Loving God More Than Halacha -Fall Bulletin 2016

It would seem to be old news. This past summer, the Petach Tikvah Rabbinate rejected the
conversion of a young woman who was converted by Rabbi Lookstein. There were protests, opeds and negotiations; and the crisis ultimately ended in absurdity and ambiguity, with the
Supreme Rabbinical Court dodging the case, and instead pressuring the convert to undergo a
flash reconversion. Rabbi Looksteins convert is now free to get married. One could say this is
now over. But its not.
Unfortunately, many of the issues behind the disqualification of Rabbi Lookstein are still
ongoing; and of greater concern is the religious philosophy that precipitated this crisis, a
philosophy which promotes an unhealthy fixation on Halachic rules while forgetting the ultimate
goals of Halacha.
This fixation is not new. The Talmud (Sotah 21b) talks about the pious fool. It says:
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What is a pious fool? a woman is drowning in the river, and he says: 'It is improper for me to
look upon her and rescue her'.
A pious fool looks only at the rules and never at the goals. A woman created in the image of God
is dying, yet this pious idiot cant even look at her in order to throw her a lifeline!1
The discipline of Halacha is so intense that we must always worry about mutating into pious
fools; and I believe the Lookstein case is a classic example of this phenomenon, of putting
meticulous observance of Halacha before Jewish unity and serving God.
To understand this, we need some context. While it is unclear why Rabbi Looksteins conversion
was rejected by the Petach Tikvah Beit Din, one suspects that it has a lot to do with an ongoing
conflict in Israel regarding conversion. In 2008, Rabbi Avraham Sherman disqualified thousands
of conversions by Rabbi Chaim Drukman. He did so because he felt Rabbi Druckman was no
longer a qualified Rabbinic Judge. In his decision Rabbi Sherman wrote:
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1 Sadly, real life cases like this exist. On March 11, 2002, a fire at a girls' school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia
killed fifteen people. Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving the burning building
and saving their lives because the girls were not wearing correct Islamic dress.

The conversion Beit Din of Rabbi Druckman is a disqualified Beit Din, because they disrespect
the Halacha as decided by all of the decisors..and act with a lack of seriousness, and...one
should see them as frivolous people who do not accept the decisions of the Torah and
Shulchan Aruch, and fabricate on their own empty words.therefore one should see them as
intentional transgressors and heretics
Rabbi Sherman is referring to a lenient view in the laws of conversion, one accepted by Rabbi
Druckman. In response, he claims this view is fabricated, and any Rabbi who follows it is a
transgressor and heretic. Therefore, not only are converts who are converted based on this
lenient view disqualified, but Rabbi Druckman himself, because he holds this lenient view, is
disqualified and considered a heretic and a sinner.
After all of the shenanigans this summer, I was left with the sneaking suspicion that a similar
process was at hand with Rabbi Lookstein. After all, one could see immediately that this convert
was quite meticulous in her observance of mitzvot; that was admitted by all. And the idea that a
well known Rabbi was not known by the Rabbis in Petach Tikvah was also a smokescreen;
why couldnt they make a few phone calls and find out who Rabbi Lookstein was? Clearly, the
rejection had something else behind it. And I suspected this was an attempt to apply the
Sherman ruling to Rabbi Lookstein, to say that he is disqualified because he may be too
lenient to be a qualified judge.
This attitude is disastrous. The age old etiquette of Halachic debate has been destroyed,
replaced with a my way or the highway attitude. In the past, we could disagree passionately
about serious halachic subjects, but we never allowed that to divide us. The Mishnah in
Yevamot (1:4) writes about the debates of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel:
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Even though these prohibit (certain marriages) and these permit, these disqualify and these
allow, Beit Shammai did not refrain from marrying women from Beit Hillel, nor did Beit Hillel
refrain from marrying women from Beit Shammai. The utensils where these ruled pure and
these ruled impure, still they (Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel) did not refrain from using utensils
the other deemed pure.
The way of Torah is to allow debate without division; without it, we cannot hold a diverse
community together. The tragedy of the Sherman ruling is that it cannot imagine another
legitimate Halachic interpretation, and cannot see as legitimate Rabbis with differing points of
view.
Disqualifying Halachic opponents is an ersatz piety. It is easy to define a community by its
opponents and to manufacture passion by harping on an imagined threat to the Halachic

tradition. This tendency is not new, and events like the disqualification of Rabbi Druckman were
predicted over a 100 years ago by the Netziv, Rav Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (1816-1893). He
writes in his Meshiv Davar (1:44):
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Thus, when a Pharisee saw someone being lax in a certain matter, even though he was not a
Sadducee but only sinning in this matter, because of unnecessary hatred he judged him to be a
SadduceeFrom this mistaken attitude numerous people justified murders (of religious
opponents) ..
It must not be like this; we cannot allow exaggerated piety to destroy our community. Rav
Aharon Lichtenstein liked to quote the phrase the traditions of civility; and our community
needs those traditions of civility desperately. We must learn how to respect each others
religious perspectives and how to live together as one community. In medieval Europe there
was a debate over the permissibility of caul fat, a fat found on the outside of the animals
stomach. The Shulchan Aruch notes that it was considered prohibited. The Rama notes that this
was ruling was accepted everywhere except for the Rhineland, where people ate caul fat. The
Rama (Yoreh Deah 64) then adds:
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One does not prohibit the dishes of the Jews of the Rhineland (even though they eat caul fat),
because they consider (this fat) to be permissible.
This is an exceptional ruling!! In the Rhineland, people are eating a food that the rest of Europe
considers to be absolutely prohibited. Yet even so, Jews from the rest of Europe would eat off of
what they considered non-kosher dishes in order to respect the Jews of the Rhineland. In
contrast, today it is far more common for one to dismiss those who accept an unsuitable
hashgacha. We have sadly become pious fools, forgetting that our priority should be unity, not
Halachic stringency.

Halacha is intended as a way to bring us close to God; but that can only work when we put God
first. When we forget God, Halacha can become a heartless discipline. The Talmud (Yoma 23a)
tells a tragic story that represents the worst of a Halacha-first attitude, where overzealous love
for Halacha ends up leading to murder. The setting is the Temple, where two young priests are
competing for the privilege of doing the service on the altar. The Talmud recounts:
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Our Rabbis taught: It once happened that two priests were equal as they ran to mount the
ramp (to do the service) and when one of them came first within four cubits of the altar, the
other took a knife and thrust it into his heart. . The father of the young man came and found
him still in convulsions. He said: May he be an atonement for you. My son is still in convulsions
(alive) and the knife has not become unclean. [The fathers remark] comes to teach you that
the purity of their vessels was of greater concern to them even than the shedding of
blood.
The fathers statement is both chilling and telling; here is a man worried more about the purity of
the Temple than the death of his own son. The Talmud includes the fathers words to underline
that how widespread a halacha-first attitude was at the time.
But we must love God more than Halacha; and the greatest of Rabbis would put God first. In a
famed case from July 1802, Rav Chaim of Volozhin grapples with a difficult agunah issue, of a
woman whose husband was presumed dead but there was a dearth of clear evidence to permit
her to remarry. (Chut Hameshulash 1:8). In page after page of careful legal reasoning, Rav
Chaim disputes precedents, and allows the woman to remarry. He explains he did so because
" I have
thought together with my creator, and saw it was my obligation to use all my might to find a
solution for agunot; may God save me from mistakes. Rav Chaim recognized that to truly
follow Halacha one must look to serve God, and he had to look for a way to alleviate the
suffering of a bereaved widow.
I thought of this when the Rabbis in Petach Tikvah were busy rejecting Rabbi Looksteins
conversion. They rejected his conversion without any due diligence: not one Rabbi from Israel
called Rabbi Lookstein to discuss his conversion standards. From all appearances, the Petach
Tikvah Beit Din did not consider the emotional turmoil they caused this poor woman. Clearly,
they did not think it over with their creator before rejecting her conversion.
The ultimate lesson of the Petach Tikvah incident is this: we must learn to love God more than
Halacha. Rav Chaim of Volozhin, who elsewhere writes about the importance of pure devotion
to Torah2, never forgets that God must come first in Halachic decision making. We need to think
2 Cf. Norman Lamm Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torahs Sake in the Works of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin
and his Contemporaries and Allan Nadler,The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Response to the Hasidic

about morality and spirituality before, during, and after opening the Shulchan Aruch. If we dont,
we are doomed to become pious fools again and again.
Loving God more than Halacha requires spiritual sacrifices. Rabbi Abraham Twersky tells an
inspiring story about the great Rabbinic leaders, the Chofetz Chaim and Rav Meir Shapiro. He
writes3:
On the return from a convention in which many Torah sages participated, the train made stops
in
several towns, whose Jewish communities came out to greet the gedolim. The Chafetz Chaim,
however, in his profound humility, never went on the train platform to meet the people. HaGaon
Rav Meir Shapiro of Lublin, although he was a young man, boldly approached the elderly sage.
Why arent you going out to meet the people? he asked. The Chafetz Chaim answered, Why
should I go out? What is it that they want to see? I dont have horns on my head. It is because
they have this idea about me that I am a tzaddik, and if I go out to them, I am making a
statement
about myself that I am someone special. Rav Meir Shapiro asked, And what is wrong with
making such a statement? The Chafetz Chaim said, What do you mean what is wrong? It is
gaavah (arrogance). Rav Meir Shapiro said, And if it is gaavah, so what? The Chafetz
Chaim said, Gaavah is a terrible aveirah (sin). Rav Meir Shapiro said, And what happens if
one does an aveirah? The Chafetz Chaim said, Why, for an aveirah one will be punished in
Gehenom (hell). Rav Meir Shapiro said, Throngs of Jews will have pleasure from seeing you.
Arent you willing to accept some punishment in order to give Jews pleasure?
From then on, every time the train pulled into a station, the Chofetz Chaim was the first one on
the platform to meet the people.
This attitude needs to inform every aspect of our halachic observances. If Halacha is to have
any meaning, it must lead us closer to God, to love our fellow Jew, and to serve mankind.
Simply put, we must love God more than Halacha.

Rapture

3 Dear Rabbi, Dear Doctor, pp. 20-21