Further Comments by Marc Shapiro

By Marc B. Shapiro

I had thought that this would be my last post of the current batch, but it turned out to be too long. So I have divided it into two parts. Here is part no. 1.

The volumes Shomrei Mishmeret ha-Kodesh, by R. Natan Raphael Auerbach, have just appeared. Here is the cover.

This book is devoted to the Auerbach family, which was one of the great rabbinic families in Germany. They were the “A” in what was known as the ABC rabbinic families (the others being Bamberger and Carlebach). Over 150 pages are devoted to R. Zvi Benjamin Auerbach, who was the most prominent of the Auerbach rabbis. He was also the publisher of Sefer ha-Eshkol, to which he added his commentary Nahal Eshkol. In a number of posts I dealt with Auerbach’s edition of Sefer Ha-Eshkol, and discussed how both academic scholars and traditional talmidei hakhamim have concluded that the work is a forgery.1 Readers who are interested in the details can examine the earlier posts. In this newly published volume, which was called to my attention by Eliezer Brodt, the author speaks briefly about the Sefer ha-Eshkol controversy and responds to those who, in his words, continue to defame a gadol be-Yisrael (p. 382):

הממשיכים לבזות גדול בישראל ולהכפישו באופן אישי

In the note the author refers to Moshe Samet, who earlier had dealt with Sefer ha-Eshkol, and also to one of my posts on the Seforim Blog. While Seforim Blog posts have been cited in English scholarly writings, as far as I know this is the first time that there has been citation in a Hebrew volume.

I understand why members of the Auerbach family might feel obliged to defend him. (Yet one of my college suitemates was a descendant of Auerbach, and it didn’t seem to trouble him when I told him about the controversy.) Why a respected rabbi would forge a book is not something I want to get into now. In the earlier post I assumed that he was schizophrenic, as when it comes to Sefer ha-Eshkol I can’t think of any ideological reason for his actions. (Samet, He-Hadash Assur min ha-Torah [Jerusalem, 2005], p. 152 n. 235, identifies as one of Auerbach’s motivations: מגמה אורתודוקסית).

As for the argument that since he was a leading rabbi we must therefore assume that he couldn’t have done such a thing, this is disproven by all the recent examples of well-known rabbis who were involved in a variety of types of improper behavior. Before they were exposed, no one could ever have imagined what we learnt, and everyone would have been 100 percent sure that these rabbis could not possibly have been involved in such activities. This simply shows that that just because someone is a well-known rabbi we don’t have to automatically conclude that he is innocent no matter what the evidence says.

In many of the recent cases, at least the ones dealing with sexual abuse, the rabbis no doubt suffered from some sort of mental illness, as I can’t imagine that men who did so much to influence people positively and help them were complete frauds. I think that Auerbach must also have had some psychological issues, and this is actually the best limud zekhut. For once we assume this, it means that we don’t have to view the rest of his illustrious career and achievements as fraudulent. In short, he had a problem and it manifested itself in his forgeries. Yet I admit that I can’t prove my supposition, and at the end of the day we will probably never be able to explain definitively why Auerbach would forge the text any more than we can explain how another great figure, Erasmus, forged a patristic work and attributed it to Saint Cyprian.2 Anthony Grafton, who has written an entire book on the subject, sums up the matter as follows: “The desire to forge, in other words, can infect almost anyone: the learned as well as the ignorant, the honest person as well as the rogue.”3

Unfortunately, Shomrei Mishmeret ha-Kodesh does not seriously deal with any of the evidence that has led to the conclusion that we are dealing with a forgery. (For reasons I can’t get into now, I find it completely implausible that someone in medieval times forged the work and Auerbach was duped. But let me make one point: Auerbach claimed to be working from a very old manuscript, and yet this “manuscript” contains material from the 17th and 18th centuries.). Since the author mentions Sefer ha-Eshkol vol. 4, which was published in 1986 together with the Nahal Eshkol, I once again renew my call for this manuscript to be made public and for some explanation to be given as to where it comes from, since Auerbach’s many defenders were unaware of it. The fact that a portion of Auerbach’s manuscript (i.e. his copy of the supposed medieval manuscript) mysteriously surfaced so many decades after Auerbach’s death, and that we are told nothing about it or even shown a picture of it, certainly raises red flags. As I noted in one of my previous posts, the Nahal Eshkol published here has a reference to a book that only appeared after Auerbach died. This means that quite apart from Sefer ha-Eshkol, we also have to raise questions about whether the Nahal Eshkol published here is itself authentic. It could be that it is indeed genuine, and the reference to the later book is an interpolation, but that is why we have to see the manuscript. After all, if the manuscript is written in one hand, and it includes the reference to the later book, then there is no doubt that it too is a forgery. So let the evidence about Sefer ha-Eshkol vol. 4, together with the manuscript, be placed on the Seforim Blog for all to see. Perhaps then we can begin to understand the mystery of this volume.

As long as the topic has been brought up, let me call attention to Shulamit Elitzur’s new book, Lamah Tzamnu (Jerusalem, 2007). On p. 115 n. 2, she gives an example where the Sefer ha-Eshkol forgery was perpetrated by using a quotation from the Shibolei ha-Leket, and cites a comment in this regard from the noted scholar Simhah Emanuel. On p. 235 n. 3,8 she mentions another example of forgery in the Auerbach Sefer Ha-Eshkol. For further instance, see Israel Moshe Ta-Shma’s posthumously published Keneset Mehkarim, vol. 4 (Jerusalem, 2010), p. 183 n. 28.4 In an article in Atarah le-Hayyim (Jerusalem, 2000), p. 292, Neil Danzig also points to a non-authentic interpolation in Auerbach’s Sefer ha-Eshkol. Yet I am surprised to see that he follows Ta-Shma in thinking that R. Moses De Leon might have had something to do with this.

In terms of traditional Torah scholars, I came across a comment by R. Avigdor Nebenzahl in R. Yaakov Epstein’s recently published Hevel Nahalato, vol. 7, p. 157. (Epstein is the grandson of Prof. Jacob Nahum Epstein.5) Nebenzahl comes from a German Orthodox background, so one might expect him to come to the defense of Auerbach, as did a number of prominent German Orthodox figures. Yet that is not what we find. Epstein had cited a passage from Auerbach’s Sefer ha- Eshkol to which Nebenzahl added that it is well known that some question the authenticity of this edition and claim that it is a forgery. In case you are looking for any non-scholarly motivations for this comment, I should mention that Nebenzahl’s sister was Plia Albeck (died 2005), the daughter-in-law of Hanokh Albeck and a significant person in her own right. (She paved the way for most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.) Hanokh Albeck, together with his father, Shalom Albeck, published the authentic Sefer ha-Eshkol, and were both very involved in exposing Auerbach’s forgery. In other words, Nebenzahl’s comment shows that families stick together. (Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if there have been any marriages between the two important families, the Auerbachs and the Albecks?)

In a previous post, I mentioned R. Yehiel Avraham Zilber’s belief that the Auerbach Sefer ha-Eshkol is forged. To the sources I referred to, we can add Birur Halakhah, Orah Hayyim 75. Also, R. Yisrael Tuporovitz, who has written many volumes of Talmudic commentaries, is not shy about offering his opinion. Here is what he writes in Derekh Yisrael: Hullin (Bnei Brak, 1999), p. 8:

וכבר נודע שספר האשכול הנדפס עם ביאור נחל אשכול הוא מזוייף ואין לסמוך עליו כלל

He repeats this judgment on pages 38, 53 and 345.

In one of the earlier posts I mentioned that R. Yitzhak Ratsaby denies the authenticity of Auerbach’s edition. I also quoted from his letter to me. At the time, I was unaware that portions of this letter also appear in his haskamah to R. Moshe Parzis’ Taharat Kelim (Bnei Brak, 2002). Another new source in this regard from Ratsaby is his Shulhan Arukh ha-Mekutzar (Bnei Brak, 2000), Yoreh Deah 138:3 (p. 287), where he accuses Auerbach of taking something from the Peri Hadash and placing it in Sefer ha-Eshkol.

Ratsaby discussed the Sefer ha-Eshkol in his haskamah to Parzis’ book because the latter had called attention to the defense of Auerbach in Tzidkat ha-Tzaddik. Here is the title page of the latter work.

Among the defenders of Auerbach was R. Jacob Schorr of Kuty, Galicia. Schorr was a genius and is best known for his edition of the Sefer ha-Itim.6 He also wrote the responsa volume Divrei Yaakov (Kolomea, 1881), and a second volume, culled from various sources, both published and manuscript, appeared in 2006. Here is his picture, taken from Aharon Sorasky’s Marbitzei Torah me-Olam ha-Hasidut, vol. 3, p. 11.

It is an unfortunate oversight that this incredible scholar does not have an entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. A list of all of his works can be found in the introduction to his Mavo al ha-Tosefta (Petrokov, 1930). This introduction also contains R. Zvi Ezekiel Michaelson’s biography of Schorr. As with everything written by this amazing bibliophile,7 one learns a great deal, not only about the subject he focuses on, but about all sorts of other things.8 Michaelson was killed in the Holocaust and numerous unpublished manuscripts of his were lost. His grandson was Prof. Moshe Shulvass, and a responsum is addressed to him in Michaelson’s Tirosh ve-Yitzhar, no. 158.

Schorr’s son was Dr. Alexander Schorr, who translated many classic Greek and Latin texts into Hebrew.9 Alexander Schorr’s grandson is the well-known Israeli film director, Renen Schorr.10

Since Prof. Leiman has just written about the Maharal, it is worth noting that Schorr tells an incredibly far-fetched story, which he actually believed, about the Maharal and Emperor Rudolph. According to the tale, Rudolph’s biological father was a Jewish man. What happened was that Rudolph’s mother, the queen, could not have children with the Emperor. She therefore asked a Jewish man to impregnate her or else she would unleash persecution on the Jews in the kingdom. Upon hearing this, the beit din gave the man permission to accede to her wishes. I don’t want to repeat any more of this nonsensical story, but those who are interested can find it in R. Abraham Michaelson’s Shemen ha-Tov (Petrokov, 1905), pp. 60a-b. (R. Abraham was R. Zvi Ezekiel’s son.)

Returning to Schorr, one of the most astounding examples of self-confidence—others will no doubt call it arrogance or foolishness—ever stated by a rabbi (in print, at least) was penned by him. In his Meir Einei Hakhamim, reprinted in Kitvei ve-Hiddushei ha-Gaon Rabbi Yaakov Schorr (Bnei Brak, 1991), p. 177, we find the following:

ואני מעיד עלי שמים וארץ כי לא היה ולא יקום עוד אחרי שום חכם אשר יהי’ בקי בטוב [!] בפלפול תנאים ואמוראים כמותי

This text is often quoted by R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer in his various works.11 This is not the only time Schorr expressed himself this way. On page 129 he writes

ודע דהופיע רוח הקודש בבית מדרשי

(This expression can also be found in other books, and originates in Rabad’s hassagah to Hilkhot Lulav 8:5. But to see this type of language in a sefer written by a someone very young [see below], even a genius like Schorr, is a bit jarring.) Sofer, Shem Betzalel, p. 28, also points to Meir Einei Hakhamim, p. 209, where Schorr writes about one of his ideas:

וזה נכון יותר מפירוש רש”י

(On this page, Schorr alludes to R Zvi Hirsch Chajes, referring to him as אחד מחכמי הזמן. Sofer claims that Schorr’s general practice is to not mention Chajes by name. Sofer wants the reader to think that he doesn’t know why Schorr acts this way. Yet the reason is obvious, and Sofer himself certainly knows that some talmudists were not fans of Chajes.)

Perhaps we can attribute Schorr’s over-the-top comments to his own immaturity. After all, as Sofer, Shem Betzalel, p. 29, points out, Schorr began writing the book I am quoting from at age thirteen, and completed it by the time he was sixteen. A genius he certainly was, yet I think we should assume that his excessive comments were the product of youthful exuberance. Sofer sees Schorr’s youthfulness as also responsible for the very harsh way he criticizes the writings of various gedolim, which is something that is more understandable, and forgivable, in a teenager than in a mature scholar. I think all writers are embarrassed of things their penned in their youth, and that is to be expected.12 An example I often mention in this regard (when not referring to myself) is Hirsch’s harsh criticism of Maimonides. This appeared in Hirsch’s first book, the Nineteen Letters, published when he was 28 years old. Never again in Hirsch’s many writings does he ever express himself this way. My assumption is that he regretted what he wrote, and in his mature years he would not have used such strong language. Similarly, I wonder if in his mature years R. Soloveitchik would have commented to R. Weinberg—as he did in his twenties—that his grandfather had a greater understanding than even the Vilna Gaon. (I have printed Weinberg’s letter where this appears in a few different places, most recently on the Seforim Blog and in the Hebrew section to my Studies in Maimonides.)

In terms of young achievers in the Lithuanian Torah world, I wonder how many have ever heard of R. Meir Shafit. He lived in the nineteenth century and wrote a commentary on the Jerusalem Talmud, when not many were studying it. Here is the title page of one of the volumes, where it tells us that he became rav of a community at the age of fifteen.

The Hazon Ish once remarked that the young Rabbi Shafit would mischievously throw pillows at his gabbaim!13

Returning to Schorr and Sefer ha-Eshkol, Ratsaby is not impressed by Schorr’s defense. He notes that in R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer’s Torat Yaakov, Sofer states that the ideas of Schorr “צריכים בדיקה.”

I found the comment in Torat Yaakov (2002 edition) p. 880. Here Sofer claims that despite his brilliance, Schorr often puts forth unsustainable suppositions, and he calls attention to R. Reuven Margaliot, Ha-Mikra ve-ha-Mesorah, ch. 12. Here Margaliot cites a suggestion by Schorr that the text of Kiddushin 30a should be emended because the vav of גחון is not the middle letter of the Torah. Schorr further states that the editor of Masekhet Sofrim was misled by the error in the Talmud. The implication of Schorr’s comment is that all of our sifrei Torah are mistaken, for they mark this letter as special. Margaliot responds:

ותמה אני על תלמיד חכם מובהק כמוהו איך הרשה לעצמו לחשוב על מסדר מסכת סופרים שהוא טועה ומטעה וגם בודה מלבו מנהגים בכתיבת ס”ת. ב”הגהות” כאלו יכולים לעשות כל מה שרוצים, וכאשר כתב הגר”א [אליהו] פוסק בפסקי אליהו שם: רעדה אחזתני לעשות טעות כזה בגמרא ולחשוב על כל הס”ת שגיונות בדקדוקים דו’ דגחון ודרש דרש.

With regard to Ratsaby, I should also note that his dispute with R. Ovadiah Yosef continues unabated. In his recent Ner Yom Tov (Bnei Brak, 2008), pp. 20-21, he goes so far as to accuse R. Ovadiah of plagiarism.

He also states, with regard to R. Ovadiah (p. 100):

שכבוד התורה אצלו, הוא רק למי שמסכים לדבריו

Ratsaby’s book was written to defend the Yemenite practice of not making a blessing on Yom Tov candles against the criticism of R. Ovadiah. He also deals with R. Ovadiah’s larger point that the Yemenites must embrace the Shulhan Arukh’s rulings now that they are in the Land of Israel. The entire Yemenite rabbinate agrees with Ratsaby’s position, but upon seeing how he attacked R. Ovadiah, the condemnation of him from other Yemenite rabbis was swift. All I can say in defense of Ratsaby is that R. Ovadiah has been criticizing him in a less than respectful way for some time now. But in a sense, Ratsaby got what was coming to him, because for many years he has been writing very disrespectfully about R. Kafih.

In this new book, p. 98, Ratsaby goes so far as to repeat the legend that when Kafih was appointed a dayan in Jerusalem he swore to R. Ovadiah that he accepted the Zohar, and Ratsaby claims that Kafih swore falsely. Kafih, however, denied that he ever took such an oath.14 For a long time Ratsaby has been proclaiming that it forbidden to use Kafih’s books, as he is a member of the kat, i.e., the Dardaim who don’t accept the Zohar or Kabbalah in general. Yet R. Ovadiah has declared that the Dardaim are not to be regarded as heretics.15 This is in contrast to R. Chaim Kanievsky who holds that the Dardaim are heretics who cannot be counted in a minyan.16 R. David Teherani states that since the Dardaim reject the Zohar, their wine is yein nesekh.17 According to Aaron Abadi, R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach also ruled that rejection of the Zohar and Kabbalah is heresy.18

I can understand those who assert that one must believe that the Zohar was written by Rashbi or at the very least that it was written be-ruah ha-kodesh, and if you deny this it is heresy. Yet what is one to make of the following statement, which greatly enlarges the realm of heresy (R. Menasheh Klein, Mishneh Halakhot, vol. 7, no. 160):

ואם הוא אינו מאמין שהמ”ב [משנה ברורה] נכתב ברוה”ק אזי הוא בכלל אפיקורוס וכופר בתורת ה’ . . . יש בזמן הזה שאין מאמינים שגם בדורינו אנו ישנם חכמי הזמן שיש להם רוה”ק . . . ומי שלא מאמין בזה הרי הוא אפיקורוס וכופר בלי ספק.

Based on this definition, I think the entire Lithuanian rabbinate until World War II would be regarded as heretics. Would such a statement even have been imaginable before twenty years ago? It is, of course, no secret that the Lithuanian rabbinate has been transformed along hasidic lines. This change is undeniable and I can point to many examples of this. Here is one (which was sent to me by R. Yitzhak Hershkowitz).

Would any Jew in Lithuania ever fall for such a thing as magic (or holy) wine? Anyone who tried to peddle this stuff would have been thrown out of the beit midrash. I was actually told an anti-hasidic joke with regard to this picture. I ask all Hasidim not to be offended as neither I nor the management endorse the joke. Yet it deserves to be recorded for posterity, for as we all know, jokes are simply jokes, but the history of jokes (even bad ones), well that is scholarship. The joke goes as follows: “It is incredbible. We now see great Lithuanian Torah scholars doing things that until now only hasidic rebbes did. But even more incredible would be to see the reverse, that is, to see hasidic rebbes write seforim on Shas and poskim.”

With regard to the Zohar, I must mention an amazing point called to my attention by David Zilberberg, from which we see that R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik did not believe that R. Simeon bar Yohai wrote the Zohar, or at least that he didn’t write all of it. I always assumed as much, but as far as I know there was never any proof, until now. In The Lord is Righteous in All His Ways, pp. 206-207, the Rav discusses the Western Wall and says that there is no mention of it in Chazal and very little mention in rishonim. The Wall is mentioned in Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah 2:2219, where it states that the Kotel will never be destroyed, but the Rav says about this Midrash:

I will tell you frankly that I am always suspicious about this midrash, because the classical sources, the Bavli and the Yerushalmi, do not mention the Kotel ha-Ma’aravi. The midrash cited earlier is, perhaps, a later insert. Apparently, Rabbi El’azar ha-Kalir knew the midrash. To my mind, this kinah of Rabbi Elazar ha-Kalir is one of the earliest documents to mention the Kotel ha-Ma’aravi.

Earlier in this book the Rav tells us when Kalir lived:

I do not know why historians have to explore when Kalir lived when he himself states that nine hundred years have passed and the Messiah has not yet arrived. It means that Kalir lived in the tenth century.

Yet as Zilberberg correctly points out, the Western Wall is seen as quite significant in the Zohar (II, 5b), and is referred to as Rosh Amanah.20 The Rav knew the Zohar very well, and therefore, when he tells us that Chazal do not mention the Western Wall, and it is only during the time of the rishonim that we begin to see references to it, he is also telling us that the Zohar (or at least this section of the Zohar) was written in the days of the rishonim.

Returning to Auerbach, let me add in conclusion that he is not the only great rabbi and Torah scholar who was involved in forgery. An earlier case is R. Benjamin Ze’ev of Arta (sixteenth century), author of the well known responsa volume Teshuvot Binyamin Ze’ev. Here is the title page from the first edition (Venice, 1539):

In the midst of a dispute he was involved in, he forged the signature of the Venetian rabbi, R. Baruch Bendit Axelrad, placing it on a document that supported himself. He also forged an entire letter in R. Baruch Bendit’s name. When all this was discovered, it helped lead to R. Benjamin’s downfall.21

Quite apart from the forgery, R. Solomon Luria, Yam Shel Shlomo, Bava Kamma, ch. 8 no. 72, also accuses R. Benjamin Zev of plagiarism. Here are some his words:

כל דבריו גנובים וארוכים בפלפול שאינו לצורך וכנגד פנים מראה אחור . . . ושרי לי מרי אם הוא צדיק למה הביא הקב”ה תקלה על ידו הלא הוא היה הכותב ונתן לדפוס הספר מידו ומפיו.

One big question that needs to be considered is how far removed is forgery from false attribution? When it comes to false attribution there is a long rabbinic tradition supporting it, and in the book I am currently working on I deal with this in great detail. If you can falsely attribute a position to a sage, perhaps you can forge a document in his name as well (assuming it is not done for personal gain). Could that be what was driving Auerbach?

* * *

A few people have sent me a question about my Monday night Torah in Motion classes, so I assume that there are others who have the question as well. Here is the answer: If you cannot be with us at 9PM and you are signed up, the classes are sent to you so that you can watch or listen at your convenience. This is much cheaper than downloading the classes individually.

Notes

1 From my post here you can find all the links.

2 See Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, 1990), pp. 44-45.

3 Ibid., p. 48.

4 As has been noted by many, Auerbach’s edition of Sefer Ha-Eshkol has misled countless talmidei hakhamim. There is another way in which Auerbach misled a scholar, but in this case it was accidental. In the introduction to his edition, p. xv note 9, Auerbach reports in the name of a supposedly reliable person that the Yerushalmi Kodashim was to be found in the Vatican library. This false report led R. Mordechai Farhand to travel there from Hungary in search of this treasure, and he describes his journey. See Farhand, Be’er Mordechai (Galanta, 1927), pp. 154ff. Farhand was a gullible fellow. See ibid. p. 152, where even though it had been a number of years since Friedlaender’s Yerushalmi forgery had been established, he didn’t want to take sides. The legend that there was a copy of the Yerushalmi Kodashim in the Vatican had been disproven already in the nineteenth century. See R. Baruch Oberlander in Or Yisrael (Tamuz 5761), p. 220.

5 In his review of my edition of Kitvei ha-Rav Weinberg, vol. 2, R. Neriah Guttel, Ha-Ma’ayan (Nisan 5764), pp. 82-83, writes that it was improper for me to publish Weinberg’ judgment of Epstein (p. 430). Although they were friends, and Weinberg thought that Epstein was a great scholar, he also pointed out that that Epstein wasn’t a lamdan. What Weinberg meant is that Epstein wasn’t a traditional talmid hakham but an academic Talmudic researcher. As such, while his publications had great value, in Weinberg’s eyes they didn’t get to the heart of what Talmudic scholarship should be about. In Weinberg’s words:

סוכ”ס אפשטיין אינו למדן, ואיננו אלא פילולוג בעל חוש חד. בלא לומדות אי אפשר לחקור לא את המשנה ולא התלמוד.

Statements like these are vital for evaluating Weinberg’s approach to academic scholarship, and I never would dream of censoring such things.

6 In his Sha’ar Yaakov (Petrokov, 1922), no. 16, there is a responsum to “Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Shmuel Glick, Kuntres ha-Teshuvot he-Hadash, vol. 3, s.v. Sha’ar Yaakov, assumes that this is the famous A. J. Heschel, but I don’t think we can conclude this based only on the name, which was shared by a number of others.

7 Eleh Ezkerah (New York, 1957), vol. 2, p. 196 (repeated in the Encylopaedia Judaica entry on Michaelson), states that in Michaelson’s Degan Shamayim (Petrokov, 1901), there are responsa written when he was twelve and thirteen years old. This is a mistake. The earliest responsa dates from when he was seventeen years old. See pp. 10a, 11a.

8 On p. 23 he prints a letter that Schorr wrote to Michaelson’s son, who wanted to translate the Sefer ha-Hinukh into Yiddish. Schorr was strongly opposed to this. He explained as follows, using words that won’t make the women very happy:

רבינו הרמב”ם והחינוך אחריו שהודיעו ברבים טעמי מצות וכו’ יכשלו בזה קלי הדעת לבטל המצוה כפי סכלות דעתם אשר לפי הטעם אין לחוש עוד בזמנינו וכיוצא שבטל בהם טעם זה וכו’ איך ניתן לגלות טעמי מצות גם בפני נשים ועמי הארץ אשר יקראו בו, חלילה לרו”מ לעבור על לפני עור.

9 See here

10 See here

11 Sofer often refers to a similar type of comment by R. Shlomo Kluger, Ha-Elef Lekha Shlomo, Orah Hayyim 367:

אם הייתי זוכר כל מה שכתבתי מעולם לא הי’ שום הערה בעולם שלא הרגשתי בזה.

(I cited both Schorr and Kluger in a footnote in my article on the Hatam Sofer in Be’erot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky. Although other writers also cite this comment of Kluger, as with much else, I believe that I first saw the reference in one of Sofer’s writings.) Kluger wrote so many thousands of responsa, that it is not uncommon for him to contradict himself and forget what he wrote previously. See R. Yehudah Leib Maimon, ed., Sefer ha-Gra (Jerusalem, 1954), p. 99 in the note. R. Solomon Schreiber, Hut ha-Meshulash (Tel Aviv, 1963), p. 19, claims that R. Nathan Adler’s reason for not recording his Torah teachings was due to a belief that the permission to put the Oral Law into writing only applies if one is not able to remember this information. Since, according to Schreiber, R. Nathan claimed that he never forgot any Torah knowledge, he was not permitted to take advantage of this heter.

12 Regarding Schorr being a childhood genius, this letter from him to R. Shlomo Kluger appeared in Moriah, Av 5767.

As you can see, the letter was written in 1860 (although I can’t make out what the handwriting says after תר”ך). We are informed, correctly, that Schorr was born in 1853, which would mean that he was seven years old when he wrote the letter. This, I believe, would make him the greatest child genius in Jewish history, as I don’t think the Vilna Gaon could even write like this at age seven. Furthermore, if you read the letter you see that two years prior to this Schorr had also written to Kluger. Are there any other examples of a five-year-old writing Torah letters to one of the gedolei ha-dor? Furthermore, from the letter we see that the seven-year-old Schorr was also the rav of the town of Mariompol! (The Mariompol in Galicia, not Lithuania.) I would have thought that this merited some mention by the person publishing this letter. After all, Schorr would be the only seven-year-old communal rav in history, and this letter would be the only evidence that he ever served as rav in this town. But the man who published this document and the editor of the journal are entirely oblivious to what must be one of the most fascinating letters in all of Jewish history. Yet all this assumes that the letter was actually written by Schorr. Once again we must thank R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer for setting the record straight. In his recently published Shuvi ha-Shulamit (Jerusalem, 2009), vol. 7, p. 101, he calls attention to the error and points out, citing Wunder, Meorei Galicia, that the rav of Mariampol was another man entirely, who was also named Jacob Schorr.

13 A. Horowitz, Orhot Rabbenu (Bnei Brak, 1991), vol. 1, p. 364.

14 See Avivit Levi, Holekh Tamim (Jerusalem, 2003), p. 133 n. 161.

15 See R. Yosef Pinhasi, Yefeh Toar, p. 116.

16 See his response in Mordechai Alemkayas, Va-Yikhtov Mordechai (Jerusalem, 2009), p. 340.

17 Yayin le-Nesekh (Betar Ilit, 1996), p. 70.

18 See here. According to Abadi, R. Shlomo Zalman’s decision was made with regard to a well-known scholar who is very involved with Artscroll.

19 The Rav doesn’t note that there is a mention of the Wall in Shemot Rabbah 2:2 as well, but his judgment would no doubt be the same. Contrary to the Rav, since these midrashim are found in so many parallel sources, I don’t think there is any question that they indeed originate with Chazal.

20 See Pinchas Giller, Reading the Zohar (Oxford, 2001), pp. 12-13.

21 The event is described in Meir Benayahu, Mavo le-Sefer Binyamin Ze’ev (Jerusalem, 1989), pp. 120ff. Once the dispute got going, all sorts things were said. R. Benjamin was even accused of purchasing his semikhah. See ibid., p.140. The source for this is R. Elijah ha-Levi, Zekan Aharon (Constantinople, 1534), no. 184.

More on Chaim Bloch

More on Chaim Bloch

By Marc B. Shapiro

In a previous post I mentioned how the non-Jewish Austrian minister Leon Bilinski was descended from the rav of Posen, R. Samuel ben Moses Falkenfeld, the Beit Shmuel Aharon. More information about Bilinski’s Jewish roots is found in Chaim Bloch’s Ve-Da Mah she-Tashiv (New York, 1943), p. 74 n. 1. In general, I have found that when Bloch is reporting about other people’s biographies and history in general, he is very reliable. It is only when he is somehow involved in the story that he is full of lies.1 His Ve-Da Mah she-Tashiv is a good example. Here is the title page.

In this book he makes up an entire story that he was asked by an important Catholic figure to answer questions from the Vatican dealing with Judaism. The whole story is a fiction, as is so much else he writes about himself. As for Bilinski, Bloch tells us that he is in possession of Bilinski’s 1146 page (!) unpublished diary. As Bloch himself notes, he provided various scholars (e.g.., N. M. Gelber) with selections of this diary which they then used in their own works, thus misleading the world. In these selections, Bilinski comes off as a strong anti-Zionist, who even warns Herzl about how the Arabs will never accept a Jewish state in Palestine.2 In an article in the Herzl Year Book, Bloch published what he claimed was an 1893 letter from Herzl and uses this to prove that Herzl was interested in the Jewish problem already in 1893, a year before the 1894 Dreyfus trial which is usually cited as having turned Herzl to Jewish matters.3 Various scholars have cited this letter, as they understandably regard it as significant in understanding Herzl, but of course it is a forgery. Another way Bloch misled scholars, in particular Gelber, is with regard to an anonymous booklet that speaks of a return of the Jews to the Land of Israel and the establishment of a state.4 According to Billinski’s diary, so Bloch tells us, the author of this booklet was Benjamin Disraeli. Bilinski would certainly have been in a position to know this information, and therefore a number of people have been misled by this, thinking the diary authentic

Look how Bloch’s forgeries were able to have such an impact. I think, in the end, this is what gives the forger satisfaction, watching everyone taken in by his creation. In 1948 no one would have believed that Bloch was capable of this. In fact, if not for his blatant forgeries in Dovev Siftei Yeshenim, some people today would still assume that he is reliable. As the Talmud tells us, tafasta merubah lo tafasta! Bloch should have stuck with his smaller forgeries, because when he decided to publish complete volumes of forged material, that’s when people really began to take notice. It is therefore very surprising that no less a scholar than Robert S. Wistrich, who is aware of the accusations of forgery against Bloch, nevertheless cites material from Bloch’s Mi Natan li-Meshisah and states that in his opinion at least some of the material must be considered authentic. Why he thinks this he doesn’t tell us. The truth is that this book, like Dovev Siftei Yeshenim, is full of Bloch’s forgeries, and not only of rabbis but also of political leaders (including summaries of supposed letters from Bismark about Zionism!)5

Just to illustrate that you can’t judge people by appearances, here is a picture of Bloch, which previously appeared in Dr. Shnayer Leiman’s post on the Seforim Blog.6

Throughout Bloch’s various books, he quotes numerous letters from gedolim who were no longer alive, and none of these letters are found in his archives, currently kept at YIVO and the Leo Baeck Institute. In other words, he simply made up these letters, as he did with the entire volumes of anti-Zionist letters of gedolim that he published. The rule is that whenever Bloch cites a previously unpublished letter from someone, either addressed to himself or to another, and the author of the letter is no longer alive, you can assume that the letter is forged. We know this now, after Shmuel Weingarten’s exposé of Dovev Siftei Yeshenim.7 Yet the evidence was there all along, had people paid attention. But people had no reason to assumed that Bloch was not reliable. R. Joseph Elijah Henkin, however, who was involved in a terrible dispute with Bloch, did accuse Bloch of dishonesty, and pointed out that he would attribute quotes to rabbis who were no longer alive so that he couldn’t be contradicted. In the late 1930’s Bloch published a letter from R. Kook. R. Zvi Yehudah Kook was very skeptical of its authenticity and requested that Bloch send him a copy of it. Bloch replied that he was unable to do so since he had lost the original.8 This was Bloch’s pattern, and I assume that all of the many letters he published from leading rabbis and hasidic leaders, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, are forgeries.9

Here is another example of Bloch’s tendency to fabricate things. It comes from his Heikhal le-Divrei Chazal u-Fitgameihem (New York, 1948), p. 9. Everything he reports here is a fantasy. As with some of his other forgeries, Bloch is obviously motivated here by good intentions, but it is all complete nonsense.

Ve-Da Ma she-Tashiv also contains forged letters. I am certain that the letter of R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinski on pp. 52-53 is an example of this. Anyone can look at the style of R. Chaim Ozer’s many letters and see how he consistently used certain formulas in concluding his letters. Nowhere does R. Chaim Ozer conclude a letter with

ונזכה כולנו לראות בישועת עמנו במהרה

He does use the expression

ועיניהם תחזינה בישועת עמנו במהרה

and this is found in a letter that Bloch would have had access to, the letter of R. Chaim Ozer to Agudat ha-Rabbanim about the Louis Epstein proposal.10 I assume he used the concluding portion of this letter to help him create his forgery. But in other areas he wasn’t so careful. For example, in the supposed letter of R. Chaim Ozer to Bloch, he refers to the latter as a צנא מלא ספרא , yet this expression does not appear in R. Chaim Ozer’s other letters (based on Otzar ha-Hokhmah’s database, which only has the first edition of R. Chaim Ozer’s letters, not the expanded Iggerot R. Chaim Ozer.)

We should assume the same for all of the other letters in this book from people who were not alive when the book was written. It is fascinating that on p. 44 n. 1 Bloch refers to the anti-Zionist letters he would later publish in Dovev Siftei Yeshenim. Ve-Da Mah she-Tashiv was published in 1943 and the first volume of Dovev Siftei Yeshenim didn’t appear until 1959, meaning that this forgery was very long in the making, and Bloch was setting the stage for it many years prior.

There is more to say about this book, in particular his argument that there are passages in the Talmud that were inserted by heretics – a viewpoint earlier mentioned by R. Joseph Zvi Duenner, as I have pointed out elsewhere, see here.

I will leave that for another time, but to give you an example of what I am referring to, here is a passage from p. 39 (emphasis in the original):

אופינית היא “המעשיה” בר’ שמעון בן גמליאל “שהיה על גב מעלה בהר הבית וראה נכרית אחת נאה ביותר. אמר: מה רבו מעשיך ד'” (ע”ז כ ע”א) המאמר הזה זיוף . . . לא יעלה בדעתנו, שר’ שמעון בן גמליאל הביט על אשה, היינו הך, נכרית או ישראלי – לשם יפיה. ומצאתי עוד מאמר בשם רב, שזיופו עומד מחוץ לכל ספק: “בשעה שבקש נבוכדנצר לעשות לאותו צדיק (צדקיהו) כך, נמשכה ערלתו ש’ אמה והיתה מחזרת על כל המסבה כולה שנאמר: שבעת קלון מכבוד, שתה גם אתה והערל” (שבת קמט ע”ב). מלבד הנבול שבמאמר זה, הוא חסר טעם, ולא יתכן, שמפי רב יצאו הדברים.

I don’t know which position is “frummer”? To defend the honor of the sages and therefore deny that these “obscene” passages are authentic, or to defend the Talmud as we have it and thus have to deal with these passages.

Yet whatever the answer to this is, if Bloch were alive today, the haredi world would put him in herem for another reason. Here is what he writes on p. 38, with regard to how to view Aggadah in contrast to the halakhic sections of the Talmud. (What he says is nothing other than the Geonic and Spanish tradition, which is largely unknown in today’s yeshiva world.):

היא אינה נחשבת ליסוד קיומה של היהדות ויש לה אופי של ספר עם . . . לחלק האגדה נכנסו דברי מוסר ודרך ארץ, מליצות ובדיחות, סגולות ורפואות, אזהרות ועצות, פתרון חלומות ואגדות, שלהרבה מהם יש ערך גם מחוץ להיהדות. יתכן שהרבה הושפעו בעלי התלמוד בזה מהעמים שכניהם.

Also interesting is that in Ve-Da Mah she-Tashiv, p. 44 n. 1, he refers very positively to R. Henkin, something that would later change when their great battle began.

Bloch claimed that he had a close relationship with the great R. Judah Leib Zirelson of Kishinev (Speaking for myself, Zirelson’s greatest achievement had to have been standing up to the extreme anti-Zionist elements in Agudat Israel, led by R. Elhanan Wasserman and R. Aaron Kotler. They wanted the Agudah to officially oppose the creation of a Jewish state. Zirelson, as president of the 1937 Kenesiah Ha-Gedolah in Marienbad, was able to convince the Moetzet Gedolei ha-Torah to agree with his own position, which was not to oppose a state but to attempt to bring Torah values into it. See Ha-Pardes, Oct. 1937, p. 8). In this book, Bloch cites a number of things from Zirelson of which, again, I have no doubt that he has made them up. For example, can anyone imagine that Zirelson would offer the following Haskalah-Reformist interpretation that Bloch puts in his mouth (p. 34)?

יתכן שהיתה כוונתו של ר’ שמעון בן יוחאי, בחפשו יסוד במקרא שהנכרים אינם מטמאים באוהל, כדי שלא ימצאו הרומיים תואנות ואמתלאות חדשות על ישראל, ומאימת המלכות הורה כן.

Although I can’t go into it in any detail now, the truth is that we do on occasion find Haskalah-Reformist types of interpretation even in traditional sources,11 but since these are very rare and we have no evidence that Zirelson ever said what is attributed to him, I assume it is another of Bloch’s forgeries. In other words, as he did so often, Bloch attributed his own understanding to one of the great Torah sages.

In chapter fourteen of Ve-Da Mah She-Tashiv, where he stresses the need for honesty in one’s dealings with non-Jews, he claims that Zirelson told him about a Zoharic passage in parashat Lekh Lekha that states:

כל מאן דמשקר בהאי עלמא בערל כמאן דמשקר בשמיה דקוב”ה

This is a beautiful thought. The only problem is that it doesn’t exist anywhere in the Zohar. I am certain that Zirelson would never have misquoted the Zohar and that the mistake is Bloch’s. I assume that the mistake is unintentional, perhaps quoting from memory, since a great forger like Bloch would never have dared falsely attribute anything to the Zohar, the accuracy of which could easily be checked.

Here is the actual Zohar text (vol. 1, p. 93a):

דכל מאן דמשקר בהאי כמאן דמשקר בשמיה דקב”ה

If you examine the entire passage you will find that it has nothing to do with being honest, and the word משקר here does not mean “to lie”, but “to betray”. The text is actually speaking about berit milah and how one is obligated to treat it properly, especially דלא עייל ליה ברשותא אחרא, which certainly refers to refraining from having sex with non-Jewish women. What the text is saying is that if you have illicit sex you betray the mark of the circumcision, and this is like betraying God’s name.

Since I mentioned Haskalah-Reformist interpretations in traditional texts, let me note one of the most famous of these. In Shabbat 140b, R. Papa’s states that if one can drink beer but instead drinks wine, he violates the prohibition on baal tashchit. Maharsha explains that R. Papa said this because he was a beer salesman! What this apparently means is that R. Papa lied about the halakhah in order to drum up more business for himself. How else to interpret Maharsha’s explanation?

ורב פפא לטובת עצמו אמרה שהוא הי’ עושה שכר.

This explanation is, to be sure, quite shocking. If you want to stretch things a bit you can say that according to Maharsha, R. Papa didn’t consciously alter the halakhah to benefit himself, but since he was a beer maker he was unconsciously led to this position, as it would benefit him. This explanation – which could easily have been offered by Jacob Katz – is suggested by the noted Yemenite posek, R. Yitzhak Ratsaby12:

והנה כל העובר ישום וישרוק, היתכן כדבר הזה שרב פפא יפסוק הלכה משום ריוח ממונו?! . . . ובודאי גם לדעת מהרש”א לא יתכן שרב פפא יאמר פסקי הלכה רק מתוך נגיעה, חלילה לו. אלא היה זה כעין “שוחד סמוי”, שלא הרגיש בו הוא עצמו, שמתוך כך בא לידי טעות בהלכה זו. כמו שהכתוב צווח ואומר (שמות כג, ח): “כי השוחד יעוור פקחים ויסלף דברי צדיקים”, ועל דרך שמצינו בכתובות (קט, ב) בגדולי עולם שאמרו על עצמם שהשוחד היטה את ליבם.

I think most people will tell you that this sort of explanation, which points to unconscious factors influencing halakhic decisions, was not how people thought in the days of the Maharsha. I myself do not see this as an anachronistic explanation, as the Talmud, Ketubot 105b, already discusses precisely this sort of unconscious influence.13 I believe that this is also how we are to understand all the discussions about נוגע בדבר, and how it applies even to the greatest tzadikim. It is not that these people will consciously twist the truth, but that unconsciously this is what can happen. Presumably, this is also the meaning of Hullin 49a: ישמעאל כהנא מסייע כהני

I think this is also how we are to understand R. Moses Isserles, Yoreh Deah 242:36:

תלמיד חכם שאמר דבר הלכה בדבר השייך לדידיה . . . אין שומעין לדידיה דלמא מדמי דברים להדדי שאינן דומים

Marc Shapiro: R. Kook on Sacrifices & Other Assorted Comments

R. Kook on Sacrifices and Other Assorted Comments

by: Marc B. Shapiro

1. At the beginning of my previous post (the Gurock review) I mentioned R. Solomon Isaac Scheinfeld (1860-1943). The source of the comment I quote is his Olam ha-Sheker (Milwaukee, 1936), p. 77.1 Scheinfeld was the unofficial chief rabbi in Milwaukee, arriving there in 1902 and serving until his death in 1943. Here is his picture.

He had a traditional education, having studied for three years in the Kovno Kollel under R. Isaac Elhanan Spektor, from whom he received semikhah.2 He also had a very original mind, and wrote a number of books and essays. One of his most fascinating works is the article he published under the pseudonym Even Shayish. In this article he argued that since sacrifices will never be revived, they are now irrelevant to Judaism and all references to them should be removed from the prayer book.

R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg has a lengthy essay in which he critiques Scheinfeld’s position. A Hebrew translation of this essay appears in volume 2 of Kitvei R. Weinberg. Yet Weinberg himself leaves open the possibility that there won’t be a return to sacrifices (p. 255):

אין דנים כאן על עצם הרעיון היסודי של הקרבנות. לו היתה היום קיימת אצלנו שאלה כזאת והיא דורשת פתרון דחוף – אין מספר מצומצם של יהודים בארץ אחת בני סמכות להכריע בענין זה, וכל שכן כאשר הם אינם מייצגים את כלל ישראל. שאלה זאת חייבים להביא לפני הבית דין של כלל ישראל. רק לבית דין כזה הרשות לקבוע אם להשאיר טקס מקודש בעם בתוקפו או לבטלו. היום שאין לנו ארץ ולא בית המקדש ולא כהנים הרי זה מגוחך ומצער כאחת להעלות תביעה לבטל עבודת קרבנות!

Weinberg doesn’t mention Maimonides, but this is usually to where people turn when seeking to argue against a revival of sacrifices. According to the Guide 3:32, Maimonides thought that sacrifices were a concession to the masses’ primitive religious notions, developed in an idolatrous society. While Maimonides is explicit in the Mishneh Torah that there will be a return of the sacrificial order, his reason for sacrifices offered in the Guide led some people to assume that his true opinion was that there will not be sacrifices in the future. One example is R. Simhah Paltrovitch, Simhat Avot (New York, 1917), pp. 7-8, who offers a mystical approach:

אמנם מה נעשה במה שדברי מורנו ורבנו הרמב”ם ז”ל שהוא בסברתו מתנגד לאלה הדברים, ואומר כי בימים הבאים עת קץ משיחנו, יבוטל עבודה בקרבנות ולא יהיה עוד . . . להעולם הזה נתנו הפשט והדרוש, ובעולם השני יקויים הרמז והסוד . . .וכן ממש הוא טעם של הרמב”ם ז”ל שיבוטל הקרבנות, כי אז יהי’ התורה על צד הרמז וסוד כמו שארי המצוות המבוארות בתורה, כי יתחלפון מן הפשט לרמז וסוד שמשונים מן הפשט.

R. Joseph Messas also cites Maimonides’ reason for sacrifices and concludes that there will be no return of the sacrificial order (Otzar ha-Mikhtavim, vol. 2, no. 1305).

לפי”ז יתבטלו לעתיד כל הקרבנות כי זה אלפי שנים משנעקרה ע”ז מישראל, וישראל גוי אחד, עובדים רק לאל אחד ועל ידי ישראל בגלותם נעקרה ע”ז גם מכל האומות.

What about the problem that the abolition of sacrifices would mean a change in Torah law, which is a point that R. Kook will also deal with? Messas answers simply:

ואין בזה שנוי בתורה חלילה, דזיל בתר טעמא

What this means, I think, is that from the beginning sacrifices were only intended to be offered in a society in which people were attached to primitive religious notions associated with idolatry, and the animal sacrifices that went along with this. However, once this era has passed from the scene, then there will no longer be any obligation for sacrifices.

A really shocking comment against sacrfices appears in a supposed letter from R. Yaakov of Lissa to R. Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (published in Ha-Posek, Kislev 5712). Responding to Kalischer’s advocacy of renewing sacrifices even before the coming of the Messiah, R. Yaakov claims that to do so would cause Jews to be a subject of mockery by the Gentiles and the non-religious Jews.

לבי נוקף ונפשי מלא רטט ורעד כי אם ישמעו הגויים והקלים בישראל שאנחנו מקריבים קרבנות ימלאו שחוק פיהם ונהיה
ח”ו ללעג ולקלס וה’ יודע כמה צרות וקלקולים יצמחו מזה

It is very unlikely, to put it mildly, that a gadol be-Yisrael would give this as his reason for not fulfilling a mitzvah. When one realizes that the person who published this letter was the famous forger Chaim Bloch, then all doubts are removed: The letter, like so much else published by Bloch, is a complete forgery. Apparently Bloch had some negative feelings about sacrifices and transferred them to R. Yaakov. Interestingly, when this letter was republished in Dovev Siftei Yeshenim, vol. 1, Bloch made a subtle change in the letter, which as far as I know, no one has yet pointed out. The letter’s authenticity had been attacked by Zvi Harkavy in Kol Torah (Nisan-Iyar 5712), and one of the things he pointed to was this line, and that R. Yaakov could never have written it. So when Bloch republished the letter, in an attempt to bolster its authenticity, he altered it to read as follows (I have underlined the newly added words):

כי אם ישמעו הגויים והקלים בישראל שאנחנו מקריבים קרבנות בזמן הזה לפני ביאת משיח צדקנו ובטרם עומד בית מקדשנו
על מכונו, ימלאו שחוק פיהם ונהיה ח”ו ללעג ולקלס

Had he been smart enough to have added these extra words in the first edition of his forgery, it would have been more believable. Now R. Yaakov is not speaking of the non-Jews and the non-religious mocking the offering of sacrifices, but only mocking the offering of them before the coming of the Messiah and the building of the Temple.

Michael Friedlaender’s The Jewish Religion (London, 1891), was for many years regarded as a standard work of Orthodox belief. As far as I know, it was the first of its kind in English and can still hold its own against many more recently published books. You can see it here. On pages 162-163, 417-418, he speaks of the return of the sacrificial order in Messianic days, and how we should look forward to this, even if it is contrary to our taste. He says that we should not model Divine Law according to our liking, but rather model our liking according to the will of God. Yet despite these strong statements, he was also sensitive to those who were not comfortable with sacrifices. He writes as follows (p. 452):

References to the Sacrificial Service, and especially prayers for its restoration, are disliked by some, who think such restoration undesirable. Let no one pray for a thing against his will; let him whose heart is not with his fellow-worshippers in any of their supplications silently substitute his own prayers for them; but let him not interfere with the devotion of those to whom “the statues of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart” . . . and who yearn for the opportunity of fulfilling Divine commandments which they cannot observe at present.

This passage is quoted by British Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz in his Authorised Daily Prayer Book, p. 532. Upon seeing this, R. Yerucham Leiner, then living in London, wrote a letter to the Jewish Chronicle (Dec. 17, 1943; I learnt of this from Louis Jacobs, Tree of Life, second ed., p. xxix). Before quoting from his letter, let me reproduce what Wikipedia says about this most incredible figure.

Grand Rabbi Yerucham Leiner of Radzin, son of Likutei Divrei Torah, author of Tiferes Yerucham, Zikaron LaRishonim, Mipi Hashmua, Zohar HaRakiya. Moved from Chelm to London to America. Continuation of the Radziner line in America, and one of the last direct descendants of the Leiner family. After the war, he did not reinstitute the wearing of techeiles as other branches of Radzin did, even though his father, Grand Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel Leiner of Radzin-Chelm, wore them, as he was a chosid of his older brother, the Orchos Chayim, who had reinstituted the wearing of techeiles. Reb Yerucham believed that the original formula of his uncle was lost during the war. This is the reason that his family doesn’t wear techeiles today, only pairs that were left from pre-war Europe. Reb Yerucham was an expert in all areas of Torah and scholarship. There existed very few admorim/tzaddikim since the beginning of Chassidus who were also lamdanim in both the Polish and Lithuanian styles of learning, bibliographers, Jewish historians, very learned in Kabbalah works, philologists, and masters of both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Reb Yerucham was very close with the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoelish Teitelbaum ZTVK”L. He always made sure to spend a few weeks vacationing with the him, specifically learning Midrashei Chazal, of which they were both masters. He studied and visited with Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner, and they were good friends in later life. They always treated one another with special respect. He established the Radziner shtiebel in Boro Park. Died 20 Av 5724 (1964). Buried in Beth Israel Cemetery, Woodbridge, New Jersey

Responding to the quote from Friedlaender, Leiner wrote: “This opinion was put forward by the founders of Reform Judaism, Holdheim and Geiger. But it is hardly in accord with Orthodox traditions of Judaism.” The editor of the Jewish Chronicle responsed: “The words quoted with regard to the Musaph are those of the great and sainted scholar, Dr. Michael Friedlander, for 42 years Principal of Jews College: and it is certainly strange to class him with Holdheim and Geiger.”

The most famous of our sages to speak of a Messianic era without animal sacrifices is, of course, R. Kook, who envisions vegetable sacrifices. He writes this in his commentary to the siddur, Olat ha-Reiyah, vol. 1, p. 292. In the preface R. Zvi Yehudah tells us that he began writing this commentary during World War I. I don’t need to go into any detail on this, as I have done so already in The Limits of Orthodox Theology, where I also mention passages in R. Kook’s writings that offer a different approach. The notion that there will only be vegetable sacrifices in Messianic days is, of course, a radical position, and many who don’t know R. Kook’s writings find it impossible to accept that he could have said this. This is what happened when R. Yosef Kanefsky of Los Angeles published an essay in which he mentioned R. Kook’s view.3 He was attacked by some prominent rabbis since they found it impossible to believe that R. Kook could say what was attributed to him. Yet it was Kanefsky who was right, not his opponents.

In my book I dealt with R. Kook’s position on sacrifices, because positing that there will be no sacrifices in the future would seem to be in contradiction to Maimonides’ Principle that the commandments of the Torah are eternal. That consideration is precisely what makes his position so radical. A couple of years ago one of R. Kook’s notebooks dating from his time as rabbi in Bausk, which lasted until 1904, was published. We actually have two publications of this, one by Boaz Ofen called Kevatzim mi-Ketav Yad Kodsho, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 2008), and the other, which comes out of the world of Merkaz ha-Rav, called Pinkesei ha-Reiyah (Jerusalem, 2008).

This is not the first competing publications of the same material by these people, and as I will show in my forthcoming book, the Merkaz editions are tainted by censorship in that “problematic” passages are removed.4 Those who claim to be the greatest adherents of R. Kook have once again taken it upon themselves to save their master from himself, as it were, and decided which writings of R. Kook should appear and which should not. Yet in the passage I am interested in now (no. 8 in the Ofen edition and no. 6 in the Merkaz edition), the two books are identical. The passage is very significant since it shows you that even in his earlier years R. Kook had the same notion later expressed in Olat ha-Reiyah, that the future would only know vegetable sacrifices. (In case people are wondering, R. Kook was not a vegetarian. Yet he did see vegetarianism as part of the eschatological future. His great student, the Nazir, was a vegetarian, as was Nazir’s son-in-law, R. Shlomo Goren, and as is his son, R. Shear Yashuv Cohen.5)

This passage gives us new insight into R. Kook’s view of sacrifices, and how things will change in the future era. He begins by speaking of the abandonment of meat-eating in the Messianic era, since this will not be something that people desire. Recall that in speaking of eating meat, the Torah writes (Deut. 12:6): כי תאוה נפשך לאכל בשר, which means “when thy soul desires to eat meat.” The Messianic era is not a time when people will have this desire, as R. Kook also explains in his famous essay on vegetarianism, “Afikim ba-Negev”.

What about the sacrifices that are required by the Torah? R. Kook offers a few possibilities. One is that sacrifices will still be necessary. Yet he also speculates that perhaps certain animals will be so spiritually advanced that they will on their own offer themselves as sacrifices, in acknowledgment of the great benefit that will come to them and the world through their actions.6 This solves the problem of people deliberately killing animals, which goes against his conception of the eschaton.

What is most interesting for our purpose is another suggestion by R. Kook, namely, that the Sanhedrin will use its power to uproot a matter from the Torah in order to abolish obligatory animal sacrifices. Their reason for doing this will be that the killing of animals will no longer be part of the culture in Messianic days. R. Kook even shows how the Rabbis will be able to find support for this step from the Torah. What he is doing, I think, is imagining himself as part of the future Sanhedrin that abolishes sacrifices, and informing us of the derashah that will be used to support this. This is related to what I wrote in an earlier post, see here, and I repeat it now:

As to the general problem of laws that trouble the ethical sense of people, we find that it is R. Kook who takes the bull by the horns and suggests a radical approach. The issue was much more vexing for R. Kook than for other sages, as in these types of matters he could not simply tell people that their consciences were leading them astray and that they should submerge their inherent feelings of right and wrong. It is R. Kook, after all, who famously says that fear of heaven cannot push aside one’s natural morality (Shemonah Kevatzim 1:75):

אסור ליראת שמים שתדחק את המוסר הטבעי של האדם, כי אז אינה עוד יראת שמים טהורה. סימן ליראת שמים טהורה הוא, כשהמוסר הטבעי, הנטוע בטבע הישר של האדם, הולך ועולה על פיה במעלות יותר גבוהות ממה שהוא עומד מבלעדיה. אבל אם תצוייר יראת שמים בתכונה כזאת, שבלא השפעתה על החיים היו החיים יותר נוטים לפעול טוב, ולהוציא אל הפועל דברים מועילים לפרט ולכלל, ועל פי השפעתה מתמעט כח הפועל ההוא, יראת שמים כזאת היא יראה פסולה.

These are incredible words. R. Kook was also “confident that if a particular moral intuition reflecting the divine will achieves widespread popularity, it will no doubt enable the halakhic authorities to find genuine textual basis for their new understanding.” R. Kook formulates his idea as follows (Iggerot ha-Reiyah, vol. 1, p. 103):

ואם תפול שאלה על איזה משפט שבתורה, שלפי מושגי המוסר יהיה נראה שצריך להיות מובן באופן אחר, אז אם באמת ע”פ ב”ד הגדול יוחלט שזה המשפט לא נאמר כ”א באותם התנאים שכבר אינם, ודאי ימצא ע”ז מקור בתורה.

R. Kook is not speaking about apologetics here, but a revealing of Torah truth that was previously hidden. The truth is latent, and with the development of moral ideas, which is driven by God, the new insight in the Torah becomes apparent.

Ad kan leshoni in the previous post.

In other words, R. Kook sees the Sanhedrin as able to actualize new moral and religious insights that have become apparent. That is why it is important for the Sanhedrin to use derashot when dealing with these matters, as this shows that the idea is not something new that has been developed, but something that was latent in the Torah, and only now has become apparent.

So what derashah can be used to justify an abolishment of animal sacrifices? R. Kook points to Num 28:2: את קרבני לחמי לאשי . This is usually translated as “My food which is presented to Me for offerings made by fire”. Yet the word לחמי actually means “my bread.” Right after this, in discussing the particulars of the sacrifice, the Torah states: “The one lamb thou shalt offer in the morning.” R. Kook’s proposed messianic derashah is: “Whenever animals are killed for personal consumption, you should use them for sacrifices, but when they are not killed for personal use, make sacrifices of bread.”

I don’t think I am exaggerating in saying that this is one of the most provocative and radical texts in R. Kook’s writings. I say this not because of his advocacy of abolishing sacrifices, which I don’t think to be that significant in the larger scheme, but due to how he is envisioning the process by which the Rabbis will actually use derashot to create a Messianic Judaism.

The Rambam, Hilkhot Mamrim 2:1, speaks of laws derived from the hermeneutical principles that can be altered by a future beit din ha-gadol (even one not as great as the one that established the original law). This was the great fear of the opponents of a reconstituted Sanhedrin, that the Mizrachi rabbis would take upon themselves to do precisely this. Since so many of our laws are based on derashot, Judaism as we practice it can be entirely reworked. R. Kook is showing us how this can be done, but he is going further than anything Maimonides envisioned, since sacrifices are not matters that have been established based on a rabbinic derashah but are commanded by explicit biblical verses.

Basically, what R. Kook is doing is recreating the world of the Pharisees, before Judaism was bound to codes (beginning with the Mishnah). It was a time when Jewish law was developing and the biblical verses could be read—some would say “read”— in all sorts of ways. In the days of the Pharisees much of the halakhah as we know it was created, and to a large extent that can be done again in the Messianic era.

Here are R. Kook’s words (note also his exegesis with ריח ניחוח) :

שהסנהדרין אז ימצאו לנכון, ע”פ הכח שיש להם לעקור דבר מה”ת בשוא”ת, לפטור מקרבנות החובה של מין החי, כיון שכבר חדלה הריגת החי מן המנהג של תשמישי הרשות והמקרא מסייע, שקרא הכתוב לקרבן לחם, “את קרבני לחמי לאשי”, ואח”כ אומר “את הכבש אחד”, הא כיצד? כל זמן שבע”ח קרבים לתשמיש הרשות, עשה בע”ח לגבוה, אבל כשבע”ח אינם קרבים לרשות, עשה הקרבנות מלחם, ועל זה רמזו חז”ל: “כל הקרבנות בטלין וקרבן תודה אינה בטלה” שיש בה לחם . . . רק כעת עד זמן ההשלמה תאמר להם שיקריבו כבשים, ומותנה תמיד לריח ניחוח, וכיון שיבורר בזמן ההשלמה שהריגת הבע”ח [אינה ראויה] אי אפשר שתהיה לריח ניחוח.

R. Kook then cites the proof he mentions in Olat ha-Reiyah and in his essay “Afikim ba-Negev” (Otzarot ha-Reiyah [Rishon le-Tziyon, 2002], vol. 2, p. 103), that Malachi 3:4 writes: וערבה לה’ מנחת יהודה וירושלים כימי עולם וכשנים קדמוניות . This verse, in speaking of a sacrificial offering in Messianic days, mentions the minhah sacrifice, which is not an animal offering.

As mentioned, the passage from R. Kook is so interesting because it shows that he was not merely thinking about the Messianic era, but also the actual functioning of the future Sanhedrin. He was imagining the derashot that could be used to “update” Judaism. I am unaware if this aspect of R. Kook’s thought was known before the publication of this latest volume. I also don’t know if any scholars have taken note of it even subsequent to the publication. However, in “Afikim ba-Negev” (Otzarot ha-Reiyah, vol. 2, p. 103), R. Kook also, in an offhand sentence, provides a possible derashah to justify the abolishment of sacrifices. He doesn’t develop the idea, but just puts it out there. Here is the sentence:

והגביל “לרצונכם תזבחהו” (ויקרא יט, ה) שיהיה אפשר וראוי לומר “רוצה אני”. (רש”י על ויקרא א, ג).

The Talmud, Rosh ha-Shanah 6a, which is quoted by Rashi, Lev, 1:3, states that one cannot bring a sacrifice unless it arises from one’s free will. Now the Talmud, which is speaking of one particular sacrifice, actually says that we force him to bring it until he agrees, and this means that he is “willing.” But R. Kook is using this passage to hint at a different matter. In future times, when sacrifices will be so far from human sentiment, it will be impossible to do it willingly. The derashah, לרצונכם תזבחהו , will then come into play. Since this teaches that one can only bring a sacrifice when one is willing, at a time when animal sacrifices are not considered acceptable, and thus not something people “want” to do, animal sacrifices will no longer be a requirement. Remember, R. Kook describes this future era as one in which the animals will be far advanced of what they are now. It is only when the animals are at the low state that they currently are, that we can offer them as sacrifices and eat them. He writes (Otzarot ha-Reiyah, vol. 2, p. 101), in a passage in which animals are compared to one’s children:

מי לא יבין שאי אפשר להעלות על הדעת שיקח האדם את בניו, ברוח אשר יטפחם וירבה אותם להיטיב ולהשכיל, ויזבחם וישפך דמם?

The texts we have seen are important in explaining how his viewpoint of the abolishment of sacrifices relates to the Ninth Principle of Maimonides. As mentioned, in my book I listed R. Kook’s view as being in opposition to the Principle. R. Kook is certainly great enough to disagree with Maimonides in this matter had he chosen to. Yet we see from his newly published writings that he would not have regarded himself in disagreement, because he understands the abolishment of sacrifices to be carried out in a purely halakhic fashion. Since the Rabbis have the exegetical authority to do such things, an authority given to them by the Torah, we are not speaking of a revision of Torah law. This case is then no different than any of the other examples where the Sages interpret Torah law different that the peshat of the verse.

Returning to the newly published text, R. Kook’s imagination continues to run, and he doesn’t stop with sacrifices. In my book I called attention to R. Hayyim Halberstam’s view that in Messianic days the first born will take the place of the kohanim. R. Kook must have been attracted to this view for kabbalistic reasons, and here he provides a possible basis for how this too can be justified by the Rabbis. He also notes that since the change can be justified, “it is not uprooting a Torah matter, but rather fulfilling the Torah.”! In other words, built into the Torah is the notion that the kohanim would only be temporarily in charge of the divine worship. R. Kook argues that since the First Born were removed from their role because of the sin of the Golden Calf, it is impossible for the effects of this sin to last forever, as repentance is a more powerful force. Therefore, when the sin of the Golden Calf is atoned for there will no longer any reason for the First Born to be kept from the Avodah, and it will return to them.

Following this, R. Kook offers another way of explaining why his view of sacrifices should not be seen as a “reform” or as evidence of the Torah changing (he obviously was sensitive to this point). He says ויש לדרוש, in other words, he is once again providing the halakhic justification that can be used by a future Sanhedrin in abolishing sacrifices. His new exegetical reasoning goes as follows: The obligation of animal sacrifices was only intended for an era when the kohanim were in charge of the Avodah. This is how one is to understand the verse (Lev. 11:1) ושחט אותו על ירך המזבח . . . וזרקו בני אהרן הכהנים את דמו. In other words, it is only to the descendants of Aaron that animal sacrifice is commanded,

אבל כשיהיו כשרים ג”כ בכורות, אז מטעם העילוי של בע”ח וכלל המציאות אין הבע”ח נהוגים כ”א לחם ומנחה . . . וכך הוא המדה בכל מקום שנמצא פסוק בתורה וסברא ישרה שיש כח ביד ב”ד הגדול, מכש”כ כבצירוף הנביאים לפסוק הוראת גדולות כאלה.

Note that R. Kook ties together a verse in the Torah with logic. When both are present, then the Beit Din ha-Gadol is able to act in order to make adjustments to Torah law. In this matter, the “sevarah yesharah” is the sense that animal sacrifices will not suitable for the future eschatological era, and the verses in the Torah that he cites give “cover” to the sevarah yesharah. That is, they provide the exegetical justification. (I wonder though, is R. Kook really correct when he implies that the only time the Sages could uproot a commandment was when they also had a biblical verse to justify this?)

R. Kook concludes that all that he is speaking about is a long way off, and it is possible that the Resurrection will come before this and then all sorts of things will change. Yet all his prior ruminations here are about a pre-Resurrection era, when the Beit Din ha-Gadol is functioning and adjusting Torah law by means of derashot and sevarah yesharah. This is not the sort of thing that will be taking place post-Resurrection.7

Finally, lest anyone start using R. Kook’s thoughts in an antinomian fashion, he throws in the following for good measure:

וזה היה מקור תרבות והרע ד”אחר”, שחזי שהמצות יש להן יחש מוגבל ותכליתי, חשב שבאמת אפשר להתעלות למעלה מהמעשים, גם בלא עת, ובאמת הכל אחדות יחיד היה הוה ויהיה, וכל עת וזמן את חובותיה נשמור, בלא נדנוד צל פקפוק.

Earlier in this post, I referred to the implications of R. Kook’s ideas with regard to Jewish law being adjusted because of new moral insights. In fact, I think it is R. Kook who provides the most comprehensive and satisfying approach to this issue. I don’t want to get into that subject at present, as I plan on returning to it, especially as a number of people have written to me about R. Kook’s views. In my future post I will illustrate my point by citing a number of examples of rulings and statements by mainstream halakhists from earlier centuries which could never be made today. The only way to explain this, I will argue, is that there has been a change in societal norms and this has made certain approaches not just practically impossible but simply wrong for our times. (See here where I cite in this regard R. Weinberg and R. Aviner.) However, I promised someone that I would give one example in this post, so here it is. R. Hayyim Benveniste, Keneset ha-Gedolah, Even ha-Ezer 154, Hagahot Beit Yosef no. 59, in discussing when we can force a husband to give a divorce, writes as follows:

ובעל משפט צדק ח”א סי’ נ”ט כתב דאפי’ רודף אחריה בסכין להכותה אין כופין אותו לגרש ואפי’ לו’ לו שחייב להוציא.

Can anyone imagine a posek, from even the most right-wing community, advocating such a viewpoint? I assume the logic behind this position is that even if the man is running after her with the knife, we don’t assume that he will actually kill her. He must just be doing it to scare her, and that is not enough of a reason to force him to divorce her. And if we are wrong, and he really does kill her? I guess the reply would be that this isn’t anything we could have anticipated even if we saw the knife in his hand, sort of like all those who have let pedophiles run loose in the yeshivot, presumably on the assumption that just because a man abused children in the past, that doesn’t mean that he will continue to do so.8

Notes

1 Among other interesting passages in this book, see p. 24, where he objects to people who write “ethical wills.” Quite apart from the frauds who wrote them, in order to show that they were really great people when they were in fact far from it, many tzadikim also wrote these wills. Yet Scheinfeld says that this was a mistake, since many of their children, and even more their grandchildren, assimilated among the Gentiles. He continues by lamenting how much worse things have gotten in his day:

ובימינו אלה בודאי אינו מהראוי לכתוב צוואות, כמעט כל הבנים מתרחקים והולכים מדרכי אביהם, אינם רוצים ואינם יכולים ללכת בדרכיהם: “וכשם שמצוה לאמר דבר הנשמע, כך מצוה שלא לאמר דבר שאינו נשמע.”

On pp. 82-83 he criticizes the “inflation” with regard to rabbinic titles that he saw in his day, and which has increased a great deal more since his time. Here is a very good example of this “inflation,” from responsa written by R. Moshe Malka, Ve-Heshiv Moshe, nos. 34-35. In this case I can guarantee you that the recipient is not deserving of the titles he has been given.

For another example of such exalted titles with regard to a non-rabbinic figure, see R. Michel Shurkin, Meged Giv’ot Olam (Jerusalem, 2005), vol. 2, p. 5, who is speaking of Prof. Samuel Soloveitchik:

כיוצא בזה ראיתי מעשה, כשבשנת תשכ”ז נפטרו במשך תקופה קצרה אחיו של הגרי”ב זצ”ל, הגאון ר’ שמואל זצ”ל . . .

In R. Weinberg’s letter to Samuel Atlas, published in Torah u-Madda Journal 7 (1997), pp. 107-108, he writes: “’Geonim’ sprout up there as grass in the field. Those who were emissaries of the yeshivot and unimportant mashgihim have overnight become outstanding geonim.”

For more on the nonsense of elaborate titles of praise, see the many sources quoted by R. Pinchas Meyers, Nahalat Pinchas (Jerusalem, 1995), vol., 2, no. 41. See also R. Chaim Hirschensohn, Malki ba-Kodesh, vol. 1, p. 90, vol. 6, pp. 198, 200, 237-238.

Returning to Scheinfeld, here is what he has to say on the topic (pp. 82-83):

לרב פשוט מתארים “הרב הגאון”. לרב גדול בתורה באמת מתארים “מאור הגולה, בקי בכל חדרי התורה”. באמעריקא, ארץ החנופה והשקר, מתארים לכל דרשן פטפטן “הרב המטיף הגדול, פה מפיק מרגליות” ועוד. מגוזמים, מגוחכים עוד יותר תוארי-הכבוד של רביי החסידים: “אד”מור, סבא קדישא, בוצינא קדישא, צדיק יסוד עולם, בנן של קדושים, פרי צדיק, גזע ישישים, פטיש החזק, עמוד הימיני” ועוד ועוד. בעולם הקולטורי נוהגים: כשכותבים מכתב לאדם שקבל התואר Ph.D. מאיזה בית מדעים, מתארים אותו בתואר דר. ודי בזה. אפילו כשכותבים לדר. איינשטיין, לא היה שום אדם כותב: “כבוד הדר. החוזה בכוכבים, נהירין לו שבילי דרקיע” ועוד, דברים שהם ראויים לייחס לו באמת.

After seeing what the term “Gaon” has become in our time, it is worth recalling what appears in R. Malachi ha-Kohen, Yad Malachi, Kelalei ha-Geonim 1. If we use the following definition of Gaon, you can count the living geonim on one hand, and perhaps still have some fingers not counted:

ושמעתי אומרים שתנאי הגאון היה לידע ש”ס על פה גמ’ ומשניות.

The Hatam Sofer states (She’elot u-Teshuvot Hatam Sofer ha-Hadashot, Yoreh Deah no. 33):

ידע מעלתו מיום שהורגלו בני מדינתו בתואר “גאון אמיתי”, גילו ופרסמו שסתם גאון אינו אמיתי, אבל חוששני שגם אמיתי אינו אמת.

The exaggerated titles are most often found in haskamot, and with this in mind see the haskamah published by Jacob Goldman in his book Peret ve-Olelot (Jerusalem, 1930).

This is not the only example of an author giving himself a haskamah (the Aderet comes to mind), but I think it is the only example of an author giving himself a haskamah which tells the world how unqualified he is.

2 See Louis J. Swichkow and Lloyd P. Gartner, The History of the Jews of Milwaukee (Philadelphia, 1963), p. 209.

3 “Willingness to Sacrifice,” Jewish Journal, available here

4 Speaking of editions, I don’t understand why people continue to cite works such as Orot and Orot ha-Kodesh. Now that we are fortunate to have the Shemonah Kevatzim, and can cite R. Kook from the source, why would anyone continue to refer to writings that have been edited, and touched up, by R. Zvi Yehudah and the Nazir?

5 In an earlier post I called attention to Joseph Ibn Caspi’s incredible comments about how we are to treat animals, wherein he notes that “we are very close to them and we both have one father”!

See here.

Elsewhere in Caspi’s writings we see ambivalence towards eating meat. There too he explains that that an animal is אחינו בן אבינו החי

He also writes

עיקר הכוונה שלא נאכל בשר, כי יספיקו לנו הצמחים. ולכן בבראשית לא הותר לנו רק עשב השדה, ואחר המבול נתפשט אכילת בעלי החיים שהוא כאילו נאכל אבינו [!] כי הוא סוגנו [סוג שלנו] הקרוב

Both of these sources, from Caspi’s Gevia Kesef, p. 31, and Metzaref le-Kesef, p. 294, are cited in Hannah Kasher, “‘Eikh Yetzavenu ha-Shem La’asot Toevah ka-Zot:’ Bikoret Akedat Yitzhak al pi R. Yosef Ibn Caspi,” Et ha-Da’at 1 (1997), p. 41.

For an opposing viewpoint to that of Caspi, see R. Gershon Ashkenazi, Avodat ha-Gershuni, no. 13:

צער בעלי חיים לא שייך אלא בבעל חיים כשהוא בחיים חיותו . . . מי שנוחר את הבהמה במקום שיוכל לשחטה אין בזה משום צער בעלי חיים, וכי הבהמה אחינו הוא לברור לה מיתה יפה.

R. Zvi Yehudah Kook, Or li-Netivati, pp. 245-246, expresses himself similarly to Caspi:

בהשקפת האחדות השלמה לא נראה את עצמנו בתור דבר פרטי מיוחד בפני עצמו, וכן לא את כל אחד ואחד מכל יצורי עולם, לא את החי, לא את הצומח ולא את הדומם, אלא כולם וכולנו דבר אחד ממש . . . לא זה אוכל את זה כי אם הכל אוכל את הכל.

For the view, expressed by a couple of rishonim as well as the Aderet, that before his sin Adam was permitted to eat meat, see R. Bezalel Naor, Ma’amar al Yishmael (Spring Valley, 2008), pp. 52ff. (first pagination; there is an enormous amount of learning in this book. In addition, it opens with a Hebrew letter to Naor from Prof. Isadore Twersky.).

6 In the following section (no. 9 in the Ofen edition and censored from the Merkaz edition for reasons unclear), he offers another possible reason for the continuation of sacrifices:

יתכן שימשכו הקורבנות גם בזמן התקופה של השלמת הבעלי חיים רק בתור עזר לתקן הנפשות המגולגלות בבהמות, וכפי המעלה הגדולה של הדעת אז תהי’ הדעת ברורה מי יבוחר לקרבן.

7 Regarding the authority of the Court to uproot a mitzvah from the Torah, see the interesting observation of R. Hayyim Hirschensohn, Commentary to Horayot, vol. 1, p. 3b (Hirschensohn’s numbering):

אמר ר’ יוסי לא שהורו מותר לאכל חלב יודעין היו שאסור לאכול חלב והתורה נתנה רשות לב”ד להורות, וזה לא נקרא לדעת הירושלמי עקירת כל הגוף, שטעו שיש כח לב”ד לעקור דבר מן התורה אפילו בקום ועשה, וזה נקרא הגוף קים רק עקירת מקצת, לאמר שאין נצחיות ח”ו לחוקי התורה שיוכל הב”ד לעקרם כרצונם, כדעת רבני הרפארים היום החושבים שמפני צורך הזמן יכולים להתר איסורים מפורשים וקבועים בתורה, ולא נקראים בזה כופרים בעיקר, רק ב”ד טועים ולו הי’ בהם שאר תנאי פר העלם דבר היו חייבים עדת הראפרים בפר העלם דבר.

8 There is another theory as to why the sectarian hasidic world in particular has had so many cases of covering up and defending child sex abusers. It is that they simply do not regard these people as so terrible. The evidence for this appears obvious, in that in case of after case we see that they continue to allow sex abusers to teach and refuse to turn them over to the authorities and warn the parent body. Had they caught the rebbe eating at McDonald’s, you can be sure he would have been fired, but not so when it comes to fooling around with kids. The question is why do they have this outlook, and how come they don’t regard child sex abusers as so terrible? Here is a possible answer (which a wise person suggested). Look at where these societies get their information about human nature, the information that they regard as authentic and true. It does not come from modern psychology, but from Torah sources and folk beliefs. If you look only at traditional rabbinic literature, you won’t conclude that child sex abuse is as terrible as modern society views it. Yes, it is a sin and the person who commits it must repent as he must do with all sins, but there is nothing in the traditional literature that speaks to the great trauma suffered by the victim. How do we know about this trauma? Only from modern psychology and the testimony of the victims. Yet this type of evidence does not have much significance in the insular hasidic world (unless it is your own child who has been abused). Certainly modern psychology, which is often attacked by figures in that community, is not given much credence, especially not when they are confronted with an issur of mesirah. This theory makes a lot of sense to me and I am curious to hear what others have to say.

Marc B. Shapiro – Review: Orthodox Jews in America

Orthodox Jews in America

reviewed by Marc B. Shapiro

This is the first part of a four part post. It begins with a review I was asked to write that in the end was never published. The format of the review was not designed for the arcane stuff and numerous footnotes that are usual fare for the Seforim blog. Yet have no fear, these will return in parts 2-4.

Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2009)

Pretty much everyone has seen an image that would have been unimaginable fifty years ago. It could be in a restaurant, playground, sporting event, or just on the street. The image is that of a typical American grandparent, with no identifying signs of being Jewish, doting on grandchildren who are wearing long skirts, big kippot and sometimes even have sidelocks. Many have also seen another image, a Shabbat morning with father and son walking to synagogue. Father is dressed in suit and tie and son also has a suit and tie. Yet the son's suit is black and the shirt is white. He is also wearing the obligatory black hat (and in so doing is helping keep alive a business—hat making—that seems to have no other client base).

From one perspective, these images are understandable, as children have often rejected the religious lifestyle of their parents. Yet what makes the story significant is that until recently the movement was almost always in one direction, with children becoming less observant. Seventy-five years ago Rabbi Solomon Isaac Scheinfeld of Milwaukee could declare that there were no baalei teshuvah (newly religious) in the “Land of Columbus.” Yet today we see both plenty of newly religious and, even more significant from my perspective, many who were raised Orthodox adopting a more stringent observance and narrower outlook on life than their parents. This is all part of the historic revival of Orthodoxy. How we got to this place should be a question on the mind of every thinking Jew.

Many have set out to answer this question, and the study of Orthodox Judaism in all of its forms has been a growth industry for the last couple of decades. Recent years have seen an explosion of writings on the topic, both articles and full-length books. There have also been a number of conferences focusing on Orthodoxy, and many of the proceedings have been published. On the internet there are loads of sites devoted to aspects of Orthodox life and culture from all different angles. Even though the Orthodox are significantly smaller than the other denominations, the amount written about them in recent years dwarfs what we can point to with regard to the Conservative and Reform movements. In terms of blogs and other internet sites, there also is no comparison. How to explain all this?

When it comes to the blogs and more popular sites on the internet the answer is not hard to find. It is true that the other denominations have more “members” than the Orthodox. Yet if we are talking about those who are educated Jewishly, and interested in Jewish matters, the Orthodox unquestionably outnumber the other denominations. Since the internet is the great equalizer, with everyone able to set up his or her soapbox, it is no wonder that it is crawling with Orthodox sites. Furthermore, average Orthodox Jews, by which I mean those who are not in the rabbinate or the academy, buy books of Jewish interest to a much greater extent than other laypeople. Since they are bound to be interested in their own denomination, this would explain why books dealing with aspects of Orthodoxy sell well.

Yet how are we to explain the great scholarly interest that has also taken root? Are the academics fascinated by a movement that defied predictions of its demise, and instead shows incredible dynamism and often seems to be changing before our eyes? To be sure, this is bound to interest those in the academy, especially the phenomenon of a movement supposedly committed to continuity with the past that nevertheless shows an incredible ability to alter its traditional practices. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that for most products one determined if they were kosher by looking at the ingredients. Yet the consensus today in the United States, even among the Modern Orthodox, is that a product cannot be kosher without rabbinical supervision (and the supervision itself has to be regarded as reputable). Kosher consumers are now told by the various kashrut organizations that canned vegetables, which contain only vegetables and water, need supervision, not to mention mouthwash, tin foil pans, and a host of other items. They are further told that some fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries and broccoli, can’t be eaten at all, or at least not without a cleaning regimen (complete with liquid soap) that would discourage most. These are all relatively new practices that have developed, and as such are bound to spark the interest of historians, sociologists, and even psychologists.

The latest contribution to the study of Orthodoxy comes from Jeffrey S. Gurock. Gurock was one of the first scholars to write about Orthodoxy, beginning with his classic 1983 essay “Resisters and Accommodators: Varieties of Orthodox Rabbis in America, 1886-1983.” Since that time, he has written on a variety of aspects of American Orthodoxy, and his latest book can be seen as a culmination of his work in this area. Orthodox Jews in America is the first attempt at a complete history of traditional Judaism in the United States (and the colonies).

Let me note at the outset that intellectual history is not part of the story Gurock tells. Other than Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who is briefly treated, there is no analysis of important Orthodox thinkers such as Eliezer Berkovits, Leo Jung, and Emanuel Rackman, and how their ideas were influenced by their American experience. The only time the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, is mentioned is when Gurock notes that some Lubavitchers regard him as the Messiah. I think this is an important lacuna as Schneersohn's role as thinker and builder are certainly significant enough for inclusion even in a book not focused on intellectual history. In fact, it was the success of Lubavitch that encouraged the non-hasidic haredim (ultra-Orthodox) to also move into “outreach,” and today they are the major force in drawing newcomers to Orthodoxy.

This is ironic considering that some of the leaders of this world mocked the Lubavitch for doing precisely what the non-hasidic “outreach professionials” are doing today. In fact, it seems that the demographic realities of America have affected their perspective even more than Lubavitch. How else to explain that Aish Hatorah, a supposedly haredi organization, honors intermarried celebrities at its events and prominently features them in its programming and on its website? This is certainly something that R. Aaron Kotler (died 1962), who more than anyone else is the ideological forebear of the non-hasidic American haredim, could never have imagined.

In analyzing Orthodoxy we must not forget that more than anything else, it is a movement that revolves around Jewish law. Yet Gurock also pays no attention to how the halakhic system was impacted by the New World. I refer to both specific halakhic questions that arose in the United States (e.g., can one eat Turkey on Thanksgiving?), as well as the wider issue of how the democratic ethos of America influenced the outlook of the halakhic decisors, in particular men such as Joseph Elijah Henkin and Moses Feinstein. How the rabbinic leaders of both the United States and Europe regarded American Jewry, a community whose observance was often tenuous, is also an important part of the story that remains to be told.

For example, Gurock writes about the common practice of “Orthodox” Jews going to work on the Sabbath, a phenomenon he himself witnessed and offers a personal description. He even refers to a synagogue in Atlanta that in 1932 began holding Friday night services, not at sunset, but at a time that would permit members “to attend the synagogue after work or before the theatre.” In some synagogues, especially in the big cities, there was an early Saturday morning service that enabled those in attendance to go from there to work.

Not mentioned by Gurock is that there were rabbis who actually justified some of these Sabbath violators (that is, those who went to work, not the theatre goers). These rabbis asserted that those who worked on the Sabbath did so because they felt this was necessary in order to survive. Therefore, from a halakhic standpoint they could not be regarded as typical Sabbath violators. This is only one example of how the American reality influenced the halakhic response, and the writings of Rabbi Hayyim Hirschenson are most significant in this regard.

Finally, there is no attention paid to the wider religious context of Orthodoxy in modern times. The turn to traditional religion is certainly not confined to Judaism. The same phenomenon can be observed in Christianity and Islam, which means that there are no doubt broad cross-cultural factors that can explain some of the Orthodox revival of recent decades. In fact, this latter point, which I think is of great significance, is also entirely ignored in Haym Soloveitchik’s “Rupture and Reconstruction,” a classic article on the topic of Orthodoxy’s turn to the right. Soloveitchik describes late twentieth-century Orthodoxy’s evolution to a book culture from what had been a living culture. With this book culture, that is, modeling one’s behavior on the rulings found in traditional halakhic texts, as opposed to how Jews actually lived in the “real world,” came increasing stringency. There is a great deal of truth in this, but as is always the case, no important phenomenon can be explained by one cause. I make these points not to criticize Gurock, but only to call attention to how much work still needs to be done, even after Gurock’s book of almost four hundred pages.

Gurock’s strength is social history, and it is with this in mind that his book should be appreciated. He gives us insight into how Orthodox Jews lived, the peddler and merchant of years ago and the white collar professional of today, in places where there were many like them and in areas far removed from other Jews. Newspaper articles and memoirs are much more valuable for this type of history than the rabbinical writings, which are intended for the intellectuals and often give a very different slant. The story he tells is compelling reading, sometimes maddening (as with the various Orthodox disputes and scandals mentioned), and other times inspiring. I put the book down convinced more than ever that Orthodoxy, in all of its permutations, is where the future of American Judaism will be found. At the very least, its power and influence will be of much greater significance than today.

The one major negative that the community has to contend with, and which has always acted as a major hurdle to more people joining, is the incredible cost of day school tuition. Yet even here a new paradigm might be emerging, as some Orthodox parents have begun to send their children to public school. This is a new development that has just begun to pick up some steam and although not included in Gurock’s book, might be part of the Orthodox story in another twenty years.

Gurock begins his story from the start of Jewish settlement in colonial America, and I found the second chapter, dealing with nineteenth-century Orthodoxy and the difficulties it faced throughout the vast country, particularly fascinating. The bulk of the book is understandably devoted to the era beginning with large-scale Jewish immigration towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was then that American Orthodoxy really came into its own.

While some leading rabbis of the time, such as R. Jacob David Wilovsky of Chicago, assumed that no real synagogue could have English sermons, others were more attuned to where the American future would be. Although there were plans in New York and elsewhere to create European-type communities, complete with chief rabbis, the American scene, with its stress on religious autonomy, was not fertile ground for the European model. When one self-styled chief rabbi of New York was asked who actually appointed him to this august position, he is alleged to have replied, “the sign maker.” Even if apocryphal, the story accurately portrays the futility of transferring European models of authority to an increasingly complicated American scene. It is here that Gurock does a fine job showing the reader the complexity of what was taking place.

The twentieth century saw Orthodoxy really come into its own. The challenge of Conservative Judaism, the struggle to create a market for kosher products, and the varied attempts to create an attractive school system for the young are all part of the twentieth-century story recounted by Gurock. Although by mid-century any sociologist worth his salt was ready to proclaim that Orthodoxy would never survive in America—one famously declared that American Orthodoxy was a “case study of institutional decay”—by 1960 it should have been clear that Orthodoxy had made tremendous strides and was here to stay.
While there is much of significance in the book, I feel that Gurock is at his best in his treatment of what I call "old-time Orthodoxy," the type Gurock describes growing up with and has focused on in a few essays. This approach to Judaism, characterized by an identification with Orthodoxy while being less than fully observant in one’s personal life, was the dominant form of Orthodox Judaism in the United States for much of the twentieth country. Gurock has even spoken of the years 1900-1960 as “American Orthodoxy’s era of non-observance.” This “non-observant Orthodoxy” increasingly came under challenge in the latter half of the twentieth century, as stricter observance of kashrut and the Sabbath laws became part of the Orthodox mainstream. As the century came to a close levels of observance continued to rise.
Many of the older generation would have difficulty recognizing the form of Orthodoxy that has developed in the last thirty years. Unlike when they were growing up, today's Orthodoxy does not offer social dances for singles and synagogue trips to Broadway musicals. The mehitzah has been raised and the after-school Talmud Torahs have been closed down since almost all children attend day schools. Orthodoxy no longer feels very welcoming to one who drives to synagogue on Shabbat. In many congregations one who “eats fish out” will have to keep this quiet unless he wishes to appear as a religious deviant. These changes in Orthodoxy happened at the same time that most Orthodox Jews have become completely at home in American society and culture, to the extent of having kosher hot dogs sold at baseball games for all those who wish to take part in the great American pastime.

By creating the day schools and yeshivot to which they sent their children, the old-time Orthodox planted the seeds of the future revolution in American Orthodoxy, a revolution that has brought great satisfaction to some and heartache to others. Their children discovered that Judaism as practiced in their homes was far removed from what the rabbis and the Jewish texts had to say. Unlike their parents, whose major exposure to Judaism was in the home, the children's major exposure was in the schools. It is therefore not surprising that with their new knowledge they often examined their parents' lifestyle and found in wanting. Many of these people spent time in advanced Torah study in Israel, and as part of the quest for a more serious religious life were ready to accept added stringencies (e. g., glatt kosher and even sometimes halav yisrael [milk produced by Jews]).

One sign of the haredi infiltration, as it were, of Modern Orthodox synagogues is the ubiquity of the Artscroll prayer book and Humash, which present an “East European” flavor combined with a quasi-fundamentalism. It didn’t have to be this way. Yet Modern Orthodox intellectuals were so busy writing learned essays to be read by each other, that they abandoned the masses to the right wing, producing virtually no literature directed towards them. It was only in 2009 that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks produced a competing prayer book to Artscroll, one more in line with the Modern Orthodox ethos. Yet I doubt that it can win over many of the synagogues that years ago switched over to Artscroll.

The increasing visibility and power of the right-wing Orthodox, combined with the turn to the right in Modern Orthodoxy, was bound to engender a counter reaction. Gurock has a chapter dealing with Orthodox feminism, which is just one aspect of an incipient move to the left on the part of some in the Modern Orthodox world. This new liberal Orthodoxy, not as powerful or confident as its adherents would like, has begun to focus on issues that the mainstream Orthodox shy away from, including interdenominational and interfaith dialogue. Yet Gurock is correct in sensing that the women’s issue is central to the self-understanding of the new liberal Orthodox, many of whom seek rabbinic guidance from the recently established Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York. It is too soon to tell what the enduring role of this new institution will be. However, the strong attacks on it by both right-wing and centrist Orthodox figures, who see it as the beginning of a new Conservative movement, show that the institution and its rabbis are already viewed as a threat.

The liberal Orthodox first found their voice in dealing with the agunah problem, and have also worked to expand the role of women in the synagogue and communal life. There are now synagogues that regard themselves as Orthodox yet function in a semi-egalitarian fashion, and full egalitarianism might just be a matter of time. Too recent to be included in the book, a woman has just been given a rabbinic ordination, and presumably there will soon be other Orthodox women rabbis. Yet there are also other aspects of the liberal Orthodox vision that Gurock does not mention. For example, social justice has emerged as an issue that they feel strongly about. A new kosher certification has even been unveiled, one that focuses on how the workers are treated. Some in this camp have even begun to speak about the need for a new approach to homosexuality. It is thus very difficult to predict where this segment of the community will be in another fifty years, and if the mainstream will even regard it as part of wider Orthodoxy. Indeed, some of the liberals see themselves as part of a new era, one that is both committed to halakhah and post-denominational in mindset.

At the end of the book, Gurock describes his trip to an Arizona hotel for Passover. Here, around the pool, he witnessed the persistence of old-time Orthodoxy, which he describes as those “Jews on the edges of Orthodoxy’s contemporary tent.” Yet the people he describes are not on the edges at all, but part of mainstream Modern Orthodoxy, especially when one leaves the great population centers. It is true that organized religious life has moved to the right. As mentioned already, you will no longer find synagogues sponsoring trips to a Broadway musical, and the once ubiquitous synagogue dance barely survives. It is also the case that many of the young generation are more observant than their parents. For example, it was almost unheard of for a married woman in America in the 1950’s and 1960’s to cover her hair. If her rabbi’s wife didn’t (and that was almost always the case), then why should she? Yet today, there are many young women in the Modern Orthodox world who do follow this practice.

However, old-time Orthodoxy, which combines a middle or upper class American lifestyle with traditional ritual observance, both survives and is reproducing. Throughout the country pools and beaches are packed with Orthodox Jews, and despite their synagogue’s lack of sponsorship, on any night one can find Orthodox in attendance at Broadway shows and the opera. The synagogue dance might have disappeared, but husbands and wives can dance to the oldies (for many this means “YMCA”) at plenty of Orthodox weddings and bar mitzvahs.

What we can say is that the ritual instinct of many Modern Orthodox Jews has zeroed in on matters such as kashrut and the Sabbath, so that these areas are observed much more carefully than in previous years. However, other areas of Jewish law are treated not much differently than a generation or two ago. While some observers have spoken of a future haredi takeover of American Orthodoxy, there is good reason to assume that the varieties of Orthodox experience described by Gurock will continue for a long time to come.

Kosher Tube: TV Series on the 13 Principles

TV Series on the Thirteen Principles
by: Marc B. Shapiro

My next post will, God willing, appear after Pesah (in three parts). In the meantime, I wanted to let readers know about the thirteen episodes of a show focusing on the Thirteen Principles. It is called Credo 13 and you can find it here.
It appeared on Canadian television and “stars” myself, David Novak. Benjamin Hecht, Shalom Carmy, Eliezer Breitowitz, Mayer Schiller, and Leib Tropper. (If you can’t tolerate, or figure out, the game played by the girls in the show, just fast-forward through that section. Also, for some reason the quality of parts 10-13 is not perfect).
I was very impressed with the speakers, in particular Rabbi Breitowitz. Unlike the others, I had never heard of him, and found him to be a very insightful and really wonderful member of the “team”. The one weak link, in my opinion, was Leib Tropper, and I say this without any connection to recent events. Apart from the fact that he speaks as if he is talking to yeshiva bochurim rather than the larger community, there are times when he is simply wrong. For example, what he says in part 8 about the text of the Torah is based on a misunderstanding, and contrast what he says with the perceptive comments of Schiller and Hecht.
On this topic, in my book I cited a number of examples of authors who have no knowledge of the history of the Torah text[1] (or perhaps they do have knowledge, but are consciously engaged in the creation of a religious myth). A recent example of this is R. Ezriel Tauber, Pirkei Mahashavah al Yod Gimel Ikarei ha-Emunah (Jerusalem, 2008). This is what he says regarding the text of the Torah (p. 206):

עינינו הרואות כי מסורת זו נשמרה בישראל עד לימינו. ואף על פי שכלל ישראל התפזרו לארבע כנפות הארץ, בכל אופן כל ספרי התורה של כל העדות בכל התקופות ובכל המקומות הם בנוסח אחיד, והם זהים. זוהי תופעה מופלאה מאד שלאחר העתקות כה רבות וטלטולים נותרו כל ספרי התורה באותו נוסח.

What is one to make of such a statement? Can it be that Tauber really knows so little about this matter? Is he ignorant of a number of famous talmudic passages, of numerous teshuvot of rishonim and aharonim that deal with differences in Torah texts, of the famous comment of R. Akiva Eger? Does he not know anything about the Masoretes, and the work of Rambam, R. Meir ha-Levi Abulafia, R. Menahem Lonzano, and R. Yedidiah Solomon Norzi to establish a correct text? Does he not know that as we speak, the Yemenite text is not identical to the Ashkenazic and Sephardic texts?
I don’t for a minute think that Tauber, who is a very learned man, is ignorant of any of this. In fact, elsewhere in his book one finds a different perspective (p. 215):

בכל תפוצות ישראל אין הבדל משמעותי בין ספרי התורה

Is there any way to explain what Tauber is doing other than assuming that in the first passage I cite he is creating a religious myth, but his true opinion is reflected in the second passage?
Perhaps another example of his creation of a religious myth is the following comment, which is designed to illustrate the universal nature of Jewish observance despite the myriad of details in halakhah (p. 216):

אם באנו למנות את כל הדינים וההלכות הכלולים בזוג תפילין, נגיע לכשלושים אלף הלכות!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that this can only be read as לשון גוזמא , in other words, designed to impress and inspire, rather than being factual. Rashbam states (Pesahim 119a):

משוי שלש מאות: לאו דוקא וכן כל שלש מאות שבש”ס

R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes brings a bunch of other talmudic examples where the number 300 is used in an exaggerated fashion.[2] I think we can say the same thing about the number 30,000 in Rabbi Tauber’s book.
With regard to the text of the Torah, in Limits, p. 97 n. 41, I discussed the different readings of the word דכא vs. דכה in Deut. 23:2. I stated that Ashkenazim and Sephardim read it with a heh and Yemenites read it with an aleph. This is also how the matter is described in the responsum of R. Ovadiah Yosef that I refer to in this note. Yet matters are actually more complicated than this. R. Chaim Rapoport informs me that the Chabad practice is to write with an aleph. Furthermore, there was also an old Ashkenazic minhag to write it with an aleph.[3]
Right before I was going to post this, S. of On the Main Line asked me if I could make sense of a sentence that appeared in a Yated Neeman article entitled “Letter by Letter: The Story of the Romm Publishing House and the Vilna Shas”, available here.
The strange sentence reads: “The first manuscript that the Romm family obtained was Rabbenu Chananel’s commentary which now appears alongside the gemora on many masechtos. The manuscript was kept in the Vatican archives but it had not been well preserved. The pages were very worn and were marked by rust stains, while the edges of the sheets had been eaten away. Moreover, the commentary was written in Latin characters, which made deciphering and copying it much harder.”
One doesn’t need to be an expert in Hebrew manuscripts to realize that this is real howler. But S. wondered where they got got the idea that R. Hananel’s commentary was written in Latin characters. Before I was able to examine the matter carefully, Dan replied with the answer. The whole article is taken (and censored) from an earlier article by Shmuel Shraga Feigensohn,[4] as Dan has already shown. See here. As for the information about the Latin characters, Dan points to this passage

בראשית שמנו לבנו להעתיק כתב יד פירושו של רבנו חננאל בר חושיאל ז”ל (מימי המאה השמינית לאלף החמישי) על מסכתות רבות מתלמוד בבלי שנמצאו באוצר הספרים שבוואטיקאן ברומי והכתב הוא באותיות רש”י בצורות איטאליאניות [נוסח איטלקי] אשר רוב ישראל בזמננו לא כהלין כתבא דא למקריה

What this mean is that the manuscript was written in the Hebrew script popular in Italy, which was not easy for non-Italians read. The anonymous person who wrote this article thought that this referred to Latin characters! (Rashi letters in Latin characters!)
When reading this passage I was reminded of another error, this time not by an anonymous Yated writer, but, bi-mehilat kevodo, by Rabban shel Yisrael, R. Moses Isserles. In his responsa, no. 128, he suggests that Rashi’s commentary to the Torah was written in the vernacular, which I assume means French, and only later translated into Hebrew. It is a mystery how he came up with this bizarre idea. R. Asher Siev, in his edition of the responsa, writes about Rama’s suggestion:

השערה תמוהה ומיוסדת על סברת עצמו ולא על שום בסיס היסטורי או עובדתי

In the subsequent responsum, no. 129, R. Samuel Katzenellenbogen writes to Rama:

והס שלא להזכיר שפירוש רש”י לא נעשה בלשון הקדש כאשר כתב אדוני

As I noted in an earlier post, it is possible to find at least one strange idea in even the greatest of our sages.

Notes

[1] I neglected to cite Yosef Reinman, who writes as follows in One People, Two Worlds, p. 119:

[A]n examination of Torah scrolls from all over the world, from Ireland to Siberia to isolated Yemen, all handwritten by scribes, yielded just nine instances of one-letter spelling discrepancies. Nine! And none of them affect the meaning of the text. Why is this so? Because every week we take out the scrolls and read them in public. The people follow the reading closely and if something is wrong, they are quick to point it out.

Unfortunately, Reinman doesn’t realize that it was the invention of printing that unified Torah texts by creating a standard version that soferim could have access to and be guided from. Printed humashim also enabled people listening to the reading to point out errors. Yet let us not forget that most of the differences in Torah scrolls have concerned male and haser. Contrary to Reinman’s implication in his last sentence, there is no way for the people following the reading to catch such an error.
I also must point out that Reinman’s first sentence is an egregious error, and one doesn’t need to go to Ireland or Siberia to prove this (and, of course, no one has ever performed such an examination). If one simply takes fifty Torah scrolls from Lakewood one will find all sorts of discrepancies. I know this because the people who check sifrei Torah by computer claim that the overwhelming majority of scrolls they check, including those that have been in use for decades, have contained at least one error. In other words, contrary to what Reinman is statng, the truth of Torah does not rise or fall because of scribal errors. If it did, then we would be in big trouble because as I just mentioned, almost every Torah scroll in the world has discrepancies. What Reinman doesn’t seem to get is that while contemporary halakhic authorities are in dispute about only nine letters, this has nothing to do with the quality of actual Torah scrolls, which are obviously subject to human errors by scribes.
For the information on errors in Torah scrolls, including eye-opening pictures, see Kolmos, Elul 5748. Here is part of R. Shmuel Wosner’s letter quoted on p. 7

עכשיו שנכנס עבודת הקאמפיוטער בזה למסלולו, ונתברר על ידו לתמהון לבב כולנו, שמבערך ששים ספרים, ס”ת שהיו בחזקת בדוקים יצאו רק תשע ספרים נקיים מכל שגיאה וברובא דמינכר מאד נמצאו שגיאות פוסלות לרוב. וכן בדידן הוי עובדא בס”ת שנכתב ע”ש תלמידים גדולים וצדיקים שנספו בעו”ה, נמצאו ה’ טעיות ממש בחסר ויתר

[2] Mavo ha-Talmud, ch. 30 and his comment to Sotah 34a. For more on rabbinic exaggerations when it comes to numbers, see R. David Yoel Weiss, Megadim Hadashim (Jerusalem, 2008), Berakhot 51b.
[3] For details, see R. Yaakov Hayim Sofer in Mekabtziel 35 (Tishrei 5769), p. 124; R. Avihai Yitzhak, Masoret Teman be-Of (Zichron Yaakov, 2009), pp. 188ff.
[4] Yahadut Lita (Tel Aviv, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 268-296. See also Feigensohn’s Aharit Davar, at the end of the Romm ed. of Nidda.

Update from Dr.Ezra Chwat of the Giluy Milta B’alma blog:
R’ Hananel in the Vilna edition employed three manuscripts. Vatican 126/128 covers all of Moe’d. The missing pages at the beginning of 126 (Yoma 2-8) are also missing in print. This is in a clear, undamaged Ashkenazic square hand, perfectly legible even to laymen. More on Vatican 126/128 here: http://nli.org.il/imhm/vaticanhebmss.pdf Pages 91-92. Bava Qama and Bava Metzia are from London BL Add. 27194 (cat. 408), as both include only BQ 2-37 and BM 2-51. This is manuscript slightly less legible. The rest of Neziqin is from Rome, Angelica (not Vatican) 83. The censor’s erasure of 4 lines on fol. 100 (on Sanhedrin 43b), is described in respective daf in Vilna, in the editors footnote. Had the Vilna editors used the BL copy mentioned above, which continues to the end of Nezikin (except for Horiyot), they would not have omitted the page on Sanhedrin 18, which is missing from Angelica (between fols. 81-82), nor the missing line on Sanhedrin 43a, both are copied in BL. This is in Italian semi-cursive hand, slightly more difficult than the others. More on the uncensored Talmud and R’ Hananel on Sanhedrin 43 (of particular interest to Daf yomi participants, coming up, how hauntingly appropriate, this Shabbat Hagadol)Here: http://imhm.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-post.html

Some Assorted Comments and a Selection from my Memoir, part 2

Some Assorted Comments and a Selection from my Memoir, part 2

by Marc B. Shapiro

1. In a recent Jewish Action (Summer 2009), p. 21, Elli Fischer writes:

Brandeis University has been enclosed by an eruv for thirty years, longer than any other campus not adjacent to an established Jewish community. Since Brandeis is a Jewish institution, the eruv is funded by the university (as opposed to the students). . . . Rabbi David Fine, who graduated from Brandeis in the mid-1980’s, recalls checking the eruv as a student. . . . The first two JLIC rabbis to serve at Brandeis, Todd Berman and Aharon Frazer, each implemented minor upgrades to the eruv.

This gives me the opportunity to correct some errors and tell part of the story of the Brandeis Orthodox community. The eruv was first established in the 1982-1983 school year, when R. Meir Sendor was the Orthodox advisor. (Sendor is currently the rabbi of Young Israel of Sharon and is unusual in that he is both an academic scholar of Kabbalah, with a PhD from Harvard,[1] and also involved in Kabbalah from the spiritual side.) Rabbi Sendor informs me that Rabbi Yehudah Kelemer was the initial halakhic advisor, and Rabbi Shimon Eider was later brought in to be the official rav ha-machshir. (R. Eider later helped in putting up the eruv in Sharon, which was the first eruv in New England.)

When I arrived in Brandeis in the fall of 1985 we did not carry on Shabbat. (Contrary to the Jewish Action article, David Fine didn’t arrive at Brandeis until two years later.) I assume that due to some structural changes on campus, the eruv was no longer functional. During that academic year, Rabbi Eider returned, did what needed to be done, and the eruv was once again kosher. At this time, R. Yaakov Lazaros, a Chabad rabbi in Framingham (with semichah from R. Moshe Feinstein), was the Orthodox advisor.

The university paid (and I assume still pays) for the eruv’s upkeep, but this has nothing to do with Brandeis supposedly being a Jewish institution. In fact, it is not a Jewish institution. Brandeis paid because it saw this as an important service to the Orthodox community. The university has expanded since the 1980’s so that is probably why changes to the eruv had to be made. I don’t like the word “upgrade” that Fischer used, because “upgrade” means to improve the quality of something, and I don’t think that Rabbi Eider’s eruv needed to be improved.

When one speaks of Orthodox life at Brandeis, a lot of credit must go to Rabbi Albert Axelrad, who was the Reform Hillel rabbi at Brandeis. He is someone who over time I came to admire greatly, even though our religious outlooks were so very different. What Weinberg jokingly said about another Reform rabbi applies equally to Axelrad: He is a “hillul ha-shem,” (hillul ha-shem in quotation marks!) because he shows that “one can be an upstanding and noble man, full of the spirit of love for Israel, its Torah, and its language,” even if one is not a halakhic Jew.[2]

In ways that people don’t realize, Axelrad greatly assisted Orthodox growth on campus, and today Brandeis has a very large Orthodox contingent.[3] It was Axelrad who made sure that there would be an Orthodox advisor on campus, paid for from the Hillel budget. Yet despite his leaning over backwards to help the Orthodox, there were always those in the Orthodox community who had negative feelings towards him, not only ideologically, but also personally. These were people who came from yeshivot and had never had any contact with a Reform rabbi, and here was one who performed intermarriages. Axelrad had also been involved in some leftist causes and has the dubious distinction of having been officially put into herem, ceremony and all, by Rabbi Marvin Antelman. He shared this honor with the entire membership of the New Jewish Agenda, whom Antelman also placed under herem. (I mentioned Antelman in a previous installment and hope to return to him as his books are deserving of their own post.)

Rabbi Lazaros was only at Brandeis for one year and he was followed by Rabbi Marc Gopin. Those who saw the video on the Rav will probably remember Gopin as he has a few appearances in it. At the time he was working on his dissertation, which focuses on Samuel David Luzzatto.[4] He has also published a nice article on Elijah Benamozegh.[5] Since then he has made an international reputation for himself in the area of conflict resolution, travelling widely and publishing a number of books.[6]

Gopin was followed by another rabbi, a RIETS graduate, who would have been very good for the community in another ten years. But at this time he was too much to the right for them. The community had always been a somewhat liberal place. I recall the outrage among many when R. Moshe Dovid Tendler came to campus and expressed his feelings about homosexuality. There was the same outrage when the new campus rabbi said similar things. (Shmuley Boteach or R. Chaim Rapoport would have been more in line with the students’ feelings.) The following should give a further sense of the liberal nature of the community: The practice on Shabbat morning when taking the Torah out of the ark was for the hazan to carry it through the women’s section. This struck everyone as a very nice thing to do, and although it is not done at the typical synagogue, college is a very different place. Another example of how college differs from the “real world” is that during Shabbat morning services women routinely give divrei Torah, yet this is not something that most “regular” shuls are willing to allow.

When Rabbi Lazaros was the Orthodox advisor he ruled that the practice of carrying the Torah on the women’s side was forbidden. From the way he explained his decision I understood that the major issue wasn’t carrying the Torah on the woman’s side per se, but rather women kissing the Torah. As he was the rav, we had to listen to him, even on the Shabbatot that he was not there. However, in an act of rebellion the community made a decision that when the Torah was taken out of the ark the hazan, who now could not walk around the women’s side, would also not walk around the men’s side. He would bring the Torah right to the bimah. When the Torah was returned to the ark the hazan walked to the front of the synagogue and sang Mizmor le-David, once again without walking around the men’s side. The following year, with the arrival of a new Orthodox advisor, the community revived the old practice of carrying the Torah on the women’s side.

When I was the Orthodox advisor in the early 1990’s the Orthodox culture on campus had changed, and the situation with carrying the Torah was exactly reversed from what it had been in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s it was the students, or rather some students, who wanted to stop carrying the Torah on the women’s side. They didn’t think that an Orthodox shul could have such a practice. My position was that the minhag had to remain the way it was. At that time there was a very dynamic Ramah-type minyan and if the Orthodox were seen as too close-minded we would lose people to the Conservative minyan. In fact, it was precisely because of the liberal nature of our minyan that many non-Orthodox were attracted to it, and a number of students adopted an observant lifestyle while at Brandeis. While some students, coming to Brandeis after a year in Israel, wanted the minyan to be just like their shul in Teaneck and the Five Towns, the truth was that the minyan, to be successful, had to be run like an out of town shul.

This was not the only time I felt that for the sake of the wider appeal of the Orthodox community I had to make decisions that got some people upset. On Friday night there was a communal meal for all the different denominations. Often a woman would say kiddush. After that everyone could, of course, make their own kiddush. But there were some people who wanted to make a big deal about the women saying kiddush, and were also saying that men are not yotze with this, no matter which woman is reciting the kiddush. At the same time that this was happening, there were also those in the non-Orthodox groups who wanted to start having women lead the communal birkat ha-mazon. Until then, out of deference to the Orthodox, only a man led it.

We have a talmudic principle that if you try to grab too much you will end up with nothing, so I had to make a choice. The real halakhic issue here was birkat ha-mazon, as a woman cannot be motzi a man.[7] Therefore, I told the students that it was OK for the women to make kiddush but not birkat ha-mazon, and anyone who wanted to should make his own kiddush. This compromise was accepted. A year prior to this, before I was working at Brandeis, I had been wondering about this issue and asked R. Yehudah Herzl Henkin if it was permitted for a woman to say kiddush for a man. He replied in the affirmative. Shortly after receiving his answer, the same issue became pressing at Harvard Hillel. I told the Orthodox rabbi at Harvard, Harry Sinoff, what the practice at Brandeis was and that he might want to consult with R. Henkin. This is the responsum R. Henkin wrote, published here for the first time. (See also Bnei Vanim, vol. 2, pp. 40-41.)

I myself wrote a short Hebrew “mini-responsum” dealing with women, kiddush, and birkat ha-mazon. It was taped to the wall of the campus beit midrash, but with the move to the right, I am sure that not too long after my departure the responsum came down.

I just mentioned the Brandeis beit midrash, which it itself significant. Other than Brandeis, I don’t know if there is another secular university in the world that has a beit midrash in a university building. When the beit midrash was established in the early 1990’s it was a great achievement. It was an entirely student led project, but again, Rabbi Axelrad’s involvement, behind the scenes, was crucial. He spoke at the beit midrash dedication, as did the Boston Rosh Kollel.

There were also some minor conflicts related to the beit midrash. Although it was the Orthodox students who arranged for it, it was obviously something that all students could be part of. The question came up of what type of books should be stocked there. My feeling was that since the library had all the scholarly and academic books, there was no reason for these sorts of texts to be in the beit midrash.

Another issue arose with the Boston kollel. They had recently become involved with Brandeis students as part of their outreach. One of the kollel guys, who was having a great influence on the students, wanted to start a gemara shiur on campus. This was fabulous. He wanted to give the shiur in the beit midrash, which was the natural place. However, he said that he could only do it if no women were allowed into the beit midrash during this time (even if they were not participating in the shiur). One of the women students complained to me, and I agreed that this was improper. The beit midrash was established for all students and must be open 24 hours a day for everyone. We could not have a situation where, like a pool, the beit midrash is closed to women for certain hours. It also went against the ethos of the community to declare that women are barred from attending certain classes. I told the male students who were organizing the shiur that it would have to take place somewhere else, and that is what happened.

Right when we were having the discussions one of the students drove to Brookline to attend Prof. Isadore (R. Yitzhak) Twersky’s gemara shiur, and he came back reporting that there was a woman in attendance. If the Talner Rebbe welcomed women to his shiur, were the Brandeis students supposed to be more “frum”? For those who have never seen a picture of my late teacher, who was also the son-in-law of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, here he is:

There was another time when the Boston Rosh Kollel gave a decision to some of the students that I felt could drive away the less religious if it was adopted by the community as a whole. Since there were students who thought that the Rosh Kollel should be regarded as the halakhic authority for the community, I was in a difficult situation. This was especially so as I myself had asked him questions in the past, so it would not be an easy thing to reject his ruling in this case. I consulted a well-known haredi posek with whom I had discussed other matters, including an issue of possible mamzerut that came up on campus. He agreed with my position but said that he could not put his decision in writing.

I know that some people will find this objectionable, but it never bothered me. Why should I care if he put it in writing? He knew that if he did he might be attacked. Given the choice between no pesak (if it has to be in writing) or an oral pesak, obviously the latter is preferable. Although at the time I told people who gave the pesak (and anyone who wanted to could call him up to confirm it), revealing it on this blog would, I think, fall into the category of “putting it in writing.” This posek is still functioning, and if he was afraid of being attacked fifteen years ago, all the more so today. (There are reasons why I am being vague about the particulars of the pesak.)

Returning to the Brandeis beit midrash, Prof. Marvin Fox also spoke at its dedication. This was significant as it was the first time, in my memory, that the students took advantage of this great scholar and talmid hakham.[8] There was such a disconnect at Brandeis between the academic life and the religious life that regarding the latter we all overlooked the people in our midst, those who were teaching us in the classroom. I too regret not speaking to Fox in greater detail. For example, having lived in Columbus, Ohio he knew R. Leopold Greenwald very well, and yet other than hearing one or two stories about him from Fox, I never took the time to find out more. Fox also knew Chaim Bloch, the great rabbinic forger. (Greenwald and Bloch were themselves good friends.) He told me once that there was a lot he could say about Bloch, and yet I was foolish and never took advantage of this.

After Fox’s death I discovered a letter from him to Bloch in which he explains how it happened that Greenwald’s great library ended up at the Hebrew Union College. He also tells us the tragic fate of Greenwald’s huge collection of letters, letters that he received from gedolim and scholars over the course of many decades. This must have been one of the largest and most interesting collections in the world, full of priceless material which should have been given to a library so a Greenwald archive could be established. Among these papers were also to be found manuscripts from Greenwald’s own pen that had not yet been published. It was perhaps with this in mind that Fox told me very firmly, at the Brandeis beit midrash dedication, not to let the letters of Weinberg out of my hands. He was convinced that some people would want to destroy them, or at the very least make sure they were not made public.

Here is Fox’s letter to Bloch, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York [9]:

Returning to the RIETS graduate who was the Orthodox advisor following Gopin, there were a few issues that created problems. Yet the straw that broke the camel’s back was that, in accordance with R. Moshe Feinstein’s pesak, he would not give an aliyah to Rabbi Axelrad. Axelrad’s practice was to come to the Orthodox minyan once a year. Not giving him an aliyah was something that simply wouldn’t fly at Brandeis. It was not a question of Axelrad being concerned about his kavod. I am certain that he did not take personal offense. But he was very concerned about what appeared to be a growing split in the community, a community that had always gotten along so well. To publicly refuse to give the Hillel rabbi an aliyah would give the Orthodox community a sectarian flavor very much removed from both the Hillel ethos, as well from the majority of Orthodox students as well. It was not surprising, therefore, that this rabbi was let go in the middle of the year. After he was let go he tried to create a separate Orthodox community independent of Hillel. It was to be a real Austrittsgemeinde, and he told us that money would be forthcoming from New York to help us form the new community. Yet none of the students were interested.

R. Yehudah Herzl Henkin’s responsum, Bnei Vanim, vol. 2, no. 9, on whether one can give a Reform rabbi an aliyah, is dealing with the Brandeis situation (and was sent to me). Rabbi Henkin’s responsa have an unfortunate characteristic in that they don’t mention to whom he is writing, or give other identifying details. Without this blog post, future historians would have had no way of knowing which of the many American campuses he was referring to. Think of how much we learn about the history of Orthodoxy in America from R. Moshe Feinstein’s responsa. We see him answering questions to Canton, Berkeley and all sorts of other places. Knowing to where he is writing is vital for getting a sense not only of Orthodoxy of the time, but of the responsum itself, since his ruling for an out-of-the way place cannot always be applied when dealing with a center of Jewish life. More leniencies are obviously found in the former. With regard to Bnei Vanim, since R. Henkin doesn’t tell us to whom he is writing, when he is offering comments on another’s work we have no way of identifying this text if we want to get a better sense of the opposing position. (Other poskim have also published responsa that deal with Brandeis, and I will discuss them in a future post.)

I think readers might also find the following story interesting, from my tenure as Orthodox advisor at Brandeis. Every Friday night all the different groups on campus would get together for an oneg, at which there would be a speaker. Out of respect for the Orthodox a microphone was never used, which wasn’t really an issue since the onegs were not that big. However, it so happened that Hillel had an opportunity to bring in Dr. Ruth Westheimer [10] to speak on Friday night. She wasn’t going to speak about any sexual matters, but about her early years in Germany and her family that was killed.

This was at the height of Dr. Ruth’s fame, and there was going to be a huge crowd to come hear her. Hillel had decided to break with tradition and use a microphone at the event, which was to be held in a hall much larger than was usually used. I was told that Dr. Ruth actually insisted on the microphone, and the Hillel leadership didn’t feel like they could refuse. Before continuing with the story, let me go back a few years and tell how I, and my classmates, first heard of Dr. Ruth, because I think it says something about how yeshiva administrators are sometimes very foolish. I still remember how one day on the bus all the talk was about how the administration of Bruriah High School – the girl’s school of the Jewish Educational Center in Elizabeth, where I was a student – had sent out a letter to all parents telling them about a very dangerous radio show called “Sexually Speaking” that was on very late on Sunday night. The parents were told to make sure that their daughters didn’t listen to it—as if a parent can control what a teenager does with her radio in the privacy of her room. It was an era before computers, when we all listened to radio. (I am sure many readers remember the days when 770 WABC played music.)

Now anyone should realize that the perfect way to bring teenagers to do something is to tell them that they can’t do it. Although perhaps none of the Bruriah students had ever even heard of the show, upon receipt of this letter they all were determined to find out what the administration wanted to keep them away from. Not only that, but on the bus, the day after the letter was received, they told all the boys about this strange letter. None of us had ever heard of Dr. Ruth, and our school never sent out a warning letter to parents. Yet you can be sure that after hearing the news we too were curious. It happens that some students found Dr. Ruth so funny and interesting that they listened to her while they were on the phone together. The whole novelty was about an older Jewish woman, with a strong accent, speaking so openly about the things people don’t usually speak about.

Returning to the story, I was now put in a difficult situation, since the Orthodox community could not support an event that involved Sabbath violation. I told this to the Hillel administration and I told the students that I would not be going and it was not something that the Orthodox community could be part of. I remained in the dining room with those students who chose to stay, and those who wanted to hear Dr. Ruth went upstairs, where the event was taking place. Imagine my surprise when someone sits down next to me, and lo and behold, it is Dr. Ruth. She had obviously been told that there was some controversy about her speaking on the microphone, and she wanted to come speak to me. She was extremely apologetic, and said that unfortunately she needs the microphone, otherwise no one would be able to hear her. She also told me that she was sorry that this created problems for the Orthodox community. Dr. Ruth stayed with us for about ten minutes or so, and even bentched together with us (though though she hadn’t eaten anything!). She told me that she remembered singing the standard tune to the first paragraph of birkat hamazon when she was a child in Germany. I don’t know if she had sung it since.

One other event is worth recalling, and this took place when I was an undergraduate. It involved a dispute between me and my friend David Bernstein, and I would be curious to hear what readers have to say.[11] We decided to create an organization so we could invite in speakers. In order to get money from the university, we had to be officially chartered, so in our senior year we created the Brandeis chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. It had exactly two members (we had no interest in having any others join), and lasted for only one year (i.e., until we graduated). I was a little surprised when the Brandeis student senate agreed to charter us and give us money, but hey, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. (Had Matthew Brooks not already graduated, we probably would have let him join our little club. Brooks is now the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. See here)

One of our events was sponsoring a debate between my father, Edward S. Shapiro, and Stephen S. Whitfield on what political ideology was more in line with Jewish interests. This had a very large turn-out and the problem was that Whitfield, although a Democrat, is more of a Truman or Kennedy Democrat. Every time my father cited some nonsensical statement by a Democratic figure, Whitlfield agreed that it was nonsense, so they ended up agreeing about as much as they disagreed. A debate isn’t much fun unless one of the speakers is prepared to defend what others regard as indefensible (e.g., anyone looking to defend ACORN?).

For those who don’t know, Whitfield is one of the leading experts on American Jewish culture, having written an enormous amount on the topic. My father started off as a general historian, but has also written a great deal on American Jewish history. I can’t help thinking that the reason the New York Times never reviewed his book on the Crown Heights Riots [12] – which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist – was that they didn’t want to revisit the issue. It was, after all, the great embarrassment of the Dinkins administration, and the symbol of Democratic failure in New York City, ushering in the Giuliani era. Yet it was, precisely for these reasons, one of the most important events in recent New York City history, and one would think that the New York Times would have thought it worthwhile to review such a book. But no, they let it pass without comment.

We also brought in Dinesh D’Souza to speak. This was before he had published any of his books. In fact, I had never even heard of him when Bernstein suggested we bring him. His talk, though sparsely attended, was quite good. My dispute with Bernstein happened regarding our next speaker. I wanted to bring Lew Lehrman to speak. He was a prominent conservative who almost became governor of New York. He also had some honorary role in Young Americans for Freedom. Bernstein strongly disagreed. He argued that since Lehrman had converted to Catholicism a few years prior, he was not the sort of person we should be asking to speak. Although Bernstein was not Orthodox, that was a big issue for him and I agreed to drop the idea. But from my perspective, the fact that Lehrman had left the fold had no relevance for me in terms of having him speak. I wasn’t giving him an honor or asking him to speak on his theology. I wanted to hear him talk about economic matters and the situation in Nicaragua, and didn’t think that his personal life was of any relevance.

Although the cases are obviously not identical, there was a time when many people would have reacted the same way to inviting an intermarried speaker, and my response would have been the same. Since there is such a high intermarriage rate, one day most of us will have someone running for Congress in our district who is intermarried (some already have such representatives), just like most of us already know people, or have family members, who are intermarried. I don’t think this should have any relevance on my vote. In fact, I don’t think it should have any relevance on anything. Two generations ago, anyone who intermarried realized that he was doing something very much at odds with Jewish life and upbringing. Today, hardly anyone who grows up in the non-Orthodox world thinks that it is an issue at all, and it is only a matter of time before the Conservative movement accepts intermarriage. They have no choice, as their congregations are full of people whose children intermarry, and they can’t go on forever taking a hard line on this issue. Not only do they lose the intermarried children, they often lose the parents when the rabbi tells his long-time congregants that he is sorry but he can’t perform the wedding of their children or even announce it in the synagogue newsletter. I predict that within ten years we will see Conservative rabbis doing intermarriages.

The massive intermarriage rate has also impacted the Orthodox world. A number of years ago R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg stated that he thought that it might be a good idea for a father whose son was going to intermarry to attend the wedding, thus not completely cutting off all ties.[13] Weinberg had known the problems of intermarriage very well, as the son of his good friend R. Shlomo Aronson, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, had married a non-Jewish Russian woman. He also knew Jacob Klatzkin, the brilliant philosopher and Zionist thinker, who was the son of the even more brilliant R. Elijah Klatzkin. How many people know that Jacob Klatzkin intermarried?

According to Gotthard Deutsch, R. Esriel Hildesheimer’s son Levi intermarried.[14] It is hard to imagine that Deutsch, who was Levi’s contemporary, was mistaken with the facts, especially since he was never corrected in succeeding issues of the newspaper in which he published this information. Yet Dr. Meir Hildesheimer has told me that Levi Hildesheimer married the daughter of Abraham Brodsky of Odessa, the well known philanthropist. Levi’s son, Arnold Hildesheimer, was an active Zionist who made his living as a chemist and eventually moved to the Land of Israel. Arnold’s mother was definitely Jewish. Therefore, I don’t know if Deutsch erred or if Levi married twice.. Arnold Hildesheimer’s son was Wolfgang Hildesheimer, an important figure in pre-World War II German literature.

Unfortunately, we have a number of examples of not merely intermarriage of children of great rabbis, but even conversion. The story of the son of R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady is well known, and I don’t need to repeat it here. Let me just mention, however, that the man was clearly mentally unbalanced. Michael Bernays, a son of Hakham Isaac Bernays, is probably the most famous apostate from a rabbinic family in modern times, converting seven years after his father’s death. Another son of Hakham Bernays, Jacob, actually sat shiva when this occurred.[15] If we want to look at descendants of great rabbis who converted, then the family tree of R. Akiva Eger has plenty of non-Jews. In fact, a predecessor to R. Akiva Eger as rav of Posen, the Beit Shmuel Aharon, R. Samuel ben Moses Falkenfeld,[16] had a most significant great-grandson, yet he was not Jewish. I refer to none other than Leon von Bilinski.[17] He was Austrian minister of finance and also military governor of Bosnia when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.

I assume the famous Posen family got its name from the city of Posen. R. Gershon Posen, the dayan of Frankfurt’s separatist community, had a grandson who was on the verge of converting to Christianity. Nahum Glatzer describes this young man’s disillusionment with Orthodoxy, and how he tried to talk him out of conversion.[18] (The conversion never took place, and another grandson, R. Raphael Posen, tells me that the more than seventy grandchildren of R. Gershon all remained Orthodox.)

How are Orthodox Jews supposed to relate to those who intermarry, and who typically don’t know any better? Many of us have even been invited to intermarriages. R Yuval Sherlow has stated that while it is not permitted to attend an intermarriage wedding ceremony, there are times (especially when family is involved) that it would be permitted to attend the party.[19] R. Ovadiah Yosef has ruled that it is permitted to give an intermarried man an aliyah,[20] and this opinion is also shared by R. Baruch Avraham Toledano and R. Pinchas Toledano (former Sephardic Av Beit Din of London).[21] I am also told that this is the practice at the Lakewood kiruv minyanim all over the country. This is so despite the fact that the most that R. Moshe Feinstein would permit in such a case is to allow the intermarried man to open and close the Ark.[22] It is actually Aish Hatorah that has done more to “normalize” intermarriage than any other organization in the Orthodox world. Not only does Aish Hatorah do outreach to the intermarried (something we can all appreciate), but they use various intermarried Jewish celebrities in their publicity, and have even honored these people at their events. I am not saying that they are wrong in what they do. After all, the old approach to intermarriage doesn’t work today, and although I find something distasteful about using an intermarried celebrity as the poster-boy to invite people to a Torah class, I see how people can disagree. But about one thing there can be no doubt, and that is that R. Aaron Kotler would be turning over in his grave if he saw what this supposedly haredi organization has done when it comes to tacit acceptance of intermarriage.

Yet we shouldn’t assume that it is only in modern times that intermarried people have been honored by Orthodox Jews. While it would have been unimaginable in previous years to put them on a pedestal the way Aish Hatorah does, there were times that the intermarried man did such great service for the Jewish community that it was only proper to express feelings of gratitude. Adolphe Cremieux is one such example. Although being intermarried, he helped the Jewish community in many ways. One can even say that he is a model for our time, in showing that one can love the Jewish people and sacrifice for them, even after having intermarried. Here is a song written in honor of Cremieux by the noted R. Aaron Fuld of Frankfurt, author of Beit Aharon. It is taken from Judaica Jerusalem auction cataloge of Summer 1997, p. 6.

Worse than intermarriage is apostasy, but the same issue came up there also. The apostate Daniel Chwolson staunchly defended his former religion and people. How were the Jews to relate to him? Let me quote Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion (Oxford, 1995) pp. 99-100:

When Chwolson celebrated his seventieth birthday, a number of Russian rabbis, in gratitude for his efforts on behalf of the Jewish community, sent him a telegram to wish him many happy returns. Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik was more typical of the standard Jewish abhorrence of apostasy when he refused to participate, saying: ‘I do not send congratulatory telegrams to a meshumad.” The wry remark attributed to Chwolson himself in the following story is probably apocryphal. Chwolson is reported to have said that he became a Christian out of conviction. “Who are you kidding?” said a Jewish friend. “How can you of all people, a learned Jew, be convinced that Christianity is true and Judaism false?” To which Chwolson is supposed to have replied: “I was convinced that it is better to be a professor at the university than to be a Hebrew teacher [melamed] in a small town.”

2. I have seen ads for the soon to be published new RCA Artscroll siddur. It will be interesting to see how the battle shapes up between the Sacks siddur and the new RCA Artscroll. I can’t see how the Sacks siddur is going to make any real headway, as I don’t think many shuls are going to get rid of the Artscroll siddur they have been using for so long, and which does just about everything you need a siddur to do. While the new RCA siddur was in the production stages, R. Asher Lopatin of Chicago sent the following letter to the Siddur Committee. I think it is interesting in that it shows some of the concerns of those on the Orthodox left. Although I haven’t seen the new siddur yet, I don’t think I am going out on too much of a limb to predict that the RCA will not be adopting Lopatin’s proposal. (I thank R. Lopatin for allowing me to publish his letter.[23])

The Practice of Saying She’asani Yisrael for the Birchot HaShachar instead of the three “Shelo Asani”s

In Masechet Menachot, 43b (Bavli), Rabbi Meir says that a person, “Adam”, has to (chayav) say three blessings every day: She’asani Yisrael, Shelo Asani Isha and Shelo Asani Bur. There is a note there that it should be Rabbi Yehuda saying this instead of Rabbi Meir, and also on the next line Rav Acha Bar Ya’akov replaces “Shelo Asani Bur” with “Shelo Asani Aved”.

The G’mara questions why we need to say both Shelo Asani Aved and Shelo Asani Isha, but it gives an answer to this question. Rashi, in his second explanation of that answer, on Menachot 44a, says that we need to say both in order to come up with 100 b’rachot. The Bach (O.C 46) argues that the main reason for saying all three is to increase the number of b’rachot we say to 100. He argues that that is the main reason for saying three b’rachot in the negative (shelo asani) instead of one b’racha in the positive (she’asani Yisrael) – basically, if you would say “She’asani Yisrael” then you couldn’t say “Shelo asani aved, isha”. The Aruch HaShulchan (46, yud) paskins as well that if you say She’asani Yisrael, you cannot say the other two negative b’rachot. The Mishna B’rura (46,16) leaves it as a dispute.

Most Rishonim, notably the Rif and the Rambam (according to the G’ra), disagree with our existing girsa of the words of Rabbi Meir/Rabbi Yehuda, and they have the first b’racha in the negative as “Shelo Asani Goy”. This is the standard version in siddurim, nusach Ashkenaz and Sepharad and Edot Hamizrach, with the occasional nusach of “Shelo Asani Nochri” instead of “goy”. The Magen Avraham (O.C. 46, tet) mentions, that there were siddurim – perhaps many of them – that had the b’racha of she’asani Yehudi , but that that is a mistake of the printers, and the Mishna B’rura (46, 15) says that there are several siddurim with “She’asani Yisrael” but that one should not say that as it is also a mistake that of the printers (shibush had’fus).

The Magen Avraham (O.C. 46, yud) and the Haghot Ha’Gra (O.C. 46) interpret the Rama (46, 4) as suggesting that converts should say “She’asani Ger” and the Bach (46) interprets the Rama as suggesting that converts say “She’asani Yehudi” – instead of the negative.

Moreover, the Rosh is in the back of Masechet B’rachot, paragraph #24 (daf 39 in our versions, referring to B’rachot 60a) – upholds the Girsa that we have in Menachot. It’s in rounded brackets in the Rosh, and the Divrei Chamudot on the Rosh doesn’t like it, but it is there. Importantly, the G’ra affirms it is the girsa of the Rosh (and the Tur, which doesn’t appear in our versions) in his Biur HaGra on OH 46:4.

Therefore:

Since many of the Nosei Keilim and the Aruch HaShulchan feel compelled to ask: Why are these b’rachot in the negative (see Taz 46:4 “Rabim makshim…”)?

And since the girsa that we have in our G’marras is She’asani Yisrael, supported by the Rosh and the G’ra

And since even though the Shulchan Aruch rejects our positive girsa of the b’racha, the Rama does support it (in some version) as a legitimate b’racha in certain circumstances – for a convert

And since even those who reject “She’asani Yisrael/Yehudi/Ger” for a convert, (Sh’lah and Bach, see Taz 46, 10), do not reject it because it is not a legitimate nusach, but, rather, because it does not apply to a convert who has made himself a Jew, rather than being created by God as a Jew.

And since the negativity of the three b’rachot causes lots of misunderstandings in shul where many people come from Reform, Conservative or unaffiliated backgrounds – or even from Orthodox backgrounds without perhaps truly understanding the love that Chazal had for all human beings, male, female, Jewish or Gentile

I have asked my shul, Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation, a shul that does a lot of kiruv, to follow the girsa of the b’racha according to the G’ra and the Rosh, and say, “She’asani Yisrael” and that a woman say “She’asani Yisraelit” instead of “Shelo Asani Goy.”

Once the first b’racha is said in this way, the way it appears in the G’marra Menachot, then we have no choice, based on the rule of ‘safek b’rachot lekula’ and based on the p’sak of the Aruch HaShulchan (from the Bach) , to avoid saying the final two, negative b’rachot of “Shelo Asani Aved” and “Shelo Asani Isha”.

Clearly this helps avoid many of the questions that people ask about the negativity toward “goyim” or “women” that someone who does not understand Chazal do ask. The answers given help, but for a shul dedicated to kiruv, these b’rachot are a big turn off.

On the other hand, the b’racha of “she’asani Yisrael/Yisraelit” is a beautiful b’racha, thanking God for making me Jewish – proud to be Jewish, excited to begin the day as a Yisrael.

In addition, from a philosophical point of view, rather than beginning the day with negative b’rachot, which accentuate the G’mara of “noach lo la’adam shelo nivra” (see Bach 46, then Taz 46, 4), let us begin the day with a positive b’racha “k’mo sha’ar b’rachot shemevarchim al hatova” (Magen Avraham, 46, 9). Not negating the p’sak of “noach lo…”, but just respecting the positive aspects which G’mara Menachot the way we have it preferred.

Homiletically, “She’asani Yisrael” matches very well with B’reishit 32:27: “Vayomer, Shalcheni ki alah hashacher” – see Rashi ad loc where that is referring to Birchot HaShachar of the angels! And then two p’sukim later, what b’racha (“ki im beirachtani”) does Ya’akov get? “Lo Ya’akov ye’ameir shimcha, ki im Yisrael”! There is no better way to bringing these p’sukim to life than by saying birchot hashachar every day the way our G’marra has it: “She’asani Yisrael” – proud as Ya’akov was to receive the name, “Yisrael.”

Finally, Rav Benny Lau, an important Talmid Chacham and leader of Beit Morasha, has told me that he, too, follows this practice of saying “She’asani Yisrael” – and he tells his daughters to say “Yisraelit” – in the morning and having it replace the three negative b’rachot.

At the same time, it is important to emphasize the need to reach 100 b’rachot a day, and to push people to be careful about saying Asher Yatzar when leaving the bathroom, and b’rachot before and after eating, and being in shul as frequently as possible in order to hear chazarat haShatz to more easily reach 100 b’rachot.

I would humbly ask the Committee responsible for the new RCA Artscroll siddur to consider either putting this practice in the siddur itself, as a possible “hanhaga”, or allowing this way of saying birchot Hashachar to appear on the RCA Artscroll siddur web site, to that I can download it and print it up for my shul, and any other shuls interested in this hanhaga can do the same.

Sincerely yours and with wishes of hatzlacha rabba,

Rabbi Asher Lopatin

3. Virtually every one of our sages, together with all their brilliance, offer at least one an unusual, sometimes even incomprehensible, idea. Since I am writing this right before Sukkot, here is something to think about when you take the Arba’ah Minim. R. Jacob Ettlinger, the greatest of nineteenth-century German gedolim, writes as follows in his Bikurei Yaakov 651:13. (If you raised this safek in shiur today, the rebbe would think you were joking, but as with even the strangest suggestions, one can often find a true gadol who discusses the issue.)

נסתפקתי אם אנו יושבי אירופא יוצאין בד’ מינין שגדלו באיי אמעריקא ואויסטראליען שיושבין לצדינו ותחתינו, וכן איפכא. שידוע מה שכתבו הטבעים שרגליהם נגד רגלינו, ומה שאין נופלין נגד השמים הוא מפני ששם הבורא כח מושך בארץ. וא”כ המינים שגדלו שם אם נוטלין אצלנו הוא הפוך מדרך גדולתן, שאצלנו גדלו ראשי הלולב וההדס ההם יותר למטה מזנבם. או אי נימא, כיון שנוטל הגדל סמוך לארץ למטה זה מקרי דרך גדילתו, והכי מסתברא.

4. In the latest Hakirah (Summer 2009), p. 134 n. 189, Chaim Landerer quotes my translation of a comment by R. Solomon Judah Rapoport. I didn’t know that Landerer was going to publish my translation, and I answered his e-mail quickly and carelessly. The correct translation is not that Rapoport is “as Catholic as the Pope,” but something even stronger. Frankel says that Shir is “more Catholic than the Pope.” (Thanks to R. Ysoscher Katz who caught the error and alerted me. Also thanks to Rabbi Jonah Sievers who is always helpful in matters concerning German translation. Not being a native speaker, and obviously not familiar with all idioms of the language, every translation I have published has been carefully reviewed by expert translators.)

Speaking of errors, let me also correct something that appears in Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy. This correction has already been taken care of in the more recent editions of the book, but those who have the first or second printing can insert the correction into the volume. How this error came about, I have no idea. I must have been in a daze, and it was only when the book was published that I saw it. On p. 180, beginning line 3 from the top, it states “Might one then be able to say that our great divine Torah cannot endure the conjunction of Torah with so-called secular studies . . .” It should be corrected to say, “Might one then be able to say that our great divine Torah cannot compete with so called secular studies . . .”

There is a popular expression

כשם שאין תבן בלא בר כך אין ספר ללא טעויות.

The internet is so amazing as it allows all of us to correct errors that have appeared in our works, and publicize them, something that was not possible in earlier years. R. Judah Ibn Tibbon wrote to his son, R. Samuel (Iggeret ha-Musar, ed. Korah [Kiryat Sefer, 2007], p. 45):

והטעות שתצא מיד האדם הוא הנתפש עליה ונזכר בה כל ימיו.

In other words, unlike a verbal error which is forgotten, something in print is there forever. Yet today, we can minimize this problem by means of the internet. Rather than be embarrassed by errors we have made, and try to ensure that no one learns of them, we should all welcome the opportunity to point out our errors, so that our works are as perfect as we can make them. This is quite apart from the unseemliness of pointing out the errors of others, but not being prepared to call attention to our own mistakes.

Incidentally, Ibn Tibbon’s work is full of important lessons, but he says one thing that is very problematic. On p. 42 he writes:
.

.ואל תתעקש אתה להחזיק בדעתך אפילו אם תדע שהאמת אתך

What sense does this make? Doesn’t the Torah tell us לא תגורו? Didn’t the Rambam speak his mind no matter who disagreed? In our own day, isn’t R. Ovadiah Yosef fearless in expressing his opinion, no matter how much he is attacked? I posed this question to R. Meir Mazuz and he replied:

זו הערה נכונה. כנראה ר’ שמואל היה עוד רך בשנים וחשש האב שיגרום לו קנאה ושנאה כמו שקרה לר”ש בן גבירול, וגם להגר”ע יוסף שליט”א בבחרותו כשחלק על הבא”ח כידוע. אבל כשאדם כותב ספר חייב לגלות את דעתו (בעדינות ובזהירות) ולא יכוף על האמת פסכתר. ובמשך הזמן תתגלה האמת, כי היא לעולם עומדת.

5. I want to call everyone’s attention to a fascinating new book. Dirshuni, edited by Tamar Biala and Nechamah Weingarten-Mintz, is a book of modern midrashim, written by women. It has been selling very well in Israel and is an exciting genre that deserves its own discussion. Those who want to see some small excerpts can go here.

To order the book you can go here

6. In my last post I mentioned R. Meir Amsel and the memorial volume that recently appeared. I should have also mentioned that his son, R. Eli Amsel, runs the site Virtual Judaica.

7. Finally, I thank everyone who commented and e-mailed me about R. Yerucham Gorelik. There is no question that he was a fascinating man, and an entire post could be devoted to the great stories told about him. It is also true that his relationship with YU was complicated. Let me quote what Dr. Norman Lamm wrote about Gorelik, shortly after his death.

Rabbi Yerucham Gorelick appeared at times to be engaged in some kind of titanic inner struggle. He was a cauldron of activity and movement, of perpetual motion. He was a man of striking, sometimes startling contradictions. He appeared to be moving in different directions simultaneously. He was a man of changing moods, of profound dialectical tensions, although he was at all times an ish ha-emet, a man of unshakeable integrity.

For Dr. Lamm’s article, see here

Notes
[1] “The Emergence of the Provencal Kabbalah : Rabbi Isaac the Blind’s Commentary on Sefer Yezirah” (1994).

[2] Letter to Samuel Atlas, dated Oct. 16, 1959, published in “Scholars and Friends: Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg and Professor Samuel Atlas,” Torah u-Madda Journal 7 (1997), p. 113.

[3] See R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg’s letter to R. Kook, Iggerot la-Reiyah (Jerusalem, 1990), p. 128

כבר הונח לי בהשתדלותו של רב אחד מרבני העדה הליברלית (דווקא ע”י רב ליברלי של העדה הליברלית, כאלו רוצה הקב”ה לזכות את כל ישראל במעלות שונות שיש בזה מה שאין וכו’).

[4] “The Religious Ethics of Samuel David Luzzatto” (Brandeis University, 1993).

[5] “An Orthodox Embrace of Gentiles? Interfaith Tolerance in the Thought of S. D. Luzzatto and E. Benamozegh,” Modern Judaism 18 (May 1998), pp. 173-195.

[6] See here A few days before his death, Rabbi Meir Kahane spoke at Brandeis. I think it was actually his last public talk before the night he was killed. For a video of Gopin confronting Kahane see here at 24:20, 31:50, and 43:05, and 56. Gopin starts to speak extensively at 1:02:45. The man standing next to Gopin is Dr. Aryeh Cohen, who also briefly served as Orthodox advisor at Brandeis. He now teaches at the American Jewish University. See here.

[7] See Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 199:6-7.

[8] He also had a nice sense of humor. On the first day of class he would come in and write his name on the board as “F-x.”

[9] The letter is found in the Chaim Bloch Collection, AR 7155.

[10] See here.

[11] Bernstein is now a nationally known professor of law. See here.

[12] Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (Waltham, 2006).

[13] I have given the information on this to Rabbi Mark Dratch for his paper at the Orthodox Forum on the topic.

[14] See his article in the Jewish Chronicle, June 26, 1914.

[15] See Moshe Gresser, Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew (Albany, 1994), p. 73. Hakham Bernays’ grandaughter, Martha (daughter of Berman Bernays) married Sigmund Freud. After they were married, Freud refused to allow her to light Shabbat candles. See ibid., p. 67.

[16] For details on the controversy surrounding Falkenfeld’s selection as rabbi, and how his opponents regarded as an “uncouth Polack” see Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1898), pp. 2-3. When he was rav in Tarnopol, he also had to contend with troublemakers. See R. Solomon Judah Rapoport’s letter in Leopold Greenwald, Toldot Mishpahat Rosenthal (Budapest, 1920), p. 76. For a picture of his tombstone, see here.

I can’t explain why on the tombstone he is referred to as “Moses Samuel,” when it should be Samuel ben Moses. For his biography, see Beit Shmuel Aharon al ha-Torah (Jerusalem, 1994), introduction.

[17] See here. My information on Bilinski’s family background comes from Gotthard Deutsch’s article in the Jewish Chronicle, June 26, 1914.

[18] The Memoirs of Nahum N. Glatzer (New York, 1997), pp. 126-128. Although Glatzer left Orthodoxy, in his younger years he studied in R. Salomon Breuer’s yeshiva in Frankfurt, and also with R. Nehemiah Nobel. As such, he understood Orthodoxy very well. Glatzer, who died in 1990, was retired when I came to Brandeis in 1985. To my great regret, I never took the trouble to interview him as I did with Prof. Alexander Altmann, who retired from Brandeis in 1976. On pp. 129-130 of Glatzer’s memoir we find the following, which I am sure will interest many readers of the Seforim blog.

In 1944 Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (called “the Rov” by his followers and admirers) published in Talpiot a major article, “Ish ha-Halakhah” (the Halakhic Personality). The essay, written in a most beautiful Hebrew style, not only claimed for the observance of Jewish law the central place in Jewish life, but denied the—however circumscribed—validity of any other approach. The Halakhah demands a complete control of the Jew, to the exclusion of an emotional state of mind to accompany the halakhc function. There is no rightful place for, or justification of, a state of excitement or religious agitation, say, in the ceremony of blowing the shofar on New Year’s Day; what matters, and matters exclusively, is the proper execution of the ritual.

This exclusion of the emotional side of religion bothered me when I read the essay. I planned a polemic reply but was dissuaded by my colleagues. I happened to visit New York and voiced my feelings to Professor Louis Ginzberg, the great Talmudist. I expected him to agree with me and object to the rigid stand of the Rov. The cautious Ginzberg did not wish to commit himself, or to say something that could be quoted as a criticism of his Talmudic colleague. He, therefore, did not go beyond saying: “I like my whiskey straight,” which was a mild complaint against the Rov’s combination of Halakhah and philosophy. The only reference that could be interepreted as an admission of esthetics into the realm of religion was Ginzberg’s telling of the Gaon of Vilna (brother of Rabbi Abraham, Ginzberg’s forebear in the seventh generation), who near death admired the beauty of the etrog that was brought to him, since the day was one of the Sukkot festival days.

(The Rov, apparently, would have felt: Never mind the etrog’s beauty. What matters is that the citron is without blemish and the benediction is properly pronounced.).

I was disappointed that Ginzberg did not wish to take seriously the younger man’s question. In the meantime, the Rov changed his position and realized the wider dimension of faith. If you wait long enough . . . [ellipsis in original]. Yet, even with the changed position on the part of the Rov, Ginzberg, were he alive, would insist on having his whiskey straight.

Glatzer sees “The Lonely Man of Faith” as expressing a change in the Rav’s earlier “halakho-centrism.” I wonder if Prof. Lawrence Kaplan will agree.

[19] Reshut ha-Yahid (Petah Tivah, 2003), p. 186.

[20] Ma’ayan Omer (Jerusalem, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 186, 194, 205. R. Hillel Posek, Divrei Hillel, Orah Hayyim, no. 8, strongly supports giving an intermarried man an aliyah, but not as one of the first seven. To deny such an aliyah woould be to embarrass the man, and Posek explains why even sinners cannot be treated with disrespect. See also his comments in Ha-Posek, Sivan 5747, p. 1336. In Amsterdam the practice was also not to give an intermarried man one of the first seven aliyot. See R. Jacob Zvi Katz, Leket ha-Kemah he-Hadash (London, n.d.), vol. 3, p. 63.

[21] Sha’alu le-Varukh, vol. 1, no. 40.

[22] Of course, there are many other poskim who forbid giving an intermarried man an aliyah. Even as liberal a posek as R. Ben Zion Uziel was adamant that you cannot call an intermarried man up to the Torah. See Mishpetei Uziel, vol 8, no. 53.

[23] For those who don’t know, Lopatin was the first Rhodes Scholar to become an Orthodox rabbi. In fact, he might be the first Rhodes Scholar to become a rabbi in any denomination. R. Chaim Strauchler of Toronto is the second Rhodes Scholar-Orthodox rabbi.