Taking the Reins of Torah Leadership

The entire Torah world owes a great debt of gratitude to Rav Hershel Schachter and Rav Mayer Twersky of Yeshiva University for their respective responses to the decision of the principal of a Modern Orthodox girls’ school in New York to allow two female students to lay tefillin during morning prayers.

No Orthodox community has remained unscathed by contemporary egalitarianism the belief that any halachic differences between men and women are inherently discriminatory. Rav Sheftel Neuberger told me recently that already in the 1970s Rav Yaakov Weinberg warned that the challenge facing Orthodoxy was no longer from heterodox movements but from feminism. Rav Twersky shows us how to confront that challenge.

In addition Rav Schachter’s and Rav Twerky’s responses constitute an object lesson in responsible communal leadership. Rather than eschewing any responsibility for condemning deviations from Torah — on the grounds that it would be an insult to ask them to condemn behavior with which they do not identify — they felt the responsibility as eminent roshei yeshivah within the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy to explain cogently and forcefully how misguided was the decision of the principal a graduate of their institution. The force of their arguments will have a powerful effect on their legion of devoted talmidim and will deter others from following the principal’s path.

“IN MODERN TIMES” writes Rav Twersky “women did not begin donning tefillin to emulate Michal bas Shaul or to be devoted Maimonideans or to invoke the Sheim Hashem upon themselves. Women donned tefillin because men do so.” Both he and Rav Schachter note that the practice is most closely associated with the Conservative movement for which the dominant philosophy is egalitarianism — the belief that halachic distinctions between genders are inherently suspect.

That belief cannot be squared with halachic distinctions between genders. The attempt to graft a “socially dominant false philosophy onto Judaism” writes Rav Twersky is doomed from the start. The impetus for that unpromising kilayim is a deep inferiority complex about Torah.

By allowing two students from Conservative homes to continue their family’s practice at SAR High School the principal was not showing sensitivity; he was deliberately misleading them according to Rav Twersky. He offers a historical analogy to a principal in 19th-century Germany confronted by two students from Reform homes who find that they have more kavanah in their davening when it is accompanied by organ music. If the principal makes space for the organ “he grievously misleads” and reinforces Reform behavior with predictable consequences.

In his responsum on women wearing tefillin Rav Schachter notes that the Tannaim introduced practices into the preparation of the parah adumah to make clear that they did not accept the views of the Sadducees even where the practice of the Sadducees was more stringent. Their concern was that people not emulate schismatic movements and the same concern holds true today.

He cites Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik as forbidding Orthodox rabbis from emulating the Conservative practice of having a bat mitzvah ceremony in the middle of prayers. Such heterodox practices said Rav Soloveitchik have the status of the “shoelaces” worn by gentiles for which a Jew must give up his life when those shoelaces become a symbol of the destruction of religion. That is true even if the shoelaces are permitted according to “technical halachah.”

From the Conservative movement itself Rav Twersky points out one learns the futility of fighting assimilation via accommodation. Driving to synagogue on Shabbos was justified by the movement in the 1950s as necessary to fight assimilation. And 60 years later the Conservative movement is on the verge of extinction while assimilation is ever accelerating.

Nor can accommodation ever satisfy the demands of the feminists. Brushing aside the ruling of the Rema that women should not wear tefillin — which has been unchallenged for 500 years — will not end the matter for other gender distinctions remain. What started with women’s prayer groups has morphed into tefillin partnership minyanim and demands for female rabbis.

“By reinforcing the egalitarian impulse without ever satisfying it every accommodation intensifies demands for further accommodations [which] can never be met because Torah and egalitarianism are fundamentally incompatible” concludes Rav Twersky.

BOTH RABBIS WRITE with barely contained fury not at the girls who put on tefillin but at the rabbis who ruled that they might do so without even consulting recognized baalei hora’ah. “It may be his school ” Rav Twersky writes about the principal of SAR “but it is the Ribbono shel Olam’s Torah.”

He takes aim at the assumption that when there are differences of opinion among the Rishonim or later decisors that halachah becomes a “smorgasbord from which everyone is free to make his own selection.” Rav Twersky quotes the Rema: “A person may not say regarding an issue where there is a difference of opinion ‘I will decide the halachah as I wish’ and if he does so his ruling is false.”

The idea that anyone who has access to Otzar HaHochma or the Bar Ilan Responsa Project is qualified to render halachic rulings departing from the accepted mesorah writes Rav Schachter derives from Korach’s claim of equality that “the entire congregation is holy.” Only one who has spent much time at the feet of a great master writes Rav Schachter and has invested his “blood and soul” in understanding words of Torah can possibly become that one in a thousand who is fit for hora’ah. “He must be married to the Torah — not just engaged to it.”

Rav Twersky points out that even such giants as Rav Akiva Eiger and in our times Rav Moshe Feinstein despite their mastery of the entirety of Torah questioned whether they were fully qualified to be baalei hora’ah and to publish their responsa. How then can we characterize someone of no standing as a baal hora’ah who presumes to overrule a mesorah of 500 years other than as the Shulchan Aruch describes him: “delusional wicked and arrogant.”

Acceptance of Hashem’s Torah he concludes is not merely a matter of practical compliance. It requires a reverential attitude a sense of awe joy privilege and pride. That cannot be achieved by those who wish to simultaneously hold fast to Torah and to secular anti-Torah Western values .

Conduct Holds the Key

Last week my wife heard a lecture by one of Israel’s leading sportsmen in which he described the impact of his profession on his marriage and his decision to become a baal teshuvah. The rabbis with whom he consulted all agreed that his becoming religious was not a reason for divorce and that as the party who had changed the rules he had no right to place any demands upon his wife with respect to Shabbos or kashrus.

The couple’s children were initially enrolled in nonreligious schools. At some point however the wife removed them from nonreligious schools and placed them in religious schools. When her husband asked her why she had done so she replied simply “I want them to be like you.”

That response got me thinking. What if each one of us went around with the feeling that our conduct holds the key to whether another Jew chooses to be like us? Our behavior would surely change. How much more would we think about our every action and its likely impact.

Well aren’t most of us in that situation with respect at least to our own children? And each of us has probably read numerous stories of Jews whose lives were permanently changed by the behavior of a religious Jew — most for the better and some for the opposite.

And the more Torah we have been privileged to learn the more intense should be this consciousness. The Ramchal makes this point forcefully: “For it is to the honor of the Torah that one who learns more of it progresses more likewise in righteousness and in refinement of character traits. Any lack in this respect… contributes to disparagement of learning itself which is a desecration of the name of the HaKadosh Baruch Hu Who gave us His holy Torah and commanded us to immerse ourselves in it to attain our perfection.”

Those words should be ingrained on our hearts both entering and leaving the beis medrash.

Upshlugged Happily

None of us likes to be upshlugged in learning. But we are less likely to mind if the one doing so happens to be our own son.
Two of my sons approached me independently over Shabbos to criticize in almost identical language last week’s column in which I argued that the Torah community should not as a matter of course object to governmental benefits being specifically targeted at those who have done military service or some other form of national service. Neither denied the general premise that the government may distinguish between different forms of national service in terms of benefits.
Rather they argued that it would be wrongly applied to Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s new housing proposals which would waive the 18 percent VAT on the purchase of a first apartment for young couples with at least one child who have performed government-recognized national service.
It’s one thing they told me for the government to offer benefits as a means of encouraging various types of service. But when past service is used as a criterion for new government benefits long after the service has been completed and the benefits have no intrinsic connection to that service the matter is more problematic. By tying new housing benefits to past service Yair Lapid was doing nothing more than finding a way to discriminate against young chareidi couples and signaling to his voters that he has not forgotten who gave Yesh Atid 19 seats.
While I’m not willing to acknowledge as a general rule the superiority of Attorney General Yehudah Weinstein’s legal analysis over mine I’m delighted that in this case he sided with my sons and told Lapid that he could not base the VAT discounts on national service. Sometimes being out-argued by one’s sons is not only tolerable but preferable.