Responding to the Critics: On Tzitzit and the Rav

My post on tzitzit and the Rav has inspired a welcome number of insightful, but ultimately misguided, responses. (And one obviously not-so-insightful comment.) They raise fair questions, and I hope they'll see in my words fair answers.

Firstly: it is not the Rav's philosophy, but the Rav's actions, which are so grossly problematic. Let's grant the Rav his (very counterintuitive) belief that “an enhanced kiyum hamitzvah” is the only legitimate source of spiritual fulfillment – it still fails to explain his disrespectful actions. The Rav could have spoken with the woman as if she was a real person, laying out his concerns while thoughtfully fielding hers; the Rav could have delivered a two-minute overview of the mitzvah of tzitzit, so that the congregant would properly understand the nature of the mitzvah and her enhanced kiyum thereof; the Rav could have suggested a more constructive “lesson” - that the woman first spend three months learning hilchot tzitzot (and maybe Nefesh Ha-Hayyim, while we're at it.). In other words, the Rav had many more productive and less disrespectful tools for applying his halakhic philosophy to this case.


Instead, he chose to put her through this insulting, disingenuous, and cruel experiment. Of course, those are my words, and several commentators insisted that the experiment was fair, even “Solomonic”. So let me spell out some of the many ways in which the experiment itself was unkind and unfair. For one, nobody enjoys being a guinea pig – we are human beings, not test subjects. Even for a noble purpose, I would never put my mother through an inconvenience just to see how she'd react; I would never tempt a friend into stealing my money just to test their loyalty. When you respect someone, you don't – pardon the language – putz around with them. Insulting: its a word I stand by.

In fact, this “putzing around” is much worse than the examples I gave. If my friend did succumb to temptation and steal my money, at least he would know he was doing something basically wrong. The great cruelty of the Rav's test resides in the fact that he tricks her into believing she is doing something noble. The woman believes she is reaching new spiritual heights, while the Rav laughs and calls it sinful; she believes she's performing a mitzvah, while the more educated Halakhist knows the performance is meaningless in God's eyes. Oh, that instant when he pulls away the drape and informs her that those precious moments when she stood in God's warm embrace were but the delusions of a spiritual dipshit! Cruel: not Abu Grahb style, but you get the idea.


And to achieve this effect, the Rav must ply her with a direct lie. The Rav tells her that gradual entry to the mitzvah is the key thing – and deludes her into believing it – when he himself has no such belief. It's all a sham – the Rav's psak instead a lie – so that she can be tricked into performing in his game. Disingenuous, indeed.

With all that said, even had the Rav not lied, and even if he straightforwardly explained how her spiritual intentions were about to be quizzed, its still rather inappropriate pastoral care. She comes to the Rabbi with a problem, and he turns the table on her – declaring her to be the potential problem, and investigating her personal abilities and beliefs. Here's a congregant (not a “woman congregant” but a congregant) who in interested in performing a mitzvah, and the Rav's first reaction is to challenge her spiritual worthiness?

Of course it wouldn't be. The Rav would never do this to a man who comes to him, saying he'd like an Orthodox Jewish wedding. Or to a person who says he'd like to start learning Talmud every morning - where's a good tractate to start? (“How about you first read Jewish history articles for three months!”) Or to a woman who confides that although she's never done it before, she'd like to start lighting Shabbat candles. At least not without good reason.


Good reason - that's what it all comes own to.  For perhaps this case of a woman wearing tzitzit is different; perhaps the Rav had good reason to suspect some kind of vicious mal-intent. One can certainly imagine reading something like the following in this story: “R. Soloveitchik knew this woman personally, and had verified suspicions that her interest was not in the mitzvah, but in making a public scene,”* or, “The Rav had counseled her before, and knew that she had a hard time performing mitzvot for the correct spiritual reasons.”

Ah!, how much one can learn from what isn't written in the story! It is precisely because no such lines are mentioned that the whole thing is so pernicious. The narrative takes for granted – and allows us to see the Rav taking for granted! - that any woman looking to wear tzitzit is suspect. The whole power of the story derives from the fact that it doesn't need to tell us that she is some "rabble-rousing feminist"* or uneducated feel-good idiot – we can, just like the Rav in this story, happily assume it. 

 And we are also meant to happily assume that said female idiot is, for reasons obviously not worth mentioning, beyond spiritual repair. This is why, with no justification, the Rav glibbly decides against teaching her a constructive lesson about Rav-ian philosophy and the nature of mitzvot, but instead forbids her from ever donning a talit again. Or, as the story effectively says: “Women, right – what a joke!”

Some responders have argued that the Rav's ruling is itself only about one individual, and is not meant to make a statement about women at large. But it is her gender, and her desire to wear tzitzit, that are the only details the narrator imagines to be relevant. We are never given any other “problem” that could possibly explain the Rav's otherwise mysterious decisions, and if it were about an ungendered congregant and an unnamed mitzvah, the Rav's actions would seem utterly bizarre. (Wait, so he didn't do it right, so the Rav forbade him from doing it again?) We, as the story's audience, are just meant to understand that because its a woman trying to wear tzitzit, a host of derogatory assumptions now apply.






*I don't think these are sufficient rationales, but I imagine they are what some readers are meant to hear.

The Rav was Wrong, Just Say it Already

Finally, the first volley in an anti-Rav, but Modern Orthodox attack has been launched. Rabbi Michael Broyde, writing at Hirhurim, has declared a certain mainstream story about Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik to be “perplexing” and “Halakhically problematic”.

Of course, Rabbi Broyde is entirely correct; its just a damn shame that he failed to go further. We must be honest with ourselves: the story he quotes regarding the Rav needs to be immediately excised from the Modern Orthodox canon. The story, i.e. the “famous woman wants to wear a talit” story, runs as follows:

During the mid-1970′s, one of R. Kelemer’s woman congregants at the Young Israel of Brookline was interested in wearing a talit and tsitsit during the prayer services. After R. Kelemer had expressed to her his hesitations about the matter, she approached R. Soloveitchik — who lived in Brookline — on the matter. The Rav explained that in light of the novelty of the action, it needed to be adopted gradually. Accordingly, he suggested that she first try wearing a talit without tsitsit (which is, of course, allowed for women.) The Rav asked the woman to return to him after three months, at which time they would discuss the matter further. When the two met once again, she described to R. Soloveitchik the magnificent nature of her religious experience in wearing the talit. The Rav pointed out to the woman that wearing a talit without tsitsit lacked any halakhically authentic element of mitsvah. It was obvious, therefore, that what generated her sense of “religious high” was not an enhanced kiyyum hamitsvah, but something else. Under such circumstances, the Rav maintained, wearing a talit was an inappropriate use of the mitsvah. Consequently, the Rav forbade the woman from wearing a talit with tsitsit.

The story is problematic on several levels. As Rabbi Broyde points out, when a woman wears a four cornered garment sans tzitzit she violates a mitzvah aseh actively misses out on a mitzvah aseh kiyumi, and for the Rav to counsel that of her is certainly suspect rabbinic practice. Furthermore, this tale begs the obvious question of whether the Rav would have radically revised his ruling had the woman responded differently. In Rabbi Broyde's words: “If the women had responded to the Rav’s request that . . . “every day her heart had been broken by the knowledge that she was not fulfilling a positive commandment of the Torah” would the Rav have agreed to let her wear a tallit? In public?” And either way, surely this one woman's subjective experience is no ground for extrapolating to other women who aspire to wear tzitzit, unless you conceive of “women congregants” not as individuals but as a generic class of feel-good idiots.

But we can add a few more. For one, the Rav's tactic was nothing less than insulting and disingenuous. Why put an honest Jew, in search of spiritual fulfillment, through this bizarre and condescending experiment? Was she beneath an honest statement of the Rav's concerns, or did the he simply take pleasure in seeing her fail his cruel little test? In addition, why in God's name is “an enhanced kiyum hamitzvah” the only legitimate source for feeling close to God? Its almost as if the Rav thinks it utterly vile for someone to feel attached to the Divine through, say, a brush with the glory of nature or, say, the wonder of one's grandchildren lighting hannukah candles. (But wait, your grandchildren are not yet b'nai mitzvah, you foolish woman!) The irony of course, is that the woman was following a direct psak halakha, such that her actions were indeed the very fulfillment of her halakhic obligation in this context.

In sum, the story attests to the very worst Rabbinic stereotypes: joyous condescension to others' lack of Jewish knowledge, willful disregard to women's sincere spiritual needs, and a general preference for legalism over humanism.

So let it be known: thoughtful, intelligent, Modern Orthodox individuals have one of two options – claim that this story never really happened, or admit that it was one of the Rav's major missteps. However great and noble the Rav (and, I think he was both) this was an exception and must be regarded as such. Label the story apocryphal, or assign it to the Rav Apocrypha. But never cite it approvingly again.