Those who most admire Rav Shlomo Issachar Teichtal’s book, Em Ha Banim Smeicha, least understand its true message.
While the book may be a most eloquent argument in support of the mitzvah of yishuv haaretz, that’s not its most profound lesson.
Of far greater import is the intellectual awakening that overcame this holy Jew in the midst of his terrified crossing through the fires of the Shoah. As the inferno burned about him, the Rabbi made a complete cheshbon, a full and thorough accounting of all the halachic resources he had at hand (and everything a life’s worth of Torah study permitted him to commit to memory) and issued a psak halacha that absolutely reversed his pre-war position regarding aliyah to Israel.
He admitted his mistake, which he candidly explained was born more of prejudice than scholarship, and accepted his role in the death of Europe’s Jewish population. His claim that he and his fellow European Rabbis had “blood on their hands” for not encouraging wholesale immigration to Israel still resounds mightily today.
And this precisely was his genius.
Rav Teichtal, zt”l, hy”d, had the wherewithal, intellectual honesty and courage to assess the reality in which he was living and reassess his learning vis-à-vis that same reality. He was brave enough to ask himself if he had been thorough enough in his original learning of the applicable sources, or, indeed, if he had permitted the reigning political zeitgeist to shape his halachic outlook.
When the final reckoning was made, it was already too late. Those same Jews he had forbidden to ascend to Eretz Yisrael were either already dead or on their way to being killed. And he too suffered their fate.
Yet for all that, his book remains a testament to the steadfastness of his faith and his passion for truth. That he – or anyone else – would undertake a halachic treatise on death’s door, in the midst of history’s greatest ever upheaval, is a Kiddush Hashem on a scale the Jewish People rarely has the privilege to glimpse.
Rav Teichtal’s cry should echo powerfully in the ears of all those Jews of a mamlachti (statist) stripe in Israel today, who fail on a daily basis to take the full measure of the government regime and the reach of its institutional tentacles, and choose instead to support its evil deeds and designs as if it were some kind of religious imperative. They, too, will have blood on their hands should they refuse to make a full accounting of the changing reality about them.
Best pray they do so before the fires begin burning as they once did, and those same mamlachti rabbis become – like Rav Teichtal himself – accomplices to wholesale murder.