העורך Editor
Rabbi Shach Was Never a Disciple of the Chazon Ish!
Some Jews have pretended Rabbi Elazar Menachem Man Shach was a student of the Chazon Ish. To be clear, I don’t mind hearing the lie itself.
As it says in Proverbs 29:12:
משל מקשיב על דבר שקר כל משרתיו רשעים.
Their motivation is to elevate his stature by associating him with a known Torah scholar. Fine.
My problem with this is that it obscures the legacy of the great Chazon Ish by attributing to his surroundings people who were nothing like him in any way (even before his immense power went to his head). Rabbi Shach was always a Brisker (although he managed to alienate some of them in the Kotler/Feinstein episode) — and the two schools were and are mutually exclusive.
(The Chazon Ish wrote friendly letters to many young scholars and tried to honor and encourage them in countless ways. And when he wrote the word “Emes” (“אבל מעלת כבוד תורתו שליט”א, שהאמת אהוב לו מאוד, דנתי בזה לפניהם למען הגדיל תורה”), this refers to the Brisker idioglossic version of faux-exactitude, no more, just like he was being mostly polite when he wrote to a Breslover of כי באמת אין כל עצב בעולם למי שמכיר את אור האורות של האמת, ונשמת… תבינהו.)
So I write to fix the record.
מה אמרו חז”ל על הבירוקרטיה הממשלתית?
שבועות ל”ט א’:
ושמתי אני את פני באיש ההוא ובמשפחתו [ו]תניא אמר ר”ש אם הוא חטא משפחתו מה חטאת לומר לך אין לך משפחה שיש בה מוכס שאין כולה מוכסין ושיש בה לסטים שאין כולה לסטים מפני שמחפין עליו.
Yoshke For Destroying Yidden
Here is an informative, and powerfully written essay on the “Jews for J****” trap.
For the Separation of Religion (and Everything Else!) and State
The late Yeshayahu Leibowitz was a kind of anarchist, at least in pure principle. See this:
Yeshayahu Leibowitz: The Religious Significance of the State of Israel on the Incompatibility of Religion and Politics
January 1, 1975
I believe that no state whatsoever, in the past, present, or any forseeable future, in any society, in any era, in any culture, including the Jewish culture, ever was or will ever be anything but a secular institution. The function of the state is essentially secular. It is not service of God. Whenever the Jews had a state, the history of that state was that of a continuous struggle between religion and political leadership… This struggle is logically and factually inevitable. Religion, that is, man’s recognition of his duty to serve God, cannot be integrated with the machinery of government.
…
Some twenty years ago I had a lengthy conversation with Ben-Gurion, whose attitude toward Judaism is well known to you, about the problem of religion and state. He said to me: “I understand very well why you demand the separation of religion from the state. You want the Jewish religion to be reinstated as an independent factor with which the political authority will have to contend. Therefore I shall never agree to the separation of state and religion. I want the state to hold religion under its control.” The official representatives of Jewish religion are resigned to this state of affairs; even worse, they count on being “kept” by the secular government.
The state, as such, has no religious value. No state ever had. Political achievements, conquests, victories–none of these are religiously significant.
I found this through Rabbi Bar Chaim at Machon Shilo, here.
By the way, the word “kept” is here meant in the sense of prostitution, which is exactly correct.