Response to Prof. Marc B. Shapiro
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The Genius and Limitations of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Z"L
The Genius and Limitations of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik z"l Byline: Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo is Dean of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem. Thoughts to Ponder 529 The Genius and Limitations of Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik z”l * Nathan Lopes Cardozo Based on an introduction to a discussion between Professor William Kolbrener and Professor Elliott Malamet (1) Honoring the publication of Professor William Kolbrener’s new book “The Last Rabbi” (2) Yad Harav Nissim, Jerusalem, on Feb. 1, 2017 Dear Friends, I never had the privilege of meeting Rav Soloveitchik z”l or learning under him. But I believe I have read all of his books on Jewish philosophy and Halacha, and even some of his Talmudic novellae and halachic decisions. I have also spoken with many of his students. Here are my impressions. No doubt Rav Soloveitchik was a Gadol Ha-dor (a great sage of his generation). He was a supreme Talmudist and certainly one of the greatest religious thinkers of our time. His literary output is incredible. Still, I believe that he was not a mechadesh – a man whose novel ideas really moved the Jewish tradition forward, especially regarding Halacha. He did not solve major halachic problems. This may sound strange, because almost no one has written as many novel ideas about Halacha as Rav Soloveitchik (3). His masterpiece, Halakhic Man, is perhaps the prime example. Before Rav Soloveitchik appeared on the scene, nobody – surely not in mainstream Orthodoxy – had seriously dealt with the ideology and philosophy of Halacha (4). Page 1 In fact, the reverse is true. -
Chapter 2 Tort Liability in Maimonides
CHAPTER 2 TORT LIABILITY IN MAIMONIDES’ CODE (MISHNEH TORAH): THE DOWNSIDE OF THE COMMON INTERPRETATION A. INTRODUCTION: THE MODERN STUDY OF JEWISH TORT THEORY AS A STORY OF “SELF- MIRRORING” B. THE OWNERSHIP AND STRICT LIABILITY THEORY VS. THE FAULT-BASED THEORY (PESHIAH) (1) The Difficulties of the Concept of Peshiah (2) The Common Interpretation of the Code: The “Ownership and Strict Liability Theory” C. EXEGETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE COMMON INTERPRETATION OF MAIMONIDES (1) Maimonides did not Impose Comprehensive Strict Liability on the Tortfeasor (2) Maimonides’ Use of the Term Peshiah in Different Places (3) The Theory of Ownership Contradicts Various Rulings in the Code (4) The Problem with Finding a Convincing Rationale for the Ownership Theory D. DIFFICULTIES IN UNDERSTANDING SOME ELEMENTS OF TORT LIABILITY MENTIONED IN THE CODE (1) Rulings that are Difficult to Interpret according to Either Ownership or Fault-Based Theories (2) Providing a Rationale for the Exemption in Tort (3) Standard of Care in Damages Caused by a Person to the Property of Another: Absolute/Strict Liability or Negligence? (4) Deterrence of Risk-Causing Behavior E. RE-EXAMINING THE OPENING CHAPTER OF THE BOOK OF TORTS IN THE CODE: CONTROL AS A CENTRAL ELEMENT OF LIABILITY IN TORT F. CONCLUSION 1 A. INTRODUCTION: THE MODERN STUDY OF JEWISH TORT THEORY AS A STORY OF “SELF- MIRRORING” Isidore Twersky showed us that “[t]o a great extent the study of Maimonides is a story of ‘self- mirroring’,”1 and that the answers given by modern and medieval scholars and rabbis to some questions on the concepts of Maimonides “were as different as their evaluations of Maimonides, tempered of course by their own ideological convictions and/or related contingencies.”2 Maimonides’ opening passages of the Book of Torts (Sefer Nezikin) in the Code (Mishneh Torah) can also be described as a story of “self-mirroring”. -
1 I. Introduction: the Following Essay Is Offered to the Dear Reader to Help
I. Introduction: The power point presentation offers a number of specific examples from Jewish Law, Jewish history, Biblical Exegesis, etc. to illustrate research strategies, techniques, and methodologies. The student can better learn how to conduct research using: (1) online catalogs of Judaica, (2) Judaica databases (i.e. Bar Ilan Responsa, Otzar HaHokmah, RAMBI , etc.], (3) digitized archival historical collections of Judaica (i.e. Cairo Geniza, JNUL illuminated Ketuboth, JTSA Wedding poems, etc.), (4) ebooks (i.e. HebrewBooks.org) and eReference Encyclopedias (i.e., Encyclopedia Talmudit via Bar Ilan, EJ, and JE), (5) Judaica websites (e.g., WebShas), (5) and some key print sources. The following essay is offered to the dear reader to help better understand the great gains we make as librarians by entering the online digital age, however at the same time still keeping in mind what we dare not loose in risking to liquidate the importance of our print collections and the types of Jewish learning innately and traditionally associate with the print medium. The paradox of this positioning on the vestibule of the cyber digital information age/revolution is formulated by my allusion to continental philosophies characterization of “The Question Concerning Technology” (Die Frage ueber Teknologie) in the phrase from Holderlin‟s poem, Patmos, cited by Heidegger: Wo die Gefahr ist wachst das Retende Auch!, Where the danger is there is also the saving power. II. Going Digital and Throwing out the print books? Critique of Cushing Academy’s liquidating print sources in the library and going automated totally digital online: Cushing Academy, a New England prep school, is one of the first schools in the country to abandon its books. -
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Rabbi JB Soloveitchik's Between Philosophy and Halakhah Joel West
Overinterpreting Maimonides: Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik’s Between Philosophy and Halakhah Joel West Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I contain multitudes). (Whitman 1892) The question of reading and understanding religious texts in the contexts which they were meant to be interpreted is crucial, since some of those religious texts which have survived and currently exist, and which we wish to interpret in a fair context, only exist in fragments or in translation. An example of the first kind of text is the Dead Sea scrolls of Qumran. An example of the second kind of text is the Book of Maccabees, which now only exists in translation. Of a third kind, we have the book of Judith, which may or may not be a translation of a text. We, as temporally displaced readers, must understand that the actual empirical production of these texts happened under various circumstances, so that the history and historicity of any religious texts, their pedigree if you would, becomes as important to the scholar, as the texts themselves. We can even state that in modernity, we may have similar issues of readership. To supply an example, while we know that Rabbi Soloveitchik’s graduate seminars on the topic of The Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides 1963) did indeed take place at Yeshiva University in the late 1950’s, the relationship between those lectures and the document we have in hand today, Maimonides - Between Philosophy and Halakhah: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's Lectures on the Guide of the Perplexed at the Bernard Revel Graduate School (1950 - 51) (Kaplan 2016) is extremely important and must be examined closely. -
Constructed and Denied: “The Talmud” from the Brisker Rav to the Mishneh Torah
CHAPTER SEVEN CONSTRUCTED AND DENIED: “THE Talmud” FROM THE BRISKER RAV TO THE MISHNEH TORAH Sergey Dolgopolski The construction of the medieval in modernity both implies and sheds light on the construction of the ancient in the Middle Ages; together, these actions shed further light on the nature of the shifting subject position from which such seemingly objective historical epochs are constructed. Of course, the notion that many things—identities, gen- ders, and epochs among them—are “constructed” is a postmodern truism, but what does this construction entail? The concept of “construction” often is simplistically understood as the opposite of and corrective for the positivist notion that things just naturally “are.” Yet what exactly makes a constructed object “objective” or “natural” is no trivial matter. Attributing the process of construction to an agent, say to “society,” as in the clichéd term “a social construct,” makes “society” the agent in this process, which is no less naturalistic than the “naturalistic” position it purports to oppose. Although construction implies an agent, construction is not a mat- ter of pure fabulation, of making things up from scratch. Rather, it implies extracting objects from their “natural” positions and assem- bling them into a new unity. Construction is in effect the inverse of the Romantic conception of expression, in which the subject, typified by the artist, openly puts his or her thoughts and emotions on display and even stresses them, in part at the expense of objectivity or “realism” in the representation of objects. By contrast to both naturalism and expressionism the construction of “objective” phenomena is attained by the withdrawal of the subject from the representation, as if, even though constructed, the representation is still objective. -
Rethinking Amalek in This 21St Century
religions Article Rethinking Amalek in This 21st Century Steven Leonard Jacobs Department of Religious Studies, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0264, USA; [email protected] Received: 16 May 2017; Accepted: 15 September 2017; Published: 18 September 2017 Abstract: Twice in the Hebrew Bible—Exodus 17:14–16 and Deuteronomy 25: 17–19—the ancient Israelites were commanded to “blot out” the memory of Amalek, their enemy for all time (as God intended to do as well). Yet, because these texts are a part of Jewish (and Christian) religious traditions, annually these passages are read in the synagogue on the appropriate Sabbath occasions in the annual reading cycle, and linked to the Festival of Purim that is based on the Book of Esther. Over the course of Jewish history, Amalek has served as the symbolic enemy of the Jewish people (e.g., Armenians, Nazis, Palestinians); indeed, all of the enemies of the Jews were and are understood to be descendants of the original Amalekites, and thus worthy not only of enmity but of destruction as well (e.g., Haman, Antiochus, Titus, Hadrian, Torquemada, Khmelnitsky, Hitler). Today, many of those in Israel allied with the so-called “settler movement” associated with right-of-center Orthodox Judaism and located among populations primarily of Palestinian Muslims, and Arabs view them as the descendants of Amalek as well, and thus sanction and legitimate their own at times violent actions and behaviors. At its most transparent level, responding to Amalek is a response to antisemitism, both historical and contemporary. This paper examines the history of Amalekut (“Amalek-ness”) within the Jewish (and Christian) religious tradition, the role of memory and forgetting of those survivors and their descendants traumatized by their enemies, the current manner of branding one’s enemies as descendants of Amalek, and whether, in truth, reconciliation is even possible among enemies of long standing. -
Chapter 2: Who Is the Lubavitcher Rebbe?
Can the Rebbe be Moshiach? Copyright © 2002 Gil Student – www.MoshiachTalk.com Chapter 2: Who is the Lubavitcher Rebbe? The first Lubavitcher Rebbe was R' Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1746-1812). He was a student of R' Dov Baer (The Maggid of) Mezeritch, who was in turn a student of the Baal Shem Tov. R' Shneur Zalman, the Alter Rebbe, led a group of Chasidim who called their movement Chabad. It was also called Lubavitch, after a town in Lithuania that was at one time the center of the movement. He had an illustrious lineage going back to Rashi and through him to King David. After the Alter Rebbe's death, his son R' Dovber (1773- 1827), the Mittler Rebbe, led the movement. Third in the line of Lubavitcher Rebbes was R' Dovber's nephew, R' Menachem Mendel (1789-1866). He is commonly known as the Tzemach Tzedek after the title of his highly regarded tshuvos (responsa). He led the movement through a very difficult time. The Czar in Russia was making life very difficult for Jews and R' Menachem Mendel tried to intervene with the government on behalf of his followers. After R' Menachem Mendel's death, his son R' Shmuel (1834-1882), the Rebbe Maharash, led Lubavitch. In turn, 20 Can the Rebbe be Moshiach? Copyright © 2002 Gil Student – www.MoshiachTalk.com his son R' Sholom Dovber (1860-1920), the Rebbe Rashab, took over after him. In 1920, R' Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson (1880-1950), the Rebbe Rayatz, took over the mantle of leadership of Lubavitch from his father. -
Download Catalogue
F i n e Ju d a i C a . he b r e W pr i n t e d bo o K s , ma n u s C r i p t s , au t o g r a p h Le t t e r s & gr a p h i C ar t K e s t e n b a u m & Co m p a n y We d n e s d a y , oC t o b e r 27t h , 2010 K e s t e n b a u m & Co m p a n y . Auctioneers of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Fine Art A Lot 315 Catalogue of F i n e Ju d a i C a . PRINTED BOOKS , MANUSCRI P TS , AUTOGRA P H LETTERS & GRA P HIC ART Including: German, Haskallah and Related Books from the Library of the late Philosopher, Prof. Steven S. Schwarzschild Exceptional Rabbinic Autograph Letters: A Private Collection American-Judaica from the Library of Gratz College (Part II) Featuring: Talmudic Leaves. Guadalajara, 1480. * Machzor. Soncino, 1486. Spinoza, Opera Posthuma. Amsterdam, 1677. Judah Monis, Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue. Boston, 1735. The Toulouse Hagadah, 1941. Extensive Kabbalistic Manuscript Prayer-Book, 1732. Manuscript Kethubah. Peoria, Illinois, 1861. ——— To be Offered for Sale by Auction, Wednesday, 27th October, 2010 at 1:00 pm precisely (NOTE EARLIER TIME) ——— Viewing Beforehand: Sunday, 24th October - 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm Monday, 25th October - 10:00 am - 6:00 pm Tuesday, 26th October - 10:00 am - 6:00 pm NO VIEWING ON THE DAY OF SALE This Sale may be referred to as: “Agatti” Sale Number Forty-Nine Illustrated Catalogues: $35 (US) * $42 (Overseas) KestenbauM & CoMpAny Auctioneers of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Fine Art . -
Jewish Spirituality and Divine Law
Jewish Spirituality and Divine Law forum 104 draft 21.indd i 05/02/2005 19:04:45 THE ORTHODOX FORUM The Orthodox Forum, convened by Dr. Norman Lamm, Chancel- lor of Yeshiva University, meets each year to consider major issues of concern to the Jewish community. Forum participants from throughout the world, including academicians in both Jewish and secular fields, rabbis,rashei yeshiva, Jewish educators, and Jewish communal professionals, gather in conference as a think tank to discuss and critique each other’s original papers, examining different aspects of a central theme. The purpose of the Forum is to create and disseminate a new and vibrant Torah literature addressing the critical issues facing Jewry today. The Orthodox Forum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Joseph J. and Bertha K. Green Memorial Fund at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. forum 104 draft 21.indd ii 05/02/2005 19:04:45 Jewish Spirituality and Divine Law edited by Adam Mintz and Lawrence Schiffman Robert S. Hirt, Series Editor The Orthodux Forum Series is a project of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, an affiliate of Yeshiva University forum 104 draft 21.indd iii 05/02/2005 19:04:46 This book was set in Minion by Jerusalem Typesetting, www.jerusalemtype.com forum 104 draft 21.indd iv 05/02/2005 19:04:46 Contents Contributors viii Series Editor’s Preface xiii Introduction xv Adam Mintz Section one 1 Law and Spirituality: Defining the Terms 3 Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein Section two Spirituality Across Intellectual History – Ancient Period 2 Jewish Spirituality in the Bible and Second Temple Literature 37 Lawrence H. -
Chapter 5: What Counter-Proofs Can Be Brought?
Can the Rebbe be Moshiach? Copyright © 2002 Gil Student – www.MoshiachTalk.com Chapter 5: What Counter-proofs can be Brought? There are two types of proofs that are brought for the claim that a dead person can be Moshiach. The first type is passages from primary sources and the second is commentary on these sources. The former tries to demonstrate that Chazal considered it possible, or maybe even likely, that a resurrected figure can serve as Moshiach. The latter attempts to show that regardless of what we think the primary source actually says, there were commentators who may have thought differently. This distinction is important because it highlights that the value in a commentary’s statement rests totally on the weight of who the commentator is and not on what text the author is explaining. For example, if a relatively unknown twentieth century rabbi wrote a commentary on the Talmud Yerushalmi in which he says that Moshiach can come from the dead, we can only conclude from this that this obscure 67 Can the Rebbe be Moshiach? Copyright © 2002 Gil Student – www.MoshiachTalk.com modern commentator thought the idea was possible. We cannot deduce any more than that. This clarity in the relative value of proofs is crucial in making a final evaluation of the evidence. The texts that are generally brought revolve around statements that either Daniel, King David, or Moshe will be the future Moshiach. Since these righteous men are deceased we can infer that there is nothing in Judaism that contradicts the idea that Moshiach can come from the dead. -
The Vilna Gaon, Part 3 (Review of Eliyahu Stern, the Genius) by Marc B
The Vilna Gaon, part 3 (Review of Eliyahu Stern, The Genius) by Marc B. Shapiro The Vilna Gaon, part 3 (Review of Eliyahu Stern, The Genius) by Marc B. Shapiro In honor of Sean Penn and Mark Wahlberg, who understand what pidyon shevuyim is all about. Continued from here.Returning to R. Sternbuch’s Ta’am ve- Da’at, vol. 1, earlier in this book, p. 88, we find the following passage. שמעתי ממרן הגריז”ס זצ”ל (הגאב”ד דבריסק) שאברהם אבינו לא היה עצבני וחושש ומפחד שהולך לשחוט בנו יחידו, אלא היה לו הלילה שלפני העקדה ככל הלילות, ולא נתרגש מצווי זה וקם בבוקר לקיים המצוה כשם שמקיימים כל מצוה, והשכים כזריזין שמקדימים למצוות, ושש ושמח לקיים מצות בוראו According to R. Velvel Soloveitchik, Abraham was not emotionally affected by the command to sacrifice Isaac, and on the night before he was to go to Mt. Moriah he slept as well as on any other night. He approached this commandment like any other commandment, and was ready to do it with joy. It is hardly an accident that the Abraham described by R. Velvel very much resembles R. Velvel himself. See also my earlier post here. [1] Yet doesn’t R. Velvel’s understanding conflict with the notion that the Akedah was a test or trial? What kind of test was it if Abraham related to this command just like any other? The Gaon is quoted as having a different perspective on the Akedah.[2] According to him, since Abraham was engaged in acts of loving kindness all the time, this commandment was designed to develop in him the attribute of cruelty, which is also required at times.