Marc B. Shapiro: ‘The Aderet (part 2); Sonya Diskin and R. Yitzhak Yeruham Diskin; Zvi Glatt; and a New Letter from R. Herzog’

Several threads here repay close attention.
The R. Kook censorship discovery stands out. R. Kook excises three paragraphs from his father-in-law’s autobiography when he reproduces the passage in Eder ha-Yekar. The middle paragraph speaks of hatred for sinners. The flanking paragraphs speak of love for Torah scholars and the absence of hostility toward non-Jews who do not hate Jews. Shapiro suggests R. Kook removed the whole section so the removal of the middle paragraph might not stand out as targeted. Whether or not Shapiro has the explanation right, the operation reads clearly. R. Kook’s coalition position toward irreligious Jews in Eretz Yisrael depended on universalist warmth being legible as a family inheritance. The Aderet expressing standard Orthodox hostility toward sinners might undermine the inheritance R. Kook was trying to claim. R. Kook was a coalition founder managing his sources.
The R. Yitzhak Yeruham Diskin trajectory shows coalition realignment in miniature. In Europe he wore European fashion, knew French, valued secular studies, and identified as a Zionist. After moving to Eretz Yisrael he became a figure providing cover for the worst attacks on R. Kook. His father moved in the same direction. Pre-aliyah moderation, post-aliyah extremism. Eretz Yisrael did not moderate the imports. The Old Yishuv coalition demanded a particular posture, and the new arrivals supplied it. The pattern recurs often enough to count as a rule. Importing yourself into a small intense coalition strips away the cosmopolitan habits the larger coalition elsewhere allowed.
The R. Herzog material reads as the price of public Orthodox theology in the twentieth century. R. Herzog identifies the right problem. Archaeology, not cosmology, presses harder on the biblical record. Dinosaurs and the Big Bang are scientific theory. Continuous human habitation for tens of thousands of years is documentary fact. He has the right procedure from Maimonides. If proven, reinterpret. He picks the right collaborator in R. Soloveitchik. He never writes the book. R. Soloveitchik never writes his half. The coalition cost shows up in what does not get written. A figure can correspond about a project that he cannot publish, because publishing might force the coalition to choose between his solution and continued silence. Silence was the operating consensus.
The boundary-drift material running through the post is its most consequential thread. R. Akiva Eiger declines to disqualify witnesses who shave with a razor because the practice was common among observant Jews and most did not understand the seriousness of the prohibition. R. Hirschensohn tries to construct a heter for the T-shaped razor in early twentieth-century America. Non-kosher wine flowed at Modern Orthodox congregations in the early 1960s. Tevilat kelim got skipped then and gets skipped now. The Pioneer Country Club hosted Agudath Israel conventions while offering mixed swimming and women singers, with R. Aharon Kotler in attendance teaching the kitchen staff about pilot lights. R. Moshe Rosenstein in 1938 named a woman in print as one of his four teachers and described his observation of her conduct.
The pattern across these examples runs the same direction. Practice precedes the boundary. Great rabbis accommodate, sometimes by leniency, sometimes by silence. The next generation or the one after tightens the practice. The divergence gets scrubbed from coalition memory. The current strict standard gets projected backward as the standard that always held. Anyone who lived through any of the transitions knows the older state, but published Orthodox literature treats the current state as continuous with the past. Shapiro’s broader project on the blog can be described as documenting the seam between what observant Jews did in practice and what current coalition memory says they did.
The Sonya Diskin material is lighter but tracks the same theme. She got a pashkevil. She wore tzitzit. The apocryphal Yiddish joke about her father selling her to a goy migrated to her name. The kitchen-treifing line attached itself to Tonya Soloveitchik in modified form. Haym Soloveitchik’s correction shows the migration in real time. The mother said one half of the line. The father did not respond. The two stories merged in retelling. Coalitions like a tidy story and tidy stories up on their own.