Question

Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham,
Hello,
 
My name is Rav Eitan, from the Eretz Hemdah kollel. In recent years I have studied various halakhic topics, and many times I was surprised to see that when I present the sources to rabbis, they tell me one of two things: you are right, but that is not how our ancestors practiced; or, you are right, but if you say that publicly they will smear you, so it is better not to say it. Since then I have been looking for rabbis who are willing to say the truth as it is written in our sources and cling to the truth without fear of slander and the like. I looked for rabbis who are willing to study Torah together with reason, and not separate the two. And I have to say that from personal experience, through phone calls and correspondence with leading rabbis, there are very few of them. Still, I did manage to find a few such rabbis. One of the rabbis on this path is Dayan Rav David Bar-Hayim (head of the Shilo Institute). I met with him, and we discussed the fact that if these rabbis were to work together, they would have much more power to accomplish meaningful things. Halakhic rulings would carry much more authority if a religious court (even one of only three) were to issue a ruling, rather than a single rabbi on his own. Take, for example, your halakhic ruling on legumes. And more importantly, if people in the Land of Israel were to see that there is a religious court of three very serious rabbis issuing halakhic rulings in this way, it would cause more rabbis to feel more comfortable with it, to join gradually, and ultimately to create a larger religious court that would issue rulings in this way. In that way we could truly achieve great things.
 
Therefore I am turning to you, because I saw what you wrote about legumes and about many other issues as well. I saw that what drives you is the demand for truth. What the Torah really says—that is what matters, and not all the side calculations of what people will say about me, whether they will smear me, our ancestors did not practice this way, and so on. I also saw that you think about Torah in a way in which reason goes together with Torah, not separately. There are already two serious rabbis who want and are prepared to step forward and establish such a religious court. If you are interested, I would be happy for you to contact me.