Q&A: The Rabbi’s Responsa
The Rabbi’s Responsa
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’ve seen that the Rabbi is a prolific writer, and I haven’t seen among his books a responsa volume on Jewish law.
Did you ever think of perhaps publishing a responsa book on Jewish law? What the Rabbi writes on the site is enlightening, but not everyone knows about it or has internet access.
Answer
I haven’t thought about it. People can read online, and if someone shuts himself off, that’s his problem. Beyond that, printing is a major expense, and almost nobody would buy a halakhic responsa book of mine. In general, I’m no longer publishing books, even on other topics.
Discussion on Answer
What they have in common is that nobody would buy either of them.
I didn’t write about printing. I just meant making a distinction within the site between the different kinds of responsa.
As far as I remember, the responsa here don’t include truly full answers, with in-depth analysis and a proper laying out of the whole map.
Sometimes answers like that pop up from the email.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to distinguish between the regular responsa on the site, whose parallels are books like Yechaveh Da’at by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Aseh Lekha Rav by Rabbi Hayyim David Halevy, and weighty, analytical halakhic responsa, whose parallels are regular responsa books like Yabia Omer and Pnei Moshe, which could get a separate tab on the site. It’s not that there’s no overlap between the two kinds of responsa, but the literary genre is a bit different.