The Seforim Blog

R. Ahron Soloveichik: “In Defense of My Brother” Marc B. Shapiro In his recent post here Professor Shnayer Leiman showed how almost magically, things from the past, thought to be lost, can be brought back to life as it were. I recently had the same experience. In my Torah in Motion class a couple of weeks ago (see here) I was discussing the Jewish Observer “eulogy” for R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. I mentioned R. Moshe Tendler’s strong response in the…

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Response to Criticism, Part 3 Marc B. Shapiro Continued from here. Let me continue with Rabbi Herschel Grossman’s review. [1] This post will complete my response to around a quarter of his review, so we still have a long way to go. Grossman writes (p. 42) According to Shapiro, “Maimonides would be surprised that . . . later generations of Jews . . . latched onto his earlier work;” and it “is certainly one of the great ironies of Jewish history that…

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Post-Mosaic Additions to the Torah? Marc B. Shapiro In his post here, Ben Zion Katz deals with medieval rabbinic views regarding post-Mosaic additions to the Torah. Katz refers to The Limits of Orthodox Theology, and I have mentioned many additional sources in Seforim Blog posts. (A couple of people have commented that in a few recent publications on this topic it seems that the authors used my writings without any acknowledgment. I would only say that I don’t have a copyright on any…

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Pets on Shabbat, Rabbi Morenu, and Epidemics Marc B. Shapiro 1. In my last post here I wrote as follows: R. Yitzhak Nahman Eshkoli calls attention to what he sees as another mistake made by those who published R. Moshe Feinstein’s works.[1] Here is Iggerot Moshe,Orah Hayyim 5, 22:21. According to the text of R. Moshe’s responsum, animals are muktzeh, even those that children play with. This means that R. Moshe held that pets are also muktzeh. Yet in the small…

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The Lost Library, Missing Manuscripts, Saul Lieberman, and More Marc B. Shapiro When I finished my new post, it ended up being so long that I had to split it into five parts. Here is part 1. 1. All of us are able to benefit from the Seforim Blog because of the efforts of Dan Rabinowitz, who founded the blog almost fifteen years ago. In the early days, there was only a relatively small amount of people who knew about…

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Reuven Elitzur, Saul Lieberman, and Response to Criticism, part 2 Marc B. Shapiro Since I mentioned R. Reuven Elitzur in my post here, let me note two other interesting items from his posthumously published book, Degel Mahaneh Reuven. On pp. 304-305 we learn that when Elitzur studied in Ponovezh, one of the students joined the Irgun. When some other students found out about this, they grabbed the Irgun student one night, covered his head with a blanket, and beat him terribly. The…

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