Who Is The Most Highly Regarded Haredi Torah Scholar?

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro, history professor, writes:

…opponents of R. Steinman have been very harsh in their evaluation of him, and a steady stream of publications has appeared designed to show that his views are not in line with the haredi Daas Torah going back to the Chazon Ish and continuing through R. Elyashiv’s leadership. These publications have also attempted to show that he does not have the level of Torah scholarship required to lead the haredi world. Yet R. Chaim Kanievsky, who throughout the controversy has been the most vocal in attacking R. Auerbach and his followers, has, as far as I know, never been subject to written criticism. All of the many attacks on R. Steinman simply omit mention of R. Kanievsky even though R. Kanievsky stands together with R. Steinman. One who claims that R. Steinman’s views are not in line with “correct” haredi thinking must assume that R. Kanievsky has also departed from the “proper” haredi path, which is a difficult position for most haredim to adopt. At the end of the day, R. Kanievsky is the most highly regarded Torah scholar in the haredi world, and if he has subordinated himself to R. Steinman, that will be enough for almost all haredim even if they do have questions about some of R. Steinman’s liberal positions…

I would like to make just one more point about the term gadol ha-dor which is now so important and means the most prominent Torah leader of the generation. I think it is the equivalent of the term manhig ha-dor and is parallel to the other term that has popped up in recent decades, posek ha-dor. Regarding posek ha-dor, since the passing of R. Elyashiv, and then R. Wosner, I haven’t seen the term used for anyone in the Ashkenazic haredi world, and there is no one towering halakhic figure (although one is bound to emerge). In the Sephardic world, after the passing of R. Ovadiah Yosef, both R. Yitzhak Yosef and R. Meir Mazuz have emerged as posek ha-dor as well as gadol ha-dor. When it comes to gadol ha-dor in the Ashkenazic haredi world, both R. Steinman and R. Auerbach are regarded as such, and my sense is that many also regard R. Kanievsky as the gadol ha-dor even though he himself claims that R. Steinman holds this position…

I cannot recall a gadol who did not have enemies who tried to tear him down…

It is almost impossible for one to be removed from “gadol” status once he has been elevated to this level. I think we can be very proud that in the long history of gedolim there are no examples – at least I am not aware of any – where gedolim lost their status because of immoral behavior…

As far as I know, there is not even one scholarly article about R. Steinman, which is surprising, to say the least, since he is the single most important haredi rabbinic leader.

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R. Hershel Schachter, Gedolim, Rachel Morpurgo, and More

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro, history professor, writes:

1. In listening to a recent shiur[1] on Daas Torah by R. Hershel Schachter, I found a number of noteworthy comments. In this shiur, which has been heard thousands of times, R. Schachter states, “If you have an outlook, if you have what I would consider a crooked, a krum outlook on Yom ha-Atzmaut, then your outlook on eruvin is also crooked. I can’t rely on anything that you say.” I find this difficult to accept, since can’t someone be regarded as a great posek, one that can be relied on, even if one disagrees with important ideological positions he holds? In Eastern Europe, the people all relied on their local rav to decide halakhic questions for them. It didn’t matter to them whether the rav supported Agudah or Mizrachi. He was the halakhic authority of the town.

I agree, however, that there are limits. What sense does it make to rely on a Satmar posek for a ruling if one wouldn’t accept anything he said in non-halakhic matters? (It is known that when men want a ruling that they don’t have to give their wives a get, they go to a posek in Monsey whom they wouldn’t ask any other questions of.) I think it is important for R. Schachter to explain what his definition of a “crooked” outlook on Yom ha-Atzmaut is? Does he mean someone who says tahanun on that day, or only someone who thinks it is a day akin to avodah zarah?[2]
Among other interesting comments in R. Schachter’s shiur is that he states that a posek can give you a binding pesak concerning whom you must marry.[3] This too I find difficult, since where does a posek get the authority to tell someone whom he must marry? An individual can certainly consult with a posek for his advice in this matter, but since this consultation is done voluntarily by the potential groom, how do we go from there to a situation of pesak which binds the person asking the question?
[Subsequent to writing these words I saw R. Schachter and asked him about this matter. He reaffirmed his position, stating that whom one marries is a halakhic matter and therefore a posek can indeed tell you whom you must marry. He added that this is almost always theoretical since in order to make such a ruling the posek would need to know both the bride and groom for many years so as to be sure that what he is saying is correct. But he also insisted that if the posek does have the requisite knowledge he can indeed give a binding pesak about whom one must marry.]
In discussing the matter of Israel giving back land for peace, as far as I understand (and this is also the understanding of everyone I have seen who has written on the topic), R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik held that this is not a halakhic matter and therefore there is no place for rabbinic involvement. The political and military leaders should make a decision based on their knowledge of what is in the best interest of the country. However, R. Schachter has a different perspective. He states that according to R. Soloveitchik, first the politicians and military leaders should be consulted, and following this the rabbis need to make a halakhic judgment about what is permissible.[4] Yet the following are R. Soloveitchik’s words from 1967, as transcribed by Arnold Lustiger here:
I give praise and thanks to the RBSO for liberating the Kotel Hamaarovi and for liberating and for removing all Eretz Yisrael from the Arabs, so that it now belongs to us. But I don’t need to rule whether we should give the West Bank back to the Arabs or not to give the West Bank to the Arabs: we rabbis should not be involved in decisions regarding the safety and security of the population. . . . We have to negotiate with common sense as the security of the yishuv requires. What specifically these security requirements are, I don’€t know, I don’t understand these things. These decisions require a military perspective which one must research assiduously. The borders that must be established should be based upon which will provide more security. It is not a topic appropriate for which rabbis should release statements or for rabbinical conferences.
Also of interest in this shiur is that R. Schachter rejects the legitimacy of Daas Torah proclamations by roshei yeshiva who do not deal with practical halakhic questions.[5] In his halakhic-centric approach, there is no room for such proclamations by figures who are talmudically learned but are not poskim. This means that R. Aharon Leib Steinman, for instance, who is not a posek, is not to be regarded as one who transmits Daas Torah. As R. Schachter says, one who does not decide practical halakhic questions dealing with Shabbat, kashrut, and taharat ha-mishpahah is not able to rule on matters that are not explicit in earlier texts, and are often categorized as being in the realm of Daas Torah. He specifically states that the Steipler and R. Shakh, who were not known as poskim, were not the ones people should have been turning to for Daas Torah.[6]
It is hard to imagine a stronger repudiation of the haredi notion of Daas Torah, for while R. Elyashiv was of course a great posek, there has never been an expectation among haredim that the transmitters of Daas Torah must be involved in pesak. Daas Torah depends on the Torah scholar being immersed in Torah and righteousness, but this does not mean that he has to be involved with halakhah le-ma’aseh questions. R. Schachter’s point is obviously in contradiction to the hasidic approach in which the rebbe is the leader, and the job qualifications of a rebbe have nothing to do with deciding halakhic questions.[7]
It is true, however, that R. Schachter’s description of who should be the religious leaders of the Torah community is what historically was the case before the rise of hasidut in the 18th century, the creation of the great yeshivot in the 19th century, and the rise of haredism in the 20th century. But even in previous centuries matters were not absolute. For example, what about R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto? He was not a posek, yet would anyone today deny that he could speak with Torah authority on matters that fall into the category of Daas Torah? What about R. Nosson Zvi Finkel and many of the other mussar greats, or R. Zvi Yehudah Kook? Using R. Schachter’s halakhic-centric yardstick, they too would have to be excluded from what is today referred to as Daas Torah.
All this of course relates to the subject of gedolim, a topic that has recently seen a lot of discussion at the new website Lehrhaus. Professor Chaim Saiman’s essay, “The Market for Gedolim: A Tale of Supply and Demand,” was followed up by a number of insightful responses from people who represent the Centrist and Liberal Orthodox community, and by Rabbi Ethan Tucker who can be termed a leader of the halakhically committed egalitarian community.[8]
I have made the point a number of times that the twentieth century saw the creation of a new model in the haredi world. It is not just gedolim who are important, but the gadol ha-dor (technically: gedol ha-dor), that is, the gadol who stands above other gedolim. Although you had such figures in earlier times, such as the Hatam Sofer and R. Yitzhak Elhanan Spektor, in the twentieth century the notion of “the gadol ha-dor” has become institutionalized and is a basic feature of haredi society. Gedolim are not enough, but there also needs to be a supreme gadol. Thus, on the passing of the gadol ha-dor, the new gadol ha-dor emerges, (or he can actually be proclaimed, such as what happened when, after R. Elyashiv’s passing, R. Chaim Kanievsky declared that R. Steinman was the new leader). This is now an expectation of laypeople in the haredi world,[9] and obviously satisfies a psychological need, so inexorably one gadol ha-dor will be followed by another.

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Affidavit: Woman killed by step-son after she ‘gloated’ about Cowboys win

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

Article.

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off on Affidavit: Woman killed by step-son after she ‘gloated’ about Cowboys win

Hate Hoaxes Are Hate Crimes

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* These hate hoaxes are still hate crimes, just their targets are Trump supporters and whites in general. They are similar to blood libels (or, in case someone is purported to be hurt, are literally blood libels) against them. Their purpose is to incite hatred against whites or at least Trump supporting whites.

* Is Facebook going to crack down on fake news like this?

* This isn’t a hoax. Reality is fluid. It’s trans-political.

* Facts themselves are white-male-oppression constructs, and hence facts are the enemy. The MSM are well into the ‘post-factual’ era, where up is down, right is wrong, and all the rest of it. What are you, racist? I bet you’re racist.

* If you’re wondering out how this played out on e.g. Reddit:

The original story was a front-page, top story on /r/politics and had 3,500 comments.

The new story is being repeatedly down-voted and deleted as “Off topic”.

* Right after the trial, OJ said his #1 priority was to find the killer? Did he come close at least?

OJ Trial was significant in stretching the narrative. Everyone knew he was guilty. Whites knew it, and I suspect most blacks knew it too. But blacks just loved to stick it to whitey and stand with the brotha, and the sistaz were secretly happy that OJ finally done good and killed a ‘hon*ey biatch’. Even most black intellectuals all sided with OJ. Only later did some of them mildly recant… well… maybe he done it.

Whites were upset but just hung their heads. Blacks were celebrating. And the nation just let it pass.. and moved on. Earlier, there was the Rodney King beating trial and then riots. That was more complicated, but that also stretched the narrative. King was no innocent victim but a total scumbag. Sure, one can make a case that police went too far, but King was acting unruly that night. At any rate, black behavior was totally crazy, but the narrative, even when stretched to incredulity, was maintained. (But then, US narrative on foreign policy is hardly any better, and the fault of this must go not only to Liberal globalists but militarist conservatives who always love ‘new cold wars’, ‘new hitlers’, and ‘support the troops’ or ‘support the dupes’.)

Now, the OJ trial was complicated by Fuhrman(whose confidence was betrayed by someone to whom he gave candid interview). Because of the Fuhrman revelations, blacks had more reason not to trust the police testimonry. But even if there had been no Fuhrman tapes, I suspect blacks would have acted pretty much the same. We saw the same thing with Trayvon, Michael Brown, and Baltimore clown. Even though a black-dominated legal system failed to charge the cops, that moron Charles Blow of NTY was ‘incandescent’ with rage.

Some might attribute such tribalism among blacks on lower IQ but it’s really about racial personality and emotions. Blacks evolved in warrior-hunter tribes where all the traits that were disfavored by most other races were favorably selected.
So, it’s not a matter of hard evidence. Even when the evidence is clear, blacks have this tribal-warrior emotional tendency to stick with the tribe than consider truth in objective manner. It’s also why so many blacks kill one another. They are emotionally deficient in feeling empathy for the other side. It’s our gang vs your gang.
Even among savvier blacks, empathy is less emotional than tactical. It’s like Obama understood white psychology but only cared about manipulating it, not coming to genuine terms with white people. It was all about me, me, me.

In fifth grade in the integrated city school, there was one black kid who got a pass to go to the washroom. He came back pretty late, and the teacher, an attractive German-American named Ms Wiener — a joke by some Hindu kid about ‘wiener and mashed potatoes’ was one of the classroom favorites — decided to turn the incident into a civic lesson. She inquired as to why the kid returned late. It turned out he stood outside another class and was making signals to some girl in the class.
So, the teacher put on a little classroom trial and made the kid the defendant. Some kid was chosen as prosecutor, some as defendant. As the trial progressed, Ms. Wiener was telling us about law and procedure, and etc.
And witnesses were called. Even the teacher in the other classroom, a very pretty black woman named Mrs. Jones(like that song), was called to testify. (Wiener had that German thing about details, thoroughness, and discipline. She was tough and could be mean, but she was an idealist who even took off weekends to take students to museums and theater. It was the ONLY time I got to attend staged theater, which was Beauty and the Beast where the Beast took off his mask and finally revealed himself to be a Negro, which had the black classmate blurt out ‘the dude black!’ I sort of suspected cuz of his darth vader voice.)

Anyway, it became pretty clear what had happened. The kid had told a lie about why he returned late. So, finally, the teacher told us to serve as jury and decide on the verdict. It was plain as day what happened. All the white kids, asian kids, and hispanic kids voted guilty BUT all the black kids but ONE voted innocent.
That tells you something. It wasn’t due to lack of IQ in this case cuz the evidence was overwhelming that the kid was guilty. I mean even pretty Mrs. Jones testified as to what really happened.

From that one incident, it was plain as day that blacks are gonna be a special problem in America.

* Steve, did you notice how Joel Stein and his wife in the previous thread never considered moving to an Asian country?

I’m posting my comment here because I think this is part of the hoax society: Americans blather on about how great Asians are but NOBODY wants to move there except a certain type of old single guys.

Mrs Stein used an (plausibly) economic excuse to reject Mexico but there are several Asian options that provide a “first world lifestyle” amirite? Or maybe not? How many swpls in the USA consider any Asian country to be first world? I would say very very few.

This country is filled to the brim with people who lie to themselves up the yingyang about whether America is hell on earth or not. Mrs Cassandra is the perfect example of the American self-hoaxer: she thinks there are a hundred better countries than the USA to move to … until you pin her down to a short list. And then it turns out that the list actually sucks and staying here is better. BUT AMERICA STILLS SUCKS MORE THAN ANY OTHER PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE.

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Bye, Bye Neo-Cons

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Luke Ford

David Goldman writes: Israeli leaders of all major parties warn of two existential threats to Israel: a U.N. resolution forcing Israel back to the 1967 armistice line, and a nuclear-armed Iran. With Donald Trump’s election both threats have receded into the distance, and the State of Israel is more secure than it has been in its history. Yet American Jews, at least the majority of politically active Jews of high public profile, are miserable. America’s best-known Jewish conservatives—the “neocons”—have burnt their bridges to the incoming administration. It is one of the strangest, and silliest, episodes in Jewish political history.

An estimated 30 percent of American Jews voted for Trump, the highest Jewish vote for a Republican since 1988. Among religious Jews, anecdotal evidence suggests, support for Trump was overwhelming. But most Jewish Republican leaders backed Hillary Clinton or minor candidates in the general election while opposing Trump in terms that often climbed the walls of hysteria.

“Jews to this day continue to combine an almost pathologically intense concern for politics with a seemingly equally intense inclination toward political foolishness, often crossing over into the realm of the politically suicidal,” wrote the late Irving Kristol, the original neoconservative. His son Bill Kristol proved the Jewish proclivity for political hara-kiri remains undiminished in his generation by doing everything he could to prevent the election of Donald Trump—along with such high-profile Jewish conservatives as pundit Charles Krauthammer and Commentary Editor John Podhoretz. In the end, Kristol destroyed his own career. On Dec. 12 he resigned as editor of The Weekly Standard, the political journal he founded 20 years ago.

A Leninist mood of revolutionary defeatism swept the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party before the November election. Trump would “reenact Thelma and Louise’s visit to the bottom of a ravine,” as a National Review pundit predicted, and its intellectual elite would rebuild the party on the ruins of a discredited populism. In comfortable and well-funded opposition, the mandarins of mainstream Republicanism—The Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute, Commentary , the National Review and so forth—would prepare a Republican comeback in 2020 or 2024, or whenever. The important thing is that they would be in charge of whatever was left and would still get their foundation grants.

George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became the graveyard of the intellectual movement that contributed so much to the Republican revolution under Ronald Reagan. So persuaded were the heirs of Irving Kristol that democracy and capitalism were the natural order of things that they bet the store on a global campaign of nation-building. In the end, they grasped at straws during the Arab Spring and the collapse of Libya and Syria.

To have been associated with the Bush “freedom agenda” became the kiss of death for Republican candidates during the 2016 primaries, and Donald Trump most effectively spoke to the party’s disillusionment with its intellectual leaders. Yet the neoconservatives couldn’t let go. They are a peculiar kind of right-wing Marxists, with a cultlike belief that the march of history dictated the triumph of liberal democracy. Being would determine consciousness, as democratic institutions transformed tribalist Muslims in the Middle East into Western-style democrats.

Kristol had formed the Emergency Committee for Israel in 2010 to counter liberal organizations like J Street that supported President Barack Obama’s Iran deal. Confronted with a candidate who repudiated the Iran deal, namely Donald Trump, Kristol’s Emergency Committee ran ads attacking him—for being too friendly to Vladimir Putin.

Iran was supposed to be the acid-test issue for Jewish conservatives. Donald Trump not only opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran during the presidential campaign but gave his top national-security appointments to men Obama had fired for their opposition to the Iran deal, namely Marine Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser.

The prematurely triumphant neocons imagined themselves sitting in judgment over the errant populists of the Republican Party, exacting apologies in emulation of Chinese Communist self-criticism sessions. At Commentary magazine, Noah Rothman proclaimed Oct. 5, “Donald Trump is likely to lose. As such, Republicans need to start thinking about the fallout from 2016 and how to heal the lingering divisions from a fractious year defined by internecine conflict.” The condition for membership in the reconstituted Republican Party, Rothman proclaimed, would be Maoist recantations:

“Trumpism exists at odds with conservatism, and the party as reconstituted in 2017 must be one built up around conservative ideals of limited government, free trade, an internationalist foreign policy, and an unqualified rejection of identity politics. In short, Republicans of all stripes must be made to acknowledge and accept that Trumpism is an experiment that failed. That’s the price of admission, and it’s a modest one given the great costs associated with sacrificing a winnable race for the White House.”

Right up until Charles Krauthammer called the election for Clinton early on Fox News on election night, the neoconservatives were secure in their belief that the ruins of the Republican Party would accrue to them. With Trump’s victory, their problem is to show their funders that they still matter. Like abandoned dogs, the neoconservatives do not know whether to lick or to bite the hand of the new masters in Washington.

That made the annual fundraising letter that Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz sent out in November especially poignant reading. “There will be matters,” Podhoretz intoned “about which the Trump administration will look to Commentary to provide the clarity and insight and guidance that America’s conservative leaders—including many likely to take senior roles in the coming years—have come to rely upon from us, especially when it comes to the security and safety of Israel.”

Just where or why the new administration might require the advice of Commentary’s editors is unclear. Only two weeks earlier, Commentary Online Editor Noah Rothman got the attention of the incoming administration with a blast email claiming that Trump’s designated national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was “a dubious choice,” and “deeply unsettling.” Rothman went so far as to allege that Flynn had warned that America needed to work harder to keep Turkey in the Western alliance because his business had a Turkish consulting client. Flynn’s concerns about Turkey are hardly controversial, and a veteran national security specialist who has worked with Flynn dismissed the allegation as “McCarthyism.”

Rothman’s attempt to sandbag Flynn was restrained compared to the wrath that the neoconservatives poured on Trump adviser Steve Bannon. John Podhoretz inveighed, “The key problem with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s newly named strategist, isn’t that he’s an anti-Semite. He may be. … The key moral problem with Steve Bannon is that as the CEO of Andrew Breitbart’s namesake organization, he is an aider and abettor of foul extremist views, including anti-Semitic ones.”

As it happens, I have spent some time with Steve Bannon, and I—like other Jews of his acquaintance—observe that he is exuberantly pro-Israel and as friendly to Jews as any Gentile I know. After reading Podhoretz’s accusation, I examined every article published on Bannon’s Breitbart website during the past years containing the search terms “Israel” or “Jews” and found that all were pro-Israel and friendly to Jews without a single exception. Facts are facts, and Commentary’s shrillness stems from hysteria more than outrage.

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