Now that I am to some degree immersed in the Yerushalmi, I can appreciate all these points. However, proving that R. Lieberman was a part of the Orthodox world is besides the point. He was, he always remained, and he deeply cared to be accepted and respected within it. Saul Leiberman always saw himself as an Orthodox Jew who happened to teach in a non-denominational rabbinic seminary, that's all. It means he didn't beleive in Austritt. What it tells you about his capacity for self-delusion is a lot harder to imagine.
He was a fascinating man of many contradictions. Hw was and will remain for a long time one of the most impressive resources for the study of the Yerushalmi.
What it tells you about his capacity for self-delusion is a lot harder to imagine.
By all accounts, the gap between Orthodox and Conservate Judaism was substantially less defined
What it tells you about his capacity for self-delusion is a lot harder to imagine.
By all accounts, the gap between Orthodox and Conservate Judaism was substantially less defined 60 years ago than it is today. I wouldn't call it "self-delusion" as much as naivete.
S:
Lieberman was clearly piggybacking off of Daf Yomi, which Conservative Jews did not participate in.
That's obviously not to disagree with your assessment of his opinions on Orthodoxy, but I wouldn't draw conclusions from this particular anecdote.
who happened to teach in a non-denominational rabbinic seminary
who's delusional now??? there was never any doubt of the denominational distinction of jts, even way back in 1940, not to mention later.
Lieberman was clearly piggybacking off of Daf Yomi, which Conservative Jews did not participate in.
huh? whaddayamean??
That's obviously not to disagree with your assessment of his opinions on Orthodoxy, but I wouldn't draw conclusions from this particular anecdote.
what opinions on orthodoxy??? he mentioned three world events that happened. there is no hint of reference to opinions on any movement here.
and S, why no honorific in front of SLs name in the blog heading??? and he didnt have a phd so dr. is not the correct one to use (later in the piece)
I disagree. As Marshall Sklar wrote, many of the faculty thought that they were teaching in a seminary that happened to produce Conservative rabbis but not in a Conservative Rabbinic Seminary. A man with Lieberman's intellect and pikhus (he made a fortune on the stock market, for example) should have had an inkling. Even when he had an opportinity to come to YU (R. YD Soloveitchik attempted to negotiate this), he refused. The Seminary asked only for 4 hours of teaching a week, leaving him time to learn and write.
The Escorial ms. is indeed an extraordinary resource.
Avakesh,
Where does Sklare say this?
Where did you see that Lieberman had an opportunity to come to YU and that the Rav negotiated this?
many of the faculty thought that they were teaching in a seminary that happened to produce Conservative rabbis but not in a Conservative Rabbinic Seminary
again, i say rubbish. i dont beleive this applied to any faculty after 1940 (what does it even mean for a seminary to produce conservative rabbis but not actually be conservative???) and certainly not RSL. didnt you see the letter Marc Shapiro published at the end of his second vol of kol kitvei r yy weinberg? rsl knew the denominational distinction of the seminary, cared enough to ask three separate poskim when he was invited there in 1940 and got a go ahead from at least one of them. plus the famous letter he wrote to RDWH, RZlotnick, RFrancus etc when the women ordination issue first came up, there is no question he knew where he was teaching. ultimately he didnt care tho. denominationalism is just politics in the end.
According to Schochet/ Spiro RSL's signature appeared on every semicha certificate issued by the JTS.
Bottom line, as Mivami said, he didn't believe in Austritt. He also felt that he was given the okay by three gedolim who he declined to name (S/ S quote Dov Zlotnick who believes they were R. Yitzhak Herzog, R. Zvi Pesach Frank, and R. Meir Bar-Ilan--Marc Shapiro believes they were R. Herzog, R. Isser Zalman Meltzer and R. Yaakov Moshe Charlap--all are speculation, even if educated guesses--particularly the R. IZ Meltzer one, in my opinion).
It seems that he sincerely believed that he was simply teaching Torah in an environment which enabled him to learn most of the time (he only had to teach a few hours a week).
Whether his belief was disingenuous or naive, whether it could be reconciled with what I typed in the first sentence here, or that he was active in shaping seminary policy; surely he knew that many of his students and colleagues were not shomer halakhah etc. But such was his belief about his career choice.
As for him and YU, sounds like an urban legend. I don't know if its an urban legend or not, but Wolfe Keleman claimed that RMS considered landing a teaching position for RYBS at JTS. I don't know, but he was there then and I wasn't.
In case anyone from the Israel Academy ... is reading this, we have been waiting for years for the reprint of the Escorial ms. What is the holdup? (I mean I know books about Israeli flora and fauna are very important but maybe you could sneak this one in somehow.) BMG has a copy but it is kept upstairs out of public view.
andy
wait for the hebrew u to be putting up online very soon. or so i am led to believe.
I heard that when the issue of female ordination came up, RSL said, 'what does it matter if we give the semicha to women? Our semicha is not semicha anyway...'
I would really love to know if this quote is authentic or not. It's point would, in my mind, support S's contentions.
That's the opposite: while its true that he did point out that our semicha is not semicha, he did so to demonstrate his opinion that it is forbidden to grant women what we call semicha, that is, the right to judge.
'what does it matter if we give the semicha to women? Our semicha is not semicha anyway
dont know if there is a source for an oral tradition like this but he says something similar in the private letter to RDWH etc that was (posthumously) published in tomekh kahahalakha. but what he said i think was that semicha nowadays is not what it was back in the days of the talmud etc but it is still wrong to grant women ordination bec of other reasons. read there for details.
The Israel Academy for sciences and humanities is, possibly, the worst venue for publishing a book in the entire world. They have been in possession of Prof. David Rosenthal's (the son of the prof. rosenthal who discovered Escorial)MS of his critical edition of Mishnah Neziqin for seven years. The edition of seder olam, by milikowsky, has received a similar delay. Someone should be fired there.
So what else is new! I am just beginning to study Yerushalmi, and the magid shiur said the same thing. Strangely enough, he is Orthodox, so . . . It's about time that the non-Orthodox movements stop pretending they can compete with the Talmudic scholars at those Institutes of Higher Torah Studies where the 'associates and fellows" spend much of their time studying the Gemara.
Granted, Tanach, and other aspects of Jewish scholarship are an issue which comes up for discussion, but Daf for Daf, even the Sephardic Yeshivot who are more known for their emphasis on Halachic Studies, are more knowledgable about the texts, as they are than the garden variety Reform or Conservative rabbi.
So when I read that the Yerushalmi is not a consistent text, well, ho-hum, we've been knowing that for a long time. Considering the number of sites that "the Orthodox" have been launching feature Talmudic studies, not to mention that the YU-Bar Ilan Responsa Project is up the version no. 16, I have to wonder where the Conservative and Reform Jews were all these years.
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