Marc B. Shapiro: ‘Two Books by R. Bezalel Naor, R. Meir Simhah of Dvinsk, Michael Lerner, and More’

The most consequential thread runs through Shapiro’s third section on the king’s power to kill innocents. Earlier authorities give startling positions. R. Levi ben Gershom recommends executing a captive enemy of the Jewish people. R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes says a king can kill the children of a rebel for tikun olam, and the Hatam Sofer endorses the position in correspondence with him. R. Kook leans the same way in Da’at Kohen for extreme cases. R. Jacob Kamenetsky thinks Solomon would have halved the baby because the king has authority over his subjects’ lives. Few of these readings could survive sustained public exposure in Orthodox spaces today. Sforno, Netziv, and Meshekh Hokhmah already reject the premise on the strength of Deut. 24:16. Shapiro then quotes R. Weinberg’s rule that when authorities disagree, the poskim should reject the view that brings the Torah into disrepute. R. Aviner and R. Sherlo build on this. Aviner says moral conceptions change and a posek’s ruling has a sell-by date. Sherlo says there is moral progress and that religious people believe this is the will of God.
The Aviner-Sherlo move is the analytically interesting one. They are not pretending the older positions never existed, and they are not claiming continuity where none exists. They acknowledge moral drift and theologize it. The will of God runs in the same direction as international moral consensus, and the coalition can absorb the change without admitting embarrassment. Religious Zionism at the Aviner-Sherlo end has reasons for this. Their students serve in the IDF, which operates under international humanitarian law. Their movement’s standing inside Israel’s Western liberal frame depends on aligning Jewish ethics with that frame. The theological move underwrites the strategic posture. Haredi positions can afford different rulings because their coalition does not pay the same external costs.
The R. Moshe Feinstein move on the Hatam Sofer’s chiddush is the second thread worth pulling. The Hatam Sofer writes that klal Yisrael, through its rabbinic leaders, can remove rebels from the Jewish people and turn them into complete non-Jews for halakhic purposes. R. Feinstein declares this position so impossible that the Hatam Sofer could not have written it. Shapiro, following R. Deblitsky, reads the denial as rhetorical rather than literal. R. Feinstein uses the move elsewhere, treating texts he finds unacceptable as inauthentic by convention rather than evidence. The procedure does coalition work. It preserves the rule that great rabbis are reliable while updating the substance of what they are presumed to have ruled. Anything that might damage the coalition’s self-image gets rerouted through the figure of the corrupted text.
The Hatam Sofer’s underlying position is striking on its own. Klal Yisrael has the authority to expel members all the way out of Jewish status. Lending at interest becomes permitted, marriages do not take effect, divorces become unnecessary. The Neturei Karta application Shapiro raises tracks the logic. Whatever one thinks of the reading, the position acknowledges that Jewishness for halakhic purposes is a coalition status the coalition can revoke. Most Orthodox treatments of “who is a Jew” prefer to treat the category as fixed by birth and irrevocable. The Hatam Sofer treats it as constructed by the rabbinic leadership. R. Feinstein’s instinct to declare the passage inauthentic shows how uncomfortable the position remains.
Several smaller items deserve mention. R. Henkin’s letter on euthanasia leans more liberal than current Orthodox discourse permits, which fits the recurring pattern of liberal voices in the tradition that current memory edits out. R. Meir Simhah’s daughter stabbed him, a fact that survives in a small periodical and gets coded sideways into a textual emendation R. Meir Simhah made in the Or Sameach, where he changed בבת אחת to בכת אחת so the verse would not read “if a daughter slaughtered him.” The Or Sameach yeshiva took its name from the Rogachover’s hesped about R. Meir Simhah learning with such intensity that he seemed to be extinguishing flames around himself. The false 1919 report of R. Meir Simhah’s murder produced eulogies before his death, which then got published. Each item adds a datum to a larger pattern: coalition memory selects, simplifies, and sometimes inverts what the textual record preserves.
The Naor material is its own world. Shapiro engages it as a serious reader. The Abudarham observation, that he is not generating his own derashah but offering an ex post facto explanation for an inherited practice, gives a useful corrective to Mazuz. The pattern of post-talmudic sages declining to use independent derashot is itself a coalition fact about how authority gets located. Reisher’s article in Ha-Ma’yan would repay reading for that question alone.