Rupture and Reconstruction Two Decades Later

Someone advertised the following as the topics for a recent halachic lecture:

My Sephardi friend won’t go with me to the restaurant, even with a good hechsher. He said it’s only for Ashkenazim. Is there a real halachic problem, or is it discrimination? Can a Sephardi buy Shwarma if a non-Jew is behind the counter?

Although I am familiar with 2oth century figures speaking in such terms, I could not find them in classical sources, and I figure that I will never find the like within the writings of the quintessential Sephardic and Ashkenazic decisors who wrote the Shulhan Aruch. Neither the Rema nor the Beth Yosef would ask a third generation Israeli if he was  this or that before rendering him a halachic opinion. We should follow in their ways, and not let such non-factors enter our halachic calculus, mostly because doing otherwise can harm Jewish social cohesion.

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I heard that when Kochav Yaakov was founded, the rabbi of the community, Rabbi Zion Weitzman, reluctantly allowed for the creation of only two synagogues in addition to the central synagogue that would adorn the town. As the majority of the inhabitants hailed from the Edot Hamizrah, a heterogeneous group us Ashkenazim ignorantly refer to as Sephardim,  the central synagogue would function according to their traditions, but there could also be an Ashkenazic synagogue and a Yemenite Synagogue, and they would eventually have to be housed in the same building as the central synagogue. Rabbi Weitzman apparently was on to the fallacious and divisive construct that holds the rest of us hostage. He could not straight out declare that there would be one, organic, public custom that would bind/unite the people, but if everyone were to ascend to one sanctuary to pray, they may realize that Jacob had twelve sons with names like Reuben and Benjamin, and not three by the names of Ashkenaz, Sepharad, and Teiman, but years ago they had all become known by the name of the tribe that produced their greatest kings, Jews.

Rabbi Weitzman tragically passed away years before the central synagogue was completed. The main sanctuary was dedicated some years before the adjoining rooms which housed the Askenazic and Yemenite…  congregations perhaps? Or should I be more conservative, and say minyanim? You see, in  the meantime, many more synagogues were established in Kochav Yaakov. The town fathers struck a deal with some developers who wanted to build a more intentionally congested neighborhood on a barren hilltop of the Yishuv. The new neighborhood would offer cheaper housing for those so interested but not interested in joining the community, and they of course built their own synagogues, and the residents of Kochav Yaakov proper also built more synagogues. Dozens more. Because, after all, Edot Hamizrach is actually much more varied than we realize. The French, who call themselves North Africans even though they even pray in what sounds to me like French, need two of their own synagogues, as do the Breslovers and Lubavitchers.

But Rabbi Weitzman was shown to be a hidden prophet that sabbath before Rosh Hashana six years ago when the Ashkenazic synagogue, at the town’s only real “shul,” had its first service in its permanent home within the central synagogue compound. The worshipers in the adjoining rooms flooded the smaller sanctuary for some Orthodox-Jewish style circle dancing, and the resulting crowds moved to the much larger courtyard in the front of the building. The same has been repeated every subsequent Simhath Torah. It was then that I pointed out to others present that what we had just witnessed showed the futility of trying to maintain separate styles of prayer in this day and age. Considering that as the years go by, Ashkenaizc congregations lose more and more of what defines and characterizes them as Ashkenazic, an Ashkneaizc synagogue, or a Sefardic one, or a Yemenite, or whatever one for that matter, is less a living and vibrant expression of ritual and communal Judaism, and more of  a museum, a memento of what was in the darkest of our exiles, a place where Jews can gather and collectively imagine, delude themselves into thinking, that they are doing just as their ancestors did, and ignore that they are doing what they are doing in part just because they subconsciously want to be different from their neighbors and act differently from them.

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Like all of the labels we give ourselves, “Ashkenazic” is divisive,  inaccurate, imprecise, a-historical, and necessary, and does not have any real meaning. It depends on who is doing the labeling, really. I imagine that the more leftward one goes on the religious-political spectrum, it is has the minimalist meaning, merely a statement of one’s ethnic origins up to the last century, and on the farthest right, it refers to a whole slew of religious practices one keeps, often in mistaken belief as to what was and what should forever be. I recall with amusement a conversation my wife had with a  neighboress, who by all accounts certainly was not of Ashkenaic descent and neither was her husband, a few weeks after we had moved to Jerusalem. They were talking about the students in what was a local and by all accounts  Edot Hamizrah yeshiva. Without irony, the women called some of the students Litvaks. Litvaks? In what way? “The Litvaks wear ties and don’t go to Uman, but the chassidim do not wear ties and do go to Uman, like my husband.” “But your husband is Sephardic, right?” “So? he’s gonna be going to Uman next week. He is chassidshe.”

When I stumbled upon this, I realized how it is I would like to try to see myself as a proud Ashkenaizc Jew. A precious crystal vase was smashed in the middle of a large room, and those surrounding the point of impact each too a few shards of it. When the Jewish people were exiled, they each took some part of the truth with them, and it is our job to take that which each group has preserved and to attempt to put that vase of tradition back together. To me, being Ashkenazic does not mean sanctifying whatever the self proclaimed guardians of Neo-Haredite culture claim is truly Ashkenazic. I have been perceptive enough to know that I can’t find a synagogue nowadays, not in the states nor here in Israel, that is Ashkenazic like the Holocaust survivors I remember from my youth. Being Ashkenazic for me is less about actual rote actions, like pronouncing the last letter of the alphabet as a sav, and more about a mindset. It is less about bagels and lox, and more about loyalty to tradition. It is less about doctrine and fiat, and more about a rational, thoughtful, and scholarly approach to the underlying ideas that shape halacha.

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And then I remember reading Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s magnum opus about the evolution of Halachic observance during the generation proceeding the Holocaust. When I wrote what I did about the methods of the Chafetz Chayim, I recall this particular passage:

The contemporary shift to text authority explains the current prevalence in yeshivah circles of the rulings of the GRA. The GRA, while far from the first to subject the corpus of Jewish practice to textual scrutiny, did it on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented rigor. No one before him (and quite possibly, no one since) has so often and relentlessly drawn the conclusion of jettisoning practices that did not square with the canonized texts. Great as was the GRA’s influence upon the mode of Talmudic study, and awesome as was his reputation generally, nevertheless, very few of his radical rulings were accepted in nineteenth century Lithuania, even in the yeshiva world. (To give a simple example: the practice in the Yeshivah of Volozhin was to stand during the havdalah service as was customary, rather than to sit as the GRA had insisted.) See also Aryeh Leib Fromkin, Sefer ToldotEliyahu (Wilno, 1990), pp. 70-71. Seeking there to demonstrate, to an elite Lithuanian audience at the close of the nineteenth century, the uniqueness of his distinguished father and uncle, Fromkin points out that they were numbered among the very few who followed the rulings of the GRA. Most towns in Eastern Europe had traditions going back many centuries, and even the mightiest names could alter a practice here and there, but could effect no wholesale revision of common usage. Indeed, the GRA’s writ rarely ran even in Vilna (Wilno), outside of his own kloyz [the small synagogue where he had prayed]. (I have heard this point made by former residents of Vilna. See also Mishnah Berurah, BiurHalakhah, 551:1, and note how rare such a comment is in that work.) Mark should be made of the striking absence of the GRA from the Arukh ha-Shulhan, Orah Hayyim, written by one who was a distinguished product of the Yeshivah of Volozhin and rabbi of that bastion of Lithuanian talmudism, Navahrdok (Novogrudok). Indeed, the first major work known to me that systematically reckons with the Biur ha-Gra is the Mishnah Berurah, and understandably so, as that work is one of the first to reflect the erosion of the traditional society (see, above, text and n. 6). With the further disappearance of the traditional orah hayyim in the twentieth century, the ritual of daily life had to be constructed anew from the texts; the GRA’s work exemplified this process in its most intense and uncompromising form, and with the most comprehensive mastery of those texts. It is this consonance with the contemporary religious agenda and mode of decision making {pesak} that has led to the widespread influence of the GRA today in the yeshivah and haredi world. (See below n. 68.) (S. Z. Leiman pointed out to me that S. Z. Havlin arrived at similar conclusions as to the delayed influence of the GRA on pesak, and further corroborated them by a computer check of the Responsa Project of Bar-llan University. He presented his findings, in a still unpublished paper, at the Harvard Conference on Jewish Thought in the Eighteenth Century, April 1992.)

(1) I emphasize that my remarks are restricted to pesak and do not refer to modes of study. In the latter field, the GRA’s impact was both swift and massive. (2) In light of my remarks above, I should take care to add that though the GRA is noticeably absent as an authority in the Arukh ha-Shulhan, that work is written in the spirit of the GRA, whereas the Mishnah Berurah, for all its deference to the GRA, is penned in a spirit antithetical to the one of the Gaon. The crux of the Gaon’s approach both to Torah study and pesak was its independence of precedent. A problem was to be approached in terms of the text of the Talmud as mediated by the rishonim (and in the Gaon’s case even that mediation was occasionally dispensed with). What subsequent commentators had to say about this issue, was, with few exceptions (e.g. Magen Avraham, Shakh), irrelevant. This approach is writ large on every page of the Biur ha-Gra, further embodied in the Hayyei Adam and the Arukh ha-Shulhan, and has continued on to our day in the works of such Lithuanian posekim, as the Hazon Ish and R. Mosheh Feinstein. The Mishnah Berurah rejects de facto this approach and returns to the world of precedent and string citation. Decisions are arrived at only after elaborate calibration of and negotiation with multiple “aharonic” positions.

When considering these ideas along with the Torat Eretz Yisrael movement, I realized somethings about the importance of the mimetic tradition and the necessity of text-based transmission.

Firstly, the Torah was given in both written form and oral form. The oral form was the traditional way to understand that which was written, and is sometimes considered the more “important of the two.” There was also a prohibition to write down the Oral Law, but eventually the prohibition was waived, due to pressing need. Why was any of the Torah ever written down? Because once something is written explicitly, it is no longer subjective, or open to discussion. It is also guaranteed not to change. Some parts of the Torah are objective,  eternal, and unchanging, and need to be kept as such, whereas some are are subjective and fluid, and needed to be decided by the sages of each and every generation. Both components of the Torah are necessary. (Incidentally, this illustrates R’ Kappah’s elaboration of Maimonides’s conception of the distinction between between the two great components of the Oral Law: oral halacha and halacha l’moshe misinai. The first can change by decision of the Sanhedrin, one court deciding yes or permitted, the next generation’s court deciding no and forbidden, while the second is not up for a vote. Each generation, the question of women’s s’micha, i.e., whether or not women should lean on their sacrifces before slaughter, was subject to reconsideration, but the fact that tefillin should be square and black is and will remain a given.) When the situation called for parts of the Oral Law to be written down, it was tragic but necessary. The truth would be preserved for future generations, but it would from then on be in a sterile, preserved form, and lack the virility and flexibility it was meant to have.

Secondly, today, when we write about halacha, we are engaging in the same trade off. When scholars codify and sanctify rulings, they sacrifice flexibility for clarity and preservation.

Thirdly, the rupture was meant to happen. The rupture had to happen because the system was broken. Jewish society could not continue to function as it did it in Diaspora form. The written collection of laws left no room for once again observing the entire Torah, especially the parts that describe the sanctuary, ritual purity, and statehood and nationhood. Further, sections of the now-written codes hamstrung the Jews who would wish to rectify the situation, to make the religious state of the nation the way it was meant to be. The greatest examples of these are the pseudo-prohibitions against statehood and nationalism, and the impossibility of humans rebuilding the Temple.

Becoming a text-based halachic society is therefore a critical stage in our recovery as a nation, and the writings of Maimonides and the Vilna Gaon are some the greatest texts for teaching us how to somehow remove the Oral Law from its deep freeze, how to make it live once again so that we  once again think as we should, and works such as the Mishna Berura are not sufficient. If the  mainstream halachic works would have served as our guide, or if the mimetic ways were to do so, or even a combination of the two, we would never have seen for example, the reinstatement of the daily priestly blessing, or any of the advantages conferred on our people by the establishment of the State of Israel. The Reconstruction needs to continue, but it also needs to be guided by decision-making principles, principles that lead to decisive courses of action while rejecting others, instead of principles for trying to maintain the status quo and/or satisfying as many opinions as possible. The halachic system, if is to continue to be a unifying force, must avoid false ethnocentricities and the pernicious monolithism that pervades halachic discourse.