The Torah content for the remainder of October has been sponsored by Naomi Schwartz Rothschild, who writes: “My stepmother was nifteres. She was a mother to me for almost 20 years. She called me her daughter. She was always positive and b’simchah. My Ima also helped and then took over my father’s (z״l) Partners in Torah when he had difficulty and then couldn’t do it all.” May the memory of Chava Leah bas Tzivia Rochel be for a blessing.

Vayeira: Radak on the Akeidah (Part 1: Questions)

Radak’s Take

One of the most tantalizing topics in this week’s parashah is Akeidas Yitzchak: the Binding of Isaac. Many approaches have been offered as to the purpose of the Akeidah and how to reconcile it with the Torah’s values (see AlHaTorah’s overview for a comprehensive survey with hyperlinked sources).

A recent favorite of mine has been that of Radak. Every time I read it, I find his approach more satisfying at its core. At the same time, I’ve become increasingly bothered by two difficulties. I’ve realized that the next step I need to take is to think about it in writing, and to share my thoughts with my readers.

Radak begins (Bereishis 22:1) by acknowledging the classic problem of God “testing” Avraham:

The matter of the test is very difficult to relate concerning God, for He searches the heart and understands thoughts, and He knew that Avraham would do His command.

In short, it doesn’t make sense for Hashem to test Avraham to know what he’ll do, since Hashem is omniscient, is aware of Avraham’s innermost thoughts, and knows with certainty that he will obey.

Next, Radak raises and rejects a popular interpretation:

And if [it was] to make [it] known to the people of the world, behold, there was no one there at the time of the Akeidah except Avraham and his son Yitzchak, for even his young men who went with him did not know anything of this, so who made this thing known to the world? Even if he himself had related [it], who would have believed him?

Although Radak doesn’t mention him by name, the view he cites is almost certainly that of Saadia Gaon. In his commentary (ibid. 22:1), Saadia Gaon writes that one purpose of the Akeidah was “for people’s knowledge,” and Ibn Ezra (ibid. 22:1, first commentary) cites Saadia Gaon as saying that “the word ‘test’ [means] to show [Avraham’s] righteousness to mankind.”

The problem, according to Radak, is that the Akeidah was only witnessed by the two individuals involved. How, then, could it have served as a public demonstration? Ibn Ezra likewise writes, “Didn’t the Gaon know that at the time [Avraham] bound his son, no one was there, [not] even his youths?”

Radak then presents his own theory:

The truth is that the test was to show to the people of the world Avraham’s complete love for God. And it was not done for those generations, but rather for the generations to come who believe in the Torah that Moshe Rabbeinu wrote from the mouth of God, and in its narratives, so that they would see how far Avraham’s love for God reached, and they would learn from him to love Hashem with all their heart and with all their soul.

For Avraham loved Yitzchak more than himself, for he was old, and if he were to die, he would die by his nature, at a good old age, old and satisfied. But his son was a youth, and he did not yet have a wife and children, and he had not enjoyed the world, and if he were to die, that matter would be very difficult for Avraham, for he loved him more than the love of himself. And moreover, he was the son of his old age. And when God told him to bring him up to Him as a burnt offering, all the love and the affection were as nothing in his eyes, and he did not ask and did not test, [saying]: Did You not tell me “that through Yitzchak offspring shall be called yours” (Bereishis 21:12)? And he did not pray to Him concerning him. Rather, since He told him, “Do thus,” he immediately rose early and hurried to do the will of God, and he did not consider any love against His love.

Indeed, before the Torah and its narratives were written, this great thing was transmitted to the seed of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, for Yitzchak transmitted [it] to Yaakov and Yaakov to his sons. And after the Torah was written for the sons of Yaakov, the matter became publicized in the world; there are those who believe and there are those who do not believe. Today, many years since the day the worship of images and idols ceased, most of the world believes in the Torah of Moshe Rabbeinu and in its narratives, except that they disagree with us about the commandments, for they say that they were stated by way of parable. And in most of the people of the world believing this great narrative, it is great testimony about Avraham Avinu, that he loved God with a complete and wholehearted love, and it is fitting for a person to learn from him the way of his love.

Like Saadia Gaon, Radak maintains that the purpose of the Akeidah was to convey knowledge to mankind. His innovation is to supply the mechanism by which this private trial would become known to the world, namely, through the mesorah (oral transmission) from Yitzchak to Yaakov, from Yaakov to his sons, and from his sons to their descendants. And once Bnei Yisrael received the Torah, knowledge of the Akeidah would spread to all those who accept the Revelation at Sinai. Not only would this ultimately spread through Christianity and Islam,^[1] but it would also become a familiar narrative among non-believers, thereby serving as a model of our chief value: love of God.

The Problems

But, as I alluded to, there’s a major problem: the Torah’s presentation of the Akeidah’s outcome seemingly does not support Radak’s reading. Just as Avraham is about to slaughter Yitzchak, an angel of Hashem calls out and says:

“Do not stretch forth your hand against the boy and do not do anything to him! Because now I know that you are God-fearing and you did not withhold your son, your only one, from Me.” (Bereishis 22:12)

According to Radak, the purpose of the Akeidah was to demonstrate Avraham’s ahavas Hashem (love of God), but this statement indicates that the purpose of the Akeidah was to demonstrate his yiras Hashem (fear of God)!

Additionally, the plain reading of the statement “now I know that you are God-fearing” suggests that the Akeidah resulted in God knowing something He didn’t know before! This, as Radak pointed out, is problematic.

The good news is that Radak (ad loc.) addresses both questions:

For now I know – if we interpret [it] as “I have made known,” in accordance with the matter that we explained regarding the test, behold, we have not found the verb Y.D.A’. in the kal as transitive. In my opinion its meaning is like “I have known you by name” (Shemos 33:12) “and I have known you by name” (ibid. 33:17); its meaning is that the part has returned [to the] whole, and this hint suffices for those who understand, for it is not to be explained more than this.

that you are God-fearing – this fear is from love, for it was not fear for his body but rather fear for his soul, that it not be lost; and he was giving over the soul of his son, whom he loved more than himself, in place of his own soul, that it not be lost from Olam ha’Ba (the World to Come), which is the love for God and the cleaving to Him.

The “bad” news is that Radak’s answers introduce more difficulties. He refuses to follow Saadia Gaon (Tafsir to Bereishis 22:12) in translating “for now I know” as “for now I have made known,” which would have fit quite nicely with his interpretation of the Akeidah. Instead, he provides a cryptic hint which he refuses to explain. The two clues are the pair of examples of Hashem knowing Moshe “by name” and the vague statement “ki shav ha’chelek kol – that the part has returned [to the] whole.” The question is: What is Radak getting at here? And what are we, “the uninitiated,” supposed to get out of the “now I know” statement?

As for the question about how the Akeidah demonstrates love when its stated outcome is “now I know that you are God-fearing,” Radak simply says that the yirah (fear) is from ahavah (love)! The first time I read that, I actually laughed out loud and said, “What?!” It sounds like he’s just dismissing the problem by saying, “Eh, yirah here basically means ahavah.” How does that make sense? Isn’t “fear for his soul, that it not be lost” still fear? And how can he equate the fear that “[his soul] not be lost from Olam ha’Ba” with “love for God” and “cleaving to Him”?

While I do believe the question about Radak’s equation of yirah with ahavah stands on its own, it becomes even more problematic if one accepts the definitions stated by the Rambam in Hilchos Teshuvah 10:1-2:

10:1 – A person should not say, “I will do the mitzvos of the Torah and involve myself in its wisdom in order to receive the blessings that are written in the Torah,” or “in order that I will merit life in Olam ha’Ba,” “and I will separate myself from the transgressions about which the Torah warned [us], in order to escape from the curses written in the Torah” or “so that I will not be cut off from life in Olam ha’Ba.”

It is not proper to serve Hashem in this manner, for one who serves in this manner is an “oveid mi’yirah” (“one who serves out of fear”). This is neither the level of the prophets nor the level of the wise. And only the ignoramuses, the women, and the children serve Hashem in this manner, whom we train to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.

10:2 – An “oveid me’ahavah” (“one who serves out of love”) involves himself in Torah and mitzvos and walks on the paths of wisdom not because of anything in the world, neither out of fear of the bad nor in order to inherit the good. Rather, he does what is true because it is true, and the good will ultimately come along with it.

This is an exceedingly high level, and not every wise man merits it. It is the level of Avraham Avinu, whom the Holy One, Blessed is He, called “the one who loves Me” (Yeshayahu 41:8), since he served only out of love. This is the level that the Holy One, Blessed is He, commanded us through Moshe Rabbeinu [to attain], as it is stated, “And you shall love Hashem, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your resources” (Devarim 6:5). And when a person loves Hashem with the proper love, he will immediately do all of the mitzvos out of love.

According to the Rambam, one who serves Hashem to inherit Olam ha’Ba or to not lose Olam ha’Ba is an oveid mi’yirah. If Radak accepts the Rambam’s framework, how can he regard Avraham’s fear of losing Olam ha’Ba as a form of ahavah when the two modes of service are mutually exclusive? And if he doesn’t accept the Rambam’s definitions, how does he define yirah vs. ahavah?

Thus, even though Radak offered answers to our difficulties, these answers only compounded them. We’re still left with the two questions, each with its own Radak-originated difficulty:

• (1a) How can Radak claim that the Akeidah demonstrates ahavas Hashem when the angel says, “now I know that you are God-fearing”?

• (1b) How can Radak reinterpret that yirah as ahavah?

• (2a) If Hashem didn’t gain any knowledge from the Akeidah, what is meant by “now I know that you are God-fearing”?

• (2b) If “now I know” means “I now know you by name,” in the same sense that Hashem knew Moshe by name, and Radak understands this to mean “the part has returned [to the] whole,” what does that mean?

To Be Continued …

That’s as far as I’m going to go this week. I have some additional sources on (2b) that shed light on what he might mean, and if my intuition there is correct, then this will also answer (1b).

But I want to give this some more thought. I don’t know whether I’ll write Part 2 this coming week or sometime in the future. Either way, I’d love to hear what you think!

^[1] According to Claude, roughly 4.3 billion people belong to religions that treat the Akeidah as Divinely revealed history: 2.3 billion Christians, 2 billion Muslims (though most hold that the son was Yishmael), 15.8 million Jews, and somewhere between 5 and 8 million Bahá’ís. That’s over half of the world’s population!

Let me know what you think!

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The Torah content for the remainder of October has been sponsored by Naomi Schwartz Rothschild, who writes: “My stepmother was nifteres. She was a mother to me for almost 20 years. She called me her daughter. She was always positive and b’simchah. My Ima also helped and then took over my father’s (z״l) Partners in Torah when he had difficulty and then couldn’t do it all.” May the memory of Chava Leah bas Tzivia Rochel be for a blessing.

Lech Lecha: Can We Still Call Him Avram? (A Meta-Halachic PSA)

Avram and Sarai both get new names as part of their new covenant with Hashem: “Your name shall no longer be called Avram, but your name shall be Avraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations (av hamon goyim)” (Bereishis 17:5). “God said to Avraham, ‘As for your wife Sarai, you shall not call her Sarai, but her name shall be Sarah’” (ibid. 17:15). The Gemara in Berachos 13a explains the significance of the name changes:

“Avram is Avraham” (I Divrei ha’Yamim 1:27). Initially he became an av (a father, i.e., a prominent figure) [only] to Aram (i.e., Avram = Av + Aram), and ultimately he became a father to the entire world. “Sarai is Sarah.” Initially, she became Sarai (a princess) to her nation, and ultimately she became Sarah (a princess) to the entire world.

Immediately thereafter, the Gemara brings down two views prohibiting us from using Avraham’s old name:

Bar Kappara taught: Anyone who calls Avraham “Avram” transgresses an aseh (positive commandment), as it is stated: “But your name shall be Avraham.” R. Eliezer says: [One who calls Avraham “Avram”] transgresses a lav (negative commandment), as it is stated: “Your name shall no longer be called Avram.”

The Gemara then proceeds with a back-and-forth about whether this should also be applied to Sarai/Sarah and Yaakov/Yisrael but concludes that both original names are still viable. Only Avraham’s old name was “uprooted.” The sugya (Talmudic discussion) ends with the statements of Bar Kappara and R. Eliezer unrefuted.

For this reason, the Maharsha (Chidushei Aggados ad loc.) raises the question: Why isn’t this codified in halacha? The transgression of an aseh and a lav is no small thing! “And even if it were nothing but a mere asmachta (Scriptural allusion or support), they should have mentioned that there is at least a prohibition in it.” The Maharsha concludes with tzarich iyun (this requires further analysis).

The Torah Temimah (Bereishis 17:5, note 8) raises a similar question: If one who calls Avraham “Avram” violates an aseh and a lav, why don’t any of the monei ha’mitzvos (mitzvah enumerators) include this in their count? Neither Rambam, Ramban, Behag, Sefer Yereim, Semag, Semak, nor Sefer ha’Chinuch count these in their totals.

But unlike the Maharsha, the Torah Temimah thinks the answer is simple:

To me it seems obvious that, according to what is made clear from the Tosefta Berachos chapter 1, we do not hold by any of this law, and these commands are not absolute requirements, but are mere narrative (sippur devarim b’alma).

He then cites the lengthy Tosefta which compares Avraham’s name change with the Sages’ response to Ben Zoma that the ultimate redemption at the time of Moshiach won’t replace our mentioning of the Exodus, but will merely outshine it. The Tosefta goes on to compare this to Yaakov’s name change, then Sarai’s, then Avram’s. The Torah Temimah concludes from here:

Thus it is explicitly clear that the Tosefta holds that in the designation of the new name Avraham there is no prohibition on calling [him by] the former name; rather, it is added to it, just as with the Exodus from Egypt and the subjugation by the kingdoms, and the names Yaakov and Sarah, as explained. Therefore, the poskim saw fit to omit this matter, since, according to what has been explained, this drashah is nothing but a mere asmachta.

What about Bar Kappara’s and R. Eliezer’s statements about transgressing positive and negative commandments?

[As for] the expression “transgresses a lav” and “an aseh,” we find many [instances] that are by way of asmachta, such as in Yoma 19b: One who converses in mundane conversation transgresses an aseh, “and you shall speak of them” (Devarim 6:7), and not of idle matters; and in Sotah 38b: One who benefits from stingy people transgresses a lav, “Do not eat the bread of one with an evil eye (i.e., one who is stingy)” (Mishlei 23:6); and in Sanhedrin 110a: Whoever persists in a dispute transgresses a lav, “and let him not be like Korach and his congregation” (Bamidbar 17:5); and in Makkos 16b: One who delays relieving himself and one who drinks from a bloodletter’s horn transgress a lav, “and you shall not make your souls abominable” (Vayikra 20:25) [ed. note: this is usually sourced from Vayikra 11:43]; and similar expressions of this kind, which are nothing but [statements made] by way of asmachta. And here too it is so.

According to the Torah Temimah, just because the Gemara says that a particular action violates a Torah prohibition and cites verses in support doesn’t mean that such statements are intended to be literal halachic proscriptions. His view is shared by the Pri Chadash (OC 67), the Be’er Sheva (Tamid 28b), and the Penei Mevin (YD 29).

R. Ovadia Yosef disagrees (Yabia Omer 2 YD 16). He cites the view of the Penei Mevin and finds it difficult, given the Gemara’s explicit language of transgression. He suggests that the Penei Mevin must hold like the Be’er Sheva, that it’s not a literal aseh, but R. Ovadia is convinced that “in any case, it is surely no worse than a mere asmachta, and [therefore] it at least constitutes a rabbinic prohibition.” He answers the question about why the monei ha’mitzvos didn’t count this by citing the Rashbatz (Zohar ha’Rakia: Mitzvos Aseh #88), who writes that commandments issued before the Giving of the Torah aren’t counted among the mitzvos unless they were reinstituted at Sinai. R. Ovadia concludes: “In any event, according to all [opinions] it is a complete prohibition, and not in accordance with the words of the Penei Mevin mentioned above.”

In sum, we have three views: the Maharsha, who seems to hold that there is a prohibition but is at a loss to explain why it’s not codified; the Torah Temimah, who holds that it’s not codified because it’s not prohibited; and R. Ovadia Yosef, who holds that it is absolutely prohibited and offers a possibility as to why it wasn’t counted in the 613.

While the halacha l’maaseh (practical halacha) may not be clear or unanimous here, our titular meta-halachic PSA is clear: don’t draw hasty conclusions from Chazal’s use of halachic terminology. There’s a reason why we don’t paskin (issue halachic rulings) straight out of the Gemara. Halacha is a science. There are principles and methodologies whose applications are not always clear-cut, as this case illustrates.

Consider what the Torah Temimah and R. Ovadia write about the possibility that the drashos of Bar Kappara and R. Eliezer fall into the category of asmachta, a mere Scriptural “support” rather than an independent source of Torah law. The Torah Temimah writes “this drashah is nothing but a mere asmachta” and therefore, it’s not halachically binding, and offers many examples in support, whereas R. Ovadia writes that even if it were an asmachta, surely that would at least constitute a rabbinic prohibition. They don’t even agree on the significance of the asmachta!

Just as you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) read an excerpt from a medical study and immediately draw practical conclusions about your own medical care, so too in halachic matters. Even doctors looking at the same study may disagree about its implications. Why? Because medicine is a science, not a list of black-and-white rules. It must be approached with chochmah (wisdom) and knowledge of the inner workings of the subject.

As a high school teacher, I wish this point were emphasized more by teachers of Talmud and halacha. So many misunderstandings arise from people having an overly simplistic notion of how to read Talmudic and halachic literature. Even a broad awareness that things aren’t always what they seem on the surface can go a long way toward avoiding such errors.

Having said all that, some might wonder, “According to the Torah Temimah, what are we supposed to learn from the statements of Bar Kappara and R. Eliezer, if not halacha?”

Shockingly, I didn’t find any clear, direct answers to that question. But I’d love to hear what you think!

What do you make of the differences of opinion about the halachic or non-halachic character of Bar Kappara’s and R. Eliezer’s statements?

Leave a comment

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If you’ve gained from what you’ve learned here, please consider supporting my work via Patreon, Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal — links below. Even a small contribution helps cover production costs and gives me the freedom to create more Torah content. To sponsor a day’s or week’s worth of content, or to inquire about tutoring or teaching, reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail. Thank you for listening, reading, and supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Patreon | [Venmo: @Matt-Schneeweiss] | [Zelle/PayPal: mattschneeweiss at gmail]

Substack | YouTube | YUTorah | Instagram

Podcasts: The Stoic Jew | Machshavah Lab | The Mishlei Podcast | Rambam Bekius | The Tefilah Podcast

WhatsApp Content Hub | Old Blog | Amazon Wishlist

The Torah content for the remainder of October has been sponsored by Naomi Schwartz Rothschild, who writes: “My stepmother was nifteres. She was a mother to me for almost 20 years. She called me her daughter. She was always positive and b’simchah. My Ima also helped and then took over my father’s (z״l) Partners in Torah when he had difficulty and then couldn’t do it all.” May the memory of Chava Leah bas Tzivia Rochel be for a blessing.

Three Claude Skills I Use When Writing

Disclaimer

I’ll start with the same FYI/disclaimer I feel obligated to write at the top of all my posts about AI: I do not use generative AI in my public writing, but I DO use it for proofreading.

I explained my main reason for this in my What I’m Thinking About This Morning post on my 5th principle of AI use, which I summed up as “Only use AI for skills you are willing to lose.” And writing is not a skill I am willing to lose.

A few people recently asked me to share my most frequently used Claude skills. I figured I might as well do so publicly.

Now, if you’re wondering, “What is a Claude skill?” then you’re in the same boat I was in just three months ago. I was going to quote Anthropic’s official explanation of what skills are, but I don’t think they did a very good job of explaining skills for laypeople. So I asked Claude to explain what skills are for someone whose only frame of reference is prompts. Here’s its answer:

(And yes, here I am using generative AI because I’m NOT presenting this as my own writing.)

Prompts. When you use an AI, you write a prompt: you tell it what you want and, if you’re careful, how you want it done. If you have a task you do often, you’ve probably learned that a good prompt makes a big difference, and you may even keep your best prompts in a document somewhere so you can paste them in again.

The core idea. A skill is like one of those saved prompts, except you don’t have to paste it in. It’s a set of written instructions for a particular kind of task, stored where Claude can find it, and Claude pulls it out on its own whenever that task comes up.

What it physically is. It’s a folder. At minimum it holds one file of instructions (called SKILL.md) written in ordinary language, the same kind of language you’d use in a prompt: what the task is, the steps to follow, the standards to meet, the mistakes to avoid. Unlike a prompt, the folder can also hold supporting material, like templates, examples, reference documents, or small programs Claude can run.

How Claude knows when to use it. Each skill has a short description at the top saying what it’s for and when it applies. Claude keeps only those short descriptions in view, and when your request matches one, it opens the full instructions and follows them. You can also call a skill by name if you want to be sure it’s used.

Why this is better than a prompt. A prompt lives in one conversation. When the conversation ends, so does the prompt, and next time you start over. A skill persists, so you write your instructions once and they apply every time, whether or not you remember to include them.

A prompt also has to be short enough to type or paste, and anything you put in it takes up room for the rest of the conversation. A skill can be as long and detailed as the task demands, because Claude only opens it when it’s needed. That also means you can have dozens of skills for different tasks without any of them getting in each other’s way.

Finally, a prompt you improve in one chat is lost unless you go back and update your saved copy. When you improve a skill, the improvement carries forward to every future use. Over time the skill becomes a refined version of how you want that job done, rather than something you reconstruct from memory each time.

An analogy. Think of a new employee who’s smart but doesn’t know how your office does things. Prompting is like standing over them and explaining each procedure every time it comes up, hoping you remember to mention everything. Skills are like handing them a binder of standard procedures, each tab labeled “How we handle refunds,” “How we format reports,” and so on. They don’t memorize the binder; they glance at the tabs, and when a refund comes in, they open that section and follow it. A skill is one of those tabbed sections, and the AI is the employee who actually checks the binder.

Like many aspects of AI mastery, the key is to see examples and to use them.

How This Is Going to Work

I’ll include a link to download the SKILL.md file for each one (see image above for the way-too-small download option). To install, follow these instructions, or these simpler ones:

• Claude Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload (or left menu → Customize → Skills → + → Upload a skill).

• The skill appears; click “Try in chat.” Type or paste your text.

• Alternatively, open a new session, type “/” and all your skills will pop up. Select the one you want, then type your prompt.

For each skill, I’ll provide an overview of how I use it (in italics), followed by the skill description that appears in Claude when you click on the skill (indented), followed by the full text of the skill.

Remember: the whole idea of skills is that you don’t need to copy and paste the whole thing. All I need to do is prompt it by saying (for example), “proofread this” or even “/article-proofread,” and it calls up the entire thing automatically.

One more thing: models and effort levels matter! A colleague of mine recently complained that Claude is bad at translation. I’d bet money that in addition to not using a well-crafted prompt, she was probably also using an inferior model. Because I pay for Claude, my default is to use Opus 5.5 on medium effort. I’ll crank up the effort level for some tasks, but not the ones for which I use the skills below.

Also, it should be noted that I’m constantly tweaking and updating my skills. Treat this as the October 20, 2026, version of these three.

Skill #1: Proofreading (click to download the SKILL.md)

Overview: When I write a Substack article, I usually start proofreading once I’m somewhere between 70% and 90% done writing it. I prefer to do it in chunks, either one section at a time or a few paragraphs at a time.

The key features of this skill are the editorial dialogue and the response format. I essentially want Claude to function in the same capacity as a human editor, which means that I want to be able to discuss its suggestions and push back. The response format presents Claude’s revision upfront, but then walks me through a “before and after” with an explanation of what changed and why.

I have a separate “WITATM proofreading” skill, which accomplishes basically the same thing, but for my What I’m Thinking About This Morning posts. The main difference is that it factors in Instagram’s 2,200-character limit and helps me trim phrasing and cut characters when necessary.

Skill Description: Proofread a long-form article a few paragraphs at a time: fix grammar, punctuation, and usage, streamline prose and flow, preserve his voice exactly, and report every changed sentence with before/after and reasoning. Use when he asks to proofread or edit an article, essay, or Substack piece, pastes a draft or its next section, or pushes back on a suggestion, even for two paragraphs. Not for substance review (article-substance-eval/lite) or WITATM posts (witatm-proofread).

Proofreading an Article

He has a finished or near-finished long-form draft, usually for Substack, and wants it corrected and tightened. The article is already written and already his. This skill fixes errors, streamlines prose, improves flow, and hands each stretch back sounding exactly like him, only cleaner.

The default failure mode is the helpful editor’s instinct: smoothing an odd word into a normal one, replacing a funny construction with a correct-but-flat one, formalizing an aside, or generally rewriting the piece into competent prose that no longer sounds like anyone in particular. Every one of those is a worse outcome than leaving the sentence untouched. The vividness is not decoration on top of the writing; it is the writing.

Work one coherent unit at a time

This is the procedural core of the skill and the thing that most distinguishes it from a one-shot proofread.

Edit one coherent unit and stop there. A unit is a section, an argument, a stretch that holds together, and length is not the criterion; his sections run long or short as the material demands. Do not run ahead through the rest of the piece, and do not preview what is coming.

Chunking exists so he can catch a bad editorial instinct early instead of discovering it repeated forty paragraphs deep. That only works if you actually stop.

Usually he sets the unit himself by pasting it. When he pastes a stretch of the article, that is the chunk. Edit exactly what he gave you, no more, and stop. A bare paste in the middle of an editing session means “here is the next section,” not “start over” and not “tell me what you think of this.” Do not ask which paragraphs he wants covered; the paste already answered that.

If he attaches a file instead (a .docx, a Google Doc link), read it and work the same way: choose units, edit one, stop. Return the edited text in the reply for him to paste, not an edited file. The paste-ready text is the deliverable either way.

Titles and subtitles get proofread when they are included, under the same rules. Treat title wording with extra care; a title is usually a deliberate choice, so correct errors but rarely streamline.

When he hands over a whole article at once, you choose the units. Edit the first one, stop, and name in a single line where you stopped so he can pick up cleanly. When he set the unit himself, that line is unnecessary; skip it.

Carry decisions forward across units. When he rejects a change, do not make the same kind of change again later in the article. When he accepts a convention (a spelling, a transliteration, a term), apply it consistently in every subsequent unit. This matters more than it looks, because a freshly pasted section arrives looking like a clean slate when it is not. Watch also for repetition and inconsistency across unit boundaries, since that is exactly what chunked editing tends to miss. If something in the current unit seems to depend on material that has not appeared yet, flag it as a question rather than resolving it on a guess.

Voice preservation governs everything else

This rule outranks grammar, concision, and every other instruction below. When any of them conflicts with it, it wins.

His word choices are deliberate. He reaches for the vivid, the humorous, the offbeat, and the slightly wrong-on-purpose, and his register shifts between formal, analytical, and conversational on purpose. If a phrase is technically correct but flatter or more generic than what he wrote, leave his. He would rather keep a distinctive or quirky turn of phrase than trade it for something more conventional.

When uncertain whether something is stylized or clunky, assume stylized. The asymmetry matters: wrongly preserving a clunky phrase costs him one line of polish, while wrongly normalizing a deliberate one costs him the thing his writing depends on. Only intervene when the phrasing genuinely interferes with clarity or flow, not when it is merely unusual.

Asides, footnotes, and parentheticals are frequently in a looser, more meta voice. That is a feature. Do not trim them, formalize them, or fold them into the main prose by default. Flag one only when it genuinely weakens the flow or muddies the argument, and flag it rather than fixing it.

The confidence bar

Do not suggest a change unless you are confident it improves the writing, not merely that it makes it different. If a choice could plausibly go either way, leave it alone.

This bar is deliberately high. An edit list where every entry is clearly right is more useful to him than a longer list he has to litigate. Volume is not the goal.

Streamlining and flow

Within the confidence bar, prose improvement is in scope here in a way it is not in a WITATM pass. Prioritize clarity, conciseness, and readability. Cut filler and throat-clearing, cut redundancy, untangle sentences whose syntax fights the reader, fix rhythm problems that make a passage stumble.

Preserve contractions unless there is a compelling reason not to. Use American spelling and punctuation conventions throughout, and keep them consistent across units.

The hard boundary: streamline the connective tissue, never the distinctive phrasing. Do not over-normalize.

Structure and pacing

Reordering words, sentences, or paragraphs is permitted when a structural adjustment clearly improves clarity or impact, but only when the improvement is unambiguous. Explain every structural change in the changelog. Micro-edits for grammar, rhythm, or flow get explained too, but structural moves especially, since they are the ones he most needs to be able to reverse.

Watch paragraph length and visual density. Online reading punishes a wall of text. When a paragraph is too dense, suggest a split point, but only where the split does not interrupt a unified thought. Suggest it; do not silently impose it.

Do not add anything

Do not introduce new ideas, sentiments, or rhetorical questions. Edit only what is present in the draft. Even when a gap seems obvious. Especially then.

What is untouchable

• Direct quotations, verbatim: wording, punctuation, and length. This holds whether the quotation is from a rabbinic source, a book, a person, or a sign. If a quotation looks wrong, ask about it rather than fixing it.

• Transliteration conventions, exactly as written. He is consistent on purpose (Ashkenazic, phonetically consistent vowels, apostrophe-separated prefixes). Do not regularize toward any other system.

• Halachic and theological terminology. Do not modernize it, normalize it, or subtly alter it. These words carry precise freight, and a synonym is usually a different claim. If a term might be misunderstood by a reader, flag it rather than change it.

• Divine names and their conventions. Hashem, G-d, God, and whatever else he uses, exactly as written, along with his capitalization of pronouns referring to God. A normalizing editor is most likely to slip here, and the choice is often religiously or rhetorically deliberate. If usage is inconsistent within the piece, flag it; do not pick one.

• Formatting markup. Preserve whatever arrives with the text: italics, bold, links, footnote markers and their numbering. Never add emphasis. If formatting seems to have been lost in pasting (a book title in plain text, say), do not restore it on a guess; at most, flag it.

Punctuation

Em dashes. He generally prefers commas, parentheses, or a small rewrite over an em dash, but the preference is a lean, not a ban. When an em dash appears in his draft, weigh whether it is the stronger stylistic choice in that spot. If a comma, parentheses, or a small rewrite reads better, replace it, give the reason, and mark the entry Your call: since it is a judgment, not a correction. If the dash is the better choice, keep it. Do not introduce new em dashes unless one is clearly the best option.

Assume every exclamation point was intentional. You may make a case for removing one, but do not simply flatten the excitement he is trying to convey, and never add one.

Fix genuine punctuation errors normally: comma splices that hurt readability, missing apostrophes, mismatched quotation marks, spacing.

Curly apostrophes and quotation marks. Every apostrophe and quotation mark in the returned text must be curly (’ ‘ “ ”), never straight (’ “). Type curly marks in anything you edit, and convert every straight mark you find to its curly equivalent, including inside direct quotations, since this changes typography, not wording. Watch the direction: an apostrophe marking an omission at the start of a word takes the closing mark (’til, ’90s, ’em), not the opening one. Leave the geresh and gershayim in Hebrew or Aramaic text exactly as written, both the single mark (ר’ or ג’) and the double (ט”ז, ע”ה); those are abbreviation marks, not apostrophes or quotation marks, and the single geresh is the one most easily mistaken for an apostrophe. List every conversion in the changelog as a single grouped entry, one line per instance with enough surrounding words to locate it, so he can verify rather than hunt.

Editorial dialogue

When he pushes back on a suggestion, engage with the objection directly. If you still think the suggestion was right, say so and explain why. Do not fold the moment he disagrees.

He wants a real editor, not a yes-man, and reflexive agreement is worthless to him precisely because it is unfalsifiable. Losing the argument is fine. Not having it is not. Once he has decided, though, the decision stands, and it carries forward to later chunks.

Scope

Proofreading and line editing only. No evaluation of the ideas, no assessment of whether the argument lands, no suggestions about what else the piece could say, no alternate framings. Substance evaluation has its own skills (article-substance-eval for a full evaluation, article-substance-lite for a quick pre-deadline check), and he asks for it explicitly, typically at the end of an editing session, often by asking you to put on an analysis hat. The vocabulary overlaps (”finished article,” “check this,” “look this over”), so when a request could mean either, a request involving fixing the prose is this skill; a request about whether the piece works is not. Wait for him to ask.

The one exception, and it is narrow: surface factual, citation, and transcription errors. Verify Torah and rabbinic citations against the sources before responding. If he cites a pasuk, a Rambam, or a Chazal and the citation is wrong, or the source says something other than what he attributes to it, say so directly and separately from the edit. Present anything else you notice neutrally at the end (”I noticed something outside the proofreading question, want it?”) rather than including it unbidden.

How to verify. Fetch texts from AlHaTorah.org first; use Sefaria only when AlHaTorah is insufficient. For Mishneh Torah he uses the Sheilat critical edition; do not cross-check against other editions. Verify halachic citations down to the specific section and subsection. His quoted text is authoritative for its edition. When a quotation in his draft differs from what you find, never correct it; raise the difference as a question, and only if it seems to matter. A wrong citation (the reference points to the wrong place) is an error to report directly; a textual variant is a question.

If something is unclear enough that you cannot tell what he meant, ask instead of guessing. A guess here becomes a silent rewrite.

Response format

Lead with the complete edited chunk, clean and ready to paste, with no commentary interleaved. He should be able to copy it in one motion.

Then the changelog. One bullet per changed sentence, before and after shown side by side, with a brief reason. Multiple edits inside one sentence can share a bullet. No change goes unreported, including trivial ones; the point is that he can reverse any of them in one move without rereading the chunk.

• Before: the original sentence

• After: the edited sentence Reason, in a clause or two.

Mark the entries that need his judgment by starting the reason with Your call: (always that exact tag, so he can scan for it): structural moves, paragraph splits, em dash replacements, exclamation point cases, anything where preserving voice and improving flow pulled against each other.

Then flagged items, if any, in a short separate list: citation problems, terminology a reader might misread, ambiguities you did not resolve, asides that gave you pause.

Then, only when you chose the unit yourself, one line naming where you stopped, so he can pick up without specifying. Something like: That is through the paragraph ending “...and nothing else.” Nothing longer than a line. When he pasted the section, he already knows where it ended, so leave this out.

If a chunk needed no changes at all, say so in a sentence rather than manufacturing edits to fill out a list.

Formatting details

In your own prose (the changelog, flags, and any notes), never begin a line with a Hebrew or Aramaic word; restructure so an English word comes first (”The phrase שֶׁלֹּא is...” rather than opening with the Hebrew). This rule governs only what you write. His text is untouched by it: if one of his paragraphs opens with Hebrew, leave it exactly as he wrote it.

Prefer commas, parentheses, or small rewrites over em dashes in your own prose too, not just in his.

Skill #2: Article Substance Evaluation (click to download the SKILL.md)

Overview: I’m done proofreading and am somewhere between 90% and 100% done writing the article, I’ll run it through my substance evaluation skill. The purpose of this is to stress-test the content of my article: exposing its weaknesses, identifying areas of potential misunderstanding, and noting ways I can improve its substance without infringing on my turf as a writer. The goal is NOT to have Claude help me write the article, but to have it act as a stand-in for a critical reader who reads the published article and finds fault.

The key features of this skill are the four tiers (error, weakness, question, taste) and the “diagnose; do not fix” directive. This is the juncture where it would be far too easy for me to let Claude figure out the solutions on my behalf. Thankfully, Claude respects my instruction: “Do not propose fixes, rewrites, or replacement passages; he usually prefers to fix things himself.”

Below is my “substance evaluation (full)” skill. I also have a “substance evaluation (lite)” skill for when I’m nearing the deadline and want to finish up quickly.

Skill Description: Full substance evaluation of a finished, already-proofread article: argument, use of sources (verified via his links), structure, and whether it does what it sets out to do; diagnoses only. Default when he asks for substance evaluation without saying lite.

Evaluating an Article’s Substance (Full)

Use this skill when he says “put on your analysis hat,” “evaluate the substance,” “full substance evaluation,” “does this argument hold up,” or any variation, usually after a proofreading session, with the whole article pasted or uploaded. When he asks for a substance evaluation without saying full or lite and without mentioning time pressure, this is the default. For a quick pre-deadline pass, use article-substance-lite. A bare paste of an article with no instruction belongs to article-proofread, not here. Do not improvise an approach to this task; follow this procedure.

He has a finished draft, already proofread with the article-proofread skill, and wants to know whether it holds up: whether the argument works, whether the sources carry the weight he puts on them, whether the structure serves the argument, and whether the piece does what it sets out to do. The prose is done. This pass is about the thinking.

The default failure mode is the critic’s instinct to deliver a verdict with heft: manufacturing a headline flaw, promoting a taste preference into a weakness, or reviewing the article he didn’t write. He would rather get one real error than four items padded to look substantial. If every evaluation finds a fatal weakness, he loses the ability to tell when one actually does.

What is already done (do not redo it)

By the time this skill runs, two things are settled.

Proofreading. The article-proofread skill has already handled grammar, punctuation, usage, sentence-level clarity, rhythm, paragraph splits, local reordering for flow, repetition and inconsistency of wording across sections, asides, terminology a reader might misread, citation accuracy (whether a reference points to the right place), and attribution (whether a source says what he attributes to it at the spot he cites). Do not re-run any of these. An awkward sentence is not your concern here.

Translations. He has vetted every translation of every source. Do not reassess renderings, suggest alternate translations, or build a critique on a translation choice. Treat his English as the agreed text of the source.

The line between the passes: proofreading checks each source at its point of citation, one chunk at a time, and reorders locally for readability. This pass checks what only the whole article reveals: whether a source, read in its own context, supports the inference the argument draws from it; whether a claim made early survives what comes later; whether the order and architecture of the argument do the work they need to. If something you would raise is really a proofreading item, drop it.

Structure is in scope when the argument is at stake. Sometimes an argument problem is a structural problem: a point arrives before the groundwork it needs, a section’s real job is undercut by where it sits, two sections are making one argument and should be one, the strongest support is buried. When the remedy for an argument problem involves reordering points or restructuring the article, say so. That is part of the diagnosis, not a proofreading intrusion. What stays out is reordering for flow or readability alone.

If this conversation already contains a proofreading session or a lite substance pass on this article, anything he explicitly declined there stays declined, and anything he already fixed stays out. Do not treat silence as declining (see “When he sends a revised draft”).

Get the whole article

He will paste or upload the complete article. Evaluate that text as the current draft. If it is an upload, read the whole file and extract the hyperlinks as well, since his links are how he cites sources (for .docx, converting with pandoc to markdown preserves them). If what you have is clearly partial, say so and ask for the rest rather than evaluating a fragment.

State what the article sets out to do

Before any critique, read the whole piece and write one to three sentences: what it claims, how it argues, and what it is trying to accomplish for its reader. Follow with one sentence of bottom line: does it do that?

This comes first so he can catch a misreading before reading critiques built on it. If he corrects your statement of the goals, re-evaluate on his reading.

Judge the article against these goals, not against the article you would write. Do not say a source is missing unless the argument actually depends on it. Do not assume his readers’ expectations are the ones you would bring.

Verify the sources

For every source the argument leans on, check it firsthand, in this order:

1. His link in the article. Rely on it first and foremost.

2. Only if the link fails, or there is no link (including when pasting stripped the links), locate the source yourself: AlHaTorah.org first, Sefaria only if AlHaTorah is insufficient. Say which sources you located on your own.

For Mishneh Torah he uses the Sheilat edition. If the text you reach differs from what he quotes, his quoted text governs; raise the discrepancy as a Question only if it matters to the argument.

What you are checking is the inference, not the translation and not the citation. Read enough of the surrounding context to know what the source is doing. Does it support the conclusion he draws from it? Is he putting more weight on it than it can bear? If he claims consensus, the plain meaning, or what “the meforshim” say, is that true?

A contested interpretation is not an Error. That another commentator reads a text differently belongs nowhere in the evaluation unless his argument claims or depends on there being no other reading. A source problem is an Error only when the text cannot bear his reading or a factual claim about the source is false.

If you cannot reach a source, keep going. Do not stop, ask, or wait. Evaluate that source on the text and translation he gives in the article, and treat whatever you find from that the same way as anything else (it can land in any tier). List the sources you could not reach in one line at the end so he knows which ones were checked against his own quotation only.

Read what he wrote, not the stronger claim nearby

Quote the exact words before objecting to them. If a sentence has two available readings and only one yields a critique, assume the other. Hedges, qualifiers, and modal verbs are load-bearing: “serves as” is not “is,” “often” is not “always,” “might” is not “does.”

One exception: if the reading that yields the critique is the one his readers are likely to reach, you may raise it as a Weakness, framed as “readers are likely to take this as X,” not as a claim that his argument is wrong. This applies to claims, not to individual terms, which proofreading already covered.

The tiers

Sort everything you raise into one of four tiers and label it.

• Error. Something is wrong. A source, read in context, does not support what he draws from it; a conclusion does not follow; two claims in the piece contradict each other; a factual mistake.

• Weakness. Nothing is false, but the article underdelivers on its own terms. A question it poses and does not answer; an argument resting on its weaker support while stronger support sits unused; a claim that outruns its warrant; an asset in hand that goes unused; a section that does no work for the argument; an order that buries the thesis or reaches a conclusion before its support.

• Question. You cannot tell what he means, and the answer changes whether something holds. Ask; do not guess.

• Taste. You would have done it differently. Say so plainly and briefly, and do not argue for it.

There is no cap on any tier, but the absence of a cap is not a quota. If items keep occurring to you, check whether you are finding them or generating them. When an item could go in two tiers, put it in the less severe one. Within each tier, order items by severity.

If a tier is empty, say so in one line and move on. If the draft is sound, say so after the statement of goals and stop; a short response is a legitimate outcome. Do not pad in the other direction either: no compliment sandwich, and no list of strengths unless he asks for one.

Diagnose; do not fix

Each item names the problem. When the problem is structural, the diagnosis can say what is out of place relative to what (”the objection in section 4 depends on the distinction that does not arrive until section 6”). Do not propose fixes, rewrites, or replacement passages; he usually prefers to fix things himself.

When he asks for help with a specific item (often because he is on deadline), give direction: what needs to change and where, concretely enough to act on quickly, including a proposed reordering or restructuring when that is the remedy. Offer replacement wording only if he explicitly asks for wording, and keep it to the sentence or two in question.

When he pushes back

Engage the objection directly and answer it once. If you still think you are right, say so and explain why, but do not restate a point he has declined. If his rebuttal defeats your critique, drop it in a sentence and do not rehabilitate it in a weaker form. Not deferring means not caving to his say-so; it does not mean defending a position after it has been refuted. One good pass per objection.

When he sends a revised draft

Evaluate the new draft on its own merits, and also account for every item from the previous round. Each one is in exactly one of three states:

• Fixed. The revision resolves it. Say so in a short line, and do not hunt for the previous round’s problem in the new text or find a replacement for it.

• Declined. He explicitly said he is not changing it, or his rebuttal defeated it. Drop it and do not raise it again.

• Open. He neither fixed it nor explicitly declined it. Do not assume that leaving something untouched was deliberate; he may simply have forgotten. Raise it again in its tier, marked as still open from the previous round, and keep raising it in later rounds until it is fixed or declined.

Only his explicit word makes an item declined. Silence never does.

Response format

1. What the piece sets out to do, followed by the one-sentence bottom line.

2. On a revised draft only: one short line naming which previous items are now fixed.

3. Errors

4. Weaknesses

5. Questions

6. Taste

For each item: the exact words you are addressing, quoted; the problem, in a sentence or a few; and for source-based items, what the source says in context and which source you checked (his link, or one you located yourself). Mark items carried over from a previous round as still open.

If any sources could not be reached, list them in one line at the end.

Formatting details

Never begin a paragraph, bullet, list item, heading, table cell, or blockquote line with a Hebrew or Aramaic word, including when quoting his text. Restructure so an English word comes first (”The phrase שֶׁלֹּא is...” or “He writes: ...”).

Prefer commas, parentheses, or small rewrites over em dashes in your own prose.

Skill #3: Translation (click to download the SKILL.md)

Overview: When I write articles or give shiurim, I prefer to translate everything myself, then have Claude check it over for mistakes. I do this for two reasons: (1) translation is not just a skill but an art, and I tend to prefer my own translation style over anyone else’s, human or AI; (2) the laborious effort to translate is part of my learning process, and bypassing that step shortchanges me. I have a separate Claude skill called “translation review,” where I give Claude the original text followed by my translation and have it assess the entire thing.

Nevertheless, Claude is getting better and better at translating, and I’ve increasingly found myself opting to have it translate everything first, after which I go through and edit it in accordance with my preferences and purposes. That’s the skill I’m going to share below, since I suspect that will be more useful to more people.

Skill description: Translate a Hebrew, Aramaic, or Judeo-Arabic primary text (Tanach, Mishnah, Gemara, Midrash, Rambam, Shulchan Aruch, a sefer or hakdamah, a teshuvah, a piyut or kinnah, a letter, modern Hebrew) into faithful literal English in the source’s own structure. Use whenever he asks for the English of a passage, names one, or pastes Hebrew or Aramaic with no other instruction, even a single line. Not for commentaries on a base text (meforshim-translation), checking existing English (translation-review), or the Moreh (moreh-synthesis).

Translating a Hebrew or Aramaic text

The user pastes, attaches, or names a Hebrew, Aramaic, or Judeo-Arabic text and wants it in English: a pasuk or perek of Tanach, a Mishnah, a passage of Gemara, a Midrash, a halachah in the Rambam or Shulchan Aruch, a chapter of a sefer, a hakdamah, a teshuvah, a piyut or kinnah, a letter, a modern Hebrew essay. He wants a translation, not a paraphrase and not an explanation, faithful enough to serve as raw material for shiur prep, a handout, an article, or a class.

This is a raw-material job. He is not asking what the text means, what is difficult about it, or how it relates to other sources. He wants the English to stand where the Hebrew stood, and nothing else.

Scope

This skill covers primary texts and any passage that is not a set of commentaries on a base text. Route elsewhere when the job is different:

• A batch of commentaries on a pasuk, Mishnah, sugya, or halachah (Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rishonim on a Gemara, a single mefaresh on a single line): meforshim-translation.

• A paste that contains a base text followed by its commentaries (a Gemara with Rashi and Tosafos below it): translate the base text first under this skill, then the commentaries under meforshim-translation‘s conventions, in the order he pasted them.

• English he already has, his own or a published one, to be checked: translation-review. If he pastes Hebrew followed by English, that is a review even if he only says “what do you think.”

• The Moreh ha’Nevuchim, weighed against its standard translations: moreh-synthesis.

• A Mishlei source sheet: the source-sheet skills.

• A one-word gloss or a quick “what does this word mean” is a lookup; answer it directly without this procedure.

The text

What he pastes is the text. His Hebrew is authoritative for its edition. Do not fetch a different version, do not correct toward another edition, do not “fix” a word that looks off. If a reading seems to break the author’s own argument (a word that appears to be the wrong one, a missing negation, a citation that does not match the words quoted), translate what he pasted and raise the discrepancy afterward under Flags, as a question, never as a silent correction. If the paste includes an editorial marker (a bracketed variant, a parenthetical “נ”א” reading, a לפנינו note), carry it into the English in the same position as a parenthetical, translated.

When he names a text without pasting it, retrieve it yourself. Default to AlHaTorah; use Sefaria only when AlHaTorah does not have the text or its version is insufficient. WebFetch’s summarizer often will not return Hebrew verbatim, so read the page through the browser (Claude in Chrome first, the built-in browser if the extension is not connected) when WebFetch fails. Confirm that you have the right passage and its exact boundaries before translating. Never translate from memory of a text, and never use a site’s published English as the translation or as a crib.

Two exceptions to retrieving it yourself:

• Mishneh Torah. He uses the Sheilat critical edition. Do not fetch another edition and do not cross-check his text against one; ask him to paste the halachos.

• Unclear boundaries. If the request does not pin down the passage (”translate the Rambam on teshuvah,” “the Ramban’s hakdamah”), ask which passage rather than guessing.

If the text is neither pasted nor retrievable, ask for it.

Priority order

Accuracy first, then literalness, then readability. When they pull in different directions, the earlier one wins.

Accuracy. Parse the structure, not just the vocabulary: binyan, pronominal suffixes and their antecedents, construct chains, the force of vav, ki, asher, she-, and in Aramaic the de-, ka-, and ha- prefixes. A misparse produces fluent English that is simply wrong. Spend attention there.

Literalness. Stay as close to the original as coherent English allows. Keep the author’s sentence order and clause order where English permits. Do not smooth a medieval sentence into a modern one, do not condense, and do not paraphrase. Deviate from the literal only where English grammar or basic clarity requires it.

Readability. The result should read as clear English in the author’s own register: Mishnaic terseness stays terse, a medieval philosophical sentence stays a medieval philosophical sentence, modern Hebrew reads as modern prose. No interpretive flourishes, no modern idioms, no added rhetoric.

Reading the text before translating

• Unvocalized ambiguity. Where a word can be read more than one way and the reading changes the meaning (active or passive, noun or verb, which binyan), choose by context and record the choice under Judgment calls.

• Abbreviations. Render the expansion of a rashei teivos in plain English, without brackets, since the words are in the original in abbreviated form (”that is to say” for ר”ל, “of blessed memory” for ז”ל). When the expansion itself is uncertain, record it under Judgment calls.

• Unpunctuated texts. Supply English punctuation freely. In the Gemara, render the standard formulas by their conventional English and keep each rendering consistent through the passage (תא שמע as “Come and hear,” איבעיא להו as “They inquired”). Where the speaker or the question-and-answer frame is implicit and the English is unclear without it, supply the frame in brackets (”[The Gemara asks:]”), but only where needed; do not narrate a sugya the text does not narrate.

• Recurring terms. Render a key term the same way every time it recurs in the passage. If context forces a different rendering somewhere, record that under Judgment calls.

• Judeo-Arabic. Translate from the Arabic itself, not from a Hebrew rendering that accompanies it. If he pastes both, translate both and keep them separate, so he can see where the Hebrew translator and your English diverge.

Conventions

These conventions are shared with translation-review and meforshim-translation, so that a passage he translates with one skill and checks with another comes out the same way. If one changes, the others should change with it.

Brackets. Any word not in the original but needed for the English goes in square brackets: “which is [the time] in which a man reaps.” Use brackets also for clarifying glosses that are not in the original: “one who sees what is to be born [i.e., foresees the outcome].” Brackets are load-bearing in his published work; do not add unbracketed words.

Scriptural quotations. A quotation from Tanach is italicized, enclosed in quotation marks, and followed by its citation in parentheses, and everything is italic: the quotation marks, the words, the parentheses, and the reference inside them: “Hear, my son, the discipline of your father” (Mishlei 1:8). This holds whether the citation is the author’s own or one you supply; a bracketed addition to an oblique citation sits inside the italics: (Parashas Ki Sisa [Shemos 32:1]). The introductory formula (”as it is stated,” “as it is written”) stays upright. A truncated quotation ending in וגו’ takes “etc.” inside the quotation marks; do not supply the rest of the pasuk. When a Midrash or Gemara quotes a pasuk and then immediately requotes words of that same pasuk while expounding them, the requoted words are still italic in quotation marks but take no second citation.

Render a quoted pasuk as the quoting author reads it. When his point depends on a particular reading of the words (a derashah on a word’s form, a reading against the plain sense), translate the pasuk so the author’s use of it makes sense, and record the departure from the plain sense under Judgment calls.

When the text is itself Tanach. If he asks for a pasuk or perek, the pesukim are the text, not quotations: render them upright, with no added quotation marks or citation, keeping verse numbers if his paste has them. The Scriptural-quotation rule applies only to pesukim quoted inside some other text.

Non-Scriptural quotations. When the author quotes a Mishnah, a Gemara, a Midrash, or a line from another sefer, render the quotation in italics only, with no added quotation marks and an upright citation.

Dibbur ha’maschil. If the text is built as a commentary with lemmas (a sefer that goes pasuk by pasuk, Rambam’s Peirush ha’Mishnayos), the quoted words of the text under discussion are in bold, and bold italic when they are a pasuk, with no quotation marks and no citation. A quotation from anywhere else is italic, by the rules above, even at the head of an entry. The test is the source, not the position.

Citations. Keep the author’s own citation as he gave it, rendered in English in chapter:verse form. Where he quotes a source without a reference, or with an oblique one, supply the reference in parentheses after the quotation. Verify every reference you supply, to section and subsection where the source has them (Yoreh De’ah 89:14, not Yoreh De’ah 89); a wrong reference is worse than none. If you cannot verify one, leave it out and list it under Flags.

Honorifics. In parentheses, not set off by commas: “Moshe Rabbeinu (peace be upon him),” “as the Sages (of blessed memory) said,” “the Creator (may He be exalted).”

Names. Use the names of people and seforim as the text gives them, in his conventional Ashkenazic forms. Do not add full names, dates, or biographical tags.

Transliteration. Ashkenazic, with phonetic vowels kept consistent within a phrase. Use “machlokess,” not “machlokes.” Separate prefixes with an apostrophe (she’lo, ha’Romi). Transliterate a technical or halachic term only when English would lose something, and gloss it on first occurrence in parentheses: “alacrity (zerizus),” “a figurative sense (melitzah).” Under doubt, use English rather than transliteration. Prefer halachic terminology (heter, mechuyav, assur) over yeshivish slang (tachlis, kedai).

Italics for transliterated terms. Italicize every transliterated term at every occurrence, not only the first: teshuvah, machlokess, mechuyav. Names of people and of seforim are not terms for this purpose and stay upright (Rambam, Moreh ha’Nevuchim), except inside an italic Scriptural citation, which is italic throughout.

Terminology. Avoid “perfection” for שלמות; his students hear it as absolute perfection. Prefer “excellence” or “development” as context allows, and record the choice under Judgment calls when the context is philosophical.

Grammatical terms. When the text uses a grammatical term (יוצא for a transitive verb, עומד for intransitive, and the like), translate it as the grammatical term, not literally.

Punctuation. Do not introduce em dashes; use commas, parentheses, or a small rewrite. Use curly quotation marks and apostrophes throughout (“ ” ‘ ’), with doubles outside and singles for a quotation nested inside a quotation.

Line-start rule. Never begin a paragraph, bullet, heading, table cell, or line with a Hebrew or Aramaic word, in the translation or in the notes after it. If a line would open with Hebrew, restructure so an English word comes first (”The word אוגר means…,” “Hebrew: אוגר”). Hebrew mid-line is fine. For this reason, do not reproduce the Hebrew source as a block in the reply.

Structure of the output

• No preamble. Begin with the translation itself.

• Paragraph breaks. Use the same paragraph breaks as the original. Do not merge, split, or reorder. Render the whole passage as a single paragraph only when he asks for that explicitly.

• Numbering and headings. Keep the source’s chapter, halachah, verse, or section numbering in the same positions, converting Hebrew-letter numerals to Arabic (פרק ג as “Chapter 3,” (א) as “(1)”). Translate headings and keep them as headings.

• Source emphasis. Mirror bold that marks a heading or a lemma in the source. Do not add emphasis of your own.

• Poetry. For a piyut, kinnah, or other verse, keep the line breaks and stanza breaks of the original. Do not rhyme, meter, or reconstruct an acrostic in English.

• Length. Translate the whole passage, never an excerpt or a summary. If it is too long for one reply, deliver it in consecutive parts, ending each part with one line saying where it stopped, and continue when he says to.

• Delivery. Inline in the chat. Create a file only when he asks for one, in the format he names.

After the translation

Up to three short sections may follow the translation, in this order, each only if it has content.

Source. Only when you retrieved the text yourself: one line naming the site, the edition if the site names it, and the link.

Flags. A reading in the text that seems to break the author’s own logic (frame it as a question, quote the original mid-line, say what the argument seems to call for, and confirm you translated what is there), or a citation you could not verify to the section and subsection. Keep it short.

Judgment calls. Substantive translation decisions where a different defensible rendering would change the meaning or emphasis: an ambiguous antecedent you resolved one way, a term with two live senses, a clause whose syntax could parse two ways, an unvocalized word read one way, a pasuk rendered according to the author’s reading rather than its plain sense, a technical term you chose to English rather than transliterate. One line each: the original phrase mid-line, what you chose, what the alternative would have committed to. Do not pad this with synonyms or polish; only decisions that matter. If none rise to that level, omit the section.

If none of the three has content, end with the translation’s final sentence.

What not to do

• No machlokess maps, no comparison tables, no position summaries, no question lists, no cross-references to sources he did not paste. If the text cites Chazal or another source, translate the citation; do not expand on it.

• No interpretive or analytical input on what the text means, unless he asks. If something substantive and non-translational occurs to you, hold it; you may offer it neutrally at the very end in a single sentence (”I noticed something outside the translation question, want it?”).

• No changelog. This is a fresh translation, not an edit of his English.

• No introduction to the text, its author, or its context.

Before delivering

Reread every English paragraph against its original and check for:

• dropped words or clauses, and anything condensed or paraphrased;

• added words that are not bracketed;

• pronouns and suffixes attached to the wrong antecedent;

• italics and bold applied by the wrong test (Scripture versus other sources, the text under discussion versus a quotation from elsewhere), and any transliterated term left upright;

• recurring terms rendered inconsistently;

• paragraph breaks that differ from the original;

• em dashes, straight quotation marks, and any line that opens with Hebrew;

• every reference you supplied, re-verified.

Related skills

For commentaries on a base text, use meforshim-translation. For checking English he already has against the original, use translation-review. For a synthesized rendering of the Moreh ha’Nevuchim, use moreh-synthesis. This skill is for producing the English of any other Hebrew, Aramaic, or Judeo-Arabic text from scratch.

Any suggestions for how to improve these? What are your most frequently used Claude skills? Are you willing to share? If so, feel free to email me!

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The Torah content for the remainder of October has been sponsored by Naomi Schwartz Rothschild, who writes: “My stepmother was nifteres. She was a mother to me for almost 20 years. She called me her daughter. She was always positive and b’simchah. My Ima also helped and then took over my father’s (z״l) Partners in Torah when he had difficulty and then couldn’t do it all.” May the memory of Chava Leah bas Tzivia Rochel be for a blessing.

I’d like to begin by publicly thanking Hashem. I’ve been sick with COVID-19 (for the first time!) all week. Thursday was the first day I had the energy and clarity to learn and to write an actual article. It took me all day, with a hefty nap in the afternoon, but I was able to complete this in time for publication. Baruch Rofeh Cholim!

Noach: Microlooting and the Mabul

Earlier this year I wrote a What I’m Thinking About This Morning post about the morally abhorrent and frightening discussion on the NYT podcast episode ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules, So Why Should I?’ hosted by Nadja Spiegelman with guests Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker (shr’y). All three endorsed the practice of “microlooting,” which they initially defined as “taking small things from big corporations.” Within minutes it became clear that pretty much any form of theft could be justified under that heading. When confronted with the hypothetical question, “Would you steal a car?” Piker answered, “If I could get away with it, if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property, I would do it.” By that same line of reasoning, they went on to express admiration for those who murder CEOs.

In that post, I cited the Sages’ statement (Sanhedrin 108a) that Dor ha’Mabul (the Generation of the Flood) “transgressed everything, but their fate was only sealed because of chamas.” I paraphrased Ramban’s explanation (Bereishis 6:13) that this is because unlike avodah zarah (idolatry) and arayos (sexual immorality), chamas is obviously destructive to society. Therefore, those who commit chamas knowingly engage in their own destruction. For a fuller exposition on this approach, see my article Bereishis/Noach: Why God Hates Hamas (חמס and حماس).

When I wrote about that NYT podcast, I was operating on Ramban’s definition of chamas as “ha’gezel ve’ha’oshek – robbery and oppression.” That’s always been the default way I imagine that society. I pictured the chamas to be of a lawless character, in which people take what they want by force, as suggested by the plain meaning of “the sons of rulers saw that the daughters of man were beautiful, and they took for themselves wives from whomever they chose” (ibid. 6:2). Having recently reread and rewatched Cloud Atlas, I can’t help but associate to the motto of the evil Dr. Henry Goose: “The weak are meat, and the strong do eat.”

It wasn’t until this week that I learned of the view by which chamas actually refers to microlooting, albeit defined halachically rather than in the anti-corporate sense championed by Piker and his ilk.

The two references to chamas in Bereishis 6:11-13 are the basis of the conclusion that chamas sealed their verdict:

The earth was corrupt before God (ha’Elohim) and the earth was filled with chamas. God (Elohim) saw the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its way on the earth. God said to Noach, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with chamas because of them, and I am about to destroy them with the earth.”

R. Acha, in the Talmud Yerushalmi Bava Metzia 4:2, defines the term chamas through an example:

It is written, “For the earth is filled with chamas because of them.” What was their chamas? A person would go out carrying a basket full of lupines (tormusin), and they would intentionally take less than the value of a perutah – a matter that cannot be brought before the judges. (See also Bereishis Rabbah 31:5.)

The chamas of Dor ha’Mabul was an unambiguously illegal act, but unlike the full range of microlooting tacitly endorsed by the NYT, chamas refers specifically to stealing an amount that cannot be prosecuted in court. Claude informs me that the legal term for this is de minimis, from the principle de minimis non curat lex (“the law does not concern itself with trifles”). In halacha, that amount is less than the value of a perutah, or around 4-5 cents. ^[1] My rebbi, Rabbi Morton Moskowitz zt”l, used to give the example of taking office supplies from one’s workplace for personal use without permission: an unequivocal act of theft in the eyes of halacha, but one that could not be taken to Beis Din (a Jewish court of law).

This new definition of chamas lowers the bar for the cardinal sin that destroyed the world. Why, out of all the transgressions committed by Dor ha’Mabul, did halachic microlooting seal their fate?

The explanation given by Ramban cited in my article can still work, even though he doesn’t adopt the Yerushalmi’s definition of chamas: “The reason is because it is a common-sense mitzvah and doesn’t require a prophet to warn about.” Anyone can (or should be able to) see that a self-evidently self-destructive crime like theft erodes society. The fact that such behavior became pervasive shows that the generation was beyond hope of doing teshuvah. Rav Hirsch (Bereishis 6:11) is consistent with Ramban. He underscores the insidious harm of a crime that is easy to commit and can’t be prosecuted in human courts, implying that these thieves were aware of the harm they inflicted:

Such a wrong cannot be caught by a human court – eino yotzei b’dinim – but, committed over and over, it gradually buries one’s fellow.

But the Kli Yakar (Bereishis 6:13) provides a different kind of explanation. He begins by noting an allusion to the Yerushalmi’s definition of chamas in the word “ha’Elohim”:

and the earth became corrupt before ha’elohim, etc. – Elohim means the judges [in this context rather than “God”], for they were robbing less than the value of a perutah, which is not extracted through judges, and the eyes of the law see, yet it is not within the power of its hand to save the tears of the oppressed; therefore it says “before ha’elohim,” literally before them. And for this reason, “and the earth was filled with chamas.”

He then cites midrashic evidence from the Yalkut Shimoni on Tehilim 1 (Remez #614):

We find a support for this in the Yalkut on Tehilim: “‘Praiseworthy is the man’ (Tehilim 1:1) – this is Noach, etc.; ‘Therefore the wicked will not stand in judgment’ (ibid. 1:5) – this is Dor ha’Mabul.”

From where is it implied that this verse speaks of Dor ha’Mabul? It appears that [the Yalkut] relied on the beginning of the matter: “Not so the wicked, but rather like the chaff that the wind drives away” (ibid. 1:4). That is to say, “not so” (lo chen, read as “not honest”), meaning, they were not honest (kenim) and truthful in their deeds, since they schemed to rob little by little, “like the chaff” – that which lacks [even] the value of a perutah, “that the wind (ruach) drives away,” [i.e.,] the judges, in whom is the spirit (ruach) of Hashem. Therefore “the wicked will not stand in judgment,” for it was not in their [the judges’] hands to bring them to stand in judgment, for the judge does not attend to [a claim of] less than the value of a perutah.

And for this reason, even the sinner stood in the congregation of the tzadikim (righteous) and said, “I am righteous like you.” This is what it says: “and sinners in the congregation of the righteous” (ibid. 1:5), for both of them were brazen [enough] to say, “I am just like you.” And [even] if they concealed their wickedness from people, nevertheless before Hashem it was revealed who is the tzadik and who is the rasha (wicked one); this is what it says: “For Hashem knows the way of the tzadikim, and the way of the resha’im will perish” (ibid. 1:6).

According to the Kli Yakar, this isn’t the case of someone who sneaks an envelope from his office without asking and justifies it by saying, “It’s such a small amount that it doesn’t even count” or “Surely they won’t care about this.” These chamas-thieves were schemers. Not only did they steal with eyes wide open, knowing full well that the victims would be helpless to seek redress, but they considered themselves just as righteous as those who don’t steal at all. That is a special kind of degeneracy: one that denies Divine justice and regards human power as the only true good. It really does boil down to “the weak are meat, and the strong do eat.”

The definition of microlooting praised by the Hasan Pikers of this world may not be identical with Chazal’s, in scope or intent, but “If I could get away with it … I would do it” is the same principle invoked by the lupine thieves. The Kli Yakar’s “I am just like you” partakes of the same moral equivalency reflected in “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules, So Why Should I?” Both trample Divine justice while allowing the perpetrators to bask in an aura of righteousness.

^[1] If you find this difficult on account of the halacha that Bnei Noach are liable for stealing even less than the value of a perutah, as the Rambam codifies in Hilchos Melachim u’Milchamos 9:9, see the Ohr ha’Chayim on Bereishis 6:11 who tries to work out an answer. In my opinion, the simplest answer is that Chazal in these midrashim are not concerned with providing an actual halachic analysis of the sin committed by Dor ha’Mabul, but are merely providing a midrashic exposition on our pesukim.

What parallels do you see between the microlooting of Dor ha’Mabul and the NYT-endorsed variety?

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WITATM Round-up: September 2026

If you follow me on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, or in the Substack app, I’d wager it’s impossible for you not to be aware of my What I’m Thinking About This Morning posts, which I share every weekday morning. But I know—I just know—there are people who are interested in my content yet completely unaware of these (week)daily posts.

I also know there are people who are aware of these posts and want to read them but either don’t have time to keep up or prefer print-friendly content over digital formats.

If that sounds like you, you might be interested in my latest experiment: a monthly round-up of all my WITATM posts at the end of each month! While the images accompanying these posts are sometimes an essential part of the content, I realize that most people wouldn’t want to print a version with all the images—so I’ve created a text-only PDF instead. Here are the entries:

Here’s the version with images, which is truer to the spirit of my WITATM.

Here’s the version without images, which is friendlier for printing.

Enjoy!

If you have any thoughts on any of the individual WITATM posts, or on this monthly round-up experiment, or about my substack writing or content in general, let me know in the comments!

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If you’ve gained from what you’ve learned here, please consider supporting my work via Patreon, Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal — links below. Even a small contribution helps cover production costs and gives me the freedom to create more Torah content. To sponsor a day’s or week’s worth of content, or to inquire about tutoring or teaching, reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail. Thank you for listening, reading, and supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Patreon | [Venmo: @Matt-Schneeweiss] | [Zelle/PayPal: mattschneeweiss at gmail]

Substack | YouTube | YUTorah | Instagram

Podcasts: The Stoic Jew | Machshavah Lab | The Mishlei Podcast | Rambam Bekius | The Tefilah Podcast

WhatsApp Content Hub | Old Blog | Amazon Wishlist

The Torah content for the remainder of October has been sponsored by Naomi Schwartz Rothschild, who writes: “My stepmother was nifteres. She was a mother to me for almost 20 years. She called me her daughter. She was always positive and b’simchah. My Ima also helped and then took over my father’s (z״l) Partners in Torah when he had difficulty and then couldn’t do it all.” May the memory of Chava Leah bas Tzivia Rochel be for a blessing.

Bereishis: Rav Hirsch vs. the World on Divine “Emotions”

The very end of this week’s parashah (Bereishis 6:5-8) sets up the events of next week’s parashah:

Hashem saw that the evil of man was great on the earth, and that every design of his heart’s thoughts was only evil, all day long. Hashem regretted that He had made man on earth, and He was pained to His heart. Hashem said, “I will wipe out the man whom I have created from the face of the earth, from man to animal to creeping things to the birds of the heavens, because I regret that I have made them.” But Noach found favor in the eyes of Hashem.

There are at least two major problems here. First, how can Hashem “regret”? This would seem to imply imperfection on His part, suggesting that His initial assessment of creation as a whole was flawed, and that He now regrets at least one aspect of that creation and would no longer deem it “very good.” Moreover, the Torah says: “God is not a man to say falsehood, or a human to regret” (Bamidbar 23:19), later echoed by the navi: “And also, the Eternal One of Israel does not lie and does not regret, for He is not a man, that He should regret” (I Shmuel 15:29).

Second, how can Hashem be “pained to His heart”? Hashem is not physical and has no physical qualities, including emotions. And unlike human beings, who “contain multitudes” of feelings, experiences, and moods, Hashem is absolutely One and has no parts, no multiplicity, no characteristics or divisions or internal dynamics of any kind.

Perhaps the most explicit anchor for both problems is the navi’s statement: “I am Hashem; I have not changed” (Malachi 3:6). The Hebrew word for “regret” (N.CH.M.) literally means “to change one’s mind” (see the section “Defining Nechamah” in my article Eich Enacheim), and all emotions involve a change from one state to another.

Unsurprisingly, I am not the first one to notice these two problems. In each and every generation, our greatest thinkers have arisen and addressed them. For a variety of solutions, see Targum Onkelos, Saadia Gaon (Tafsir and commentary), Ibn Ezra (in his first and second commentaries), Ramban, Chizkuni, Rabbeinu Bachya, Ralbag, Abravanel, Sforno, R. Naftali Herz Wessely, R. Reggio, ha’Kesav ve’ha’Kabbalah, and R. Dovid Tzvi Hoffmann.

This list is far from comprehensive; it includes only the Chumash commentaries I regularly consult. It doesn’t even include the thinkers who addressed such matters in their philosophical works, such as R. Bachya ibn Paquda (Chovos ha’Levavos 1:10), R. Yehuda ha’Levi (Kuzari 3:73), R. Yosef Albo (Sefer ha’Ikkarim 2:14-15), and most of all, Rambam (in the Moreh 1:29, but really the whole first chelek, and other works). That list goes on as well.

As a representative of the group, I’ll cite one of the clearest and most concise presentations. Radak writes:

Hashem regretted – As for [the verse’s] saying regretted, the Torah spoke in human language (dibrah Torah ki’leshon bnei adam). For in truth, “… He is not a human being, that He should regret” (I Shmuel 15:29), for there is no change of will in Him. And He was saddened in His heart – This, too, is metaphorical. For in truth, before Him there is neither joy nor sadness, and He does not change from one disposition to another.

Radak raises both issues: Hashem has no emotions and cannot change. He states the time-honored solution: “the Torah speaks in human language.” He then explains how these anthropomorphic (technically, anthropopathic) expressions were intended metaphorically:

And the opposite of He was saddened [is]: “… May God rejoice in His handiwork” (Tehilim 104:31). All of this is metaphorical: just as a human being rejoices over something which pleases him and is saddened by something that displeases him, so does this narrative attribute such things to God. It is [said] of Him as a borrowed [expression]. Joy and sadness in a human being are in the heart, which is why [the verse] says figuratively concerning God: “in His heart.”

Some of the aforementioned commentators provide sophisticated elucidations of Divine regret and pain, yet there is an elegant simplicity in Radak’s approach. The Torah is simply conveying the feeling that we would have if we willed something to go one way and it went against our will.

However, one of my go-to commentators stands in stark opposition to all the approaches cited above: Rav Hirsch. He looked upon them and declared, in so many words, “[Sie] kamen der Gefahr nahe, selbst die Persönlichkeit Gottes zu verflüchtigen.” Here is Claude’s translation of his original German critique of the philosophical approach:

Regarding these and similar anthropomorphic expressions about God, we permit ourselves a general remark. People have philosophized around these expressions for so long, in order to remove every thought of corporeality, that in the end they came close to the danger of causing even the personality of God to evaporate. If that were the Torah’s intention, it could easily have avoided such expressions. But this latter danger is greater than the former.

These two expressions rescue the two most essential concepts: the freedom of God and the freedom of man. Not for nothing does it say, “When Hashem saw,” etc. The wickedness of man was not necessary. A seeing on God’s part had to come first, before God knew it; this expression thus guarantees us the awareness of human freedom. And the fate that befalls man does not come about as a result of physical causality; it is preceded by an examining decision of God, and the decision itself pains the One Who decides.

All this presupposes the personality and freedom of God and keeps them pure in [our] awareness. Already the Raavad, one of our most Jewish thinkers, is of the view that this awareness of the personality of God is much more important than speculation over whether one can predicate this or that of God.

I do not believe Rav Hirsch is affirming that God has emotions or undergoes change. To my knowledge, he agrees with the fundamental principles of Divine incorporeality and immutability. Rather, Rav Hirsch is bothered by the interpretive trend of “overphilosophizing” the plain meaning of the text to the point where the richness of the mashal (metaphorical expression) is drowned out by the more philosophically accurate nimshal (signified meaning).

In this case, he maintains that the Torah went out of its way to use gross anthropomorphic language – not only Divine “regret” and “pain,” but also Divine “seeing” – to convey another pair of fundamental philosophical concepts: God’s freedom and man’s freedom. And he feels that stripping away the metaphorical layer would result in a loss of these two critical pillars of Torah.

When I encountered this Rav Hirsch, I was suddenly hit not by a single memory but by an entire saga. Back in my seventh and final year of yeshiva (2008-2009), a discussion (debate?) erupted on a well-known discussion forum for Jewish educators. Broadly speaking, the topic was how to teach students about Hashem’s “emotions,” and what responsible pedagogy looks like when presenting beliefs that are embraced by one camp but deemed heretical by another. Participants included former high school teachers of mine, rabbeim in yeshiva, friends, peers, bloggers, “big name” educators I didn’t know at the time but would encounter later in other contexts, and many others. The discussion spanned nearly nine weeks and, despite getting heated at points, remained surprisingly civil throughout. ^[1]

In that debate, this Rav Hirsch was cited by one of my former high school teachers, who likewise worried that the “Maimonidean” ^[2] approach of “philosophizing away” corporealism is dangerous, insofar as it “depersonalizes” God.

I’m not here to argue with Rav Hirsch. He’s an independent thinker who is entitled to his opinion. But I am here to express my amazement at those who, by championing the Hirschian view, blithely disregard the generations of chachamim who held fast to the very approach he criticizes. They, too, were aware of the cost of such “depersonalization,” and yet, they still wrote what they wrote in their commentaries. Emunas chachamim should give one pause before rejecting an approach taken by so many of the greatest thinkers in our tradition.

^[1] No, I’m not going to link to that debate here. First, it’s no longer accessible. Second, I know I wouldn’t want someone to publicly reignite a debate like that from 18 years ago that I was a participant in. But I do plan on sharing the entire thing with paid subscribers next week.

^[2] I didn’t realize Onkelos, Saadia Gaon, R. Yehuda ha’Levi, Ramban, R. Yosef Albo, and all the others were “Maimonidean.” Yeesh.

What do you think of Rav Hirsch’s approach? More pointedly, if you agree with Rav Hirsch’s approach, how do you contend with the fact that SO MANY thinkers in our tradition differ? I don’t mean to suggest that we decide the truth based majority. I mean, “Have you thought about what they would argue back? If so, how would you respond? If not, why not?”

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Hoshana Rabbah 5787: Ho’il Moshe’s Theory of Hoshana Rabbah

I’d describe myself as a Shemini Atzeres enthusiast but a Hoshana Rabbah grinch.

I love thinking about Shemini Atzeres! The classical sources have so little to say about its themes, which is what makes it such a tantalizingly mysterious puzzle. My favorite explanation is that of R. Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg,^[1] but I still enjoy looking for new approaches each year. I also relish the experiential dimension of this final chag of the moadim cycle, especially in Galus, where we get a full day of “pure” Yom Tov before capping it off with Simchas Torah. I love the midrash cited by Rashi (Vayikra 23:36) about the king saying, “Children, I beg of you, stay one day more with me; it is so hard for me to part with you!” That’s the vibe I feel and cherish on Shemini Atzeres.

But Hoshana Rabbah is a different story. I struggle to connect to it for many reasons: partially because I was halachically traumatized by the extra-long davening in my early years as a Jew, partially because my frame of reference is Maimonidean and the Rambam doesn’t mention anything about “the seventh day of Sukkos” having its own special character except in reference to the Mikdash and its commemoration, and partially because the day has accumulated so many extraneous customs, many of which are kabbalistic, superstitious, and/or baseless. And all the additional selichos, tachanunim, and other Yomim Nora’im-coded embellishments? Ugh. Aren’t the Yomim Nora’im over by now? And yeah, I know the Rema brings down many of these customs in Orach Chayim 664:1, but I’m writing about my grinchy feelings here, not what should or shouldn’t be done in practice.

I may get a mild adrenaline rush from thwacking my aravos on the ground two or three times, but that’s about the extent of my Hoshana Rabbah joy.

Last year, however, I came across a new approach to Hoshana Rabbah and Shemini Atzeres: that of Ho’il Moshe (R. Moisè Tedeschi, 1821–1898). I was intrigued by the conservative (lowercase “c”) approach he took in framing both days within his analysis of the moadim as agricultural holidays.

He begins with Pesach, Shavuos, and Sukkos:

And furthermore, you, pleasant reader, will acknowledge that all the festivals of Israel, a people destined for the work of the field, were distinguished days for the farmers: the festival of Pesach in the spring, that is to say, at the beginning of the barley harvest … the festival of Shavuos, the end of the harvest, the days of the wheat harvest and the days of the first fruits of the tree; and the festival of Sukkos, the time of ingathering, when they gathered their produce from the field, where they had left it to dry, into the house. But in the days of Nissan there also falls the day of their going out from slavery to freedom; therefore they established for it one special day for the remembrance of the redemption, and from the second day they began to celebrate the beginning of the harvest by waving a wave-offering to Hashem; and afterwards, on the day they finished the harvest and began to gather the fruit of the tree, they would celebrate and bring a new meal-offering, the two loaves.

I find it interesting how prominently Ho’il Moshe features the agricultural aspects of these festivals in contrast to the historical events they commemorate. He notes that the first day of Pesach commemorates the Exodus but regards the rest of the seven-day festival as celebrating the harvest. He doesn’t mention anything about Shavuos commemorating the Giving of the Torah, which isn’t surprising, given that this isn’t stated anywhere in the pesukim.^[2] And despite the fact that the mitzvah of sukkah explicitly commemorates our sojourn in the Wilderness, he doesn’t mention that as a theme of the chag as a whole.

He then explains the relationship between the Moadei Chodesh ha’Shevii (Holidays of the Seventh Month):

And in the seventh month, which is the month of ingathering, the farmers would celebrate the whole month with a simchah (rejoicing) of vanity, and frivolity, and drunkenness, which lead to lewdness (the word chag is from the root CH.G.G., whose meaning is dancing and round-dancing); and in place of this the Torah sanctified all the festivals to Hashem, so that they would rejoice in them with the simchah shel mitzvah (rejoicing of mitzvah). And it sanctified the first day in it as the Day of Remembrance, that is to say, to contemplate and take to heart the kindnesses of God toward them, and to submit before Him in praying that it should be so always. And the tenth day in it (according to the tradition of our Rabbis, founded upon the verses of Parashas Eikev, the day of forgiveness of the sin of the Calf) it sanctified as a Day of Atonement. And afterwards, from the fifteenth day of the month onward, the days of simchah begin, but on condition that there be before Hashem a simchah shel mitzvah.

My takeaway from Ho’il Moshe’s explanation is as follows: because the ingathering season was prone to inappropriate celebrations, the Torah set up Rosh ha’Shanah and Yom ha’Kippurim so we’d enter this fraught month in a spirit of gratitude, reflection, and submissiveness before Hashem, thereby increasing the chances of celebrating with a simchah shel mitzvah instead of a simchah of vanity, frivolity, drunkenness, and lewdness.

And this explanation is the basis for his theory of Hoshana Rabbah and Shemini Atzeres:

And on the last day, as on the last day of Pesach, which were perhaps days of great joy for the farmers since they are the end of the days of their festival, a day of atzarah (assembly) and gathering was established, to pray to Hashem for their success in the future. And if so, they are similar to the Day of Remembrance and Yom ha’Kippurim, days of atzeres, that is to say, days of tefilah and tachanunim (supplication). But since they established the day of Shemini Atzeres for the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael as the day of the joy of the completion of the Torah, they moved a day of teshuvah earlier, to the day before it, which is the day of Hoshana Rabbah.

Accordingly, the statement of the Rabbis is exceedingly justified: “On Pesach the world is judged concerning grain, on Atzeres (Shavuos) concerning the fruits of the tree […] and on the Chag (Sukkos) they are judged concerning water” (Rosh ha’Shanah 1:2), since each time they would go up to Yerushalayim and bring the tribute of their freewill offering to the Mikdash, they would pray for their needs in the coming days: on Pesach for the grain, on Atzeres for the fruits of the tree, and on the Chag for the rains of the year, which fall in the days of autumn. And according to their deeds, so was their prayer accepted or rejected. And in particular the day of Shemini Atzeres, on which they would pray for the rains, the mainstay of their livelihood, was for them like a day of scrutiny of their deeds and of teshuvah from their sins, as the day of Hoshana Rabbah was afterwards instituted for us.

Based on Ho’il Moshe’s framing, here is how I now view the structure of these moadim: Chag ha’Sukkos, a period of heightened celebration for the ingathering of the harvest, is bracketed by Rosh ha’Shanah and Yom ha’Kippurim on one side and Hoshana Rabbah and Shemini Atzeres on the other side. Both bracket-pairings are associated with tefilah, teshuvah, and the solemn awareness that our fate depends on Hashem’s mercy and kindness, and both mitigate the risk of the inappropriate forms of simchah that the month of ingathering would otherwise be prone to.

It turns out that the Yomim Nora’im vibes of Hoshana Rabbah are entirely appropriate: it is supposed to be a day on which we scrutinize our deeds, engage in teshuvah, and beseech Hashem for success in the future!

Now, you might be wondering, “Really?! This take is what makes Hoshana Rabbah more meaningful to you? But we don’t even live in an agrarian society! How is this even relatable?” My response? Exactly! At least in those days, we keenly felt how dependent we were on the yield of the land, and could channel that awareness into teshuvah for the judgment on rain. Nowadays, most of us are so far removed from the sources of our sustenance that we need all the reminders we can get. If Hoshana Rabbah can become that kind of reminder, then I’m all for it.

I’m sure this approach can be developed further. I’m just thrilled that I have a new framework to explore. And with that, I wish you a successful Hoshana Rabbah and a chag sameach!

^[1] See my article Shemini Atzeres 5781: The Festival of Holding On.

^[2] See my article Shavuos is NOT About the Giving of the Torah for the Abravanel’s full exposition of this view.

What’s your understanding of Hoshana Rabbah? How do you relate to it?

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Maimonidean Musings: Mitzvos Between Man and God, or Between Man and Himself?

I recently heard the following claim: “There are three types of mitzvos: bein adam la’chaveiro (between man and his fellow), bein adam la’Makom (between man and God), and bein adam la’atzmo (between man and himself).”

At the time, two thoughts occurred to me. First, as far as I was aware, Chazal refer only to the first two categories (Yoma 8:9), not the third. This wouldn’t mean that the category is invalid, only that the bein adam la’atzmo terminology has a later provenance. Second, I vaguely recalled that Rambam’s explanation of bein adam la’Makom was strikingly similar to the intuitive notion of bein adam la’atzmo. I wanted to share my findings in this short article.

I started my research with Claude and ChatGPT. Both reported that the earliest mention of bein adam la’atzmo as a distinct category of mitzvos can be found in the Sefer ha’Ikkarim 3:25, by R. Yosef Albo (15^th century). When I looked up the source myself, I was shocked by what I found. The chapter begins as follows:

One of the Christian scholars raised an objection to me and said: A thing is to be tested by reference to its causes … When you test the Law of Moses, you will find it defective in all of them … [It is defective] in respect to the form, for a law should embrace three things: 1. What is between man and God, i.e. commandments relating to divine worship, called ceremoniales in their language … 2. Commandments between man and his fellow; these are judgments, called judiciales, i.e. the commandments having their origin in the dealings of a man with others; these are necessitated by the political association. 3. Commandments between a man and himself, called morales. These are precepts which a man follows in order to acquire a good disposition in his soul, such as fear of sin, humility, and so on, which develop a good disposition in the soul.

R. Albo then goes on to defend the Torah against these charges. But the noteworthy thing is that the bein adam la’atzmo categorization isn’t his own! The Christian is the one who introduces the threefold classification, and R. Albo merely responds to his arguments within that framework. Again, this doesn’t render it an invalid paradigm, but it does seem to indicate that bein adam la’atzmo didn’t originate with Chazal, the Geonim, or the Rishonim.

Next, I tracked down the partially recalled source in the Rambam. It’s located in the Moreh ha’Nevuchim 3:35, which is the preface to his taamei ha’mitzvos (rationales for the commandments) section. Rambam begins by thematically dividing the 613 mitzvos into fourteen categories. These categories differ somewhat from his fourteen-fold categorization in his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah. He then writes:

It is known that all the mitzvos are divided into two parts: transgressions that are bein adam la’chaveiro and transgressions that are bein adam la’Makom. Of these classes that we have distinguished and enumerated, those between man and his fellow are categories #5, #6, #7, and part of #3; all the other categories are between man and God. For every mitzvah, whether a positive command or a prohibition, whose purpose is to bring about some middah (character trait) or hashkafah (view of reality), or the rectification of actions that pertain to the individual himself and bring him toward shleimus (perfection or completeness), [Chazal] call “between man and God,” even though in truth it may lead to matters between man and his fellow. But this happens only after the mediation of many things and by way of general considerations, and it does not in the first instance lead to harming another. Understand this.

I find this subversive on two levels. First, it essentially makes bein adam la’Makom into bein adam l’atzmo. And appropriately so, since nothing we do affects God in any way, as the Rambam underscores throughout his writings. Second, it narrows the gap between bein adam la’Makom and bein adam la’chaveiro. Every bein adam la’Makom mitzvah brings about a middah or hashkafah in us, which in turn ripples outward into our interpersonal relations.

This is consistent with the Rambam’s explanation of ve’halachta bi’drachav (emulating His ways) in Hilchos Deios 1:5-6 and his take on Yirmiyahu 9:23 at the end of the Moreh. And perhaps this is what Rambam means at the end of Hilchos Megilah v’Chanukah: “the entire Torah was given to make shalom in the world, as it is stated, ‘its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace’ (Mishlei 3:17).” There is much more food for thought here!

Are you aware of any pre-Acharonim reference to bein adam la’atzmo? I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong. Also, what do you think of the Rambam’s explanation of bein adam la’Makom and its implications?

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Shabbos Shuvah 5787: How to Reject Hashem’s Help in Doing Teshuvah

The fourth chapter of Rambam’s Hilchos Teshuvah is devoted to the “twenty-four things that impede teshuvah,” which he divides into five groups. The first group consists of four things, about which he says:

Four of them are a great iniquity, and if a person does one of the four, Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu doesn’t provide him with the means to do teshuvah, due to the magnitude of his sin.

The major question is: what does it mean that Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu will not provide him with the means to do teshuvah? Rambam cannot mean that teshuvah is impossible for such a person. At the end of the chapter (4:6) he emphatically states that “even though [these things] impede teshuvah, they do not preclude teshuvah.” So what does he mean? How does Hashem’s relationship with this sinner and his teshuvah change?

I’m not going to analyze or even cite all four iniquities listed by the Rambam. I’d like to focus on the fourth iniquity in this category, which subdivides into two cases:

One who says, “I’ll sin and do teshuvah”; included in this is one who says, “I’ll sin and Yom ha’Kippurim will atone.”

What is it about these two sinners that precludes Divine assistance? Why won’t Hashem help them do teshuvah?

To answer these questions, we need to ask a more basic one: how does Hashem help us do teshuvah in general? Rambam answers in Hilchos Teshuvah 6:5:

What did David mean when he said, “Good and upright is Hashem; therefore, He instructs sinners on the path. He guides the humble in justice and teaches the humble His way” (Tehilim 25:8-9)? This [refers to the fact that] He sent them neviim (prophets) who make known to them the ways of Hashem and bring them back in teshuvah. Furthermore, He implanted within them the capacity to learn and to understand, for this tendency is within every human being, namely, that as long as he is drawn along the ways of chochmah (wisdom) and tzedek (righteousness), he [continually] desires them and pursues them. This is what the Sages meant by, “Ba le’taher mesayin oso – one who comes to be purified will be assisted,” meaning to say, he will find himself assisted in the matter.

Hashem’s assistance in doing teshuvah isn’t supernatural. First, He provides guidance through the neviim. We may not have neviim today, but their teachings are just as available now as they were then. Second, He endowed humans with the capacity to learn, and embedded a “virtuous cycle” in our nature whereby the more we are drawn to chochmah and tzedek, the more we pursue them. This is how Hashem helps us do teshuvah.

One who sins with intent to do teshuvah has ipso facto removed that sin and its teshuvah from the realm of chochmah and tzedek altogether. To him, there’s no reality to his actions. It’s all a game, and he believes he’s found a way to game the system. Therefore, the Divine assistance (that is, the virtuous cycle of being drawn to chochmah and tzedek) simply doesn’t kick in, and Hashem’s call to teshuvah through His servants the neviim will not reach him.

Yet, as the Rambam points out in the conclusion of chapter four cited above:

All these things and the like, even though they impede teshuvah, they do not preclude teshuvah. Rather, if a person did teshuvah from them, he is a baal teshuvah, and he has a portion in the World to Come.

The person who sins with intent to do teshuvah or with the intent that Yom ha’Kippurim will atone will lack the benefit of the momentum that assists other sinners on the path of teshuvah, but he can nevertheless engage in the process through his own efforts. Once he chooses to heed the words of the neviim and reengages in the pursuit of chochmah and tzedek, he has dropped the game he was playing and is now approaching sin and teshuvah as a reality. Accordingly, he will once again enjoy the Divine assistance Hashem grants to all those who engage in sincere teshuvah.

This is the message Ne’ilah broadcasts to all ordinary sinners, even the bad ones, who seek to do teshuvah: “You give a hand to rebellious sinners, and Your right hand is extended to accept those who engage in teshuvah.”

What do you think of this approach? How would you answer the questions?

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Rosh ha’Shanah 5787: How to Enjoy Rosh ha’Shanah

Many Jews relate to Rosh ha’Shanah as a day of utter solemnity and gravity to the point where they forget that it’s a Yom Tov with a mitzvah of simchah (rejoicing). The Aruch ha’Shulchan (OC 597:2) addresses that mentality:

This is the language of our master, the Beis Yosef: “[On Rosh ha’Shanah] we eat, drink, and rejoice; and we shouldn’t fast on Rosh ha’Shanah nor on Shabbos Shuvah. However, we shouldn’t eat to complete satiety, nor should we behave frivolously; the fear of Hashem should be on our faces.” The Maharshal wouldn’t eat fish on Rosh ha’Shanah because they were beloved to him, and he wanted to diminish his desire in a specific matter. One also shouldn’t wear choshuv (distinguished) clothing on Rosh ha’Shanah like on every other Yom Tov, but white garments (Bach and M.A.).

We [however] are not accustomed to wear white garments on Rosh ha’Shanah, only on Yom ha’Kippurim. We also eat and drink [on Rosh ha’Shanah] just like on other Yomim Tovim. Behold, it is an explicit verse [about Rosh ha’Shanah]: “eat fatty [foods] and drink sweet [drinks]” (Nechemiah 8:10). Only in this regard is Rosh ha’Shanah different from other Yomim Tovim: we extend our tefilah until long after midday. Also, there are those who do not sleep on the first day of Rosh ha’Shanah, based on a Yerushalmi: “If one sleeps on Rosh ha’Shanah, his mazal sleeps.” We don’t know where this Yerushalmi is found. The Arizal wasn’t concerned about this (and said that after the shofar blasts and after midday, the judgments have already been sweetened).

The Aruch ha’Shulchan acknowledges the opinions of the Beis Yosef and the Maharshal, who maintain that our simchah on Rosh ha’Shanah ought to be tempered or diminished. He similarly cites the Bach and Magen Avraham, who advocate the custom of donning somber white garments on Rosh ha’Shanah, just like on Yom ha’Kippurim.

But after citing these views that paint a picture of a more austere Rosh ha’Shanah, he contrasts them with his own view, which he anchors in the characterization of Rosh ha’Shanah in Nechemiah. Here is that passage in context:

Nechemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra ha’Kohen, the scribe, and the Levites who helped the people understand, said to all the people, “This day is holy to Hashem your God; don’t mourn and don’t weep.” For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the Torah. And he said to them, “Go, eat fatty [foods] and drink sweet [drinks], and send portions to those who have nothing prepared, for today is holy to our Lord. Don’t be sad, for the joy of Hashem is your strength!” So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, “Hush, for the day is holy; don’t be sad.” And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great rejoicing, for they understood the words that had been made known to them. (Nechemiah 8:9-12)

Ralbag (ibid. 8:10) explains the key verse in light of oneg (enjoyment) and simchas Yom Tov (holiday rejoicing):

Go, eat fatty [foods] etc. – he said this because of oneg Yom Tov, and because the Torah commands us on all our occasions of holiday rejoicing to bring joy to the needy with all the good that Hashem has given us. He commanded them to send portions to those who have nothing prepared, namely, the poor. And because they read Torah until midday, we learn from here that the moadim (festivals) were given to gladden the soul during part of [each of] them, this being involvement in Torah, and to gladden the body during part of [each of] them, this being [physical] enjoyment in foods and pleasant beverages.

for the joy of Hashem is your strength – this means to say: the fortress and strength that you strengthen yourselves in is that you rejoice in what Hashem wants you to rejoice in, namely, the moadim, for in them is a wondrous guidance to apprehend Hashem, as we explained in our commentary on the Torah. And with this simchah and harchavas nefesh (expansiveness of the soul) it is possible to achieve this more.

These sources serve as a welcome reminder of a commonly overlooked aspect of Rosh ha’Shanah, namely, that it is supposed to be a happy day filled not only with spiritual activities but with physical and psychological enjoyment as well. It is easy to get so caught up in fear, shame, and guilt that we end up neglecting simchas Yom Tov, which applies to Rosh ha’Shanah, just like it does to every other Yom Tov. True, we are being judged, and that is a cause for fear and seriousness, but not to the point where we lose sight of the nature of the day, and certainly not to the point where we neglect such an important mitzvah as simchas Yom Tov.

But even if we adopt the untempered simchas Yom Tov on Rosh ha’Shanah as per the Aruch ha’Shulchan, there is still a reality of eimas ha’din – the fear of the Divine judgment that takes place. How do we balance our simchah with this fear? This is similar to the quandary raised by the words of David ha’Melech: “Serve Hashem with fear and rejoice in trembling” (Tehilim 2:11). On the surface, it would seem that fear and trembling are antithetical to rejoicing – and yet, we are expected to experience both emotions in our avodas Hashem.

One of the main reasons why we find this so difficult on Rosh ha’Shanah is that the yetzer ha’ra, by nature, is drawn to extremes. Those who are overcome by their yetzer will either spend the entire day cowering in fear or frolic the day away in carefree indulgence without any eimas ha’din. How are we to embody both emotions?

The Gemara (Berachos 30b) directly addresses the question about David’s words:

What is the meaning of “rejoice in trembling”? Rav Adda bar Matana said in the name of Rabbah: “Where there is rejoicing, there should be trembling.”

Rabbah’s answer is cryptic. How does this resolve the paradox? How can rejoicing coexist with trembling? Rabbeinu Yonah (Talmidei Rabbeinu Yonah on Berachos 21a in the dapei ha’Rif) answers:

Where there is rejoicing, there should be trembling. The reason for this is that a person shouldn’t be drawn on from the simchah to the worldly enjoyments and forget the matters of the Creator. Therefore, it is necessary to intermingle them with one another so that he should be on the intermediate line (i.e., the middle path). This is the straightforward meaning of the verse, that even though by flesh and blood, fear and rejoicing are antithetical – for at a time when a person is afraid of another, he stands recoiling and worrying – but Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu is not like this. To the contrary, when a person contemplates His greatness and is in awe of Him, he rejoices and is glad in that awe because by means of it he is stirred to fulfill the mitzvos, and he is jubilant and exultant in its fulfillment, for he knows that his reward is with Him and his recompense before Him. Regarding simchah such as this, you will find that he said in one verse, “Serve Hashem with fear,” etc., and in another verse, “Serve Hashem with joy” – this means to say, you should serve Hashem with awe, and in that awe you should rejoice and be glad in it, as we have said.

Rabbeinu Yonah resolves the paradoxical directive by contrasting fear of a human being with awe of Hashem. He notes that fear of a human is characterized by “recoiling” and “worrying.” We recoil because we’re afraid of what he might do to us, and we worry because we don’t know what’s coming. Such a state is antithetical to joy, which is a drawing close to something we know is good.

In contrast, the “fear” evoked by Hashem is of a different character. It is a state of awe that stems from contemplating the greatness of the Creator. This awe is a source of joy because it spurs us to fulfill the mitzvos, for which we are promised reward. According to Rabbeinu Yonah, this is what it means to “rejoice in trembling”: we rejoice both in the awe itself and in the fulfillment of the mitzvos, knowing we will be rewarded for our service.

I’d like to suggest combining the ideas of Rabbeinu Yonah and Ralbag to achieve the proper balance of joy and awe on Rosh ha’Shanah. During the first half of the day, amid our awed recognition of the King, we should remember that serving Him ought to be a source of joy, since the mitzvos are for our own benefit. And during the second half of the day, we are commanded to engage in the mitzvah of simchah itself! But we must take care not to get “drawn on from the simchah to the worldly enjoyments and forget the matters of the Creator.” Thus, we fully engage the totality of the self, mind and body, in the service of Hashem, thereby experiencing true joy amid trembling.

I wish you all a joyously awesome day of Rosh ha’Shanah! “Go, eat fatty [foods] and drink sweet [drinks], and send portions to those who have nothing prepared, for today is holy to our Lord. Don’t be sad, for the joy of Hashem is your strength!” May the upcoming year be filled with simchah in our avodas Hashem!

What do you think of this approach (or these approaches)? How do you think we should strike a balance between rejoicing and awe on Rosh ha’Shanah?

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Q&A: Rambam on Female Intelligence and Teaching the Oral Torah to Women

Q&A Series Relaunch and Recap of the Paywall Justification

Last year I launched an experimental genre of articles on my Substack: Q&A posts, in which I’d share lightly edited versions of responses I’ve written in my high school Q&A WhatsApp group. In that inaugural post I explained the three reservations I had about sharing such Q&A responses publicly. See the preface to that article, Q&A: Walking Daled Amos Before Netilas Yadayim - Bunk Bed Edition, for my full reasoning. My compromise was to keep these posts behind a paywall.

Turns out, that was the only Q&A article I ended up writing! To be sure, I wrote MANY other lengthy responses to Q&A questions, but for some reason, I didn’t bother to refurbish them as paid-subscriber Substack articles.

Yesterday, I spent four hours writing a response to another Q&A question. This time, it was on a “hot topic” that I had wanted to address for a long time but always felt too daunted to write about. The fact that my student asked a very specific question, and that I was responding to that student (and his peers), made it easier for me to write. Had I attempted to write a full treatment of the topic for general audiences, I would have felt too intimidated to try.

When I finished, I was proud of the results. I once again thought, “It would be a shame if the only people who read this were my high school students.”

And so I’m going to attempt to relaunch that genre of Q&A articles by sharing what I wrote yesterday.

The Question in Context

This question actually came about tangentially. My student initially asked why kiddushin (halachic betrothal) can only be enacted by a man. I shared a philosophical response from my friend, Rabbi Joshua Maroof. His explanation was predicated on the claim that “while the woman is thought to have the ability to understand wisdom and to apply it practically, the man is thought to have a deficiency when it comes to translating abstract ideas into real life situations.” My student questioned this claim, saying:

I find it hard to believe that the [sic] for most of Jewish history the mainstream tradition believed that a womens [sic] ability to understand wisdom was superior to man’s because didn’t they hold that most women were incapable of learning certain things like talmud.

I countered this with:

Well, I don’t know what to tell you: the Gemara Niddah 45b concludes מלמד שנתן הקב”ה בינה יתירה באשה יותר מבאיש (“this teaches [us] that Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu endowed woman with greater understanding than man”), and בינה refers to the ability to apply principles to particulars. And that statement FACTUALLY was committed to writing in around 500 C.E., and was passed down orally for centuries before that.

My student responded:

Then why did many rishonim like the Rambam write that most women were [sic] able to learn torah in depth?

I’m 99% sure my student meant to write “that most women weren’t able to learn Torah in depth.” To this, I responded:

Rambam held that women were just as capable of understanding Talmud as men. In Hilchos Yesodei ha’Torah 4:13, he writes about the study of halacha and Gemara: ואפשר שידעם הכל, גדול וקטון, איש ואשה, בעל לב רחב ובעל לב קצר (“It is possible for everyone to know them – adult and minor, man and woman, one who possesses an abstract mind and one who possesses a narrow mind”).

That’s when the student asked his main question:

In gemmara class 2 years ago qe [sic] learned that In hilchot talmud Torah 1:13 the Rambam wrote:

“The sages commanded that a person should not teach his daughter Torah, because most women cannot concentrate their attention on study, and thus transform the words of Torah into idle matters because of their LACK OF UNDERSTANDING…”

If the Jewish tradition held that women were capable of higher wisdom to a GREATER extent than men, what did the Rambam mean by saying this?

I will note that this is an exceptional form of a question that could have been asked in a number of inferior ways. This student recalled learning a specific source (two years ago!) and challenged my claim based on that source.

My Answer

Below you’ll find the answer I gave my student with very few edits. The major difference is that when I answered my student, I only addressed the partial excerpt from the Rambam he cited. Here, I’ll share the entire halacha for context.

This happens to be one of the most misunderstood halachos in the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah. Before responding to your question, I want to clarify a few premises:

1. This is going to seem nitpicky, but it’s important to say out loud, especially because there are new students in this WhatsApp group who might not have been exposed to this before. The formulation of your question presupposes that there’s a monolithic entity of “Jewish tradition” that “holds by” certain views unanimously. I take issue with that premise. While there certainly are some core beliefs and positions that are unanimous (or near-unanimous) within traditional Judaism, there are MANY issues that are the subject of machlokess (disagreement and debate). Everyone knows this to be the case in matters of halacha, but this is even more so in matters of aggadah (non-halachic teachings), in which there is a wide range of views, some of which are diametrically opposed.

2. My last two responses in this thread were intended to challenge that assumption. You expressed your disbelief that “for most of Jewish history the mainstream tradition believed that a womens ability to understand wisdom was superior to man’s,” and I responded by quoting a piece of mainstream tradition from long ago in Jewish history which expresses precisely that view. You then asked, “why did many rishonim like the Rambam write that most women were able to learn torah in depth?” (I assume you meant to write “were NOT able to learn Torah in depth”). I responded by citing a statement from the Rambam in which he affirms that women ARE capable of learning Torah, specifically Gemara, in depth. My aim in responding this way was NOT to suggest that the views I cited were held unanimously; rather, I wanted to show that there ARE mainstream voices that do not express the views you seemed to think were mainstream.

3. But now the discussion is going to change because you’re asking me about a halacha as formulated by the Rambam, specifically. I am going to answer that question by presenting my understanding of the Rambam, specifically. I am NOT claiming that the Rambam’s view is unanimous or even that it’s the majority view among the Rishonim.

4. Moreover, I am NOT claiming that my understanding of the Rambam is the only valid understanding. I am well aware that what I’m about to say might not be what you learned two years ago in your Talmud class, and while I think I’m correct in my understanding, I don’t want you to think that what you’ve learned previously is entirely baseless. You’ll have to decide which reading makes the most sense to you.

First, here’s the text of the halacha you cited from the Rambam, with your excerpt in bold, followed by MY translation, which differs slightly from the one you were taught:

רמב”ם – משנה תורה: ספר המדע, הלכות תלמוד תורה א:יג

אשה שלמדה תורה יש לה שכר, אבל אינו כשכר האיש, מפני שלא נצטוות, וכל העושה דבר שאינו מצווה עליו אין שכרו כשכר המצווה שעשה, אלא פחות ממנו. ואף על פי שיש לה שכר, צוו חכמים שלא ילמד אדם את בתו תורה, מפני שרוב הנשים אין דעתן מכוונת להתלמד, והן מוציאין דברי תורה לדברי הבאי לפי עניות דעתן:

אמרו חכמים, כל המלמד את בתו תורה כאילו לימדה תפלות. במה דברים אמורים, בתורה שבעל פה, אבל תורה שבכתב, לא ילמד אותה לכתחלה, ואם למדה אינו כמלמדה תפלות:

Rambam – Mishneh Torah: Sefer ha’Mada, Hilchos Talmud Torah 1:13

A woman who studied Torah has reward, but it is not like the reward of the man, since she was not commanded; and anyone who does a thing he is not commanded in does not have reward like the reward of one who was commanded and did it, but rather less than his. And even though she has reward, the Sages commanded that a man not teach his daughter Torah, because the minds of most women are not directed toward being taught, and they turn words of Torah into divrei havai (empty nonsense) in accordance with the poverty of their knowledge.

The Sages said: anyone who teaches his daughter Torah, it is as though he taught her tiflus (frivolity). In what case were these words said? Regarding the Oral Torah. But the Written Torah, he should not teach it to her at the outset, and if he did teach her, he is not like one who teaches her tiflus.

My understanding of this Rambam is based primarily on the commentary Yad Peshuta (ad loc.), by R. Nachum Rabinovitch zt”l (1928-2020), “a Canadian-Israeli Religious Zionist rabbi and posek” (Wikipedia), who was one of the leading contemporary Rambam scholars. Also, he was the rebbi of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l.

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Nitzavim / Vayeilech: Don’t Follow Your Heart

Perhaps the most confusing passage in Nitzavim is Devarim 29:15-20, especially the pasuk in bold:

For you know how we dwelled in the land of Egypt and how we passed through the midst of the nations through whom you passed. And you saw their abominations and their detestable idols – of wood and stone, of silver and gold that were with them. Lest there be among you a man or a woman, or a family or tribe, whose heart turns away today from being with Hashem, our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations; lest there be among you a root bearing gall and wormwood. And it will be that when he hears the words of this oath-curse, he will bless himself in his heart, saying, “Peace will be with me, ki bi’shrirus libi eilech” – thereby adding the watered upon the thirsty. Hashem will not be willing to forgive him, for then Hashem’s anger and jealousy will smoke against that man, and the entire oath-curse written in this Book will settle upon him, and Hashem will erase his name from under the heaven. Hashem will separate him for evil from among all the tribes of Israel, like all the oath-curses of the covenant that is written in this Book of the Torah.

I transliterated “ki bi’shrirus libi eilech” because each of these four words can be translated in a variety of ways:

1. “ki” can be rendered as adversative (“rather”), concessive (“even though”), temporal (“when”), conditional (“if”), consequential (“and therefore”), interrogative (“is it?”), or causal (“because”).

2. “shrirus” might stem from shur (“to see”), sharir (“firm, strong”), or shorer (“dominion, rule”).

3. “libi” (lit. “my heart”) can refer to the heart as the perceiving/judging faculty, as the appetitive faculty, as the will, as a concealed inner domain, or as something like the conscience or source of internal authority.

4. Even “eilech” (lit. “I go”) can be understood as “I conduct myself,” “I do/act,” “I follow,” or “I go by.”

Not every permutation is reflected in the commentaries I consulted, but those commentaries still yield at least a dozen different ways to read the verse. And this isn’t getting into the numerous explanations of the equally perplexing phrase, “thereby adding the watered upon the thirsty.”

I’ve wanted to write about this pasuk for years, but whenever I begin my research, I’m immediately overwhelmed with the translation complications, and end up settling on a more accessible pasuk instead.

Perhaps the answer lies not in the Torah commentaries, but in Mishlei.

This week I taught my 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th grade students their first pasuk in Mishlei: “A chacham (wise person) fears and turns away from evil, but a ksil (Mishleic fool) transgresses ^[1] yet [feels] secure” (Mishlei 14:16). I start my Mishlei curriculum with this pasuk because it features the chacham and the ksil, who are probably the two most important Mishleic archetypes in the entire sefer, and because the main idea is fundamental to Mishleic thinking. Plus, it’s easy to analyze, and it’s beneficial for students to realize that they can arrive at an understanding on their own.

After having my students come up with all the questions and giving them the chance to figure out the pasuk on their own, I introduce them to the definition of chacham given by Chazal in Tamid 32a: “Who is wise? One who sees the consequences [of his actions].” Rashi (or the commentary attributed to him) elaborates: “one who understands from his mind what will be in the future, occurrences that will come in the future, and he will be cautious of them.”

Based on this definition, we can infer that a ksil is either someone who does not see the consequences of his actions or someone who sees them but ignores them. Instead, he forges ahead, follows his desires, and trusts that everything will work out. Unfortunately for him, those consequences will inevitably catch up with him.

The question is: What accounts for this difference? What is it about the way the chacham sees the world that makes him cautious? What is it about the ksil that prompts him to throw caution to the wind?

My answer is that the ksil assumes that reality will automatically align with his desires. Accordingly, he sees no reason to think about the future because he believes everything will work out in his favor. In contrast, the chacham recognizes that reality operates based on its own principles, irrespective of his preferences. If he wants success, he must align his desires with reality, and if he doesn’t want to suffer any harm, it is his responsibility to avoid it.

This is not an original explanation. The same explanation is given by Saadia Gaon, not in his Mishlei commentary but in the introduction to his philosophical work, Emunos v’Deos. He writes:

The praiseworthy chacham is he who makes reality his foundation and directs his thinking in accordance with it. With his wisdom he relies on what is deserving of trust and is wary of what ought to be guarded against. The reprehensible ksil, on the other hand, is he who sets up his [personal] conviction as his foundation, assuming that reality is patterned after his belief. With his foolishness, he trusts in what should be shunned and shuns what is deserving of trust. This is as the wise man said: “A chacham fears and turns away from evil, but a ksil transgresses yet [feels] secure.”

Saadia Gaon marvels at the idiocy of the ksil’s childish and egocentric worldview, especially in relation to Hashem:

To this discourse I append the expression of my amazement at certain people who, being slaves, yet believe that they have no master, and who rely on [the assumption] that whatever they reject is void and whatever they affirm is established. These are the ones who have plunged into the depths of folly, and who have already reached the depths of perdition. For if they are right, then let him among them who has no money take it into his head that his bank accounts and chests are filled with money, and see what it would profit him. Or let him take it into his head that he is seventy years old, when he is forty years of age, and see what good it would do him. Or let him take it into his head that he is sated when he is hungry, or that he has drunk his fill when he is thirsty, or that he is covered up when he is naked, and see what his condition will be. Or let him among them who has a vicious enemy take it into his head that his enemy is dead, aye perished, so that he no longer fears the latter. But, oh, how quickly will he [in such a case] be overcome by the misfortune of which he has no dread. And this is utter folly on the part of people who supposed that if they do not believe in His divinity they will be relieved of His mitzvos and His warnings, His recompense and His punishment, and the rest of what is like these. Of such as these Scripture said: “Let us break their bands asunder, and cast off their cords from us” (Tehillim 2:3).

These examples highlight the hypocrisy of the ksil: he would never ignore his empty bank account, his hunger and thirst, or his enemy on the naïve assumption that belief alone can secure the results he desires. Why, then, does he think he can avoid all the consequences of violating Hashem’s mitzvos and warnings?

This, I believe, is also a valid interpretation of our cryptic pasuk in Devarim: “And it will be that when he hears the words of this oath-curse, he will bless himself in his heart, saying, ‘Peace will be with me, for I follow the authority of my heart’ – thereby adding the watered upon the thirsty.” Deep down in the heart of every human being (and not so deep down in some of us) is a powerful conviction that reality will automatically conform to our beliefs and desires. Our pasuk in Devarim is describing a Mishleic ksil who hears Hashem Himself promise to punish those who worship avodah zarah (idolatry), but chooses to transgress and trusts that things will work out for him.

Unfortunately, there are those who worship Hashem yet follow exactly the same path as the ksil, and they will also suffer the consequences, even if they’re not included in this oath-curse. The Vilna Gaon even maintains that the ksil’s trust in our Mishlei pasuk refers to trust in Hashem! But the Torah’s stance on a frum ksil is a topic for a different time.

^[1] The Hebrew is מתעבר, which can be translated in several different ways. When I teach this, I use the most common translations (“makes himself pass through” or “becomes enraged”), but I’m translating it here according to Saadia Gaon, because it fits with Devarim 29:18.

What is your favorite interpretation of Devarim 29:18? Or Mishlei 14:16, for that matter?

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WITATM Round-up: August 2026

If you follow me on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, or in the Substack app, I’d wager it’s impossible for you not to be aware of my What I’m Thinking About This Morning posts, which I share every weekday morning. But I know—I just know—there are people who are interested in my content yet completely unaware of these (week)daily posts.

I also know there are people who are aware of these posts and want to read them but either don’t have time to keep up or prefer print-friendly content over digital formats.

If that sounds like you, you might be interested in my latest experiment: a monthly round-up of all my WITATM posts at the end of each month! While the images accompanying these posts are sometimes an essential part of the content, I realize that most people wouldn’t want to print a version with all the images—so I’ve created a text-only PDF instead. Here are the entries:

Here’s the version with images, which is truer to the spirit of my WITATM.

Here’s the version without images, which is friendlier for printing.

Enjoy!

If you have any thoughts on any of the individual WITATM posts, or on this monthly round-up experiment, or about my substack writing or content in general, let me know in the comments!

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Ki Savo – Is It Really a Great Mitzvah to Be Happy All the Time?

Rebbe Nachman’s Misleading Slogan

People quote the teaching “Mitzvah gedolah lihiyos b’simchah tamid – it is a great mitzvah to be in [a state of] joy always” as if it’s a statement of the Sages. It’s actually a statement of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. The full statement is “it is a great mitzvah to be b’simchah always, and to exert oneself with all one’s strength to push away sadness and melancholy” (Likutei Moharan Tinyana Part II, Torah 24).

This statement has always bothered me. First, the term “mitzvah” is being used extremely loosely here. I am not aware of a single mitzvah-enumerator who counts this as one of the 613 mitzvos, and it irks me, as someone who takes mitzvah-counting seriously^[1], to see the term “mitzvah” thrown around so cavalierly.

Second, and more importantly, there are times when we should feel sad. Rambam (Laws of Mourning 13:12) writes, “Anyone who does not mourn as commanded by the Sages is achzari (cruel),” and the Sages (Moed Katan 27b) command us to devote three days to crying. Likewise, we are obligated to mourn the destruction of the Mikdash – not just to go through the motions, but to feel deeply and genuinely aggrieved. Rambam (Laws of Fasts 5:9) states that the Chasidim ha’Rishonim (Early Pious Ones) would enter into Tishah b’Av “in a state of anxiety and devastation and crying, like a person whose dead [relative] is before him.” There are more examples as well.^[2]

If anyone who knows Rebbe Nachman’s Torah can enlighten me as to how he would respond, I’m all ears.

Rambam on Simchah

The closest parallel in Rambam to Rebbe Nachman’s statement is Laws of Shofar, Sukkah, and Lulav 8:15:

For the simchah with which a person rejoices in doing the mitzvos and in loving the God Who commanded them is a great avodah (service). Anyone who withholds himself from this simchah is fit to be punished, as it is stated, “In return for the fact that you did not serve Hashem, your God, with simchah and gladness of heart” (Devarim 28:47). Anyone who is haughty and apportions honor for himself and honors himself in his own eyes in these places is a sinner and a fool. Shlomo warned regarding this and said, “Do not glorify yourself before a king” (Mishlei 25:6).

Anyone who lowers himself and makes light of his body in these places – he is the great one, the honored one, the one who serves out of love. Likewise David, King of Israel, said, “And I shall be even more lightly esteemed than this, and I shall be lowly in my eyes,” etc. (II Shmuel 6:22). There is no greatness and honor other than rejoicing before Hashem, as it is stated, “[And] King David was leaping and dancing before Hashem” (ibid. 6:16).

Unlike Rebbe Nachman, Rambam characterizes this simchah as an avodah rather than a mitzvah, citing as support Devarim 28:47 in The Tochechah (Admonition) of Parashas Ki Savo.

The Difficulty with Rambam’s Reading

It wasn’t until today that I noticed the problem. Here is Devarim 28:47 in its immediate context:

And all these curses will come upon you, and they will chase you and overtake you until you are annihilated, because you did not listen to the voice of Hashem, your God, to keep His mitzvos and His statutes that He commanded you. And they shall be in you as a sign and as a wonder, and in your offspring forever. In return for the fact that you did not serve Hashem, your God, with simchah and gladness of heart out of the abundance of everything, you shall serve your enemies whom Hashem shall send against you in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in the lack of everything; and He shall place a yoke of iron on your neck until He annihilates you.

Rambam implies that the simchah referred to here is the joy “in doing the mitzvos and in loving the God Who commanded them,” and that the punishment is for “withholding himself from this simchah.” But Devarim 28:47 isn’t a rebuke about avodah b’simchah per se; it’s rebuking us for failing to serve Him out of gratitude for the material blessings He has provided.

R. Dovid Tzvi Hoffman (ad loc.) underscores this distinction in the name of Rav Hirsch (evidently not in our edition):

With joy and with gladness of heart: R. Shimshon Refael Hirsch explains that the intent is not the joy of the avodah, for even one who serves his Creator in distress is likewise doing His will; rather its meaning is that you were joyful and glad of heart because Hashem provided you with all good, and you had to recognize the good [i.e., to be grateful] for this, and you did not serve ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu; therefore you will be compelled to be an enslaved servant out of hunger and lack of everything.

The Abravanel (ad loc.) connects this with the sin of Israel that Moshe Rabbeinu foretells in Haazinu:

And they will also be middah k’neged middah (measure for measure), for in place of the fact that you did not serve Hashem your God in the land, while you were there, with joy and with gladness of heart from an abundance of everything – that is to say, from the abundance of the totality of the goods that you had, by which “you grew fat, you grew thick, you became covered [with fat], and you forsook the God who made you” (Devarim 32:15) – in exchange for this it will be that you will serve your enemies whom Hashem will send against you, while you are in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness, etc.; for “anyone who nullifies the avodah (service) out of wealth, his end is to nullify it out of poverty” (Avos 4:9).

How can the Rambam cite Devarim 28:47 as if Hashem is talking about the simchah of doing mitzvos when He is actually rebuking us for failing to serve Him out of gratitude for the material blessings He has provided?

An Approach

Perhaps the rest of Rambam’s statements provide the answer. If asked, “What is the opposite of serving Hashem with simchah amid abundance?” many would answer, “Serving Hashem without simchah amid abundance.” But Rambam doesn’t say that. He contrasts the one who serves Hashem b’simchah with one “who is haughty and apportions honor for himself and honors himself in his own eyes.” He then praises one “who lowers himself and makes light of his body in these places.”

The quality the Rambam is highlighting here is not merely simchah. Rather, it is simchah that results from the humble recognition of one’s position vis-à-vis the true King, Whom he serves. This was exemplified by David, who held the most exalted standing in the world at that time, but lowered himself before Hashem.

Someone who recognizes that Hashem not only gave us mitzvos for our own benefit but also showers us with material blessings when we observe those mitzvos will be humbled by His kindness and will naturally serve Him with simchah. But if a person doesn’t serve Him b’simchah, something is wrong: either he doesn’t appreciate what the mitzvos are or he doesn’t recognize the Source and purpose of the material blessings he has been given. Both failures stem from a distortion in his relationship with the King Who provides us with both.^[3]

This reveals a third problem with Rebbe Nachman’s statement. Rambam isn’t merely criticizing the absence of simchah. He’s pointing out that the lack of simchah reflects a distortion in one’s relationship with Hashem. By that same token, if a person is always in a state of simchah, feeling as much joy in sin as in service, then there must be a distortion in his relationship with Hashem and in his understanding of what it means to serve Him.

^[1] see Ki Tavo: How We Know It’s a Mitzvah to Have Good Middos (and Why We Should Care) – particularly the end.

^[2] see Pixar’s Inside Out (2015) for the mental health argument against Rebbe Nachman, which I won’t get into here.

^[3] This is why Rambam quotes Devarim 28:47-48 in Teshuvah 9:1 when explaining the role of the blessings and curses.

What is your understanding of Rebbe Nachman and the Rambam on serving Hashem with joy? How would you resolve the difficulties mentioned here?

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Ki Teitzei – Sanitation and Shechinah

The Scourge of the American Revolution

More than 25,000 American soldiers are estimated to have died during the Revolutionary War. The shocking fact is that disease killed two and a half times as many of them as the British did. Only 6,824 died in battle. Roughly 10,000 died of disease in their own camps. (The other 8,500 died as prisoners, many due to disease as well.)

We now know that the maladies that ravaged these revolutionary soldiers were largely preventable. Here is a passage from David McCullough’s 1776 about the horrid illness-breeding conditions, with my emphasis in bold:

“Camp fever” or “putrid fever” were terms used for the highly infectious deadly scourges of dysentery, typhus, and typhoid fever, the causes of which were unknown or only partially understood. Dysentery had been the curse of armies since ancient times, as recorded by Herodotus. Typhus, characterized by high fever, severe headaches, and delirium, was carried by lice and fleas, which were a plague amid the army. (One soldier recorded seeing a dead body so covered with lice that it was thought that the lice alone had killed the man.) Typhoid fever, also characterized by a raging fever, red rash, vomiting, diarrhea, and excruciating abdominal pain, was caused by the bacillus Salmonella typhosa in contaminated food or water, usually the result of too little separation between sewage and drinking water.

And it was not the troops alone who suffered from camp fever. Many of those who came to nurse them were sickened or carried the disease home. And thus it lay waste to one New England town after another. Of the parishioners of a single charge in Danbury, Connecticut, more than a hundred would die of fever by November.

“Infectious filth” was understood to be the killer. Cleanliness in person, clean cooking utensils, clean water and unspoiled meat and produce were seen as essential to the prolonged health of the army, and this was among the chief reasons for constant insistence on discipline and order, and especially with so many thousands encamped in such close company.

As it was, open latrines were the worst of it, but there was also, as recorded in one orderly book, a “great neglect of people repairing to the necessaries.” Instead, they voided “excrement about the fields perniciously.” The smell of many camps was vile in the extreme.

It was this last paragraph that prompted me to write this article about an obscure pair of mitzvos in Ki Teitzei.

The Mitzvos of Military Sanitation

Among this parashah’s wartime passages is one that describes and legislates Israelite military camp conduct:

When you go forth in camp against your enemies, then you shall guard yourself from every evil thing. If there is among you any man who is not clean because of a nocturnal occurrence, then he shall go outside of the camp. He shall not come into the midst of the camp. And it shall be, toward evening, he shall bathe himself in the water; and when the sun is down, he shall come into the midst of the camp. You shall have a place outside of the camp, and you shall go out there, outside. And you shall have a peg upon your gear; and it shall be, when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it, and shall turn back and cover your excrement, for Hashem your God walks about in the midst of your camp, to save you, and to give up your enemies before you. And your camp shall be holy, and He shall not see in you ervah (nakedness) of any matter, and He will turn away from after you. (Devarim 23:10-15)

The halachos for these mitzvos are sparse. Rambam codifies them in the Laws of Kings and Wars 6:14-15:

And it is forbidden to relieve oneself in the midst of the camp or upon the face of the field in any place; rather, it is a positive commandment to establish a designated pathway there to relieve oneself in, as it is stated, “You shall have a place outside of the camp.”

And likewise, it is a positive commandment for there to be a peg for each and every [soldier] hanging along with his implements of war; he goes out by way of that [aforementioned] path, digs with it, relieves himself, and covers [the excrement], as it is stated, “And you shall have a peg upon your gear.” Whether they had the Ark with them or not, this is how they would act all the time, as it is stated, “And your camp shall be holy.”

R. Nachum Rabinovitch (Yad Peshutah ad loc.) clarifies the division of responsibility for these mitzvos:

[The Rambam] opens with the rationale of the mitzvah, since it is the rationale for both mitzvos, namely, that the camp should be pure, and the prohibition obligates each of the soldiers. However, the first mitzvah (i.e., making a latrine path) is [incumbent] upon the community in the camp or upon the commanders, whereas the second mitzvah (i.e., carrying a digging implement) is [incumbent] upon each and every individual. Due to this distinction, he begins “and likewise it is a positive commandment for there to be a peg for each and every [soldier].”

The distinction between communal and individual responsibility is important, as we shall later see.

The Questions

What interests me about these mitzvos is the reasoning stated in the text:

for Hashem your God walks about in the midst of your camp, to save you, and to give up your enemies before you. And your camp shall be holy, and He shall not see in you ervah of any matter, and turn away from after you.

There are a number of questions here. What, exactly, is the relationship between the rationale(s) given for these mitzvos? What does it mean that Hashem “walks about in the midst of your camp”? Are “saving” and “giving up your enemies” meant to be read as two types of Divine assistance or one? How, exactly, would the transgression of the mitzvos in this passage cause Hashem to “turn away from after you”?

Rather than attempting to answer all these questions, we will try to arrive at a general understanding of how these two mitzvos relate to each other, and of the Torah’s choice to present its reasoning in this form.

Shadal’s Approach: Reminders

The most straightforward explanation I found was stated by Shadal (Devarim 23:15, translated by Dan Klein):

“therefore, your camp must be holy” The essential point [of this commandment] was to establish the idea in their hearts that God was proceeding before them, and that from Him came victory; therefore it was commanded that they should set the Lord before them always, as if they were in His Temple … the purpose of all these regulations was so that the people should stand in awe as if they were in the Temple of God.

One of the greatest struggles of our army, from the earliest days of Israel to the modern IDF, is remembering “that not by sword and not by spear does Hashem save, but the war belongs to Hashem” (I Shmuel 17:47), that “the king is not saved by a great army; a warrior is not delivered by great power. The horse is futile for salvation, and with its great strength it provides no escape” (Tehilim 33:16-17), that “A horse is prepared for a day of war, but salvation belongs to Hashem” (Mishlei 21:31), and “that the war is not yours, but God’s” (II Divrei ha’Yamim 20:15).

Shadal understands the halachos in our passage as reminders of this fundamental principle. By conducting themselves with holiness in the camp, and treating as if it were “the Temple of God,” the soldiers are reminded that Hashem is with them, and that He is the One Who determines the outcome.

Ralbag’s Approach: A Means to Salvation and Victory

Ralbag (Devarim 23:10-15) offers a more multifaceted explanation than Shadal’s straightforward reading:

He said that when you go to wage war against your enemies, and you place the city under siege in a manner that the Israelites are encamped to besiege their enemies, it is necessary that they guard themselves against every evil matter in order that they do not remove Hashem’s hashgachah (providence) from themselves … He juxtaposed this to what He said, “you shall guard yourself from every evil thing” to warn a person not to entertain thoughts of transgression by day and come into [a state of] impurity at night. And He commanded that [such a person] go outside of that camp, for the camp is holy, in that the shechinah (Divine presence) is in it.

Ralbag uses the terms hashgachah and shechinah interchangeably, as Maimonidean commentators are wont to do (see Rambam in the Moreh 1:25). But as the rest of his commentary shows, the mechanism is far from simple:

He commanded that they designate a place outside the camp to relieve themselves there, for the kavod (honor) of Hashem, Who walks about in the midst of the camp, together with the fact that by this the camp will be guarded from that foulness. For this reason as well, He commanded him that he should have a peg with his weapons with which he can dig the ground when he relieves himself, and he will cover his excrement with earth. This will cause them not to sense that foulness in that holy camp, and there will be kavod for Hashem. From here we learn that it is not proper to pray and to say words of holiness in a place in which there is excrement unless it is covered.

to save you, and to give up your enemies before you – the first objective is to save you, and if you merit that some of the hashgachah cling to you such that He gives your enemies before you, He will do this as well.

and He shall not see in you ervah of any matter, and turn away from after you – this tells [us] that if Hashem will see in them any sin and disgraceful thing, His shechinah will depart from them. And we learn from this, according to our methodology, that as for ervah, the covering does not suffice for it if it can be seen; this is so because its matter is more disgraceful [than excrement], for seeing it brings one to entertain thoughts of transgression.

Shadal, who writes nothing about hashgachah, regards the statements “to save you, and to give up your enemies before you” as outlining truths these halachos are designed to recall. In contrast, Ralbag maintains that the halachos are designed to bring about these two objectives. Hashem’s shechinah (that is, His hashgachah) will accompany the Israelite army so long as they accord proper kavod to Hashem by observing these halachos. The lower level of hashgachah is salvation, in which Hashem protects us from the harm our enemies would inflict. The higher level is victory, in which He helps us defeat them.

Ralbag’s approach complements Shadal’s: according to Shadal, the Torah wants us to be cognizant of the army’s relationship with Hashem; according to Ralbag, the merit of that cognizance translates into Divine assistance.

Ramban’s Approach: Keeping the Shechinah With Us

The crux of Ramban’s approach (Devarim 23:10) is “you shall guard yourself from every evil thing”:

… Scripture gives its warning at a time when sin is prevalent. And what is known of the practices of the camps that go out to war is that they eat every abomination, and rob and plunder and are not ashamed, even at adultery and every vile act. [Even] he who is upright among men by his nature clothes himself in cruelty and fury when a camp goes out against an enemy, and therefore Scripture warned concerning it: “and you shall guard yourself from every evil thing.” And by way of peshat (the plain sense): it is a warning against everything that is forbidden.

Ramban then quotes a lengthy Sifrei that itemizes the categories of sin against which soldiers must guard during wartime: avodah zarah (idolatry), gilui arayos (forbidden sexual relations), shfichus damim (bloodshed), kilelas ha’shem (blasphemy), and lashon ha’ra (evil speech). He then explains how the Sifrei is consistent with his view:

And this too is of the reason that we explained, for aside from the warnings that have come regarding these severe transgressions, [Scripture] adds a lav (negative commandment) in the camp, that we guard ourselves in it from all these transgressions, so that the shechinah not depart from Israel who are there, as it says: “For Hashem your God walks about in the midst of your camp.” And one who commits the great transgressions in the camp is like those of whom it is written: “They have set their abominations in the house upon which My name is called, to defile it” (Yirmiyahu 7:30). And further, so that the enemies not prevail over us if we do like their deeds, which cause them to be exiled from before us. And this is: “and to give up your enemies before you.” They added lashon ha’ra to it so that disputes not multiply among them and they strike among themselves a blow greater than [that of] the enemies.

At first glance, Ramban and Ralbag appear to be saying similar things. Both warn that improper conduct in the camp will cause the shechinah to depart and might result in our defeat. Granted, Ramban expands the scope of the Torah’s concern, noting that men at war are prone to many more sins than the Torah explicitly mentions, whereas Ralbag sticks to what the text says. Still, the general thrust of their commentaries seems the same.

But note Ramban’s innovation: “[Scripture] adds a lav in the camp, that we guard ourselves in it from all these transgressions, so that the shechinah not depart from Israel who are there.” Out of all the commentators and all the authors of Sifrei ha’Mitzvos – Behag, Yereim, Rambam, Semag, Semak, Sefer ha’Chinuch – Ramban is the only one who counts “that there not be any evil matter in the camp” as its own mitzvah. He enumerates this in his list of mitzvos that Rambam “forgot” to count (Lo Taaseh #11). Here is an excerpt from his lengthy entry:

The substance of this mitzvah is that they are forbidden in the camp from these transgressions that cause the removal of the shechinah; and He warned us with this lav that one not cause the removal of His shechinah from us in the camp, for one who transgresses them causes Israel to fall by the sword, and profanes Hashem, and renders their idolatry esteemed in the eyes of the enemies.

In light of this point, a significant difference between the two approaches emerges. Whereas Ralbag regards “and He will turn away from after you” as a consequence of violating these mitzvos, Ramban sees it as the purpose of the mitzvos. In other words, Ralbag would say, “The Torah commands us to guard against every evil matter lest the shechinah depart,” whereas Ramban would say, “The Torah commands us to guard against every evil matter so as not to cause the shechinah to depart.”

Ho’il Moshe: The Torah’s Ingenious Method of Military Sanitation Enforcement

In his commentary on our passage (Devarim 23:10), Ho’il Moshe makes two points, one minor and one major:

“evil thing” – [namely,] a reprehensible matter in zenus (promiscuity) and mishkav zachor (homosexual relations) and maaseh onan (onanism); and a baal keri (one who experienced a seminal emission) [even] involuntarily shall distance himself one day from the camp, and shall not fight together with the rest of the people.

Ho’il Moshe, presumably inferring from “He shall not see in you ervah of any matter,” reads “every evil thing” as a reference to sexual violations – not only zenus, which is common for soldiers at a time of war, but even mishkav zachor ^[1] and maaseh onan. As far as I can tell, he is a daas yachid (singular opinion) on this matter.

But it’s this next part of Ho’il Moshe’s commentary that blew me away:

And all this (i.e. the Torah’s military camp regulation) is to warn them that when they are encamped on the open field they should guard themselves in purity so that there not arise in them the severe illnesses ^[2] that commonly come about in the camps of soldiers, and they should also cover their excrement so that it not ruin the air … and although He wrote [as the rationale for this prohibition], “for Hashem, your God, walks about in the midst of your camp,” it is to instill fear in them in order that they be careful with all these things, for if He had told [this] to them by way of advice for their own good, they wouldn’t have listened. Likewise, our Rabbis of blessed memory also did this by establishing netilas yadayim (handwashing) with a blessing in the morning and before a meal, because if they had advised the masses of the people to wash their hands, they wouldn’t have listened, [but] now that they established the matter as an obligation, they are careful about it.

According to Ho’il Moshe, these mitzvos aren’t about reminding us of Hashem’s role in the war or enlisting the aid of the hashgachah or not chasing away the shechinah. Rather, the purpose of these mitzvos is to maintain sanitary conditions in the camp so that we don’t die of disease, and the statements about the shechinah are merely the rhetoric that the Torah employed to drive home the message.

A naïve skeptic might question Ho’il Moshe’s claim that “if He had told [this] to them by way of advice for their own good, they wouldn’t have listened.” But history bears this out. And I’m not even talking about ancient history, in which most people in most societies were accustomed to living in their own squalor, and all the more so during wartime. I’m talking about fairly recent history, in which poor sanitation decimated the armies of empires. The example cited above from the American Revolution (1775-1783) is powerful as is, but here are a few more:

• In the Crimean War (1853-1856), 77% of the British army’s deaths (16,323 out of 21,097) were from disease.

• In the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), roughly two-thirds of soldier deaths were from disease rather than battle.

• In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the Army reported 20,926 cases of typhoid fever resulting in 2,192 deaths, which is more than five times as many as the 385 deaths in battle.

Throughout history, soldiers have been advised or even commanded to adhere to sanitation guidelines for their own good. It was known (if not fully understood) that unsanitary conditions were linked to outbreaks of disease. And by the time of the Spanish-American War, germ theory was settled science, the bacterial causes of typhoid were well known, and the Army’s own regulations already required the sanitary measures that would have prevented it. Yet that knowledge didn’t translate into practice.

Herein lies the genius of the Torah’s approach. First, it eliminated the ambiguity and indecision about where to defecate by legislating a designated latrine area as part of the camp design. Second, it removed the excuse of not being equipped to dig a latrine by mandating that each soldier carry a digging implement along with his weaponry. As a talmid of mine pointed out, this underscores that the cleanliness of the camp is as critical to the outcome of the war as the weapons themselves. (The split between these two requirements is why R. Nachum Rabinovitch’s point about division of responsibility is important: the Torah places some of the responsibility on the officers and the rest on the individual soldiers.) Third, it framed these requirements as a matter of religious obligation, providing a theological reason instead of an easy-to-ignore practical one. Lastly, it explicitly stated that the outcome of the war would depend on their adherence to these laws.

Concluding Thoughts

Although Ho’il Moshe writes that the Torah’s statements about Hashem walking about in the camp and saving us from our enemies are “mere” rhetoric, that rhetoric turns out to be true: by adhering to these laws, Israel would save itself from many of the diseases that have ravaged armies for millennia. If one understands hashgachah to operate through natural mechanisms (which is a can of worms I won’t open here), then perhaps this is precisely what the Torah means when it says that Hashem will save and protect us if we adhere to these laws.

^[1] I ran deep research on both Claude and ChatGPT to see if wartime mishkav zachor was common enough in the ancient world that the Torah would speak out against it. According to both AI reports, there’s no evidence that this was the case.

^[2] It is possible that the point about illness should be read in conjunction with his point about sexual violations, and that Ho’il Moshe maintains that the injunction to guard themselves in purity is designed to prevent venereal disease. At least, that was Claude’s (unsolicited) opinion. But a full analysis of the ervah / baal keri aspect is beyond the scope of this article.

What do you think of these approaches? Which other explanations have you heard?

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The Torah content for the month of Av is sponsored by Aliza Feder in honor of the yahrzeit of her mother, Mindy Pincus a”h. I had the pleasure of getting to know Mindy during my first year of yeshiva. She and her husband Gersh hosted me so often that she told me I could assume that a place would automatically be set at their table every Friday night. I will always remember her as a living embodiment of chesed and hachnasas orchim.

Re’eh: Rav Kook’s Anti-Vegetarian Views

Preface

“Anti-vegetarian? Don’t you mean pro-vegetarian?” Nope. I meant what I wrote.

Before I read Le-Nevukhei ha-Dor: Rav Kook’s Guide for Today’s Perplexed [1], I knew virtually nothing about Rav Kook’s hashkafah. Other than his Zionism, one of the few things I’d heard was that he was pro-vegetarianism. Little did I realize how nuanced his view on this matter was.

Before we commence with the main body of this article, I’d like to state three disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: This is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the Torah’s stance on vegetarianism. As far as I am aware, there are three major exegetical views on the permission to eat meat granted by the Torah in Parashas Noach (Bereishis 9:1-7): (a) that meat was never prohibited in the first place, (b) that it was initially permitted, then prohibited after Adam’s sin, then re-permitted after the flood, and (c) that meat was forbidden from creation and only permitted after the flood. For an overview of these three views, with their rationales and sources, see AlHaTorah’s Study Topic article. See also my 2015 article Re’eh: MEAT IS MURDER!!!

Disclaimer #2: This isn’t even intended to be a comprehensive presentation of Rav Kook’s position. Like I said, it’s nuanced. And I’m not familiar with it. If you’re interested, read chapter 10 in its entirety and/or check out R. Sklar’s translation with extensive footnotes.

Disclaimer #3: In my Rhapsody on Rav Kook: First Impressions of a New Chapter in My Learning, I wrote “I’m going to keep all my Rav Kook-related writing behind a paywall as a default.” I explained:

The main reason is that I need to be able to explore this new world freely, following my mind wherever it goes, without feeling pressure to be “authoritative.” I need to be able to think out loud as someone who knows nothing about Rav Kook, but who conducts his investigations in writing. If every post I write is met with objections (“That’s not what Rav Kook holds!” “You need to learn such-and-such before you can write about such-and-such!” “How dare you misappropriate concept such-and-such into your worldview when that’s clearly not what Rav Kook would have said!”), then I know I’ll just clam up and lose the ability to think freely in public.

I’m tentatively making an exception here because I really wanted to write about this, and I’m traveling so I don’t have time to write a paywalled and a non-paywalled article. We’ll see what happens!

Rav Kook’s Theory of Chukim

When I ask my high school students what the difference is between chukim and mishpatim, they usually say, “Mishpatim have reasons and chukim don’t.” This view is not held by most (if any) of the Rishonim. A more accurate distinction is: mishpatim have reasons that are obvious, whereas chukim have reasons that are not obvious. The Rambam (Moreh 3:26) maintains that this view of chukim is unanimous:

All of us, the masses as well as the elite individuals, maintain that there is a reason for every mitzvah, although there are mitzvos the reason of which is unknown to us, and in which the ways of [Divine] wisdom are not known. This view is distinctly expressed in Scripture, as it is stated, “chukim and mishpatim of justice” (Devarim 4:8), “The mishpatim of Hashem are true and righteous altogether” (Tehilim 19:10).

My friend Rabbi Joshua Maroof wrote an excellent article in which he asks a further question on this distinction:

On the surface, it is difficult to understand why this method of classification is justified. Does it make sense to categorize commandments simply based on whether we can provide a logical explanation for them or not? Isn’t there a more meaningful criterion to use for grouping the mitsvot?

(I encourage you to read Rabbi Maroof’s answer there, which is consistent with Rav Kook’s view below.)

In the middle of our chapter, Rav Kook provides a thought-provoking answer to this question:

The category of “chukim” is [defined as] commandments whose relevance in the present cannot be found, and are rather a sowing of the seeds and a preparation for the future. Only when that fortunate time comes, only then will this great purpose that this wondrous nation took on will [sic] be felt, a preparation for guidance so lofty as this. When our judges and counsellors look into the Torah and find our nation ready to activate these sprouts, then light will go out to the entire nation. The nation that is elevated for that wondrous leadership, in the innate feeling “of compassion, of shame, of acts of kindness” which will manifest in their fullest sense, that will surely be “for the light of nations” (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6). “When all the nations hear about these chukim, they will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people!’” (Deuteronomy 4:6).

The seed analogy is beautiful. Imagine a person who had only ever seen fruit trees but had no knowledge of how they came to be. Imagine you showed them a handful of seeds and told them they yielded just as much value as the trees. They wouldn’t believe you. How could something that appears so useless possibly bear fruit? But plant those seeds, and the truth will be evident in its proper time.

According to Rav Kook, the same is true of chukim: the wise can appreciate the wisdom and understanding embedded in these chukim, but the masses – Jews and non-Jews alike – will only be able to appreciate their utility in the future, at the right time.

Rav Kook’s Case for Vegetarianism

Rav Kook states his essential view early on in the chapter:

Let us consider … the ethical yearning of not killing any living thing for the needs of man. It is impossible to deny what is sensed by any feeling heart, that there is a general ethical deficiency in how the human species fails to uphold the good and lofty feeling that it should not take the life of any living thing for its own needs. And it is absolutely impossible that the good God would decree a permanent law in a very good creation dictating that the human species will not be able to sustain itself unless it clouds its ethical feelings by spilling blood, even the blood of animals.

Ultimately, God’s wish is to “[connect] humanity with all other living things,” causing man to “yearn for the highest ethical nobility” and “demand of himself his obligation towards all creation, his fellows in creation and in life.”

What, according to Rav Kook, was the intended state of man in relation to animals at the time of creation?

There is no doubt to any inteintelligent person that when the Torah says to Adam, “You shall have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heaven, and all animals that crawl upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28), it does not mean the domination of a cruel dictator who treats his people harshly only in order to bring about his own personal desires. Heaven forbid that such a disgusting law of enslavement should be of the ways of the good God, of whom it is said, “the world is built with kindness” (Psalms 89:3) and we see that all His ways are filled with justice and compassion. The Torah itself surely expresses this clearly from the fact that Adam was not allowed to have meat as food. If that is true, what kind of domination [was he to have] over all animals and insects, if not dominion over the well-being of those under domination, to develop them, to improve their situation, to be involved in their physical and spiritual advancement?

Note the strength of Rav Kook’s stance. It’s not that vegetarianism would be preferable, but that a permanent license to kill for food would be incompatible with God’s goodness.

As we shall soon see, Rav Kook holds by the third of the three views cited above, that meat was forbidden from creation and only permitted after the flood. And this permission was a concession to human nature.

Rav Kook’s Warning Against Premature Vegetarianism

Up until this point, Rav Kook’s view might be considered unremarkable. But here’s where things get interesting:

However, after the generation of the Flood, when meat was allowed for food, this concession was certainly not meant to remain forever, for how can there be an ethical situation that changes and is nullified after it had already been the practice [originally] – we are to “add holiness, not diminish it!” Rather, the Divine Intellect saw that man had fallen from his ethical state, and until the time comes when man will stir himself awake and arrive at the true ethical recognition, he should not be burdened [with moral obligations] that do not accord with his level.

In other words, this was not merely a concession on the particular issue of eating meat. Instead, it marked a concession in the method used by the Torah to promote the ethical development of mankind. Formerly, the Torah had legislated the ethical ideal; after the flood, the Torah employed the approach of “chanoch l’naar al pi darko, gam ki yazkin lo yasur mimenah – train the youth in accordance with his way, and even when he grows old, he will not deviate from it” (Mishlei 22:6). In my shiur How the (Seemingly) Outdated Elements of Torah Are Evidence of Its Perfection, I refer to this distinction using Rabbi Hayyim Angel’s terminology: static vs. evolutionary morality.

Why was such an approach necessary? Because the alternative would have been disastrous, as Rav Kook writes:

There is no doubt that if the prohibition against killing animals would be practiced now, when man’s ethical state has not yet been rectified, it would cause tremendous damage. When the animalistic desire to eat meat would intensify, it would not make a distinction between human and animal, since it would be the same prohibition either way; cannibalism would then become a very constant sight … And sometimes, there also needs to be a concession of some impressionable aspect of the ways of morality in order to prepare man for an even higher level, because if we were to put first what should really come later, then all would be lost.

Herein lies the nuance alluded to at the beginning of this article. Rav Kook really does hold that the cruel exploitation of animals for our own needs is akin to (albeit not absolutely equal to) the oppression of our fellow human beings. Both run contrary to the will of the Creator insofar as they cause harm and suffering to His creatures. However, the blurring of the distinction between human and animal will lead to even greater harm: if killing an animal and killing a human fall under a single prohibition, then whoever violates it for a steak has already crossed the only line there is, and human flesh no longer stands in a category of its own.

The solution is not to implement the ethical ideal at the present time. Rather, the antidote to this moral equivalency and its attendant moral degradation is to draw a sharp distinction between how we treat animals and how we treat our fellow human beings:

To illustrate, since the ethical state of man continues to waver, his animalistic love of self always prone to overcome him [even] to the point that all the rules of ethics and morality would be a joke to him, it makes sense that he would need to keep a social distance between himself and the lowly animals. This is in order that he should not see himself as one of them, for then they would make an impression on him with their animalistic ways to bring down his spirit to the “dark valley” (Joshua 7:24, 26, 15:7, Hosea 2:17, Isaiah 65:10) of the wild animals. He would be prone to leaving aside his human superiority and be counted among the wild beasts. Were it so that the [equivalent] moral obligation was set for all, the same for the rest of the animals as for other human beings, it would leave an impression of a community and partnership between man and all [other] living things. Even if this would not be harmful for the best of humanity, the ethical level of the common people would be greatly lowered … The temptation is greater to descend into the ways of the animals in order to be exempt from the many ethical calculations, and to enjoy the many crass pleasures of the moment.

Rav Kook concludes his thesis by rounding out and reiterating the picture of mankind’s proper development:

Thus, it is unfathomable how good for the world the impact of severing the relationship between humans and all other living things has been. All of this could only happen by way of an exemption that freed man from many ethical obligations [toward animals], and he was permitted to satisfy his desires even through killing them, so that he would recognize on a very deep level his superiority over them, and thus, his soul would be elevated toward the highest ethical yearnings.

In the end, absolute ethical truth – which is truly the knowledge of God – will win out, at which point man will no longer need these concessions. If ethical obligations were overly practiced between man and the animals, then in a time lacking in ethical perfection, it would have caused a great amount of evil to humanity … Therefore, there was a necessary decision made by the Divine Intellect, “who discerns the mind and heart” (cf. Jeremiah 11:20, 20:12), to sever the connecting thread between man and beast, so that the concentration of man’s ethical focus could be specifically for his own betterment, and then man will successfully arrive at his good fortune in the End of Days.

And when humanity arrives at that glorious and free age, then man will have the proper understanding of his relationship to the animal kingdom from the standpoint of pure morality. Man will no longer need any exigent concessions and exemptions, for “the Torah only speaks against the evil inclination,” only in order to walk in the way of absolute goodness.

He then offers explanations of many animal-related mitzvos in light of this theory: shechitah (ritual slaughter), kisui ha’dam (covering the blood of slaughtered beasts and fowl), cheilev (prohibited fat), kilayim (prohibited mixtures), and more.

In sum, although God cares about the welfare of all creatures, He prioritized the ethical development of human beings. This necessitated differentiating between man and animal. Without this sharp distinction, man would descend to the level of the wild beasts. Only when this phase of ethical development is well-established will we rise to the universal ethics of the Creator “Who is good to all, and Whose mercies are upon all His works” (cf. Tehilim 145:9).

Support for Rav Kook’s Warning: PETA

Consider Ingrid Newkirk (born 1949), animal rights activist and cofounder of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). She and her organization illustrate the very mechanism Rav Kook identified: what happens to moral intuition when the distinction between man and animal is flattened before mankind is ready. Here are just a few of the many examples:

Newkirk’s most famous quotation is “There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.” The obligation toward animals underlying this claim is one Rav Kook affirms as part of God’s ultimate plan, but the flattening of the distinction between human and animal is precisely what he warns will fuel moral deterioration if implemented prematurely.

PETA’s It’s Still Going On campaign featured ads “comparing widely publicized murder-cannibalization cases to the deaths of animals in slaughterhouses.” Newkirk herself has drafted an elaborate will specifying what should be done with her body after her death. She wants her skin turned into wallets, her feet into umbrella stands, her flesh carved out, fried up with onions, and incorporated into “a human barbecue,” and her various other body parts processed in other ways and sent to specific public figures. While these attention-grabbing stunts may not be tantamount to a full-throated advocacy of cannibalism, they certainly veer in that direction.

One of PETA’s most controversial campaigns was its 2003 Holocaust on Your Plate exhibition, which

consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each with a juxtaposition of images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of battery chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. Captions alleged that “like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps.”

Newkirk’s misguided moral intuitions are evident in the letter she wrote in 2003 to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat protesting the use of a donkey as a suicide bomber, not because this was an act of terrorism intended to murder innocent human beings, but because she didn’t want any more donkeys to die.

(By the way, this is why I titled this “Rav Kook’s Anti-Vegetarian Views” rather than “Anti-Vegetarianism.” He is staunchly pro-vegetarian, but warns against the kinds of vegetarians who promote or are produced by a vegetarianism improperly implemented. Vegetarians like Newkirk and her organization.)

PETA and its cofounder may seem like an extreme example, but such extremism is exactly what Rav Kook warned would follow from the erasure of the distinction between man and animal before mankind is ready for it. This leads to a final question.

Concluding Thoughts: If Not Now, When?

At what point should mankind transition back into vegetarianism? Rav Kook notes that the criterion is embedded within the Torah’s presentation of the permission to eat meat:

But when the Torah gave permission to eat meat, it elaborated [with a narrative element], “When your soul desires to eat meat…” (Deuteronomy 12:20), creating a limitation, as if to say, “Only so long as your natural ethical state does not abhor the eating of living things like you abhor the eating of human meat ….” Indeed, this is why the Torah did not have to explicitly prohibit cannibalism, for man had already acquired the correct natural idea regarding this, and the Torah does not need to prohibit it, just as it does not need to specify good and bad character traits, which are innate and familiar. But when the time comes of an ethical state of abhorrence for meat because of a natural repulsion to it, there will be no “desire of your soul to eat meat” – “and you shall not eat it” (ve-lo tokhal).

There are many vegetarians, and even entire cultures, who feel such an abhorrence for meat. But should these people be proactive in persuading their fellow human beings to cultivate similar sentiments, or are these feelings supposed to develop organically? Does Rav Kook envision this change occurring throughout the species, or should it be spearheaded by the Jews, under the auspices of Torah? Should we become vegetarians if we are swayed by Rav Kook’s arguments?

I’m sure Rav Kook addresses these and other questions in his other writings on this topic. Those who are interested should start with the many citations compiled by Rabbi Sklar in his notes to this chapter.

As stated at the outset, my intention in this article was not to provide a comprehensive treatment of this topic or Rav Kook’s position. My main goal was to showcase a fascinating example of the Torah’s approach to shaping mankind’s values through the system of chukim. May we merit to see the sprouting of these life-giving seeds.

[1] published in 2026 by Kodesh Press, translated by Rabbi Aryeh Sklar, whose translations I’m relying on here with my own emphasis in bold and my own paragraph breaks

Ordinarily I’d open the floor to any and all questions about this, and I still will. Just remember that I’m VERY new to Rav Kook, and might need to refer your question to Rabbi Sklar or one of the other Rav Kook experts I know.

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WITATM Round-up: July 2026

If you follow me on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, or in the Substack app, I’d wager it’s impossible for you not to be aware of my What I’m Thinking About This Morning posts, which I share every weekday morning. But I know—I just know—there are people who are interested in my content yet completely unaware of these (week)daily posts.

I also know there are people who are aware of these posts and want to read them but either don’t have time to keep up or prefer print-friendly content over digital formats.

If that sounds like you, you might be interested in my latest experiment: a monthly round-up of all my WITATM posts at the end of each month! While the images accompanying these posts are sometimes an essential part of the content, I realize that most people wouldn’t want to print a version with all the images—so I’ve created a text-only PDF instead. Here are the entries:

Here’s the version with images, which is truer to the spirit of my WITATM.

Here’s the version without images, which is friendlier for printing.

Enjoy!

If you have any thoughts on any of the individual WITATM posts, or on this monthly round-up experiment, or about my substack writing or content in general, let me know in the comments!

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If you’ve gained from what you’ve learned here, please consider supporting my work via Patreon, Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal — links below. Even a small contribution helps cover production costs and gives me the freedom to create more Torah content. To sponsor a day’s or week’s worth of content, or to inquire about tutoring or teaching, reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail. Thank you for listening, reading, and supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Patreon | [Venmo: @Matt-Schneeweiss] | [Zelle/PayPal: mattschneeweiss at gmail]

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The Torah content for the month of Av is sponsored by Aliza Feder in honor of the yahrzeit of her mother, Mindy Pincus a”h. I had the pleasure of getting to know Mindy during my first year of yeshiva. She and her husband Gersh hosted me so often that she told me I could assume that a place would automatically be set at their table every Friday night. I will always remember her as a living embodiment of chesed and hachnasas orchim.

Eikev: All You Need is Fear

Only Yirah … Really?

Among the many highly quotable statements Moshe Rabbeinu makes throughout Sefer Devarim is the following:

And now, Israel, what does Hashem your God ask of you? Only to fear Hashem your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve Hashem your God with all your heart and with all your soul, to keep Hashem’s mitzvos and His statutes that I command you this day for your good. (Devarim 10:12-13)

R. Chanina (Berachos 33b), noting Moshe’s use of the phrase “only,” offers this drashah (exegetical explanation):

Ha’kol bi’ydei Shamayim chutz mi’yiras Shamayim – everything is in the hands of Heaven, except for fear of Heaven, as it is stated: “And now, Israel, what does Hashem your God ask of you? Only to fear Hashem your God.”

The Gemara continues with other statements of R. Chanina on yirah (which I hope to write about someday).

I’m sure I’ve quoted R. Chanina’s statement dozens of times, but only this year was I struck by a question on his reading: Why single out yirah when the pesukim go on to list many other things that God asks of us?

Imagine you’re on your way to the grocery store. You get a text: “Can you pick something up for me?” You respond, “Sure! What can I get you?” The reply comes back: “I only need a carton of milk, a dozen eggs, some onions, a pint of ice cream, and the best ribeye steak you can find.” Would it make sense to summarize their request by saying they only want a carton of milk? Of course not! Similarly, it’s very nice for R. Chanina to give a drashah on Moshe’s use of the phrase “only,” but how can he ignore everything else on the list?

Thankfully, I’m not the only one bothered by this question. The Torah Temimah and the Rambam offer explanations of R. Chanina’s statement that answer it in different (and arguably opposite) ways.

The Torah Temimah’s Minimalist Reading of Yirah

Not only does the Torah Temimah raise and answer our exact question, but he maintains that this is precisely what R. Chanina intends to address! He writes at the beginning of his analysis (Devarim 10:12 Note 12):

Ha’kol bi’ydei Shamayim etc. This means to say that the choice to fear Hashem is given over to the person himself. Regarding the rationale of the proof from this pasuk, it would seem [that R. Chanina made his statement] because it is impossible to explain in accordance with its plain meaning that Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu demands from man [only] to fear Him and nothing more. Doesn’t this pasuk itself explain many more things that Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu demands – to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve Him, to keep His mitzvos and statutes? And in truth, many things are demanded of a person who fears Hashem: to turn away from all evil, to do good, to bestow kindness, to do justice and righteousness, to walk humbly, etc. and so on! ... Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu certainly demands all these things from a perfected person who fears and serves Him. If so, what is this that Moshe said that Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu demands only to fear [Him], given that many great matters cling to the heels of fear?

This is an expanded version of our question: How can yirah be the only thing Hashem demands when (a) Moshe goes on to list other demands, and (b) one who fears Hashem will need to do even more things that Moshe doesn’t mention at all? The Torah Temimah then elucidates R. Chanina’s statement:

And therefore [R. Chanina] expounds that because this middah (trait) of yirah is only in the hands of the person and his will, and through it [his] keeping of the mitzvos and the middos (traits) emerge and branch off, therefore Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu demands only this from him, but the other acquisitions and perfections are in the hands of Heaven, and He bequeaths them to the person who fears Him. And such is the intent of the expression, “to walk in all His ways etc.,” that is to say: all these are the tachlis (“end,” “culmination,” or “outcome”) of the yirah, and in truth they come about through assistance from Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu, as is said in Yoma 39a (sic; actually Yoma 38b), “ha’ba le’taheir mesayin oso – one who comes to purify himself is assisted.”

The Torah Temimah then briefly addresses the next statement of R. Chanina in the Gemara before returning to recap his analysis:

… according to what we have written, that everything enumerated in this verse does not refer to Hashem’s demand from man, and rather they are explained as the tachlis that comes from the one who fears Hashem, then Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu in truth demands only yirah alone, and with the rest of the things he will be assisted from Heaven.

According to the Torah Temimah, R. Chanina’s claim is that the middah of yirah, or “the choice to fear Hashem” (as the Torah Temimah puts it), is the only thing in our hands. Everything else in the pasuk, including shmiras ha’mitzvos (observance of the commandments), isn’t what Hashem is asking of us at all. These are the tachlis of yirah: they “branch off” from it and are bequeathed by God, with His assistance, to those who fear Him.

In short, Moshe can say that Hashem asks only yirah of us because yirah is the only thing given over to our choice.

The Rambam’s Maximalist Reading of Yirah

The Rambam’s understanding of R. Chanina’s statement differs markedly from the Torah Temimah’s. His primary exposition can be found in Shemoneh Perakim Chapter 8:

But the expression found in [the words of] the Sages, namely their statement: “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except for fear of Heaven” – this is true, and accords with what we mentioned, but many people err in it, and they think, regarding some of man’s volitional actions, that he is compelled in them, such as [a man] being paired with a certain woman, or this money being in his hand.

The errors to which the Rambam refers are reinforced by various statements of Chazal implying that matches are made in Heaven, such as the one in Sotah 2a:

Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: Forty days before the formation of a child, a bas kol (heavenly voice) goes forth and proclaims: “The daughter of so-and-so is for so-and-so! The house of so-and-so is for so-and-so! The field of so-and-so is for so-and-so!”

The problem with reading such statements literally is simple, as the Rambam explains:

This is not true, for [regarding] this woman – if taking her in marriage was with a kesubah (a marriage contract) and kiddushin (halachic betrothal), and she is permitted [to him], and he married her to be fruitful and multiply, then this is a mitzvah, and Hashem will not decree the doing of a mitzvah. And if there was a blemish in her marriage, then this is an aveirah (transgression), and Hashem will not decree an aveirah.

Likewise, this person who robbed so-and-so’s money, or stole it, or acted faithlessly [with a deposit] and denied and swore to him about his money – if we say that Hashem decreed upon this one that this money should come to his possession and leave from the possession of this other one, then [we are saying that] He has already decreed an aveirah. But the matter is not so.

The Rambam here doesn’t spell out why he finds it objectionable that Hashem would decree the doing of a mitzvah or a transgression, because he writes at length about this earlier in the chapter. Here is the most relevant excerpt:

And if man were compelled in his actions, then the Torah’s command and prohibition would be nullified, and all of this would be absolutely for naught, since the choice is not in man’s hand as to what he will do ... And reward and punishment would also be absolute injustice, whether from us to one another or from Hashem to us, for this Shimon who killed Reuven, if [Shimon] was coerced and compelled to kill and [Reuven] coerced and compelled to be killed, then why should we punish Shimon? And furthermore, how is it possible to say of Him, “righteous and upright is He” (Devarim 32:4), that He should punish him for an act that he is compelled to do in any event, and even if he wanted not to do it, he could not?

This is the premise of the Rambam’s arguments here: if Hashem compelled our actions, then the Torah’s commandments and prohibitions would be irrational and reward and punishment would be unjust. And since a particular man marrying a particular woman is within the realm of mitzvah and aveirah, we cannot accept a literal reading of any statement of Chazal implying Divine interference.

Having stated his objections to these erroneous readings, the Rambam interprets R. Chanina’s statement:

Rather, all of man’s volitional actions – in them, without a doubt, are found obedience and rebellion. For we have already explained in the second chapter that Torah-command and prohibition are only in actions in which a person has choice as to whether he will do them or not do them, and this is the part of the soul in which yiras Shamayim will be, and it is not in the hands of Heaven but is given over to the choice of man, as we explained.

If so, by their statement “everything,” they intend only the natural matters over which a person has no choice, such as his being tall or short, or the falling of rain or drought, or the corruption of the air or its healthfulness, and other things like this from all that is in the world, except for the movements of man and his rests.

He then provides solid Scriptural support for his view from the words of Yirmiyah in Eichah:

But as for this matter which the Sages explained, that obedience and rebellion are not by His decree nor by His desire, but rather by man’s volition – in this they were following the language of Yirmiyah, namely his statement: “From the mouth of the Most High the bad things and the good do not come forth” (Eichah 3:38). For “bad things” [in this context] are the bad actions, and “good” – the good actions. And he said that Hashem will not decree that a person do the bad [actions], nor that he do the good [actions].

A more concise and explicit statement of the Rambam’s view can be found in his response to Ovadiah ha’Ger (shu”t 159, or 436 in the Blau edition):

[Regarding your] question on, “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except for fear of Heaven,” the answer regarding that which you yourself said [is as follows]: That all human actions are not [compelled] by a decree from the Creator is the truth in which there is no flaw. Therefore, a person is rewarded if he follows a good path and punished if he follows a bad path. All human actions are included in “the fear of Heaven,” for every single action eventuates in either a mitzvah or an aveirah. When the Rabbis (of blessed memory) said, “Everything is in the hands of Heaven” [they were referring to] the way of the world and its nature, such as the species of trees, animals, souls, intellects, spheres, and angels – all of them are “in the hands of Heaven.”

The Rambam’s reading is clear but will become clearer if we compare and contrast it with the Torah Temimah’s.

The Torah Temimah vs. the Rambam

According to the Torah Temimah, yirah (in the context of R. Chanina’s statement) is a particular middah. It is the only middah entirely in our hands. The other qualities and virtues mentioned by Moshe (walking in Hashem’s ways, loving Him, serving Him, keeping His mitzvos), as well as the many others he doesn’t mention (turning from evil, doing good, bestowing kindness, doing justice and righteousness, walking humbly, etc.), are not in our hands, but in the hands of Heaven. He reads R. Chanina’s “everything” as maximal and his “yiras Shamayim” as minimal.

In contrast, the Rambam regards yirah as a stand-in for the complete realm of human freedom and agency. He reads R. Chanina’s “yiras Shamayim” maximally: “All human actions are included in ‘the fear of Heaven,’ for every single action eventuates in either a mitzvah or an aveirah.” R. Chanina’s “everything” refers to physics (i.e., the laws of nature), including man’s physical makeup (“his being tall or short”), but doesn’t touch upon anything in the realm of morality – the “good” and “bad” things Yirmiyah was referring to when he said, “From the mouth of the Most High the bad things and the good do not come forth.”

Consider, for example, ahavas Hashem (love of God). The Torah commands each of us to “love Hashem, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your resources” (Devarim 6:5). The Rambam (Hilchos Teshuvah 10:2) writes about one who serves God out of love: “This is an exceedingly great level, and not every chacham (wise person) merits it. It is the level of Avraham Avinu, whom Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu called ‘My beloved.’” How would R. Chanina speak about ahavas Hashem according to the Torah Temimah and the Rambam?

The Torah Temimah understands R. Chanina to mean that the only choice we really have is whether to fear Hashem. Of those who cultivate that middah of yirah, some will attain the high level of ahavas Hashem and others will not. The results are not in our hands. How far we get depends entirely on Divine assistance.

The Rambam, however, places ahavas Hashem squarely within the category of “things within our control.” While he certainly wouldn’t deny that each of us is given predispositions (as he writes about at length in the same chapter of Shemoneh Perakim) and that the Torah and its mitzvos will not be able to perfect every person in every way, due to the inherent limitations of physicality (see the Moreh 3:34), he would balk at the suggestion that ahavas Hashem is not “in our hands.”

This same machlokess (disagreement) extends to all other middos, perfections, and attainments. This includes shmiras ha’mitzvos, which is not only listed in the parashah but which the Torah Temimah reiterates in his own enumeration. This, more than any of the other particulars included in the “tachlis of yirah,” the Rambam would find objectionable.

The Torah Temimah and the Rambam also differ in how they interpret the pasuk in our parashah. Neither would accept the grocery-run difficulty from the beginning of our article, but each would reframe the analogy differently. The Rambam would reframe it as: “I only need groceries: milk, eggs, onions, ice cream, and a ribeye.” The Torah Temimah would reframe it as: “I only need a ride to the store, and I’ll get the rest myself.”

Lastly, note that the Torah Temimah is focused on resolving a textual problem: the pesukim list more than yirah, so R. Chanina’s proof seems difficult. The Rambam, on the other hand, is addressing a philosophical problem: people mistakenly take R. Chanina’s statement to constitute a denial of free will. Both problems are real. The question is: Which one dictates how we read R. Chanina’s statement? This brings us to the Rambam’s advice.

The Rambam’s Methodological Advice

After explaining R. Chanina’s statement to Ovadiah ha’Ger, the Rambam offers some methodological guidance for how to interpret statements of Chazal that seem to contradict the fundamental principles of Torah:

Anyone who neglects these matters which we have explained and which are built upon the foundations of the world, and goes and searches in one of the aggadic (non-legalistic) statements or midrashim or in the words of one of the Gaonim until he finds one word with which to object to our words – which are words of knowledge and understanding – is only committing suicide; and it is enough for him what he has done to his own soul …

Rather, the following is the proper [approach] for a person of understanding whose heart is set to take the path of truth, namely, that he should make the matter which is explicitly stated in the Torah into a fundamental principle and foundation, and should not demolish a building and a firmly driven peg which does not falter. When he finds a verse from the prophets or a statement from the Rabbis (of blessed memory) which disputes this fundamental principle and contradicts this idea, he should seek and search with his mind’s eye until he understands the words of that prophet or that wise man: if their words come out in line with the idea stated explicitly in the Torah, then it is good; and if not, he should say, “I don’t know the meaning of that prophet’s words or the words of that wise man. They must have a hidden meaning, and were not intended literally.”

Free will is one of the few principles that the Rambam refers to in the Mishneh Torah (Hilchos Teshuvah 5:3) as an “ikkar gadol” (major principle). To take an aggadic statement like R. Chanina’s, which seems to undermine an ikkar gadol, and to make it into its own ikkar is to commit (intellectual) suicide. Instead, we should treat the ikkarim as ikkarim and interpret the statements of Chazal in light of them, rather than the reverse. [1]

How Would the Torah Temimah Respond?

How are we to view the Torah Temimah’s stance in light of the Rambam’s harsh condemnation of those who (in his view) egregiously misinterpret R. Chanina’s statement, or commit intellectual suicide with their misguided methodology? Surely he was familiar with the Rambam’s approach to these matters.

Perhaps when the Torah Temimah listed “shmiras ha’mitzvos” as one of the outcomes that are in the hands of Heaven, he was referring to Divine assistance rather than Divine compulsion. This is implied by his citation of Chazal’s statement “one who comes to purify himself is assisted.” He would fully agree with the Rambam that God never compels a person to do a mitzvah or an aveirah. The machlokess might be far narrower than it seems.

Then again, this reading has to contend with his own words, that everything enumerated in the pasuk “does not refer to Hashem’s demand from man.” Divine assistance might explain how these attainments come about, but it doesn’t explain why shmiras ha’mitzvos would be excluded from what Hashem asks of us in the first place. Perhaps the machlokess is exactly as wide as it appears.

The topics of yiras Hashem, free will, and Divine assistance are broad and deep. I am willing to acknowledge that I’ve misunderstood one or both of the two positions I’ve analyzed in this article. Regardless, the Rambam’s methodology stands firm: no matter what stance we take on these ikkarim, we must subordinate our understanding of Chazal’s statements to the ikkarim and not the other way around.

[1] I’ve relegated the Rambam’s interpretation of the Gemara in Sotah 2a here because I don’t want it to distract from the discussion at hand:

Regarding that which your rabbi said to you: “The daughter of so-and-so is for so-and-so! The money of so-and-so is for so-and-so!” – if this were a [Divine] decree which is equal for everyone and the statements were intended to be understood literally, then why would the Torah say, “lest he will die in the war and another man take her (i.e. the betrothed woman)” (Devarim 20:7) or “lest he will die in the war and another man will redeem it (i.e. the vineyard)” (ibid. 6)? Is there any person of understanding in the world for whom this matter would remain in doubt after what is written in the Torah? …

That which the Sage stated: “The daughter of so-and-so is for so-and-so” was intended by way of reward or by way of punishment, namely, that if this man or this woman had done a mitzvah whose reward is fittingly given to them [in the form of] a beautiful and praiseworthy match, Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu would match them up with each other. Likewise, if they were worthy to be punished by means of a match in which there would be constant strife and war, He would match them up. This is similar to what the Rabbis (of blessed memory) said: “Even if a mamzer (halachically illegitimate male offspring) is at one end of the earth and a mamzeres (halachically illegitimate female offspring) is at the other end of the earth, Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu will bring them and match them up with each other” (Yerushalmi Kiddushin 3:12). This matter is not equal for everybody, but only for those who are deserving [of punishment] or who merit [reward] – all in accordance with what is upright in the eyes of God.

The Gemara is not saying that God forces a particular man to marry a particular woman, but that He provides a fitting spouse as recompense. This impinges on free will no more and no less than other forms of recompense, like providing or withholding rain in its time.

What do you think of the two answers given to the question we opened with? How would you answer it? How do you think the Torah Temimah would respond to the Rambam?

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The Torah content for the month of Av is sponsored by Aliza Feder in honor of the yahrzeit of her mother, Mindy Pincus a”h. I had the pleasure of getting to know Mindy during my first year of yeshiva. She and her husband Gersh hosted me so often that she told me I could assume that a place would automatically be set at their table every Friday night. I will always remember her as a living embodiment of chesed and hachnasas orchim.

Vaeschanan: Rashba on What “Shema Yisrael” Demands of Us

Undoubtedly, the most important phrase in the Shema is “Hashem Echad” (Devarim 6:4), the most explicit declaration of absolute monotheism in the entire Tanach. The second most important phrase is “Hashem Elokeinu,” which expresses Hashem’s providential relationship with us, His chosen nation.

For these two reasons, the opening command of “Shema Yisrael” is easy to overlook. We are prone to rendering it, “Hear, O Israel,” without stopping to contemplate what, exactly, we are being asked to do.

Thankfully, the Rashba – R. Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet (1235-1310), one of the greatest and most prolific Rishonim – was asked in a responsum (5:55) for an explanation of the words in the Shema, and he gave a rich and thorough answer. In this article, we will focus exclusively on his commentary on the first word. I will refrain from commenting too much because, like Jiro Ono, I prefer to let the high-quality raw ingredients of the Rashba’s words speak for themselves.

He begins by outlining the parameters of what he will and will not explain:

You have further asked me to explain to you the section of the Shema. I previously stated that we shouldn’t have any involvement in esoteric ideas (sodos), and in truth every rational being should know that it (i.e. the Shema) is a section designated for us, encompassing [God’s] Oneness and conviction [in His existence], which truly alludes to esoteric ideas and great fundamental principles, which are the foundations of the entire edifice upon which the House of Israel is established.

We do, however, have permission to contemplate the plain meaning of the matters (pshatei ha’devarim), which the entire Torah alludes to and states. And I say, and will tell you in this matter as well, the ideas that have arisen in my mind from the plain meaning of the subject (pshat ha’inyan), namely, that we will need to direct [our intention] toward it at the time of the recitation.

The Rashba is what we would today call a “mekubal,” one who has received knowledge of sodos (esoteric ideas) and sisrei Torah (Torah secrets). He received these secrets from his rebbi, the Ramban (1194-1270). Unlike the Ramban, who permitted himself to transmit these ideas through cryptic allusions, the Rashba took a hardline stance on secrecy. In this respect, he followed the policy of his other rebbi, Rabbeinu Yonah (1180-1264), who refrained from even hinting at the content of any sodos in his writings.

If the Rashba isn’t going to give us even a hint of these sodos, why does he mention them at all? Presumably, so we do not erroneously believe that the ideas he proceeds to explain reflect the full depth of the text. Because he is going to list a number of weighty concepts, it would be very easy to relate to them as a sort of checklist, and to lapse into the feeling (even if not the full-fledged intellectual mistake) that these and these alone are the ideational contents of the Shema.

After this preface, the Rashba begins listing ideas in bullet-point fashion:

And [the plain meaning of the subject] is as follows: That we are all obligated to recite the passage, not with intent of merely reading, as one who reads a section of the Torah simply to fulfill the obligation of reading, but rather to direct our minds to know that He is One and that He is our God.

Kavanah (intention) is me’akeiv (halachically indispensable) for the first pasuk of the Shema (see Shulchan Aruch Orach Chayim 60:5 and 63:4). We will not delve here into the intense debates about the type of kavanah required. I only mention this to point out that this is NOT what the Rashba is referring to. In addition to having kavanah for the meaning of the words we are saying, we are supposed to read the word Shema as directing our minds to seek knowledge of God’s Oneness and hashgachah.

That might sound obvious, so let me spell it out: I myself have kavanah for specific concepts [1] but I do not relate to the phrase “Shema Yisrael” as an injunction to pursue further knowledge of those concepts. But on the Rashba’s reading, kabbalas ole malchus shamayim (the acceptance of the yoke of the kingship of Heaven) is not only an affirmation of what we believe, but a renewal of our commitment to seek further understanding of those beliefs.

The Rashba continues with the next idea:

And that we are obligated to give over our soul, our desire, and all our might for His Name, may He be exalted.

He doesn’t elaborate on this concise point, but in context he seems to mean that we should direct all our energy to “His Name” (i.e. knowledge of Hashem), as the Rambam describes in Hilchos Deos 3:2-3:

A human being needs to direct all of his actions, every one of them, toward the sole objective of knowing Hashem, Blessed is He ... And regarding this matter the Sages commanded, saying: “And let all your actions be for the sake of heaven” (Avos 2:12). And this is what Shlomo said in his wisdom: “In all your ways, know Him, and He will straighten your paths” (Mishlei 3:6).

The Rashba’s next point combines two of his previous ones:

And that we resolve and affirm this with absolute commitment, not with the mere motion of the lips. May God save us from the group of whom it is said, “With his mouth and with his lips he honors Me, but his heart is far from Me [and their fear of Me is a rote human command]” (Yeshayahu 29:13).

It’s one thing to verbally affirm a belief as mere “lip service,” and it’s another to make a hollow declaration of our intent to pursue knowledge that would make that belief genuine. Judaism raises the bar far above rote mitzvos. I’m reminded of the Rambam’s characterization (Moreh 3:51) of people who observe mitzvos by rote:

All our religious activities – reading the Torah, davening, and performing the other mitzvos – aim only to train us to focus on His commandments and free us from worldly distractions, engrossed in Him and lost to all else. If you pray by just moving your lips, facing the wall but thinking of your business dealings; or your tongue reads the Torah, but your heart is on building your house, oblivious to what you are reading; or when you do any mitzvah with your limbs alone, as if digging a hole in the ground or chopping wood in the forest, without reflecting on the meaning of the action or its purpose or its Author, do not think you have achieved the goal [of the mitzvah]. Rather, you will then be like those of whom it is said: “You are near in their mouth but far from their thoughts” (Yirmiyahu 12:2).

Back to the Rashba. This next point caught me off-guard:

And that we accept this upon ourselves not as those who are pained and anxious about it, like a person who resolves in his heart out of fear of one who rules over him, from whose authority he cannot escape and whose command he cannot refrain from fulfilling; rather, like one who loves and desires, desiring to attain the will of his Master whom he loves. Upon Him he sets his love [and] his soul, [and] he will find pleasure for his soul, and he is honored through all that comes to him in pursuing His commandments.

This is something I’m certainly guilty of. I think about mitzvos, and I also think about my relationship with Hashem, but I barely give any thought to how I relate to Hashem as THE Commander-in-Chief. I mean, I’m sure that I do more mitzvos out of a feeling of obligation than out of a feeling of love, but the point here is that I don’t think about this when I’m saying the Shema, which is what the Rashba informs me the Shema is urging me to do.

This next point is, perhaps, the most important part of his entire discourse:

Furthermore, we must contemplate that belief in Him and His Oneness is not “a rote human command,” such that the instruction which one was taught and trained in would lead him to believe thus, without its having been founded upon the analysis of his mind and wisdom, and he would be equally obligated toward the opposite, as happens with most beliefs. Rather, we are obligated to listen and to analyze, and after the listening and the analysis, [it will emerge] that true analysis necessitated and determined this.

Up until this point, the Rashba has only talked about the type of rote belief that is unacceptable: belief as “a rote human command” that could be anything – even the opposite. Here, he defines in positive terms what we are commanded to do: not only to listen (i.e. to apprehend what the Torah teaches us), but to analyze that belief with our minds and the full powers of our wisdom, to the point that our understanding necessitates it. He then explains that this is implied in the word Shema:

And this is [the meaning of] its saying, “Shema Yisrael,” for the word “shema” encompasses three meanings. Its first, primary denotation is the hearing of the ear – “When an ear would hear [me] (sham’ah) it would praise me” (Iyov 29:11). It is also extended, in the opinion of the Rav (Rambam), [to understanding] – “May You grant Your servant an understanding mind (leiv shome’ah)” (I Melachim 3:9). And it is also extended to acceptance and conviction in it (i.e. in what one accepts) – “Hearken (shema), my son, unto the discipline of your father” (Mishlei 1:8); “Praiseworthy is the one who hearkens unto me (shome’ah li)” (ibid. 8:34); “If you shall surely hearken unto (shamo’ah tishme’u) My commandments” (Devarim 11:13).

Here, in its saying “Shema Yisrael,” it includes all three meanings, which we were commanded to hear and to learn, for were we not to hear and learn, we would not gain understanding of it. And after the hearing and the learning and a thorough investigation, [we examine] whether there is any contradicting proof, God forbid. And after we advance from the hearing to true analysis, the analysis will bring us and compel us, by a genuine necessity, to accept and to be convinced that He exists, and likewise that He exercises providence over the particulars of our deeds.

In short, hearing is just the first level. We reach the second, understanding, by investigating what the Torah requires us to believe, examining any and all counterarguments against it, and pursuing this investigation until we become convinced of the truth of those beliefs. Only at that point do we reach the third level of “hearing”: acceptance and true conviction.

Many of us say the Shema multiple times each day. We may be more or less aware of its contents – the core beliefs and values we mention and the obligations enumerated in its three paragraphs. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I haven’t related to the words “Shema Yisrael” as a charge with its own content, which governs everything I read. Thanks to the Rashba, I now know what the word Shema demands of me. The next step is to live up to it.

[1] Check out my Kavanah Primer: Avos, on Hashem’s Name, if you’re interested in what kavanah I have in mind.

What are your thoughts and takeaways from the Rashba’s explanations?

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Note: Although I appreciate feedback on all my content, I’m particularly interested in feedback on this one. Not because I think this is one of my better pieces, and not even because I’m unsure about it, but because this one was particularly vexing to write. I can never predict which pieces will be easy or difficult. For some reason, this one was fraught with problems. If I did it right, the seams shouldn’t show. That’s what I’m interested in.

Devarim: When Judges Are Threatened with Violence

I grew up in Yakima, WA in the nineties. Yakima was (and still is) a town renowned for its hops, its orchards, its vineyards, and its gang violence. At least, in the bad parts of town.

One of my best friends, who resided in the good part of town, lived next door to a family whose kids often came over to play. One day, he informed me that these kids’ parents were both judges and casually mentioned that they had received death threats in the past. Most likely from the thugs in these gangs.

That’s what I think of whenever I read one of the first mitzvos mentioned in Sefer Devarim: the Torah prohibition of lo saguru mipnei ish (“Do not fear any man”), which is directed specifically at judges. Here it is in context:

I commanded your judges at that time, saying, “Listen among your brothers and judge righteously between man and his brother or his sojourner. Do not show partiality in judgment; the small like the great you shall hear. Do not fear any man, for the mishpat (justice or judgment) is God’s. And the matter that is too difficult for you, bring to me and I will hear it.” (1:16-17)

I’d like to examine both clauses of the bolded phrase: (1) What is the prohibition of lo saguru, and what are its parameters? (2) What does it mean that the mishpat belongs to God, and how does it relate to lo saguru?

Rambam codifies the primary case of lo saguru in Hilchos Sanhedrin ve’ha’Onshin ha’Mesurin la’Hen 22:1:

[When] two who come before you for judgment, one gentle and one tough: before you hear their words, or once you hear their words and you do not [yet] know how the judgment leans, you are permitted to say to them, “I will not attend to you” – perhaps the strong one will become liable, and he will consequently chase after the judges.

But once you’ve heard their words and know how the judgment leans, you are not permitted to say, “I will not attend to you,” as it is stated, “do not fear any man” (Devarim 1:17). [This means] that you shouldn’t say, “So-and-so is wicked; maybe he’ll kill my son,” “maybe he’ll set fire to my grain-stack,” “maybe he’ll cut down my saplings.” And if he was appointed for the public, he is obligated to attend to them [in every case].

The Torah gives a dayan two outs: he can opt not to hear the case at all, or he can recuse himself even after hearing the claims as long as he hasn’t yet formed a judgment. But once he hears their words and is inclined toward a ruling, lo saguru kicks in, and he is obligated to judge the case no matter how afraid he is. And these outs only apply to dayanim who aren’t appointed for the public. A dayan who is memuneh la’rabbim (a public appointee) may not opt out of any case.

Upon hearing this halacha, one might wonder, “Really?! The dayan is required to endanger himself and his family? What about the paramount value of pikuach nefesh (the preservation of life)?” R. Nachum Rabinovitch zt”l (Yad Peshutah ad loc.) raises this question and tentatively offers an original answer:

The Acharonim discussed the question: if the case involves a powerful litigant, and the dayan fears that he may kill his [the dayan’s] son, why is he obligated to take up their case? Surely nothing stands in the way of sakanas nefashos (danger to life) except three transgressions, and the negative commandment of lo saguru is not one of them!

Were it not that I am afraid [to say so], I would say that the law of the king and the law of beis din (the court) differ from the din yachid (law of an individual). For the function of beis din is to pursue evildoers and to restrain them, even by force … And it is evident that if beis din applies force against evildoers, it is possible that they will meet with opposition from them, and consequently danger will be created for the dayan or the officer as well.

But it is on that understanding that they appointed him … If, God forbid, the dayanim will be afraid to judge the transgressors, there is no danger greater than this for the entire public, and the pikuach nefesh of the whole public depends on this. Compare 23:9: “Any dayan who takes money from this one and gives it to that one unlawfully, Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu exacts souls from him, as it is said: ‘And He will rob of life those who rob them’ (Mishlei 22:23).”

Since it is on that understanding that he was appointed, the dayan cannot exempt himself with a claim of concern for pikuach nefesh; rather, if he truly fears for his life on account of the wicked, he must resign and step down from his eminence and no longer be a dayan at all. But one who continues to be a dayan while betraying his office by showing favor to the wicked, he thereby forfeits his life.

R. Rabinovitch’s argument is that the dayan acting as the arm of beis din isn’t governed by the din yachid with regard to pikuach nefesh. The Torah’s response to a judge’s sakanas nefashos concern is: in your capacity as dayan, you are charged with the pikuach nefesh of the whole community; this is what you signed up for.

In many ways, this is akin to being a soldier: both the dayan and the soldier serve their roles knowing that they may very well endanger their lives, and both are aware that it is vital that some people take such roles for the preservation and wellbeing of society at large.

Now that we’ve answered our question about lo saguru, let us move on to our question about “ki ha’mishpat lelokim hu.” The Ramban cites a passage in II Divrei ha’Yamim 19:6-7. After the righteous King Yehoshafat appoints judges throughout the land, he gives these judges a charge similar to Moshe Rabbeinu’s:

[Yehoshafat] said to the judges: “See what you are doing, because it is not for man that you judge, but for Hashem, and [He is] with you in the matter of judgment. And now, let the dread of Hashem be upon you; take care and act, for with Hashem our God there is no injustice, nor favoritism, nor taking of bribes.”

The Ramban (Devarim 1:17) explains Moshe’s words based on that passage:

The meaning of “because the mishpat is God’s” is like the meaning of “because you do not judge for man, but for Hashem, and He is with you in the matter of mishpat,” [meaning] to say that it is for God to do justice among His creatures, for it is on account of this that He created them, that there be uprightness and righteousness among them, and to save the robbed from the hand of the oppressor, and He appointed you in His place, and if you are afraid and you commit robbery [through your perversion of justice,] behold! you have sinned against Hashem, for you have betrayed His shlichus (commission).

When I first read our verse, I assumed it was intended as divrei chizuk (words of encouragement) for the judges: “Do not fear any man, for the mishpat is God’s” and He will assist you in your task and protect you from the harm you fear. Indeed, this is one of the explanations of Yehoshafat’s words given by the Radak (ad loc.): “He will be with you and help you in the matter of judgment if you fear Him.”

This is not how the Ramban understands it. Rather, Moshe is reminding the judges that they are the shluchim (agents) through whom God enacts justice. Therefore, if they allow intimidation by litigants to affect their rulings, not only are they failing in their duties toward their fellow Jews, but they are also betraying their shlichus, thereby hindering God from carrying out His justice through His earthly representatives.

Whereas the Radak learns “ki ha’mishpat lelokim hu” as a statement of what God will do for the dayan, the Ramban learns it as a statement of what the dayan does for God (so to speak). And although this relates directly to lo saguru mipnei ish, it also serves as a fitting conclusion to the entire list of mitzvos, insofar as it reminds the judge of his role and its importance.

I don’t know how my friend’s judiciary neighbors handled the death threats they received, but if the Ramban were to address them, he might remind them that they, too, are the agents of Divine justice. “… it is for God to do justice among His creatures, for it is on account of this that He created them.” All human beings who enact justice are carrying out the will of the Creator, the “King Who loves righteousness and justice” (amidah).

Curious as to how you would answer the second question. I had to be selective in what to write about, but I’m sure there are other great answers out there!

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