The beauty of learning Torah without access to a packed Beit Midrash is that the canon of books that I typically consult has grown extensively. The sheer number of sefarim in digital databases that are immediately available at my fingertips far surpasses the library of any single Rabbi living before the year 2000. I can read more “books” from my home than that the Rambam or Rav Moshe Feinstein ever saw in their entire lives. 

The explosion of online Jewish primary texts in the last ten years is simply astounding. If you have access to the Bar-Ilan Response Project, HebrewBooks, Sefaria, alhatorah, Otzar HaChochma and Meforshei haOtzar you do not need a single printed book! All of these are archives of primary sources; let’s not even start to list the plethora of online journals and secondary literature.

Nonetheless, some aspects of this new reality are terribly disappointing and sad. The “death of the book” is likely not coming any time soon. Though I have been known to quip that books are going the way of the dodo, I actually don’t think that will happen in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of my children. (It might happen in the lifetimes of my future grandchildren). This brief reflection is not about the nostalgia of the printed word or how much I love my Vilna Sha”s. Instead, I want to think about how the information age impacts serious Halakhic research and decision making (psak). I will then move to show a key pattern regarding why certain times lean toward codification and how that speaks to us today.

Implications of the Information Age

Breaking down geographical barriers

For most of Jewish history, people only had access to the views of their local rabbis. This historical truth helps us to understand how and why the traditions of Sephardi, Edut ha-Mizrach and Ashkenaz can be so different. We see those differences in liturgy but also in method of psak. Sephardic poskim were not weighed down by the burden of a liberal Jewish community like the burgeoning Reform movement, so they responded in different ways to certain kinds of questions, such as those related to Shul customs or use of the vernacular. Ashkenazi poskim had to contend with Crusades, Pogroms, and Massacres for hundreds of years, which shaped their responses. Even pragmatic matters like climate differences shaped these rabbis’ psak: the weather in Northern Germany is likely to lead to different psakim about Sukkot from the weather of the Mediterranean basin.

Today, though, when I look for halakhic material about how to decide if a person may leave the sukkah, I might just as easily happen upon a North African posek as a Polish one. It is the reader’s responsibility to discern those differences. But, suddenly, a large and new corpus of authoritative Halakhic writing is now part of my research. Sometimes the differences are inconsequential and can be explained with simple or even shallow generalizations, such as those as mentioned above. However, certain differences are much more significant; when I read North African poskim, I begin to recognize that they are working with a different set of assumptions about certain core questions like the role of the Gemara in decision making, the relative weight of the Rambam or the Shulchan Aruch, the importance of communal custom, and the impact of Kabala.

My point here is not to outline the many differences between Ashkenzi and Sephardi psak but simply to note that most Ashkenazi poskim never read anything from Morocco, and most Sephardi poskim were more than happy to ignore the Lithuanian rabbinic elite. That benign neglect is no longer advisable or even possible. We can no longer limit our halakhic knowledge by region, necessitating that we attend to halakhic traditions from areas other than our own. Rav Ovadia’s prolific literary output may have begun this process,  but one need no longer have his memory to access his library.

Blurring the boundaries between first tier and second tier poskim:

When I create source sheets for a d’var Torah or class, every rishon and every acharon appears the same way on the nicely formatted page. Each source is copied in the same font, and each quoted rabbi is provided with a short biographical statement. This uniformity ensures that the uninformed reader cannot understand the difference between someone who was printed on the page of the Shuchan Aruch because of his authority — Rabbi Akiva Eiger, for example — and some local community rabbi who wrote a small sefer that no one ever heard of until I discovered it using some clever search terms.

There is something democratizing about this phenomenon, but there is also a lie built into every source sheet. People don’t become the posek of a generation by accident. While I do not seek to worship any gadol ha-dor, I also recognize an important difference between Rav Moshe Feinstein and a local shul rabbi on the Lower East Side. That difference is not merely about a person’s intellect — I am not certain that every Gadol is or was a genius — but often more about that individual’s personality, authority, and life experience. The more that people continue to ask a gadol questions, the more that they are forced to see themselves as a person who should be answering. When rabbis come to certain other rabbis to seek advice, direction and psak, those who are most frequently approached understand their own authority differently and also gain exposure to a wider range of questions.

One of the challenges of creative Boolean searches is that the computer does not know which posek is more influential. Everyone shows up as just another result on a list. The person doing the research must understand this difference even though the computer has no clue.

Exploding the idea of a canon:

The ability to have access to instant data is extremely powerful. When people come to ask me questions, they have usually already checked Google and often spoken to at least one other rabbi. The same phenomenon occurs with doctors and WebMD. Access to such information makes for a more educated questioner but also demands more from the one offering the answer.

The texts that I consult when trying to answer a complex question have grown widely. While I used to rely on the encyclopedic teshuvot of Rav Ovadia, I can now use indexes and smart searches to find relevant material from many generations and locations. My decisions are certainly informed by many of the same poskim as before the explosion of online resources, but now I can find alternate paths forward beyond what I could have imagined.

The fact is, when you have the entire mesorah at your disposal, you begin to appreciate the flexibility that the greatest poskim had and continue to have in the face of serious human needs. We have all witnessed this happen in real time over the last few months by the likes of Rav Asher Weiss and Rav Herschel Shechter. They are both rabbis with 70+ years of immersion in a beit midrash who are also deeply sensitive to the needs of their communities. These two poskim have displayed tremendous flexibility and creativity in the face of pandemic. They were able to respond to detailed questions about what to skip in davening as well as broader questions like when one may use technology on yontif in the face of crippling isolation. 

In recent days, there has been a drive to canonize and curate all of these Covid-related psakim into one place. Ideally, these gedolim should be in communication with one another in order to compare and discuss their varied decisions about the same, or similar, issues. Before Pesach, we found a rush of responses clarifying what might be possible in terms of kashering our homes. We were, and are still, trying to stay out of stores, which raises questions of its own. Suddenly we find ourselves inundated with questions that had not been answered in many years, or perhaps not at all. The ability to find precedent, understand the core reasons behind our practices, and apply that knowledge and insight to the contemporary world happened at a quicker pace and in greater public view than generally occurs, drawing attention to the work of poskim and to the varieties of answers provided to such questions.

To understand both the needs of the community and the individual questioner is the first step in becoming a gadol. One also needs the ability to deploy various positions that may have been lost or discarded over the generations but are needed right now. One can see this happening as poskim respond to the questions of electricity on Shabbat and Yom Tov. As electricity has become ubiquitous in our lives, people see a need to shift the communal approach. This change can be seen with security measures at the Kotel as well as LED lights on sensors in hallways. We also felt the ground shift around the question of the Zoom-seder this year.

The access to texts and ideas is one of the greatest blessings of our age. Halakhic discourse must take place on a higher level because many individuals now have the ability to answer simple questions with a few keystrokes. Some will still rely on local rabbis, but when those community rabbis subsequently turn to their teachers for guidance, the conversation can happen at a much higher level, beginning with more foundational knowledge that was gathered from easily accessible sources. When the local rabbi calls a teacher to help clarify options, that conversation can spark ideas that may not have been considered on the local level. The contemporary posek is no longer limited by his or her own library or memory. Good research can uncover a lengthy history of approaches to many, if not most, questions.

 

This reality, brought about by access to technology, ultimately explodes the notion of a limited canon. Instead, we now face more answers to questions than we ever thought possible. In extreme circumstances, the job of the posek is to mine the mesora for the approach that is needed at this moment. The ability to skim sources and perform quick triage has, with our current resources, become more important than having an amazing memory.

Three Periods of Codification

There is a desire on the part of some communities to codify and canonize whenever possible. This impulse usually comes from a place of anxiety: the fear that people will not know what to do or will make mistakes drives the proliferation of halakhic handbooks. The codificatory impulse almost always emerges on the heels of dispersion or destruction. The generation after codification must then cultivate creativity in order to give the community the options that it needs. This pattern — Destruction → Canonization → Creativity — plays out repeatedly in Jewish History.

We can see this phenomenon in three powerful examples: 1) The Destruction of the Temple, 2) The Spanish Inquisition & The Black Plague, and 3) The Shoah.

The Destruction of the Second Temple → the Mishna → the Gemara:

After the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) and the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt (135 CE), there was a pressing need to codify. In many ways, that period of destruction led to the authorship of the Mishna (210 CE). The next 500 years of rabbinic commentary on the Mishna, what we call the Gemara, was a time of explosive creativity.

The Amoraim (the rabbis of the Gemara) inherited the Mishna, a carefully edited Code of law that left out many other texts from the period of Tannaim (that rabbis of the Mishna). On nearly every page of Talmud, the rabbis quote a competing text that was left out of Rebbi Yehuda ha-Nasi’s Mishna (berayta). One way to think about the Amoraim is that they were turning to Rebbi Yehuda ha-Nasi and saying, “Who do you think you are?” You don’t have the right to decide according to this particular approach because you must also consider this other text, which contradicts the first. 

At some level, the project of the Gemara is to undermine the code of the Mishna. The Gemara serves to remind everyone that there are more options available.

The Inquisition / The Black Plague → The Shulchan Aruch → The Opposition:

There were two major catastrophes that can be understood as necessitating the publication of the Shulchan Aruch in the 1550’s. In 1492, the Jewish community of Sefarad was uprooted in the Inquisition. There had been many expulsions prior to this one, but the expulsion of 1492 led to mass population transfer, shifting the center of Rabbinic life to North Africa and Israel, Tzfat in particular.

At four years old, (not yet Rabbi) Yosef Karo was expelled from Spain and relocated to Portugal. His family was then banished again in 1497, and they made their way to the Ottoman Empire, living in Morocco, Nikopolis, and Andrinople before making his way to Tzfat in the early 1530’s. His entire world had been uprooted, which contributed, at least in part, to his desire to create a code. His major work, The Beit Yosef, is a complex encyclopedia of halakha structured as a commentary on the Tur. However, after completing his Beit Yosef and his commentary on the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, the Kesef Mishna, he decided that people needed a simpler summary of the basics of Jewish Law, so he wrote the Code of Jewish Law.

From the early part of the 14th century until around the year 1500, a series of events decimated Europe. A great famine from 1315 to 1317 killed many and crippled the farm based economy. This was followed by the Black Death, which peaked from 1347 to 1351 and killed so many people that the population did not recover until the year 1500. The Jewish community in Ashkenaz suffered terribly at this time, and many were forced to leave the Rhineland.

Rabbi Moshe Isserles was born in 1530 in Krakow as part of the rebirth of Ashkenazi Jewry in Poland. He inherited a community struggling with the traumas of its own past.  He felt the need to codify the traditions of Ashkenazi Jewry, just as Rabbi Yosef Karo had. By the mid 1570’s, the Shulchan Aruch (the set table) of Rabbi Yosef Karo, codifying the traditions of Sepharad, was always published with the Mapa (the tablecloth) of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, reminding the reader of the mesora of Ashkenaz. Here, again, we see a period of destruction followed by a significant codification.

And, if we look at the colleagues of Rabbi Yosef Karo and Rabbi Moshe Isserles, especially the first layer of commentary on the Shulchan Aruch,  we see both the pushback and the need for creativity: great rabbis like the Maharal, the Maharsha, and the Bach all explicitly pushed back against this attempt at limiting the law. Even the early commentaries like the Shach (ש”ך), Peri Chadash (פר”ח) and Magen Avraham (מג”א) often disagree with the psak of the Shulchan Aruch. In fact, the generally accepted rule is that we follow the Shach against the Rema. 

Here, again, we see that the immediate response to the code is a period of creativity. Just as the Gemara sought to loosen the codificatory strings of the Mishna, the early commentators on the Shulchan Aruch strove to provide more options for their communities. The Shulchan Aruch draws as much of its authority from the towering giants who wrote commentaries and critiques upon it as from Rabbi Yosef Karo and Rabbi Moshe Isserles themselves.

These two cases are easy to see:

1. The Destruction of the Temple → Mishna (code) → Gemara (creativity)
2. Inquisition / Black Plague → Shulchan Aruch (code) → Early Opposition (creativity)

Let us now move to a third, contemporary, version of this pattern that is a bit more complex.

Shoah → Mishna Berura → ???

One can never overstate the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Life. In this analysis, I want to focus on one small piece of that impact. The six million Jews murdered in the Shoah represented approximately one third of world Jewry and two thirds of European Jewry at the time. The numbers are staggering. As a result of this massive European upheaval, the centers of Jewish learning shifted to Israel and America. It is hard to imagine a more destructive and disruptive catastrophe. Orthodox Jewry in American was on the wane before the Shoah, but this community changed drastically after the war. The growth of all aspects of Orthodoxy was perceived as a shock or a miracle by many at the time.

American Jewry in the post-war years needed a code to latch on to. People were not writing in that style in this country, so they looked to the early 1900’s and found the Mishna Berura. The work of the Chafetz Chayyim, Rabbi Yisrael Meir ha-Kohen of Radin, became the final word in any area of halakhah upon which he touched. The Chafetz Chayyim was known as the Tzadik ha-Dor while Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, the Lithuanian author of the Aruch ha-Shulchan, was known as the Posek ha-Dor. For many reasons, the Mishna Berura won in America. This is certainly the case in Yeshivish communities and is slightly less so within Modern Orthodoxy, where the Aruch ha-Shulchan is gaining sway.

Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, author of the Aruch ha-Shulchan, who passed away in 1908, served for 34 years as the community rabbi in Navardok. His main income came from the local Jewish community. He regularly tried to justify communal customs even if they did not quite align with the majority of rabbis. This was a very different approach from that of Rabbi Yisrael Meir ha-Kohen, who died in 1933. While the Chafetz Chaim served as a community rabbi in Radin for a short period, he eventually left that position to found a Yeshiva in that same town. He was much more driven to fulfill as many of the various earlier positions as possible, an approach that inevitably leads to greater strictures. The Aruch ha-Shulchan, on the other hand, was much more open to the authority of the practice of the Jewish People, which can sometimes, but not always, lead to a more lenient approach.

The choice of the Mishna Berura as the authoritative code for our time was not a coincidence. It was driven from that same anxious place of wanting to fulfill every possible position and cover all of our bases. The Jewish community needed to feel the stability and continuity of the Mishna Berura after the cataclysmic disruption of the Shoah.

One of the ways to distinguish the Yeshivish community from Modern Orthodoxy is to ask whether we are still in a period of ‘post-Shoah codification’ or if we have entered a time of ‘post-codification creativity.’ For those living with the Shoah on a daily basis, the answer is obvious: we need to circle the wagons and continue to protect our people and our Halakha. There are ways in which I often feel that way. The Shoah and its memory are a heavy burden that the entire Jewish community must bear.

However, one of the blessings and challenges of the 21st American Jewish community is the struggle to create a collective identity that is not built exclusively on Shoah memory, anti-anti-Semitism and Zionism. That is not to say that we can ever forget the Shoah or stop fighting the pernicious disease of Anti-Semitism. In fact, there are ways in which we must be even more vigilant today than we have been in the past twenty years.

At the same time, we may, in fact, already live in the next stage of this process. The explosion of Torah learning provides a fertile basis on which to grow, moving beyond the anxiety of codification and breathing in the air of creativity. This does not mean jettisoning any aspect of Halakha, God forbid; rather it means finding new pathways that may not have been available to us in the 20th century. The gift of all those online databases — of access to both the prominent and hidden voices; to the local or familiar authorities and to those we are now encountering for the first time — may be exactly what our generation needs.

I have deep respect for those who feel the need to codify. For me, and my community, I think we are in a different stage. I believe we need the creativity of the Gemara and the Shach. We need to seek out new ideas, new paths and new methods that respond to the needs of our generation with a new language. The beauty of learning Torah in the 21st century is that we are part of a global Beit Midrash that continues to grow day by day.