Newsletter Special: The Lehrhaus Goes Whole Hog for the Lamm!
David Shasha
The Lehrhaus Goes Whole Hog for the Lamm!
I recently wrote an article with an accompanying resource sheet on the Tradition magazine Rabbi Norman Lamm Memorial volume:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/n4N_MY-WVEg/m/8Qfyra-kAwAJ
Soon after writing the article, our dear friends at The Lehrhaus began to publish in daily installments what they have called the “Torah u-Madda Symposium,” which provides even more effusive praise for the disgraced Lamm and the dubious Washington Heights philosophy of Torah u-Madda:
https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/reclaiming-torah-u-madda-a-symposium/
Every day since the Symposium kicked off, I have dutifully cut and pasted all the articles, and as I write this cover letter the articles just keep on coming! Right now, I am done with the cutting and pasting – if there are more articles you will have to find them on your own. But, given the identikit nature of the articles – all reflecting the YU echo-chamber monolingualism – it might not make much of a difference anyway.
We begin with my original Lamm Tradition Memorial volume article and the resource sheet, and then move on to the Symposium introduction. You will notice that the introduction is written by one Yosef Lindell, who has an impeccable Tikvah Fund pedigree:
https://yoseflindell.wordpress.com/about/
Indeed, it is all White Jewish Supremacy in the current Poptrash Idiocracy climate.
And that is important to keep in mind as you read the youth-oriented articles by Moshe Kurtz and Olivia Friedman. Both, like Lindell, are up-and-coming stars who are following in the fetid footsteps of their Washington Heights progenitors, as they provide us with the stale apologetics that marks the profoundly contentious struggle which takes place in the Modern Orthodox soul over whether or not “Secular” Culture is trayf.
Indeed, it is a theme that permeates the Symposium, and which speaks volumes about how the Washington Heights White Jewish Supremacy has erased the classical Sephardic heritage and its tradition of Religious Humanism.
I would like to direct your attention to the very last entry in this special newsletter, a collection of letters that respond to the Symposium.
One of those letters is titled “Torah u-Madda: A Sephardic Perspective” and was written by a very confused member of the Buenos Aires Syrian Jewish community.
The letter provides a deeply disturbing “conversion” story that brings Sephardim to the Ashkenazi heritage that has erased them, as it praises Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s contempt for us:
I read the symposium about Torah u-Madda with interest. I want to share my personal story, with the hope of bringing a different perspective.
I am from Argentina and I was educated in a traditional Sephardic environment (Syrian community, more specifically). Growing up, I naturally read literature, philosophy, and science. When I was a teenager, there wasn’t any kind of ideology behind that impulse: it was simply and purely out of curiosity. While many of my friends were more interested in business or soccer than philosophy, I don’t think they had a religious objection to reading a Nobel Prize-winning book or a good book of science.
I think my first encounter with Torah u-Madda ideology was from the Jewish blogosphere. I didn’t know about MO, OO, RWMO, LWMO and all the labels you can think of. In fact, these labels are absolutely irrelevant to my Argentinian Syrian community. We are observant and traditional, and that’s it. We are isolated in terms of matrimony and social relationships but fully integrated in terms of pop culture.
When I was 15 or 16 years old, I bought a used copy of The Lonely Man of Faith by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (in an old Spanish translation). I literally encountered the book by chance in a used bookstore. I wasn’t prepared for what happened. I took a bus and started reading the book. I was absolutely delighted. I believe I finished the book that very same day. Until that moment, I didn’t know that kind of Torah. I was particularly taken by something that sounds almost comical: this was a well-written book! And the author used words like kerygma, behaviorist, deus revelatus, and deus absconditus! I know: it’s ludicrous, but as a teenager I encountered for the very first time a Rabbi who was prepared to use philosophical terminology to explain Torah concepts. And it worked! This was a really good book, a Torah book that wasn’t underestimating the reader. A book that speaks to me in a very intimate way. That is for me the climax of Torah u-Madda. A transformative experience, not only in intellectual terms but also in a very personal one.
Ezequiel Antebi Sacca
Buenos Aires, Argentina
And that is how you go from the rational to the irrational and climb the Washington Heights ladder in one quick YU step!
I have been advised that Mr. Antebi Sacca is closely connected to Shmuel Kornblit, whose work in the Spanish-speaking Jewish world on behalf of the White Jewish Supremacy Herzog College was featured in the following article that I re-posted in SHU 1044:
https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/article-694079
It is of course worthwhile to note here that Jose Faur was born in Buenos Aires and was part of its Syrian Jewish enclave, before he moved to Brooklyn where he spent the majority of his life and rabbinical career:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Faur
It is pretty clear that his Argentine legacy has been erased.
It is critical to note that every single – at least I think every single – contribution to the Symposium is required to mention the following four figures and their work:
Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Norman Lamm
Aharon Lichtenstein
Jonathan Sacks
That is the Torah u-Madda Mount Rushmore!
Older figures of vital importance, such as the Brisker rabbis, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Abraham Isaac Kook are also interspersed into the discourse as prominent historical progenitors of the Torah u-Madda tradition.
It is apparent that such Sephardim as the Argentine SY letter-writer do not know Jose Faur and his work on reclaiming the classical Sephardic heritage. Or perhaps it is just easier to dispense with the Sephardic heritage, as we – as Haym Soloveitchik sharply insisted – do not rate against the Ashkenazi Jewish Genius in the Modern world:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBCYyz07l0iTs34hfKZuCZ9croAiB8Mb-JK4Gx9BOFE/edit
It is a racist thesis that was confirmed by Rabbi Joseph Dweck, head of the internationally-known Habura:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/123skOImJSmEdze7OzWZtd2KeyBn77zvcOPkDmqJUNR8/edit
The Habura is very comfortable with the White Jewish Supremacy and its erasure of the Sephardim:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFWVQTzB3GLzpYLhl8YCF2Q5d9c8yrlYu-yHxWyf38E/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LUsZA48zpKtgkOB2YWRtjC4R0Y2Nt6tw4KHlbe2rRpE/edit
It all makes sense, as we see the power of YU and The Tikvah Fund, which is reinforced by the first Symposium entry by Meir Soloveichik YU Straus Center underling Stuart Halpern.
Following Halpern is Yisroel Ben-Porat who tips his cap to what I have called the New Convivencia, the promotion of a union between Fundamentalist Jews and Fundamentalist Christians, with the usual hedging.
I was particularly struck by Erica Brown’s entry, as it continues the rehabilitation of Jonathan Sacks; bringing the late British Chief Rabbi back into the heimische Washington Heights fold, after he did so much “damage” to his Orthodox reputation with his book The Dignity of Difference:
Indeed, it seems like aeons ago when the EDAH Journal felt it necessary to “balance” my enthusiasm for Dignity with a negative appraisal, more in line with the then-current sentiment in the Modern Orthodox world, which rejected Sacks’ Hebrew Humanism and dignified the controversy it aroused:
https://library.yctorah.org/journals/edah-journal-elul-5763-32-2/
https://library.yctorah.org/files/2016/09/Of-Books-and-Bans.pdf
As it has emphatically rejected the Sephardic Humanism of Faur:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
So, as you read The Lehrhaus Torah u-Madda Symposium, please keep in mind not only the Anti-Sephardi racism – there are no Sephardi contributors, as was the case with the Tradition magazine Memorial volume – but the larger antipathy to a Maimonidean tradition that is consistently reworked and reconfigured to match the way in which Lamm and Soloveitchik understood, or better mis-understood, Maimonides and his expansive Torah vision rooted in the Greco-Arab tradition.
Indeed, we are now seeing a profound integration of the Hasidic mystical-magical occult in the Modern Orthodox world, which has important implications for the new Religious Zionist militant atavism which rejects in toto the Andalusian Convivencia and its Modern integration into European philosophy as was so brilliantly presented in Faur’s work.
In that regard, I would like to close with a remark about Elinatan Kupferberg’s extremely dense article on the current state of philosophy in the Torah u-Madda world.
Providing a dazzling array of resources, Kupferberg seems to supply an intellectual match for Faur’s startling integration of Sephardic Humanism and Post-Modernism, through the figures of Edmond Jabes and Jacques Derrida.
But first looks can often be deceiving:
I got curious about Kupferberg, and recalled that he was mentioned on Alan Brill’s blog. And why was he mentioned on the blog? Because he attacked any understanding of the Binding of Isaac that sought to override a literal reading on the basis of rationalism and morality:
We gain another response to Koller written by Rabbi Elinatan Kupferberg who defends the role of submission to the law and not following our ethical intuitions, defense of Yeshivish Orthodox thinking as found in the Hazon Ish and Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk. Kupferberg argues that Rabbi JB Soloveitchik did not need Kierkegaard for focusing on submission, rather his direct Rabbinic antecedents already emphasized the need for submission to the divine will, and more than that, the Divine will is assumed to be moral even if we do not see it.
As with many, if not all, of the Tradition and Lehrhaus contributions to the Lamm legacy – a legacy which allows child molesters to get a pass on their heinous crimes – the current trend is especially pronounced in a deeply disheartening way in the ideas of young Modern Orthodox Jews – addled by Tikvah Antinomian nihilism in the Straussian manner – who seek to find fame and fortune in the Jewish institutional world.
Rather than take an honest reading of the wider arc of Jewish History, where Sephardic Humanism was standard operating procedure in enlightened circles, the current orthodoxy has shifted towards a worship of the irrational and the morally suspect, in a markedly Neo-Con manner.
So, as we read through this mountain of Lamm material, it is important for us to realize that not only has the Sephardic heritage been erased, but that the Ashkenazi tradition of Anti-Rationalism and Anti-Maimonideanism has taken ascendance, as the very principles of what they duplicitously call Torah u-Madda dissolve into a morass of obscurantist double-dealing that allows inclusion to the club strictly by affirming Modern Orthodox dogmatics, and its paranoid rejection of the larger world in which we currently live.
David Shasha
A Cautionary Orthodox Tale for Sephardim: Tradition Magazine’s Rabbi Norman Lamm Memorial Volume
By: David Shasha
Norman Lamm Memorial Volume Resource Sheet
By: David Shasha
Reclaiming Torah u-Madda: A Symposium
By: The Lehrhaus Editors
Torah u-Madda’s Moment
By: Stuart Halpern
The “Judeo-Christian” Tradition at Yeshiva
By: Yisroel Ben-Porat
One Life to Live: Torah u-Madda Today
By: Sarah Rindner Blum
Torah u-Madda Thirty Years Later
By: Elena Stein Hain
Madda or Hokhmah? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the Integration of Torah and General Wisdom
By: Erica Brown
Serpentine Psychology and Booming Babel
By: Shalom Carmy
Torah u-Madda for All?
By: Leah Sarna
The Utilitarian Case for Torah u-Madda
By: Tzvi Sinensky
Bring Back Torah u-Madda
By: Yaakov Bieler
Torah u-Madda or Torah u-Movies?
By: Moshe Kurtz
It Will Be Torah and I Am Compelled to Study It: A Philosophy of-Madda as Hiddushei Torah?
By: Elinatan Kupferberg
Sanctifying the Secular: A Torah u-Madda Approach to Popular Culture
By: Olivia Friedman
Letters to the Editor: The Boundaries of Torah u-Madda
By: The Lehrhaus Editors