Rabbi Francis Nataf, "Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's Radical Break with the Past"
David Shasha
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s Radical Break with the Past
By: Rabbi Francis Nataf
This is a very interesting assessment of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s Jewish vision that is more revealing for what it does not say than what it actually says.
In my previous comments on Rabbi Yosef’s vision I remarked that his scholarship was exclusively predicated on the minute details of Jewish ritual law. This exclusive focus on Halakhic matters forestalled any possible discussion of the larger Sephardic cultural tradition and did not seriously examine the complex and multi-faceted history and literature of the Sephardic heritage.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/zUknG4xW8Kg
Rabbi Nataf is certainly correct when he states that Rabbi Yosef transformed Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora with his massive Halakhic literary output. He reconfigured Sephardic Jewish life away from the Maimonidean Humanism of his predecessors and placed a laser-like focus on issues central to the Ashkenazi rabbinical tradition.
While Rabbi Yosef made his decisions within the parameters of the Sephardic legal tradition, the structure and emphasis of his agenda was largely based upon an Ashkenazi worldview; one that he learned as a student in the Porat Yosef seminary which had already made the transition to an Ashkenazi Orthodox agenda in the mid-20th century.
The luminaries of the Sephardic world in the modern period, rabbis like Hayyim Yosef David Azoulai, David ibn abi Zimra, Israel Moses Hazzan, Sabato Morais, Elijah Benamozegh, Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, Repha’el Aharon ben Shim’on, Abdullah Somekh, Hayyim Nahum Effendi, Ben-Zion Uzziel, Matloub Abadi, Yitzhak Dayyan, Yosef Messas, and Hayyim David Halevi were all heir to the tradition of Maimonidean Humanism.
These rabbis were careful to combine a concern for ritual law with the wider intellectual program that included the humanities and sciences. A review of their scholarly production will uncover a wide expanse of Jewish learning set in the context of general studies. They were worldly men whose intellectual purview transcended a strictly Jewish parochialism. They took seriously the intellectual production of their Sephardic predecessors who adopted a cosmopolitan view of the world and embraced cultural diversity and pluralism rather than strictly limiting themselves to matters of Jewish ritual.
I have presented this more expansive Sephardic tradition in many SHU posts. Here are a couple of them that feature some resources and a basic review of the tradition:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/yj_4nB1nWTk/PSVcxzqBsKEJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/MJ35YoKl4jI
Rabbi Nataf is also correct that Rabbi Yosef ushered in a new Israeli-Zionist era in Sephardic life. Bristling with tension at the historic persecutions faced by Jewish immigrants from the Arab-Muslim world, Rabbi Yosef lived out and articulated the paradoxes that continue to inform Sephardic Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora: Sephardim have been passed over and disabused of a tradition that is in the process of disintegration but who remain committed to their intimate ties with the very Ashkenazim who have belittled and humiliated them. The outpouring of sentiment for Rabbi Yosef at this time is proof of this close relationship and contrasts with the crushing silence at the death of the Yemenite activist Rabbi Uzi Meshulam whose relentless attacks on Zionism and the Jewish state made him an unknown figure in Israeli circles:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/7XWsFNEejHE
Rather than articulating an independent Sephardic vision based on a close reading of the literary canon of our intellectual forbears, what we see today is a frenzied attempt to align Sephardic Judaism with the values and conceptual thought patterns of the Ashkenazi tradition as embodied in fundamentalist Orthodoxy.
There will be those who will try to link Rabbi Yosef to Modern Orthodoxy, but the careful observer will already know that the real connection is with the Lithuanian Yeshivas that are so central to the SHAS constituency. A valiant, but failed, attempt to link Rabbi Yosef to the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox system has been made by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/rav_ovadia_yosef_a_personal_eulogy
When all the smoke clears and historical assessments are made in earnest we are likely to see the manner in which Rabbi Yosef did in fact transform the Sephardic past by integrating it into Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and making a place for it in Israeli Haredi society. He was able to accomplish this feat by focusing on ritual matters at the expense of the wider intellectual tradition of Sephardic civilization. By addressing only the matters involved in Halakha, Rabbi Yosef cemented the Sephardic connection to normative Yeshiva learning as practiced in Bnei Brak, Lakewood, Monsey, and Borough Park.
While making the Sephardic distinction in his many legal rulings, Rabbi Yosef’s conceptual language was indistinguishable from the Ashkenazi rabbinical seminaries; again, something that he learned at Porat Yosef which dovetailed with the consolidation of Orthodox Jewish life in the Zionist age. There have been many tensions between Zionism and Haredism, but a modus vivendi has been accomplished that allows Haredi Orthodox Judaism to function within a political context as the only form of religious Judaism available to Israelis.
There will likely continue to be acrimony between the Haredim and secular Israelis, but it is clear that non-Haredi Jewish options will also be extremely limited if they even exist at all. While most Jews in Israel do not attend Synagogue, the cliché remains true that the Synagogue that they do not attend is an Orthodox one. More specifically, it is a Haredi Synagogue, as most of the other options have been eliminated and those that remain are relatively ineffectual in today’s Jewish landscape.
By ignoring the wider intellectual traditions of the Iberian and Mediterranean Jews, Rabbi Yosef was able to successfully integrate a truncated version of Sephardic Judaism into both the Israeli political system and the larger Ultra-Orthodox world. This will be his lasting legacy in Jewish circles and will affirm the loss of the historical Sephardic heritage as its literary monuments continue to disappear from sight.
DS
There is no doubting that some will primarily remember Rabbi Ovadia Yosef for his provocative statements about his opponents. Though understandable, such a perspective fails to separate the wheat from the chaff. It relies on an unfortunate dependence on a news media appetite that knows that controversy sells and that broader and more serious analyses don’t. But perhaps now is the time to try to appreciate the important place this brilliant and charismatic Sephardi leader has held in world Jewry over the last 50 years.
It actually takes a historian to appreciate the importance of Yosef’s contribution to the contemporary Jewish world in its true perspective. Marc Shapiro, professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Scranton, certainly came close to truly recognizing the importance of this highly unusual rabbi in his review article of Yosef's “Torah revolution.” Though I have some points of contention with his findings, he hit the nail on the head when he wrote that “the halakhic enterprise that R. Ovadiah created has altered permanently the halakhic tradition of Sephardic Jewry.”
Shapiro writes about Yosef's successful campaign to eradicate the local halakhic traditions of the various Sephardic communities that immigrated to Israel and to unify them under the banner of Rabbi Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch. Shapiro also importantly notes that this generally represented a more lenient direction in deciding halakha.
Yet even Shapiro skips over some of the broader implications of Yosef’s bold halakhic leadership: While not necessarily intentional, his halakhic agenda dovetailed the absorption of Sephardic Jewry into Israeli culture. Over the last few centuries, Sephardi halakha had been heavily influenced by the mystical teachings of the kabbala, making it both more stringent and more esoteric. And as modernization reached the Sephardi world with its insistence that personal autonomy requires understanding what one chooses to do, a more esoteric approach made halakha less accessible to all but the very learned. For those who had not already been hit by this modernization in their countries of origin, they were certain to confront it when they reached Israel.
By contrast, although Karo was also influenced by kabbala, most of his decisions follow the highly rationalist interpretations of Maimonides. And by reverting to these teachings, Yosef allowed a much greater number of Sephardic Jews to understand what the halakha was asking of them, as well as to moderate its demands to a level of observance more broadly acceptable. Both of these factors were key to the religious resurgence that he masterminded as the head of the Shas movement and as the leading decisor of the Sephardic world.
The upshot of what he was trying to do had often been summarized by the phrase lehachzir ha-atara le-yoshno, which loosely translated means to bring back the grandeur of the past, referring to the glory days of the Sephardim several hundred years ago. As opposed to the Ashkenazi focus of the contemporary Jewish world, it was a time when they dominated world Jewry, both in terms of numbers and influence. Certainly, that was an appealing message to Israeli Sephardim who had been thought of as less educated and less capable in both secular and religious Israeli circles alike. It was all the more appealing since Yosef presented a moderation and practicality that struck a chord among Sephardim who failed to appreciate the polarization and extremism that they often found among their Ashkenazi neighbors.
For Yosef, the way to regain that glory was to unify the Sephardim under one tradition. A unified tradition would make it easier to spread Torah knowledge to the large number of Sephardim that had remained sympathetic to their heritage, even as they were not all so observant. It would also allow for the creation of a much larger cadre of rabbinic students who carry on his work to this very day and can be expected to continue to do so in the future.
It is hard to overestimate the success of Rabbi Ovadia’s agenda. In the context of Israeli society, it is largely due to his influence that a sizable portion of the Sephardic population of Israel sits squarely in the religious camp. This was not always the case and represents a major shift from the days when Likud came to power largely thanks to this same sector. It is a shift that continues to have a major impact on Israeli politics and society today.
But his impact on society pales in comparison to his impact on halakha. Even if his halakhic decisions have not become universally accepted, he was able to become the preponderant voice in Sephardi halakha. This would not be unusual if he was just following preexisting trends. But given that he was ushering in a radical change as to how the Sephardic world should make its decisions, his success is quite remarkable.
Rabbi Francis Nataf is a Jerusalem-based educator, writer and thinker. He is the author of the “Redeeming Relevance” series on the books of the Torah (Urim Publications).
From Haaretz, October 8, 2013