So you mean that if we put Abba Sikra opposite Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, there is even room to think that maybe the thugs were right??? And Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai has authority only in the halakhic realm!!!???

And in our terms—if we put the Minister of Defense opposite Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, then Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai has authority only in the halakhic realm??? Who could even imagine such a thing??? Is that how we are supposed to understand the words of the Sages??

And to make it current—if we put the Health Minister, or Professor Barbash, or Mr. “Coronavirus Project Manager,” opposite Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, then Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky has authority only in the halakhic realm??

As is well known, Jephthah in his generation is like Samuel in his generation. And Rabbi Chaim decides people’s fate before surgeries. And as someone-or-other put it, Rabbi Chaim has no medical knowledge, but he does have knowledge of the upper worlds.

*(Mr. Goralin, you are unnecessary in this discussion. Please don’t intervene!)

Ah, I forgot to add…
After all, of course you’ll argue, “In a place of desecration of God’s name, no honor is shown to the rabbi.”
Maybe, God forbid, we should also accuse Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai of desecration of God’s name, because of which the Temple was destroyed??
May God protect us from such thoughts…

With God’s help, 21 Av 5780

Great Torah scholars generally direct people to consult the top experts, whether in medicine or in the political-military sphere, in order to receive reliable professional information. If there is disagreement among the experts, or a halakhic problem with the plan they propose, then the halakhic decisors need to issue a ruling.

The ‘thugs’ were the exact opposite of ‘experts,’ and did the exact opposite of what needed to be done in order to succeed. There were storehouses in Jerusalem of food, water, and wood that could have lasted through a siege for many years, so it would have been possible to wear down the Romans in a prolonged siege and force them to reach a reasonable compromise.

Instead, the thugs burned the storehouses in order to bring about an immediate war with the Romans, but they achieved the opposite: the defenders of Jerusalem were weakened by hunger, and had no strength left to fight the Romans, as Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai wondered: “Can people who boil straw and drink its water stand firm in the bonds of war?”

So too in dealing with the coronavirus, one must be careful with total lockdowns, which cause hunger and demoralization, and instead seek cautious and reasonable measures that will make it possible to slow and reduce the spread of the coronavirus until vaccines and medicines are found. Professor Gamzu seems to understand this. One can hope there will be proper dialogue between him and the representatives of the Haredi public that will lead to fitting solutions.

Regards, S. Tz.

In one matter we have already seen that Professor Gamzu came around to Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky’s view. Gamzu expressed regret that at the beginning of the intersession period, the young men returned home from the yeshivas, and by increasing household crowding they increased the danger of infection. That is exactly what Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky argued at the end of Adar: that studies in the yeshivas should not be canceled. Maybe they should arrange a meeting between the professor and the rabbi, and “everything will return peacefully to its proper place”?

Regards, S. Tz.

What a comparison—between a Torah scholar who does not know his right from his left in worldly matters [and I say this as praise!],
and Torah scholars in the time of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who decided that human life was preferable to the humiliation of surrender.
The notion, invented by someone-or-other, that Jephthah in his generation—or even Samuel in his generation—should decide matters they are unfamiliar with, is a baseless invention, even if “someone-or-other” said so.

That isn’t exactly understanding of worldly matters. By the way, a very similar argument took place in the Warsaw Ghetto before the uprising, and there is some uncertainty regarding Rabbi Menachem Ziemba’s position on it. If I’m not mistaken, it was the Zionists (religious and secular) versus the Haredi rabbinic leadership.

A. Well, thank God, unlike my previous difficulty about the breaking of the tablets, a serious discussion is taking place here. And no one is claiming that the discussion is absurd. (And luckily for now Goralin hasn’t intervened…)
B. Honorable Nur—no someone-or-other said that “Jephthah in his generation is like Samuel in his generation”; that is an explicit Talmudic statement. Someone-or-other said that Rabbi Chaim doesn’t understand medicine, but knows what goes on in the upper worlds. (By the way, in a different way the Hazon Ish also did not consult doctors, but rather instructed them in how to perform the surgery even though he had never studied medicine. And sometimes he exempted people from medical recommendations given to them. Of course, by his farsighted vision.)
C. The outlook that “one who takes counsel from the elders does not stumble,” and “even if they tell you that right is left and left is right,” is also not new. And the wonders are well known among people who consult the sages about every single step.
D. S. Tz. — (you should really change those dreadful initials) — with every passing day Rabbi Chaim’s clear view, as you mentioned, becomes more evident. Also the fact that even though our situation today is worse than in the first wave, the state / the Corona Committee / the great experts — are doing everything they can to keep the education system functioning so that parents can go out to work, and nobody is even dreaming of a lockdown!!!
Not to mention gatherings of thousands at left-wing demonstrations being allowed, while prayers and weddings are restricted.
And have we already mentioned that the decisions on restrictions are being made off the cuff???
So what’s the point?? In the first wave the public was hysterical (and that’s what Bibi wanted), whereas Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky was not hysterical. That’s the whole difference!!

The band “Tippex” already dealt in its time with shepherd Chaim and the Haredi flock of sheep and cattle in the song “Inside Newspaper Wrapping,” here is the link:

With God’s help, 21 Av 5780

To Tzachi—many greetings,

The disagreements among doctors are still very much with us. Some incline toward lockdown, such as Professor Groto, Professor Sadetzki, and Professor Schwartz. Some incline toward complete leniency and making do with protecting risk groups, such as Professor Less, Professor Kimron, and others. And in the middle are Professor Gamzu, Professor Rothstein, and Professor Levy, who prefer personal hygiene and reducing gatherings over lockdown.

Regards, S. Tz.

Complaints about the initials of my name should be directed to my great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Roth (Rata), the grocery-store owner in the village of Katina in Transylvania, who named his son (my mother’s father) “Samson Zvi” 🙂

Only after Tzachi’s remark did I even notice that S. Tz. are the initials of Sabbatai Zevi. And I say this as someone who has wasted far too many minutes of his life on, among other things, reading a very strange book by the Yaavetz in which he brings various reports about the exploits of Sabbatai Zevi. The main thing I remember from it is that they attributed to Sabbatai Zevi an extraordinary kabbalistic capacity for innovation, and the best example there is (which says a lot about the quality of the content attributed there to that messiah) is that Sabbatai Zevi gave them a homily on the arrangement whereby every festival is a Sabbath and has a “Sabbath of complete rest” above it: Sukkot has Shemini Atzeret, Passover has Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah has Yom Kippur, and who is the Sabbath that sits above all these Sabbaths of rest? It is he, Sabbatai (that is how he wrote his name), who is Sabbath + i, composed of ten sefirot, and he sits at the head like a king among the troop, when soldiers gain strength, for a rest day above the Sabbath protects, and Sabbatai Zevi is over them. On the substance of the issue, I don’t think there is a matter here of “the name of the wicked shall rot,” because the names in their legitimate usage predated that man, and he merely encroached on their territory.

Sabbateanism can stay in its own place, but from that book of the Yaavetz (in which he also rails, among other things, against Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto), I at least could not understand at all what its intellectual attraction was.

And if you’ll forgive me for digging around, I’ll note that the coinage “I say this as a…” is usually for the sake of abuse. Caroline Glick wrote not long ago that there is an entire wing of American Jews where each one of them, in his writing, is not “a Jew” but “as a Jew.” That is, using Jewish identity in order to add force to an attack on Israel. Maybe this is confirmation bias, but I definitely see a great many Jews in various places who quite unequivocally interpret everything against Israel’s official position. I think I recently saw that even a primped-up lady like Rashida Tlaib employs a Jewish media adviser.

With God’s help, 21 Av 5780

To T.—many greetings,

The pseudo-kabbalistic homiletics of the Sabbateans came to legitimize the conversion of Sabbatai Zevi, after which thousands of Jews who converted to Islam followed in his wake. Even those who did not go after him as far as conversion developed various bizarre theories according to which the “righteous man of the generation” is permitted “to descend into the husks” and commit sins in order to “extract sparks” from within the husks. One of the offshoots of these ideas was the Jacob Frank sect, who came to incest in order to “extract sparks from the husks,” and in the end they converted to Christianity. In short: a cult of personality, using a kabbalistic preaching style to legitimize the gravest sins.

As for us, for these scorching summer days we recommend taking a fresh juicy fruit, and delighting in the satisfying sweetness within its peel, especially from the holy fruits of the Land of the Deer, which is in the category of “Sabbath” relative to all other lands 🙂

Regards, Samson Zvi

The conversion was a later “constraint,” as far as I know. The kabbalistic homiletics came to establish the uniqueness of the messiah (and longing for his arrival is what basically drove the whole thing), and he himself—at least according to the above-mentioned book (Torat HaKena’ot)—was presented as a tremendous kabbalist, beyond every blessing. The problem is that the examples there in that book are really so pitifully ridiculous that I could produce ten like them out of my sleeve every hour while asleep.

With God’s help, 22 Av 5780

To T.—many greetings,

I have never gone into an in-depth inquiry into the reason for the spell Sabbatai Zevi cast over his contemporaries, but it could be that he had broad knowledge of kabbalistic literature, a quick ability to perform kabbalistic homiletical acrobatics—which requires wide command of that literature and its concepts—and apparently “he had it.”

It may also be that he had strong personal qualities that brought those who met him to feel that before them stood a person of stature. It is hard to define exactly what gives a person the “charisma” that turns him into an object of admiration for many good people. And when that “charisma,” whose numerical value is that of “awake,” brought an unprecedented mass awakening to repentance in expectation of redemption, it was possible to suppose that such a compelling personality was leading the people toward redemption.

The problem was that when he was forced to convert out of fear of being judged as rebelling against the kingdom, the “charisma” turned into “evil.” Instead of admitting failure, a constraint imposed because of mortal danger, Sabbatai Zevi and his followers turned the fall into an “ideology” of “a transgression for the sake of a commandment,” and brought about mass apostasy and the legitimization of every abomination under the claim of “extracting sparks from the husk,” and so they became infamous.

In short: “charisma” requires caution. It can inspire heights of good, but on the other hand it can drag one down to depths of evil.

Regards, Samson Tavia

At the level of declarations, all of the above is agreed and more than agreed. Such a powerful and sweeping movement must be accompanied by a formulated “theology,” and it may be that there are also meaningful ideas there (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto himself testified that he ate some pomegranate from the words of Nathan of Gaza), and I know only the history and not the thought. But according to the above-mentioned book, which contains testimonies from people of that time as copied by the Yaavetz, that same kabbalistic homiletical acrobatics that cast a spell on the listeners is basically just tying thread to thread, making a scab over the head of every stature, and in particular I saw there an outrage in the practical use of gematrias for every purpose. I don’t have the patience right now to reread that book, but anyone who wants to see embarrassing buffoonery should go to the mentioned book and be astonished to himself as he goes along, marveling all the way.