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I have kept out of the fray and much of this post was written before the asifa but I was way too busy to post my comments due to finals, MA defense et. al.

First, the broader Satmar context: The Hungarian Hasidim are not following some pre-Enlightenment relic, rather a 1950’s product. Reb Yoelish Teitelbaum was important for rebuilding and recreating Hungarian Hasidism after the war by collecting all survivors from all over Galicia and Hungary. According to Poll, Reb Yoilish turned them into petit bourgeois of store keepers, merchants, and American trades. He made them adapt modern medicine, clocks, electricity, bookkeeping, and the way of the modern world so that in regard to “material culture” they were of this world. No more folk medicine, magic, graveyard rituals, or rural Judaism. (If I had more time, I would cite some teshuvot where he says that we dont do things like in the old country.) Since life in America needs a newspaper, he founded one. He taught them the world of apartment life, NYC bureaucracy, voting, and transit. Yes, he was obsessed with stockings and hosiery but that was not his major contribution in life. He also made everyone dress in shtreimel and capote, even if they dressed in work shirts and caps before the war, to look different from the goyim. For a good study of the changes of the 1960’s, see Solomon Poll’s readable 1970 book on Satmar, The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg: A study on the Sociology of Religion. George Kranzler’s book is also good but better yet study Reb Yoiish’s letters and responsa. (Today’s authors waste all their time talking about his politics.). Electrical timers became “shabbos clocks” and modern hospitals needed a new form of bikur holim. He created a community for the 1960’s and now there has been enough social and political to warrant some leadership for guidance for the new challenges. But they lack new leadership.

However, it is important to note that there were 1930’s Eastern European rabbis, even some Agudah members, who were proud that they and their students resisted electricity, light bulbs, telephones, beds, and indoor plumbing. There were strong Luddite and anti-medicine trends before the war. In an alternate history, it would be interesting to imagine that if WWII had not occurred how these Jewish Luddite and Amish thinking groups would have continued and played themselves out.

Satmar Website- For those who remember, there were one or two Satmar websites in 1997-1998, that were competing with Chabad. They were removed after a few months.

On assifos: The traditional term for a gathering was a kenes or yarah kallah. The term seems to have taken on its current meaning sometime in the late 1990’s for gathering by organizations with lay leadership like Yad laAhim, Keren Birchas Shmuel, or Pe’elim. It got transferred to gatherings called by rabbinic leadership in 2005, but already in 2004 Leib Pinter anachronistically used the term in an Artscroll to discuss an Agudah kenes of prewar Europe. Hmm..
We then have in quick succession a number of assifos. See any patterns?

2005 – for bnos yisrael and a good shidduch
2005 against the internet
2005 tzniut
2006 against the internet by Rabbis R. Ephraim Wachsman and R. Mattisyahu Solomon.
2008 – tzniut
2010 – rubashkins [This was Chabad and not Lakewood or Hungarian.]
2011 – heart-death definition of the end of life
2011- anti-eruv
2011 Leiby Kletzky
Fall 2011 – in BMG- before Tishrei banning the internet and smart phones with both Rav Kotler and R. Mattisyahu Solomon
Fall 2011 internet- both R. Mattisyahu Solomon and Skulner Rebbe-
This big asifa was announced then in September and why would you expect different speeches for the larger venue than the originals in sept?
Fall 2011 against internet in Boro Park

R. Mattisyahu Solomon has been concerned for six years. He has been repeating himself for six years. This asfia was just a culmination of a number of asifos. Here is the write-up by Mississippi Fred of the 2006 asifa and if anyone wants I have mp3s of the internal Lakewood Elul 2011 asifa.(Very large zip file- It was sent to me for the halber –shabbos mention). If R. Mattisyahu Solomon has been repeating himself for six years, then why did anyone expect a new message? He said what he had to say in 2006- 2011. Is it his Torah method to consult some psychologists, social workers, and web filter companies to come up with a new message or give a practical message?

How big is 40, 000 and another 10, 000 in another stadium?
The West Indian-American Day Carnival brings together three million merrymakers to the streets of Brooklyn. September 3.
National Puerto Rican Day Parade has nearly two million people. June 11.
NYC Gay PrideFest Parade hosts more than one million participants
The Celebrate Israel day parade which has become the Modern Orthodox pride parade gets over 30, 000.
The March in Washington in 2000 organized by Honelin and Avi Weiss got over 100, 000 (subject to debate how much over 100k)

Evangelicals, Muslims, and others

Ultra- orthodox Jews are not the first to do this. Evangelicals started with stadium gatherings in the 1990’s for men’s problems and for them it is a regular part of their preaching.. However, the better analogies are the large gathering against the internet in Egypt and Turkey, with the same dynamic of being secular states with a minority who want a more sectarian approach. Turkey bans censorship so it will be a self-imposed ban that many are trying to make public. The direct similarity of the worst elements here is to the recent anti- internet rally by Muslims in Indonesia they have a rapidly changing country. There in Indonesia, we talk bans, exclusions, and fighting back. Here is the US, we already have Mormons ready to work together with Orthodox Jews to ban the internet. There really is an issue with the internet that may take a while to find guidelines without censorship. Remember, 1930’s movies had no ratings and then most countries created ratings systems.

A peeve of mine is the absolute Jewish ignorance and making themselves feel better by comparing it to papal infallibility. This should be a complete post but listen up Jews. Papal infallibility only applies for definitions of doctrine promulgated publicly. The only clear example in the 20th century is Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII, 1950, defining the Assumption of Mary. But when the pope speaks privately or even gives a public speech or homily it is not infallible. So too when he issues letters, positions, and statements they are not infallible. And certainly nothing he says about policy, social theory, or sciences is infallible. I repeat there was only one clear case in the 20th century and several disputed ones. Papal Encyclicals, Vatican councils and Magisterium statements are binding as practice because they have authority, not because of infallibility. There are levels of tolerated dissent and debate. But certainly personal Papal opinions do not stifle legitimate discussion.

Now, the new stuff after the asifa itself. I gave into my evil inclination and listened to the event as it happened, however here is a video recording of the event. Things I notice.

There seems to be a new alliance of Lakewood and the Hungarians that has been growing in past years. Nobody thought to discuss the alliance or get separate opinions from Satmar, Belz, and Lakewood. Those most in the know, did not seek to understand how each group related to it.
All speakers spoke a pidgin and the translation from Yiddish to Yiddish was a great display of different language usages.
It did go off the rails the internet filter company was to have had a display or tech-expo, which groups were included was still open days before the event, speeches ran overtime, the language was not coordinated, the order seems to have gotten messed up, R. Ephraim Wachsman was listed as moderator just hours beforehand. Yet, for most it was the chance for an outing, some mussar, a few derashos, and to be reminded of new problems. The language of the destruction of the holy vessels is standard for their sectarian worldview. There is talk of another one next year and yes it still created enough of a buzz for the Haredi world to create guidelines over the course of the coming year.

Since this is a structural change based on many changes since the 1960’s, and based on reading and listening to the prior asifot, I did not think there was one issue of the internet. The issue was change –same-sex marriage, new knowledge and technology, and those pesky Zionists with their Tal bill. The language that the internet is destroying holiness and is animalistic and klipot is standard for items rejected in Satmar. Outsiders were busy pilpulim the implications for a clear answer, but it was basically banned in BMG since Tishrei and in the Hasidic groups- what counts is the version in the takonos.

Great op-ed at the NJJN by Andy Silow-Carrol on why everyone is fixated on this.

But none of this questionable press fully explains the Jewish majority’s fixation on haredim and their sometimes questionable behavior. The truth is that to be a Jew is to identify with other Jews, no matter how their choices or lifestyles differ from your own. We cultivate this sense of peoplehood.
The haredim compound this sense of collective responsibility — and guilt — by looking as they do. The haredi uniform of black hat, black coat, and beard shouts “JEW” in capital letters. Arrest a haredi rabbi and you’re not just indicting a Jew — you’re indicting an archetypical Jew.
But it’s not just misbehavior that fuels our fixation on the fervently Orthodox. For good and bad, the haredim represent a version of Judaism we thought we left behind with the Enlightenment. Jewish success has been associated with Enlightenment values: higher education, scientific inquiry, cultural achievement, freedom of conscience. Jump ahead a century or two and you can add feminism and acceptance of gays and lesbians.
Haredim push buttons among the most and least engaged Jews. Observant Jews who aren’t haredi cannot forgive the “black hats” for suggesting that Torah values and modernity are in conflict. Many observant Jews will say that Torah comes alive only when it encounters the real world and all its shmutz. To drag Jews and their Torah behind a self-made ghetto wall is a hillul Hashem, a desecration of Torah and its real intentions. Read the rest Here

However, what I don’t understand is the great amount of modern Orthodox hostility to the event, even facebook pages making fun. Do you get involved with Satmar takanos in general? Do you discuss the stockings, hair coverings, and mikvah rules? Are you going to tell them your Modern Orthodox posek says you don’t need the stocking so it is OK not to wear them or that your have decided for them that they dont have to wear the “Palm” thickness? Do you regularly make fun of Lakewood for not having the same rules as YU? Shall the modern Orthodox tell Rav M. Solomon that they know better about what is bitul Torah for our age? They are separate communities with separate standards.

There was a nervous need to macht a gelechter fin de asifa. Was it a sense of superiority or anxiety? Provincial narcissism or unreal grandiosity? Do you ever play by the same rules as those communities? Their minhag is not going to bring in tech guys and a psychologist to speech about practical solutions. The patterns of derashos are usually four minutes on the practical topic and the rest is mussar and castigation, its not your style but it is theirs. College and public libraries can be used for good, but then they would not be Hungarian Hasidim but modern. Why is your approach different than a liberal rabbi criticizing an Orthodox conference for their lack of academic and social science knowledge, lack of social responsiveness, lack of the historical setting of a text, and how they can show you how to live a better life as non-Orthodox. When a modern Orthodox rabbi takes a piece of pop-psych from 25 years ago and uses it together with a tangential Rav Soloveitchik story for a major talk to address a social problem, do you want people to groan and make fun? No, because this is your minhag. What gives?

Two months ago, there was a conference at the National Library in Israel to commemorate thirty years since the death of Gershom Scholem. The videos are exceptionally high quality in both audio and visual, so one can see the entire pantheon on Hebrew University scholars. Almost all of the presentations were polished and within time limits, not usually Israeli academic traits. Several were mechanical summaries of Scholem’s contribution to a topic or why he took a certain approach. Some of the highlights were:
Yehudah Liebes at his clearest presentation of his philological method applied to “rosh hermenutica demalka” of Zohar 15a. He connected the phrase to idea of Rashbi as author and traced the heroic figure who reveals secrets back to the myth of Orpheus and forward to the writing of Nathan of Gaza and his influence on the writings of the Gra and Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz. He has given these ideas as separate papers, all available online. But here we see him open a text, the way he does in his class.
Moshe Idel showed how Scholem hide his experiential attempts to work practice Abulafia and it only appears in his posthumous diary. As a neat lecture, he showed how Abulafia represented for Scholem diversity in Kabblah and that as he suppressed his interest in Abulafia he also made kabbalah monolithic.
Tzipi Kaufman showed how Scholem’s studies of Hasidut lacked questions about lumdanut, about diverse social roles, and about the importance of gestures and embodied practices.
Shalom Ratzabi showed how Scholem’s Zionism was not innovative in that it was part of the general approach of German Jews; they wanted Zionism to be ethics and religion, but had an aversion to any political element. As Hugo Bergman said- their Zionism is after having mastered Fichte not as fleeing from the uneducated shtetl. For Scholem, using traditional Jewish terms for Zionism would rob them of their ethical dimensions.
Yonatan Meir discusses Scholem’s avoidance of the Yeshivat Mekubalim in Jerusalem- yet shows that he still collected their works. He brought up a topic already started by Idel, that Scholem not only believed that history can only be written about past dead objects but like Walter Benjamim the angel of history leave a path of destruction and we are only left with an ineffable attempt to grasp lost secrets.

Here is the full program.
Here is the Liebes lecture and here are links to all the others.
Liebes maintains an updated website with pdf’s of all his articles. The top bar opens pages that contain full texts of everything he wrote sorted by myth, zohar, ari, classical studies, reviews, and classroom material.

Nice little piece in Zeek bases on the dozens of introduction to kabbalah written by those in the 13th Castille school. Lachter points out how the idea of esotericism is based on certain texts like Nahmanides and the Zohar and not on this wide spread 13th century mid-brow literature.Idel has already noticed both the midbrow second-tier of intelligentsia involved in these texts and that for most 13th readers the most important fact of the kabblah was how to do mizvot properly. Lachter offers us a transcription of a paragraph that commences to teach the reader the secrets of how to pray. The latter was important because according to the Kabbalists the philosophic- Maimonidean culture of the era caused many of the educated laity who did not pray or keep positive commandments since they figured they already grasped the Maimonidean philosophic meaning of God’s unity and attributes. They read Maimonides as if he was the Islamic haver of the Kuzari, a philosophic religion without need for most commandments. Kabbalah came to the rescue and offered supernal reasons for the observance. in addition, the 13th century was interested in a variety of ancient Hermetic traditions- Kabbalah allowed Jews to say that we have it also.

Re-considering the Elitism of Medieval Jewish Mysticism
By Hartley Lachter

One of the claims frequently lodged against 20th and 21st century popularizers of Kabbalah — whether in commercial forms such as the Kabbalah Centre or New Age forms such as Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Renewal — is that they are making popular what is meant to be an elite discourse, reserved only for the few…. In Gershom Scholem’s words, most medieval Kabbalists were “a small group of esoterics who had little or no desire to spread their ideas.” (Scholem, Major Trends, 244)

The perception of medieval Kabbalah as a carefully guarded, secret discourse is the result of an overemphasis on some early kabbalists, as well as a narrow selection of texts that have received disproportionate attention due to their prominence in later centuries. In fact, many medieval kabbalistic texts reflect an explicit desire to introduce Kabbalah to readers who are just beginning to study Jewish esoteric lore. While this might not constitute “popularization” in the simple sense, since these texts were only accessible to relatively literate and erudite Jewish readers, it is nonetheless the case that more than a few kabbalistic treatises were composed with the openly stated purpose of instructing non-kabbalists in the study of Kabbalah.

Dozens of texts were composed in the 1280s and 90s in Castile with the clearly stated goal of instructing novices in the wisdom of Kabbalah.

The evidence of these compositions suggests that, as the 13th century drew to a close, kabbalists become more actively engaged in promoting the central claims of their understanding of Judaism, namely, that the Jewish tradition possesses a secret doctrine concerning the inner life of the Godhead, and that the practice of Jewish law has the power to influence the divine realm and sustain the connection between God and cosmos.

Late 13th century Castilian kabbalists were prolific writers. They composed commentaries on the Torah, explications of the secret meaning of rabbinic texts, detailed interpretations of the kabbalistic meaning of the commandments, poetic allegories, and texts intended to provide a general overview of Jewish law. One genre of kabbalistic writing from late 13th century Castile is the peirush or “commentary” on the ten sefirot or ten divine luminosities that serve as the basic symbolic structure of kabbalistic theosophy (Chavel, 1984, p. 7). Over one hundred of these commentaries were written in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.

One interesting example can be found in a lengthy commentary on the ten sefirot entitled Sefer ha-Shem, or “The Book of the Divine Name.” Towards the end of the prefatory comments, the author states that he wrote it to create a guide to help those who are beginners in the wisdom of Kabbalah, as a service “to all of Israel, according to their capacity” and that he “saw fit to set forth a disquisition to enlighten the eyes of one who is beginning to learn Kabbalah” (Oron, 2010, p. 54). These passages clearly indicate the author’s interest in the instruction of the uninitiated in the wisdom of the Kabbalah.

We find a similar formulation in another anonymous commentary on the ten sefirot preserved in Milano Hebrew Manuscript 57, where the author introduces his work by stating that he wrote it for “one who desires [to comprehend] the wisdom of the Kabbalah in its entirety.” The author indicates that his enumeration of the divine names associated with each of the sefirot will serve as a guide to understanding the meaning of other kinds of Jewish texts, since “once one knows this, it will be possible for him when he reads a biblical verse or dictum of the Rabbis of blessed memory, or a matter described in a kabbalistic composition, that he will understand the intention of that verse or dictum, and to what matter it alludes. It is for this purpose that I composed this text.”

The dissemination of Kabbalah in late 13th century Castile, however, existed for reasons quite different from those of the contemporary popularizers. Rather than present a universally accessible discourse for the attainment of self fulfillment, medieval Kabbalists sought through their compositions to establish a shared symbolic framework that reinforces the Jewish tradition by re-envisioning it as the exclusive path to true knowledge regarding the mysteries of the Godhead, the meaning of the Torah, and the power of Jewish religious praxis.

For example, in a passage from an anonymous text entitled Mekor ha-Sekhel preserved in Bodleian Opp. 487, the author laments the trend that he observes among his fellow Jews of those who neglect prayer because they have come to regard it as worthless and ineffective. The author urges his readers not to follow such a path, but rather to recognize, on the basis of the sefirotic map, that “the prayers that come forth from a man’s mouth ascend to the place of the emanation of souls. And if it is pure and unblemished, free from impure thoughts, it shall go in peace,” (45r).

The text then, interestingly, illustrates this conception of prayer, and the practice of Judaism more broadly, with a parable that makes intriguing use of the idea of mapping: “This matter can be compared to a house filled with silver and gold and many kinds of food and drink and treasuries with keys, and before them lay scorpions and pits, trenches and caves, and there is a single good path by which one may be saved from all of these evils. When a man arrives who wishes to obtain silver, gold, food, drink or other things, if he knows the location of these treasures, and he knows the pathway leading to them, he shall obtain everything he desires, ‘he shall enter in peace and depart’ (Hagigah 9a),’ and he shall find that which he seeks. But if he does not know the pathway leading to the treasures, he shall grope in the dark and fall victim to the creatures and pits.” (45r–v)

The kabbalistic conception of Judaism that arose in late 13th century Castile accords well with the increased interest in esoteric discourses such as Hermeticism and Neo-pyathagoreanism. By putting forth a claim to ancient, revealed knowledge stemming from antiquity, kabbalists were casting Jews, and an esoteric chain of Jewish transmission, in terms that would have resonated with other forms of esoteric knowledge. Moreover, the secrets concerning the power of Jewish ritual in relation to the incomprehensible, inner life of God that the kabbalists claim as the unique patrimony of the Jewish people can be understood as a response to Christianity, as well as Christian anti-Jewish argumentation.
Read the rest here

The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a pamphlet this month on business ethics that most readers have found exceptionally good, addressing the needed morals for our age without becoming mired in explicit partisan politics. Let’s jump right into the content before I give more background. People today speak of the need to give our families good values at home and to teach them well in school, but then spend the majority of our time and energy in social and moral contact with our co-workers during our work days. The document wants us to do the obvious: we should consider our workplace and our careers as just as important as our families and education for our forming our moral lives. Consider these thoughtful passages:

When managed well, businesses actively enhance the dignity of employees and the development of virtues, such as solidarity, practical wisdom, justice, discipline, and many others. While the family is the first school of society, businesses, like many other social institutions, continue to educate people in virtue, especially those young men and women who are emerging from their families and their educational institutions and seeking their own places in society.

Chief among these obstacles at a personal level is a divided life, or what Vatican II described as ‘the split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives.’ The Second Vatican Council saw this split as ‘one of the more serious errors of our age.’

This message was the original message of R.S.R. Hirsch in his Bible commentary in dozens of places. We have to let the eternal values guide our everyday actions, when guiding means does it increase dignity, virtue, and help our education of how to act in that situation. It is not a bifurcated view where once something is permitted then I can become Mr. Hyde for the rest of the time. The extension here is that a well-run business is spoken of like a family. Business educates “people in virtue” therefore it should not stop when people are out of day school. The business does not only exist for profit but is at the heart of a just society. Right now, we imagine that we have justice in our home community and project our own vices onto the outside world.

This document was drafted as a group by a group think. It was issued by Cardinal Turkson, the president of Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, as “Vocation of a Business Leader.” The document, however, grew out of a seminar sponsored by the John A. Ryan Institute at the University of St. Thomas and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, held in February 2011, called “The Logic of Gift and the Meaning of Business.” Cardinal Turkson’s training was in Bible and one should see this document as the best practices clled by the team of drafters. It was not even published as an essay or article, rather as 30 pages corporate report with an executive summary, bullet points, side bars, and power point type graphics.

Here is another representative paragraph. Here we have some good mussar rather than Pope Benedict’s or Chief Rabbi Sacks fear of relativism and the need for covenant. As you read it, how many of the faults of the first line ring true? How would you give mussar to solve it? What would a service leadership look like? And if we look for moral exemplary, lets not pretend by using Moses as corporate leader or Rabbi Akiva as CEO, who would we use? And finally someone has put entitlement on the table. How many in the community or graduates of our schools have huge amounts of entitlement?

Obstacles to serving the common good come in many forms—lack of rule of law, corruption, tendencies towards greed, poor stewardship of resources—but the most significant for a business leader on a personal level is leading a “divided” life. This split between faith and daily business practice can lead to imbalances and misplaced devotion to worldly success. The alternative path of faith-based “servant leadership” provides business leaders with a larger perspective and helps to balance the demands of the business world with those of ethical social principles…
As a result we might have more private goods but are lacking significantly in common goods. Business leaders increasingly focus on maximising wealth, employees develop attitudes of entitlement, and consumers demand instant gratification at the lowest possible price. As values have become relative and rights more important than duties, the goal of serving the common good is often lost…
The Church calls upon the business leader to receive—humbly acknowledging what God has done for him or her—and to give—entering into communion with others to make the world a better place. Practical wisdom informs his or her approach to business and strengthens the business leader to respond to the world’s challenges not with fear or cynicism,

The interesting moral call is not to give back to your religious community but to give back to your work environment. Here are some of the bullet point goals. It is not free enterprise supply side nor socialist, rather social responsibility- leaving enough room for interpretation.

* producing goods and services that meet genuine human needs while taking responsibility for the social and environmental costs of production, of the supply chain and distribution chain (serving the common good, and watching for opportunities to serve the poor);

* organising productive and meaningful work recognising the human dignity of employees and their right and duty to flourish in their work, (“work is for man” rather than “man for work”) and

* structuring workplaces with subsidiarity that designs, equips and trusts employees to do their best work; and using resources wisely to create both profit and well-being, to produce sustainable wealth and to distribute it justly (a just wage for employees, just prices for customers and suppliers, just taxes for the community, and just returns for owners).

John Allen of NCR notes:

the idea is to be didactic on principle but interrogatory on policy. The church may not have to offer specific answers; perhaps it’s enough to frame the right questions. Perhaps the most striking element of the text, however, comes in its appendix. There one finds a “Discernment Checklist for the Business Leader,” composed of thirty questions which amount to an examination of conscience informed by Catholic social teaching.

Do I provide working conditions which allow my employees appropriate autonomy at each level?

Am I making sure that the company provides safe working conditions, living wages, training, and the opportunity for employees to organize themselves?

I can already see the potential Al-Het sheets for Yom Kippur that can-be based on this. You can read the rest of the document here. After you read it, do you have any thoughts for its application to the Jewish community?

As a side point of interest, for several years I sat next to Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, when there were the NYC meetings of Rabbis and Cardinals. At one of them graciously hosted by Bernie Lander and Touro, Turkson invited me to visit him in Ghana. He said just show up, everyone knows where he lives, and he will take care of everything locally and host me. Well, I did not rush to take him up on the offer. I schlepped on and on figuring out how many flights it would take to get to Cape Coast, Ghana and if could I get anything kosher and what season to go. In the meantime, Turkson had been appointed to head the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Rome. So, I never got to go to Ghana.

I thank JZ for providing me the link to this essay by Rabbi Isidore Epstein. The essay on social legislation gives us a good glimpse into the world of the Soncino and the world of English Judaica before the 1980’s. Isidore Epstein was the head of Jew’s College for many decades and worked closely with Rabbi Hertz. His is one volume book on Judaism was an essential work for many Jews. This work on social Legislation first a separate pamphlet and then included into the Soncino Talmud.

The first thing to notice is that his approach is historical and speaks of the creation of the Oral law through human response.
The thrust of the essay portrays Jewish law as “a moral enthusiasm and passion for social justice” more than economics or legislation. The essay takes a dim view toward private property, except for the minimum needed for social stability.He favors common or communal held property. Epstein stresses the role of worker’s rights, tenant rights and renter’s rights. He admires rabbinic control of the market and relegates free market thinking to those immoral Romans. Rabbinic thought sought to create a kingdom of God.Finally, for a specific example of his approach he translates “lifnim mishurat hadin” as within the law and not as beyond the law or supererogation. The law itself mandates within the application of the law itself the demands of justice, the good and the right, and righteous.

Here are some selections from the essay. My question is what are the changes in method, canon, and style between this essay and the recent 30 years of free enterprise-supply side-trust the market legalism? Beyond the obvious, by what specific means do they come to opposite conclusions?

Social Legislation in the Talmud ISIDORE EPSTEIN
This essay, which appeared originally as a Torah Va’Avodah publication, first in 1946 and then in a revised and enlarged form in 1947, has now been again revised and enlarged and, by reason of the relevance of much of its subject matter to the tractate Baba Mezia, has been included in this volume. The Publishers wish to record their appreciation to the Bachad Fellowship for their kind co-operation.

THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL
This only God and Supreme King had spoken to them at Sinai through the Law and continued to speak to them through priest and prophet. What He said and commanded was gathered up in books, which became the Book—the Bible—by which their individual and corporate life was to be guided. Thus arose and developed the religion of Israel. Grounded on the Book and centred in God, it was not like the Roman religion, the creature of the State, nor was it ever to derive its inspiration from political feeling.
Its laws, precepts and ordinances had to be interpreted both literally and spiritually. The change in their environment could not be neglected. Beside the Written Law, there had been from the first, from the divine commandments to Moses onward, an unwritten Law which law-giver and prophet sought to engrave on the hearts of the people. The Written and Unwritten both must co-operate in the guidance of Jewish people struggling against the inrolling civilisations of Greece and Rome, the unwritten being the dynamic factor of change, the written the abiding fundamental factor.

The Sadducees, representing the extreme latitudinarians in life, opposed the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of the Law to meet changing circumstances. They failed and disappeared. The Pharisees who provided the chief teachers of the Law succeeded and remained, and the Talmud is not the least of their achievements… With the transformations in their surroundings and conditions, they were confronted with new dangers, new problems and new difficulties. Re-adaptation and re-interpretation of the Book to meet the kaleidoscopic changes in their situation, became more necessary than ever, and leaders arose to continue the work of past generations.

SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS AS AIM OF COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION
With the Torah as supreme guide in communal life, the primary end and aim of communal organization had moral and religious purposes. This does not mean that the economic and social functions of organized society were ignored. But it does mean that all was looked upon as subordinate to the moral functions. In other words, morality was made the dominating factor of communal life, and the underlying principle of all legislation regulating social and economic relations. This will be particularly seen in the personal responsibility which the community enforced on each of its members in matters of social righteousness. With the result that the Jewish communities were able to exhibit, even under the most untoward circumstances and environments, a moral enthusiasm and passion for social justice to which communities of enlightened European states but rarely testify.

COMMON PROPERTY AND UNDERTAKINGS
The sense of solidarity in the life of the townsmen was expressed and strengthened by a number of common undertakings, including undertakings of a commercial character carried out on a co-operative basis with a pooling of resources and profit; and by the possession of no little town property from which the great body of citizens derived considerable benefit. There were public fruit trees from which all citizens were allowed to pluck. They could even take them home and eat them, provided there was no hoarding nor conserving.19 There were also common pasture grounds and woods on which citizens could send their cattle to graze.

The common property was equally at the disposal of all citizens. There was no claim to priority, nor discrimination. The right to the use of the common well was likewise shared by all townsmen. It was, however, restricted to drinking purposes, but did not extend to the requirements of industry, such as washing and scouring wool. As to the needs of washing clothes and personal washing, these were provided for in special containers.21

The larger sense of humanity transcended the confines of the town and even strangers shared the use of the common property. This was particularly the case with the pastural grounds on which also outsiders were allowed to feed their cattle. All likewise were permitted to gather shrubs and grass in all places, by force of an ancient enactment ascribed to Joshua.

All roads were, of course, included among the common property and open to the free common use of all; but the public had in addition the right to use paths leading through private fields before the seeds began to sprout;23 and a private path in public use for some time could not be obstructed
.
As inalienable public possession, the common property could be used by every individual, provided this did not involve any appropriation of, or interference with, public access. No one was therefore permitted to place or cause an obstruction in the street or act in a way that would cause inconvenience to those who use it. If anyone happened to place an object in the street and failed to remove at after due warning was given, he forfeited all claims to it.27 If one had a tree on his private ground overhanging the street, he was required to cut the branches off at a height that would enable a camel and its rider to pass under it unmolested.28 Threshing floors had likewise to be set up at a distance from the city so that the wind might not carry the stubble into the city to the annoyance of the residents.

PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS
Though the rabbis recognised private property rights, these were governed essentially by social considerations, and only in so far as it provided a basis for social peace and welfare, and for a better ordering of human affairs, was the claim of the possession of property justified; and when it was to serve the public interest this claim might, by the properly constituted authority, be modified or suspended altogether.

THE BIBLICAL CONCEPTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
This rabbinic attitude to private property is based on the [page iv] fundamental biblical principle that whatever man has, he holds from God: ‘For all things come of Thee, and of thine own have we given Thee’ (I Chron. XXIX, 14). Such property is conceived in terms of a Divine trust, in which no man can claim exclusive rights. While those appointed by God as trustees have their own specific rights of use and enjoyment, there still remain common rights to be shared by others in virtue of the Divine ownership.

It was this principle of Divine ownership on which rested the biblical laws designed to ensure the common rights of the poor to the land. In ancient Israel, those who could not earn enough were provided for by the precepts of the Torah regarding the reaping of the harvest. The landowner, while enjoying the reward of his diligence, had to recognise that others too had a right to live and that he had duties towards them to enable them to live.

The ethical principle underlying these precepts is quite clear. Its meaning is that the earth created by God as well as all the gifts of nature can never become altogether private property. It is handed out in trust to man, who by the sweat of his brow, brings out its produce. The right and the duty to apply his diligence to the land is the only relationship permitted him by the spirit of the Torah. Beyond this relationship stands the eternal truth that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof’ (Psalm XXIV, 1). It is from Him that man has received the land, and it is from Him that mankind derives common rights in the land; and in the olden days, the common property in the gathering of the harvest was an example of these common rights.

CONTROL OF PRICE
The Rabbis, actuated by the same ethical and religious motives governing private property rights, applied them to the whole range of social relations. This is particularly noticeable in the rigid control exercised over the price-fixing of commodities and the penalties attached in cases of contraventions. In Roman Law, price was entirely a matter to be determined by free contract.

It was left to the two contracting parties, the buyer and the seller, to agree upon the price at their own risk, subject only to the limitation that the seller was bound to reveal faults and defects, interfering with the proper enjoyment of the things sold. Paulus, a legist of the third century, stated that, in buying and selling, a man has really a natural right to purchase for a small price that which is really valuable and to sell at a higher price that which is less valuable, and each may seek to over-reach the other.3 What appeared to Roman Law natural and right was in the eyes of the Talmudic Law unethical and wrong.

Basing themselves on the biblical law in Leviticus, ‘If thou sellest aught to thine neighbour, or buy of thy neighbour’s hand, ye shall not wrong one another’ (Lev. XXV, 14). Jewish magistrates regulated the relationship of buyer and seller on quite a different basis than that of contract. For them it was determined by social considerations and based on ethical principles; and thus they developed and enacted a number of legal provisions that safeguarded the interests of both parties. They not only limited all profits, but fixed the amount which constituted in each case, according to the nature and circumstances of the transaction, a charge of fraud and the penalties attached to it.. It becomes clear that in a system where such laws and regulations were in force, the ideas about rights, of property were quite different from those that predominate today.

RESPECT FOR PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS
But apart from the social considerations which, in Talmudic legislation, govern the property rights of individuals, man’s lawful possessions were safeguarded by a number of strict laws and regulations. This is particularly seen in the law which considers the unauthorised use of any property belonging to another to be the equivalent of robbery, rendering the offender liable as such for any loss or deterioration suffered by the property even through an unavoidable accident (force majeure).

RIGHTS OF WORKERS
How little Jewish ethics were influenced from the earliest days by the idea of absolute property is already reflected in the position of the non-Jewish slave in ancient Israel. Even a slave was not recognised as an absolute possession. He was never to become a thing.
The same social conception of property governed the relations between employers and employees. Property did not give owners the right to hire workers on their own terms.

WITHIN THE LINE OF LEGAL JUSTICE
Akin to the ethical principle of ‘uprightness’ which, as we have seen, had in some respects the force of a written law, was the principle of lifenim mi-shurath ha-Din, which urged a man to act ‘within the line of justice’ and to forego his legal rights in favour of his fellow man on whom the application of legal justice would inflict undue hardship.
An early example of the operation of this ethical ideal is told in the Talmud: ‘Rabbah, the son of Hunah, engaged certain carriers to transport barrels of wine from one place to another. In handling the barrels, the carriers broke one barrel, spilling the wine. Their employer, Rabbah, seized their coats in order to secure for himself the payment of the damage. The carriers thereupon summoned him before Abba Arika who ordered him to return them their coats. “Is this the law?” asked Rabbah. “Yes”, answered Abba. “In order that you may walk in the ways of good men” (Proverbs II, 20). The carriers then said: “We are poor labourers, we have spent the whole day on this work and now we are hungry and have nothing to eat.” Abba Arika then ordered Rabbah to pay them their full wages. “Is this the law? asked Rabbah again. “Yes”, answered Abba, quoting the concluding part of the cited verse, “and keep the path of the righteous” Thus, though the law gave the employer the right to make the labourers pay for the damage caused by their carelessness, Abba ordered Rabbah to follow the rule of acting ‘within the line of justice’, and thus forego his claim in favour of the poor workmen.

PROTECTION OF TENANTS
Talmudic legislation also provided for the protection of tenants against the hardship of eviction. It insisted that no landlord could dispossess a tenant who rented a house for an unspecified length of tenure unless he gave him thirty days’ notice in advance so as to enable him to find alternative accommodation. This applies only in the summer, but during the winter season—i.e., from the Feast of Tabernacles until the Feast of Passover—when it was extremely difficult to obtain vacant premises, the landlord could on no account dispossess the tenant, but had to allow him to continue to occupy the premises under the original terms of the tenancy.

TO SUM UP
To sum up this rapid sketch. What impresses most in this study is the governing force which the religion of Israel supplied, and the remarkable humanizing influence it exerted on the dispersed Jewish communities during the centuries when Roman civilization was being shattered. These communities were able to acquire in most countries a large measure of self-government and independent municipal rights. They were in fact little empires within an empire, theocratic empires, in which the One and Only ruled supreme. To interpret His will, there was the Torah—the Written Law, and the ever expanding and adapting oral tradition by which the Law was amplified and adjusted, so as to bring the details of social life into subjection to the Divine will and at the same time into harmony with the changing environment and conditions.

Living amidst a mixed and unfriendly population, subject to violent currents of hate and persecution, the Jewish communities had a severe struggle to maintain the ideals of justice and mercy, righteousness and equity, which they drew from the Bible. It was not always possible for them to regulate the social relations of rich and poor, employer and employed, debtor and creditor, rulers and ruled, buyer and seller, sinner and saint, on the lines they desired. But the Jewish leaders, undaunted by all obstacles and difficulties, struggled bravely on, and thus kept their people from being submerged; and in what they accomplished they not only anticipated much that is best in the social ethics of modern civilization, but what is more, have provided the Jewish state of the future with valuable material for setting up on earth a Kingdom of God.

Many German Orthodox youth became the backbone and ideologues of the socialist religious Kibbutz movement. So in honor of German Orthodoxy- happy May Day, the workers day.  It seems that there was only one Orthodox training camp to go on Aliyah from Germany so the members of Mizrachi and Bnai Akiva were together with Poalei Agudah and Ezra, and both with Blue-White. They replace Torah im Derekh Eretz with Torah ve Avodah, except for Breuer himself who said he was Torah im Derekh Eretz Israel. They formed Brit Chalutzim Datiim (Bahad). They traveled and settled together and all moved onto Keren Kayemet lands.

They taught, preached, and published that Torah and socialism go together. It was mainly a libertarian socialism like Buber or his student Akiva Simon except for Breuer who wanted a national socialism by libertarian organic means. The one exception to the deep connection of socialism and Torah was Yeshaya Leibowitz, who thought Judaism has no social doctrine – we choose socialism as a practical means.   We have a whole generation of socialist Orthodox rabbis. So spend some time today and look at the publications of Bahad, especially those that appeared in English for the German Jews who took refuge in England.

Torah and social order.by Joseph Heinemann

Social legislation in the Talmud by Isidore Epstein

ha-Tsedek ha-sotsyali veha-tsedek ha-mishpati veha-musari shelanu  by  Moshe Avigdor Amiel

They all spent a decade farming on the kibbutz. They avoided the use of non-Jewish labor as part of their return to the land, allowing themselves great leniencies for milking and running a farm on Shabbat. They also allowed free mixing of the sexes, changed the dress code, and prayed without a mehitza for many years –see the  extensive article by Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman- here.

They were generally liberal on Settlement -Arab issues. The predominate voice of the unified party of the religious parties was German immigrant Moshe Unna who advocated division of the land as well as just and flexible negotiations with the local population. (The secular labor party were the hardliners in those days.) Seven out of ten settlements did not survive the war of independence. (They were re-founded with different personnel a decade later.) Hence, after the war, the German Orthodox intellectuals all found their way to Rehavia and Talbiah to positions in education. Their way of life formed the basis for Bnai Akiva in the 1950’s and the textbooks of the 1960’s.

When I was writing on other faiths,  I posted often on that topic. Now that I am working on Varieties of Modern Orthodoxy, I keep posting on interesting points in the German Orthodoxy chapter.

Hirschian Orthodoxy like novels about Orthodoxy.  Last year, we discussed those of Hirsch’s daughter Sarah Guggenheim and those of Rabbi Markus Lehrman.  I came across a wonderful article by Michael Brenner, East and West in Orthodox German –Jewish Novels. Leo Baeck Institute Annual 37/1 1992.  In the article, he deals with three authors who, unlike Lehrman , attempted to answer the issues of the day- Selig Schachnowitz, Pinchas Kohn, and Isaac Breuer.  I fleshed the post out with some material from Morgenstern’s book.

Selig Schachnowitz thought the world of urban Frankfort  and its Orthodoxy was ideal. In 1912 novel Luftmenchen, he paints a dystopic vision of Eastern European Jewry. They either have no education or only a Yeshiva education so they are assimilating and becoming communists. The only safe answer for a Yeshiva graduate is to come to the West and become Orthodox. The Russian Talmud bakhur needs to be turned into a civilized human being. Rude students need to be cultivated into Hirschian Orthodoxy, where Yosef Karo, Friedrich von Schiller, and Yehuda Halevi meet. The ideal is to be a successful businessman who keeps the mizvot and marries a day school teacher.  In other works, he anachronistically painted the 18^th century as Hirschian and even painted the Hatam Sofer as Hirschian. Schachnowitz was uberHirsch is his writings.

Pinchas Kohn  was a key figure in the birth of the Agudah, anti-Zionist and anti-gemidne. In his 1915 novel he extols the pastoral life of rural Jewry. He yearned for old time 18^th century Jewry–pre-Hirsch rural life without culture, refinement, or education. He glorified the magic and superstition of the 18^th century Jewish rural life. The genuine Jew does not require German culture, sermons, or seminaries, but is a natural Jew.  He became the editor of the Hirschian Agudah journal.

Isaac Breuer  wrote several novels in the 1920’s were he expresses his disgust with the Hirschian community.  His protagonist criticized their concern with German culture and superficial ritual observance. Breuer paints the Hirschian community as living the same lives as the Reformers; they only differ only in the outer appearance of their lives.

He criticizes the Bourgeois culture of the Hirschian college associations who alternate between beer drinking bouts and Talmud study. He thinks finance and a Torah-true life do not, and can not, go together. He paints Hirsch as against his own will founding a bourgeois Orthodoxy.

For Breuer’s era, Schiller & Goethe had been replaced by crude materialism and nihilism, leaving little to emulate. Besides having anti-Semitic undertones, this new materialism bred skepticism. In addition, the middle class life was requiring more hours and greater commitment, leaving no time for any Torah study.  Breuer blamed it on the decadent superstructure of capitalism.  America was the worst. (AB- think of the Brecht-Weil Opera Mahogany.) He is disgusted by Hirschian materialism where Torah im Derekh Eretz means that on Shavuot people consume great quantities of cheesecake, rather than appreciate revelation.

In the story, Breuer glorifies Ost-Juden, he prefers a society of women and grandmothers to the mechanical observances of the Hirschian businessmen, and he creates a scene where a simple Ost-Juden dairyman teaches the protagonist Talmud in a way that the Hirschain community Rabbi could not.

He painted the opposite of the Hirschian philistinism the even worse community of nomads who need an organization to lead them. He saw the Agudah and Rosenheim as an organizer, a pejorative opposite of the need to be a living organism and people.  Breuer answer is to create a non-capitalist religious Torah state in Zion.

Already, in a 1907 story, an orthodox university student leaves university for a few weeks at home with his extended Hirschian family, a philistine among philistines.  He sees the only ones who care about Zion, anti-semtiism, Torah, ideas, and Sinai are the college Orthodox students. Hirsch in Deut 4:25 had warned against becoming part of the land and Breuer applies it not to Reform but to the Hirschian community.

I am not sure about the other authors, but since Breuer wrote dozens of books and hundreds of essays we can use a new anthology of his untranslated essays.

In last week’s Forward, we read the following in a review of a recent Holocaust encyclopedia.

In the village of Iwaniska, for example, we read with consternation that “Orthodox and liberal Jews continued infighting to such an extent that both groups assisted the Germans by preparing lists of their opponents, whom they claimed were not complying with the German orders.” Ultimately, however, as their situation grew more perilous, younger Jews from this community — contrary to the urging of their Hasidic elders — decided to slip out of the village and hide in bunkers in the forest.

This deep lack of solidarity among Jews is discussed in the important book Tzvetan Todorov’s Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. The book discusses many of the important points obscured by Elie Wiesel stories. Todorov shows how people did not change immediately in a single “night,” they maintained many ordinary virtues. These ordinary virtues like art, music, religion, helped people survive (as Frankl and Berkovits claimed).

Todorov asks whether it is true the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags revealed that in extreme situations “all traces of moral life evaporate as men become beasts locked in a merciless struggle for survival”(31–46). However, in his reading of actual survivor testimonies, Todorov says the picture is not that bleak, that there are many examples of inmates helping each other and showing compassion in human relationships despite the inhumane conditions and terror. Survivors point out that survival always depended on the help of others. For example, righteous gentiles who saved Jews were usually husband wife teams, the husband had the virtue of courage to engage in smuggling and defiance and the wife had the virtue of compassion.

Those that survived needed people to help them. But Jews could not automatically rely on other Jews. All Jews were not saints, nor are they sinners for us to judge. People  are complex.(similar to Maus) We are all fragmented human beings.

On the topic of solidarity, Bulgarian non-Jews saw the country’s non-Jews as Bulgarians- showing that solidarity was not Jew vs non-Jew. Todorov says: Solidarity is no more than a quantitative extension of the principal of self interest; it is the selfishness of the collective. Acting with a group doesn’t make you moral to Todorov, but it does in Wiesel’s thought.  (Would you consider the solidarity activities of NYC Jews as moral?)

Todorov, the humanist, asks the difference between humanity and solidarity.  He shows that in troubled times/places, solidarity is important to survive.  But in ordinary times we need humanity not to have a paranoid or vengeful society. In the war, solidarity was important but Bulgarian non-Jews showed it with their Jews. However, Polish or Hungarian Jews had no solidarity at all with French or Greek Jews. They could leave them to die or considered them of little concern.   Wiesel creates this fuzzy idea that all Jews, especially Hasidism had great solidarity the world’s Jews and their suffering.  Todorov shows that none of the eyewitness or survivor stories show that. The secular Jew on a transport with orthodox Jews is left to die.

There are many other important discussions in the work, but the Forward quote clearly brings Todorov to mind.

Chava Weissler who is writing a book about Jewish Renewal and was recently interviewed in Zeek. She offers a nice distinction between the cerebral Neo-Hasidism of the Havurah movement with their emphasis on textual study and the ecstatic approach of renewal where even Artscroll is emotionally moving.

CW: I often use the following metaphor: the Havurah movement represents the Misnagdim and the Renewal movement the Hasidim of the Jewish counter-culture. The style of the Havurah movement is more cognitive, and the style of Renewal is more expressive and devotional. Also, the Havurah movement has a deep aversion to the “rebbe” model, while the Renewal movement has seen it as a way into a heightened spirituality.

ZEEK: The Hasidim/Misnagdim analogy is a fascinating one, though I can see how some folks in the Havurah movement might have bones to pick there.

CW: Especially because we saw ourselves as reinstating Hasidism, or parts of it. Some years ago, a well-known Renewal teacher taught at the Havurah Institute. I asked him how he felt it compared to the Kallah and Renewal. And he said, ‘the havurah movement is so unspiritual, it really bothered me… when they have a study class, they go in, open the text, study, close the text and you’re done. When I teach a class, we sit in silence, we open our hearts to the text, we sing a niggun, we study the text, we process what’s happened to us, then we sing another niggun and sit in silence again to receive what we’ve received.’

My havurah friends were outraged that he would say the Havurah movement isn’t spiritual! But it’s a different model of spirituality and also of study. The point of the study is — and this isn’t so true in the higher-level classes, but — the point of the study isn’t primarily intellectual.

ZEEK: I think that in a lot of Renewal retreat experiences, we’re trying to reach people who may not have access to the traditional model. I know that fifteen years ago if someone had handed me an Artscroll I would have been lost. These days I’ll happily daven out of any siddur, because if it’s in a Renewal context, I know there’s going to be a lot of heart even in the most traditional structure.

On Yom Haatzmaut Last Year, Rabbi Yosef Blau gave a speech at the gala for Encounter. The Encounter program bring American Jews and Israelis to meet Palestinians in the West Bank- to get to know one another as people. They describe themselves as follows:

While the Jewish commu­nity continues to be one of the most influ­en­tial stake­holders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most American Jews have never met a Palestinian, nor seri­ously encountered Palestinian narratives or perspec­tives. Influential segments of the American Jewish community advo­cate for solu­tions to the conflict and educate the next gener­a­tion about it in complete isola­tion from Palestinian people and claims. This infor­ma­tion vacuum perpet­u­ates our failure to bring about real, viable solu­tions and further­more, research demonstrates that simplistic advo­cacy efforts are driving away our next generation’s engagement with the Jewish community and their commit­ment to Israel.

Underlying all of Encounter’s work is the core belief that inno­v­a­tive strate­gies for peace will be created only when influ­en­tial stake­holders in a conflict have oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet one another, toopen them­selves to previ­ously disre­garded points-of-view, and to develop rela­tion­ships across polit­ical and ideo­log­ical divides.

Rabbi Blau had recently been on one of their trips to the West Bank and describes as his Yom Haatzmaut message what he learned from a Palestinian businessman in Ramallah. Note his conclusion in the last paragraph.

D’var Torah by Rabbi Yosef Blau at the Encounter Gala

Judaism is a complex blend of partic­u­larism and univer­salism. As a Religious Zionist leader, committed to Israel as a Jewish demo­c­ratic state, I felt it impor­tant to learn directly from the Palestinians with whom we share living in the Land of Israel — to broaden my under­standing of the land so central to my passionate and reli­gious concern. Encounter created this opportunity.

I want to share a message of Torah by opening with a corre­spon­dence that I had with a Palestinian leader I met on my trip. After the attacks in Itamar, I exchanged emails with Sam Bahour, a Palestinian American busi­nessman living in Ramallah. We did not always agree, but the dialogue was conducted in a spirit of mutual listening and respect. I wanted to know his response to the massacre. His response captured the danger of demo­nizing an entire popu­la­tion, the impor­tance of seeing our so-called enemies person-by-person and one-by-one. He wrote me that when in 2004–5 the Israeli Defense Forces was bombing Ramallah with F-16s during the second Intifada, he told his young daugh­ters that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was piloting each bomber plane flying over their heads. It was the only way he could think of to convince them that this was not being done by “Jews” or “Israelis”, but rather one indi­vidual political/military figure who was respon­sible. He wanted to teach them to direct their anger at one man and one man only; he refused to allow his daugh­ters to perceive all Israelis as war-mongering and violent.

This message is espe­cially rele­vant today, on Yom Haatzmaut, Israel Independence Day, preceded yesterday by Yom Hazikaron,

Remembrance Day, commem­o­rating those who fell in the wars fought to create and main­tain the state of Israel. How are we guided by our Sages to cele­brate mili­tary victory and Israel’s Independence? What is the Jewish atti­tude toward our adver­saries in a time of war and loss on both sides?After the split­ting of the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers Moses and the Israelites sang Az Yashir, a song of celebration. According to the Talmud, the angels want to sing as well, but G-d stopped them. “My crea­tures are drowning and you want to sing.” G-d teaches His chil­dren to affirm the humanity and dignity of our adver­saries, even in the face of violence and war.
Our foun­da­tional Biblical story of being freed from slavery sensi­tizes us to the humanity, dignity and suffering of all other human beings. In the context of war and grief, our foun­da­tional commit­ment is most tested and stretched. Many of us begin to reduce the world’s complexity to black-and-white terms. But to do so is to forget G-d’s message that all humans are His crea­tures. Encounter forced me to confront the humanity of those who had been “other”- to inter­nalize their humanity emotionally. This is perhaps one of the greatest expres­sions of this core message of our Torah.

Click here to see a video of the speech and for the introduction he was given by the head of Encounter, Rabbi Miriam Margles.

Any Thoughts on that last paragraph?

Rav Moshe Feinstein relates to our issue in Igrot Moshe OC vol.I, responsa #98 and #99 (pp. 159-160). Rav Moshe writes [in response to a question (#98) posed by Rav Aryeh Kaplan] that one who invites people who drive on Shabbat to participate in a minyan, transgresses the prohibition “Lifnei iveir lo titein mikhshol” (Do not place a stumbling block in front of the blind) because of his involvement in their Shabbat desecration. He goes a step further in responsum #99 and claims that besides transgressing lifnei iveir, one who invites another to do something that inevitably involves desecration of Shabbat is defined as a “meisit” (one who incites another to sin). For the rest see here

This factoid allowed the following biography to show up in google.

Mason City Globe Gazette , April 3, 1965 

Welcome Rabbi and Mrs Leonard Kaplan Joseph and Ronald

They came from Maryland

Welcome to the Kaplans

Books were an important part of the belongings which Rabbi and Leonard M Kaplan brought with them when they moved to Mason in Februrary.

Not only were there books of general interest religious books scientific books but cook books Mrs Kaplan is a cook book collector

The with children 21 month old Joseph Michael and 10 month old Ronald Myer came from Hyattsville Md when Rabbi Kaplan began his service with the Adas Israel congregation

He is a nuclear physicist as well as a rabbi and was engaged in research in Washington DC.

This is his first pulpit Rabbi Kaplan received his BS degree from the University of Louisville Ky

His theological training was at Yeshiva Torah and Mirrer Ye in New York He was ordained in Israel While in the seminary he taught for a time at Richmond Va and in the Bronx.

Following his ordination he was engaged in religious teaching at Eliahu Academy in Louisville.He accepted position with the US Bureau of Standards in Washington and continued his education as a predoctoral student in research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US Air Force

The Bronx is Rabbi Kaplans hometown Mrs Kaplan is from Marigold Miss..

Reading and photography and making scrapbooks are hobbies with Rabbi Kaplan.

The writings of Rabbi Isaac Breuer and his student Barukh Kurzweil bring to mind an interesting article from twenty years ago on the idea of someone formulating their Orthodoxy as simultaneously sectarian counter-society and at the same time an advocate for secular society. This approach avoids conjunctives and synthesis; it also avoids two complimentary but non-concordant realms. Those two options of synthesis or irreconcilable, we discussed in an earlier post. In this options one goes in both extremes on the same topic- secular literature is demonic but we devote ourselves to it as a religious quest, Zionism is forbidden but we must build up the material base of a Torah state. The article deals with both Kurzweil and Leibowitz, but I have culled out the discussion only about the former. There seem to be a variety of younger Orthodox rabbis who are cultivating forms of this positions.

The Orthodox Jew as Intellectual Crank- David Singer

First Things aug/Sept 1990

The question I want to raise is this: Is the crank element—what I shall hereafter refer to as “crankitude”—that manifests itself in the work of Kurzweil and Leibowitz merely a reflection of personal idiosyncrasy or does it point to something more significant?

At the same time, one cannot help but notice that being a crank helps them to function more effectively as Orthodox thinkers— crankitude provides them with nothing less than a full-fledged intellectual stance. In short, my thesis is that Kurzweil and Leibowitz have elevated personal idiosyncrasy into a stylized cultural response—a response that permits them, at once, to take modernity with full seriousness, but also to reject modernity in the name of Jewish faith.

To better appreciate the nature of the enterprise that Kurzweil and Leibowitz engage in as Orthodox intellectual cranks it would be useful to consider the categories employed by sociologist Peter Berger, the leading academic analyst of the modernization process. Berger argues that religious thinkers have available essentially three types of response to the challenge of modernity: “cognitive retrenchment,” “cognitive bargaining,” and “cognitive surrender.” Cognitive retrenchment is the sectarian option, calling for a conscious rejection of modernity as a dangerous heresy. The thinker taking this position in effect states, as Berger puts it: “The rest of you go climb a tree; we believe this, we know this, and we are going to stick to it. And if this is irrelevant to the rest of you, well, that is just too bad.” In cognitive bargaining, in contrast, “there are two conflicting views of the world and they start to negotiate with each other”; an “attempt is made to arrive at a cognitive compromise.” Finally, there is cognitive surrender, in which, in Berger’s terms, “one simply accepts the fact that the majority is right, then adapts oneself to that point of view.”

Most Orthodox thinkers operating in a modern framework have engaged in one form or another of cognitive bargaining. In sharp contrast, Kurzweil and Leibowitz offer us the model of Orthodox intellectuals managing to combine—in equal measure no less—cognitive surrender and cognitive retrenchment. This, to put it mildly, is an astonishing intellectual feat… at one and the same time, embrace and reject modernity.

On the bibliographical side, it is important to note that only a very small sampling of the writings of Kurzweil and Leibowitz are available outside the Hebrew language. This has begun to change, however, with the appearance of James Diamond’s very fine English-language study Baruch Kurzweil and Modern Hebrew Literature This fact underscores the point that the work of these two Orthodox thinkers, in its origin—though certainly not in its reach—is inseparable from the Israeli context.

Proposition 1: The Orthodox intellectual crank centers his work on a religious problematic defined in rigidly either/or terms.

In Kurzweil’s case, this problematic is the absolute gulf separating the world of pre-modern religious faith from the secular outlook of modernity. For Kurzweil, modern and secular are synonymous, and it is the rise of secularization that has made modernity an age of permanent crisis. The starting point of Kurzweil’s thinking is the assumption, as Diamond puts it, that the “only absolute in human life, human history, and human culture is faith in the living transcendent God.” In the absence of faith—which is what secular modernity has brought about—human existence loses its one sure anchor, opening itself to what Kurzweil variously calls the “void,” the “absurd,” and the “demonic.” (These are key terms in his lexicon.) The meaning of this change, as Kurzweil sees it, is described by Diamond in the following manner:

In this new setting man is thrust into a cosmos bereft of certainty. He lives now not in the presence of God but of the abyss, of Nothing. The individual ego becomes the center and gradually enlarges to fill the void. Man for the first time conceives of himself as an autonomous being who is self-sufficient. There is no transcendent source for values and morality, nothing to hold in check man’s instinctive capacity for self-aggrandizement, hubris, domination and destruction. . . . Now man is utterly alone, beyond all values and all relationships with society or his fellow-men—yet he is unsatisfied. He has lost his soul but failed to gain the world, for the demons are insatiable.

A key element in Kurzweil’s thinking is the notion of “late return,” which occurs when an individual, caught in the web of modernity, seeks to escape his situation by turning back to a life of pristine faith. It is just here, however, that the either/or element comes to the fore, in that Kurzweil takes it for granted that no such return is possible for the vast majority of moderns. Kurzweil is not an evangelist calling for the restoration of religious faith; rather, he is a diagnostician of secular unbelief, describing what he takes to be the permanent condition of modern man. If Kurzweil devoted his career to the study of modern literature, it was because he saw it as offering telling testimony to this very condition.

Kurzweil’s interpretation of modern Hebrew literature is clearly set forth in Our Modern Literature: Continuity or Revolt? In this work, now a classic in the field, he argues decisively for the latter position. The emphasis here is on radical discontinuity, on modern Hebrew literature as a product of secularization and the collapse of religious faith.

 Kurzweil mocks those who fail to see the “difference between the sacral world of traditional Judaism, in which the Divine Torah structures the totality of life activities, and a world which has become secularized in its totality but still preserves individual corners of interest in religious elements and subjects.” The former—the “sacral world of traditional Judaism”—is the domain of the “vision,” while the latter—a “world which has become secularized in its totality”—is the place of the “void.” Modern Hebrew writers, in Kurzweil’s view, sort themselves out most fundamentally by their varying responses to the confrontation with the “void.”

Proposition 2: The Orthodox intellectual crank displays radical openness to key aspects of the modern experience.

In Kurzweil’s case, this is the openness he shows to modern literary expression in all its forms. Far from spurning modern writing as the illicit fruit of the secularization process, Kurzweil lavishes endless attention on it, producing a body of literary criticism that is nothing short of massive. More importantly, it is also first-rate. Kurzweil’s critics are legion, but even the severest of them would have to admit that he was the very model of the engaged literary scholar.

Consider, then, the strange phenomenon of an Orthodox intellectual identifying the realm of heresy and then settling in for the lifelong study of it. A study, moreover, carried out in loving detail and with a considerable amount of imaginative sympathy for the heretics. That certainly is what Kurzweil offers us in his literary criticism, which yielded brilliant analyses of the work of, among others, Bialik, Brenner, Tchernichovsky, Greenberg, and, of course, Agnon. All that Kurzweil asks of his writers is that they testify honestly to the confrontation with the “void” and the “demonic”—wherever that takes them. What he could not abide, however, were attempts at evasion, such as he saw in the younger generation of Israeli writers. Kurzweil took it upon himself—as if. he needed any prodding!—to expose their “snobby immaturity and inflated nothingness.” With a straight face, he declared Amos Oz’s My Michael to be more dangerous to Israel as a nation than all the Arab armies.

Proposition 3: Despite his receptivity to key aspects of modernity, the Orthodox intellectual crank’s ultimate allegiance is to a version of Orthodox Judaism that negates the basic thrust of the modern experience.

In Kurzweil’s case, this is the meta-historical vision of Jewish history advanced by Samson Raphael Hirsch and his grandson Isaac Breuer. Kurzweil first befriended Breuer during his years in Frankfurt, when, in addition to attending the university there, he enrolled in the yeshivah that Hirsch had founded in the nineteenth century.

Breuer affirmed this model as well, but more importantly, he taught Kurzweil to oppose all attempts at the secularization of Jewish life. When Kurzweil argued that “Jewish existence without God is the Absurd with a capital ‘A,’“ he was directly echoing Breuer. More generally, Kurzweil followed the Hirsch-Breuer school in regarding Judaism and the Jewish people as meta-historical realities. In this view. Diamond explains, the Torah is “God-given, a timeless absolute that transcends the limitations of human history. The Jews, therefore, exist for the sake of Judaism; Judaism does not exist for the sake of the Jews.” “Kurzweil’s commitment to a meta-historical fideism,” Diamond rightly concludes, “is antipodal to the perspective [of] most Hebrew literature in the twentieth century.”

It is precisely here that Kurzweil’s famous attacks on Ahad Haam and Gershom Scholem come into the picture. Kurzweil saw these two “arch culprits” aiming at a secularization of Jewish life, an enterprise he saw as nothing short of “demonic.” To struggle within the world of the “void,” as did modern Hebrew writers, was one thing; to establish the “void” as the new foundation for a Jewish life, as did Ahad Haam and Scholem, quite another. Against this tendency, Kurzweil was unsparing in his criticism, referring to the “palpable absurdities of the Ahad Haamist philosophy.”

 This was child’s play, however, compared to his polemic against Scholem, whose sins, in Kurzweil’s view, were threefold. First, he employed historicism as a tool to relativize the Judaic absolute. Second, he assigned “demonic” mysticism a position of importance in the framework of normative Judaism. Third, and most important, he legitimated secular Zionism as an expression native to Jewish history. “There is no more penetrating proof of the absurdity of our time,” Kurzweil railed, “than the fact that Scholem is today the spokesman for Judaism.”

Proposition 4: Crankitude is a coping mechanism that enables the Orthodox intellectual crank to maintain a reasonable equilibrium in a situation of extreme stress.

From everything that I have said thus far about Kurzweil and Leibowitz it should be evident that theirs is not a placid synthesis of Orthodoxy and modernity à la Samson Raphael Hirsch.

 On the contrary, their encounter with modernity is characterized by sharply conflicted feelings, by powerful attraction on the one side and violent rejection on the other. The crucial factor here is the element of simultaneity—the fact that Kurzweil and Leibowitz feel drawn to and repulsed by modernity at one and the same time. It is no exaggeration at all to state that the measure of their attraction is the measure of their repulsion, and vice versa. It is precisely this tension that makes the work of these two Orthodox intellectuals so fascinating, and, I would contend, that accounts for their crankitude.

In the discussion of Rabbi Grunfeld in a prior post, the contrasts with Rabbi Isaac Breuer were not immediately obvious to my readers. To further discussion, Rabbi Isaac Breuer wrote a 15 page essay on the importance of his grandfather Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.  (Jewish Leaders ed. Leo Jung, pp 163-177). The essay does not claim to be Breuer’s views but those of Hirsch.

Breuer paints Hirsch as a revolutionary great man directing history to move forward.  In fact, Breuer declares every great historical personality is a revolutionary figure. True Jewish revolutionaries do not rebel against God’s law but against the material social conditions, which have to be overthrown to change. The revolutionary masters the new conditions – and then break the mold in advance of the rest of his generation.  Other nations may rebel against their religion or law but the Jewish revolution keeps the law as eternal. The law is Divine, not the will of the people. Just as one cannot rebel against the laws of nature we cannot rebel against the Divine law.

Breuer reminds us that at the close of 18th century and start of 19th century there was a change in society with astonishing new modes of living. There was a Renaissance of individualism and granting of rights to the individual. Liberalism, capitalism, and science were each a challenge to the old order.

Mendelssohn was only a puny evolutionary and not a revolutionary who overthrew the system. The old rabbis denounced enlightenment and Emancipation which was futile before the change in the material culture and Reform was an illegitimate incorrect revolution.

According to Breuer, revolutionaries are never theoreticians; they work with facts and proceed with actions. Therefore, Hirsch does not set out a presentation of his views or a justification. He did not even have to articulate or develop his views. And he did not need “far-fetched” halakhic justification.

Breuer removes the conjunctive from Hirsch’s legacy – there was no combining of Torah and Western culture. Hirsch did not try for balance, synthesis or the richness of a fuller education.  According to Breuer,  Hirsch wanted absolute domination of the divine precept over the new tendencies of civilization. There can be no collateral rule, and no tolerance of anything else after the revolution Hirsch took liberalism, capitalism, and science and led them to flames of Torah.

Only his epigones, his second rate imitators turned Torah and Derekh Eretz into byword or motto. There is no time when derekh eretz was not the province of Torah- it is prerequisite for Torah, so there is no need for coordination or synthesis.  (In our contemporary language, everyone is embedded in culture , in the manifestations of that civilization).

What was revolutionary about Rabbi Hirsch was the incomparable courage he displayed in detecting the dwindling of one civilization (derekh eretz), and in grasping the need for a new one…” and then judging it by Torah. He was revolutionary in that he prevailed over centuries old custom which thought of Torah as part of a different derekh eretz. He is to be judged therefore not by his relationship to externals like secular studies or socio-politcal realities but by his revolution.

Hirsch  was not bound to a new derekh eretz or a definite derekh eretz. Hirsch’s new derekh eretz meant a new way of life. His achievement was the “re-conducting” the Jewish people into its own history- the aim of which is no other than the establishment of the Divine state.”

For Breuer, Hirsch was the first national Jew of modern times- before Herzl. The middle ages was a civilization of wailing and suffering- absolute passivity.  Only a small part of human life was used.Hirsch saw the need to create scientists and physicians and businessmen for the operation of the state.  To most people looking at his work with a naked eye, his work in the diaspora (galut) had no connection to Jewish national history. In reality, it was working toward the establishment of a divine state based on divine law on Zion. The spread of Torah over all of life can only exist in a divine state. Hirsch’s vision is a renewal of the ancient proclamation of the Divine sovereignty over Jerusalem and new Jewish individual  with a new many sided derekh eretz under the sole rule of divine precept for the coming divine state.

Breuer acknowledges that what he says does not appear in the vast Hirschian corpus. He finds a hint in one in 19 letters of a restored Torah government.  Breuer sees Hirsch’s Commentary on the Pentateuch as a blueprint is for the coming divine state. It has a history that shows modern decadence stemming from the  Falls of Adam in the misuse of his free choice, Noah’s story shows on cultural decadence, and the story of Babel shows usurped state sovereignty by a collective.-It shows the dangers of universal history without divine precept.  Hirsch’s  explanations of sacrifice, purity, and social law are as blueprint for the state. (AB-On this one he would have to cite examples because the simple reading of these explanation is for the ideal bourgeois life of education, work, and family life. Also notice how much Schopenhauer weltschmertz pessimism Breuer accepts, compared to Grunfeld’s liberalism).

Breuer writes that only fools cold think that those who freed us to perform the divine precepts are could fetter us with German derekh eretz. Hirsch did not accept German culture alongside Torah. If Torah ve derekh eretz was Torah and Western civilization, then if the later fell in WWI there would be a revolt against the combination. Hirsch’s derekh erets is now further revealed in the derekh eretz of the land of Israel. If you view the tragic events of WWI Germany as marking the collapse of Hirsch’s thought – then you don’t know Hirsch. Hirsch was a call for a return to Zion long before our people were ready.

Now the only choice is the materialism of the Zionists, including the Religious Zionism who only look at the material causality or the meta-Historic Divine state. There is no third way. It is either a Divine state as envisioned  by Hirsch’s meta-historic identity or if the materialists win we will need Divine grace.

As one can see from the opening of this essay, Breuer owes a debt to his reading of Marxist texts and theory.  He was so enamored of Marx that he called him the Kant for economic/social theory. Breuer uses direct quotes from the Manifesto and other famous works.  (In contrast, Dayan Grunfeld thought that all a Jew needed was Kant ). He is somewhat of a Leninists in expecting the leaders to be in the vanguard of the nation.  Elsewhere in his writings Breuer writes that the revolution will come from the workers, hence his concern with the Ost-Juden. For Breuer, Marxism as just materialistic- whereas we have a divine service when the revolution comes. At this same time, the Frankfort School was meeting regularly in Frankfort. Leading Orthodox rabbis such as Nechimias Nobel and S B Rabinkow preach a Jewish socialism.

Breuer’s Divine state is a bit more indigestible if it had come to be. On one hand, it is Spengler meets TS Elliot’s Christian culture, but on the other hand Sayyed Qutb uses similar Marxist arguments to bolster an Islamicist revolution against the West.  For more on Breuer’s Marxist background, see Matthias Morgenstern, From Frankfurt to Jerusalem Isaac Breuer and the History of the Secession Dispute in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy; On the warm personal relationship of Breuer and Franz Rosenzweig, both of whom believed in an eternal Israel, were ahistoric, and anti-Zionist , see Rivka Horowitz,  “Exile and Redemption in the Thought of Isaac Breuer,” Tradition 26 (1992)

Breuer’s son became mainstream Mizrachi, albeit of a more Torani variety, teaching German Jewish History at Bar Ilan after a stint teaching in the Horev school in Jerusalem. But Breuer’s thought was continued in the literature department of Bar Ilan by his disciple Barukh Kurzweil who characterized his mentor as abounding in “paradoxes and contradictions.”

Barukh Kurzweil studied at Solomon Breuer’s yeshiva in Frankfurt and the University of Frankfurt. He founded and headed Bar Ilan University’s Department of Hebrew Literature until his death.

Kurzweil saw secular modernity (including secular Zionism) as representing a tragic, fundamental break from the premodern world. Where before the belief in God provided a fundamental absolute of human existence, in the modern world this pillar of human life has disappeared, leaving a “void” that moderns futilely attempt to fill by exalting the individual ego. This discontinuity is reflected in modern Hebrew literature, which lacks the religious foundation of traditional Jewish literature: “The secularism of modern Hebrew literature is a given in that it is for the most part the outgrowth of a spiritual world divested of the primordial certainty in a sacral foundation that envelops all the events of life and measures their value.”  Kurzweil wanted a society grounded in religious values.

Outside both the USHMM and Yad Vashem is the statement “Remember Always “ attributed to the Eighteenth century mystic  the Baal Shem Tov. The original statement of the Besht was “Remember God Always.”  The context and purpose of the original was removed.  The source for this change is the writings of Elie Wiesel who sees memory by itself as redemptive.  He considers memory greater than Justice, greater than truth, and restoring the past. Hence the obligation is to remember “always.” But is memory always good?

The Yale theologian Miroslav Volf in his important work The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006) notes that many times remembrance elicits a desire for revenge—either on ourselves or on others. Rejecting Wiesel’s simply plea for memory, Volf illustrates with many personals stories that memory is ambiguous; it can be used as a justification to be mean to others, to remain depressed and embittered for life or it even can even lead one to become a perpetrator of evil upon another.

 Volf also points out how memory of a wrong can lead to viewing the world in Manichean terms. “In memory, a wrongdoing often does not remain an isolated stain on the [wrongdoer’s] character…it spreads over and colors his entire character. Must I not try to contain that spreading?” Through merely remembering, we begin falling into a cycle of sadism or masochism under the guise of geopolitical and personal safety.

What Jews need, following Volf, is an approach to memory that is future oriented toward learning the right lessons.  What are the right lesson for survivors and their families, for culture and education, and for morally responding?

For those personally dealing with tragic memories, right remembering involves not allowing traumatic memories to dominate our identity, but reframing those memories for personal healing, having the truth of the traumas acknowledged. We need to avoid the negative use of memory by those who are victimized which perpetuates the evil that is done by the original wrong doers. To prevent an endless cycle of repaying evil for evil, we must seek a way to redeem the memories of what we have suffered at the hands of others.

For those involved in culture or education, the goal is to go beyond the fragility and faultiness of person all memory and seek historical memory through study, inquiry, and teaching. The goal is to seek truth understand the data contained in the documents, archives, and artifacts, then to seek the historical causes. Legends and personal trauma should not replace knowledge in our op-eds, classrooms, and public discussion. We should learn how factually incorrect are almost all of our contemporary analogies to the Holocaust. 

On the moral plane, what does it take to remember for positive effects of justice, rather than destructive effects? How can we utilize traumatic memories as a means of solidarity with victims and as an impetus for protecting victims from further violence?

As a generation that no longer deals directly with survivors, we are not at the mercy of our memories. We are stronger than them in that we play a part in shaping them. Volf likens the totality of our memories to a quilt. What is sewn in and discarded, what is prominently featured on the quilt, and what material constitutes background depends on how we sew our memories together. Memory is not all powerful in forming who we are; we ourselves shape our memories. Survivors needed a fragile memory for its recover of self and dignity, a therapeutic process of their own experience. But those raised in the lap of prosperity and security need memory first of all to be truthful  to the events and then we need it to offer a lesson.

Jews can use the story of the Exodus as a “meta-memory” through which Jews rightly remember. The great Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas taught that  Israel’s memories of the Exodus are to serve as the basis for their treatment of aliens and strangers. The Exodus also serves as the basis for a continuity that teaches its past in order to pass it on to the next generation. The meta-memory of Tisha beAv is a memory of the need for restoration and national redemption after tragedy. 

At the same time, more problematic are the texts about memory as a means for vengeance, for example against the Amalekites, urging use to go out and find an Amalelkite to beat up. The answer isn’t how well you teach, it’s how well you’re able to draw the correct lessons. This is where the problem of exemplary memory begins.  Memory translates into action, but how and what we choose to remember maintains a clear relationship to what we do.

Emmanuel Levinas concurs that memory is about our actions not our emotions.  Levinas thinks that the Holocaust has little to do with the perpetual problem of theodicy-why does God allow evil to occur?. The lesson of the Holocaust is that we need to take responsibility for the future. We shouldn’t allow Hitler a posthumous victory by allowing further genocides where people are slaughtered or reduced to a sub-human state. 

Levinas modifies the words of the Holocaust theologian Emil Fackenheim who said the message of absolute evil was that the Jewish people should survive. In contrast, Levinas demands that we need to make sure it does not happen to anyone, anywhere again. Levinas says the true meaning is that we need to take responsibility not to allow a genocide to continue to occur anywhere, always.

We should remember always, but memory without context and purpose may not always be for the good. It is easy to see that our public discussions would benefit from the truth of historical objectivity and greater study.

But how to remember rightly for justice is harder to establish context that will allow us to remember rightly.  How do we read our text for justice and not vengeance?  How do we balance our particular Jewish concerns with our pressing need to stop further genocides? How can we insure that memory is for restoring human dignity and not for making post-traumatic survivors of us all? And most importantly, we should ask ourselves Levinas’  question: how can we move from banal facebook posts that turn genocide into institutionalized cliché to responsibility action.

When someone says they are a follower of the approach of the religious approach of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, which generation of the approach? Do you want to invoke the humanist synthesis of Hirsch in 1835 or the community leader of 1878? Do you mean the second generation consisting of Hirsch’s children and immediate followers who collected their father’s legacy and wrote popular novels. Do they mean the third generation that studied in the Yeshiva founded by Rabbi Solomon Breuer who distinguished between the eternal Torah and the temporal ways of the world, such as Rabbi Isaac Breuer. Or do you mean the fourth generation who sought a return to Eastern European values? In the course of my research I have had a chance to reread Dayan Isidor Grunfeld’s classic work, Three Generations: the influence of Samson Raphael Hirsch on Jewish Life and Thought (1958). In the work, he clearly distinguishes between the first, second, and third generations of Hirschians and, in turn, distinguishes them from what Dayan Grunfeld considers the distortions and half-truths of the fourth generation. The book offers valuable insight into the varieties within Hirschian world including Dayan Grunfeld’s own approach. I found it pretty exceptionally important and interesting.

Dayan Grunfeld accepts that Mendelsohn was the father of the Jewish side of emancipation who “Entreated his brethren not to buy their political freedom at the cost of their most sacred treasure, the Torah.” And that ”No one can deny or has ever denied the purity of Mendelsohn’s intentions, the integrity of his character, his personal piety and meticulous observance of our Laws.” But the aesthetic and philosophic side of the Bible was presented at the expense of torah sheb’al peh, the oral law which is the soul of the Torah. He showed the world that one can be a strictly observant Jew and yet to be distinguished as the German Plato. The problem was the “and yet;” it was two separate realms and not drawing the aesthetic and philosophic from the Torah itself.

In contrast, Hirsch brought the two realms together when he arose and “declared the alleged antithesis between Torah law and social emancipation to be a false one. He entered the stage…carrying aloft two torches: Torah and Humanism. In his hand the two torches became one.” For Grunfeld, Hirsch brilliantly refuted the arguments against secular studies (see his commentaries on Leviticus 18: 4 and Psalm 119). Mendelsohn did not fight the battles for Enlightenment and Emancipation within the community that follows the oral law by showing the falsity of the separatist claims. For Grunfeld, Hirsch was known as a Biblical commentator, educator, member of Moravian Parliament, preacher of the freedom and dignity of man and philosopher of symbolism of the observances.

Dayyan Grunfeld rejects what he calls the revisionism of Jacob Rosenheim, founder of the Agudat Yisroel, that this was not a compromise. Humanism was not forced on the Jew rather his exclusion from the wider world was forced on the Jew. The estrangement from humanism was not natural so the Jews quickly came back into their own organic state. The highest era of Torah is always from an era of secular studies such as Spain.

Grunfeld presents his own theology of culture as part of explaining the Hirschian legacy.He consistently translates “way of the world” not as secular studies but as civilization. Hence, what is the relationship of Torah and civilization (derekh eretz) in modern historical thinkers? He presents four approaches. Arnold Toynbee consider world history as the relationship of religion and civilization, the latter requiring the former. The opposite approach is embraced by Edmond Gibbon who considers religion as the enemy of civilization. Alternately, “most secular historians consider religion as the chrysalis stage between civilizations.” The third approach considers religion as the core of civilization and when civilization decays it serve for deeper religious thought.

The fourth approach, which Grunfeld considers as “usually disregarded by non-Jewish thinkers, is namely, that true religion and true civilization are identical. The Torah is co-extensive with life in all its manifestations. This is only applicable in its fullest meaning of civilization would be in a Jewish state or an autonomous Jewish community. Grunfeld wrote that because of the decline in Jewish civilization in the 1850’s Hirsch had to deal with the third approach in which “non-Jewish civilization is the material for the realization of Torah.” He could only aspire to the autonomous cultural realm envisioned by the fourth approach. Torah is not just for ideal situations but also needs to be applied to civilization in times of decay like Hirsch’s post 1848 world of the anti-Enlightenment reaction and nnow one hundred years later in our post World War II world of cultural decay of the 1950’s.

Grunfeld reflectively quotes Nikolai Berdyaev’s idea that the Renaissance put man in the center of the universe rejecting the previous medieval other worldliness. But this change destroyed the unity of life and the natural ability to concentrate man’s forces to a spiritual authority. In the modern era, humanism and the study of the classics has taken the place of religion and the concept of a natural man replaced religious man. Currently, science offers unlimited reason as the sole truth and arbiter. Grunfeld aspired to a religious humanism. (AB- In contrast, Isaac Breuer paints a decadent secular culture and a religion above culture is the redemption.For Breuer, Torah is outside of history.)

For Grunfeld, one cannot hold onto a declining or lost civilization. One need to replace one civilization (derekh erets) with the new one. The sovereignty of Torah can, and does, work within any civilization including the new one. Hirsch waged war against the traditionalists who clung to the old civilization. Hirsch is to be compared to Hakham David Nieto who defended the Jewish tradition using the civilization of his era- including ideas close to Deism. So too, we need to come to grips with the main manifestations of the new civilization.

Humanism is a stepping stone to service of God, humanism without a religious basis would debase man and destroy itself. Berdyaev stated that we have a self-destructive dialectic with humanism (cf Hirsch’s Schiller based aesthetic education). We need to understand history and contemporary society. The Egyptian civilization had contempt for human life, the Romans had social oppression and Greece had licentiousness. With Torah we know how to take the best of the civilization. We cultivate our Individualism under divine law. In our civilization we learn that money cannot be idolized over people’s lives.

Chapters two and three recount the second generation of Hirschians. It includes Hirsch own sons- Rabbi Mendel who became the principal of the high school and his other sons who became each became a lawyer, doctor, and businessman respectively. Along with Joseph Guggenheim of Kolin, the son in law of Hirsh, they edited their father’s writings.

The second generation was busy wiring popular works for the increasing number of families choosing to affiliate Orthodox. Since Hirsch stressed that Judaism was to be taught in the home especially at the family table by both parents, they produced popular works, Solomon Carlebach, who wrote A Guide for the Jewish Home; H Ehrmann who wrote on Avot; Josef Nobel, wrote on midrash, Psalms, and haftrot.

It also includes, Mauritis Prins in Holland, Asher Cohn of Basle. The later in his public misgivings caused Herzl to remark at the First Zionist Congress, “Returning to Jewishness comes before returning to the land of the Jews.”

The third generation, lived after WWI and were educated during the era of Rabbi Solomon Breuer; they saw the return to Yeshiva
education. They founded a variety of organizations for the support of Orthodox Jews including the “Free union for the interests of Orthodox Judaism communities” This era witnessed the division of the community into Agudah and Mizrachi, creating two groups in the Hirschian community. This era included major pulpit rabbis like Isaac Unna of Mannheim and Ezra Munk, who were Mizrachi (as well as defender of the Geminde) and Agudah respectively. (AB- Unna is a grandson R. Bamberger, and student of Rabbi Marcus Horowitz both defenders of the Geminde. Implicitly by the absence of a discussion of Isaac Breuer and an incorporation of Unna within the Hirschian tradtion, we see Dayyan Grunfelds’ own sympathies. Grunfeld includes in this era, those integrated into culture such as the lae professor Jekutiel Jacob Neubauer, Herman struck the famous artist and Oscar Wolfsberg (Yeshayah Aviad) the Zionist leader.

Grunfeld also credits this era as producing revisionists like Jacob Rosenheim who saw Hirsch’s defense of secular studies as only a compromise. Isaac Halevy, a popular historian who polemicized against all historians who saw Rabbinic law as a contingent response to its time. And Herman Schwab whose writings give greater continuity with the tradition and gives less credit to modernity.
There were those who served as conduits of Hirschian thought to the Eastern European Jews such as Leo Deutschlander who headed Keren Hatorah and later founded the girls school movement Beis Yakov. Deutschlander wrote books extolling the virtues of German humanism Goethe and the Bible, and Shem ve yefet, an anthology of poetics.

Philip Biberfeld wrote the Universal Jewish history and worked for the Keren haTorah where he translated children’s books including those on Hatam Sofer so people could consume the new genre of rabbinic biography.

In England, Hirschians included Dayan Grossnass, Dayan Julius Jacobowitz and himself. Most notably, it included Rabbi Avigor (Victor) Schonfeld who married Chief Rabbi Hertz’s daughter and argued that today in the 1950’s there is no need for austritt even according to Hirsch because he did it only to separate from Reform influence on Rabbinic leadership. However, here in England where all are orthodox it is not needed even if there are different levels of observance among laity. He founded the Hasmaean HS and instrumental in setting up secondary schools that were both Mizrachi and followed Hirsch. (AB- I don’t see a direct link to Hirsch in his education, but Schonfeld was a close personal friend of Grunfeld.)Other names included in this era- all producing their own spin on the Hirschian legacy include Rabbis Raphael Breuer, Joseph Carlebach, Pinchas Kohn, Saul Kaatz, Avaham Eliyahu Kaplan and Moses Auerbach.

In the Fourth generation, Grunfeld laments “it seems strange to witness this hostile attitude to general education in the descendants of the disciples of Hirsch.” Yet, “the hostile attitude to general education and the consequent narrowing down of the intellectual horizons among some of the spiritual heirs of Hirsch in the fourth generation can easily be explained as a psychological reaction to the ghastly experience of our time which saw the merciless torture and murder of six million of our brethren in the heart of civilized Europe…What is, however,, less understandable, and must be objected to for reasons of historical truth, is the attempt to –re-interpret Hirsch in a way that would fit with this negative attitude to secular education.”Grunfeld acknowledges that some of this shift already occurred in the third generation during the post Kristallnacht era. Already, they emphasized the need to earn a livelihood.

“We must not endanger Jewish Orthodox life by being extricably involved in economic patterns and forms which have had their day and are doomed to die.” No civilization is eternal, they are ever changing. “Atomic energy is the symbol of the new age” The new orthodox baal habayit cannot live like in the shtetl nor can he look backwards to the period before WWI.

Grunfeld nevertheless concludes that 10 periods of Jewish Studies during a day school week consisting of 40-45 periods may have not been enough to actualize this vision in people’s lives.