Assorted Comments

Marc B. Shapiro

Here is the passage as it appears in the censored Mikraot Gedolot Ha-Maor.

Fortunately, the new English translation of Siftei Hakhamim published by Metsudah includes the passage in its entirety.

2. In a recent post I referred to the Yemenite Rabbi Shlomo Korah and his experience in Lakewood. R. Korah has also published a commentary on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah entitled Sefat Melekh. Although R. Korah presumably knows Arabic, for some reason he didn’t know what to make of the word שָם found throughout the Mishneh Torah, including right at the beginning:

Numerous commentaries struggle with the word, and R. Korah offers his own interpretation, stating that it should be vocalized with a tzereh under the shin, not a kamatz.[2] Yet R. Samuel Ibn Tibbon, in the introduction to his translation of the Guide, already explained what the word means.

See also R. Joseph Kafih’s commentary to Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah 1:1. Confusion about the word שם goes back to medieval times, and in a recently published text of the Provencal sage R. Meir ha-Meili we see that he too did not know its meaning.[3]

R. Shlomo Korah should not be confused with R. Ezra Korah who is the translator of a new edition of Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah that was published in 2009. The new translation is not very different than R. Kafih’s translation and is obviously based on the latter. It is also not an improvement on what R. Kafih provided us with. What makes this edition valuable is that each page is full of helpful notes compiled by a team of scholars. In fact, I don’t think anyone can seriously study Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah without making use of this new edition.

Yet there is something deeply problematic about this edition. As is well known, R. Kafih’s translation of Maimonides' Commentary sparked a new interest in study of this work, and for decades was the text that everyone used.[4] R. Korah’s new edition, which as already indicated is based on that of R. Kafih, only mentions R. Kafih once in the lengthy introduction.[5] Throughout the notes to the Commentary, R. Kafih is not mentioned, but is referred to as יש מי שכתב or יש מי שתרגם.

When will these people ever grow up and realize that just because you don’t agree with someone’s outlook doesn’t mean you can’t be a mensch and give him the scholarly credit he deserves? To give an idea of who R. Kafih was, R. Mordechai Eliyahu went so far as to state that was greater than R. Abraham Maimonides![6]

Here is the English dedication page of the new translation and the Hebrew title page.

Look at what it says in the dedication page. Is it possible that they told the donor that the translation that he was funding would be the first time that the Commentary on the Mishnah would be translated into Hebrew?

3. I have many unpublished rabbinic letters that readers will find interesting. Some of them need to be published in a journal, complete with an introduction and footnotes, as I have done in Milin Havivin, Or Yisrael, and elsewhere. (Discerning readers will note the incongruity of the two journals just mentioned.) For others, I don’t need to do anything but post them, as they are easy to read and self-explanatory.

Here is one such example. It is a 1950 letter from Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog to R. Isser Yehudah Unterman, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv. I found it in the R. Herzog archive in Jerusalem and I thank the archive for allowing me to reproduce the letter. It is significant in that we see how impressed R. Herzog was with R. Elyashiv, and he hopes that R. Elyashiv will agree to move to Tel Aviv to serve as a dayan.[7]

Recently there was talk that if the Israeli draft bill was passed that the Belzer Rebbe would leave the State of Israel. Here is a February 14, 1948 letter from R. Herzog to a previous Belzer Rebbe. As you can see, R. Herzog was very upset when he heard that the Rebbe was thinking of leaving Eretz Yisrael due to the deteriorating security situation. He thought that this would create a hillul ha-shem and break the spirits of some of the Rebbe's followers.

According to the Steipler, R. Isaac Zev Soloveitchik (the Brisker Rav) also wanted to leave Israel during the 1948 war, and even traveled to Haifa to receive his exit permit. In the end, he was prevented from leaving for reasons beyond his control, and didn’t continue his efforts in this regard. The Steipler explained that his desire to leave Israel was not because he was afraid but because he thought that the halakhah requires one to leave a place of danger to life.[8] I have difficulty understanding this view, as it would mean that all the Jews in Israel would have been required to leave. Presumably, R. Velvel’s point was that one who has no civilian or military role has to leave, since there is no justification for such a person to put his life in danger as he is not in any way contributing to the military cause.

4. In his latest article criticizing the haredi mentality, R. Berel Wein writes:

The great struggle of most of Orthodoxy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries against Zionism influenced all Orthodox thought and behavior. As late as 1937, with German Jewry already prostrate before Hitler’s madness and Germany already threatening Poland, the mainstream Orthodox rabbinate in Poland publicly objected to the formation of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel on the grounds that the heads of that state would undoubtedly be secular if not even anti-religious.

A number of people wanted details about this rejection of a Jewish state by the Polish rabbinate in 1937. Let me begin by saying that there is no truth to what Wein reports. The mainstream Polish rabbinate, represented by the Agudat ha-Rabbanim of Poland, never publicly objected to the creation of a Jewish state. The Agudat ha-Rabbanim included many rabbis who were Zionist and thus would never act in the way Wein describes. In fact, R. Yehezkel Lifshitz, author of the respected work Ha-Midrash ve-ha-Ma’aseh, was the head of the Agudat Rabbanim until his death in 1932. He was also a great lover of Zion who supported the creation of a Jewish state.[9]

In 1937, not only did Agudat ha-Rabbanim of Poland not reject the idea of a Jewish state, but it issued a public letter affirming the Jewish right to the Land of Israel. This letter also stated that under no circumstances could Agudat ha-Rabbanim agree with the removal of any part of the Land of Israel from future Jewish sovereignty.[10] Here is part of this letter, containing the Agudat ha-Rabbanim’s strong endorsement of a Jewish state.

Even Agudat Yisrael at its 1937 international convention in Marienbad (the third Kenesiyah Gedolah) did not reject a Jewish state, even though it was urged to do so by R. Elchanan Wasserman and R. Aaron Kotler. Neither R. Wasserman nor R. Kotler reflected the outlook of the mainstream Lithuanian or Polish rabbinate in this matter. In fact, according to the report of R. Samuel Aaron Pardes who attended the convention, R. Kotler agreed with R. Wasserman that acceptance of a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah, even a State that would be completely Torah observant, is a denial of the messianic belief.[11] In other words, they both shared what would later be identified as the Satmar philosophy.

5. The internet is an amazing thing. Yechezkel Moskowitz, who listened to my Torah in Motion classes on R. Hayyim Hirschensohn, asked me where he was buried. I didn’t know but after only a couple of minutes online I found the answer: Riverside Cemetery in Saddlebook, N.J. The cemetery was very helpful and sent both me and Yechezkel a picture of the grave. Seeing that it needed to be cleaned up, Yechezkel took the opportunity to do this mitzvah, and here is how the grave currently looks.



Yechezkel also sent the picture to Kevarim.com and it can be found here here.

Here is a picture of R. Hirschensohn.

There is so much to be said about R. Hirschensohn and his enormous literary output and fascinating ideas in all areas of Torah. (I also have a number of unpublished responsa of his.) I have never seen anyone refer to the many short musings of R. Hirschensohn that appear in the Budapest journal Apiryon. I could have a lengthy post discussing any number of his short comments, that remind me both of R. Kook’s Shemonah Kevatzim and also of Nietzsche. Here is musing no. 46, which appears in Apiryon 3 (1926) p. 183:

The final words of the sentence are derived from Pesahim 59b, and the translation is (based on Artscroll) “Leave the verses alone, for they force themselves to be interpreted this way.”

What R. Hirschensohn is saying in the first part of the sentence is that there are Jewish principles of faith that are not to be found in a book, but are intuitive, i.e., part of our heritage and our blood. We can each come up with our own examples. One which comes to my mind is that it is a principle of faith not to try to settle Jewish problems by involving the non-Jewish authorities. Over thousands of years we have learnt that such an approach leads to all sorts of negative consequences, both foreseeable and unintended.

The second half of the sentence tells us that when a “book truth” contradicts the principle of faith we know intuitively, then the “book truth” is to be understood (reinterpreted if necessary) to conform to our intuitive faith. One can find similarities to this idea in the writings of R. Kook (see here and here where I discussed the observant Jewish masses’ innate natural morality and how according to R. Kook it is superior to the book-learning-based morality of the scholars).

The significance of R. Hirschensohn’s words is in 1) the denial that basic principles of faith are all found in books, and 2) the assertion that intuitive truths can effectively trump what appears in the canonical books. It is obvious that what when R. Hirschensohn writes of דם ומורשה he is speaking about the experience of the Jewish people as a whole, not about the Torah scholars. The Torah scholars are to be viewed as part of this experience of דם ומורשה , not something apart.[12]

In previous posts I have commented that one of the novelties of haredi ideology is the notion that the “Gedolim” are the carriers of all truth. See here where I quote R. Itzele of Ponovezh’s assertion that it is the people, עמך, not the Gedolim, who represent what today is referred to as Daas Torah.[13] This idea can be found in the Talmud and later rabbinic literature as well. When the Talmud and post-Talmudic authorities state
אם אינם נביאים בני נביאים הם  or
פוק חזי מאי עמא דבר  or
 קול המון כקול ש-די  or
מנהג ישראל תורה  they are not referring to the Gedolim but to the masses of pious Jews, the ones who make up the kehillah kedoshah.

Earlier in this post I referred to R. Kook and Nietzsche. Some readers might be thinking that I should write "R. Kook and Nietzsche lehavdil." Yet R. Hirschensohn rejects the notion that this word should be used to distinguish Jews from non-Jews. See his commentary to Horayot (Jerusalem, 1926), part 3, p.6a.


For those who do want to use the word, R. Hirschensohn says that it is wrong to say הגוי להבדיל since it is precisely the Jews whom God chose to separate as his special people. Therefore, one should say (if he want to use the word),  "Nietzsche and R. Kook lehavdil." Yet as mentioned already, R.. Hirschensohn rejects the usage of this word when it comes to Jews and non-Jews. In addition to what I already quoted, he writes:


R. Hirschensohn is assumed by everyone to be very liberal, in both his outlook as well as in his halakhic decisions. Yet this is not the entire truth, as we can see from his comment in Apiryon 3 (1926), p. 101, where he describes the “New Orthodoxy”, also known as “Conservative”, as akin to Christianity!

He states that in traditional Judaism  the mind is the center, and the heart is influenced by it, while in Christianity it is the reverse, with the heart influencing the mind. The problem with the “New Orthodox” is that they too put the stress on the heart over the mind. As we all know, when the heart is the determining factor, then Jewish law must be constantly updated in accord with people’s changing feelings.

His very next musing (ibid.) is undoubtedly directed against Hasidism, which he sees as mixing up the heart and mind.

And finally, what is one to make of the following statement (ibid.) that removes Christian belief (as opposed to worship) from the status of avodah zarah?

Does this mean that a belief alone can never rise to the level of avodah zarah?

There is a lot more I want to say about R. Hirschensohn. In the Limits of Orthodox Theology I mentioned his view that even in Messianic days animal sacrifices would not be reinstated. He also has some significant comments about sacrifices in the introduction to his Nimukei Rashi, vol. 3. (This three volume commentary on Rashi is an outstanding work of scholarship.) 

In discussing the origins of sacrifices, R. Hirschensohn sees no reason to assume that Cain and Abel actually brought sacrifices in the sense we think of. While for us, a sacrifice means placing something on an altar and burning it, R. Hirschensohn states that there is no evidence that this is what Cain and Abel did. It is possible that all Cain did was bring his vegetable offering to the top of a mountain where he would commune with God, and left it there. With Cain’s “meager religious philosophical knowledge” he perhaps thought that after he left it there, God would take it. This is how R. Hirschensohn explains that Cain concluded that his sacrifice was not accepted. He reascended the mountain after a few days and lo and behold, the sacrifice had not been taken by God. For Cain, this meant that God didn’t accept it. And what about Abel’s sacrifice? Here, too, R. Hirschensohn says that there is no reason to think that it was burnt on an altar. Rather, it was a gift to God, and what Abel did was send his offering away, so that it would wander freely. This was the gift to God, not that he killed an animal. If you look at Genesis ch. 4, all it mentions is that Cain and Abel brought their offerings to God, not that they were ever burnt as a sacrifice.

How then did the idea of offering animal sacrifices come to be? The first example we have in the Bible is that of Noah when he leaves the ark. At this time he was not yet permitted to eat meat and yet he concluded that it would be proper to kill animals and birds for God. Where did he get this notion? The question is especially sharp as one would have assumed that Noah would be more interested in ensuring that the species multiply, rather than killing members of them. After Noah offers his sacrifices, we are told (Gen. 8:21), “And the Lord smelled the sweet savour; and the Lord said in His heart: ‘I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” This would seem to imply God’s approval of Noah’s sacrifices. R. Hirschensohn’s suggested understanding of this episode is, I think, shocking in its boldness:

R. Hirschensohn’s suggested explanation assumes that part of man’s heart being “evil” from his youth was the thought that he should serve God is such a cruel fashion as killing an animal, and God accepting this sacrifice was an example of God being kind to the simpleton Noah who didn’t know any better.

R. Hirschensohn continues by saying that he in no way rejects the sacrificial system. His explanation is only applicable to an era when eating meat was not allowed. However, once the Torah makes clear that killing an animal to eat it is not cruel, we cannot say otherwise. Furthermore, he says, it makes no sense for people who eat meat to object to sacrifices on philosophical grounds.

R. Hirschensohn still has to explain the origin of sacrifices, and his position is quite original. He states that in ancient days people showed their loyalty to one another by a ceremony in which blood was drawn from each of them and mixed together. Later it developed that instead of using human blood to seal covenants, animal blood was used. The next natural development was the notion that sacrifices to the deity should also involve blood, and this is why the nations began to offer sacrifices to their gods, including sacrifices for all the good the god did.

R. Hirschensohn adds that sacrifices represent instinctual religious feelings, and no one who believes in God can degrade such a sign of faith.[14]

Let me now return to what I wrote here concerning R. Hirschensohn’s discussion of the comment of Rashi to Genesis 26:8. The verse states that Abimelech looked out his window and saw that Isaac “was amusing himself with Rebekah.” Upon this verse, Rashi, based on a Midrash, states that Abimelech saw them having marital relations. In the earlier post I expressed surprise that some commentators thought it was appropriate for them to discuss the Patriarch’s sexual life. One reader called my attention to R. Levi ben Hayyim, Livyat Hen: Eikhut ha-Nevuah ve-Sodot ha-Torah, ed. Kreisel (Beer Sheva, 2007), p. 672, which is another example of what occasioned my surprise.

R. Levi contrasts Isaac negatively to both Abraham and Jacob. He regards the latter two as on a higher spiritual level, and thus closer to God, than Isaac, and brings a number of biblical proofs to support this contention. In a really outrageous comment, much more objectionable than R. Levi’s allegorical passages that R. Solomon ben Adret was so upset with (and which don’t appear at all problematic when seen in context), R. Levi suggests that Isaac’s blindness was brought on by the fact that he was so attracted to Rebekah’s beauty[15] that it led to him having too much sex! (Although R. Levi reflects an old superstition, there is actually a medically documented phenomenon of temporary blindness following sex.)

Finally, let me make one more point about sexual matters in the Torah. Genesis 35:22 states that “Reuben lay with Bilhah.” The Artscroll multi-volume commentary on Bereshit (i.e., not the Stone Chumash), p. 1522, states that in Shabbat 55b “the Sages emphatically declare that Reuben did not commit the sin of adultery. They proclaim that מי שאמר ראובן חטא אינו אלא טועה.”

I believe this to be a conscious distortion of what appears in the Talmud, in the name of “frumkeit”, of course. If you open up the Talmud to Shabbat 55b you find that, first of all, it is not the “Sages” who proclaim מי שאמר ראובן וכו' but one of the Sages, R. Samuel Bar Nahmani in the name of R. Jonathan. This is a very minor point, since following this statement in the Talmud we find other Sages who agree with this statement, i.e., they also assume that Reuben never actually had sexual relations with Bilhah (and they are quoted in the Artscroll commentary to Bereshit). However, from the Talmud we also learn that there were Sages who disagreed with R. Jonathan and took the biblical text literally. It is none other than the Artscroll Talmud that, quoting Maharsha, explains that according to R. Eliezer, Reuben did have sexual relations with Bilhah.

The Artscroll commentary on Bereshit is a very long work (2232 pages), providing numerous perspectives on every verse. Yet in this case they chose not to include the view of R. Eliezer and R. Joshua that Genesis 35:22 is to be taken literally, and Reuben indeed had sexual relations with Bilhah. A conscious choice had to be made to exclude this view, and I think we all understand why. But doesn’t Artscroll’s choice in this regard show a real lack of respect for R. Eliezer and R. Joshua? Maybe others see things differently, but it appears to me that Artscroll stood in judgment, as it were, over R. Eliezer and R. Joshua, and decided that their view was not worthy of being included since Artscroll did not like what they said. This is hardly the sort of kevod ha-Torah that Artscroll is supposed to represent.