“And sometimes it’s even true” — even if it is true, a mentally balanced person would not suffer from attributing this trait to himself. He may think so, but he would not expose his thoughts to the surrounding society, if only for the simple reason that he wouldn’t want to be considered a megalomaniac.

When I talk with Haredim, they tell me: you’re not the dust beneath so-and-so’s feet, not the dust beneath that other one’s feet. Dust, dust, dust. What is it with them and dust? When I spoke with some Breslover guy, he even gestured at me with his fingers, “You’re not this much compared to Rabbi Nachman.” I couldn’t see it — I thought he was already talking to me in sizes of cells and atoms.

A., yes, there is a valid point there, in my opinion: it’s more appropriate to criticize figures in the areas where they are strong or in the fields where they acted and had influence, rather than getting hung up on catchphrases or marginal aspects.

Benjamin Gurelin coined an expression here that I had trouble understanding: “megulomania,” until it suddenly dawned on me that “megulo” comes from the phrase “the revealed end.”

According to that, it would turn out that specifically the Religious Zionists have “megulomania,” in thinking that our era — in which the mountains of Israel give forth their branches and fruit “for My people Israel, for they are soon to come” — is the “revealed end.”

The Haredi position, of not seeing the “revealed end and the light of salvation dawning” in our era, would be more aptly defined as “megulo-phobia” 🙂

Regards,
Shatz Levingolo

Of course the knitted-kippah crowd has its own megalomania: “We’re the best,” “we’re present in every stratum of society,” “the bridge!” “Only we have the perfect, redemptive Torah in all the purity of its radiance.” “We have the highest conscience and morality.”

Indeed. But among the knitted-kippah crowd, the delusions of grandeur are also wrapped up in an inferiority complex.

An inferiority complex is the other side of the coin. In my humble opinion, a lot of it is connected to the fact that this is a society founded on an ideological basis without a real tradition (the invention of the “redemptive Torah” of Mercaz HaRav, Rabbi Goren’s uniform prayer book, the Rinat Yisrael prayer book). When you don’t have any natural simplicity in life, and the personality — including the collective one — is built from the outside inward, meaning from ideas that have to be fulfilled and aspired to, the society will always measure itself by how it is received in the world.
Unfortunately — and very deeply so — the same thing happened to the Torah-oriented Sephardim. Rabbi Ovadia was so human and lived the needs of people as people, before loading himself up with doctrines and theories. And here his students have become a copy-paste of the Haredi-Lithuanian public, with all the stories it tells itself through the lenses of the Chazon Ish and Rabbi Shach…. Really a bummer.
Where is our Rabbi Uziel? Where is our Rabbi Nissim? Where is our Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi?…. “The world” loves brands.

And the Haredim suffer from it a great deal too, even if they don’t admit it. There’s a difference between the feeling and the declarations, both among the knitted-kippah crowd and among the Haredim.

With God’s help, 5 Elul 5780

And in short, we “authentic Sephardim” are the best and the truest. No one compares to us. We’re better than everyone — than the Haredim, the Mercaz people, the students of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, etc. etc. There’s no one like us in the world, and especially in humility we put both Rabbi and Rabbi Yosef in our little pocket 🙂

Regards, Samson Zvi Halevi, graduate of the state religious school named after Rabbi Uziel and librarian at “Yad HaRav Nissim”

And seriously speaking: every person thinks his path is the best one, even agnostics… 🙂

Hey, Shatzl, are you the librarian at Yad HaRav Nissim? We’ve exchanged quite a few words here under every garlic and nickname, and I had no idea. Can I send you an email? [As for the substance of the matter, of course everyone thinks his path is the best one, and otherwise he would move to a different path were it not for constraints that usually aren’t absolute. But there’s a difference between the opinion and the results.]

What’s the problem with the Rinat Yisrael prayer book? That it’s printed in a normal font? Instead of the awful, jumbled font (huge letters next to tiny ones) of prayer-by-heart? Is that “tradition” for you? Miserableness and ugliness? About such things one should recite in the morning: “Who has not made me Haredi.”

With God’s help, 6 Elul 5780

To T — greetings,

You’ll find my email on this very site, by clicking “Tesafhun Levingisto” 🙂

Regards, Samson Zwieblinger, knight of onions and garlic

And let the great librarian Shatz answer everyone here: when was the expression “the redemptive Torah” invented? Since when has it been used to describe a public spiritual phenomenon? Who uses it? Is its meaning and significance agreed upon by most Torah scholars? Is it authentic?

I lamented the fact that Sephardiness 50 years ago looked different, including in the period when there were “Sephardi Haredim” such as Rabbi Mutzafi and Hakham Ben Zion Abba Shaul, of blessed and saintly memory.

In the same way, I could lament the way the authentic, sweet way of life of Jerusalem-style people like Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach disappeared. I tend to believe that there were thousands like him (in quantity, not necessarily in quality). And what can you do — today’s Haredim really aren’t authentic.

The Rinat Yisrael prayer book erased many traditions (Ashkenazi and Sephardi). It created a ridiculous synthesis of a Jewish world it tried to build and that was officially buried with the National Religious Party, of blessed memory.

Shatz, enjoy your Ashkenazi, condescending knitted-religiousness that thinks it is the complete path to redemption that unites all the tribes of Israel! Enjoy the “here and now,” because soon there won’t remain even three people with the depth of being religiously former-religious, and the number of Religious Zionists who know how to read the Maharsha.

It will weep bitterly over you.

The group that is interested in thoughts about the complete path to redemption that unites all the tribes of Israel (= Mercaz / Har Hamor and their offshoots) actually does know how to read Maharsha quite well.

With God’s help, 8 Elul 5780

To Yehoshua — greetings,

“The redemptive Torah” is a term that Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook gave to the Torah of his father, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, in an article published in 1965 marking 30 years since Rabbi Kook’s passing. That is what I saw in an article by Rabbi Yohanan Fried, which I reached by googling “the redemptive Torah.” There is even a “HaTorah HaGo’elet Street” in Be’er Sheva 🙂

I hope to find the article in the coming days, and without making a vow I’ll bring a few excerpts from it.

Regards,
Shatz

The condition of Sephardic Judaism has actually improved greatly over the last 50 years, and it has undergone and is undergoing tremendous Torah flourishing from every direction and in every circle. Prominent yeshiva heads and Torah leaders from the Eastern communities are found also in Religious Zionist circles — for example Rabbis Sabato, Sherki, and Gigi (head of Yeshivat Har Etzion), and Rabbi Eliyahu Zini (head of Yeshivat Or VeYeshua), and many others; also in Hasidic circles, such as Breslov and Chabad; and of course in the Sephardic Torah world — the students of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Rabbi Ben Zion Abba Shaul, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, Rabbi Shalom Messas, and Rabbi Yosef Kapach of blessed memory, and may he live long, Rabbi Meir Mazuz. And all of them have students and students of students on the order of hundreds of thousands.

I was today at the “Sephardic Library” in Jerusalem to bring them our books that they had ordered from the Yad HaRav Nissim publishing house, and the place is full of hundreds of books in all areas of Torah study, by Torah institutes of Sephardim and the communities of the East and North Africa. We are talking about hundreds and thousands of books coming out “new every morning” in Jewish law, aggadah, Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Talmud, and Kabbalah, language, prayer, and history — books by the sages of the East from previous generations and books by the sages of our own generation. Fortunate is the eye that has seen all this. If one is to cry, it would be tears of joy 🙂

With God’s help, 8 Elul 5780

Rabbi Isaac Nissim, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi, describes the uniqueness of Rabbi Kook in remarks delivered twenty years after his passing (3 Elul 5715; “For the Generation and for Generations — Articles and Speeches,” pp. 404–405):

He was unique in his qualities and virtues, in that not only questions of religion and law, not only public and judicial matters, came to him and received his contribution. Every question and every difficult problem that arose was brought before him, and with the breadth of his understanding, with the power of great inspiration that accompanied him, he knew how to solve every question, and there was no problem that remained without a solution. They came to him from east and west, those who observed Torah and commandments and those who did not. Everyone recognized his authority and greatness… and saw light.

And if this was so with temporal matters, all the more so with questions of Jewish law and eternal life. He had a unique conception of the Torah, the commandments, and the building of the Land, which he expressed in his many speeches and articles, and he excelled in his books of Jewish law and in the responsa that he sent to every part of the country and the Diaspora.

He was especially distinct from the other rabbis of his generation in this: that in his books and speeches we hear the echo of the revival of the Jewish people, the renewal of the bond and covenant between the people and its land, after which will come the covenant between Israel as a whole and the Torah, and then the complete redemption will come, in which God will restore His Presence to Zion.

***

One can see here two connections that are really three, required for the completion of redemption: the connection of the people to its land, and the connection of “Israel as a whole,” in all its streams and shades, to the Torah. Rabbi Kook aspires to bring about all three connections, and therefore he is attentive and open to all parts of the people, in order to renew the covenant of the people as a whole with the Torah; and from that, he seeks and finds solutions to all questions and problems. That is “the redemptive Torah” in a nutshell, and the rest is commentary — go study.

Regards,
Shatz

Now Rabbi Nissim has also become a significant authority? When judges start analyzing his books in depth, call me. For the most part he chewed over what others before him had said (even if he was right) and added nothing except attaching his own name. Even someone who doesn’t value Rabbi Kook values him more than Rabbi Nissim.

With God’s help, I still haven’t found the 1965 article to which Rabbi Yohanan Fried referred. Perhaps it is in volume 2 of Netivot Yisrael.

The expression “the redemptive Torah” in relation to the Torah of Rabbi Kook I found in Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook’s article “To Cherish Torah, Faith, and Love of Israel,” published in the Iyar-Sivan 1957 issue of Alonim, the journal of the Ezra movement (= Netivot Yisrael, pp. 212–215).

Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda was asked by the journal’s editors: “What are the ways — aside from the political way — in which religious Jewry must learn, so that it may draw closer to achieving its Torah goals in the State?”

And the rabbi outlines the path. First of all, the study of faith and its grounding: “To the extent that certainty of faith penetrates — that He chose us from among all the nations and gave us His Torah, in the individual no less than in the collective — the goal of Torah life and Torah governance will be attained.”

Beyond in-depth study of faith, in the light of the Kuzari, the Ramchal, the Maharal, and “the lights of the messenger of the Merciful One in the appearance of the redemptive Torah, my father and teacher the rabbi of blessed memory” — there is a need for “an increase of Torah in its wholeness and innocence, in all its fullness and aspects and levels, from schoolchildren in the foundations of their education… toward their growth in yeshiva and their rise in Torah ever higher, to become Torah scholars, great and brilliant in Torah and awe, mighty in faith and holy ones, people of the innermost rank of the Israelite nation, who fill the whole content of its atmosphere and straighten the ways of its world, from ‘the wise, to the scribes, to the cantors, and to the common people’ — this indeed is the beginning of our way toward attaining our purpose and the task of our generations in its truth.”

Following the grounding of faith and greatness in Torah, there must come love of Israel “in all the force of its pure innocence, love of all Israel literally,” a gratuitous love that repairs the defect of baseless hatred, “which is the corruption of social relations due to the excessive sharpening of differences of opinion and mutual accusations.” When proper social relations are established, out of a sense of mutual belonging, “the mutual understanding is revealed, which enables and makes successful the commandment of rebuke… through its accepted influence and its heeded words,” and thereby it becomes possible to bring the entire public closer to Torah and faith.

In short, one can say that “redemptive Torah” is Torah filled with faith and love; such Torah can influence the improvement of the spiritual condition of the nation as a whole.

Regards,
Shatz

Listen, Shatz (even though you can read). Your innocent sweetness — that no one can take away from you. Honestly, I’d want you educating my kids until eighth grade.

“The two thousand.”
I’ll reveal a secret to you, my lovely sweet brother-in-law, the wonderful grandfather of my children, the man with golden fingers who fixes everything for me in the house, is called Rabbi Shlomo Aviner. Bless him with long life and years. So I know the theories very well. I even studied in those yeshivot. And lo and behold, to my taste — “living in a movie”…

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… Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda, “To Cherish Torah, Faith…”

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… people of the inner rank…

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… this indeed is the beginning of our way…

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… can influence …