[Part I of this four-part essay can be read at http://www.israelnn.com/article.php3?id=2628.]
Libertarian Implications of Contemporary Realia
I will focus on one specific area of censorship as a paradigm for this issue as a whole. I will focus on that which our sages called ?halacha ve?ain morin ken? (a halacha that one should not teach) ? meaning that the ancillary damage caused by the likely popular misapplication of such a halacha outweighs the benefits of knowing it. In other words, these are halachot that were kept away from the masses for their own good.
By far the most famous example of such a halacha is identified with the story of Pinchas (see Sanhedrin 82a and the Rama in Hoshen Mishpat 425:5): the halacha of haboel Aramit, kanaim pog?im bo. Since it is a secret halacha, I will not translate it. Rather to illustrate my point, as you shall see, anyone who doesn?t know what it means will immediately have the option of asking their neighbor.
While you?re asking your neighbor, I will digress to a story that this reminds me of: A new rabbi is hired by a community and all eagerly await his first drasha as their rabbi. The rabbi gets up and asks his new congregation, how many of you have read this week?s parsha? Wanting to impress their rabbi, everyone in the entire shul raises their hand.
The rabbi, looking somewhat surprised, says, ?Well, if that is the case, then you don?t need me to speak this morning,? and sits down.
The following week, the rabbi gets up and asks the same question, ?How many of you have read the parshathis week??
The congregation, wishing to avoid a repeat performance, all keep their hands down.
The rabbi, looking disgusted, says, ?I am not prepared to teach you if no one prepares the parsha,? turns around and sits down.
The following week, the congregation decides to organize itself in such a way that will meet the rabbi?s apparent expectations. When the rabbi asks his by-now famous question, everyone whose last name is from A to L will raise their hands. Everyone else will keep their hands down.
Sure enough, that week the rabbi asks his question, ?How many of you have read the parsha??
The congregation is now evenly divided, half with their hands up and half with their hands down, certain that they will finally hear from their rabbi.
The rabbi smiles approvingly and says, ?Great! Will those of you who learned the parsha kindly explain it to those that did not.? He then turns around and sits down.
The fact is that many and perhaps, most of you already knew this ?secret? halacha of ?haboel Aramit?. Those of you who did not know it, have many opportunities to find out about it. If not from your neighbor tonight, books that you have at home or more knowledgeable acquaintances, one can always turn to the ?omnipotent? Internet and find out about this, or just about any other ?secret? information that one desires. (When I think about the Internet, I am reminded of the refrain from ?Alice?s Restaurant?: ?You can get anything you want at Alice?s Restaurant? ? instead of Alice?s Restaurant, it?s the Internet, but with all of the same murky connotations.)
The irony of halacha ve?ain morin ken arose a couple of years ago when I was teaching a somewhat more prosaic example of it in Masechet Beitza. There, the discussion has to do with sharpening knives in an unusual way (i.e., with a shinui) on Yom Tov. At the time, I was teaching a public shiur twice a week, covering the entire tractate, to what one would consider the general public. There was no way to avoid it, black on white, the gemara said halacha veain morin ken. But as soon as my students read this piece, the cat was out of the bag. Now, if these same students, the very type of people who one is not to instruct about such matters, would have come back to me and asked about sharpening knives, I would have had great difficulty concealing the actual halacha. Moreover, what would their reaction be, if, as would likely be the case, they were able to catch me trying to misinform them?
It is my suggestion, however, that the cat was already out of the bag, before my students ever saw it on the daf. I will suggest that historical changes have made the notion of halacha veain morin ken no longer applicable.
There are three significant historical changes that have made keeping such secrets untenable:
1) The first change is the writing down of torah shebe?al peh, which is later compounded by the wide accessibility of printed matter generated by the printing press. When the halacha was only taught orally, one could easily choose to whom to teach halachot and whom not to teach halachot. As all you spy book fans can attest, no good spy commits secret information to writing. All the more so if these writings, in our case, the Talmud, are available to all. This, by itself, however, is not enough of a change to invalidate the concept of halacha veain morin ken.
2) The second change has to do with recent educational trends that encourage the masses to involve themselves in sophisticated study of Talmud and Halacha. Historically, in the vast majority of Jewish societies, men like those who came to my Talmud class would have been woodcutters, storekeepers and even doctors, but whose access to Talmudic texts would have been very limited. Talmud was reserved for the elite. Thus, while anyone could physically pick up and open Masechet Beitza, a common person would have been very unlikely to have done so. In our times, Talmud is being studied by wider and wider sections of the Jewish people. This issue, in fact, may be significant enough to put the concept of halacha ve?ain morin ken into serious question.
3) The third change which then becomes the straw, or in this case, the log that breaks the camel?s back is mass access to the Internet. Now, you don?t even have to pick up the Talmud to have all sorts of Judaic information at your fingertips, if you so desire. We underestimate the impact of the Internet at our own risk.
In other words, any information that exists in the public domain becomes more and more difficult to conceal. Thus, censorship of anything but the most highly guarded secrets becomes extremely impractical. I am not saying that Chazal erred in wanting to keep certain halachot secret. One of our religious credos is faith in the best judgment of Chazal and, as pointed out earlier, there are times when censorship is the best policy. I am simply saying that the underlying realia upon which Chazal based the idea of halacha veain morin ken are no longer present.
And so, if you didn?t immediately figure out my thesis based on the subtitle, it should be clearer to you now. The realia that we are speaking about here are both technological ? mass access to almost unlimited amounts of information ? and social ? greater educational exposure of Jewish laymen to sophisticated texts. The implications of these realia are that censorship of information will no longer be effective. As such, attempts at imposing new censorship or even maintaining old censorship may be as relevant as the old hand signals [for indicating turns in a car].
Notice that I am not taking an intrinsically libertarian position, decrying censorship for it own sake. Rather, I am suggesting that we align ourselves with a libertarian position only in response to various realia that make censorship no longer practical.
The application obviously goes beyond halacha ve?ain morin ken. To draw a more actual example, if one intends to whitewash the biography of a certain scholar or the history of a certain yeshiva, one must somehow destroy all truthful information that exists about said scholar or said yeshiva. Otherwise, one runs the very likely risk of being caught distorting the truth. As such, doing so is not only impractical, it can often be counterproductive.
Incidentally, I don?t think I?m the only one using halacha veain morin ken as a paradigm for wider application. Something one sees quite frequently among recent Ashkenazi poskim is a tendency to hide halacha out of fear that people will misunderstand it and go beyond the bounds of the permissible. Teaching Shmirat Shabbat K?hilchata a few years ago, I remember several cases where the main body of the book said asur and a careful reading of the footnotes said mutar.
Going back to our paradigm, we are still left with halachot that really can be misunderstood, and misunderstood to our detriment. If we can no longer repress knowledge of such halachot, we must do our best to make sure they are not misunderstood. Which leads me back to one of my favorite topics, Jewish education. Jewish education will have to do a more comprehensive job. I believe we have no other choice. The same is true of mystical texts. Once people have exposure to mystical texts, we need to be sure that these texts are properly understood. Thus, the task of a censorship no longer practical must be taken over by a Jewish education more sophisticated than ever before.
On some level, moving from censorship to education positions us to properly compete in the free marketplace of ideas, which, like it or not, we are all a part of. From a religious point of view, this forces our hand towards a dor de?ah that can pave the way for messianic times.
[Part 2 of 4]
Libertarian Implications of Contemporary Realia
I will focus on one specific area of censorship as a paradigm for this issue as a whole. I will focus on that which our sages called ?halacha ve?ain morin ken? (a halacha that one should not teach) ? meaning that the ancillary damage caused by the likely popular misapplication of such a halacha outweighs the benefits of knowing it. In other words, these are halachot that were kept away from the masses for their own good.
By far the most famous example of such a halacha is identified with the story of Pinchas (see Sanhedrin 82a and the Rama in Hoshen Mishpat 425:5): the halacha of haboel Aramit, kanaim pog?im bo. Since it is a secret halacha, I will not translate it. Rather to illustrate my point, as you shall see, anyone who doesn?t know what it means will immediately have the option of asking their neighbor.
While you?re asking your neighbor, I will digress to a story that this reminds me of: A new rabbi is hired by a community and all eagerly await his first drasha as their rabbi. The rabbi gets up and asks his new congregation, how many of you have read this week?s parsha? Wanting to impress their rabbi, everyone in the entire shul raises their hand.
The rabbi, looking somewhat surprised, says, ?Well, if that is the case, then you don?t need me to speak this morning,? and sits down.
The following week, the rabbi gets up and asks the same question, ?How many of you have read the parshathis week??
The congregation, wishing to avoid a repeat performance, all keep their hands down.
The rabbi, looking disgusted, says, ?I am not prepared to teach you if no one prepares the parsha,? turns around and sits down.
The following week, the congregation decides to organize itself in such a way that will meet the rabbi?s apparent expectations. When the rabbi asks his by-now famous question, everyone whose last name is from A to L will raise their hands. Everyone else will keep their hands down.
Sure enough, that week the rabbi asks his question, ?How many of you have read the parsha??
The congregation is now evenly divided, half with their hands up and half with their hands down, certain that they will finally hear from their rabbi.
The rabbi smiles approvingly and says, ?Great! Will those of you who learned the parsha kindly explain it to those that did not.? He then turns around and sits down.
The fact is that many and perhaps, most of you already knew this ?secret? halacha of ?haboel Aramit?. Those of you who did not know it, have many opportunities to find out about it. If not from your neighbor tonight, books that you have at home or more knowledgeable acquaintances, one can always turn to the ?omnipotent? Internet and find out about this, or just about any other ?secret? information that one desires. (When I think about the Internet, I am reminded of the refrain from ?Alice?s Restaurant?: ?You can get anything you want at Alice?s Restaurant? ? instead of Alice?s Restaurant, it?s the Internet, but with all of the same murky connotations.)
The irony of halacha ve?ain morin ken arose a couple of years ago when I was teaching a somewhat more prosaic example of it in Masechet Beitza. There, the discussion has to do with sharpening knives in an unusual way (i.e., with a shinui) on Yom Tov. At the time, I was teaching a public shiur twice a week, covering the entire tractate, to what one would consider the general public. There was no way to avoid it, black on white, the gemara said halacha veain morin ken. But as soon as my students read this piece, the cat was out of the bag. Now, if these same students, the very type of people who one is not to instruct about such matters, would have come back to me and asked about sharpening knives, I would have had great difficulty concealing the actual halacha. Moreover, what would their reaction be, if, as would likely be the case, they were able to catch me trying to misinform them?
It is my suggestion, however, that the cat was already out of the bag, before my students ever saw it on the daf. I will suggest that historical changes have made the notion of halacha veain morin ken no longer applicable.
There are three significant historical changes that have made keeping such secrets untenable:
1) The first change is the writing down of torah shebe?al peh, which is later compounded by the wide accessibility of printed matter generated by the printing press. When the halacha was only taught orally, one could easily choose to whom to teach halachot and whom not to teach halachot. As all you spy book fans can attest, no good spy commits secret information to writing. All the more so if these writings, in our case, the Talmud, are available to all. This, by itself, however, is not enough of a change to invalidate the concept of halacha veain morin ken.
2) The second change has to do with recent educational trends that encourage the masses to involve themselves in sophisticated study of Talmud and Halacha. Historically, in the vast majority of Jewish societies, men like those who came to my Talmud class would have been woodcutters, storekeepers and even doctors, but whose access to Talmudic texts would have been very limited. Talmud was reserved for the elite. Thus, while anyone could physically pick up and open Masechet Beitza, a common person would have been very unlikely to have done so. In our times, Talmud is being studied by wider and wider sections of the Jewish people. This issue, in fact, may be significant enough to put the concept of halacha ve?ain morin ken into serious question.
3) The third change which then becomes the straw, or in this case, the log that breaks the camel?s back is mass access to the Internet. Now, you don?t even have to pick up the Talmud to have all sorts of Judaic information at your fingertips, if you so desire. We underestimate the impact of the Internet at our own risk.
In other words, any information that exists in the public domain becomes more and more difficult to conceal. Thus, censorship of anything but the most highly guarded secrets becomes extremely impractical. I am not saying that Chazal erred in wanting to keep certain halachot secret. One of our religious credos is faith in the best judgment of Chazal and, as pointed out earlier, there are times when censorship is the best policy. I am simply saying that the underlying realia upon which Chazal based the idea of halacha veain morin ken are no longer present.
And so, if you didn?t immediately figure out my thesis based on the subtitle, it should be clearer to you now. The realia that we are speaking about here are both technological ? mass access to almost unlimited amounts of information ? and social ? greater educational exposure of Jewish laymen to sophisticated texts. The implications of these realia are that censorship of information will no longer be effective. As such, attempts at imposing new censorship or even maintaining old censorship may be as relevant as the old hand signals [for indicating turns in a car].
Notice that I am not taking an intrinsically libertarian position, decrying censorship for it own sake. Rather, I am suggesting that we align ourselves with a libertarian position only in response to various realia that make censorship no longer practical.
The application obviously goes beyond halacha ve?ain morin ken. To draw a more actual example, if one intends to whitewash the biography of a certain scholar or the history of a certain yeshiva, one must somehow destroy all truthful information that exists about said scholar or said yeshiva. Otherwise, one runs the very likely risk of being caught distorting the truth. As such, doing so is not only impractical, it can often be counterproductive.
Incidentally, I don?t think I?m the only one using halacha veain morin ken as a paradigm for wider application. Something one sees quite frequently among recent Ashkenazi poskim is a tendency to hide halacha out of fear that people will misunderstand it and go beyond the bounds of the permissible. Teaching Shmirat Shabbat K?hilchata a few years ago, I remember several cases where the main body of the book said asur and a careful reading of the footnotes said mutar.
Going back to our paradigm, we are still left with halachot that really can be misunderstood, and misunderstood to our detriment. If we can no longer repress knowledge of such halachot, we must do our best to make sure they are not misunderstood. Which leads me back to one of my favorite topics, Jewish education. Jewish education will have to do a more comprehensive job. I believe we have no other choice. The same is true of mystical texts. Once people have exposure to mystical texts, we need to be sure that these texts are properly understood. Thus, the task of a censorship no longer practical must be taken over by a Jewish education more sophisticated than ever before.
On some level, moving from censorship to education positions us to properly compete in the free marketplace of ideas, which, like it or not, we are all a part of. From a religious point of view, this forces our hand towards a dor de?ah that can pave the way for messianic times.
[Part 2 of 4]