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| Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz |
One of the less known Torah giants of our generation must be
Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz. He is a holocaust survivor, who seems to have made it
his mission to point out how the Torah world we know today, has dramatically
changed in comparison to the pre-war Judaism he remembers. He studied at
Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, and at the age of 16 was asked to check his Rosh
Yeshiva’s[1]
halachik responsa prior to publication.
After his inhuman suffering in
the concentration camps, he became an expert at the then very important
question of aggunos[2], for
whom special courts were created. He later settled in America but shied
away from public office and religious/political affiliation, a trend which had
become popular in the rabbinical world at that time.
Although he kept to
himself, in 1958, Rabbi Yaakov Kemenetsky referred to him as one of the ‘gedolei
doreinu’ or greats of this generation.
In 1974, when he published his Ma’aneh
LeIgrot, which fearlessly criticised many of Reb Moshe Feinstein’s halachik
rulings, people began to take notice of him. Since then he has been consulted
by many leading rabbis on important issues of halacha that many other
authorities were reluctant to get involved with[3].
In his book, Enayim Lirot[4],
he recalls how before the war, a European city may have had different religious
communities each with different synagogues and customs. But a single rabbi
acted as the Rav of the community which was essentially united in its
diversity. Also, and perhaps more importantly, there was non-sectarian Torah
education for all the children. Students from all ‘denominations’ generally went
to the same school. The fact is that throughout most of our history, Jewish
communities never even had elementary schools.
Typically, a melamed or tutor was hired privately to teach small
groups of younger children.
“After the Shoah, however,
a new social order – unlike any other in our nation’s history – began to evolve
as our nation became splintered into different factions, each of which
functions almost like a separate nation...”
Now, for the first time in Jewish history we have a separate
school for each religious sect. This sows seeds of division which is
subliminally inculcated into our young children from the moment they are able
to learn. I go to this school but you go to that school. One of us must be
better than the other. This creates an illusion of elitism in Torah education,
something which never existed before.
“And when these children grow up and become
eligible for marriage, they will hardly ever marry someone from another group.
In the Holy Land, each sect even has its own neighbourhood, led by a rabbi whose
entire upbringing and education took place within the confines of that sect’s
yeshiva system.”
Now the factionalism is perpetuated into the next
generation, consolidating the misleading impression that this is how Jewish
communities were always structured.
In times gone by, if a person wanted to become an expert
scholar, he would never just study under one rabbi. Instead he would travel to
a variety of teachers to be exposed to a variety of views[5].
This ‘cross pollination’ is severely discouraged in modern Torah society. But
Rabbi Schwarz believes this ‘new practice’ which encourages students to only
study at one ideological institution, has a detrimental effect on scholarship
in general, because a gifted student is led to believe that all meaningful
learning can only take place within his present environment. The student thus insulates himself from
further potential spiritual and intellectual growth.
“It has also become customary for all members
of a particular group to follow a unique dress code – marked by subtle
distinctions in various articles of clothing such as a hat or overcoat – which
identifies them as being members of that group and no other.”
Rabbi Schwarz then goes on to explain that while it is true
that in Egypt, the Jews dressed differently from their Egyptian counterparts. - that was in
order to differentiate them from the Egyptians. We are now
differentiating ourselves from our fellow Jews!
Although dress codes
obviously pre-dated the holocaust, by analysing photographs of those older
communities, it was clearly nowhere near the extent that it is today.
“Thus, in the ultimate of
ironies, the very means used by our forefathers in Egypt to keep the Jews
united...is now being used by these groups to separate themselves from all
other Jews... We should not be inventing new practices that perpetuate
division...”
He traces this new thirst for factionalism directly to the
generation surviving the holocaust which was young, orphaned and had no fixed
tradition or long lines of links with the past. Whatever they had absorbed
before the war was quickly forgotten, and only the major milestone observances
were remembered without the subtle nuances of meaning and ethics that were once
so tangible. When they transmitted these external demonstrations of faith to
their children, it was much like a body without a soul. In a sense this was an
unprecedented break in the mesora of Torah transmission, in that unlike
earlier times where “a segment of the population in each new generation will
have lived half their lives in the outgoing generation”, this did not happen
after the war.
Although we have suffered many horrific calamities in our
history, we were always defiantly quick to recover, and often experienced
periods of great growth afterwards. After the terrible persecutions of 1648, for
example, the great commentators to the Shulchan Aruch[6]
wrote their monumental works. Amazingly these works abound not just with
legalities, but with amazing ethical insight and with respect for interpersonal
relationships.
The difference was that in the past there were always
surviving elders who had grown up in the spirit not just the letter of the
Torah, and they were able to transmit that spirit to the next generation. Not
so with the generation surviving the holocaust, where even those who did
survive were “old, shattered and broken.”
It is no wonder then, that
“hardly a week goes by without some story appearing in the non-Jewish media
about yet another case of corruption, or some other shameful act committed by
an observant Jew, causing a tremendous chillul Hashem...as the Talmud
declares...the non-Jews will then say ‘This person has learned the Torah and
its commandments, yet his conduct is more corrupt and shameful than that of a
descent gentile.’[7]”
Like a modern day Kotzker, Rabbi Schwarz daringly argues for
the religious world to re-evaluate their insular view of non-religious Jews, as
well as of non-Jews. He pleads with religious Jews to become kinder, more
compassionate, and conscious of creating a kiddush Hashem by their
unconscious public behaviour. And he strongly advocates for a re-appraisal of
fundamentalism and factionalism which he says has become a hallmark, plaguing
the modern religious world. This never existed in pre-war Judaism, on the scale
that it does now. As a result, the common cultural religious Judaism practised
today, is in his view, skewed - notwithstanding the unprecedented growth of
yeshivas and other learning institutions that abound.
Maintaining and growing the status quo, will not course correct us back to how we used to be. That can only be achieved through a powerful re-injection of the value of ethics back into the scholarly curriculum. For that we need massive buy-in from all our leaders, who would first have to become aware of the problem...
In short, he believes the holocaust killed not just Jews,
but sadly some of the most important aspects of Judaism as well.
[1] Rabbi
Frommer, known as the Kozhiglever Rav.
[2] The
sad predicament of many women whose husbands were ‘missing’ during the
holocaust, and were still considered to be legally married, and therefore unable
to remarry as they did not have a divorce.
[3] A
case in point is kidushei ketana, where an unpleasant divorce led a man
to ‘betroth’ his eleven year old daughter to an undisclosed man. Rabbi Schwarz
was able to invalidate the ‘marriage’ and remove this cruel manipulation of law
from becoming a precedent.
[4] EYES
TO SEE, published by URIM in 2004, p36 – 54.
[5] The
original ‘chareidim’ who would ‘tremble’ in order not to make a mistake
in halachik rulings, would travel from sage to sage until they were
satisfied they had explored every conceivable angle of a concept in question.
See Bava Metzia 33b and the relating Rashi who says they ‘studied under many
chachamim...since they were not all expert in all subjects.’
[6] These
included the Shach, Taz, Be'er HaGolah and Magen Avraham. The Chmielnitsky uprising of 1648-49 (known as the Gezeiros Tach veTat), saw Cossaks murdering tens of thousands of Jews and displacing hundreds of thousands of other Jews, in Poland and Lithuania.
[7] Yoma
86a.
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