Marc Shapiro: ‘R. Moshe Zuriel, the Aderet, Sonya Diskin, and ChatGPT’

The haskamah self-endorsement material gives a clean window into how the genre operates. The Aderet writes approbations for his own anonymously published works and feels awkward calling himself ha-ma’or ha-gadol, but the convention requires it. Had he used plainer language, readers might have accused him of disrespecting the author. The haskamah does not function as serious vetting. It functions as a coalition signal that the book belongs inside the boundary. R. Kook’s claim that his father-in-law read every book before approving it shows the formal ideology, but the Aderet’s own self-haskamot show what the genre lets you do when ideology and practice come apart.
R. Zuriel publishing Wessely under pseudonyms tracks the same pattern. His Orthodox standing was secure enough that he could later publish under his own name and defend Wessely in public. The pseudonym was protection during the period when the cost of association ran higher than the benefit. Once he had built enough coalition capital through dozens of conventional works, he could spend some of it.
Shapiro’s challenge to the R. Kook ghost-writing story merits attention. R. Zvi Yehudah’s version has the Aderet receiving the Chafetz Chaim’s letter, lacking time to write the haskamah, and asking R. Kook to draft it. Shapiro notes two problems. The Aderet’s autobiography mentions writing the haskamah and gives no hint that R. Kook wrote it. R. Kook himself wrote that the Aderet read every book before approving it. The R. Refael Kook variant places the ghost-writing on a different book and contains a chronological error that breaks the story.
The story serves a coalition purpose. The Chafetz Chaim functions as a unifying figure across Orthodox factions. R. Kook divides them. If R. Kook ghost-wrote the haskamah, the Chafetz Chaim’s authority underwrites R. Kook. The story converts a contested figure into one already endorsed by a figure both sides accept. Whether or not it happened, the appeal of telling it tracks the coalition interest of the Merkaz ha-Rav world.
The Brisker Rav line on lashon hara stands out as the densest coalition observation in the piece. Asked why the Chafetz Chaim showed respect for a certain Zionist rabbi, he said: “This is what happens when you don’t listen to lashon hara.” The remark inverts the conventional valuation. Inside Orthodox theology lashon hara is a sin. Inside coalition practice the sharing of negative information about outsiders maintains the boundary. The Brisker Rav lets the coalition logic surface. He treats the Chafetz Chaim’s ignorance of the right negative information as a defect, not as the achievement the Chafetz Chaim might have considered it. The architecture of Orthodox lashon hara prohibition runs alongside an unspoken expectation that coalition members will share the right negative information about the right people. The Brisker Rav says the quiet part out loud.
The kippah serugah point follows the same logic. R. Zvi Yehudah Kook preferred black kippot for himself and for everyone, yet his yeshiva became the center of the kippah serugah world. Coalition markers fix in retrospect. The signal becomes load-bearing over time, after which the founding figure’s own preference loses authority over the practice the coalition has settled on.
On ChatGPT. The Soloveitchik summary captures the surface argument and misses the diagnostic edge. “Rupture and Reconstruction” argues that Orthodoxy under text substitutes performance of religiosity for embodied tradition, and that the resulting rigor disguises rather than resolves the uncertainty produced by the loss of mimetic transmission. ChatGPT gives the topic and the moves but flattens the claim about authenticity anxiety. For translation of Haskalah Hebrew the tools have crossed a threshold. For summary of an argumentative essay they still produce a syllabus version rather than the argument.