A Note on the Rhetoric of Genocide

Accusations of genocide serve to legitimate unrestrained violent resistance. No one thinks that a community facing genocide needs to abide by the rules of war if that means they lose. To accuse X of attempting genocide against Y means that Y can do whatever it takes to defeat X, up to and perhaps including counter-genocide.

Therefore, accusations of genocide are extremely dangerous. They are almost by definition incitements to the worst forms of violence. Sometimes that is necessary and salutary. But handle with extreme care.

THOSE WHO ACCUSE ISRAEL OF GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS, REAL OR INTENDED, HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS. The accusation is absurd, trivializing, insulting, and murderous, all at the same time.

I need to put out a word of caution the other way as well. Rhetoric encouraging genocide is just as dangerous, even or especially if framed as counter-genocide. JEWS MUST NOT APPLY THE CATEGORY OF AMALEK TO REAL PEOPLE. Full stop. Every violation of this principle harms our cause.

This is true even with regard to real people who have genocidal intentions toward us (see links below). This is true even if the category Amalek is hedged about with qualifiers to obscure its genocidal implications. This is true even if one claims to be engaged purely in textual interpretation.

https://moderntoraleadership.wordpress.com/…/amalek…/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-not-to-talk-about…/

Support the Center for Modern Torah Leadership!

Donations may be made at http://tinyurl.com/CMTLgive or by mail to CMTL, 63 South Pleasant Street, Sharon MA 02067. We can also accept donations of securities via Stockdonator. 

Dear Friend and Supporter,

I began typing these words on December 17 while waiting to board my flight to Israel. That’s late for an end-of-year appeal. But I didn’t feel able to write before I was en route, and I’m revising now that I’ve returned.      

You’re being inundated with appeals for nonprofits that will help our soldiers directly and physically; that claim to be protecting our soldiers metaphysically; or that ask for money now to prepare for inevitable rising demand when the war ends. This will be different.

Since October 7, my teaching has focused on military halakhah and Jewish military ethics. That has involved shiurim at Princeton , Rutgers, and Yale; many CMTL weekly essays; a much longer essay published Dec. 22 on TheLehrhaus.com; an internationally attended zoom shiur; Jewish Link articles with Barry Kornblau; podcasts on Taking Responsibility for Torah and the Yeshiva of Newark; and more. Here you can find a chronological compilation of my articles on war. 

This material seemed useless for my trip. Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm told my semikhah class that all Jews should make aliyah – except rabbis; Israel had more than enough mediocre Torah scholars. So why would anyone want American Torah about war in Israel?  

I was wrong. Yeshivot and communities in Israel wanted to hear my shiurim about the ethics and halakhot of war, and how those relate to concern for civilian casualties. Yeshivat Migdal haTorah spent a three-hour morning seder learning these topics with me, as did Rav Elisha Anselovics shiur at Machon Pardes; and I gave hour-long shiurim at Yeshivat Eretz Hatzvi, Midreshet Amudim, and Machon Gruss. Each of these shiurim sought to be rigorous, generous, and critical, and to leave students with the resources and responsibility to keep thinking. I’m grateful to the students for listening intently and asking great questions. Many thanks to SBM alum and Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Jonathan Ziring of Migda HaTorah (who has introduced a teshuvah-writing course at the yeshiva modeled on SBM), Rabbi Simon Levy of Eretz HaTzvi, Dr. Julie Goldstein of Amudim, and SBM alums/Gruss students Daniel Peled-Schwartz and Zach Beer for arranging those shiurim.

All the above shiurim were aimed at American gap-year students. But I also greatly appreciated invitations to learn with Israeli audiences in Tekoa, at Yeshivat Drisha, and at Kehillat B’Orkha in Yerushalayim. 

The event at Tekoa emphasized to me the importance of CMTL’s campaign against the use of Amalek as a descriptor for current enemies. No matter how many qualifiers are used, invoking Amalek inevitably carries a whiff of genocide. This is simply a gift handed to Israel-bashers. But more importantly, it risks tempting us to relax the high moral standards that we are justifiably so proud of under such difficult circumstances. I’m grateful to Dr. Naftali Moses for arranging the event and to Rabbi Dr. Avi Walfish for participating.

At Drisha, I introduced the dispute between Rav Moshe Kahn z”l, rebbe of my wife and of my younger daughter, and yibadel lechayim Rav Herschel Schachter about whether newlyweds need the sanction of a posek to delay starting a family. The shiur was optional, during break time, and in the middle of review week, and I was warned that only SBM alums might show up. But in the end over twenty Israeli talmidot and Rosh Yeshiva Rabbanit Chani Dreyfuss joined alums Elke Bentley, Sofia Freudenstein, and Tzophia Stefansky.

My Shabbat derashah at B’Orkha, delivered in Hebrew, discussed whether the fulfillment of Yosef’s dreams was inevitable, and what lessons we can learn if they were not. It was an unalloyed joy to receive a letter from Rav Dovid Ansbacher on behalf of his community recognizing the importance of connecting the communities of Yerushalayim and North America and expressing appreciation for a “deep and original shiur . . able to ground our beliefs and thoughts about out dreams and the ways to realize them”.  

I also delivered shiurim for American students at Yeshivat Orayta, Midreshet Migdal Oz, and Yeshivat Har Etzion. on “Halakhah from First Principles”. The content of those shiurim, which I hope will develop into my next book, was adapted each time in response to excellent student critiques, as well as those of my friend Rabbi Dov Weinstein. I’m grateful to Rabbi Yitzchak Blau of Orayta, Rabbanit Shayna Goldberg and Ms. Racheli Schmelli of Migdal Oz, and Rabbi Eli Weber of Har Etzion for arranging these shiurim, and to Barak Eisenman ’23 and current Har Etzion student Judah Lopatin for successfully encouraging so many of their friends to attend.

I also gave a brief presentation at Midreshet Lindenbaum based on last year’s SBM topic. I’m grateful to Rabbanit Sally Mayer and Rabbanit Nomi Berman for arranging that. 

It was wonderful to see the enthusiasm of this past summer’s amazing SBM reflected in attendance at these shiurim, as well as the continued support and appreciation of so many wonderful Torah educators, Over 80 students added their names to the CMTL mailing list, with several stating their intention to apply to SBM.  

I’m also moved by the continued attachment of SBM alums. Alums from as far back as 2008 came to an informal gathering in Yerushalayim on Thursday night, and in addition to the alums studying at Drisha and Gruss, and Rabbi Ziring (who has introduced a teshuvah-writing course directly modeled on SBM), alums showed up spontaneously at B’Orkha and Pardes, or made arrangements to meet privately. I crossed paths with sixteen of the approximately 45 alumni presently living or studying in israel, and I hope to do better next time.

The long and short of it is that CMTL remains an important resource and inspiration for alumni in both Israel and the US, and for their friends and institutions; the Summer Beit Midrash is strong and likely strengthening; and CMTL’s content plays an important, recognized, and appreciated role in our community. I’ve focused in this letter on my trip, but please be aware that our work for agunot continues, as does our work on issues of sexuality, and more. I’m also working hard to finish an edited collection of teshuvot from the 2023 Summer Beit Midrash Fellows, exploring the tension between halakhah and spiritual utilitarianism.

Our community needs CMTL’s responsible, ethical, rigorous, courageous, and compassionate voice on all these issues. CMTL needs your support to continue and expand its role, and ensure that more such voices emerge. We recognize that the war has properly redirected much American Jewish philanthropy to Israel. We ask for your support on the assumption that this is not a zero-sum game. Donate via http://tinyurl.com/CMTLgive or by mail to CMTL, 63 South Pleasant Street, Sharon MA 02067. We can also accept donations of securities via Stockdonator. Please email moderntorahleadership@gmail.com with any questions. 

With great appreciation and all best wishes,

Aryeh Klapper, Dean              

(Last year’s appeal is appended so you can evaluate us for consistency etc.)

Dear Friend,

Please support the Center for Modern Torah Leadership generously. You share our ideals; you love our alums; and you know that any disagreements we have are rooted in seriousness and integrity on both sides. Giving generously to CMTL is an investment in your understanding of Torah and your vision of a Torah community. You can donate online at www.torahleadership.org/donate.html or by mailing a check to CMTL, 63 South Pleasant Street, Sharon MA 02067.

Two wonderful things happened this past summer. First, an amazing group of Summer Beit Midrash Fellows built a model community of intellectual rigor, religious depth, and simple humanity. Second, CMTL published my book Divine Will and Human Experience: Explorations of Halakhah and Its Values, which promptly became a #1 best-seller in its category on Amazon.

The book generated lively, engaged, and challenging conversations with and among the SBM Fellows. You can hear the Fellow-created podcast based on Chapter 1 on our podcast Taking Responsibility for Torah, and a second episode based on Chapter 8 should be posted soon. A variety of popular and scholarly publications have assigned reviewers, and I look forward with eager trepidation to reading the reviews as they come out. I also expect to discuss the book on various non-CMTL podcasts.

Chapter 26 shows how the standard American beit din practice for writing converts’ names in divorces can lead to their Jewishness being challenged years later. For most batei din, this is unintentional, and the practice has already changed in at least one major beit din in response to this essay. At the same time, a Youtube video shows the director of a different beit din advocating for the problematic practice on the ground that it will enable challenging a conversion years later, and acknowledging openly that this involves “tricking the convert”. There’s a long way to go.

One underlying issue is that many batei din have not internalized transparency as a value. A second is that while Orthodoxy wants non-Orthodox Jews to come to our institutions for personal status issues – for example, we want every heterosexual intramarriage that ends in divorce to include a get – we have not accepted that this makes non-Orthodox Jews part of the constituency of halakhah.

Here’s another example. A woman was referred to a significant posek with a question as to whether she needed a get from a years-ago relationship. The answer was yes – but no one told her how to go about arranging it, even though she had long since been out of contact with the relevant man, and had no connection with anyone who could guide her through the get process. This was just one of four cases that came to me recently through the GETYOURGET project of the Boston Agunah Task Force. Each case revealed a hole or flaw in the system. CMTL stands in those breaches for now, and works toward a tomorrow where there are no breaches, for example by advocating for both the halakhic prenup and for the pre-civil-divorce agreement and strategies that the BATF has devised with my halakhic advice and the approval of major batei din.

Right now, not knowing whether we have any discretionary budget for the next year, I won’t pledge to produce programs other than SBM for 5783. I understand that you face the same inflationary pressures that we do. But, if the money does come in, here are some things I hope and expect will happen with your generous help:

• Continuing and expanding the advanced program for women in Even HaEzer that we piloted last year,
• A weekly podcast based on chapters of the book,
• Publication of 2022 SBM teshuvot,
• Restarting the CMTL Campus Fellowship,
• An Israel trip giving shiurim at many gap year and advanced programs, for both American and Israelis. This both seeds recruitment for SBM and helps us stay connected to our many alums who have made aliyah,
• Shiurim on many university campuses in America,
• Scholar in Residence weekends to spread CMTL’s message,
• At least one more book
• Weekly Torah essays,
• Many other podcasts, essays, and shiurim.

Any and all of this will be possible only because you and people like you resonate with our vision and find us worthy of support. Please give generously.

Please help spread the word about CMTL and our Torah by sharing our essays and podcasts, liking our posts on social media, and inviting me to your community for a scholar in residence program or shiur.

Please contact me at moderntorahleadership@gmail.com with any questions about our programming or Torah content, or if you have a halakhic or other question where you think my input might be valuable.

With gratitude, appreciation, and blessings

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, Dean                              

A Repentant Dayyan Explains How A Standard Beit Din Process Oppresses Converts

reprinted from Chapter 26 of Divine Will and Human Experience

Dear Rabbi Klapper, 

I am an Orthodox convert who recently went through an exceedingly bitter divorce. My husband Shimshon became abusive shortly after our marriage, and he used his superior Torah knowledge as a means of controlling me. It took me a long time to realize this. I’m trying very hard to stop seeing halakhah that way, but for now, while I still believe in Torah intellectually, and I’m completely committed to being Jewish, I’m not emotionally able to follow the laws of Shabbes and kashrus punctiliously. I hope to do so again when I’ve healed. 

Thank G-d, at the start of negotiations our lawyers insisted that we sign the Boston Agunah Task Force agreement binding us to complete our halakhic divorce before finalizing a settlement. So I didn’t have to fight Shimshon for the get (halakhic bill of divorce). 

When we came to beit din, though, I was very hurt and surprised when the rabbis asked me questions about my observance. I asked them why, and after a series of evasions, they replied that my husband had said that I no longer kept Shabbes, and if so, they needed to write my name in the get as hagiyores rather than as bas Avrohom Avinu. 

This was shocking and deeply hurtful to me. I felt like my adopted family was abandoning me in my time of need. Worse, it felt like they were siding with my abuser. Did Avrohom Avinu, embodiment of chesed, really not want his name associated with mine?! What about all the times that rabbis had assured me that “convert” was a compliment, not a term of derision? What about all the laws against oppressing converts? 

I was honest, and they wrote “hagiyores”, and I took the get – I felt that I had no choice. I have a friend who walked away from the get process after a similar experience, and is now remarried without a get, with a child at risk of being declared a mamzer.  

My question to you is – do all batei din do this, or were I and my friend just unlucky? It seems strange to me for halakhah to be so cruel to converts when they are so vulnerable, and to judge them so absolutely at a point that is obviously transitional. Is that what Hashem wants? 

Sincerely,  

Timna A.  (Note: Timna A. is a fictionalized composite portrait.) 

Dear Timna, 

I’m deeply sorry and profoundly embarrassed to hear your story. Yes, to the best of my knowledge that’s what all American batei din do. Yes, this practice is an obvious violation of the Torah’s many prohibitions against causing psychological distress to converts (ona’at hager). No, it is not halakhically necessary or even desirable. 

But there is an even worse underlying truth. Israeli batei din may take the absence of “ben/bat Avraham Avinu” in a convert’s get as a basis for challenging the validity of the conversion, even after several generations. 

I write as a penance/maaseh teshuvah for having participated as a dayyan in this recently developed practice. I pray that this response to you, and the more comprehensive as-yet-unpublished article it is drawn from, will help generate a rapid return to tradition.     

American batei din today conventionally distinguish two classes of converts when they write a get. Converts who are halakhically observant at the time of divorce are identified as “ben/bat Avraham Avinu”. Those who aren’t halakhically observant at the time of divorce are identified as “hager/hagiyoret”, with no father’s name.  

This is intrinsically problematic – there is no reason for batei din to judge the observance level of anyone appearing before them for divorce (and batei din generally claim that they don’t). It is also technically problematic: for example, the investigation is necessarily cursory and relies on a halakhically inadmissible confession (ayn adam oseh atzmo rasha) and/or testimony from an interested party (nogeia badavar). But the worst part is that some Israeli rabbinic courts and agencies may take the absence of “ben/bat Avraham Avinu” in a convert’s get as a basis for challenging the conversion, sometimes even several generations down the line. 

This is made explicit by Dayyan Mordekhai Ralbag in Avnei Mishpat 4:13: 

“If the divorcing man or women are converts who observe the mitzvot –  

one should write ben/bat Avraham Avinu. 

But if they do not observe mitzvot,  

and there is a concern that at the time of conversion they did not intend to accept the yoke of the commandments and the conversion is not good and they are Gentiles –  

one must hint at this in the get,  

and therefore one should write only their names and conclude with “haGer/haGiyoret”. 

Dayyan Ralbag’s rule makes the presence of haGer/haGiyoret in a get a clear basis for challenging the presumed validity of a conversion¹. (Dayyan Ralbag was recently appointed by his brother in-law, Chief Rabbi Dovid Lau, to head the beit din system in Yerushalayim. The appointment is on hold because the Attorney General has charged that the process was nepotistic, but Rabbi Ralbag is certainly an intellectually impressive and influential dayyan). 

Dayyan Ralbag was cited to just that end by Rabbi Shimon Yaakobi in his 2010 bookביטול גיור עקב חוסר כנות בקבלת המצוות (Nullification of Conversion Owing to Lack of Sincerity When Accepting the Mitzvot).  

Rabbi Yakobi argued that beit din records showing that the majority of Israeli gittin used “hager/giyoret” rather than “ben/bat Avraham Avinu” supported the decision by Rabbi Avraham Sherman of the Beit Din HaGadol to retroactively invalidate en masse thousands of Rabbinate-authorized conversions (Rabbi Yakobi’s statistical argument was compellingly refuted by Rabbi David Bass and Rabbi Mordekhai Brully, as cited by Rabbi Yisroel Rozen, ואוהב גר, p. 217. Rabbi Sherman’s own grounds are beyond the scope of this article. Regardless, his decision served notice that he and his supporters would not refrain from challenging Orthodox conversions even many years later. In other words, it put all converts in permanent fear of challenges to their own or their descendants’ Jewishness. I can attest that it had this effect based on contemporary phone calls to the Boston Beit Din and many conversations in subsequent years. Sometimes the ends justify the means; but it would take ultimately important ends to justify such an enormous violation of ona’at hager.)   

There is no historical precedent for the procedure Rabbi Ralbag records. The closest model is the late 18^th century Toras Gittin (129:11), who insisted that one ought not write ben/bat Avraham Avinu for converts who subsequently apostasized, in other words who explicitly denied their connection to and membership in the Jewish people. The Tel Aviv beit din seems to have extended it to public Sabbath desecrators in the 1950s, and then at some later point to all converts who admitted not being shomrei Shabbat. But no one argued that this practice was halakhically necessary, and empirical evidence shows that it is still not standard in Israel. However, Rabbi Yaakobi reports that it nonetheless became the recommended practice in several manuals of beit din practice.   

I found two cases prior to Rav Yaakobi of dayyanim trying to use the language of the get as evidence. The first, from 1972, cited a 1950s Tel Aviv get’s use of hager to support a claim that an alleged convert had never stopped being Christian and in fact had never appeared before a beit din. This argument was intended to prevent children born to the (deceased) convert’s wife and another man before the get from being classified as mamzerim. The second cited a 1970s Tel Aviv get’s use of bat Avraham Avinu as evidence that the convert must at least have claimed to be shomeret Shabbat. This was intended to enable the convert’s granddaughter to be classified as Jewish. Neither case made a claim that went beyond the Toras Gittin, and neither made a claim about practice outside of Tel Aviv. 

It seems that the Tel Aviv expansion of Toras Gittin reached these shores quite recently. Rav Gedaliah Felder’s mid-20^th century Nachalat Tzvi cites even Toras Gittin’s position as “there are those who say”, with a note that it applies only lekhatchilah. Similarly, Rabbi Ephraim Eliezer Yulis (Divrei Efraim Eliezer EH 219), Av Beit Din of Philadelphia, responded to a report of the first case above by noting that decisors throughout the ages had made clear that “hager” and “ben Avraham Avinu” were both valid for all male converts, so what evidence could be brought from the use of one or the other?! 

Why did this practice spread to the US? It is implausible that there was newly heightened concern for the honor of Avraham Avinu. The universal practice in the United States is to write ben/bat Avraham Avinu for all converts in their ketubahs, and an Israeli Rabbinate official has confirmed to me that this is also the universal practice in Israel. With regard to Avraham Avinu’s honor, what is the difference between a get and a ketubah?!   

Rather, as the State of Israel became more central to world Judaism, American batei din realized that they needed their gittin to be accepted by the central Rabbanut bureaucracy. Somewhat ironically, they therefore became more likely to match the Rabbanut’s officially prescribed procedures than the Rabbanut’s own courts. This is true with regard to many issues.  

Possibly some American dayyanim also meant to encode their qualms about specific conversions. But since they had other ways of conveying such concerns to fellow batei din, and because American batei din are generally horrified by attempts to invalidate conversions based on the converts’ state of observance years later (at least since the Tropper/Eternal Jewish Family scandals became public), I assume that the majority simply wanted their gittin to “look normal” in Israel.   

Converts are not told why the questions about observance are being asked. They are not told that honest answers may lead the Israeli Rabbinate to treat their divorce documents as evidence against the validity of their conversions. In many cases, the beit din itself may not realize this. But it is nonetheless true.  

The Israeli nonprofit ITIM, headed by Rabbi Seth Farber, has repeatedly sued the Rabbinate to prevent them from using the divorce process as an occasion to reopen question of Jewish status. Doing so is now illegal, but it remains unclear whether the practice has ceased. Regardless, there is no bar to the Rabbinate using the divorce documents of converts as evidence in an initial inquiry into Jewish status, such as when converts from abroad apply for Aliyah. 

In other words, distinguishing between “hager/hagiyoret” and “ben/bat Avraham Avinu” in gittin puts converts in permanent danger of challenges to their own or their descendants’ Jewishness. 

American batei din have a moral obligation to return to the simple halakhah, which requires no such distinctions in the get, or at least to the narrow practice of the Toras Gittin.   

We should regardless not be asking anyone about their religious practice when they come for divorce, all the more so converts, all the more so without being transparent about the stakes. Asking such questions raises anxieties in every convert about every imperfection in their halakhic practice and violates ona’at hager. We certainly must not continue a practice that raises unfounded doubts about many legitimate conversions, aids and abets those who seek to invalidate conversions we regard as perfectly legitimate, and makes many converts and their descendants permanently insecure. 

If the Heavens Proclaim His Glory, May One Use a Telescope from a Bathroom?

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Rambam (Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 4:12) wrote the classic Jewish paean to the religious impact of scientific understanding. Does his argument still work?

Here is the first part of Rambam in the Touger translation on Sefaria:

When a person meditates on these matters and recognizes all the creations,

the angels, the spheres, man, and the like,

and appreciates the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He,

in all these creations,

he will add to his love for God.

It’s important to understand that Sefaria does not correlate texts and translations. Thus “the angels, the spheres, man, and the like” is the translation presented for the standard printed Hebrew edition מִמַּלְאָךְ וְגַלְגַּל וְאָדָם כַּיּוֹצֵא בּוֹ but is actually a translation of the variant readingוְגַלְגַּל וְאָדָם וכַּיּוֹצֵא בּוֹ. There is no “and” in the standard text.

Moreover, the translation has no basis for leaving the מ of ממלאך untranslated. This must be corrected to “from the angels, the spheres, man . . .”, But every “from” must have a “to” – where is the “to” here?[1] 

Finally, the Hebrew translated as “all the creations” in the first phrase is kol haberuim; the Hebrew translated as “all these creations” in the second phrase is kol hayetzurim vekol haberuim. Ignoring the yetzurim enables the claim that both phrases refer to the same thing – “these creations”[2]. But what justifies ignoring them?

While the Frankel Mishneh Torah edition adopts the variant “and” on the basis of manuscripts, I suggest keeping the standard text, and strictly translating, as follows:

When a person meditates on these matters and recognizes/makir all the creations

from the angels, the spheres, and men like himself,  

and sees/yir’eh the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, in all the yetzurim and creations,

he adds to his love for the Omnipresent . . .

I suggest tentatively that Rambam changes verbs from makir to yir’eh because “recognition” does not apply to creatures below the level of humans, because they have no consciousness and/or insufficient intellect. They are only canvases for displaying G-d’s wisdom.

This reading is supported by the continuation of 4:12:

. . . and his soul will thirst and his flesh will yearn to love the Omnipresent, blessed be He,
and He will be in awe and fear because of his lowliness, poverty, and triviality

 when he evaluates himself relative to one of the great holy bodies,

all the more so to one of the pure forms that are incorporeal,

that have never been corporeal,

and he will discover himself to be a vessel full of shame and humiliation, empty and lacking.

Human bodies are not “shameful vessels” relative to lobsters or llamas. What is shameful for Rambam is having any body! We can see and appreciate the wisdom with which G-d designs the physical world, but precisely because we have that capacity, we are ashamed of being part of it rather than having purely metaphysical being.

The problem is that Rambam’s masterworks of Divine creation seem imaginary to many of us. There are no intelligent or conscious spheres holding the astronomical bodies. We don’t believe in the this-worldly being divorced from physicality. This seems to radically undermine Rambam’s religious argument for science.

I think two elements remain, if my translation of Rambam is correct. We can still derive humility and inspiration, awe and fear, from humans like ourselves who seem to have gotten so much closer to fulfilling His goals. (My primary example in that regard was Rav Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l, whose yahrtzeit was this week.) And we can still see G-d’s wisdom in any aspect of creation when we understand it deeply.

This experience of science may have halakhic or quasi-halakhic implications. For example, in discussion after my shiur at Columbia Hillel earlier this semester (pre-encampment), an SBM alum asked me how a person who experienced this sort of religious inspiration should prioritize science vs. gemara in their schedule. And this week, SBM alum Rabbi Jonathan Ziring sent me sources (קיום מצוות במקום לא נקי – עולמות (olamot.net)) relating to a conversation we had years ago about whether one may learn science in a bathroom.

Both issues seem to be addressed by Devarim Rabbah 8:6:

What is the meaning of “it is not in the Heavens”?

Shmuel said:

The Torah is not found in astrologim, whose craft is in the Heavens.

They said to Shmuel:

But you are an astrologi, and a great Torah scholar!

He replied:

I would look at/in astrologim only in a time when I was free from Torah.

When was that?

When I entered the lavatory.

Taken straightforwardly, this passage suggests that of course one must prioritize gemara, and that of course it is permitted to study science in the bathroom.

But I have a hard time taking it straightforwardly. Yeshiva students of my youth made a similar claim about the Vilna Gaon, that he learned mathematics only in the bathroom, but most of us took it as funny – we all understood that anyway bathroom breaks are extended when you have serious reading material.  

Also – my father a”h toward the end of his life often discussed the religious inspiration he drew from scientific understanding. His favorite verse was Tehillim 19:2, “The Heavens tell the Glory of G-d”. (My appreciation of this owes much to a comment that Larry Yudelson once made to me about physics – thank you!) So the Torah must be in the Heavens.

One might argue that the verse refers to poetic appreciation rather than to scientific understanding, in the manner of Walt Whitman:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

My father contended that Whitman was being shallow. So one can revise the argument to say that Shmuel refers to professionals for whom scientific learning is not a religious experience.

But then how could Shmuel learn science in the bathroom at all?

Among the sources Rabbi Ziring referred me to is a characteristically brilliant and maddening passage from Rabbi Shlomo Kluger (Chokhmat Shlomoh OC 85:2), commenting on Shulchan Arukh’s ruling that one may not even cogitate about words of Torah in bathrooms and the like.

Rabbi Kluger writes:

I was in doubt as to whether it is permitted to cogitate/להרהר about Him (in such places) or not.

Prima facie one should derive kal vachomer (from the ban re Torah)

that it is forbidden to cogitate about His existence and Ability.

But according to what the kabbalists wrote,

that one may speak of mundane things while wearing the tefillin-of-Rabbeinu-Tam

(as opposed to the standard tefillin-of-Rashi)

because they are exceptionally holy and nothing tamei can adhere to them,  

we can make a kal vachomer argument that the same is true of (cogitating on His existence).

Rabbi Kluger then makes an extended Talmudic argument. Talmud Yoma 7b rejects the possibility that Shemot 28:38 “it must be on his forehead tamid” literally means that the Kohen Gadol can never remove the tzitz, because “doesn’t a person need to sleep a bit? To go to the bathroom?”. Rather, tamid must refer to the effect of the tzitz. But, Rabbi Kluger asks, what about Tehillim 16:8, “I have placed G-d before me tamid”, where there is (he claims) no such way out? It must in fact be permitted to place G-d before oneself even in the bathroom (and even while sleeping; his understanding of dreams requires separate analysis.)

Following Rabbi Kluger, perhaps one may study science in the bathroom even if doing so is a religious experience. However, if that is so, why is it forbidden to study Torah in the bathroom?

Rav Asher Weiss cites Rabbi Kluger to distinguish between religious experience and creative intellectual endeavor. Only the latter is forbidden. This perhaps follows precedents that allow issuing rulings in the bathroom but not providing rationales.

However, what about a religious experience that emerges from creative scientific thought?

My wife Deborah and I have long argued about whether studying the obsolete science found in many Torah books counts as Talmud Torah; I contend it does, so that one can, for instance, say birkat hatorah over pondering the nature of the spheres referred to in Hilkhot Yesodei haTorah 4:12, even though one could not make that blessing over pondering the possibly identical nature of spheres referred to by Aristotle.  

I further contend that Torah has a formal halakhic definition that is not related to its objective truth. Perhaps the prohibition against studying Torah in the bathroom relates only to that formal definition (and, as Rav Lichtenstein suggested, perhaps women are exempt only from the obligation of studying formal Torah). Everything one would make a Birkat haTorah over cannot be studied in the bathroom, but anything else can be. Because even though a person sometimes has to sleep, or to excrete, it is unimaginable that halakhah would obligate us to ever pause deepening our understanding of G-d[3].

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[1] The Hyamson translation has “from the angels and spheres down to human beings and so on”. “And so on” reflects its adoption of the variant text, but “down to” has no textual basis.

[2] Hyamson similarly has “in them all”.

[3] Although Rav Chaim Volozhin says that one may not think of G-d in ways that distract from the actual legal meaning of a halakhic text. This may be a critique of the Chassidic tale in which the rebbe Rev Zusya never gets past the first word of Mishnah, מאימתי = when, because he is seized by trembling when he reaches מאימת = out of terror of.

Can Halakhah Speak to the Experience of Not Being Heterosexual?

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Discussions of homosexuality and Torah tend to focus on the (im)possibility of legitimate couplehood, in the same way that discussions of heterosexuality traditionally focus on challenges within marriage.

In recent years there has been useful pushback on this with regard to heterosexuality and increasing awareness that Torah must speak to and account for the experiences of singles, whether their singleness is voluntary or involuntary, whether they have previously been coupled, and whether or not they expect or hope to become coupled.    

“Speaking to experience” does not imply or require either leniency or stringency. It does require being sensitive to how halakhah affects those experiences; to how halakhic options might affect those experiences; and to how those experiences shape the subjective challenges and opportunities of halakhah.

To at least some extent, it requires acknowledging that many or most singles who generally aspire to full observance and identify with the observant community will nonetheless not succeed in keeping these halakhot fully, and that many of them do not relate to full observance in this area as a live option. This raises the policy question of the extent to which we should invest in making partial observance holistically meaningful, rather than insisting that some aspects of halakhah “work” only as “package deals”.

I’m not speaking here of how the Ribono Shel Olam keeps score, but of the extent to which partial observance gives this-worldly satisfaction. For example: Do we want Jews who drive to shul on Shabbat to maximally bask in the bliss of their neshomoh yeseirah, or is it more important to us that they feel a huge gap in their Shabbat experience? (I recognize that at least with regard to Shabbat these goals can be complementary rather than competing.)     

My strong sense is that at the very least we are responsible to create maximal meaning for involuntary singles, kal vachomer for permanent involuntary singles.

It seems to me that the ‘singles critique’ applies with even greater force in the areas of homosexuality and bisexuality. We need to talk about the overall social-emotional-spiritual experience of people in halakhically observant communities who identify as having a homosexual orientation. We need to speak to the experiences of voluntary and involuntary singles, of various ages, of couples who self-conceive of as acting within halakhah and without, and who are conceived of by others as living within an observant community or without, etc. In all these areas we need to carefully consider the halakhic and experiential differences between biological males and females.

As a preliminary illustration, consider the effect of the laws of negiah on the involuntarily single bisexual. Negiah is a subset of the prohibition Do not draw near to reveal ervah/nakedness (Vayikra 18:4). It prima facie bars hugging anyone to whom one might be sexually attracted and with whom one cannot licitly have sex. (We’ll leave aside the question of whether this prohibition is Biblical or Rabbinic. The verse directly relates only to relatives, but the Rabbis applied it to all prohibitions classified as ervah). This leaves heterosexual singles able to hug and be hugged by any member of their sex. But it seems to leave single bisexuals unable to hug anyone but close relatives and spouses. (We’ll leave aside for now the question of why negiah is permitted for which relatives, and to what extent.)

I think it’s a reasonable presumption that being halakhically unable to receive a hug from any friend is a psychologically unhealthy situation. “Speaking to experience” requires understanding and acknowledging this.

One naturally arising halakhic response is to pull out categories such as “ones Rachmana patrei”. This is usually translated as “The Merciful exempts from punishment those who transgress as the result of coercion/force of circumstances) to excuse people’s violations”. But “exempts from punishment” seems to presume that the prohibition is still in force. Perhaps in some circumstances it can be used prospectively, and in the sense of “exempts from obligation/prohibition” rather than “exempts from punishment”. However, the extent and limits of that application would need to be worked out carefully and rigorously. My sense is that this has not yet been done well, and I’m not yet convinced that it would yield a useful result here.

A second difficulty with the ones approach is that ones is usually defined by immediate specific circumstances, and here we are speaking more of an ongoing “state of ones”.

A third difficulty, which a 2023 SBM Fellow raised forcefully, is that it forces people to see themselves as living in a permanently bediavad state, in constant recognition that from a religious perspective, an important aspect of their overall human experience is at best excusable rather than a source of religious value and/or holiness.

This is in a sense the sort of issue often raised by people whose physical health prevents them from fasting on Yom Kippur, or whose mental health prevents them from doing certain positive mitzvot; but the comparisons by themselves show why this approach may not effectively speak to experience, as people with homosexual orientations generally do not experience themselves, and do not wish to experience themselves, as unhealthy or disabled.

Another sort of halakhic response is to have halakhah simply treat the majority case as universal (lo plug rabanan). We can say that, on the assumption that most biological males are attracted exclusively enough to biological females, and vice versa, the prohibition of negiah applies exclusively to heterosexual contact.

I am not sure this approach is halakhically viable according to Rambam’s position that the prohibition against “drawing near” is Biblical. But let us assume with Ramban that it is Rabbinic, and further assume boldly that we can apply here the principle that Rabbinic decrees do not apply to uncommon cases. We would in effect be requiring halakhah davka not to speak to the experiences of those who identify as having homosexual or bisexual orientations by relegating them to the uncommon and therefore legally invisible. We should at least acknowledge that cost.

I have proposed a hybrid model in which negiah is permitted between two people of the same biological sex unless both of them are known to have a non-heterosexual orientation, and in which heterosexuality remains the default assumption about any individual. This allows halakhah to speak to individual experience, but does not integrate diverse individual experiences into public experience unless they “out” themselves.

One reasonable critique of my proposal is that it requires and entrenches heterocentrism = the public presumption that everyone is heterosexual. I suggest that this is at least a reasonable cost and possibly a desideratum, and very different from the erasure of private experience inherent in the lo plug rabanan approach. But I’ve received quite a bit of pushback already, and I encourage you to email me with your thoughts either way.

The underlying issue is whether public halakhah should deal with the reality of sexual orientation identity diversity by treating all variations equally, or rather by maintaining a default norm and then seek to ameliorate any negative effects of marginalization.  

That is to some extent a pragmatic question: I’ve argued thus far at least in the case of negiah, and likely yichud as well, the default assumption of heterosexuality can prevent marginalization. But it is also a moral question. To what extent is it important for us to establish heterosexual coupling as the standard Jewish human aspiration, even at the cost of marginalizing Jews for whom that aspiration is practically out of bounds?

Another way of asking this is: Can we speak to specific experiences of sexuality, as I’ve tried to do above, without first establishing a clear overall hashkafic perspective on sexuality that includes those specific experiences?

My first take is that starting from such an overall perspective would be much better. But at the same time, I contend that we have not really even begun to formulate such a perspective, so a certain degree of muddling through is inevitable.

Here’s why I think we are at the philosophic starting line despite millennia of tradition: a whole set of moral, legal, and practical connections/dependencies that until recently were thought of as obviously intrinsic are now seen as accidental.

These include, but are not limited to:

1. Heterosexual intercourse and procreation, meaning that now
   1. Heterosexual intercourse does not ineluctably involve the possibility of procreation
   1. Procreation does not require heterosexual intercourse.
2. Biological sex and gender identity
3. Biological sex and sexual orientation
4. Gender identity and sexual orientation
5. Sexual orientation and sexual orientation identity
6. Genetic relationship to a child and the expected social parenthood of that child
7. Sexual relationship with a planned coparent
8. Sexual diversity and marriage
9. Sexual homogeneity and the invisibility of sexual interest

In other words: We used to take it as given that human personalities embodied with female sex organs and reproductive systems would identify as female, seek to partner sexually with a biological male and become pregnant from and parent only with that male, and that human personalities embodied with male sex organs and reproductive systems would identify as male, seek to partner sexually with and impregnate a biological female, and parent only with that biological female. 

These broken connections may result from

1. technological progress, meaning that we can DO things that we previously could not, such as IVF;
2. changes in empirical knowledge, factual belief, or human society, such as our understanding of genetics;
3. changes in moral, philosophical, and theological opinions, such as giving greater significance to women’s bodily autonomy 

Another way of putting this is that as Moderns, we are

1. intellectually sensitive to the difference between correlation and causality, and
2. intellectually convinced that “from almost-always-is to ought there is no inference”

We must consider carefully which if any of these changes can be approached through Torah separately, and which require addressing several together or the whole package as a unity.

I hope I’ve made clear my strong preference for addressing the whole package as a unity. But I acknowledge that consistency with the goal of restoring some of these broken connections or dependencies may require making terribly hard legal decisions in areas such as solutions for married couples where one spouse is incapable of reproduction. Those decisions may prove too hard for us, at least for a while, and yet I cannot envision a consistent Torah approach that does not require some such restorations. So we may need to act on some matters piecemeal even while acknowledging the profound bediavadness of doing so.

Shabbat shalom!

Eliyahu in Oz

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

“I am Oz, the great and terrible”. L. Frank Baum presumably drew “great and terrible” from Bible translations of gadol venora. Devarim 1:19 describes the wilderness that we traversed after the Exodus as gadol venora; Devarim 7:21 describes Hashem Elokekha as E-l gadol venora; and Yoel 3:4 and Malakhi 3:23 each describe a future “day of Hashem hagadol vehanora.” (Despite Devarim 7:21, all commentaries I’ve seen understand hagadol vehanora in Yoel and Malakhi as modifying the day rather than modifying Hashem.)

The word “terror” has a deeply negative valence in contemporary society. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary liturgist choosing to praise G-d by describing Him as evoking terror. This may reflect a purely linguistic shift, or we may no longer understand why the capacity to evoke the emotion of terror in others would ever be praiseworthy.

Yoel points strongly to the latter option. The “Day of Hashem” is introduced in 1:15 as the day of a massive locust invasion, causing destruction, famine, and depression. In Chapter 2 the locusts are like heavy smog in the air and a ravenous army on the ground, turning Eden into desolation. In Chapter 3 the spirit of prophecy pours onto the population while the sky fills with bleak omens of blood, fire, and smoke. The sun transforms to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the coming of the day of Hashem, the great and terrible. All these apparently associate the day of Hashem with an emotion we still recognize as terror.

But this picture of Yoel is not complete. 3:5 promises that all who call in the name of Hashem will escape, because in Har Tziyon and Yerushalayim there will be a pleitah = refuge, and in the remnants who call Hashem. Chapter 4 warns the righteous to prepare for war – beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears!–and ends with a vison of Yehudah triumphant and eternal, with its enemies punished and desolated. Assuming this is all part of the Day of Hashem, it turns out that terror is followed by relief and probably joy. More precisely, the terror is of justice, grounded in fear that one deserves punishment.

My question is whether the terror itself is just, and perhaps in some cases obviates the need for other punishments. Those correctly certain of their own rectitude will not experience this terror. That kind of certainty might itself reflect a moral flaw, or not.

The end of Malakhi might suggest another possibility. G-d sends Eliyah the Prophet before the coming of the day of Hashem, the great and terrible . . . lest I come and smite the land cherem. Eliezer of Beaugency implicitly contrasts this vision with Yoel: “Cherem = with no pleitah”. Eliyahu HaNavi is tasked with preventing a nightmare scenario that Yoel never considers. My question is whether Eliyahu’s goal is to transform Malakhi into Yoel, in other words to ensure the survival of a refuge. Or might he have the more ambitious goal of saving the majority, or everyone. In which case there might be no need for terror at all.

I am tempted by a more ambitious version of this thesis. Raavad in his commentary to Mishnah Eduyot reads the verses this way:

Remember the Torah of Mosheh my servant etc.;

if you do – Behold I am sending you Elijah the prophet etc.

but if you don’t – I will come and smite the land utterly.

According to this reading, Eliyahu’s task is to prevent the Day of Hashem from coming. My question then would be whether Eliyahu’s task is enabled by the terror of judgment, or is instead to prevent the terror as well.

To address this question, we must ask: what does Eliyahu actually do?

Textually, the answer is straightforward: veheshiv lev avot al banim, velev banim al avotam. The meaning of that text is a four-way dispute in the last mishnah of Masekhet Eduyot:

1. Rabbi Yehoshua – Eliyahu will undo all genealogical rulings (about eligibility to marry, or to serve as kohanim) that emerged from concessions to force, however long ago.
2. Rabbi Yehudah – Eliyahu will undo only such rulings distorted toward strictness (lerachek ­= to distance) but not those distorted toward leniency (lekarev = to bring closer)
3. Rabbi Shimon – Eliyahu comes lehashvot machlokot = to turn disputes into consensus. (This is not the same as settling disputes by deciding for one side or the other.)
4. The Sages – Eliyahu comes neither lerachek nor lekarev, but rather to make peace in the world (laasot shalom baolam)

Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Yehudah take avot and banim literally and specifically as fathers and sons, whereas the Sages somehow generalize them. (I’m unclear whether Rabbi Shimon’s position is a variant of the first two, on its own axis, or a narrower version of the Sages’.)

The clear advantage of the Sages’ position is that it gives Eliyahu’s task a scope worthy of its massive purpose of preventing total annihilation. Why would clarifying families’ halakhic status serve that purpose?

Keter Hamelekh (Rabbi Catriel Aharon Nathan, 1846-1922, Lithuania) to Mishneh Torah Hilkhot Nezirut 4:11 accidentally provides a possible solution. In the context of a classic technical halakhic conversation about whether traveling from Heaven to Earth on Shabbat can violate the techum, and assuming that the day of Hashem is the day on which the King Messiah is revealed, he notes that the verse makes no commitment as to how much before that day Eliyahu will arrive. He then constructs a dispute within Chazal as to whether it will be the day before, or rather three days before.

Keter HaMelekh explains this dispute as follows: If the Jewish people have achieved righteousness on their own, then Eliyahu need come only one day before. But if we have failed to achieve righteousness on our own, and the clock is running out on the world, or we will otherwise become permanently irredeemable then Eliyahu must come earlier, in order to compel our repentance.

Now Keter HaMelekh contends that the positions in Mishnah Eduyot all relate to Eliyahu’s task on the penultimate day. I suggest instead that Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Shimon assume that Eliyahu is coming to a people who already deserve redemption, while the Sages understand Eliyahu’s task as making us worthy of redemption. How could we be worthy of redemption if there is no peace between fathers and sons?  (Note: Raavad and others argue that the Sages have Eliyahu making peace between Jews and

Gentiles. But this seems a very difficult read of the verse in Malakhi.)

If one sees compelled repentance as a reasonable end to history, then perhaps terror of judgment is necessary and justified as a means to that end.

This is the position taken by a key protagonist’s mother in H. G. Wells’ socialist allegory In The Days of the Comet. Before the comet’s passing, the mother had often harangued her son about the tortures of Hell. After the comet transforms the atmosphere, and thereby human behavior, making clear that human sins were a consequence of environment and not of an intrinsic yetzer hora, the son asks how she could ever have felt such tortures were justified. Her defense is that while she had indeed described Hell in loving detail, she had never said that any souls were actually sent there.

In other words, inspiring terror of judgment is justified, even if the terrifying judgement will never happen because a comet or prophet will regardless come in time to prevent us from deserving it.

But maybe the mother was still wrong, because repentance inspired by terror is psychologically compelled. If that is the only hope for repentance, we might as well wait for Eliyahu to compel us, or conversely, G-d might as well send Eliyahu now, since nothing better will ever happen.

I understand that many people focus more on shortening the exile than on how redemption happens. I also understand why the fact that the pains of an unredeemed world have lessened for most Jews in the world – even as we recognize the incredible suffering of our hostages and the absurdly constant genocidal threats faced by all Israelis, and even as we live still in the shadow of the Shoah – make us less tolerant of their continuation.  But I cannot agree.

I am confident that G-d would rather we knocked over His screen and related to Him as much more great than terrible. Moreover, I suspect that all such screens eventually get knocked over, because at some point a situation comes in which we are convinced that a truly terrible G-d would destroy us.

I suspect this is true of human and national relationships as well. Deterrence via threats of extreme consequences is always a delaying strategy at best. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad strategy, or a short-term strategy – for example, it worked long enough to get us through the Cold War. But I hope and believe that when Eliyahu comes, it will be because we can find ways to bring peace to the world that are not motivated by the constant threat of G-d arriving to annihilate us.

Shabbat shalom!

Coercion in Captivity – a Study in Responsa Chavot Yair

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

Why is the redemption of captives given such importance in halakhah? Granting its significance, why does the Torah not specifically mandate it? I’ll take a somewhat circuitous route to answering those questions.

Responsa Chavot Yair #183 illustrates the gap between halakhic abstraction and human experience in several important ways.  

We rule that Jews (may or) must violate most halakhic prohibitions rather than be killed. In the standard abstract case, an idolater presents the Jew with an either/or: “Violate this prohibition or I will kill you!” The ruling is that Jew should violate the prohibition rather than be killed.

But in the real world, the Jew cannot know whether the either/or is real. The idolater may or may not kill them regardless of whether they agree to violate the prohibition. In such a case, do we rule that any risk that the terms of the bargain are honest justifies the violation? Or do we require some evaluation of the degree of risk?

One might argue that the rule safeik nefashot lehachmir means that any possibility that one’s life is in danger justifies violation. But that rule is not absolute; for example, as Noda B’Yehuda argues, it would be unreasonable to allow all potentially lifesaving medical research and training to take place on Shabbat, even if the potential is infinitesimal.

Allowing Jews to submit to a mere threat might have terrible social consequences in an antisemitic cultural context, particularly once the antisemites learn of this ruling. Halakhah tries to account for this by declaring that all prohibitions must be violated rather than submitting to a threat made for the sole purpose of forcing the violation. But motivations are hard to know with certainty.

Chavot Yair’s case is as follows: A nonJew threatened a Jew: “If you don’t drink yayin nesekh (wine dedicated via libation to idolatry) with me, I will cut off your ear!”. The Jew (chose not to embrace his inner Van Gogh and instead) drank the wine. At least some of his fellows reacted with horror and publicly tagged him a libertine. Was drinking the wine justified?

One might argue that since the nonJew plainly derives no physical enjoyment from the Jew drinking the wine, his motivation must plainly be forcing the violation. If he merely wanted the Jews’ social company, he could have ordered kosher wine! But perhaps he is not interested in religion per se, only in demonstrating that he can utterly dominate the Jew. Or perhaps kosher wine was commercially unavailable, or too expensive, or (in those primitive times before flash-pasteurization) of insufficient quality.

Chavot Yair might have evaded the question by asserting that the wine wasn’t truly yayin nesekh but rather stam yaynam, wine touched by a nonJew, which is only Rabbinically prohibited (formally because of concern that it might have become yayin nesekh; actually because the purpose of the Rabbinic prohibition is to prevent uninhibited socializing.) He mentions in passing the standard ruling that “there is no yayin nesekh at all today as is well-known”. But since the rule is that one may submit, there may be no formal difference between Rabbinic and Biblical violations. Or the rule about not drinking nonkosher wine with nonJews may have had great social significance, so that a technical defense would not have rung true with the community.

Chavot Yair’s halakhic bottom line, if I understand him correctly[1], captures the human ambiguity.

. . . אם הוי דיבור בעלמא וגיזום –

לא היה לו למהר לשתות.

ומ”מ, אם באמת ירא לנפשו

פן יחרה אפו ויריק חרבו פתאום ויעשה אשר זמם –

אין לו חטא  . . .

ואם הי’ יכול להציל עצמו בממונו ולא עשה –

חוששני לו מחטאת, וצריך תשובה קלה . . .

If this was mere speech and threat –

he should not have hurried to drink.

Nonetheless, if he was truly afraid for his life

lest the nonJew be enraged, and his sword strike suddenly, and he do as he plotted –

the Jew bears no sin . . .

But if he had been able to save himself by bribery, and did not do so –

I am concerned that he may ‘owe a sin-sacrifice’, and he needs ‘a light penance’.

However, in a later edition of his responsa, Chavot Yair added an aside which sets aside much of this complexity in one kind of case:

[ובקונטרסים הוכחתי

דשבוי שאמר לו אדונו ‘עשה לי מדורה’ בשבת לחמם או לבשל אצלו, אפילו לא גזים כלל –

שרי,

אם לא ישמע לקול תחנוניו ובכיותו,

אפילו לא גזים,

דמידי ספק נפשות לא יצא,

ושבי כלהו איתנהו ביה.]

[In my notebooks I have proven

that a captive whose master told him on Shabbat “Light a hearth for me” to heat or cook,

even if he did not threaten at all –

(the captive is) permitted to obey, if the master refuses to heed his entreaties and tears,

even if he did not threaten,

because this situation has not departed the bounds of risk to life,

and “captivity included all of these within it”]

A captive is always under ultimate threat, even if the captor is too polite to make the threat explicitly[2].

The discussion of captivity ends with a quote from Rabbi Yochanan on Bava Batra 8b, cited by Rabbah bar Mari as the source for the Rabbinic maxim that “Redemption of captives is a great mitzvah”. Rabbi Yochanan asserts that captivity is worse than famine and death-by-the-sword because it includes them all. I suggest that this means that captivity includes the constant awareness that the captor can starve or kill one at will.

Chavot Yair’s extension and insight is that being under constant threat makes one a slave. In such a circumstance there is no halakhic obligation to calibrate how far to resist in any particular case (although it may be psychologically vital to find pockets of resistance). This is what makes redeeming captives such an important mitzvah – it is the equivalent of redeeming slaves from captivity. And the evil of slavery is the fact of power-over-others more than the extent to which masters utilize their power.

Redeeming Jewish slaves from captivity is a stand-alone Biblical commandment. Talmud Kiddushin 20 interprets Vayikra 25:47-49 as establishing an obligation to redeem a Jew even though he has sold himself voluntarily to a nonJew. Kal vachomer one is obligated to redeem Jews who have been enslaved against their will. So redeeming captives is a “great mitzvah”, an intensification of the Biblical commandment to redeem slaves. It is also an act of imitatio dei, of emulating the G-d Who took the Jews out of Mitzrayim.

But – and this is a very important but – I suggest tentatively that Kiddushin 20b interprets Vayikra 25:50-54 as limiting the obligation to redeem slaves to paying market value for them. This is implied by establishing the means for calculating the redemption price for such slaves in a market under Jewish law.  In other words, the Rabbinic decree against redeeming captives above market value is not a suspension of the law, but rather a prohibition against voluntarily going beyond the requirement of the law.[3]

Shabbat shalom!

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[1] I owe this understanding in significant part to Davida Kollmar.

[2] This awareness of situational threat is mutatis mutandum also necessary in contemporary divorce cases: husbands need not mention the possibility of withholding a get for women to correctly feel threatened.

[3] My analysis of the obligation to redeem captives follows Rav Yehudah Herzl Henkin, Responsa Bnei Banim 1:43, rather than Rav Ovadiah Yosef, Responsa Yabia Omer 10:CM:6. For more detail please listen to the series “Redeeming Captives – At Any Price?” on the Taking Responsibility for Torah podcast. The analysis of and argument from the obligation to redeem slaves is my own based on Kiddushin 20. I welcome critiques and challenges.  

Berov Am Hadrat Melekh, Democracy, and Church-State Issues

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

The phrase berov am hadrat melekh, taken from Mishlei 14:28, is probably invoked most often in contemporary Orthodox conversations to oppose “breakaway minyanim”, or to encourage minyan attendance even when the minyan is assured; this argument has the advantage of applying equally to men and women. The assumed meaning is that G-d as king is more hadarified by one large crowd praying than by several smaller crowds, even if the total number of participants remains the same or decreases.

The Talmud (Yoma 70a and Megillah 27b) uses the phrase in this meaning only to explain hava aminas, halakhic roads not taken. We might have banned selling a synagogue building to a smaller congregation, or required onlookers at one part of a ritual to stay throughout rather than moving to a second, but we don’t. Nonetheless, Magen Avraham (90:15) reasonably assumes that the principle survives the rejection of those specific applications.

Magen Avraham’s own application is surprising. He uses it to explain why a person should pray alone at home at the same time as his synagogue’s minyan rather than waiting to pray with a minyan at home. This shifts the “crowd” from the actual to the virtual, and suggests that breakaways should make sure to meet at the same time as the main shul.

In several other contexts (Sukkah 52b, Pesachim 64b; see also Rosh HaShannah 32b), the Talmud used berov am to explain a bias toward increasing ACTIVE participation. The avodah of the Temple was broken into as many pieces as possible so that each kohen had a role to play. This suggests that multiple simultaneous minyanim might be ideal, on the model I’ve seen several synagogues when there are multiple chiyuvim.

However, Berakhot 53a appears to use the phrase to promote an exactly opposite position: that it is better for one person to vicariously fulfill the obligation of a crowd rather than to have each individual fulfill it for themselves.

Oceans of ink have been spilled to reconcile and unify these meanings. But the simplest solution is that the phrase itself has no single halakhic meaning; rather, it is invoked as a mnemonic for a variety of purposes, some of which are in tension with each other.

(Midrash Mishlei additionally cites Rabbi Chanina bar Chama as praising G-d for preferring the praises of am Yisroel over those of the vastly more numerous (rivei revavot) angels. I don’t understand how this interpretation relates to our verse.)

In all the above contexts, the melekh is G-d. However, RaDaK to Yechekel 46:10 applies the verse to a human king. Yechezkel depicts the nasi in a future Temple as using a private entrance and exit most days, but

on festivals he must come with the am where they come, and leave with them where they leave,

because all of Israel who are there came up for the regel,

and it is his honor/kavod and glory/hadar to come with them and leave with them

because Scripture says “berov am hadrat melekh”.

RaDaK imposes an obligation on the human nasi to contribute to his own hadar by joining the crowds. It’s tempting to consider whether there are theological parallels. For example: Is this why the Shekhinah is present at every minyan?

Regardless, RaDaK carries the crucial implication that any halakhic obligation of hadar toward a king is not about the subordination of some humans to another.Indeed, it might be that the berov am obligation is always best understood as a bias toward joining with the crowd when you share its ideals and purposes, rather than focusing on your private experience. This obligation applies equally to king and commoner.

This democratic-tending understanding is strengthened when we consider berov am in tandem with the later Rabbinic-epigram אין מלך בלא עם = there is no king, i.e. there is no meaningful kingship, without an am. Moreover, it seems to me that this sort of interpretation is necessary if we consider the full verse Mishlei 14:28:

בְּרָב־עָ֥ם               הַדְרַת־מֶ֑לֶךְ

וּבְאֶ֥פֶס לְ֝אֹ֗ם          מְחִתַּ֥ת רָזֽוֹן

With a large am          there is glory for the melekh

But in the absence of a leom          there is fear for the razon

The inverse of hadar/glory is not mechitah/fear unless we understand the presence of the people as constitutive of monarchy rather than as a mere aesthetic flourish. Rashi takes this implication on directly, but with the qualifications necessary for a theological context:

ברב עם = כשהצבור זכאים –

הדרת הקדוש ברוך היא:

ובאפס לאום =

כשאינם דבקים בו

מחתת רזון = חסרון רזנותו = הוא כביכול נותן מכבודו לאלהי נכר

ומשליט את האומות על בניו.

With a large am = when the community is worthy –

there is glory for the Holy Blessed One

But in the absence of a leom =

when they are not attached to Him

there is fear for the razon = as if it were possible, He gives some of His honor to alien gods

and puts the other nations in power over His children

One would not need the “as if it were possible” in the context of human monarchy, nor would the transfer of honor be voluntary. RaLBaG makes this clear:

הדר המלך הוא כשיהיה לו רבוי עם, כי בם יתחזק כנגד הקמי’ עליו,

ואולם בהעדר העם ממנו – יש לו מחתה שיהיה לו רזון וכחש בקום עליו אדם להלחם בו:

The glory of a king is when he has a large populace,

because they strengthen him to stand against his enemies

but when the nation absents itself from him

he fears that he will have razon and weakness when a man arises to do battle with him

RaLBaG seems to be translating razon as thinness, perhaps based on Yeshayahu 24:16. Almost everyone else, however, more plausibly understands razon as in parallelism with melekh and referring to some sort of leader. The issue then becomes whether one prefers to interpret parallel structures as synonymous, so that razon=melekh, or to look for significance in every change. Thus Alshikh for example understands razon as a subordinate to a melekh, while Hoil Mosheh understand a melekh to be a just ruler, who therefore has confidence in his populace, while a razon is a ruler-by-force who therefore lives in fear  that the population will abandon him.

But the exemplar of the position that the second half of a parallel structure must always add meaning is Malbim. I find his interpretation of our verse politically creative, utterly fascinating, and very, very difficult to understand.

A collective that has a melekh/king is called an am,

while a collective that as a unique religion/dat is called a leom.

Roznim are advisors/sarei eitzah,

but there is a difference between a rozen and a yoetz:

Yoatzim address political issues (עניני מדינה) and their advice is public,

whereas roznim deal with hidden matters,

and their mandate includes matters of religion and its laws (עניני הדת וחוקיה) . . .

The hadar of a king happens via a large am,

because there is a distinction between hod and hadar:

hadar is external glory, as relevant to any issue,

and therefore the hadar of a king is proportional to the size of his am,

but the razon who has charge over the laws of the dat –

even if there is an am, but no leom,

meaning that there are no baalei daat,

he is in fear, because he will be unable to accomplish anything.

 As best I can make out, Malbim here acknowledges the “Jewish problem”, namely that we are both an am and a leom, a political and a religious collective. But I don’t understand his political solution. Why should the advice given to the king on religious matters be kept secret? Are the roznim and the dat ultimately subordinate to the melekh, or do they have constitutionally independent spheres of influence? What happens when an am contains members of many leoms?  Any and all help you can give me in figuring this out would be greatly appreciated.

Shabbat shalom!

If You Were G-d

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

If You Were G-d is a tour-de-force pamphlet by the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. Kaplan demonstrates with his signature clarity and reasonableness that it was not at all odd of G-d to choose the Jews; rather, this was the optimal strategy for spreading His ideals throughout humanity, and would be adopted by any omnipotent and omniscient divinity. Put yourself in G-d’s place, and the Torah comes out exactly the same.

One can resist Kaplan’s magnetic literary intellect only by having experienced the likes of Bertrand Russell and (lehavdil/mutatis mutandum) Isaac Asimov, or by wondering whether G-d’s strategy ought to be so readily comprehensible.

The exercise has value nonetheless. So: if you were G-d, and had already chosen the Jews, and they were not living up to Your hopes or expectations, what would You do?

Let’s consider G-d’s options in the context of this week’s haftorah, Yechezkel 36:16-38.

Yechezkel is in the Babylonian exile. In other words, G-d has evicted the Children of Israel from the Land of Israel which He had granted them. This was punishment for their egregious violations of the most severe prohibitions in the Torah, including idolatry, adultery, and murder.

You might consider wiping the Jews out and starting over, perhaps from Yechezkel’s children in order to maintain genetic continuity with promises You made to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov. But Mosheh Rabbeinu pointed out the flaw in that strategy. You are already identified with the Jews to the point that no one will believe that Your only consideration in destroying them was retributive justice. Rather, they will say that G-d was unable to keep His promises to them.

Mosheh Rabbeinu’s argument had a subtext. It’s not just a question of whether G-d had the temporal power to sustain His people in the desert and enable them to conquer the immediately previous conquerors of the Land of Canaan. By destroying the Jewish people, G-d would admit that He could not sustain a satisfactory relationship with them despite all His demonstrations of benevolence and power. Any subsequent relationship with a perfectly obedient nation would be sneered at as a Stepford marriage.

You might hope that the experience of exile would change the Jews’ attitude. But this might be just another fantasy of deterrence through power. Deterrence through power sometimes lowers the odds of other people doing bad things to you, but it is never absolute. That’s not how human psychology works.

So You can’t break the relationship, at least not permanently; You can’t repair it by force; and You can’t repair it via benevolence. What can You do?

The haftorah spells out this dilemma. Exiling the Jews is a desecration of G-d’s Name, because the nations among whom we are exiled will say that He could not protect them. If the Jews behave well in exile, that increases the desecration, because now He has no excuse for having failed to protect them. But if the Jews behave badly, that also increases the desecration, because either the host nations will assume that He stands for bad behavior, or else, they will see how badly the relationship has failed. (At some point, perhaps they will also see His failure to destroy them as nepotistic injustice?)

Perhaps You could try the Stepford Wives solution. Don’t perceptibly destroy the Jews, just change their being!

That would be a deeply cynical reading of Yechezkel 36:26-27. 

וְנָתַתִּ֤י לָכֶם֙ לֵ֣ב חָדָ֔שׁ וְר֥וּחַ חֲדָשָׁ֖ה אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם

וַהֲסִ֨רֹתִ֜י אֶת־לֵ֤ב הָאֶ֙בֶן֙ מִבְּשַׂרְכֶ֔ם וְנָתַתִּ֥י לָכֶ֖ם לֵ֥ב בָּשָֽׂר:

וְאֶת־רוּחִ֖י אֶתֵּ֣ן בְּקִרְבְּכֶ֑ם

וְעָשִׂ֗יתִי אֵ֤ת אֲשֶׁר־בְּחֻקַּי֙ תֵּלֵ֔כוּ וּמִשְׁפָּטַ֥י תִּשְׁמְר֖וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶֽם:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I place in your midst

I will remove the stone heart from your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh.

I will place My spirit in your midst;

I will make it so that you walk within My rules and guard and act in accordance with My laws.

Abravanel tries desperately to avoid this implication. Here is Abravanel:

So that they would not return to sin again,

He will place a new heart and a new spirit within them.

This alludes to the straightening of desires and the rule of the intellect;

and regarding the nullification of the evil inclination, He said:

I will remove the stone heart for your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh,

meaning submissive and subordinate to the intellect, not hard as stone.

The intention of this prediction is not to remove choice and contingency

and that humans will be compelled in their actions,

rather that the Holy Blessed One will perform such wondrous deeds visible to them

that they will be panicked/yifchadu toward Hashem and His good

and there will be in them no tendency toward physical desires, rather toward perfection,

just as in Adam the First before his sin.

But when it says afterward and I will place My spirit in your midst –

this alludes to the spirit of prophecy that will manifest in that time in those ready for it.

This testifies that this prophecy is about the future and was not fulfilled in the Second Temple

because they did not have prophecy among them . . .

I confess that references to Adam the First-ness as a state immune to sin always baffle me. But my focus for now is on Abravanel’s assertion that this prophecy has not yet happened. Why not, if it is the correct strategy?

Also: Do you think Abravanel successfully explains how G-d will maintain His relationship with the Jewish people and yet escape the cycle of sin and retribution? Does he explain why G-d did not adopt this strategy for the Second Temple?

Malbim builds off Abravanel, as he often does. His opening comment on the haftorah states that

This section (beginning verse 16) comes to explain his prior words,

which indicated that the Redemption of Cyrus would not be eternal.

But if restoring the Jews to Israel will not break the cycle, what is the point of the promised next Redemption?

Why would he exile them and then revert and gather them?

Malbim explains that during the Second Temple, when The House of Israel dwelled on their ground – and they made it tamei through their ways and actions –

nonetheless I did not drive them away from My presence,

rather like the tum’ah of a niddah was their way before Me ­–

just as the niddah’s husband separates from her while she menstruates

but awaits her becoming tehorah, when he will return to her,

so also their way; I looked forward to their becoming tahor from their tumah so I would return to them. . .

G-d continually hoped for this taharah, but it never really happened. Instead, his continuing relationship with the Jews – albeit without intimacy – led to constant desecration of His name among the people of the world.

I judged them in accordance with their ways and deeds . .

He came to the nations to which they had come –

G-d came with them into exile to supervise so that their punishment would be to the measure of their sin and tailored, so that they would recognize that it was providential,

but as a result they (the other nations) desecrated my holy Name =

seeing that G-d’s providence was still with the Jews, that He had not abandoned them even in the lands of their enemies to destruction, so why had they left His land? Why hadn’t He returned them to His land, the ideal place for providence? It must be because of His inability . . .

To end this constant desecration,

I had mercy on My holy Name

which the Children of Israel had desecrated via their evil deeds,

which made it necessary to punish them time after time,

with the Name of Heaven being desecrated anew each time.

Therefore . . .  not for your sake . . .

because were I acting for your sake, it would depend on virtue and guilt,

and when they sinned again, He would exile them again.

But since He is not doing it for their sake but rather for the honor of His desecrated Name –  

He is compelled to make it so that they will not sin again,

and so He won’t need to exile them again, and His Name will not be desecrated time after time . . .

and this (He will accomplish) by forcing them to repent

Malbim’s conclusion utterly fails to explain why G-d did not adopt this strategy during the Second Temple. Moreover, “forcing them to repent” a way of evading the real issue, which is whether G-d and the nation of Jewish human beings can have a successful and mutually satisfying relationship.

If you were G-d, I suspect You would regard Abravanel and Malbim as counsels of despair, not solutions. Instead of implementing them, you would continue tinkering with the formula of intimacy and distance in the hope of finding a balance that works at least for a time, because the temporary experience of a love given freely is worth more than an eternity of compelled worship.

The belief that the current Jewish return from exile is necessarily and inevitably permanent is a counsel of despair. It assumes that G-d has given up on the Jewish people, and that at some point soon He will transform our natures or compel our repentance. I’d rather believe that we remain in a genuine relationship whose outcomes depend on our actions. I hope and believe that G-d wants that as well.

Shabbat shalom!

Mussar for Messianists

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

If the Third Temple were to be built tomorrow, what emotions should we feel today? Think for a moment. (This parenthesis is inserted to give you time to think.)

I suspect that most of you thought in terms of joy and anticipation. Certainly those are part of what we should be feeling. What about apprehension?

Let me be clearer. Of course we would be worried that things might go wrong and prevent construction. But should we be worried that things might go right?

My high school mashgiach often made the cynical comment that American Jews have trouble rooting for the Messianic Era to arrive because it would lower their standard of living; we’d be in inadequately air- conditioned caravans in the Negev for years.

But I’m not speaking here of material concerns. Are there reasons to worry that things could go wrong religiously?

Talmud Yoma 69b tells us that a sense of unease overtook the Jews as they danced for the inauguration of the Second Temple. The prophets on-site identified its cause: the yetzer hora laavodah zarah (inclination to idolatry), which caused the destruction of the First Temple, was dancing among them! The Jews fasted for thirty days and thirty nights. A fiery lion then came out of the Holy of Holies.

I understand this to mean that the impulse for religion is inseparable from the yetzer hora laavodah zarah. They are both expressions of the same human impulse/desire/need for spirituality. This yetzer got out of control during the First Temple and led to its destruction.

The Jews mistakenly thought that exile had been sufficient to purge them of this yetzer. Their mistake became evident immediately after the new Temple was built! They responded by toning down the spirituality of the Second Temple. It therefore lacked the miracles and the passion of the First Temple, to the point that Nachmanides believes that it was only a placeholder for an eventual true Redemption.

Netziv argues that toning down the spirituality inevitably meant upgrading the intellectualism. The initial leaders of Second Temple Judaism essentially chose to replace Prophetic with Rabbinic Judaism.

Our Talmudic story presents this decision as tragic but necessary. It succeeds in the sense that that the Second Temple endures, until it is destroyed because of a breakdown in social relationships. Perhaps the breakdown in social relationships could have been prevented by stronger communal spirituality. But our story’s perspective is that the Temple would have been destroyed almost immediately had the (genuine) spirituality not been dampened.

I think of this story whenever someone suggests that increased spirituality is a panacea for problems facing the Jewish community. Certainly it is not; spirituality is necessary but also dangerous, and we must always calibrate for our reality.

The caution and restraint at the Second Temple’s inauguration came from hard memories of the destruction of the First. Were there any such voices of caution at the inauguration of the First Temple? Ralbag to this week’s haftorah (1 Melakhim 9:1) thinks that Hashem Himself was such a voice.

The thirty-third moral is to inform about the extent of Hashem the Blessed’s Providence over Israel.

For this reason you will find that because the Divine Wisdom predicted that Shlomoh would sin, and his descendants, and that this would be a cause for the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel from off its land, therefore it went to an extreme to warn him against this in what it said to him in G-d’s second appearance to him, so that he would be careful of Hashem’s Will, and command his sons and his house after him to guard the path of Hashem.

And to this purpose He informed him of the exile of Israel from the Land and the destruction of the Temple, if they did not observe the path of Hashem, he and his sons.

Hashem had already said this to Shlomoh at the time of the Temple’s building, to caution him to observe all the mitzvot of Hashem the Blessed.

For this very reason, at the time that he sinned to Hashem, Hashem the Blessed informed him of the punishment that He would bring upon his descendants because of this sin, so they would repent and straighten the crooked.

But he was not cowed by this to the point of rebuking his wife,

and also did not command his sons after him to observe the path of Hashem.,

and this was the reason for the exile of Israel from the land and for the destruction of the Temple.

(Note: Ralbag’s reconciles Divine foreknowledge with human free will by saying that G-d knows how beings without free will would choose.)

Ralbag apparently reads the founding of the Temple as a risky time. This reading has deep roots in chumash. Consider the possibility that the Golden Calf to some extent resulted from G-d’s legitimization of iconography and profoundly immanent religious experience via the initial command to build the Tabernacle. Consider as well that the entire category of avodah zarah is likely named after the eish zarah brought by Nadav and Avihu at the Tabernacle’s inauguration.

It seems that anyone who foresees a Temple being rebuilt imminently would do well to look for signs of dangerously mistaken religious passion among their fellow believers. If they don’t see any, most likely either their prediction is wrong or else their perceptiveness is limited.

In the Talmudic story, the Jews succeed in “killing” the inclination to idolatry. They seek to follow up this victory by “killing” the inclination to sexual sin as well. But being cautious types, they experimented first, and discovered that even imprisoning this inclination led to finding no eggs under chickens.

I don’t think this is an empirical claim that sexual desire is necessary for egg-production. Rather, it symbolizes the idea that eliminating a yetzer hora always comes at great cost.  Sometimes the cost is worth it, and sometimes it isn’t.

It seems intuitive to me that both the productivity and the dangers of these impulses are heightened by arousal. It also seems intuitive to me that the impulse for redemption, the Messianic impulse, reflects another such innate human drive with great potential for both construction and destruction.

Many of us in the Religious Zionist community are in a state of Messianic arousal. The extreme version of this yields a sense that the State of Israel leads inevitably to a rebuilt Third Temple. If so, we should be looking very, very carefully to ensure that some corrupt version of that drive – perhaps even something idolatrous – is dancing with us. If we can’t see it, and therefore can’t take precautions against it, then  either we are mistaken that Redemption is imminent, or else we are blind to our own desires.

That may seem a false dichotomy – why can’t this Redemption be different than the previous ones, and involve a fundamental positive change in human nature? My answer is twofold:

First, I see quite a lot of evidence in the masoret that the First Temple was also intended to be the permanent and last. According to Ralbag, G-d sought to prevent the sin that led to its eventual destruction.

Second, it seems difficult to me, tending to profound inconsistency, to simultaneously argue for a Religious Zionism that insists that human beings as-we-are can accomplish key steps toward Redemption, and then for a Redemption that will fundamentally alter human nature. I don’t think it is coherent to suggest that the State be achieved by human force so that G-d can send a flaming prefab Temple down from Heaven.

I argue for a nonMessianic religious Zionism. That position may be a minority in the Religious Zionist world, and in any case, I certainly can’t demonstrate it empirically. But I hold that I can say on the basis of tradition that those who do see the State of Israel as Messianic have a special obligation to be vigilant for corruptions of the religious Zionist impulse.  They must be looking for and valorizing those sorts of critiques, so that they can identify and perhaps conquer or at least contain the yetzer hora that is certainly dancing among them.

Shabbat shalom!

Lessons for Jewish Education from King Yehoash’s Religious Arc

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

How responsible are teachers for their students’ souls, and for how long? When I taught high school, I told students that I would evaluate myself as a teacher by the condition of their souls ten years after graduation.

That was a semifacetious reaction to a real problem. Teachers, schools et al often evaluate success and failure by what they see from students while they have power over them. Thus when a day school or yeshiva/seminary student doesn’t turn out shomer/et Shabbat, or tzanua, or ethical, it’s the fault of their “secular college”. That is wrong empirically because nonconforming students hide their true beliefs and practices, whether out of fear or out of love (not wanting to hurt their teachers).

I think it is also wrong pedagogically, because our goal should be to create autonomous commitments that can stand independently. But that may be too harsh, or too focused on an environment which makes choosing not to be frum a “live option” for many students. It is true that only “love that is not dependent on anything” endures forever; but does that mean that dependent love has no value? Doesn’t that position run the risk that almost no one will get married?  Maybe autonomous spirituality can happen only after a long process of growth, ala “mitokh shelo lishmoh ba lishmoh”.   

This week’s haftorah – and its darker version in Ketuvim – offers an opportunity to consider these questions.

Background: The infant prince Yehoash was rescued from Queen Atalyah’s attempted extermination of the Davidic line and hidden in the Temple. Seven years later, Yehoyada HaKohen produced him as the legitimate heir and ended Atalyah’s reign.

2Kings 12:1 tells us that

Yehoash did what was straight in the eyes of Hashem

all his days

that he was shown/mentored/paskened by Yehoyada HaKohen

וַיַּ֨עַשׂ יְהוֹאָ֧שׁ הַיָּשָׁ֛ר בְּעֵינֵ֥י יקוק

כׇּל־יָמָ֑יו

אֲשֶׁ֣ר הוֹרָ֔הוּ יְהוֹיָדָ֖ע הַכֹּהֵֽן׃

Yehoash launched a major refurbishing of the Temple during his reign. However, a threatened invasion from Aram led him to strip the Temple of its valuables in order to successfully buy off the Aramean invaders. A court revolt then led to his assassination.

That is the story as our haftorah from the Book of Kings tells it. Verse 20 helpfully adds that more information can be found in the Chronicle of the Kings of Judah.

2Chronicles Chapter 24 informs us that Yehoyada predeceased Yehoash; that Yehoash’s servants persuaded him to idolatry shortly after Yehoyada’s death; and that the stripping of the Temple to buy off Aram took place after this regression. Moreover, Yehoash’s later actions were condemned by a series of prophets, culminating in Yehoyada’s son Zekharyah, whom Yehoash executes, with Zekharyah calling G-d’s judgment on him while dying. The Arameans soon invade again and plunder. Yehoash is then killed by the same or a different set of servants.

With Chronicles in mind, Chazal understand 2Kings 14:1 to say that Yehoash acted properly only while being mentored by Yehoyada. But a naïve reader of Kings would be shocked by Chronicles. Regardless, the intent of Kings plainly is to present an overall positive image of Yehoash and his reign, whereas Chronicles presents it as tragic and justly ended. Why does Tanakh preserve both?

One entirely reasonable approach is to expand the question outward – why does Tanakh include two histories of the whole monarchic period, one much more favorable to the Davidic line than the other? But my focus this week is on the Yehoash sections as stand-alones. In that context, the core issue is how to evaluate a life that starts well and ends badly, with the fulcrum being the death of a core teacher.

Let me emphasize that Kings and Chronicles are not disagreeing factually, only about how to interpret, and therefore how to present, the agreed reality. One possible explanation of their perspectives is this: For Chronicles, Yehoash’s piety was always shallow, because it was rooted in subordination to Yehoyada. That subordination was unhealthy; the discomfort it causes leads inevitably to the killing of Zekharyah. For Kings, Yehoash, like all human beings, was constantly exercising free will. His eventual bad choices were not in any way inevitable, and did not diminish the meaningfulness of his earlier good choices.

Mesilat Yesharim Chapter 23 seems to me to take the second approach:

Another eroder of humility (in people) is joining together with or using human beings who are flatterers, who to advance their own interests will praise and exalt him in order to steal his heart with their flattery, by expanding whatever positive traits he has infinitely, or ascribing to him (positive traits) that he lacks entirely, and sometimes his character is the opposite of what they are praising him for. Bottom line, the human mind is susceptible, and his nature is weak and easily seduced, especially in matters that he naturally inclines to. Therefore, when he hears there things spoken by someone by someone he trusts in, they enter him like venom and poison, and he falls into the domain of arrogance and is broken.

Here is our paradigm: Yoash, who acted well all the days that he was mentored by his teacher Yehoyada HaKohen, but after the death of Yehoyada, his servants came and began to flatter hum and to magnify his praises, to the point of deeming him a divinity, and then the king heeded them.

See this clearly, that most officers and kings, or anyone with ability, of whatever spiritual level, stumble and are corrupted because of the flattery of those who serve them.

By contrast, Kovetz Teshuvot HaRAv Elyashiv 3:18, citing Rav Yehonatan Eybescheutz, blames Yehoyada’s naivete:

Chazal said (Midrash Rabban VaEira 8:3) regarding Yehoash King of Judah:

“From when Yehoyada died, the officers of Judah came to bow to the king and made him a god.

They said to him: “One who enters the house of the Holy of Holies even for a moment is in danger of death, and you were hidden in it for seven years! You are fit to be a god, because if you were not a god, you would not have survived seven years in the house of the Holy of Holies!”

They said to him that it was so (or: He agreed that this was so), and he accepted being made a god.

Rabbi Yehonatan author of the Tumim was astonished by this:

Yehoash has consistently done what was straight in the eyes of Hashem, following all that he had been instructed by Yehoyada his teacher, so how, in his old age, after Yehoyada’s death, did he reverse and decline? Why was the influence of his teacher ineffective?

He replied:

Everything that Yehoyada taught him – endured, but he never consider teaching him about Avodah Zarah, since he did not think that Yehoash could read such a level (at which Avodah Zarah would be a live option), and since “his teacher did not teach him”, therefore when his teacher died, he descended wondrously.

We might take Rav Elyashiv far beyond his intent by comparing Yehoyada to teachers that seek to hide intellectual challenges to the standard Orthodox narrative and worldview from students who will inevitably be exposed to them.

Malbim offers a different critique:

All the days that he mentored him,

meaning the whole time that Yehoyada was mentoring, because he sinned after Yehoyada’s death,

and in Chronicles it explicitly says All the days of Yehoyada the Cohen.

I distinguish between horaah and limmud, as I wrote in my commentary to Vayikra.

This means to say that Yehoyada did not teach/lamed well, rather horah, he showed him,

and when the moreh (Yehoyada) died – he (Yehoash) strayed from the path,

which would not have happened had he learned to understand well using the method of limmud.

Malbim’s reference is to his commentary to Vayikra Parashat Metzora #117:

A melamed habituates his student, whether in a matter of practice or in a wisdom-discipline,

while a moreh merely shows it to him once.

Limmud is sometimes related to things that emerge from the emotional wisdom of the teacher and his mind,

whereas horaah is only about things that exist in reality or that he received from his teachers or from Hashem, not things generated by measured judgment.

For Malbim, Yehoyada failed because Yehoash’s education – despite having every possible advantage of charisma and circumstance – was never internalized, never became something that he could use independently to reach conclusions that were truly his own.

Including the tension between Kings and Chronicles in Tanakh, without seeking to reconcile them, is a useful warning against the belief that any educational method is foolproof.  We cannot fairly blame all religious personality outcomes we dislike on religious education methods we dislike.

But I think it is worth examining the extent to which we are willing and able to confront the full gamut of temptations to which our students are exposed. And I think we need the toughness to be willing to face our students’ skepticism while we have them in our classrooms and institutions, in the hope and belief that more often than not, this will yield autonomous commitment.

We do not have the option of hiding our students in the Temple forever – certainly not if that deprives them of the opportunity to become king, but the same is true of many other opportunities to accomplish worthwhile things in the world.

Shabbat shalom!

Was Making the Golden Calf a Violation of Halakhah?

(significantly revised from 2019)

by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper

According to my father z”l, his father did not sing the stanza “Tzeitkhem l’shalom” (Go in/to peace) on Friday nights because it’s rude to rush guests out. My wife’s family sings “Tzeitkhem” but omits “Barkhuni” (Bless me in/to peace) on the ground that asking angels for blessings violates Rambam’s Fifth Principle of Faith, which forbids praying to Heavenly beings intermediaries. Deborah and I have agreed to disagree about this. We sometimes hum along to each other’s verses.

Here’s how I frame the issue to guests: Should we give more weight to mitzvot bein adam lachaveiro (interpersonal), or rather to mitzvot bein adam lamakom (=between humans and G-d)? To maintaining derekh eretz, or to avoiding avodah zarah? Then I justify my received custom by quoting King David: “Let us please fall at the hand of Hashem, for His mercies are numerous, and let me not fall at the hand of a human being.”

That framing assumes a false dichotomy. We could omit both stanzas, and just leave the angels standing awkwardly in our dining room (“In every other house they ask us to bless them?!?”) until they decide to leave. Or we could add “Shuvkhem l’shalom” (=return in peace)[1], which mitigates the rudeness.

But students tell us that our family’s eccentric pattern of sounds and silences beautifully models for them the ability to disagree passionately and yet respect each other’s practices. (For our children, the punchline of the old Jewish joke applies: “That was the custom: to fight about it!”)

I initially thought that Deborah’s objection to Barkhuni was simply wrong. After all, Yaakov Avinu detains an angel “until you bless me”, and asks that his grandchildren be blessed by “the angel who has redeemed me from all evil”! I eventually learned that the objection was reliably attributed to R. Chayyim Volozhin, but with all respect, still could not understand how it could be squared with the verses about Yaakov[2]. The more serious theological problem I saw with “Shalom Aleikhem” is that people tend to sing not “melekh malkhei hamelakhim” (King who is king of all kings) but rather “melekh malakhei hamelakhim” (King of the messengers of kings).

Netziv’s commentary to Shemot 32:2 made me rethink.

Netziv starts from the classic question: How could the great Aharon haKohen have enabled idolatry by making the Golden Calf? He rejects out of hand the notion that Aharon acted out of fear for his life. He does not even raise his radical version of aveirah lishmah (sinning for the sake of Heaven), according to which a violation of halakhah can sometimes be justified on consequentialist grounds. He also ignores the Midrashic claim that Aharon was surprised by the spontaneous emergence of a calf from the gold he melted. Instead, Netziv argues that Aharon must have had a formally correct halakhic argument to justify making the Calf.

Netziv contends that G-d extended the perimeter of the prohibition against avodah zarah in reaction to the Calf. Praying to intermediaries that carry out Hashem’s will was originally permitted, with the desire for mediation understood as a legitimate expression of fear of Heaven. But the experience of the Calf demonstrated that established intermediaries would inevitably become substitutes. Perhaps that experience also created the social-religious will necessary for a ban on intermediaries to be effective rather than generating a worse counterrevolution.

The Torah articulated this prohibition (immediately) after the Giving of the Torah via the Ten Statements:

“Do not make with me elohim of silver, and elohim of gold you must not make for yourselves”… This is not actual avodah zarah, which was prohibited to them in the Ten Statements when He said “You must not have other elohim…”as there the meaning is an overseer with power, that we would chas v’shalom believe that The Holy Blessed One transferred His management to some middlebeing,but this prohibition, that comes after the Giving of the Torah,comes to add a ban even in a manner where the middlebeing will ask Hashem for our needs.

This is actually permitted, as I explained regarding the above verse “Behold I send an angel…” (23:20) … when he manages us via an angel, even though it is possible to ask Him directly, nonetheless there is no sin chas v’shalom in asking the angels to seek mercy for us from Him the Blessed…

but all this refers only to mere requests, but not to making a fixed form or idol to receive from Hashem and give to us, which we were cautioned against after the Ten Statements… but this prohibition was not yet known to Aharon, all the more so to the masses of Israel… (so this) was an accidental violation of a prohibition that he had as yet no responsibility to know, but great corruption came from this…

When Yaakov demanded a blessing from the angel, the Calf had not yet happened. However, after the disaster of the Calf, G-d ‘built a fence around the Torah’ by forbidding us to addressing requests to intermediaries even when the ultimate addressee of our requests is clearly G-d, Who alone has the capacity to fulfill or reject them. So “Barkhuni” can be forbidden even though by singing it we follow in the footsteps of Yaakov Avinu.

Netziv does not discuss “Barkhuni’ directly, and Deborah considers this defense of her position more problematic than the challenge from Yaakov. I too will cheerfully continue to sing Barkhuni rather than accept Netziv’s explanation.

But having thought of applying Netziv to Barkhuni, I looked to see if anyone had made the connection explicitly. I looked in vain. But the search led me to discover that the issue goes back much further than I had realized. An excellent summary and analysis of the literature (relating to 32 separate piyyutim or teflllot!) can be found in an article by Rabbi Shlomo Sperber in the journal Yeshurun, Volume 3 (5757), which I found on the Otzar HaChokhmah site but is publicly available at www.beureihatefila.com.  

Rabbi Sperber’s earliest source is a responsum from Rav Sherira Gaon that accepts as a matter of course that one prays to angels for some matters, and directly to G-d for others. Rav Sherira uses this to explain why, when Rav states that one must not pray for one’s needs in Aramaic, Rav Yochanan explains that angels don’t understand Aramaic. (He concludes that one need not be concerned for this in practice, but raises no theological objections). Nonetheless, such prayers are not found elsewhere in Geonic literature (with the possible exception of Siddur Rav Amram Gaon). But they are produced in a flurry in early medieval Ashkenaz, to the dismay of the Maimonideans, and the polemics develop from there.

Rabbi Sperber concludes by publishing a responsum of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch that offers a valuable model for dealing with many contemporary conflicts, which so often depend on whether we are willing to read each other’s words and opinions generously.

Human requests for angels to request from The Holy Blessed One on their behalf is a common phenomenon that is brought down in Chazal on Sanhedrin 44b:

“Rav Yochanan said: A person should always seek mercy that all bolster his strength”,

and Rashi explains “that the ministering angels should assist him, and not oppose him from above”.

Also on Shabbat 12b: “A person should never ask for his needs in Aramaic . . . because the ministering angels won’t relate to him . . . but a sick person is different because the Presence is with him”,

and Rashi explains that “the (sick person) who prays does not need the ministering angels to relate to him

to bring his prayer within the Curtain.”

Nonetheless, these statements can be understood however one wishes.

However, you can certainly find a way of justifying the piyyut “Makhnisei rachamim” on the basis of these citations.

It would be absurd and disingenuous to present Rav Hirsch as a model of theological tolerance who prized communal unity over truth. Rather, he explicitly and compellingly self-identified with the zealotry of Pinchas/Eliyahu.

Moreover, Aharon’s error teaches us that compromise and unity are not supreme values. Sometimes one must call out: “Whoever is for G-d – to me!”, even at the cost of civil strife or electoral strength, even when the other side has a technically defensible halakhic argument.

But in the Book of Joshua, Pinchas prevents civil war by accepting the claim of the Tribes in TransJordan that their altar was not idolatrous. Rav Hirsch’s commitment to theological truth is similarly tempered here by a commitment to accurately understanding others’ religious expressions in their own terms, and to defend them where a defense is available.

Maybe only zealots capable of turning down opportunities to express their zealotry against fellow humans are capable of making positive contributions to religious society.

Shabbat shalom!

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[1] When I published the previous sentence in 2019, I was certain that adding shuvkhem leshalom was a traditional if rarely chosen option. However, www.israelnationalnews.com/news/381269 reports that when Ishay Ribo performed on 1/12 for the return of our hostages, “To the traditional verses bidding the angels to arrive and depart in peace, Ribo added a new verse – ‘Return in peace’.” Was I being prophetic in 2019?

Disappointingly, no; Gershon Klapper found a reference to the verse in an account of a 2012 JTS graduation, and in an Israeli musical performance pre 10/7. But I was not aware of either in 2019. So I welcome more information as to where “Shuvkhem” developed.

[2] Hebrew Wikipedia now informs me that the attribution is disputed by Rabbi Naftali Hertz,סידור הגר”א בנגלה ובנסתר, ירושלם תרנ”ה, דף פה ע”א