Marc B. Shapiro: ‘Neturei Karta; ArtScroll, Arius, and Orangutans; Suicide and the Law of Rodef’

The post repays close reading because it shows Shapiro stepping outside his usual historical-method bracket and applying his documentary technique to a present coalition. The Neturei Karta section is the most direct moral judgment in his recent output. He calls the behavior vile and obscene, prints his correspondence with Rabbi Moshe Beck, and reproduces the Aryeh Leib Weissfish letter from the Central Zionist Archives. The Weissfish document does the work no commentary could match. A future Neturei Karta leader wrote to the Supreme Muslim Council during World War II to identify “good” anti-Zionist Jews who should be spared if Arab violence followed a feared German invasion. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi copied it from the original. The provenance is clean. The document shows that NK collaboration with Arab leaders against other Jews is continuous with the movement’s founding structure rather than a post-1967 reaction to Zionist policy. Shapiro’s method, designed for documenting how Orthodoxy edits its past, here documents how a sub-coalition has been consistent in a way its present spokesmen sometimes deny.
The contrast with the Lichtenstein passage in the Kook talk is striking. Lichtenstein refused to grant that present moral intuition outranks past authority on slavery. Here Shapiro grants a parallel claim about a present coalition that claims past authority. Once you accept Kook’s framework that natural moral intuition reveals the divine will, you have grounds to discipline contemporary deviation as well as to revise past law. The NK section is the Kook framework in real-time application. Shapiro does not name it as such. The connection sits beneath the surface and gives the section its edge.
The practical halakhic questions Shapiro raises at the end of the NK section are the right ones and they sit there unanswered: can NK members count for a minyan, can children be expelled from yeshivot, can their businesses be boycotted, can charity be given to families when the children are not at fault. These are the questions a working halakhic system has to answer about Jews who march in support of those murdering Jews. That no one has answered them publicly is a coalition fact rather than a halakhic one. Posekim do not want to issue a ruling that could be turned against figures or movements they prefer not to discipline. Shapiro raises the questions, names the silence, and leaves it. The omission is a finding.
The ArtScroll-Arius case is a different kind of editorial failure than the censorship documented in Changing the Immutable. The original ArtScroll Rashi note said nothing was known about Arius. The updated note identified him as the fourth-century Christian theologian and added a reference to Likkutei Sichos. The chronology is impossible: Rabbi Yose was a second-century tanna, Arius the heretic lived in the fourth century. Someone at ArtScroll wanted to add information and produced an error that survived into print. The pattern is not suppression but accretion without competence. The note also routes the reader to a Lubavitcher source, which Shapiro flags with quiet amusement as a rare appearance in ArtScroll. The case suggests that ArtScroll’s editorial process operates by addition without coordination, with no single eye checking that new material clears basic chronological tests. That is a structural finding about the apparatus that produces the most-distributed Orthodox texts in the English-speaking world. The censorship documented in Changing the Immutable required will. The Arius error required only a process that does not check.
The Chaim Bloch-Jonathan Sacks pairing is the cleanest example in the post of bilateral coalition pressure on textual fidelity. Bloch forged a Haggadah manuscript with a softened “pour out your love” passage replacing the standard “pour out your wrath.” Bloch’s motive was apologetic, smoothing anti-Gentile texts for non-Jewish readers. Sacks reprinted the passage in his own Haggadah without checking the source. Sacks’s motive was different: a liberal Modern Orthodox preference for a more universalist liturgy. Two opposite coalition positions produced the same failure of source criticism, because the forgery flattered both. Bloch’s forgery serves an apologetic project from inside the tradition. Sacks’s amplification serves a public-facing project of presenting Judaism as morally generous to outsiders. The forgery’s career inside both projects shows that careful scholars can accept fabricated sources when those sources align with the position they want to hold. Shapiro’s footnote on Sacks is brief, but the implication is sharp: Sacks’s failure is the predictable failure of a scholar who has a coalition stake in the conclusion the source supports.
The Rabbi Yaakov Fink section continues a pattern Shapiro has documented elsewhere: institutional affiliation gets retroactively scrubbed when a figure migrates into a coalition that does not respect the original institution. Fink studied at the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary and received semicha there from Weinberg, Gruenberg, and Altmann. The 1952 Ha-Pardes article on his appointment as chief rabbi of Brazil described him as someone who heard shiurim from Weinberg at the Seminary, omitting that he was an enrolled student. Weinberg himself caught the change and complained to Joseph Apfel, Fink’s classmate. The pattern repeats with Yosef Zvi Dunner, whose obituary in Ha-Modia invented “the beis medrash of Rav Weinberg” to avoid naming the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. Shapiro then surfaces the parallel inside Modern Orthodoxy: students of Yeshiva University and RIETS who later say only that they “heard shiurim from the Rav.” The same coalition logic in two settings. The institution becomes embarrassing inside the new coalition; the affiliation is downgraded into informal contact; the formal training disappears from the record. This is the structural finding that runs through Shapiro’s career, applied here in miniature.
The Carlebach suicide-as-rodef section is a different kind of exhibit. Carlebach’s reasoning is internally valid by formalist standards. Suicide counts as murder. Rodef-doctrine requires intervention against an imminent murderer. Therefore one might be obligated to kill a person who is about to kill himself. The conclusion is preposterous by any moral standard the system claims to serve. Maimon’s defense, that the argument is pilpulistic and not practical, is the structural concession that exposes the underlying problem. A legal system that produces conclusions its own practitioners must mark off as inapplicable has a coherence problem that cannot be solved by labeling parts of itself “theoretical.” Auerbach approving the argument with a smile is itself a coalition signal. The smile says: we maintain the formal coherence of the system at the cost of bracketing its conclusions when they embarrass us. The smile is not a refutation. It is an exemption.
The Shimon Sofer cat-as-rodef teshuvah extends the pattern. Sofer reasons that a cat chasing a chicken is a rodef, and so killing the cat to save the chicken is a mitzvah. Auerbach rejects extending rodef-doctrine to animals. Sofer’s volume itself prints an instruction at the top of every page warning readers not to rely on its halakhic conclusions in practice. Shapiro’s note that he knows of no other responsa volume that prints such a disclaimer is the right observation. A rabbinic genre that produces material the author himself flags as practically unreliable is operating at a distance from its claimed function. The genre has become a vehicle for performing legal virtuosity rather than a vehicle for guiding practice. Stephen Turner’s analysis of formalism applies cleanly. The form is preserved. The original purpose has receded.
The smaller pieces do real work too. R. Lifshitz on orangutans is a low-stakes example of the higher-stakes pattern in his commentary: a rabbinic figure folds incorrect contemporary scientific information into a Torah commentary as confirmation of rabbinic claims, and the error survives into a printed commentary that students will read as authoritative. R. Heller’s emendation, changing “city with pigs” to “pigsty with pigs,” shows how a textual error in Piskei Tosafot might have shaped centuries of mezuzah practice in Ashkenaz. Shapiro flags Ashkenazic laxity with mezuzot in medieval times and connects it to the corrupted text. The example shows how scribal error has theological and ritual downstream effects, which is one of the most underappreciated implications of his work.
The post’s overall structure is what Shapiro does best. He moves between contemporary moral judgment, textual criticism, biographical correction, and exposure of editorial sloppiness, and each section reinforces the others. The coalition that protects NK from halakhic discipline is not the same coalition that produced the ArtScroll Arius error or scrubbed Fink’s CV, but they share an underlying logic: Orthodox institutional production runs on uncoordinated editorial decisions, deferred contemporary judgments, and the silent rebranding of figures and affiliations to fit current alignments. Shapiro names the artifacts and lets the structural claim emerge. He does not state the claim in the form Luke’s prior analysis has made explicit, that Orthodoxy preserves the authority to decide what counts as unchanging rather than preserving an unchanging tradition. He documents the operation of that authority case by case and leaves the structural claim for readers willing to see it.
The directness on NK is the new note. Shapiro has rarely been this morally explicit in his blog posts. The shift might mark the war’s effect on him, or it might mark a stage in his career where the documentary method has accumulated enough evidence that he no longer feels compelled to maintain a strict scholarly bracket on contemporary judgments. Either way, the section reads as a man who has decided that historical method does not require him to withhold present moral judgment when the evidence makes the judgment unavoidable. That is closer to what Sabato wanted from Lichtenstein and did not get. Shapiro is doing in his own voice, on a contemporary coalition, what he licenses Kook to do on the law of war and slavery. The continuity of the method across past and present is the post’s most underappreciated feature.