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כעומד לפני השכינה בשעת ער Rabbi Aharon :לערנט Lichtenstein on the Divide Between Traditional and Academic Jewish Studies כּעומד לפֿני השכינה בשעת ער לערנט: Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein on the Divide Between Traditional and Academic Jewish Studies By Shaul Seidler-Feller Shaul Seidler-Feller strives to be a posheter yid and an oved Hashem; the rest is commentary. This is his third contribution to the Seforim blog; for his previous articles, see here and here. This post has been generously sponsored le-illui nishmat Sima Belah bat Aryeh Leib, z”l. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein enthusiasts might be surprised to learn that there was a time when the rosh yeshivah, zts”l, lectured publicly in Yiddish. I myself had no idea that this was the case until my dear friend, Reb Menachem Butler, who fulfills be-hiddur the prophetic pronouncement asof asifem (Jer. 8:13) in its most positive sense, forwarded me a link containing a snippet from a talk Rav Lichtenstein had given at the Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut-YIVO on May 12, 1968, as part of the Institute’s forty-second annual conference. Feeling a sense of responsibility to help bring Rav Lichtenstein’s insights to a broader audience, I quickly translated that brief excerpt into English, and, with the assistance of YIVO’s Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions Dr. Eddy Portnoy, my translation was posted on the YIVO website in early December 2017. Realizing, however, that the original lecture had been much longer, Menachem and I made some inquiries to see if we could locate the rest of the recording, only to come up empty-handed. As hashgahah would have it, on the Friday night following the publication of the translation, I was privileged to share a meal with another dear friend, Rabbi Noach Goldstein, whose great beki’ut in Rav Lichtenstein’s (written and oral) oeuvre was already well-known to me. In the course of our conversation, Noach mentioned that there was another Yiddish-language shi‘ur by Rav Lichtenstein available on the YUTorah website. I was stunned: could this be the missing part of the YIVO lecture? After Shabbat, I followed up with Noach, who duly sent me the relevant link – and lo and behold, here was the (incomplete) first part of the speech Rav Lichtenstein had given at YIVO![1] I told myself at the time that I would translate this as well; unfortunately, though, work and other obligations prevented me from doing so… But then, in another twist of fate, one of the orekhei/arkhei dayyanim at The Lehrhaus, Rabbi (soon-to-be Dayyan Dr.) Shlomo Zuckier, reached out to me at the end of December in connection with a syllabus he was compiling for a class he is teaching this semester at the Isaac Breuer College of Yeshiva University on “The Thought of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein.” I mentioned to him at the time that Noach had recently referred me to the YUTorah recording and that I had hoped to translate it. With his encouragement, the permission of YUTorah (thank you, Rabbi Robert Shur!), and the magnanimous support of an anonymous sponsor (Menachem Butler functioning as shaddekhan), I present below a preliminary annotated English version of the lecture, whose relevance to the current debate about Rav Lichtenstein’s attitude toward academic Jewish studies should be clear. It is my hope to post my original Yiddish transcription (which awaits proper vocalization), as well as any refinements to the English, shortly after Pesah; please check back then for an update. [UPDATE (June 15, 2018): My vocalized Yiddish transcription of both recordings is now available as a PDF here. The text of the translation below has also been improved accordingly.] Note: As was the case with my translation of the shorter recording published previously, Romanization of Yiddish andloshn- koydesh (Hebrew/Aramaic) terms attempts to follow the standards adopted by YIVO,[2] and all bracketed (and footnoted) references were added by me. It should also be borne in mind that the material that follows was originally delivered as a lecture, and while the translation tries to preserve the oral flavor of the presentation, certain liberties have been taken with the elision of repetitions in order to allow the text to flow more smoothly. [A Century of Traditional Jewish Higher Learning in America] [Introduction] I beg your pardon for the slight delay. It was not on my own account; rather, my wife is not able to attend, and I promised I would see to it to set up a recording for her. In truth, I must not only ask your indulgence; it may be that this behavior touches upon a halakhic matter as well. After all, the gemore says that “we do not roll Torah scrolls in public in order not to burden the community” [see Yume 70a with Rambam, Hilkhes tfile 12:23]. It is for that reason that we sometimes take out two or three Torah scrolls: so that those assembled need not wait as we roll from one section to another. The gemore did not speak of tape recorders, but presumably the same principle obtains, and so I beg your pardon especially. When they originally asked me to speak on the topic of “A Century of Traditional Higher Jewish Learning in America,” they presented it to me as a counterbalance, so to speak, to a second talk, which, as I understand it, had been assigned to Professor Rudavsky.[3] They told me that since we are now marking the centennial of the founding of Maimonides College, which, as Professor Rudavsky capably informed us, was the first institution of higher Jewish scholarship in America, perhaps it would be worthwhile to hear from an opposing view, so to speak, from the yeshive world, regarding another type, another model, of Jewish scholarship. This was certainly entirely appropriate on their part – and perhaps it was not only appropriate, but, in a certain sense, there was an element of khesed in their invitation to me to serve as such a counterbalance. I wish to say at the outset that what I plan to present here is not meant to play devil’s advocate, contradicting what we heard earlier; rather, just the opposite, I hope, in a certain sense, to fill out the picture. However, as proper as the intention was, my assignment has presented me with something of a problem. Plainly put: my subject, as I understand it, does not exist. We simply do not have a hundred years of so-called “traditional higher Jewish learning in America” – at least, not in public. Privately, presumably there were “one from a town and two from a clan” [Jer. 3:14], a Torah scholar who sat and clenched the bench[4] here and there. But in public, in the form of institutions, yeshives, a hundred years have not yet passed, and for that centennial, I am afraid, we must wait perhaps another ten to twenty years. At that point – may we all, with God’s help, be strong and healthy – they will have to invite a professor as a counterbalance to the yeshive world. The first yeshive, which was a predecessor, in a certain sense, to our yeshive, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, a yeshive known as Yeshiva University, was the Etz Chaim Yeshiva, founded in 1886. As a result, I find myself facing something of a dilemma here, bound in – as it is known in the non-Jewish world – a Procrustean bed, that same bed familiar to everyone from the gemore in Sanhedrin. The gemore describes that when a guest arrived in Sodom, they had a one-size-fits-all bed, and it seems that in Sodom they were not particularly attentive to individual preferences. So they took each guest and measured him against the bed: if he turned out too short, they stationed one fellow at his head, another at his feet, and they stretched him in both directions until he covered the bed; if he turned out too tall, they would cut him down to size, sometimes at his feet, sometimes at his head, so that, in any event, he would fit [Sanhedrin 109b]. Here I face the same problem, and I have one of two ways to extricate myself from my present impasse. On the one hand, I could, perhaps, make a bit of a stretch and broaden the definition of “traditional higher Jewish scholarship and learning,” so that my title, my subject, would be accurate and so that I might, after all, be able to identify a hundred years during which people sat and learned. But, on the other hand, perhaps I should rather stay firm and close to the title, maintaining the pure, unadulterated conception of what constitutes “learning,” “Jewish learning,” “traditional learning,” even if doing so would come at the expense of completely fulfilling the task assigned to me: to speak not about a brief span of years, but a full hundred. You yourselves understand very well that, given these two options, it is certainly better to choose the latter – perhaps abbreviating a bit chronologically – in order to grasp, at least partially, the inner essence of traditional learning as I understand it. In taking up the work of presenting an approach to traditional Jewish learning here in America, I believe that, in truth, I have two tasks. The first is to define, to a certain degree, how I conceive of “traditional Jewish learning,” or, let us say, more or less, yeshive learning – what constitutes the idea in its purest manifestation? – though I fear this might take us to an epoch, a period, that does not fit the title as it stands, in its literal form.

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