A 14-year-old prodigy Moshe Raziel Sharify finds himself at the center of a dispute between his father and Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar. The boy recently sat for five-and-a-half hours of exams of the Chief Rabbinate but Chief Rabbi Amar has ordered that his exams not be graded because of a long-standing rule of the Council of the Chief Rabbi that semichah not be granted to anyone under the age of twenty-two.

His father Nisan Sharify has already written the Attorney-General Yehudah Weinstein that he will petition the High Court of Justice to order that his son’s exam be graded if the Chief Rabbinate remains resolute in its refusal. In a lengthy article in the Jerusalem Post one of the many Israeli news outlets to give extensive coverage to the issue the elder Sharify cites many examples of other prodigies such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who were granted semicha as teenagers though none as young as fourteen.

I have no reason to doubt that Moshe Raziel Sharify is phenomenally bright. Both his parents hold doctorates and an older brother completed university studies in his mid-teens. Furthermore numerous senior rabbis and dayanim have attested to Moshe’s clarity in the areas of halachah in which he was tested and to his phenomenal grasp of the subject matter. Nor do I doubt his religious devotion. His father told the Post that as a two-year-old he cried all night one Shabbos when his father did not take him to shul because of a hailstorm and only stopped when his father took him early the next morning.

My problem is with his father who seems obsessed with the idea of his son being the youngest rabbi in Israel if not in modern times. In the process he risks destroying a potential treasure to Klal Yisrael by conveying the message that great Torah knowledge is a means to prestige. And the threat to bring the Israeli Supreme Court into the inner workings of the rabbinic council – i.e. to have the Supreme Court order the rabbinical council what procedures to adopt for granting semichah – over what is nothing more than an honorific title with no practical significance for his son suggests a profound contempt for the rabbinate to which his son aspires.

As great an ilui as Moshe Raziel Sharify may be he is not a greater genius than the Vilna Gaon. Yet at twelve the Gaon still had the halachic status of a minor and could not have testified in beis din. (In a similar vein Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach once pointed out that the Gaon could not sit on the Vilna Beis Din until he was thirty by which time he was already the pre-eminent Torah scholar in the world.) Though we may not be able to understand what aspect of da’as the Gaon could have lacked to be considered an adult halachah does not allow the matter to be adjudicated on an ad-hoc basis but draws a clear line.

Nor is it difficult to conceive of perfectly valid reasons for the chief rabbinate not to grant semichah to young prodigies. Even in our time Moshe Sharify is not the only youngster blessed with a phenomenal memory the quality that usually stands out first in young geniuses. Chief Rabbi Amar may fear turning the chief rabbinate exams into a form of competition for young prodigies to see who can pass them at the youngest age. And he may well feel that such memory contests may not serve the prodigies themselves and could prevent them from developing their analytical abilities properly.

Yet while I feel that Moshe’s father has embarked on a wrong-headed course that does not serve his son and the development of his wondrous abilities there is at least one thing that I envy the boy: He has very clear and concrete goals in learning. 

In a well-known letter HaRav Aharon Leib Shteinman shlita laments that so few bochurim still aspire to know Shas not to speak of Rambam Tur and Shulchan Aruch as was the case in European yeshivos. At the current pace of learning he notes it would take a thousand years to learn Shas and by that time one would have forgotten all the tractates one had already learned because of inadequate review.

Who among us he asks can realistically hope to write chiddushim like Reb Chaim Brisker? But many have the ability to master Shas over a period of years. And it is precisely when one is young Rav Shteinman writes that one is best suited to acquire broad knowledge in Shas. 

My guess is that Moshe Raziel Sharify is one who still aspires to know Shas. But that aspiration is probably despite not because of his father’s push for public recognition of his genius.

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George Will retells in a recent piece the cautionary tale of one of the unsung Jewish “economic criminals” of modern times: Jacob Maged a Polish-born tailor in Jersey City. Maged’s crime: He advertised his willingness to press a man’s suit for 35 cents in 1934. The National Recovery Administration under General Hugh Johnson who admired Mussolini for his ability to get the trains to run on time had determined that the proper price for the service Maged offered was 40 cents.

According to the New York Times account Maged seemed to barely understand the nature of the “crime” with which he was charged. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail and fined $100 (a sum that represented 7% of the average annual wage at the time). After three days in jail the judge generously freed him with a lecture on superiority of cooperation over individualism. (Perhaps Maged should have considered himself fortunate to get off so lightly for by 1934 when he went on trial millions of kulaks had already starved to death as a matter of government policy for their stubborn resistance to collectivization in the Soviet Union.)

The theory of FDR’s “brain trust” apparently was that price competition is inherently irrational and that bureaucrats could better determine the “fair” price than the marketplace. By propping up prices the NRA somehow expected to return the nation to prosperity.

Smart people it was argued would prove more efficient than markets powered by millions of decisions of consumers some of them not so bright.

Following that theory President Roosevelt called in his 1937 State of the Union speech for “unprecedented power” to enforce the “proper subordination of private interest.” His decisions according to many economists succeeded in triggering a severe setback to the economic recovery from the Great Depression. 

What was it that George Santayana said about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it?

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An August 8 2009 crash above the Hudson River of a private plane and a helicopter carrying Italian tourists claimed nine lives. Recordings from the control tower now suggest that that a contributing cause was that the air controller guiding the private plane was distracted by a personal call on his cell phone concerning a dead cat. As a consequence he failed to hear or respond when the pilot of the private plane incorrectly repeated the altitude to which he had been cleared for ascent.

I assume that the air controller in question was highly competent and fully aware of the enormous responsibility resting on his shoulders. In all likelihood the cellphone call was a rare occurrence. Presumably he assured himself before taking the call that he was in full control and he was confident that he would not be distracted. No rationalization however will protect him from living the rest of his life with the guilty knowledge that on account of one already dead cat nine human lives were snuffed out in an instant.

And that’s something for the rest of us to think about every time we drive holding a cellphone to our ear or dial while driving. A car too is a killing machine and it takes only a microsecond for a child to dart out from between parked cars or for another driver to wander into our lane. Even the slightest diminution in attention can be the difference between life and death. Could any phone call be worth going through life with blood on our hands?