Marc Shapiro: ‘If this wasn’t so comical…’

Marc Shapiro (b. 1966) wins most of these exchanges, and he wins them on the simplest ground available: he tells the reader to look at the page.
That move runs through the whole piece. Grossman charges him with citing Rivash in support of a claim. Shapiro says go look at page 40. Grossman says Shapiro cites R. Hochman to support a view Hochman rejects. Shapiro reprints what he quoted and what Hochman wrote and lets the gap speak. Grossman compares him to Spinoza over Shadal on Ibn Ezra. Shapiro reprints the Shadal page and the follow-up page. When a man keeps saying “here is the source, read it yourself,” and his opponent keeps relying on the reader not checking, the man with the photographs has the stronger hand. That is the structure of the entire response.
The Seventh Principle exchange is the one that settles the question of competence. Grossman writes that Maimonides (1138-1204) never declares Moses the greatest prophet, only the “father of all prophets.” Shapiro quotes Maimonides saying Moses reached a greater understanding of God than any man who ever existed or will exist, then stacks up R. Yaakov Weinberg, R. Yehudah Meir Keilson, R. Elchanan Wasserman (1874-1941), and others, all reading it as Shapiro does. This is not a case where two learned men interpret a hard text two ways. Grossman got the plain meaning wrong, and Shapiro can show it with the principle’s own words. His question about how Dialogue published it, and whether anyone on the editorial board read it, lands because the error is that basic.
Where Shapiro is weaker, he says so. On kabbalah he concedes the ground rather than defend it. That concession costs him nothing and buys him credibility on everything else.
The one place I would not give him a clean victory is the R. Shlomo Fisher (1932-2021) material. Shapiro is on solid footing that students repeat what they hear and that a blanket instruction not to quote a teacher who gave thousands of shiurim cannot bind the world. But he relies on oral transmission and on a chain through R. Bezalel Naor, and Grossman relies on the family’s horror. Neither side can produce the page here, because there is no page. So the reader cannot adjudicate that one the way he can adjudicate Rivash or Shadal. Shapiro’s account is more plausible. It is not provable from the documents, and he half-admits this by resting on the general practice of Torah transmission rather than on a text.
The “Dialogue never offered me a chance to respond” correction and the “the Seforim Blog is not my own blog” correction are small, and Shapiro spends little on them, which is right. They establish that Grossman is loose with facts even about logistics, which primes the reader for the larger looseness. That is a rhetorical setup, and it works, but it is setup.
The deeper thing under the dispute is the one Shapiro names near the Hochman section. Hochman writes that no one disputes the principles, men only argue about their number. Shapiro’s whole book exists to deny that. So the two are not really arguing about Rivash or Shadal. They argue about whether Orthodox tradition contains real internal disagreement about dogma, or whether the disagreements get absorbed and called “not accepted.” Grossman needs every apparent dissent to dissolve. Shapiro needs them to stand. The citation fights are proxies for that. When Shapiro says “with such an outlook, we can’t even begin to have a dialogue,” he names the actual divide, which is not about who misread a footnote but about whether the tradition is one voice or many.
On the prose: it is a takedown delivered in the register of a man more amused than angry, and the amusement is the weapon. “If this wasn’t so comical, I might actually take offense.” A reader trusts the calm man over the heated one, and Grossman supplies the heat (“brazenness,” the Spinoza comparison) while Shapiro supplies the pages.
If you want the short version for a post: Shapiro wins on documents, wins decisively on the Seventh Principle, concedes kabbalah to keep his credibility, and fights Fisher to a draw because no document exists to settle it. The real fight is whether Orthodox tradition admits genuine dogmatic disagreement, and Grossman’s whole method requires the answer to be no.