Do Zealots make Good Jewish Leaders? -by Rabbi Hyim Shafner

July 4, 2010

This past week we read in the Torah of Pinchus, someone who stands up to fulfill what is written in Pirkey Avot (The Ethics of Our Fathers), “In a place where there is no one, stand up and be someone”.  He is the classic zealot for God.  Several paragraphs latter when God tells Moses that Moses will die, Moses asks God to choose someone as a new leader.   The obvious question is why not Pinchus?   The obvious answer is that Pinchus is a zealot and while God gave Pinchas His covenant of peace, he is not fitting for Jewish leadership.

In asking God to appoint a leader Moses calls God a name with which he has not been referred to before.  “God of the spirits of all flesh (creatures).”   Rashi comments, God of “ruchot” spirits of all flesh- “Appoint someone who can tolerate the individual spirits, personalities, of each of your people.”   “So that your people will not be like sheep without a shepherd.”

Moses feels a good leader for the Jewish people is one that is a shepherd, knows each as an individual and is willing to tolerate each individual’s personality.  Perhaps like Aaron, who does not oppose the Jewish peoples’ desire to make the golden calf but goes with their request trying along the way to curb their idolatrous desire toward something better.   The opposite perhaps of Pinchus, who stands up and attacks when wrong is being perpetrated.

God tells Moses to pick Yehoshuah, a man who, “has the spirit in him.”  Rashi comments here that the spirit referred to is the ability to stand in opposition to the ruach, the spirit and personality, of the people when he must.   Yehoshuah of course is neither Pinchas nor Aaron, neither one who only tolerates the desires of the people nor one who trounces them.  Thus he is a good Jewish leader.  Joshuah like Moses, is a balanced leader who is both shepherd and admonisher, who can tolerate the people’s ruach and also stand against it.

We live in world where Pinchus seems to have won.  Whether Muslim zealots who blow themselves up, Christian zealots who reneg on the kindness and understanding of Vatican II, or Jewish zealots (lihavdil) who revoke sincere peoples conversions, today it is the extremists who hold the day and the media.  May we merit that the God of the, “spirits of all creatures,” bring us leaders well balanced like Moses and Yehoshua.

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Rabbi Shafner’s Series of On-Location Video Divrey Torah from Israel

June 22, 2010

Just click HERE to watch them.

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Morethodoxy will be Regularly Back Online in About Two Weeks

June 22, 2010

Thanks for bearing with us as we regroup, add some bloggers and get back to regular posting in just 2 weeks or so…..

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What is the Purpose of Zionism, Part 2- By Rabbi Hyim Shafner

April 25, 2010

Last week I wrote that it seemed from the torah that the goal of the Jewish people to be a “blessing to all the peoples of the world” as God tells Abraham, can only happen by going to the “land which I will show you,” and there becoming a “great nation.”  Why is it that being a Jewish landed nation is important beyond the obvious reason that the world and its nations can see us more clearly as a national example on par with other nations?  Is there something uniquely spiritual and holy, something uniquely “torahdik” about being a nation in a land? The following quote from Rav Kook I think may shed some light (my thanks to my teacher Rabbi Israel Samet for the quote):

אורות עמ’ קד

בראשית מטעו של העם הזה, אשר ידע לקרוא בשם הרעיון האלהי הברור והטהור בעת השלטון הכביר של האליליות בטומאתה-פראותה, נתגלתה השאיפה להקים צבור אנושי גדול אשר “ישמור את דרך ד’ לעשות צדקה ומשפט”. זוהי השאיפה, שבאה מכח ההכרה הברורה והעזה והתביעה המוסרית הכוללת והרמה, להוציא את האנושיות מתחת סבל נורא של צרות רוחניות וחמריות ולהביאנה לחיי חופש מלאי הוד ועדן, באור האידיאה האלהית, ולהצליח בזה את כל האדם כלו. למלואה של שאיפה זו צריך דוקא, שצבור זה יהיה בעל מדינה פוליטית וסוציאלית וכסא ממלכה לאומית, ברום התרבות האנושית, “עם חכם ונבון וגוי גדול”, והאידיאה האלהית המוחלטת מושלת שמה ומחיה את העם ואת הארץ במאור-חייה. למען דעת, שלא רק יחידים חכמים מצויינים, חסידים ונזירים ואנשי-קדש, חיים באור האידיאה האלהית, כי גם עמים שלמים, מתוקנים ומשוכללים בכל תקוני התרבות והישוב המדיני; עמים שלמים, הכוללים בתוכם את כל השדרות האנושיות השונות, מן רום האינטליגנציה האמנותית, הפרושית, המשכלת והקדושה, עד המערכות הרחבות, הסוציאליות, הפוליטיות והאקנומיות, ועד הפרולטריון לכל פלגותיו, אפילו היותר נמוך ומגושם.

“At the beginning of this nation’s formation, it knew how to call in the name of the pure idea of God at the time of the controlling ideology of idol worship, there was revealed in it them a desire to form a large human group that would “guard the way of God, to do justice and righteousness.”  This is the desire that comes from the clear, subtle, ethical  recognition of the need to take man from under the terrible burden of physical and spiritual pain and to bring man to a life of freedom full of grace and kindness, in the light of Divine ideology, and through this to redeem the whole person.  But to fulfill this yearning there must be a community that has a politic, country, and culture.  A “big nation that is wise and intelligent.”   This encompassing divine ideology must rule there and enliven the people and its land in its light in order to know that not just wise and holy individuals alone live in the light of this Divine ideology but also whole nation with elaborate cultures and a functioning society, from the intellectual, holy, and esthetic to the vast systems -social, political and economic, to the proletariat and all its sub-sections, even the lowest and poorest of them.”  (Orot 204)

Rabbi Kook here seems to be saying that the torah and a relationship to God and Godly ideas can not be achieved solely as an individual or even as a community.  It takes the complexities and structures of nationhood to truly achieve it.

In addition to this second outwardly oriented national reason for the importance of a Jewish nation state in the Land of Israel, another important reason for the existence of a Jewish nation state I think, is as a light unto itself.  Some have argued that the Torah, though given in the desert, is clearly written for the Jewish nation living as a people in the Land of Israel, and thus can only truly be observed as just that.

The Ramb”n is the most famous opinion who holds that mitzvoth kept outside of the Land of Israel are not truly obligatory mitzvoth.  That settling the Land of Israel is equal to all the mitzvoth and that outside of Israel mitzvoth are done only so we do not forget them but are not really an obligation in the same way as those performed within the land are.

Why is this so?  It’s a holy land but how does that change the nature of specific person oriented mitzvoth such as matza, shofar or tifilin?  Such mitzvot do not seem tied to the land.

Perhaps if the mitzvoth are not just meant to be about an individual’s soul and relationship to God but about a landed nation’s function visa via other peoples, this would explain why each mitzvah, how each citizen acts, is in turn an inextricable part of the whole, like a mosaic or a Surat painting, together coloring the world in the shades of Torah.

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What is the Purpose of Zionism? –By Rabbi Hyim Shafner

April 9, 2010

Although in the modern Orthodox community it is not PC to admit this, I am not a Zionist.   I did not grow up feeling or being taught that Israel, in the modern sense of the term, was essential for the Jews or for being Jewish.  I was taught that though Israel is a holy land, the land God gave to Avrohom and the Jewish people, but the torah is what makes us who we are.  The Jews have lived for as much times in exile as not and the torah has flourished there, in spite of all our persecution.  I grew up looking not to Zion for torah but to Vilna.   Indeed the Jews remain the Jews without Israel, but with out torah we are merely another nationality like all others.

Many years ago when Rabbi Avi Weiss asked me to come to the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and interview to be his assistant, though I had spent many years at Yeshiva University I still did not see Zionism and the modern state of Israel as important.   At one point during the interview I was asked how I saw the place of Israel. I responded that I thought Israel was a holy land, a good place to study torah and keep mitzvot dependant upon the land, but, I said that I did not think it was that important to being a Jew or to the Jewish people.

After the weekend, Reb Avi told me, “Chaim, you can not be a rabbi in America without coming to terms with Israel.”  And so 15 years ago, after that interview my wife and I went to Israel for 6 months.   I had never really learned in Israel, (my education had been mostly in Charedi Yeshivot in America), or lived there before, and I remember at the end of our time turning to Sara my wife and saying, “You know, maybe Israel is the home of the Jewish people.”  Yet a committed emotional Zionist I was not.

And so it is hard for someone like me to feel that living in Israel is important; if torah is more important shouldn’t one decide where to live based on where they learn torah best?   But after a trip I took to Israel a year ago I gave a derasha looking at God’s first command to Abraham, God tells Avrohom to “go to the land, become a nation and then be a blessing to all the people of the world.”  It seemed that a prerequisite to fulfilling the original and ongoing mission of the Jewish people to be a light unto the nations was somehow dependent on becoming a landed nation in the land which “I will show you.”  The only truly valid reason I could see for the importance of aliyah, since I was not taught that the land of Israel would save the Jews from persecution and the halachic question of the need to settle the land is one subject to argument.

This past week I read Rabbi Ian Pear’s book, “The Accidental Zionist” in which he argues precisely this, that to be a blessing to the people of the world, to fulfill the Jewish mission, especially in the modern period it is essential to be a landed nation state.   Only then can we be a model to the other nations on a world level.

The book is well said, interesting, and inspiring, well worth reading.  Of course it seems to me there is a need for a second book.   When the Jews make a nation in the land how do they proceed to be that national model to the world?  It is not enough to say they do it by just keeping the torah since most of the torah we are used to does not address the national questions, and a theocracy is not really doable or productive at this point.  So how do we as a Jewish nation in a land go about being in a conscious and organized way, “a blessing to all of the families (nations) of the world,” as god commanded Abraham when they first met?

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Why We Need a Reversion of Conversion-By Rabbi Hyim Shafner

April 3, 2010

A while back I sent a certain Orthodox rabbi a link to Rabbi Marc Angel’s article about conversion which appeared in the Forward http://www.forward.com/articles/11985/ in which Rabbi Angel argues quoting former chief Sephardic Rabbi Uziel, that we should err on the side of accepting converts rather than rejecting them and criticizes the high barriers the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has placed before those who wish to be part of our people.    The particular rabbi’s response to me was, “Don’t get involved with ideas and people which are so extremely liberal, everyone like that wants to hang their hat on Rav Uziel the one minority opinion.”  End of conversation.

Another conversion experience:  Several years ago I brought a very sincere potential convert  to a Orthodox Bait Din which had functioned for many years and whose conversions are widely accepted.   The potential ger had a Jewish father and non Jewish mother, and no Jewish girlfriend or wife that he wished to please.  He just wanted to be an observant, full-fledged Jew.  After about a year of study and several meetings with the bait din the bait din brought him in for what I assumed would be his final meeting and conversion, he was fully religious, studying torah and attending synagogue, had taught himself Hebrew off the internet and was actually studying mishnah and chumash on his own in Hebrew by this point.  A no brainer. 

After his meeting I asked how it went, when would the mikvah be?  He answered that they had given him a test of which he knew practically all the answers, except for all the names of the Hebrew months, and they had sent him back to wait another 6 months before converting him asking him to study more halacha, specifically a book by Rabbi Shimon Eider on the laws of the 3 weeks and a 150 page English halacha book on the laws of yichud, the  laws pertaining to with whom and when one is allowed to be in a room together with someone of the opposite gender.  

Enraged I called the head of the bait din, “isn’t this a violation of “lo tunu et hageer”   (The biblical commandment not to oppress the stranger, which some commentaries applies even to one just considering conversion) I asked?  

“We are volunteers,” he replied, “I will not convert someone if there is a chance they will not observe a law on my account.”

I tell these stories now for two reasons.  Recently I had two experiences that offer at least a bit of indication that things may change.  That we have gone so far to one extreme that we may soon see the light and the Torah’s way and experience a corrective return to the middle.   Myself and several other rabbis met with Rabbi Chaim Amsalem, a member of Kenneset from the Shas party.  Rabbi Amsalem showed us the 2 volume magnum opus he has just published entitled “Zera Yisrael,” “seed of Israel”  which refers to someone who is not technically Jewish by birth but has some connection to the Jewish people, a Jewish father or grandparent, or perhaps lives in the Jewish country fighting its wars and casting their lot with its people.  

Such people are not halachically Jewish but are not like other non-Jews either, they occupy an intermediate space in Jewish law referred to as zera yisrael, much as the person in my story above or the myriads of Jews I see on a daily basis in America who due to an entire generation assimilating have a Jewish father or grandfather and a non Jewish mother.   In his book, which he says Rabbi Ovadiyah Yosef is willing to support, he argues that the opinion of Rabbi Uziel that someone, especially a person with a previous connection to the Jewish people, should be able to convert even without full acceptance of the commandments, is actually the opinion of tens of rishonim, early halachic commentators.    Not just a minority opinion ”upon which liberal hang their hat”.

Another experience was a speaker I heard today, Rabbi Telushkin, who has just written a book on the sage Hillel.  Well known are the stories in which a person wanting to convert but with outlandish demands, such as convert me while I stand on one foot, convert me on the condition that you make me a kohen gadol, convert me on the condition that I accept only the written torah and not the oral one, is rejected outright by Shamai and immediately accepted and converted by Hillel.  Only afterward did Hillel teach them the torah.  Rabbi Telushkin put it well, “Though Hillel always wins in the gemara, it is Shamai who wins in Jewish life.”  That just about sums it up I think.  

And so perhaps soon we will realize that though the words of Shamai are also the words of the living God, the law is like Hillel who is almost always lenient.  It seems this is what our tradition is supposed to be, leniency that results, as the converts say of Hillel, in lovingly bringing others underneath the wings of the divine presence.

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Religious Zionism, Creativity, and the Future of the Jewish People-by Rabbi Hyim Shafner

March 8, 2010

In a recent Jerusalem post article rabbi Daniel Gordis wrote that in his view there is no creativity in the torah of religious Zionism and that indeed since rabbi Solovetchik and rabbi kook there has not been any.   As a result he does not feel that religious Zionism is able to speak to secular Jews in Israel.   The article can be read here:

http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=169638

My vehement disagreement with him was published as a letter to the editor in the Jerusalem Post last week.   In it I argue that the only place in the Torah world today (think Machon Hertzog,  Siach Yitzchak and others) in which there is any creativity is in the world of Religious Zionism, that this creativity is a result of its relationship with the land and people of Israel, and that only this approach has any hope of truly engaging the nonreligious population.

Here is the letter:

February 28, 2010

Letter to the Editor

Sir, -I vehemently disagree with Daniel Gordis’ pronouncement that Religious Zionism has not produced any creative thinkers.  It is in fact only in the world of Religious Zionism today in Israel that creative thinking about Torah and Talmud is taking place.

One example: As an Orthodox American Rabbi on sabbatical in Jerusalem, I commute to Lod each day to learn from Rabbi Israel Samet, the Rabbi of the Religious Zionist garin in Lod and head of its yeshiva.  Rabbi Samet’s ground breaking approach to Talmud is based upon the observation that the Talmud, like the Bible, is not a legal work.   Both are primarily narratives of which the law is but a part.  The rabbis of the Talmud, according to this new vision, were not halachists but are rather telling the story of the Jewish people, integrating the law with the narrative of the Talmud to do so.

It is in fact only Religious Zionists that can understand the Mishnaic Rabbis in this wholesome way since they live lives closest to those of the ancient rabbis, speaking their language, living in their land, and seeing the Jewish People as a nation, not solely as a religion to which Judaism in Diaspora must of necessity be limited.

This approach to Talmud will soon affect a sea change in the way that the Talmud and Torah speak to our people in Israel who have moved from observing laws in a vacuum (or for much of Israeli society, not observing them)  to living the continued narrative of the Jewish Nation.  This approach which emerges from and speaks directly to the Jewish nation living in its land, has the potential to finally bridge what it means to be a Jew with what it means to be an Israeli, thus engaging the world of non-religious Israelis who feel the Torah and the Talmud offer little of relevance to their lives today but are thirsty for something that does.

Rabbi Hyim Shafner

Bais Abraham Congregation

St. Louis, Missouri (currently on sabbatical in Jerusalem)

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Sleeping Over in the West Bank -By Rabbi Hyim Shafner

February 21, 2010

Two weeks ago I traveled with 40 Rabbis, Rabbinical students and educators to Bethlehem, and spent two days talking with Arabs in the West Bank who have committed themselves to solving the looming problems of the Israeli Palestinian conflict peacefully.  I slept overnight in the very nice home of a Christian family in Bethlehem.  None of us visitors were Israeli citizens since they are not allowed in Bethlehem which is part of Area A, the Oslo section of the West Bank that is solely under PA control.

I., as many Anglo Jews and perhaps Israeli Jews, always imagined that to enter the West Bank was to take one’s life in one’s hands; that all West Bank citizens want most of all to kill Jews.   Hearing Arabic or seeing it would sometimes make me afraid.

While there is usually some truth in stereotypes, which is how they get to be stereotypes, it is also true that there are real people on the other side of the wall, Christians and Muslims, who do not fit the stereotype.  Though the situation did not become any clearer while I was there, and even less so after I returned to discuss my findings and experiences with Israelis I know, I did become more convinced that peace can only happen if real individuals are in touch with, and experience as people, other real human beings on the other side of each.

The following video is a 5 minute account of some of my experiences in Bethlehem.

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More on learning with Rav Samet and the Yeshivah Gedolah of Lod -Rabbi Hyim Shafner

February 7, 2010

We are learning the beginning of Baba Kama which speaks of 4 avot, “parents” (meaning parent categories) of nizikin, of damages -the ox, the pit, the maaveh and the fire.

Typically in all books of the Talmud we find an interweaving of halachic, legal sections, and agaditah, narrative sections.   In many yeshivot these narrative sections are seen as beside the point, and in some of the yeshivot I attended even skipped over entirely; viewed as irrelevant to the halachic, or legal sections of the chapter.

The approach in Lod is just the opposite.  The narrative and legal sections must not only both be read but seen as an integrated whole.   When I asked Rabbi Samet about this he answered that this interweaving of law and narrative was the way in which chazal, our rabbis, wrote because it was their (and by extension Judaism’s?) world view.  The reason for the constant presence of agadah in what we usually see as primarily a legal book is not just to pepper the halacha with stories which would teach musar and hashkafah, ethics and Jewish thought, but because for chazal halacha and agada are one and the same.

In fact, he said, agadah is in a way actually the main item.  Our story, an understanding of our world and the world around us is chazal’s thrust, halacha is one part of that story.   Indeed he said this is true of Tanach, the Bible, which is mostly narrative also.  When I asked about the first Rashi on the torah which seems to indicate that laws are the main purpose of the torah, and that the torah should have thus begun from the first mitzvah given to the Jewish people, Rabbi Samet answered that not only does the torah not start with law but with narrative, but in fact the torah is mostly narrative, with law interwoven.

Indeed, he replied, this precisely is Rashi’s answer, the torah had to start from birashit (Genesis) so that people would know that God created the world and thus had the authority to give the Land of Israel to the Jewish people.  Why is this the answer?  Because the story of the Jewish people as a nation in a land IS the story and point of the Torah.   There is no bifurcation of law and story, it is one.  The law is but a part of the story.   Thus when we study Talmud we must look closely at how the rabbis phrased what they did, often it is not for legal purposes but because they are looking at a much larger narrative, that of life in general and of the Jewish people in particular.

When I asked why it is only now that this approach has come to light, he replied that the reason we can recognize the intention of chazal is that it is we who live in their land and speak their language and thus are closest to the lives they led and the perceptive they had of the universe.   Halacha is not meant as a series of actions but as a life lived, as a national story, as the life and thought of a people and nation, halacha is part of this.  Thus each halachic concept must be seen as integrated with the agadah because it is agadah (I do not mean by this that it is not binding or not literal).

For instance, the point of labeling the “pit” as a “father “of damage has not only to do with it technically being a way to damage, for there are may ways and many “avot” of damage not listed in the Mishnah of the four Avot. The “pit” is more than a method of damage; it is an idea that plays a role in the Weltanschauung of chazal and in our vision as Jews.   When seen it this way, the answer to why Baba Kama begins with specifically these 4 “father” categories of damage when actually there are many more, becomes clear.   The rabbis were not only making a statement about the technicalities of damage but about central notions in the life of the Jewish people.  This is their program, their method and goal.

Thus the 4 “fathers” of damage, (which the Talmud says also have “children” categories or generations), the pit, the fire, the walking and the ox, loom large in our mishna not because they are the only ways to damage but for much bigger reasons that have everything to do both with damage and with who we are as a nation.   For example the “pit” is not only a place of potential damage but just the opposite also, the source of life in the Land of Israel.   Israel is a land in which it only rains during the rainy season, there is no large Nile River to irrigate the land, as the torah says in Devarim chapter 11, it is a land irrigated by the rains.   The only way to store rain is the bor, the pit.     Each source of damage is not only a damager, but its opposite also, a source of creation and life, reflecting the fragile nature of our universe and our mission in it as Jews.  Thus are these categories quite aptly referred to as “Avot” parents with “toldot” children.

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More on Rav Samet’s Yeshivah in Lod and the Creativity of Talmud Study –by Rabbi Hyim Shafner

January 15, 2010

There are several Torah scholars who derive creative philosophical, psychological, and quite modern thoughts from the Tanach and Midrash.  Among these authors is most notably Aviva Zorenberg, and I think she herself would argue, the Midrash itself.  There are also those commentaries that take the same approach to Agaditah, the narrative sections of the Talmud.  These thinkers include Immanual Levinas, as well as, I would say, the Mahara”l, and many others.    To read these authors is to see all of the great ideas even of the world reflected in our texts and moreover to see ourselves in them.

Few though have used these methods to delve into the halachic sections of the Talmud.   I think this is because when we approach a halachic section of Talmud our aim usually is not to see ourselves reflected in the sugyah, but more as a scientist; objective, linier, and above all logical.   The approach in the yeshiva in Lod is unique in that in addition of course to the classical study of the rishonim and achronim (earlier and latter commentaries) the Talmud is analyzed with an eye to the psychological, the philosophical, the human and the personal.  In this way one can sense an added level of relevancy in these halchaic sections.

For instance, in the process of studying the halachic sections of Baba Kammah regarding the required compensation for injury that one who damages another must pay, the much deeper questions of what it means to damage another human was dealt with in depth.   Though I came to the yeshiva only toward the end of their study of this section of Talmud, the first day I attended was actually a field trip related to the sugyah, the halachik section of the Talmud they were learning.

The yeshiva visited a residential facility for individuals with disabilities to interact with them and to understand from their point of view what it is like to not posses all the  physical abilities of the average person.   This was then related back to a central question underlying the halchic sections of this chapter in Baba Kamah.  If one person damages another physically, say by cutting off their hand, they must compensate them monetarily.  Is this truly compensation for lost use or have they inflicted upon another person something that in truth can not be compensated?  Have they taken from them part of their humanness, part of what it means for them to be themselves?   What does it mean then to halachically compensate another for physical damage we have inflicted upon them.

Though in many yeshivot such questions would be seen as beside the point, the object usually being to invent new ideas in a removed intellectual manor,  rather than to be ourselves present to what the Talmud says, I think Talmud studied in this way opens a door to the Talmud and Jewish law changing the way we see ourselves in the world; not just fulfilling the commandment to study torah.   Ironically, as in psychotherapy, Rabbi Samet pointed out, to uncover one’s own discomfort, one’s own personal feelings and the baggage they bring to the Sugyah, enables one actually to be more objective in the end.

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