכתובים בצורה אינציקלופדית (כך למשל פרק י”א שהוא למעשה הערך “תלמוד בבלי” מהאנציקלופדיה העברית), וישנם פרקים המכילים חידושים מפליגים. ישנם פרקים בעלי אופי יותר בית-מדרשי, ישנם בעלי אופי יותר עממי, וישנם בעלי אופי מאד אקדמאי. ישנם פרקים עם ריבוי הפניות והערות שוליים וישנם עם מעט מאד. ככלל, המחבר משתדל לעסוק בכל מה שקשור להגדרת ולהבנת מהותה של התורה שבעל פה. אני מניח שכל מי שנושא התורה שבעל פה מעסיק אותו, בין אם זה בעל-בית שלומד דף יומי, או אברך שלומד בכולל או חוקר תלמוד באוניברסיטה, ימצא בספר זה דברים מרתקים. עוד חידוש שישנו בספר זה הוא שמצורף אליו תקליטור ובו כל הספר, זאת על מנת להקל על הלומד לחפש בספר וכדי לחסוך את הצורך בהכנת מפתח מפורט לספר. הספר הוא באורך כ600 עמודים ברוטו ונטו, כאמור, ללא מפתח וללא ביבליוגרפיה. אני מבקש להתייחס ולסקור שני נושאים משני פרקים מתוך הספר שאני מצאתי בהם חידוש. בפרק ד’ בספר, תחת הכותרת “להבנת יסודות דרכי הלימוד של חז”ל”, עוסק המחבר במדרש הידוע בתלמוד הבבלי מסכת מנחות (דף כט עמוד ב):
“אמר רב יהודה אמר רב: בשעה שעלה משה למרום, מצאו להקב”ה שיושב וקושר כתרים לאותיות, אמר לפניו: רבש”ע, מי מעכב על ידך? אמר לו: אדם אחד יש שעתיד להיות בסוף כמה דורות ועקיבא בן יוסף שמו, שעתיד לדרוש על כל קוץ וקוץ תילין תילין של הלכות.”
המחבר מעיר על כל שינויי הנוסח שישנם על טקסט סיפורי זה על פי כתבי יד, דפוסים ישנים וראשונים, לאחר מכן הוא נדרש לתוכן הסיפור:
–
מה פירוש “קושר כתרים לאותיות”?
–
מה פירוש “על כל קוץ וקוץ”?
–
היכן הם אותם “תילין תילין של הלכות”? הייתכן וכולם נאבדו מאיתנו? לאחרונה שמעתי בשיעור ברשת את הרב הרשל שכטר מסביר שהפשט במימרא זו זה שרבי עקיבא היה עוצר אחרי כל נקודה ונקודה בספר התורה ודורש הלכות. כלומר, ההלכות לא נדרשו מהתגים או הקוצים, אלא שהקוצים באים לבטא שלאחר כל אות שרבי עקיבא היה עובר, לומד ומלמד הוא היה דורש. עוד הוסיף הרב שכטר שהדרשנים אומרים שעל כל ניסיון לפגיעה במסורת היהודית (כל קוץ וקוץ) יש להוסיף עוד ועוד הלכות כדי לגדור את גדרה. כשמספרים סיפור זה לילדים מתארים להם שהקב”ה, בסיפור, מוסיף את התגין לאותיות שעטנ”ז ג”ץ, ואולי גם את קוצו של יו”ד. אך מעיר הרב הבלין בצדק שלא מצינו בשום מקום בחז”ל שהתגין המוכרים לנו מכונים “קוצים”. גם לא מצינו שהם נקראים “כתרים”. לא רק זה, אלא שגם לא מצינו שחז”ל קוראים להם “תגים”, כפי שהם מכונים בלשונינו, כך שגם אם נרצה לטעון שתגים הרי הם כתרים (כבלשון המשנה “דאשתמש בתגא חלף”), לא מצינו את המינוח תגים בלשון חז”ל כמשמש לקישוטי האותיות, כפי שאנו מכנים אותם.  לעומת זאת, מראה המחבר, שחז”ל קוראים “תגים” לחלקי האותיות עצמם. כך מצאנו בגמרא בשבת (קד ע”ב):
“כגון שנטלו לתגו של דל”ת ועשאו רי”ש”
וכבר הזכרנו גם את “קוצו של יוד”, חלק מהגוף האות יו”ד. המחבר הולך עוד צעד בחידושו ואת הביטוי “קושר כתרים” מפרש המחבר בתור “ממליך”, הקב”ה “ממליך” את האותיות, מעניק חשיבות לכל אחת ואחת מהן. וכך מסביר הקב”ה למשה שעתיד לקום רבי עקיבא והוא ידרוש כל קוץ וקוץ, זאת אומרת יחפש משמעות לכל אות ואות. רבי עקיבא, בניגוד לשיטת רבי
ישמעאל שסבר שדברה תורה כלשון בני אדם, ראה צורך לדייק ולדרוש כל אות ואות, כפי שאנו מוצאים בגמרא במסכת סנהדרין (דף נא עמוד ב):
“אמר ליה רבי עקיבא: ישמעאל אחי (ויקרא כ”א) בת ובת אני דורש. – אמר ליה: וכי מפני שאתה דורש בת ובת נוציא זו לשריפה?”
המחבר מבסס את דבריו ומביא להם סימוכין ממחברים שונים ואף ממשיך ומבאר את המשך המדרש לאור דברים אלו. בפרק ו’, הרואה אור לראשונה בספר זה, תחת הכותרת “דרשת חז”ל על ‘לא תסור … ימין ושמאל'”, דן המחבר בסתירה בין מדרשי הלכה. הספרי על הפסוק “לא תסור מן הדבר אשר יגידו לך ימין ושמאל” (דברים יז יא), המובא גם ברש”י שם, כותב:
“על פי התורה אשר יורוך, על דברי תורה חייבים מיתה ואין חייבים מיתה על דברי סופרים. ועל המשפט אשר יאמרו לך תעשה, מצות עשה. לא תסור מן התורה אשר יגידו לך, מצות לא תעשה, ימין ושמאל, אפילו מראים בעיניך על ימין שהוא שמאל ועל שמאל שהוא ימין שמע להם סליק פיסקא”
בתלמוד הירושלמי (מסכת הוריות פרק א), לעומת זאת, מופיע דרשה הפוכה לחלוטין:
“יכול אם יאמרו לך על ימין שהיא שמאל ועל שמאל שהיא ימין תשמע להם ת”ל ללכת ימין ושמאל שיאמרו לך על ימין שהוא ימין ועל שמאל שהיא שמאל.”
המחבר מקשה ששתי הדרשות אינן מובנות: וכי המדרש בספרי אינו מקבל את זה שייתכן ובית הדין טועה? וכי הגמרא בירושלמי מעוניין שכל אחד יחליט לעצמו מתי לשמוע לבית הדין ומתי לא? לכן, מנסה המחבר לפשר בין שני המדרשים. לצורך זה מביא המחבר 8 (!) דרכים, ממחברים שונים, כיצד ניתן לפשר בין שני המדרשים. לאחר מכן מציע המחבר אפשרות תשיעית, משלו. לדבריו, הדרך לפשר בין שני המדרשים מונח במילה אחת הנראית לא במקומה בדברי הירושלמי. המילה “ללכת”. מילה זו, אינה מופיעה בפסוק שאותו לכאורה דורשים: “לא תסור מן הדבר אשר יגידו לך ימין ושמאל”, אך כן מופיעה משום מה בדברי הירושלמי: “ת”ל ללכת ימין ושמאל”. לכן מסיק המחבר, שהירושלמי בכלל דורש פסוק אחר מספר דברים (כח יד):
“ולא תסור מכל הדברים אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם היום ימין ושמאל ללכת אחרי אלהים אחרים לעבדם”
כלומר, הספרי מדבר על הוראות חכמים “הדבר אשר יגידו לך”, ואלו הירושלמי עוסק בפסוק המדבר אודות ציווי הקב”ה בתורה “אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם”. על הראשון אומרת הספרי שגם אם בית הדין טעה בהוראתו חייבים לשמוע לו. אך הירושלמי מסייג זאת, שזהו כל עוד בית הדין לא הורו לעבור על דבר המפורש בתורה, כי על דבר המפורש בתורה יש לשמוע לבית הדין רק אם יאמרו על ימין שהוא ימין ועל שמאל שהוא שמאל. לא ניתן, לדעתי, לומר שפתרון זה של המחבר חף מדוחק, שהרי גם בפסוק בפרק כח לא נאמר “ללכת ימין ושמאל”, אלא “ימין ושמאל ללכת וכו'”, אך הכיוון הוא בהחלט מחודש ומרענן. יש עוד הרבה פרטים ודיונים בספר עב כרס זה. נזכיר רק עוד דיון אחד שמצאתי בו עניין מיוחד. בנספח לפרק ח’ “היחס לשאלות נוסח בספרי חז”ל”, מנתח המחבר את מעמד הבחינה המתואר בספרו של חיים פוטוק “ההבטחה” (The Promise). לדבריו, מעמד הבחינה של גיבור הספר, המתואר שם, הוא למעשה תיאור בחינה בישיבה-אוניברסיטה בניו-יורק בפני הרב יוסף דב סולובייצ’יק, הרב ירוחם גורעליק וד”ר שמואל בלקין. בחן רב, המחבר מגלה לנו לאיזה סוגיא רומז חיים פוטוק והוא מנתח ומבקר את התשובות שענה הנבחן. יותר ממה שכתבתי בפניכם יש בספר זה. אוהבי ספר ומחקר תלמודי בודאי ימצאו בו דברים אהובים.
*ברצוני להודות לרב ד”ר משה רחימי שהמציא לי את הספר ולמו”ח פרופ’ דניאל י. לסקר שעבר על דברי.


‘Masa’ot Yerushalayim’ and the ‘Sabba Kaddisha’ R. Shlomo Eliezer Alfandari

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‘Masa’ot Yerushalayim’ and the ‘Sabba  Kaddisha’ R. Shlomo Eliezer Alfandari
By: Moshe Maimon
One of the greatest and most unique Torah scholars, Sephardic or otherwise, of the past 100 years was R. Shlomo Eliezer Alfandari . His life spanned about a century[1] and his prolific rabbinic career included stints in Istanbul, Damascus, Safed and Jerusalem. Besides for being an outstanding scholar with a near-photographic memory he was also extremely diligent and was a prodigious writer of responsa and novellae. Additionally, he was renowned as an independent thinker and outspoken critic of many of the societal norms prevalent around him including Zionism and modernity, and he had little tolerance for those who he felt had strayed from the torah-true path.[2] This quality earned him many admirers and not a few adversaries, but all admitted that R. Shlomo Eliezer’s sole motivation was the truth and he did nothing for personal gain. Indeed, despite his considerable means, he lived a life of asceticism and completely shunned any form of publicity.
Amongst his native Sephardic brethren he was known as ‘Chacham Mercado Alfandari’.[3] This unusual-sounding surname; ‘Mercado’, meaning ‘purchased’ in Ladino, was somewhat common in his native Turkey and was indicative of the fact that it’s bearer had undergone a symbolic ceremony in his youth whereby he was ‘sold’ and redeemed. This practice is mentioned in Sefer Hasidim (#245) and was widespread in Sephardic lands.[4] My Great-uncle, Sam Bension Maimon, himself a Turkish native, in his book The Beauty of Sephardic life (p. 188) has this to say about that interesting custom:
This practice of “purchase,” was followed by a family that was blessed with a newborn baby, but had previously suffered the loss of an infant before the new arrival. In order to ensure the life of the muevo nasido (newborn baby), they would go through a formality in which a relative or a friend would “purchase” this baby from the parents, thus transferring ownership. This was done to outsmart the evil spirits and ward off their fatal hold on this family’s offspring that was marked for a fatal accident. So, if it was a boy, he was called Mercado; or if it was a girl, she was called Mercada.[5]
Today, however, he is more popularly known as ‘the Sabba Kaddisha’ which was the title bequeathed upon him by the Minchas Elazar of Munkacz; R. Chaim Elazar Shapira, who was largely responsible for bringing this sage to the attention of the greater public especially in Europe among the Ashkenazim.  This also was used as the title of his response – שו”ת הסבא קדישא. In a sense, the Munkaczer was also responsible for shaping the perception that many people have of R. Alfandari, as his perspective as detailed in his writings and in Masa’ot Yerushalayim, is the lens through which many see the Sabba Kaddisha.
The Munkaczer, after hearing about this extraordinary personality almost completely coincidentally, gradually became convinced that this sage was the ‘Holy elder’ or Sabba Kaddisha of the generation. According to a personal Hassidic tradition he had, the Holy Elder of every generation was capable of bringing the Messiah. This is what drew this great Hassidic leader, born and bred in Ashkenazic/Hassidic Hungary to R. Alfandari, although from a distance it might have seemed that the two made strange bedfellows. R. Alfandari, for his part, was delighted to make the acquaintance of an important Torah leader who shared his extreme views on Zionism and modernity.
Masa’ot Yerushalayim; Journey To Jerusalem: A review
 
There are various sources which provide biographical information on this unique sage,[6] but predominant among them is the detailed account of the Munkaczer Rebbe’s trip to meet R. Alfandari in the late spring of 1930 shortly before the latter’s passing. This account was written by a follower of the Rebbe, who accompanied him on his trip, by the name of R. Moshe Goldstein. The book, entitled Masa’ot Yerushalayim which also contains a biographical section on R. Alfandari[7] was first published 1931 in Munkacz and has been published many times since. This monumental meeting between east and west is a most interesting narrative and in addition to providing insight into the lives of these great scholars, it also allows for a view of pre-war Israel which is the backdrop for this meeting.
The book was recently translated into English by Artscroll (in 2009) and is called Journey to Jerusalem. It is this last work which I will focus on. Unfortunately, instead of adhering to their usual high standard and putting in the type of quality effort they have come to be known for into producing a professional edition of this classic, I found it to be lacking in many basic areas. First off, it is essentially just a simple translation from the original, complete with the archaic syntax such as ‘the Holy Rebbe’, ‘the Holy shul’, etc. Generally speaking, such prose, although sounding fine in Rabbinic Hebrew, nevertheless grates on the ears when rendered into English.
Additionally, the ’famed’ Artscroll system of transliteration[8] was dropped in the case of this book, instead they adopted in many instances
the Hungarian Hasidic mode of pronunciation. Understandably, this can be accepted when mentioning the Minchas Elazar who was known to his Hasidim as the Minchas Eluzar; but what justification is there, on the other hand, for spelling out Rabbi Eluzar son of Rabbi Shimon (p. 136) and Rabbi Eluzar Azikri (p. 157)?
In one instance (p. 205) they transliterated the Hebrew spelling of the Isle of Rhodes (רודיס) and thereby refer to “…The great Rabbi Rephael Yitzchak Yisrael, rav of Rudis (!)”.
In one case a faulty translation of the original completely corrupts the meaning of the sentence such as when discussing the origin of the famous Abohab Synagogue in Safed the author writes parenthetically:
אינו נודע אם זהו בעהמח”ס מנורת המאור או זקינו.
In English they got it backwards and wrote (p. 148):
It is unclear whether it was he or his grandfather who authored the Menoras Hamaor.
So much for style, but when it comes to content there are also quite a few editorial blunders such as when they refer to the Maharit (= Moreinu Harav Yosef diTrani) as Rabbi Yitzchak (!) of Trani (p. 204). One particularly egregious oversight can be found in the following paragraph (from p. 142 – 143):
The story is told in the holy Rabbi Shlomo ibn Gabirol’s accounts of his travels in Eretz Yisroel that because of Rabbi Alkabetz’s great wisdom, the gentiles envied him, and an Arab killed him and buried him under a tree in his garden. When the tree bore fruit early, people investigated. The crime was discovered, and the murderer was hanged on that very tree. This story is recorded in the holy work Kav Hayashar (chapter 86) about Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz.
Besides for the obvious problem with this story being that R. Shlomo Ibn Gabirol preceeded R. Alkabetz by 500 years, there are two contradictory sources given for this tale, namely the supposed ‘accounts of R. Ibn Gabirol’s travels’  (a non-existent work) and Kav Hayashar. A quick check with the Hebrew Edition will reveal the source of this error. Here is the original:
ולפלא, כי המעשה שהביאו בספרי תיירי ארץ הקודש מהקדוש מה״ר שלמה בן גבירול שמרוב חכמתו נתקנאו בו אומות העולם, וישמעאל אחד הרגו והטמינו תחת אילן בגן שלו, ועל ידי שהתאנה חנטה פגיה קודם זמנה חקרו, ואכן נודע הדבר ונתלה הרוצח על אותו אילן, מובא בספר הקדוש קב הישר (פרק פ״ו) על מה״ר שלמה אלקבץ ז״ל, יעיין שם.
What he is saying is that he was amazed to find that different accounts of tourists’ travels in Israel record a story supposedly about R. Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, while in Kav Hayashar it is reported to have happened to R. Shlomo Alkabetz. This is indeed an important bibliographical point, but In truth this legend is actually quoted in Shalshelet hakaballah regarding Ibn Gabirol[9] and although the authenticity of this sefer is often questioned, there can be no doubt that the legend predates R. Shlomo Alkabetz and indeed no contemporary sources indicate that R. Alkabetz had anything but a peaceful end. Even though all early prints of Kav Hayashar that I have checked say R. Shlomo Alkabetz, the context leaves no doubt that it is a mistake and should read Ibn Gabirol.[10]
Censorship and political correctness in Masa’ot Yerushalayim
 
It is clear that the English edition is a translation from the latest Hebrew Edition published in 2003[11] by Emes publishing ltd. (the official publishing house of the Munkacz Hasidim in Brooklyn).[12] This addition is somewhat different from the first edition and I am not sure on what basis these changes were made. In addition to the footnotes which were actually parenthetical remarks included in the text in the original they have added numerous footnotes expanding and cross-referencing the material[13] and there is no differentiation made between the original footnotes and the later ones. There are also various differences in the text itself. For instance the original edition when describing the Grave of R. Haim ibn Attar, (the author of Ohr Hachaim) the first edition (p.25b) adds:
‘סמוך למנוחת האוה”ח הקדוש שם ג”כ מנוחת אשתו ושתי יבמות שהיו לו לנשים’
The 2003 edition is less shocking in it’s revelation by stating instead:
‘סמוך למנוחת האור החיים הקדוש שם גם כן מנוחת שתי נשיו‘
This is also the version found in the English translation and if memory serves correct, contemporary restorations at the actual gravesite reflect the veracity of the later edition. In fact, this may be the reason they took the initiative, justified or not, to change the text.[14]
On another occasion the altering of the text was clearly intended to avoid possible fallout with today’s Yeshiva adherents. I refer you to the passage in the first edition (p.87b-88a) which recounts how certain members of the Hareidi Rabbis of Jerusalem approached the Munkaczer Rebbe in an attempt to find a solution to the problem of the negative effect the recently established Hebroner yeshiva was having on native Jerusalmite youth on account of the former’s modern style of dress.[15] The Rebbe hastened to consult with R. Alfandari who wisely advised him not to make a commotion over it as such a fuss would only have negative ‘political results’. It reads like this:
בהיות רבנו שליט”א בתוככי ירושלים באו אליו גדולים חקרי לב מהרבנים החרדים שם ליהנות ממנו עצה ותושי’ כדת מה לעשות ע”ד ישיבת סלאבאדקע שהיתה מלפנים בחברון ואחר הפרעות והשחיטות ר”ל נעתקו משם וקבעו ישיבתם בירושלים והמה רובם ככולם (אם כי למדנים הם) הולכי קצוצי פאות וזקן ומגדלי בלורית ורגילים לזה ממדינתם ובהיותם בחברון שאין שם ישוב חסידים מהאשכנזים כ”כ לא הזיקו לאחרים משא”כ פה בקרתא דשופריא עיר מלאה חכמים חסידי עליון ירעו וישחיתו לנו ולבנינו ותלמידי ישיבתנו שילמדו מהם ח”ו בדמותם כצלמם.
רבנו בשמעו את כל התלאה הזאת הלך להתייעץ עם הסבא קדישא הרב מהרש”א אם להרעיש עליהם כעת אחרי שנמלטו על נפשם מהפראים וכו’. והוא השיב בחכמת שלמ”ה אשר בקרבו כי יש לחוש בעודם בחמימות מהרוגי חברון שנשחטו גם מתלמידי ישיבתם (ובתוכם יראי ה’ הי”ד) ואם ירעישו עליהם יכנסו תחת כנפי אותו האיש קוק וכל משרד הרבנות הציונית שר”י ועי”ז יתרבה חילם עי ישיבת סלאבאדקי מפורסמת בעולם והראש מתיבתא שלהם מפורסם ללמדן ע”כ שוא”ת עדיף כעת…
וכשאני לעצמי כשבאו תלמידי סלאבאדקא לביתי לדבר דברי תורה, וראיתים בלי זקן ופיאות ומגדלי בלורית, אמרתי להם על הכתוב (שיר השירים ב, יד) הראיני את מראיך (צלם אלקים על פי התורה. ואחר כך) השמיעיני את קולך בדברי תורה. אבל כשהוא ההיפך לא אדבר עמכם, ודחיתים כי הם באמת מחריבי קרתא קדישא. וכן יעשה גם הדר״ת להזהיר לאנשי שלומו ויראי אלקים להתרחק מישיבתם, אבל לא לצאת עתה בקול רעש מטעם הנ”ל עכתד”ה.
The 2003 edition censors this passage and simply writes:
בהיות רבינו שליט״א בתוככי ירושלים באו אליו גדולים חקרי לב מהרבנים החרדים שם ליהנות ממנו עצה ותושיה כדת מה לעשות על דבר פרצה מיוחדת שנפרצה בעיר ה׳. ושאל רבנו להסבא קדישא מה לעשות במחיצת כרם בית ישראל שנפרצה. וענה לו הסבא קדישא כי יש לחוש וכו’ על כן שב ואל תעשה עדיף כעת…
וכן סיפר הסבא קדיש אל רבינו כשבאו תלמידי ישיבה מסוימת לביתי לדבר דברי תורה, וראיתים בלי זקן ופיאות ומגדלי בלורית, אמרתי להם על הכתוב (שיר השירים ב, יד) הראיני את מראיך (צלם אלקים על פי התורה. ואחר כך) השמיעיני את קולך בדברי תורה. אבל כשהוא ההיפך לא אדבר עמכם, ודחיתים כי הם באמת מחריבי קרתא קדישא. וכן יעשה גם הדר״ת להזהיר לאנשי שלומו ויראי אלקים להתרחק מהם, אבל לא לצאת עתה בקול רעש, עד כאן תורף דבריו הקדושים.
There is no reason to suspect that this was done to protect the identity of R. Kook, because this edition shows little sympathy for R. Kook, in fact in the preceding paragraphs dealing with R. Alfandari’s opposition to R. Kook, the Chief Rabbinate[16], and even to Agudath Israel, nothing is omitted and the material is buttressed with lengthy footnotes detailing all the letters written by various Rabbis opposing Zionism in general and the Chief Rabbinate in particular. It is obvious that sensitivities for the Slabodka Yeshiva are at the root of this censorship. This is also why the next passage (from p. 88a), which I am loath to reproduce here, detailing R. Alfandari’s assessment of R. M.M. Epstein and R. Kook is also omitted in the 2003 edition.
Needless to say the English edition not only follows lead of the 2003 edition in censoring the Slabodka passages but also omits all of the anti R. Kook passages such as this one, from p. 229 in the 2003 edition:
כשבאו אליו אח”כ אנשים גם רבנים או אדמורי״ם שבאו לא”י, ושמע שהיו אצל ׳קוק׳ רב חראשי של המשרד חציונית והחפשים, לא אבה לקבלם להכניסם לביתו, ואמר הלא כבר היה אצל קוק[17] ומה יחפצו ממני, ומדוע אתם פוסחים על שתי חסעיפים.
Gone too are the following statements regarding Agudath Israel attributed to R. Alfandari, and with them a possible window into the special relationship he shared with the Munkaczer:
פעם אחד שאלו אותו לחוות דעתו בענין האגודה. והשיב שאין חילוק בין הציונים והמזרחים והאגודים רק בשמא, וחוט המקיף את כולם הוא הכסף והשתררות ולא כבוד שמים. על כן היה אוהב מאוד כששמע מצדיק ואדמו״ר אשר לא כרע לבעל לשום אחת מהמפלגות וכתות הנזכרים לעיל, ואדרבה מוחה בהם ומקנא קנאת ה׳ צבאות. ואמר כי מדה זו אהוב לו מן הכל ועולה על כולנה יותר מבקיאות התורה והפלגה בחסידות וזכות אבות, אם כי רב הוא.
Understandably, the English speaking audience this book is intended for is not as virulently anti-Zionist as the Munkacz/Satmar Hasidic base that the Hebrew edition was intended for and certainly wouldn’t countenance any anti-Agudah sentiments and therefore excised the more extreme passages from its translation. It is therefore all the more surprising that the following passage got by the careful eye of the censor and made it into the English edition on P. 178:
We found out that the main reason they did not keep their word was because they were afraid of their rabbi and leader, Yaakov Maier, a member of the official rabbinate, which the Sabba Kaddisha strenuously opposed. Immediately after the Sabba Kaddisha’s demise the zealous Torah scholars of Jerusalem warned Yaakov Maier not to come eulogize him.
Obviously they did not realize that despite R. Yaakov Meir’s affiliation with the Rabbinate as the Sephardic Rishon L’zion, nevertheless he was widely respected by virtually all segments of orthodox Jewry[18]. Indeed another popular Artscroll biography actually lauds R. Yaakov Meir for forging a close connection with Jerusalem’s Ultra-Orthodox Eidah Hachareidit and working together with them on various occasions.[19] Most likely, the American proofreader did not know who this famous Israeli-Sephardic personality was and thus allowed this disrespectful passage though.
In conclusion
 
The biographical information available on R. Alfandari is sparse, and precious little of it pertains to the bulk of his life before his move to Jerusalem in his final decade. There is certainly much more to the picture we could gain from a fuller biography of his life, also taking into perspective the vastly different milieu that he sprouted from. Yet, the detailed picture we have from the period of the Munkaczer’s visit certainly is an accurate portrayal of at least one dimension of his great personality. As I have demonstrated, the reader is best served consulting the original version where possible to obtain a more complete and accurate snapshot of this historic encounter.
In the case of R. Alfandari, this sort of contest for understanding and presenting his legacy is a testament to his greatness, his broad appeal, and to his own multi-faceted personality. He is certainly worthy of further in-depth study, and a full-length professional biography would certainly give us much to learn from and be inspired. However, this will only be true if the study is free of the constraints of bias and preconceived notions.


[1] It is difficult to pinpoint his exact year of birth and many different dates have been given. Masa’ot Yerushalayim, on the basis of a statement of R. Shlomo Eliezer regarding his involvement in the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, assumes that he had to have been born at least by 1810 and thereby making him 120 years old at the time of his death in 1930. In Ohalei Shem (pinsk 1912) p. 507 he is mistakenly referred to as ר’ חיים(!) מירקאדו אלפנדרי, and this has caused many to overlook his entry there, but there it states that he was born in 1846. Most sources give 1826 as the year of his birth.
[2] This quality was unique even among Ashkenazic Rabbis of that era but certainly among the Sephardic Rabbis. See what R. Yosef-Zundel of Salant had to say about his Sephardic contemporaries in Ha-tzaddik R. Yosef Zundel M’Salant p. 37 to wit ‘רבני הספרדים שיחיו…אעפ”י שהם ת”ח וצדיקים אכן אין הם יודעים מעניני האשכנזים כלל… ודאי כוונתם לש”ש אמנם יותר טוב היה להם השתיקה ולא להתערב בעניני האשכנזים’ .
[3] His name has understandably been misunderstood and misspelled by Ashkenazic writers. See for example: Mara D’ara Yisrael vol. 2 page 201 where he is addressed as כמהר”ר אלעזר מלכאדו אלפנדרי.
[4] In fact, the Hida writes in glosses to Sefer Hasidim (Brit Olam ad. loc.): ‘בראותי דברי רבנו הנאני דכך נוהגים במדינת תוגרמה ומתקיימים ונמצא שרש הענין בדברי רבנו ז”ל’. See also the other sources referenced in R. Margolies edition. R. Eliezer Brodt pointed out that some Ashkenazic scholars have also followed the advice of Sefer Hasidim, such as the Aderet; see his Seder Eliyahu p. 30.
[5] The practice of calling a child by anything other than his given surname may seem strange today but it had a parallel among Sephardim not too long ago, where many firstborns were called “B’chor” to the point of where his official surname was all but forgotten. See Keter Shem Tov (Keidan 1934) vol. 1 p. 680 where he writes: ‘המנהג בא”י וסת”מ כשנולד בן בכור, מלבד שם העריסה, קוראין אותו בשם “בכור” ולנקבה “בכורה”, ושם העריסה משתקע לגמרי. ואם יש לו משרה דתית קוראים לו רבי בכור, חכם בכור, או האדון בכור’.
[6] Including articles in these two publications here and here. The latter article by R. Aharon Surasky was later expanded and included in his Orot Hamizrach.
[7] This section was printed recently as the introduction to a new work of R. Alfandari’s published from manuscript by Ahavat Shalom (2011), as part of new initiative to publish more of his writings, called Yakhel Shlomo. Surprisingly, they attribute the article to the noted Jerusalem Kabbalist R. Yeshaya Asher Zelig Margolies. I am not sure how they could have made that mistake since it was clearly part of R. Goldstein’s work although he does credit R. Margolies, among others, for providing him with valuable information on R. Alfandari.
[8] See here.
[9] See here. The language used by R. Goldstein is too similar to that of Shalshelet Hakabbalah to be a coincidence and it is therefore surprising that he gave such a vague reference. The story is also recounted in Divrei Yosef (Jerusalem 2011) p. 81 with regards to R. Shlomo Ibn Gabirol.
[10] In the edition published by Machon Haktav (Jerusalem 2001) available here they have corrected it but leave no clue as to on what basis they did so. The legend itself has been shown to be inaccurate. See Yeshurun 25 pp. 769-770 and also R. Eliezer Brodt’s fine article here.
[11] The prologue to the English edition, basing itself on the Hebrew תשסד, mistakenly claims it was published in 2004.
[12] Available here.
[13]Some of which just don’t make any sense, such as this one (from the English edition p. 152): ‘Rabbeinu David ibn Zimra, who taught much Torah and had many great students. He wrote over 2000 halachic rulings, of which only 300 were printed.’ I can’t figure out what is the basis for this statement as there are actually well over 2000 responsa printed from the Radvaz.
[14] R. E. M. Reich pointed out that in Toldot Chachmei Yerushalayim vol. 3 p. 10, the author states that although according to folklore the two women buried adjacent to the Ohr Hachaim were יבמות, in reality they were his two wives. Interestingly enough, the account in Masa’ot Yerushalayim mentions three women altogether. It would seem that Toldot Chachmei Yerushalayim is the source for this change as you can tell by looking at the interesting footnote in the 2003 ed. (ad. loc.) which was lifted straight from Toldot Chachmei Yerushalayim. To wit: מקובל כי הן .היו נשים גדולות ומופלאות במעשיהן, ומנהגיהן היה להתעטף בטלית ולהתלבש בתפלין על דרך שאיתא במיכל בת שאול The only difference is that in Toldot Chachmei Yerushalayim this is only reported with regards to the second of his two wives. See also R. Rueven Margolies’ Toldot R. Chaim ibn Attar pp 45-46. Interestingly, he records an unsubstantiated report that there were four יבמות in addition to the two wives.
[15] It is noteworthy that R. Dov Cohen, a Slobodka student at that time, reported that the transition to Jerusalem was smooth ‘and almost completely devoid of any opposition’. See his memoirs: Vayelchu Shneihem Yachdav (Feldheim 2009) p. 250.
[16] R. Alfandari was so opposed to the Rabbinate that when he heard that R. Tzvi Pesah Frank, who had been close with him, had become involved with the Rabbinate, he remarked that it was ‘חמץ שנמצא בפסח’. I heard this from a descendant of R. Asher Zelig Margolies.
[17] It is instructive that in a written correspondence reproduced on p. 228 of the 2003 ed., R. Alfandari refers to R. Kook respectfully as הר’ מהרא”י קוק ה”י even when disagreeing with him sharply. It may be the zealotry of R. Goldstein who saw fit to leave out the honorifics in this quotation.
[18] To be sure, his appointment to this position after the death R. Elyashar in 1906, was not without controversy, as many favored R. Elyashar’s son to succeed him over the Alliance-trained and Zionist-inclined R. Yaakov Meir. In some cases he proved himself to be too right-wing for some factions, such as when he opposed the Vaad Ha’leumi for giving women the right to vote. See B’toch Hachomot (Jerusalem 1948) pp. 334-335.
[19] See Guardian of Jerusalem (Artscroll 1983) p. 401.

 



Israel ben Shabtai [Hapstein]. ‘Avodat Yisrael – Book review by Bezalel Naor

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Israel ben Shabtai [Hapstein]. ‘Avodat Yisrael (B’nei Berak: Pe’er mi-Kedoshim, 5773 / 2013). 66, 738 pages. 
Reviewed by Bezalel Naor 
Rabbi Israel ben Shabtai Hapstein, the Maggid of Kozienice (or more commonly, the “Kozhnitser Maggid”) (d. 1814) was a major figure in the third generation of East-European Hasidism founded by Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, and specifically, a towering luminary within Polish Hasidism. Like his contemporary Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liozhno (and later Liadi), Rabbi Israel studied under Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezritch (who led the Hasidic movement after the death of the founder, Ba’al Shem Tov). Unlike Rabbi Shneur Zalman, whose school of Hasidism, Habad, continues to this very day, Rabbi Israel founded no school and has no hasidim, no followers to speak of, today. 
The same goes for Rabbi Israel’s book. Whereas Rabbi Shneur Zalman’s most famous work, Tanya, has earned the sobriquet (at least among Habad Hasidim) “the written Torah of Hasidism” (“torah she-biketav shel hasidut”), relatively few have studied Rabbi Israel’s magnum opus, ‘Avodat Yisrael (Service of Israel), a commentary on the Pentateuch. Indicative of neglect in this respect, until today the book has been an example of poor typography. First published in 1842, ‘Avodat Yisrael has been reissued periodically with pitifully broken letters of “Rashi” script (today unfamiliar to Hebrew readers without rabbinic training). About now the cognoscenti will chime in, “Afilu sefer torah she-be-heikhal tsarikh mazal” (“Even a Torah scroll in the ark requires luck”) and “Habent sua fata libelli” (“Books have their fates”). 
Thankfully, this horrendous situation has now been remedied. Enter Pe’er mi-Kedoshim, a publishing concern headed by Rabbi Israel Menachem Alter, son of the present Rebbe of Gur. Pe’er mi-Kedoshim has committed itself to re-issuing the classic texts of Hasidic thought in deluxe, state-of-the-art editions. The Kozhnitser Maggid’s ‘Avodat Yisrael is the premier volume in a series envisioned to include: Degel Mahaneh Efraim by Ba’al Shem Tov’s grandson, Rabbi Moses Hayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow (next on the agenda); No’am Elimelekh by Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk; Zot Zikaron by Rabbi Jacob Isaac Horowitz (the “Seer of Lublin”), et cetera. 
The book displays all the benefits that the modern age of Hebrew printing has brought to the sacred realm. The cursive “Rashi” script has been replaced by the square characters familiar to every Hebrew reader, which have then been provided with vowel points and modern punctuation. Sidebars caption the highlights of the Maggid’s comments. Footnotes reference sources in rabbinic and kabbalistic literature, as well as cross-referencing to parallel passages in the Maggid’s own works. As is customary, the book is preceded by “Toledot” (Biography) of the Author, and followed by “Maftehot” (Indices). (At present these indices are purely topical. It is hoped that in the future there will be included an index of the works cited by the Maggid, which will allow students of his thought a glimpse of his library, and the horizon of his intellectual and spiritual world.) 
Quoting the Psalmist, “Who can understand errors?” (Psalms 19:12), the Editors have encouraged readers to offer constructive criticism, including pointing out errata in the present printing. Let us take them up on their kind offer. 
In Parashat Bereshit, end s.v. vayyasem H’ le-Kayin ‘ot (6a), the Maggid observes “that there are times when miracles are performed by the Other Side, as we find in the Gemara, and in the Midrash, Parashat Toledot, that through Arginiton miracles were performed for Rabbi Judah the Prince and his companions, and the Omnipresent has many emissaries.” Where the Maggid alludes to an unspecified “Gemara,” the Editors have supplied within the text itself, within parentheses, “Me’ilah 17b.” If one consults the text of that passage in the Talmud Bavli, one discovers that it concerns miracles wrought by Ben Temalyon (name of a demon) for Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai during his mission to Rome. When offered the demon’s help, rather than rebuffing him, Rabbi Shim’on resigned himself to accepting his intervention by saying: “Yavo’ ha-ness mi-kol makom.” (“Let the miracle come from any place.”) This statement of Rabbi Shim’on is similar in tenor to the Maggid’s conclusion: “Harbeh sheluhim la-Makom.” (“The Omnipresent has many emissaries.”) 
Clearly, the Editors have read the text of ‘Avodat Yisrael in a disjointed fashion, interpreting that the “Gemara” and the “Midrash, Parashat Toledot” refer to two different stories. My own reading of the situation is that the “Gemara” and the “Midrash, Parashat Toledot” refer to the identical story whereby Rabbi Judah the Prince and his companions were spared the imperial wrath of Diocletian through the intervention of the demon Arginiton (or in the version of the Yerushalmi, “Antigris”). The “Gemara” of course is not the Gemara Bavlit, but rather the Gemara Yerushalmit, and the reference is to the Talmud Yerushalmi at the end of the eighth chapter of Terumot. I rather like my suggested reading for two reasons. First, we are told in the biographical introduction to the book that Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin attested that the Kozhnitser Maggid was “familiar with Talmud Yerushalmi” (“baki be-Shas Yerushalmi”) (p. 30). Second, in recent years, the Hasidic court of Gur has expended great energy in promoting the study of the hitherto neglected Talmud Yerushalmi, so I believe it especially appropriate that the edition of ’Avodat Yisrael under the guidance of Rabbi Israel Menachem Alter shelit”a offer this alternate solution to deciphering the Maggid’s cryptic reference to “the Gemara.” 
In Parashat Shemot, beginning s.v. ve-sham’u le-kolekha (91a), the Maggid writes that Moses was confronted with a conundrum. On the one hand, he was pressing for some kind of divine assurance that his mission to Egypt be crowned with success and that the Hebrews indeed hearken to his voice. On the other hand, he was concerned that by its very nature a divine guarantee would rob the Hebrews of their free will, forcing them into belief. The assumption is that the Hebrews were redeemed from Egypt in the merit of their faith or emunah. (See Exodus Rabbah, Beshalah [parashah 23] playing on the words “tashuri me-rosh Amanah” [Song of Songs 4:8].) It is a tribute to the originality of the Kozhnitser Maggid that while most Biblical commentators busied themselves with the philosophic problem of God’s hardening the heart of Pharaoh, thereby depriving him of the free will to respond affirmatively to the divine demands, the Maggid explored in the opposite direction the problem of preserving the Hebrews’ free will to disbelieve. The Maggid’s solution to the problem involves some rather esoteric doctrines of Kabbalah, namely “hanhagat gadlut” (“governance of greatness”) versus “hanhagat katnut” (“governance of smallness”), best left for the adept in Jewish mysticism. I would just point out for the record that the Editors missed a cue here. When the Maggid writes “’Ve-hen’ she-hu ahat,” he is clearly referencing the Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 31b: “She-ken bi-leshon yevani korin la-ahat ‘hen’.” (“Hen in Greek is one.”) 
In the section for the festival of Shavu’ot, s.v. u-Moshe ‘alah el ha-Elohim (200a), the Maggid writes: “Since all Israel prepared themselves for the sanctity of the Lord, and a leader is commensurate to his generation, therefore Moses was able to ascend above.” Now the crucial words, the key to understanding this thought, “u-parnas lefi doro” (“and a leader is commensurate to his generation”), have been emended by the Editors to: “kol ehad le-fi koho” (“each according to his ability”). Granted that in the old edition there was some fuzziness concerning these words (“u-parush lefi doro”), but they could still be made out simply by correcting “u-parush lefi doro” to “u-parnas lefi doro,” a well-known Hebrew adage. In the present version, one is at a loss to glean the Maggid’s meaning. (I see now that the wording “kol ehad lefi koho” does occur in the Warsaw 1878 edition of ‘Avodat Yisrael. Unfortunately, the edition I possess is without place or date. Unable to locate a copy of the editio princeps of 1842, I have no way of knowing which version occurs there.) 
In Parashat Mas’ei, end s.v. eleh mas’ei b’nei yisrael (240a), in regard to Tish’ah be-Av, the Maggid discusses the difference between the “batei gava’ei” (“inner chambers”) and the “batei bara’ei” (“outer chambers”), alluded to by the Rabbis in TB, Hagigah 5b. The Maggid’s remarks in this passage are consonant with what he wrote elsewhere in Ner Israel, his commentary to the Likkutim me-Rav Hai Gaon (2a): “In the outer chambers there is sadness and mourning, but for one who is able to ascend to the inner chambers, to the will of the Creator, blessed be He, certainly there is happiness.” (By the way, the kabbalists’ reading of the passage in Hagigah, while opposite Rashi’s, coincides with the version of Rabbenu Hananel. See Rabbi Solomon Elyashev, Hakdamot u-She’arim [Piotrkow, 1909], sha’ar 6, chap. 6, “avnei milu’im” [24b-27b].) 
In Parashat Devarim, end s.v. eleh ha-devarim (246a) there is a quote from Rabbi Isaac Luria’s commentary to the Idra Zuta. The Maggid supplies the exact page number: folio 120. The problem is that the passage does not occur there. The Editors have left the reference in the text untouched. At least in a footnote we should be told that the quote may be found in Rabbi Jacob Zemah, Kol ba-Ramah (Korets, 1785), 122a. (I am indebted to my dear friend Prof. Menachem Kallus for the correct address.) See also Rabbi Hayyim Vital, Sefer ha-Derushim (Jerusalem, 5756 /1996), 214 (left column); and Rabbi Shalom Buzaglo, Hadrat Melekh, 139a. 
In the section for Tu be-Av, s.v. meyuhasot she-bahen (256b-257a), the Maggid writes that there are times that ki-ve-yakhol (as it were), God so delights in Israel that He becomes as a young man (bahur). The Maggid writes that he has dealt with this in his commentary to the line in Avot (beginning Chap. 6), “Barukh she-bahar bahem u-be-mishnatam.” As the Editors point out, the comment is not to be found in the Maggid’s remarks on Avot. Instead, they refer us to a parallel passage in Re’eh, s.v. ve-hineh ha-Midrash (270a). By the same token, they might have referred us to Ner Israel (commentary to Likkutim me-Rav Hai Gaon), 4b: “Ve-nikra bahur ka-arazim…” 
In the section for Rosh ha-Shanah, there is a lengthy kabbalistic homily, the thrust of which is that on that day we ask the Holy One, blessed be He, to reinvest himself in the particular role of “Elohei Yisrael” (“God of Israel”). “The God of these [Jews] is asleep.” Which is to say, [the nations] were not foolish enough to assert that the Sibat Kol ha-Sibbot (Cause of All Causes) is in a state of slumber, only “the God of these [Jews],” in other words, this particular hanhagah (governance) referred to as “Elohei Yisrael” (the God of Israel) is in a state of sleep…and unconsciousness, and there is but “Elaha de-Elahaya” (the God of Gods). Based on this, you will understand the kavvanot (mystical meditations) of Rabbi Isaac Luria for Rosh Hashanah. We awaken Him with the shofar (ram’s horn). (‘Avodat Yisrael, 290b) The Editors duly noted the reference to Rabbi Hayyim Vital, Peri ‘Ets Hayyim, Sha’ar ha-Shofar, chap. 1. But what they should have noted is the following reference which would have been even more instructive: “Now in the days of Mordecai was the mystery of the time of dormita of Zeir Anpin, and the mystery that Haman said ‘There is (yeshno) one people spread and separated among the peoples’ [Esther 3:8]. The Rabbis, of blessed memory, commented on the word ‘yeshno,’ that Haman alleged ‘their God is asleep.’” (Rabbi Hayyim Vital, Sha’ar ha-Purim, beginning chap. 5) The Holy Maggid loaded the kavvanot of Purim on to the kavvanot of Rosh Ha-Shanah! 
The Kozhnitser Maggid was a preeminent halakhist (specializing in heter ‘agunot, permitting wives of missing husbands to remarry), kabbalist, thinker (penning commentaries to the works of Maharal of Prague), and statesman. With all that, the following anecdote sent a shiver down my spine: The Kozhnitser Maggid was on friendly terms with several prominent members of the Polish nobility. In the eighteenth century, Poland, dismembered and subjected to a tripartite division—whereby Prussia annexed the western portion of Poland; Austro-Hungary annexed Galicia in the south; and Russia annexed the east—simply ceased to exist. A certain Polish nobleman importuned the Maggid to intercede with Heaven on behalf of the Polish nation. The gentleman would not leave the Maggid’s home until promised Polish independence. Finally, the Maggid foretold that at a time in the future Poland would once again be a sovereign nation—for a span of “three shemitin” (three sabbatical cycles or 21 years). When the Jews of Warsaw were being subjected to aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe in September of 1939, they recalled the Maggid’s prediction. In the aftermath of World War I, in 1918 to be precise, Poland once again declared its independence. Three shemitin had passed from 1918 until 1939. Warsaw capitulated to the Nazis on the eve of Sukkot, the yahrzeit of the Kozhnitser Maggid! This anecdote was told by a witness to Warsaw’s destruction, Rabbi Joseph Friedenson, editor of Dos Yiddishe Vort, the Yiddish magazine of Agudath Israel of America (“Toledot,” p. 37).