It is with great sadness that the first bit of news to reach me after Shavuos here in Yerushalayim was the petirah of R. Nosson Kamenetsky zt”l. While some will remember him for the controversy surrounding his two-volume Making of a Gadol, there are far more memorable images of him that history should retain.
First and foremost, hundreds of talmidim have only warm memories of the decades he spent in his primary vocation: as a teacher of Torah, most notably as a rosh yeshiva at ITRI. He was also a paragon of the mussar movement, receiving and treating people with incredible dignity and respect, even when few around him evinced anything close to the same refinement. It was always accompanied by the trademark Kamenetsky smile, that added another dollop of encouragement to all who spoke to him.
He was slavishly devoted to the truth. This may have been his undoing in writing Making of a Gadol, as parts of the community were not ready for a detailed consideration of some events and personalities in the Torah world. Even in presenting the work to the public, he could not escape the truth: his introduction offered ample consideration of both sides of the question as to whether Torah biographies should be entirely factual or hagiographic. He would not present his arguments without allowing the reader to consider the alternatives. His devotion to truth ensured that he refused to walk out of, or distance himself from, the yeshiva world even after some friends let him down, and lesser individuals savaged him in his own neighborhood. He understood the primacy of limud Torah and the community that nurtured it, and could not entertain any notion of lessening his identification with it.
My most vivid memory of him was of an exchange just a few months ago. The last time I visited him in his apartment, my son asked him a difficult question about how to explain some apparent shortcomings in the community to his own children. At one point, my son pushed him to better define one of his answers. “But what does Daas Torah say about that?” my son asked. Rav Nosson looked him straight in the eye and responded, “Daas Torah is that you should use your own brain!” He could hardly be called a free-thinker (like the European maskilim were called), but he put individual sechel on a pedestal. I can’t think of a quality that is so often in short supply, and that will be so sorely missed.
His Making of a Gadol was conceived of as a history not only of his father, R. Yaakov zt”l, but of the world that produced him. Someone will have to do the same for R. Nosson, so that we might still learn how to reverse engineer someone of his stature.
You find yourself standing in a vast convention hall, larger than any you’ve seen before. A cacophony of different languages and dialects pounds at your eardrums, but the sounds are all happy sounds. Multiply Citifield by a hundred, and you begin to get the vibe of the gathering.
From the name tags that identify everyone milling about, you gather that many of the attendees had at one point been dead, some for a very long time. What seems to be happening is that people are seeking out “celebrities” of the past, and stop to interact with the ones they find particularly interesting. More than photo-ops, people seem intent on walking away with some inspiration from the serial encounters.
They’ve made it easier by grouping the attractions by century. You spot R. Yoshe Ber Soloveitchik (the American one from YU) and immediately walk towards him. You heard oodles of his denigration when he was (first) alive, but in the decades since, you’ve furtively picked up a number of his works and been impressed each time. This would be a good opportunity to gain some clarity. But then you spot the head of the seminary your daughter has applied to, and think the better of it. R. Soloveitchik did earn a PhD and left Aguda for Mizrachi. You don’t want the seminary to get the wrong impression of the home your daughter grew up in, right? No need to rock the boat. Why not stick to those who are free of any taint of being on the wrong side? You can’t be too careful these days.
The crowd around Rav Kook and the Satmar Rov – amazingly engaged in amiable, if animated, conversation with each other – is larger than the lines at Disneyland, so you move on, practically bumping into R. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto. Wow! Mesilas Yesharim in person! Then you remember the article your somewhat nerdy intellectual friend showed you years before, when discussing – purely academically, of course – the outrageous idea that you-know-who might have thought that he was Moshiach. Your friend showed you the lines in the Ramchal’s poetry that suggested that similar thoughts had crossed his mind. OK – Mesilas Yesharim has been sanitized by history. But, spotting a few people from your shul who recognize you, you don’t want people to think you are soft on mainstream hashkafa, so you move on without stopping.
You always had a weakness for halacha, so you are initially excited when you spot R. Yaakov Emden, who was certainly one of the pillars of halacha in the centuries after the Shulchan Aruch. The excitement turns into urgent prudence. The Yaavetz (as he is known) would be great to talk to, but he did have a few black marks. He questioned the authorship of parts of the Zohar. That’s not going to sit well with the rebbe of the shtibel where you daven mincha on Shabbos. His personality was – how should we say this? – a bit argumentative. Reportedly, he wrote about himself that he did not really like people. How his mussar chabura let him get away with that, you have no idea, but it is not your business. And then there was the way he dealt with the epidemic of male marital extra-curricular activity (this is a family blog!!!) that he witnessed. He thought that bringing back the institution of pilegesh/ concubine might be a better way of handling male libido than the commonplace trysts with the domestic workers. (Hard to believe, you think, that they never expunged that responsum from the volume. Probably by the next printing, they will.) You determine to avoid him, not wanting to offend some of the more outspoken women, and look for his great adversary, R. Yonoson Eybeschutz, instead. Ummm. Maybe not, as you remember about his son Wolf. Like, how did that happen? Did his father let him have a smartphone? You know that parents aren’t perfect, but he was supposed to be an adam gadol! What kind of gadol would have a son like that?
You think, briefly, of heading over to the Chasam Sofer. But wait. What do we make of that teshuvah he wrote claiming that scientific evidence obtained by studying the general population was irrelevant to Jews, whose physiologies are different? Will your chavrusa – who happens to be a physician – give you a hard time for that? Maybe things will be better as you move much further back in time. But you keep passing up opportunities, worried that the great weren’t really that great, or that you would be affected by some errant teaching of theirs, or – perish the thought – your neighbors would get the wrong impression. As much as he was an important part of your life, you stayed clear of the Rambam. (There were these rumors – unsubstantiated, you hoped – that he wrote a heretical book called Moreh Nevuchim that no one studies anymore because it is not our derech. And he didn’t seem to know much about kabbalah, did he?) Ibn Ezra – fuhgedaboudit. That same nerdy friend told you the dark secret about the twelve verses in Devarim.
Better, you think, to head to the Tanach section. You are trembling with reverence – but you give Dovid HaMelech a wide berth nonetheless. (Never did get that thing with Batsheva straight, even after the gemara in Shabbos.) Yitzchok Avinu? So tell me again how he managed to father an Esav? Avraham Avinu? You really, really want to ask him what it was like taking his son up the mountain to the Akeidah. But then you remember Ramban’s criticism of him for compromising Soro’s safety. You don’t want any trouble from the #metoo feminists in the neighborhood, who could shut down your practice.
Come to think of it, Tanach always made you nervous. So you head over to the Tanaim. Unbelievable – R. Elazar ben Arach! You can have him all to yourself! But then you remember what happened to him after the death of R. Yochanan ben Zakai. How the talmidim split up, and he went up north where the water was better, and life a bit more comfortable. How his own talmidim did not follow, and how in the course of time he forgot all his learning because he did not have the stimulation of combative students. It got so bad that when he found himself with some of his old Tanaim-friends, he could not read “Ha-chodesh hazeh lachem,” reading it instead “hachresh haya libam.” How terrible he felt, and how he repented, and his friends prayed for him, and his learning was restored. And how did all of this happen? Because he listened to his wife, who pushed for the move up north. “Does the cheese go to the mice, or the mice to the cheese,” she asked. What kind of adam gadol makes mistakes because he is influenced by his wife?
Then you wake up. Was this a dream? Or a nightmare?
It’s hard to prove Judaism has been subverted in our time because those claims which made it most vacuous are kept out of the books. You can find such travesties as Mechiras Chametz and hair-like hair-coveringsin the Poskim, but the very worst heresies are only passed on orally, like in a cult, especially to those who fall afoul of them.
This is why it’s harder to find written evidence on the regular bookshelves of Chassidic and Mussar antinomianism, the esoteric meaning of the “Chadash assur min hatorah” catchphrase, Brisker doctrines on denying reality (such as the infamous “Am Ha’aretz chicken” story) — among other things, and many more.
For a “book-based” nation, it seems strange there are important customs that somehow manage to evade a well-written exposition. Like the “holy” battles of Rabbi Shach against half of his contemporaries, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum‘s view (adopted by other fools “in principle”) Eretz Yisrael is only for Torah scholars (Only Teshuvos Vehanahagos writes about this a bit, because he lacks the horse sense to realize this doctrine contradicts entire parshiyos in the Torah, see the parable here!).
Like the “insight” Yeshiva youth need not (and therefore ought not) observe the Torah they are busy studying (which has nothing to do with the Dinim Vehanhagos sometimes looped in on this!), hinted at throughout the “Tenu’as Hamussar” set by Rabbi Dov Katz (such as reading Shema at its proper time or covering the tables on Shabbos (which has nothing to do with eating, as they are covered on Yom Kippur, as well), or eating only truly kosher food).
Like the notion, all mitzvos are capable of observance without their numerous, peripheral “Tzitzin” of halachic “side-constraints/conditions” leading Judaism away from “legalism“.
Chazon Ish – Emunah Ubitachon, end of chapter 4:
והתמדה בדרך הדביקות מצד אחד וההזנחה בתלמודה של המצוות מצד שני, יוצרת שיטה שלמה הנראית לרבים, ומתבלטת כיצירה מסוימה, המכרזת על עצמה, ועל אלה המתיחסים אליה, כאילו אמרו חלילה הרינו מקבלים עלינו מלכות שמים ע”מ שאין עלינו דקדוק הדין.
וההכרזה הזאת הלא היא מחמורה שבחמורות, חבר הוא לפורקי עול, ולא עוד אלא שהקבלה על הדברים שהם נכנסים במחיצות קבלתו מזויפת בהחלט כאשר סיג וצרורות של המראה מעורבות בה, עירוב מכוון ומבוסס, מחושב ויסודי.
It is with great sadness that the first bit of news to reach me after Shavuos here in Yerushalayim was the petirah of R. Nosson Kamenetsky zt”l. While some will remember him for the controversy surrounding his two-volume Making of a Gadol, there are far more memorable images of him that history should retain.