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Blogging Rav Lichtenstein BLOGGING RAV LICHTENSTEIN A JOURNEY THROUGH A GIANT’S WRITINGS AS THE SERIES ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON TORAHMUSINGS.COM by GIDON ROTHSTEIN Please note that throughout the text, RA”L, Rav Lichtenstein and R. Lichtenstein all refer to Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l. Blogging Rav Lichtenstein: A Journey Through a Giant’s Writings © 2016 Gidon Rothstein. All Rights Reserved. Blogging Rav Lichtenstein INTRODUCTION AND INVITATION This past Rosh Chodesh Iyyar, the world of Torah and avodat Hashem lost a giant, mori ve-rabi R. Aharon I in ,ואני בעניי ,Lichtenstein. Many people are taking on important acts and learning projects in his memory my limited capabilities, wanted to join in that. The idea that came to me was to review R. Lichtenstein z”l’s published volumes. While he wrote more than many realize (here’s the bibliography), there are, as far as I know, thirteen books he wrote or that were based on his talks. Eight of those are notes on shiurim he gave at Yeshivat Har Etzion, one is a collection, Minchat Aviv, of articles he published, and four volumes (By His Light, two volumes of Leaves of Faith, and Varieties of Religious Experience) collect English language talks he gave or articles he wrote. As I try to review for myself some of the fruit of R. Lichtenstein’s toiling and tilling in the garden of Torah, I hope to share one stimulating idea a week. I make no pretense that I will be comprehensive, will capture all or a representative sample of what is found in those works, only that I can, in a few hundred words, share a thought worth knowing. The inspiration for the idea, I think, was a current project on Tablet, where poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch writes a once-weekly reaction to the Daf Yomi. Just as he does not summarize the seven folios he studied that week, I will not be attempting to capture what R. Lichtenstein did in these volumes. that ,ראויים למי שאמרםInstead, in the thirty weeks until his first yahrzeit, I hope to find thirty ideas that are meaningfully reflect the man who said or wrote them, the ways he approached the study of Torah and the kinds of ideas his approach produced. I plan to devote two weeks to each volume, two volumes of Hebrew writings followed by one of the English ones, to maintain enough variety that we never become too caught up in one topic (even as R. Lichtenstein himself did not, to my knowledge, tire of investigating ideas deeply and thoroughly, not putting them aside until he felt he had taken on their complexities). That will leave a few weeks at the end to return to those ideas that particularly attract our attention. It is my hope that these weeks will a) be part of reviewing the Torah of a hacham who passed away, part of how we are supposed to commemorate the loss of a teacher of Torah, and b) introduce us or, for those who knew him somewhat, give a fuller picture of the man. We’ll start next week, God willing, with Minchat Aviv. 3 Gidon Rothstein MINCHAT AVIV, WEEK 1: HIKING ON SUKKOT WITHOUT A SUKKAH Minchat Aviv is a collection of some of the Hebrew articles mori ve-rabi R. Lichtenstein z”l wrote, on an impressive array of topics. (I write the words mori ve-rabi, my teacher and master, hesitantly; many jump to declare themselves the students of great men, basking in the reflected glory of a claimed close connection with the giant. I do not mean to make any such claim. I had the good fortune to study in his yeshiva, to attend some of his shiurim and sichot, and to have sought and taken his expert and excellent advice on more than one occasion. I did strive to stay in touch from afar over the years, to hear him when I could, to read his writings, and I have no doubt that I have benefitted greatly from learning from him, that he in no small measure shaped my knowledge and understanding of Torah, and my worldview. In those terms, he was my teacher and master, and it is my obligation to refer to him that way. But please do not infer from there any assertion to have been one of his students in the sense of those who sat at his feet, drank thirstily of his waters, and deserve to be thought of as continuers of his traditions). I stress that I will not attempt or pretend to capture the entirety of the works I will be discussing, only finding a point that seems to me interesting and enlightening. This week, the choice was easy, because one of the articles in Minchat Aviv was published in Alon Shvut 84 (5742). Alon Shvut is Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush)’s internal Torah periodical, with articles by Roshei Yeshiva, rebbeim, and students. This particular one deals with whether youth groups can plan tiyulim, hikes, on Chol haMoed Sukkot, when they are unsure whether they can have a sukkah. It has a special place in my heart because 5742 was the year I arrived at Gush (heading into 5743), and I remember reading the article at the time. It was, to the best of my ability to recall, the first written piece of R. Lichtenstein’s I ever read. At the time, as a new student, I had encountered him in the yeshiva, giving sichot or shiur klali, public talks or lectures, in one of his Friday night “press conferences,” where we gathered in an apartment in the kollel buildings and fired questions at him. Over the years, as I watched these, I marveled at his ability to take the same questions, year after year (give or take), and answer them with the same seriousness and investment as if it were an entirely new issue. Which it was, of course, for the student asking the question. At that point, it wasn’t as if I could pretend I knew him in any depth. Then I encountered this article. The first five pages are a fairly straightforward discussion of the halachic issues and possibilities, culminating with four conclusions (on page 581 in Minchat Aviv): 1) It is permissible to go on a tiyul during Sukkot even if one knows ahead of time that no sukkah will be available. 2) If, however, hikers reach a point where a sukkah is available, around the time they ordinarily eat or sleep (he explicitly notes that he is leaving the definition of “available” or “around the time” for further clarification), they are obligated to use that sukkah. © 2016 Gidon Rothstein. All rights reserved. 4 Blogging Rav Lichtenstein 3) If they stop for the night at a place where they could build a sukkah, for eating and sleeping, they must. Once again, he refrains from offering a definition of how much effort or expense counts as “could build a sukkah.” 4) If the group is involved in an activity that takes them late into the night, such that they cannot build a sukkah, they need not stop the activity in order to be sure to have a sukkah. It’s what comes next that I noticed at the time, and that later came to seem to me characteristic of the R. Lichtenstein I knew. After making a brief comparison to tsitsit, another mitzvah that can be circumvented by anyone who wants (by not owning or wearing garments with four corners), he expresses his surprise that a youth movement, interested in educating its members in avodat Hashem and yirat shamayim, service of God and fear of Heaven, is raising the question. In all his time outside of Israel, he notes, where the challenges of sukkah are equal or greater, he’d never been asked such a question—no religiously concerned businessman, working in the skyscrapers of Manhattan, thought to eat at his desk because a sukkah wasn’t easily at hand. No religious university student, whose campus lacked a sukkah, decided to eat at the cafeteria. R. Lichtenstein finds it ironic, then, that specifically a movement dedicated to eeducation—and R. Lichtenstein is well aware that they see an educational value in walking the Land of Israel, deepening students’ connection to that Land, and that Chol HaMoed is a particularly felicitous time for such events— should be asking this question. To his mind, the educational value in showing the students a concern with finding ways to keep the mitzvah of sukkah, not circumvent it, is at least as valuable. Just as the organizers appropriately ensure transportation, water, counselors, and security, they need to make clear that observant Jews also care about ensuring an environment that allows for keeping mitzvot, in this case sukkah. Re-reading it decades later, the article carries much I knew of R. Lichtenstein. His insistence on taking a question on its own terms, investigating it until reaching conclusions on the issue as raised. Then stepping back to challenge the premise, to point out other values neglected in the framing of the question, and calling on those who posed it to recognize those, to strive to achieve both the values they had already seen and the ones he was bringing to their attention. It was an experience I had with him in many contexts, where his contribution wasn’t only knowing the answers, it was expanding my and others’ awareness of the issues at play in the topic involved. Asked for an answer, he would wonder why that was the question posed, why we had let our possibilities be narrowed to those presented.
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