Question

Good evening,
Although the title, and maybe also the content of the question, might sound a bit like the kind of provocative complaint one of the regular questioners here tends to make, that is not my intention. I’ll explain in a moment what I’m aiming at with this question.

The Haredi approach and the ultra-liberal approach have always fascinated me, in terms of the kinds of arguments people recruit for themselves, the unquestioned assumptions they allow themselves to formulate, and the tendency to cling strongly to historical figures as a source of authority. The ultra-liberal approach of certain circles (I mean the Hartman Institute, Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah, and certain American groups overseas, which very often supposedly try, on the basis of leaning on certain historical figures, to establish an approach that says Judaism has always fit like a glove with all the values of democracy, equality, fraternity, and enlightenment, and that in fact there is not and cannot be any contradiction between Judaism and these approaches. Of course, this is a crude generalization, and I do not mean to say that every member, community rabbi, halakhic decisor, or professor affiliated with these organizations is an apologist of that type. But as a generalization, that really is the spirit blowing through such organizations.) Opposed to that stands the Haredi approach, which of course says the opposite: that any approach that so much as evokes concepts close to ideas like equality, the right to democracy, liberalism, and the like is something impure, and no God-fearing Jew can hold any principle similar to those principles.

The ultra-liberals latch onto certain “revolutionary” historical figures, “enlightened rabbis,” “brave” ones, and tell you: if he observed all the commandments, lenient and stringent alike, and was democratic, enlightened, and liberal, then we can be too (and they also like to take certain statements out of context, and so on). But the Haredim supposedly have many more trees, and taller ones, to hang onto.

I’m not asking you to do a psychological analysis of a group of people. I also know your approach, which says that in matters of fact and theological determinations, no Jewish sage has any authority, and that even in Jewish law, laws that stem from a certain perception of reality that may no longer be relevant (like the banal example of returning a lost object to a gentile or saving him on the Sabbath), one should act according to our own understanding, even if we cannot find any halakhic decisor from the past who thought otherwise.

But as someone who, by your own account, spent many years within Haredi society and, by your own account, acquired friends and acquaintances from that sector among others, my question is different:

How exactly is it determined who is a “great one,” “our master,” someone with “the correct worldview” whom one must obey? Precisely from the starting assumption that the determinations of the sages of previous generations are binding—how is it decided that, for example, on the issue of studying external wisdom and a very strict separation between men and women, the authority is “our master the Hazon Ish” and not “our master Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg”? Why, on the issue of attitudes toward gentiles, is the decisive authority in the topic our master the Hatam Sofer and not our master Maharetz Chajes or our master the author of Tiferet Yisrael?

Of course, there is a certain process, apparently deliberate, by which halakhic decisors and thinkers with a more conservative worldview enter the pantheon of the greats, while more open or flexible halakhic decisors and thinkers are treated like a view that was rejected in every generation—but is there any logical, sensible, well-founded argument for this approach? Some justification that is not apologetics or begging the question, for why the Hazon Ish is automatically greater than Rabbi Hirsch? Is this a quantitative claim? (That throughout history there were more great Torah sages who held the Hazon Ish’s approach than the approach of #?) Is it a claim about scholarship? (That the greater and more expert scholars held one approach, while the less scholarly held another?) In short: have you ever heard a convincing, reasoned, logical, common-sense argument in favor of the claim that “these are the great leaders of the generation”?