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R. Yair Hayyim Bachrach as a Writer of Romance?, A Non-Jewish Song Made Holy, Love (and More) Before and After Marriage, and Memoirs that Maybe Tell Too Much

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R. Yair Hayyim Bachrach as a Writer of Romance?, A Non-Jewish Song Made Holy, Love (and More) Before and After Marriage, and Memoirs that Maybe Tell Too Much
Marc B. Shapiro
Continued from here
There is an interesting responsum of R Yair Hayyim Bacharach, Havot Yair, no. 60, that deals with a man and woman who were in love and get married despite the strong opposition of the woman’s father. The story is quite romantic. It describes how during an epidemic in Worms in 1636 the beautiful and intelligent only daughter of one of the rich leaders of the local Jewish community falls ill. There is a man who had fallen in love with her and wants to take care of her in her illness. We are told that this man is tall and handsome, yet he comes from “the other side of the tracks” (i.e., from the lower class). He is able to get the agreement of both the father and daughter that if he takes care of the woman, which would be at great personal risk to himself, and she recovers, that they will marry. The woman indeed recovers but the man himself becomes sick, and the roles are reversed. The woman now takes care of him, which is only fitting since he caught the illness taking care of her. She too has fallen in with him and fortunately he survives, meaning that they are now able to marry. However, the father wishes to go back on his side of the agreement, which obligated him to provide a dowry, and that is the halakhic matter that the responsum focuses on.

Elchanan Reiner has argued that the entire story is a fiction, and what R. Bacharach, one of the most important 17th century halakhic authorities, has done is create a love story in line with the romantic stories that were appearing at this time in general literature. The story can therefore be seen as similar to a parable that is created for use in a sermon.[1]
The story R. Bacharach records is about a woman, indeed an only daughter, from a rich and important family. On the other side you have a poor man with no financial future. These are two people who in traditional Jewish society (and general society as well) normally would never be allowed or even want to come together. Yet because of the unusual circumstances of the epidemic, the man who dreams of the woman he could normally never have, is able to arrange a way to spend time with her and cross the boundary that otherwise would have kept them apart.
In the end we are inspired to see how love conquers all. For the sake of love the woman defies her father and gives up all the wealth that would be hers if she would only listen to her father and reject what her heart is telling her. It is a case of love vs. money, position, and power, and love wins. R. Bacharach mentions that when the father refuses to allow the marriage, the daughter says to him שעל כל פנים תזדקק לו הן בהיתר הן באיסור. What this means is that she threatens her father that if he doesn’t allow her to marry the man she loves, that she will be with him, i.e., sleep with him, anyway. For his part, the father says that he will not give her a dowry, and in the end ולקחה המשרת חנם. In other words, they married, but without any money from her father. They did what virtually no one else in 17th century Jewish society did. They married for love, choosing their own partners, without concern for status or money. According to Reiner, what R. Bacharach has given us in abridged form is nothing less than a Jewish version of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story.
The late R. Raphael Posen responded to Reiner’s article, rejecting completely the latter’s hypothesis.[2] He acknowledges that the case described in R. Bacharach’s responsum may be theoretical, and notes that there are many such theoretical cases in the responsa literature. As for the romantic elements in the responsum, he states that in responsa one can find much “juicier” stories than the one discussed by Reiner, and there are also cases of lovers’ entanglements from completely different eras. Posen refers in particular to two responsa that appear in the Tashbetz. These responsa predate R. Bacharach by a couple of centuries. They also were written in North Africa, a place that did not have the sort of romantic literature that according to Reiner was the model for R. Bacharach’s responsum.
Reiner has a short and somewhat biting response to Posen.[3] He states that Posen’s article shows the very mentality that created the need for R. Bacharach to “cover up”, as it were, the love story he inserted into his responsa.
לא ניתן היה להעלות על הדעת דוגמא טובה הימנו להציג לקורא את פניה התרבותיים של השכבה החברתית שמפניה היה על חיים יאיר [!] בכרך מוורמס להסתיר לכאורה את סיפורו: שכבה העשויה מתלמידי חכמים בינוניים ובעלי בתים למדנים למחצה, הקוראים את הטקסט באופן חד ממדי, מפרשים אותו פירוש אחד ויחיד, שאינו סוטה מערכי היסוד הבסיסיים ביותר של סביבתם.
Reiner also states that what upset Posen was that Reiner’s portrayal of R. Bacharach diverges from the standard portrayal of “gedolei Torah” in that Reiner assumes that R. Bacharach was aware of the world around him and responded with originality to its intellectual challenges. Reiner obviously did not know Posen, as he assumed that Posen was an unsophisticated haredi ideologue with no appreciation for complexity in great rabbinic figures. The truth is that Posen, who represented the best of the German Orthodox tradition, was the exact opposite of this, as anyone can see by examining his essays in Ha-Ma’yan and elsewhere. As for the substance of the dispute between Reiner and Posen, I would love to hear which side readers come down on.
Regarding love prior to marriage, which we also discussed in the last post, it is noteworthy that there is a non-Jewish song focused on this theme that was turned into a religious song. Here is a Yiddish version of the original song, recorded by R. Yekutiel Yehudah Greenwald. It would have originally been sung in German or Hungarian [4]
וואַלד, וואַלד, ווי גרויס ביסטו
ראָזא, ראָזא, ווי ווייט ביסטו
וואָלט דער וואַלד ניט גרויס געווען
וואָלט דאָך מיין ראָזא נענטער געווען
וואָלט מען מיך פון וואַלד אַרויסגענומען
וואָלטן מיר זיך ביידע צוזאַמענגעקומען
This translates as:
Forest, Forest, how large you are,
Rosa, Rosa, how distant you are,
If the forest was not so large,
My Rosa would be closer,
If I would be taken out of the forest,
We would both come together.
By changing only a few words, R. Isaac Taub, the Kaliver Rebbe (1744-1828) turned this love song into a religious song, the title of which is גלות, גלות.[5]
גלות, גלות, ווי גרויס ביסטו
שכינה, שכינה, ווי ווייט ביסטו
וואָלט דער גלות ניט גרויס געווען
וואָלט דאך די שכינה נענטער געווען
וואָלט מען מיך פון גלות ארויסגענומען
וואָלטן מיר זיך ביידע צוזאַמענגעקומען
All this is well known in the hasidic world. It is so well known that one can only wonder how R. Yaakov Moshe Hillel could attempt to deny what I have just mentioned. In his Va-Yashav ha-Yam,[6] R. Hillel states, “Heaven forbid” to believe that any love songs were ever turned into religious songs by great rabbis:
(וכן מה שמפיצים שמועות כאלו על גדולים אחרים שהיו שומעים מהגוים שירי עגבים ומעתיקים אותם אל הקדושה, להלחין עליהם גם שירות ותשבחות גם קדישים וקדושות) אנא דאמינא ולא מסתפינא דחלילה להאמין כזה על גדולי ישראל שכבר כתבנו לעיל דלדעת כל הפוסקים אסור לשמוע שירי עגבים, ובעצם השמיעה לבד יש איסור, ואיך יתכן שגדולי ישראל יתעסקו בדברים מכוערים כאלו, חלילה להעלות כן על הדעת.
I have often written about how people are sometimes so convinced of something that when they are confronted with an alternative perspective in the writings of authoritative sages or in a report by a trustworthy person, they argue that the text is a forgery or the report is fraudulent, because gadol X never could have said or done such a thing. The situation with R. Hillel is even beyond this. The fact that the Kaliver Rebbe took a love song and turned it into a religious song is something that is known by all pretty much all educated Hungarian Hasidim (and not only Hasidim). It is worth noting that he didn’t just take the tune and add religious words, which is the case with other songs taken from the non-Jews. He actually kept the words, just changing a few of them.[7] Yet R. Hillel refuses to believe any of this. R. Hillel is a Sephardic Jew from India who probably knows close to zero about the history of Hasidism. Yet somehow he feels that he can declare that all the people who know the truth about this matter are not only incorrect, but are also degrading the honor of the Kaliver Rebbe.
Regarding love between husband and wife, I found an interesting passage from R. Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev.[8] He asks, why does the Torah tell us that Isaac loved Rebekkah? He answers that there are two ways a man loves his wife. One is that he loves her because of his physical lusts, “and this means that she is not his wife at all, rather, he [really] loves himself.” The other way of loving ones wife is because she is the “vessel” by which he can fulfill God’s commandments,[9] just like a person loves other mitzvot. “This is what it means that Isaac loved her, because he didn’t think at all about his physical desires, but was only intent on fulfilling God’s commandments.”
ויש אדם שאוהב אשתו ואינו מחמת תאות גוף שימלא תאותו רק מחמת שהיא כלי לקיים על ידה מצות הבורא ית’ שמו כמו שאדם אוהב שאר מצות וזה נקרא אוהב את אשתו וזהו ויאהבה יצחק שלא חשב כלל מחמת תאות הגוף שלו רק כדי לקיים מצות הבורא ית’ שמו ויתעלה זכרו.
R. Daniel Eidensohn has called attention to a similar approach attributed to the Baal Shem Tov, that you should love your wife as you love your tefillin. That is because with each of them you have the opportunity to fulfill mitzvot. See here. I don’t think this sort of interpretation will find much appeal in modern times, as it completely ignores the most obvious, and most important, type of love from husband to wife, which one hopes is present in every marriage. In fact, it is not only in modern times that such an interpretation would not be appealing, as all of the pre-modern sources that speak about loving one’s wife are indeed referring to real love.
R. Levi Yitzhak’s stress on love of one’s wife since she gives one the ability to perform mitzvot (i.e., purely utilitarian) is also at odds with other hasidic sentiments. For example, there is a famous story about a hasidic rebbe who was ill. A Lithuanian rabbi came to visit him late one night. He knocked on the door and when the rebbe answered the door, the rabbi said, “I have come to fulfill the mitzvah of bikur cholim”. The rebbe replied, “It is very late now, and I am tired and not in the mood to be the cheftza for your mitzvah.” This story is told among hasidim as a way to knock the non-hasidim. The lesson is that the Lithuanian rabbi should have come to visit the rebbe because he had the basic human emotion of wanting to show empathy to another who was suffering. Instead, he showed that this was foreign to his way of thinking, and his primary goal was simply to fulfill the mitzvah. And for that, the rebbe was not interested in taking part.
Since we are talking about love, I can’t resist sharing the following story told about R. Jacob Lorberbaum of Lissa. Like all of these types of stories, we can’t say if it actually occurred, but the fact that it is told is itself significant even if in this case I find it hard to believe that the sentiments expressed would be widely shared by any group. The story is found in R. Israel Beckmeister’s Ahavat Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1976), pp. 49-50.

According to the story, a student once came to R. Lorberbaum and told him that since his wife hadn’t given birth in ten years he wished to divorce her. R. Lorberbaum asked him what his wife says about this, and he replied that she doesn’t want to be divorced as she loves him greatly. He also added that he too loves his wife greatly. R. Lorberbaum told him that he shouldn’t love her so much, and he should return home and God would grant him a child.
The student could not understand what R. Lorberbaum was telling him, since how could he tell a husband not to love his wife so much. When he returned home his wife asked him what R. Lorberbaum said, and he replied sharply that it does not concern her. This led to an argument and he slapped his wife, causing her to faint and leading to a great rift between them. The wife’s parents intervened and they were able to make peace between the couple, and following this the wife became pregnant and had a son.
R. Lorberbaum, who served as sandak, asked his student if he followed what he told him, i.e., not to love his wife so much. The student replied that he did, and that he also slapped her. R. Lorberbaum told him that the slap was too much, but that he should know that the scientists have stated that if a husband and wife are very much alike they cannot have children. Thus, when he heard that his student and his wife loved each other greatly, he understood why they couldn’t have children, and that is why he told the student that he shouldn’t love her so much. In other words, only if there is some distance between them will they be able to have children. (The nonsense that earlier generations believed in never ceases to amaze me. I realize, of course, that future generations might think the same about us.)
Another relevant text is found in R. Hayyim ben Betzalel of Friedberg’s Sefer ha-Hayyim. As part of my Torah in Motion tour of Germany this summer, we are going to Friedberg. The most famous of the rabbis of Friedberg was R. Hayyim ben Betzalel, the brother of the Maharal and a great scholar in his own right. In preparation for the trip I am reading material by and about R. Hayyim, and the following is one of the fascinating things I found.
In his Sefer ha-Hayyim,[10] R. Hayyim notes that the demons want to connect themselves with scholars or even with any men. However, this is difficult since men are on the highest spiritual level, and thus distant from the demons. Therefore, the demons connect themselves to women who are on a lower spiritual level than men, and thus closer to the demons. In other words, at the bottom you have demons, women are above them, and men stand at the top. As R. Hayyim explains, both demons and women share an important characteristic, namely, that they are naturally defective: חסירי היצירה. As proof for this contention about women, he cites Sanhedrin 22b:
אשה גולם היא ואינה כורתת ברית אלא למי שעשאה כלי
“A woman [before marriage] is a shapeless lump, and concludes a covenant only with him who transforms her [into] a [useful] vessel.”
The fact that the Talmud refers to a woman as a “shapeless lump” is proof for R. Hayyim that she is on a lower level than a man, and this basic division is not altered after marriage.
This then leads R. Hayyim to call attention to Exodus 22:17 which states מכשפה לא תחיה, “Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live.” He asks, why is only a sorceress mentioned, and not a sorcerer מכשף? He also calls attention to Avot 2:8, מרבה נשים מרבה כשפים, “The more wives, the more witchcraft,” which also makes the connection of sorcery to women. R. Hayyim explains that because of the closeness of women and demons the Torah was concerned that women would seek to “go down” and achieve completeness by connecting themselves with the demonic forces below them. This wasn’t such a worry when it came to men since they were “two levels above” the domain of the demons.
All of this is quite interesting, and R. Hayyim ben Betzalel was very happy with this explanation (which must be causing some readers to pull their hair out.) After offering it he expressed pride in what he wrote:
והנה לא קדמני אדם בפירוש זה והוא ענין נכון אצלי.
So what does this have to do with what I have been discussing in the post? R. Hayyim warns men not to be too connected to women (which includes their wives) since this will mean that they are trying to complete themselves and find perfection by means of someone who is on a lower level than them. I believe this to be in complete opposition to the modern romantic notion that men and women can be soulmates, for one cannot be a soulmate with one whose soul is literally on a lower level.[11]
Since I mentioned love between future husbands and wives, I should also note that there was concern that because young men and women were engaged, that they might initiate a physical relationship before the marriage. This explains the takkanot in Candia (1238) and Corfu (1663) forbidding an engaged man to even enter the house of his future father-in-law (where his fiancée lived).[12] The Corfu takkanah also states that an engaged woman is not permitted to be in the house of her future husband. The Corfu takkanah does make an exception that a month before the wedding the man and woman can be in the homes of their future in-laws. This is because there are wedding plans that need to be taken care of. But the takkanah specifies that the engaged couple must not be left alone.

The Candia takkanah states that if for some reason the man has to enter his future father-in-law’s home, he has to bring two men with him to act as his “guards”. The only exception to this rule is if the young man is studying Torah with his future father-in-law. In that case he can be at the home, since “the study of Torah is such as to weaken the force of the tempter.”

Solomon Buber records a 1776 oath signed by a man in Lvov declaring that he will not enter the house of his future bride under any circumstanced.[13] This was no doubt required by the rabbi. According to the text of the oath, if the man violates his pledge

אהיה נדון כעובר על השבועה בכל מיני עונשין וקנסים עצומים וחרפות ובזיונות בלי שום המלטה בעולם
R. Jonathan Eybeschuetz, in a sermon delivered in Metz in 1744, declared that “from this point on” he would only write a betrothal contract if the man and woman give their solemn agreement not to touch one another until after the wedding.[14]
As is clear from the sermon of R. Eybeschuetz just referred to,[15] many engaged couples were ignoring the law of negiah. Even Mendelssohn did not follow it, as we see from a letter he wrote to his fiancée. “Even the kisses that I stole from your lips were mixed with some bitterness, for the approaching separation made me heavy of heart and incapable of enjoying a pure pleasure.”[16]
In his autobiography, R. Leon Modena records the following about his young fiancée who was on her deathbed. He was 19 years old at the time.
On the day she died, she summoned me and embraced and kissed me. She said, “I know that this is bold behavior, but God knows that during the one year of our engagement we did not touch each other even with our little fingers. Now, at the time of death, the rights of the dying are mine. I was not allowed to become your wife, but what can I do, for thus it is decreed in heaven. May God’s will be done.”[17]
This story reminded me of an incident R. Jacob Emden records in his autobiography, although the details are entirely different. The translation of this lengthy passage is by Jacob J. Schacter in his outstanding dissertation on R. Emden.[18]
A miracle also occurred to me, especially relevant to matters spiritual. (It was) a miracle similar to that of Joseph the righteous and (even) slightly more so. I was a young man, tender in years, in the full strength of my passion. I had been separated from my wife for a long time and greatly desired a woman. A very pretty unmarried young girl who was my cousin happened to meet me there and was alone with me. She brazenly demonstrated great love to me, came close to me and almost kissed me. Even when I was lying in my bed, she came to cover me well on the couch, in a close loving manner. Truthfully, had I hearkened to the advice of my instinct she would not have denied my desire at all. Several times it (indeed) almost happened, as a fire (consumes) the chaff. Frequently there was no one in the house with me but her. They (i.e. the members of her family) were also not accustomed to come for they stayed in the store on the marketplace, occupied with their livelihood all day. Had God not given me great strength, the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power (Gen. 49:3), to overcome my fiery instinct which once almost forced me to do its bidding, (and) were it not for the grace of God which was great upon me, (I would have been unable) to withstand this very powerful temptation, greater than all temptations. I was a man at the prime of my strength and passion. There was a very pleasant beautiful woman before me who demonstrated for me all manner of love and closeness many times. She was related to me, unmarried, a tender child and recently widowed. She may have been ritually pure or would have ritually purified herself had I requested it. If I had wanted to fulfill my passionate desire for her, I was absolutely certain that she would not reveal my secret. I controlled my instinct, conquered my passion and determined to kill it. My heart was hollow and I did not . . . Blessed be the Lord who gives strength to the weary for I was saved from this flaming fire.
Schacter does not translate the next sentence in the memoir in which R. Emden expresses the wish that as a reward for standing firm, he and his descendants until the end of time will be protected from sexual temptation.
Here are the pages from the Warsaw 1896 edition of Megilat Sefer, pp. 82-83.
In 2012 a new edition of Megilat Sefer appeared, edited by R. Avraham Yaakov Bombach. Here is page 106 from this edition.
As you can see, the Bombach edition has omitted the entire story R. Emden tells. While R. Emden thought it was important for people to know about how he overcame his evil inclination, and he therefore recorded it for posterity, Bombach obviously felt that this is “too much information.” Instead of discussing the significance (and strangeness) of R. Emden allowing us entry into his most personal memories, Bombach chooses the other path and censors that which he is uncomfortable with.
On the other hand, in the introduction to the recently published memoir of the Sephardic scholar, R. Joseph Hayyim Abuhbut,[19] the editor calls attention to the very passage I have quoted, and which was censored by Bombach. He notes how much value the reader can derive from this passage in seeing how R. Emden was able to overcome temptation.
מה מאוד מופלאים הם דברי הגאון יעב”ץ זצ”ל . . . כמה תועלת תצמח לקורא כאשר יווכח לראות באיזה נסיונות נתנסה זה האיש המרעיש ארץ, מי מילל ומי פילל.
R. Elijah Rabinowitz-Teomim mentions in his autobiography that he lived in the home of his future father-in-law together with the girl he was engaged to.[20] At that time he was around sixteen years old and she was under fifteen. He mentions that she was in love with him: והיא דבקה אחרי בלבה. As with R. Emden, he makes a point of telling us that although he engaged in much conversation with her, as they had become very close (“like brother and sister”), he never touched her in all the time he lived in her home. Unlike R. Emden who tells us how much he was tempted and that he “greatly desired a woman,” R. Rabinowitz-Teomim tells us that his relationship with the girl was purely platonic, and he never even thought about her in a sexual way. 
בשלהי שנת תרי”ט העתיק אאמו”ר ז”ל משכנו לעיר ראגאלי ועמו יצאו כל ב”ב, ונשארתי לבדי בשילעל בבית המחותן . . . בכל משך היותי בבית המחותן לא הייתי רחוק מהמשודכת והיינו מדברים זע”ז, ובשגם אחרי נסע בית אאמו”ר ז”ל משם ונשארתי בבית אביה, כל היום, והיא דבקה אחרי בלבה, כאשר ראיתי וידעתי גם שמעתי כי יקרתי בעיני’. . . היינו קרובים זה לזה כאח לאחות, לשוחח כנהוג בבני הנעורים, אבל לא עלה לבי על דבר אחר, חלילה, ולא נגעתי בה אפילו באצבע קטנה כל משך שבתי עמהם, כדת שלת תורה.
So we have three memoirs by leading rabbis, all of which mention them with a girl. Both R. Emden and R. Rabinowitz-Teomim feel it is important to inform the reader that they never touched the girl. As we have seen, R. Emden was very proud of how he overcame his evil inclination and that is why he tells the story. I don’t know why R. Rabinowitz-Teomim thought it was important to mention the matter, especially as no one would have assumed that he had any physical contact before marriage.
I found another interesting source in R. Eleazar Kalir’s Havot Yair.[21] R. Kalir, who died in 1801, was the rabbi in Kolín, today in the Czech Republic. He discusses the common phenomenon of engaged couples having physical contact, and he tells us that no rebuke can stop the practice. He also says that the fault for this must be placed mostly upon the parents, since they are happy to see this behavior by the engaged couple and thus make no efforts to stop it.
בעו”ה רבו המספחת זו בישראל שתיכף אחר התקשורת התנאים, החתן הולך אל הכלה ואינו נזהר מח”ו [חיבוק ונישוק], והיא גם היא אסור לו משום נדה שהיא בכרת . . . ובעו”ה הדבר הזה הוא כמנהג הקבוע, ואולי הוא ממנהגות סדום ודור המבול שהשחיתו את דרכם, והיתר זה אינו בא רק כמאמרם, עבר ושנה נעשו לו כהיתר, ובעו”ה אין התוכחה מועלת בזה, שאמר יאמר מה בכך, שאני הולך אל הכלה שלי, שהיא המיועדת לי, על זה סיים הנביא וכלה מחופתה שאינה נקראת כלה אלא לאחר חופתה, ואז רשאי ליחד עמה, ואמרו כלה בלא ברכה אסורה לבעלה כנדה, וק”ו בעודה לא טהרה מטמאת נדתה.
ולא על החתן לבד יש להתלונן אלא ביותר על אבותיהם שרואים דבר זה, ולא די שהם שותקים אלא אף משמחים אלי גיל בראותן מעשים הללו בעיניהן ממש כצאן לטבח יובל . . . והוא מסייע ידי עוברי עבירה, בראותו תולדותיו כיוצא בזה ולא די דאינו מוחה אלא אף מסייע לדבר עבירה, ואדרבה מוטל על האבות להיות מוחים ובפרט מי שסיפק בידו לעשות.
Elsewhere in his book, we see that R. Kalir told his female congregants that on Shabbat morning they should leave the synagogue and go home before the end of services. This was to prevent men and women mixing which would happen if the women were still there when services ended.[22] It is hard to believe that he found much of a receptive audience for this request.
To Be Continued
1. In my last post I mentioned Maxine Jacobson’s new book on R. Leo Jung. Anyone who is interested in purchasing a soft-cover copy of the book for $25 can contact her directly at maxine.jacobson at sympatico.ca.

2. One of the most prolific authors of halakhic works in English is Rabbi Ari Enkin. His most recent book (which is his eighth such publication) is Halichot V’halachot. Anyone who is interested in modern issues and their halakhic ramifications will enjoy this book and his previous volumes. The topics he discusses run the gamut, from Shabbat and holidays, to kashrut, interpersonal issues, and civil and monetary law. As one can see from the numerous references in each essay, Rabbi Enkin has great erudition in the responsa literature, particularly the modern halakhic authorities. He cites these authorities no matter which ideological camp they are found in, and as such should be a model for all. Those who wish to order the book can contact the author at rabbiari at hotmail.com. His website is here.

3. On June 5, 2016, in honor of Yom Yerushalayim, I will be speaking at the Community Synagogue of Monsey, 89 West Maple Avenue. The title of my talk is “R. Shlomo Goren: The Revolutionary Chief Rabbi.” The talk will follow minhah which is at 8:15pm.

[1] See Reiner, מעשה שאירע בק”ק ווירמייש”א ברעש הגדול שנת שצ”ו, Ha-Aretz, Oct. 4, 2006, available here.
[2] See Posen, מגדלים פסיכולוגיסטיים, Ha’aretz, Oct. 17, 2006, available here.
[3] See Reiner, שערי פירושים לא ננעלו, Ha’aretz, Oct. 24, 2006, available here.
[4] Toyznt yor Idish lebn in Ungarn ([New York, 1945]), p. 173.
[5] See ibid.
[6] Vol. 2, no. 7 (p. 145).
[7] See R. Avraham Mordechai Katz, “Be-Inyan Shirat Nigunim ha-Musharim Etzel ha-Goyim,” Minhat ha-Kayitz 8-11 (2006), pp. 73-74, who makes this point and responds to R. Hillel. Regarding using non-Jewish music, Dov Weinstein called my attention to this shiur on the Yeshivat Kise Rahamim website which begins with music from Abba’s song “Dancing Queen.” I can’t imagine that the person who inserted the music has any clue where it comes from.
The Kise Rahamim website is where you can find R. Meir Mazuz’s shiurim, but a number of short videos are not included on the website. For example, this video appeared on Yom ha-Zikaron 2016:



R. Mazuz refers to the day as “kadosh ve-nora” and calls for synagogues to recite the prayer for Israeli soldiers every Shabbat. As he notes, if someone donates ten shekalim you make a blessing for him, so how could you not make a blessing for one who spills his blood for the Jewish people? I understand full well why haredim don’t say the prayer for the State of Israel. Yet I have never understood how haredi society could refuse to recite a mi-sheberakh prayer for the soldiers, the same soldiers who are the only reason why there can be a haredi society in Israel in the first place. Interestingly enough, in all the conversations over the years that I have had with haredim regarding this matter, to my recollection I have never met one who agreed with, or was willing to defend, his community’s avoidance of the prayer. (I am referring to mainstream haredim, not Satmar or other anti-Zionists.)

[8] Kedushat Levi (Warsaw, 1902), p. 15b, s.v. ויביאה יצחק
[9] The text has מצות which could be read as singular or plural.
[10] (Jerusalem, 1993), p. 153 (Sefer Selihah u-Mehilah, ch. 10). See Byron Sherwin, “In the Shadows of Greatness: Rabbi Hayyim Ben Betsalel of Friedberg,” Jewish Social Studies 37 (Winter 1975), pp. 49-50.
[11] Since this post has dealt a good deal with love, let me add one more point about a different sort of love. There is an old question, why when the kohanim bless the people do they say וצונו לברך את עמו ישראל באהבה? Where do we find that the kohanim were told to bless the people “with love”?  A number of different answers have been given, and one famous answer, intended as a joke, is as follows.
Before giving us the text of the priestly blessing , the Torah, Numbers 6:23, states:
דבר אל אהרן ואל בניו לאמור, כה תברכו את בני ישראל אמור להם.
This word, אמור, sounds a lot like the French and Italian words for love, so we see that God is telling the kohanim to love the people.
As mentioned, this is a famous answer. Not so famous is that it was actually stated by R. Leon Modena with reference to Italian. He, of course, also intended it as a joke. See Ziknei Yehudah, no. 127:
ואמרתי על דרך צחות דכתיב כה תברכו אב”י אמו”ר להם אמור בלע”ז היינו באהבה.
[12] See Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages (New York, 1964), pp. 271-272, 279, 320-321.
[13] Solomon Buber, Anshei Shem (Cracow, 1895), p. 132.
[14] See Ya’arot Devash (Jerusalem, 1988), vol. 1, p. 62, s.v. ואתם עם ה’. The last three sources I have cited are mentioned by Salo Wittmayer Baron, The Jewish Community (Philadelphia, 1942), vol. 3, p. 206. For other relevant sources, see David Biale, Eros and the Jews (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 70ff.
[15] See Ya’arot Devash, vol. 1, pp. 61, 62
[16] Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn (Portland, 1998), p. 93.
[17] The Autobiography of a Seventeeth-Century Venetian Rabbi, trans. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton, 1988), p. 91.
[18] “Rabbi Jacob Emden: His Life and Major Works” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1988), pp. 55-57.
[19] Meoraot Yosef (Elad, 2014), p. 14 (first pagination).
[20] Seder Eliyahu (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 22-23.
[21] (Jerusalem, 2004). p. 76.
[22] Ibid., p. 75.


Some Recollections of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, Love Before Marriage, and More

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Some Recollections of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, Love Before Marriage, and More
Marc B. Shapiro
1. In my last post I mentioned R. Nosson Zvi Finkel, the Alter of Slobodka, so let me add the following. There is a transcript of a 1965 taped conversation between R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg and R. Yaakov Herzog.[1] Herzog had come to Montreux to speak to R. Weinberg, and here is a picture from that meeting which appears in Michael Bar-Zohar, Yaacov Herzog: A Biography.

R. Weinberg, who knew R. Finkel very well, stated as follows.

הרב ויינברג: דער אלטער ז”ל (דער סלאבאדקער, זאגט מען דער אלטער), ר’ נטע הירש, ער איז דאך א צדיק.

הרצוג: אבער נישט קיין למדן.

הרב ויינברג: נישט קיין גרויסער למדן. ער האט געקענט לערנען, אבער ער איז נישט געווין קיין גרויסער למדן. אבער ער איז געווען א חכם, א גרויסער.

הרצוג: יא, דער חכם פון סלאבאדקע.

הרב ויינברג: און ער איז געווען א איידעלער מענטש זייער.

Some sections of this conversation appeared in the English Yated Ne’eman, Nov. 5, 1999. Yet as is to be expected, they appeared in a censored form as Yated Ne’eman would never record R. Weinberg’s statement that R. Nosson Zvi Finkel was not a great talmudic scholar. This judgment is not to be regarded as a put-down, as everyone in the Lithuanian yeshiva world knew that R. Nosson Zvi Finkel’s original insights were focused on Mussar, not analytical Talmud study.[2] Needless to say, the Alter always made sure that outstanding talmudic scholars were on the Slobodka faculty.
Speaking of censorship, here is another example. In the Yated Ne’eman article just mentioned, we find the following passage which is a quote from R. Weinberg.
I was intimately acquainted with R. Eizik Sher. . . . His son-in-law, R. Mordechai Shulman, visited me in Berlin and wanted to hear shiurim from me. I told him: This is not your place. Return to Slobodke.[!] Maybe you will some day become the son-in-law of R. Eizik.
This is what R. Weinberg actually said to Herzog:

ויינברג: ער איז ארויפגעקומען צו מיר אין סעמינאר. ער איז געווען אין בערלין, זיך ארומגעדרייט צוויי מאנאטן. געוואלט אריין אין סעמינאר. האב איך אים געזאגט: הערט זיך איין, ר’ מרדכי, ער איז א טיקטינר. דו וועסט נישט ווערן קיינמאל קיין דאקטאר. און אויב דו וועסט זיין א דאקטאר אפילו, וועסטו קיינמאל נישט קריגן קיין רבינער שטעלע אין דייטשלאנד. וואס טויג עס דיר? וועסט נישט מאכן קיין קאריערע. איז גיי אוועק צוריק אין סלאבאדקע. אמאל קען זיין, דו וועס זיך פארליבן אדער זי וועט זיך אין דיר פארליבן, די טאכטער פון ר’ אייזיק’ן, וועסטו ווערן ר’ אייזיק’ס א איידים.

.הרצוג: וכך הווה

 .ויינברג: און איך האב אים דערמאנט דאס. אז איך האב עס אים אמאל פאראויס געזאגט

R. Weinberg tells us that R. Mordechai Shulman, who was from Tiktin and later became Rosh Yeshiva of Slobodka in Bnei Brak, wanted to enroll in the Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin. Yated doesn’t want its readers to know this, so it “translates” the passage as saying that R. Shulman “visited” R. Weinberg and “wanted to hear shiurim” from him. R. Weinberg told him that he would never get a doctorate, and even if he did he would not get a rabbinic position in Germany, so he should return to Slobodka. R. Weinberg adds that when he returns it could be that he “will fall in love” with the daughter of R. Isaac Sher, or she will fall in love with him, and he can then become the son-in-law of R. Sher, the rosh yeshiva of Slobodka. In fact, this is exactly what happened.[3]
The Yated “translation” omits anything about R. Shulman and R. Sher’s daughter “falling in love.” This is because there is no such concept in the haredi world (and in traditional Jewish societies, in both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic worlds, such a notion was hardly found at all). Any love between husband and wife is said to come after marriage, and the biblical support for this concept, repeated in numerous texts (both haredi and pre-haredi[4]), is found in Genesis 24:67: “Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebekkah. So she became his wife, and he loved her.” This verse states that Isaac loved Rebekkah, but only after he married her.[5] R. Gamaliel Rabinowitz goes so far as to state that any love that is found before marriage arises from sin, as there is no room for “feelings” before marriage.[6]
האהבה באה רק לאחר הנישואין, כל אהבה שלפני הנישואין מקורה בחטא רח”ל, ענין ה”רגשות” בכלל אין לו מקום לפני הנישואין, וזה דבר פשוט וברור שאין צריך לבארו.
R. Reuven Margaliyot mentions an interesting interpretation in support of this perspective.[7] There are two contradictory biblical verses. Proverbs 18:22 states מצא אשה מצא טוב, while Ecclesiastes 7:26 states ומוצא אני את האשה מר ממות. The contradiction can be explained as follows.
In earlier years parents would arrange marriages for their sons, and the overwhelming majority of the marriages succeeded. This is alluded to by the verse in Proverbs: מצא אשה מצא טוב. Now, however, things are different, and young men find their own brides, “and most of the time there isn’t peace between them after the marriage.” This is alluded to by the verse ומוצא אני את האשה מר ממות . In other words, if I find a wife for myself, most of the time it will turn out to be “more bitter than death.”
I think there might be another text that speaks to this concept, though I have not seen anyone who has made this point. The sixth of the sheva berakhot recited at a wedding states שמח תשמח רעים האהובים. The words רעים האהובים mean “beloved friends” or “beloved companions.” I don’t think one would use the word רעים to describe a man and woman who are “in love.” I believe that the words of the blessing mean a love that is found between two friends, rather than romantic love. 
R. Moses Gruenwald writes as follows:[8]
וענין חתונה א”א אלא בין רעים האהובים דמי שאינם אוהבים זה את זה א”א להם להתחתן.
What he says is that people who do not love each other cannot get married. I believe that he means the sort of “friendship love” I mentioned in the previous paragraph, rather than romantic love. I find his formulation particularly interesting, since R. Gruenwald was a Hungarian rav typically viewed as being on the extreme side of things. Yet here he is saying that there needs to be a sort of love between the bride and groom.
Could this really have been the norm in R. Gruenwald’s Hungarian (non-hasidic) community? Maybe some readers who come (or descend) from this type of community can offer some comments. I have also wondered what hasidim mean when they say רעים האהובים, since the people getting married hardly know each other. A friend from the hasidic world acknowledged that he doesn’t know if these words can be reconciled with the current reality. He also suggested that perhaps the words can be understood like יומת המת in Deuteronomy 17:6. In this verse the word המת does not mean one who is dead, but rather one who will soon be dead. So perhaps האהובים means “the ones who are in the process of becoming אהובים.”
I found another interesting passage that speaks about love of bride and groom. It is attributed to R. Isaac Luria by R. Hayyim Vital. As part of his explanation of a verse in Song of Songs, R. Luria writes:[9] מחמת רוב אהבת חתן לכלה. These words are explained allegorically, but their simple meaning also reflects a reality, one in which there is real love between bride and groom which could only have flowered prior to the wedding.
Returning to the traditionalist value that love only comes after marriage, this is all fine and good, but R. Weinberg specifically spoke of falling in love before marriage, and that this could lead R. Shulman to become R. Sher’s son-in-law. From the Yated “translation” the reader would assume that R. Weinberg was telling him to return to Slobodka and become a big learner, and that this might lead to him becoming R. Sher’s son-in-law.[10]
Regarding love letters, the following appears in R. Nathan Kamenetsky, Making of a Godol, p. 802, and was one of the passages that led to the book being banned:
A reliable source reported that R’ Aaron [Kotler] wrote a letter to his fiancée of which her father, R’ Isser-Zalman Meltzer, disapproved. When it was shown to the Alter, he rejoined, “I did not tell you he was a tzaddiq. I said he had other qualities, but he will yet become so frum that everyone will suffer from him.”
Many who read Making of a Godol assumed that the letter allegedly sent by R. Kotler was a love letter. In order to counter this understanding, in the second edition of Making of a Godol Kamenetsky added: “This author conjectures that the letter concerned an impressive hasbarah he had delivered.” This conjecture doesn’t seem to fit with the Alter’s reply about R. Kotler not being a “tzaddiq” and becoming “frum”. If R. Isser Zalman was upset because he thought that the young R. Kotler was a bit too impressed with himself, then the Alter would presumably have replied differently. The words that he allegedly used, “tzaddiq” and “frum”, have a certain meaning, and it thus is not surprising that the family of R. Kotler was so strongly opposed to the book and viewed this passage as insulting. (Another report has it that R. Kotler had suggested that his fiancée read a certain book and that was what upset R. Isser Zalman.)
In the second edition of Making of a Godol, the last sentence of the passage in question was altered to read, “But his frumkeit will yet become so great that everyone will suffer its brunt.” 
In my review of Making of a Godol, I wrote as follows:
Another problematic element of the book, admittedly found only on occasion, is its use of unnamed sources. This is acceptable in journalism, but not in scholarship. For example, the evidence for one of the most controversial passages in the book, concerning R. Aaron Kotler, his future wife, and his future father-in-law, R. Isser Zalman Meltzer, is “a reliable source” (p. 802). I understand why the source would not want his or her name to be given, but when repeating such a loaded story, which one knows will be controversial and its veracity challenged, the author is obligated to name the source, thus allowing the reader to judge its reliability. After all, if the source is R. Kotler’s daughter, its authenticity is more apparent than if it is another example of what X heard from Y. If the source does not wish to go on the record, it is best for the story to be omitted. (In my own biography of R. Weinberg, I was forced to leave out a number of “juicy” details, precisely for this reason.)[11]
I have previously discussed R. Samuel Archivolti’s book of melitzah letters, Ma’yan Ganim, and how it was misused by R. Baruch Epstein. See here.[12] This book is described in the Encyclopaedia Judaica as follows: “Archivolti’s most important works are . . . Ma’yan Ganim (Venice, 1553), divided into ‘passages’ containing 25 letters in metrical form designed to serve as models for students of this classic literary genre.”[13] It is worth mentioning Ma’yan Ganim now because on pp. 39ff. Archivolti includes two love letters. It appears clear to me that the focus of these letters is an unmarried couple, and first letter begins with the following heading: אגרת חושק לחשוקתה. 

Also of interest is this picture that appears at the beginning of each section of the book. As I learnt from Shimon Steinmetz, urinating putti were a common theme in the art of Archivolti’s day. You can read about it here. 

While Ma’yan Ganim is a book of melitzah letters, not responsa, R. Archivolti (1515-1611) was indeed a halakhic authority who served as rabbi of Padua. His pesak in the famous Rovigo mikveh controversy appears in Palgei Mayim (Venice, 1608), p. 15a.
 

R. Archivolti is referred to as מ”ד which stands for מרא דאתרא. In Renaissance Italy this title was only used for very important rabbis,[14] unlike today when all communal rabbis are given the title.
Interestingly, I found that a Hebrew manuscript from R. Archivolti’s era includes a love charm. The woman is told to write יריש ליאוש פילוש on her left hand, and this will cause the man she desires to fall in love with her.[15]
R. David Cohen, the Nazir, is an example of one who fell in love before marriage. In fact, his relationship with his future wife, Sarah, is a great love story. They were separated from each other for twelve years. He was in Europe and Eretz Yisrael and she was in Russia and later trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Throughout these long years they remained committed to each other, and the Nazir kept her picture on his desk. As reported by R. Avraham Remer, R. Zvi Yehudah Kook saw fit to mention this last point at the Nazir’s funeral.[16]
אמר עליו: “אור מופלא”, וציין אז שתי נקודות בחייו של רבי דוד: האחת, תחילת הנזירות בעת היותו באוניברסיטה, כדי לשמור על הפיאות והזקן. והשניה, שעל שולחנו הציב תמונת ארוסתו, כדי שחס-ושלום לא יתן עיניו באחרת.
R. Shear Yashuv Cohen tells us that the Nazir and Sarah also exchanged wonderful love letters during this time, letters which have not been made public:[17]
שמורים בארכיון המשפחה מכתבי-האהבה הנפלאים, ואף קטעי-יומן מלא רגש רוטט שנכתבו על ידי אבא מארי זצ”ל בימי הפירוד שנתמשכו הרבה מעבר למתוכנן ולמצופה . . . הכלה הצעירה מונה ימים ושנים, ונשארת בנאמנותה לבחיר לבה. אף הוא שומר לה אמונים ומתנזר מכל אפשרות של ברית או קשר אחר, בקפידה ובנאמנות יסודית.
When Sarah finally made it to Jerusalem, the Nazir was in the midst of a ta’anit dibur. R. Kook summoned R. Zvi Pesah Frank and R. Yeruham Fishel Bernstein so that they could sit as a beit din and void the ta’anit dibur, thus allowing him to speak to his soon-to-be bride.[18]

Regarding falling in love before marriage, R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, in his Oct. 12, 1960, letter to Samuel Atlas, states that R. Soloveitchik came to Berlin intending to marry R. Hayyim Heller’s daughter:
השידוך בטל. ס’ התאהב בזו שהיא עתה אשתו.
According to members of the Soloveitchik family, there is no truth to this, and R. Weinberg was simply repeating a rumor. But it is true that the Rav fell in love with his future wife in Berlin. R. Ronnie Ziegler writes as follows here:
The Rav’s most important and fateful encounter in Berlin was that with his wife, Dr. Tonya (Lewit) Soloveitchik (1904-1967). A student at the University of Jena, where she obtained a Ph.D. in education, she was introduced to Rav Soloveitchik by her brother, a fellow student at University of Berlin. Although a scion of the illustrious Soloveitchik family was expected to conclude a match with the daughter of a prominent rabbi or at least a successful businessman, Rav Soloveitchik fell in love with Tonya Lewit and married her in 1931 despite her family’s undistinguished lineage and lack of means.
R. Ziegler continues by describing the deep connection between the Rav and Tonya.
As mentioned in the previous lecture, the Rav’s relationship with his wife was one of the two most significant relationships in his life. He had unlimited esteem for her – his dedication of “The Lonely Man of Faith” reads: “To Tonya: A woman of great courage, sublime dignity, total commitment, and uncompromising truthfulness.” He respected her opinion and heeded her advice, both in practical and in intellectual matters. It was on her advice that he changed the topics of his annual Yahrzeit (memorial) lectures for his father, which attracted thousands of listeners, to matters which non-scholars could relate to (such as prayer, Torah reading, and holidays). [The halakhic portions of some of these lectures are collected in the two volumes of Shiurim Le-zekher Abba Mari z”l.] In a poignant passage in a teshuva lecture delivered after his wife’s death, he recounted how he used to consult her before speaking:
The longing for one who has died and is gone forever is worse than death. The soul is overcome and shattered with fierce longing. . . . Several days ago, I once again sat down to prepare my annual discourse on the subject of repentance. I always used to discuss it with my wife and she would help me to define and crystallize my thoughts. This year, too, I prepared the discourse while consulting her: “Could you please advise me? Should I expand this idea or cut down on that idea? Should I emphasize this point or that one?” I asked, but heard no reply. Perhaps there was a whispered response to my question, but it was swallowed up by the wind whistling through the trees and did not reach me.” (On Repentance [Jerusalem, 1980], p. 280)
Rav Soloveitchik’s wife was his best and perhaps only real friend. His natural proclivity towards loneliness, which we will encounter repeatedly in his writings, was heightened in his philosophy to an ideal, which expresses itself in an invigorating sense of one’s own uniqueness. One can be lonely even, or perhaps especially, when surrounded by friends, colleagues, and family. This is a constructive force which propels a person toward his individual destiny, while also propelling him to seek a depth-connection with God and with his fellow man. Aloneness, as opposed to loneliness, is a disjunctive emotion – it is a sense of lacking companionship, of being abandoned and forlorn. The passage above highlights the Rav’s almost unbearable sense of aloneness following his wife’s death in 1967 after a long struggle with cancer. He is reported to have said, “After my father’s death, I felt like a wall of my house had fallen down. After my wife’s death, I felt like the entire house had collapsed.”
Concerning the matter of falling in love before marriage, it is noteworthy that the great R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai (the Hida) was in love with the woman who would later be his wife, and whom he knew for a number of years before they were married. Here is what Meir Benayahu has to say about this.[19]
את אשתו השניה, רחל בת משה הלוי מפיסה, הכיר כחמש שנים לפני שנשא אותה ונקשר עמה בקשרי אהבה. החלומות שחלם עליה לפני הנישואין מעידים על יחסו הנכבד לאשה. הוא שאף ל”נשואים רעננים” ובהנשאו לה ראה שהוא מתעטר בכבוד והדר. בנסיעותיו רכש לה מתנות ומסר לה אותם לפני הנישואין. כסף הרבה הוציא עליה למלבושיה ולהנאותיה, ומותה בשנת תקס”ד הקדיר עליו את עולמו.
Benayahu mentions the Hida’s dreams. Here is a passage that the Hida recorded from one of his dreams.[20]
תשרי תקל”ו . . . וראיתי בחלומי שהייתי בא על אשתי [שהיתה כבר נשואה עמי ולא זכרתי מי] ומוציא בתוליה ורואה דם. [קמ]תי והלכתי אצל אמ”ן [אבי מורי נ”ע] ושאלני ברמז והשבתיו ברמז . . . ונתעוררתי. ותכף הבנתי שהוא תשו’ שאלה מיום [ראש השנה?] לטובה. וב”ה שלא אירע לי שום מקרה ח”ו. הוא ית’ ירחם וייטיב אחריתי מראשיתי לאי”ט וש”ח.
Most people will probably feel uncomfortable reading this sort of passage. Yet the performance of the mitzvah the Hida discusses appears very natural to him and nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps it is only uncomfortable to read because we have become overly puritanical regarding these matters which are also part of Torah. Nevertheless, it does remind me of other “uncomfortable” passages found in R. Jacob Emden’s autobiography.
I found another interesting passage that deals with love between a bride and groom in R. Aaron Fried’s Zekan Aharon (Munkacz, 1904), p. 52a. Here is the passage.
I am quite surprised by the example the author uses. In commenting on the rabbinic derashah connecting the words מורשה and מאורסה,[21] he uses an example that portrays a romantic relationship. He tells of a rich man, apparently newly married, who loved his wife and tried to woo her by telling her how greatly he loved her. “His love for her increased in quantity and quality beyond how other grooms love their brides.”
This type of description would be unusual enough in a rabbinic work. Yet it gets even more unusual when R. Fried continues by telling us that the rich man showered her with hugs and kisses and placed an expensive necklace around her neck as a sign of his love. R. Fried also elaborates on why, despite all these signs of affection, the woman did not reciprocate with any feelings of love. Later he explains that since the Torah is to us like one bound with erusin, that is why we show it love, decorate it with silver and gold, and even kiss it, just like a groom does with his bride! It happens to be a clever derashah, and ends with how if you want the Torah (i.e., God) to love you back, it is not enough to only support the Torah. One must also support the poor Torah scholars, the “relatives” of the Torah.
Is it just me, or is anyone else surprised by this derashah? I can’t imagine using the imagery found here as part of a derashah before a haredi audience in order to inspire them to be generous with their support of Torah scholars. With the mention of hugging and kissing the bride, I don’t even think this would go over well in front of a Modern Orthodox audience. [22]
I am doubly astounded by the fact that the derashah we have just seen was written by an outstanding student of the Hatam Sofer, one who also showed his halakhic expertise by authoring a volume of responsa titled שו”ת מהרא”ף.
I found the derashah so unusual that I was curious to see if anyone cited it. Using Otzar ha-Hokhmah I found two citations. The first is by a Hungarian rabbi, R. Efraim Balati, who authored Hamudei Efrayim (Galanta, 1935). In vol. 1, p. 35, he cites R. Fried’s comment.
Once again, I am surprised that a Hungarian rabbi would include such information in a derashah, even if, in R. Balati’s retelling, he leaves out the words ומחבב אותה בחיבוק ונישוק. Even though he doesn’t mention how the rich man showed his affection with hugs and kisses, he does include the rest of R. Fried’s words, including how we kiss the Torah just like a groom kisses his bride.
The other source I found that cites R. Fried’s passage is R. Barukh Moskovits, Tenuvot Barukh (Jerusalem, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 326-327.
If you examine the passage, you will see that he is quoting from R. Fried’s text, not R. Balati’s version. Yet R. Moskovits also alters R. Fried’s words ומחבב אותה בחיבוק ונישוק. In R. Moskovits’ text this appears as ומחבב אותה מאד. Since R. Moskovits copied R. Fried’s text basically word for word, I don’t understand why at the end of the passage he writes שמעתי. Why doesn’t he tell the reader the source of the passage? 
To be continued
2. The most recent book to appear in my series with Academic Studies Press is Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung. Anyone with an interest in the history of Orthodoxy in America will want to read this book, and I am very happy that I was able to include it, together with other high quality works, in my series, “Studies in Orthodoxy.” Rather than offer my own description of the book, here is an “official” description, which appears on Amazon.
This work presents the issues of Modern Orthodox Judaism in America, from the decades of the twenties to the sixties, by looking at the activities of one of its leaders, Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, pulpit rabbi, community leader and writer, whose career spanned over sixty years, beginning in the 1920s. Jung is a fulcrum around which many issues are explored. Rabbi Jung’s path crossed with some of the most interesting people of his time. He worked with Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, with Albert Einstein to promote Yeshiva College, with Herman Wouk, American author and Pulitzer Prize winner, and with Pearl Buck, a Nobel Prize laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner.
Modern Orthodoxy went from being a threatened entity on the American scene to a well- recognized and respected force in Judaism. Orthodoxy, at first, was seen as alien to the American environment. Marshall Sklare, perhaps the most influential exponent of this notion, wrote in the 1950s that the history of Orthodoxy in America could be written in terms of a case study of institutional decay. He realized the errors of his ways in the 1970s. This is the story of the renaissance of American Modern Orthodoxy, from the disorganization of the older Orthodoxy to the new spirit of confidence that emerged after World War Two. The phenomenon of Modern Orthodoxy is examined in the context of Orthodox invigoration and change. This book has relevance for further studies in various areas. It is part of the study of religious acculturation, of the conflict between tradition and modernity and of religious reinvigoration in a secular society.
Another noteworthy recent book is Michael J. Harris, Faith Without Fear: Unresolved Issues in Modern Orthodoxy. In my blurb that appears on the back cover, I write: “A proud and sophisticated manifesto of Modern Orthodoxy, one which builds on past thinkers but does not hesitate to chart new ground as well.” Rabbi Harris deals with a number of issues such as the role and status of women, mysticism, academic biblical scholarship, and religious pluralism. He generally comes down on the more “liberal” side of what is known as Modern Orthodoxy. (An exception to this generalization is his chapter on academic biblical scholarship.) Anyone who is interested in the intellectual trends of Modern Orthodoxy will want to read Harris’s book, as it is engaged scholarship at its best.
I would also like to call attention to R. Shimon Szimonowitz’s just published Haggadah shel Pesah: Aleh Zayit.[23] I know that there are a lot of Haggadot out there, but for talmidei hakhamim this is one of the special ones. I say this because of the many learned comments, including full-length essays, that are found in the volume. Of particular interest to me is R. Szimonowitz’s lengthy article on le-shem yihud. It is crucial reading for anyone interested in the dispute over the le-shem yihud formulation, in particular the positions of R. Ezekiel Landau, R. Eleazar Fleckeles, and R. Moses Sofer. Among other noteworthy things found in this Haggadah are an article by R. Chaim Rapoport and the Yiddish version of a few beloved Passover songs.
3. On June 5, 2016, in honor of Yom Yerushalayim, I will be speaking at the Community Synagogue of Monsey, 89 West Maple Avenue. The title of my talk is “R. Shlomo Goren: The Revolutionary Chief Rabbi.” The talk will follow minhah which is at 8:15pm.

[1] Israel State Archives, Yaakov Herzog Collection, 2989-4/פ. R. Yaakov David Herzog was the son of R. Isaac Herzog. He was named after R. Yaakov David Wilovsky, the Ridbaz, from whom R. Isaac Herzog received semikhah. In addition to his public role in government and as a diplomat, Yaakov Herzog was also a rabbinic scholar. In 1945 he published a translation and commentary of Mishnah Berakhot, Peah, and Demai. This translation was actually ready for publication by the end of 1942, before Herzog was even 21 years old (he was born Dec. 11, 1921). See Michael Bar-Zohar, Yaacov Herzog: A Biography (London, 2005), p. 50.
In Iggerot Moshe, Hoshen Mishpat no. 1, R. Moshe Feinstein critiques an article of R. Isaac Herzog that appeared in Ha-Pardes. R. Moshe’s own article originally appeared in installments in Ha-Pardes, Tamuz and Av 5703. Yaakov Herzog defended what his father wrote in Ha-Pardes, Elul 5704, pp. 36-38, and Tishrei 5705, pp. 25-27. He was only 23 years old when he wrote these articles.
After the retirement of R. Israel Brodie, Herzog was offered, and accepted, the position of British Chief Rabbi. The common view is that Herzog’s health problems prevented him taking up the post, but the truth is more complicated. See Bar-Zohar, Yaacov Herzog, ch. 13.
Since I have spoken in prior posts about religious men not wearing kippot, Herzog should be added to the list. Not only did he go bareheaded when representing the State of Israel in the Diaspora (and also in his famous debate with Toynbee), but as you can see from pictures in Bar-Zohar’s book, he also did so in Israel, while at work in various important government positions. Bar Zohar writes, “Even as a very young man, when he was working at the Foreign Ministry and then in the Prime Minister’s office, Yaacov did not wear a skullcap, except when saying blessings or praying.” (Yaacov Herzog, p. 111) Because of the vast changes that have taken place in Israeli society, it is hard for us to appreciate why, in the early decades of the State of Israel, some religious men, even those who were not of German background, felt that government work required removing their kippah.
You can listen to the Herzog-Toynbee debate here.
In a previous post here I referred to Yitzhak Nebenzahl as not wearing a kippah, and I mentioned that this German practice continued into his old age. In 1974 Nebenzahl was a member of the Agranat Commission which investigated the Yom Kippur War. In pictures of him from this time you can see that he was still without a kippah. A couple of people emailed me to say that by the 1980s he had abandoned the galut custom and indeed wore a big black kippah. One of them even sent a picture of him and Nebenzahl together.
In the post referred to in the previous paragraph, I also discussed Aharon Barth, who like Nebenzahl came from Germany and did not wear a kippah while at work. Subsequent to the post I found that Zorach Warhaftig mentions that after the death of Chaim Weizman, Ha-Poel ha-Mizrachi recommended to Ben Gurion that Barth be a candidate for president of the State of Israel. Warhaftig reports that Ben Gurion rejected this since Barth was too religious and thus not an appropriate representative for the average citizen. See Warhaftig, Hamishim Shanah ve-Shanah (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 116.
[2] Shlomo Tikochinski, Lamdanut, Musar ve-Elitizm (Jerusalem, 2016) p. 111 n. 131, cites Israel Zissel Dvortz and Dov Katz who claim that R. Finkel was indeed a “gadol” in talmudic learning, but he hid this knowledge even from those who were close to him. Some will no doubt regard this judgment as motivated by “religious correctness,” especially as R. Weinberg had a particularly close relationship with R. Finkel and was privy to all sorts of private information. See, however, Nathan Kamenetsky, Making of a Godol, pp. 777ff., who cites additional sources testifying to R. Finkel’s talmudic knowledge.
[3] R. Shulman’s early shiurim were not very successful in drawing a following. Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky writes (Ke-Tzur Halamish: Tor ha-Zahav shel ha-Yeshivot ha-Lita’iyot be-Mizrah Eiropah [Jerusalem, 2104], p. 342):
בסלבודקה הורגשה אי-נחת כשמינה בה הרב יצחק אייזיק שר את חתנו מרדכי “טיקטינר” שולמן לר”מ בשנת 1935. בישיבה הוא היה תלמיד ותיק נודע, ולאחר נישואיו ב-1929 הועיד את כל זמנו להתעלות בלימודיו. אולם משהחל להרצות את שיעוריו בישיבה לא מצאו בחוריה הדעתנים לנכון להשתתף בהם, ובשיעורים הראשונים נכחו חניכים יחידים בלבד.
Here is a picture of R. Weinberg and R. Shulman in Montreux. It appears in Joseph Friedenson, Heroine of Rescue (Brooklyn, 1984), p. 230.

[4] R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, in his commentary to Gen. 24:67, writes as follows:
Like the marriage of the first Jewish son [Jacob], Jewish marriages, most Jewish marriages, are contracted, not by passion but by reason and judgment. Parents, relations and friends consider which young people are really suited to each other, bring them together, and then love grows more and more, the more they get to know each other. But most non-Jewish marriages are made by what they call “love”, and one has only to glance at the novels depicting life to notice what a gulf there usually yawns between the “love” before marriage and after, how rapid and insipid everything then seems, how different from all the glamour one had imagined etc. etc. Such “love” is blind, every step into the future brings disappointment. But of Jewish marriage it says: ויקח את רבקה ותהי לו לאשה ויאהבה. There the wedding is not the culmination but the seed, the root of love!
The Malbim is another pre-haredi figure who speaks of love coming after marriage and cites Gen. 24:67. See his commentary to Deut. 24:1 (p. 169b). Yet he differs from others who make the same general point in that he acknowledges that at the beginning (which appears to mean even before marriage) there is indeed a “spark of love,” זיק אהבה. In context, these words might only mean a healthy attraction. The Malbim continues that the essence of love between a man and woman comes only after marriage:
ונמצא שעקר האהבה היתה נגלית רק אחר הנשואין.
R. Hayyim Hirschensohn, whose outlook was as far from a haredi perspective as can be imagined, also points to Gen. 24:67 as providing the proper approach to love and marriage. He even throws in a negative comment about American mores which is not what most would expect to come from him. See Apiryon 3 (1926), p. 29:
ותהי לו לאשה ויאהביה, לא כמנהג אמריקא שהאהבה בא קודם הנשואין ומתה עם הנשואין, אבל יצחק אהב את רבקה אחרי הנשואין.
Reading all of these passages shows us how much has changed both culturally and sociologically. I don’t think there is a parent in the Modern Orthodox world who would support a child’s marriage if the son or daughter was not convinced that he/she loved the future spouse.
I asked a friend if in the haredi world people would ever say that the bride and groom loved each other (i.e., before marriage). He replied:
לא היו אומרים, אבל אצל הישיבתיים זה בסדר גמור – ואולי גם יותר טוב – שיהיה אהבה ביניהם, אבל לא היו מביעים את זה, קוראים לזה chemistry, רוצים שיהיה chemistry ביניהם לפני שסוגרים את השידוך. אצל חסידים זה לא מקובל.
Radak, in his commentary to Gen. 24:67, is not concerned with using the verse to show that love should only come after marriage, and indeed, in his day this was generally not even an option. Yet in discussing the verse he makes a very telling comment, as true today as in his times:
רוב בני אדם אוהבים נשותיהם.
“Most men love their wives.” If you read Hirsch’s grand rhetoric you feel carried away with the purity and perfection of Jewish love after marriage. Radak, however, brings you down to the real world, where unfortunately the truth is that not all men really love their wives.

[5] See, however, Gen. 29:18, 20, where it says that Jacob loved Rachel, and this was before he married her. In Gen. 29:30 the verse states: ויאהב גם את רחל מלאה. Most understand this to mean that while Jacob loved Leah, he loved Rachel more. However, according to one interpretation of the Tosafists, Jacob did not love Leah at all. See Tosafot ha-Shalem al Torah, Nevi’im, u-Khetuvim, vol. 3, p. 145:
ויבא גם אל רחל ויאהב גם: ב’ פעמים גם, אין ריבוי אחר ריבוי אלא למעט, מיעט את לאה מן האהבה, שלא אהב אותה כלל, שנאמר “וירא ה’ כי שנואה לאה”.
See also Nahmanides, Commentary to Genesis 29:31: ולכן שנאה יעקב. He also offers an alternative explanation.
[6] Tiv ha-Emunah (5769 ed.), p. 142.                                         
[7] Devarim be-Itam (Tel Aviv, 1959), p. 57.
[8] Arugat ha-Bosem (Huszt, 1913), parashat Emor, p. 52a.
[9] Humash in Perush ha-Arizal (Jerusalem, 1993), Song of Songs 6:5 (p. 295).
[10] There is a story in yeshiva circles that before R. Isaac Hutner went to Berlin, he was supposed to marry R. Sher’s daughter, whose name was Chava Miriam.
R. Weinberg mentions both R. Sher and R. Shulman in his letter to Samuel Atlas, dated Jan. 17, 1950. (The letter is found in the Jewish Theological Seminary Library, Samuel Atlas collection.) The young rosh yeshiva R. Weinberg refers to is R. Chaim Kreiswirth, who was the son-in-law of the martyred R. Abraham Grodzinski. In this letter R. Weinberg frankly explains why he could not accept a position at Hebrew Theological College in Chicago.
וכן הדבר בשיקאגו. הרב המנוח שאול זילבר כתב לי קודם פרוץ המלחמה ואח”כ כמה וכמה מכתבים ובקשני שאבוא אליהם. גם ידידי הרב רגנסבורג כתב לי. ויש לי שם ידיד אוהב ומעריץ גדול, הרב ר’ אפרים עפשטיין, אחד מחבשי הקוראטוריום של בית המדרש לתורה וגם הוא הפציר בי לבוא לאמיריקה. ובכ”ז לא זכרו אותי בשעה שנפנתה משרת “ראש הישיבה” ונתנוה לאחר. אפשר שרצו באדם צעיר ואפשר שיד סלאבודקי באמצע. הראש ישיבה החדש הוא חתנו של ר’ אברהם ווארשאווער הי”ד, מי שהי’ מנהל ישיבת סלאבודקי. שמעתי שהוא דרש שיתנו לו משרה בישיבת סלאבודקי אשר בבני ברק. טען טענת ירושה. אבל ר’ אייזיק שער נ”י וחתנו ר”מ שולמן שהם כוננו את ישיבת סלאבודקי בבני ברק דחוהו ולפיכך הצטרכו למצוא לו מקום חדש . . .
עכ”פ אי אפשר לי עכשיו לחשוב ע”ד קבלת מינוי בביהמ”ד אשר בשיקאגו. הנ”ל הוא ראש הישיבה ולי אי אפשר לעמוד תחת מרותו של אדם צעיר, ואפילו יהי’ גדול שבגדולים. וצריך אתה לדעת, כי לביהמ”ד זה יש אופי של ישיבה ונוהגים בה כל מנהגי ישיבה, בכבודים ובתוארים וכו’ וכו’ וא”כ איך אפשר לי לעמוד במחיצתם והם ינהגו בי מנהג זלזול כנהוג בישיבה למי שאינו “הראש”.
ב”ה יש לי תלמידים שתופסים משרות רבנות בערים גדולות וגם בבמשלה העברית שבא”י יש לי תלמידים. ומשום כבודם בלבד אסור לי להעשות אסקופה בשביל פרנסה.
Regarding broken engagements, here is the front page of Doar ha-Yom, April 28, 1926 (called to my attention by Moshe Dembitzer).

As you can see, there is an ad wishing R. Kook mazal tov on the engagement of his daughter, Basya, to R. Hayyim Walkin, the son of R. Aaron Walkin. R. Hayyim Walkin would later break this engagement and marry the daughter of R. Yaakov Shapiro, who was the Rosh Yeshiva of Volozhin. After R. Shapiro’s death R. Walkin became Rosh Yeshiva (and was later martyred in the Holocaust). See here.           
[11] Edah Journal 3:2 (Elul 5763), p. 8, available here.
[12] Regarding R. Baruch Epstein’s supposed conversations with his aunt, Rayna Basya – conversations that I have argued here were invented by R. Epstein and thus cannot be regarded as having any historical value – see also Eliyana Adler’s fine article, “Reading Rayna Batya: The Rebellious Rebbetzin as Self Reflection,” Nashim 16 (Fall 2008), pp. 130-152. Another completely fictional account is provided by R. Hayyim Haikel Greenberg in Beit Yaakov 8 (Tevet 5720).

Greenberg has R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzinski pull out Ma’yan Ganim from his bookshelf and read from it during a discussion about the Beis Yaakov school system. Had R. Hayyim Ozer actually had this rare book in his library he would have known that it is a book of melitzah letters, not a book of responsa as stated by Greenberg. (R. Epstein was responsible for creating the false notion that Ma’yan Ganim is a book of responsa. As shown in my post referred to in the previous paragraph, R. Epstein never actually saw Ma’yan Ganim, and I can now add, neither did Greenberg.)
[13] Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 3, col. 397.
[14] See Robert Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy, trans. Jonathan Chipman (London and Washington, 1993),  p. 139.
[15] See Max Grunwald, “Kleine Beiträge zur jűdischen Kulturgeschichte,” Mitteilungen zur jűdischen Volkskunde 19 (1906), p. 112. We know of love charms from ancient times as well. Sefer ha-Razim, which was written in either the tannaitic or amoraic period, records a spell that will cause a woman to fall in love with you. See Michael Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton, 2001), p. 130. Mif’alot Elokim is a book of segulot that has been printed many times since first appearing in 1710. Here is the title page of the Lemberg 1858 edition.

In ma’arekhet aleph, s.v. אהבה, it contains a number of segulot to help women get rid of their “love sickness.” Shimon Steinmetz pointed out to me that R. Jacob Zahalon (17th century), Otzar ha-Hayyim (Venice, 1683), p. 58b, also explains איך יתרפא חולי אהבה. Yet unlike the segulot that appear in Mif’alot Elokim, Zahalon actually has some real psychological insight. His advice is to think about the flaws of the person you are infatuated with, to occupy yourself with other things (that way you won’t be focused on the object of your infatuation), and to move to a different city.
The phrase חולי האהבה is used by Maimonides in Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 10:3 (חולת אהבה appears in Song of Songs 2:5). He states:
What is the love of God that is befitting? It is to love the Eternal with a great and exceeding love so strong that one’s soul shall be knit up with the love of God, and one should be continually enraptured by it, like a love-sick individual, whose mind is at no time free from his passion for a particular woman, the thought of her filling his heart at all times, when sitting down or rising up, when he is eating or drinking.
Although some have described Maimonides as akin to Spock when it comes to emotions, anyone who reads the passage just quoted will see that Maimonides understood very well what being in love is all about.
[16] Gadol Shimushah (Jerusalem, 1994), p. 47. 
[17] Mishnat ha-Nazir (Jerusalem, 2005), pp. 26-27.
[18] See Mishnat ha-Nazir, pp. 27-28.
[19] Rabbi Hayyim Yosef David Azulai (Jerusalem, 1959), vol. 1, p. 161.
[20] Ibid., p. 559. Benayahu informs us that the first passage in brackets is written above the text in the manuscript.
[21] Actually, מאורשה, see Berakhot 57a.

[22] A friend in the haredi world commented as follows: “Why is this different than the imagery used in שיר השירים? Or in the zemer written by the אריז”ל and sung at my Friday night seudah every week: יחבק לה בעלה?” To this I replied that if someone today would write an erotic poem and say that it really represented God’s love for Israel, it would nevertheless be put in herem.
[23] Regarding the words עלה זית (and עלה תאנה), Samuel David Luzzatto points out that in Biblical Hebrew the word עלה is used for singular and plural. This is similar to how the word פרי is singular and plural in biblical Hebrew. Later Hebrew created the words עלים and פירות. That is why people began to write עלי זית, something which upsets the purist Luzzatto. See his letter at the end of R. Abraham Bedersi, Hotem Tokhnit (Amsterdam, 1865).


Assorted Matters

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Assorted Matters
Marc B. Shapiro
My next post will take some time to prepare, but there are some other matters that I want to bring to readers’ attention, in particular a few books that I recently received. Due to space considerations, I couldn’t include these in my last post.
1. For those interested in the history of Lithuanian yeshivot, the last few years have been very fruitful. In 2014 Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky’s Ke-Tzur Halamish appeared. This book is a study of the yeshivot from World War I until the destruction of European Jewry. 2015 saw the appearance of Geoffrey D. Claussen’s Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Mussar.[1]In January 2016 Shlomo Tikoshinski’s long-awaited book appeared. Its title is Lamdanut, Musar ve-Elitizm: Yeshivat Slobodka me-Lita le-Eretz Yisrael. The book can be purchased here. Eliezer Brodt is also selling the book and a portion of each sale will go to support the efforts of the Seforim Blog, so I also encourage purchasing from him.

This outstanding book is full of new information, and Tikoshinski had access to a variety of private archives and letters that help bring to life a world now lost. Lamdanut, Musar ve-Elitizm is also a crucial source in understanding the development of religious life in Eretz Yisrael in the two decades before the creation of the State.

When you read about the Slobodka students, and later the students of Chevron, it is impossible not to see how very different the student culture was then from what is found today in haredi yeshivot, including the contemporary Yeshivat Chevron. Some of this differences can be explained by the subtitle of the book where the word “elitism” is mentioned. Unlike the situation today, Tikoshinski discusses an era when very few people studied in yeshivot. Those who chose to devote themselves to Torah study were regarded by the traditional community, and more importantly they regarded themselves, as the elite of Jewish society. One should not underestimate how such a self-image impacted the lives of the students.
R. Moshe Finkel was a part of the story Tikoshinski tells. He was the son of R. Nosson Zvi Finkel and son-in-law of R. Moshe Mordechai Epstein, and taught at the yeshiva both in Slobodka and in Chevron. Unfortunately, he unexpectedly died in 1925 at the young age of 43. Here is a photo of R. Moshe Finkel with his wife Sarah. (This picture does not appear in Tikoshinski’s book.)
Among the pictures included in Tikoshinksi’s book is the following. Can anyone guess who the one on the right is?
2. In the last post I included a picture of R. Moshe Feinstein and R. Soloveitchik. Here is another picture of R. Moshe, the Rav, and R. Shneur Kotler.

Here is a picture of R. Soloveitchik walking down the aisle at a wedding. Next to him is R. Samuel Walkin, and in front of R. Walkin is R. Moshe Feinstein.. I thank Dr. Dov Zakheim for sending me this picture.

In older pictures you find rabbis walking down the aisle at weddings. Has anyone been to a wedding where this is still done?
3. Yeshiva University recently acquired the archive of the late Rabbi Louis Bernstein (1928-1995), an important Modern Orthodox pulpit rabbi in the second half of the twentieth century. The collection contains an interesting letter from R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, in which R. Weinberg mentions that R. Soloveitchik used to sometimes come to his shiurim at the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. R. Weinberg also speaks about how outstanding R. Soloveitchik was, and how even in his younger years his greatness was recognized by all the Torah sages of the generation.[2]

Also of interest in the collection is material relating to a controversial incident, or actually two incidents, that R. Bernstein was involved with. In 1985 R. Bernstein, who at the time was president of the Rabbinical Council of America, agreed to deliver a speech at the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly convention. That would have been controversial enough. However, things got even more heated when it was announced that the RCA would be reciprocating by having the head of the Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi Alexander M. Shapiro, speak at the RCA convention.
This became a major dispute not just between the RCA and the more right wing elements in Orthodoxy, but within the RCA itself. The New York Times even covered the matter. See here. Unfortunately for R. Bernstein, the weight of all the opposition came down on him even though the decision for him to speak at the RA convention, and to have Rabbi Shapiro speak before the RCA, was not an individual decision but was voted on by members of the RCA’s Executive Committee.
In a future post I will discuss this matter in greater detail, and also deal with the role of R. Soloveitchik. For now, let me share this strong letter from R. Nissan Alpert to R. Bernstein, in which in addition to protesting Rabbi’s Shapiro upcoming speech, R. Alpert states that if the event goes forward he sees no way that he can remain a member of the RCA.[3]

4. Recently, Ha-Mashbir, vol. 2, appeared, edited by R. Yissachar Dov Hoffman and R. Ovadiah Hoffman. This volume, which can be purchased at Biegeleisen, is dedicated to R. Ovadiah Yosef and is full of worthwhile articles. Particularly noteworthy are the contributions by R. Meir Mazuz, R. Baruch Simon (focusing on R. Ovadiah’s shiurim at Yeshiva University), R. Pinhas Zebihi on the practice in Gibraltar that men in mourning do not wear a tallit on Shabbat (actually, this is only the case for the first month of mourning), and an important and lengthy article by R. Eliyahu Kohen on R. Ovadiah’s attitude towards Zionism, the State of Israel, and the army. The various articles in the book are supplemented by notes from the two editors, each of whom is a scholar in his own right.
I would also like to call attention to the wonderful introduction to the book by R. Ovadiah Hoffman. He speaks about the need to reject religious extremism that leads to the delegitimization of Torah scholars just because they belong to a different camp. As I mentioned in my last post, this is a great problem in Israeli haredi society, and R. Ovadiah Yosef in particular was subjected to all sorts of attacks from small-minded people who could not recognize the simple truth R. Ovadiah Hoffman speaks about.
דא עקא, קול חרדה שמענו, פחד ואין שלום. בפרי מעללינו הובלנו לעידן של מצוקת הדעת, בו דעות מיעוט ודוקטורינות דתיות של רב אחד ותלמידיו שאינן עולות בקנה אחד עם ההשקפה המסורתית המקובלת של רב אחר וקהלתו, מבוססות ככל שיהיו, לא די שאינן מופרכות לפי כללי התורה ובאופן רציונלי אלא נדחות בשאט נפש ומבוטלות כלאחר יד, ופעמים בדעת קדומה של ביטול הדברים למפרע. . . . כל יום שני שומעים על עוד אדם ש”נפסל” או “נמחק” ונרדף עד לחייו בנסיבות עלובות. מלבד שהיום אין דנין דיני נפשות, גם אין אחידות או סמכות מקובלת או מועצה מוכרת בין כל קהילות ישראל, אפילו את”ל הוא חטא בניו ובנתיו מה חטאו? כמה משפחות נהרסות על חשבון הרודנות הזאת. ברור כי עוד לא זכינו להמשך הנבואה: ושקט ושאנן ואין מחריד (ירמיה ל, י).
I thought of R. Hoffman’s point this week when I received a copy of a new book that needs to be seen to be believed. (Thanks to Meir Yosef Frankel for sending it.) The title that appears on the top of each page is שרידי-אש זרה, and the book is designed to show that R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg was a complete heretic. Interestingly, the author doesn’t know how old I am as he refers to me as a student of R. Weinberg: פרופסור אחד מתלמידיו הותיקים. I will discuss this book in more detail in a future post.Returning to Ha-Mashbir, the second page, where it gives information on how to submit material, states as follows:

בעז”ה ית”ש בכרכים הבאים יודפסו גם מאמרים שאינם מרוכזים על משנת רבינו, הלכה מנהג ומחקר, ויפתח”ו שערי”ה תמיד לציבור הרחב. . . . גם לתגובות ולביקר”ת מבוא פתחים, כולם יתקבלו בברכה.
I have underlined certain words that have double apostrophes. This is a sign that there is a melitzah play on words, something that the editor R. Ovadiah Hoffman is quite good with. The first example, ויפתח”ו שערי”ה תמיד, is a play on Isaiah 60:11: ופתחו שעריך תמיד. The second example, ולביקור”ת מבוא פתחים, is quite clever. It is a play on Proverbs 8:3: .לפי-קרת מבוא פתחים
5. The ever-productive Menachem Kellner has just published a new book, Gam Hem Nikraim Adam: Ha-Nokhri be-Einei ha-Rambam, available here. This is not just a work of academic scholarship, but is what we can call “engaged scholarship,” in other words, scholarship that is also intent on making a difference in the real world. One of the things that troubles Kellner about contemporary Orthodox Judaism (and he specifically deals with such figures as R. Shlomo Aviner, R. Hershel Schachter, and the authors of Torat ha-Melekh) is the recent turn (or perhaps better, return) to negative portrayals of non-Jews and their spiritual worth. Kellner discusses this in the first section of the book which is titled גילוי דעת, and you can read it here. See also his interview with Alan Brill here.
In the book, Kellner argues that Maimonides sees no essential difference between Jews and non-Jews, and it is this view that Kellner wishes his readers to adopt. He refers to it as “Maimonides’ universalism.” Responses to Kellner’s book will be of two types: Those that deal with his interpretation of Maimonides and those that focus on what Kellner has to say about the contemporary scene and how Maimonides relates to it. This is a very exciting book which further establishes Kellner as an important public intellectual, and shows us once again why Kellner’s work has had a significant impact on the study of medieval Jewish philosophy. I hope to take up some of Kellner’s points in a future post.
7. R. Simcha Feuerman has recently published Et Lifrosh ve-Et le-Ehov. This small book, available at Biegeleisen, focuses on issues of shelom bayit. What makes this book significant is that R. Feuerman is also a licensed social worker with great experience in the field. This makes his book different than many previous books on the topic authored by well-intentioned people who never actually had any practical experience. As is fitting for a book like this, sexual matters are also discussed, and R. Feuerman mentions (p. 13) that the book was shown to rabbis and dayanim. Yet other than R. Gavriel Zinner, who penned a haskamah, none of the other rabbis chose to be public in their support because of their fear of being attacked by extremists who don’t think that these matters should be publicly discussed.
R. Feuerman also deals with the matter of psychological counseling and possible conflicts between the role of the psychologist, who is not supposed to be judgmental, and the traditional obligation to rebuke those who are sinning. As part of this essay (pp. 88ff.), R. Feuerman discusses the value of Freud’s insights (and notes the advances that have been made since his time). I find this significant since for many in the haredi world, and they are the ones who will be reading this book, Freud is almost up there with Darwin when it comes to objects of derision. It is also worth noting that the author uses “lomdus” to make psychological arguments.
8. For anyone who hasn’t yet picked up my new book, Changing the Immutable, the YU Seforim Sale is selling it at a great price. See here. Regarding Changing the Immutable, let me also add that because of the book’s last chapter, a number of people have been upset and have even characterized me as a haredi apologist. That is not the case at all, and Adam Ferziger, in his just-published review here, gets it right.

 

[1] Also worthy of note is Ernest Gugenheim, Letters from Mir: A Torah World in the Shadow of the Shoah (New York, 2014). One piece of interesting information appears on p. 106, where in a 1938 letter Gugenheim writes: “Tomorrow [the day before Purim] will be a day of fasting. Here, they are rather meikil with respect to this viewpoint, and many bachurim, too weak, do not fast completely. It is true that every day for them is a day of half-fasting, such that they are quite weakened.” Thanks to Jonathan Hirsch for calling this passage to my attention.
[2] R. Weinberg’s letter is found in the Rabbi Louis Bernstein archives, box 3. I thank the Yeshiva University Archives for granting me permission to publish it.
[3] R. Alpert’s letter is found in the Rabbi Louis Bernstein archives, box 6, Folder no.: RCA etc. 1985. I thank the Yeshiva University Archives for granting me permission to publish it.


An Unknown Picture

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An Unknown Picture
Marc B. Shapiro
In the post that went up earlier today, I mention that in the future I plan to share an unknown picture of R. Moshe Feinstein and R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. My intention was to include this picture in a future post, but that could be awhile, so here it is.

 

It was taken at the wedding of R. Moshe Dovid Tendler’s daughter, Rivka, to R. Shabtai Rappaport. The man on the left is R. Isaac Tendler, R. Moshe Dovid’s father. The wedding took place at the Pioneer Country Club, Greenfield Park, N.Y., on June 17, 1971. I thank Jack Prince who was at the wedding for allowing me to make a copy of the picture in his possession.


Some Unusually “Liberal” Statements by Mainstream Rabbinic Figures

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Some Unusually “Liberal” Statements by Mainstream Rabbinic Figures
Marc B. Shapiro
I have found a number of statements by mainstream rabbinic figures that, if one didn’t know better, one would think that they were said by liberal Orthodox figures. For example:
ומה אעשה ולבי מרחם על אלמנה [ובפרט בימינו] רחמים גדולים, ואולי אפשר לערער אם אני כשר לדון דין אלמנה, אבל מצד הדין אינני רואה פסול לעצמי.
If a liberal Orthodox rabbi made this statement, I think many would say that he was not “objective” and thus not suitable to serve as a dayan. Yet the statement I just quoted was made by R. Isaac Herzog.[1]
I was surprised to see that R. Ovadiah Yosef stated that had the Hazon Ish been a dayan and seen the pain of agunot first-hand then he would have been more lenient.[2]
רבנו דיבר על החזון איש שהחמיר בענין תרי רובי בעגונות, והחמיר עוד בעניינים אחרים, ואמר רבנו אודות החזון איש, שאם החזון איש היה אב בית דין היה מוכרח להקל, כי כך אמרו הרבה שכאשר הרב מוכרח לומר דברים למעשה הוא מוכרח יותר להקל, ואמר רבנו חבל שלא עשו את החזון איש אב בית דין, כי אם היו ממנים אותו אב בית דין היה מוכרח להקל, כי הוא יושב בביתו וכותב, אם היה יושב בבית דין, והיה רואה את הנשים שבוכות כשבאות לבקש להתיר אותן וכו’ היה מוכרח למצוא צדדים להקל. ובספר אבי הישיבות אמרו על רבי חיים מוולוזין שהיה אומר בתחלה שכל עוד שלא נתמנה לאב”ד היה מחמיר בתרי רובי, ועכשיו שמינו אותו לדיין הוא מיקל בתרי רובי בעגונה.
Regarding R. Hayyim of Volozhin, who is mentioned by R. Ovadiah, see what he writes in Hut ha-Meshulash, no. 8.
שכת”ר נוטה אל החומרא מחמת שאין הדבר מוטל עליו ואף אני כמוהו לא פניתי אל צדדי היתרים העולים מתוך העיון טרם הוחלה עלי עול ההוראה והן עתה שבעוה”ר בסביבותינו נתייתם הדור מחכמים והעלו על צוארי עול הוראה מכל הסביבה שאינם מתירים בשום אופן בלתי הסכמת דעתי הקלה וחשבתי עם קוני וראיתי חובה לעצמי להתחזק בכל כחי לשקוד על תקנת עגונות.
Some people will think that the following statement, which appeals to a dayan’s emotion, is problematic:
והוא הדבר גם כאן על הדיין לראות מעצמו אם היה ענין כזה באחת מבנותיו ח”ו, ובא הבעל נגדה בטענה כזו, האם ירצה שביה”ד יפסקו עליה להוציאה בע”כ מבלי כתובה.
Yet this was said by R. Ovadiah Hadaya.[3] 
In fact, words very similar to those of R. Hadaya were earlier stated by R. Hayyim Palache.[4] He explains that the Sages referred to Jewish women as בנות ישראל and not נשי ישראל in order to teach us that when a dayan and beit din deal with women in difficult halakhic circumstances, they should treat them just like their own daughters. Just like they would move heaven and earth to try to find a heter for their own daughters, so too they should do this with every woman who comes appears before them. Here are some of his words, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are soon emblazoned on the website of ORA.
שירחם הדיין והב”ד וכל מי שהוא חכם בעל הוראה להשתדל על נשי ישראל כאלו הם בנותיו שיצאו מיריכו ובכן בבא עליהן צרה וצוקה שנעלמו בעליהן באיזה אופן שיהיה ותהיינה צרורות שישים כל מגמתו לחפש בספרי הפוסקים חיפוש מחיפוש עד מקום שידו מגעת וידיעתו מכרעת בינו לשמים אם המצא ימצא להפוך בזכותן כאלו היתה בתו ממש כדי שלא תשאר עגונא כמו שמשתדל האב על בתו?:
.The following sentence sounds very 20th century

כנראה שהר’ ז”ל [רש”י] כאב הבנות הפך בזכותן בכל ואולי מזה הצד הוסיף כפייה לחליצה שלא כדברי שאר הפוסקים.

It states that because Rashi had daughters he was led to decide the halakhah in a certain way. Although it sounds modern, it was actually stated by R. Levi Ibn Habib.[5]
Look at the following sentences that explain a dispute among rishonim about the messianic era based on the environments they were living in.
וכפי הנראה החלוקה באה מסיבת חלוקת הזמנים והמקומות שהיה לכל אחד ואחד, שהרמב”ן ז”ל היה בעת המצור והמצוק שהציקו את ישראל ואכלום בכל פה בימי הבינים בין הקתולים, לכן לא מצא מקום למלאות תקות הגאולה אם לא ביד חזקה וכפיות הרצון הנעשה ע”י נפלאות כבימי פרעה מלך מצרים. אבל הרד”ק ז”ל היה בשעתו ומקומו בין מלכי חסד ועמים רודפי צדק אשר לא שנאו את ישראל והיתה תקוה קרובה, כי ישוב לבם לטוב על ישראל.
This definitely sounds like a liberal Orthodox approach, since traditionalists do not usually say that rishonim are influenced by their environment when it comes to such an important thing as their vision of the End of Days. Yet the passage I quoted actually comes from R. Jonathan Eliasberg, Shevil ha-Zahav (Warsaw, 1897), pp. 64-65.
What about someone who writes words of praise for the woman who does not ask the rabbis if she can wear tallit and tefillin, but simply does it on her own? Believe it or not, such a sentiment is found in the writings of R. Yom Tov Algazi, who served as Rishon le-Tziyon in the 18th century.[6]
והנה בפ”ק דברכות אמרו אין עוז אלא תפילין שנא’ נשבע ה’ בימינו ובזרוע עוזו ועוד אמרי’ התם האי מאן דבעי למהוי חסידא לקיים מילי דברכות מפני שהברכות הן להמשכת החסדים כנודע והוא הנרצה באומרו עוז והדר לבושה שהית’ לובשת תפילין וטלית שנקרא עז והדר ומעיד עליה הכתוב לאמר ותשחק ליום אחרון דשכרה איתה ליום אחרון בעה”ב דאע”ג דאינה מצוו’ ועושה מ”מ יש לה שכר, דגדול המצווה אמרו מכלל דמי שאינו מצוו’ ועוש’ נמי נוטל שכר אבל אף חכמת’ עמדה לה שלא באת’ לשאול לחכמי’ אם תהי’ מנחת או”ל אלא היא מעצמה פיה פתחה בחכמ’ ותור’ חסד על לשונה שהית’ עוש’ מ”ע שה”ג שלא נצטו’ בהם מעצמ’.
If someone says that the Talmud was written by men for men and reflects a male approach in the way it is written, I would normally assume that this person is a feminist who sees patriarchy at every corner and interprets everything through the prism of gender. Yet in fact this was actually said by R. Avrohom Chaim Levin of Chicago.[7]
Even when it comes to women rabbis, I have been surprised by some of what I have found. Take a look at this rabbi’s response to a question:
אישה תוכל לכהן כרבנית קהילה?
אני לא יודע. ברור שיש ראשונים שחשבו שזה בסדר ויש כאלו שסלדו מהרעיון. רש”י על התורה מביא את דברי ‘הספרי’ על הציווי למנות שופטים: התורה אומרת ‘הבו לכם אנשים’, והספרי תמה ‘וכי יעלה על דעתך נשים?’. אנחנו אומרים: רש”י, מורנו ורבנו, על דעתך זה לא עולה? על דעתנו זה עולה. אחרי שזה עולה יכול להיות שאנחנו נוריד את זה, אבל אנחנו לא חושבים שמדובר בשיגעון או טירוף. הציווי לבנות עולם ניתן גם לנשים וגם לגברים, ‘לעבדה ולשמרה’.
This was not said by a liberal rabbi but by R. Aharon Lichtenstein.[8] R. Lichtenstein also deals with this matter in his conversations with R. Haim Sabato.[9] Here he tells us that he simply doesn’t know what will be in thirty years when it comes to women’s ordination. 

איני יודע מה יפסקו פוסקי הדור בעוד שלושים שנה בשאלות סמכות נשים וכדומה. אין לי מושג . . . ידועים דברי הרמב”ם, על סמך הספרי, בעניין המינויים הפורמליים, אך יש פוסקים שלא נרתעו מכך. מה יהיה בעתיד איני יודע. אבל מה שאני יודע זה שהיום חשוב שבנות ישראל תדענה תורה, שתהיינה דבקות בתורה. לגבי כל השאר איני אומר בדיוק. בהדי כבשי דרחמנא למה לך

His position, which recognizes the possibility of change in this matter guided by Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist halakhic authorities, is much more nuanced than what we have been hearing recently. R. Lichtenstein recognized that changes occur and he was honest enough to admit that he didn’t know what the future will bring.

R. Norman Lamm has also stated that he doesn’t know if women will be ordained, and that his opposition to women’s ordination is “social, not religious.”[10] In another interview he took the middle ground, saying that he doesn’t know if it is halakhically permissible for women to become rabbis, but he also doesn’t know if this is forbidden.[11]
Regarding the general matter of women’s ordination, I have already commented on it here.[12] Let me just add that I think I have read everything coming out of the RCA and its people in the last few months, and I confess that I still don’t see the objection to female clergy. I am not talking about women pulpit rabbis, but what is the problem with a woman chaplain at a hospital or a woman teacher of advanced Torah studies or even a woman posek (poseket)? I realize that there are objections to using the title of “rabbi” for women, and Saul Liebeman focused on this in his letter of opposition. So why not just come up with a different title?
The RCA is apparently opposed to giving learned women any title. However, titles are important, as they are community recognition that someone has reached a certain level. There are women who are learned and it is only fitting that they too have a title. In fact, some women who went into academic Jewish studies would have been just as happy to remain in traditional Jewish studies if there was some way of recognizing their achievements. And before you start putting down the importance of titles, I can tell you that there are learned (and not so learned) men who use the title “rabbi”, even though they have never received semikhah. They do so because they feel the title is important for their community work. By the same token, a title can also be important for women who are involved in teaching Torah and community leadership.
As for the title of “rebbetzin”, or “rabbanit” in modern Hebrew,[13] this has no appeal for many of the Modern Orthodox, as I have mentioned here. This point is also seen in a recent comment by Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi, that the title “rabbanit” is used to create a halo of authority where none exists.[14] Yet as I note in the just mentioned post, there is biblical precedent for calling women by their husband’s title. I subsequently saw that in Shabbat 95a, Rashi, s.v. אשה חכמה claims that אשה חכמה here does not mean a learned woman but the wife or daughter of a scholar who would have picked up some knowledge by virtue of her family situation.[15] Isn’t this the same thing with rebbetzins in the haredi world? Simply by being married to a rabbi they end up more Jewishly learned, especially in practical halakhah, than the typical haredi woman.
For a long time the ones pushing women’s ordination have pointed to a responsum by R. Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, Binyan Av, vol. 1, no. 65, in which he affirmed that women could be poskot. Here is his conclusion.
I have already noted here that very few rabbis are poskim, but every posek is by definition a rabbi. And since R. Bakshi-Doron is telling us that a women can be a posek, it is easy to see why this responsum has been cited again and again in support of women rabbis. This led the RCA to turn to R. Bakshi-Doron for clarification as to whether he indeed supports women’s ordination. Here is the RCA letter[16] and R. Bakshi-Doron’s response
As you can see, he strongly rejects the notion of women rabbis, seeing this as a Reform innovation. He also says that while women can function as poskot, they cannot be appointed to any such position in an official way, and thus a rabbinic position is also out of the question. (So again I ask, what would be the problem with a woman being given a title if she served as a chaplain or teacher? This does not contradict what R. Bakshi-Doron says.[17]) R. Bakshi-Doron concludes his letter as follows:
ויש להבהיר להם שלא יהא יהירות לנשים כדברי הגמ’ במגילה, וחשך דרא דמברא איתתא. ויש בדבר חוסר צניעות בפרט בדורנו שפרוץ מרובה על העומד ותורה על מכתבכם שיש בו כדי להסיר מכשול.
Rabbi Gordimer did a post on R. Bakshi-Doron’s reply. In it, he translated the last sentence of the final paragraph of R. Bakshi-Doron’s letter.
There inheres in the matter (of women serving as rabbis and licensed halachic authorities) a lack of modesty, especially in our generation, in which immodesty is more prevalent than modesty. I thank you for your letter, which has enabled me to remove a source of misinformation.
Rabbi Gordimer did not translate the final paragraph in its entirety. The first part of it states: “It should be explained to them that haughtiness is not fitting for women, as stated by the Gemara in Megillah.” The exact reference is Megillah 14b.
If this wasn’t enough for the Orthodox feminists to stop citing R. Bakshi-Doron, then his next words will be. He wrote וחשך דרא דמברא איתתא. The first thing to note is that there is a typo here and דמברא should read דמדברא. The source of this passage is Midrash Tehillim 22:20 where it states: חשיך דרא דאתתא דברייתא. This means, “Woe unto the generation whose leader is a woman.” This is definitely not the sort of thing that a typical RCA rabbi would feel comfortable putting in print, or announcing from the pulpit. For those arguing against women rabbis this kind of sentiment would hurt, not help, the cause. I think this is the reason why the RCA has not released a translation of R. Bakshi-Doron’s letter, and as noted, Rabbi Gordimer didn’t provide a complete translation either.
To give an example of how this passage from Midrash Tehillin has been used in the past, R. Yisrael Zev Mintzberg published his Zot Hukat ha-Torah in Jerusalem in 1920. This work is devoted to showing that women are not permitted to vote. Look how he cites the passage in his conclusion on p. 33.
R. Hayyim Hirschensohn referred to this passage as well, in his strong attack on R. Mintzberg in which he goes so far as to say that the latter does not even permit women to be women.[18]
ואחד מרבני ירושלים הרה”ג מוהר”ר ישראל זאב מינצבערג נ”י יצא בקונטרס “זאת חוקת התורה” אשר חוקה הוא חוקק גזרה הוא גוזר בכח הפלפול ובכח הקבלה ובכח האגדה לשלול כל זכיה מנשים אפי’ מלהיות נשים, כל ההולך בעצת אשתו נופל בגהינם, אינון מסיטרא דדינא קשיא, חשיך דרא דאיתתא דבריתא, דא היא גזירת אורייתא, ואי אתה רשאי להרהר אחריה.
R. Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich also cites the phrase חשיך דרא דאיתתא דברייתא in order to make the following point:[19] Women were not created to bring others to Torah. Rather, their role is to enable their husbands to reach perfection.
האשה לא נבראת לטהר אחרים לאביהם שבשמים כדאיתא במגילה י”ד לא יאי יוהרא לנשי ובמדרש שוח”ט חשיך דרא דאיתתא דברייתא הובא בילקוט שמעוני שופטים ב’ ע”ש. ולפמש”כ דכל עיקר האשה הוא רק לתכלית שהבעל יתקדש על ידה.
Finally, when it comes to the matter of women rabbis, I think people will find the following amusing, or disturbing. There are liberal Muslims in Israel, and these are the people that Israel should be supporting. Recently, a Muslim member of Kenesset, Issawi Frej, journeyed to Bnei Brak to try to convince some leading rabbis to support the appointment of women qadis. The problem is that Minister Yaakov Litzman of the Yahadut ha-Torah bloc is strongly opposed to appointing women as qadis, because he fears that this will then lead to pressure for recognition of women rabbis. Knowing that Litzman and the other haredi Kenesset members take their orders from the rabbis, Frej understood that he had to convince the rabbis of his position. Yet unfortunately for Frej and liberal Muslims as whole, and I think for the rest of us as well, the Bnei Brak rabbis he met with refused to budge. See the story here.
Regarding the issue of yoatzot, I don’t want to get into that in any detail, but I do want to call readers’ attention to the following which surprisingly has not been referred to by any of the supporters of yoatzot. In the Leket Yosher (pp. 35-37 in the Machon Yerushalayim edition) we can see a yoetzet in action. A woman wrote to the wife of R. Israel Isserlein with a halakhic question. The wife inquired from her husband, R. Isserlein, and then replied to the woman. Had she already known the answer she would not have had to ask her husband. This is exactly what yoatzot do in the 21st century. Here is the text.
There is also a text in Niddah 13b that refers to what we can term a yoetzet, yet I have also not seen it cited.
אמר רבי חרשת היתה בשכונתינו לא דיה שבודקת לעצמה אלא שחברותיה רואות ומראות לה.
Rashi explains:
ומראות לה: שהיתה בקיאה במראה דם טמא ודם טהור.
Let me now return to the matter of halakhic decisions and ideology. As mentioned, Rabbi Gordimer is mistaken in stating that Modern Orthodox poskim evaluate matters the same way as haredi poskim. They don’t, and this isn’t even something that they should aspire to. Does this mean that a posek’s general ideology should disqualify him in some people’s eyes? For example, if someone is a recognized posek, does the fact that his ideology on Zionism is diametrically opposed to yours (e.g., R. Moshe Sternbuch) mean that you shouldn’t ask him questions?
Historically, ideological matters were kept separate from halakhah. The various rabbinic organizations in Europe and the United States were comprised of rabbis who held different views about Zionism and other matters. If you were a Mizrachi supporter but the rav of your town was an Agudist, you still asked him all of your halakhic questions, because he was your rav. By the same token, if you were an Agudist and the rav of the town was Mizrachi, he was still the one to answer your halakhic questions. This is how matters worked in Lithuania and Poland and then in the United States. One of the unfortunate results of modern haredi Judaism (and it has precedents in Germany and Hungary) is that this model was destroyed.
A basic feature of “official” haredism, especially in Israel, is the attitude that even if someone is a great posek, he is still disqualified if he doesn’t follow the correct Da’as Torah. It is hard to imagine a greater degrading of respect for Torah scholars than this (which thankfully is not shared by all who identify as haredim, even though it is reflected in all the Israeli haredi newspapers and “official” publications). It is precisely this approach, that of degrading one’s ideological opponents despite their great Torah knowledge, that stands at the root of all the terrible disputes in the haredi world. It also explains why, in recent years, haredi figures and newspapers felt that it was OK to speak so inappropriately about outstanding sages such as R. Ovadiah Yosef, R. Meir Mazuz, R. Shlomo Amar, R. Aharon Leib Steinman, and R. Shmuel Auerbach.
Unfortunately, this approach has now entered the Sephardic world as well, where in the last Israeli elections we saw the worst aspects of Ashkenazic haredi society, i.e., personal denigration for ideological reasons, arise for the first time in the Sephardic world. I will discuss this in detail in a future post when I speak about R. Mazuz’s religious and political outlook, his role in the last Israeli elections, and the vicious things said about him and his yeshiva.
While it is true that it was Ashkenazim who began the personal denigrations, it is a Sephardi, R. Shalom Cohen, who brought it to a new low. I will discuss this in the upcoming post, but for now, suffice it to say that for all the Ashkenazic haredi disrespect for opponents, I don’t know of anyone who has referred to an opponent’s yeshiva in the way R. Cohen referred to R Mazuz’s Yeshivat Kise Rahamim, a yeshiva that has educated thousands of students and today is of much greater significance than R. Cohen’s Porat Yosef. For those who haven’t heard, and it is difficult for me to even repeat this, R. Cohen publicly referred to the great Kise Rahamim yeshiva as a בית הכסא. Can anyone imagine a more disgraceful statement about a place of Torah? This is what happens when people think that they can degrade those who don’t adopt a certain Da’as Torah perspective.
Here is a letter I recently received from R. Mazuz, which I publicize with his permission. 

In it he states:

 גדולה שנאה ששונאים חרדים את החרדים משנאה ששונאים חילונים את החרדים.
It is unfortunate that the disqualification of great Torah scholars due to ideological reasons has also been seen in the Religious Zionist world, though not to the extent that it is found in the haredi world. For some Religious Zionist figures, haredi poskim are disqualified in the exact same way that haredim disqualify Religious Zionist poskim. R. Dov Lior quotes R. Kook as stating that the rabbis we today refer to as haredim cannot arrive at the truth of Torah in any matter.[20]
שמי שחי בדור שלנו ואינו מביט אל האור הזרוע של תהליך גאולת עם ישראל, לא יוכל לכוון בשום דבר לאמתה של תורה. גם אם הם יכולים להתפלפל בעניייני שור שנגח את הפרה, בענייני ההנהגה של כלל ישראל הם לא מכוונים לאמיתתה של תורה.
R. Lior’s statement was made in response to haredi indifference to the Gush Katif expulsion, and he claims to be simply citing R. Kook. Yet if we look at R. Kook, Iggerot ha-Re’iyah, vol. 2, no. 378 (p. 37), we find that R. Kook’s statement is much narrower, and I have underlined the point that R. Kook focuses on.
ואם יבא אדם לחדש דברים עליונים בעסקי התשובה בזמן הזה, ואל דברת קץ המגולה ואור הישועה הזרוחה לא יביט, לא יוכל לכוין שום דבר לאמתתה של תורת אמת.
Even R. Lior’s statement is not entirely clear, since he begins by saying that the haredi rabbis can never arrive at Torah truth, but in the end he only seems to be referring to Torah truth when dealing with communal and national matters. R. Kook would agree with this latter point, but I know of no evidence that he would say that in general the haredi rabbis can never arrive at Torah truth.
R. Zvi Yehudah Kook, basing himself on the same letter of R. Kook cited by R. Lior, stated that one should not ask a haredi posek any halakhic questions.[21]
רבנו לימד את אגרת שע”ח: “ואשר יבוא לחדש דברים עליונים בעסקי התשובה ואל דברת הקץ המגולה ואור הישועה הזרוחה לא יביט, לא יוכל לכוון שום דבר לאמתתה של תורת אמת”. הוא הסביר: “עסקי תשובה – הכוונה לדברים כלליים”. תלמיד שאל: “האם בהלכות שאינן נוגעות לענייני תשובה ואמונה ושאר דברים כלליים – אפשר לשאול רב חרדי”? רבנו הגיב חדות: “הדברים ברורים! מה כוונתך?” התלמיד חזר ושאל: “למשל, האם אפשר לשאול רב חרדי בהלכות בשר וחלב”? רבנו דפק על השולחן והגיב בתקיפות: “חרדיות זה מיעוט אמונה, ומיעוט אמונה זה עקמומיות בשכל, ועקמומיות בשכל צריכה בדיקה.”
This is just the flip-side of the common haredi position that one should not ask a Religious Zionist posek any halakhic questions. As mentioned already, the haredim were the first to push this approach, and I find it unfortunate that some Religious Zionist leaders have responded in kind.
Coming soon: R. Hershel Schachter on poskim as communal leaders, a newly discovered letter from R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg in which he praises R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and a previously unknown picture of R. Moshe Feinstein and R. Soloveitchik.

[1] Pesakim u-Khetavim, Even ha-Ezer, no. 229 (p. 1291).
[2] Rabbenu, p. 191.
[3] See R. Ovadiah Yosef, Yabia Omer, vol. 3, p. 300. R. Ovadiah Yosef does not agree with R. Hadaya’s sentiments.
[4] Hayyim ve-Shalom, vol. 2, Even ha-Ezer, no. 1 (p. 2a).
[5] She’elot u-Teshuvot ha-Ralbah, no. 36.
[6] Kedushat Yom Tov (Jerusalem, 1843), p. 87b (emphasis added). This passage was noted by Zvi Zohar in Akdamot 17 (2006), pp. 81-82. He mistakenly identifies the author as R. Israel Jacob Algazi, the father of R. Yom Tov.
[7] This is recorded in R. Yona Reiss’s shiur, “Women’s Issues in Halacha: Female Rabbis, Torah for Women, Saying Kaddish & Bat Mitzvas,” available here, beginning at 18:30.
[8] See here (called to my attention by Marc Glickman).
[9] Mevakshei Panekha (Tel Aviv, 2011), p. 177. The passage below from R. Lichtenstein comes from this page.
[10] See here.
[11] See here.
[12] Regarding the matter of women dayanim that I discussed here, see also R. Jonathan Eliasberg, Darkhei Hora’ah (Vilna, 1884), part 2, ch. 8. R. Eliasberg thinks that a woman can be a dayan, but she cannot be a dayan together with men.
דלעולם אשה כשירה לדון אלא דכמו דאשה חייבת בזימון (להאי שיטה) ומ”מ אינה מצטרפת עם אנשים ועקרו חכמים בשוא”ת משום פריצותא מכש”כ דאשה אינה מצטרפת עם עוד שני דיינים משום פריצותא. אבל לעולם אשה שהיא מומחית כיחיד מומחה דנה וכן ג’ נשים דנות וא”כ א”ש הכל דדבורה ע”כ דדנה ביחידי.

[13] See my discussion of “rabbanit” here, where I note that R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai uses the term “rabbanit” in his Shem ha-Gedolim, but for him it means a female rabbi. R. Hershel Schachter responded to my comment about the Hida and female rabbis. See here.
[14] Guf u-Miniyut be-Siah ha-Tziyoni-Dati he-Hadash (Jerusalem, 2013), p. 123.
[15] R. Meir Mazuz, Asaf ha-Mazkir, p. 115, calls attention to JShabbat 13:7:
דאמר ר”ש בי רבי ינאי אני לא שמעתי מאבא אחותי אמרה לי משמו ביצה שנולדה ביום טוב סומכין לה כלי בשביל שלא תתגלגל אבל אין כופין עליה כלי.
[16] It is strange that the RCA stationery used in June 2015 still listed Barry Freundel as a member of the Executive Committee, even though at that time he was in prison.
[17] R. Bakshi-Doron might see women rabbis as forbidden due to the prohibition of serarah for women. I haven’t seen this point mentioned by RCA figures, and it is difficult to see the modern position of rabbi as having anything to do with serarah. Regarding this matter, see R. Aryeh Frimer, “Nashim be-Tafkidim Tziburiyim bi-Tekufah ha-Modernit,” in Itamar Warfhaftig, ed., Afikei Yehudah (Jerusalem, 2005), pp. 330-354. On p. 345, R. Frimer cites R. Eliezer Silver’s hiddush that there is no issue of serarah in the Diaspora. On p. 346, he cites R. Isaac Herzog’s view that there might not even be an issue of serarah today in the Land of Israel. See also p. 353 where he prints a 1986 letter he received from R. Shaul Yisraeli that is almost prophetic, since in those days no one in Orthodoxy other than Blu Greenberg was even considering the matter of women rabbis. While R. Frimer had argued in favor of including women on religious councils in Israel, R. Yisraeli responded as follows:
כבודו מדבר על השאלה הספציפית של חברות במועצה הדתית. האם כבודו חושב, שבזה יגמר הדבר? הן כבר עיננו רואות את המפלגות החילוניות שעטו על המציאה, וכולם נעשו לפתע מעונינות למנות את נציגיהם, יותר נכון – נציגותיהן, לגוף הבוחר של רב הראשי לתל-אביב. הן לא נטעה, שמחר-מחרתיים, תופיע דרישה למנות “רבנית” במקום “רב”. והרי גם לזה לא קשה למצוא סימוכין – דבורה הנביאה וחולדה הנביאה.

[18] Malki ba-Kodesh, vol. 2, p. 172.
[19] R. Hayyim ben Betzalel, Iggeret ha-Tiyul, ed. Ehrenreich (Jerusalem, 1957), p. 90.
[20] Devar Hevron: Hashkafah ve-Inyanei Emunah (Kiryat Arba, 2011), p. 232 (emphasis added).
[21] Iturei Yerushalayim, Sivan 5769, p. 5. 


Open Orthodoxy and Its Main Critic, part 1

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Open Orthodoxy and Its Main Critic, part 1
Marc B. Shapiro

Please note: The conversation in the comments, while of importance, does not fit the focus of the Seforim Blog. Anyone who wishes to continue can email Dr. Shapiro or the conversation can be continued on a different website.
1. Those who follow Jewish debates on the internet have probably heard of Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer, who has assumed the mantle of defender of the faith. He sees his goal as exposing the non-Orthodox nature of Open Orthodoxy, and has spent many hundreds of hours reading everything written by Open Orthodox figures (and their spouses), looking for a problematic sentence in order to pounce on them. He not only attacks the Open Orthodox rabbis but also shows his contempt for them by generally refusing to even mention their names. Instead, he refers to an unnamed Open Orthodox rosh yeshiva or rabbi and you don’t know who he is speaking about until you click on the link. I realize he doesn’t respect these figures, but to even deny them the simple courtesy of mentioning their names, as if to do so is muktzeh mehamat mius, is in my opinion simply disgraceful (albeit a common writing style in the haredi world).
This obsession with the Open Orthodox reminds me of how in earlier centuries Christian zealots “could declare themselves ‘crusaders’, join a company of St. Peter Martyr, and assume a special responsibility for denouncing suspicious behaviour to the Holy Office.”[1] It also reminds me of how in previous years the right wing would constantly attack YU and Modern Orthodoxy. Now that the Open Orthodox are under attack, YU and Modern Orthodoxy re getting a pass. But make no mistake about it, if there wasn’t an Open Orthodoxy to kick around, YU and Modern Orthodoxy would once again be the focus. It appears to me, and many others, that all of Rabbi Gordimer’s attacks are pretty meaningless by now, as we get it, he doesn’t like Open Orthodoxy and he thinks that they are not “Orthodox” (a Christian term which perhaps it is time to jettison). Simply drumming this point continuously is not going to make it any clearer.[2]
R. Kook famously said that the righteous do not complain about heresy but add faith.[3] In other words, they always focus on the positive. Now the truth is that this quote, taken by itself, is problematic, as we have examples where R. Kook himself complained about heresy. I think that the passage therefore must be speaking in generalities. In other words, he doesn’t mean that the righteous never complain, but that their essential nature does not focus on the negative and finding the flaws in others. Rather, they are focused on adding faith in order to show the truth of their own position.
Rabbi Gordimer gives us a continuing list of controversial statements from people identified with Open Orthodoxy. As mentioned, he will spend hours and hours reading their material until he finally hits pay dirt. We are never told about any of the good things he sees in the writers he so often attacks, and how 99% of what he reads in their writings is not objectionable. I also find it most curious (but not unexpected) that it is only the left who are subjected to this type of detailed examination, all in order to find material with which to attack them. What about people on the right who also say objectionable things? Why are they not subjected to the same criticisms? How come he criticizes Open Orthodox figures for their liberal Zionism, but never says a word of criticism about the anti-Zionism found in Satmar and other haredi groups? The question is rhetorical.
Another problem is that while Rabbi Gordimer himself tries to stick to the issues, the comments to his posts, which have to be approved before being posted, sometimes do contain derogatory and insulting remarks about individuals. How can anyone view this as appropriate?
I have no difficulty if someone wants to criticize, even sharply, Open Orthodox writers, as long as there are no personal attacks. In fact, if the criticisms of Rabbi Gordimer and others were offered on a basis of friendship and common purpose, I can tell you without hesitation that the Open Orthodox writers would be grateful for the criticism and dialogue, as they want nothing more than to engage with all segments of the Jewish world, including the more right wing elements.
As mentioned above, I find it most objectionable that all of Rabbi Gordimer’s (and others’) criticism is of the left, never the right. I have made this point in a number of lectures. Occasionally, individuals have replied to me that it is unfair to compare Open Orthodox ideas with actions of people identified with the haredi world, as these actions are simply the result of people making mistakes and say nothing about haredi Judaism itself. Thus, they claim, if a criminal is haredi, this has nothing to do with the ideals or teachings of haredi society.
While there is some truth to this argument, it is not entirely true. For example, the widespread cover-ups of sexual abuse in haredi society, and the reluctance to go to the authorities, are directly related to haredi ideology. Yet Rabbi Gordimer has never commented on this. I also have no doubt that some financial crimes in the haredi world, including by institutions such as yeshivot, are often related to both the structure of haredi society, which leads many into poverty, and also haredi teachings that may downplay or even deny the halakhic prohibition of certain white collar criminal activity. And you don’t need me to say this. Haredim say the same thing all the time. I mention this only to stress that just as I would be the first to say that there is plenty to criticize in Open Orthodox thought, there is also plenty to criticize in haredi thought (and also in Centrist thought). In fact, as we shall soon see, one can find things written by those on the right that I think many readers, including haredim, would find even more objectionable than what Rabbi Gordimer has written about.
Before going further, let me note that there is much that Rabbi Gordimer criticizes that I don’t find at all objectionable, and I will give an example of this below. By the same token, there are aspects of the Open Orthodox critique of haredism and Centrism that I do not share, and I don’t expect either the haredim or the Open Orthodox to agree with everything I write either. But that is OK, as no one can expect everyone to agree on everything. Well-founded criticism is a vital part of any society and must be appreciated. Just as there is what to criticize in all camps, there is also a great deal to praise in all camps (and in some areas, in particular Torah study and respect for Torah scholarship, the haredi world is far superior to what is found among non-haredim in the United States).
As noted already, Rabbi Gordimer is an avid reader of Open Orthodox writings. In fact, I think he has read more such writings than anyone else (even more than the Open Orthodox!), and yet he is not able to come up with anything positive that they say or do. This shows me that he is not being fair, as I can give a long list of great things that Open Orthodox rabbis have done across the country, things that even the most right wing would applaud. I can do the same with haredi rabbis and I guarantee you that Open Orthodox rabbis would applaud. Contrary to the mean caricatures one finds online, the Open Orthodox are some of the most genuine and giving people I have ever met, and I say this as one who has never been an adherent of Open Orthodoxy. The Open Orthodox leadership and its rabbis show respect not only for those on their left (which leads Rabbi Gordimer and others to criticize them) but also for those on their right, as I can attest from many years of personal interaction. (When I speak of respect for those on their right, I am not referring to people like myself, but of Torah scholars firmly ensconced in the haredi world who do not reciprocate this respect.) In short, we must recognize there is a lot of good in all camps and we should support positive developments no matter where they originate.
Furthermore, it is important for the halakhic community to understand that there needs to be different paths for different people as not everyone has the same spiritual make-up. It is therefore important to have responsible halakhic authorities who can speak to the different communities. Rather than engaging in constant criticism, Rabbi Gordimer should be happy that the communities on the left are able to turn to an outstanding talmid chacham such as R. Dov Linzer, as he understands their situation and can provide proper guidance. I encourage people to examine some of R. Linzer’s recent halakhic writings here.
Returning to an earlier comment I made, if the point of all the criticism of Open Orthodoxy is the protection of authentic Judaism by countering the distortions on the left, then shouldn’t the distortions on the right also be countered? Aren’t these also dangerous, even more dangerous as they reach a wider range of people and are regarded as authentic Torah teachings by many? Since Rabbi Gordimer and others only look to criticize those to their left, never those to their right, they must ask themselves if the protection of Judaism is really their only goal, or if, unconsciously perhaps, their crusade against Open Orthodoxy also has other motivations.
When I have mentioned these points to various people, they always ask me to provide examples of what I am talking about, i.e., of writings from the haredi world that should be criticized by Rabbi Gordimer in the same way he criticizes what Open Orthodox writers are saying. There are lots of examples I could give (and readers can find some of them in previous posts), but let me choose a book that was actually removed from a synagogue library because of the views expressed in it.[4]
In 2007 Rabbi Dovid Kaplan published Major Impact.[5]
It has a chapter entitled “Jews and Goyim”. The chapter begins as follows:
Every Shabbos in Kiddush we declare that HaKadosh Baruch Hu chose us from all the nations. At every Havdalah we declare that we’re as different from them as day is from night. It’s always interesting to see examples of just how different we are. So read this chapter and then enjoy your next Kiddush and Havdalah.
Here are some examples from the chapter:

We once took our kids on a trip to the United States. A goy on the plane asked me how many children we have. I told him five. “How old are they,” he asked. “The oldest is eight, and the youngest is three months.” “Wow,” he said with a look of disbelief, “you have twins?”

COMMENT: The idea of bringing children into the world on a regular basis was utterly foreign to his way of thinking. 

The Polish maid brought her fiancé to meet her employer, Rebbetzin Ruchama Shain. “You have to treat your wife with respect,” she said. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll only beat her if she disobeys me,” responded the big shaigetz.

COMMENT: And he’ll only steal if he doesn’t have enough money. And he’ll only kill if he’s upset. And he’ll only . . . 

Shechitah houses often employ goyim, big strong ones, to help with the animals. A friend related the following incident to me. A cow had just been shechted. One of the goyim walked over with an empty cup, filled it with blood that was oozing from the neck, and then drank it down.

COMMENT: For him there’s no issue. For us it’s unimaginable. 

I once saw a young boy sitting on a fence at the zoo. A little old goyish lady wearing a zoo maintenance outfit approached him. “Come on down off that fence honey,” she said, “cuz I don’t want you to fall.” Wow, I thought to myself. It’s nice of her to be so concerned. I was really impressed, but only briefly. “cuz if you fall there’ll be brains all over the place, and I don’t wanna hafta clean up no brains.”

COMMENT: Can you imagine a Jewish bubby ever talking like that? 

Dr. Jacobs was making his rounds through the ward accompanied by Dr. Obama [!], an African-American. “What’s happening with Mr. O’Neill?” he asked Dr. Obama. 

“Her blood pressure is up and she has a little edema. Other than that she’s fairly stable.”

“I asked about Mr. O’Neill.”

“And I answered. ”

“But why did you refer to him as ‘she’?”

“Oh, I guess you wouldn’t know. Mr. O’Neill is eighty-eight years old. Back in Africa our native tribe has a custom. Once a man passes eighty-five and can’t do much, he’s referred to as ‘she.’”

COMMENT: We place older people on a pedestal and make every effort to make them feel important. Anything that may even remotely reduce their dignity is by definition pasul. And them? Yuch![6]

I realize that most of these stories are made up in order to make non-Jews look bad, but this last one is really stupid, even as a racist story, since when was the last time you heard an African-American referring to the customs of his native tribe? Also, in case anyone missed it, the name “Obama” is probably not an accident.
I don’t think there is any need for me to elaborate on how offensive this material is. Everyone understands how we would react if the focus was Jews and if one were to extrapolate from a (phony) story with one Jew to the entire Jewish people. The ideology expressed in this book (and others like it) is in direct opposition to everything I was taught about how Torah is supposed to make one a more refined individual. I also wonder, how many potential baalei teshuvah who picked up this book were turned off to Judaism after reading what I have quoted?[7]
I have no doubt that Rabbi Gordimer agrees with me that the views expressed in this book are not in line with what we should stand for as a people. So will we see a condemnation of this book and of ones that express similar views, or do they get a pass because they emanate from the haredi world?
Despite my great opposition to this book, I am willing to acknowledge that other things the author has written can be valuable. Why can’t Rabbi Gordimer, despite his criticism of Open Orthodox writers, admit that even if he disagrees with them about certain things, they can still make valuable contributions in areas where he would agree with them? In sum, when Rabbi Gordimer begins criticizing the problems in the haredi and centrist worlds with the same enthusiasm (or even half the enthusiasm) as he takes on writers in the Open Orthodox world, then I and many others might begin to take him seriously as someone who can offer a valuable perspective.
I should note that R. Yitzchok Adlerstein has made some comments relevant to the matter I have just discussed:

Mean-spirited and racist remarks made on comboxes on websites catering to the Chassidic community turn up quoted on anti-Semitic and anti-Israel websites. . . . Enough material exists to make it easy for intelligent outsiders to get beyond the posturing of spokespeople and learn about attitudes often expressed by the masses. For decades, observant Jews of all persuasions could go about their business flying under the radar of their neighbors. If they stayed out of trouble with the law (or did a good enough job at keeping malefactors out of the headlines), they were more than tolerated by other Americans. There are no longer any secrets. Every small group is the subject of inquiry, and the free sharing of information means that outside investigators quickly learn what people speak about behind closed doors. 

Agudath Israel undertook an impressive program of community education to parts of its membership regarding dina demalchuta[8] and chillul Hashem[9] in the aftermath of too many high-profile scandals. It will not be enough. The next exposés (they have already begun) will not deal so much with criminal behavior as with rejection and contempt. Many Americans who are not anti-Semitic will still not take kindly to the thought that large numbers of people, albeit minorities even within their own communities, have little or no regard for them as human beings, and no concern for their welfare. Those who take the policy of hen am levadad yishkon to the limit will soon learn that there are minimum expectations placed upon citizens not by law but by popular sentiment. If they wish to live as equals in the United States, they will have to come to some sort of modus vivendi with other Jewish values like darkhei shalom and genuine regard for the tzelem Elokim in all people.[10]

Let me now turn to the reason I have been discussing Rabbi Gordimer in the first place, and that is his attack on R. Ysoscher Katz found here. Rabbi Gordimer claims that there is no such thing as Modern Orthodox pesak, and that decisions by Modern Orthodox poskim “should look no different than if [they] were adjudicated by a chareidi posek; process (research) and product (conclusion) should be indistinguishable.” This is simply false, as anyone who knows the writings of Modern Orthodox poskim can attest. A posek is not a computer. All sorts of meta-halakhic considerations go into his rulings and this explains why a Modern Orthodox posek will come to different conclusions than haredi poskim on many issues. I am not referring to whether a tea bag can be used on Shabbat, as in this sort of case there shouldn’t be any differences between haredi and Modern Orthodox poskim, but in matters concerning which the two camps differ (e.g., the role of women) there will obviously be differences among the poskim.
For Rabbi Gordimer, all poskim share the same “process”. Not only is this historically incorrect, it isn’t even “doctrine”. Does he really think that there are any haredim who believe that Modern Orthodox poskim operate the same way as haredi poskim? Of course they don’t, which is precisely the reason why they reject Modern Orthodox halakhists, because they know that their meta-halakhic values influence their halakhic decisions. The haredim don’t oppose meta-halakhic values per se. Meta-halakhah has a very prominent place in haredi halakhah. It is the particular Modern Orthodox meta-halakhic values that they see as problematic.
I realize that for people reading this post what I have just said is neither new or even controversial. Many of you are probably wondering why I am even wasting my time in making an obvious point. So let me mention some important sources that you might have been unaware of that illustrate what I have been saying.
In 1951 R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik was asked if it was permitted to volunteer to serve as a chaplain in the U.S. armed forces, as this might lead to various halakhic problems, in particular with regard to Shabbat. Before analyzing the halakhic sources, R. Soloveitchik gives us an insight into the meta-halakhic factors that are operating within him. He confesses his lack of objectivity in a way that directly contradicts his portrayal of how Halakhic Man operates. A haredi posek who did not see any value in participating in larger American society could never have penned the following words, which stand as a complete rejection of Rabbi Gordimer’s point:
I have undertaken the research into the halakhic phase of this problem, which is fraught with grave political and social implications on the highest level of public relations, with utmost care and seriousness. Yet, I cannot lay claim to objectivity if the latter should signify the absence of axiological premises and a completely emotionally detached attitude. The halakhic inquiry, like any other cognitive theoretical performance, does not start out from the point of absolute zero as to sentimental attitudes and value judgments. There always exists in the mind of the researcher an ethico-axiological background against which the contours of the subject matter in question stand out more clearly. In all fields of human intellectual endeavor there is always an intuitive approach which determines the course and method of the analysis. Not even in exact sciences (particularly in their interpretive phase) is it possible to divorce the human element from the formal aspect. Hence this investigation was also undertaken in a similar subjective mood. From the very outset I was prejudiced in favor of the project of the Rabbinical Council of America and I could not imagine any halakhic authority rendering a decision against it. My inquiry consisted only in translating a vague intuitive feeling into fixed terms of halakhic discursive thinking.[11]
R. Soloveitchik’s description does not only apply to himself, but is how all poskim operate, although, with the possible exception of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, none of them have been as self-reflective as R. Soloveitchik. It would actually be a good project to interview different poskim and see how each of them formulate the role of intuition and their own “ethico-axiological background” in the formation of halakhic decisions. In R. Nachum Rabinovitch’s recently published Mesilot bi-Levavam,[12] he states that a posek who is not guided by broad ethical considerations, a pesak of his “is not worth the paper it is written on.” These ethical considerations will of course vary, depending on whether the posek is haredi or Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist.
Here are two examples of what I am talking about from R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, and which shows how wrong Rabbi Gordimer is in his assumption that one’s ideology doesn’t affect one’s halakhic decisions. R. Weinberg was asked about the halakhic permissibility of autopsies in the State of Israel. He wrote as follows (Kitvei ha-Gaon Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, vol. 1, p. 42):
והנה זה דבר ברור, שלעולם לא יגיעו בארץ ישראל לדעה אחת . . . ופתרון השאלה תלוי הרבה בהערכת המצב בעולם הרפואה, וביחס אל המדינה ומוסדותיה; וגם בהבנת המצב במחקר מדע הרפואי, וביחס אל החכמים העוסקים במדע זה, הן במחקר והן בשמוש למעשה.
R. Weinberg explicitly tells us that how one decides the halakhah depends on how one evaluates a series of non-halakhic matters. One of these is how one relates to the State of Israel. Obviously, a haredi posek who sees no real significance to the State of Israel will be inclined to rule one way, while a posek who regards Jewish self-rule as being of momentous significance will be inclined to rule differently. None of what I am saying is at all radical or controversial. It is simply obvious to anyone who studies halakhic literature.
Elsewhere, as we have seen in previous posts, R. Weinberg states that if there is a dispute among halakhic authorities we must reject the view that will bring the Torah into disrepute in people’s eyes (Kitvei ha-Gaon Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, vol. 1, p. 60):
ואגלה להדר”ג [הגרא”י אונטרמן] מה שבלבי: שמקום שיש מחלוקת הראשונים צריכים הרבנים להכריע נגד אותה הדעה, שהיא רחוקה מדעת הבריות וגורמת לזלזול וללעג נגד תוה”ק.
Obviously, a posek from a closed haredi society is going to have a different view regarding whether a halakhic decision will bring the Torah into disrepute in people’s eyes. In fact, I would assume that such a posek would reject R. Weinberg’s statement completely, seeing it as giving in to modern values even when in opposition to Torah sources.
Although I can cite numerous other texts to support what I am saying, let me just add one more. The late R. Aharon Felder, She’elat Aharon, vol. 1, no. 12, responded to someone who claimed that R. Moshe Feinstein’s halakhic decisions were not at all influenced by his nature or surroundings. R. Felder completely rejects this claim and adds[13]:
לא נתנה תורה למלאכי השרת וזהו כלל גדול אף בקשר למנהיגי ופוסקי הדור.
I mention R. Felder since I have very fond memories of a Shabbat I spent as scholar-in-residence in his shul not long before his untimely passing. I was fortunate to be able to spend hours talking with him over that Shabbat, and by telephone afterwards. While people generally knew him as a posek, he was also full of information about great rabbis, many of whom he knew personally, and he was happy to share this information. Here is a picture of us together.
One of the interesting things I learnt from speaking to him was that he had semichah from R. Shlomo Yosef Zevin. I think this is very unusual as I have never met anyone else who received semichah from R. Zevin. This connection to R. Zevin probably explained something else that happened over the Shabbat which was also very unusual. On Shabbat morning R. Felder spoke. Usually, when there is a scholar-in-residence the rabbi does not speak, but R. Felder had something he wanted to say. He devoted most of the derashah, which dealt with the importance of truth, to my post here on ArtScroll’s censorship of R. Zevin’s Ha-Moadim ba-Halakhah. Having a derashah focus on a Seforim Blog post was certainly a new one for me. In the derashah, R. Felder mentioned that when he first learnt of the censorship years ago, he told Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz that what ArtScroll did was completely wrong, and that while they are entitled to disagree with what R. Zevin wrote, they had no right alter his words.
To Be Continued
2. This past year we were told that it was Agudath Israel of America’s 93rd convention. This convention was significant as the Agudah finally threw in the towel and accepted the internet, setting up a website for the convention and broadcasting live. See here. The Agudah now has its own website here.
This new policy came in through the back door, with no explanation as to why something that until now has been forbidden is now permitted. This was typical for the Agudah, and years from now we will probably be able to read in the official history of Agudath Israel of America how the Agudah was among the first to recognize the great value of the internet for spreading Torah, and how the Agudah immediately seized this opportunity. Also of interest is that although the website just mentioned is the official Agudah website, and reports on all that is going on with Agudath Israel of America, it is called the Lefkowitz Leadership Initiative. Yet as anyone who examines the website can see, the Lefkowitz Leadership Initiative is only a small part of the website. Apparently, there is still a problem with calling the Agudah website by its proper name so they had to use a bit of false advertising by referring to it as the Lefkowitz Leadership Initiative.
What about the “93rd convention”? This would mean that the first Agudath Israel of America convention was in 1923 (as we are speaking about annual conventions). How is this possible if Agudath Israel in America was not formed until 1939 and its first convention was held on July 9-11, 1939?[14] See here for a 1950 news report which speaks of the 28th annual convention. This would mean that the first convention was indeed in 1923. Yet see here for a 1947 news report that speaks of Agudah’s 9th annual convention. This would mean that the first convention was in 1939, which is indeed correct. In years prior to 1947 the reports of the Agudah conventions also give 1939 as the year of the first convention.
So what happened between 1947 and 1950 and how did the Agudah start portraying itself as having conventions before Agudath Israel of America even existed? Rabbi Moshe Kolodny, the Agudah archivist, informed me that the 93rd year is a commemoration of the founding of the American branch of the World Agudat Israel on July 20, 1921. (As already mentioned, Agudah Israel of America was itself not founded until 1939). The problem with this explanation is that the 2015 convention should then be the 95th convention, not the 93rd. This is quite apart from the fact that I don’t understand how the Agudah can speak of 93 conventions when until 1939 there weren’t any annual conventions for Agudath Israel of America.
1923 as a year is significant in Agudah history, as it is the year when the first World Agudath Israel convention took place in Vienna. This is the convention from which we have the recently discovered video of the Chafetz Chaim. What I think happened is that between 1947 and 1950 some Agudah functionary decided that the annual Agudath Israel of America convention should be tied to 1923, and that is why this year’s convention was called the 93rd convention. The problem with this is, as mentioned, not only that Agudah Israel of America has not had 93 conventions, but that even if you date the conventions to 1923, you still don’t get 93 conventions. I say this because while the first world Agudah convention was held in 1923, this was not a yearly event. The next world convention was not held until 1929.
I have told this to a number of people and they are all surprised. Yet I find it hard to believe that I am the first person to point out that there have not been 93 annual conventions. Maybe some of the readers who attended the convention can weigh in. Can it really be that no one in attendance realized the problem involved in advertising it as the 93rd convention?
I realize that next year when the Agudah announces its 94th convention, opponents of the Agudah will, based on this post, write about how 94 is an incorrect number. But the more important point is that the Agudah actually has an annual convention. Mizrachi used to have an annual convention, but it is no more. Isn’t it significant that the Modern Orthodox have nothing to equal the annual Agudah convention?
3. A couple of months ago I was speaking to two people and one of them asked me why, if the right wing is so opposed to Open Orthodoxy, that they don’t just put its leaders in herem. I replied that in today’s day and age we don’t find anyone being put in herem. They will put books in herem but not individuals, as we saw with R. Nathan Kamenetsky and R. Natan Slifkin. Why don’t they put people in herem anymore? The answer usually given is that no one will pay attention to the herem.[15] Yet people don’t pay attention to the herems on books either, and that hasn’t stopped them from banning books.
In the discussion one of the people said that if they would put a herem on the leaders of Open Orthodoxy, they would have to also to put a herem on some women, and this would never work.  As he put it, the negative publicity would be too much, as the rabbis would be portrayed as big bullies coming after defenseless women. I have no idea if this is the reason why they haven’t put a herem on the Open Orthodox leadership, but I have to confess that I had never thought of the female angle. It probably is the case that putting women in herem would create a public relations nightmare that would equal what we have seen with the sexual abuse cover-ups and the declarations that basic historical and scientific knowledge is to be regarded as heresy. (In fact, I think that even putting men in herem in this day and age would lead to a big backlash.) That then got me thinking, how often in Jewish history have women been put in herem? I am only aware of the following cases: one in the Talmud,[16] two others discussed by R. David Ibn Zimra[17] and R. Meir Katzenellenbogen[18] respectively, and another two separate cases that involved many Italian rabbis.[19] Yet there must be others.
4. As I write this post, Yosef Mizrachi is in the news. It began with his unbelievably ignorant comments about the Holocaust and soon moved into other outrageous things he said, both about the Holocaust and in general.[20] Years ago I found another really offensive comment about the Holocaust, yet in this case the author was actually a well-known posek. In seeking to explain why the Holocaust occurred, R. Ovadiah Hadaya writes as follows, in words that sound like they could have been said by Mizrachi:[21]
לפעמים יש הרבה ממזרים בישראל שלא ידועים ואז הקב”ה מוכרח למחותם וכדי שלא יתביישו משפחתם אז הקב”ה נותן רשות למשחית להרוג גם טובים עמהם בכדי שלא יורגשו מי הם הממזרים.
Just think about the implications of this statement. 6 million pure Jewish souls, including 1 million children, are destroyed, and R. Hadaya suggests this was done to get rid of the mamzerim. Furthermore, in order not to embarrass the families of the mamzerim all the rest had to be killed as well, as if the omnipotent God couldn’t come up with some other way to take care of this. I don’t think that this passage can even be called “theodicy”, as theodicy is the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in the face of evil. The theology of this passage, if accepted as true, would actually lead people to doubt God’s goodness and omnipotence.
One day, not long after I found this passage, I was in the National Library of Israel reading room, and there, as usual, was Prof. David Weiss Halivni. I was very comfortable talking with him, but I wasn’t sure if I should tell him about what R. Hadaya said. I thought it might really unsettle him, seeing how a rabbi could give this explanation as to why all his loved ones were slaughtered in the most cruel way. In the end, I decided to share it with him. All Prof. Halivni said, and this is applicable to Mizrachi as well, is that when it comes to the Holocaust Sephardim simply don’t get it. What he meant was that not having the personal connection to the Holocaust, their discussions of it are without the emotional intensity one finds in the Ashkenazic world. In the Ashkenazic world, detached explanations of the sort offered by R. Hadaya and Mizrachi would be too offensive to even consider.
[1] Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (London, 1997),  p. 100.
[2] If one looks at the attacks that have been made on Open Orthodoxy by Rabbi Gordimer and others, you will find the Open Orthodox placed together with Early Christians, Sadducees, Reform, and Conservative Jews. A friend commented that it is a wonder that they aren’t also compared to Sabbateans. I replied that this is probably only because the attackers are unaware of the fact that Shabbetai Zvi gave women aliyot, a step that Gershom Scholem describes as the “substitution of a messianic Judaism for the traditional and imperfect one.” See Sabbatai Zvi, p. 403.
[3] Shemonah Kevatzim 2:99.          
[4] It would be interesting to create a list of books removed from synagogue libraries for heresy or other reasons. When I was in yeshiva in Israel (and some of my classmates will probably remember this episode), Rabbi Alfred Kolatch’s Second Jewish Book of Why popped up in the beit midrash. This volume, and the others in Kolatch’s series, were extremely popular and sold more than 1.5 million copies. See here. Kolatch was a Yeshiva College graduate but he was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary. One of the teachers at the yeshiva insisted on having the book removed because the author was a Conservative rabbi. This teacher also wanted to show that Kolatch was an ignoramus. He pointed to a passage, p. 294, where Kolatch discusses why women are not obligated in tzitzit. Kolatch mentions that most assume that it is a mitzvat aseh she-ha-zeman gerama. He also offers another option, that in ancient times the four-cornered type of garment to which tzitzit were attached was a male garment, so women never adopted the practice of tzitzit. The teacher mocked the notion that tzitzit had anything to do with a male garment, and was adamant that the only reason women do not wear tzitzit is because it is a time-bound positive commandment. Unbeknownst to the teacher, and I didn’t feel comfortable mentioning it to him at the time as I thought he might not take it well after making such a public case against Kolatch, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan includes tzitzit (and tefillin) as male garments which women are forbidden to wear. See Targum Ps. Jonathan, Deut. 22:5.
[5] This book was called to my attention by Michael Steel.
[6] It is true that observant Jews place older people on a pedestal. Sometimes they may even go too far. R. Solomon Kluger, one of the most outstanding nineteenth-century poskim, has a passage that is very difficult to understand. It appears in his commentary on the Shulhan Arukh, Hokhmat Shlomo, Hoshen Mishpat 426.
According to R. Kluger, if one has to put oneself in a degrading situation or if it requires too much effort to save the life of another, then one doesn’t have to do it. In giving an example of טרחה יתרה he mentions an old person, who according to R. Kluger would not be obligated to trouble himself excessively to save the life of another. Many have discussed this strange passage (and surprisingly, a number of the discussions do not note that at the end R. Kluger appears to backtrack from his hiddush). R. Moshe Feinstein, Iggerot Moshe, Yoreh Deah 2, p. 290, uses the following very strong language regarding R. Kluger’s suggestion:
הוא טעות גמור ושרי להו מרייהו, דדברי חכמת שלמה הא ודאי ח”ו לאומרם.
As we have come to expect, at least one scholar questioned the authenticity of R. Kluger’s words, a phenomenon we find whenever a radical position is expressed. But in this case the scholar I am referring to is the great R. Reuven Margaliyot who should have known better. He writes (Nefesh Hayah, 13:3):
והנה על כגון דא בוודאי אמרו דחדש אסור מן התורה ותמה אני אם יצאו דברים הללו מפיו הקדוש.
When I first saw R. Kluger’s words, I thought of R. Moses Isserles, Shulhan Arukh Yoreh Deah 251:9:
ואפילו חכם לכסות ועם הארץ להחיות [החכם קודם] ואשת חבירו כחבר.
Many understand להחיות to mean literally to save from death. I think most will offer a sigh of relief that the Shakh writes:
בזמן הזה שאין תלמיד חכם . . . כל שכן דאין לדחות פקוח נפש מפניו.
[7] Contrast what appears in Kaplan’s book with what R. Ahron Soloveichik wrote:

Every human being, regardless of religion, race, origin, or creed, is endowed with divine dignity. Consequently all people are to be treated with equal respect and dignity.  

Anyone who fails to apply a uniform standard of mishpat, justice, tzedek, righteousness, to all human beings regardless of origin, color or creed is deemed barbaric.  

People who refuse to grant any human being the same respect that they offer to their own race or nationality are adopting a barbaric attitude.

The quotations all come from R. Soloveichik’s Logic of the Heart, Logic of the Mind (Jerusalem, 1991), and are discussed in Meir Soloveichik’s recent essay, “Founding Brothers”: The Rav, Rav Ahron, and the American Idea,” in Soloveichik, et al., eds., Torah and Western Thought: Intellectual Portraits of Orthodoxy and Modernity (New Milford, CT, 2015), pp. 96ff.
Torah and Western Thought is quite an interesting book and I highly recommend it. It also contains essays on R. Kook, R. Isaac Herzog, Nehama Leibowitz, R. Immanuel Jakobovits, R. Yehuda Amital, R. Aharon Lichtenstein, R. Norman Lamm, and Prof. Isadore Twersky. For obvious reasons the essay on Twersky, written by Carmi Horowitz, was of particular interest to me, and I was very happy to read, p. 258 n. 26, that Rabbi David Shapiro “is now editing and preparing for publication more than twenty years of Rabbi Twersky’s divrei Torah delivered at the Talner Beit Midrash.”
[8] As long ago as 1819, Leopold Zunz wrote about “the persistent delusion, contrary to law, that it is permissible to cheat non-Jews.” See Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the Germany-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 (New York, 2002),  p. 113. In an earlier post here I wrote:

Isn’t all the stress on following dina de-malchuta revealing? Why can’t people simply be told to do the right thing because it is the right thing? Why does it have to be anchored in halakhah, and especially in dina de-malchuta? Once this sort of thing becomes a requirement because of halakhah, instead of arising from basic ethics, then there are 101 loopholes that people can find, and all sorts of heterim.

After writing this I heard R. Jeremy Wieder’s shiur on the topic of dina de-malchuta dina (available here) and he makes some very similar points.

[9] This is a mistake. It is not Hashem (with a capital “H”, implying “God”) but hashem (or ha-shem). I.e., it is not a desecration of God but of His name. Thus, one should writeחילול השם  not חילול ה’. See Lev. 22:32: ולא תחללו את שם קדשי. Nissim Dana titled his 1989 translation of one of R. Abraham Maimonides’ works ספר המספיק לעובדי השם. Yet the last two words should be ‘לעובדי ה.
Regarding the use the “Hashem”, I found something very confusing in the ArtScroll Stone Chumash. In place of the Tetragrammaton, ArtScroll does not use the word “Lord” but “HASHEM”, as this is how people pronounce the Tetragrammaton. While ArtScroll is the first translation to adopt this approach, it does have a certain logic. However, this logic breaks down a few times on p. 319 when the ArtScroll commentary attempts to explain what occurs at the beginning of parashat Va-Era. For example, “Or HaChaim comments that God’s essence is represented by the name HASHEM.” This makes no sense, as there is no name HASHEM. The commentary should have written that “God’s essence is represented by the four letter name of God.”
[10] “Digital Orthodoxy: The Making and Unmaking of a Lifestyle,” in Yehuda Sarna, ed., Developing a Jewish Perspective on Culture (New York, 2014), pp. 280-281.
[11] Community, Covenant and Commitment, ed. N. Helfgot (Jersey City, 2005), pp. 24-25. See also The Rav Speaks (Brooklyn, 2002), pp. 49-50: “I once said that there exists problems for which one cannot find a clear-cut decision in the Shulchan Aruch (code of Jewish law); one has to decide intuitively.” For another example where we see that R. Soloveitchik did not operate as Halakhic Man, see R. Menachem Genack, “My First Year in the Rav’s Shiur,” in Zev Eleff, ed., Mentor of Generations (Jersey City, 2008), p. 171:

I went to be menachem avel [console the mourner] at his home on Hancock Road in Brookline on Shushan Purim. His aveilus on Shushan Purim itself was something of a chiddush: although the Mechaber writes that one should sit shivah on Shushan Purim, the Remah rules that one should not. And Rav Soloveitchik said that, should he be asked to pasken the question, he would follow the opinion of the Remah. But he himself could not do otherwise than sit shivah on that day. Sitting shivah was the only way he could express himself that day – psychologically he could not do otherwise.

It is impossible to imagine that the Rav’s uncle, R. Isaac Zev Soloveitchik, would have ever consciously allowed his emotions to influence how he decided halakhah. See e.g., here where I write: “Another such example of this is the report that when one of R. Velvel’s sons died shortly after birth, and the family was crying, he was insistent that they stop their tears, since there is no avelut before thirty days.”

[12] (Ma’aleh Adumim, 2015), p. 512.                                                           
[13] R. Menahem Azariah of Fano even states that one can ignore a conclusion of R. Samuel Di Medina as he was angry when he wrote a particular responsum. See She’elot u-Teshuvot ha-Rama mi-Fano, no. 109.
                                                                                              
ואין לחוש לדברי הר”ש די מדינה שכתב ההפך מזה, כי נראין הדברים מתוך התשובה שבא לכלל כעס עם אחד העם שהיה מנהיג כך והוא מוחזק בעיניו שהיה עושה כן להתיהר ושלא לש”ש.
On the other hand, see here for the following story told by R. Eliezer Melamed in which R. Zvi Yehudah Kook turns his father into a religious robot, completely lacking any natural emotion.
פעם ליווה אבי מורי את הרצי”ה בלכתו מהישיבה לביתו, ואז סיפר לו הרצי”ה שלאחר פטירת הרב חיים עוזר גרודז’ינסקי מוילנא, קיימו לזכרו אזכרה בירושלים. אחד הספדנים אמר בתוך דבריו, שאצל רבי חיים עוזר האהבה לישראל לא קלקלה את השורה, והוא אהב את מי שצריך לאהוב. ומתוך דבריו נרמזה ביקורת על מרן הרב קוק, שנפטר שנים ספורות לפני כן, שכביכול אצלו האהבה קלקלה את השורה. דברים אלו ציערו וקוממו את הרצי”ה. זמן לא רב אח”כ התקיימה האזכרה השנתית של מרן הרב קוק, ואז הזכיר הרצי”ה את המשנה בברכות (לג, ב): “האומר על קן ציפור יגיעו רחמיך . . . משתקין אותו”. וזאת משום שהוא תופס את מידותיו של הקב”ה כאילו יש בהן חולשה אנושית של רחמנות שחורגת ממידת הדין והצדק, ואילו האמת היא שגם רחמיו של הקב”ה הם גזרות מדויקות. וכך הוסיף הרצי”ה: הצדיקים הגדולים ההולכים בדרכי ה’, הרחמים שלהם ואהבת ישראל שלהם אינם רגש אנושי שסובל מחולשה וטעות, אלא הם גזרות הנובעות מעומקה של תורה. וכל מי שאומר על הצדיקים שמידותיהם רחמים – “משתקין אותו”! וכך חזר כמה פעמים ואמר כלפי אותו ספדן “משתקין אותו”!
[14] For the founding of Agudath Israel of America and its first convention, see Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff, The Silver Era in American Jewish Orthodoxy (Jerusalem/New York, 2000), pp. 162-163.
[15] If they started putting individuals in herem, one of the questions that would be raised is does the banned person’s spouse and children also have to abide by the herem. It is hard to see how a couple could remain married if that was the case. This matter is actually discussed by R. Solomon ben Adret, She’elot u-Teshuvot ha-Rashba ha-Meyuhasot le-Ramban, no. 266. He informs us that R. Abraham ben David (Rabad) did not think that a wife has to observe the herem (we don’t know what he thought about the children). However, the Rashba disagrees and states the wife is indeed obligated to observe the herem.
[16] Nedarim 50b.
[17] She’elot u-Teshuvot ha-Radbaz, vol. 7, no. 50.
[18] See She’elot u-Teshuvot Maharam mi-Padua, no. 73.
[19] See Yakob Boksenboim, ed., Parashiyot me-Havai Yehudei Italyah ba-Meah ha-16 (Tel Aviv, 1986), pp. 29ff.; Nahum Rakover, “Shikulim be-Anishah: Hatalat Ones ke-she-ha-Avaryan Alul la-Tzet le-Tarbut Ra’ah o le-Hishtamed,” in Yitzhak Alfasi, ed., Ha-Ma’a lot li-Shelomo (n.p., 1995), pp. 367ff.
[20] R. Amnon Yitzhak actually spoke about Mizrachi’s statement before anyone else (someone obviously fed it to him). This youtube video was put up on October 25, 2015, two months before Mizrachi’s statement became an international scandal.

After the controversy broke, I looked around a bit and found that from a religious standpoint, Mizrachi has said something regarding the Holocaust that is much worse than what he was called to task over, as his comment defames many great rabbis. In the video below he has the chutzpah to think that he knows why so many tzadikim were killed in the Holocaust. He explains – I hope you are sitting down –  that they were not really complete tzadikim, and he identifies their supposed flaw. On the other hand, he states that the complete tzadikim were saved (and he makes the ridiculous statement that R. Aaron Kotler was a kiruv activist in Europe). Has anyone before Mizrachi ever made the appalling statement that survival of the Holocaust is proof that Rabbi X was more righteous than Rabbi Y who was murdered?

Contrast what Mizrachi said with what R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, a survivor of the Holocaust, said (Seridei Esh, vol. 1, p. 1):
רעדה תאחזני ובושה תכסה את פני לבוא ולספר על הנסים והנפלאות שנעשו עם אזוב קטן כמוני, אשר לא אדע במה לתלות נס-הצלתי, בוודאי לא מזכות יתירה, אלא ממיעוט זכות להמנות בין מקדשי השם הגדול והנורא
The only explanation R. Weinberg could give as to why he was miraculously saved was that he was not worthy enough to die al kiddush ha-shem.
In my Torah in Motion classes on R. Elchanan Wasserman I discuss the false claim that R. Elchanan returned to Europe “to die with his students.” I don’t know how this yeshiva myth arose. R. Elchanan left the United States in March 1939, more than five months before the German invasion of Poland. He didn’t know what was coming and would never have returned to Poland if he did. (R. Elchanan’s son, R. Simcha Wasserman, is reported to have made this exact point. See R. Ari Kahn’s post here.)

[21] Yaskil Avdi, vol. 8, p. 200. R. Hadaya was also a kabbalist but surprisingly he makes an obvious mistake, ibid., p. 97, as pointed out by R. Meir Mazuz in his just published Darkhei ha-Limud, p. 7. R. Chaim Vital, Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim, hakdamah 34, states:
והנה משה תחילה היה הבל בן אדם הראשון ואח”כ נתגלגל בשת ואח”כ בנח ואח”כ בשם בן נח
R. Hadaya writes:
הרי לך דעם שמשה היה אחרי כמה מאות שנים, מזמן הבל ושת ונח ובנו שם, עכ”ז נתגלגל בהם
According to R. Hadaya, what R. Vital is saying is that Moses was reincarnated into Abel, and then into Seth, Noah, and Shem, even though Moses lived many years after them. This would be a great mystery if R. Vital had said it, since how could a person be reincarnated into someone who lived before him? Yet this is not what R. Vital said. If you look at the quotation from Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim you can see that its point is that Abel was reincarnated as Seth, and then Noah, and then Shem, and in the end came Moses.