Rabbi David Weiss Halivni @ 90

This article was written in November 2017, but has been edited upon the passing of Rabbi Halivni.

On Monday, November 20, 2017, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni’s students who attended his Talmud shi’ur at the Hebrew University’s Giv’at Ram campus made a birthday party honoring our teacher, Rabbenu David Weiss Halivni, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Since I have known Rabbenu since the Fall of 1968 when I entered the Rabbinical School program of the Jewish Theological Seminary [=JTS] a little less than half a century ago, I was asked by the shi’ur’s attendees, amongst them published professors, accomplished educators, and ordained rabbis, to present a devar Torah honoring Rabbenu for his teaching us and celebrating his rich lifetime of Torah scholarship, teaching, and accomplishment. Below is an English summary of my remarks on that occasion.

My very first encounter with Rabbenu was at the bar mitsva of his son, Baruch, at JTS. At that bar mitsva, Baruch spoke about the Halakhic debate regarding the wearing of phylacteries on the intermediate festival days. I did not understand even one sentence of the young man’s talk. Here I was a JTS Rabbinical student and nevertheless unable to follow the halakhic discourse of R. Halivni’s thirteen year old son. Who was this man, whose son is so learned, whose reputation for greatness so dazzling, and whose voluminous Talmudic research has set the agenda of Talmudic scholarship to this day?

Born in 1927, Rabbenu was raised by his maternal grandfather, Rav Yeshayahu Weiss, a poor man who was nonetheless an accomplished Torah scholar in Sighet, Hungary. In his grandfather’s house, the young prodigy who grew into Rabbenu was trained to learn peshat, the plain, simple, literal meaning of the Talmud’s holy words. In this Hungarian Hassidic milieu, Rabbenu learned how to learn Torah with integrity but without casuistry, agendas, or fanaticism. If Torah is the word of the Lord, its holy words must be understood clearly and correctly in order that they be applied appropriately and accurately. After all, the Rabbi/teacher is an explainer, not an oracle.

The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, Rabbenu recalls only some of his Holocaust horrors. One of his touching Holocaust stories was the reverence with which Jewish concentration camp inmates gave to a torn page of Orah Hayyim. Literally, the title means “the way of life,” and refers to the first major section of the Shulhan Aruch which first deals with the religious rules for the Jewish day, the second, with weekly Sabbath, and concludes with the yearly cycle of holy days. The study occupation with “the way of life” in the Death Camp apples Torah as a counter-cultural, life-affirming response to history’s most professional murderers. The Torah’s societal ideal is the polar opposite of the oppressive Nazi society and Torah study becomes the religious expression of a sacred subversion of absolute evil.

Rabbenu’s reputation and publications have dealt mostly with Talmud exegesis, but practical law and proper, normative behavior was always a religious concern and it is this private side of Rabbenu that I was privileged to encounter in our sessions. Briskers are said to learn Torah for the sake of Torah; the modernized Hungarian Hassid that Rabbenu happens to be learns Torah in order to observe the Torah’s commandments correctly. After all, an ignorant person cannot be a Hassid [mAvot 2:5].

Some emerged from the Holocaust Hell without faith at all, others with faith tried, tested, but intact, yet others with faith tinged and singed with anger. Rabbenu cannot live without God, but a thinking, feeling, human response, and protest, is for him inevitable. In the metaphor and mood of Rabbenu’s Hassidic Tradition, the Jew is commissioned fix this imperfect world by making tiqqun, the proactive, corrective action that changes the world that God created for good. As Rabbenu would later write for a mature, academic audience, our received Torah text has been blemished, i.e. is “maculate,” and Rabbenu’s academic, “scientific” research is the contemporary expression, and instrument, of tiqqun, the cleansing of God’s originally perfect Torah of historical maculation, the perfecting of Torah and the recovery of God’s “seal,” which is truth. And this God’s seal truth may not be broken by secular indifference, egalitarian excess, misplaced, uninformed “religious” zeal, and for sure not by Nazi monster murderers.

After World War II, Rabbenu came to America. He found his residence’s Orthodox Kosher supervisor to be less than competent in his Judaic erudition, at least according to the rigorous benchmarks of his Hungarian, Hassidic Orthodoxy. After all, Rabbenu was ordained as rabbi and rabbinical judge at the age of fifteen! A wise and astute social worker introduced Rabbenu to the greatest academic Talmudist, and for full disclosure we should add, confirmed Litvak [non-Hassidic Orthodox Jew], in 20^th Century America, Rav Shaul Lieberman, who was subsequently to become the major teacher, the Rav Muvhaq, of Rabbenu. After convincing Rabbenu that the institutional food was indeed kosher, Rav Lieberman kept an eye on this firebrand plucked from the crematoria’s fire, whose black fire and white fire were destined to fill volumes of Talmud commentary, and he continued to nurture Rabbenu into the Academic Torah giant that he was destined to become.

A superb student at Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, Rabbenu was exempt from the Rosh Yeshiva’s, R. Isaac Hutner’s, lectures. For Rabbenu, greatness in Torah also demanded the acquisition of worldly wisdom. Unwilling to be limited in his search for Truth by the Yeshiva World’s educational/ideological  narrative, curriculum and culture, Rabbenu sought to master the Western mind as well and made up his mind to study Philosophy at college. The Satmar Rov and the founder of the Lakewood Yeshiva, Rav Ahron Kotler, were “drafted” to talk Rabbenu out of his spiritually independent course of Torah study, according to which thinking freely should not be confused with free thinking, but is the condition for the discovery of truth. I imagine Rav Kotler admonishing Rabbenu, pressing him arguing, “only Torah counts, what can you learn from sinful Epicureans, do you really need to learn goyesheh narishkeit [Gentile foolishness] in order to become a ben Toyreh?” And I can imagine Rabbenu listening respectfully, politely, and deferentially to the strong-willed Rav Kotler, and then retorting, “nowhere in the Oral Torah is the study of Gentile wisdom forbidden, Ashkenazi practice is usually based on the rulings of Rav Moshe Isserles, i.e. the Rem”a, who quotes Aristotle in his Responsa and Maimonides’ Guide in his introduction to his Shulhan Aruch glosses. I don’t think God gave a different Torah to him than He gave to me.”

The essential difference between Rav Kotler’s Torah study and Rabbenu’s is that “Yeshiva” learning aims to recover the Tradition as proclaimed by the Rosh Yeshiva as he reads his world view narrative into in the canonical library. The ideal student would not think of confronting the Torah canon other than through the perfect, predetermined prism of Orthodox folk culture as it is mediated by the world view and religious narrative supplied by the Great Rabbi/Rosh ha-Yeshiva. The student never grows up into a Jewish adult. The student must always defer to the teacher, who alone processes and defines what the Torah truly prescribes.  [See however R. Hayyim Berlin, Ru’ah Hayyim 1:3, where the good student is obliged to challenge the teacher. Sometimes the student is right].

In stark contrast to Yeshiva learning, which reads the Great Rabbi’s narrative assumptions into the canonical library, Rabbenu struggles to discover God’s word, i.e. the Divine narrative encoded in that library. He strives to decode, describe, and define the Tradition and narrative memorialized in that canon. He invites his students to join him in this at once religious and academic enterprise. In the Yeshiva world that Rabbenu left, “truth” is located in the divinely inspired, and unquestionably correct intuition of the Great Rabbi’s charisma, office, and narrative. By choosing to learn under R. Lieberman, who studied the Torah canon ki-feshuta, according to the simple, plain, common sense philological evidence and meaning of the canon’s words, Rabbenu’s academic method serves a profound religious objective, to encounter God in the Torah library’s text.

Here a word regarding Rabbenu’s learning is in order. Rabbenu divides the Babylonian Talmud into Tannaitic, Amoraic, and post-Talmudic strata, or literary levels. The Tannaitic and Amoraic strata tend to identify rabbinic authorities by name, their traditions are transmittedtr in Hebrew, and they usually present their views apodictically, that with direct, declarative statements, with limited interpretation, dialectic, or commentary. Since the post-Amoraic sages transmitted their comments anonymously, Rabbenu calls them Stamma’im, the “anonymous” rabbis. These sages did not issue apodictic rulings, as that authority was believed to have lapsed with the court of Ravina I and Rav Ashi [bBava Mezi’a 86a]. But these Stamma’im glossed Amoraic materials, recovering and perhaps innovating interpretations of those Amoraic texts, they composed or redacted Talmudic compositions and are responsible for transferring Talmudic materials that appear in multiple versions. The “Yeshiva” approach to Talmudic learning assumes as dogma that the Talmud is a unified text, actually composed and compiled by Ravina and Rav Ashi. Furthermore, the Rishonim, the early authorities, are themselves masoretically canonical, and lernen, authentic learning, requires the student to find—or discover–the Rosh Yeshiva’s narrative and ideology in the harmonized, canonical texts. Rabbenu’s method has been accepted by just about all Academic Talmudists and clandestinely by at least a few in the Yeshiva world. The epistemological difference between the Yeshiva world’s lernen and Academic Talmudic learning is reflected in their respective views of “Tradition.”  Academic Talmudists confront the Rabbinic corpus as a human artifact that may be read and parsed, with data being culled, patterns noted and interpreted, and conclusions reached and formulated. On the other hand, the Yeshiva world’s lernen makes ideological assumptions that render the Oral Torah corpus unreadable. The authority to render a reading resides in the person of the Rosh Yeshiva, i.e. the community’s rabbinic elite. By subjecting the Oral Torah to literary explication and readability, Academic Talmudists remove the mystery from the Talmud, which for the Yeshiva world undermines the Talmud’s sanctity, which is the Rosh Yeshiva’s apodictic authority to intuit, initiate, and invent new rulings free and immune from review or assessment. According to the Oral Torah Tradition, after Rav Ashi, no individual rabbi is authorized to issue apodictic decrees that bind all Israel, a view to be codified by Maimonides in his introduction to the Yad compendium. In contrast, the Yeshiva world regularly, and consistently, reminds its charges that “we do not decide the Law on the basis of the Talmud” or for that matter,according to the Yad. To this view, the Law is revealed in the charismatic and non-reviewable narrative of the elite Yeshiva rabbis. Rabbenu’s Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara, his English language exposition of his life’s project, is subtitled “The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law.” In normative terms, nobody and no body after Rav Ashi is authorized to say “do or believe this or that because I/we say so.”

It was reported that when asked about Rabbenu’s whereabouts on the evening of December 24^th, a.k.a. Christmas Eve, it was reported that Rabbenu was in his office, doing what he always does, that is learning Torah. Somewhat annoyed, the questioner asked, “this is Nittal nacht, the birthday of Jesus, how dare he sit and learn Torah?” Learning Torah on what for Christianity is a “Holy Night” became a parochial taboo for Eastern European Orthodox Jewish culture. Rabbenu retorted, “I am called an apiqoros. I ought to do something to deserve the title.” According to Jewish law, we do not learn Torah on the 9^th of Av and during the week of mourning. Whether this Nittal nonsense policy may have made sense in Eastern Europe is beyond the scope of this paper or the competence of this reviewer to assess; I have found neither Source nor Tradition in the Oral Torah canon that justifies suspending Torah learning on December 24^th, especially if the learning does not endanger the learner’s physical safety.

Rabbenu believed in doing acts of human kindness as well as Torah truth; this tandem gave him his anchor when confronted with physical and spiritual threats and challenges. When Rabbenu realized that JTS’s changed religious orientation had become for him untenable, Rabbenu had the courage to walk away from his chaired professorship, institutional prestige, and professional deference that would still be his if he would only bend to the will, whim, and ideology of the new JTS administration. Under Rabbis Finkelstein and Lieberman, JTS defined Judaism by referencing Judaism’s sacred canon; now “Judaism” at JTS is no more and no less than the taste culture lived by the Conservative synagogues’ non-observant, uninformed, aging, and declining lay membership, those Jews in the pews who pay the dues—and the rabbinic professionals’ salaries.

Rabbenu earned his BA in Philosophy at Brooklyn College and an MA, also in Philosophy, at NYU. Philosophy served as Rabbenu’s window into the Western world’s moral mind and collective consciousness. Rabbenu was particularly drawn to the study of logic and legal theory, which provided him with tools with which to parse his beloved Talmud and Jewish law.

According to Mishnas Rabbi Ahron, which is based upon the Lakewood Yeshiva’s students’ transcripts of R. Ahron Kotler’s lectures, the Great Man, the Godol, reads his hashqofeh/world view/ideology/narrative into the textual Torah canon, which because it is sacred, remains unreadable except by the Godol, whose divine inspiration is made possible by his professed piety and intellectual innocence, i.e. his mind has not been contaminated by secular thoughts or non-sacred learning. In stark contrast to R. Kotler’s world view, Rabbenu the Hungarian hassid wanted to know what the Torah canon actually says, means, and requires of Jewry based upon its layering, unfolding, and evolution over time. Rabbenu identifies, compares, and distinguishes between the Oral Torah’s sacred sources and the subsequent traditions that were based upon those sources. God’s Torah is both readable and accessible [Deut. 30:12] when the Torah’s taxonomy of “Sources and Traditions” is identified.

Rabbenu almost failed to be accepted into JTS’s Rabbinical Program. He was shy, spoke English with an accent, and appeared at first glance to be insufficiently charismatic to lead an American Conservative congregation. When it became clear that Rabbenu was to be groomed by R. Lieberman for an academic career, he was admitted into the Rabbinical School program. Ironically, after his break with JTS, Rabbenu became the spiritual leader of Congregation of Ohel Eliezer [Louis] Finklestein, the last Halakhically committed Chancellor of JTS. Rabbenu became the mara de-atra, the spiritual leader of the Union for Traditional Judaism, the American UTJ, and my teacher for Yadin Yadin Ordination.

Rabbenu left the JTS over the procedure by which women were determined to be eligible for acceptance to JTS’s Rabbinical School. Non-experts with no expertise in, and for most of the voting faculty, without commitment to Jewish law, were to be eligible—and deemed to be competent—to vote to ordain women rabbis. And JTS’s non-tenured faculty knew very well how Chancellor Gerson D. Cohen expected them to vote. Breaking with the JTS tradition of academic freedom and meritocracy, with R. Lieberman’s passing, Rabbenu, the most eminent Rabbinics scholar at JTS at the time, was not appointed to the post of Rabbi of the JTS Synagogue. Instead, Chancellor Cohen appointed an elderly egalitarian rabbi who knew what his Chancellor expected of him and was apparently prepared to dutifully comply. Ironically, under R. Lieberman, intellectual diversity at JTS was valued and respected. In order to accommodate the new egalitarian dogma, classical Jewish law at JTS was to undergo reconstructive reformation, a path Rabbenu was unwilling to walk.

After resigning from the JTS faculty, Rabbenu subsequently taught at Columbia, Bar Ilan and Hebrew Universities. He was also awarded the Israel Prize for Talmud. One of his Israeli students informed me that unlike most Israeli professors, Rabbenu would graciously and generously give of his time and erudition to help any and every student and scholar who sought his guidance, breadth of learning, and methodological acuity and sophistication.

hen a rabbinical student at JTS, I was impressed that Rabbenu’s office was both a library and a Bet Midrash. The office was immaculately clean, precisely ordered, and invitingly and warmly intimate. The shelves were lined with both sacred and secular books; Rabbenu’s bookshelves proclaimed by the example of the range of subjects that modern Orthodox Jews must master in order to decode the Torah’s sacred secrets. In response to the demonic chaos that was the Holocaust, Rabbenu found a sacred ordering and meaning in Torah, now to be deconstructed with modern, critical tools.  It was in his Bet Midrash office at the Conservative JTS that Rabbenu emerges as a compelling modern Orthodox rabbinic model. Rabbenu’s “Orthodoxy” is expressed in as well as by his total commitment to the object of his study, the Judaism of the Written and Oral Torah, the study of which is a sacred act. By accepting “Modernity” as the culture horizon which he happens to inhabit, Rabbenu realizes that God’s Torah must resonate to current realities, without valorizing what is nostalgically remembered to be the “good old days” of “traditional” life or by succumbing to Modernity’s seductive secularity. Critical thinking does not undermine the sanctity of Torah; for Rabbenu, critical thinking anchors the student in the search for truth, “letting the law pierce the mountain” [bSan 6b], the chips falling where they may.

“Criticism” is the art of making of a thoughtful judgment based on analysis. Because  Rabbenu focuses on understanding what the canon actually says rather than accepting ideological narratives and intuitive conceptualizations that are read into the Torah’s words, Rabbenu chose as his adult rebbe R. Lieberman, who studied the Oral Torah ke-feshuta, according to its plain sense meaning. By studying the Oral Torah in its Greek and Roman culture context, R. Lieberman broke with those within Orthodoxy who forbade secular studies and who outlawed any but their own ideologies, world views, or narratives, like R. Kotler and the Haredi Yeshiva world.

For Rabbenu, one cannot understand Torah properly and adequately if one lacks the requisite tools to decode, read, interpret, and read the Torah canon with precision. For some with Orthodoxy, it is sufficient to follow “Tradition,” which is construed to be the way that our ancestors believed, learned, and practiced Judaism, as defined and moderated by the Yeshiva world’s elite rabbis. For Rabbenu, we have to be honest to God when we learn God’s Torah. Chabad and Satmar agree that the Holocaust happened because of Jewish assimilation, secularization, and Zionism. For Rabbenu, this suggestion is not merely incorrect, it is theologically blasphemous. How dare we read God’s mind so presumptuously!  Job’s “friends” maintained that since Job was suffering, he must have sinned because a good God would not allow the righteous to suffer. God angerly chides Job’s friends, saying “you did not speak about Me properly, as did My servant, Job” [Job 42:7]. Job knew that the suffering he had undergone was not commensurate with the pain he was obliged to endure. A mature, adult modern Orthodoxy  possesses the integrity to ask hard questions and not to be content with the easy, conventional, pre-packaged trite, so-called “traditional” answers. What is amazing about Rabbenu is that his academic/spiritual quest is undertaken with a profound humility. Rabbenu taught that we cannot obey God with open eyes if we are ordered to follow people’s opinions with eyes closed. After all, if a dreamer of dreams or prophetic pretender commands that Torah be violated, we need Rabbenu’s eyes and energy to read Torah carefully and to resist even well intentioned error courageously [see Deut. 13:1-6].

When contemplating aliya in 2002, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin advised me to acquire a Yadin Yadin ordination. Since I was at the time on the faculty of the Union for Traditional Judaism’s [the American UTJ rabbinical program, the Metivta], and Rabbenu was the Reish Metivta, and hence my boss, it was natural that I turn to Rabbenu for direction. For the next nine years, Rabbenu directed my personal Torah learning, not as a detached, “objective” academic scholar but as an old- fashioned Hungarian Rov whose community happens to be located in the modern world. My first exam covered the Laws of Judges and Testimony. The exam took place after a UTJ meeting in Teaneck, N.J. while I driving Rabbenu and three collegiates to New York City. His questions were always focused in the plain sense of the Shulhan Aruch text, the sources upon which the Shulhan Aruch’s ruling was based, and how I might apply those Traditions in real life’s situational reality. Rabbenu never ever asked trick questions.  He did, however, require total control of the information on the page and a familiarity with the range of opinion regarding the rulings on the page.

After ascertaining that the requisite material had been mastered adequately, Rabbenu asked, “what is the issue underlying the laws of Jewish testimony?” I recall answering, with the anxiety of uncertainty, “we are defining ‘who is a good Jew,’ and the rush to condemn and declare dissenters to be heretics is, according to Jewish Law, slander.” Upon reaching Manhattan, Rabbenu disembarked and the first exam happily ended happily.

Rabbenu was guiding and nudging me to consider Jewish Law’s ethos, teleology, and social vision, which brought me to consider the society that the Torah Law prescribes. For Rabbenu, the poseq, the rabbi who decides questions of Jewish Law may not oracularly intuit the “right” answer and then reconstruct a narrative by means of a selective citation of canonical sources. Rabbenu is a conservative but not an activist jurist. Not once did he remind me that Rabina I and Rav Ashi were the last rabbis who were authorized to issue apodictic decrees that bind all Israel [bBava Metsi’a 86a]. The post-Talmudic rabbi may interpret but does not proclaim or create the law. Rabbenu stresses that throughout the history of Halakhah, we find a “predilection for a justified law.” Rabbenu maintains that the poseq must suspend his personal preferences and instead recover the norm as it is embedded in the canon’s library. Accordingly, anything not forbidden by a formal legal norm may normally be permitted in practice. Orthodox Jewish law actually prescribes precision, avoiding the extremes of gratuitous restriction on the Right as well as libertine, antinomian abandon on the Left. In sum, Rabbenu’s Judaism is no more and no less than the intellectually honest, socially appropriate, and humane application of Halakhah, locating eternity in the moment by synthesizing classical piety with a present tense intellectual integrity.