More on Meiri

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I attended an AJWS event where Professor Moshe Halbertal spoke to past attendees of their Rabbinical Student Delegation trips (of which I was one, having gone to El Salvador), wherein, although he spoke about Rabbi Menachem Meiri,* he nicely framed the larger discussion. Professor Halbertal wrote an article on the aforementioned Meiri several years back that is pretty well-regarded on the topic.

What isn't as well-known is that Rabbi Aryeh Klapper gave a lecture (“Paskening Like the Meiri: Reflections on Jewish Attitudes Toward Gentiles and Halakhic Integrity”) which I attended a few years ago (although I re-listened to here and here). Although I found many ideas interesting in the lecture, I'm going to transcribe several interesting excerpts.

The first is on the interest in the Meiri:

In the draft of an article I am trying to write about this,** I think the fun paragraph I wrote about this was:

The mere existence of the Meiri has been a source of comfort for Orthodox Jews with universalistic tendencies. The reason that one wants to pasken like the Meiri is because of his unique position about Jewish-Gentile relations that appeal to those of us who have discomfort with laws that make sharp distinctions as to the obligations one has toward Gentiles as opposed to Jews and particularly those laws that seem to imply that basic standards of ethics are limited within the Jewish community.

A very fascinating section was where he discussed the importance of Meiri's writings and how they were attempted to be suppressed:

One is I want to preserve the uniqueness of Judaism, so if I say that all that you need to be a good person is x, then what’s special about Judaism? Secondly, one has the sense that somehow that being part of a community means that you relate to members of the community differently than you relate to non-members of the community. So then there should be some way that family members see themselves as obligated differently to each other, they’re should be some difference.

Now the Meiri offering a way possibly to level all of those distinctions, therefore, was seen as, both because he is seen as diminishing the uniqueness of Judaism and diminishing the unique bonds of Jews to each other was seen as very threatening. And because of this, a whole series of objections were raised. A stark way of framing this – and I’m going to quote this article again where I said

Meiri’s evident willingness to subject halakhah to moral critique and Meiri’s position to say not just "I think this is the halakhah", but I think if you don’t think this is the halakhah, then you’re doing something very wrong. And not just technically wrong, but morally wrong, because there is no justification for treating people like this. So Meiri’s evident willingness to subject halakhah to moral critique raised alarm among traditionalists. As a result, various legends and methodological positions have grown up with the purpose of limiting Meiri’s halakhic and hashkafic impact. These include the claim that Meiri’s works were unknown in halakhic tradition before the 20th century, that his work was published by the memorized transmission of unique manuscripts in the Vatican library, and, therefore, the Jesuits had infiltrated pro-Gentile glosses into the text.

When I was in yeshivah, there was, in fact, a very elaborate story about this: that Meiri was unknown to many for many years. One man who had a photographic memory was allowed into the Vatican library one day a year; he would read the Meiri and come back and write it down very quickly. That’s how the Meiri was published and the Meiri was unknown before this. Now one has to be suspicious because isn’t it funny that a work which exists only in the Vatican library happens to have these pro-Gentile glosses.

All very nice but regrettably not true. Not true at all. If you look at the Harvard Library catalog, you’ll see that the Meiri is published as early as 1830….

Another interesting quote:

The fundamental claim that Halbertal makes is that Meiri thinks that there is no avodah zarah in Christianity and, therefore, you can be engaged with their worship – all those prohibitions are moot. And Rabbi Henkin claims no, you can’t do that. Halbertal makes this claim based on this terminological precision. Here, I have to make a reference to quote Rabbi Saul Berman, who taught me the notion of Predictive Principles in Halakhah. If I want to set up the claim that A always goes with B, I have to know in advance whether a certain object is going to be B or not. So Professor Halbertal has these three categories, which are Civil Discrimination, Indirect Contact with Idolatry, and Social Contact. And there are 60-70 cases. So I had my students – what I did was, instead of giving them Professor Halbertal’s neat categorizations, I gave them all these cases in the order in the Talmud, and I said “Take every case and put it in either category A, B, or C.” And it turns out that the categories are not good predictive principles. On the whole, except for a few cases, the students distributed randomly as to whether these laws fell into category A, B, or C. So, it’s difficult to test Professor’s Halbertal’s thesis on a broad level.

Another:

Whenever Meiri makes these radical claims, he only makes them by implication. For example, he says here עובדי אלילים, one is not obligated to save them because they have no דת. This is the law regarding paternity of people who have no דת. When he makes the non-radical claims, he says "but, with regard to those who have דת...,". When he makes the radical claims, he leaves out the "but". He just does the implication. Pretty consistent. So you have to wonder: does this mean that Meiri really believes these things but can't get away with it or he's just seeding the tradition and hoping someone will come along and pasken like it? Is he cluing you in that this is really just apologetic and don't believe any of the other places he said it, either? I don't know. It's tough to imagine that he says it in so many times and yet, at the same time, there is a pattern - to me, and I have to show you all of the cases - that the more radical he gets halakhically, the less likely it is for him to spell out the implication.

One last one:

...Rabbi Henkin's really compelling argument is there's some silence - there's so many places that Meiri has the opportunity to just tell us "Christians are not עובדי עבודה זרה." He says the Sefardic rabbis write that Muslims are not עובדי עבודה זרה. He never says it about Christians. He has so many opportunities, it's suspicious.

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* Meiri had previously been discussed on my blog here.

** The paper on which he was working was presented as "The Meiri’s Halakhah about Christians and Christianity: A Response to Halbertal" at the Association for Jewish Studies 39th Annual Conference in December 2007.

Considering Basic Human Rights in Competition with Associational Rights: An Evening Conversation with Professor Moshe Halbertal

The other night I went down to the Upper West Side where the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) was holding its first ever Rabbinical Student Delegation (RSD) alumni gathering. After having a trip of rabbinical students go on winter trips to locations in the developing world for each of the past six years as well as this past summer (I went on the second such RSD trip), there is a growing cohort of alumni from this program.
For the evening in question, about two dozen RSD alumni had gathered to have Professor Moshe Halbertal speak to us, followed by some further discussion on the topic of universalistic versus particularistic conceptions of rights (which was, to some degree, the topic of his article on Rabbi Menachem Meiri (to which I will return later)).
Halbertal started off with the assertion that there are two types of rights: (1) a basic type (law of humanity) and (2) a "whole set of association of rights", that is to say, "associational" rights, like citizens or members.
He framed the discussion as a matter of three questions:
(1) What is the breadth and depth of human rights? (How many rights do we grant people qua humans?)
(2) What is the morally relevant way in which we carve membership?
(3) What do you do when there is a clash between associational rights and human rights?

Some random smattering of various tidbits (it's late and I'm tired):
- "It's not a zero sum game."
- "not necessarily a shared metaphysical sense, but a shared normativity."
- Meiri - whoever adheres to a normative system is considered עמיתך - "to do that in the thirteenth century is a very bold move."

- Meiri did not imagine a world in which there are law-abiding atheists (not even Spinoza could imagine it).

- בית הבחירה (The Choice House) is the largest Talmudic commentary - unfortunately why it was not copied so much

- although the humash starts out with אדם and talking in a universalistic language, it then goes into a "heavy, strong associational language" later on in the Humash

- אומות גדורות בדת - says in Talmud abiding by by normative system between Jews and uncivilized

- he said you can play a "war of verses" to justify any atrocity.

- Meiri wanted to include them in normative community - all those who are under a normative structure

In our discussion at the end, a big topic was in regards to helping others and how helpful or not it is to use different elements of discourse in relating to it. An interesting comment in the discussion part was that of Rachel Kahn-Troster, who said that "Using associative language versus universal language is more powerful" for helping out others. It seems that universal language can sound more abstract in motivating people to help others out while associative language in helping others can prove to be more helpful.

Interesting Note on Exercise

This morning, while exercising on an elliptical machine, I ironically came across the following note in Professor Haym Soloveitchik's seminal essay, "Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy" (Tradition 28, no. 4 [1994]: 64-131), which I've been reading recently* (the following is n. 49 on pp. 119-120):

There seems to be a fixed quantity of pain that people, in all periods, wish to inflict upon themselves for the sake of some distant, possibly unattainable, summum bonum. The rigors of monastic asceticism, or that of the flagellants, find their equivalent in our ceaseless exercise and unremitting self-starvation undertaken for the sake of Beauty or in the name of something called Fitness. Now, as then, it is those free from the immediate burdens of subsistence who most hear the call of that higher good and voluntarily undertake to wear the hairshirt. This impulse is often linked to an attempt to move backward in time. We strive, no less than medieval men, to move backwards in time, we to Youth, they to Eden. To them the body was born with the taint of original concupiscence; to us it acquires too swiftly the odor of Age. They mortified the flesh to enable the soul to escape the confines of the body, we to enable the body to escape the ravages of Time. Each of the two equally impossible, by all rules of common sense, yet each pursued with equal vigor. To be sure the overwhelming majority of people eschewed the rigors of asceticism, but probably never denied the rightness of the enterprise. Many, perhaps, even made some half-hearted attempts to engage in it themselves, much as exercise-bikes and running shoes gathering dust in countless homes stand as witnesses to an aspiration rather than to any actual endeavor. (My remarks refer to American society generally, rather than to the religious Jewish community, who participate tepidly, at best, in this form of asceticism. In this regard, at least, contemporary Orthodoxy is still unacculturated. Nevertheless, as this community is the subject of this essay, I felt it more appropriate to use "original concupiscence" rather than "Original Sin." The latter is alien to Jewish thought, the former is not....)

I was amused that he was talking about people making "half-hearted attempts to engage" in exercise and not really being involved in exercise whilst I actually was at the moment of reading it.
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While I am highlighting an interesting endnote in the article, I thought I would do so for another interesting one (n. 54 on pp. 120-121), about which I hadn't known as much:

The current popularity of the Beit ha-Behirah of R. Menahem ha-Meiri reflects this change in modes of learning. Meiri is the only medieval Talmudist (rishon) whose works can be read almost independently of the Talmudic text, upon which it ostensibly comments. The Beit ha-Behirah is not a running commentary on the Talmud. Meiri, in quasi-Maimonidean fashion, intentionally omits the give and take of the sugya, he focuses, rather, on the final upshot of the discussion and presents the differing views of that upshot and conclusion. Also, he alone, and again intentionally, provides the reader with background information. His writings are the closest thing to a secondary source in the library of rishonim. This trait coupled with the remarkably modern syntax of Meiri's Hebrew prose have won for his works their current widespread use. It is not, as commonly thought, because the Beit ha-Behirah has been recently discovered. True, the massive Parma manuscript has been in employ only for some seventy years. However, even a glance at any Hebrew bibliography will show that much of the Beit ha-Behirah on sefer mo'ed, for example, had been published long before Avraham Sofer began his transcriptions of the Parma manuscript in the nineteen twenties. (E. g. Megillah Amsterdam, 1759; Sukkah Berlin, 1859; Shabbat Vienna, 1864.) Rather, Meiri's works had previously fallen stillborn from the press. Sensing its alien character, most scholars simply ignored them, and, judging by the infrequent reprintings, if any, they also appear not to have found a popular audience. They have come into their own only in the past half century. (On Meiri's quasi-Maimonidean intentions, see Beit ha-Behirah, Berakhot, ed. Y. Dickman [Jerusalem, 1965], introduction, pp. 25-32. Meiri consciously follows Maimonides in addressing the halakhic dicta rather than the Talmudic discussion, in gathering scattered halakhic dicta under one roof, and in writing in neo-Mishnaic rather than Rabbinic Hebrew. He parts company with Maimonides and follows R. Judah ha-Nassi in writing not topically but tractatewise, and in registering multiple views. Indeed, no one writing after the dialectical revolution of the Tosafists could entertain again the Maimonidean notion of halakhic univocality.)

Wow!
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* Was reading it the other day, continuing from last month, when I started reading it at the gym.