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Parsha Mishpatim
Rabbi Herzfeld
As if it isnt hard enough keeping kosher today, they keep changing the rules. When I was growing up in New York, it was a truism that even if we were stranded in a place without kosher food, at least we could always drink the water. But now thats no longer the case, at least not in New York.
The OU, the largest governing Kashrut organization in the world, issued a directive in 2004 that restaurants and caterers in New York should filter their water in order to make certain that there are no copepodssmall, nearly microscopic, crustacean organismsin the water. According to the OU any copepod in the water might make the water treyf.
Jewish law does not allow one to eat or drink food which has bugs in it. The main issue here is that copepods are small bugs. Some claim that these copepods can be seen by the naked eye and are thus forbidden, while others contend that they are only visible with a microscope and therefore permitted.
Great poskim have weighed in on different sides of the argument. Practically speaking, more and more Orthodox families in New York are deciding to install filters in their homes to take out the copepods and to buy bottled water since one is not permitted to filter on Shabbat.
The merits of each sides argument are not the point. The point is to understand the context behind how this debate could even emerge in the first place. More than that, Id like to begin a discussion with our entire community as to what direction Orthodox Judaism is headed in.
Today we read Parshat Mishpatim which is a collection of laws that teach us how to run our society. It is an appropriate time for us to begin our preparation for the visit of Professor Haym Soloveitchik set for May, 2006.
In 1994 Prof. Soloveitchik wrote an essay about the Orthodox Jewish community called, Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of American Orthodoxy.
One of his points is that historically the halakhic community has always given equal weight to two sources: an intellectual, textual tradition and a mimetic tradition, or law as taught and law as practiced. The mimetic tradition reflects knowledge as imparted through the everyday practice of the home. For example, you knew how to keep a kosher home because you saw how your grandmother kept a kosher home. In contrast, the textual tradition reflects knowledge as taught by scholars through their writings. For example, you knew how to keep a kosher home because you followed what was written in the great code of Jewish Law, the Shulkhan Arukh and its commentaries.
But in the past decades there has been an ever accelerating shift away from the mimetic tradition and an overwhelming reliance on a textual tradition. One of the examples that Prof. Soloveitchik gives in his article is in the area of berakhot (blessings) that we recite over our everyday food. In his words:
The five basic berakhot are taught to children as soon as they begin to speak, and, by the age of four or five, their recitation is already reflexive. Grade school adds a few refinements and pointers about compounds, such as, sandwiches or hotdogs, and there things, more or less, stand for the rest of one's life. Or at least, so it stood in the past. This is no longer so. In 1989 The Halachos of Berachos by Yisroel P. Bodner appeared in both hardcover and paperback form and has been reprinted three times in as many years. Nevertheless, it did not slake the current thirst, for 1990 saw the appearance in the Art Scroll Series of The Laws of Berachos by Binyamin Furst, a large and full tome of some 420 pages (Bodner's work was only 289 pages), and which, within a year, was already into its third printing!
He might just as well have been writing about the drinking water in New York City. The water (which not only affects drinking, but brushing ones teeth and potentially washing dishes) is a classic example of abandoning a mimetic tradition in favor of a textual tradition.
David Berger, a former teacher of mine, who is both an ordained rabbi and a recognized expert in Intellectual Jewish History, pointed this out in an op-ed in the Jewish Press which he called, An Appeal to Poskim. He said: We are being told that the Torah [now] forbids what Rav Aharon Kotler, Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, Rav Avraham Pam, Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky, and a galaxy of chassidic rebbes from Satmar to Bobov to Lubavitch to Skver, drank without the slightest hesitation as a result of their failure to investigate the content of this perfectly clear glass of water.
There is something very disturbing in the idea that we are discovering new prohibitions that our revered ancestors did not know about. I am not questioningGod Forbidthe sanctity and the piety of the rabbis who are issuing these rulings. These are holy people who are devoted completely to the Path of Hashem. And, yet, there is something disturbing here .
When I was in College, I studied Talmud with my rebbe, Rav Shimon Romm, of blessed memory. Rav Romm, known as the Visoker Ilui, was considered the top student in the Mirer yeshiva before this famous yeshiva moved to Shang Hai in World War II. He was a rabbi who not only knew the Talmud, but also lived and breathed the Talmud. He was Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshiva University for over forty years. One day before Pesach, a student brought in a newspaper which said that some poskim in Israel had ruled that one could not use the drinking water in Israel on Pesach, since some fisherman might have used bread as bait on Pesach and thereby made the whole Kinneret (the principle reservoir) chometz. We turned to Rav Romm for a ruling. He smiled and dismissed this ruling with a question: Do you think no one ever went fishing in the time of the Talmud?
This week the Torah tells us that Moshe taught all the laws to the Jewish people and then he took a book called Sefer ha-Berit and read it to the people. Va-yikah sefer ha-Berit va-yikra be-aznei ha-am. What is this Sefer ha-Berit? If he had just taught the laws to the people then why did he now have to read from a different book?
Most commentators explain that Sefer ha-Berit contained a collection of stories from Genesis up until the Exodus. In the words of Netziv: Maaseh Ha-Avot, the stories of our patriarchs. Moshe found it necessary to accompany the laws of Mishpatim with an historical retelling of the stories of our patriarchs. In doing so Moshe was teaching that in order to fully obey the laws of the Torah we must have respect for the laws of the Torah AND an equal reverence for the behavior of our patriarchs. We cannot observe the laws of the Torah without an understanding of the activity of our ancestors.
In the Talmud, on certain occasions, the rabbis say, puk chazi mai amah devargo out and see what the people are doing. I wonder if such a principle would ever be applied today. I wonder how often today we would find in the halakhic rulkings , This is what the holy people have been doing for years in accordance with their great rabbinic leaders. In fact, we see the opposite; today we are valuing law as taught far more than law as practiced.
Lest you think that this trend only applies to the more right-wing Orthodox and not the Modern Orthodox, think again. Prof. Soloveitchik points out that there is usually a lag of no more than a few years before these trends get picked up in the Modern Orthodox community.
What does it mean to say that we are a community that now values the text in a way that greatly minimizes the authority of the home and commonly accepted custom? Is this a trend we should support? Is this a trend we should fight against? Does it even pay to fight against such a trend? If we ignore law as practiced, then what are the negative consequences? Remember, that which we learn from our families resonates in a way that little else can. By clinging to the text above all else are we not really undoing the text?
The practice of Halakah is crucial to Judaism. Even by raising these questions, I fear that people will misunderstand me and some in our community might--God Forbidbe even more confused about Halakhah and thus less inclined to follow it. And yet, not raising this issue is ultimately more dangerous to our community than having an open discussion.
Whatever the answers to these questions, our communityand by this I dont only mean our shul, but our larger communityhas a responsibility to start discussing this issue.
According to the Sefer ha-Berit of the Torah, this is a responsibility that we owe not only to ourselves and to our children, but to our ancestors as well.
