Luke Ford

Israel Drazin writes on Amazon.com about Marc Shapiro’s new book: Since time began, since the more intelligent men and women realized they had ideas they could not share with others, yet they had to speak, they learnt to lie.

Highly respected philosophers did so. The pagan Greek Plato called what they said “noble lies.” The Jewish Maimonides named them “essential truths.” The Moslem Ibn Tufayl gave the lies no name, but wrote a book describing why it is necessary to hide the truth. The Roman Plutarch hid the truth in his famed history “Parallel Lives,” and gave an idealized version the ancient heroes “with the intention of conveying moral examples to imitate or avoid.” They knew that the lies they taught the masses were not facts, but teachings that advance what they considered to be good, what we could call “pedagogical truths,” focusing on education, or “orphaned truths,” unrelated to real truths, or “pious myths.”

As many other philosophers, Maimonides recognized that intelligent people, leaders, clergy, philosophers, and teachers of all kinds need to teach people lies – such as, God spoke to prophets, you will be resurrected, pray and God will help you, this is what God demands, God will punish you unless you do this, there will be a messianic time when all evil will cease – to make people feel good about themselves, feel secure, “know” that there will be a better time, behave properly, provide stability, preserve order, and teach and promote values. Maimonides told readers of his Guide that he will place both his true ideas and “essential truths” in his Guide so that the common people will find notions in it that support their beliefs while intelligent people will be able to sift the true teachings from the dross.

Even the Bible seemed to sanction lies. Abraham told his servants and his son Isaac that he and Isaac will return from offering a sacrifice while he had every intention when he said this that he would offer Isaac as a sacrifice to God. Jacob misled his father Isaac claiming he was Esau the son that blind Isaac wanted to bless. Moses attempted to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt saying they would return after three days. The biblical book Chronicles suppressed the truth contained in the earlier biblical books; they retold the earlier-told tales in a manner that erased mistakes made by biblical heroes, such as King David’s adultery and murder of Bathsheba’s husband. The Chronicle version is “actually far from a detached recording of what happened in the past.” And there are many more examples of dishonesty in the Bible. Abraham ibn Ezra states: “Our sages explained this beautifully, for ‘a prudent man conceals shame.’”

The Talmud recognized a concept halakhah ve’ein morin ken, meaning that although something is technically permitted, the rabbis do not inform the masses of the leniency out of fear that using this permission could have negative ramifications. Nachmanides (1194-1270) contends that this concept is in the Torah which states “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,”

The rabbis lied and continue to lie for many reasons, such as the interest of peace, to stop people from sinning, to avoid embarrassment, to prevent injury, to collect money to support the study of Torah, to help feed a poor man, to improve a person’s chance of marriage, when one has a mental reservation that what he is saying is not true, for educational reasons, and if the lie leads to a good result. Each of these reasons is subjective; one rabbi may feel that the lie is appropriate while another might strongly disagree. It is as if the rabbi is saying, I can lie if I think it is proper to do so and if I feel that it is better for the person to believe my lie rather than know the truth.

Marc B. Shapiro points this out and shows how this phenomenon continued from ancient time to righteous Jews today, including famed rabbis who lie to other Jews. His book is superb, scholarly, comprehensible, well-documented with copious supportive notes, very readable, and above all eye-opening. He shows that all too many rabbis in the Orthodox community rewrite the past by snipping out of books of prior rabbis and scholars, even well-respected ones, that which does not fit into their personal world-view. They “insist on viewing the past through the religious needs of the present,” erasing the liberal opinions of the past to obligate others to follow their personal notions of what is right. Organizations such as ArtScroll distort the interpretations of Bible commentators in their ArtScroll commentaries when what is said contradicts their understanding, as they deleted the “offending view” of Rashi’s grandson Rashbam on Genesis 1:5 that in the Bible the day began in the morning. These rabbis are turn their backs to what is true when they are convinced that what was said would lead readers to observances they dislike. Paradoxically, rabbis who make these changes consider themselves traditional, even hereidi, ultra-Orthodox, men who decry the changes wrought by the Reform movement; yet they too are uncomfortable with the past, the history of Judaism and its practices, and feel the need the revise what is most sacred to them, what the Torah actually says and Judaism.

They conceal the conviction of many sages that parts of the Five Books of Moses” were composed after Moses’ death, such as Abraham ibn Ezra and the famed pietistic Rabbi Judah HeHasid who held this post-Mosaic view. They hide the fact that the codifier Moses Isserles felt that it is permissible to drink non-Jewish wine. They censored Joseph Karo’s “Shulchan Arukh” where he states that the “kapporot” ceremony on the day before Yom Kippur in which people transferred their sins to a chicken was a “foolish custom.” They erased the opinion of Rabbi Hayim of Volozhin quoting the Vilna Gaon “that in matters of halakhah one should not give up one’s independent judgment, even if that means opposing a ruling in the “Shulchan Aruch.” They excised the statement of Rabbi Joseph Messas (1892-1974) from his “Mayim Chayim” where he ruled that married women have no obligation to cover their hair, a decision also held by Rabbi Joseph Hayim (1832-1909) and many others. They conceal the ancient decisions by respected rabbis such as Rabbenu Tam, Rabbi Solomon Ganzfred in his “Kitsur Shulchan Arukh,” and others that the “shekiah,” sunset for the purposes of when the Sabbath starts, takes place much later than what is usually regarded as sunset, that the Shabbat begins when it is dark about an hour after the current practice. They obscured the ruling of the highly respected codifier Rabbi Yehiel Mikhel Epstein (1829-1908) that one is allowed to turn on electric lights on festivals. They expunged the opinion of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch that everyone does not need to devote his life to Torah study and the opinion of Maimonides in his Introduction to his opus “Mishneh Torah” that Jews need not study the Talmud. They erased the Vilna Gaon’s belief that it is only a custom for males to cover their heads and that in Orthodox families in Germany, male Jews only covered their heads when at prayer or saying a blessing. They painted head coverings on the pictures of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and many others who did not wear a head covering in college. They hide that Rabbi Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine as well as Maimonides taught that people need to exercise.

Also, hereidi Jews as well as rabbis who are afraid to deviate from them will not mention the words breast, gay, homosexual, rape, or insert the words in their newspapers, and even exclude pictures of women, including that of Hillary Clinton, even though this is not prohibited in the Torah and was not the practice in ancient Judaism.

These are just some of the many examples that Dr. Shapiro gives in his excellent book (with a couple that I added) of how rabbis and others have changed and are continuing to change the immutable Torah.

We could, of course add many more to the couple of hundred example offered by Dr. Shapiro, for Dr. Shapiro notes that he is not giving a complete list of violations. For example, many rabbis today do not reveal that the behaviors they are advocating in their sermons is not taught in the Torah. Also, when these rabbis sermonize today and base their sermons on the “fact” that the “medrish” says such and such, the rabbis do not reveal that there are multiple Midrashim, each saying something somewhat different than the others, and the position they are advocating is not held by other Midrashim.

* By Israel U. Khachewatsky:

Having been a reader of Marc Shapiro’s writings for about twenty years, I’ve often been made to wonder about what motivates and animates Jewish thinkers to do and say the things that they do. His current book on Jewish censorship and revisionism places the question of motivation and psychology front and center.

Shapiro is, as always, encyclopedic in the scope of the sources he brings down. His observations on some outlandish forms of Jewish censorship and revisionism are often wry and witty, with minimal personal editorial and without being either cynical or unsympathetic to the subject matter. The one possible slant to which his book lends itself, of which Shapiro himself is aware, is that in accumulating every possible example of Jewish religious censorship and revisionism one could walk away with the impression that there are no Jewish authorities that defend being sincere and transparent, which of course is not the case.

There is a certain charm to Shapiro’s writings, as in how in the midst of a much broader discussion, Shapiro will share an embarrassingly true but conveniently forgotten insight, such as the fact that over hundred years ago the majority of Jews started (and ended) Shabbos later than they do nowadays, a practice that at present is rare and is deemed scandalous.

While modern scholarship would not condone any form of censorship, when reading Shapiro one can nevertheless distinguish between more excusable forms of hiding the truth versus completely inexcusable ones. At the excusable end of the spectrum are: censoring passages from non-Jews that, if revealed, could endanger the Jewish community; hiding awkward revelations about the personal failings or peccadilloes of a religious sage, especially sexual ones; genuinely believing a falsehood, without any ulterior motive and then propagating it; censoring gratuitously abusive language between respected scholars; the altering of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s writings by his handlers, for fear that some of his ideas would alienate his intended readership. In all these cases we can sense the imperfect choices being presented between on the one hand being completely transparent but on the other hand wanting to either exercise common sense or display good taste.

What appears, however, to be altogether inexcusable is the constant theological posturing that goes on in the Haredi world, to give the impression of a form of religious orthodoxy that is consistent throughout all time and space. Examples where historical photos are altered to either make Orthodox women from the past appear to be dressed more modestly than they actually were or to color a skull cap onto a rabbi’s bare head are only a small sampling of it. Much larger and more damning are the chapters devoted to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and the aforementioned Rabbi Kook. While Hirsch’s philosophy and the community he advocated were forcibly made to appear more palatable to Haredi sensibilities, Kook, once the darling of the Orthodox world, had been rendered a persona non grata. This persistent practice of disfiguring history by making it more homogenous is absolute cultural vandalism. The censors in these cases have found it expedient to lie and cover up numerous facts, all in order to control the religious experience of the masses, to ensure uniform thought and practice. As Shapiro himself points out, people in power, by lying and hiding the truth, have predetermined how Judaism should have looked historically (evidence to the contrary be damned) and in the process they have chosen to be the judges over the great luminaries that preceded them.

And in no way do the Haredim have a monopoly over this sort of censorship, though they are the most persistent practitioners of it. Shapiro gives examples of censorship in other branches of Judaism. And it’s clear to any reader that rewriting the past is a standard practice in any sort of orthodoxy, whether it be political or ideological in nature, whenever the facts as they are do not conveniently corroborate what people “need” to believe at present.

Shapiro’s last chapter, which deals with the Jewish literature on when it is permissible to lie and to deceive is the most painful to read through. Shapiro frames the discussion in terms of the overarching problem: the Torah is replete with statements to the effect that it is important to be truthful and that lying is evil. Many rabbinical sermons are in fact delivered in which Judaism is couched as an unrelenting search for truth. How then to defend the frequent practice by religious publishers of deceiving their readership? The answers on the whole are of an extremely legal, technical nature, arbitrary in their application and completely inelegant. And even worse than the inorganic loopholes that various religious figures relied upon to allow themselves to be untruthful is a statement by Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler. In line with the thinking of certain secular philosophers, Dessler redefines the truth to be whatever is most expedient, whichever statement most practically achieves a desired outcome, i.e., extracting greater religious observance and devotion from the masses. The intellectual acrobatics Dessler uses to justify being deceptive come off as flippant, not too clever and disingenuous.

The notion that the greatest truth is whatever achieves a desired outcome begs the question: Isn’t there a greater truth to strive for than achieving mass obedience? Especially in an age in which orthodoxies of all sorts are on their way out, what exactly are we sacrificing in order to achieve uniform behavior? People en masse are leaving organized religion, especially Western organized religion –Judaism is being hit especially hard – and are pursuing more experiential/less dogmatic strains of spirituality such as Easter religion. There’s a good reason that Jews as a whole are over-represented among the numbers of Westerners who flock to either trendy new age spiritual movements or to Buddhism and Hinduism. Instead of addressing the spiritual poverty engendered by un-self aware orthodox dogmatism, we’re expending precious mental energy on hosting a beauty pageant of sorts, on upholding appearances of piety. In the end, Orthodox Judaism can end up becoming self selecting – retaining the traditionalists who would have naturally gravitated towards it anyway, while losing all of the sincere seekers who are genuinely curious and trying to understand.

Shapiro had me considering the subject matter from different vantage points. What, for instance, drives people to want to believe something to be true? I remember meeting a religious man a few years back, whose father was among the Jews who was saved during World War II by Sugihara, the courageous Japanese diplomat who defiantly gave out numerous visas to save Jewish lives. With complete conviction, the man related to me how later in life Sugihara converted to Judaism. Of course, nothing of the sort happened and I politely kept quiet. I sensed how the man very much wanted to believe that Sugihara was Jewish, as if a goy altruistically saving thousands of Jewish lives weren’t good enough. As with other urban legends, people find comfort in believing that certain things are true.

Urban legends, for course, are a universal phenomenon, not at all unique to Orthodox Jews, and people tend towards being suggestible. And it is sometimes hard to get at what is really true versus what we wish to be true. With the internet, however, becoming more ubiquitous and especially with the advent of web sites such as Snopes that devote themselves to debunking false legends the likelihood of people continuing to believe a bubbe meise are smaller. The question is whether this trend towards greater transparency will have the same sort of impact in the Haredi world. If so will the censors in Haredi world continue to be able to spin their personal story to their own liking or will they need to adjust their spin for an evermore skeptical public?

And what can we say about the cynical mindset that encourages censorship? In a world that is moving towards greater transparency and towards empowering individuals more and more, censors are elitists who continue to believe that people “can’t handle the truth.” It is possible that there are facts that are too damning and too overwhelming for people to process, but when people are constantly infantilized and lied to, it can become a self fulfilling prophecy by which the public can no longer stand to hear anything remotely threatening to their beliefs.

I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject of Judaism and its relationship to the truth to read Shapiro’s well written book.

* A. J. Sutter writes: I was quite disappointed with this book, though more because of what’s missing from it than with what’s in it. I have neither the knowledge nor the temperament to fault the author’s (MBS’s) deep erudition when it comes to his familiarity with religious texts, doctrines and practices. But not only has MBS chosen to make the book opaque to many non-Orthodox Jewish readers, he’s failed to put the very important topics he describes into a larger social context. And even as to the topics he does discuss, most of which are connected to religious writings, MBS comes to a very murky and ultra-cautious conclusion that seems to endorse rabbinical tinkering “in the name of a larger truth.”

The book opens with contrasting versions of the famous photograph of Obama, Hillary Clinton and their staffs monitoring the fatal raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. The Brooklyn Yiddish-language weekly Di Tzeitung published the image with Secretary Clinton and US counterterrorism director Audrey Tomason airbrushed out. (A different Haredi paper later did something similar, when it removed Angela Merkel and other female leaders from the image of the 2015 Paris march protesting the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket.) But the reader expecting more discussion of how Jewish religious attitudes affect portrayal of the contemporary secular world will be disappointed. Aside from some discussion of prudery about sex and self-censorship about non-Jews, the book is mainly about how religious attitudes are used to censor religious texts and writings about, or even simply mentioning, certain teachers.

But OK, the subtitle of the book is “How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites *Its* History,” not history in general. A great deal of censorship arises in reprints of responsa and collected works of great scholars. Passages or entire articles are omitted on such grounds as they are no longer in conformity with current opinion; or that the writer’s words might put him (always him) in a bad light among readers today (he would have omitted the article or passage himself were he alive to do so, the censors rationalise); or that the words would alienate some members of the community who disapprove of R. Y because they contain evidence that the author, R. X, was friendly with R. Y or at least didn’t hate him, etc. Chapter 8 is among the most unsettling, when it details how rabbis have falsely claimed attribution for certain views — and even worse, have falsely claimed that a commandment is biblically sourced — using the justification that it was for the sake of getting “the masses” to follow halakhah.

MBS illustrates his points with a several dozen before-and-after photos of rabbinical texts, title pages of books, and other documentation to illustrate censorship. Unfortunately, aside from some hilarious photos with inked-in kippot on originally bare-headed scholars, including the Lubavitcher Rebbe, may he rest in peace, and a few illustrations from Renaissance books, virtually all of these examples are in untranslated Hebrew. As a non-Orthodox reader who can pick my way through Yiddish and maybe some selected vocalised sentences from the Siddur and Tanach, most of the evidence for MBS’s arguments was inaccessible to me. (The footnotes, too, contain a lot of untranslated Hebrew — all the more frustrating because MBS sometimes labels these passages as “interesting comments,” e.g. @46n198.) Here MBS seems to be taking a leaf from the censors themselves. As he explains, a common rabbinical justification for censorship is that it’s OK for scholars to know certain things, but these should be kept hidden from the masses (such as regarding the body of halakhah ve’ein morin ken, halakhah that is not taught). This apparently is his own attitude towards his readers: at the end of a page-long prefatory discourse about his transliteration of Hebrew spelling, he remarks simply “Hebrew sources of general interest have been translated, while those of a more technical nature have not” (@xv). So he deems much of the evidence for his own contentions to be too “technical” for a general readership, even though he devotes many conspicuous pages to it in this book.

More substantively, the book seemed out of focus for not clearly differentiating among different types of texts in the context of emendation and other forms of “censorship.” Some texts serve as a source of halakhah; some as part of a rabbi’s collected works but without legal status; some images are purely fanciful and serve only an aesthetic purpose; and some images or writings serve to record of events that actually occurred. These should be treated case by case. Regarding law, it’s quite common in the secular world for legal texts to be changed if they lose their authoritative status: e.g., the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations keep the most current forms of statutes and regulations, and the California Supreme Court has “depublished” many published legal opinions to which precedential value is not to be accorded. So perhaps it’s not so scandalous when a rabbi’s responsum isn’t republished because it’s in error. And even literary authors must suffer their editors: the other day another Amazon review alerted me to the fact that a certain volume of “Collected Poems” I was thinking of buying wasn’t the “Complete Poems” (though presumably the poems weren’t rewritten, as some rabbis might have done, were they editing literature). But there’s a big difference between covering up the breasts on allegorical figures in Renaissance frontispieces to Jewish works, on the one hand, and erasing Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel, on the other: in the first case, one is altering fictions, in the second, reality. Unfortunately, such differences are never clearly articulated by MBS (and the case of adjusting reality not really addressed).

Although MBS occasionally uses words like “disturbing” in connection with instances of censorship, by the end of the book he seems to be an apologist for it. The last chapter describes how rabbis have justified lying in everything from praising ugly brides to bearing false witness in a legal proceeding to regain one’s own property. The book’s final section, entitled “Redefining Truth,” approvingly cites R. Elijah Dessler for his observations that “‘truth’ is not dependent upon empirical observation, but derives from religious considerations. Historically accurate description that leads to a bad result is, from a religious perspective, ‘false.’ By the same token, that which helps lead people to do G-d’s will, even if it is factually false, is nevertheless to be regarded as ‘truth'” (@284). Lest we be skeptical, MBS reminds us that the (Gentile) philosophers Hastings Rashdall and Harald Hoffding [sic] held similar views (though I confess I’d not heard of either of those gentlemen previously). MBS concludes: “I think that rationales of the sort advanced by Dessler, Rashdall and Hoffding, even if not consciously formulated, are how the religious censors, and those who create falsehoods in the name of a larger truth, justify their actions to themselves. As this chapter has attempted to show, such an approach can be supported by quite a few sources in the rabbinic tradition” (@285). Period. It’s kosher, after all.

What troubled me most was that MBS didn’t reflect on how these attitudes might have impact on the world outside Orthodox Jewish religious thought. For example, in the past several years a number of child molestation cases involving rabbis in the Haredi community in Brooklyn have come to light. Could attitudes toward sex-related censorship have slowed down bringing the predators to justice? Or what about a teacher who may have held an attitude that was progressive for its time, say about women or homosexuality, but whose writings were edited by censors who claim that he himself would have excised the pertinent passages. Those progressive opinions can’t serve as potential sources of support and consolation for many religious Jews who find themselves in conflict with repressive attitudes — is that OK, simply because the rabbinic tradition is rife with such manipulations? Or consider Dessler’s point about how truth is that which helps lead people to do G-d’s will: who’s to say what that will is? Don’t leaders in other religions use the same rationale to read into their holy works some rather dangerous ideas — such as the radical conceptions of jihad that we’re told aren’t really in the Qur’an? Could such alterations of Torah be used to justify aggressive Israeli territorial claims, for example? (To be fair, the instances of halakhic deception discussed in this book all seem to relate to prohibitions, rather than to affirmative commandments; but MBS doesn’t make clear that the latter are off-limits to falsehoods “in the name of a larger truth.”) MBS doesn’t connect his topic to any of these issues, and the book is considerably weaker for it.

In sum, if you’re frum and fluently literate in Hebrew, you may be able to appreciate this book within the very circumscribed range of issues it addresses. If you aren’t, then you can learn enough from this book to be both deeply disturbed by what the author says, and deeply frustrated by what he doesn’t.

Marc B. Shapiro writes: I completely reject the Kuzari argument not only for logical reasons but because it can be used to “prove” the historicity of miracles in other religions, miracles that we are told were witnessed by many people…

Most Jews don’t keep Torah. What else will they be able to say? Even people raised religious can have the status of anus or tinok she-nishbah. R. Chaim Brisker said that emunah begins where proof (i.e., evidence) stops. But I don’t think the beit din on high will be asking such questions. The people who didn’t keep the Torah will realize then how much they missed out.