Marc Shapiro: ‘Comments on recent books by R. Benji Levy and R. Eitam Henkin; R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik; and the first color photographs of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg’

Marc B. Shapiro’s Levy and Henkin reviews each carry a sharp critical point. The Soloveitchik archive material is good for what it shows about how the Rav functioned in practice and how scholarship on him gets shaped by selective access to material.
On Levy and conversion, Shapiro’s correction matters. Benji Levy reads the Rav as holding that an apostate keeps his collective Jewish holiness even after losing individual holiness. Shapiro reads the Rav as holding that for most purposes the apostate severs his connection to the Jewish people. The Aharon Lichtenstein 1963 article, written in the wake of the Brother Daniel episode, was likely composed under the Rav’s close guidance. Shapiro adduces a document from his Hakirah 32 piece that quotes the Rav aligning directly with Lichtenstein. Levy’s textual argument turns on a distinction the Rav himself does not draw between an irreligious Jew and an apostate.
But Shapiro has a problem he half-acknowledges in a footnote. The 1965 Ha-Aretz interview has the Rav saying that according to formal halakhah Brother Daniel is a Jew, that he wrote to the Chief Rabbi urging a non-halakhic decision, and that he prayed the justices would not follow halakhah. That is not a shiur aside. It is a published interview. Shapiro leaves the tension unresolved. Either the Rav held two views in different periods, or he distinguished between formal halakhic categorization and something like spiritual-sociological standing, or his stance shifted with audience. The cleanest reading is the third. The Rav speaking to Lichtenstein and Hebrew correspondents takes one tone. The Rav speaking to a secular Israeli paper takes another. Both might be sincere, but they are not the same stance.
Henkin on stainless steel is the cleverest argument in the post and the one Shapiro disposes of with the right tool. Eitam Henkin runs an experiment, finds that his family cannot distinguish dairy-stirred tea from clean-stirred tea, and concludes that human taste perception has weakened since the Sages. The argument saves the halakhic concept of beliah by relocating the deficit from the utensil to the human palate. Shapiro’s rebuttal is that this shifts the goalposts. Stainless steel does not absorb. Granting weaker taste perception now, the Sages with their sharper palates still might not have detected anything in stainless steel because there is nothing there to detect. The question stands. R. Yaakov Ariel’s position that beliah operates by its own halakhic logic independent of empirical absorption is the escape route, but it changes what halakhah is doing here. It turns an empirical concept into a formal one. That move can be defended, but it should be made openly rather than through experiments designed to rescue an old framework.
The Bernard Homa story about the UK Chief Rabbinate. The Rav’s name comes up in 1947 as a candidate to succeed Joseph Hertz (1872-1946). The chairman, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, reports that the Rav does not know how to use a knife and fork properly. The committee drops him. Meir Persoff’s documentary work confirms the candidacy but not the cutlery reason. Even if Homa’s recollection embellishes the rejection, the anecdote captures something about Anglo-Jewish establishment culture in that period. Class, as much as theology, governed who got the post. Hertz himself had been an outsider candidate and faced similar resistance.
The Rebbetzin Pesha Soloveitchik material on reheating liquids is the most useful piece Shapiro adds for halakhic history. The Rav’s lenient position on putting cold soup on the blech traces to his mother’s reasoning from a sefek sefeika. Two doubts pile up: whether ein bishul achar bishul applies to liquids at all, and whether bringing food only to a lukewarm temperature triggers a rabbinic prohibition. She concludes the case is permitted. The Rav inherits this. He tells R. Irwin Haut in 1959 that liquids may be returned to the blech if they do not reach yad soledet bo. He tells the Maimonides school caterers a stricter version. The contrast between the two letters shows him distinguishing private competence from institutional supervision. Caterers cannot be trusted to monitor temperature. Individuals at home can. That is a sensible distinction and one many poskim do not make explicit.
The Darkhei Moshe exchange in the comments is a small lesson in public scholarly correction. Shapiro asserts confidently that parenthetical citations in the Rama are editorial additions that postdate the Rama and therefore cannot show what the Rama himself drew on. A commenter named Sass points out that the Rama in Darkhei Moshe sources the practice of standing during chazarat hashatz to Hagahot Minhagim, not to Maimonides. Shapiro acknowledges the point. Another commenter, Fotheringay-Phipps, adds that the standard printed Darkhei Moshe is an abridgement and that the Darkhei Moshe ha-Aruch is the authoritative source. The Hanukkah candles example Shapiro cites does turn out to source the Rambam in the longer version. Shapiro asks whether all parenthetical citations in the Rama trace to the Darkhei Moshe ha-Aruch. Nobody has done the study.
The lo tirtzah footnote raises a philosophical question Shapiro cannot fully resolve. The Rav in a 1940s YU graduate school lecture calls the prohibition on murder a hok, comparable to the prohibition on pork. Shapiro thinks this cannot be the Rav’s settled view because Noahide laws are not chukim. But the Rav is glossing the Akiva-Ishmael dispute, where Akiva holds that without God’s command we might commit murder. The Rav’s position is closer to a divine-command view than Shapiro grants. It tracks Maimonides in Guide 2:33, which categorizes the final seven Decalogue commandments as “generally accepted opinions” rather than rational. Marvin Fox (1922-1996) reads this as meaning we see the goodness only after revelation, not before it. Whether the Rav held this consistently, the position has standing in the Jewish philosophical tradition and is not something to write off as classroom provocation.
The color photographs of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg (1885-1966) in Montreux are striking for what they show about the gap between hagiographic representation and lived reality. Weinberg in those photographs looks like an old European rabbi sitting in a postwar Swiss town, surrounded by visiting students. The picture is small, the light is afternoon, the hat is the same hat. Color brings him forward in a way black and white does not. The same is true of the Djerba boys in the Alan Messner photograph. They are children at a Jewish school in a Tunisian island town in 2023. They could be from 1950 or 1900 except for the slightly different fabric of the shirts.
The Rav’s standing with feet together for the entire chazarat hashatz is one example of how a distinctive personal practice gets imitated by students and creates friction in shul. The Hadaya and Liebes argument about Maimonides on standing during chazarat hashatz is one of those cases where a creative lomdishe move gets undermined by textual scholarship, only for textual scholarship to be partly undermined by closer attention to Darkhei Moshe. The Saul Lieberman (1898-1983) recordings are worth listening to for the accent alone. The image of him drafting a teshuvah permitting collection of money on Yom Tov for Israel during the lead-up to the Six Day War, while Orthodox rabbis hesitate, fits Shapiro’s general portrait of Lieberman as a man comfortable taking responsibility for hard rulings.
Shapiro does not push these threads as hard as he might. The post hops from one item to the next in the manner of the bibliographic essay he has perfected over many years on this blog. The strength of the form is its range. The cost is that points get raised and dropped before they are pressed. The conversion question, the stainless steel question, the natural law question all deserve longer treatment. He tends to leave the harder problem in the footnote.