Q&A: A Torah Scholar in Secular Matters
A Torah Scholar in Secular Matters
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Is it possible for a rabbi to be such a great Torah scholar that he also knows science or medicine, but solely through Torah study? Is it possible that he would know anatomy, or the law of gravity, or the Pythagorean theorem, or geometry, without ever having looked at secular books? Do you believe stories like the one told about the Chazon Ish, that a doctor came to him who in that case did not know how to operate on the patient’s brain, and the Chazon Ish drew for him exactly how to perform the surgery? And they say the Chazon Ish never looked at secular books. And if you don’t believe it, then are all the people who tell this story liars? I saw it written in biographies and books about the Chazon Ish. Why would they lie?
Answer
In principle, anything is possible. You can’t categorically rule out someone who learned everything through divine inspiration or from letter-skipping in “chipopo” (so to speak). But personally, I’m not inclined to believe these tall tales.
As for the Chazon Ish, there is testimony I once saw that he read medical books back in Europe. Beyond that, one has to know that in a community of ignoramuses there is a tendency to vastly overestimate every trace of education. I experienced this more than once in Bnei Brak: anyone who knows how to read English and keeps a book by some non-Jewish thinker by his bed is considered one of the great intellectuals. If he has a PhD, he is one of the great scientists, and so on. By the way, the same applies to statements by secular people, or just ordinary laymen, about so-and-so being “an enormous Torah scholar” (= he knows how to read Rashi script and once even quoted a passage from Abravanel). So I would take such testimonies with a grain of salt. Usually this is not about lies but about ignorance, and when you also factor in the “educational benefit” of such claims, it becomes very tempting to write things like this in hagiographic books about the great sages of the generations.
Discussion on Answer
Do you remember which issue of “Drops of Sanity” this was in? I found the Google group, but I couldn’t locate the specific bulletin where this is mentioned.
We have what may be the picture the Chazon Ish drew:
https://www.hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=21194&pgnum=504
From the actual letter (it is difficult to read) it looks like it was written to the patient to show to the doctor, not the doctor himself.
(Please show this to the above-mentioned person and according to his opinion on the matter…)
So it looks like a patient asked the Chazon Ish for advice and the Chazon Ish gave advice (not necessarily good advice.)
We don't know if the doctor took the advice, and if he did, we don't know how it ended.
You’re invited to look at the online bulletin “Drops of Sanity” by Rabbi David Bloch, and see testimony from someone who was in the room with the Chazon Ish at the time [he learned with him regularly as a study partner], when they asked about the surgery — and there was nothing to it at all… Just plain bubbe-meises that never happened, not even as a parable… They just slapped a story on him…
And what’s interesting is that this isn’t just from logic but testimony from the head of Slabodka Yeshiva [then still alive] of blessed memory, who was in the room at the time, and later became Rabbi David Bloch’s study partner…